In Missing May, Cynthia Rylant introduces readers to a young girl named Summer who has bounced around foster homes since her mother died shortly after her birth. The revolving door of homes stops when she's six, as she goes to live with her elderly Aunt May and Uncle Ob in a trailer in the mountains of West Virginia. The couple provides Summer with a stable and loving home, something she had never experienced before.
The narrative then jumps to when Summer is twelve, and her beloved Aunt May has just died. Summer and Uncle Ob are left to deal with their grief and the absence of May. Ob, in particular, is hard hit by his wife's death and becomes almost obsessed with finding signs of her in the afterlife. The characters' mourning processes reveal much about their personalities: Summer, pragmatic yet sensitive, tries to come to terms with the death, while Ob, dreamy and emotional, seeks a spiritual connection with his departed wife.
One day, a peculiar boy named Cletus enters their lives. He is a classmate of Summer and shares a deep fascination with peculiarities and oddities. Cletus brings a whirligig, a wind toy he believes is a conduit to the spiritual world. Intrigued and hopeful, Ob embarks on a journey with Cletus and Summer to visit a spiritual medium to contact May. However, the trip did not go as planned. Instead of finding a mystical connection with May, they find a charlatan medium. Disappointed but undeterred, they return home.
Once back home, Cletus points out a whirligig beetle—an oddity he'd been hoping to see—in their yard. Ob finds a moment of spiritual connection he had been seeking, not with a specter of May, but in the continuity of life around him. He realizes that while May is gone, life continues, and there are still beautiful and strange things to see and people to love. The novel concludes with a sense of hope, symbolized by Ob's decision to plant a garden, a sign of looking forward to the future.
