Miracles on Maple Hill
by Virginia Sorensen
Summary
Marly's family moves from the city to a run down farmhouse on Maple Hill in rural Pennsylvania so that her father, a World War II veteran left withdrawn and troubled by what the book only gradually reveals as the lasting effects of his wartime experience, can recover in quiet surroundings. Marly, her older brother Joe and their mother settle into the slower rhythms of country life across the changing seasons, and Marly in particular grows close to the elderly maple farming couple next door, Mr. and Mrs. Chris, whose sugarhouse and syrup making Marly finds genuinely magical the first time she watches it. The book's central crisis comes when Mr. Chris suffers a heart attack right in the middle of the crucial sugaring season, leaving his sap unboiled and his livelihood at risk; Marly's family steps in to harvest and process the syrup themselves, uncertain the whole time whether their inexperienced effort will match Mr. Chris's own decades of skill. When Mr. Chris returns home and tastes the result, he finds no difference at all between his syrup and theirs, a small vindication that closes the book alongside the quieter, larger recovery running underneath it, her father's steady return to himself, her family's growing roots in Maple Hill, and the ordinary, cumulative good fortune Marly comes to understand as the real miracles the title promises.
It reads gently and warmly, closer to a seasonal family portrait than to a plotted adventure, and its handling of a father's unnamed postwar trouble is treated with more care than drama.
Historical Context & Significance
Miracles on Maple Hill won the 1957 Newbery Medal for a book Harcourt published in 1956, illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush. That year's honor books were Fred Gipson's Old Yeller, Meindert De Jong's The House of Sixty Fathers, Clara Ingram Judson's Mr. Justice Holmes, Dorothy Rhoads's The Corn Grows Ripe and Marguerite de Angeli's Black Fox of Lorne.
Sorensen, who also wrote fiction for adults, set the novel in the maple sugar country of Edinboro, Pennsylvania, where she herself lived through much of the 1950s, and drew the Chris family and their sugarhouse from that firsthand setting. Kirkus Reviews called it a complete and realistic family story and the New York Times praised its country magic and family warmth, though Carolyn Horovitz later criticized its sentimental language as beneath what she considered Sorensen's better adult work.