Posted on by TracyC

The Ghost of Dibble Hollow

The Ghost of Dibble Hollow by May Nickerson Wallace, 1965.

Elisha Nathanael Dibble Allen, called Pug, is excited to be spending the summer at the old family house called Dibble Hollow that his mother inherited! The summer starts out awkwardly when he gets on the wrong side of old Mr. Smith because his dog, Ricky, chases Mr. Smith’s chickens. When people find out that his family are Dibbles and that they’ll be staying in Dibble Hollow, Pug and his sister Helen learn that the locals in the area are afraid of Dibble Hollow. There are rumors that the house is haunted.

Pug thinks that the house is charming. It was built in 1730, and Pug immediately claims a room for himself with a picture of a boy in old-fashioned clothes who looks a lot like him. It does seem odd, though, that Ricky is afraid to enter that room, no matter how much Pug tries to persuade him.

Then, it seems like the family won’t be able to stay at the house after all because the well is dry, and they can’t get water. Pug is upset about having to leave the house and abandon their summer plans, but things change during the night, when Pug meets the ghost who haunts his room. The ghost is Miles Dibble, the older brother of Nathanael, Pug’s grandfather. Miles died young and still haunts the room that he once shared with Nathanael.

The ghostly Miles explains to Pug that he’s been responsible for the rumors that Dibble Hollow is haunted. He does things to scare strangers away from the house. However, he really wants his relatives to stay at Dibble Hollow, so he explains to Pug that there is actually a second well at Dibble Hollow, and it is connected to the house with pipes, but Pug’s grandfather’s eldest brother, Ezra, turned off the water on purpose to fool people into thinking that there was no water at the house, so he could have the house all to himself. Miles explains to Pug how to find the right pipe in the basement and turn the water back on.

The next morning, Pug follows Miles’s instructions and finds the pipe so the plumber can turn the water back on. His family is amazed how he knew where to look, but Pug is vague about how he knew. He can’t tell them about Miles because Miles tells him that only boys under the age of 15 in the Dibble family can see him, and also one other person who is special to Miles, although Miles doesn’t explain who that is.

Pug is happy that his family will be able to stay at Dibble Hollow for the summer, but he also begins hearing about a feud between the Smith family and the Dibble family. People are unsure exactly how the feud started. The plumber, Mr. Potter, says that there are only a few people who really knew the beginning of it. One of them is Miles, who has been dead for more than 50 years at that point. Another is Eb Smith, who was once Miles’s best friend, and is now the elderly Mr. Smith who was angry that Ricky chased his chickens. Pug is interested in being friends with Eb Smith’s granddaughter, Priscilla, but he thinks that he needs to understand the feud between their families before he can do that.

Since Eb Smith doesn’t want to talk to the Dibbles, Pug and Helen go to see Miss Fanny Woodman, the other person Mr. Potter says would know what happened to start the feud. Miss Woodman explains that the feud started when she was 13 years old, after both the Dibble and Smith families made a lot of money at a fair by winning some prizes and selling livestock. The elder boys in the Dibble and Smith families were supposed to take the money home, but they paid Eb and Miles to do it for them because they wanted to stay longer at the fair. However, Eb thought some suspicious men were following them home, thinking that the younger boys would be easier to rob. To evade the thieves, the two younger boys split up. Eb was supposed to lead the thieves on a wild goose chase while Miles got the money safely home. Eb did manage to lose their followers, but Miles never turned up with the money. The Smiths suspected Miles of running away with the money, but the Dibbles suspected the Smiths of having done something to Miles to get all the money for themselves.

At first, Eb didn’t think the Miles stole the money. He thought maybe Miles was playing some kind of trick on him because the two of them had a rivalry over Miss Woodman. Both boys had a crush on her when they were all kids. Miles was a teaser and a prankster, so it would have been in character for him to pull a trick. However, nobody ever saw the thieves who were supposedly following the boys, and the more Eb thought about it over the years, the more he became convinced that Miles was the one who thought he saw them and was the one who suggested that the two of them split up. Nobody ever found Miles’s body, so there was no proof that he ever died. His family eventually decided that’s what must have happened, so they had a memorial service for him and put a marker for him in the local cemetery, but the Smiths still suspected that Miles just stole the money and ran away.

Eb’s feelings for Miles turned to bitterness when he came to believe that Miles took advantage of their friendship to steal from him and his family, and those feelings only got worse when he suffered a series of misfortunes in his life. Eb’s wife died young, leaving him to raise their son alone. Then, his son and his wife also died, leaving him to care for his granddaughter Priscilla alone. Eb has been struggling for money to help raise Priscilla, and the money that his family lost would have made a difference to him. In fact, it still would make a difference to Eb because he’s in danger of losing his family’s old home because he can’t pay the mortgage. Miss Woodman doesn’t believe that Miles was a thief, but without the town knowing what really happened to Miles, it would be difficult to prove that to Eb Smith.

Pug knows that he has access to a source of information that nobody else does – he’s the only one who can talk to Miles himself about what happened! When Pug sees Miles again, Miles confirms what Miss Woodman said. He says that the thieves followed him instead of Eb that night. Miles tried to get away from them by crossing an old bridge, but he fell into the river and was killed. The thieves were alarmed that he was dead, so after searching him for the money, they pushed his body into the river again and got out of town as fast as they could. Miles says that a man called Mr. Miller later found his body down river and had him buried, but Mr. Miller didn’t know the boy’s identity, so he couldn’t notify his family. Instead, Mr. Miller buried Miles under the name of his own son, who died at sea as a cabin boy and whose body was never recovered. Mr. Miller felt that giving the nameless boy his son’s name and a resting place among his family was a kindness to the drowned boy and a fitting memorial to his own son, who was unable to return to rest with his family. People in the town where the Millers lived and live today know the story about the nameless boy buried with the Millers and Miles’s tombstone recounts it, but so far, nobody has made the connection between that nameless boy and Miles. (Except for one other person, who can’t explain how he knows where Miles is buried for the same reason why Pug can’t tell his family how he knew where the water pipe was.)

Pug asks Miles what happened to the money, and Miles says that he successfully managed to hide it from the thieves before he fell in the river. The problem is that he’s not exactly sure where he hid it. He knows he put it in a tree, but it was night, he was confused and in a hurry, his sense of direction was never good, and then, he died a sudden death. He’s been looking for the tree where he hid the money ever since, but he still can’t find it. He just knows that it’s somewhere around the old Smith place, Twin Maples … where Dibbles aren’t really welcome these days. Miles needs Pug’s help to find that hidden money and repair the relationship between the Smiths and the Dibbles!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

Part of the theme of the story is about old grudges. Miss Woodman and Priscilla, among others, tell Eb Smith that the grudge that he’s been holding against Miles and the other Dibbles is only hurting him and that it’s time to let it go, but at the same time, they also understand why he has trouble letting the issue go. The money that Miles was carrying when he disappeared would make a major difference to Eb Smith because he’s been struggling for years to take care of his old family home and his orphaned granddaughter. With the mortgage coming due, the holder of the mortgage, Mr. Pratt, is planning for foreclose and have Eb Smith sent to a retirement home, but that would leave Priscilla without a home. Mr. Pratt says he and his wife would take Priscilla in as a nanny for their four children, but that’s a nightmare job! The Pratts have had trouble keeping a nanny because the children are so badly behaved. Priscilla would be little more than a captive domestic slave to the Pratts. With that much depending on the lost money that would secure the Smiths’ home and future, it’s understandable why Eb Smith has trouble letting the matter go.

Eb doesn’t know that Miles is definitely dead and that he died the night of the fair, when they were chased by thieves. If Miles’s body had been identified and returned to his family shortly after his death, Eb would have accepted years ago that Miles was just the unfortunate victim of the thieves. He would have mourned the loss of his friend and reconciled himself to the loss of the money as something that couldn’t be helped. It was not knowing the truth for years that caused Eb to doubt his old friend and convince himself that Miles was the one responsible for the loss of the money. The restoration of the money is key to helping the Smiths and settling the feud, but knowing the real truth of Miles’s death is also important. As long as Eb doesn’t know the truth, his family’s suspicions, his own suspicions and imagination, and the rumors of the local people are all that Eb has had to fill in the space of what he doesn’t know.

