Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Good Masters! Sweet Lades! (#2)

In a word: delightful.

Other words to describe this: gem, fascinating, funny, captivating, beautiful.

Amazing.

I won't go into how much I loved the foreword, or the explanation sections, since Sandy did that already (and I wholeheartedly agree with her!)

It's amazing how much information Laura Amy Schlitz packed into 81 pages. There are 23 captivating characters, each one with their own story. It's a well-researched (but never dull) peek back in to Medieval times, the harshness of it, as well as the simple little joys. I liked that Schlitz didn't glamorize the lives of these children, but I liked that she kept it accessible to kids of today. I liked that much of it was poetry: beautiful, simple, powerful. (And this is from someone who isn't necessarily a fan of poetry.)

It's a treasure, and well worth the Newbery it won this year.

2 comments:

  1. Melissa, I hated using the word "charming" - it seems so *nice*, and that's really damning a book with faint praise, if you ask me. But I had a really hard coming up with alternative words that described how I felt about the book.

    Gem is pretty good, I think. :-)

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  2. Thanks. It is a charming book, though. Sometimes it's okay to be charming.

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