It’s Children’s Book Review Week!

All this week we will feature reviews of new and not-so-new children’s books, including picture books, middle grade and YA fiction, and nonfiction for kids at all grade levels.

If you’d like to have a review of your book featured here this week, email the review to suzannelieurance@hotmail.com.

Here is our first review of the week. The book was reviewed by Carma Dutra:

Title: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

Author: Laura Amy Schlitz

Reading level: Young Adult

Hardcover: 96 pages

Publisher: Candlewick Press (July 24, 2007)

ISBN-10: 0763615781

ISBN-13: 978-0763615789

Illustrator: Robert Byrd who teaches children’s book illustration at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! is the Newbery Medal winner for 2008. One thing strikes me in this medieval historical fiction of individual monologues and that is the characters do not speak of their poverty with any resentment. Like many children they are cheerful and show moments of daring acts. Each character attribute is written in a matter-of-fact, that-is-just-the-way-it-is manner. Kids are just trying to figure out what their position is within the Lord’s Manor.

Author Laura Schlitz has given distinct voices to twenty-three individual characters. Schlitz shows this thirteenth century medieval village through various dialogues relating to their lot in life. She explains in sidebars about medieval terminology and traditions which adds additional insight to the era.

“The boys in Shamble Lane laughed. They won’t tell on me.” The part of town where butchers, tanners, and fishmongers sold their wares was often called the Shambles or Shamble Lane. Originally shamble meant a slaughterhouse.

With well researched details each character relates to other characters. For instance, when Mogg, the Villein’s (a peasant who wasn’t free) daughter, tells of her father beating her brother Jack until he had brain damage. “He beat Jack, and the lad is a half-wit,” the reader gets to hear Jack’s recount of his father’s treatment. “Father used to say I was good for nothing else, but Father died, and we don’t miss him.” Jack becomes friends with Otho, the Miller’s son who everyone hates. Jack comforts Otho one day when he finds him beaten and bloody.

Simon, the Knight’s son, describes how his grandfather fought with Richard the Lion-Heart to save the Holy City (Jerusalem). There were several campaigns fought during the Crusades between 1095 and 1272. “My father came back home a year ago, half-starved, horseless, on one leg.” War was expensive back then, as well, and many, if not most, Knights came home to sell some of their land to pay for weapons, armor, and horses. This left most of them and their families broke.

The added background of historical facts that Schlitz places throughout the book give realism to all the fictional characters. The story is not without humor. Someone in the village throws a clod of dung at Isobel, the Lord’s daughter. It stains her silk dress horribly. Some common remedies like chicken feathers, water, urine, and ox gall were used during this time. As you might guess they were no match for dung stain. Did she find out who did it? You have to read on to find out the unlikely dung thrower.

Good Masters is a historical novel for young adults, but it is the kind of book that adults want to read, too.

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About the Author – Laura Amy Schlitz has spent most of her life as a librarian and professional storyteller. She is currently a librarian at the Park School in Baltimore, where she has worked since 1991. She has also been a playwright, a costumer, and an actress. As of January 2008, she had written eight or nine plays, which have been produced at Stage One in Louisville, Ky., Pumpkin Theatre in Baltimore, Md., and the Children’s Theatre Association, in Baltimore, Md.

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Learn more about children’s issues, writing tips and award winning book reviews by visiting Carma’s Window. Download the free EBook, Unite to Write, a compilation of thirteen top expert authors as read on Ezine article directory and Free Tips for Freelance Writing.