The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree by Gloria Houston, pictures by Barbara Cooney, 1988.
Ruthie is a little girl living on a farm in Pine Grove in the Appalachian Mountains during World War I. (The story calls it The Great War because that was its name before WWII.) During the spring, Ruthie’s father selected a tree for the village church’s Christmas celebration. The local families take turns providing the tree, and it’s their family’s turn. Ruthie goes with him to pick out the right tree and mark it with a red ribbon.
However, during the summer, Ruthie’s father has to go away to be a soldier overseas. Ruthie and her mother tend the farm while her father is away, but money is tight. Ruthie thinks ahead to Christmas and prays for her father to come home and for a special Christmas present for herself – a pretty doll with a cream-colored dress with ribbons and lace.
In the fall of that year (1918), Ruthie’s father writes a letter, saying that the Armistice has been signed, meaning that the war is over, so he’s sure he’ll be home for Christmas. Ruthie and her mother keep waiting for him to arrive any day, but he doesn’t seem to come, and they don’t know exactly when to expect him.
At school, Ruthie is told that she will have the role of the heavenly angel in the Christmas play and that they are still expecting Ruthie’s father to supply the Christmas tree. Ruthie is looking forward to it, but Ruthie and her mother don’t have enough money for a new dress for the angel costume, and there is still the worry about when her father will return home, and if he will make it in time to cut the Christmas tree and take it to the church.
The local preacher tells them that the person who is due to provide a Christmas tree next year is willing to do it this year instead, if Ruthie’s father can’t get home in time, but Ruthie’s mother is still sure that their family can manage the tree. Ruthie’s mother decides that she and Ruthie will go get the tree themselves. It isn’t easy, but they manage it, and Ruthie’s mother also finds a way to make a dress for Ruthie’s angel costume.
However, there are two more things that would make this Christmas perfect for Ruthie – if her father returns home in time for Christmas and if she somehow receives the doll of her dreams.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
This is a sweet, old-fashioned Christmas story about wishes coming true. Wishes coming true at Christmas is a popular theme in Christmas stories, and in this book, they come true because Ruthie’s mother and Ruthie do what they need to do to make everything work out the way they want it to. They could have let someone else provide the Christmas tree, and no one would have thought less of them for doing it because the father of the family was still away, but they were determined to see their family’s promise to provide the Christmas tree through. The mother also uses her old wedding dress for the material for Ruthie’s angel costume, and it’s implied that she also made the angel doll for the top of the Christmas tree that becomes Ruthie’s special Christmas present.
The pictures are charming, and they fit well with the Cottagecore aesthetic that’s been popular in recent years.
Following the death of Jodie and Peter’s father in a car accident, Jodie’s mother decides that she want to move to a new town and have a fresh start. For some reason, people have been gossiping about the family, particularly Jodie’s Aunt Claire. Jodie doesn’t really want to leave her old home, but she does make a new best friend in her new school. However, they don’t return to their home town of East Hill until Great Aunt Winifred invites them to visit for Christmas.
Jodie loves Aunt Winifred and her big, old-fashioned house with the old toys in the attic. She has fond memories of her whole family getting together for Christmas there, and she thinks that if they visit for Christmas, things will be like they used to be. Jodie’s mother knows differently. Things are not like they used to be with Jodie’s father gone and the gossip still hanging over the family, although Jodie doesn’t understand why. Her mother refuses to return to East Hill, but she says that Jodie can visit Aunt Winifred if she wants. Jodie doesn’t want to be away from her mother and little brother on Christmas itself, so they decide that Jodie can visit Aunt Winifred the week after Christmas, between Christmas and New Year’s.
Jodie still can’t understand why her mother doesn’t want to see Aunt Winifred, but it’s really Aunt Claire that she doesn’t want to see. Jodie’s mother explains that, around the time that Jodie’s father died in the car accident, some money was stolen from Mr. Carrington. Jodie’s father was a lawyer, and Mr. Carrington was once of his clients, and the theft was discovered after Mr. Carrington himself died of a heart attack. Aunt Claire accused of Jodie’s father of stealing the money, but since he was killed in the accident, he never had a chance to defend himself against the accusation. Uncle Phillip, Claire’s husband and vice-president of the bank where Mr. Carrington kept his safe deposit box, never believed that Jodie’s father took the money, but it was bad publicity for the bank when it was stolen. He was trying to get to the bottom of the situation, but he had been in the car with Jodie’s father during the car accident and was also killed. That may have been why Aunt Claire started making public accusations against Jodie’s father – to deflect any blame or suspicion of Phillip because of his role in the bank and maybe also because she blamed Jodie’s father for getting him killed in the car accident when they skidded on a snowy road.
In spite of everything that’s happened, and even because of it, Jodie feels like she has to return to East Hill to see Aunt Winifred and face Aunt Claire. She’s not sure how, but she thinks that if she goes back to East Hill, she might find something that will clear up the situation. There had been another suspect in the theft, a nephew of Mr. Carrington, who was known to be in debt, but nobody could figure out how he could have stolen the money. When it comes down to it, Aunt Claire herself spends more money than she should.
When she gets to East Hill, she realizes that her mother was correct that East Hill doesn’t feel like it used to. Jodie no longer feels like East Hill is her home. She likes her new town and misses her best friend. Her older cousin, Lisa, who is Aunt Claire’s daughter, used to get on her nerves sometimes because she was always the “perfect” child. She is very pretty and talented on the piano, always seems to look great and do everything right, and is also kind of a snob. When Lisa is at the train station with Aunt Winifred to meet Jodie on her arrival, Jodie realizes that Lisa bothers her even more than she used did before.
Lisa is still fussy and snobby and impatient with Aunt Winifred, who sleeps more because she’s getting old. One thing that interests Lisa about Aunt Winifred is that she’s heard that Aunt Winifred is making a new will, and she openly speculates about who is going to get the most out of it. Jodie is disgusted by this talk and asks her why anybody has to get more than anyone else, and Lisa matter-of-factly tells her that there is always a favorite and that the favorite always gets the most. (I can guess that her mother probably told her this.) From the way Lisa talks, Jodie can tell that she thinks of herself as the “perfect” favorite and, therefore, already entitled to receive the most. It disturbs Jodie that Lisa doesn’t seem to care that Aunt Winifred would have to die for her to get anything at all. One day, she overhears Aunt Claire lecturing Lisa that she needs to practice her piano music more while visiting Aunt Winifred because she wants Aunt Winifred to pay for Lisa to study music in Europe. Aunt Winifred seems to want it even more than Lisa does.
While Lisa busies herself with practicing at the piano and calling her friends on the phone, Jodie goes up to the attic to see the old toys they used to play with. When she looks in the attic, she is surprised that her feelings about the attic have also changed. There is something about the attic that now bothers her, but she can’t quite think what it is. She feels like something in the attic has changed or that she wants to change something there, but she’s not sure why. When she looks for a log cabin toy with little pioneer and Indian (Native American) figurines that her father always loved, she is surprised that it is missing. Aunt Claire doesn’t think much of it, suggesting that Aunt Winifred might have just thrown it away, not knowing that it was Jodie’s father’s old favorite toy. However, Jodie knows that can’t be it. Aunt Winifred never had any children of her own, and she loved her two nephews as if they were her sons. She was very sentimental about the toys that they loved, and Jodie doubts that she would just suddenly decide to get rid of one of them.
