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Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall

Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall by Alice B. Emerson, 1913.

Since Ruth and her friends have helped her Uncle Jabez to recover his stolen cash box in the previous book, Uncle Jabez has decided to send Ruth to Briarwood Hall, the boarding school that her best friend, Helen Cameron will attend, so the two of them can stay together. Briarwood Hall is an exclusive school, where the primary entrance requirements are academic records and teacher recommendations. Ruth has already graduated from the local school in her uncle’s town although she is a little younger than Helen, and she is ready for the high school level. Helen’s twin brother, Tom, will be attending a military academy close to the girls’ boarding school.

The three of them travel alone to their schools, without adult chaperones. They amuse themselves by seeing if there are other students bound for their schools traveling on the same train and steamboat they take to their boarding schools, but they can’t find any. However, they do see an interesting older lady with a veiled hat who attracts their attention because she looks doll-like and speaks French. For some reason, this lady seems greatly upset by a strange man with a harp who is part of a musical group entertaining passengers on the steamboat.

The mysterious French woman turns out to be the girls’ new French teacher at Briarwood Hall. She seems very nice to the girls when they are introduced to her as they’re riding in a coach to the school after they get off the boat. Mary Cox, a fellow student who is older than Ruth and Helen, rides to the school with the girls and the French teacher. On the way to the school, Ruth notices that Mary seems to oddly ignore the French teacher, speaking only to her and Helen.

Mary is a Junior at the school, and tells the girls about the school clubs. The two main clubs at Briarwood are the “Upedes” and the “Fussy Curls.” I was glad that Ruth and Helen thought that these sounded by strange names for clubs, too. Mary explains that they’re just nicknames for the official club names. The Upedes are members of the Up and Doing Club, a group of girls who like lively activities. There are other groups at school, like the basketball players, but the Upedes and Fussy Curls have a particular rivalry for members. Mary is a member of the Upedes, although, in spite of the groups’ rivalry for gaining new members, Mary strangely doesn’t invite Ruth and Helen to join her group and doesn’t seem to want to explain what the rival group does.

When the girls leave the coach, Mary says that she doesn’t like the French teacher because she’s a poor foreigner, and Mary doesn’t know why she’s at the school. (Mary sounds like she’s rather a snob.) Mary says that she thinks it’s strange that the French teacher never wears any nice clothes and doesn’t seem to have any personal friends or relations. (Yeah, definitely a snob toward someone who just seems a bit unfortunate, like it’s some kind of moral failing, not having nice clothes or personal connections to show off.) Helen says that the French teacher does have personal acquaintances because she seemed to know the harp player on the boat, something that seems to interest Mary. Ruth has the uneasy feeling that they shouldn’t have mentioned it, not knowing exactly what the teacher’s connection to the harp player is. Helen likes Mary, but Ruth has reservations about her friendship.

Mary Cox shows the girls where their dorm room is. Helen and Ruth are sharing a room by themselves. Another girl, a senior named Madge Steel, comes by to talk to the girls and invites them to a meeting of the Forward Club (known as the “Fussy Curls” because of its initials) that evening. Ruth wants to go to that meeting because Madge seems very nice, and the Forward Club includes members of the school faculty. However, Helen says that she’d rather attend the meeting of the Upedes that evening that Mary told her about. Helen thinks that they owe Mary their loyalty because she was the first to meet them and was helpful in finding their room. Besides, the Upedes have no teachers in their club, and Helen thinks that it sounds more exciting and free from supervision than the Forward Club. Ruth thinks that she would prefer to get closer to her new teachers and some well-behaved girls instead, and it’s the first major disagreement that the friends have. Mary talks Ruth into going to the meeting of the Upedes that evening because that was the invitation that they received first, but Ruth says that she won’t join any club officially until she’s had a chance to see the other girls involved and learn what the clubs are really like. Ruth’s stance seems to be the wise one as the school’s headmistress tells the girls that joining clubs on campus are fun but that they should beware of getting involved too much with girls who don’t take their studies seriously and waste their time, and they learn that Mary Cox’s nickname at school is “the Fox”, suggesting that she’s as sly as Ruth has sensed. Although Mary didn’t mention it to the girls before, she’s actually the leader of the Upedes.

That evening, the girls are introduced to other students, and at the meeting of the Upedes, the school’s very own ghost story. Briarwood wasn’t always a school. It used to be a private mansion, and a wealthy man lived there with his beautiful daughter. The wealthy man was the one who commissioned the creation of the fountain with the marble statue that still stands on the school’s grounds. Although people on campus say that nobody really knows what the statue of the woman playing a harp in the fountain is supposed to represent, the ghost story claims that the figure was modeled after the beautiful daughter of the mansion’s former owner. However, according to the story, the girl fell in love with the man who sculpted the statue of her, and the two of them eloped, leaving her father alone and sad. Rumor had it, though, that the girl and her new husband must have died somewhere after they ran away because people started hearing mysterious harp music at night on the grounds of the mansion. Eventually, Briarwood was sold, and the school’s founders, the Tellinghams, bought it, and sometimes, people still hear harp music on the school grounds. Every time something strange or momentous happens at the school, people hear the twang of the harp.

That night, Ruth and Helen become the targets of a frightening hazing stunt by the Upedes that seems to bring the ghost story to life, but when something happens that frightens even the hazers, it brings into question how much of the ghost story is really true.

The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.

Spoilers and My Reaction:

I liked this story much better than the first book in the series because it is more directly a mystery story than the first book, and Ruth makes a deliberate effort to untangle some of the puzzling things happening at her new school.

It’s pretty obvious that there is a connection between the ghost story of the girl with the harp and the French teacher’s apparent discomfort at the suspicious harpist. Ruth finds out pretty quickly that the harpist from the boat is lurking around the school. That revelation explains the frightening happenings at the hazing incident, although it still leaves the question of the connection between the harpist and the French teacher. At first, I thought that it was going to turn out that there is some truth to the ghost story the Upedes told, but that actually has nothing to do with the real situation. In some ways, I felt like the real situation was a little to straight-forward and resolved a bit too quickly at the end, considering the build-up they’d had about it. It is interesting that, of the students at the school, only Ruth comes to learn the full truth of the French teacher’s secret. Even Helen doesn’t know what Ruth eventually discovers, partly to save the French teacher’s reputation and partly because Ruth and Helen’s friendship is suffering for part of the book.

Unlike newer series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, characters in the older Stratemeyer series, including the Ruth Fielding series, grow, age, and develop their lives and personalities. In this book, when the girls go away to boarding school, the differences in Helen and Ruth’s backgrounds and personalities become more obvious. It leads them to clash in some ways, and they both worry about endangering their friendship with each other, but by the end of the book, each of the girls develop a greater sense of who they are and what they really stand for.

Helen is more familiar and comfortable than Ruth is with the traditional rituals of boarding school, even taking some glee in the mean hazing ritual of the Upedes, and she badly wants to fit in with the cooler older girls at school, willing to put up with their mean bossing to take part in their schemes for the fun and excitement. However, Ruth, is naturally more serious and shy and less accustomed to having things her way or telling others what to do anywhere she’s lived than the wealthy Helen. Ruth overcomes some of her shyness and learns to be more assertive as she stands up for herself and the other new girls at school, called “Infants” by the older girls. Ruth decides to refuse to join either the Forward Club, which has a reputation of being made up of girls who toady up to the school faculty, or the Upedes (which was initially founded as a protest group to the Forward Club, which is why most of the activities of their club involve breaking various school rules and instigating pranks), after experiencing their mean pranks and bossiness. Instead, she takes a joke of Helen’s seriously and decides to form a secret society of her own. She talks to some of the other new girls at school, and they feel the same way they do, that they don’t want to choose between either the Upedes or the Fussy Curls and would rather have a club of their own, where they won’t be dominated or hazed by the older girls. Helen gets upset at Ruth starting this new group because she thinks that they won’t gain any new friends or have any real fun or really be a part of this school if they don’t join an already-established group. Helen thinks that a group of new girls would look ridiculous because they wouldn’t know what to do with their club and will look like a group of babies. However, Ruth realizes that this is nonsense. There are enough interested girls among the newcomers to give them a good group of friends and they can think of their own things to do where they can be the leaders. Ruth turns out to be more of a leader and Helen more of a follower, and Ruth is also more creative, thinking of new possibilities in life instead of stuck with someone else’s creation. I wish that the book had gone into more details about what Ruth’s club actually does. She and some of the other girls periodically go to meetings of their club, but they don’t say much about what they do at the meetings.

Helen and Ruth temporarily go separate ways at school. Helen joins the Upedes, and Ruth and some of the other new girls carry out the plan to form a new club that they call The Sweetbriars. The other girls who help form The Sweetbriars are as independently-minded and creative as Ruth and like the idea of forming their own school traditions. Helen criticizes Ruth for being a stickler from the rules because she doesn’t want to take part in school stunts that might get her in trouble, but although Helen is more inclined to break rules in the name of fun, she is still less independent in her mind than Ruth because her rule-breaking is done following the dictates of the Upedes and the traditional school stunts of having midnight feasts with other girls in their dorm rooms. They are not stunts of her own creation or particularly imaginative, and while she is brave about school demerits, she is not very brave about what other people think about her. After the Upedes have treated Ruth very badly and spread rumors about her, Ruth finds the courage to tell Helen how hurt she is that she continues to be friends with people who have treated her so badly when she wouldn’t have put up with people mistreating a friend of hers. She doesn’t ask for an apology and says that she’s not sure that one is even warranted, but she wants Helen to know how she feels. Helen has felt like hanging around Mary Cox has made her act like a meaner person, and she feels like she can’t help herself in Mary’s company. Understanding how Ruth really feels reminds Helen that she risks damaging her relationship with her best friend if she doesn’t do something about her behavior, and when Mary is ungrateful and lies to Helen after Ruth and Helen’s brother help save her life during a skating accident, Helen begins to see Mary for what she really is.

