Posted on by TracyC

The Traitor’s Gate

TraitorsGate

The Traitor’s Gate by Avi, 2007.

The story is set in London, in 1849. Fourteen-year-old John Huffam lives with his parents and sister and their servant, Brigit and attends a school taught by a former military man who acts like he is still in the army and teaches them little beyond discipline and what army life would be like.

Then, one day, John is called home suddenly because of a family emergency. His family has fallen on hard times, and his father is in debt, so the family’s belongings are being confiscated. His father is summoned to appear in court, and if he cannot find the money to pay his debt, he will have to go to debtors’ prison. John’s father is shocked because he doesn’t actually owe any money to the man who is trying to call in the debt, Finnegan O’Doul.

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In spite of this, John and the rest of the Huffam family must spend the night in the bailiff’s sponging house, the Halfmoon Inn. There, John’s father again promises John that there is no debt between himself and Mr. O’Doul. He even says that he doesn’t really know O’Doul, although John doubts him. It seems like his father has had dealings of some kind with the man that he wants to keep secret.

John’s father, Wesley Huffam, was originally from a fairly well-off family, but all the family’s money ended up going to a great-aunt instead of to him (possibly because it became obvious to his relatives that he had little skill at handling money in the first place). John’s father is resentful toward the great-aunt, Euphemia Huffam, for inheriting when he thinks that, as a man, he should have been first in line for the family’s money. However, with this enormous (although possibly false) debt hanging over his head, he may be forced to appeal to Great-Aunt Euphemia for help. He persuades John to go and visit Great-Aunt Euphemia on his behalf, since he is not allowed to leave the sponging house for now and the past quarrels between him and his aunt would make it unlikely that his aunt would want to see him. John is beginning to realize that there are pieces of his father’s life and their family’s past that have been kept from him, and he doesn’t like the idea that his father has been deceiving him, but with their family in such a desperate situation, he agrees to visit Great-Aunt Euphemia.

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The bailiff, John’s mother, and Brigid all agree that John is going to have to be instrumental in solving their family’s problems. Of all the people in his family, he is the most practical, in spite of his young age. His father is an impractical man, stuck in a vision of his family’s former glory (and his aunt’s current money, which he does not share in) that doesn’t fit their current circumstances. John’s mother thinks that her husband’s job as a clerk for the Naval Ordinance Office doesn’t provide enough money for the family to live on, even though he earns more than twice what typical London tradesmen of the time do. The real problem is that the family doesn’t live within its means (it is eventually revealed that Wesley Huffam has been withholding money from his family that he uses for gambling), and John’s father’s snobbish attitude because he thinks of his family as being more grand than the commoners around them alienates people who might otherwise be friends and help them. John knows that he’s young, and he’s not completely sure what he can do to help his family, but he knows that there is no other option but to try. In the process, he learns quite a lot about life, himself, the people in his family, and the wider issues in the world around him, including some political intrigue that hits uncomfortably close to home.

Great-Aunt Euphemia agrees to see John when he comes to her house, but their first meeting doesn’t go very well. Great-Aunt Euphemia is ill (or says she is), and she bluntly tells John that his father was always bad with money. She is not at all surprised that he is in debt and needs her help. John gets upset at the bad things that Euphemia tells him about his father, and she gets angry when John tells her the amount of the debt. At first, John is sure that she will refuse to help them completely, but Euphemia tells him not to assume anything but that he should come back the next day.  Her eventual contribution to helping John’s family in their troubles comes in the form of a job for John.

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As John moves around the city, he gets the feeling that he is being followed, and he is. One of the people following him turns out to be Inspector Copperfield (or so he calls himself) from Scotland Yard. When John confronts him, the inspector seems to have a pretty good idea of the difficulty that his family is in and what John himself has been doing. John asks him why he cares, and the inspector says that John’s father is suspected of a crime and that John had better learn more about what his father has been doing and share that information with him. John doesn’t believe that his father could be a criminal, but the accusation is worrying because he knows that his father is hiding something (his gambling addiction isn’t the only secret he has).

The other person following John is a young girl in ragged clothes. The girl, who calls herself Sary the Sneak, approaches John herself, freely admitting that she’s been following him. In spite of her young age, Sarah (or Sary, as she is frequently called) lives on her own and must support herself because her mother is dead and her father was transported to Australia. People don’t often notice a young girl on the street, so sometimes people will pay her to follow someone and provide information about them. The reason why she tells John about it is because she isn’t above playing both sides of the street; sometimes, she gets the people she’s been following to pay her to provide them with information about the people who hired her to spy on them. She considers it even-handed. However, John has no money to pay her for information and finds her spying distasteful, so he doesn’t want to take her up on the offer at first.

However, John does a little spying of his own when his father sneaks away from the Halfmoon Inn, which he is not supposed to do. He follows his father to a pub called the Red Lion, where he witnesses his father gambling with money that he had claimed not to have. More than that, he sees his father arguing with a man who turns out to be O’Doul, another gambler. To John’s surprise, his teacher also shows up and seems to know O’Doul. When John later confronts his father with what he saw at the Red Lion, all his father will say is that he is carrying a fortune around in his head. Later, John overhears the bailiff speaking with someone else, an Inspector Ratchet from Scotland, saying that it appears that Wesley Huffam may be a traitor involved with spies and that the Inspector Copperfield who spoke to John earlier was an imposter, probably also a spy.

Could it be true? Is John’s father really a traitor, selling naval secrets from his job? If so, who can John trust?  Conspirators seem to be around every corner, and John has the feeling that the people who are closest to him may be the biggest threats.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Daily Life in a Victorian House

VictorianHouse

Daily Life in a Victorian House by Laura Wilson, 1993.

The book begins by giving some background on the Victorian era, which lasted from 1838, when Victoria became Queen of England, to Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. It was a time of expansion and colonization for the British Empire. Society was becoming increasingly industrialized and urban, although there was still great inequality about who had voting rights, and there were great gaps between rich and poor people.

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To explain what a typical day might be like for people living in the Victorian era, the book introduces a fictional upper middle class family, the Smiths. It explains some of the background of the Smith family and the members of the Smith household. Mr. George Smith, the head of the household, is a lawyer. His wife, Florence, does not need to work, so she spends her time overseeing the household servants, managing the household accounts (how much money is needed for household expenses such as food, clothes, and supplies), visiting friends, and shopping. Mr. Smith’s income is good enough to afford for the family to have a cook, two maids, and a nurse to look after the youngest children in the family.