When Jodie finally figures out what happened to the log cabin toy, the whole truth about the theft comes out.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
I liked the setting of the story. Big old houses like Aunt Winifred’s aren’t very common anymore, and I always wanted to live in a house with an attic that had a solid floor to it, like the one in the story. Jodie’s memories of playing with the old toys and dress-up clothes there sound fun. Although Jodie doesn’t spend Christmas itself at the house, she is still there during the Christmas season, so the Christmas tree with its unique, old ornaments is still there, and the family enjoys Christmas treats, like chocolates and mince pies.
I had theories about the mystery right from the start. I hoped that Mr. Carrington’s nephew, who we never met, wouldn’t be the thief because that felt too much like bringing in an outsider as the culprit. When Jodie meets a boy named Kenny and becomes friends with him, I thought his family might have something to do with the theft, but they don’t. He’s just a boy who likes Jodie and has fun with her, doing things that Lisa thinks she’s too grown-up to do anymore, like throwing snowballs and making a snowman.
I really suspected Aunt Claire as the thief from the beginning. She definitely has expensive tastes, and when she appears in the story, her clothes and hairstyle sound much more expensive than I would expect from a widow raising a daughter in a fairly small town. The way she and her daughter talk about getting their hands on Aunt Winifred’s money emphasizes how callous and money-grubbing she is. Even Lisa admits that she doesn’t really want to go to Europe to study music. Her mother is the one who wants to go to Europe, and she’s using Lisa as the excuse to get money so both of them can go there. Lisa doesn’t like her mother’s plans because she wants to stay at her school with her friends. It occurred to me that Claire’s accusations about Jodie’s father taking Mr. Carrington’s money could have been to cover up for herself doing it. Since her husband worked at the bank, she could have used his position to get access to the money herself. That’s not exactly what happened, though.
Claire is not the thief. In a way, she was the motive for the crime, so when the truth comes out, it’s still going to hurt. When Jodie discovers what really happened, she even feels sorry for her aunt because she knows that the truth will be hard for her to hear and will affect her reputation in this town in the same way that the suspicions about her father affected her mother. Jodie also feels sorry for Lisa, which I felt was more justified than sympathy for Claire. However, the story ends with Jodie finding out the truth for herself, and we aren’t shown the moment when she reveals it to everyone. We don’t get to see everyone’s reactions, and if it changes any of Aunt Winifred’s thoughts about her will, we don’t see that happen. We don’t know what arrangements Aunt Winifred made originally, so that doesn’t matter too much. The talk about the will is really to establish the moral characters of Aunt Claire and Lisa.
I suspected that Aunt Claire was set up as being so awful and unlikable that readers wouldn’t be sorry if she turned out to be the thief, kind of like how the people who get murdered in old episodes of Murder She Wrote are usually the people who are the most nasty to everyone during the first ten minutes of the show, so viewers are not too sad about them dying and can get on with the puzzle of figuring out who did it. Aunt Claire makes a great villain because I disliked her so much that I wouldn’t have cared no matter what she was guilty of or what happened to her. She’s the snotty kind of woman who says awful things about other people, both behind their backs and to their faces. She criticizes people she sees for being fat and offers unsolicited critiques of their clothes, like she’s the fashion police. She’s extremely manipulative of other people and their emotions for the sake of getting what she wants and making herself feel good, and this even extends to her own daughter. Basically, she’s one of those middle school mean girls who never grew up beyond that point. That she’s good at being awful to other people and getting things she wants is enough justification to her that she sees nothing wrong with being the way she is. I’ve known so many other horrible adults exactly like that in real life that I knew I would cheer to see her shoved under the proverbial bus.
I was expecting that her greediness and high maintenance lifestyle were her motives and that her nastiness was a set-up so readers could focus on the puzzle of how she gets caught. I even thought that the story might take a dark twist with her tampering with Aunt Winifred’s medicine to slowly poison her for the inheritance she expected, since Aunt Winifred said that her medicine was making her unusually sleepy. However, Aunt Claire isn’t an attempted murderer any more than she’s a thief. She’s just an awful person who uses people, and her high maintenance lifestyle was the motive for the real thief, who was probably also manipulated by Claire and her expensive tastes.
Lisa’s character softens a little during the course of the story. She’s still fussy and a little spoiled because of the way her mother is, but Jodie realizes that Lisa isn’t very happy with the way her mother is. Lisa likes music, but her mother is manipulating her as much as anyone else to further her lifestyle. Lisa knows what she wants for herself, and hopefully, even though the truth about the theft is going to hurt her, it might actually change things for Lisa’s benefit in the long term.
I also wondered whether the car accident had anything to do with the theft, but apparently, it doesn’t. It doesn’t seem to have been caused deliberately or by anything directly related to the theft. It was just an accident that took place at an unfortunate time.
In the beginning, Lucy is an orphan who lives in the countryside with her elderly Aunt Olive. The two of them are very fond of each other. Then, Aunt Olive dies, and Lucy has to go live in London with her distant cousins. Even though Lucy inherited her aunt’s house, there were bills to settle, and the trustees in charge of Lucy’s legacy had to sell the house to pay them and provide money to help support Lucy. Lucy’s cousins have agreed to take her for Christmas, but Lucy isn’t sure whether or not she will be living with them permanently. It depends on how well Lucy gets along with the children of the family. People keep telling her “we’ll see” and reminding her to be brave and sensible and that changes are natural after someone dies. Her trustees and her aunt’s old friends want to do what’s best for Lucy, although they’re secretly a little concerned about whether their plans are what’s best for her. If she doesn’t get along with her relatives, they might have to send her to a boarding school, although they know that type of environment isn’t really suited to Lucy’s personality.
Since Lucy was raised and home-schooled by an elderly and old-fashioned woman, she is not accustomed to living in a big family or with other children and not even accustomed to any type of school environment. The adults who know her understand that Lucy is a quiet, reserved child who acts older than her age. Before she goes to stay with her relatives for Christmas, one of her trustees, Mr. Thomas, talks to Lucy about her life with her aunt and the need to give her other relatives a chance to be friendly. He says that Aunt Olive was an old woman who had a tendency to look back to the past, but Lucy is young and still has her future ahead of her. Mr. Thomas advises her to look forward. However, Lucy can only think of how much she already misses her life with her aunt and how she can’t imagine being happy with these relatives she’s never even met. She escapes thinking about these things by imagining herself other places, immersing herself in past memories.
