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The Half Child

The Half Child cover

The Half Child by Kathleen Hersom, 1989.

Lucy Emerson (Lucy Watson after her marriage) and her family live in an English village in the 17th century. As an elderly woman in her early 60s, she looks back on her sister, Sarah. She has actually had two sisters named Sarah, but it’s her first sister Sarah that she thinks of.

Little Sarah was always a strange child. From when she was very small, she would do odd things, like rocking back and forth while singing odd little wordless songs and being very clumsy. She could never talk clearly, and most people couldn’t really understand her. Because she is abnormal, she is quickly labeled as a “changeling” – a fairy baby substituted for a regular human child. Those who don’t call her a changeling call her a “half-wit.” Only Lucy really values Sarah, whether she’s a little human child or a fairy child, and she tries hard to understand her and take care of her. What Sarah likes best are the little “stone dollies” – small statues of praying children – in the local church, and she always asks Lucy to take her there to see them.

Lucy and Sarah’s mother is often harsh with Sarah out of frustration because she’s difficult to understand and difficult to deal with. Some people in the community think that she should be even more harsh with Sarah than she is because, if she really is a changeling, the fairies or Little People might snatch her back if she isn’t being treated well, being beaten or starved. Their Granny believes that Sarah is a changeling, and she implies it often, comparing a changeling child to a cuckoo’s egg, substituted in the next for another’s bird’s egg. However, their mother never refers to Sarah as a changeling and doesn’t seem to believe that Sarah isn’t really her daughter.

Then, one day, they can’t find Sarah. It seems like she’s wandered off by herself. Lucy looks in the church to see of Sarah went there to look at the “stone dollies.” Sarah isn’t there, but one of the dollies has the daisy chain that Lucy made for Sarah. According to superstition, a daisy chain helps to protect a child from the fairies, and Lucy thinks that, without it, maybe the fairies did carry Sarah away. On the other hand, maybe Sarah fell in the river, and it carried her away. Worried, Lucy desperately searches the village for Sarah, until one woman says that she saw Sarah in the churchyard. She would have walked Sarah home, but Sarah didn’t want to come with her, so she came to get Lucy to take her. Lucy hurries back to the churchyard and finds Sarah there, waiting for her. Lucy demands to know what Sarah has been doing, and she says that she’s been playing with the “little people.” Fearing that Sarah is talking about the fairies, Lucy demands to know if she’s seen them before or had anything to eat from them, but Sarah just says, “Not telling.” Lucy considers that maybe Sarah meant something other than fairies when she said, “little people.” Maybe Sarah just met some other young children, or maybe she was talking about playing with the stone dollies again.

One day, Lucy leaves Sarah at home with their mother when she goes to visit their older sister, Martha, who is working at a farm near a neighboring town. Lucy’s mother tells her that Sarah should stay home because it’s such a long walk to the farm, and Sarah is too little to handle it. When Lucy returns home from the visit, she discovers that something disastrous has happened while she was away. Lucy’s mother, who was pregnant and due to give birth in another month or so, accidentally tripped over Sarah in some way and fall, bringing on the birth of the baby too soon. A neighbor who came to borrow some salt found her and called the midwife to come and tend to her. The baby is safely delivered and survives, but Lucy’s mother is in bad condition.

While everyone was busy attending to the mother, little Sarah apparently ran away from the house and disappeared. Lucy is too worried about her mother and the baby at first to leave the house and go looking for Sarah, although she sends her brother to ask the neighbors if they’ve seen her. Her uncle promises to look for her in the countryside and to send out criers to the neighboring towns if she isn’t found. However, the town is also disrupted that day by soldiers who vandalize the town’s church! Later, Lucy goes to look for Sarah in her usual favorite spots, but she doesn’t find her. When Lucy returns home, her brother tells her that their mother has died.

Their father says that their mother’s last wish was that this new baby girl will be named Sarah. Lucy is shocked because she is sure that the sister named she already has is still out there somewhere, lost. Lucy’s father isn’t so sure. He seems to suspect that the rumors were right, that Sarah was always a changeling, that maybe she has gone back to the fairies now, and that this new baby may be the Sarah they were always meant to have. At least, Lucy’s mother seemed to believe that when she told him that this new baby was to be named Sarah. Lucy never thought that her father believed the changeling stories, but he privately admits to Lucy that he doesn’t really know what to think. None of it makes sense to Lucy because, after all, her mother was pregnant with this new baby while Sarah was still at home with them. If the first Sarah was taken away and the “real” Sarah left her in place, surely there would be two babies now – the “real” Sarah plus this other new sister. As it is, there’s only one baby and one missing sister. Lucy father says that if Sarah returns before the baby’s christening, they will choose another name for the baby, but if she’s still gone, she is probably gone for good, and the baby will be named Sarah.

Sarah is not found by the time the baby is christened, so the new baby becomes the “new” Sarah. Sarah’s father and sister, Martha, try to console Lucy about the loss of the first Sarah, saying that it might be for the best and that Lucy’s life will be easier now because Sarah was too wild, too strange, and too difficult to care for. Lucy feels even worse then they say that because, although Sarah was difficult to look after, Lucy truly loved her and didn’t think of her as a burden. Lucy takes care of her new sister for a couple of years, never giving up hope that she will find the first Sarah or at least learn what happened to her. When Lucy’s father decides to remarry, Lucy goes to work on the farm where Martha is working, leaving the new Sarah to be cared for by their stepmother.

It’s only after Lucy goes to work on the farm that she eventually meets someone who is able to tell her at least some of what happened to the first Sarah after she was lost.

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

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

I first read this story as a young teen in middle school, and I found it fascinating for the historical and folkloric connections. This story takes place over a period of years. The year when the older Lucy reflects on her sister Sarah is 1700. During the year that the first Sarah disappeared, Lucy is talking to someone else, and they mention the Roundheads and that the king was executed the year before, so they are referring to the execution of Charles I in 1649, putting the year of that conversation at 1650. Most of the book is set around the middle of the 17th century.

In real life, there were stories about changelings, fairy children substituted for human children as infants, and stories like this seem to have been used to explain human children born with deformities or disabilities of various kinds. Modern people might recognize that young Sarah was born with some kind of developmental disability, which is why she’s not like her siblings, but people in the past didn’t have as much ability to diagnose or understand people who were born “different” from others. They couldn’t understand how children with disabilities could be born to apparently healthy parents, especially ones who had produced other healthy children, so they explained it by saying that those children were not the “real” children but substitutes left by the fairies in exchange for the healthy human children, like a cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, to be raised and cared for by them. In the story, Lucy’s grandmother makes the comparison between Sarah and the cuckoo bird, although Lucy is very upset by that description.

