At Twenty-three is 'Missing May' a classic?

Missing May is my favorite book of all time. Written as a children’s/young teen novel, I feel that this is a book parents and children should read together, although I loved it as an adult.

The author, Cynthia Rylant, once said, "They say to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived."

                            Cynthia Rylant 

In Missing May, May dies suddenly while gardening and Summer (the protagonist) assumes she'll never see her beloved aunt again. But then Summer's Uncle Ob claims that May is on her way back—she has sent a sign from the spirit world.

Summer has lost her parents at a very young age and has been passed around several relatives who don't want her before she is finally adopted by her Aunt May and Uncle Ob (who have always wanted children but could never have any). She lives a happy life with them until May dies suddenly while gardening. The story is how Summer and Ob cope with their grief, often not knowing how to help each other. When Summer's friend Cletus tells them about a medium who claims to be able to contact the departed, they decide to go on a summer trip to consult with her, hoping to hear from May again. And they do, but not in the way they'd expected. The encounter is spellbinding and believable.


From Chapter 1: "When May died, Ob came back to the trailer, got out of his good suit and into his regular clothes, then went and sat in the Chevy for the rest of the night. That old car had been parked out by the doghouse for as long as I could remember, and the weeds had grown up all around it so you didn’t even notice it unless you looked, and for years I couldn’t understand why Ob didn’t just get rid of the awful thing. Until I saw him sitting in it after the funeral. Then I knew that even though nobody in the world figured that old car had any good purpose, Ob knew there was some real reason to let it sit. And when May died, he figured out what it was. I never saw two people love each other so much. Sometimes the tears would just come over me, looking at the two of them, even six years back when I first got here and was too young to be thinking about love. But I guess I must have had a deep part of me thinking about it, hoping to see it all along, because the first time I saw Ob help May braid her long yellow hair, sitting in the kitchen one night, it was all I could do not to go to the woods and cry forever from happiness.”


This beautifully written simple and sweet story is injected with just the right touches of humor and mysticism.

Missing May is a critically acclaimed winner of the Newbery Medal in 1993 and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and has joined Scholastic's paperback line. It grieves me to read all the one and two star reviews, written presumably by a group of schoolchildren as a class assignment that included writing a review. One reviewer titled their review: "Teachers worship it; Kids squash hornets with it." And another stated, “At the beginning of this year, the whole sixth grade was assigned to read this book; no one liked it. The characters were blank, and just about as lively as a stone. They spent the whole book wallowing in their self-pity. I had to force myself to read it, and now it is shoved out of my sight and under the bed.”

But, then there are the rave reviews, one of them mine: "Missing May isn't about vampires or zombies or other worlds as most of the "one star" reviewers seem to have expected.” And "Missing May is the most beautiful book I've ever read. I call it my 'Happy Book.' Whenever I feel sad, I read it, and it lifts my spirits.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Missing May is especially good for those who have lost a close relative or friend...and isn't that just about all of us?

The Summer of Letting Go (p.33). Gae Polisner: “I swallow back a lump in my throat. I miss Lisette. I miss us. I know I was just at her house, but we’re not quite us anymore. Something is off between us. There’s a crack turning into a chasm. It keeps stretching wider and wider.” 

Gae Polisner

The Summer of Letting Go is a story of Francesca (“Frankie” and sometimes “Beans”), an almost sixteen-year-old girl laden with heavy burdens—the worst of which is the drowning death of her four-year-old brother, Simon under her apparent watch. Left alone on the beach while her parents sleep on a blanket in the sun, Frankie is distracted for a moment while Simon is washed out to sea. The grief and guilt her parents experience is nothing compared to Frankie’s.

How can Frankie bare to love herself or let anyone else love her when she has allowed to let her brother die?

Frankie meets the four-year-old Frankie Sky as he plunges to the bottom of the country club pool. He reminds her of her brother.

From chapter 3: “I watch, frozen, as his blond curls float upward while the rest of him plummets down. Bubbles escape his mouth, and his blue eyes blink up at me. The air turns thick and dark, and a thousand panicked memories skitter like water bugs across the sun-bleached landscape of my brain. A bright summer day. The sparkling water. Simon, and the sand castle, and the waves.”

Frankie seems like a rather normal young teen full of self-doubt, longing to be curvier, prettier, and wishing for a boy who will bring her what her best friend, Zette, has.

From chapter 16: “What does it feel like, Zette, seriously,” I ask, letting the last little ember singe the tips of my fingers, “to kiss a guy that way?” She looks out over the water, her face illuminated by moonlight, and holds her burnt-out sparkler in front of her. “Like this, Beans. It feels just like this. All electric and sparkly. Like your entire heart is on fire. And when it’s over, you can’t wait to do it again.” And though I promised not to be, I’m filled with envy.

The typical “angry” teen shows up when she decides to confront her parents in chapter 33—her mother for apparently blaming her for her brother’s death and her father for an apparent love affair. I liked this Francesca. She is honest and forthright and fighting to “let go” of all the past horror and pain.

The Summer Of Letting Go is Teen level Young Adult Fiction novel that touched my emotions with beautiful prose—even if I am 71!

CRASH LANDING in Savannah

"The air told me and the azaleas confirmed it: it was the end of March in Savannah."

Alberto Landi traveled to Savannah, Georgia 23 times. Me, just once but we both crash landed. My face-first "fall" really wasn't a fall at all. According to my husband I went flying without a parachute from a 24" raised sidewalk on River Street. We'd just left a restaurant when a huge cargo ship slowly maneuvered down the narrow Savannah River right in front of us. I'd never seen such a spectacle so I ran over to view the ship that towered over me by some 50 feet. When we turned back toward the shops and restaurants I looked up and pointed to the second story. "People live up there," I said. It amazed and surprised me and like I do whenever I visit a new place I imagined living there in the romance of it all. That's when I flew off the sidewalk and landed face first on the pavement below. Covered in blood, I took my first ride in an ambulance. I am happy to say that I walked away from the hospital with five or six stitches in my lip and no other injuries. 

Alberto Landi, the protagonist in Whispering Tides by Guido Mattioni, took a far more impressive fall. After the horrific death of his beloved wife of 23 years, when his world crumbled, he left his home in Milan, Italy and with all his worldly possessions in two bags, moved heart and soul to Savannah where he slowly healed. 

"Now I understood the sincere sensation that I had experienced the very first time I had arrived here and immediately felt this place hidden deeply inside something already familiar that belonged to me. It was almost as if that water and that mud, so remote from the places where I was born and had lived, were in reality elements that had always been known to me, so much so that from then on I felt as I was immersed, secure and at ease in an amniotic liquid."

Mattioni goes on to describe Savannah, its residents, the flowers, and the wildlife in such detail that the writing seems three-dimensional and in slow motion. This brilliant writer paints such beautiful pictures with his imaginative prose that I will not soon forget them.

Whispering Tides is not a story of grief and loss. It is a wondrous love story between Alberto and his wife, Nina, and his romance with every nuance of Savannah.

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