Lucy feels out of place in her new home and worries if these relatives really want her. The father of the family, called Uncle Peter, is an architect, and the mother, called Aunt Gwen, is an artist who used to design theatrical costumes. Their three children are pretty close in age to Lucy. Patrick is the oldest, Rachel is closest to Lucy’s age, and Bill is the youngest. Their house is an old Victorian house, which pleases Lucy, but she doesn’t like it when she finds out that Uncle Peter is modernizing it. Home renovations are part of what he does as an architect, but Lucy prefers old-fashioned styles to the modern ones, which feel too stark and have garish colors. The children of the family are noisy, and Lucy has to share a room with Rachel, when she’s used to having a room of her own in a quiet, old-fashioned house. Rachel points out that they haven’t been in this house very long themselves, and there are rooms in this house that haven’t been renovated yet. When the renovations are done, Lucy could have one of those rooms for herself, but again, Lucy feels like the renovations are destroying the old-fashioned charm of the place. She doesn’t see why everything has to be new and modern. While she has no idea where else she could go, Lucy just can’t imagine herself living in this house with these people.
Then, Lucy makes an unusual new friend. Alice is a girl about Lucy’s age, and she used to live in the aunt and uncle’s house 100 years before. Now, she haunts it as a ghost. Lucy first sees Alice in a mirror in the attic, where there are many antiques that have been stored away from Alice’s time. Alice brings Lucy back in time to visit her in the Victorian era because Alice is lonely in the past. She has six older siblings, but four of them have already left home to marry or start careers, and two are at boarding school. Her parents are away much of the time, so most of the time, she is alone with her tutor, whom she calls Mademoiselle. Alice says that she really wants someone to play with.
Alice shows Lucy her toys and games, which are all familiar to Lucy, looking like the ones she always played with at Aunt Olive’s house. However, Alice is spoiled and cheats at games to win. The two of them argue about it, and then Alice sends Lucy to the attic because her tutor is coming, and Alice doesn’t want her to see Lucy. Lucy finds herself in the attic in her aunt and uncle’s house in modern times, unsure of what just happened.
Over the next few days, Lucy spends part of her time with her relatives, preparing for Christmas, and part of her time in the Victorian era with Alice, which is also around Christmastime. Things are still awkward between Lucy and her cousins. On the one hand, she has some fun with them, doing things that Aunt Olive would never have allowed her to do, like going to the movies without adults and eating take-out fish and chips. On the other hand, Lucy is still overwhelmed when her cousins get boisterous, and she is repulsed by their ultra-modern Christmas decorations. Although Alice intimidates and even frightens Lucy, whenever things get overwhelming for her in modern life, Lucy retreats into the past with Alice … only for Alice to get intimidating and frightening again as she tries to keep Lucy in the past with her.
In some ways, Lucy feels more comfortable in the past than she does in her aunt and uncle’s modern home. She likes the homey feel of the house as it was in the Victorian era. The old-fashioned Christmas decorations and Alice’s party are far more charming to her than the modern ones, and she likes the old-fashioned party games better than dancing to modern music. However, Lucy becomes increasingly afraid of Alice. Alice tries to trap Lucy in the past and make her forget all about the present. When Lucy resists and tries to remember things about her family or modern times, Alice gets angry and threatens her. She says that she’ll make something bad happen if Lucy tells anybody about her. Alice has sinister intentions for Lucy. Alice is a lonely and selfish child who isn’t above lies, cheating, and manipulation to get what she wants. She exists only in the Victorian era, and what she wants more than anything is a playmate to join her for all eternity. She says that she always gets what she wants. She wants Lucy.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The original British title of this book was Come Back, Lucy, which was also the title of the tv mini-series from 1978 based on the book. You can sometimes see trailers, clips, or episodes from this series online on YouTube. This fan page has more information about the tv mini-series and the book and its author.
My Reaction and Spoilers
The heart of the story is about looking back and living in the past instead of looking forward and living in the present. Aunt Olive, as an elderly woman, had a tendency to live in the past, bringing up Lucy as if she were a Victorian girl instead of a modern one. Because that was the only life Lucy knew from a young age, she clung to it after Aunt Olive’s death. It was what was familiar and comfortable to her when her life was changing, and she needed comfort. Her London relatives know that this is the case, but they’re not sure how to connect with her at first and to help her see that modern times and a new home can also become comfortable.
There’s a difference between just liking old-fashioned, vintage things and styles and the type of living in the past that Lucy does at first. There are people in modern times who still like the Cottagecore aesthetic and who try to live a slower pace of life and enjoy old-fashioned things and simple pleasures, something that came out of the coronavirus pandemic. But, just having a few vintage things and learning to slow down and appreciate the small things in life isn’t quite what Lucy does. It is the sort of thing she misses from the old-fashioned house in the country, where she used to live, but the problem is that she uses her memories of that time, Aunt Olive, and the stories that Aunt Olive used to tell her about life in the past to take her mind off the things and people in the present too much. Whenever things get stressful or upsetting to her, she retreats into past memories, so she doesn’t have to think about how her life has changed or learn to appreciate the things around her or get along with other people. Her relatives can tell that she’s shutting them out, and while they’re sympathetic to her struggling through her grief, it’s also hurtful that she’s rejecting them. She’s not just using her past memories or love of old-fashioned things for comfort but to avoid dealing with things in the present and forming new relationships.
At the same time, Lucy feels like her relatives don’t really care about her or the life she had before she came to them because they never express sympathy about Aunt Olive’s death or ask her any questions about what she was like. However, that’s due to a misunderstanding and miscommunication rather than her relatives trying to ignore Lucy or Aunt Olive’s death. If Lucy had bothered to read Aunt Gwen’s letter to her all the way through before she arrived at their house, she would have known that Aunt Gwen had told her children not to bring up the subject of Aunt Olive until Lucy did because she didn’t want them upsetting Lucy by forcing her to talk about her death if she wasn’t ready. Her relatives planned to wait for Lucy to feel ready to talk to them and for her to raise the subject herself. Because she was too upset to read the letter, Lucy didn’t understand that and has been waiting for them to talk to her first. At the end of the story, Lucy does read the letter, and she and her relatives have an honest talk about everything, including Alice. This is exactly what Lucy needs to free herself from Alice.
Alice is a similar sort of malevolent child ghost to Helen in Wait Till Helen Comes or Emily in Jane-Emily. She is selfish, and she has no concern for Lucy and Lucy’s life and future. Alice is dead, and she lives only in the past because that’s the only place where she can live. She has no future left. The one thing that past Alice is waiting for is a message from her parents, who are looking for a house in the country to buy. When the message finally arrives for her on December 21, 1873, Lucy has her final encounter with Alice on the 100th anniversary of the event. Alice is happy because she wants to move to the new house and live there with her parents, but she’s also decided that she’s going to bring Lucy with her by drowning her in an icy pond. In a frightening scene, she tricks Lucy into walking out on thin ice, but fortunately, Lucy is saved by her cousin Patrick.
