Posted on by TracyC

Apple Tree Christmas

Apple Tree Christmas book cover

Apple Tree Christmas by Trinka Hakes Noble, 1984.

A farm family in 1881 lives in their barn because they haven’t built a separate house yet. Outside the barn, there is an old apple tree that the family loves.

They like to pick the apples from the tree, and use them for cider and applesauce. The two girls in the family like to climb the tree. Josie, the younger girl, likes to swing on the vines that hang from the tree’s branches. Katrina, the older girl, likes to draw in the tree with her paper resting against a crooked branch. She thinks of that special limb as her “studio.”

Then, a terrible winter storm ruins the apple tree before Christmas. The whole family is sad at the loss of the tree, but Katrina is particularly devastated at the loss of her studio. Will she even be able to draw again if she can’t craw in her special place?

The family uses most of the ruined tree as firewood, and they use apples they’ve saved from the tree as decorations on their Christmas tree. However, because of the loss of the apple tree, it doesn’t really feel like Christmas to Katrina. Then, their father shows them that he has saved their favorite parts of the tree and turned them into special Christmas presents.

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

My Reaction

I thought this was a charming Christmas story! When I first saw the title, I guessed that the family would use an apple tree as a Christmas tree, but that’s not it at all. It’s just about the family feeling sad about the loss of their apple tree and how the remains of the tree made it a memorable Christmas. Because the father of the family saved their favorite parts of the tree when he was cutting up the rest for firewood, they will still be able to enjoy the things they loved about the tree, particularly Katrina, who receives a special drawing table made out her favorite branch of the tree.

The author dedicated the book to her own father because he made a special drawing board for her. On the inside dust jacket of the book, the explains that the inspiration for the apple tree and vine swing came from her own childhood in rural Michigan.

I love the artwork in this book! The pictures are realistic and detailed, and they have an old-fashioned charm that fits well with the modern Cottagecore aesthetic. I love the family’s home in the barn, with the girls sleeping in the loft and being wrapped in colorful patchwork quilts! The first book that I read by this author was The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash, but she wasn’t the illustrator for that book. I didn’t know the she did illustrations, but seeing the illustrations in this book makes me want to see more by her!

Posted on by TracyC

The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree

The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree by Gloria Houston, pictures by Barbara Cooney, 1988.

Ruthie is a little girl living on a farm in Pine Grove in the Appalachian Mountains during World War I. (The story calls it The Great War because that was its name before WWII.) During the spring, Ruthie’s father selected a tree for the village church’s Christmas celebration. The local families take turns providing the tree, and it’s their family’s turn. Ruthie goes with him to pick out the right tree and mark it with a red ribbon.

However, during the summer, Ruthie’s father has to go away to be a soldier overseas. Ruthie and her mother tend the farm while her father is away, but money is tight. Ruthie thinks ahead to Christmas and prays for her father to come home and for a special Christmas present for herself – a pretty doll with a cream-colored dress with ribbons and lace.

In the fall of that year (1918), Ruthie’s father writes a letter, saying that the Armistice has been signed, meaning that the war is over, so he’s sure he’ll be home for Christmas. Ruthie and her mother keep waiting for him to arrive any day, but he doesn’t seem to come, and they don’t know exactly when to expect him.

At school, Ruthie is told that she will have the role of the heavenly angel in the Christmas play and that they are still expecting Ruthie’s father to supply the Christmas tree. Ruthie is looking forward to it, but Ruthie and her mother don’t have enough money for a new dress for the angel costume, and there is still the worry about when her father will return home, and if he will make it in time to cut the Christmas tree and take it to the church.

The local preacher tells them that the person who is due to provide a Christmas tree next year is willing to do it this year instead, if Ruthie’s father can’t get home in time, but Ruthie’s mother is still sure that their family can manage the tree. Ruthie’s mother decides that she and Ruthie will go get the tree themselves. It isn’t easy, but they manage it, and Ruthie’s mother also finds a way to make a dress for Ruthie’s angel costume.

However, there are two more things that would make this Christmas perfect for Ruthie – if her father returns home in time for Christmas and if she somehow receives the doll of her dreams.

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

My Reaction

This is a sweet, old-fashioned Christmas story about wishes coming true. Wishes coming true at Christmas is a popular theme in Christmas stories, and in this book, they come true because Ruthie’s mother and Ruthie do what they need to do to make everything work out the way they want it to. They could have let someone else provide the Christmas tree, and no one would have thought less of them for doing it because the father of the family was still away, but they were determined to see their family’s promise to provide the Christmas tree through. The mother also uses her old wedding dress for the material for Ruthie’s angel costume, and it’s implied that she also made the angel doll for the top of the Christmas tree that becomes Ruthie’s special Christmas present.