The inability of people to communicate with each other hampers the truth. Pug’s attempts to help the Smiths are hampered because he can’t let Eb Smith know that he’s helping at first. If he did, Eb Smith’s pride and the grudge he holds would probably cause him to refuse the help, even if it hurt him and his granddaughter. Miles refuses to say at first who else besides Pug can see him as a ghost, but Miles later learns that (spoiler) it’s the man who found his body and buried him. Gideon Miller is now a very old man, and he only saw Miles’s ghost once when he was seriously ill, about a year after he buried Miles. That’s the only way that Mr. Miller knows his name and that he is the boy he buried. However, Mr. Miller can’t go to Miles’s family or the Smiths and tell them the truth about Miles because he knows nobody would be likely to believe him. Everyone would just think that he was hallucinating. Mr. Miller and Pug can talk to each other about it because they’ve both experienced Miles and can understand each other’s experiences, but neither of them can convincingly tell anyone else. Pug can’t tell his sister or Priscilla about the things he’s doing to try to help the Smiths, so they think he isn’t really doing much, if anything, although Helen is suspicious that Pug knows things he shouldn’t know and seems to have a hidden source of information. Fortunately, Pug eventually finds a way to show his parents that the unidentified boy buried with the Miller family is Miles.

When Pug has problems with the eldest Pratt boy, Ernie, his father talks to him about grudges and expectations, bringing the story back around to the main theme. People have prejudices against the Dibbles because of what they’ve suspected for years about Miles and the missing money. Pug’s father points out that, while the Pratts definitely have some negative traits, people’s habits of expecting the worst of them just because their family has that reputation, can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people have the sense that nobody expects anything good about them, they won’t even try to do better. Pug and Ernie do end up getting into a fight, but once they’ve got their feelings out and impressed each other with their fighting ability, they make up and become friends. Ernie helps Pug to understand Mr. Pratt better. Mr. Pratt actually thinks he would be helping Eb Smith by sending him to the county old folks’ home because he genuinely thinks Eb Smith can’t manage his house by himself. It’s not just a ploy to get the property and make a personal profit.

When the truth is revealed and the money found, the adults in the story are mature enough to admit that they were wrong about things, and I thought that was a really good example to present to kids. Eb Smith apologizes to the Dibbles, particularly Pug, about how he treated them when they were only trying to help. He also expresses regret that he came to doubt his best friend, not understanding that something truly tragic happened to him all those years ago. Mr. Pratt, rather than being upset that he won’t get the Smiths’ property after all, is actually relieved that things have worked out well for the Smiths. He tells Mr. Smith that he didn’t mean to make things hard on him, that he really did think that what he was doing was best for him and Priscilla, but Ernie has been talking to him about their situation, and he’s changed his mind.

The time period of the story is dated. Miles’s tombstone and an old diary of his that Pug finds date the year of Miles’s death to 1900. Since he’s been dead for more than 50 years or almost 60 years, the story is set c. 1960, just a few years before the book was published.

Posted on by TracyC

A Stitch in Time

A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively, 1976.

It’s summer, and 11-year-old Maria Foster’s parents have rented a house near the sea for their summer holidays. Maria is an only child, quiet and given to daydreaming. Maria is shy and socially-awkward and her parents are often preoccupied with their business and thoughts. It often seems like their parents are socially-awkward and don’t know quite what to do or say to Maria as a child, which is why she doesn’t always know what to say to other people. Because she frequently doesn’t have anyone else to talk to and doesn’t always know what to say to other people, Maria often finds herself having imaginary conversations with objects or animals.

The seaside house where the Fosters are staying is an old one, built about 1820. It’s lovely and has a beautiful view. The interior has brown wall paneling. The furniture is old-fashioned, Victorian, and rather grand. When Maria chooses a bedroom for herself, she finds a collection of labeled fossils in a small chest of drawers, which she finds fascinating. The only modern touches are just a few bits and pieces left behind by the family that had rented the house before them and left the week before, like some half-eaten boxes of cereal. There’s also a tabby cat who appears to come with the house, and Maria begins to imagine conversations with it.

When they first arrive, Maria is sure that she hears the creaking of a swing and a dog barking, but when she goes looking for them, she can’t find them. When she begins exploring outside, she finds some small fossils in the rock, and her mother says that they’re ammonites and that the area is famous for them. She accidentally breaks one while trying to get it out, and she decides that it’s better to leave the others where they are. Exploring further, she finds some loose fossils and fossil fragments that she can collect more casually without hurting them. She begins making her own fossil collection, and she uses the old fossil collection and some books she finds in the house to begin labeling her own specimens. She begins to think that the fossil notes and sketches she finds were written by a girl around her age, and she tries to imagine what she was like.

When they meet the landlady who rented the house to them, Mrs. Shand, she says that she grew up in the house herself with several brothers and sisters. She says that the room that Maria chose for herself was once the old nursery. Mrs. Shand now lives in a small flat in the old guesthouse nearby, and she invites them to call on her if they have any questions about the house.

Maria observes a family with several children at a nearby hotel, and she even briefly speaks to a boy her age, but she doesn’t know how to ask them if she can play with them. Later, she and the boy, Martin, meet again and realize that they have a mutual interest in the natural world. Martin tells her the names of some plants and birds, and Maria impresses him with the name of a fossil she’s learned. Martin warns her about the cliffs nearby, which have a tendency to crumble after rain.

Mrs. Shand invites Maria to her house to get a book that she would like to loan her. Maria doesn’t really know what to say to Mrs. Shand, but Mrs. Shand tells her about the collection of stopped clocks she has. She says that they belonged to her grandfather, who was a scientist, and that they have been stopped as a gesture of respect to her grandfather since his death. Maria notices a stitched Victorian sampler on the wall, and Mrs. Shand says that she can look at it because the girl who made it was about her age. It has a the typical alphabet and an embroidered quotation about death, but it also has the image of a house with a tree and a swing, a little black dog, and some fossils. Maria realizes that it’s the house that she is now staying in and that it confirms that there was once a dog and a swing there, like she keeps hearing! An inscription says that the sampler was started by a ten-year-old girl named Harriet in 1865 and completed by her sister, Susan.

Maria begins to think about time and how the lives of people who had once lived in the house where her family is staying, like Harriet, have left traces behind, not unlike the fossils in the cliffs or Mrs. Shand’s stopped clocks, full of past times. Maria begins to wonder about Harriet and what happened to her. She lived over 100 years ago, so she would be dead by Maria’s time (the 1970s, contemporary to the writing), and Martin says that Harriet probably grew up, got married, and had children, like most girls. Yet, Maria finds herself thinking that maybe Harriet didn’t grow up and get married. When Mrs. Shand lets her and Martin look at her old photo albums, Maria notices that, after a certain age, Maria doesn’t seem to appear in family photographs. Mrs. Shand says that her own mother was Susan. The lack of Harriet in the photographs and the fact that Susan finished the sampler leads Maria to conclude that something tragic happened to Harriet.

Then, one day, Maria thinks she hears the dog again, barking frantically with the sounds of a landslide and shouting children. Nobody else can hear it, but Maria is sure that she’s hearing an echo of a past tragedy, and she becomes convinced that Harriet was killed in that past landslide. The existence of the metal swing that once hung in the tree is confirmed when she and Martin find it and restore it. When Maria swings on it, she feels like she’s gone back in time, almost like she was Harriet with her dog and sister Susan nearby.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed the themes of time and what people leave behind. There are comparisons all through the story between clocks, fossils, and echoes of the past, and it all relates to the passage of time. More specifically, Maria starts seeing changes in herself, emotionally and mentally, as she matures.

Some of this story obviously takes place in Maria’s imagination. As a shy, socially-awkward introvert with parents who are also introverted, Maria tends to live in her own head much of the time. She often has imaginary conversations with objects and animals, and many of these are reflections of Maria’s concerns at the time. Through much of the story, Maria isn’t happy with herself as she is, realizing that she is socially-awkward and doesn’t know how to approach people and connect with them. When Maria imagines conversations with the tabby cat at the house, the cat tends to be critical of her. It’s a reflection of Maria’s own insecurity and self-criticism.

