Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

Posted on August 15, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC

If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island

If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island by Ellen Levine, 1993.

Like other books in this series, this book explains about a part of American history using a series of questions and answers. Each section of the book starts with a different question about what it was like to come to America as an immigrant in the past and what happened when they reached Ellis Island, one of the main ports of entry into the United States around the turn of the 20^th century, just off the coast of New York City, such as, “Would everyone in your family come together?”, “What did people bring with them?”, and “What did the legal inspectors do?” Then, the book answers each of the questions.

The questions and answers start by describing what the journey to America was like from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. Typically, families would come to the United States in stages: the father of a family (or perhaps one of the older children) would make the trip first, find a job in the United States and start saving money to prepare for rest of the family to come. Depending on the family’s individual circumstances, it might be years before all the members completed the immigration process and reunited in America.

People traveled by ship in those days, and an often-forgotten part of their journey was even reaching the port the ship to America would be leaving from. Depending on the starting point of the journey and the travel arrangements each family was able to make, getting to the port might involve crossing borders between other countries, adding another layer of legal difficulties to the journey.

There was also the knowledge that they might be turned away once they arrived at Ellis Island. One of the chief concerns at the time was illness. The inspectors at Ellis Island checked immigrants for signs of infectious diseases, and the ship companies knew that if their passengers were turned away because of the fear of disease, they would be required to pay for the return voyage themselves. To help ensure that their passengers would not arrive with a disease, they would conduct their own health checks before the ship ever left port, looking for signs of illness, giving the passengers vaccines, and disinfecting things. They were particularly afraid of passengers with lice because lice can spread typhus, which is deadly. They would often cut the passengers’ hair or comb it very carefully.

The treatment passengers on ships received depended largely on their class of passage. First and second-class passengers received the best rooms and the best food, and when they arrived in New York (assuming that was their destination), they didn’t even have to go to Ellis Island at all; the immigration inspectors would inspect first and second-class passengers on board the ship. Only steerage passengers (“third class”, the cheapest possible method of travel, used by the poorest people, the largest group) would have to get off the ship for processing at Ellis Island.

The processing center at Ellis Island wasn’t just a building; it was an entire complex. The Great Hall alone was large enough to contain hundreds of people at a time, and when it was full of immigrants there were so many languages being spoken at once (sometimes as many as 30 different languages) that some people described it as sounding like the Tower of Babel. There were also dormitories that could house more than a thousand people, a hospital for the sick, a post office, banks where people could change their cash for American money, a restaurant to feed everyone (with two kitchens, one kosher and one regular), a railroad ticket office where immigrants who would be moving on from New York could make their travel arrangements, and much more. Some people called Ellis Island the “Island of Tears” because the arrival there after a long journey was an emotional experience and many immigrants were worried that they might be sent back if they couldn’t answer the inspectors’ questions to their satisfaction. At the end of the Great Hall, there was a large staircase that came to be known as the Staircase of Separation. Everyone had to go down this staircase after their examination by the inspectors. At the bottom, they would go their separate ways, depending on their travel plans or whether they had passed inspection. People who turned to the right were heading to the railroad ticket office. People turning to the left were heading to the Manhattan ferry. People who went straight were heading to the detention rooms because they hadn’t passed the inspection.

As I mentioned before, the inspectors were very concerned about people who showed signs of serious diseases. One of the first things that would happen during inspection was a brief examination by the Ellis Island doctors. Because of the massive amount of people who had to be processed, this examination lasted only a few minutes, during which the doctor would quickly check for very specific symptoms and signs of possible illness. If they didn’t see anything obviously wrong, such as red eyes (possible sign of eye infection, although for some, it was just because they’d been crying), difficulty in breathing, or lice, they would let the people pass. If the doctors thought that they saw something that might be sign of illness, they would write a letter in chalk on the person’s clothes and send them on to be examined more thoroughly by another doctor. Getting one of these letters didn’t always mean rejection. If the other doctor decided that the first doctor was mistaken or that the person’s symptoms weren’t serious, they would still be allowed into the country. Sometimes, if a person was ill but had a curable disease, they would be kept in the hospital on Ellis Island until they were better. If the doctors weren’t quite sure if a person was ill or not, they might keep the person in the dormitories for a few days and then check them again after they had a chance to rest. The people who were sent back on the ship were ones who had diseases that were incurable or seriously contagious. (It sounds heartless, but they were trying to head off deadly epidemics. During the 1800s, large cities like New York sometimes suffered serious epidemics of deadly diseases because of the sudden influx of new people who were living in overly-crowded conditions with relatively poor sanitation. By preventing people with signs of serious diseases from joining the rest of the population, they were hoping to head off new epidemics and save lives.)