The pictures are charming, and they fit well with the Cottagecore aesthetic that’s been popular in recent years.

Posted on by TracyC · 8 Comments

The Mystery of the Missing Mummy

The Bobbsey Twins

Bobbsey Twins The Mystery of the Missing Mummy cover

The Mystery of the Missing Mummy by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1989.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!

It’s only two days before Halloween, and the Bobbsey Twins are getting their costumes ready. Flossie is going to be a black cat, Bert is dressing as Frankenstein (the monster, not the scientist, for purists), and Nan is a traditional witch in a pointed hat. Only Freddie isn’t sure what he’s going to be yet. He could just put a sheet over his head and go trick-or-treating as a ghost, but that doesn’t seem exciting enough. He wants to be something really scary, but he doesn’t have much time left to decide.

The children’s mother offers Freddie some inspiration when she tells them that she will be writing a story about a new museum exhibit for the local newspaper. The new exhibit is an ancient Egyptian mummy. She asks the kids if they want to go to the museum with her to see the mummy, and they eagerly accept. Freddie thinks that a mummy would make a great costume idea, so he will be a mummy for Halloween.

The museum curator, Mr. Foxworth, gives the Bobbseys a special tour of the exhibit after hours, when there are no other visitors. The Bobbsey Twins are fascinated with the exhibit, and they talk about Egyptian hieroglyphics and the reasons why ancient Egyptians wanted their bodies preserved as mummies for the afterlife. Mr. Foxworth says that the mummy belongs to a wealthy woman named Mrs. Truesdale, who is also there to see the exhibit with her fifteen-year-old nephew, Lex.

The kids notice that Lex seems nervous, and he tells them that there’s a legend about the mummy coming to life. He even says that he’s heard strange noises coming from the mummy case. Mrs. Truesdale thinks that’s nonsense. The mummy has belonged to their family for 60 years. However, when the case is opened, Flossie is certain that she hears the mummy sigh. Then, when Freddie takes a closer look after the others leave the room, he sees the mummy breathing, and it tries to grab him!

Freddie and Flossie try to tell everyone what they saw, but everyone assumes that it was just their imagination. The kids go to the library to do some research about mummies, and they learn that Lex was telling them the truth about the legends surrounding this particular mummy. Nan doesn’t believe that the legends are real, but when the kids walk home from the library, they see the mummy walking in the park!

The kids run home and tell their parents what they saw. Their parents remind them that it’s almost Halloween, and it could have been somebody in costume, on their way home from a Halloween party. It sounds like a reasonable explanation, but the next morning, they hear a news report on the radio that someone broke into the museum and stole the mummy from the exhibit! The kids wonder if the mummy could have really come to life and broke out of the museum itself rather than being stolen.

The Bobbsey Twins decide to report their mummy sighting in the park to the police. At they police station, they see the security guard from the museum. The security guard tells them that the mummy did come to life and that it knocked him unconscious before leaving the museum, but nobody believes him because it sounds too crazy. The kids believe the security guard, but it also occurs to them that their parents might be right, that it could have been someone dressed as the mummy rather than the mummy itself. But, why would someone want to dress up like the mummy to pull a stunt like that, and if that’s what happened, where is the real mummy now?

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

My Reaction

I was pretty sure I knew right away who one or two of the culprits was because I figured that a theft and stunt like this would have to involve more than one person. However, I figured that there had to be another confederate involved because my favorite suspects were accounted for the first time the mummy moved. It turned out that I was way off base because there were suspects I hadn’t considered. The motive behind everything was different from the one that even the kids believed. I was pleasantly surprised by the twists in the story. There is a clue later in the book that more than one person dresses up as the mummy at different times when the kids realize that the mummy looked thin one time and fat the next time they saw him.

I liked the pieces of historical information about mummies included in the story, although the part about tanna leaves bringing mummies to life and attracting them is fictional, a concept created for a movie called The Mummy’s Hand from 1940. That’s why it’s important that one of the books Freddie finds at the library is about mummies in movies. At one point, Freddie and Flossie use what they’ve learned to build their own trap for the mummy.

I also noticed that the mummy’s legend comes with curse that rhymes when it’s translated into English, sort of like how the clues on the old Spanish map rhyme in English in The Goonies. In real life, things translated from one language to another don’t maintain their rhyme scheme. That went over my head when I was a kid, but I hadn’t studied other languages at that point, so the idea didn’t occur to me.