Maria’s parents love her, but they interact with her in a kind of off-handed way, which feeds her insecurity and social awkwardness. Maria knows that her parents love her, but she can tell that they don’t always know what to say to her or do with her, which makes it harder for Maria to learn how to interact with other people. Maria’s parents are both very introverted and try to avoid social occasions, if they can. However, Maria has realized that she needs to connect with other people and make friends. Through her experiences with Martin and his siblings, Maria becomes more outgoing and confident, and she finds it easier to interact with other people.

In some ways, Maria doesn’t entirely fit in with her parents because she’d like to be a little more outgoing than they are. Similarly, Martin sometimes doesn’t fit in with his family, either. Martin’s family is boisterous, and he is something of an intellectual. There are times when he likes doing quieter activities with Maria, talking about plants and fossils.

When Maria visits a local museum with Martin, and they look at the fossil exhibit, they talk about evolution vs. creationism. Maria decides that she doesn’t believe in the Noah’s Ark story about animals in the Bible, but at the same time, she thinks that studying animals through time makes it look like someone was experimenting with different designs of creatures and improving them with each generation. Martin says that’s nonsense and that it’s just evolution. Maria and Martin both seem to believe in evolution, but the difference between them is that Maria thinks that it seems like there’s a hand guiding it, and Martin credits just natural, scientific forces. In some ways, Maria and Martin are kindred spirits in their thinking, but Maria leaves a little more room in her personal understanding for feelings and the supernatural. Maria seems to be the only person in the story who is sensitive to the sounds and echoes of Harriet’s past.

At the end of the story, Maria decides that she’s going to give up imagining the conversations with the cat because she’s feeling a little more confident in herself through her friendship with Martin, her new understanding of the echoes of the past, and her realization that she herself is moving forward into her own future. She has a sense that she is leaving her past self behind, much like Harriet did. A part of Maria may always be young in this particular summer, but like Harriet, Maria herself is moving on.

What Really Happened to Harriet? (Spoilers)

As Martin guessed, Harriet did grow up and get married. She didn’t die young as Maria thought, based on the echoes of the past she’s been hearing, although she is correct that there was a landslide by the beach and that a tragedy occurred there. Before Maria’s family leaves at the end of the summer, Maria finally asks Mrs. Shand about Harriet and the landslide. Mrs. Shand explains that Harriet and her sister managed to escape the landslide, but their dog was killed. They were very upset about it and buried the dog near the old house. When Maria visits the grave, she discovers that this is the anniversary of the dog’s death.

Because I love dogs, I was still upset about the dog’s death, but Maria is at least reassured that Harriet herself survived. She asks Mrs. Shand why there aren’t any pictures of Harriet with the family after that summer, and she says that there are pictures of Harriet grown up, just not many because she wasn’t living at home anymore. The fall after her dog died, Harriet went away to boarding school. Her sister finished her sampler, both because Harriet was leaving for school and because Harriet never liked sewing. After Harriet graduated from her school, she got married and moved away. She did visit with her family after that, but because she was living somewhere else, she just wasn’t present for all the occasions when her family had their photographs taken.

So, because Maria guessed wrong about Harriet’s fate, readers might wonder if she just imagined everything she experienced related to Harriet’s memories and the landslide. However, the book indicates that Maria didn’t imagine it all. She drew the wrong conclusions about what was sensing, but she did sense things that she would have had no reason to know about, hearing the dog’s bark and the sounds of the swing before she had reason to know that either of them were ever there. When she’s on the swing and feels like she’s becoming Harriet in the past, she also manages to come up with the dog’s name before anybody tells her what it is. Because Maria is an introvert who often interacts with things in her environment more than she interacts with living people, it seems that she has a kind of sensitivity to her environment. At the end of the summer, though, when she senses that she’s changing as a person, she considers that, even if she were to return to this place again, she probably wouldn’t experience it in the same way. She’s moving on, mentally and emotionally, and that changes her perceptions of things.

Posted on by TracyC

When Marnie Was There

When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson, 1967.

Anna is traveling alone by train to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Pegg for the summer. Anna lives with Mrs. Preston, who she calls her auntie, but the truth is that Anna is a foster child. She knows that her mother and grandmother are dead. Anna feels different from other children and has trouble relating to them. Anna often feels like an outsider around other people. She also suffers from asthma, which gets worse when she is stressed, and it’s been interfering with her going to school. Her vacation in the countryside with the Peggs is meant to help improve her health, but her health problems are partly based on her inner turmoil, which accompanies her to the countryside.

The Peggs are nice. Mrs. Pegg tries to get Anna to be friendly with a local girl, Sandra, but it doesn’t go well. Anna takes offense that Sandra cheats at cards, and she calls Sandra a pig. Sandra insults Anna by saying that she looks like “what she is.” Although the vague insult is probably because Sandra couldn’t think of anything better at the time, it stings because Anna really doesn’t think much of herself, and she constantly worries that it shows on the outside.

Anna is happiest when she’s left to wander and explore by herself and try not to think about all the things that bother her. As Anna explores the area alone, she finds a large, old house that intrigues her. She has the odd feeling like the house has been waiting for her and an odd sense of familiarity with it. Mr. and Mrs. Pegg say that’s the old Marsh house and that nobody lives there now, although they’ve heard that someone has bought it. Anna likes to imagine that the house belongs to her and that the family that will move into it belong to her, too. She thinks she sees a blonde girl in one of the windows, getting her hair brushed.

Then, one evening, she meets a pretty blonde girl with a little boat. The two of them hide and listen to the girl’s parents talk, and they begin to develop a kind of odd friendship. The two girls continue to meet in the evenings in the blonde girl’s boat. The blonde girl, who calls herself Marnie, says that she wants to keep their friendship a secret, and she would rather that they get to know each other slowly, only asking one question about each other in turn. For some odd reason, though, when Anna is with Marnie, she has trouble recalling details of her present life, and anytime she stops to focus on the present, Marnie suddenly disappears, although Marnie claims that Anna is the one who suddenly disappears.

Marnie and Anna explore the countryside together, gathering mushrooms, and talking a little to each other about their lives. Anna admits to Marnie what she can’t bring herself to tell anyone else, the reasons why she’s been so upset. She fears that her foster family doesn’t really love her. She thinks they kind of do, but she has recently learned that they’ve been receiving payments from the local council for her support. Since she found out about the money they’re receiving for her, she’s felt a sense of betrayal and abandonment. She used to think they felt like she was their own child, but now, she thinks that they’re mostly just being paid to care for her.

It seems like, all her life, Anna has been abandoned by the people who were supposed to live her the most. She doesn’t really remember her parents at all. She knows that her father abandoned her and her mother when she was small and that her mother remarried but died shortly after that. Anna’s mother had left her with her grandmother while she went away on her honeymoon, but then, she and her new husband were both killed in a car crash, so they never returned for her. Anna remembers a little about her grandmother, who took care of her after her mother died, but then, her grandmother also got sick and died. Anna tells Marnie that she hates them all for going away and leaving her. Marnie points out that dying wasn’t their fault, but Anna says that, before her grandmother went to the hospital, she promised to return soon. She broke her promise by dying. Ever since, Anna has had the feeling that she can’t trust anybody because people leave and break promises. Her feelings of not being able to trust people are at the root of her difficulties in forming friendships and confiding her true feelings to her foster family. Marnie hugs Anna and tells her that she really loves her and that they’ll be friends forever, and for the first time in a long time, Anna feels happy and feels like she can believe Marnie.

At first, Anna envies Marnie’s privileged life in the big house. Marnie’s father is wealthy, and her mother is beautiful, and it seems like Marnie has everything she could want. Anna even gets to attend one of the parties Marnie’s parents hold at the house when Marnie convinces them to let her in as a little beggar gypsy girl (the book’s description) selling sea lavender for luck. (There is minor alcohol use at this point because the people at the party give Anna a little glass of wine. People are also smoking at the party.) However, when Marnie explains a little more about what her parents are like and what really happens in her house, Anna comes to see that Marnie isn’t fortunate at all. Her parents are rarely home because her father is often away, in the navy, and her mother likes to spend most of her time in London. Marnie doesn’t exactly say what her mother does in London, but the implication seems to be that she spends a lot of time partying and hob-nobbing with high society. While they’re away, Marnie is looked after by her nurse, who can be abusive when she’s angry with Marnie, and sometimes she and the maids threaten to lock Marnie in the old windmill nearby, knowing that she’s afraid of the place. Anna thinks that’s horribly cruel, and she says that no adult in her life has ever hurt her or tried to frighten her on purpose. Marnie doesn’t think of herself as being so unfortunate because this is the only life she’s ever known, but Anna knows that not everybody treats children like that. Her heart goes out to Marnie, and she declares that she loves Marnie, too.

