Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz

Schlitz, L. A., & Byrd, R. (2011). Good masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a medieval village. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.

This book was written by Laura Amy Schlitz for children in her school to perform in a school play. The book contains seventeen individual poems, dialogues, and monologues that are performed by children representing different children characters that might be found in a medieval village. There are several passages of background information for readers to better understand what it was like to live in medieval times in an English village. Each character tells his or her story of what their life was like at that time. Specific life experiences are told by each character in the different literary forms. All the characters range from about ten to fifteen years of age. The author explains in the forward of the book that her 5^th grade students were studying the Middle Ages. The students wanted to do a play, so the author wrote poems, monologues, and dialogues for them to perform. The characters verbalized what struggles and hardships they faced in their daily lives growing up in a medieval village. The stories the characters told were very emotional and passionate. The setting of the stories was in England in a rural manor in 1255. The author includes some of the historical background information and vocabulary used in the book at various points. This information helps the reader to have a deeper understanding of what the characters are explaining in their personal narratives. The illustrations in the book were excellent and added more emotion to the book. This book would be good to use in conjunction with the study of historical medieval times.