During the course of the story, Lucy, as the one who seems to understand Sarah the best and love her the most, struggles to find her missing sister and learn what happened to her. At various times, she also struggles to reconcile what other people tell her about Sarah being a changeling or being taken away by fairies with her own love for Sarah as her sister, a real sister and not just a changeling, and her own worries about the more mundane tragedies that can befall a lost and neglected child. There are times when Lucy finds it difficult to ignore the superstitions of the people who raised her, and she finds herself at least halfway believing in fairies and that the girl she loves as a sister is in danger from them. While Sarah is with her, she makes daisy chains for her to wear as a precaution against the fairies taking her, although those who seem to most believe that Sarah is a changeling would be happy to see her reclaimed by fairies in the hopes of getting the “real” child back.

When their dying mother insists that the new baby girl be named Sarah, Lucy is heart-broken, realizing that her mother believes that Sarah was a changeling all along and that this new baby is the “real” daughter that Sarah should have been. However, to Lucy, who always loved the first Sarah, this new baby is the imposter Sarah, the “new” Sarah, taking the place of the Sarah she has loved and cared for. She never feels the same way about the new Sarah as she did for the first Sarah.

What always interested me about the story since I read it when I was young was how it demonstrates that real phenomena and the more inexplicable parts of human nature are part of the basis behind folklore. All through the book, people refer to children like the first Sarah as being “changelings” because they simply don’t understand why these children are the way they are, but the superstition is ultimately less about people genuinely trying to understand something and more finding a way of taking out their emotions on the “problem” or finding an excuse for not really dealing with it. Beyond the adults simply failing to understand children like Sarah and help their development to the best of their ability, their superstitions lead some of them to be deliberately cruel to children like her in the hopes that the fairies will decide to reclaim them. When a child like that runs away or is lost and never recovered, the adults tell themselves that the child was simply taken by the fairies, apparently both as an excuse to stop looking for a child they don’t know how to handle and also to soothe themselves that they don’t have to worry about her anymore because she is being taken care of by her “real” supernatural family. Whether they really believe that’s what is happening on an intellectual level or not, if they can convince themselves and others that it’s true on an emotional level, then they’re basically letting themselves off the hook and getting rid of an unwanted responsibility without guilt, which sounds a lot less noble than trying to understand and help make the situation better. I think that attitude comes from the sense that these people didn’t think it was even possible for them to understand or deal with the situation. From that attitude, the notion of the “problem child” magically vanishing would be appealing.

It’s sad because, as readers realize, that is not actually the case. Sarah’s disappearance isn’t magical. What Lucy learns about Sarah after the time she disappeared contradicts that idea because she did almost die but was rescued by a kind stranger who happened to be in the right place to find her. Sarah’s eventual whereabouts are unknown at the end of the story because she seems to have wandered off when her caretaker died or shortly before that. Until the very end of the story, elderly Lucy thinks that Sarah is probably dead, having spent some time wandering wild somewhere, but the fact that she never learns for sure leaves it open that Sarah could be alive or for Lucy to convince herself that maybe she finally got Sarah back in the end. When another child, who is very like Sarah, is born into the family, elderly Lucy finds herself wondering again about changelings. Is this new child just another unfortunate child who happened to inherit the developmental disability that Sarah had, or has the original Sarah managed to come back to Lucy in another form? They are so much alike that Lucy begins speaking to her as Sarah, and the new child answers just like Sarah always did, leaving the situation ambiguous in Lucy’s mind.

Although Lucy is ambivalent in her feelings at the end of the story, modern readers will likely side with the more scientific explanation of heredity and genes that sometimes reappear in later generations, producing lookalikes and people with similar health conditions. However, I think that the author did a good job of depicting the uncertainty that affects people confronted by situations and conditions they have no capacity to understand. The people of Lucy’s time did not understand what causes developmental disabilities. Because they needed to come up with an explanation for something they couldn’t understand, they developed the superstition about children like Sarah not being fully human or being substitutes for the “real” children, who were abducted by supernatural beings. Lucy finds herself torn between her own sense that Sarah is her real, human sister and that there must be more logical explanations and her own inability to understand what ultimately happened to her sister.

The book is a little sad because readers can recognize that, with better understanding and support, the original Sarah would have lived a much happier life and that Lucy (and others who appear later in the story) wanted to give her the support she needed but just didn’t know how. At the end of the book, Lucy reflects that times have changed since she was younger. Most people don’t believe in changelings and other old superstitions in 1700, not as much as they did in 1650. The Puritans, in particular, reject all such ideas as “pagan superstitions.” Society seems to be moving more in the direction of rationalism. Lucy says, “So there are plenty boasting nowadays that they cannot believe in such hocus-pocus, and that they have what they call a scientific reason for explaining any strange happenings that occur, instead of blaming the fairies, duergars or witches even. Though much that some call scientific I would say was just plain common sense.”

Even though Lucy generally believes in the rational explanations for what likely happened to the first Sarah, she experiences some doubt again at the end of the story, when she’s confronted with the young relative who looks so much like her. I liked the way the story ends on a slightly ambiguous note, with Lucy reconsidering whether or not Sarah was a changeling and if she has come back to her in another form. Modern readers know that’s not likely, but it does speak to the lifelong uncertainty that Lucy has lived with and the element of uncertainty that often surrounds the human experience in general. Even in modern times, there are many things that we don’t fully understand. In the 21st century, we’re more likely to accept the idea that, just because we don’t know the explanation for something doesn’t mean that there is no explanation that humans can understand but that we just don’t understand it yet. Still, that feeling that there are things beyond our mental grasp still appeals to the human imagination. If Lucy wants to believe that she has found Sarah again, after a fashion, it might give her some peace. For me, though, I just feel a little reassured that this member of the next generation might get more of the love, attention, and support that Sarah always needed, at least from Lucy, and less of the superstition surrounding her condition.

In the section at the back of the book about the author, it says that Kathleen Hersom used to volunteer at a hospital working with mentally disabled children. She was inspired to write this story both because of that experience and because of her interest in folklore.

Posted on by TracyC

Amelia Bedelia and the Baby

Amelia Bedelia and the Baby by Peggy Parish, pictures by Lynn Sweat, 1981.

A friend of Mrs. Rogers, Mrs. Lane, asks Amelia Bedelia to babysit her baby. Amelia Bedelia says she doesn’t know anything about babies, but Mrs. Rogers says that Amelia Bedelia is good with children and points out that babies are also children. When she puts it that way, Amelia Bedelia agrees to babysit. Fortunately, she doesn’t have the idea that babysitting involves sitting on the baby, but being Amelia Bedelia, she finds plenty of ways to misinterpret the list of instructions that Mrs. Lane gives her for taking care of the baby.

When the baby starts to cry, Amelia Bedelia consults the list and sees that she’s supposed to give the baby a bottle. She worries that a baby might break a bottle, though. She tries giving the baby a box and a can instead, but of course, that doesn’t work. Fortunately, Mrs. Carter stops by to drop off some strawberries and helps to fix the baby a bottle.