Anna’s relationship with Marnie teaches her how to open up to other people and trust them, but that trust is shaken after a frightening experience at the old windmill. Marnie’s distant cousin Edward, who seems to be the only person in her life who truly looks out for her, is also a bit strict and teasing with her when it comes to the things that she’s afraid of. He thinks that fears should be confronted, so he convinces her that she should be brave and get over her fear of the windmill. In an effort to face her fears, Marnie tries to go inside the windmill alone and climb up the ladder to the loft. However, once she’s up there, she becomes too afraid of the ladder to climb down again. Anna also climbs up and tries to comfort Marnie, but no matter what she says, Marnie is too scared to climb back down. The girls fall asleep in the windmill, and when Anna wakes up, Marnie is suddenly gone. Anna is angry at Marnie for leaving without telling her when both of them had been frightened. Once again, she feels betrayed and abandoned by someone she thought she could trust.

Then, during a storm, Anna sees Marnie gesturing to her from a window of the Marsh house. Marnie calls out to her that she’s sorry about leaving her and that she can’t come out because she’s locked in and is being sent away the next day. She just wants Anna to know that she loves her. Anna, seeing that Marnie didn’t mean to hurt her, forgives her and says she still loves her, too. To Anna’s shock, though, when she tries to look inside the windows of the Marsh house, the place looks empty and abandoned. Confused and upset, Anna stumbles and falls into the water nearby, nearly drowning, but she is rescued by a local man.

After that experience, Anna is ill and sad because she realizes that Marnie is gone from her life. When she recovers, though, she goes to look at the Marsh house again and encounters the children of the new owners, the Lindseys. Anna feels a surprising sense of connection to them, and they to her. As they get to know each other and become friends, one of the Lindsey children, Scilla, reveals that she’s found a diary in the house that tells her about Marnie’s life. At first, she thought Anna was Marnie when they met. Anna is shocked because she’s been starting to think that Marnie was only an imaginary friend of hers. When Anna and Priscilla read the diary, they learn more about the history of the Marsh house and Marnie. The diary is old and refers to the First World War as an event that is currently happening, bringing into question who and what Marnie really was when Anna was becoming her friend. Mrs. Lindsey says that they can ask their family friend, the elderly Gillie about Marnie. Learning about Marnie’s past awakens some of Anna’s memories and reveals some things about Anna’s own past. Understanding who and what Marnie was helps Anna to understand that her birth family, who seemed to have abandoned her, actually loved her. Accepting Marnie’s love helps Anna to understand and accept the love of her foster parents and new friends.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. This book has also been made into a Studio Ghibli movie of the same name, although they changed the location of the story from England to Japan. Changing the location of the story changes some of the historical details, but the essential parts of the story are the same as well as the lessons Anna learns from her experiences.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Probably, most people today are familiar with this story because of the Studio Ghibli movie. The movie is pretty faithful to the original book, although changing the setting from England to Japan changes some of the details. It kept the general sense of Anna’s family’s history, her personal connection with Marnie, and the lessons that Anna learns about love, trust, forgiveness, and connecting with other people. In both the book and the movie, Anna comes to realize that the feeling of being “outside” or “inside” relationships with other people is largely a reflection of how the person feels inside themselves. Anna is troubled because she has long-term trauma and inner turmoil that needs to be resolved. Finding out the truth about Marnie and her own past, especially now that she’s old enough to understand the situation, helps to resolve Anna’s feelings.

This is one of those stories where it’s difficult to talk about the book in detail without spoilers, so from this point on there are going to be some major spoilers.

Who is Marnie Really?

Readers will probably get the sense that there’s something odd about Marnie pretty quickly. There are a few odd time discrepancies when Anna’s with Marnie. Marnie vanishes at odd moments, especially when Anna tries to remember details of her present life in Marnie’s presence. For some reason, it takes a lot of effort for Anna to remember her present life when she’s with Marnie, and when she tries to focus on the present day, Marnie disappears.

Why do I keep talking about the “present”? Because this is a time slip story. It’s not immediately obvious to Anna that, when she’s with Marnie, she’s in a different time period because they’re spending time in the countryside with no signs of modern technology or the absence of modern technology, like television or radio, to give away the time periods. Marnie never goes into the Peggs’ household, and the only time Anna goes into the Marsh house with Marnie is during a party, where everyone is dressed up. There are a couple of minor clues, like Marnie referring to what Anna’s wearing as boys’ clothes because she’s wearing pants instead of a dress or skirt, but other than that, there are few references that would clarify the time period for Anna. Anna’s difficulty of thinking of or being in two different time periods at once also keeps her from making the connection.

After Marnie leaves and Anna knows that she is gone, Anna partly concludes that she was only an imaginary friend of hers, but the diary makes it clear that Marnie was a real person. It also adds some details that confirm Anna’s experiences with her and add some extra information that Marnie didn’t discuss with Anna that clarifies when she really lived in the Marsh house.

The truth is that Marnie was Anna’s grandmother, who is now deceased. The Marsh house was familiar to Anna because it was her home with Marnie during her earliest years. The things that Gillie has to say about Marnie help to fill in the blanks and connect Marnie’s story to Anna’s.

As a child herself, Marnie really was the poor little rich girl whose wealthy parents neglected her and frequently left her alone with an abusive nurse. Marnie was somewhat isolated as a child and, like Anna, was frequently happiest exploring the countryside or going out alone in her boat. The only person she felt that she could confide in was her distant cousin, Edward, who was older and tried to look after her, although he was also stern and not as emotionally understanding as he probably should have been. The summer that Anna experiences with Marnie was the summer when Marnie’s life changed forever, partly because of the windmill incident.

Marnie really did go into the windmill by herself in an effort to conquer her fear, and she did get trapped there because she was afraid to come down. Her nurse and the maids, unable to find her and not knowing where she went, finally called for a search party for the missing girl, but it was Edward who figured out where she was. He found her in the mill, unconscious, either passed out from fright or having fallen asleep from exhaustion, and carried her down the ladder himself, which is why Marnie was gone when Anna woke up. Edward didn’t see Anna there, probably because she had either shifted back to her own time while the girls were asleep or because not everybody is able to see Anna when she’s caught between times. The fact that the nurse had no idea where Marnie was exposes her neglect of Marnie, and when Marnie tells Edward about how the nurse and maids made her afraid of the windmill by threatening to lock her in there and how her nurse has given her abusive punishments, he makes sure that the nurse is fired. The reason why Marnie called out to Anna that she was being sent away was that, when the nurse was discharged, her family decided that it would be best for her to go to boarding school instead. Marnie’s father, who was in the navy during WWI/The Great War, was killed during the war, not very long after that party that Anna attended as the little beggar girl, and after boarding school, Marnie married Edward. They moved somewhere else, and they had a daughter of her own.

Unfortunately, Marnie’s life and family were plagued with problems, some of their own making and some beyond their control. When Anna and her new friends, the Lindsey children, try to ask Gilly who was responsible for how things turned out for Marnie, she says that the answer is complicated. The older a person gets, the more they realize that there are many factors involved in how a person’s life turns out, and it’s difficult to point to any one thing as a cause.

Marnie’s parents obviously neglected her, and although Edward really did love her, he wasn’t very understanding about emotional needs. Marnie herself, although she wanted to be a better parent to her daughter than her parents had been to her, didn’t really know how because she didn’t have good parental role models to follow and hadn’t been brought up to understand her own emotional needs, let alone how to care for the emotional needs of a child. She hadn’t fully matured emotionally by the time she became a mother, and outside events complicated her relationship with her daughter, Esme. Esme was young during WWII, and she was sent away to the United States as a child evacuee to escape the threat of bombing. Although Marnie sent Esme away for safety, they were separated for a period of years when Esme was very young. When Esme came back, she didn’t feel much connection to Marnie. She felt abandoned for being sent away from her mother and accused Marnie of never really acting like her mother because she wasn’t there for her, physically or emotionally. Marnie tried to repair her relationship with Esme, but as soon as Esme was out of school, she ran away and got married to Anna’s father.

