Our Only May Amelia

This is an extremely engaging tale told in first-person by the youngest in a family of all boys. May Amelia lives in the Pacific Northwest of 1899, a rural community of farmers, loggers, and fishers. She's a bit of an impulsive and independent spirit of a girl who gets into issues, a lot. I can see why this would have been given a Newbery Honor award, it's good enough for the main Newbery Medal in my estimation. There's an author's note at the end that took me by surprise, a pleasant one, and endeared the character to me all the more. Definitely recommended.

Fun in that Laura Ingalls Wilder frontier sense--which means you can be appalled by how hard everyday life was and, at the same time, be delighted by how simple everyday life was. It's a mixed bag of adventure and tragedy, with no great drama other than the characters surviving and getting along okay.

May Amelia is a tomboy, a troublemaker, and a plucky youngster with adorable speech patterns. She's the only girl in her small Finnish community in southwestern Washington. She struggles with loneliness and constant disapproval from her brothers, father and grandmother for not being "a proper young lady."

Some notes: A woman is murdered kind of gruesomely. The word "chinaman" is used a lot, which I'm sure is historically accurate, but show more might be offensive. show less

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Infant death, domestic violence, emotional abuse, parentification of a child.
This book was really annoying. Lack of punctuation in dialogue is a tricky device, and here it fell beyond flat. May Amelia was not exactly sympathetic. That's likely due to how horrid her family was to her. Her dad outright hates her and wanted another boy, since seven weren't enough. Her grandmother beats her bloody. Her mother enlists her as the sole caretaker of an infant, who later dies. My family and I are Finnish Sami on my dad's side, third generation now, who grew up in Washington state. One of my aunts (I have four on my dad's side) was indeed enlisted at the age of ten to take care of a new infant, another aunt of mine. My show more grandmother was apparently too tired, yet magically regained energy to take care of, overprotect, and spoil my dad when he was born ten years later. So I should have seen my family in this. I did not.

There is zero stuff about Finnish culture except for a few names that would be easy for Americans to pronounce, and some food items. A sauna is briefly mentioned. May Amelia isn't a Finnish name. Neither is Wilbert, which is actually a German name. Off the top of my head: Eeva is a Finnish girl name, and Juuso for a boy. I get that the characters' names were Americanized, but the protagonist stresses that Wilbert dislikes English. So why call him an English name? May Amelia is Not Like Other Girls (haha see what I did there? It's a nod to the capitalization choices in the book). And -wow-, that character choice is -much- better done in "Dovey Coe" by Frances O'Rourke Dowell. Here, it's just weird since the characters are underdeveloped. The plot lines, if you could call them that, were stupid. There was no climax. This is a character study of someone's extremely vague idea of what a Finnish family might be like in Washington state in 1899. The author points out several times that her great-far-back grandmother was the real May Amelia, and uhh...ehhm...I can't come up with a response besides "then it seems like you packaged your own family history, Americanized it for a children's book and hoped to turn a profit." I'm off to find a better book about Finns. show less

My mom's been married a few times now, and I can honestly say that not much good has come out of the multiple stepfathers I've dealt with. There is one notable exception: my first stepfather, when I was maybe 8 years old, randomly decided to give my sister and I a present each. He put his hands behind his back and told us to each pick a side, and then presented us each with our own book. My sister got "Because of Winn Dixie" and I got this book.

I remember being disappointed at first, because I had heard about "Because of Winn Dixie" and had never heard of this May Amelia character. Plus, the book wasn't pretty. Also, I had wanted to pick the other hand but the older sister got first call. Needless to say I didn't enter this book with show more any positive expectations.

I guess it goes without saying that I loved it, if I remember it all these years later as a favorite, so much so that I still have it on my elusive 'favorites' shelf ten years later at age 18.

The book is about a young girl who has grown up in a family of rambunctious brothers. She's unruly and rather wild, just goes about the riverside with her animal friends and her imagination to make a great day out of it. I remember the book felt rustic to me, that I was transported to this whole world that I, safely growing up in my upper-middle-class suburb, had no idea existed. And who knew that it could be so fun!

I might have been too young by conventional standards to read this at age 8 or so, so I'm not suggesting this as the prime reading age for any of my friends' and followers' children. But my gosh, please don't forget about this book. In 2000 it didn't win the Newbery Medal but it did win Honors, and it deserved every bit of recognition it got. show less

May Amelia has seven brothers, but not a single sister. She can keep up with the boys, but doing so often gets her in trouble, especially from her father. But why should the boys get to have all the fun, just because May Amelia is supposed to be learning how to be a proper young lady?

This story combines lighthearted moments of humor with themes of surprising depth as May Amelia experiences both the joys and the hardships of frontier living. I can see the episodic nature of the story making for good classroom reading, but the lack of a narrative arc makes it seem a bit disjointed at times. Still, readers who enjoy tales of plucky heroines of days gone by are sure to enjoy this book.

This book reminded me of a more culturally sensitive Caddie Woodlawn, which is awesome because that was one of my very favorite books growing up. May Amelia lives in a small community of Finish immigrants in Washington State in 1900. She's got a lot of spunk and a lot of heart, running around their farm and the woods with her many brothers, but she's also starting to feel pressure to "act like a girl". With lots of detail about the Finish immigrants and Native American people of the time and area woven in seamlessly, this is a solid adventure story with a strong heroine.

The audio recording is just fine. I tend to prefer voiced recordings, which this is not, but it's still a solid reading. Emmy Rossum gives May Amelia a no-nonsense show more voice, which fits with May Amelia's character. Rossum's reading voice is high and clear, childlike without being annoyingly childish. show less

May Amelia lives with her parents and seven older brothers on their Washington state homestead in the late 1800's. She struggles against the idea that she should learn to be a proper young lady and that she's not supposed to do all the things her brothers can, and hopes that the baby her mother is carrying will be another girl so that she won't feel so alone.
Think Little House on the Prairie, but with Finnish immigrants in the Northwest. If you like Wilder's books, chances are good that you'd enjoy this one, too, which Holm wrote based on her great-aunt's actual diary entries.