May Bird and the Ever After

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May Bird and the Ever After
Author Jodi Lynn Anderson
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Children's literature
Publisher Atheneum
Publication date 2005
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 336 (Original hardcover)
ISBN ISBN 0-689-86923-1
Followed by May Bird Among the Stars (Book Two)

May Bird and the Ever After is an IRA/CBC Children's Choice award book by New York Times best selling author Jodi Lynn Anderson. It is illustrated by Leonid Gore. It is also on the Sunshine State Young Reader's Award Master List (Florida).

[edit] Plot

May Bird lives alone with her mother and her cat, Somber Kitty (a hairless Rex) on the edge of a wooded swamp in West Virginia. She loves to draw and make believe, and desperately wants to fit in at school but can not seem to figure out how. Most people aren't very comfortable in the woods, but the woods of Briery Swamp fit May Bird like a fuzzy mitten. There, she is safe from school and the taunts and teases of kids who don't understand her. Hidden in the trees, May is a warrior princess, and her cat is her brave guardian. Then May falls into the lake. When she crawls out, May finds herself in a world that is inhabited by things she thought were just in her imagination. She sees many, many ghosts and other amazing creatures. A ghost named Pumpkin, (with a pumpkin head) has pulled her into the Ever After. It is a place few living people have ever seen. Here, towns glow blue beneath zipping stars and the people walk through walls. Here the Book of the Dead holds the answers to everything in the universe. And here, if May is discovered, the horrifyingly evil Bo Cleevil will turn her into nothing. May Bird must get out. Thus is the beginning of May Bird's daring journey into the Ever After, a haunting place where true friends -- and one terrible foe -- await her on every corner. She meets Pumpkin her house ghost/guardian who lives with the Beekeeper Arista in a giant beehive. She is told that she needs to go see the Lady of North Farm, a place no ghost is willing to go. She faces the Bogey man, a henchman of Bo Cleevil's whose fingers will suck you into nothingness, and his dogs.