In the second half of the book, the Mercy Curtis from the first book in the series reappears. In the first book, she spent most of the time being bitter because she had a physical disability that prevented her from walking, and she was overly sensitive about how people looked her. However, at the end of the first book, Mercy received some treatment from a surgical specialist that has enabled her to regain her ability to walk. She still walks with crutches, but her spirits have improved now that she is able to move more easily on her own, without relying on her wheelchair. Because she had previously spent much of her time alone, studying, she qualifies for admittance to Briarwood and decides that she would like to join her friends, Ruth and Helen. When Mercy comes to the school, she is still sharp-tongued, although less bitter about herself. She rooms with Ruth and Helen and joins the Sweetbriars. She adds a nice balance to Ruth and Helen’s friendship. Ruth gets to spend some time with Mercy and the other Sweetbriars when Helen is with the Upedes, and Mercy is very serious about her studies, so she insists that her friends not neglect theirs, keeping then on task in the middle of their social dramas.

As a historical note, there is a place in the story in, Ch. 22, where the book describes Ruth as wearing a sweater, defining it as if readers might not know exactly what a sweater was, calling it “one of those stretching, clinging coats.” The reason for that is that sweaters were actually a relatively new fashion development for women in 1910s, although men had worn sweaters before. Women often wore shawls in cold weather before sweaters became popular, but sweaters left a woman’s arms more able to move freely than a shawl would allow, as this video about women’s clothing during World War I from CrowsEyeProductions explains.

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Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill

Ruth Fielding

#1 Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill or Jasper Parloe’s Secret, by Alice B. Emerson (The Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1913.

In the first book of the Ruth Fielding mysteries, one of the older series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, young Ruth Fielding has recently lost her parents and is traveling by train to New York state to live with her Great Uncle Jabez. She has never met him before, but she knows that he lives in a red mill outside of a small town. She meets the town doctor on the train when he notices how sad she looks and explains to him why she’s traveling to her great uncle’s home. Her old home was in a poor area, and although she would have liked to stay with her friends there after her father’s death, no one would have been able to keep her. Then, the train unexpectedly stops when the engineer sees what looks like a warning light.

It turns out that the light is a red lamp tied to a large mastiff, who seems very upset. Ruth, who is good with dogs, is the only person who is able to calm the dog enough to get a look at the dog’s tag. It turns out that the dog belongs to Tom Cameron, who doesn’t live too far from where her Great Uncle lives. Tom Cameron comes from a wealthy family, and he has a reputation for being a wild boy. The lamp tied to the dog appears to come from his motorcycle, and there is a note tied to the dog that appears to be written in blood and only says, “Help.” Ruth is very upset, thinking that the dog’s owner must be badly hurt somewhere. The adults around her aren’t so sure because they think Tom could be playing a prank, but they take the dog aboard the train. The town doctor says that it’s possible that Tom could have had an accident on his motorcycle, and when they get to town, the town doctor, some of the other men, and Ruth set out to see if the dog will lead them to where Tom is. Ruth needs to come because the dog behaves better for her than for the men.

When they find Tom, he really is hurt, having had a motorcycle accident. He is barely conscious and muttering, “It was J. Potter. He did it!” They don’t know what it means, although it sounds like he’s accusing Ruth’s great uncle of causing his accident. By the time they get Tom to safety, it is late, and it turns out that Ruth’s uncle visited the train station at the wrong time, before the train even arrived and not seeing Ruth, assumed that she wasn’t on the train and left. Because her uncle lives outside of town and it’s rather late, the station master, Mr. Curtis takes Ruth to stay the night at his house with his family. Mrs. Curtis is very nice, but Mercy is a young invalid. She doesn’t like other children because they stare at her because of her disability, and she can’t play the games other children play.

The next day, Helen Cameron, Tom Cameron’s twin sister, comes to the Curtis house to give Ruth a ride to her great uncle’s house. Ruth likes Helen, but Helen tells her that her great uncle is a good miller but has a reputation as a miser, and she’s surprised that he decided to take her in. That worries Ruth, but Helen assures her that there will be others in town who would be willing to have her if she can’t stand living with her great uncle. In fact, Helen’s father even told her that he would be interested in having Ruth come to stay with them because she would be a good companion for Helen. Tom and Helen’s mother died when they were babies, and Helen would appreciate having another girl in the house. It’s a generous offer, but first, Ruth needs to meet her great uncle and see what he’s like.

Great Uncle Jabez is very much like Helen described. He is a hard worker but an impatient, hard-hearted, and self-centered man who doesn’t do much of anything without analyzing what he can get out of it for himself. He makes it clear that if Ruth wants to stay with him, he’ll expect her to work and make herself useful to the household. There is only one other person who lives with Uncle Jabez, the housekeeper, who likes to be called Aunt Alvira, although she is no relation to either Jabez or Ruth. Aunt Alvira tells Ruth that her uncle is a good man for giving her the position of housekeeper when she had nowhere else to live and no family of her own. She is more warm and affectionate than Ruth’s great uncle, making Ruth feel more at home. Ruth sees that she can be helpful to Aunt Alvira by assisting her with household chores. Aunt Alvira is getting older and has aches and pains that cause her to often exclaim, “Oh, my back, and oh, my bones!” She appreciates having a strong young person to help her. Uncle Jabez becomes appreciative when he sees that Ruth knows how to do chores and make herself useful, and Aunt Alvira’s affection makes Ruth’s new home bearable for her.

One day, when Tom is feeling better, he and Helen come to see if Ruth wants to take a ride with them. Aunt Alvira says it’s okay for her to go, and while they’re out in the Camerons’ car, they witness the breaking of the mill’s dam. The young people realize that they need to warn others who are in danger. They drive around, shouting warnings for people to get out of the way, and they finally take refuge at the red mill, which is soon cut off like an island. The mill’s office is partially destroyed in the flood, but the mill itself is undamaged. Uncle Jabez makes it safely back to the mill, although he has to drive his mules hard to make it through the waters. Unfortunately, there are two major losses: Ruth’s trunk, which Jabez was bringing to the mill from the train station and was lost out the back of his cart in the water, and Uncle Jabez’s money box, which was in the mill office and contained his life’s savings, all of the cash he had in the world. Uncle Jabez hasn’t trusted banks since the last time he lost money when the town’s bank failed. Everyone thinks that the money box was swept away when the office was partly destroyed by the flood, but Uncle Jabez has other suspicions when he learns that Jasper Parloe, a disreputable man, was near the mill office around the time when it was destroyed.

The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.

My Reaction

As one of the earlier Stratemeyer Syndicate books, there are elements of adventure and general fiction as well as mystery. In fact, there is more of these elements than there is of mystery. There are the disasters that Ruth and her friends must confront, the motorcycle accident and the flood caused by the breaking of the dam, but they don’t really seem to try to investigate any further into these for much of the book. They also don’t really try to investigate the disappearance of Uncle Jabez’s money box, thinking that it just washed away in the flood, even though Jasper Parloe suspiciously ran to where he knew it was and then ran away immediately after. I don’t think it’s even that much of a spoiler to tell you that Jasper Parloe did indeed take Uncle Jabez’s money box. The fact that he has a “secret” is right in the title of the book, there are no other suggested secrets about him, he was right on the scene to take it at the time it disappeared, and there are absolutely no other suspects other than the flood.

Ruth has legitimate complaints about her uncle. Insisting that Ruth help out around the house isn’t bad, but at first, he resists the idea of sending Ruth to school, asking basically, “What’s in it for me?” Uncle Jabez never does anything for anybody without seeing what’s in it for him. Even though Aunt Alvira credits Uncle Jabez with giving her a home, Jabez got a free servant out of it, so it’s not like he was really doing Alvira a favor as a Good Samaritan. In fact, in places where slavery and indentured servitude are illegal, most people would pay a live-in housekeeper a salary as well as providing them with a place to live as part of the job. Jabez isn’t even doing that. His “favor” gets him free services most people would pay for.

I don’t fault him too much with not trying to immediately get Ruth some new clothes after he lost her trunk in the flood. While he should replace the clothes as soon as possible, his money was missing, so he might not have had the funds. Still, he is not the least bit sympathetic to Ruth about her loss and even seems to take some pleasure in telling her that he lost her trunk, which is awful. Uncle Jabez does get better, though, especially after he gets his money back.

