Birdie Boyer is a girl who belonged to a large Strawberry family. They raised strawberries for a living in Florida. In this story, Birdie goes through many things such as the desire to play the organ and wanting an education, to learning how to grow and take care of strawberries.

This is a very nice paced, sweet story. There is a variety of characters and the illustrations flow very well with the story. A sweet, moral and uplifting story for children.

This one is a Newbery Award-winning classic. (Umm humm. Says so right on the cover.) I enjoyed it tremendously.
It was copyrighted in 1945 and tells the story of two neighboring families living in the lake region of Florida in the early 1900s after the Seminole War. Most of the people in this region had moved down from the Carolinas and were known as the Florida Crackers. They had wonderfully colorful speech patterns, a wealth of idioms, and brought with them many a folk song, superstition and integrity of character (or not, as in the case on one of the neighbors).
This is a cross section of America. An American way of life not known to a great many of us, a poor but very colorful way of life.
The main character is a 10 year old girl named Birdie Boyer and the story is told through her eyes. Her family is a farming family attempting to grow strawberries, orange groves, and sweet potatoes among other produce.
The neighboring family, the Slaters, raise cattle and pigs. Or to be more precise, they have cattle and pigs. They pretty much just let them free range and raise themselves until it is time to round them up and take them to be sold.
The cattle and pigs continue to get into the crop fields of the Boyer family and trample the berries, eat the fruit trees down to nubbins and wreak all kinds of havoc. This does not sit well with Mr. Boyer and he speaks to Mr. Slater, who cares not one whit. So Mr. Boyer decides to fence in his property. Mr. Slater threatens him that if he does, something bad will happen. And so it goes.
The book was a quick read and it was easy to relate to and to get to know and care about the characters. I quite liked it and think that anyone else picking it up would like it as well. I will be looking for more of Ms. Linski's books. ( )

When I was a kid, I loved Lois Lenski's Indian Captive so much that it got checked out of the library about every three or four trips - and we visited biweekly. I always wanted to read other books of hers, especially Strawberry Girl because it was about a girl growing up in Florida and I have always had a lot of pride in my Floridian heritage, but whenever I got to the shelf with the L's, I always ended up picking Indian Captive again.

I finally had an excuse to read Strawberry Girl last spring for an adolescent literature course assignment, wherein we had to read a Newbery Award winner and give a presentation. I hadn't thought about Lois Lenski in years, but browsing the list of titles, I was reminded by how often I had almost read Strawberry Girl as a kid, so I decided to finally do so. I really loved the book, though not as much as I like Indian Captive or another novel set on a Florida farm, Tangerine.

Just the other day, I was picking through my books to give some to a friend's kids and decided to read this one again. It was a quick read, and I managed it during my breaks over only two days, but I feel that I have a much different response to it than when I read it last year. I still like it, but I noticed a lot more that struck me as being very "1940s children's book".

The story can be summed up fairly simply: it's a slice of life sort of plot about two neighboring families in Polk County, Florida (as stated on page 75 in my copy) sometime between 1895 and 1902. The story begins with the Boyers moving into their new home, and it ends about a year later, with them having established a strawberry field and having received the profits from the first crop. The primary conflicts are between the Boyer family and the Slater family, who have lived in the same house for upwards of four generations and who are not very well pleased with the new way of farming that the Slaters have. Of course, at the end of the book, the Slaters have decided to give up their old ways and become more modern/civilized.

I have to admit that both times I've read this book, I got really sad around the end, when the Slaters decide to give up being cowmen and fence in their land, on account of the phosphorous company building fences anyway and destroying the land in order to get to the phosphorous. Even though this is about events a century ago, it's very much like what's going on more recently with the enormous growth in Florida, which is making the wild bits fewer and farther between. I grew up down here and my mom's family were Crackers just like the Boyers and Slaters, and I have such a love for the wild bits of Florida. It's just so dang beautiful, all the Spanish swords and live oaks and gators and armadillos and everything. So the end of the book, with the foreshadowing of the development of the state that was already in full-swing by the time Lois Lenski wrote about it in 1945, just makes my heart near to breaking.

Speaking of the development of Florida that goes on in the book, it's also the people who get civilized. I'm not sure that I'm so pleased with this aspect of the book, because it really plays up the stereotypes of Crackers. Not only do you get a really strong (and possibly off-putting, for some folks) written dialect whenever anyone speaks, but it's the family from up North who brings modernization and cleanliness and change (and even religion, for goodness sake) to the slow, lazy, ornery, and dirty folks from the South - even though the Northern family are poor farmers themselves, hailing from Marion County, Fla., via the Carolinas. One of the opening scenes has Birdie Boyer (the girl through whom the story is told) combing the Slater girls' hair - the Slater girls who had never seen a comb or mirror before in their lives! The final chapter has the schoolteacher correcting the children's speech even, which also bothered me, but then, I relished every use of "fixin" and "ary" and "studyin", because that's how my grandparents and their siblings talk, and though I grew up in a more urban area where the dialect has grown more like the standard US one, I find myself lapsing into those patterns when spending any time with my family.

So I'm not at all happy with the general movement of the story, with the whole colonialization thing, to use one of the words I learned from literary criticism classes. But I love the descriptions of the region, and I love reading the dialect (though many won't), and I love that this is a book about rural Florida. I can't say how many books I read as a kid that took place up North or out West, but I don't think I found hardly any that had the South for their settings, much less Florida. So even though I'm not well pleased with the theme of the plot itself, I love this book, and I think I'm not going to keep it for a while yet.

A note: the illustrations are more creepy than charming, looking through them again. Shoestring's face is so oddly drawn! ( )

It was little confusing but it was still good and taught you to love your neighbor. ( )

Some books, like Little House in the Woods, are ageless. I don't think this is of the same caliber - I stopped reading it about 1/3 of the way thru. ( )