Writin’ Wrong

Just sent this book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, to Weirleader because its exactly the kind of essentially wholesome but irreverent stuff inquiring kids love. (Weirleader–I hope both boys dig it but its more suited to your eldest at the moment)

Hopefully it can figure into your 24 books for 2008.

A brief synopsis courtesy of Publisher’s Weekly (via Amazon):

Schlitz (The Hero Schliemann ) wrote these 22 brief monologues to be performed by students at the school where she is a librarian; here, bolstered by lively asides and unobtrusive notes, and illuminated by Byrd’s (Leonardo, Beautiful Dreamer) stunningly atmospheric watercolors, they bring to life a prototypical English village in 1255. Adopting both prose and verse, the speakers, all young, range from the half-wit to the lord’s daughter, who explains her privileged status as the will of God.

Some representative quotes from the review in The New York Times of December 17, 2008 after the jump:

Camelot, it’s not. Lowdy, for example, hates the fleas. The girl is not troubled by the lice “raising families in my hair” and doesn’t really mind having to scrape the maggots off the cheese. But she helps her father, a varlet, tend the lord’s dogs, and fleas are one of the occupational hazards. So she prays for relief:

I itch in the cathedral
When I pray upon my knees:
God, You saved us from damnation;
Now save us from the fleas!

For the young people of Laura Amy Schlitz’s new book, “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village,” life tends to be nasty, brutish and short. But young readers are also likely to find it engaging, affecting and occasionally giggle-worthy.

… Schlitz is a talented storyteller. Her language is forceful, and learning slips in on the sly. She explains crop rotation through a boy who must plow the family fields after his father’s death and who confesses puzzlement over the concept of a field laying fallow. “I don’t know why the fields have the right to rest when people don’t.”

… It is bracing to see the Middle Ages without the rosy gloss many historical novels insist on bringing to the period. (Brief, easy-to-read footnotes and a bibliography give us some of Schlitz’s sources for her gritty portrait of daily medieval life.) This village stinks of dung and is sharp with the bitterness of poverty, wickedness and loss. But there are flashes of goodness and warmth as well. The mother of a girl named Mogg saves the family’s beloved cow from the clutches of a lord through cleverness born of desperation. Jack, Mogg’s half-wit brother, shows kindness to the hated Otho after the miller’s son takes a beating, and they cry together. The pathetic scene, and Jack’s belief that Otho shows his friendship by no longer joining in the other boys’ taunts of “Lack-a-wit / Numbskull / Mooncalf / Fool,” could even bring a lump to a grown-up’s throat.