At one point in the story, the kids receive a message from the “mummy” that is clearly written on modern paper that someone tried to make look old, and the kids notice right away. They realize that it’s modern computer paper that someone yellowed with a candle, and they see where the holes at the sides were torn off. Modern kids might not understand what they mean about holes being torn off at the sides of the paper, but this was a familiar feature of computer paper at the time the book was written in the 1980s. Modern computer paper doesn’t have holes at the sides, but when I was a kid in the 1980s, there were perforated sections on both sides of the dot matrix printer computer paper with a series of little holes in them. The holes were where the printer would grab the paper and feed it through the machine. They later became unnecessary when printer designs changed, which is why you don’t see paper like that any more. When I was a kid, we would tear off those perforated sections with the little holes after printing. We would also have to break the individual sheets apart at perforated points because the sheets of paper were all joined together to feed continuously through the printer. That’s the type of printer paper that the kids in the story have. I don’t know if everyone did this, but I’d sometimes use those edging strips with the holes for little craft projects, or make them into little chains or bracelets.

Posted on by TracyC

The Time of the Ghost

The Time of the Ghost cover

The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, 1981.

This isn’t a very long book, but it packs a lot in! This is both a time travel story and a supernatural ghost story, but with the odd twist that we don’t initially know who the “ghost” is, and she isn’t really dead. She’s trying to save her own life.

In the beginning, although this book is from the first person perspective, we don’t know quite who the narrator is. Even the narrator isn’t quite sure who she is or what has happened. Her last memory is that there was some sort of accident, and her mind doesn’t seem to be working right. Now, she seems to be walking through the countryside, but she can’t remember what happened earlier that day or even what she had for lunch. When she looks down to see what she’s wearing that day, she realizes in a panic that she can’t see herself. She has become a ghost!

It takes her some time to get her panicked thoughts together, but she gradually begins to recognize the countryside. She is surprised that she can look over a hedge, thinking that it was something she had always wanted to do before, and she must have grown. There is a small hut nearby, and she recalls that there is an old rag doll called Monigan inside. Exploring further, she finds herself at a school and locates a classroom she recognizes. To her surprise, she discovers that it’s a Latin class full of boys, and although she has no body, she is sure that she’s a girl, so this can’t be her class. However, she does recognize the teacher as someone familiar but also intimidating.

Leaving the classroom, she continues exploring the school, and she finds people she is sure are her family. She remembers that the woman is called Phyllis, and Phyllis is her mother. There are also girls called Imogen, Fenella, and Charlotte. The ghost thinks that these are her sisters and that her name is Sally because Phyllis seems to call her Sally, although nobody really seems to see her. Sometimes, people just seem to have a sense that someone is there, and the dog, Oliver, seems to know she’s there. Pieces of information click in the ghost’s mind. This family’s last name is Melford. The teacher in the Latin class is her father. Sally is short for Selina. Charlotte is called Cart as a nickname.

The ghost finds herself angry and hating her family. She wonders if she could have died in the accident she vaguely remembers and if she came back to get some sort of revenge on her family, but the idea horrifies her, and she’s sure that she wouldn’t have thought of it in other circumstances.

The ghost watches as Fenella goes to the little hut and pretends to worship the doll Monigan and call her forth, like the doll is some kind of oracle. The ghost remembers that Cart was the one who started this game a year before and that she always thought that it was a boring game. Cart started the game because the four sisters had been fighting over the doll or playing with it too roughly one day, and they had each grabbed an arm or leg and pulled the doll apart. Cart had felt guilty about that, so she sewed the doll back together (badly, because she’s bad at sewing), and she turned the doll into a kind of oracle that the girls would worship to make it up to the doll that she had been ruined. Now, the doll is moldy and mildewy from being left in the little hut for a year. Only little Fenella still plays this game, although the doll has never actually done anything magical when they’ve called on her.

Gradually, the ghost begins putting the pieces of her memories together. Her parents manage a boarding school for boys. The girls help out with chores at the school, but they’re mostly expected to stay out of the way. Although they attend a different school themselves, it feels like they never get a break from school because they live at one. They never even get summers off because there are summer courses for disabled children at the boarding school.

Sally the ghost listens to her sisters complaining about her in her absence. They resent her for being overly sweet and a perfectionist and for defending their parents when the other girls criticize them. Sally is angry with them for the things they say behind her back and for their constant bickering and drama. Imogen gets melodramatic and picks at her sisters because she’s worried about not achieving the music career she really wants. Cart keeps trying to shut Imogen down because she feels overwhelmed by sentiment and emotions, and admittedly, Imogen’s emotions are frequently overwhelming. This dynamic between Imogen trying to express her overwhelming emotions and Cart trying to shut her down is a large part of the quarreling between the girls. Fenella, the youngest of the sisters, is just being a silly little girl, and she is rather fed up with her older sisters. At one point, Sally finds a poem that Fenella wrote that explains her relationship with her sisters:

“I have three ugly sisters
They really should be misters
They shout and scream and play the piano
I can never do anything I want.”

