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Fish Face

The Kids of the Polk Street School

FishFace#2 Fish Face by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1984.

When there’s a new girl in Ms. Rooney’s class, Emily Arrow is happy at first that she’ll be sitting next to her and thinks maybe they’ll be friends.  However, that feeling doesn’t last very long.  Dawn Bosco doesn’t seem interested in making friends.  She doesn’t respond to the compliments that Emily gives her.  Instead, she brags about herself, saying things that Emily learns later aren’t true.  Worst still, she steals Emily’s toy unicorn, Uni.

Uni is Emily’s best friend, and she’s convinced that he brings her good luck.  Without him, everything seems to go wrong.  Emily even has trouble sleeping because she always sleeps with Uni.  When she tries to get Dawn to give Uni back, she denies taking him, but Emily knows that Dawn is hiding him in her pencil box.  She saw him there, but she just can’t get to him.  Will Emily ever get Uni back?

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and  Spoilers

FishFacePic1The title of the story comes from the fish faces that Emily was making, imitating the classroom pet fish.  She shows Dawn her fish face when she’s trying to joke with her, but Dawn just thinks it’s weird.  Dawn worries that she’s not making friends, but at the same time, she also seems determined not to like things and people at her new school and stealing Emily’s unicorn and lying about it was a sure way to make her angry.

I didn’t like this book as well as others in the series.  The kids in the series don’t always explain their actions or completely understand them, which is somewhat true to life.  Young children don’t always understand their true feelings or motives because they don’t have the words or the experience to explain what they feel.  However, this book felt more unexplained than normal.

Dawn steals Emily’s toy unicorn just moments after they first meet, while sitting in the desk next to her in their classroom.  Emily doesn’t get help getting her unicorn back right away, and by the time she does, it’s too little help, and Dawn gets away with keeping the unicorn.  We’re supposed to believe that Dawn did it just because she felt awkward in a new place with no friends, but that’s shaky because even a second-grader would know that stealing something isn’t going to win friends.  The kids later find a letter Dawn was writing to a friend at her old school, saying that she’d done something bad but that Emily was mean and that she was upset about not having friends.  So, she understands that she did something wrong, but still thinks Emily is mean for trying to recover her stolen property?  Children can say and do some odd, sometimes contradictory, things, but Dawn’s feelings seem to be all over the place and her character difficult to pin down.

It’s difficult to tell what, if any, lesson to take away from this story.  That if someone steals your stuff, it’s because they’re lonely and you just don’t understand them?  Things partly get resolved because Emily is interrupted in searching for her unicorn and ends up taking Dawn’s reader out of her desk.  Returning the reader seems to be what causes Dawn to have a change of heart, maybe because missing it made her understand Emily’s feelings about the loss of her unicorn, but we never really find out.

Fortunately, Dawn does become a more distinct character in other books, and later, because she wants to be a detective, she gets her own series of mysteries.  One of the mysteries in her spin-off series references this story because something else disappears in class, and Dawn is suspected because people know that she stole something before.  In that book, Dawn has to figure out the mystery in order to clear herself of suspicion.

One thing I did like about this book was that, although losing Uni was very hard for Emily at first, she does come to realize that she can do without him, that he is not her sole source of good luck, and that she can sleep without him at night.  She is pleased when Dawn agrees to give him back, but she does recognize that learning that she can be okay on her own is a sign of growing up.

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The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room

The Kids of the Polk Street School

BeastMsRooney#1 The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1984.

It’s the start of a new school year, and Richard Best (nicknamed “Beast”) is embarrassed to find himself in Ms. Rooney’s room once again because he was held back a year for his poor reading skills.  Everyone he knows has moved on to the third grade, and he’s still in a second grade class with kids who were first grade babies last year.  He feels awkward, being the tallest, oldest person in class, and kids in his old class tease him and refuse to let him play baseball on the playground with them because he’s a pathetic “left-back.”

At first, Beast tries to pretend that it was all a horrible mistake that will be straightened out soon, but that just makes him feel bad for lying.  The kids who are now in the same class he is, who he still thinks of as “babies,” try to make friends with him, but he doesn’t accept them at first because of his embarrassment at being older and still not as good at reading as some of them are.

BeastMsRooneyPic1However, even though he’s embarrassed at having to attend special reading classes with Mrs. Paris while most of the rest of his class has normal reading, these special classes really help him, not just to improve his reading skills, but to connect with other kids in his new class who have the same reading difficulties he does and who understand how he feels.

Beast discovers that it’s no shame to not know something or to have trouble doing something because everyone has different skills and it can take some people longer to learn certain things than others.  Emily Arrow, the girl who now sits next to him in class is a whiz at math but has as much trouble reading as he does.  Beast learns some new skills from his new, younger classmates and realizes that they’re not really babies.  They also really appreciate him and help him see some of the good things about himself.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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Journeyman Wizard

JourneymanWizardJourneyman Wizard by Mary Frances Zambreno, 1994.

This book is the sequel to A Plague of Sorcerers.

Jermyn Graves has finished his apprenticeship and is ready to move onto his Journeyman studies.  As a Spellmaker, an especially rare type of wizard, he really needs to study with a Master Spellmaker, and for years, there has only been one in the Wizard’s Guild: Lady Jean Allons.  Jermyn’s current teacher, Theoretician William Eschar, once studied under her himself.

Mistress Allons is a formidable old woman, and Jermyn is nervous about going to live with her and completing the next part of his training. Master Eschar says that she is strict but an excellent teacher, and he has fond memories of her from his own youth.  However, much has changed for Mistress Allons since those days.

Mistress Allons lives in her manor house in the small town of Land’s End with her widower son-in-law, Duncan, and her granddaughter, Brianne, who is only a little younger than Jermyn himself. Since the death of her only daughter, Annalise, in a mysterious accident during a magical experiment, Mistress Allons has not really practiced magic and no longer even keeps a familiar.  As Jermyn soon learns, everyone in Land’s End is still haunted by Annalise’s death.

Although Brianne has magical talent, both her father and grandmother refuse to let her study magic.  In defiance and because her talent will not allow her to leave magic alone, Brianne has taken to studying magic with a local Hedgewitch, Maudie.  Hedgewitches, or Wise Women as they call themselves, practice a very natural form of magic, but it can also be very dangerous because of its raw, undisciplined nature.  Although magical accidents are usually rare, that type of magic is more prone to them than the more formal kind that Jermyn is studying.  Jermyn tries to convince Brianne of the danger, but Brianne sees it as her only hope for learning anything, in view of her father and grandmother’s opposition.

Jermyn is not there for very long before Mistress Allons herself dies, the victim of another strange magical accident. Was it really just a terrible accident, or was it actually murder?  Jermyn struggles to find the answers while some people believe that he may have been responsible for Mistress Allons’s death himself.

I enjoyed the fascinating combination of mystery and fantasy in this short series.  While Jermyn’s magical studies are fictional, the book has some interesting insights into cross-disciplinary studies as Jermyn comes to understand something that Mistress Allons was trying to explain to him about using lessons from art and science to solve magical problems because different fields of knowledge are connected and the principles of one discipline have some bearing on the other.

There is also something interesting that Jermyn says to the evil wizard who is responsible for everything about how he can’t really do all the things that he thinks he can do (specifically flying) because the kind of drugs that evil wizards use to boost their powers also cause hallucinations.  When I was in college, I did a report about witchcraft trials, and some of the plants used by supposed “witches” in their potions also had hallucinogenic properties, which is probably the origin of the belief in flying witches.  Just an interesting little cross-over from real history.