Amelia Bedelia successfully manages to give the baby a bath but thinks that the instruction to use baby powder means that she should use it on herself and that putting on the baby’s bib means that she should wear it herself. Similarly, Amelia Bedelia thinks that the instruction for naptime mean that she should take a nap herself, and she refuses to do it because she hates naps. Instead, she decides to make strawberry tarts while the baby takes a nap in her play pen.

Amelia Bedelia has some misinterpretations about what the baby is supposed to eat, and when Mr. and Mrs. Lane arrive home, the baby is a mess. Mrs. Lane is upset, realizing that Amelia Bedelia doesn’t understand anything about babies and baby food, but her husband gives her one of Amelia Bedelia’s amazing strawberry tarts. That, and realizing that the baby likes Amelia Bedelia makes Mrs. Lane change her mind.

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

My Reaction

Amelia Bedelia books aren’t supposed to be taken seriously. They’re just funny stories about the ways Amelia Bedelia misinterprets instructions people give her. She gets things wrong because she doesn’t understand certain expressions and words with multiple meanings.

In real life, putting someone like Amelia Bedelia in charge of a baby would be a complete disaster, and it could even be dangerous to the baby. Although things work out with the food Amelia Bedelia gives the baby, a real baby could choke on food they’re not old enough to handle. I couldn’t really blame Mrs. Lane for being upset when she realizes that she put someone who didn’t know what they were doing in charge of her small child. No real parents would be willing to let the matter go or invite her to come back in those circumstances just because they liked her strawberry tarts. However, because this is just meant to be a humorous story, everything works out okay in the end.

I did think it was kind of funny, in hindsight, that they never made any jokes about a babysitter sitting on the baby, which would be the kind of literal interpretation that Amelia Bedelia does. They probably couldn’t make that joke because, if Amelia Bedelia made any comment about that, nobody, not even Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, would dare leave Amelia Bedelia in charge of an infant. They also probably wouldn’t want kids to think that might be a funny thing to do. They also never made any jokes about “changing” the baby or having Amelia Bedelia wonder in what way she was supposed to be changed. That’s probably all for the best.

Posted on by TracyC

Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping

Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping by Peggy Parish, 1985.

Mr. and Mrs. Rogers are going camping, and they take along their maid/housekeeper, Amelia Bedelia. Amelia Bedelia has never been camping before, and she brings along her unique habit of taking things too literally or misinterpreting instructions as Mr. and Mrs. Rogers explain to her what she needs to do while camping.

When Mr. Rogers tries to teach her how to catch a fish, he doesn’t tell her right away that they need to use fishing poles, so Amelia Bedelia just jumps right into the stream and grabs a fish right out of the water. It’s actually kind of an amazing accomplishment, but Mr. Rogers is stunned when Amelia Bedelia lets the fish go, not realizing that they were supposed to keep what they catch. She thought the activity was only about catching.

When Amelia Bedelia is sent to “pitch the tent”, she meets some boys, who say that they’ve heard of Amelia Bedelia. Even knowing that she’s pitching the tent wrong, by simply throwing it and letting it come down wherever it lands, the boys happily participate. When they suggest to Amelia Bedelia that maybe they should move the tent or throw it again when it lands in the bushes, Amelia Bedelia says that isn’t necessary because the tent is conveniently out of the way there.

Amelia Bedelia also gets confused about starting a fire with pine cones because Mr. Rogers didn’t say to use a match, and she thinks “rowing a boat” means to put all the boats in a row. She also doesn’t understand that tent stakes aren’t the same as meat steaks and thinks that sleeping bags are bags that are asleep. The only order that I know that Amelia Bedelia refuses to obey is Mr. Rogers’s order to “go jump in the lake”, and that’s only because she is out of dry clothes! Fortunately, where Amelia shines is preparing a picnic feast for Mr. Rogers’s birthday!

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

My Reaction

The Amelia Bedelia books all poke fun at words with multiple meanings and the literal ways that Amelia Bedelia misinterprets various expressions. As with some of the other Amelia Bedelia books, though, the whole premise of the book is based on Amelia Bedelia not only getting confused about the proper meanings of words but also having no knowledge of the subject at hand. Amelia Bedelia doesn’t know what tent stakes are or what pitching a tent involves because she’s never been camping before. In spite of that, even knowing that Amelia Bedelia has no experience in camping and how she usually interprets instructions she doesn’t fully understand, Mr. Rogers assigns her tasks which he should know that she has no idea how to do. Not only does Amelia Bedelia never learn to check her understanding of what other people mean, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers never really learn that they have to teach Amelia Bedelia what she needs to know to do a task and check to make sure that she understands.

As with other books in this series, though, Amelia Bedelia’s cooking skills save the day and her job with Mr. and Mrs. Rogers! Maybe Amelia Bedelia should have just gotten a job in a bakery or something, but then again, she also messes up cooking instructions whenever she tries to do what someone else told her rather than just doing things the way she’s accustomed to doing them.

Posted on by TracyC

A My Name is Alice

A My Name is Alice by Jane Bayer, pictures by Steven Kellogg, 1984.

I remember this book from when I was a kid! I always liked the pictures in the book, which are by Steven Kellogg, who also did the pictures for The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash.

This book isn’t a story. It’s based on a talking game that’s often played on car rides called A My Name is Alice or Alphabet Chant. Like many casual folk games or childhood playground/car games, it goes by different names and has variable rules. In the back of the book, the author, Jane Bayer, says that she learned the game on a playground when she was a child in the 1950s. When she played it, they would bounce a ball while playing. This book was a favorite of mine when I was little because it was the first place I learned about this game.

This game is an alphabet game where players have to follow the alphabet, giving the names of people, objects, and places all according to which letter of the alphabet they were currently on, using the following format: “(Letter) my name is (female name) and my husband’s name is (male name). We come from (place name), and we sell (object name).” (Because the rules vary, some people who have played this game with a slightly different format, possibly using the male name first.) First, you give all A names and words in this format, then you do the same for the letter B, then C, and so on to the end of the alphabet. (Or until you reach your destination, get stuck, get bored, etc.)

The fun of the game is that you can be as silly as you want with the names, places, and things to sell. The challenge is that it’s harder to think of names, places, and objects for certain letters than it is for others. Many kids playing this name will use the most common words they can think of first, took keep the game going quickly. However, the author deliberately goes for silly and unusual, which makes the book and the pictures fun and interesting.

She also adds the element that all of the “people” she’s talking about are animals, and the types of animals they are also fits the alphabet theme. It can be difficult to think of animals for certain letters of the alphabet, but again, she goes for the unusual ones. The husband/wife pairs being named aren’t always the same animal, either. When they match, it’s usually because it was too difficult to come up with two different animal names for particular letters. The types of animals are given under each picture.

X is always the most difficult letter in an alphabet game because there aren’t many words or names that start with X. However, I liked the way the author dealt with it, just using aliens!

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

Posted on by TracyC

Lucy and Tom’s Christmas

Lucy & Tom’s Christmas by Shirley Hughes, 1981, 1989.

