“Olema began to be friendly. She pointed out the school children by name—Mary Jim Dorsey, Lank Tatum, Rofelia March, Latrelle Tatum, Coy and Loy—the Marsh twins, the Hardens—Shad, Billie Sue and Roxie May—Kossie and Kessie Cook and others.”
Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski won the Newbery Award in 1946. Like many children’s stories of its time, this one took place on a farm. Birdie Boyer and her family are settling on a farm in Florida, but run into problems with their neighbors, the Slaters.
Mr. Slater is a lazy drunk who cuts down their fences and tries to undo their hard work at every turn. Mrs. Slater and the Slater children wave between trying to be friendly with the Boyers and being jealous of them for being “biggety.”
The story is supposed to center around the hard working Boyer family, but I couldn’t help but focus on the tragedy of the Slaters—-their extreme poverty, the vicious cycle of abuse. There is even a scene where the “good” Mr. Boyer beats one of the Slater boys. The main character Birdie Boyer doesn’t like that her father has beaten her sometimes friend and sometimes enemy, but only because it will just cause more problems with the Slaters-—not because it is a terrible thing to do.
Reading the Newbery Award winning books has been an interesting view of what was considered the best children’s literature of its time. Young readers today would never read this book. The dialogue is written in the local dialect, which makes it difficult to follow at times. I was also left with a funny feeling about the supposed wholesomeness of this story. And readers today, including me, just can’t buy the sugary sweet ending where the antagonist has a very abrupt and supposedly permanent change of heart. We’re much more apt to believe endings like the one in Pixar's Up-—people don’t always change, deadbeat dads often stay deadbeat dads. But in the world of Strawberry Girl, all it takes is religion to make the most hideous of characters suddenly saintly.
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