A fun, expected part of the story is the fondness that unexpectedly develops between Uncle Jabez and Mercy Curtis. From the beginning of the book, Mercy is bitter about her physical condition and the fact that she has to use a wheelchair. The book makes it clear that Mercy’s bitterness is poisoning her chances of making friends in her community. She thinks that other people are mocking her or looking down on her for her disability. A major part of that exists only in Mercy’s own mind because she herself is upset about being disabled, so she exaggerates what she thinks other people are thinking about her or saying about her behind her back, and she’s often wrong. One thing that she’s not wrong about is that people pity her, and even if they’re not being mocking of her, they are sometimes overly sweet or pitying in their tone. She takes that as mockery, although it’s really meant to be a kind of sympathy. Mercy ends up liking Ruth because Ruth doesn’t do that around her. Ruth feels pity for Mercy, both because of her physical problem and because of her bitter attitude that’s making her more unhappy, but she purposely doesn’t show it because she knows that would only annoy Mercy more. Instead, she just speaks calmly and nicely to Mercy about things that she’s experiencing and finds pleasant, and that draws Mercy out of her shell. When Ruth describes her life at the mill while visiting Mercy, Mercy admits that she’s often admired the red mill and the grounds around it from a distance, the first time she really admits to liking anything. Most of the time, Mercy has a sharp tongue and is full of criticism. However, she expresses an interest in seeing the red mill up close and meeting Uncle Jabez. Uncle Jabez fascinates Mercy because he is ugly. Because Mercy is physically imperfect, she is drawn to other people who are also physically imperfect, and the fact that Uncle Jabez is blunt and biting in his speech also fits well with Mercy’s personality. She knows that Uncle Jabez won’t talk to her with any of the pitying sweetness that she can’t stand. In return, Uncle Jabez is pleasantly surprised that Mercy honestly likes him for being the crotchety old coot he is and enjoys letting her come for a visit at the mill. The twins take her to the mill in their car, which is a treat for Mercy, and the visit with other people who accept her for who she is does her good.

Stories about invalids getting better through improving their attitude and outlook on life were a common trope in children’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Secret Garden was only published two years prior to this book. However, I was pleased that they chose to make it clear that Mercy has a genuine physical disability, not one that’s all in her head and vanishes as soon as she starts thinking pleasant thoughts. It makes the book more grounded in reality. Mercy did have a real problem that would be genuinely upsetting to have, and while making new friends and getting a new perspective on life did help her feel better, it takes real medical intervention to bring about improvement in her physical condition. Before the end of the book, the local doctor brings a specialist surgeon to see Mercy, and Mercy gets an operation that restores some of the use of her legs, giving her improvement that she can genuinely feel glad about. She doesn’t get completely better, which also is true to life with serious physical conditions. She still has to walk with crutches, so it’s not like they gave her an unrealistic, magical cure. However, Mercy accepts the marked improvement in her condition for the blessing it is. No longer being dependent on a wheelchair means that she can do more things than she was previous able to do, and in the next book in the series, she is even able to attend boarding school with Ruth and Helen.


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Daddy-Long-Legs

Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster, 1912.

Seventeen-year-old Jerusha Abbott has spent her entire life at the John Greer Home for orphans. She has no memory of her parents and no experience of life outside the orphanage. Usually, when an orphan has not been adopted and has finished his or her education at the basic level provided by the orphanage, which does not always include high school, the orphanage and its trustees arrange for the child to be placed in a job so he or she can begin earning a living. Jerusha Abbott has stayed longer than most. She is bright and finished her studies early, so she was allowed to attend the local high school, helping out with some of the younger children at the orphanage to help earn her keep. However, now that she is about to graduate from high school, the orphanage and trustees have been trying to decide what to do with her. After the most recent meeting of the trustees, the matron of the orphanage calls Jerusha into her office to tell her what they have decided.

Jerusha has done well in high school, and her teachers have given her excellent reports. In particular, Jerusha has excelled in English class. One of her essays for English class, entitled “Blue Wednesday,” is a humorous piece about the difficulties Jerusha has preparing the young orphans in her charge for the monthly visits of the trustees: getting them nicely dressed, combing their hair, wiping runny noses, and trying to make sure that they all behave nicely and politely to the trustees. Jerusha hadn’t expected the matron or the trustees to ever read it. The matron thought that the essay was too flippant and showed ingratitude toward the orphanage that raised her, but one of the trustees in particular appreciated the quality of writing and the humor of the piece. This particular trustee is one of the wealthiest, although he usually prefers to remain anonymous about his donations and uses the alias “John Smith.” “John Smith” has helped some of the boys leaving the orphanage by funding their college educations, but so far, he has not done the same for any of the girls, not apparently thinking much of girls or their continued education. Jerusha Abbott and her essay cause him to change his mind. He thinks that Jerusha Abbott could make a great writer, and he is willing to fund her college education. Although the matron thinks that he’s being overly generous with Jerusha, this benefactor has arranged to pay for her college tuition and boarding at an all-girls college and will even provide her with a regular allowance like the other students at college will have from their parents. In return, he still wants to remain anonymous and doesn’t want to be embarrassed with too much thanks, but he does insist that Jerusha write monthly letters to him, updating him about her progress in school and what is happening in her daily life. Not only is he interested in her progress, but he also thinks that the letters will provide her with good writing experience.

Most of the book, aside from the early part that explains about Jerusha’s past and how she is able to attend college, is in the form of Jerusha’s letters to her mysterious benefactor. (This is called epistolary style.) They cover her entire college education, from her arrival at the campus to her graduation and what happens after. The letters in the book are only Jerusha’s, with no replies from her benefactor shown because her benefactor does not write to her until almost the end, only sending money and an occasional present (like flowers, when she was sick).

In spite of the matron’s instructions to keep her letters basic and to show proper respect and gratitude, Jerusha’s lively personality comes through and is often a bit irreverent, just the style that her benefactor prefers. In her first letter, she describes her very first train ride to the college and how big and bewildering the college campus is to her. She also confides the matron’s final instructions to her about how she should behave for the whole rest of her life, including the part about being “Very Respectful.” She says that she finds it difficult to be Very Respectful to someone who goes by the alias of “John Smith.” It bothers her that it’s so impersonal. She’s been thinking a lot about who “John Smith” really is and what he’s really like. She has never had a family, and no one has ever taken any particular interest in her before, and now she feels like her benefactor is her family. She tells him that all she knows about him is that he is rich, that he is tall (from a brief glimpse she had of him as he was leaving the orphanage), and that he doesn’t like girls (from what the matron told her). Based on these qualities, she chooses the one that yields the best nickname, that he is tall and has long legs, and gives him the more personal nickname of “Daddy-Long-Legs.” All of her letters to him from this point forward are addressed with this nickname. At one point, she says that she hopes that the comments she makes about her previous life at the orphanage don’t offend him, but she knows that he has the advantage of being able to stop paying her tuition and allowance if he decides that she’s too impertinent. That knowledge doesn’t stop her from making occasional jokes or flippant comments about life at the orphanage.

Jerusha loves college and begins making new friends, particularly a girl who lives in the same dorm, Sallie McBride. Sallie is very friendly, and but her roommate, Julia Rutledge Pendleton, is more stuffy and standoffish. Julia comes from a very wealthy family, one of the oldest in New York. Julia doesn’t notice Jerusha right away. She is too wrapped up in her family’s prestige, and she seems to be bored by everything going on around her. By contrast, Jerusha is excited by everything because everything is a new experience to her. Sallie gets homesick, but Jerusha doesn’t because she doesn’t have a regular home to miss. For the first time, she gets new clothes, not hand-me-downs or not the standard gingham that the orphans wear. Jerusha also gets a room to herself, for the first time in her life. Jerusha realizes that she can be completely alone whenever she wants to and spend time getting to know herself without other people.

One of Jerusha’s first moves to get to know herself and establish her personal identity is to change her name to Judy. Jerusha was a foundling who came to the orphanage without a name and was named by the matron. Jerusha knows that the matron chooses children’s last names from the phone book, and she picked Abbott for her right off the first page. The first names that the matron gives are random, and she happened to notice the name “Jerusha” on a tombstone once. Jerusha has never liked her name, and she thinks that “Judy” sounds like a girl “without any cares,” which is the kind of girl she would like to be and wishes she was. She is also pleased and amazed when her teachers praise her creativity and originality because, at the orphanage, the 97 children who lived there were dressed and trained to behave as if they were 97 identical twins instead of 97 individuals. Creativity and nonconformity were not generally encouraged.

One of the most difficult and embarrassing parts of college for Jerusha/Judy is that the other girls there know many things that she does not because the orphanage never thought it was important to teach her those things. Most of them are cultural references, like who Michelangelo was or that Henry VIII was married multiple times. (That part actually surprises me. Jerusha did attend a public high school, and my high school covered these subjects. We also read some of the books that Jerusha says that she never read, and we are told that she did well in English class. It makes me wonder if, by “English,” they mean that the class focused only on writing the English language and did not study literature at all.) At the orphanage, Jerusha was never introduced to the childhood classics that the other girls know, like Mother Goose rhymes, fairy tales like Cinderella, or stories like Alice in Wonderland or Little Women. She has not read any of the popular novels or classics like those by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, or Rudyard Kipling. Before she came to college, she didn’t even know who Sherlock Holmes was. Sometimes, when the girls make jokes about certain things in popular culture, Judy doesn’t understand, and she can tell that people notice when she misses the point of the discussion or doesn’t get the joke. Sometimes, she feels like she’s visiting a foreign country where people speak a language she doesn’t understand. Some people may say that studying things like art, history, and literature are not important, but there are benefits to understanding history and a shared culture, and Jerusha feels the lack of that in her life.

Jerusha/Judy is afraid to tell the others that she grew up in an orphanage because she doesn’t want to seem too strange to them. Instead, she just says that her parents are dead and that a kind gentleman is helping her with her education. Later, when Julia begins to take an interest in her and to press her for details about her family, Judy makes up a name for her mother’s maiden name because she doesn’t want to have to explain her past to Julia while Julia brags about her own pedigree. One of the reasons why Judy doesn’t show much gratitude toward the people who raised her at the orphanage and its trustees is because she has been raised differently from other children. The orphanage fed, clothed, and educated her in a basic way, but their care for her was minimal. She wasn’t really loved there, and in some ways, they have not adequately prepared her for the outside world. Outside of the orphanage, she feels like something of an oddity and just wants to be like the other girls.

