Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village

Laura Amy Schlitz built this collection of monologues for the fifth graders she taught as a school librarian, and it keeps that classroom origin close to its surface: nineteen speeches and two dialogues, each spoken by a different young resident of a fictional English village in the year 1255, meant to be read aloud or performed rather than read silently start to finish. A lord's daughter frets over an arranged marriage, a blacksmith's apprentice describes the ache of a day at the forge, a Jewish moneylender's son explains a precarious status the rest of the village barely tolerates, and a runaway boy speaks about hiding from a life the village has already mapped out for him without his consent. Each monologue stands alone rather than advancing a single plot, so the book has no ending in the ordinary sense; instead the pieces accumulate into a portrait of an entire social order, lords, serfs, clergy, tradespeople, seen entirely through the voices of the children born into each rank. Short informative sidebars sit between the monologues, filling in the history, land tenure, church authority, plague, guild rules, that the young speakers take for granted but a modern reader does not.

Written as much for performance as for reading, the collection asks a young audience to inhabit rather than simply learn medieval history, and each monologue is short enough for a single student to memorize and deliver as a speaking part. It is unusual among Newbery winners for having no continuous narrative at all, and some readers who come to it expecting a novel find the format harder going than its short pieces suggest; read aloud, in the classroom setting it was built for, it comes fully alive in a way it can lose on a solitary page.