After this incident and her brush with death, Lucy is finally able to release all of her bottled-up feelings about Aunt Olive and the changes in her life and explain everything to her relatives about Alice and how Alice has been influencing her to do and say things that upset them. Aunt Gwen had suspected that Lucy had seen a ghost or at least thought that she had, but she had thought that maybe Lucy had seen someone who made her think that she was seeing Aunt Olive’s ghost. Then, Aunt Gwen saw a door in the house open and close by itself, making her think that maybe the ghost was real. Rachel knew that Lucy was upset about someone named Alice because Lucy was talking in her sleep, but she didn’t know who Alice was. By the time Lucy reveals everything, all of her relatives have had encounters with Alice or things Alice caused to happen. Lucy isn’t sure when she explains things whether or not they all believe her that Alice is a real ghost. Aunt Gwen is convinced, and so is Bill because he met Alice face-to-face at one point and can describe her. Uncle Peter does consider the idea that Alice is a ghost in Lucy’s mind, inspired by all of Aunt Olive’s stories about her Victorian youth and the old house they now live in, but then, he looks through more of the things in the attic and finds Alice’s old scrapbook with her final note about moving to the countryside and starting a new life on December 21st. In the context of the story, Alice is a real ghost who posed a real threat to Lucy, and not just the imagining of a distraught child.
There are a couple of factors that end Alice’s threat to Lucy. The first one is getting past the 100th anniversary of Alice leaving the house, which seems to hold great significance to the ghost, like it was her last opportunity to connect with the house in the present. We never find out Alice’s full history or why she haunts the house as a child in the time shortly before she was supposed to move to the country. She simply disappears after her attempt to kill Lucy so she can remain in the past forever and go to her new home with her. Alice is a ghost who is conscious that she is a ghost, and she knows that Lucy lives in a different time period with people who inhabit her house in the future or present time. Because Alice is a child and seems forever stuck as a lonely child, it seems that she died young somehow and is aware of it, but we never find out exactly how that happened. I have a theory that she was killed in an accident on the way to her new home, but we are never told that. It feels like a let-down that we don’t get the rest of the story about Alice, especially because Lucy says that she would like to learn more about the historical Alice so she can think of her more as a person and less as a ghost.
There is a sequel to this book called Lucy Beware, so perhaps more of that information is revealed in the sequel. The sequel is much more rare than the original, book, though. It only rarely comes up for sale, even online. I’ve checked Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Alibris, and Abe Books, and currently, none of them have a copy. It’s not even on Internet Archive. (At least, not yet, as of this writing.) You can try to get the sequel through an interlibrary loan, but not all libraries will loan out books that are considered “rare.”
The most important factor that breaks Alice’s connection to Lucy is Lucy’s changing feelings. Lucy has some control over when she goes back in time and when she returns to the present, although it takes her a while to see it. There are times when she deliberately seeks out Alice in the past, even when Alice disturbs her, because she just finds the present time and her relatives so overwhelming. While she doesn’t really want to stay with Alice in the past forever, especially at the expense of her own life, Alice gives her someone to talk to about things that she can’t bring herself to talk about with her relatives and a place to retreat to so she doesn’t have to think about the present or her future. At one point, Lucy and Rachel are talking about the importance of making plans for the future. Rachel says that everyone needs to think of the future, and she is exhilarated by all of the possibilities that modern life has to offer for young women. However, because of her life with Aunt Olive, who lived mainly in the past, Lucy is unaccustomed to thinking about the future and finds the prospect frightening. To a woman like Aunt Olive, girls should simply receive a basic education and then get married. Beyond that, Lucy doesn’t know what she wants out of life. She has never considered having a career or learning to support herself because Aunt Olive never discussed things like that with her and never prepared her to make decisions like that. At the beginning of the story, Lucy finds it difficult to look much beyond the immediate future anyway because it seems uncertain where she will live since Aunt Olive is gone. However, once she and her relatives open up to each other and it becomes clear that they do want her to stay with them, her doubts and fears about her immediate future are resolved. She has people who love her, care about her feelings, and want her to talk to them about things, so she no longer feels so overwhelmed about her situation and in need of a retreat. Aunt Gwen says that Alice no longer has influence over her because, whether or not Alice still wants Lucy, Lucy no longer wants or needs Alice. Lucy can now face her present and future without feeling the need or temptation to escape into Alice’s past.
It’s true for people who are victims of living narcissists, too. Abusive people count on their victims being unable to leave them, and they even try to gaslight victims into thinking that they really need them in their lives, for some reason. As soon as their victims realize that they can escape and manage without them, their abusers lose their hold on them. Lucy has no more desire to return to her abuser/attempted murderer because she has dealt with the insecurities that made her vulnerable to Alice and kept her tied to the past, and she has forged new bonds with other people.
One other thing that I really liked about this story was the description of the antique games and game pieces that Lucy kept from Aunt Olive’s house. If you’ve never heard the term before, Spillikins is an old name for Pick-up Sticks. One of the more unique gaming pieces was the set of fish-shaped game counters. There were real fish-shaped game counters (link repaired 12-11-23) like that that were used in the 1800s for playing card games.
#30 The Mystery of the Golden Reindeer by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 2000.
Titus doesn’t really like to go Christmas shopping. The department store is always crowded around Christmastime, and he’d really rather just stay home, where it’s comfortable and quiet, and eat popcorn and watch videos. However, his mother really wants to go to the department store and so do his cousins, so they persuade him to come along. The three cousins are allowed to browse in the toys without adult supervision, as long as they stay together. They make arrangements to meet Titus’s mother for lunch in the store’s restaurant.
When they get to the toy department, they hear an announcement about a lost child, and to their surprise, their younger cousin, Patience, suddenly appears. She had been shopping with her grandmother when she spotted her cousins and started following them. As far as Patience is concerned, she wasn’t lost because she knew where she was. It was her grandmother who was lost, and she points out that she found her cousins instead of them finding her. The cousins manage to find Patience’s grandmother and reunite the two of them, and they invite them to come to the restaurant with them for lunch.
When they meet up with Titus’s mother, they all are surprised when she tells off Titus for wandering around the department store by himself when he was supposed to stay with his cousins. They all insist that Titus was with them the entire time. Titus’s mother was sure that she saw him riding the escalator alone, but none of them were on the escalator because Patience is afraid of escalators. Patience suddenly speaks up and says that she must have seen the “other Titus”, not the “real Titus.”
They enjoy the restaurant, which has a large Christmas tree, decorated with golden reindeer. During lunch, Patience tries to point out the “other Titus” to them, but nobody else spots who she’s pointing to. Patience is known for having an imaginary friend named Amy and for making up tall tales. She sometimes mixed up things she’s imagined with things that are real, so they’re not sure if she really saw the “other Titus” or not. (Personally, I thought this was silly on their part because they already know that Titus’s mother saw someone who looked a lot like him. Titus is wearing a distinctive black-and-white scarf, so I figured at this point that there’s someone wearing a scarf that’s also black-and-white.) Titus feels a little uneasy that there might be another him wandering around.