At one point, a local bishop visits the college and gives a speech, saying that the poor will always be with us and the reason that there will always be poor people is to encourage people to be charitable. Although Judy can’t say anything, she gets angry at the speech because it implies that poor girls like her are basically like “useful domestic animals,” that they exist for no other reason than to be of use to other people to improve their character by enabling them to be charitable to someone lesser than themselves. Judy wants to be thought of as her own person, someone who is deserving of the good things in life because she is a person, not just someone who serves a purpose for someone else to show off their largesse. The fact that she feels comfortable enough to let even her benefactor, who is giving her largesse, know how she feels about these things shows how deeply Judy feels these issues and how much she needs someone to understand her feelings. Since no one else knows about Judy’s background, she feels compelled to tell her benefactor what she can’t tell others. Judy is grateful for her benefactor’s help and generosity, enabling her to attend college, but her gratitude has limits. At no point does the money she receives change her personality, her personal feelings about poverty, or her feelings about her benefactor himself. Judy knows that the benefactor’s generosity will end with her graduation, and she is mindful that, from that point on, she will be expected to be her own person, make her own way, and manage her own life.

At various points in the book, Judy becomes philosophical and discusses serious issues and the way that she sees life, offering her views and remarks on topics like socialism, the vanity and burden of fashion (yet the need women have to consider it and how it can make a difference in a woman’s life and attitude), the concept of wealth and the narrower topic of personal finances and debts, family lineage and what it can mean for individuals, self-determination and personal freedom, education and culture, and toward the end of the story, romance and marriage. When Judy meets her benefactor (without knowing at first that he is her benefactor) and gets to know him, she finds that they have similar attitudes about many of these topics, although there are times when he tries to tell her what to do and she rejects his orders, acting on her own initiative. As I said before, Judy is aware, increasingly so throughout the book, that she is her own person, and while she is grateful for her benefactor’s help, she has limits on that gratitude, feeling that there are some things that her benefactor has no right to insist on. Her independence grows particularly toward the end of the book, when Judy must seriously consider her life after graduation, when she expects that her benefactor’s generosity will end. One of the purposes of a college education is to expose students to new ideas and experiences, opening new channels of thought and giving them the chance to establish their identities and views on particular subjects. For Judy, everything is a new experience, but she learns quickly and establishes definite views and her own strong personality.

Judy’s letters are full of humor and are often accompanied by little sketches of her activities. She discusses her classes and her joy at being accepted on the girls’ basketball team. (There were women’s and girls’ basketball teams back in the early 1900s and 1910s, when this book was written. These pictures show what their uniforms looked like.) She catches up on all the books that she has missed reading before, and she loves reading them. The more she reads, the more she understands what the other girls are talking about when they mention their childhood favorites or make jokes about the things they’ve read. When Judy reports what she’s studying in her classes, she often does so in a creative way, like when she describes Hannibal’s battle against the army of Ancient Rome as though she were a war correspondent. She does very well in English and gym classes, but fails her Latin and mathematics courses and needs tutoring.

Over Christmas, Judy stays at the school with a fellow student named Leonora. They treat themselves to a lobster dinner at a restaurant, Judy buys herself a few presents with the Christmas money sent by her benefactor, and they have a molasses candy pull (people used to make that kind of taffy candy at parties with other people) with some other students.

Gradually, Judy begins being more friendly with Julia, even though she still thinks that Julia is a snob, and she becomes friendly with Julia’s uncle, Jervis Pendleton, who comes to visit the college. Jervis is Julia’s father’s youngest brother, a handsome, wealthy, and good-natured man. He is very kind to Judy when they meet, and he later sends Julia, Sallie, and Judy some candy. His age is never given, but Judy comments in one of her letters that she imagines that he is much like her benefactor would have been 20 years earlier, believing her benefactor to be a much older man, although she has not been told his age.

When it’s time for her first summer holidays, Judy actually tells her benefactor that she cannot face going back to the John Grier Home and would rather die than go back for the summer, even though the matron has written to say that she will take her if she has nowhere else to go. Judy loves being free from the orphanage and can’t stand the idea of going back and being pressed into service to take care of the younger children again. Instead, her benefactor arranges for her to spend the summer at a farm owned by Mr. and Mrs. Semple in Connecticut. The Semples tell her that the farm used to belong to Jervis Pendleton and that Mrs. Semple was his nurse when he was a child. He gave the farm to her out of fondness for her. If you haven’t guessed already, this is an important clue to the identity of Judy’s mysterious benefactor.

Recounting all of Judy’s adventures during the rest of her college education would take too long, but she does become roommates with both Julia and Sallie during her sophomore year. This gives Judy more opportunities to see Julia’s Uncle Jervis. She visits Sallie’s family at Christmas, getting a taste of happy family life, and she meets her brother, Jimmie. Jimmie seems fond of Judy, but Judy’s mysterious benefactor doesn’t allow her to spend the summer with the McBride family, where she would be going to dances with him and his college friend. Instead, he insists that she go to the farm in Connecticut again, so she is there when Jervis Pendleton drops in for a visit. (Another important clue.) Judy does disobey her benefactor’s orders and gets a job and goes to see Jimmie the following summer instead of going on a trip to Europe that he had originally arranged for her.

Judy also furthers her writing ambitions, winning a writing contest and sending stories and poems that she writes to magazines, eventually selling some and writing a novel that will be published in volumes. She is a published author by the time she graduates from college.

At the end of the book, Judy’s benefactor reveals his true identity, which Judy had not guessed, only after Judy reveals her feelings regarding him in her letters. Initially, before she knows the identity of her benefactor, she turns down the offer of marriage he makes to her in person, but as she reveals in her letters to Daddy-Long-Legs, the reason is that she thinks that he knows nothing about her past, and she doubts that a wealthy man like him would marry a poor orphan if he knew. The book ends with Judy’s letter to her benefactor/fiance after she goes to meet him at his home and he tells her the truth. When she realizes that he does know all about her past and has loved her all along for the person she really is through her letters and his periodic visits, she agrees to marry him.

This book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The book has been adapted for stage and screen many times over and in different countries around the world. There is also a sequel called Dear Enemy, which focuses on Sallie McBride and what she does after graduating from college.

My Reaction and Spoilers:

I realized that I couldn’t give my full opinion about the book without revealing the identity of Judy’s benefactor, although probably most people would have guessed it already. Judy’s benefactor throughout the book is Jervis Pendleton, Julia’s uncle. I’ve read other reviews of the book where people find the romance between Judy and Jervis to be somewhat creepy, both because of the difference in their ages and because of the benefactor relationship between them. It is a relationships of two people who are not equals, and that can create some awkwardness, but I don’t think that it’s quite as bad as some reviewers suggest for several reasons.

As I said, Jervis’s age is never given in the book. Judy is in her late teens in the beginning of the story, and by the end of her college education, she is in her early 20s. Judy is old enough to get engaged and married by the end of the book, so it’s not a case of an adult taking advantage of a minor. From the descriptions of Jervis, the fact that he is older and more mature than Jimmie, and Judy’s estimate on meeting him for the first time that he is like how she imagines her benefactor might have been 20 years before (because she imagines her benefactor as a middle-aged or older man), my guess is that he is probably somewhere in his 30s. He could be as young as late 20s, a few years out of college, but I’m inclined to think that he’s older because he is very well-established in life and has apparently been making donations to the orphanage for at least several years. He could be as old as his 40s, but I’m thinking that he’s probably younger than that because he is supposed to be much younger than Julia’s father, and I think that Julia’s father is probably in his 40s, based on her age. It makes sense to me if Jervis is in his 30s, perhaps 10 to 15 years older than Judy. It’s a significant age gap, but not as creepy as a 50-year-old man being interested in a 20-year-old girl. From the descriptions given, Jervis is definitely older than Judy but not old enough to be her father.

Some people in other reviews wondered if Jervis was specifically grooming her to be his wife from the very beginning by funding her education, which would be creepy, but I don’t think that’s the case. Jervis is supposed to be something of an eccentric, which is why he doesn’t seem particularly close to the rest of his family, like Julia. He is given to acting on whims, and since the matron at the orphanage said that he’s never shown any particular interest in the female orphans before, I don’t think he’s the kind of man who is attracted to young girls in a creepy way. I think all that the story was trying to portray was that Jervis, as an eccentric, just really enjoyed Jerusha’s essay in the beginning, that it appealed to his odd sense of humor, and since he was there to bestow a donation on the orphanage anyway, decided to make Jerusha the beneficiary of his donation because the oddity of the situation appealed to him. People don’t usually fall in love on first acquaintance, so I doubt that he started thinking about that just by reading a funny school essay. More likely, that idea evolved later. My guess is that he thought that the whole thing was funny at first, paying her way through college while occasionally showing up as Julia’s uncle, maintaining his secret identity as “Daddy-Long-Legs.” It probably started out as a kind of game for a rich eccentric, but it turned into something more serious along the way, as he really got to know Judy. Judy’s letters are humorous, but they also have their serious side, and they discuss some very serious subjects. As I said, Judy and Jervis discover that they actually have some similar attitudes about a number of serious things in life, and that is one of the factors in a good, long-term relationship.