This British children’s picture book shows a young brother and sister enjoying Christmas and celebrating many popular British Christmas traditions.

Before Christmas, Tom and Lucy help their mother make a Christmas pudding, each of them making a wish as they stir it. They see the postman delivering Christmas cards and packages, and they make Christmas cards of their own. They also help their mother to decorate the house.

Each of them also has small presents for each other and other people in their family. They also write letters to Father Christmas and “post them up the chimney.” (In Britain, it’s traditional to burn letters to Father Christmas or Santa Claus because he can read their wishes in the smoke.)

They enjoy listening to carol singers and buying a Christmas tree in the market. On Christmas Eve, they hang their stockings at the foot of their beds for Father Christmas to fill with presents.

On Christmas morning, the excited children wake up early and play with the presents in their stockings. When their parents wake up, they unwrap their other presents.

Later, they go to church, and friends and family come to their house for a turkey dinner. After dinner, they open Christmas crackers (party favors that open with a bang and have little prizes and paper hats inside – they aren’t as common in the United States as in Britain, but you can get them here). They give their guests their presents and play party games. It’s a Merry Christmas for everyone!

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

My Reaction

I enjoy seeing different types of traditions from around the world, and this picture book reminded me of a YouTube video I saw about British Christmas traditions. Many of the traditions mentioned in the video were also shown in the book, including burning letters to Father Christmas, hanging up stockings on the beds instead of by the fireplace, and opening Christmas crackers.

I loved the pictures in the book, showing the children participating in all of the Christmas activities. They are colorful and cheerful, and I enjoyed noticing little details among the children’s Christmas presents. In one picture, it looks like Tom has received a little R2-D2 robot.

Posted on by TracyC

The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush

The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush retold and illustrated by Tomie DePaola, 1988.

This story is a retelling of a Native American legend.

In the distant past, there was a boy called Little Gopher who never seemed able to keep up with the other boys with the skills they would need to be warriors. His parents worried about his future, but he had other talents. He had a skill for making things, and the shaman of the tribe told him that his destiny would be different from the others.

One day, Little Gopher had a vision of a grandfather and a young maiden, who came to him, holding an animal skin, a brush made of animal hairs, and paints. These figures told him that these would be the tools he would use to accomplish great things for his people. He would spend his life painting the warrior’s deeds and the shaman’s visions so people would remember them. The maiden told him to find a white buckskin and paint a picture with the colors of the setting sun.

From then on, Little Gopher gathered animal skins and painted them with the scenes of great hunts, warrior’s deeds, and visions from dreams. When he found a pure white buckskin, he tried to paint it with the colors of the setting sun, but they never looked right. He kept trying and studying the sunset to figure out how to make the right colors.

One night, he heard a voice telling him to take the buckskin with him to watch the sunset and that he would find what he needed on the ground there. He did as the voice told him, and he found brushes with paint stuck into the ground. He used the brushes, and they were just the right colors. The next day, everyone saw plants growing with beautiful colors, like the colors of a sunset, where the brushes had taken root.

My Reaction

I remember this book from when I was a kid, and I always kind of paired it in my mind with The Legend of the Bluebonnet by the same author, Tomie DePaola because both of them are retellings of Native American folktales about the origins of particular flowers. In the back of the book, there’s an Author’s Note about the story. A friend of Tomie DePaola had recommended to him that he write this story about the state flower of Wyoming, the Indian Paintbrush, because he had already written about the state flower of Texas in The Legend of the Bluebonnet. The folk tale about the origins of the Indian Paintbrush came from a book about stories and legends about Texas Wildflowers, which was given to Tomie DePaola by another friend. Although the Indian Paintbrush is the state flower of Wyoming, it also grows in Texas.

When I was a kid, I was often too impatient or absorbed with the main story to read Author’s Notes, Forewords, Afterwords, or any explanations outside of the main story, but as an adult, I find that they really do add to the story by adding context. I appreciated this story even more after understanding its connection to the other story, The Legend of the Bluebonnet, and how the author learned this story before making his own retelling.

Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Gobbling Squash

The Case of the Gobbling Squash by Elizabeth Levy, illustrated by Ellen Eagle, 1988.

This is the first book in the A Magic Mystery series, which is about a couple of kids who like magic tricks. In every book in the series, there is a section in the back with direction for performing the magic tricks in the story.

It’s Thanksgiving, and all of the kids at school are participating in a Thanksgiving Fair. Different kids are doing different things for the fair, and Kate has a booth where she is advertising her services as a detective. Unfortunately, she gets more teasing than people approaching her with mysteries to solve. Then, Max tells her that he needs her help.

Max is an amateur magician, and he keeps a couple of rabbits to use his act. One of his rabbits is missing. When Kate goes to his house to investigate, it doesn’t take her long to figure out where the missing rabbit is … and the rabbit has become a mother, which presents the kids with a new problem to solve. Max’s mother won’t let him keep that many bunnies.

Fortunately, Kate comes up with an idea to use Max’s magic act in their Thanksgiving play at school to provide the bunnies with new homes. However, when she and Max are preparing for the show, the bunnies disappear in a non-magical way. Someone has stolen them! Max points out that they were supposed to give the bunnies away anyhow, but Kate says they can’t let the matter rest until they’re sure that the bunnies are safe in a good home.

Once again, Max and Kate use Max’s magic tricks to expose the bunny thief and to turn their Thanksgiving magic act into something extra special!

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

My Reaction

The mystery is a little cheesy, but I thought that the kids were clever in the way they used concepts from magic tricks to solve their problems. Whether they would work so well in real life is questionable, but I though the concept was creative. The first mystery about where the missing rabbit is was easily resolved, but they have to figure out who took all the bunnies. I thought that the solution to that mystery was also obvious because there was really only one person who seemed to have a reason to mess up their magic act, but the mystery may seem more mysterious to young children.

The story gets some credit from me for being set at Thanksgiving because it’s a less popular holiday for kids’ books than Christmas or Halloween. Like other kids’ Thanksgiving books that aren’t set at the First Thanksgiving, this one is set at a school and involves a cheesy Thanksgiving celebration. The Thanksgiving play in the story involves some of the kids being dressed as Pilgrims and Native Americans, and the Native American aspects are also cheesy and stereotypical. It actually reminds me of actual school plays from my own childhood, which were equally cheesy and embarrassing to me when I was a kid.

I really liked the section in the back of the book that explained how all of the magic tricks in the book were done, even the one for their grand finale! The tricks include a card trick, making a coin disappear, and pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Posted on by TracyC

Arthur’s Halloween

Arthur Adventure

Arthur’s Halloween by Marc Brown, 1982.

It’s Halloween, and Arthur’s already getting spooked! His family is putting up Halloween decorations, and his sister, D.W., scares him with her costume when he wakes up on Halloween morning. Arthur is supposed to take D.W. trick-or-treating, although he doesn’t really want his little sister tagging along.

