Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page 4) 2008 Newbery AwArd wiNNer book review: i es! T he 2008 Newbery Medal Winner is Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz,1 a school librarian at Baltimore’s Park School. This, her fourth published book, is a book whose very writing is a curious story in its own right. visually inform the book throughout. The artwork suits the text and helps to make an informative book also an interesting book. There are six sections labeled “A Little Background” that discuss topics like crop rotation, falconry, the Crusades, and the interaction between Christians and Jews. Sidebar notes give additional information that help a modern reader understand the culture of this time. All of these features give this book good potential as a resource book for a study of the Middle Ages, but the monologues are the real story. The monologues in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! are verbal portraits of various young people who populate the area in and around an authentic but fictional manor of the 1200s. Each character is in some way connected to the others, though the nature of the association is colored by rank or wealth and may be subtle or direct. Hugo, the lord’s nephew, opens the book, telling about a boar hunt with his uncle—a rite of passage into manhood. The story moves from Hugo to Taggot, the blacksmith’s daughter, who pulls a stone from the shoe of Hugo’s mount following the hunt. Other monologues feature farmers, shepherds, and the children of doctors and millers and knights. Stories are told by Medieval pilgrims, a mud slinger, and even Jack, the halfwit (who may not be all that dull). Isobel, the lord’s daughter, begins her vignette, noticing the stain on her dress, and ends with a brief commentary on social status. And Mogg, the villein’s (sic) daughter, recounts how the lord of the manor comes to claim her widowed mother’s best beast, a practice that was the lord’s right. The sidebar notes that “villein” in that day referred to “a peasant who was not free,”2 which could serve as a talking point about the development and changes of language. These monologues not only tell facts about the occupations necessary to sustain life in the Middle Ages but also 1 When the fifth-grade students at her school were looking for a play set in the Middle Ages with interesting parts for all of them, she did what good librarians do and began the search for just the right play. But unlike most librarians, finding nothing that fully satisfied the need, she picked up her own pen and wrote the play herself— a play whose twenty monologues and two dialogues became the substance of this book. While novels are the most common form for Newbery winners, this collection of short works joins earlier winners with unusual literary form, like Paul Fleishman’s book of choral readings, Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust written in free verse, and Nothing but the Truth by Avi, a story told in a documentary style. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, the newest winner, uses a wide variety of poetic styles. Although the Newbery award is given to the author for the writing, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! cannot be fairly reviewed without noting the complementary illustrations by Robert Byrd that open each monologue and page 4 Teacher to Teacher | August 2008 Laura Amy Schlitz. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!. (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2007). Ibid., 42 2
Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page Intro) Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page 1) Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page 2) Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page 3) Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page 4) Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page 5) Teacher to Teacher - August 2008 - (Page 6)
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