Would you believe this is the first time I’m reading this? For some reason I missed this as a kid, which seems like an outrageous oversight. I can’t explain it.

Catherine, Called Birdy¸ Karen Cushman, 1994.

How did no one buy me this book as a kid? It was a Newbery Honor book and it would have been right up my alley! But instead here I am with the 20^th anniversary edition, enjoying it as an adult and totally unable to share what I thought of it as a kid. Such is life. Anyway, Karen Cushman wrote the excellent The Midwife’s Apprentice and has an excellent reputation for children’s historical fiction, so I am practically preprogrammed to enjoy this.

This is a journal-style book, except it has the charming detail of including which saint’s feast day every day is, and some expository detail. “28^th Day of January, Feast of Saint John the Sage, an Irish philosopher who was stabbed to death by his students.” “3^rd Day of November, Feast of Saint Rumwald, who at three days old said ‘I am a Christian’ and died.” This is also pretty much the Ur-Example of “girl who doesn’t want to submit to society’s expectations about her,” which is the most common trope in all the books I review, but it’s done reasonably well here so I won’t complain about it too much. Other than right here.

So the idea and driving force behind this whole book is that Catherine (called Birdy, because of her attraction to birds) is fast approaching the age where she’ll need to be married off, and she does not want to be at all. Her father is a rough and cruel lackwit, but he’s doing his best to get Catherine married off to a wealthy man as quickly as possible. Catherine’s job is basically to try to outwit him at every pass. She does a surprisingly good job for a young teenager, which either speaks to her wit or her father’s lack. The first suitor comes calling and Catherine manages to dispatch him by blacking out some teeth with soot and behaving like an idiot at dinner. Mission accomplished.

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This book was a surprisingly enjoyable reread and trip down Memory Lane! However, I have never found anyone who’s ever even heard of it, which is truly bizarre to me. I don’t think they even had it in my childhood library—I don’t even know where my copy came from. Someone must have given it to me as a gift WAY too young, because I have a very clear memory of trying to read it in Grade 2 at age eight and being in way over my head and then stowing it away in my desk. I didn’t pick it up again until sometime in high school, I think.

Quest For A Maid, Frances Mary Hendry, 1988.

I’m not a big fantasy person, but this book has exactly the right amount for me. Meg, the protagonist, is the nine-year-old youngest of seven sisters, all daughters of a reasonably wealthy Scottish shipwright in Inverkeithing in the 13^th century. Her oldest sister, Inge, is a witch, and a witch of some power to boot. We start right in on the action when Meg hides in her sister’s storehouse and watches as an elegant court lady asks for a favour from Inge—asking her to kill the king, Alexander III, to clear the way for her own family to assume the throne. Inge does it by appearing in a spectre before the king as he rides during a dark night’s storm towards his queen—and then Scotland is, predictably, plunged into a horrorshow.

One of the things that’s so great about this book is that Hendry is a terrific writer, and the book moves right along at a terrific clip considering at 270 pages it’s a pretty hefty tome for a YA novel. And the second great thing is that it relies pretty heavily on plenty of Scots dialect words, but it doesn’t come off as pretentious and annoying like so many others do. I think it’s due to the fact that Hendry uses it extensively throughout the book, rather than just sprinkling in a few words here and there for “effect,” and the fact that it doesn’t distract from the story itself. It’s used along with sentence structure evocative of Scots that’s period-appropriate, so instead of just being a twee little affectation, it’s a major, and excellent, part of the book.

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Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of revisiting these classics and trash. This week is a classic to start the year off in the best way.

This is aimed at a little bit younger than the books I usually review, but I can’t possibly ignore it. It’s such a classic of the genre! It was a staple in every school library, on every classroom bookshelf, at every book fair, etc. etc., and so on. I haven’t probably touched this book in seventeen years or so, but it’s amazing the things that I remembered.

The Midwife’s Apprentice, Karen Cushman, 1991.

In case you don’t remember the basic premise of this book, it’s about a homeless girl in the Middle Ages, who literally lives in a dung heap. She has no family and no friends and no one to look after her, and she cuddles down in the dung heap to keep warm. This is also the first place I learned that rotting hay and stuff got warm and could conceivably be a place to stay if necessary, which featured in many of my childhood imaginings about what would happen if I got transported back to the Middle Ages. (I was a weird kid, don’t judge me.) She has no name, so everyone calls her Brat, except for the mean village boys, who call her Beetle. So already we’re working with a super cheery premise for a kids’ book.

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