Titus’s mother wants to look at some furniture after lunch, and she asks Patience’s grandmother if she could come with her and give her opinion. The three cousins would rather go look at store windows instead of furniture, and Patience insists that they take her with them. The older cousins know that Patience can be a handful to look after, but Sarah-Jane knows that she would feel badly if they didn’t take Patience somewhere where she would have more fun than she would have looking at furniture. Patience promises that she’ll stay with her cousins and not run off anywhere, so the adults agree to let her go with them.
While Titus and Patience are looking at the Christmas tree together, Titus is surprised by a teenage boy who comes up to him and starts talking to him as if he knows him. The teenager says that he has a message for him and tells him, “Happy Birthday. The golden reindeer. Dish towels. Christmas tree.” Titus asks him what he’s talking about, and the teenager says that he was paid to deliver that message to him and that he must have been expecting him. When the other cousins come back from the restrooms, Titus and Patience tells them what happened, and they’re equally confused. All they can think is that this bizarre message was meant for the “other Titus.” But, who is the “other Titus”, and what does the message mean?
Theme of the Story:
“What you get from wisdom is better than the finest gold.”
Proverbs 8:19
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
This mystery does involve a lookalike for Titus. However, the mystery doesn’t quite end when they meet the other boy. He tells them that he got a phone call telling him to come to the department store for a special message about something that belongs to his family that was stolen. When the other kids tell him the message that was given to Titus, he finds it just as confusing as they do.
It’s Patience who really solves the mystery of what the clues in the message mean, and that’s both because she is nosy and because, as a young child, she doesn’t take certain things for granted, the way an adult or older child would. Sometimes, people see not what’s actually there but what they expect to see. Titus’s mother didn’t really see him on the escalator alone; she saw the other boy, who happened to be wearing a different black-and-white scarf. She just figured it was Titus because she expected the boy with the black-and-white scarf would be her son, and she didn’t look closer to notice that it wasn’t the same boy and that the scarf actually had a different pattern. It was the same with the teenager who was looking for the other boy. In the case of the clues, all of the older kids assume that the packages underneath the decorative Christmas trees in the department store are just empty boxes, wrapped up for decoration. Because Patience wants to check to see if they’re all empty, she’s the one who realizes that one of the packages isn’t like the others.
We never learn who stole the object that the other boy was looking for, but he does get it back. Also, Patience learns to get over her fear of the escalator.
#6 The Mystery of the Magi’s Treasure by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1995.
Timothy, Titus, and Sarah-Jane go to visit their grandparents in the resort town where they live over the summer. Their grandfather is the pastor of a church, and in their Sunday school class, there are three boys, all named Kevin, who are close friends and have a reputation for being troublemakers and goofs. The three cousins have little to do with the three Kevins, but it’s because of the three Kevins that they are recruited to help with the community’s Christmas in July art fair.
The community holds an art fair every summer, and this year, they’ve chosen Christmas in July as their theme. Some of the local churches are holding a special concert of Christmas music as part of the event, and someone through it would be a fun idea to have children dressed in costumes from the Nativity play, like shepherds and angels, to hand out flyers for the concert. The three Kevins get the roles of the Three Wise Men, but it becomes obvious pretty quickly that this arrangement isn’t going to work because they’re more like the Three Stooges than stately wise men. The choir director says that they need more reliable children to be the Three Wise Men, so naturally, he gives the roles to the three cousins. After all, their grandfather is the pastor, and their grandmother is always bragging about how well-behaved they are.
As soon as they put on the wise men costumes, Timothy realizes that there’s method to the Kevins’ madness. If you get a reputation for being reliable and doing good work, people give you more work. If you get a reputation for not doing anything right, nobody will even let you do certain jobs. The job of being wise men in July is anything but fun. The robes are too heavy and hot for summer. They can’t even complain because everyone says they look adorable, which is humiliating, and their grandmother keeps telling everyone how proud she is of them. It’s almost like they’re being punished for being good, and they can’t say a thing about it without disappointing Grandma.
Then, something really strange happens while they’re passing out flyers. A woman they’ve never seen before runs up to them and gives them three boxes. She says that they’re supposed to be part of their costumes, the gifts for Baby Jesus. She seems a little flustered and has trouble remembering exactly what the gifts are supposed to be, forgetting the words “frankincense” and “myrrh.” She tells the kids that she’s in charge of the props and that they have to take good care of these boxes and only return them to her. Then, she rushes off again.
The kids think that it’s an inconvenience to have to carry around the boxes as well as pass out flyers, but the woman’s manner struck them as strange. When they look more closely at the boxes, the workmanship also seems unusually good for objects used only for a Nativity play.
Then, the kids overhear a couple of artists talking about some artwork stolen from a fellow artist. Suddenly, they have an uncomfortable feeling that they know what was stolen, who took it, and where it is now. The big problem is that the thief is watching them.
Theme of the Story: Goodness.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
After the kids hear about an artist’s work getting stolen, it doesn’t take them long to realize that the boxes they were give were probably the stolen artwork and that the “prop” lady who didn’t seem to know what she was doing was the thief. She was just looking for a convenient place to leave her stolen goods so she wouldn’t be caught walking around with them, and she happened to spot the children in their wise men costumes. Three fancy boxes look like what people would expect the gifts of the Three Wise Men to look like, so the thief could essentially hide the stolen goods in plain sight. The artists talking about the theft were uncertain exactly what type of art was stolen, so most people at the fair also wouldn’t know what to look for and would just assume that the boxes were props.
The Kevins got them into this mess in the first place, and they turn out to be the way out of it, too. The thief was counting on the kids being easy for her to watch because they stand out in their costumes but almost invisible to bystanders because everyone else just disregards them as being in costume and doesn’t look closer. What the kids realize is that maybe she also hasn’t looked closely enough to really recognize them and is only following the costumes, no matter who happens to be wearing them. Once the cousins explain to the Kevins what’s happening, it’s exciting enough for the Kevins to be more than happy to participate. They finally put their playacting and thrill-seeking to a good purpose!
Weirdly, the thief also unintentionally did a good deed for the artist. The artist has been doubting herself and the quality of her work. While stealing from her was a bad thing to do, the thief unintentionally confirmed that her work was so good that she was willing to steal it! It reminded me of a funny line from an old episode of Remington Steele with an artist whose work was stolen: “I’ve finally hit the big time! I’ve been stolen!”
The theme of “goodness” sounds somewhat generic, but the story is really about turning something bad into something good. The kids didn’t really like getting the roles of the Three Wise Men, but if they hadn’t taken them, they wouldn’t have found this mystery and saved the stolen artwork. Instead of goofing off and messing up like usual, the Kevins came through when it was really important. The woman who tried to take something that didn’t belong to her proved that it was something with value. The boxes themselves were made from pieces of junk, but they’re beautiful. It doesn’t mean that stealing becomes right if it unintentionally accomplishes something good, but the kids come to realize that even things that don’t seem like they’re worth anything can have unexpected good sides. Even Baby Jesus was born in a humble stable.
The Mystery in the Snow by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1992.