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The Smiths have three living children. One of their daughters died in infancy, which was sadly common for that era. The eldest boy in the family, Albert, spends most of his time away at boarding school. The two youngest children, Alice and John, are cared for by their nurse. When John is old enough, he will go away to boarding school, like Albert, but Alice will probably be tutored at home. Their parents spend surprisingly little time with them, even in the general course of a day.

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There is a map of the Smiths’ house, and then the book begins explaining what each of the members of the house do at different times of the day. Each day, the servants are the first to get up because they need to light the fires to heat the house and start cleaning and making breakfast, which would be a large meal.

Something that I thought was interesting was that the cook typically purchased food from tradesmen who sold their goods door-to-door. This was also important to the maids, who are in their teens, because they worked such long hours that they really wouldn’t have had time to get away and met young men in any other way. Their suitors would likely be the young tradesmen. Of course, the young tradesmen would have met many young female servants at all of the households they visited during their daily rounds.

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The maids would have spent their days cleaning, tasks that would have been more time-consuming without more modern inventions. Vacuum cleaners were invented toward the end of the era, in 1899. Cooking was also a time-consuming job, although the book does explain some innovations for the Victorian kitchen. Because Mrs. Smith had servants to do all of her cooking and cleaning for her, she never even went into her own kitchen at all. It was considered improper for a lady with servants to handle menial tasks herself, and the servants wouldn’t have welcomed her interference in their work.

I liked the sections of the book that explained about the lives of children in the Victorian era the best, although I was surprised at how little time children from well-off families would have spent with their parents. Generally, young children would see their parents in the morning for prayers and spend about an hour with their mother in the late afternoon. Other than that, they would spend most of their time in the nursery with their nurse, who would take care of them and didn’t welcome much parental interference any more than the cook would welcome the lady of the house supervising her work.

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I also liked the sections about toys and games and entertainment as well as the description of what young Albert’s life would have been like at boarding school. The book also explains what life and childhood were like for less fortunate people during the Victorian era.

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Overall, I really liked this book. It’s a good introduction to Victorian history and life, and it does one of the things that I really wish adult books would do more often: have pictures. Pictures really are worth a thousand words, and actually showing the objects that people of this time would have used in their daily lives is far more effective than pages of lengthy descriptions of them in words only.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Chimney Sweeps

ChimneySweeps

Chimney Sweeps by James Cross Giblin, 1982.

This book explains about the history and traditions of chimney sweeps. I love books that cover odd topics from history like this!

It starts by explaining the origins of chimneys in the Middle Ages. Before they were invented, people would have to have simple holes in the roofs of their houses to let out smoke from heating and cooking fires, or they would have had to rely on windows or doors to perform the function of venting smoke. Chimneys vent smoke more efficiently, but the more they are used, the more soot collects inside them, and they need to be cleaned out from time to time. If they aren’t cleaned, the build-up inside could either block air from getting to the fire in the fireplace, causing the fire to go out sooner, or it could pose a fire risk because the build-up inside the chimney is still flammable. Sometimes, home owners could clean their own chimneys, if they weren’t very tall, but the taller the chimney is, the more professionals are needed to clean it.

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Modern chimney cleaners have vacuums that they can use to clean soot out of a chimney, but originally, people were basically relying on brushes. The book explains the evolution of the profession and variations in the profession between England, Germany, and the United States. Germany is significant to the profession because it was one of the first places where chimney sweep became a recognized profession and there were laws even in the 1400s that all chimneys had to be cleaned twice year. (Remember that chimneys that haven’t been cleaned can be a real fire risk, posing a danger not only to you but your neighbors, especially during a time when most buildings are made of wood and other highly flammable materials.) When chimney sweep became a recognized profession during the Middle Ages, members of the profession formed a guild (as was traditional for different professions in general during the Middle Ages) and established rules and standards for the profession. One of the responsibilities of a guild was to decide on the training and qualifications that the profession requires, and in the case of chimney sweeps, the only way to learn was by serving an apprenticeship. The apprentice would live with a master sweep for three years, learning the trade, and at the end of his training, he would have to prove that he could clean a difficult chimney all by himself with thoroughness and reasonable speed.

There are many traditions and superstitions that came to surround the profession of chimney sweep. One of them that you can still sometimes see even in modern times is the image of the chimney sweep in a top hat. The exact reasons for adopting a top hat and tailcoat as part of their uniform are uncertain, but it began back in the 1500s in Europe. The sweeps often got their top hats and tailcoats as secondhand clothing from undertakers (yes, really). Part of the reason for wearing them might have been as an effort to look professional, but the color black was also suitable for a person who was going to end up covered in soot. According to superstition, the top hat would help to protect the chimney sweep from falling when he was on the roof of a house. Chimney sweeps were often thought to be lucky because their jobs were dangerous, yet they survived.

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However, chimney sweeps’ lives and work were often hard. In 18th century England, their jobs became more difficult because chimneys were purposely being built in narrow, crooked zigzags. The idea behind the crooked chimneys was that they would keep more heat in, but that made them much harder to clean. Because brushes couldn’t make it around the bends of these chimneys and adults couldn’t get into the narrow flues, sweeps became reliant on young boys to climb up into them and clean them by hand. Although the law required boy apprentices to be no younger than eight years old, many sweeps used boys as young as four or five. Sometimes these boys were official apprentices with the permission of their parents (typically from poor families with many children) or even the sweep’s own children (sometimes, they used their daughters because girls were often smaller than boys). If they couldn’t get children any other way, sometimes sweeps would get children from orphanages or might even resort to kidnapping.  The author of this book includes a short story about what a day in the life of a child chimney sweep was like.

The plight of child chimney sweeps came to light during the early 19th century, when people were starting to become concerned about child labor of all kinds. At first, there was strong opposition to banning child chimney sweeps and using new cleaning devices because the adult chimney sweeps saw it as a threat to their livelihoods and home owners were worried that new methods would be more expensive for them (of the two, I think I’m more offended at the home owners’ attitudes because of the implication that they were more upset about a possible slight increase in expense than the risk to the lives of the children they knowingly endangered).  Many of the child chimney sweeps suffered severe and permanent health problems because they were forced to do this kind of work at an early age, while they were still growing, and because they inhaled and were covered with soot for such long periods.

