I am sure the judges felt that they'd worked very hard and done their job well. And they probably did, up until the reading of the five finalist titles over the phone. It seems to me like a doctor prescribing over the phone and assuming that the lay person at the other end will know the difference between two medications that sound almost identical. A doctor making that sort of assumption would be the one at fault when the wrong pill is swallowed. Not the lay person. Reading "Chime" and not clarifying this title by author was a mistake.
So why wasn't everyone involved more sympathetic, apologetic, humble, contrite, anguished . . . ? How would any of the judges have reacted if this had happened to him or her? I shouldn't lump them all together because some, I am sure, did feel terrible, and it truly wasn't their fault. Nikki Grimes even wrote a lovely blog post mentioning many other deserving books -- before the mistake was in the open. However, it seems to me that the judge who wrote the essay is making the point that "Shine" was so inferior that no one should have misheard the name of the finalist. So adding insult to injury somehow excuses the mixup? And to make matters worse, at the presentation, there was no huge and heartfelt apology to Lauren nor acknowledgment of her very kind and graceful handling of their mistake. And piling the dung heap even higher, those in charge seemed to leave the other books for youth in the shadows. At the awards dinner, the finalist book titles were not read aloud nor their covers displayed nor authors' names read -- or did I miss something?