Title: Our Only May Amelia

Author: Holm, Jennifer L.

Book Preview:

May Amelia Jakson thinks being a lady is just too boring.  So instead of sewing or doing what is expected of a proper young lady, she is learning to shoot guns, fish, hunt, and other tomboy things.  May's ma is always on her case to act the way girls should, but she never listens.  May just goes behind her mother's back and does everything she is not supposed to do.  Will May be able to live her life the way she wants to, or will she be forced to be a proper young lady, never being able to get a decent job, vote, or even stand up for her rights?

Rating:

I thought the book was a real "page turner". At the end of every chapter there was a cliffhanger, so it made you want to read on. In one of the chapters it ended with May being chased by a cougar. I read on to see if she would be all right, even though I knew she would be.

This book also had a very good ending. I thought that May would be sad at the end because she was going through so many hard things, but she really was not. She knew her family loved her, and that it is not that bad being the only girl on the Nasel River.

I thought the beginning was very interesting also. It started with May’s birthday party. In the first chapter you got to meet all her family members including her brothers, her Aunt Alice, her Uncle Henry and Aunt Feenie, and her Mamma and Pappa. She also makes her "birthday wish" in the first chapter, which is her wish for a baby sister.

I got very interested in the characters in this book. They each had their own personality. Lonny, May’s next door neighbor, wasn’t very smart but May, Wilbert, and he were very good friends. Since May didn’t have any friends, she and Wilbert, her brother, were best friends. May told Wilbert everything, and he seemed to always know what she was thinking. It didn’t really describe him very well, but I thought that he was a main character in the book.

I liked how May was telling the story, not the author. You always knew what she was thinking. It is sort-of like her diary that she is writing as everything happens. Since May was living in 1899,everything was different from what it is now. An example is the chores they had to do everyday. Because the Jackson’s lived on a farm, they have to get up everyday and milk the cows to have butter, milk, and cream. Also, in the fall they had to bring the hay into the barn so the animals had something to eat. [Claire]

I gave this book four stars because the adventures, events, and tragedies were very interesting. Most chapters were cliffhangers, which made me want to read more. I also liked how this book centered around the life of a girl around the turn of the century. Since this whole story comes from May Amelia Jakson’s diary, the author wrote about her life on the farm and what May did in her spare time without a T.V.

I really liked this book’s great description. The events, the scenery, and the characters, were the three main things that were described very well. I also liked the way the author described things not just in her point of view, but in the other main character’s points of view also. The author wrote how May felt about certain situations and described her feelings very nicely.

I really liked how most of the characters were very interesting. Each character had something special about them, which made them all different. I liked how all of May’s family was related, but they each had such a different personality that it seemed like they could have come from different families. An example would be how May’s brother, Wilbert, had a sweet, kind, and caring personality, while her twin brothers had wild, mischievous, and sly personalities.

I liked this book’s real life lesson because it came from something that truly happened. This lesson really teaches you that if you don’t stay alert, bad things can happen. In the story one of the characters was in a life-threatening situation, and they could have died just because they didn’t stay alert. I also liked this book’s real life lesson because it made me think that the person in danger could be me.

I think one way to make the book better would be to improve the introduction. It didn’t really grab my attention at all because the first 20-30 pages are just about May’s family, May, and where they live. I think the author included all of that information because she could have thought it would help kids understand more about May and her family, which it did. Still I thought the introduction was boring.

Another way to improve this book would be to have more interesting events. I think if there were more exciting things included in the story, the book would be a lot better. For example, some chapters were mainly about May’s family, May, and the farm. I think the author didn’t make every chapter exciting because she could have wanted to include everything that was in May’s diary about her life. [Brittany]