We never learn who Anna’s father was. He is probably still alive somewhere, but Gillie describes him as having been too young and immature for the role of a husband and father. It wasn’t long before he and Esme divorced, and he was out of Anna’s life forever. The story seems to imply that he might have been from Spain because he has a darker complexion than Marnie or Esme and because he liked the Spanish sound of the name Marianna, the name that Esme originally gave to Anna as a baby and which came from Marnie’s mother. (We are told that Anna was unaware that her legal name is still Marianna and that Anna is a nickname that her foster family gave her.) Because her marriage failed when Anna was only a baby, Esme turned Anna over to Marnie almost immediately, so Marnie really was the one who was raising Anna the entire time. Esme tried to get her life straightened out, and the man she married next seems to have been a nice person. The family might have managed to get themselves back together as a family after that, but Esme and her new husband tragically died in a car accident on their honeymoon. Marnie genuinely loved Anna and tried to continue caring for her, but her own health was failing, and the shock of Esme’s sudden death made it worse. Marnie desperately wanted to recover and return to Anna at the Marsh house, but she really couldn’t help dying. When Anna fully comes to understand all of this, she manages to forgive her mother and grandmother for leaving her, knowing that they loved her and that leaving her the way they did wasn’t what they wanted.

Anna’s new sense of inner peace and acceptance of her family’s love for her, flawed as they all were, helps Anna understand and accept her foster family’s love. She and her foster mother also have a heart-to-heart talk about the payments they’ve been receiving to help support Anna. Mrs. Preston says that she hadn’t wanted to talk to Anna about the payments because she hadn’t wanted Anna to feel self-conscious about them or to think that the Prestons didn’t want to support her themselves, although the money has helped with Anna’s expenses. Mrs. Preston admits that she’s tried to avoid mentioning things that would make Anna seem more separate from the Preston family or less than fully hers, and she had noticed that Anna was uncomfortable when she was younger and Mrs. Preston tried to tell her what she knew about her mother and grandmother. Anna had been uncomfortable hearing about them because she was angry with them for their seeming abandonment of her, but Mrs. Preston hadn’t understood and was too uncomfortable herself to probe Anna’s feelings deeper, although she now sees that it’s better to be open about things, even when they’re uncomfortable. Anna’s relationship with her “auntie” improves because of their new understanding of each other, their feelings, and Anna’s past. I think Anna also sees that Mrs. Preston has treated her much better than Marnie’s own parents ever treated her, which shows that being blood relations isn’t always a guarantee of a close and loving relationship or the best treatment. Although, realizing that she originally did come from a family who loved her as best they could and that her grandmother really was her first real friend helps give Anna the basis she needs to establish loving relationships with other people.

What is Marnie Really?

As I said, this is a time slip story. Anna apparently really does go back in time, speak to Marnie as a living person in her time, and interact with other people at the party when Marnie pretends that she’s a little gypsy beggar girl (the book’s description) selling sea lavender. The beggar girl incident also appears in Marnie’s diary. Marnie doesn’t refer to Anna by name, but it seems to indicate that Marnie actually experienced the incident with Anna and that it wasn’t just a dream.

Although, I have seen other reviewers suggest that Anna could have been dreaming or imagining some of these things as the presence of the house awakens Anna’s memories of living there with Marnie and stories that Marnie might have told her about her childhood. Yet, the fact that Scilla saw Anna once looking up at the house and seeing Marnie in the window while none of her siblings could see Anna at that time suggests that something supernatural was happening and that only certain people can see Anna when she’s caught between time periods.

So, does that mean that Marnie was a ghost or that Anna was a type of ghost when she was slipping between time periods? It’s a possible explanation, and I think one of the characters makes that comparison. We don’t have an exact explanation for how the time slips happen except that Marnie and Anna have a strong emotional connection to each other and to the Marsh house. Marnie’s death and Anna’s unresolved feelings create a need for the two of them to meet again, almost for the first time, and come to understand each other.

I think the movie version somewhat implies Marnie deliberately reaching out across time to reconnect with her granddaughter and assure her of her love, but in the book, it seems as though Marnie is unaware that they are actually family. Marnie just loves Anna as Anna, not trying to justify their family’s circumstances but just being herself as she was when she was young and letting Anna see the person she really was. Just as Anna couldn’t climb down the ladder for Marnie, only trying to help her do it herself, Marnie can’t do all the emotional understanding for Anna. Her presence just helps Anna to come to a new understanding of her and their shared past.

In beginning, Anna was angry that her teachers accused her of “not even trying” at school or at getting along with others, but the truth is that she was missing some important pieces of information and understanding to make the efforts she needs to make. Marnie’s life turned out the way it did partly because she was also missing some understanding about emotions, relationships, and what it takes to be a good parent. We don’t know why Marnie’s mother was the way she was. Perhaps she was similarly raised by neglectful parents and distracting herself from her own past traumas in those constant parties she gives and attends. As Gillie says, it’s hard to know exactly where these things start when you begin to look at the bigger picture. However, Anna’s new understanding indicates that her life is likely to turn out better than the previous generations of her family. In an odd way, it seems she both needed both her connection to them and a kind of separation from them to get there and break their cycle.

Posted on by TracyC

Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie

Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie by Peter and Connie Roop, pictures by Peter E. Hanson, 1985.

The book begins with a note from the authors about the real life Abbie Burgess. The story is based on a real girl and her family who lived in a Maine lighthouse in the 1850s and a real incident when Abbie’s father had to leave to get supplies, so Abbie had to tend the lights during a terrible storm in his absence.

Captain Burgess is a lighthouse keeper in the mid-19th century, and his family lives in the lighthouse with him. One day, while his wife is ill, he decides that he needs to go for supplies. His wife needs medicine, and the family also needs food and more oil for the lamps in the lighthouse.

While he is away, he puts his daughter, Abbie, in charge of tending the lights. Abbie is the eldest of his three daughters, and although she has never tended the lights alone before, she knows how to carry out the necessary chores of cleaning the lamps, trimming their wicks, and adding oil to the lamps. Ships approaching land on this coast depend on the lights of the lighthouse to help guide them, so they must be kept burning.

Abbie is a little nervous about handling the task by herself, and her sisters worry about what will happen if there’s a storm. Abbie assures them that they will be able to handle it, as long as they are careful about how they use their remaining supplies. If there is a storm, she knows that her father’s return will be delayed. As the girls go about their routine and taking care of their mother, they see that the sky is darkening and a storm is approaching.

At sundown, Abbie climbs to the top of each of the two the lighthouse towers and lights each of the lamps. However, she cannot sleep that night, worrying about the possibility of the lights going out. When she goes to check on them, she discovers that ice is covering the windows, so she has to scrape it off so the lights will show. The next day, she cleans the lamps and gets some sleep.

That’s fine for one night, but the storm gets worse, and Abbie has to tend the lights for longer than expected. Because of the weather, her father’s return is delayed for over a week. Abbie saves her chickens from a huge wave, and she is nearly washed away herself! Abbie and her mother and sisters move into one of the towers for more protection. Their supplies run low, and Abbie is exhausted from the work of tending the lights, but she manages to keep them burning!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). It’s a Reading Rainbow book.

My Reaction

I think remember this book from when I was a kid, although I think there was another version of this story that I might be remembering.

Lighthouse stories offer a fascinating look at a way of life that has vanished. Modern lighthouses are electronic and fully automated, so there is no need for anyone to live in a lighthouse now. The lights that Abbie tends are huge oil lamps with large reflectors behind them to make them look brighter for passing ships. During the 19th century, lights like that needed constant tending to make sure that the lights were cleaned of grime from the smoke when they were cool enough, relit and refueled with oil when necessary, and the windows of the lighthouse kept clean and clear. It was physically intense work that required someone to be constantly on duty at the lighthouse to take care of the routine chores and deal with any emergencies that arose.