Because their relationship is one of unequals, particularly early in the story, there could be the concern that Judy might feel obligated to agree with Jervis and even love him out of gratitude, but Judy’s irreverent attitude and belief that gratitude has limits make that less of a concern. Jervis is older than Judy and definitely richer, but he doesn’t always call the shots in her life, even though he sometimes tries. Judy resents when he tries to keep her from associating with Jimmie (presumably, Jervis had started developing some romantic feelings toward her at that point and was trying to separate her from a rival), and she actively defies his orders when she refuses to go on a trip to Europe her benefactor had arranged and gets a job instead. Remember that Judy was not expecting her benefactor to support her after college. Getting a job and establishing friendships and romantic relationships in her life were perfectly natural steps for a person preparing herself for an independent life. Judy sees these things as being more practical to her future than a trip to Europe, which is actually reasonable. Jervis was disappointed, but I think that he probably had to acknowledge, partly through Judy’s explanations in her letters and some internal reflection that we don’t get to see because we never hear his thoughts in the story, that Judy is being reasonable, especially because at that point, she doesn’t know his real identity or how he is beginning to feel about her. I think Judy’s acts of defiance also help to make her more of an equal to Jervis by the end of the book, although not completely because he is still older and richer. What puts Judy on a better footing with Jervis is that she has come to realize the benefits of her education and that she is now her own person. She doesn’t have to marry Jervis because of his money because she is starting to establish her own life. She has become a published writer and has had independent employment experience, and there are young men who find her interesting. She could have chosen to pursue Jimmie instead, but at that point, she really didn’t want to. Choosing Jervis was a real choice for her because she did have other options, and when she made that choice, she was unaware of his status as her benefactor, making that not a factor in her choice.

One other thing that I’d like to mention is that, at no point in the story, does Judy ever discover her parents’ true identities. When I read a book that features an orphan with an unknown past, I often find myself wondering who her parents are and if that backstory will be revealed in the course of the story. In this book, it is not revealed, and Judy never expects that it will be. She has always lived at the orphanage, and at her age, she has no expectations that her parents will suddenly come looking for her. She feels the absence of family and relatives in her life because it makes her different from other people, and she wants someone close to her to confide in, but she has no expectations of meeting any blood relatives. She makes no attempt to find them and doesn’t spend much time speculating about who they are. Jervis has no more idea who Judy’s parents are than Judy does, and it doesn’t matter to him. In the end, the story isn’t about what Judy came from or who her family was but about the person that Judy becomes.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Caleb’s Story

Caleb’s Story by Patricia MacLachlan, 2001.

This book is part of the Sarah, Plain and Tall Series, but while the first two books are narrated by Anna, this book is narrated by her brother, Caleb.

When the book begins, Caleb says that Anna is now going to live in town, finishing school and working for the local doctor.  Her boyfriend, Justin, is the doctor’s son, and he has gone to Europe to fight in World War I.  Sarah worries about Anna because of the influenza epidemic.  Anna has given him a journal in order to write about the things happening on the farm while she’s away.  Caleb isn’t as much of a writer as Anna, and he can’t imagine what he’ll find to write about, but Anna assures him that he’ll find something.

While Caleb is play hide and seek with his little half-sister, Cassie (who is now four and a half years old), Cassie says that she saw a man behind their barn who asked her about their father.  At first, Caleb thinks that Cassie imagined the whole thing, but she insists that she didn’t.  However, Caleb later finds the man in the barn, suffering from cold.  The family brings him inside to warm up, and he says that his name is John.  They try to ask John about who he is and where he came from, but he is evasive at first.  He says that he used to be a farmer, and he starts to help a little with farm chores.

The truth about John comes out when Jacob returns from taking Anna to town.  John is actually John Witting, Jacob’s father.  For years, Jacob believed that his father was dead.  It comes as a terrible shock to see him suddenly, after all this time.  Jacob is angry that John apparently abandoned his family and left him to believe that he was dead.

The children have many questions about their grandfather and where he’s been all these years, but John remains evasive for some time.  Sarah tries to encourage Jacob to talk to his father and learn what he needs to know about him, but Jacob resists because he’s too angry.  Caleb notices his grandfather taking pills, and Sarah discovers that it’s heart medicine.

The imagery in the story is pretty bleak, compared to the other books, even the drought descriptions from Skylark.  It’s winter, and people are dying during the influenza epidemic.  People have black wreaths on their doors, some because of influenza deaths and some because they have relatives who died fighting in World War I.  At one point, they see a bonfire in the cemetery because the ground is frozen, and they need to thaw it enough to dig a new grave.  When they get closer, they see that it’s a baby’s coffin, which upsets Sarah.

When Jacob finally demands that his father explain himself and his presence there, John says that he wanted to see how things turned out.  The two men argue and push each other, and Jacob accidentally falls over a plow and breaks his leg.  John sets the broken leg, saying that he’s done it before, but Jacob is still angry with him.

Eventually, John talks to Caleb about his past, admitting that he was wrong to leave years ago and saying that he can’t really blame Jacob for how he feels about it because his bad decision has affected Jacob’s whole life.  John quarreled with his wife years ago, and he felt like the two of them couldn’t live together anymore. (I have to admit that, after John had earlier tried to tell Jacob that things weren’t the way he thought they were, I was really disappointed because this explanation is exactly the way I figured it was.)  Jacob keeps saying that John could have at least written, but the truth is that John can’t read or write until Caleb begins teaching him. (If this is what John meant by things not being the way Jacob thought they were, it’s a little less disappointing.)  When Sarah is accidentally lost in a snow storm outside, and John helps Jacob save her, the father and son finally make peace with each other.

The movie version of this book is called Winter’s End, and it is the last of the series to be made into a movie. Actually, I think that the movie may have actually been made before the book (I’m a little confused by the movie’s date, but it looks like it was first). The movie and the book are pretty close to each other. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan, 1985.

This is a popular book to read in schools in the United States, the first in a series.  It’s a Newbery Award winner, and it shows aspects of farm life during the early 20th century and the concept of mail-order brides, a practice from American frontier days where men living in the West or Midwest, where there were not many available women in the population, would write to agencies or advertise for a bride from the East.  The process for arranging these marriages could vary, but it typically started with written correspondence before the man and woman would meet in person.  In this book, the man looking for a bride, Jacob Witting, is a widower with two children who has a farm on the Great Plains.  The story is narrated by his older child, Anna. The book isn’t very long, and it’s a pretty quick read, but it’s filled with colorful imagery and emotion.

Anna has had to help take care of her little brother, Caleb, since he was born.  Their mother died shortly after giving birth to him, and Caleb frequently asks Anna questions about what their mother was like.  Anna’s memories of their mother are fading because she was still very young when she died, but she really misses her.

Then, Jacob tells the children that he has advertised for a bride from the East, the way a neighbor of theirs did.  The children like their neighbor’s new wife and wouldn’t mind having a mother like her.  The father has received a reply to his advertisement from a woman in Maine, Sarah Wheaton.  Sarah has never been married, and now that her brother is getting married, she feels the need for a change in her life.  She loves living by the sea in Maine, but she is willing to move to start a new life.  She says that she would like to know more about Jacob and his children.

Jacob and the children write letters to Sarah, getting to know her better.  They come to like each other, but the children worry about whether Sarah will change her mind about coming to see them or whether she’ll like them or their farm when or if she comes.  When Sarah tells them that she’s coming during the spring, she says that they will know her because she will be wearing a yellow bonnet and describes herself as being plain and tall (the title of the book).

Sarah will stay with the family for a time while they decide if they can be a family together and if she will marry Jacob that summer.  There are adjustments that they will all have to make.  Life on the prairie is very different from what Sarah is used to, and the children still worry that she won’t want to stay.  Sarah brings seashells from Maine to show them, and they teach her about the local wildflowers.  One of my favorite scenes was where Sarah cuts Caleb’s hair, and they put the hair clippings out for birds to use in their nests.  Caleb was particularly concerned about whether Sarah would sing like their mother used to, and Sarah does. 

Through it all, the children can tell that Sarah really misses the sea.  Sarah does say that the land around the farm kind of rolls, a little like the sea, and they play in a haystack, like it was a dune by the sea.  When they visit their neighbors, Sarah talks with Maggie, the mail-order bride who came from Tennessee.  Maggie understands Sarah feels, missing her home in Maine, and it upsets Anna to hear them talk about missing their old homes.  However, Sarah says that things were changing at home, and Maggie comments that, “There are always things to miss, no matter where you are.”  What the women realize is that, although they miss their old homes, they have grown to love the new people in their lives and would miss them if they tried to go back to where they came from.

At one point, Sarah goes to town alone, and the children worry that she won’t come back, but she does.  She just went to town to buy colored pencils in her favorite sea colors.  Sarah does stay and marry Jacob, setting up the rest of the series.

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

My Reaction

There is a movie version of this book, which follows the story pretty well. The book wasn’t specific about the time period, although it seems to take place during the early 1900s. The movie and its sequels are set during the 1910s, which makes sense for the rest of the series. The book also didn’t say exactly where the farm was, but the movie clarifies that it’s in Kansas. The movie also emphasizes how much the whole family, particularly Jacob and Anna, misses the mother who died.  In the movie, Jacob forbids the children to use any of his dead wife’s things and doesn’t want to talk about her.  However, when Sarah realizes that trying to avoid his wife’s memory is hurting Anna, she brings out some of the dead wife’s belongs to use, helping the family to make peace with the past and prepare for the future. 

