Me in the Middle

By Ana Maria Machado and Caroline Merola

One day Isabel finds a box in her mother's closet and, inside, a photograph of a girl dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Ten-year-old Bel is enchanted to discover that the girl is her great-grandmother Beatrice, her Bisa Bea, and that she and her great-grandmother look very much alike.

Bel convinces her mother to let her borrow the treasured photo promising to look after it carefully. To her dismay, by the time she returns home from school, the picture is missing. But something unusual has happened. Suddenly it is as if Bisa Bea is alive inside her, telling Bel what life was like when she was a girl. Bel loves hearing the stories about the old days -- until Bisa Bea starts to tell her how to behave. Bel learns that her great-grandmother lived in a very different time, when girls were expected to be proper young ladies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Groundwood Books
• Release date: Aug 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781554984749

Ana Maria Machado

Hans Christian Andersen Award winner Ana Maria Machado is one of the world's most distinguished writers for children, with more than 100 books published in her native Brazil and in more than 18 other countries. She lives in Rio de Janeiro. Visit Ana Maria Machado's website: http://www.anamariamachado.com/

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Me in the Middle

Ana Maria Machado

Translated by David Unger

With Pictures by Caroline Merola

Groundwood Books

House of Anansi Press

Text copyright © 1982 by Ana Maria Machado

Translation copyright 2002 by David Unger

Illustrations copyright © 2002 by Caroline Merola

Originally published in Brazilian Portugueses in 1982 as Bisa Bia, Bisa Bel by Salamandra Consultoria Editorial, S.A., Río de Janeiro. Published in Spanish in 1988 by Editorial Noguer, España and in 1997 by Fondo de Cultura Económica, México.

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This edition published in 2013 by

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Machado, Ana Maria, 1941–

Me in the middle

Translation of: Bisa Bea, bisa Bel.

A Groundwood Book.

ISBN 0-88899-463-X (bound). ISBN 0-88899-467-2 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-55498-474-9 (ebook)

I. Merola, Caroline II. Unger, David III. Title.

PZ7.M1795Me 2002         j869’.3         C2001-902563-7

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF).

Contents

Me in the Middle

At the Bottom of a Little Box

Chubby-cheeked Jelly Donut

Invisible Tattoo

Old-fashioned Conversations

Whistling Girls

A Sneeze and a Tragedy

The Source of the Mysterious Voice

People Braids

Would you like to know a secret that no one else even suspects? Bisa Bea lives with me.

No one knows about her. No one can see her.

You can search all over the house, but you won’t find her. If you look in the cor­ner of a trunk or sniff under the rug or look behind a door, you won’t find her. If you want, you can even look through the keyhole into my bedroom.

Will you see Bisa Bea?

I don’t think so.

Do you know why? Bisa Bea lives with me, but not beside me. Bisa Bea lives very close to me. Actually, she lives inside me. I didn’t know it until a few days ago. I didn’t know until then that Bisa Bea even existed.

At the Bottom of a Little Box

The first time I saw Bisa Bea she was very well hidden. I only found her because my mother was cleaning up.

My mother is very nice. She doesn’t usually worry about neatness the way other mothers do. Sometimes she leaves things all over the house, and when she needs something, she drives us crazy, turning everything upside down.

But sometimes she goes on a real rampage. She does a general cleaning, as she likes to say. She cleans and cleans and cleans for two or three days in a row. She moves everything around, rips up paper and piles up the old clothes she never wears. She finds lots of things she thought she had lost. She tosses old mag­azines into the trash and gives me lots of paper to use in my art class at school. And she always has surprises for me — like the sparkling colored necklace she found one day and gave me for my costume box.

It was during one of my mother’s gen­eral clean-ups that I met Bisa Bea. It was like the story of the giant that my aunt loves to tell. Have you heard it? It goes something like this.

There was a rock in the ocean, and inside the rock there was an egg, and inside the egg there was a candle and whoever blew out the candle would kill the giant.

Of course, there

Reviews for Me in the Middle

[electrascaife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A girl finds a photo of her great-grandmother as a child and makes an invisible friend out of it.This one was strange, and not in a good way, really. It unintentionally read like a sad story about a girl with some form of schizophrenia, and the writing was clunky at best.

[rhigginbotham-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bel finds a photograph of her great-grandmother and begins to hear her voice. They have fun conversations until her great-grandmother decides to start telling Bel how to behave. Not a story I would read or assign.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very intriguing plot: Isabel finds a box. Inside is a photo of what she learns is her great-grandmother. The photo disappears, but Isabel soon discovers that her great-grandmother is living inside her, whispering to her, sharing experiences with her. And then she discovers that another person is also there, her great-granddaughter, whispering to her, sharing experiences with her. A very intriguing plot. A 1001 CBYMRBYGU.