Because lighthouses were off the coast, positioned to warn ships away from dangerous areas with rocks, they were isolated places. The people who lived there rarely left, and when they did, they had to make sure that someone who knew how to tend the lights was there, on duty. It could be a somewhat lonely life, and the people who did that type of job and the family members who helped them had to take care of whatever was necessary to keep the lights burning because other people’s lives were depending on them. It can be easy to romanticize lighthouse keepers’ self-sufficiency or the idea of living with family apart from society and in touch with nature, but it was a very difficult life. That’s what makes Abbie’s story so heroic. She had to do a difficult job that not every young girl would be able to manage. It was hard, exhausting work and not fun, but it was an important job that preserved the safety of passing ships and the lives of people on them.

Posted on by TracyC

Island Boy

Island Boy story and pictures by Barbara Cooney, 1988.

When the Tibbetts family first moves to the island, they build their house and give the island its name, Tibbetts Island. As time passes, there are eventually twelve children in the Tibbetts family, and the youngest of them is little Matthais.

The boys in the family help on their family’s farm and go hunting and fishing. At first, Matthais’s older brothers think he’s too little to help. As he grows up, though, he learns how to be more helpful, and he joins the other children in their lessons in reading and writing.

As time passes, the Tibbetts children grow up and leave the island to get married or get jobs working in their uncle’s shipyard. Eventually, Matthais becomes a cabin boy on one of his uncle’s ships. After years of experience, Matthais become the captain of the ship. He visits many places as a sailor, but he finds himself wanting to return home.

When Matthais marries a young schoolteacher named Hannah, they move into his family’s old home on the island and restart the farm because his aging parents have moved to the mainland. Together, they have three daughters.

Over time, Matthais’s daughters grow up, and he and Hannah grow old. His daughters marry and move away, and Hannah dies. Around this time, new people begin moving to the area, building vacation homes and bringing pleasure boats. Unlike the Tibbetts family, they’re there to enjoy the countryside for fun and not for farming. They’re called “rusticators” because they enjoy the rustic lifestyle. One of Matthais’s daughters points out that he could sell the family’s island to these people, but he can’t bring himself to do it because it’s the family’s old home.

Following the death of her husband, one of Matthais’s daughters moves back to the island with her small son, also named Matthais. The elderly Matthais helps to raise his young grandson and teach him about life on the island. The elderly Matthais eventually dies in a boating accident in rough weather, and many people come to pay their respects and reflect on his long life, but the younger Matthais’s life is still beginning.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I love the charming, old-fashioned pictures in this book, and it’s a sweet story about a man’s long life and the passing of one generation to the next. As characters comment at the end of the story, Matthais has lived a long and full life. He’s experienced the cozy family life on the island and the beauties of nature, and he’s also traveled and had adventures at sea. He’s raised a family of his own, and he’s set up a home for his daughter and her young son. The end of the story indicates that the cycle of life will continue in this family as the younger Matthais thinks about becoming a sailor like his grandfather and then returning to the island himself.

There’s a sense of stability to the island and its cycles of life and generations. Even when things are changing in the world around them, the nature of the island remains pretty constant, and it’s always a place for members of the family to come home.

Posted on by TracyC

Hattie and the Wild Waves

Hattie and the Wild Waves story and pictures by Barbara Cooney, 1990.

Young Hattie grows up as part of a wealthy family in a red brick house with beautiful woodwork because her father is in the woodwork business. She comes from a family of German immigrants living in New York around the turn of the last century. When she and her siblings start talking about what they want to do when they’re grown up, Hattie says that she wants to be a painter. At first, the others think she means painting houses, but what she actually means is that she wants to be an artist.

While Hattie’s siblings make life hard for the series of nursemaids who come to look after them (and are ultimately fired for reacting to their teasing) and play cards with the cook and maid, Hattie likes to spend her time drawing. The cook’s daughter admires her drawings. Hattie never minds it when she’s confined to bed with a cold because it just gives her more time to draw.

When Hattie’s relative come to visit, they always have a big dinner, and they admire a painting that Hattie’s grandfather painted years ago called Cleopatra’s Barge. However, Hattie’s father prefers a drawing that Hattie made of a barge because he thinks it looks more seaworthy. Hattie knows that the people on her mother’s side of the family tend to be musicians and artists. Hattie’s mother is one of the musical members of the family. She teaches Hattie and her sister how to play the piano and how to sew, but Hattie never does either of these very well.

The family spends their summers at a summer house at Far Rockaway with their relatives. The adults like to gather on the veranda and talk, the women sewing and knitting. Sometimes, they go sailing in their boat. Hattie absorbs the details of everything she sees at the seaside and paints pictures.

Hattie loves their summer house, but then, her father sells it and buys a bigger summer house on Long Island. Hattie’s brother and sister think it sounds exciting because it will be like a castle, but Hattie thinks she will miss the wild waves of Far Rockaway.

Their new summer house is incredible. The children ride horses there and have tennis parties. Hattie’s sister is now old enough to have suitors. While everyone is busy with her sister’s suitors and later, her sister’s wedding plans, Hattie takes walks by herself and finds new things to paint.

Hattie’s life continues to change, but she stays true to her dreams, joining the Art Institute to become the painter she’s always wanted to be. Her mother thinks that she will be like her grandfather, but Hattie knows that she will be her own artist.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

Some aspects of the story are similar to Miss Rumphius, another book by Barbara Cooney about a young girl growing up around the turn of the century who has very definite ambitions early in life. Miss Rumphius’s life ambitions aren’t quite the same as Hattie’s, but they each know what they want to do with their lives from an early age and find their own way of adding beauty to the world.

This is a very calm and relaxing story about a girl with a strong ambition early in life to be an artist. She comes from a wealthy family, so she grows up in charming homes and summer houses, surrounded by beauty and with a family that includes other artists, so her family isn’t opposed to her ambition. There are changes that come in the girl’s life as she and her siblings grow up, but nothing tragic or traumatic happens to her. This is a book where readers can enjoy the beautiful atmosphere and artwork.

The author based the story on her own mother, Mae Evelyn Bossert, although the girl in the story is called by a different name. The hotel where the family lives at the end of the story is the Hotel Bossert, which Barbara Cooney’s grandfather built and which was the place where she was born. There are German words and phrases sprinkled throughout the story because this is an immigrant family, and they speak at least some German to each other. Readers can generally tell by context what the characters are saying.

Posted on by TracyC

Jessie’s Island

Jessie’s Island by Sheryl McFarlane, illustrated by Sheena Lott, 1992.

Jessie cousin, Thomas, thinks that life must be dull on the island where she lives because there are so many things to do in the city that her island doesn’t have, like arcades, museums, and concerts. However, Jessie’s mother decides to invite Thomas for a visit so he can see what life on the island is really like.

Much of the story takes the form of letters between the two cousins, first where Thomas brags about all the things there are to do in the city and then a letter from Jessie to Thomas, telling him all the things she will show him when he comes to visit.

Jessie describes animals, like bald eagles, seals, and killer whales. There also an old, abandoned cabin to explore that has trees growing through the roof. They can also climb trees, pick berries, go out in a canoe, dig for clams, and go fishing.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

This book is fun because it points out that, no matter where you live, there are things to do and see that you can’t do and see everywhere else. It’s true that the island doesn’t have the shopping malls and museums that the city where Thomas lives has, but it has other things that Thomas can’t experience in the city. The natural environment provides interesting sights, entertainment, and scope for the imagination! Just because their environments are different doesn’t mean that there’s less to do or appreciate.

The pictures in this book are beautiful watercolor paintings that take up whole pages. I love the way the illustrator captured the colors and scenery of the island!

Posted on by TracyC

Imagine a Day

Imagine a Day by Sarah L. Thomson, paintings by Rob Gonsalves, 2005.

This book celebrates the power of imagination and invites readers to use their imaginations, envisioning things that are impossible but amazing!

There isn’t exactly a story to the book. Each page poses something for readers to imagine with an accompanying picture where the shifts from the real world to the imaginary or impossible one are shown.

Each of the illustrations is surreal, with perspective changes from the real to the unreal.

The book invites readers to imagine powerful and amazing things, like “when grace and daring are all we need to build a bridge”, “when you forget how to fall”, “when we build a moat not to keep strangers out, but to welcome them in”, “when everything you build touches the sky”, “when you build the world around you piece by piece”, or “when the edge of the map is only the beginning of what we can explore.” All of this amazing things are things that could happen on a wonderful day! Just imagine a day like that!