In the movie, Jacob’s pain over his wife’s death is partly about guilt as well as grief. The book doesn’t really talk about why Anna’s mother died after childbirth, but in the movie, Jacob has a painful discussion with Sarah about how he blames himself for his wife’s death because the doctor had warned them that they shouldn’t have any more children after Anna.  Apparently, Anna’s birth had been difficult and caused complications because his wife was so young, and the doctor had said that having another child would be dangerous.  However, after a few years went by, they decided to try for a son to help run the farm, thinking that enough time had gone by for it to be safe.  When his wife died giving birth to Caleb, Jacob felt terrible, thinking that he should have taken the doctor’s warning more seriously and not tried to have another child.  Confessing all of this to Sarah helps Jacob to make his own peace with what happened.  However, none of this discussion appears in the book.

In both the book and the movie, Jacob also has to adjust to Sarah’s different personality.  Sarah is more stubborn and independent than his first wife, with her own way of doing things.  Living with her is different from living the mother of his children.  However, Jacob comes to love Sarah for the person that she is.

Posted on by TracyC

The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat

The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat by Thornton W. Burgess, 1914.

This book is part of a series of stories about the adventures of different animals.

Jerry Muskrat lives with his family and friends in the Smiling Pool and Laughing Brook, near the farm owned by Farmer Brown. Jerry’s mother warns him to look out for the traps that Farmer Brown’s son likes to set, but he’s sure that he can take care of himself . . . until he has a very narrow escape!

Jerry’s mother calls a meeting of the other animals to discuss the threat of traps after Jerry’s close call. They decide to ask Great-Grandfather Frog for his advice. He tells them that they must find all of the traps and use a stone or stick to trigger them. Then, when the traps have been sprung, they will bury them. The animals have some close calls while springing the traps, but they manage to set them off successfully.

However, they soon have a new problem: it seems like the water in the Smiling Pool is getting lower each day. When the animals investigate, they discover that someone has dammed the Laughing Brook that feeds the Smiling Pool! If they don’t do something about it, they might all have to go live on the Big River, and they don’t want to leave their home.

It turns out that the dam was made by Paddy the Beaver, Jerry Muskrat’s “big cousin from the North.” Jerry tries to make a hole in the dam so that the water will flow, but Paddy blocks it again, telling them not to mess with his dam. Jerry has to explain to Paddy why the residents of the Smiling Pool need the water. Once Paddy understands, he lets the water flow again.

The animals in the story refer to the place where they live in terms of their pool and brook and the nearby farm. You don’t really know exactly where they live, but there is one animal who has a Southern accent, “Ol’ Mistah Buzzard.” Ol’ Mistah Buzzard talks like the characters in Disney’s Song of the South, regularly dropping phrases like, “Where are yo’alls going?”, “Fo’ the lan’s sake! Fo’ the lan’s sake!”, and referring to other animals as “Brer Mink” and “Brer Turtle.” The book was written before the movie Song of the South was created in 1946, but long after the book that the movie was based on, Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris from 1881. I suspect that the author of this book was inspired by the animal stories in Uncle Remus and that the Buzzard’s dialect is a salute to that. Unfortunately, that kind of dialect is really annoying for modern readers and may make it a difficult thing to read aloud to children. Mercifully, none of the other characters in the book do this. The parade of animals who hurry to find what has stopped the water in the brook is also a take-off from The Tortoise and the Hare story because the turtle, who was left behind by the others in their rush does become the first to find the source of the problem when the others stop to rest.

This book is over 100 years old and in the public domain now. There are multiple places to read this book for free online, but the one that I recommend the most is Lit2Go from the University of South Florida because it offers audio readings of the chapters in the book as well as the text. The book is also available online through Project Gutenberg.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Mother Carey’s Chickens

MotherCareysChickens

Mother Carey’s Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1911.

The book begins with a quote from an older children’s book, Water Babies:

“By and by there came along a flock of petrels, who are Mother Carey‘s own chickens…. They flitted along like a flock of swallows, hopping and skipping from wave to wave, lifting their little feet behind them so daintily that Tom fell in love with them at once.”

This book is very different from the story in Water Babies (which is actually a very dark book for children), but the quote is foretelling some of the events of this story, and the characters refer to the story now and then throughout the book.  Mother Carey’s Chickens is the book that the Disney movie Summer Magic was based on.  The basic premise of the story is the same between the book and the movie, but there are also many differences in details.  For example, in the movie, the Carey family had only three children, and in the book there were four.  The oldest children in the family also seem older in the movie than they were in the book, and their stuck-up cousin Julia was also much younger in the book.

When the book begins, Mrs. Carey is not yet a widow, but she has received news that her husband, a Navy captain, is ill with what appears to be typhoid.  She has to go to him, leaving her four children Nancy, Gilbert, Kathleen, and Peter, at the house with their two servants.  (Kathleen was the child who did not appear in the movie.)  She gives them some instructions to call on their relatives if they need any further help and refers to them as her “chickens” in reference to the bit of seafaring folklore that the earlier quote mentioned.  They explain that this nickname for the children was based on a joke made by their father’s Admiral back when Nancy turned ten years old.

Nancy is the eldest of the Carey children (played by Hayley Mills in the movie), and from the way that the book describes her, I suspect her to be something of a Mary Sue for the author.  Nancy has a knack for making up and telling stories, and at one point, the book says, “… sometimes, of late, Mother Carey looked at her eldest chicken and wondered if after all she had hatched in her a bird of brighter plumage or rarer song than the rest, or a young eagle whose strong wings would bear her to a higher flight!”  Nancy and her younger sister, Kathleen, are both pretty, but Nancy is definitely the center of attention and a much livelier personality.  The book is complimentary to all of the children, however.  Gilbert is described as a “fiery youth” and little Peter, the youngest, as “a consummate charmer and heart-breaker.”  Although Peter is only four years old, the book says, “The usual elements that go to the making of a small boy were all there, but mixed with white magic. It is painful to think of the dozens of girl babies in long clothes who must have been feeling premonitory pangs when Peter was four, to think they couldn’t all marry him when they grew up!”  So, the Carey children are generally idealized as children, something pretty common in older children’s literature, especially in stories that are meant to teach certain lessons or morals, as this one does.

While the children wait for their mother to return home, they are on their best behavior even more than usual, with Nancy and Kathleen having the following conversation:

“It is really just as easy to do right as wrong, Kathleen,” said Nancy when the girls were going to bed one night.

“Ye-es!” assented Kathleen with some reservations in her tone, for she was more judicial and logical than her sister. “But you have to keep your mind on it so, and never relax a single bit! Then it’s lots easier for a few weeks than it is for long stretches!”

“That’s true,” agreed Nancy; “it would be hard to keep it up forever. And you have to love somebody or something like fury every minute or you can’t do it at all. How do the people manage that can’t love like that, or haven’t anybody to love?”

“I don’t know.” said Kathleen sleepily. “I’m so worn out with being good, that every night I just say my prayers and tumble into bed exhausted. Last night I fell asleep praying, I honestly did!”

“Tell that to the marines!” remarked Nancy incredulously.

So, the kids are pretty good, but perhaps not perfect. Still, Mary Sue characters usually do have a flaw that’s not really considered much of a flaw, making them more endearing.

Even if you don’t know the story from the movie, you may have guessed that when the children’s mother returns home, it is with the news that their father has died.  With the father’s death comes many changes for the Carey family, which is the point in the story where the movie begins.  Without the father’s salary, and with all four children less than fifteen years old, the family has to cut expenses, letting the servants go.

MotherCareysChickensJuliaComingThen, the family receives word that Captain Carey’s brother is in failing health and that his business partner, Mr. Manson, is seeking to place his daughter, Julia, with a relative.  Mr. Manson has already spoken to a cousin of the family about Julia, but this cousin has refused to take her.  The now-fatherless Carey family knows that taking on another relative will be an added burden on them, but Julia has no other family and nowhere else to go, so they see it as their duty to help her.  Admittedly, none of them likes Julia very much.  They remember her as a spoiled child who was always bragging about the wonderful things that her wealthier friend Gladys Ferguson had or did.  Even now, the Ferguson family has invited Julia for a visit before she goes to live with her aunt and cousins, but unfortunately, they have no intention of adopting her or even trying to care for her until her father is well themselves.  Nancy sees them as simply spoiling Julia and preparing her for a life that the Carey family can’t possibly support.

Then, Nancy has an idea that changes everything for the family.  She reminds them all of a trip that they took to Maine years ago and a beautiful old house that they saw in a small town called Beulah.  The memories of that happy time and idyllic house and small town call to them, and Nancy and her mother wonder what happened to the house.  They decide to talk to a friend of Captain Carey’s who had a small law office in the area, sending Gilbert to Beulah to find him.  In Beulah, Gilbert learns that the Yellow House (as people commonly call it, although it also has the name Garden Fore-and-Aft) belongs to the wealthy Hamilton family, who don’t live there but have used it as a kind of vacation home.  The father of the family, Lemuel Hamilton, is in diplomatic service and lives overseas.  During the last few years, the younger Hamiltons had used the house to host house parties of other young people they knew from school, but now the young people are living all over the world, and the house has been empty.  Gilbert’s father’s friend, Colonel Wheeler, and a local store owner, Bill Harmon, describe the house’s current condition to Gilbert.  Since the younger Hamiltons renovated the barn and put in a dance floor for their parties, it’s too fancy and no longer usable for its original purpose, which is why no farming families have been interested in the house themselves.  The men say that they can rent the house to the Carey family on behalf the Hamilton family (who, after all, still have to pay taxes on the property and wouldn’t mind a little extra money to cover it) for a sum much less than the rent of their current house.  The house could use a few minor repairs, and the barn is more fixed up for holding dances than keeping animals, but that’s no problem for the Carey family.  Living there would save the family a lot of money until the children are grown and able to start earning their own livings.  Even though Gilbert is only about fourteen, he is able to rent the house on his mother’s behalf.

