Missing May
by Cynthia Rylant
Summary
Summer spent her first six years bounced between relatives who did not particularly want her before her great aunt May and great uncle Ob took her in and raised her in their trailer home in rural West Virginia, the first people in her life to actually want her around. Six years later, May dies suddenly while gardening, and the novel picks up in the aftermath, with Ob so undone by grief that he becomes convinced May's spirit is trying to reach him from beyond death. Summer, only twelve and grieving in her own quieter way, watches Ob search for signs of May everywhere and worries what will happen to both of them if he cannot let go.
Summer's odd classmate Cletus, who claims to have had a near death experience of his own, joins them on a trip to track down a well known spirit medium who Ob hopes can put him in contact with May. They arrive to learn the medium has recently died herself, a small, almost darkly funny disappointment that turns out to matter more than a successful seance would have: on the drive home, without any spiritual breakthrough at all, Ob quietly decides to keep living for Summer's sake rather than chase May's ghost any further. The ending offers no supernatural resolution, only a boy and a girl choosing each other over grief that has nowhere left to go.
Rylant writes in a plain, close first person voice that lets Summer's grief come through in understatement rather than outburst, and the whole book runs under a hundred pages, a quick read that still leaves real weight behind. A fair criticism, raised even by admiring reviewers at the time, is that Summer's own narrating voice keeps a slight distance from her feelings that can make her grief harder to feel fully alongside her.
Historical Context & Significance
Missing May won the 1993 Newbery Medal. That year's honor books were Bruce Brooks's What Hearts, Patricia McKissack's The Dark Thirty, and Walter Dean Myers's Somewhere in the Darkness. Orchard Books published the ninety eight page novel on March 1, 1992.
Publishers Weekly praised Summer's direct, matter of fact voice, occasionally laced with irony and wry humor, while noting some narrative distance from her own grief, and Kirkus Reviews called it a beautifully written, life affirming book. Rylant, who has written more than one hundred books for children, set the story in the Appalachian hill country of West Virginia where she herself grew up, and that regional specificity, the trailer home, the particular cadence of rural Appalachian speech, gives the grief at the book's center a grounded, unsentimental setting rather than a generic one.