May B

Caroline Starr Rose's May B is a prairie story for 8 year olds, told in short lines of verse by a girl who has been sent away to work.

What happens

May is Mavis Elizabeth Betterly. May Betts. May B. She gives you all three names in the first few pages, which tells you something about how sure she is of herself and how little that helps.

It opens with a hairbrush and a row. Ma is braiding what's left of May's hair (her brother Hiram cut a hunk off because she dared him to) and telling her it's for the best. May is going fifteen miles west to keep house for a couple she has never met. Until Christmas. There'll be money in it.

She says I won't go three times and then she goes.

The part that aches is what she's leaving. May is behind at school and she knows it. She's the girl who can't read out the lesson. In three more years she'd be old enough to teach, if only she could get the words to hold still. Going away finishes that, and everyone at the table knows it without saying so.

What she finds at the other end is a one-window soddy with rain-stained cloth pinned to the ceiling, a man with a new beard, and Mrs Oblinger. Mrs Oblinger wears red, has been married about five minutes, and turns out to be barely older than May herself. She picks up May's school reader, and when May snatches it back she says stupid girl. That night May hears her crying into the blankets with her husband lying right there.

Then the Oblingers are gone and May is on her own in the snow.

The verse is the thing to know about before you start. Whole pages have six words on them. It looks like almost nothing and it goes very fast, which suits a reader who finds a wall of text off-putting but wants a story with real weight in it. Your reader will finish this in an afternoon and think about it for longer.

It is a sad book though, and honestly sad rather than sad-then-fixed. A child is sent away because her family needs the money. Another family's baby dies at three weeks old, and May's mother uses it as an example of one less mouth to feed. Then a girl is left alone with winter coming. For a child who takes this sort of thing to heart, that is a lot to carry. For one who already reads survival stories, or who knows what it is to be the one who can't keep up in class, it will go straight in.

What to read next

Another girl doing far more than her share on a homestead nobody thanks her for is in The Trouble with May Amelia. Seven brothers, a father who announces that girls are useless, and a narrator with a very sharp tongue about it.