In the back of the book, there is a poem by William Blake called “The Chimney Sweeper,” which was published in Songs of Innocence in 1789. Knowing the risks to young children, like the little boys in the poem, makes the poem seem pretty disturbing, which may actually be the author’s intention.  Eventually, after long years of struggles in which children were still exploited in chimney sweeping spite of regulations against it, in 1875, Parliament tightened regulations against child labor even further, forcing chimney sweeps to apply for licenses in order to practice their trade, listing each of their apprentices and their ages.

Chimney sweeping in American history was a little different from the way things were done in Europe. The American colonists sometimes tried some strange tactics for cleaning their chimneys. One of the oddest methods was to tie a rope to a goose’s feet and lower it down the chimney. The goose would become frightened and flap its wings, thus knocking the soot loose. When the job was done, the home owner would pull the goose out of the chimney and wash it off. Another tactic was to actually burn the excess soot out of the chimney, although there was a risk of simply setting the house on fire. Later, American cities had official chimney sweeps who were licensed and regulated. On Southern plantations, slaves were used as chimney sweeps, and some of them continued to work as chimney sweeps after they gained their freedom.

Later, when homes began to be heated by other sources than fireplaces, chimney sweeps were in less demand, although there was increased demand in the 1970s, during the energy crisis, because people started using their fireplaces more instead of relying on other heating methods that involved scarce or expensive fuel. Chimney sweeps can also perform other duties beyond simply cleaning chimneys, depending on where they live. For example, in Germany, sweeps perform inspections of factories and homes to make sure that they are using fuels efficiently, looking for sources of needless pollution, which can lead to fines for the owners of the buildings if the problems are not corrected. Some people might also become chimney sweeps as a seasonal part-time job, while they also have another career.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Great Imposters

GreatImposters

Great Imposters by George Sullivan, 1982.

This is one of those unusual history books that I like about odd, little-covered topics.  The author begins by explaining what an imposter is: “a person who practices deception under an assumed name or character.”  Each of the people in the following collected stories is pretending to be someone they’re not, for a variety of different reasons.  The author points out the differences in the imposters’ motives, which range from pure greed to a desire for fame and attention to thrill-seeking behavior.  Each of these stories really happened, and the people involved were real people, even if their claimed identities weren’t.  The stories skip around in time and location, so they can be read in any order.

Willie the Actor – Willie Sutton started out as a petty thief while growing up in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood and later graduated to pulling a series of daring robberies while wearing various disguises during the 1930s through the early 1950s.

Bad Habit – Ferdinand “Fred” Waldo Demara, Jr. was the son of a fairly wealthy man who later lost the family’s money. Sis family’s loss of their previously well-off position was hard for Fred, and it led to a lifetime of him trying his hand at various professions (winging it without proper qualifications) and adopting (or stealing) new identities.  The movie The Great Imposter was based on his life and exploits.

Princess of Pretense – Sarah Wilson was a maid in the household of Queen Charlotte in England during the 18th century.  When she stole some clothes and jewelry belonging to the queen, she was exiled to the American colonies as an indentured servant.  However, she used her knowledge of royal and the objects she stole to run away and pose as an exiled younger sister of the queen.

Lord Gordon-Gordon – Philip Guy spent his youth stealing and selling stolen goods for extra money until he ended up stealing a trunk that happened to contain gentlemen’s clothes that happened to fit him.  When he noticed how much better everyone treated him when he was dressed as a wealthy gentleman, he created a new identity for himself as an English lord, undertaking greater thefts and frauds to maintain it.

The Counterfeit Count – Victor Lustig acquired a skill for languages when he was young and later used them when he masqueraded as an impoverished nobleman, covering up his gambling habits and confidence swindles in Europe and America, including his daring scheme in 1920s Paris to sell people materials from the Eiffel Tower, which was supposedly going to be dismantled.  He also once successfully swindled Al Capone.

The Claimant – During the mid-1800s, Arthur Orton pretended to be Roger Tichborne, the long-lost (and probably deceased) heir to an English baron.

The Baron of Arizona – James Addison Reavis, a former Confederate soldier from the American Civil War, learned that he had a talent for forgery and tried to use it to forge land grants, giving himself a large section of land in the Arizona Territory and the title the “Baron of Arizona.”

The Actress – Constance Cassandra “Cassie” Chadwick was a girl from a poor family in the 1800s who posed as a spiritualist, swindling people while claiming to save them from terrible fates, and later, pretended to be a lover of Andrew Carnegie.  (This book doesn’t mention it, but other sources say that Cassie’s real name was Elizabeth Bigley, and they say that she claimed to be Carnegie’s daughter, not his lover.)

Electronic Trickery – Reginald Jones was a scientist in Britain during the 1940s.  He was also a practical joker who enjoyed taking on new identities in order to play pranks on friends and colleagues over the phone.  Later, during WWII, he found ways to put his practical joking to practical use.

The Skywayman – Frank Abagnale took on a variety of new identities while writing bad checks during the 1960s and 1970s.  The story of his life was later turned into a book called Catch Me If You Can and a movie of the same name.

Dangerous Game – This chapter is about WWII intelligence agents, who also had to assume new identities to do their jobs without being caught.

The Man of a Hundred Lies – Stanley Clifford Weyman was an imposter from the 1920s through the mid-20th century who held a variety of prestigious positions . . . all self-appointed.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

A Samurai Never Fears Death

SamuraiNeverFearsDeath

A Samurai Never Fears Death by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, 2007.

This book is part of the The Samurai Detective Series.

Sixteen-year-old Seikei returns home to visit his birth family in Osaka while Judge Ooka investigates reports of smugglers in the city.  Seikei is a little nervous about seeing his birth family because he hasn’t gone to see them since he was adopted by Judge Ooka about two years before.  All he knows is that his younger brother, Denzaburo, is helping his father to run the family’s tea business, which is probably a relief to Seikei’s father because Denzaburo was always more interested in the business than Seikei was.

