May B.

May B. by Caroline Starr Rose

Mavis Elizabeth Betterly must leave her family, her schooling and her home to live as a hired girl in another family’s soddy (think Laura Ingalls grass sod home in On the Banks of Plum Creek).  She’ll stay with Mr. Oblinger and his young wife, just come from the east, but it will only be until Christmas.  May B. is as disappointed and resigned as you would expect for a teenager who must leave everything she’s known and move to a new place.  Mrs. Oblinger is sharp and cold; the soddy is wet and dirty and May B. is lonely. But she does not learn true loneliness until unforeseen circumstances leave her entirely on her own. She must find a way to survive until Christmas with no one to rely on except herself.

Written in verse, this is a spare, sometimes haunting book.  May B.’s struggle to live raises all sorts of emotions as she reflects on her struggles to survive in school despite her difficulty with reading.  For classroom use, this would be interesting to use with Sahara Special or Thank You, Mr. Falker.

For my own part, I wasn’t particularly taken with it, and didn’t adore May B. the way I felt I was supposed to.  The only occasional presence of additional characters may bore some readers. I would say there’s nothing too objectionable for a third grade reader, but I think it may be a bit hard to understand for one that young. I also believe the interest level would skew older, so I’d go fourth grade at the youngest.

Sex, Nudity, Dating –  Mrs. Oblinger is married to a man she never met before moving west.  She’s also quite young, although her exact age is never discovered.
Profanity – “stupid,”
Death, Violence and Gore – we learn that a baby died at 3 weeks old and that someone believes that it was for the best.  A boy gets a lashing for misbehavior.  There is a death, but the body is not found and it is mentioned that perhaps the wolves got to the body.
Drugs, Alcohol and Smoking – None.
Frightening or Intense Things –  Right from the start we learn that May B. must go live with strangers and then of course, she must survive on her own.  May suffers a great deal of bullying both at the hands of her teacher and her peers.