One of the more controversial parts of the examination was when they tested people for possible mental problems. They wanted to make sure that they were mentally fit enough to find work, but the problem was that the tests designed by people who didn’t take cultural differences into account when they designed them. The parts where they asked people to do simple arithmetic problems or to demonstrate that they could read, count backwards, or match up sets of similar drawings were pretty straight-forward. However, sometimes they were shown a picture and asked to describe what was happening in the picture, and the immigrants gave the inspectors some surprising interpretations because it turns out that some experiences aren’t quite as universal as some people think. For example, one picture was of some children digging a hole with a dead rabbit lying nearby. It was supposed to depict children burying a dead pet. But, some people view rabbits more as food than pets, and some immigrants said that the children were doing their chores because why shouldn’t the children work in the garden (the digging) after hunting a rabbit for dinner? Fiorello La Guardia, himself from an immigrant family, an interpreter on Ellis Island and later, mayor of New York, particularly despised tests like these because the people who designed them and administered them were trying to test the minds of others without any real idea about what their lives had been like or how their minds actually worked.

The inspectors’ examinations in general weren’t always reliable because they were often hurried (dealing with so many people in a limited amount of time) and because the interpreters weren’t always accurate, which brings us to the question of why people’s names were sometimes changed at Ellis Island. Sometimes, it was intentional. Some immigrants thought that they would be more likely to be accepted by the inspectors if they had short, easy-to-pronounce names, so they would purposely give them shorter versions of their names. There was some basis for this belief because, if an inspector didn’t understand a long, unfamiliar name, they wouldn’t have much time to figure it out and so would either take their best guess at the what the name should be, shorten it when they wrote it down, or give up altogether and write a much shorter name instead. For example, when they processed Jewish people from Russia, the inspectors often ran into difficulties in understanding their last names and would sometimes just write down “Cohen” or “Levine”, no matter what the original name really was. Sometimes, name changes were just an honest mistake because the inspector didn’t know how a name was really spelled (I can speak from personal experience because my family’s last name wasn’t always spelled like it is now, and when they found out that it had been changed, it was just too much trouble to fix it) or because they had misinterpreted something that the immigrant said. One of my favorite examples of this was a young man who tried to explain to the inspector that he was an orphan (“yosem” in Yiddish). The inspector dutifully wrote his last name as Josem.

The pictures in the book are paintings based on original photographs of immigrants and Ellis Island. (See Immigrant Kids to compare some of the pictures.)

The book also contains some further information about the lives of immigrants once they arrived in America (Immigrant Kids goes into a lot more detail), the attitudes of Americans toward immigrants at the time (varied but with strong strains of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, and general anti-immigrant attitudes during the 1800s), and the contributions of immigrants to American society. I actually bought this book as a souvenir on a visit to Ellis Island years ago.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on August 13, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC · 1 Comment

Immigrant Kids

Immigrant Kids by Russell Freedman, 1980.

One of the best parts about this book is the pictures. The preface of the book specifically talks about photography at the turn of the 20^th century, how cameras were still fairly new technology but growing in popularity. Cameras that were small enough to be held in a person’s hands were an 1880s innovation, and the book mentions that small cameras like that were known as “detective cameras” because they were small enough that they could be used to take pictures without the subjects noticing. Over time, it became easier for amateurs to learn to use cameras, and it became more common for people to take pictures of their ordinary, everyday lives. Pictures like these open up a window on the past. The pictures in this book are of children whose families had only recently arrived in America from countries around the world. The photographer for many of these pictures was Jacob A. Riis, a journalist in New York City who wanted to document the living conditions of poor immigrants. He published a book called How the Other Half Lives in 1890, in which you can see more of his work. Other pictures in this book are by Lewis Hine, who is known for his photographs of child laborers. They are not the only photographers whose work appears in this book, but they are the most famous.

The book is divided into sections, covering different aspects of the lives of immigrant children. In the chapter called Coming Over, the author describes what the journey to America was like. One of the primary motivations for people to come to America around the turn of the century was money and employment opportunities. If a family had little money and little or no chance of getting better jobs in their home country, they would decide to try their luck somewhere else. Because most of the immigrant families were poor, it was common for families to immigrate gradually. Often, the father of the family would come first, find a job, start establishing a life and home for his family, and eventually send for his wife and children when he’d saved enough money. The actual journey was by ship, often in “steerage,” the cheapest form of passage available, in cramped rooms in the ship’s hold.