The Alden children are disappointed because there is still no snow this winter, and they’ve really been looking forward to snow. Their grandfather tells them not to worry because, soon, they’ll have all the snow they want. A friend of his, Mr. Mercer, owns a ski lodge and has been urging him to visit and bring his grandchildren. There’s going to be a winter carnival there. The children are eager to go and have fun in the snow!
At the ski lodge, the Alden children meet a boy named Jimmy. Jimmy is a regular visitor to the lodge, but for some reason, he says that his parents never stay. There is also a girl called Freddie, which is short for Fredrica. Her parents aren’t at the hotel, either, because they’re visiting her sister, but she says that they will come later. Freddie could have gone to visit her sister, too, but she didn’t want to miss the fun at the ski lodge. She and Jimmy are both team captains for the winter games, which include skiing, skating, sledding, snow sculpting, and ice carving. Strangely, when the team captains get the box where kids are supposed to submit their names to join the teams, they can’t find the keys. The loss of the keys is worrying because, if they can’t find them, they won’t be able to get into the equipment shop for the equipment they need for the games. They still manage to put together the teams, and the Alden children also join.
Then, Mr. Mercer discovers that all four of the tires on his truck are flat. Grandfather Alden offers to drive him into town to get a pump for the tires and to talk to a locksmith about getting into the equipment shop.
While the adults tend to that, the kids talk about the try-outs for different events. The Aldens are all excited about different events. Violet notices that one girl, Nan, isn’t enthusiastic about the events at all and doesn’t want to try out for anything. Violet asks her why, and Nan says that joining in the games was her parents’ idea, not hers. They say it will be fun, but she never really enjoys herself at these things. She doesn’t think there are any events she can do, and she’d hate to be the one to lose an event for her team. To encourage her and build up her confidence, Violet suggests that they both sign up for the ice carving event, which doesn’t require a try out. Violet says that she doesn’t know how to do ice carving, and Violet says that’s fine because she doesn’t, either. She says that it would just be fun to try it out together. Nan points out that they would be competing against each other because they’re on opposite teams, but Violet says that doesn’t matter because they’re both equals, neither one of them knowing what they’re doing. Nan is cheered by Violet’s friendliness and signs up for ice carving.
Nan isn’t the only unhappy child involved in the games, and the Aldens begin to feel that the focus on competition instead of simply having fun in the snow is partly to blame. A boy named Pete is upset that he didn’t get selected for any of the events he tried out for, and he says he doesn’t want to be the time team’s time keeper, which is the default position. Pete says he no longer wants to be involved in any of it. Freddie is angry because she and Jimmy drew names for their team members at random, and she thinks that Jimmy ended up with most of the really good team members. She wants a way to even things out. When the Aldens ask Jimmy if his parents will come to the awards dinner at the end of the games, he seems upset and doesn’t want to talk about it much. They’re not sure if Jimmy is more upset about his parents not being there than he pretends or if he’s worried about the awards ceremony in general.
It soon becomes apparent that someone is intentionally trying to sabotage the winter games. Someone smashes the snow sculptures that the Aldens made for their team. Then, someone steals a skier’s skis and ruins the ice sculpture made by the other team. The entire skating event has to be postponed when someone ruins the ice.
Who is doing these things and why? It could be someone who’s trying to make their team win the competition, but the sabotage has been aimed at both teams and at the event in general. Is it a kid who is unhappy with the contest or their position on their team? Jimmy seems eager to cancel events every time something goes wrong. Can the Boxcar Children figure out who is responsible?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
There are themes in the story about competition and family. The Aldens aren’t accustomed to thinking competitively about other people because they’re used to doing things with each other cooperatively, as a team. Because they’re accustomed to thinking cooperatively, they are friendly with people on the other teams, like Nan, and they’re more focused on the fun of the events than on winning. That makes them different from some of the other kids, who are concerned about winning, but there are other issues in the book besides competition that matter more.
There are indications in the story that the parents of the children in the competition don’t always want the same things that their children want. Nan, for instance, didn’t even want to join contest, but her parents urged her to do it. Also, some of the children aren’t as good at others at conveying to their parents what they really want. When the most troubled child in the group finally manages to say what they really want, many things get straightened out.
I feel like there are many stories where the conflicts revolve around people who don’t really communicate with each other. In this story, there’s a character who blames others for not understanding how they feel, but even they have to acknowledge that they haven’t actually explained their feelings. They’ve just been expecting everyone else to know what they’ve been feeling. Some honest communication straightens out the problem, and that’s a good life lesson for kids and families.
Snowbound Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1968.
The school that most of the Alden children attend is closed temporarily because there was a fire and the building needs to be repaired. Henry is in college (this is one of the books in the early part of the series where the children age), but he doesn’t have to go back for another week, so the family is talking about what they’d like to do. Benny says that he wants to go up to the hunter’s cabin in the Oak Hill woods. Grandfather Alden belongs to the sportsman’s club that owns the cabin, but the hunters in the club don’t use it during the fall. It’s early for there to be snow, so Grandfather Alden thinks it will be okay. Grandfather Alden isn’t eager to go himself, but he thinks that it’s okay if the kids want to spend a week there.
The kids bring some food with them to the cabin, but they plan to buy more from the nearest store, which is a five-mile hike away. On their arrival, they choose the places where they’re going to sleep in the cabin, and they look through the cabin’s guest book for names they recognize. One name they recognize is the Nelson family. The Nelsons are the ones who own the store, and they kids wonder why they’ve visited the cabin three times recently because they wouldn’t have come there to hunt. They decide to ask the Nelsons about it when they go to the store.
The Nelsons are friendly and helpful at the store. When the kids ask about their trips to the cabin, Mr. Nelson just says that they sometimes like a change of scene. The cabin used to belong to the Nelson family before the sporting club bought it. However, the Nelsons’ young son, Pugsy, says that whenever they go to the cabin, they “look and look.” His parents stop him from saying more, but the Aldens wonder what the Nelsons could be looking for at the cabin.
The Nelsons give them useful advice about dealing with the squirrels at the cabin and about cooking. Mr. Nelson loves cooking and baking. In particular, he likes to make buns, but he makes an odd comment about how they’re not as good as they could be.
Back at the cabin, the Aldens find a hidden broom closet and a strange message that seems to be in some kind of code. They can’t understand what it means, and they wonder if this message could be what the Nelsons are looking for. Because they don’t understand the significance of the message, they’re not sure what to do about it. The Nelsons are nice, so the kids don’t want to think that they might be involved in anything bad, but if there’s an innocent reason for them to have this message, why are they being so secretive about it?
Although it is early for snow, a bad snow storm comes that leaves the Aldens snowbound in the cabin. Fortunately, they have plenty of supplies, and they can use their radio to hear about weather conditions. There are messages on the radio for people who have been separated from family members, and one of them is from the children’s grandfather, telling them to remain in the cabin and wait for help because he will get to them as soon as he can.