It’s a pretty accurate description of what goes on in their house. All of the girls are loud and argumentative, and a large part of the tension in their house comes from the inability of any of them to do what they want to do. Sally notices some pictures on the walls and remembers their father (whom the girls only refer to as “Himself”, never as “father” or “dad”) yelling at them and calling them “bitches” for stealing art supplies from the school for drawing and painting. Imogen’s drama about her music career is because she’s not allowed to use the music room at the school for practicing, and she thinks that she’ll never get a chance to develop her abilities. The parents pay more attention to the students at the school than they do to their own daughters, even forgetting to leave the girls any supper sometimes. The girls’ home life is not happy, and that’s why they’re not happy with each other. The two oldest girls especially are not happy with their parents because of their neglect.

As Sally listens to her sisters talking about her, Cart and Imogen admit that they’re both jealous of Sally because she gets to be somewhere else that will be important to her future career. Sally wishes that they would say where she’s supposed to be because she can’t remember. She finds a few unfinished rough drafts of letters that she wrote to her parents, trying to tell them that life at the school didn’t have much to offer her and that she was going away, but Sally can’t imagine where she would have gone. One of the letters even says that her life is in danger, but from what?

There is a bright spot in the girls’ lives, and that’s a secret friendship they’ve developed with some of the boys at school. The boys visit them in the kitchen after dinner, and they have coffee together. As ghostly Sally watches one of these visits, the boys ask the girls what happened to Sally, which ghostly Sally is (literally) dying to hear. Sally’s sisters explain that Sally’s disappearance is part of a Plan the girls have.

It’s obvious that the girls’ parents neglect them. While Sally has always been defending their parents to the other girls, the other girls want to prove to her that their parents would never notice if something awful happened to one of them. A lot of the strange things that Sally has witnessed them doing that day are part of this Plan. Fenella has been going around the entire day with big knots tied in her hair, and their parents haven’t noticed. Fenella says that if they continue to not notice, she’ll act like she’s fallen seriously ill. Sally’s sisters say that Sally has gone to stay with a friend named Audrey Chambers, but their parents don’t know and still haven’t noticed that she’s even gone.

The sisters and the boys decide to try holding a seance for fun, and ghostly Sally uses this as an opportunity to communicate with them. Although she has some difficulty and misspells her message, she manages to convince Imogen that she’s the one communicating and that she’s dead. Imogen gets hysterical, but the others calm her down by phoning her friend’s house and confirming that Sally is there and that she’s fine. Ghostly Sally can’t understand it. She’s sure that she’s really Sally, but how can that be if Sally is definitely at her friend’s house?

Ghostly Sally seeks out living Sally, and to her surprise, she finds her, although she feels disconnected from this girl. She also learns that this Sally has been secretly doing things with a boy from the school, Julian, performing nighttime rituals with the doll, Monigan. Although ghostly Sally remembers having been friends with Julian, seeing him from outside herself makes her realize that Julian is actually sinister and disturbed. In her spirit form, she also realizes that their rituals with Monigan have stirred up something genuinely supernatural, apart from herself.

As things become more clear to her, the ghost begins to think that she was wrong about being Sally. She is still sure that she is one of the four sisters, neglected at her parents’ school, but she doesn’t think that she’s Sally after all, and that’s why she had no knowledge of Sally’s secret rituals with Julian and couldn’t remember where Sally was or what she was thinking. She also realizes that everything she has seen happened when she was younger. Somehow, after her accident, her spirit went back into the past, seeing things that she and her sisters used to do.

As the “ghost” wakes up in the hospital in the present day, she also realizes that she is not actually dead. She’s been having an out-of-body experience. Worse, her “accident” wasn’t really an accident. Someone tried to kill her. Julian, also older now in the present day, shoved her out of his car while they were driving somewhere. He was deliberately trying to kill her! Something that happened during that time in the past, during the time with the Monigan rituals and the girls’ Plan to confront their parents over their neglect led up to this attempted murder.

The “ghost” still can’t remember everything that happened in the seven years since then, leading up to the attempted murder, and she’s still confused about who she really is. She only senses that Monigan tried to kill her through Julian. Although the girls once thought that Monigan was just a game, Monigan is actually a real, evil spirit. Seven years ago, Monigan told them that it would claim a life, and now, Monigan is trying to do so. Can the “ghost” regain her memories and figure out what to do in time to save her life before the next attempt?