At school, Arthur has trouble recognizing everyone in their costumes. There are Halloween treats and games, though.

That evening, Arthur and D.W. go trick-or-treating with Arthur’s friends. Arthur’s friend, Buster, warns them not to go to a big, old house because a witch lives there, and the last person who went in on Halloween never came out again.

Arthur and D.W. lag behind the other trick-or-treaters, and when Arthur turns around, he sees D.W. going into the witch’s house! What choice does Arthur have but to go in after his sister to save her?

My Reaction

This book reminded me of the Berenstain Bears Halloween book The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat. It’s another instance of an elderly woman who seems witch-like and scary, but the children enter her house on Halloween, discover that she’s really nice, and get some special treats. Entering a stranger’s house is never a good idea because, in real life, that could be very dangerous. I get the theme that appearances can be deceptive and things that seem scary aren’t so scary when you understand them, but I do quibble that this might not be the best way to demonstrate that to young children. All the same, I do have nostalgia for both the Berenstain Bears and the Arthur books.

I remember reading the Berenstain Bears Halloween book as a kid, but I don’t remember reading Arthur’s Halloween until I was an adult. Because of the similarity in the themes of the stories, I checked the copyright dates. They’re both from the 1980s, but Arthur’s Halloween is the older of the two books. I don’t know if the Berenstain Bears took inspiration from the Arthur story or if they were both inspired by something older or if the similar theme is just a coincidence.

One other odd thing about this story is that old Mrs. Tibble is human. Everyone in the Arthur books is some kind of animal, but not Mrs. Tibble. There is no explanation for this. In the cartoon version of Arthur, Mrs. Tibble is an animal, just like everyone else.

Posted on by TracyC

The Vanishing Pumpkin

The Vanishing Pumpkin by Tony Johnston, pictures by Tomie dePaola, 1983.

An 800-year-old man and a 700-year-old woman live together in a little house. One day, they realize that it’s Halloween, and that means that it’s time to make pumpkin pie. However, when they go to get the pumpkin from their garden, it’s gone! Who could have taken it?

They set out in search of the pumpkin thief. The first person they meet is a ghoul, and they assume he’s the pumpkin thief. They demand to know where the pumpkin is. The ghoul looks all over the place, but doesn’t see any pumpkin. The old man threatens to do him a trick, and the ghoul says he wants to see him do one. The old man turns the ghoul so thin that he can look right though him, but the ghoul doesn’t have the pumpkin.

The old man and old woman set off again to look for the pumpkin thief, and the ghoul comes along to see more tricks. The next person they encounter is a rapscallion. When they ask him where the pumpkin is, the rapscallion looks around and can’t find any pumpkin, so he offers them a mushroom. The old man does another trick, turning the rapscallion upside down, but no pumpkin falls out.

The group, including the rapscallion, sets off in search of the pumpkin thief again. The next time, they encounter a varmint, and the old man turns him into a black cat with fleas. Yet again, the varmint doesn’t have the pumpkin, so they all set off again.

The pumpkin pursuit finally ends with the person who actually has the pumpkin. The wizard has turned the pumpkin into both a jack-o’-lantern and a pumpkin pie!

My Reaction

I remember someone reading this book to me when I was a little kid. I think it might have been the school librarian, but I’m not completely sure now. We don’t really know the story behind the 800-year-old man and 700-year-old woman, who is presumably his wife. They seem to be magical because of their ancient age and the fact that the old man seems capable of magic, but they aren’t described as being a witch and wizard or anything specific. It’s just left to readers’ imaginations. I think, when I was little kid, I assumed that they were witches or something similar.

The story is just for fun. It’s one of those repetition stories, where the characters encounter more people/creatures, similar things happen each time, and each new person/creature joins the group, until they finally figure out who has the pumpkin. Part of the fun of the story is the unusual people and creatures the meet. Most of them are not typical Halloween creatures, like a witch, a ghost, and a monster, although they are Halloween-ish. The words that describe them are real words – ghoul (which is a mythological creature), rapscallion, and varmint – but at the same time, it’s not entirely clear what type of creatures they are, and the book doesn’t explain. We can only go by what they look like in the pictures. The “varmint” looks like a large rat, the “ghoul” is a little green guy in a top hat, and the “rapscallion” is a little guy in a dark robe and hood.

Posted on by TracyC

The Shadow Guests

The Shadow Guests by Joan Aiken, 1980.

When Cosmo’s mother and brother mysteriously disappear, Cosmo’s father sends him to live with eccentric cousin Eunice in England, who is a mathematician educated at Cambridge and who now lives in Oxford. Cosmo’s father plans he will join Cosmo in England later, after he’s finished wrapping up the family’s business in Australia.

After Eunice picks up Cosmo at the airport, she tells him that she’s arranged for him to attend a small boarding school. Cosmo has never been to any kind of school before because his family lived too far outside of town. He and his brother always had their lessons together at home. Cosmo isn’t sure he’s going to like living with all these strangers at school, but Eunice says that she arranged for him to be a boarder rather than a day pupil so he would make friends faster. Eunice lives at the old Curtoys mill house, and Cosmo joins her there on weekends.

However, most of the other students at school don’t seem particularly friendly, and one of the teachers seems oddly confrontational about Cosmo’s father. He knows that Cosmo’s father, Richard Curtoys, was once a well-known cancer researcher in London, and he doesn’t know why he gave it all up and moved his family to the middle of nowhere in the Australian Bush. Cosmo doesn’t know what to say because he was very young when his family moved to Australia, and he doesn’t really know why they moved.

On his next weekend with Cousin Eunice, he asks her about it and whether or not the family’s sudden move to England had anything to do with what happened to his mother and brother. Eunice admits that it did. Cosmo’s father hadn’t wanted to explain and had left it up to Eunice to decide how much to tell Cosmo, but Eunice believes that it’s better for people to know everything than not know anything. Eunice reveals to Cosmo that their family has been under a curse for generations.

The Curse

The curse apparently started with the Roman invasion of Britain. Their family seems to have Roman roots, and one of their ancestors was apparently a Roman soldier. When the Romans took over Britain, they wanted to convert the inhabitants to the Roman religion, which was still pagan at that time. According to the legend passed down in their family, their ancestor was one of a group of soldiers who were ordered to destroy a pagan British temple. The son of one of the priestesses at the temple tried to resist them, and Cosmo’s ancestor killed him. The boy’s mother then killed herself out of grief. The boy’s grandmother, who was also a priestess, placed a curse on Cosmo’s family: in every generation, the eldest son of the family would die in battle, and his mother would die of grief.

