Marvelous Middle Grade Monday: May B.

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians!

Today’s pick: May B. by Caroline Starr Rose

Schwartz & Wade, 2012

From Amazon:

I've known it since last night:

It's been too long to expect them to return.

Something's happened.

"If May is a brave, stubborn fighter, the short, free-verse lines are one-two punches in this Laura Ingalls Wilder-inspired ode to the human spirit," raved Kirkus Reviews in a starred review.

May is helping out on a neighbor's Kansas prairie homestead—just until Christmas, says Pa. She wants to contribute, but it's hard to be separated from her family by 15 long, unfamiliar miles. Then the unthinkable happens: May is abandoned. Trapped in a tiny snow-covered sod house, isolated from family and neighbors, May must prepare for the oncoming winter. While fighting to survive, May's memories of her struggles with reading at school come back to haunt her. But she's determined to find her way home again. Caroline Starr Rose's fast-paced novel, written in beautiful and riveting verse, gives readers a strong new heroine to love.

My take:

I read this novel in an afternoon and really enjoyed it. I loved reading all the “Little House” books when I was a girl (I even blogged about that once) and this book reminded me a little of those books. But the writing style was quite different and so were the situations and problems that May B. encountered. I got so involved in the story that May’s abandonment at the homestead took me by surprise and kept me hooked to the end to find out what happened. This is a great book for girls that enjoy reading about survival and pioneers. It’s also connects well to curriculum units on pioneers and early settlers.

As a writer, I loved the way the author created such compelling images and evoked deep emotion in very spare prose. This is a novel I want to have for my own bookshelf.

 Favourite quotes:

“Like a prairie hen I settle down until I can’t be seen, breathing comfort from grass and soil.”

“I sit in the rocker before the fire, thankful for hot coffee, and for the flicker of light cast on the cover of my book.”

“But tonight in this stillness, I realize there’s no shame in hoping for things that might seem out of reach.”

 Other info:

Caroline Starr Rose has lived in many places, including Saudi Arabia, Australia and New Mexico, where she now lives and writes fulltime.

According to an interview with Caroline Starr Rose over at The Reading Fever, one of the hardest scenes for Caroline to write was one where May reads a poem and struggles over her reading.

Caroline says this about her writing process: “While drafting, I imagined a quilt with each poem standing in for a different square of fabric. As I moved from poem to poem, I trusted certain themes and story strands would unfold, just as patterns form on a quilt.” From an interview with Caroline Starr Rose byauthor Augusta Scattergood.   

Other books written by this author include:

Over in the Wetlands (picture book, to be released in 2014)

For more, visit Carolyn Starr Rose’s website.

Marvelous Middle Grade Monday was dreamed up by the incredible Shannon Messenger, author of Keeper of the Lost Cities. Visit her blog for an up-to-date list of all the bloggers who are participating and posting about middle grade books today!

Memorable Middle Grade Books: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Lately I’ve been thinking about stories I read as a child that influenced my writing and my life. The “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder were definitely among my childhood favourites.

I think I was first introduced to them by my mom, who read aloud The Little House in the Big Woods. After that, I raced through the rest of them and read them over and over. I was fascinated by the details of life in a different time. I cheered along with Laura as she got even with the bully Nellie Oleson in On the Banks of Plum Creek and I loved the simple romance of These Happy Golden Years.

It’s funny how you notice different things when you read as an adult. As I child, I used to be bored by the whole story of The Long Winter, where Laura’s family was trapped in their house by blizzards, grinding grain in a coffee mill, but I now am fascinated by how they survived their hardship. As an adult, I’m a little disturbed by some of the racial attitudes in the early books, even though I can appreciate that they are consistent with the time period and need to be considered in context (for more see Little House on the Prairie: Racist or Not? ).

What influenced me most as a writer was not the content or the history in these books but the way they were written. I still admire Wilder’s writing style. It’s straightforward and simple, but it contains lovely imagery that helps me picture the scenes in my mind. The style changes a bit through the series, as the main character Laura’s age does – the earlier books have shorter sentences, whereas the older ones seem more fluid to me. To me, this not only shows her awareness of the age of the audience, but also her increasing skill as a writer. Something I strive for in my own writing is that combination of straightforwardness and vivid imagery.

What author’s writing style do you admire? Are there any books from your childhood that stand out in your mind because of the writing style?