The best part of the book is the end when we “Imagine a day … when a book swings open on silent hinges, and a play you’ve never seen before welcomes you home. Imagine … today.” Books are a key that unlocks a person’s imagination!

My Reaction

The pictures are amazing, and they really make the book! The pictures use perspective to shift the characters and their actions from the ordinary world to the extraordinary! Fence posts or toy blocks gradually morph into buildings. Streets become rivers, and rivers become trees. People on swings or bikes start off on the ground and end up above the trees! I’ve shown a number of pictures from this book to show you what they’re like, but there are many more to enjoy!

The pictures are fascinating to look at, and each of them seems like it could represent the beginning of a story. In that way, the book reminds me a little of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The things the book invites readers to imagine are positive, inspiring, and uplifting, and I think this book would be good to use for a story-writing prompts. Even adults can find this enchanting book inspirational for their creative powers!

Posted on by TracyC

Rules of Summer

Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan, 2013.

The book starts with the phrase, “This is what I learned last summer:” On every page, there’s a different “rule of summer”, something that the kid and his brother learned from their summer adventures.

However, they’re not having the ordinary kind of summer adventures. He apparently learned not to leave a red sock on the clothesline when a giant red rabbit appeared, and he learned not to drop his jar when he and his brother were catching falling stars.

The pictures show all kinds of strange things happening, like a giant lizard and weird plants spilling into the living room, which apparently taught the boy not to leave the back door open overnight and a tornado that came after the boy stepped on a snail.

At the end of the book, the two boys sit in front of their tv with pictures of all the strange creatures they’ve seen pinned to the wall. Are they pictures from the boys’ imagination or memories of a fantastic summer?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

The book is set in a gritty, urban environment where some surreal things happen. Either that, or the surreal adventures all take place in the boys’ imaginations. They could be turning regular adventures in the city where they live into sci-fi, dystopian epics. There is no backstory to anything in the book, so it’s all up to the readers’ imaginations whether anything in the book actually happened or not.

Their world may be post-apocalyptic (at least in their imaginations), peopled by all kinds of strange creatures and robots. There are no other humans in the book other than the boys. I don’t really like gritty or dystopian style books or art, but this book appealed to me because it leaves so much up to the imagination, including whether or not the boys just imagined everything. To me, the last picture, where the boys are just sitting in front of their tv with pictures they’ve drawn all over the walls suggest that they imagined their fantastic summer adventures, but that’s never clarified. In fact, there are a couple of additional pictures after the story ends that suggest maybe it wasn’t all imagination, but you can make up your own mind.

Posted on by TracyC

The Girl Who Owned a City

The Girl Who Owned a City by O. T. Nelson, 1975.

A disease has killed off all of the adults on Earth, leaving only children. In a world without adults, all of the laws, rules, and structure of society are gone, and the children struggle to survive by themselves. When they run out of food in their own homes, they raid the grocery stores and other people’s homes to get more. However, even those sources of food are starting to run out, and they need to find new sources of food. Children are starting to form gangs and raid each other, desperate for food and resources.

In one particular neighborhood, a girl named Lisa Nelson, struggles to look after her little brother, Todd. She also begins to realize how much her friends in the neighborhood are struggling and the dangers around them posed by other kids. Lisa is more practical and organized than many of the other children, and she begins to emerge as the leader of their neighborhood.

Lisa considers where food comes from before it ends up in grocery stores, and she reaches the conclusion that it’s usually transported from farms and stored in warehouses before being shipped to individual stores. Since the adults died, nobody has been taking food from the warehouses to restock stores, so there are warehouses somewhere that are still filled with food and supplies. She recruits help from other kids in the neighborhood to find a warehouse of food and raid it. However, to maintain control and keep the other children organized, she claims ownership over the warehouse and the distribution of food from it. She even threatens to burn the whole thing down if people start raiding it for food without her permission.

If the children manage their resources wisely, they will be secure for a long time while they figure out how to begin producing new food themselves. However, a gang of children from another neighborhood led by a boy named Tom Logan have been raiding the area and attacking children from Lisa’s neighborhood. The children in the neighborhood struggle to defend themselves from Tom’s gang, but Lisa realizes that their neighborhood doesn’t provide adequate defense. The only way the kids from Lisa’s neighborhood will be safe is if they relocate to a place that offers more protection and will easier to defend.

Lisa chooses the high school, Glendbard, as the children’s new home. It’s an ideal location to create a fortress because it’s surrounded by fences and has a limited number of entrances and exits. It’s self-contained, offering many rooms with indoor corridors with facilities in place for the children to use. Lisa persuades the children from the neighborhood to relocate there, set up organized defenses, and move stores of food into their small fortified city.

Under Lisa’s leadership, the new little city of Glenbard is run efficiently, and it offers the children improved safety, but nothing for them is entirely secure. When Lisa is injured in a battle with Tom’s gang and retreats to a farm outside of town with some of her friends, the children consider what the future of the civilization they want to rebuild will be. Tom and his gang are the immediate threat, but sooner or later, there will be others. Tom knows how to raid and conquer, taking things from other people, but he doesn’t have Lisa’s ability to organize, govern effectively, produce new food and supplies, and inspire real loyalty. If everyone is going to survive, they need an effective leader, someone who can organize everyone and make use of their individual talents to grow and protect their society. If Lisa is going to be that leader, she has to not only learn to fight people like Tom but also help them to see her vision of the future.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book has also been made into a graphic novel, although some of the details from the original story were changed in the graphic novel.

My Reaction

I remember reading this book in a middle school English class when I was about 13! It has always reminded me of the episode from the original Star Trek series, Miri, about a planet of children living without adults because all of the adults were killed off by a disease that only affects people adolescents and adults. The Star Trek episode is from 1966, older than this book, so if there is a connection between them, it would have been the Star Trek episode that inspired the book.

In the Star Trek episode, when any of the children gets too old, they also start showing signs of the disease, and it eventually kills them, until the crew of the Enterprise figures out a way to cure it. In this book, it isn’t clear whether or not any of the children are going to be at risk as they get older. The implication seems to be that the disease died off with the last of the adults. Presumably, the children who are alive now will live to grow up and will rebuild their society, as long as they can figure out how to manage their resources, develop new food production, and maintain order well enough that they don’t kill each other off.

Dealing with their own fears is as much of a struggle for the children as simply finding food and supplies, and it fuels much of the violence between them. Children who lack resources more than the others and don’t have the imagination, knowledge, or skill to figure out how to get more turn to bullying and violence to get what they need. They are simply desperate for survival and doing what they know how to do, which for some kids, is more about taking from others rather than scavenging for themselves or about using violence and destruction instead of creating and building. Lisa is more successful than most because she’s a thinker and planner, and she has some knowledge about how the world usually works, which she can use to fill in the gaps left by the adults (like realizing the connection between farms, warehouses, and stores and that what’s missing now is people to produce food and transport it to the places where it’s usually stored and accessed by others, so she can trace resources back through the supply chain). Lisa realizes that thinking things through is the key to survival. She has her worries, like the others, but she manages her emotions and directs her focus on making plans and accomplishing things rather than panicking and taking out her feelings and needs on others.

Around the time this story was written, in the 1970s, there were a number of other dystopian books about people needing to rebuild society after a disaster. (See In the Keep of Time Trilogy for an example.) What makes this particular book different from other dystopian books of its time is that other books tended to focus on nuclear war as the reason for the society-ending disaster. The 1970s were part of the Cold War, and nuclear threats were on people’s minds. In this book, though, the cause of the disaster is a disease, and children are the only people left on Earth. All of the infrastructure is intact, and the primary challenge is for the children to figure out how to use it. The focus on children trying to build a society of their own is great for keeping children interested in the story!

One of the things I liked about this book when I was young was how the children adapted the school into a city. Sometimes, I used to imagine how it would be to live in other unconventional places – a library, a museum (like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), or a shopping mall. Some of the features of the school do lend themselves to communal living or a small city. The school’s gates offer them protection from outsiders, the classrooms provide living space, and they have a library, an infirmary, and a cafeteria.