Since then, Eunice says, the curse seems to have come true. She can list generations of their family where the eldest son has died in battle, including Cosmo’s father’s generation. Cosmo’s father was the youngest son of his family, and his elder brother, Frank, died young in battle. After Frank’s death, when Richard was only 10 years old, his mother died of grief, just like in the curse. Richard claimed that the curse was all nonsense when he was an adult, and he refused to tell his wife about it when they got married. However, Eunice had been friends with his wife before she met Richard, and she didn’t think it was fair to keep the secret from her, now that they had two sons of their own. Eunice admits that she told Cosmo’s mother everything, and that the story seriously upset her. It was Cosmo’s mother who insisted on moving to Australia, hoping to get as far away from the curse and any potential war as possible.

When Eunice explains this, some of the things about Cosmo’s family begin to make sense to him. Eunice admits that it seems like the elder brothers of the family resent the younger ones, who are safe from the curse, and Cosmo realizes that he sensed that his brother seemed to be hard on him or resent him, indicating that he probably had some sense that he had an ordeal or possible early death to face that Cosmo would be spared. Yet, younger brothers in the family are not entirely spared from the curse. It’s true that they live to carry on the family line, but each of them is also destined to lose their first son, and shortly afterward, to lose their wife to grief at their son’s death. Cosmo considers that maybe, when he’s grown up, he’ll just adopt a child to get around the problem.

He somewhat compares the family curse to a form of cancer. Some families are more genetically prone to particular types of cancers than others, and the way that members of those families survive is if, somehow, a genetic mutation is introduced to the family line, something that makes those individuals different from the ones before. It’s an indication that, maybe, this curse might not afflict their family forever. If someone, like Cosmo, can figure out how to be different from earlier generations of his family, and not pass on the cursed element to the next generation, there might be an end to the curse. Figuring out how to do that is going to be difficult, though.

Eunice says that his mother tried to evade the curse by running away, but apparently, it didn’t work. Nobody knows exactly what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother, only that their car was found abandoned, and that they appeared to go off into the Australian desert on foot. Searchers have found no sign of them since, and because it’s such a harsh environment, people don’t think it’s likely that they’re still alive. Nobody knows why they went off into the desert, except maybe either the curse drew them there or they were trying to escape from it. Eunice’s housekeeper, who also knows about the curse, talks about it with Cosmo, and Cosmo asks her whether she thinks it’s possible to break the curse. Like Cosmo, she thinks it might be a case of gradual changes, members of the family doing things differently from earlier generations. Unlike Eunice, she thinks that maybe what Cosmo’s mother and brother did was one such change, and it’s difficult to tell what effect it has had yet.

Cosmo remembers a strange old man who visited them once in Australia. He thinks the man was probably a sorcerer or something because he told them things about their futures. He’s not sure what the man said to his mother, except that it seemed to upset her, and she was never the same afterward. Eunice suspects that the man may have told her that it’s impossible to run away from heredity and destiny. The man told his brother something about there being many different types of battles, which might indicate that staying away from wars would not be sufficient to save him from his destiny. The old man didn’t clarify that statement, but it’s true that people also fight internal and emotional battles every day, no matter where they are. Was this the battle Cosmo’s brother lost or could lose, and has it actually claimed his life already?

Cosmo had always thought his brother and mother were braver than he was, but now, he comes to question that. They had tried to run from their apparent destinies, and maybe the running caused them to go missing, and maybe even to die. When Cosmo’s father writes to him about the family curse, he explains that he has come to believe that the curse is a self-fulling prophecy, that it only comes true because people expect it to. Perhaps Cosmo’s mother and brother would have been fine if they hadn’t tried so hard to outrun their curse, putting themselves into a dangerous situation.

Of course, Cosmo realizes that it’s easier for Cosmo and his father to put aside their fear than it was for Cosmo’s mother and brother. Being the direct subject of an existential curse is certainly much more terrifying than just being part of a family that has a curse that may kill people around you. These thoughts cause Cosmo to consider the nature of fear and how people can be afraid of many different things and how the nature of a person’s fears make a difference in how they are affected by them. What one person can face with courage may be the undoing of another.

The Ghosts

Meanwhile, the other kids at school have become deliberately hostile to Cosmo. They accuse him of being stuck up and lying to them about Australia, and they start saying that Cosmo has probably never even been to Australia. Cosmo knows that all of the things that they say about him are untrue and unfair, but there isn’t much he can say to refute it. It seems to be a form of hazing at the school. He thinks about how petty and childish the other kids are and how they have no concept about the serious issues that are hanging over Cosmo. In a way, though, Cosmo discovers that he’s actually more comfortable brooding over the curse than he is thinking about the obnoxious kids at school. There is a kind of comfort in knowing your life fits a pattern, even if it’s a disturbing and unpleasant one. He also thinks about what the old man told him, that one day, he would have three friends. Because of the way kids at school act, Cosmo can’t image having any friends there at all, but that prediction comes true as well.

Cosmo gradually discovers that the mill house where his aunt lives is haunted. Eunice tells him about a phantom coach and horses that are supposed to appear at night, and Cosmo begins seeing a boy who calls himself Con. Con first appears to him as a little boy, about 4 years old, but each time Cosmo sees him, he gets a little older. He also eats Cosmo’s candy bars from his room. Eventually, Con speaks to Cosmo as a young man. He admits that he took the candy because eating someone else’s food forms a relationship between the two of them. Con explains to Cosmo that his father was a free Roman soldier, but his mother is a slave woman, so Con himself is a slave. The only way he can win his freedom is to play in the gladiatorial games, and he needs Cosmo’s help to practice. At night, Cosmo practices Roman style fighting with Con, but it is gradually revealed that Con does not expect to survive his upcoming fight. When Con speaks to Cosmo more about his family, it is revealed that Con is a member of Cosmo’s family from the distant past. He is the eldest son in his generation, and he knows about the family curse. Because of the curse, he expects to die fighting. Cosmo tries to explain to Con that he doesn’t need to believe in the curse.

Whether that helps Con or not isn’t apparent because Cosmo has to spend the next weekend at school and doesn’t see Con again. The next ghost he sees is a boy called Sim. Sim has been living at a monastery in the Middle Ages, getting an education, but his father has pledged him to his uncle to go fight in the Crusades. Sim is worried because he doesn’t know anything about fighting and thinks that he’ll be killed. He asks Cosmo if he can help him learn to fight. Again, Cosmo doesn’t know much about fighting, but he tries his best to help Sim. He doesn’t really see why Sim has to be obligated to go to war if he’s no good at it and doesn’t want to go, but he does notice that Sim’s eyesight is poor, and what he really needs are glasses.

Then, some of the hauntings at the mill house turn frightening. Cosmo is almost killed in multiple, inexplicable accidents. It seems like a poltergeist is out to get him. One of the boys who’s been giving Cosmo a hard time at school is also visiting the mill house and witnesses some of these accidents one weekend because his father works with Eunice. Not only do the boys learn to get along better after getting to know each other, but Cosmo starts realizes that the boy, Moley, actually has some problems of his own. He has an unhappy home life because of his stepmother. Moley also has a weak heart that keeps him from participating in certain school activities. Knowing this makes Cosmo feel more sympathetic toward him. Moley also comes to realize that something mysterious and threatening is happening to Cosmo, and he witnesses a ghost that Cosmo doesn’t see: a stern old woman in black. Moley has the sense that this old woman is responsible for the accidents happening to Cosmo, although he doesn’t seem to recognize that she is a ghost at first. It seems like Cosmo has now become the target of his family’s curse, which shouldn’t happen because he isn’t the eldest son. Has Cosmo become the target of the curse or some other supernatural force that now sees him as a threat?

