A Reflection on Make It or Break It: What It Did Right.After: The Summary Made Me Hesistant, But The Ending Was Glorious.A Reflection on Make It or Break It: What It Got Wrong.Recommended Age Range: 10+ Warnings: Some vulgar description and language at one point Catherine develops a crush on her uncle. I like that Cushman went full steam ahead with her Middle Ages setting (which she also did with The Midwife’s Apprentice, to a slightly less uncomfortable extent), but this may have been too much. Honestly, I would label this book as middle grade, rather than children’s, simply because of the topics covered.

The whole thing is, in fact, a wild combination of interesting details, awkward and uncomfortable scenes, and all the vulgarity and crudeness that people attribute to this period. And, of course, the plot revolves around Catherine resisting being married off to any strange (and usually much older) man that wants to marry the daughter of a knight (while learning a lot about love and family along the way), which Cushman describes with more bluntness than I would have expected. At others, there are copious amounts of beatings, vulgarity, and crude descriptions. Catherine, at one point, has a crush on her uncle. Despite the fact that much of what happens in this book is delivered for humor, or at least lessened in seriousness, I found for the majority of this book feeling extremely uncomfortable at just how much Cushman was revealing in a book for children. There is, at times, perhaps just too much “this time period was crazy” in Catherine’s voice, yet the novel definitely gives the reader a comprehensive look at the time, including the numerous feast days (Catherine starts each diary entry by listing the saint’s day and why he or she became a saint). Catherine walks a delicate line between being the voice of disgust for the modern reader to recognize all the ways things were unsanitary, inhumane, or just plain weird, and being a character who views all of this as ordinary life. From the outset, Cushman makes it clear that this time period was unpleasant.

Rating: 3/5 Catherine, Called Birdy is the story of the titular character’s 14 th year of living during the Middle Ages, where she deals with illness, marriage offers, feast days, and siblings, and every lovely thing you might expect from the year 1290. Catherine, Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman, was published in 1994 by HarperCollins.

Book catherine called birdy