Although the journey could be harrowing, one of the most nerve-wracking parts was the immigrant processing that took place at immigrant ports like Ellis Island. There were routine questions that immigrants were expected to answer and exams for them to take, and if the questioners weren’t satisfied, the immigrants could be sent back to the country they came from. Doctors would examine the immigrants to evaluate their health and look for signs of possible mental defects. They were particularly concerned about signs of infectious diseases. Sometimes, it was difficult for immigrants to answer all the questions because of language barriers and the immigrants’ own nerves at being interrogated. If an immigrant seemed too agitated, the examiners would typically let them rest for a while before trying again.

The other chapters in the book are At Home, At School, At Work, and At Play, which give more details about the lives of immigrant children as their families settled in America. They often settled in large cities because those were where the most employment opportunities were to be found. Because they didn’t speak much English and needed help learning how things worked in America, such as how to find jobs and places to live and how laws worked, they tended to settle in neighborhoods with others from similar backgrounds who could help them. That is why, even to this day, there are certain areas of large cities, such as New York, Boston, or Chicago, which are known for people of a particular nationality (like the Irish neighborhood, the Jewish neighborhood, Chinatowns, etc.). New arrivals often joined friends or relatives who had already been living in the US for a while, seeking help in getting themselves established. These ethnic neighborhoods were located in poor parts of town because the people there didn’t have much money. People lived in small, crowded apartments called tenements, sharing water and toilet facilities with other families because the apartments were not provided with individual facilities. However, once these groups of immigrant families became established, they remained established for a long time, and they gave these neighborhoods their own distinctive style.

School was often difficult for new arrivals because the children had to learn English before they could study other subjects. There were some special English language learning classes for them at larger schools with enough demand for them. At smaller schools which didn’t have these classes, they often had help from other children who had arrived in America earlier and could act as translators. They were also frequently put into classes for children who were younger than they were, studying easy subjects, until they had learned enough English to move up to classes with children their own age.

Typically, immigrant children aimed to stay in school until they were fourteen years old because that was the age when they could officially get full-time work. However, because their families were poor, the children might have to leave school early to find jobs and help their families make ends meet. The book describes how rules were frequently bent or broken because the laws were not well-enforced, and children often worked at younger ages, even under harsh conditions. For immigrant children, the most important education was that which taught practical, vocational skills that would help them find jobs quickly. Some agencies, like the Children’s Aid Society (known for the Orphan Trains), would help them with vocational training.

However, immigrant children still like to play. Boys and girls usually played separately. Boys frequently played games like baseball in the street, or stickball, which was a variant that could be played in smaller spaces. In stickball, the “bat” was a stick or the handle of an old broom, and the ball was rubber and allowed to bounce before it was hit. Girls would play other games, like “potsy,” which was a version of hopscotch.

Because of the lessons they were taught in schools and because the immigrant children mixed with children outside of their immigrant groups in school, the children absorbed the local culture and became Americanized faster than their parents. Many of them experienced the feelings of being torn between their parents’ traditions and wanting to fit in with society around them.

In each of the chapters in the book, there are anecdotes from people who had arrived in the US as children around the turn of the century, telling stories about different aspects of their lives.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on August 10, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC

Under Copp’s Hill

Under Copp’s Hill by Katherine Ayres, 2000.

This book is part of the American Girl History Mysteries series.

The year is 1908, and eleven-year-old Innocenza Moretti lives with her relatives in Boston. They are immigrants from Italy. Innie, as her family calls her, is an orphan. According to the story that her grandmother told her, she was the only one of her parents’ children to survive infancy, her siblings being born prematurely and dying shortly after birth. Innie’s mother was so grateful that Innie survived that she promised her to the Holy Mother at her baptism. Then, Innie’s parents died in a fire in their tenement building when she was about two years old. Innie and her grandmother, Nonna, survived the fire only because little Innie had started crying in the night, and she took her outside to walk her around so that she wouldn’t wake her parents. Because of that experience, Nonna is deathly afraid of fire and also has become convinced that the Holy Mother must have spared Innie (as well as herself). She thinks that Innie is destined to become a nun and has continued to promise her to the Holy Mother in prayer, repeating the promise regularly. Although Nonna thinks that the miracles surrounding Innie’s life are signs of a future life in the Church for Innie, her grandmother’s promises in prayer terrify Innie.