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed the story, although I feel a little conflicted about the ending. The story is somewhat open-ended. We know that Cosmo survives his ordeals. Part of me wonders if the curse may have actually saved his life, after a fashion. If his bother was fated to die and Cosmo was fated to survive, then the forces trying to kill Cosmo were destined to fail. But, that’s just conjecture. These questions are never really answered. In the end, Cosmo doesn’t know if anything he’s done has changed the nature of the curse or if it actually can be changed. He still doesn’t know what might be in store for his future wife and children or if he will actually have a future wife and children. The only way to know is to live his life as best he can and deal with whatever comes along the way.

There are two things that I can see that he gains from his ordeals: closure about his mother and brother and a glimpse at what various other relatives have done in the past to change their fate (or if they did anything). I think there are some indications, based on Cosmo’s encounters with family ghosts, that what his father believes about the curse is probably true, but the story leaves that up to the imaginations of the readers. If you like speculative books, you might enjoy this one.

Metaphysics

Although Eunice is a mathematician, she’s also interested in metaphysics. She and Cosmo have discussions about the nature of time and reality and the possibility of other dimensions or other realities, which have a bearing on whether or not we interpret the ghosts that Cosmo sees as ghosts or not. In some ways they seem like ghosts, but in others, they might be people who have not yet died but who have crossed over in time.

This isn’t confirmed, though, and during Cosmo’s ghost experiences, someone from the past is attempting to kill him. (Spoilers) At first, I thought that the old woman attempting to kill Cosmo was the old priestess who originally put the curse on his family and who was trying to stop Cosmo from helping the ghosts who came to him to survive and thwart the curse. That isn’t the case, though. What Cosmo discovers is that various ancestors have tried different ways of thwarting the curse themselves. So far, none of them have been successful (and I’ll have more to say about that), but Cosmo discovers that one ancestress and her son actually became evil sorcerers themselves. The old lady is a sorceress, and she believes a prophecy that her son will die in a fight with Cosmo, so both she and her son are traveling through time and actively trying to kill Cosmo to save the son from the family curse.

During his struggles with this unholy duo, Cosmo is very close to being killed, and he has a near-death experience. He sees a beautiful, peaceful place, with Con and Sim and his mother and brother. He wants to join them all there, but they tell him that it’s not his time, and they will wait for him there until it is. This seems to represent a vision of Heaven and to confirm the supernatural nature of the story and that Cosmo’s mother and brother are also both dead.

Destiny and Curses (Lots of Spoilers)

I already said that, in the end, we don’t know if anything that Cosmo has seen, done, or experienced has broken the curse or changed his future or his family’s future. What we do see through Cosmo’s experiences are two things: that different generations of the family have tried to thwart the curse in different ways and that (although the story doesn’t explicitly spell this out) there may have been reasons other than the curse itself for what happened to the sons who died, including what Cosmo’s father said about belief in the curse itself causing it to come true.

Con tried to practice his fighting skills in an effort to win his battle, but unlike Cosmo, he never seemed to seriously consider that maybe he didn’t need to fight that battle at all. We’re not sure exactly how many generations removed he was from the original curse (maybe one or two, possibly more?), but it seems that enough time has gone by to convince him that the curse is real and that he should believe in it. Did his belief that he was going to his destiny and going to die in the upcoming fight cause him to actually seek out that fight and also to lose it?

When Sim comes to Cosmo, Cosmo tries to talk to him about just choosing not to fight, but Sim explains that isn’t an option for him. His father arranged it with his uncle, and Sim has no power to refuse to go. The choice not to fight isn’t open to Sim, but Cosmo also realizes that, beyond simply not being a skilled fighter, Sim is also at a disadvantage because he has bad eyesight. So, was Sim’s death almost arranged by his family because they had already concluded that it was his fate to die in battle, never teaching him to actually fight and overlooking his eyesight? If they had left Sim in the monastery, where he was studying, maybe nothing bad would have happened to him.

After Cosmo recovers from his near death at the hands of the sorceress and her son, who was an 18th century member of the Hellfire Club, he learns their fate from Eunice. Both the evil mother and her son died at the same time in the river where they nearly drowned Cosmo, indicating that they accidentally got themselves killed in their attempt to kill him. The prophecy that said the son would die while fighting Cosmo was actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they simply hadn’t believed it and had ignored Cosmo, he would have never met them at all, living in a completely different time and having no way to magically travel through time on his own. It’s only because they sought him out and actually started the fight that both of them died, which lends credence to what Cosmo’s father says about believing in the curse causes it to happen.

Before the end of the story, Cosmo’s father tells him that searchers have finally found his mother’s and brother’s bodies in the desert, confirming his vision of them in Heaven. We still don’t know exactly why they went off into the desert to die. Were they trying to flee the curse in a panic, so they weren’t thinking about how this decision could lead to their deaths? If they had simply chosen not to believe in the curse and had continued living in London instead of trying to wildly flee, losing the battle with their own emotions, perhaps they would have both lived normal lives and not died early … maybe.

There’s no real way to prove exactly what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother. We never hear what happened to them from their point of view, and what decisions they made because of it. Both Cosmo’s father and Eunice says that they shouldn’t blame them for how they attempted to deal with something beyond themselves because they did the best they knew how at the time, even if no one else understands. This leads me to consider that maybe the real curse of the family is: bad decisions. Whenever the curse seems to arise again, each generation has to decide how they will handle it: run or fight, believe or not believe, etc. Each time, they’ve made the wrong choice for their circumstances.

In a way, Eunice bears some responsibility for what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother, although no one blames her for her role in the situation. Cosmo’s father, having concluded that belief in the curse causes it to come true, had decided not to tell his wife or kids about the curse, so they would never have to grapple with whether they believed it or not. But, apparently, he never explained that logic to Eunice because she spoiled it by telling Cosmo’s mother and shocking her into taking a course of action that led to her and her elder son dying. Would the situation have been different if she had said nothing or if she had said something but said it at a different time from the one she actually chose? Eunice says that she thought Cosmo’s father should have explained the situation before he got married. Maybe that would have changed things or maybe it wouldn’t, but if she felt that strongly that this was the right thing to do, she could have brought up the subject earlier. Maybe she should have talked to both of Cosmo’s parents before their marriage to either get everything out in the open or at least understand why she should keep the secret. Either Eunice didn’t do that or she weakened in her resolve to keep the secret, and she inadvertently set the curse cycle in motion again.