However, the Nelsons were also worried about the Aldens and made their ways through the snowy woods to check on them. The snow was worse than they thought, so now, the Nelsons are also stuck at the cabin with the Aldens. While they wait for their rescuers to arrive, the Aldens and Nelsons discuss the secret message and what the Nelsons are really looking for.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
The Nelsons are actually a nice family, and there is an innocent reason for their behavior. Mr. Nelson’s father and grandfather also loved baking, and they had a special recipe that they used for making buns. Their recipe had a secret ingredient, but unfortunately, they both died before passing on their secret. Mr. Nelson thinks that, if he could make the buns like they did, he could become famous or at least earn more money for his family. He is a good baker, but the recipe is something special. The secret message is part of the recipe, but there’s still a missing piece of the puzzle. The Aldens and the Nelsons use their time when they’re snowbound in the cabin to look for the rest.
This story is equal parts adventure and mystery. Fans of the Cottagecore aesthetic will appreciate how the Aldens make do with the primitive conditions at the cabin, use plants as decoration, and gather nuts in the woods before the snowstorm.
Years after this book was published, another author wrote a cookbook based on food references in the Boxcar Children series, and she included a recipe for the buns in this story. The story never reveals the secret ingredient, and the author uses some shortcuts in preparing them, but it’s an easy recipe that kids can learn to make.
Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne, 2002.
There is a letter to the readers at the beginning of the book, where the author briefly describes the history of the Thanksgiving holiday and how it started as a three-day harvest festival and didn’t become a regularly-celebrated holiday until President Lincoln declared it as a national holiday of thanksgiving to be celebrated annually on the last Thursday in November in 1863. The separate prologue to the book explains that Jack and Annie have started learning magic, and they’ve been going on a series of missions to find different types of magic.
It’s Thanksgiving, and the children know that they will be leaving for their grandmother’s house soon, but they can’t resist going to the tree house to see if there’s another message from Morgan. There is a message that tells the children that they are about to find a new kind of magic. A book in the tree house takes the children back in time to the first Thanksgiving in the American colonies.
They read about the Pilgrims and the voyage of the Mayflower, and they realize that they are now in 17th century Plymouth. Annie remembers how her class at school put on a play about Thanksgiving, and she gets excited, thinking about how they’re about to meet some of the people they studied in school. She dashes off, eager to get a look at them, although Jack thinks they should pause and work out a plan before they approach anyone. Unfortunately, Jack gets caught in a hunting snare.
A group of people, Pilgrims and Native Americans, come to see what got caught in the snare, and they find Jack and Annie. When they question the children, Jack isn’t sure exactly what to say, so he tells them that they came from “a village up north” and that they’re here to learn how to grow corn. Remembering something else from the book, he claims that his parents sailed to the colonies with Captain John Smith when he and Annie were babies. Captain Standish says that Squanto knew Captain John Smith and that he might remember them. To the children’s surprise, when Governor Bradford asks Squanto if he remembers two babies called Jack and Annie who sailed with Captain John Smith, he says he does. Jack wonders if he’s mistaking them for two other children from the past.
The children witness the arrival of Chief Massasoit and his men. Priscilla tells the children that they were invited to join the harvest festival (something that historians debate), but they weren’t expecting such a large group, and they wonder if they’re going to be able to feed everyone. The Wampanoag say that they will go hunting to provide more food, but the Pilgrims say that they will also gather more food.
Jack and Annie are invited to join the food-gathering efforts, although it’s difficult for them because they’re not used to hunting and fishing, like 17th century children would be. Annie thinks it won’t be so bad because they’ve helped their parents prepare for Thanksgiving before, but the types of food at this harvest festival are very different from the “traditional” Thanksgiving food the children would have expected, and the methods of preparing them are old-fashioned. Jack and Annie find themselves trying to catch eels and find clams and trying to tend things cooking over an open fire. The children’s efforts don’t go well, and at first, they’re afraid that they’ve ruined the feast, but the magic they came to seek saves everything.
My Reaction and Spoilers
The magic that the children find is called the “magic of community.” Even though Jack and Annie think that they haven’t contributed much, and they burnt the turkey they were trying to cook, their mishaps haven’t ruined the feast because the entire community was helping all the time. Because everyone contributed something, there is enough for everyone. Besides learning how the first Thanksgiving was different from the holiday they know, Jack and Annie learn about cooperation, how people share and support each other.
At one point, Jack asks Squanto why he says that he remembered them. Squanto seems to realize that Jack and Annie aren’t quite what they said they were, but he says it wasn’t really them that he was remembering. He explains a little about his own past and what it felt like to be an outsider in a strange place, reminding the children to remember that feeling and to be kind to others in the same situation.
I liked the author’s noted about the history of the Thanksgiving holiday. For another book that explains the first Thanksgiving feast from the point of view of both the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag guests, I recommend Giving Thanks by Kate Waters.
Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu, 2000.
Jenna is inspired to become one of the jingle dancers at the powwow because her grandmother has been a jingle dancer. She loves the way the little cone-shaped bells on the dancers’ costumes sing!
Her grandmother tells her that there won’t be enough time to get the tin for making the jingles for her costume this time, but next time, she can dance with the Girls group.
Jenna knows how to do the dance because she has watched old videos of her grandmother dancing and has practiced. However, she can’t really do a proper jingle dance without the jingles for her dancing costume.
However, her grandmother isn’t the only person Jenna knows who has been a jingle dancer. Other women in Jenna’s family and among her family’s friends have also been jingle dancers, and not all of them dance anymore. Perhaps, with their help, Jenna can get the jingles she needs in time for this powwow!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I liked the way the book showed how Jenna’s family and friend supported her and helped her to take part in a tradition that they have all shared. They can’t all be there to see Jenna when she dances, but Jenna dances for all them, her dress covered in borrowed jingles!
A section in the back of the book explains more about Jenna’s tribe and the traditional dance shown in the story. The story is set in Oklahoma, and Jenna is part of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has Ojibway (Chippewa/Anishinabe) ancestry. Elements of both tribal cultures appear in the story. The tradition of jingle dancing originated with the Ojibway people, and the book describes details of the costume (called “regalia” in the book) that women and girls wear to perform the dance. The book also contains a glossary of words that appear in the story with some additional details about their significance.
I think this story is a fun way to introduce readers to Native American traditions that may not be familiar to them. I also enjoyed the pictures, which have a lovely, dream-like quality to them.
Tepary Jones, called Tep for short, has always been fascinated by the ancient cliff dwelling known as Picture House. One night, he goes there with his dog, Dusty, because he think it would be a great place to watch a lunar eclipse. However, he and Dusty aren’t there alone. Tep witnesses a couple of looters illegally digging for valuable artifacts. The looters uncover the burial of a medicine man and begin taking some of the things he had buried with him. They damage the site before they leave, but Tep discovers that they have left behind an unusual artifact, a small flute made of polished bone. When Tep picks up the flute, he feels compelled to play it. Not wanting to leave the flute behind in case the looters return, Tep takes it home with him.