MotherCareysChickensHome

The entire family is pleased, except for Julia, who is still a snob.  The book explains that Julia had always been a very well-behaved little girl although neglected by her somewhat flighty mother.  (The book doesn’t say exactly what happened to Julia’s mother, although she is no longer part of Julia’s life.  She may be dead, or she may have run off a long time ago.)  Because she was an only child and always seemed the “pink of perfection” (which provides the title of a song about Julia from the movie version of the book), always seeming to say and do the right thing, her father spoiled her from a young age, giving her every possible advantage he could.  When Julia first arrives at the Yellow House in Beulah to stay with her relatives, she still prattles on about her wonderful friend Gladys and all the luxuries she has.  The book says, “She seemed to have no instinct of adapting herself to the family life, standing just a little aloof and in an attitude of silent criticism.”  So, if Nancy sounded a little too wonderful in her earlier description, understand that Nancy thinks that Julia is too sickeningly perfect and smug.  Julia’s problem, as I see it, isn’t so much that she’s too perfect as she expects the rest of the world to be too perfect.  Because she is so focused on perfection, she isn’t sympathetic enough to other people or accommodating to imperfect situations.  As the book says, “She seldom did wrong, in her own opinion, because the moment she entertained an idea it at once became right, her vanity serving as a pair of blinders to keep her from seeing the truth.”  Besides being spoiled, she is very naive and rigid in her thinking.  She thinks that she knows what’s what and how things ought to be, and that’s all there is to it.

A major part of the story deals with Julia’s adjustment to family life and the realities of the family’s situation.  At first, she thinks that Mrs. Carey should save up for college for Gilbert and a proper coming-out for each of the girls in the family to give them all the advantages that life has to offer.  She’s sure that her father will get better and be able to help pay for everything when the time comes.  However, Mrs. Carey doesn’t want to wait on that hope.  She says that she’s sure that the children will be able to make something of themselves even without the advantages.  Matters come to a head with Julia when Kathleen gets tired of Julia complaining about everything and everyone and says that if her father hadn’t lost so much of her parents’ money as well as his own, the whole family would be better off.  Julia demands to know from Mrs. Carey if that is true, and Mrs. Carey says that she and her husband did invest in her father’s business, an investment which he may never pay back, due to his poor health.  She also tells Julia:

“You are not a privileged guest, you are one of the family. If you are fatherless just now, my children are fatherless forever; yet you have not made one single burden lighter by joining our forces. You have been an outsider, instead of putting yourself loyally into the breach, and working with us heart to heart. I welcomed you with open arms and you have made my life harder, much harder, than it was before your coming. To protect you I have had to discipline my own children continually, and all the time you were putting their tempers to quite unnecessary tests! I am not extenuating Kathleen, but I merely say you have no right to behave as you do. You are thirteen years old, quite old enough to make up your mind whether you wish to be loved by anybody or not; at present you are not!”

It’s an awful thing to say to a child that she isn’t loved, but it is something of a wake-up call to Julia to realize that the way that she was behaving was making herself unlovable to the people who should have been closest to her.  When she tells Mrs. Carey that Gladys loves her, Mrs. Carey says, “Then either Gladys has a remarkable gift of loving, or else you are a different Julia in her company.” Mrs. Carey tells her to consider what the Bible says about “the sin of causing your brother to offend.” It’s probably the first time that Julia was ever criticized for anything, breaking her perfect record of apparent perfection.  Julia has greatly provoked the rest of her family and realizes that she has earned whatever bad feelings they have toward her.  She has ignored their difficulties because she was too focused on what she wanted for herself and the way that she thought that life should be, not realizing how much harder she had made things for everyone.  For the first time in her life, Julia admits that she is not perfect and asks for another chance to make things right, marking a real change in her character.  Personally, though, I think that some of this drama could have been avoided if, knowing Julia and her behavior as she does, Mrs. Carey had spoken to her when she first came to live with the family, explaining the family circumstances in a straight-forward way and making it known that she expects certain standards of behavior from Julia when she’s in her house.  Making the rules and enforcing them them from the beginning may have prevented a lot of stress and saved Kathleen from exploding emotionally.

MotherCareysChickensLatinA character that appears in the movie, Ossian “Osh” Popham, is also in the book, although instead of being the store owner, he’s a local handyman who helps the family get the house in order.  His children, also characters in the movie, are in the book, too, although I didn’t like the way the book described his daughter, Lallie Joy.  It says that “she was fairly good at any kind of housework not demanding brains” and that she “was in a perpetual state of coma,” in case you didn’t understand that she’s basically stupid.  I always hate it when stories make a character intentionally stupid.  I did appreciate her explanation of her name, though: “Lallie’s out of a book named Lallie Rook, an’ I was born on the Joy steamboat line going to Boston.” I had wondered where the name came from.

While the family continues fixing up the house to make it nicer to live in, Nancy writes a letter to the owner of the house, 50-year-old Lemuel Hamilton, who is an American consul in Germany, telling him about her family and their life at the house.  Lemuel Hamilton finds her letter charming.  Seeing the picture of her family that Nancy encloses with the letter makes Lemuel think of his own family, scattered to the four winds, the children grown or nearly grown, either away at school or starting their first business ventures in various parts of the world.  He’s lonely for the comforts of having all of his family living together and surprised at how happy this much-poorer family looks in the old house in the small town that his ambitious, social-climbing wife always thought was beneath them.  Then, it occurs to him that his sons are of an age when they’ll start thinking about marriage soon, and he wonders what wives they’ll choose and what their family lives will be like.  On an impulse, Lemuel writes to the Carey family, telling them that they can live in the house rent-free as long as they continue with the household improvements, and he also forwards Nancy’s letter to his younger son, Thomas (tying the story back to the quote at the beginning of the book), who is living in Hong Kong and who was the one who always liked the Yellow House the most.

MotherCareysChickensLetter

MotherCareysChickensTomRosesWhen Lemuel tells the Careys that they can stay in the house for as long as they like, unless his son Tom wants the house, Nancy begins thinking of Tom as a possible threat to her family’s happiness.  (She thinks of him as “The Yellow Peril” in a reference for the old xenophobic term used by people who were afraid of immigrants from Asia, since he would be coming from China, and as a pun on the Yellow House that they might be competing for. This term is also mentioned in the Disney movie.)  Of course, Tom turns out to be no threat.  Tom has been lonely pursuing his tea business in China, and Nancy’s letter and happy family life call him home to a romance that will change the lives of the Careys as well.  By the end of the book, Nancy is seventeen years old, old enough for romance and charmed by the romantic Tom.

The lessons that the story emphasizes are the importance of family relationships and togetherness over personal ambition and developing the ability to triumph over adversity instead of waiting for life advantages that may never come.  Like other books from the early 20th century, the values of hard work and cheerfulness are emphasized, and there is the implication that important people will recognize and reward these qualities when they see them.  Pretentiousness and snobbery are criticized.  A settled, happy family life is the ultimate goal.

Overall, though, I really prefer the movie to the book.  I think that cutting down some of the side plots improved the story.  Besides removing the younger daughter, Kathleen, from the story, the movie also eliminated other side characters, like Cousin Ann and the Lord siblings, Cyril and Olive, who also live in Beulah and become friends of the family.  Also, making Julia older than she was in the original book, closer to Nancy’s age than Kathleen’s, improves the sisterly relationship that the girls eventually have.

My copy of the book originally belonged to my grandmother, who was born the same year that this book was originally written.

The book is now public domain and available online through Project Gutenberg.

Posted on by TracyC

Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death

BlossomSleepDeathBlossom Culp and the Sleep of Death by Richard Peck, 1986.

This book starts shortly after the previous book in the series ends.  After Blossom’s old history teacher was run out of town for his scandalous behavior, he was replaced by Miss Fairweather.  Miss Fairweather is a tough, no-nonsense woman who pushes her students to study hard and take history seriously.  Unexpectedly, she comes to appreciate Blossom, an outcast from a poor family, because Blossom demonstrates some knowledge of Ancient Egypt.  Little does Miss Fairweather know that Blossom’s comments in class were inspired by one of the visions that Blossom occasionally gets because of her psychic gifts.

Blossom experiences a visitation from the spirit of an Ancient Egyptian princess who says that she needs Blossom’s help.  Years ago, her mummy and some precious objects were stolen from her tomb.  The princess doesn’t seem to know exactly where her “earthly form” is now, but she’s sure that it’s somewhere nearby.  She’s very concerned because she senses that archaeologists in Egypt are digging to find her tomb and knows that when they finally reach it, they will discover that she isn’t there.  Rather than being concerned about her tomb being violated by the archaeologists, the princess senses that they are searching for her remains in order to venerate them, that if they find her mummy, they will take it to a place of great beauty where it will be treated with the utmost care and respect (a museum).  She wants that and fears that she will miss her chance at the kind of immortality that this form of glorification, care, and study will provide.  So, she asks Blossom to find her earthly remains and inform the searchers of her true whereabouts.  At first, Blossom has no idea how she can accomplish that, but the princess threatens her with a true Egyptian curse if she doesn’t try.