The supernatural nature of this story and its ghosts suggests that the curse is probably real on some level and not just a series of bad luck incidents and unfortunate mistakes that the family makes. The hopeful outlook, the one that Eunice’s housekeeper believes, is that, little by little, with each passing generation, the family changes. Each generation is a little different from the last. Cosmo’s brother was apparently the first not to die in a conventional battle or a physical fight. He died trying to avoid fighting. With him, it seems to have been some kind of internal battle. This may be true of later generations, or maybe this is the first step in shattering the pattern of the curse. Possibly, all that Cosmo has seen will grant him the ability to make better choices, teach this children how to break old patterns, or do something drastically different that nobody else has done before. It’s hard to say, but realizing that it’s hard to say what might happen or what could have happened is a major part of the story.

Thinking about the curse and all of the ways the family could break it and all of the ways they’ve failed to break it so far shows the unpredictable nature of the choices people make in life. Each generation apparently did something they thought was for the best, whether they were embracing fate, fighting fate, or running from fate. The story leaves open the possibility that fate (or the curse) will always find them in some form, no matter what they do. If they don’t actively go to war, they may face their battles in another way, like internal or emotional battles. Who’s to say whether a different sort of internal battle might have taken Cosmo’s brother in London, even if the family said nothing about the curse to him or his mother? As a teenager, he might have had a battle with drugs or depression and lost. He might have gotten a disease and lost that battle. Life has a lot of maybes, and none of us can foresee every possible struggle or disaster.

Another maybe is that maybe the important point isn’t whether or not the curse exists or whether or not they can save all the potential victims but what each of them chooses to do with the life they have while they have it. Cosmo and his father will keep on living. His father will return to his important cancer research, and Cosmo will have decisions to make about his own life. He may or may not decide to have kids, he may or may not tell his future wife or fiance about the curse, and he may or may not try to adopt a child rather than have a biological one. In fact, unless the curse guarantees that sons will be born in the family, we don’t know for sure whether Cosmo might have all daughters. Really, anything is possible. What his future children’s struggles might be or what the real risks to them could be are a distant unknown right now in Cosmo’s life. In the end, he will have to trust them to a certain extent to make the right choices or at least the best choices that they know how when their battles come to them, in whatever form they take. We all have battles of our own to face and risks we take, no matter who we are, and nothing in life is guaranteed for any of us.

There is one last thing that did surprise me. In all of the ways it seems people in Cosmo’s family tried to end or thwart the curse, did nobody think of maybe some form of apology or atonement? The curse stems from an ancient offense someone in their family committed. Perhaps, if they found a way to say they were sorry, it would do something to end the vengeance against them, but it seems like nobody even suggests it. Heck, the evil sorceress lady and her son acquired the ability to use magic and travel through time, but because they were evil and stupid, they went after Cosmo, who was probably their greatest ally, instead of looking further back in time for the real source of their problems. Couldn’t they have gone and faced the priestess lady and either stopped her from creating her curse or stopped their ancestor from killing her grandson? There are a lot of maybes to this whole situation, but I’m honestly surprised that they didn’t think of that one.

School Troubles

Some of the school experiences in the story may have been based on the author’s own education. Joan Aiken was home schooled until she was 12 years old, and then, she was sent to the Wychwood School in Oxford, a boarding and day school. It’s possible that she also encountered difficulties adjusting to being at school with other children and the hazing and bullying that can occur in that type of environment. In the story, Eunice sees value in learning how to get along with other people, although Cosmo questions the value of learning to get along with people as awful as the kids at his school.

He gradually begins to learn more about the relationships of kids at school by observing them as an outsider. Some of the awful ways of treating him are considered some kind of hazing or initiation, and he’s expected to undergo it with some degree of grace before they will grant him acceptance. It’s all pretty idiotic and immature. Cosmo realizes it, although he knows he can’t show much reaction, or it will make things much worse. It’s the sort of thing I hated when I was a student myself. I admit that I was shy and socially awkward, and I didn’t get along well with many other kids because I just couldn’t stand this sort of thing.

Over 30 years later, I haven’t really changed my mind about that. I get that being around other people can open your eyes to human nature and how to deal with your fellow flawed human beings, but I see the same problem in this story as I do in real life: allowing this system of hazing encourages the personal entitlement of particular students, and it also is detrimental to the mental health of people who struggle to deal with them. I think schools do better at this now than they did when I was a kid, when it seemed like almost 100% of the personal development, learning, and personal responsibility was put on the shoulders of everyone else who has to deal with this type of person. I think I have much, much less patience for this kind of thing now than I used to due to overexposure early in life, which does call into question whether what I learned from that experience was really beneficial or not. On the whole, I actually do think that I benefited from exposure to other people, in spite of all the stresses and mental health issues along the way. Part of the issue is, when you’re part of a group of people, you have to put up with the worst parts of that group to spend time with the better parts of the group. If you avoid society too much, you don’t meet the better parts. Learning social skills and human understanding also requires time and practice, which is what Cosmo learns in the story.

People who bully and cause problems can be considered in the learning phase of developing social skills themselves. It’s just that there do have to be rules about how much of their bad behavior can be allowed while they learn. They can’t be allowed to sabotage other people’s social development for the sake of their own because that only leads to their personal entitlement at someone else’s expense. If they are spared consequences for their actions, they never learn anything, either, never improving or showing signs of development, just putting more needless stress on other people and never seeming to understand or care why. I’ve seen far too many examples of this in real life.

I actually enjoyed the way the school in the book handled some of these conflicts. The headmaster is a psychologist, and although some of the things he does seem a little unfair, he actually discusses his reasons for doing this with Cosmo. He understands how his students think and feel, and he knows how to give consequences for actions that not only enforce the school’s rules and better treatment for bullied children but also which affect their relationships with each other more positively.

At first, Cosmo is angry when he’s punished along with some of the other kids who have been bullying him for a prank he tried to discourage them from committing. However, the headmaster apologizes to him for that, saying that he knows those other kids have been giving him a hard time, treating him like he thinks he’s better than they are. One of the other teachers says that Cosmo has been targeted because he’s one of the bright students, and some of the members of his family have a more prestigious reputation than Cosmo realizes. By giving Cosmo the same punishment as the other boys, while the other boys are made to acknowledge that it’s unjust and that Cosmo doesn’t deserve it as much as they do, the headmaster is showing the other boys that they don’t have reason to think that Cosmo is being treated better than they are, ending some of their resentment against him. He also knows that the boys can now accept Cosmo as being one of them, united in resentment against the headmaster for being harsh and unfair. The headmaster is willing to take their resentment against him because, as an adult faculty member, he doesn’t need to be one of “them”, as in one of the students or their “friend” or “pal.” He’s apart from them anyway in terms of age and status, and part of his role is guiding their actions and relationships with each other. In a way, Cosmo admires the logic and the tactic, even though it means enduring the punishment, and it does improve the way the the other boys treat him.