Innie feels trapped by her grandmother’s expectations for her, expectations that the rest of her family don’t even know about. She doesn’t want to be a nun, but her grandmother is sure that she will be. Because of her fears that her grandmother may force her to become a nun when she grows up, Innie is never on her best behavior. She thinks that if she gets a reputation as a trouble-maker, the Church will decide that she is unsuited for a religious life. Unfortunately, Innie’s long-practiced habit of ignoring rules and her problem child reputation lead her to be suspected of something worse than just minor misbehaving.

Innie’s family owns a boardinghouse where they provide food and lodging for young immigrant men. Innie and Nonna live on the ground floor, and Innie’s aunt, uncle, and cousins live above them. Innie spends a lot of time with her cousins, especially Teresa, who is about her age. Her older cousin, Carmela, persuades both Teresa and Innie to join a library club at a new settlement house with her. The settlement house helps girls and young women from immigrant families by teaching them work skills and aspects of American culture that they can use as they become American citizens in exchange for some of the work that the girls do on behalf of the settlement house. Carmela has taken a new job as a pottery painter there and tells her parents that it will be good for Teresa and Innie to go there as well because they will receive help with their schoolwork and they will also have classes to teach them skills like sewing, knitting, and pottery, that they can use to make money later. However, the real attraction of the club for the girls is that they get to listen to music, have dancing lessons, read books, and socialize with other girls about their age. The prospect of sewing classes isn’t appealing for Innie, but she loves books and looks forward to borrowing some from the settlement house library.

At the settlement house, Innie meets a variety of girls from other immigrant families, not just Italian ones. In particular, Innie makes friends with a girl named Matela, who is a Jewish girl from Russia. As the girls talk about a recent, large fire in town, Matela talks about the czar’s soldiers burning things back in Russia and how she misses her grandfather, who is still there. Innie understands Matela’s feelings because she knows what it’s like to miss someone. She doesn’t really remember her parents, but she feels the lack of them in her life. Teresa also becomes friends with Matela, but the three girls agree to keep their friendship secret because each of their families prefers them to associate with girls from backgrounds similar to their own. Innie’s uncle wants the girls to spend time with other Italians, and Matela admits that her father prefers her to spend time with other Jewish girls. The adults don’t really understand the cultural mix at the settlement house.

However, from the very first day that the girls begin going to events at the house, strange things start happening. Things disappear or are oddly moved about. Food disappears. A silver teapot belonging to the ladies who run the settlement house is stolen. Then, someone steals some pottery and a shawl.

To Innie’s horror, she ends up becoming the prime suspect for the thefts because she was caught snooping in an area of the house where she didn’t belong and because she accidentally broke one of the pieces of pottery that the others girls made and tried to sweep it up without telling anyone. When she and her friends snoop around and try to find the missing objects, Innie discovers one of the missing pottery pieces. However, instead of being happy for the clue, the ladies who run the house just think that Innie must have broken more of the pottery and tried to cover it up, like she did before, by hiding the rest of the set. After all, if she was doing some things she shouldn’t have been doing, it’s plausible that she could be a thief, too.

If Innie is going to remain a member of the library club (and continue to have access to books that she can read), she’s going to have to prove her innocence. In fact, proving her innocence may also be important for Carmela, who is supposed to have a citizenship hearing soon. If Innie’s bad reputation causes problems for her at work, she may lose her job and be denied American citizenship!

Matela thinks that the thief could be a ghost from the nearby Copp’s Hill graveyard, but Innie is sure that it must be a human being. There are secrets at the settlement house that even the ladies who run it are unaware of and someone who desperately needs help and can’t ask for it.

Teresa and Matela continue to help Innie, and in the process, Innie confesses to Matela her fears about becoming a nun. It is Matela who helps Innie to find the solution to her problem, urging her to step outside of the small community of Italian immigrants that her family clings to and to seek advice from a priest in the Irish area of the city. As a priest, he has the knowledge that Innie needs to understand her faith, and because he doesn’t know Innie’s family personally, he has the objectivity to help Innie to see her grandmother’s promise in a new light and to understand that her future destiny is still in her own hands. No one can speak for another person or make important promises on their behalf. A religious vocation is a serious decision that only a mature adult can make for herself, or not make, as the case may be. The priest tells her that, as young as she is, Innie should focus on learning to be a good person, and then she will see what direction life leads her. With that knowledge, of course, Innie realizes that she will have to put more effort into behaving herself, but it’s a relief to her to realize that she doesn’t need to purposely misbehave in order to control her life.

