This is a light-hearted YA novel about a serving girl in medieval times.She is in service to a religious woman who decides to go on a pilgrimage.The book chronicles their adventures on the road, including the girl’s first love.A fun and fast book to read that also brings a smile to your face.The Book of the Maidservant is a wonderful example of making academic research accessible to any readers interested in medieval life. Don't be put off by the "Young Adult" tag; this novel would be a perfect addition to undergraduate courses in medieval literature, and makes a perfect companion to the original work of Dame Margery. Funny and warm, this is an appealing rendition of the "voiceless" whose lives were too often short, sharp and brutish. Johanna is a wonderful creation.Love this book..just got it today and I couldn't put it down...It was a good book it just gets slow at certain times and you often end up not knowing what you as reading.I'm a college professor who teaches medieval literature and women's studies. I've taught The Book of Margery Kempe more times than I can count. And I'm a big fan of the well-written young adult novel--not to mention such a novel set in the historic middle ages, so kudos for Rebecca Barnhouse for embarking on this. However, I can tell you that teaching The Book of Margery Kempe to college students, even graduate students, is a challenge. There is so much Margery-bashing around, and Margery herself is so embarrassingly "different" and just this side of self-deluded in some of her holy fantasies that we want so badly to sneer at her. Do we hear only one side of her story? Yes. Is it okay to tell another? Sure! And I can vividly imagine how irritating this woman with her afflictions, visions, tics, and fantasies must have been to an ordinary group of people--especially all that ostentatious crying. It is hard to forgive Margery but we need to give her a chance, and it doesn't help if Middle School students come to this extraordinary document with a prejudice against her that they'll carry into college. Margery Kempe flew in the face of custom and doctrine in adopting "lay piety" (i.e., religious devotion by the laity, not the learned), already looked down upon, in a very vocal and visible way. Her marriage (no divorce then) prevented her from becoming a professional religious and being able to converse on a daily basis with the people whose interests she wanted to share, but hadn't the education or resources for, and God forbid that a woman should try what she courageously set out to do: challenge the priests and bishops who maligned her, preach and travel, and set off on a grueling pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The document is extraordinary and the novel, albeit written for children, was not only a bit monotonous (we go from this inconvenience and grudge to that), the character of Johanna comes across as surly and resentful. The Margery portrayed in the actual book never once mentions being unkind to her maid servant. "You wicked child!" It's the other way around, according to Margery, where the maid servant takes the side of the other pilgrims in maligning and rejecting her (maybe with good reason--long pilgrimages were no picnic). In reading the Book of MK, I came away thinking that Margery was indeed driven and hysterical, but more anxious and compulsive than out-rightly cruel. Was she self-centered? You bet, and we do wonder about her privilege and all those children she doesn't mention; but I just didn't see the Margery I knew in this novel: disdainful, insulting, haughty, cruel, her hand raised against a young girl. Where's that wry sense of humor she expresses in her autobiography? Where is her merriment at the mere contemplation of heaven and its joys? If there had been any kind of growing emotional or spiritual engagement between these two women, that would have made an extraordinary children's novel, as well as one with a deepening conflict resolution between ordinary and extraordinary, even bizarre, religious devotion, but Margery remains essentially an external and static straw man for Johanna's (actually minor) tribulations. To be sure, Johanna's tearful confession of her anger against not only Margery and her sister is touching and redemptive, and shows some grown-up self-examination. I merely wish that students might come away with some better understanding of medieval lay piety and how hard it was for women then. I guess that's our task if they ever choose to take one of our courses on Marjory Kempe later on. ;) I might even teach this book along with the BMK because it so well represents a very common response to the real book.This is a hard book for me to review, as I nearly bailed on it about halfway through. It was short enough that I decided I might as well finish. Ultimately, I'm glad I did. If the entire book had been as good as the last third, I might have rated it five stars. At the halfway mark, I was thinking one or two stars.The story gives a name, Johanna, and a voice to the maidservant who accompanied Dame Margery Kempe on her pilgrimage to Rome. Margery was a real-life medieval holy woman, whose autobiography was the first written in English. Author Rebecca Barnhouse's writing was often lovely and conveyed a sly humor - capturing what many of us might feel if, like Johanna, we had to listen for days on end to Margery's wailing over the sufferings of Jesus, followed by her boasting about her own piety.But the book just dragged, too often turning into an unrelenting chronicle of bad weather, bad food, arguments between pilgrims and ceaseless misery for Johanna, who was forced to cook, clean and wait upon the entire company. The party of travelers all came off as cardboard cutouts, including Margery herself. No one changed or grew in response to the adversity of the journey. Occasionally, the story would pick up with a visit to a grand medieval cathedral or market, or scenes of everyday life in a town or at a pilgrim's hostel. But it was soon right back to squabbles and trudging through the rain.To my surprise, the final third of the story felt like an entirely different book. Johanna made her own way to Rome, and the tale transformed as she discovered her own resourcefulness and found a new family and a place to belong. The cowering girl unable to do anything but follow orders, hide in corners or dodge blows came into her own at last, making peace with her past and freeing herself from an unhappy life. The last part of the book featured the most appealing, best-drawn characters, and the ending was quite satisfying.The final chapters, though, just weren't enough to make up for the weaknesses of the book as a whole. I can't imagine the novel's intended audience of middle schoolers making it past the drudgery to get that far.Dame Margery, a woman with strong religious convictions and feelings, decides to go on a pilgrimage to Rome. As her other servants are unsuited to the trip, she takes young Johanna, who has little choice in the matter. This book is told from Johanna’s perspective, but the story is based on the 15th century book by Margery Kempe, the first autobiography in English. Johanna has much toil and trouble to deal with and ends up doing the domestic chores for the group of pilgrims that her mistress travels with, some of whom treat her decently, but most of whom treat her as little more than a slave. Her mistress is volatile and emotional, causing great frustrations for both Johanna and the other pilgrims. After being abandoned, Johanna must find her own way to Rome, in hopes of reuniting with her mistress and finding a way home to England.