However, things have changed in Seikei’s family since he left Osaka, and his homecoming isn’t quite what he imagined it would be.  Seikei had expected that his older sister, Asako, might be married by now, but she says that Denzaburo is keeping her from her dowry because he needs her to help run the family business.  Although Denzaburo enjoys business and the life of a merchant, it turns out that Asako has a better mind for it than he has.  The two of them have been running the family’s tea shop by themselves because their father is ill.  Also, although the family no longer lives above their shop, having bought a new house for themselves, Denzaburo says that he sometimes stays at the shop overnight to receive deliveries of goods.  Seikei knows that can’t be true because no one ever delivers goods at night in Osaka.  Denzaburo brushes off Seikei’s questions by suggesting that the three of them visit the puppet theater together to celebrate Seikei’s visit.

At the puppet theater, Seikei learns that Asako is in love with a young man who is an apprentice there, Ojoji.  Because Ojoji is only an apprentice, the two of them cannot afford to get married, something that Denzaburo laughs about.  However, before Seikei can give the matter more thought, they discover that one of the narrators of the plays has been murdered, strangled.

They summon an official from Osaka to investigate the scene, Judge Izumo, but Seikei isn’t satisfied with his investigation because it seems like Judge Izumo is quick to jump to conclusions.  Then, suspicion falls on Ojoji.  Asako doesn’t believe that the man she loves could commit murder and wants Seikei to ask Judge Ooka to intercede on Ojoji’s behalf, so Seikei begins to search for evidence that will help to prove Ojoji’s innocence.

The mysterious happenings and murders (there is another death before the book is over) at the puppet theater are connected to the smuggling case that Judge Ooka is investigating, and for Seikei, part of the solution hits uncomfortably close to home.  However, I’d like to assure readers that Asako and her beloved get a happy ending.

During part of the story, Seikei struggles to understand how the villains, a group of bandits, seem to get so much support and admiration from other people in the community, including his brother.  It is Asako who explains it to him.  It’s partly about profit because the outlaws’ activities benefit others monetarily, but that’s only part of it.  In Japan’s society, birth typically determines people’s roles in life, and each role in society comes with its own expectations about behavior, as Seikei himself well knows.  Seikei is fortunate that circumstances allowed him to choose a different path when he didn’t feel comfortable in the role that his birth seemed to choose for him; he never really wanted to be a merchant in spite of being born into a merchant family.  Others similarly do not feel completely comfortable with the standards that society has set for them, and their fascination with the outlaws is that the outlaws do not seem to care what society or anyone else thinks of them.  The outlaws do exactly what they want, when they want to do it, dressing any way they please, acting any way they please, and taking anything they want to use for their own profit.  Denzaburo, who was always willing to cut corners when it profited him, sees nothing wrong with this, and he envies the outlaws for taking this idea to greater lengths that he would ever dare to do himself.

The idea of throwing off all rules and living in complete freedom without having to consider anyone else, their ideas, their wants, their needs, can be appealing.  Asako understands because, although she is better at business than either of her younger brothers, she cannot inherit the family’s tea business because she is a girl.  She thinks that, because the system of society doesn’t look out for her interests, she has to look out for herself, and what does no harm and makes people happy (in the sense of giving them lots of money) shouldn’t be illegal.  At first, Asako sees their activities as victimless crimes. Although she doesn’t use that term to describe it, it seems to be her attitude.  However, do victimless crimes really exist?  Seikei has a problem with this attitude because what the outlaws are doing has already caused harm in form of two deaths and the risk to Ojoji, who may take the blame for the deaths even though he is innocent.  Asako might not care very much about the others at the puppet theater, but she does care about Ojoji.

It’s true that Seikei has defied the usual rules of society by becoming something other than what he was intended to be, and for a time, he struggles with the idea, comparing himself to the outlaws, who were also unhappy with their roles and wanted something different.  However, the means that Seikei used to get what he wanted in life are different from the means that the outlaws use, and Seikei also realizes that his aspirations are very different from theirs.  While Seikei had always admired the samurai for their ideals and sense of honor and order, the outlaws throw off the ideals of their society in the name of doing whatever they want.  Although the outlaws do benefit some of the poorer members of society, paying money for goods that the makers might otherwise have to give to the upper classes as taxes and tribute and trying to stand up for abused children when they can because their leader was also abused as a child, their main focus is still on themselves and what they and their well-paying friends want.  Seikei is concerned with justice and truth, which are among his highest ideals.  Even though he learns early on that, as a samurai, he could claim responsibility for the deaths at the theater himself because, in their society, a samurai would have the legal authority to kill someone for an insult.  Claiming responsibility for the killings would allow Ojoji to go free, and it would be one way to solve the problem quickly and make Asako happy, but Seikei cares too much about finding the truth behind the murders and bringing the real murderer to justice to take the easy way out.  It is this difference in ideals and priorities between Seikei and others around him which set them on different paths in life.

One thought that seemed particularly poignant to me in the story is when Seikei reflects that we don’t always understand the importance of the choices we make in life at the time when we have to make them because we don’t fully understand all the ways in which a single choice can affect our lives.  He thinks this when the leader of the outlaws offers to let a boy who was abused come with them and join their group after they intervene in a beating that the boy’s father was giving him.  They tell him that joining their group would mean that he could do whatever he wants from now on.  The boy, not being sure who they are or what joining their group would really mean for him, chooses to stay with his father.  Seikei wonders then whether the boy will later regret his decision or not.  His father obviously doesn’t treat him well and may not truly appreciate his show of loyalty by remaining, although joining the outlaws comes with its own risks.  It’s difficult to say exactly which two fates the boy was really choosing between in the long run and which would be likely to give him a longer, happier life, which is probably why the boy chose to stick with what he already knew.

There is quite a lot in this story that can cause debates about the nature of law and order, society’s expectations, and the effects of crime on society and innocent bystanders.  I also found Seikei’s thoughts about what makes different people choose different paths in life fascinating.  I’ve often thought that what choices a person makes in life  are determined about half and half between a person’s basic nature and the circumstances in which people find themselves, but how much you think that or whether you give more weight to a person’s character vs. a person’s circumstances may also make a difference.

The story also explains what fugu is, and there is kind of a side plot in which Judge Ooka wants to try some.  A lot of the characters think that the risk involved in eating the stuff isn’t worth it, but well, a samurai never fears death, right?