Eventually, Innie’s aunt also learns about the grandmother’s promise and Innie’s worries and reassures her that, although her grandmother can be an intimidating woman with what she wants, Innie’s family loves her and that she shouldn’t be afraid to come to them with her questions and concerns. Innie has thought of herself as parentless, at the mercy of her grandmother’s wishes and expectations, but her aunt says that she loves Innie like she does her own daughters and that Innie is as much a part of their family as they are. If Innie has problems, her aunt will be there for her, helping her find whatever answers she needs.

There is also a subplot about how girls in immigrant families (at least, in ones like Innie’s family) aren’t as highly-regarded as boys. When the family is discussing important matters, Innie often tries to comment on what she thinks, but her grandmother keeps telling her to be quiet because it isn’t a girl’s place to comment on business that men should handle and her male cousins sneer at her because they don’t think she knows anything. However, when Innie’s uncle is worried about the legal papers he has to sign in order to open his new grocery business because his English still isn’t good enough to understand them, Innie points out that Carmela’s English is the best of the family because of all the books she had to read and the paperwork she had to complete when she was applying for citizenship and that she would be the best person to study the paperwork. At first, her grandmother makes her try to be quiet and her male cousins laugh, but Carmela speaks up and says that she can help her father, if he wants her to, and her father agrees, on the condition that she act as translator and adviser and let him make the final decisions about the business. Carmela is happy because the arrangement allows her to use her skills without taking her away from the pottery painting that she loves. The point of this part of the story is about acknowledging the talents that people possess and not disregarding them because they are outside of the usual roles and expectations. It fits in with the subplot about the grandmother’s expectations for Innie’s future, which are not really in keeping with either her talents or character. The young people in the story are growing up under different circumstances than their parents, and they will have to learn to find their own way in life, using the abilities they have and the education they can find.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about Boston in 1908. The fire that happens around the time that the story takes place was a real event. The settlement house with its library club was also real, and the ladies who run the settlement house, Miss Brown and Miss Guerrier, were also real people. The book explains more about what life was like for immigrant families like Innie’s and about what the future held for girls like her. Many of the girls who attended the library clubs later became librarians and teachers themselves, which may be Innie’s eventual destiny when she grows up. The book also mentions that the area of Boston where Innie’s family lived still has many Italian restaurants and groceries that were started by immigrant families like Innie’s, so we can imagine that the grocery store that Innie’s uncle wants to open will be successful.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on August 8, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC

Lyddie

Lyddie by Katherine Paterson, 1991.

The year is 1843. Thirteen-year-old Lyddie’s father left home to go West and seek his fortune, and he hasn’t been heard of since. Lyddie helps her mother to take care of their farm in Vermont and the younger children, but they are very poor, and her mother has given up hope of their father returning home. The children’s aunt and uncle, Clarissa and Judah live nearby, but they are of little help, full of fire-and-brimstone talk. Lyddie and her brother Charlie, who is ten, more often turn to their Quaker neighbors, the Stevenses, for help. They are kinder than their aunt and uncle, although their mother disapproves of them for being abolitionists and, in her mind, heathens. Lyddie and Charlie are just grateful for their help. Because of their mother’s depression at the loss of their father, she pays little attention to the things that her children do to keep the farm going and the family together.

However, when a bear enters their house and eats the oatmeal that Lyddie was preparing, their mother, primed by Clarissa’s and Judah’s talk of signs of the end times and such, goes into a panic and sure that the world is going to end. Lyddie and Charlie let her go with their younger sisters to stay with Aunt Clarissa and Uncle Judah while they continue managing the farm as best they can. However, even though their mother sees that the world doesn’t end, she decides that she’s going to hire Lyddie out as a maid at the Cutlers’ tavern and Charlie to work at the mill because the family has too many debts and they will have to rent out their fields and animals.

Luke Stevens, the youngest of the Stevens sons, although much older than Lyddie and Charlie, gives them a ride to their new homes and employment at the mill and the tavern and promises to keep an eye on their house while they’re away. Lyddie is lonely and unhappy working at the tavern, badly missing the family farm and her siblings, especially Charlie. Then, one day, a woman visiting the tavern mentions that she’s one of the factory girls from Lowell, Massachusetts. The woman tells Lyddie that she seems like a good worker and that she could earn a good wage in the factories herself. At first, Lyddie doesn’t believe what the woman says that girls can earn there.