That night, Tep has a strange dream that he turned into a packrat, like one of the literal packrats he saw up at Picture House. However, he soon realizes that this was not just a dream. Ever since he played the flute, he finds himself turning into the animal he saw the first time he did so. Tep returns the flute to the body of the medicine man and reports the looting to the authorities, hoping that, once the body is respectfully reburied, whatever magic or curse is afflicting him will end. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
Tep still finds himself turning to the packrat at night, having uncontrollable urges to go out and explore and find food, and it’s dangerous because animal predators and even his own parents are after him. Rodents in the house are a serious concern because they can carry hantavirus, which causes dangerous respiratory infections in humans. After his mother catches sight of him in packrat form, Tep’s parents start setting out traps. His dog, Dusty, seems to know him even when he’s a rodent and helps to protect him, but Tep knows that he’s going to have to stop this transformation somehow, before either his parents catch him or a predator eats him!
Tep’s parents are academics and researchers who study ancient agriculture and cultivate varieties of seeds on their farm that require little water to grow. To buy himself time from his parents’ efforts to catch the packrat, Tep makes the argument that the packrat is a part of the ecosystem and that it might be performing an important role in the environment, like birds that help propagate seeds by eating them and then depositing them in new places. Tep brings up the fact that there are some seeds that really need to be processed in a bird’s digestive system before they can grow. It’s a thoughtful argument, but the looming threat of hantavirus in their community still means concern about the presence of rodents. Hantavirus is serious, even fatal, and people in their community have already fallen victim to it.
Tep returns to Picture House to try to find the flute again to break whatever spell is affecting him, but he can’t find it. He only hears what he thinks is the sound of someone playing the flute, and he’s not sure if he really hears it or if he’s imagining it. Then, a stranger comes to the farm, a man who appears to be a humpbacked Native American or possibly someone from Mexico or Central America. He calls himself Cricket, and Tep’s family thinks that he’s probably just another migrant worker. Tep shows Cricket around the farm and explains the different types of seeds they cultivate and how they can be used to keep particular varieties of plants alive for their drought-resistant or pest-resistant qualities. Cricket doesn’t say much, but he seems to approve of the idea of cultivating more varieties of seeds. When he helps Tepary to plant seeds, Tep notices that he uses a planting stick, like Native Americans traditionally did.
Of course, Cricket is no ordinary farm worker. Tepary notices his unusual ability with plants and animals, and one night, Cricket speaks with Tepary while he’s in his packrat form. Cricket knows more of what’s been happening than anyone because he is one of the legendary figures from Native American folklore known as Kokopelli. Kokopelli was a legendary humpbacked flute player known for bringing seeds to people, and Cricket says that he still visits people like Tep’s family, who are interested in the past, who cultivate the land, and who keep seeds alive. Tep appeals to him for help with his transformations, and Cricket says he will help, if he can, although he notes that Tep seems to have been managing well. Cricket says that Tep can use the flute to reverse his condition, but only if he knows the right notes to play on it. If he plays the wrong notes, he could change into something else and make his condition worse. The clues to the notes are contained in the pictures on the walls of Picture House.
Tep manages to use his animal form to play a trick on Coyote in the tradition of old trickster tales and to rescue his dog from the looters. Then, Tep’s mother contracts hantavirus. Cricket says that ancient people also suffered from the disease, and they used an herb to cure it. Nobody grows that particular herb anymore, but there should still be some contained in the medicine bundle buried with the old medicine man at Picture House. To save his mother and break the spell on him, Tep must return there to find the medicine man’s bundle and the flute.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
I vaguely remember having read this book when I was a kid, around the time when it was first published in the 1990s. It stuck in my mind because it takes place in the Southwestern United States, where I grew up, and it was also the first time that I had heard about hantavirus, which is a serious concern in real life. I couldn’t remember exactly how the book ended, though.
Reading it as an adult, I understand more about the parents’ work and the commentary about interrelated aspects of the ecosystem than I did as a kid. I understood some aspects of environmentalism and ecosystems as a kid because those were topics that we discussed in science classes at school in the 1990s, but admittedly, science wasn’t my best subject, and I’ve had more time to grasp certain concepts since then.
There are agricultural researchers in real life who do what Tep’s parents are doing, trying to cultivate seeds for drought-resistant crops, which are important in places like the area where I live, that are very dry for much of the year, and are becoming even more important due to climate change. That type of research takes time to cultivate generations of plants and to propagate seeds with desirable qualities. Modern researchers also take information and inspiration from past agricultural practices to enhance modern techniques (paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany). When Tep is talking to Cricket, he explains why it’s important to keep growing a different varieties of crops because some varieties are more resistant to different types of problems that others, like drought-resistant crops or pest-resistant crops. One of the dangers of huge, corporate farms is that they produce too few varieties of particular types of crops, focusing on the most popular ones, leaving them vulnerable to being almost completely wiped out by particular disasters. People need to keep growing older and less popular varieties of crops to keep the plant varieties alive and keep producing seeds for new generations so agriculture as a whole will have those varieties to draw on for the plant qualities they need to cope with changes in the environment and/or particular plant diseases.
One of the reasons why I liked this book is that it references the legend of Kokopelli. Because I grew up in the Southwestern United States, I grew up seeing images of Kokopelli along with other Southwestern Native American symbols. Kokopelli is often used as a decorative image in Southwestern art, although not everyone who has or uses the decoration knows the legends behind it. Kokopelli is described in somewhat different ways in different stories, but he is generally a fertility figure who travels from village to village, bringing changes to the seasons and promoting good harvests. He is also a trickster figure and represents human fertility. In some stories, human women get pregnant everywhere he visits, including by Kokopelli himself, an aspect of the character that does not appear in this particular book because it’s not kid-friendly. There is a theory that the legends might be based on traveling Aztec merchants who arrived seasonally, carrying sacks of seeds and other goods to trade on their backs, giving them that hunched appearance.
The book frequently uses the word “Indian” instead of Native American. It seems to be meant in an informal way rather than a disrespectful one, although I found it irritating because it can be a bit confusing. When Tep uses it in relation to the Native American ruins nearby, context tells readers that he means “Native American”, but when he uses it when he talks about places around the world that use the seeds his family produces, it becomes more confusing. At one point, he uses the word “Indian” and then talks about an order his parents have received from Pakistan, so did Tep mean Native Americans or people from India the country in that context? I heard the word “Indian” used a lot in relation to Native Americans when I was growing up, and sometimes, I even have the urge to use it out of old habits, but I don’t really like using that word anymore. It’s not so bad if you say “American Indian”, but just saying “Indian” by itself is often confusing. I generally agree with the modern convention of saying “Native American” or using the name of a specific tribe, if you know the name to use, both because it sounds more respectful and because it really makes a difference in the clarity of the sentence. It’s just not as effective if someone immediately has to ask, “Wait a minute, do you mean ‘American Indian’ or ‘Indian from India’?”, and when it’s in writing, there isn’t even a live person there to ask.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 