There is a section in the back with historical information, explaining more about 18th century Japan and the style of puppet theaters called ningyo joruri, where unlike with marionettes or hand puppets, the puppeteers are on stage with the puppets themselves, wearing black garments with hoods so that the audience will disregard their presence (except for very well-known puppeteers, who might reveal their faces).  For another book that also involves this style of puppetry, see The Master Puppeteer.

Posted on by TracyC

In Darkness, Death

InDarknessDeath

In Darkness, Death by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, 2004.

This book is part of The Samurai Detective Series.

One night, after a party, Lord Inaba is killed in his room by a mysterious intruder. The only clue to the intruder’s identity is a red origami butterfly left at the scene. Lord Inaba’s death is an embarrassment to the shogun because Lord Inaba was in Edo under his protection.

It doesn’t take Judge Ooka long to decide that the murderer was a ninja. Ninjas are hired assassins known for their stealth and great skill with weapons. The butterfly left at the scene was to purify the spirit of the dead man and keep it from coming after his killer.

However, Judge Ooka says that it is not enough to know that that the murderer was a ninja; what they have to find out is who hired the ninja. He assigns Seikei the task of finding the source of the butterfly and learning who Lord Inaba’s enemies were. Judge Ooka finds a ninja he knows, Tatsuno, and convinces him to accompany Seikei on a journey through Lord Inaba’s territory and to teach him what ninjas are like. Although Seikei is not sure that he trusts Tatsuno, he learns to be grateful to him for his help and for saving him from the real danger, which comes from a surprising source.

While many children’s movies glorify the ninja, in real life, they were mercenaries, assassins for hire.  They used clever tricks in order to gain access to their victims and to get away without being caught, which ended up giving rise to a number of legends about them, attributing an almost supernatural quality to their skills.  While searching for the assassin and the person who hired him, Seikei learns a number of the tricks that ninjas used and the security measures that people would take to try to guard against them, such as nightingale floors (here is a video of a nightingale floor in a Japanese castle and another where you can hear the floor even better).

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Demon in the Teahouse

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The Demon in the Teahouse by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, 2001.

This is the second book in the Samurai Detective series.  Like other books in this series, it is not a book for young children!

Seikei is trying hard to learn all the things he must know as a samurai and Judge Ooka’s adopted son. One evening, while the judge is in Edo (now called Tokyo), he sends a message that Seikei and the other samurai must come immediately. Edo is in a state of emergency because of a series of fires that have been deliberately set in shops around the city. Although Judge Ooka helped to design a system of watch towers and fire brigades to help the city in case of fire, the threat of fire is still very serious because most of the buildings in Edo are made of wood.

The only clue they have to the person setting the fires is a geisha who was in one of the shops before it burned. Judge Ooka and Seikei go to the city’s pleasure district, Yoshiwara, where there are theaters and teahouses where geishas provide entertainment. While they are there, they learn that geishas have been dying under mysterious circumstances, and the people of Yoshiwara are afraid.

Judge Ooka has Seikei take a job as a servant at a teahouse in order to learn more. He soon discovers that the dead girls were all friends of Umae, one of the most popular geishas. Then, one of Umae’s many admirers brings her a present, and she is horrified to discover that it is the kimono that one of the dead girls was wearing. Who brought her the kimono, and what connection does she have to the fires?

The nature of the villain and the villain’s motives is rather dark for a middle school level book (although some middle school level books do get fairly dark).  Although the reading level of the book would be fine for someone aged twelve to fourteen, the subject matter might make the story more appropriate for someone a little older.  I recommend parental discretion on this one.  (Remember, it takes place in the “pleasure district” of Edo.)  It’s an exciting story, and it contains an interesting picture of feudal Japan, but it’s definitely not for young children!

The part about Judge Ooka organizing watch towers and fire brigades is something that the real, historical Judge Ooka actually did.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Pippi Longstocking

PippiLongstocking

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, 1950.

Pippi Longstocking is an iconic figure in children’s literature, a little red-haired girl with amazing strength (she can lift a horse all by herself) and a quick wit, who can “always come out on top” in any situation and is frequently doing exciting and hilarious things without adult supervision. The books in her series were originally from Sweden, with the first one written in 1945, but I’m reading a later English translation.

In the first book, she comes to live by herself in a house, which she calls Villa Villekulla, in a small town in Sweden when her father, a ship’s captain, is washed overboard at sea.  Although others fear that he is dead, Pippi thinks it more likely that he was washed up on an island of cannibals, where he will soon be making himself their king.  (Of course, Pippi turns out to be right, but that’s getting ahead of the story.) Her mother died when she was a baby, so Pippi now lives all by herself, except for her pet monkey and horse. She pays for the things she needs with money from the suitcase of gold coins that her father left for her and spends her time doing just as she pleases.

Tommy and Annika, the children who live next door to Ville Villekulla, are perfectly ordinary, basically obedient children, who live normal lives with their parents. When Pippi moves in next door, their lives get a lot more exciting. The first time they meet her, she’s walking backward down the street. When they ask her why she’s doing that, she says that everyone walks that way in Egypt. Tommy and Annika quickly realize that she’s making that up, and Pippi admits it, but she’s such an interesting person that they accept her invitation to join her for breakfast. They’re amazed when they find out that Pippi has no parents, only a monkey and a horse living with her, and are entertained by the tall tales that she tells.

When they go back to see her the next day, Pippi tells them that she’s a “thing-finder” and invites them to come and look for things with her. Basically, Pippi is a kind of scavenger, looking for valuable things, things that might be useful, or (which is more likely) just any old random junk that she might happen across. Pippi does find some random junk, although she makes sure that Tommy and Annika find better things (probably by hiding them herself).

Then, the children see a group of bullies beating up another boy and decide to intervene. The meanest of the bullies, Bengt, starts picking on Pippi, but picking on a girl with super strength isn’t the wisest move. She picks him up easily and drapes him over a tree branch. Then, she takes care of his friends, too.

Word quickly spreads through town about this strange girl. Some of the adults become concerned that such a young girl seems to be living on her own. A couple of policemen come to the Ville Villekulla one day to take Pippi to a children’s home, but she saucily tells them that she already has a children’s home because she’s a child and she’s at home. Then, she tricks them into playing a bizarre game of tag that ends with them being stuck on the roof of the house. The policemen decide that perhaps Pippi can take care of herself after all and give up.

