“Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village” by Laura Amy Schlitz

Finally! The two-month wait to get the Newbery title has been rewarded. It arrived yesterday and I was able to read it in a single afternoon. Chalking this one up to another esoteric pick by the arcane Newbery committee, I was pleasantly surprised by this off-beat and unusual award-winner. The book is a series of 21 monologues, meant to be performed by 23 young actors. The intertwined stories are those of villagers in the Middle Ages, and are accompanied by a number of brief informational sections describing historical roles and events. The monologues themselves include a number of notes and there is an extensive glossary as well. Although the work is meant for performance, it was enjoyable to read – and had quite a number of interesting facts that I was completely unaware of (although I fancy myself a decent historian when it comes to this period in time). The book works best when the author’s humor and cleverness comes out (including some arch comments about the crusades) but is a bit of a mystery in terms of who might pick it up. The detailed and well-matched illustrations by Robert Byrd are a perfect accompaniment to the text, but the book presents as a picture book. High schoolers will not pick it up for this reason, yet the text was a challenge for ~me~, so I hardly think younger children would “get” it. Many of the monologues are in verse, which I did find a bit challenging, as they don’t adhere strictly to any one form – sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, sometimes very metered but breaking the meter as needed. That was a minor distraction in reading text that seemed very legitimate in terms of language of the period. The book was entertaining, engrossing and enlightening, so try to find an hour or two to peruse it. I guarantee you will learn something you didn’t know before!