Then, Blossom receives a clue to the mystery in the form of a beautiful Egyptian scarab that her mother found one day while she was out scavenging.  If Blossom can find the place where her mother found the jewel, she can also find the princess’s mummy.  Fortunately, Miss Fairweather has assigned the class special projects about Ancient Egypt, and she is thrilled when Blossom says that she wants to study grave robbers.  Blossom sees this as a good way to collect some extra information about grave robbers that she can use to find the princess’s mummy as well as get a good grade in Miss Fairweather’s class.  It also proves to be an excellent way to draw Alexander Armsworth into her search for the mummy.

Alexander still denies to Blossom that he has real psychic abilities like hers, even after their previous adventures together.  He insists that it was just a phase that they were going through, one that he wants to leave behind.  He’s been busy flirting with Letty, the class snob, and he’s trying hard to get into a prestigious fraternity so that he can give Letty his fraternity pin.  Not only does Blossom think that the boys in the fraternity are a bunch of idiots who do stupid things, but the idea of Alexander giving Letty his pin as a sign of their relationship is just sickening.

Blossom is reluctant to admit her real feelings for Alexander, but the two of them are close in ways that Letty and Alexander never will be because of their shared abilities and adventures, and Blossom has a sense that their futures will be intertwined as well.  Alexander is angry that Blossom is roping her into yet another supernatural escapade, but he has to go along with her project idea because he has already gotten on Miss Fairweather’s bad side and needs to do well on the project to save his grade in class.

Along with the supernatural adventure, there is also a look into the past, the world of 1910s America as well as Ancient Egypt.  First, there are the traditions of stunts associated with Alexander’s initiation into his fraternity and the tradition of giving a girl a fraternity pin as a precursor to engagement (“engaged to be engaged”).  Then, they discover that Miss Fairweather is a suffragette, which is the reason why she left her previous teaching job.  Her feminist ideals cause problems for her in her new, small town when they become known, but with Blossom’s help, she wins over some of the influential women in town as well as a male admirer.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

DreadfulFutureBlossomCulpThe Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp by Richard Peck, 1983.

This book is part of the Blossom Culp Series.

It’s 1914, and Blossom Culp is just starting high school. Although the principal of her old school tells her that this is a chance for her to make a fresh start, it looks like Blossom’s future is going to be very much a continuation of her immediate past.  In high school, she’s still a social outcast, looked down on by girls from better-off families, like Letty, the class president.  Also, despite her principal’s assertion that Blossom’s previous forays into the occult were imaginary, the product of the mental confusion that accompanies puberty, and that she is bound to grow out of them, Blossom knows that her psychic abilities are a natural gift and will not be ignored.

Blossom begins high school friendless because Alexander Armsworth has been ignoring her lately because of his important new position as class vice-president, his infatuation with Letty, and his friendship with a couple of local hooligans, Bub and Champ. Alexander is looking forward to his role in planning the school’s Halloween Festival, telling Blossom that he’s over their earlier, childish occult escapades and the Halloween pranks he used to pull.  Meanwhile, all of the other girls in school are infatuated with their handsome history teacher, Mr. Lacy, and so is the girls’ gym teacher, much to Blossom’s disgust.  Blossom thinks that Mr. Lacy is full of himself and denies that she has any such silly crush on Alexander.

Blossom makes an unexpected friend in a girl called Daisy-Rae, a girl from the country who has brought her younger brother into town to attend school and hoped to get an education herself but has been too afraid of the big town to actually attend classes.  Daisy-Rae hides in the school during the day and lives alone with her brother at night in the old chicken coop at the abandoned Leverette house.  It is through Daisy-Rae that she learns that Alexander and his friends aren’t so above childish pranks as they claim to be.  Blossom also discovers that Mr. Lacy has been romancing her old principal.  Mr. Lacy isn’t quite what he appears to be and has some unsavory secrets in his past.

Matters come to a head when Alexander (at Letty’s urging) tries to persuade Blossom to dress up and become the fortune teller for the haunted house that the freshmen class is doing for the Halloween Festival.  The haunted house is also a fundraiser, and Letty figures that they can get extra money from people if they’re willing to pay to have their fortunes told, and who would be better for the job than Blossom?  However, Blossom isn’t one to go out of her way to please others, especially Letty, and it turns out that they’re holding the haunted house in the Old Leverette place.  For some reason, that old house makes Blossom’s mother uneasy.  She seems to think that it’s haunted, but in an unusual way.  Blossom tells Alexander that she will not agree to be their fortune teller until he agrees to check out the house with her before Halloween and find out what’s wrong with it.  She figures that, since both of them are psychic, they can learn what’s so unusual.

As Blossom learns, her abilities don’t confine themselves to the past and people who have died but extend to the future and the people who haven’t yet been born.  Inside the Old Leverette house, Blossom suddenly finds herself entering the distant future, the 1980s.  In the 1980s, the Leverette house is once again lived in, and Blossom meets a boy named Jeremy who is a lonely social outcast, like herself.  Jeremy is a computer nerd, living with his divorced mother.  He takes Blossom on a tour of their town as it is in Blossom’s future, much larger than it used to be and with many familiar landmarks missing.  However, what Blossom sees in the future gives her the inspiration she needs to solve her problems in the past and hope that things will improve.  In return, she also proves to Jeremy that he is far from alone and has had a friend for longer than he ever imagined.

The time travel to the 1980s comes off as being a little corny (or so it seemed to me), but the writing quality of the book is excellent.  The author has an entertaining turn of phrase, and the book, like others in the series, is humorous and a lot of fun to read.

Besides being a kind of fantasy story, there are some interesting tidbits of history in the book, showing how people lived in the 1910s.  Blossom explains about the things she and her classmates did at school, like wearing beanies on their heads to show which year they were (freshmen, future graduating class of 1918).  At one point in the story, Blossom takes Daisy-Rae and her brother to their first movie, a silent film with an episode of The Perils of Pauline serial.  While Blossom worries about the future, readers can get a glimpse of the past!

As for what Blossom learns about her own future, she avoids finding out too much because she’d rather not know the details.  However, there are implications that she and Alexander may eventually marry and live in his family’s old house.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Ghost Belonged to Me

GhostBelongedToMe

The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck, 1975.

The book takes place in the 1910s in a small town on the Mississippi River. Alexander Armsworth, a boy in his early teens, is approached by a girl from his class who tells him that the barn on his family’s property is haunted and that Alexander himself has the ability to see the “Unseen.” The girl, Blossom Culp, is a poor girl from a family of outcasts who has been known to tell tall tales, so Alexander isn’t sure he believes her at first. However, he can’t help but be curious, and when he sees a light coming from the barn at night, he decides to investigate.

Inside, he finds the ghost of a young girl who warns him of danger on the trolley tracks near his house and tells him that he must act fast to save everyone. Frightened, Alexander gets the trolley to stop and learns that by doing so, he has saved the lives of everyone on board from a disaster at the bridge further on. Naturally, everyone wants to know how Alexander knew to warn them. When Alexander explains, he is met with skepticism from his social-climbing mother and sister and unwelcome attention from news people and curiosity-seekers from town.

The ghost, who tells Alexander that her name is Inez Dumaine, is also in need of help before she can rest peacefully. Alexander will need the help of those who believe in him and the ghost to find Inez’s body and return it to her home in New Orleans.

In this first book in of the Blossom Culp series, Alexander is the main character, but the other books focus more on Blossom, who discovers that she also has the ability to see ghosts.  The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

This is the movie that the Disney movie Child of Glass was based on, and the movie is available on dvd. Sometimes, you can also find it on YouTube, at least clips and reviews of it.

My Reaction

The story has sad and scary points, but those are balanced out by humorous situations. Alexander’s sister’s turmoil over the fiasco at her coming-out party is hilarious, and his mother’s change in attitude when she realizes that, instead of making them social outcasts, the ghost business actually attracts attention from one of the town’s leading citizens is a hoot. Blossom, of course, is wonderfully nosy, elbowing her way into Alexander’s life and selling tours of the haunted barn.

I was very young when I saw the Disney movie based on this book, Child of Glass (a live action movie that aired on television), and I was afraid of ghosts. However, years later, I took another look at the movie and decided to read the book that it was based on. When I did, I saw things I didn’t appreciate when I was young. The dialog and depiction of life in the early 20th century in the book are wonderful. It conjured up memories of Meet Me in St. Louis, especially the Halloween scene (which took place only about a decade earlier than this story). Unfortunately, this early 20th century setting wasn’t present in the movie version of this book because Child of Glass was placed contemporary with the time it was made, during the late 20th century.

The Disney movie was also different from the original book because it added the feature of the “child of glass” which didn’t exist in the original book. The “child of glass” was mentioned in a poem at Inez’s grave that explained how to lay her ghost to rest. At first, the Alexander and Blossom in the movie don’t know what it means, but it turns out to be Inez’s doll, which was lost when she was murdered by her wicked uncle. In the book, Inez died under different circumstances. However, the discovery of the doll in the movie uncovers the secret motive behind her murder, which is similar to the reason why Inez’s body was hidden in the book after she died in a riverboat accident.  In the book, Inez’s spirit finds rest after her body is found and taken to her family’s cemetery in New Orleans.  The Disney movie also turns this story specifically into a Halloween story, which wasn’t the case in the original book.