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

My Reaction

Earlier, I covered The Headless Cupid, in which children play at being witches and doing magical rituals that are clearly nonsense, but this book has children who are coerced by some ancient supernatural spirit into doing “real” occult rituals. The children’s rituals involve blood and cruelty to animals, which I didn’t like when I was reading the story. We don’t fully get to know what Monigan actually is, although there are indications that Monigan might be some kind of ancient goddess that craves sacrifices, especially human sacrifices. Monigan seems to remember receiving sacrifices before, in the distant past. Although Cart thinks that she invented Monigan, that Monigan is just a doll they tore, and that all of their rituals are just playacting, the “ghost” realizes that they were all being manipulated by the spirit called Monigan into thinking that. Monigan took advantage of the neglected children and their mentally ill friend for its own purposes. I think Monigan was based on Morrigan from Irish mythology. We are told in the story that this British boarding school is built on a site that has been inhabited from ancient times, and the girls’ father is obsessed with the archaeology of the area, which may also be responsible for stirring up this ancient spirit.

The intriguing part of this story is first that the readers aren’t sure whether or not the “ghost” is actually dead, and then, the readers as well as the ghost have to determine the ghost’s true identity. At first, the “ghost” thinks that she knows who she is, but then, she thinks that she was wrong. (Or was she?) Even when she is awake in the present day, her mind is still confused, and even two of her sisters, while they know that Julian’s attempt to kill her was part of Monigan’s curse, find it difficult to remember everything that happened when all of this started. The “ghost” has to go through the events of the past, with Monigan working against her all the time, to figure out what set off this threat against her before she runs out of time. She knows that Monigan plans to kill her before the day is over, and she doesn’t have much time left to break this curse or prevent it from happening in the first place. The “ghost” isn’t sure at first that she can change the past, but she gradually manages to get through to the other children and figure out a solution with the help of her sisters.

I found the parents in the story not just neglectful but actually cruel and infuriating. The father keeps calling his daughters “bitches” when he gets angry at them. When the girls appeal to their mother about how they’re not being fed and have to keep begging food from the school’s kitchen, the mother shuts her eyes and tells them to stop bothering the cook. The cook is also revealed to be stealing food from the kitchen herself, which may be the reason why both the girls and the students have little to eat, but when the girls tell their mother about it, their mother doesn’t want to hear about it. She just doesn’t want to go to the bother of finding another cook. I’m amazed that the girls haven’t actually died at some point before this or that social services hasn’t gotten involved. The girls do attend a different school from the one their parents manage, so they would have the opportunity to get help and attention from an outside source.

At one point, Fenella openly tells her mother that she’s neglecting them while she only pays attention to the boys at the school, and her mother says that girls can look after themselves while boys can’t. It’s like her mother looks at the girls like some people look at pet cats when they just let them roam and hunt for their own food. I don’t even approve of people neglecting their cats, like they don’t even have pets so much as a nodding acquaintance with feral animals. Even in the present day, when our “ghost” lies in a hospital bed after a murder attempt, their mother doesn’t come to see her because she’s too busy helping the boys at the school to pack their trunks. The father is openly hostile to his daughters, and the mother doesn’t seem to have any feeling or concern for them at all.

The concept of the book was interesting, but it’s not one that I would care to read again because I found it dark and frustrating, although it does end well. Things do improve for the girls in the past after their father discovers their weird rituals and sends them off to their grandmother’s house, angrily declaring that he never wants to see any of them again. The father’s rejection of them is actually a blessing. At their grandmother’s house, they get regular food and the attention that they desperately need. The mother partly redeems herself at the end of the book by coming to see her daughter after all, saying that she felt obligated to get the boys all packed but now that’s done, so she is free to stay with her daughter until she’s fully recovered. The girl does recover, and she begins reconciling herself to her past traumas, both the supernatural ones and the ones resulting from her parents’ neglect and her tumultuous relationship with her sisters.

One thing that the “ghost” accomplishes is that she gets a look at her past and herself as they really are, viewing herself and everything that happened from a neutral position as the “ghost.” Seeing herself from the position of a third person, she discovers that she doesn’t like the things she’s done or the person she’s been during these last several years. That’s why she has felt so disconnected from herself and her memories and why she couldn’t even recognize herself or the things she did in the past. The “ghost” is so upset with herself and ashamed of her life choices that she wonders if she’s really worth saving from Monigan. Fortunately, her sisters truly love her and know that she’s worth saving. Their bad choices and poor behavior to each other have been largely the result of their parents’ neglect, a trauma they all share and understand. Although the ghost doesn’t remember everything at first, the other sisters know that, after they went to live with their grandmother and received the attention and care they really needed, they all improved and their relationships with each other improved. They’ve been trying to move on from their past ever since, and they need to settle the matter about Monigan once and for all to truly be free to go forward in their lives. One of the sisters knows exactly what kind of sacrifice will finally appease Monigan and save her sister’s life.

