The Muffin Child [Hardcover]

Steve Menick (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 10 and up

When her parents die in an accident in 1913, eleven-year-old Tanya decides to live alone, refusing charity from the people in her village, and supporting herself by selling muffins.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This sad and eerie first novel has a dream-like quality that will quietly sweep readers to another place and era. Set in the Balkan countryside in the year 1913, the tale begins on the night of a terrible storm, when 11-year-old Tanya's parents are washed away by a flooded river. Eyeing her parents' lucrative farm, villagers are quick to step in, and Pavel and his wife, Anna, even offer to adopt Tanya. Tanya, refusing to believe that her mother and father are really dead, prefers to stay on the farm with her cow, Milenka. Anticipating her parents' homecoming, Tanya makes a batch of muffins every day. Soon she becomes known as "the muffin child," a girl "not like other children, but solitary, gifted, and dangerous." Neither the coziness of her mother's kitchen nor the memory of her father's sage advice can protect Tanya from outside forces. Pavel tries to claim her land, women invade her kitchen and Gypsies set up camp in her meadow. Menick shows uncanny insight and unusual literary skill. Besides evoking Tanya's fear, denial, suspicions and loneliness, he reveals the complexity of each of his minor characters. Hearts will go out to Tanya as she desperately clings to hope and struggles to protect what is rightfully hers. Ages 10-14.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Grade 5-9-It is 1913 and 11-year-old Tanya, who lives in an unspecified country in the Balkans, finds herself an orphan after her parents drown. She spurns the help of the other villagers, and with only her cow as company, attempts to survive alone. The village women resent her independence and skill at baking and shun her, although the men continue to buy her muffins, earning her the name of Muffin Child. When Gypsies camp in her family's fields and begin to torment her, Tanya finds herself even more isolated and unsure of whom to trust. The book's most exciting scene involves a missing boy who is developmentally disabled. It is eventually revealed that he has been kidnapped by Anton, an itinerant knife sharpener who blames the boy's disappearance on the Gypsies, knowing that the villagers will then rid the town of their presence. That, in fact, happens, but not before Tanya is blamed and she tries to deflect attention from herself by pointing a finger at the Gypsies. The convoluted nature of this incident is indicative of many aspects of The Muffin Child. Many of the characters' motivations, including the protagonist's, are often murky. Also, the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the Gypsies is a puzzling authorial choice. Finally, readers are distanced from the action by the book's introductory and concluding segments: a mother tells her daughter Tanya about her great-grandmother Tanya, who in the end is rescued from the villagers and from a fever by the Gypsies. Within a year of the above-described events, she has immigrated to New York. The story is strangely anticlimactic, and only persistent readers who are engaged by the book's mysterious, haunting quality will see it through to its finish.
Ellen Fader, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 10 and up
  
• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Philomel (September 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399233032
• ISBN-13: 978-0399233036
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,118,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars An Engaging Read, July 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Muffin Child (Hardcover)

THE MUFFIN CHILD is a beautifully written book about loss andlove. Tanya, the protagonist, will steal your heart quietly andcompletely. It is the kind of story that catches up on you as you find yourself turning page after page. And when you get to the end, you'll find yourself reaching for a tissue...and wishing for more. THE MUFFIN CHILD would make a wonderful gift.

5.0 out of 5 stars For the writing and insights, it deserves the Newbery Award., April 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Muffin Child (Hardcover)

The Muffin Child is a novel of unusual beauty and power. On nearly every page, I found a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph that I read aloud to myself -- "It was one of those days that promises no sun, and then just before sundown the sun finds a crack in the clouds and glances over the countryside. The orange light caught the insects floating over the grass." Yes, exactly!

The story of loss denied was real to me. Tanya denies loss, plans for the return of her parents: "She was basking in the heat when the thought came to her to warm up the oven and make muffins for her parents. They would be hungry when they came. They would welcome a plate of hot muffins waiting for them. They would all have muffins and tea -- Tanya, her parents, and the man driving the cart."

But then there is the painful scene in the village when the cruel words and violence of the villagers brings the truth to her mind:

"They were dead. They had drowned. She'd heard the villagers say it. No one had ever come out and said it before. Now it was true.

"She knew it was true because, in a way, she'd known it amost from the beginning, as a kind of cold frightening thought in the back of her mind. In the back of her mind was a place like the well on the farm, when you leaned over its stone rim and looked down and couldn't see anything, but you felt the chill breathing up at you. Tanya had felt the chill ever since the night the river roared over the bridge."

"Now it was true." The cruel words of the villagers made it true.

Milenka, the cow, worried me at first. A cow that provides affection like a pet could easily have been very sentimental. But it didn't turn out that way. Menick carefully kept avoided that trap:

"Then she thought of Milenka. She should milk Milenka. Tanya went out and crossed the barnyard. The dawn was turning purple, with the silver of the moon like a golden weather vane on the top of the barn.

"It was warm inside the barn and it had that smell Tanya loved, the smell of cow and hay. The chickens rusted in their coop, and the geese in their pens lifted their heads and looked. Tanya heard something up in the hayloft -- the barn owl, home after a night's work.

"'Good morning, Milenka,' Tanya said, and as Milenka turned her head, Tanya felt the cow's wet breath on her arms. She reached down and pulled, and Malenka's milk squirted into the pail and smelled sweet."

A warm relationship, but, still, Milenka is a cow to be milked. And the milk makes possible those muffins.

Historical novels are not my favorite kind of reading. Some strike me as mostly "historical" and, therefore, removed from the immediacy of the lives of living human beings. Others seem to me to be modern sensationalism set uncomfortably in another time. Not The Muffin Child. The author brilliantly creates a world that is clearly very old and very distant; but he also creates a young girl who is so alive that she lives both now and then and other characters, selfish, even evil who also live in their own time but in my immediate world as well.

I understand that the final chapters of the book, where the Gypsies become major players, have caused some negative reactions. I guess I can understand that only if one forgets what the villagers do to the Gypsies, who (Anton, the knife sharpener and supposed friend of Tanya) turns out to have done the evil to the disabled child, Nikola, and why Tanya ends up with them. And, of course, the frame of the story -- a mother today telling a story to her rather disagreeable daughter, also named Tanya -- tells us at the end who the Tanya of the story was and brings the two Tanyas together:

"In the middle of the night the cow got out from under the covers. Tanya brought her back in. Milenka smelled like stale chocolate, or like a dog just in from the rain.

"Later, Milenka smelled like herself, like Milenka. The sun rose in the dark and burned the insects floating over the meadow. Tanya looked for the Muffin Child but didn't see her. The grass rustled at her feet, and she could feel Milenka's hide under the palm of her hand."

For the writing alone, The Muffin Child deserves a full five stars (six or more if that were possible). For the insights into loss and love, evil, cruelty, and forgiveness, I'd give it the Newbery Award if it were mine to give

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving and Haunting, a lyrical journey into pain and hope., January 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Muffin Child (Hardcover)

A deceptively simple tale, "The Muffin Child" is a powerful story of loss, with its current of inner strength woven seamlessly through Stephen Menick's vivid and poetic writing style. Anyone who loves the magic of language and complexity of character, will love this book!