Missing May -1993 Winner

I finished reading this book quite some time ago - ummm, about two months ago. At the time, I was reading Torey Hayden's book One Child as well. Strangely, the books both revolve around a child who for one reason or another had been moved from one home to another after the loss of their mother. In Hayden's book, which is a true story, the young six year old girl was abused by her family and showed her distaste for the world by setting a neighborhood toddler on fire. The story told by Hayden, the little girl's teacher, is heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. Slowly, Hayden was able to break through the barriers the little girl had surrounding herself to protect from all the horribleness in the world. She did not know love until she met this teacher.

Missing May by Cynthia Rylant is nothing like One Child because the young child in this story was able to pull from the inner love she remembered from her own mother (who died) while she was passed from family to family. Then, a miracle happened, and Summer went to live with May and Ob. The story unfolds after May has died and both Summer and Ob are trying to come to terms with May's absence. Like so many children in stressful situations, young Summer is worried that she has to put her grief on hold to help Ob cope with his. With the assitance Summer's quirky classmate Cletus, Summer and Ob find peace without May - knowing that she remains a part of their lives. Seen through the eyes of the young girl, the author helps us to realize that love does not have to come in shiny big boxes or cost any money - it can be in the form of an old trailer filled with whirlygigs and whatnots!

After finishing both books, I wondered what in the world made me think they were related at all. So I reread Missing May and found myself weeping at the fictional comments of young Summer, who had everything that Hayden's real-life child did not. Here are two paragraphs that show you what I mean:

I know I must have been loved like that, even if I can't remember it. I must have; otherwise, how could I even recognize love when I saw it that night between Ob and May? Before she dies, I know my mother must have loved to comb my shiny hair and rub that Johnson's baby lotion up and down my arms and wrap me up and hold me all night long. She must have know she wasn't going to live and she must have held me longer than any other mother might, so I'd have enough love in me to know what love was when I saw it or felt it again.
When she died and all her brothers and sisters passed me from house to house, nobody ever wanting to take care of me for long, I still had that lesson in love deep inside me and I didn't grow mean or hateful when nobody cared enough to make me their own little girl. My poor mother had left me enough love to go on until somebody did come along who'd want me. (p. 4)

Torey Hayden's child must not have had that reserve - or maybe when awful, awful things happen to you it is difficult to remember the good. At any rate, these books made me want to thank everyone who loves and cares for children who might not otherwise have love in their lives.

Also, just to set this post straight - this book was not depressing in the least - it was really very uplifting and funny.

Flusi Cat

Missing May

A while back I realized that the Newbery Award winners in my town's library have a little label with a medal on the spine. So last week when I was browsing the children's shelves for some books to pull out for my son - voila! - next time he's bored and just wants to play the Nintendo DS for the whole summer break, I grabbed a couple of the stickered winners at random.

I took this one because I thought "Hey, another book by the author of Rules!" - which was one of this year's Newbery Honors books. Rules was an amazing book, one that I just ordered in hardcover because I want to have it on my shelves forever, a book that I am pretty sure most adults will enjoy and learn as much from as most kids will. If I didn't like The Higher Power of Lucky so much, I would say that Rules definitely should have won the Newbery this year.

Anyway, it wasn't until I was halfway through Missing May that I Googled (so I could order Rules), and I realized that Cynthia Lord is the author of Rules, and that Cynthia Rylant (whose name was familiar from some of my daughter's picture books - like Henry & Mudge!) is the author of this book. By then, however, I was enjoying Missing May so much that I wasn't upset that it wasn't by Cynthia Lord (whose first book is Rules - and I hope she is writing more, since she doesn't have a backlist to plunder).

Interestingly, Missing May reminds me quite a bit of The Higher Power of Lucky - it's also the story of an orphaned, not very wealthy girl (who also lives in a trailer!), who is worried about her caretaker, and dealing with death of a loved one. Like Lucky, Summer also has a friend - a boy in her class - who is more than a little quirky, who has elderly parents and a strange name: Cletus (instead of Lincoln).

The fact that this character's name is Cletus and that he lives in West Virginia bothered me a bit at first. It sounded like a bit too much of a stereotype of Appalachia. There was already a character named Ob who makes whirligigs, and May (recently deceased), who rode out a childhood flood in a washtub. But Rylant deftly avoids any further stereotypes in her story of a small family coming to terms with the death of a parent (in all but biology) and a wife.

I thought Rylant's description of the West Virginia capitol was particularly beautiful:

The capitol building sprawled gray concrete like a regal queen spreading out her petticoats, and its giant dome glittered pure gold in the morning sun. I felt in me an embarrassing sense of pride that she was ours. That we weren't just shut-down coal mines and people on welfare like the rest of the country wanted to believe we were. We were this majestic, elegant thing sitting solid, sparkling in the light. (p. 71)

And I loved this description of Cletus - especially the last line:

May would have liked him. She would have said he was "full of wonders," same as Ob. May always liked the weird ones best, the ones you couldn't peg right off. She must be loving it up in heaven, where I figure everybody must just let loose. That's got to be at least one of the benefits of heaven - never having to act normal again. (p. 55)

Missing May is a much darker book than The Higher Power of Lucky, examining loss, grief and uncertainty in much more detail. Summer and Cletus are a few years older than Lucky and Lincoln, and they grapple with their problems in a more adult way. Despite the plot similarities (and the fact that both are short books), they are very different stories (so no, I don't think that Patron ripped off Rylant fourteen years later), and I think that the subject matter of Missing May is more suited for kids in the 12 and up age range. Also, you might want to have a box of kleenex handy for the last couple of chapters.