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Nancy Keane's | Booktalks -- Quick and Simple | |
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Rose, Caroline
Starr.
MAY B : A NOVEL New York : Schwartz & Wade Books, 2012 IL 3-6, RL 3.7 ISBN 158246393X (2 booktalks) |
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Booktalk #1 Life on the frontier is certainly never easy but young May is going to find that things can get worse. Her parent ship her off to a remote farm where she is to work for the family. Her father promises her that he will come to get her before Christmas. But that is probably not going to happen. When the couple she is working for leaves, May is left alone in the remote house with little food and little fuel. The blizzards rage outside and the wolves howl in the night. May is alone and needs to find a way to survive. May’s story is told in verse. Booktalk #2 Young May is sure that her parents have hired her out to live with strangers fifteen miles from her own homestead so that there is one less mouth to feed in her family. Bitter and frightened, May soon learns that she is charged with helping Mr. Oblinger’s new bride adjust to the harsh and lonely life in a sod house on the Kansas prairie. May’s own unhappiness soon turns to real fear when she is mysteriously abandoned by the Oblingers and is forced to survive through months of increasingly harsh weather with ever-dwindling resources. With only her own thoughts and a book she can barely read, hungry and cold, May listens to the howling of a nearby wolf and the wailing of the blizzard winds that cover the soddy with snow. Does anyone even know she is alone? Does she have enough courage to face each new challenge? Will her father come back to get her before she starves or freezes to death? (South Carolina Junior Book Award nominee 2015, Prepared by: Betty T. (BT) Bouton, Fort Johnson Middle School, betty_bouton@charleston.k12.sc.us ) |
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