Strawberry Girl
by Lois Lenski
Summary
Birdie Boyer's family moves from North Carolina to the backwoods of central Florida to grow strawberries, settling next to the Slater family, whose father drinks, lets his cattle roam loose over any fence, and resents the Boyers on sight for trying to farm the open range he is used to treating as his own. Sam Slater's cattle repeatedly trample the Boyers' young crop, and when friendly overtures from the Boyers go nowhere, the feud escalates until Slater deliberately sets a prairie fire, hoping to burn the newcomers out. The fire threatens the Boyer homestead directly, and though the Slaters refuse to help fight it, neighbors rally, and in the crisis Mr. Boyer manages to save two of his own children along with two of the Slaters' from the flames. Later, while Sam Slater is off on a drunken bender, his wife falls dangerously ill, and Mrs. Boyer nurses her back to health despite everything the families have put each other through. Slater returns to find his wife alive because of the family he has spent the book fighting, and the shock pushes him toward the local preacher, sobriety and a genuine reconciliation, ending the novel on the feud's collapse rather than its escalation.
Lenski, who researched the book by living among real Florida Cracker families, renders their speech, farm work and rural customs in close, affectionate detail, and the strawberry farming itself, planting, frost worry, the harvest, gives the story a steady seasonal rhythm a young reader can follow even through the family conflict at its center.
Historical Context & Significance
Strawberry Girl won the 1946 Newbery Medal for a book J. B. Lippincott published in 1945, illustrated by Lenski herself. That year's honor books were Marguerite Henry's Justin Morgan Had a Horse, Florence Crannell Means's The Moved Outers, Christine Weston's Bhimsa, the Dancing Bear and Katherine Shippen's New Found World. It is the best known entry in Lenski's Regional series, a run of novels she wrote after traveling the country and living for stretches with the communities she portrayed, gathering most of Strawberry Girl's incidents directly from Florida families themselves.
The book has stayed continuously in print for eight decades and remains widely assigned for its firsthand documentation of a rural way of life that has since largely disappeared, even as its rendering of regional dialect on the page reads, to some modern readers, as more dated than the story around it.