The school in the story is based on a real school. The story is set in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, which is a suburban area near Chicago, where the author lived, and the school, Glenbard, is a real high school there. The children in the story, Lisa and Todd Nelson, are named after the author’s own children.

There is a new graphic novel version of this book. I haven’t read the entire the graphic novel version yet, although I’ve read selections of it. In some ways, what I’ve read so far bothered me because it seemed to me that they made Lisa meaner in the beginning. In the original book, Lisa shares the spoils from her scavenging with other kids, telling them that she would be willing to help them, if they ask her. In the graphic novel, she makes it a point to tell Todd that they got everything they have because they’re smart and work hard, and other people should just learn to do the same. It’s a very conservative/libertarian attitude, but it isn’t completely faithful to Lisa’s original character or the themes of the original story. I have to admit, though, that there are strong connections in the story to libertarian/Ayn Rand philosophy that didn’t occur to me when I was 13 years old because I hadn’t heard of Ayn Rand at that age. As an adult, it jumps out to me more now, and there’s another book reviewer who has noted the connection. The original author was a firm libertarian, which is something else I didn’t know until I was an adult. It just seems to me that the graphic novel version of the book bore down on the callousness of libertarian attitudes, that “I’ve got mine, and screw everyone who doesn’t get their own because I don’t owe you anything that’s mine” kind of attitude, than the original book did.

In the original book, Lisa realizes that she is proud of herself and Todd for learning to survive by their own efforts rather than by resorting to violence and stealing, like other kids have, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t also willing to share whenever she could or thought someone really needed help. The times when she was reluctant to share were when someone had already stolen from her, and she no longer trusted them, not merely because she thought that they weren’t smart enough, not hard-working enough, or too undeserving to merit help. In the original book, Lisa wants to rebuild community and society, and you just can’t be part of a community or society with people who would hurt and betray you if they thought they could get something they wanted for doing that. She does realize that working toward survival is useful for building community and also provides an individual sense of purpose. Like she points out to Jill, who has made it her mission to look after the youngest children, having chores to do and feelings of accomplishment are important to making the younger children feel less afraid because they can see that they have agency (although the book doesn’t use that term), that they are capable of making a difference in their own lives. Lisa works through her own fears and develops her own sense of self-confidence by realizing that she is capable of handling situations, and she wants to help the other kids build that sense of agency and capability. Lisa’s vision for building a new society is for the mutual protection and welfare of everybody, not just self-promotion or personal enrichment. At one point, she thinks to herself how she and her brother can’t focus on just their own survival alone or just getting things for themselves because, for the other kids to be willing to listen to her ideas, they have to be part of the same community with them, sharing their concerns and looking after their mutual welfare. She says to herself, “All the brilliant ideas in the world will be useless if the world collapses around me and I’m the only one left to steal from.”

That’s an issue that I often have in real life with fans of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand focused a lot on how special her main characters were and that society didn’t appreciate how brilliant and how much better they were than other people and didn’t acknowledge how much more deserving they were than anybody else. Frankly, Ayn Rand’s characters strike me as a kind of wishful thinking Mary Sue. As others have pointed out, the only characters considered “good” in any respect in Rand’s books are the ones who agree with her philosophy, and she just completely trashes everyone else. It’s not that Randian heroes are never compassionate, but they only seem compassionate to people who support them or provide personal validation. To everyone else, they’re ruthless, and anybody who disagrees with them is a villain with no positive traits on purpose.

Lisa kind of represents an Ayn Rand type character in the sense that she has more vision of what is possible for the children as they attempt to rebuild society and better organizational skills, but the focus of the original book isn’t about “look how great Lisa is and other people should acknowledge her greatness as the superior person and defer to her.” Lisa has a sense of communal welfare and an understanding that, while she and Todd have managed so far on their own, they really do need other people. She doesn’t want only rugged individualism and competition with everyone else to prove her own worth or place herself above others. Lisa doesn’t seem to see her position as leader of her new society as some kind of reward for being special or better than other people, and she isn’t trying to hoard all she has for herself as the rewards of her hard work or some kind of token that she’s the most deserving of having things. What she gathers has a purpose beyond simply enriching herself and securing her own future welfare.

She is definitely not laissez-faire in her leadership style, either. When she reveals the existence of the warehouse to the other kids and claims ownership of it, she lets everyone know that she can supply them with things they need but she would rather destroy it all if any of them abuses or misuses it. She uses its existence as a tool to gain and keep their loyalty and get them to do what she tells them, which seems a bit authoritarian. However, there are no adults left, and it seems that Lisa has realized that there always has to be an adult in the room to provide guidance and direction. Although she might not realize it, she effectively creates a kind of welfare state that provides housing, mutual protection, food, and other essentials in exchange for labor and cooperation. Providing for everyone is necessary because they’re going to have to keep everyone alive while they’re preparing for their future. The warehouse has a lot of food in it, but it will run out eventually or things will expire, and to provide for their future, they’re going to have to study food production and get crops growing again. It’s going to take time, and for them to make it to that point, they need to regulate their usage of food and supplies. Lisa is acting as the adult to guide that process.

The other kids are expected to participate and contribute in their new society, although not all kids can contribute in precisely the same way or to the same degree because some of them are much younger than the others. This is something that she discusses with Jill, who thinks that younger kids need more protection. In some ways, they’re both right and wrong in their approaches. Lisa proves correct that younger kids are sometimes capable of more than Jill thinks and that they start to feel better about themselves and the frightening loss of their parents when they realize that they can accomplish small tasks. However, Lisa does sometimes expect too much of them, and Jill is correct that little children would be frightened to patrol as night guards and wouldn’t really make intimidating guards against the bigger kids anyway. Lisa has high expectations of others and high ambitions, but her friends help to keep her more realistic about what other kids can do and what their priorities as a new society should be. When Lisa gets carried away with their accomplishments so far and excited about all the things they can do now that they’re free to do anything they want without adults, she talks about learning to fly an airplane, and one of her friends has to remind her that their first priorities should be to secure sources of food and restore water and electricity.

It seems that Lisa provides goods equitably (she doesn’t seem to provide extra to special favorites, elites, or people she deems as more deserving than others in her society) as long as everyone is willing to go along with her plans. Her primary reason for wanting to be in control is to keep the system functional and equitable. She also relies on people like Jill, who have some altruistic motives and are willing to provide nurturing care for the very young and people who are sick or injured, those least able to help themselves without help from someone else. Lisa and Jill don’t have quite the same philosophy, but building a society requires different people with different types of focus. Both of these characters are necessary for building the new society. Jill even takes in Lisa and Todd after their house burns, so Lisa benefits from Jill’s altruism, which gives her the support she needs while she recovers and makes other plans.

In the original book, her leadership and the resources that she has gathered are treated largely as tool that Lisa uses to achieve her ultimate goal of rebuilding a society. Lisa doesn’t seem opposed to the concept of “common good”, and she really wants to be part of a society. She especially wants a society that actually cares about all of its members and provides what all of its members need, and she recognizes that any society that doesn’t care for its members or provide for them sufficiently isn’t going to survive because nobody’s going to want to join something that doesn’t care about them or provide what they really need. Many of these other kids are also her long-term neighborhood friends, so she has some personal feelings for them. They’re not just there as underlings, and they have worth beyond just serving the system or proving themselves as earners.

The original book’s philosophy has some strong libertarian leanings, but it didn’t strike me as being purely libertarian in the way that the graphic novel seems to. From what I’ve read, it seems like the graphic novel doubled down on the more callous and self-centered form of individualism and took away at least some of Lisa’s consideration for other people. For me, it made her a less likeable, sympathetic character and less inspiring as a leader, and these are frequently requirements of mine when I consider literary characters. Just as people don’t tend to join societies with nothing to offer them, I lose interest in books and characters that don’t offer me what I’m looking for. The graphic novel didn’t grab me in the same way the original book did because it took out some of the aspects that appealed to what I was looking for.

Because of the subject matter, this book is best for older children. According to Wikipedia, it’s recommended for ages 12 to 15, and that estimate seems about right to me. There is real violence in the story. The children start using weapons against each other, and Lisa gets a gunshot wound. When her friend is treating her wound, she gives Lisa alcohol to drink because they don’t have any better painkiller.