Set in the 1870’s on the sparsely settled western Kansas prairie and taking inspiration from The Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Starr Rose‘s May B. A Novel is a captivating tale of a young girl’s courage and struggle to survive.
To help her homesteading family, May’s parents send her to work on the nearby homestead of a newly wed couple. May doesn’t want to go the 15 miles across the prairie, staying to help the bride, newly arrived from a city in the East, until Christmas, even if it will give her parents some money. She’d rather stay home, help on her own homestead and continue to go to school since she dreams of being a teacher someday. But the decision has been made, and she is taken further west out into the endless prairie to live and work at the neighbors’. It doesn’t take long for things to go terribly wrong: within a month of her arrival, the new bride flees to try and make her way back East and her husband leaves May alone in the tiny sod house while he attempts to find his wife. Days turn into weeks and the couple don’t return, stranding May, without a rifle, without any way to contact anyone for help, and without enough food and fuel to survive the remaining months until her Pa will come for her in December.
Told in sparse but elegant present tense free verse, May’s struggles with isolation, fear, and the shame of her troubles at school transport the reader directly into the dark, cramped sod house where she’s trapped. For girls who love The Little House books and for those who like a heroine who is courageous and determined, May B. A Novel will certainly be a favorite.
- Posted by Cori