Tommy and Annika try to persuade Pippi to come to school with them, but that doesn’t work out, either. Pippi, completely unfamiliar with the routine of school, thinks that the teacher is weirdly obsessed with numbers because she keeps demanding that her students give her the answers to math problems that Pippi thinks she should be able to solve on her own. The teacher concludes that school may not be for Pippi, at least not at this point in her life.

Tommy and Annika delight in the wild things that Pippi does, like facing off with a bull while they’re on a picnic, accepting a challenge to fight a strongman at the circus, and throwing a party with a couple of burglars.  When they invite Pippi to their mother’s coffee party, and their mother’s friends begin talking about their servants and how hard it is to find good help, Pippi (having already devastated the buffet of desserts and made a mess in general) jumps in with a series of tall tales about a servant that her grandparents had, interrupting everyone else.  Tommy and Annika’s mother finally decides that she’s had enough and sends Pippi away.  Pippi does leave, but still continuing the story about the servant on the way out, yelling out the punchline from down the street.

However, Pippi becomes a local hero when she saves some children from a fire after the fireman decide that they can’t reach them themselves.

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

My Reaction

I have to admit that, as a character, Pippi sometimes annoys me with her obvious lies and some of the stuff she does. She openly admits that she lies after telling some of her tall tales, but it’s the parts where she admonishes her listeners not to be so gullible that get to me. You can tell that her listeners aren’t really fooled at all; they’re just trying to be polite by not calling her a liar directly, and then she insults them for it. Maybe it’s Pippi who’s really the gullible one, thinking that she’s fooling people when she isn’t really. 

Admittedly, Pippi’s wild stories are sometimes amusing.  I liked the one where she claimed that the reason why other people don’t believe in ghosts is that all of the ghosts in the world live in her attic and play nine-pins with their heads.  When Tommy and Annika go up there to see them, there aren’t any, of course, and Pippi says that they must be away at a conference for ghosts and goblins.

I just don’t like it that Pippi seems to be deliberately trying to make people look dumb when she’s the one saying all the stupid stuff and it’s really obvious that people know it. I also don’t like the part where she makes such a mess at the coffee party because she seems to be trying to be a messy pain on purpose.  She insists that it’s just because she doesn’t know how to behave, but I get the sense that it’s just an excuse and that Pippi just likes to pretend to be more ignorant than she is, pushing limits just because she likes to and because she usually gets away with it.  I didn’t think it was very funny.  But, Tommy and Annika seem to just appreciate Pippi’s imagination, enjoying Pippi’s antics, which bring excitement and chaos to a world controlled by sensible adults, which can be boring to kids, and accepting Pippi’s stories for the tall tales they are, playing along with her.

Pippi herself is really a tall tale, with her super strength, her father the cannibal king, and her ability to turn pretty much any situation her to advantage.  Part of her ability to “come out on top” is due to her super strength and part of it is that Pippi approaches situations from the attitude that she’s already won and isn’t answerable to anyone but herself.  This approach doesn’t always work in real life (I can’t recommend trying it on any of your teachers, or worse still, your boss – not everyone is easily impressed, especially the people who pay your salary), and nobody in real life has Pippi’s super strength to back it up. The adults in the story frequently let Pippi win because they decide that fighting with her just isn’t worth it. (Admittedly, that does happen in real life, too. I’ve seen teachers and other people give in to people who are just too much of a pain to argue with because they’re too impatient or find the argument too exhausting.)  Kids delight in Pippi’s ability to get the better of the adults, who usually have all the control, and in Pippi’s freedom to do what she wants in all situations.

One thing that might surprise American children reading this story is that the children in the story drink coffee. Tommy and Annika say that they are usually only allowed to drink it at parties, although Pippi has it more often. It isn’t very common for American children to drink coffee in general because it’s usually considered more of an adult’s drink and because of concerns about the effects of too much caffeine on young children. Children in Scandinavia tend to drink coffee at a younger age than kids in the United States.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Bed-Knob and Broomstick

BedKnobBroomstickBed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, 1943, 1947.

This book is actually two books in one.  The title Bed-Knob and Broomstick is the one used for editions that include both the first book, The Magic Bed-Knob, and the sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks.  Together, these two books were the basis for the Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks, although the plot of the movie is considerably different from the two books. Because the movie is based on both of the books at once and because I read the combined edition, I’ll explain the plots of both of the books in one post.

There are two major differences between the movie and books that change many other things about the plot. The first one is that there is no mention of World War II in the books, even though the books were written during that time.  Miss Price was not studying magic to help the war effort, and the children were only in the countryside for vacation, not because they were evacuated there. Also, in the books, Emelius Jones (Emelius Brown in the movie) was a man they met when they traveled through time, not a man living in London during their own time.  He was not involved in Miss Price learning magic, although the two of them do end up together in the end.

The Magic Bed-Knob

At the beginning of the first book, the three Wilson children – Carey (who is described as being “about your age”), Charles (“a little younger”), and Paul (six years old) – are spending the summer with their Aunt Beatrice in Bedfordshire. There is never any mention of the children’s father in the books. Probably, their father is dead, although he might have left the family and went to live elsewhere or may be fighting overseas, although there is no mention of that in the book, making me think that it is probably not the case. The children apparently live with only their mother in London, and because she works, she always needs to find somewhere for them to stay during the summer, when they’re out of school. (This is a major plot point in both of the books.  In the Disney movie, the three children are orphans who have no memory of their birth parents, and their guardian was killed in a bombing shortly before they were evacuated to the countryside.  You only get their full backstory if you see the anniversary edition of the movie that includes the deleted scenes.)  While the children stay with Aunt Beatrice, they enjoy playing in the countryside, and one day, they happen to meet Miss Price, who they find with an injured ankle.

Miss Price is a respectable spinster from the village who gives piano lessons and is often seen riding around on her bicycle.  When they find her hurt, Carey says that they should get a doctor for her, but Miss Price insists that she doesn’t want one. Instead, she just asks the children to help her get home. As she starts to lean on Carey and Charles, Paul picks up a broom nearby. The older children thought it was just an old garden broom, but Paul calmly says that it belongs to Miss Price because it’s what she rides around on. The others are shocked, but Paul simply says that that he’s seen her improve in her flying, so Miss Price knows that he’s seen her riding her broom more than once. Miss Price is worried that everyone in the village will know now that she’s a witch, but Paul hadn’t even told his brother and sister what he’d seen.

