Great Middle Grade Reads discussion

Welcome to our Book of the Month discussion post! Each month we pick a great Middle Grade read to enjoy as a group.

March 2024’s Book of the Month selection is The Book of Boy by Catherine Gilbert Murdock.
Categories: historical (Medieval France) / adventure / magical realism / disability (physical difference)
Content Rating: Target age 10-12. An exploratory quest-style adventure styled with literary elegance provides a unique blend of action, spirituality, and magic against the rich historical background. Contains (view spoiler)[bullying on the basis of physical difference, historically accurate depiction of the treatment of orphans, adventurous peril, religious themes (Christianity), and widespread poverty and plague of the Middle Ages. (hide spoiler)]

Stories set around this time period include The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog and The Beatryce Prophecy!




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READ ALONG
• Grab a copy of our Book of the Month selection from your favorite bookseller, library, or reading app. It's also available via audio, narrated by Tim Gerard Reynolds.

• Share your thoughts here with the GMGR group! If you wish to discuss a specific plot point, we ask that you place that portion under a Spoiler, instructions can be found by clicking on the link (some html is ok) at the top right of the text box when you are creating a message.


Happy reading!

I'm nearly finished with the audiobook and this has been such a fun read! The snark from Secondus is perfection.

Did not really enjoy The Book of Boy, which I have found much too fantastical and strange and that frankly, if middle grade readers want to get immersed into the Middle Ages via fiction, in my opinion, older Newbery books like Adam of the Road, The Hidden Treasure of Glaston and The Door in the Wall are much more historically authentic (and also more accurate with regard to religious history and dogma). I know I seem to be the minority here, but The Book of Boy just does not do it for me, is too strangely fantastical and is thus also not really all that much accurate historical fiction.

(view spoiler)[When I finished reading Catherine Gilbert Murdock's 2018 historical fiction novel The Book of Boy I was very much surprised just how similar her storyline in many ways and in particular regarding the general set-up feels to Alan Gidwitz' The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, the Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, with both novels winning Newbery Honour designations, but also with both novels NOT really all that much appealing to me as true and bona fide historical fiction, and in particular so as historical fiction meant for middle grade readers (and indeed, this is all I am going to be saying about The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, the Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, as I have already reviewed it in detail, and that the remainder of this here review will now focus wholly and only on The Book of Boy and on Catherine Gilbert Murdock's presented text).

And first and foremost, and for one, albeit that with regard to her sense of and for time and place, Gilbert Murdock most definitely paints a textually rich, colourful and intensely authentic, read realistic feeling portrait of Medieval France and Italy with The Book of Boy and that she also does not spare her young readers from being confronted with and by disease, violence and the fact that for most individuals, for most people life in the Middle Ages was short, painfully hard and often also intensely brutal, well, considering that The Book of Boy is supposedly meant for middle grade readers (as I noticed that the suggested age group on Amazon and on other book selling sites is from about eight to twelve years of age), sorry, but for me, in particular the level of narrational violence and often rather gruesome descriptions encountered in The Book of Boy, it kind of make this story much more suitable for young adult and even for adult readers. And also, and furthermore (but again of course only in my opinion), much of Catherine Gilbert Murdock's depicted horrors and details upon details of pain and suffering, while of course realistic and authentic for the Middle Ages also kind of feel to and for me that in The Book of Boy, Gilbert Murdock seems to almost take some kind of perverse textual pleasure proverbially hitting her readers over their collective heads with an exaggeration of violent scenarios, and that from where I am standing, she very easily could still have shown in The Book of Boy that the Middle Ages were basically not some kind of glorious romp of knights on horseback with less direct depictions of often rather gratuitous violence and with more allusions and verbal nuance.

And for two, I also just do not think that the religious fantasy elements (and Roman Catholic dogma) of The Book of Boy are either all that interesting in and of themselves or even all that successfully incorporated by Catherine Gilbert Murdock into the historical realism parts of the story, leaving a tale of both fantasy and factual reality but one that at least for me is not really ever to be seen as a smooth and also as a believable whole. Because yes, while I do find the textual details about relics in The Book of Boy and how (sadly) important they seem to have been for pilgrims and for so-called religious pilgrimages intriguing (and that it is in fact a historical reality that relics were really "big business" in Mediaeval Europe, not only collecting, buying them, but also often their thefts), both Segundus and Boy as far as characters go feel both creepy and hard to believe (and in particular Boy talking to animals and the final revelation of what his hunchback actually signifies), and not to mention that the depicted and supposed key to hell, the presence of satanic entities combined with quite a bit of religious, of Mediaeval Catholic dogma, this really does narrationally rub me the wrong proverbial way and also make me personally not consider Catherine Gilbert Murdock's narrative as in fact representing historical fiction per se, but rather that The Book of Boy represents something that I would consider as a Catholicism based religious fantasy (but as such also not the type of fantasy that I actually do and would enjoy reading). (hide spoiler)]