When Lyddie is allowed a brief visit home to her family’s farm, she discovers that Luke Stevens has been allowing a runaway slave to hide there. Lyddie isn’t sure what she thinks of it at first. Ezekial, the fugitive, frightens her because she has never met a black man before, and she knows that if she were to turn him in, there would be a handsome reward that could solve her family’s money problems. However, Ezekial seems to understand the situation that her family is in without her father. Although Lyddie and Charlie are not technically slaves, they have become a kind of indentured servant because of their family’s debts. Ezekial is a father himself, hoping to send for his family when he has found a safe place for them. Lyddie still wonders if her own father is alive, perhaps hoping to send for his family when he can. Having come to a better understanding of Ezekial, she knows that she can’t turn him in, even for the reward money.

Her talks with Ezekial make Lyddie understand that working in the tavern won’t solve her problems, though. As a maid there, she basically works all day for her room and board and has nothing else to show for it. Mrs. Cutler just sends a little money to her mother now and then and even then, she doesn’t always bother, and her mother is in little position to insist on proper wages, making Lyddie little better than a slave. Mrs. Cutler cares nothing about Lyddie or her family’s welfare, just trying to get as much labor out of her for as little as she can. Lyddie finally makes up her mind to seek factory employment in Lowell, Massachusetts, seeing it as her only chance to earn some real wages.

Life in Lowell turns out not to be as glamorous as the woman she met at the tavern made it sound, although the wages are definitely better. The company that owns the fiber mill where Lyddie gets a job has all sorts of rules and regulations for the girls who work there, even ones that intrude on their personal lives outside of work. Anxious to give the impression that all of their workers are of good moral disposition, they insist that the girls attend church on Sundays. Lyddie never had the money to pay pew fees back home, so she is unaccustomed to going to church, but finds that other girls in her position tend to go to Methodist churches, where there are no pew fees, saving their precious wages. Lyddie, who never had much time for schooling when she and her brother were trying to keep the farm going, has trouble understanding all of the terms of the employment contract that she signs but signs it anyway. Her employment turns out to be an education that changes Lyddie’s life, although not in all the ways that she had hoped.

Like Mrs. Cutler, the bosses at the factory have little real care for their workers, trying to get as much work out of them as they can for the least amount of pay they have to give them. The work is hard and the hours are long, but Lyddie keeps at it because the pay is the best she’s ever had and she is starting to save up for her family’s future. The poor working conditions contribute to health problems among the girls, and some of them petition for better working hours, but Lyddie is reluctant to do so because girls who are dismissed “dishonorably” from the factory are blacklisted all over town, and she fears not only risking the loss of her job but the potential to find a new one.

Through her interactions with the other girls and young women at the factory, Lyddie also develops into a young woman. She had previously wished that she’d been born a boy instead because a boy would have a better chance of running her family’s farm, but she comes to realize that there are opportunities out in the world for young women who are willing and able to go out and seek them. In Lowell, Lyddie gets a taste for literature through the books that her friend Betsy reads to her and acquires more lady-like behavior by watching the lady-like Amelia. Neither of them plan on working at the factory forever, and their ambitions, to get married or continue their education, cause Lyddie to consider what she really wants for her own future. Through the difficulties she encounters and everything she learns while facing them, Lyddie really becomes her own woman.

In the end, Lyddie is unable to save her family’s farm and reunite their family there. Her mother dies, and her father’s whereabouts are still unknown, so her uncle sells the farm to pay the debts. However, Charlie and her younger sister Rachel are provided for, the Stevenses decide that they will purchase the farm themselves, and Lyddie becomes reconciled to the loss of the farm through her new vision of the future. She is unfairly discharged from the factory after she catches an overseer molesting another girl and stops him because he blackens her name in retaliation. But, by then, Lyddie has acquired some money and new confidence in herself, and she begins making other plans for her future, which may include both further education and the possibility of marriage. One thing that she knows for certain is that, whatever she does with her life, she wants to move forward as her own, independent person.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on August 6, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC

The Traitor’s Gate

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.

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.

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.

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 August 3, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC

Daily Life in a Victorian House

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 August 1, 2018November 28, 2021 by TracyC · 1 Comment

Chimney Sweeps

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.

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.

However, chimney sweeps’ lives and work were often hard. In 18^th 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 19^th 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 July 30, 2018January 19, 2019 by TracyC

Great Imposters

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 18^th 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-20^th century who held a variety of prestigious positions . . . all self-appointed.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on July 26, 2018July 26, 2018 by TracyC

A Samurai Never Fears Death

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 July 25, 2018December 20, 2018 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.

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Chimney Sweeps by James Cross Giblin, 1982.

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