Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, written by Laura Amy Schlitz and illustrated by Robert Byrd, is the 2008 Newbery Medal winner. What a fun book! The author wrote it for the students at Park School, where she works as a librarian. She wanted them to perform something about the Middle Ages, which they were studying, but nobody wanted to play a small part. So she wrote seventeen short plays, mostly monologues, so that everybody could be a star. As someone who has a Bachelors in History and is working on her Masters in Library Science, I can completely relate to the author’s rationale behind this book. There are actually twenty-three characters in this book, all between the ages of ten and fifteen years old, and they range from pauper to nobility. I enjoyed reading about all of them, but my favorite was probably Mogg because of the way they spared their cow Paradise from being taken away by the Lord after her father’s death. I also liked the way the characters were intertwined - you would meet or hear about a character in one story and find them again in the next. The book begins with a map of the setting of the book, with the characters labeled by name. The plays include helpful information about the time period in footnotes in the margins. The book also includes several pages of kid-friendly background information, and there is a wonderful bibliography at the back of the book.