Miss Hickory
by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
Summary
Miss Hickory is a doll fashioned from an apple wood twig body topped with a hickory nut for a head, living in a corncob house in the New Hampshire countryside. When the family who owns the farm shuts up the house for the winter and moves to Boston, Miss Hickory is left behind with no shelter of her own and no one to care for her, forcing her, prickly and stubborn by nature, to depend on the wild animals around her, a crow, a squirrel, a hen pheasant, to survive the cold months. She resists their help at first, clinging to her pride, but hardship gradually softens her, and she comes to accept the animals' aid and even to feel something like community with them through a long, harsh winter. The turning point comes when a squirrel, in a dispute over den space, bites off Miss Hickory's hickory nut head; her thoughts continue for a strange, unsettling moment even as the squirrel eats the head entirely, dwelling on her own past hardheadedness before the voice goes silent. Her twig body, though headless, comes suddenly alive and runs to graft itself onto an apple tree, and in the book's last scene the farm's daughter, Ann, returns in spring, climbs that tree, and is answered by a small, promised apple that will grow just for her.
It is a strange, quietly unsettling book for a chapter book, more meditation on change and self sacrifice than conventional adventure, and its ending in particular tends to surprise parents reading it aloud for the first time.
Historical Context & Significance
Miss Hickory won the 1947 Newbery Medal for a book Viking published in 1946, illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett, whose stepdaughter Ruth Stiles Gannett would soon write My Father's Dragon. That year's honor books were Nancy Barnes's The Wonderful Year, Mary and Conrad Buff's Big Tree, William Maxwell's The Heavenly Tenants, Cyrus Fisher's The Avion My Uncle Flew and Eleanore M. Jewett's The Hidden Treasure of Glaston.
The book remains in print, but its blunt handling of Miss Hickory's death and transformation has made it one of the medal's more divisive choices among modern readers and teachers, some finding real depth in its treatment of change and mortality and others considering it too strange and abrupt for the young readers it was written for.