The children help Miss Price get home, and they allow their aunt to think that Miss Price simply fell off of her bicycle. When the children are able to speak to Miss Price privately, they ask her directly if she’s a witch, and she admits that she’s studying to be one. She says that she’s had some talent for magic since she was young, but she never really had the time to develop it. The children are convinced that, while Miss Price might be a witch, she’s not a wicked one, and she says that’s true, that she started too late in life to be that way and that wickedness doesn’t come naturally to her. However, she’s still worried that the children might tell people about her magic.

Carey is the one who suggests that Miss Price give them a magical object as part of their pledge of secrecy (unlike in the movie, where it was Charlie’s idea), with the idea that, if they ever told anyone that she’s a witch, the magic would stop. Charles suggests that Miss Price could give them a magic ring that would summon a slave to do their bidding, but she says that she couldn’t manage that and that she has a better idea. Miss Price asks the children if they have anything on them they can twist, like a ring or a bracelet. The only thing they have is a bed-knob that Paul twisted off the end of his bed (basically, because he discovered that he could).

Miss Price says that the bed-knob will do nicely, and she casts a spell on it that will allow the children to travel to the destination of their choice when they put it back on the bed and give it a twist. If they turn it in one direction, they can travel in the present time, but turning it the other way can send them to the past. Also, because Paul was the one who had the bed-knob, he’s the only one who can make it work. Miss Price isn’t troubled by Paul’s young age because she thinks that it’s best to learn magic young, although she warns the children to be careful.

Because it’s Paul’s bed-knob, Carey and Charles give him first choice of where to go, but they think the places he wants to go sound mundane. He wants to either see a museum exhibit that the others saw without him once or to go home and see their mother in London. Carey and Charles try to persuade him to go someplace more exciting, but Paul insists that he wants to go home.

The bed whisks the children home to London, but when they get there, their mother isn’t home. Apparently, their mother has gone away for the weekend herself, and the children find themselves alone on their bed, in front of their house, on a foggy night. A policeman bumps into them, and when he demands to know who they are and where the bed came from, he doesn’t think it’s funny when they say, “Bedfordshire.” He takes them to the police station to spend the rest of the night. Fortunately, they find a way to get back to the bed and use the spell to return to their aunt’s house before they’re missed in the morning. It’s not quite the adventure that the children had been hoping for when they started out, but it’s just the beginning of their amazing summer!

However, magic turns out to be more dangerous than they thought. Their next adventure takes them to an island with cannibals (yeah, one of those scenes, sigh – I think that the island of talking animals in the movie was more fun), and they narrowly escape after Miss Price has a duel of magic with a witch doctor. Their magical adventures create problems that the children can’t explain to their aunt without giving away Miss Price’s secret. Eventually, their messes and wild stories cause their aunt to send them home to their mother. Miss Price considers that magic might cause more problems than it solves and tells the children that she’s thinking of giving it up for awhile. However, Paul keeps the bed-knob in the hopes that their adventures aren’t done yet.

BedKnobBroomstickChildren

Bonfires and Broomsticks

In Bonfires and Broomsticks, two years have passed since the children’s first adventures, and Aunt Beatrice has died. Carey and Charles, worried that Paul would talk too much about their magical adventures, tried to convince Paul that it was all just a dream, although they weren’t very successful.

Then, the children see an advertisement in the newspaper that Miss Price is offering to board a couple of schoolchildren in her house for the summer for a fee. The children’s mother works, and she always has to find somewhere for the children to spend the summer, when they’re not in school. They still have the bed-knob, so they tell their mother that they want to visit Miss Price, hoping they can have more adventures with her. At first, their mother doesn’t understand why they would want to visit Miss Price so badly, but since she seems like a nice, respectable woman and an old friend of Aunt Beatrice’s, she agrees.

Miss Price is happy to have the children stay for the summer, but they are disappointed when they learn that she was really serious about giving up magic. The children discover that Miss Price bought the old bed that they had used for their previous adventures at the estate sale after their aunt’s death. She’s been sleeping on it in her own room. They want to try the bed-knob on the bed, but Miss Price takes it from them. She tries to make their summer vacation a normal vacation with normal activities, like picnics and croquet.

But, even Miss Price can’t resist the opportunity to try the bed-knob one last time. One morning, Carey and Charles discover that Paul and Miss Price have traveled somewhere on the bed without them. When the two of them confront Paul about it, he says that they only went to a nearby town, just to see if the spell on the knob still worked. Carey and Charles understand, but Carey thinks that if they got to use the bed once more, she and Charles should have one more turn. She especially wants to try going into the past, which was something they hadn’t had a chance to try last time. Miss Price is reluctant, but finally agrees after Carey pressures her about it.

The children travel to London of 1666 (ending up there accidentally, when they were aiming for the Elizabethan era), where a man named Emelius Jones has been living as a necromancer. When he was young, he studied magic under a mentor who, as he was dying, finally told him that everything he learned was fakery. It was all an act that he used to get money from gullible people, although it paid very well. The old man leaves Emelius his business, but Emelius is always nervous, worrying both because someone might discover that it’s all a fake and because others might believe that it’s real and that he should be hung as a witch. The only reason why he stays with it is because he has no other business to follow.

The children meet Emelius after ending up lost and stopping at his house for directions. The children can see how nervous and unhappy Emelius is, and they ask him about himself, discovering that his home town is actually close to where they’re staying with Miss Price. They reveal to him that they are from the future and invite him to come home with them for a visit.

Miss Price isn’t happy to see that they’ve brought someone back from the past with them, but she ends up liking Emelius. Before sending him home, they learn that Emelius’s aunt, who lived near to where Miss Price now lives, died the same day that Emelius left London in the past, which is coincidentally shortly before the great fire that destroyed a good part of the city. They know that Emelius’s London lodgings will likely be destroyed in the fire as well, but at least he can move into the house that he will inherit from his aunt.

