The Trouble with May Amelia

Jennifer L. Holm's The Trouble with May Amelia is a funny, big-hearted story for 10 year olds about the only girl in a family of Finnish farmers, with seven older brothers and a very grumpy Pappa.

What happens

May Amelia Jackson is twelve and she's in Trouble Again. She's washed out the yeast starter, so there's no bread for a week. Pappa says Girls Are Useless and he'd rather have one boy than a dozen of her. (The capitals are hers, and she uses them a LOT.)

It's 1900 on the Nasel River in Washington State. There are no roads, so everyone rows everywhere, and May Amelia falls in more often than anyone. Her brothers smear cow muck in her hair and chant Cow Perfume at supper.

She gives as good as she gets, though. When Berle Holumbo tips over the school outhouse with her inside it, she scares him straight into the river. The only dry clothes in the box afterwards are her new dress, and he has to wear it in front of the whole class. Who doesn't love a bit of revenge like that?

It's told in May Amelia's own voice, with no speech marks, and it feels like she's leaning over to tell you all of it. The jokes sit right next to the hard stuff. Uncle Aarno keeps a list of all the ways he might die (Eaten By A Cougar is his newest). Four whistles from the logging camp means a man is dead, and every mother in the valley runs.

Then a man in a proper suit turns up talking about a new town and a railway. Pappa can't follow his English, so for the first time he picks May Amelia to translate instead of a brother. She's so proud she could burst, and you can feel how much it matters to her.

This one doesn't pretend farm life was gentle, so a heads-up. May's baby sister died over the winter, before the story starts. A neighbour is remembered drowning a sack of kittens. When the barn burns down, May believes her cat and the new kittens are inside. A reader who's very tender about animals may find that a lot.

If your reader likes their history with the mud left on, though, they'll probably love May Amelia. She's cheeky, brave and really rather lonely, which is a very good mix.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Little Bird Flies has another twelve-year-old girl in a hard-working family at the edge of the map. She's on a tiny Scottish island, squeezed into one bed with her sisters and gazing west across the ocean towards America, which is just where May Amelia's family ended up.