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Though my behavior occasionally indicates otherwise, it has been decades since I was a "tween" - the 9-12 age group designated for readers of the two books featured in today's column. But what a rollicking good time I would have missed if the artificial barriers of age had limited my book choices. As these books vividly demonstrate, enchantment is timeless! (And full of surprises for the reluctant readers in your life.)

"Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village"written by Laura Amy Schlitz and beguilingly illustrated by Robert Byrd, richly deserves its recently bestowed Newbery Award. Sly and clever "miniature plays" steeped in medieval merriment and mayhem, it is a collection of 21 short monologues/dialogues delivered by the 10- to 15-year- old denizens of a 13th century English village.

Librarian Schlitz wrote the plays for her students at the Park School in Baltimore who were studying the Middle Ages.

She wanted them to experience history in all its drama, as a gritty struggle for survival rather than a dull chronology of dates and "dead men."

gives new meaning to "The Village People"; there are no stock characters here, but unique and captivating medieval girls and boys whose quotidian thoughts, toils and troubles make us gag, giggle or groan. In just a few pages of prose or poetry, Schlitz masterfully enfleshes a lord's daughter or a tanner's apprentice, a plowboy or a runaway. Their stories, remarkably, move us and make us care. I hold my breath waiting to see what will happen when Mogg, "The Villein's Daughter," concocts a risky ruse to save Paradise, her cow, from being taken by the Lord of the Manor. I am touched as Alice, the young shepherdess, uses her small hands to midwife a dead lamb, and then sings through the night in a desperate effort to console Gilly, the lamb's ailing mother and Alice's favorite sheep.

As "Taggot, the Blacksmith's Daughter" begins her soliloquy, I try to imagine the young person who would choose to play this role - a girl "big and ugly and shy in the bargain" who on an unpromising May Day "stayed behind spinning in the sunshine." A "miracle" at the story's end supplies the surprising answer.

Otho, the Miller's son, illustrates why millers were not highly regarded, as he confesses that his father "grinds the flour and replaces it with chalk," stealing the flour for his own use. Echoed in the cadence and rhythm of the mill wheel is the repeated refrain:

"Oh, God makes the water, and the water makes the river, And the river turns the mill wheel, and the wheel runs on forever."

Schlitz's engaging sidebars and additional "background" information on everything from crusades and pilgrimages to falconry and farming, answers questions that arise naturally from the monologues and are welcome additions to the text.

The particular pleasures of Giles the Beggar's story provide a fitting ending to this treasury of tales that would gladden the heart of Chaucer himself. But, oh, Good Masters and Sweet Ladies, you won't want to miss Lowdy, the varlet's child; Simon, the knight's son; or Nelly, the sniggler who catches eels "as fat as priests," or..

For something a world and time apart, try the 2008 Caldecott Award winner by Brian Selznik.

In his introduction, the author asks us to imagine ourselves sitting in the darkness of a movie theater, see ourselves "zooming toward a train station," rushing through its doors, and following "a boy amid the crowd." In cross-hatched black and white drawings, the next 21 pages rush us through a series of close-ups, pans and fades, signaling that this book will be told with cinematic as well as literary techniques.

Seamlessly melding words and pictures, Selznik creates a cinematic dreamscape populated with a captivating cast of characters. There is 12-year-old Hugo Cabret himself, who "discovered a mysterious drawing that changed his life forever." An intrepid Dickensian orphan, Hugo hides out in a secret compartment behind the clock walls of a 1930s Paris train station.

There is a reclusive and mysterious toyseller, and his "very strange" goddaughter, Isabelle, who befriends Hugo. There is Etienne, a helpful film student; an automaton with a dramatic secret; and a predatory Javert-like station inspector from whose snatches Hugo must again and again escape. The game is afoot! Over 500 pages long, one-third of which are pencil drawings, the story unfurls rapidly in celluloid-like frames and written words. At times I was reminded of the flip books that preceded film. And, in the end, cinematic magic is truly what this story is all about. The novel pays homage to pioneer filmmaker Georges Melies, who believed that film "had the power to capture dreams." In this unique and suspenseful adventure, shows us the power of words and pictures to do the same.

KATHY HICKMAN can be contacted at news@thesunchronicle.com.