Monigan wants something perfect as a sacrifice, but our “ghost” isn’t a perfect person. Nobody is perfect, and our “ghost” has become truly aware of her flaws and the nature of her troubled past through her out-of-body experiences. However, things can be perfect in someone’s imagination, and one of the sisters has a more powerful imagination than the others. Someone has a dream that is perfect, at least in her mind. When she gives Monigan that dream, she not only frees her sister from Monigan but herself from something that her future self has realized that she doesn’t really want. Both she and her sister have been clinging to things that were harmful to both of them, making them into the kind of people neither of them really wanted to be. It was their insecurity from their parents’ neglect that made them cling to things that they thought would make them special and distinct. Once they are free from these harmful influences, not only does Monigan stop trying to take their lives, but they are truly free for the first time to become something better. Monigan does claim one life at the end of the story, but in that case, it’s only justice.

Posted on by TracyC

Behind the Attic Wall

Behind the Attic Wall by Sylvia Cassedy, 1983.

This story is told as a flashback, so we know that things get better for the main character, but she is still haunted by her past experiences.

Twelve-year-old Maggie is an orphan who has been bounced around between foster homes and boarding schools because of her bad behavior. Her bad behavior is because she feels neglected and unloved. She eventually comes to live with her great aunts and an uncle in an old house that used to be a boarding school. Maggie has memories of the house where she once lived with her parents before they died, but no place she’s been since has seemed home-like.

When she first arrives, her eccentric Uncle Morris picks her up at the station. Uncle Morris has a sense of humor, which is both charming and also gets on Maggie’s nerves. When she gets a look at the institutional-looking old house where her great aunts and uncle live, she is physically ill. She has lived in various boarding schools and is horrified at the idea of living in another. Her last boarding school expelled her, and the headmistress called her a “disgrace.” Maggie had hoped that, for once, living with relatives might mean living in a real home.

Her two aunts, Harriet and Lillian, remind her of the headmistresses at boarding schools, although their rules are different from most headmistresses. They lecture her about health and nutrition and worry about her being undernourished. They give her old-fashioned, hand-me-down clothes to wear that Maggie assumes are the uniforms of this old school. One of her aunts gives her a baby doll, but Maggie tells her that she doesn’t like dolls and doesn’t play with them. She doesn’t have any dolls, and if she ever had any before in her life, she doesn’t remember. Her aunt thinks her rejection of this gift is horrible. Her aunts don’t seem to understand much about children, and they are both horrified when Maggie dumps out her glass of milk because they gave her warm milk instead of cold. However, her Uncle Morris is amused and tells her that she might be the “right one” after all. Maggie isn’t sure what he means by that.

After her aunt leaves her alone in her new room, Maggie plays with the doll a little, imagining that she’s explaining it to a group of girls who have never seen a doll. A game that Maggie often plays with herself is to mentally explain common things to a group of imaginary girls who don’t know what any of them are. Then, she goes exploring the rest of the old house. Because this building is so obviously an old school, she keeps expecting that she will eventually encounter other students, but there are no students. Maggie is the only child in the old house.

Maggie finds her aunts’ rooms and tries on their curlers, a necklace, and a fancy pair of shoes. She gets in trouble with her aunts for doing that, and that’s the moment when Maggie understands that there really are no other children around to see her get in trouble. At first, her aunts think that maybe agreeing to accept Maggie was a mistake and that they can’t handle her. However, they decide to keep her, at least for the present.

They explain to Maggie that the building where they live did use to be a boarding school for girls. It was founded by some ancestors of their, whose portraits hang in the parlor. Maggie is amazed at the idea of ancestors because she barely even remembers having parents and has little concept of her extended family. The old school closed after some kind of disaster, and it reopened in a new location down the road. Now, the new school is a private day school for both boys and girls, catering mostly to wealthy families, who can afford the fees. Maggie is horrified when she finds out that she will be attending this school because she knows that a poor orphan like her in her shabby, hand-me-down clothes is going to be an oddity among the wealthy private school students.

On her first day at the school, Maggie has a panic attack while imagining going through the routine of her teacher telling the whole class about her unfortunate history and the tragic deaths of her parents in a car accident when she was little and asking the other students to be patient and charitable to her. She’s experienced this before, and she knows that, while the other students start off treating her charitably, they soon get tired of being charitable and start picking on her. Maggie tries to run away from the class, and that earns her a reputation as a weirdo right off the bat. The other kids immediately start treating her like a weirdo and calling her the usual nasty names, and Maggie’s only relief is that, this time, they didn’t go through the false kindness phase first.

Uncle Morris doesn’t live at the old school with the aunts, but he lives nearby and sometimes comes to visit. He continues to spout his witty nonsense and plays weird practical jokes that make no sense. Maggie starts to understand that her uncle’s form of teasing isn’t meant to be mean, unlike the kids at school, but none of it really makes any sense to her. His jokes are pointless, and he doesn’t respond to anything, even Maggie’s emotions, in a normal way, turning everything into some kind of bizarre joke.