However, after they send him back to his own time, the children and Miss Price learn that Emelius never made it to his aunt’s house because he was executed for practicing witchcraft. Unable to leave poor Emelius to such a terrible fate, they come up with a plan to rescue him.

The combined book edition is available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Changing Emelius’s past also changes Miss Price’s future. Neither of them has ever married, and both of them have been lonely, and they come to the conclusion that the two of them were meant to be together. In deciding that they will live their lives together on Emelius’s aunt’s farm in the past, they put an end to the magical traveling bed. Only Paul can make the magic bed-knob work, and once he sends them into the past (not going with them), they can never return. But, Carey has one final vision of the two of them, being happy together, so she knows that they will be alright.

Overall, I preferred the Disney movie to the original books.  I think the war-based plot was better than the children’s random travels to cannibal-filled islands (I never liked those tropes in children’s stories anyway) and other places.  At one point in the books, Carey did speculate about the use of magic in war, but she rejected the idea because the notion of someone with the ability to conjure a dragon that could breathe mustard gas or who could turn whole armies into mice was just too horrible.  The spell that Miss Price used against the Nazis in the movie was part of their plan to rescue Emelius in the second book, but I think the movie’s ending was much more exciting.

Posted on by TracyC

Escape to Witch Mountain

EscapeWitchMountain

Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key, 1968.

This is the book that the Disney movie of the same name was based on.  In fact, there have been three movie renditions of this book, although the 1975 Disney version is the one I know the best, and it’s the only film version to call the children by their original book names, Tia and Tony (other versions use the names Danny and Anna or Seth and Sara).  There are some major differences between the book and each of the the movies.  For one thing, most people in the book think that Tia is mute because she speaks at a frequency that ordinary humans can’t hear.  Only her brother, Tony, can hear what she’s saying.  She uses the little case with the double star emblem that she’s had ever since she can remember to carry paper and pencils so that she can write messages in order to make herself understood by other people.  In the 1975 movie, Tia can speak to Tony telepathically, but both children can speak aloud normally and be understood by everyone.

When the book begins, Tia and Tony know that they’ve always been different from other children.  They look different: they have olive skin, pale hair, and very dark blue eyes, which is a somewhat unusual combination. They can do things that others can’t: Tony can make things move with his mind, Tia can open locks without using a key or any other device, and only Tony can understand the strange way that Tia talks that others can’t even hear. They can’t remember any other home than the one they had with Granny Malone, the woman who adopted them, but now that she’s dead, they find themselves wondering who they really are and where they came from.  Tia has shadowy memories of a time before they came to Granny Malone, when they were on a boat and something bad happened to them, but she can’t quite remember what.

With no known relatives to go to, the children are taken to an orphanage, Hackett House, after Granny Malone’s death.  It’s a tough, inner-city environment, where no one has any patience with Tia and Tony’s strangeness.  However, when the children from the orphanage are sent to Heron Lake Camp in the mountains during the summer, a nun recognizes the double star symbol on Tia’s case as one that she had seen before on a letterhead, giving the children their first clue to finding their origins.

Then, a figure from one of Tia’s memories, Mr. Deranian, comes to the orphanage to claim them, saying that he’s their uncle. The children can tell that he’s no relative of theirs. They run away to see a kind priest, Father O’Day, an associate of the nun they met earlier. Father O’Day is the only one who believes the children when they talk about what they remember of their past and isn’t frightened by their strange mental powers. When the children show him a map that they found in a hidden compartment in Tia’s case, he offers to help them find the place marked on it and, hopefully, someone who knows who the children are and where they belong.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.  There is a sequel to this book which was also made into a movie, Return from Witch Mountain.

My Reaction and Spoilers

As the children and Father O’Day try to elude Deranian and the others who are chasing them, more of Tia’s memory returns. The children are from another planet. Years ago, their planet was destroyed when it crashed into one of their twin suns. Their people, who call themselves the Castaways, knowing that their planet would not be habitable for much longer, had already begun looking for a new home. Earth was the nearest habitable planet, so some scouts arrived early and began to create a home for them in the mountains of North America, which was the closest environment to their former home.

Unfortunately, when the rest of the children’s people came to Earth, the group that Tia and Tony were with crashed in Eastern Europe. The book was written during the Cold War, so the place where they crashed was controlled by Communists. When the Communists realized the powers these people possessed, they planned to make use of them themselves. One of Tia and Tony’s people escaped with the children and managed to get them aboard a ship heading for America. Before he died of a gunshot wound, he placed some money and a map in Tia’s case so that the children would know where to find the rest of their people. However, the children were traumatized by the experience, and Tia blocked the memory out of her mind. The ship’s captain, upon reaching the United States, gave the children to Deranian, a friend of his. Deranian, not knowing who the children were or what powers they possessed, gave them to Granny Malone to raise. Later, he found out about the children’s abilities from his contacts in Eastern Europe and tried to get the children back.

In the end, Father O’Day manages to reunite the children with the rest of their people, who take them to the community they have built on Witch Mountain, a place where locals are too superstitious to go, named for the odd things they’d seen there when the Castaways first arrived. Father O’Day plans to go there and join the community along with the children someday.

In spite of the Communists being enemies during the Cold War, Tia and Tony say that one of the reasons why their people had trouble establishing themselves in America at first was that they were unaccustomed to the idea of having to buy land to live on.  On their world, no one owned land; land was just there for people to live on and care for.  Their people’s early scouting expedition included selling pieces of their ships in order to raise enough money to buy some land in order to build their community.  Father O’Day is impressed with the Castaways’ commitment to the common good of all people and unselfish sharing.  So, although the oppressive Communist regimes of the Cold War are enemies in the book, some of the ideals of sharing and supporting the common welfare of everyone are still attractive ideals in the book.  The implication in the book is that Tia and Tony’s people are socially as well as technologically advanced and have created the best of all possible systems, a blending of ideals to create the ideal balance.

I can understand why the movies did not include Tia speaking at a frequency no one else can hear and appearing mute.  That would be difficult to show in a movie that relies on characters being able to communicate with each other, and it makes sense to replace it with an ability to communicate telepathically by choice instead.  None of the movies include the Cold War references that were present in the book, and the character of O’Day or the person who helps the children to reach Witch Mountain changes from movie to movie, but the plot of the 1975 Disney movie is still the closest to the original book.