Then, Maggie starts to hear voices in the house. She can’t tell where the voices are coming from, but she knows they’re not her aunts, and her aunts never seem to hear them. They talk about random things, like tea, roses, a lost umbrella, and a dog. Maggie asks her aunts who’s talking, but her aunts say no one is. They think that it’s just Maggie’s imagination because she’s highly strung, but Maggie knows that she’s not imagining it. Her Uncle Morris also seems to hear the voices because he reacts to them at one point, but when Maggie tries to ask him about it, he dodges the question and makes another of his nonsense jokes.

One day, while her aunts are out of the house, the voices call to Maggie and ask her to join them. Maggie searches for the source of the voices, and behind the wall in the attic, she discovers a small room with a pair of mysterious dolls who are alive. They walk and talk. At first, Maggie thinks this must be some kind of trick, but it isn’t. She tries to ask the dolls what they are, but they speak in nonsense jokes in response to serious questions, like Uncle Morris.

Maggie is unnerved by the dolls at first, and she throws a fit about how stupid their pretend tea party is, kicking the dolls aside in fear because she can’t understand them and is afraid of what they might do to her. The dolls simply conclude that they must have been wrong and that Maggie isn’t the right one and stop talking to her. Maggie tells them that she doesn’t care and doesn’t want to be the right one, but actually, she can’t stop thinking about the dolls. She wonders what they mean about the “right one” and what kind of person would be the right one. She also feels guilty about damaging the dolls when she kicked them, so she returns to the attic to fix them. When she starts to fix them, the dolls begin speaking to her again.

The dolls become Maggie’s friends, giving her the love she so desperately needs. Maggie also feels needed by someone else for the first time in her life, enjoying the feeling of taking care of the dolls, sort of the way she took care of the girls in her imagination. However, the dolls have a spooky origin, and when Maggie realizes the truth about the dolls, it changes her life forever.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

About Maggie

I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this one or not because, while I like sort of atmospheric spooky themes, I have limits on how many scary and sad themes I can take. It did help that the book is divided into sections, each with a prologue about Maggie in the present day as she looks back on this strange period in her life. The prologues explain how Maggie is now in a happier home with people she has come to think of as her parents and younger children that she has also come to love as little sisters. The other kids are fascinated by the stories that she tells about her time with her aunts at the old boarding school, and Maggie enjoys explaining things to them, like she used to do to the imaginary girls, only she speaks more politely to the real girls. Since her time with her aunts, she has learned to get along better with people, and this ghost story is about how she learned how to build connections with people.

The book makes it clear that Maggie’s bad behavior is because she has been lonely, neglected, and mistreated since her parents’ deaths. She has been in various foster homes and boarding schools, but the people who were her caretakers didn’t really love her or have any patience with her. The other children in her boarding schools used her as a target for teasing and bullying, causing Maggie to look at everyone new she meets with suspicion, waiting for them to turn on her, even if they acted nice at first. The adults don’t really build a relationship with Maggie and just expect Maggie to be perfectly behaved, regardless of her provocation. Maggie remembers having spoken to psychologists before, who had her draw pictures of her feelings and family, but they never really solve anything for Maggie. Maggie still feels neglected and unloved, and when the adults at each place she’s been get tired of her, they just ship her off to somewhere else, where the process continues. Maggie’s bad behavior is like shooting herself in the foot, sabotaging possible friendships and relationships, but it becomes more understanding when you realize that this is the only pattern of relationships she knows. Children and adults have both mistreated her, so she doesn’t have any knowledge of healthy and loving relationships to draw on to know how people are supposed to treat each other.

That’s been Maggie’s life for as long as she remembers. The only clothes she has are old, worn pieces of various school uniforms from the various boarding schools where she’s been, and she has no toys or personal possessions except for a pack of cards that she uses to play solitaire, a game that one of her former boarding school roommates taught her. It’s the only game Maggie knows how to play other than imaginary games.

Maggie’s aunts and even her Uncle Morris aren’t particularly good for her. Her aunts have no patience or understanding for her. The aunts do care about Maggie. Maggie does become better fed and healthier because the aunts are concerned about her health, but they don’t understand how to take care of her emotional health. They also have some selfish motives in their care of Maggie, wanting to show off her improvement to their health society because they want to prove their health theories. Uncle Morris is quietly supportive of Maggie, but I found him rather trying because, when Maggie tries to speak to him seriously and sincerely, he just makes jokes and never really addresses her feelings or the realities of her situation. Admittedly, it’s partly because he knows the truth about the dolls but can’t admit it. Still, constant jokes aren’t what Maggie really needs, and his jokes and nonsense wear on her. The dolls also speak nonsense, but they give Maggie the opportunity to learn valuable lessons about how to get long with others and build relationships with them.

How to Build Relationships

One of the first lessons that Maggie learns is that, while other people have done things to hurt her, she also does things that hurt other people’s feelings. Before she can begin to develop relationships, she has to learn to control herself, to not treat other people in hurtful ways, and to apologize and do things to repair damage she’s done. She can’t begin to build a relationship with the dolls until she repairs the damage she did the first time she met them. Maggie is actually amazed that she was able to do it because she has never fixed anything in her life. She is unaccustomed to the idea that she can make things better when things have gone wrong or when she’s done something wrong. Most of her past problems have just ended in failure and with her being sent away.

Maggie also learns that building relationships with other people means caring about their needs, and Maggie likes the feeling of being needed by someone. Acting out the tea parties with an empty tea pot and wooden pieces of bread and watering the fake roses on the wallpaper is still ridiculous, but she does it all anyway because the dolls need her to do it. She gives them presents, too, the first presents that she’s ever given anybody. One of the girls at Maggie’s school, Barbara, sees Maggie making a present for one of the dolls and gives Maggie a little paper umbrella for a doll. Maggie learns that it’s possible for people to bond over shared interests.

What Are the Dolls Really?

However, there is a dark side to this story. There are hints all along about what the dolls really are. The man doll, Timothy John, is always reading a torn scrap of a newspaper about a fire, but he can never finish the story because most of it is missing. Every day is Wednesday for them, and they say that is the day they arrived in that room. When they show Maggie their best Sunday clothes, which they never wear because every day is Wednesday to them, Maggie is surprise to see that the clothes are burned. The dolls also speak of a third person who is supposed to join their doll household at some point, but they say that it can’t be Maggie because she’s supposed to be their visitor.

The truth is that the dolls are the ghosts of her ancestors, the ones who founded the school. They were killed in a fire in the 1800s, along with their dog, who is now a little china dog in their attic room. The story in the little newspaper scrap is about them, and the fire is the reason why the school had to be moved to another building. Maggie doesn’t realize the truth until she runs away after an argument with her aunts because she didn’t come to the party of their society and finds their grave stones. It’s the anniversary of their deaths, and she meets Uncle Morris at their graves. The only time Uncle Morris doesn’t make jokes is when he explains to Maggie how they died.

After the aunts catch her in the attic with the dolls and Maggie finds out who and what they are, the dolls stop moving and talking to her. Maggie tries moving them herself, acting out their tea party, and talking for them. Maggie is afraid that the dolls have now died forever, but there is the third person the doll spoke of to consider. The third person is Uncle Morris. It occurred to me that the story leaves it a little ambiguous about whether the dolls were really the ghosts of the ancestors or if Maggie’s own lonely imagination, inspired by Uncle Morris’s nonsense and bits of family history made her feel like they did. However, the ending of the story indicates that Maggie didn’t imagine any of it because her Uncle Morris dies of a heart attack and becomes a doll in the attic with the other dolls. When Uncle Morris joins the other dolls, the other dolls come to life again. However, it could still be the imaginings of a lonely and grieving child.

Maggie’s aunts decide that they simply can’t handle Maggie, so they are the ones who arrange for her to go to her new family. It was the best thing that they could have done for Maggie. The new family is the family that Maggie really needs, and they want to keep her permanently. She never tells her new sisters the truth about the dolls. Maggie misses being with the dolls, who are also her family, but the idea that they are still alive and that Uncle Morris is keeping the other two in the attic company so they won’t be lonely without her makes her feel better. It’s a bittersweet story.

One of the things that bothers me about ghost stories is that it’s sad to think about how the people got killed. I like stories that are kind of mysterious, but behind the ghost story, there is real tragedy. I feel really bad for Maggie’s ancestors and their poor dog, although they don’t seem to mind their condition too much. On the other hand, maybe some of their nonsense talk is to cover up the sad parts, so they can forget the tragedy and pretend like they’re still living their normal lives and make it so they don’t have to answer Maggie’s uncomfortable questions. Maybe that’s even where Uncle Morris learned that trick.

There are times when the dolls seem to have some memory of the past and what happened to them, but they’re kind of caught in a sense of timeless, so it’s hard to tell how much they really remember. If they really are ghost dolls and not just dolls who are alive in Maggie’s imagination, there’s no explanation about why they are dolls. Did they have dolls made of themselves while they were alive that they came to inhabit after death? Is it because they’re now playing at a life they’re no longer living? The story doesn’t say. Uncle Morris seems to know more than he tells, and he may have known somehow that he would also become a doll after his death. If he met the dolls himself when he was young, he may have made a conscious decision that he would join them one day. However, we don’t know for sure how much he knows or how or why the other dolls know to expect him after his death. Poor Maggie’s life has been about loss since the death of her parents. She lost them and her first home and every home she’s had since then. The idea that people she loves stay alive in the dolls could still be her imagination. The story indicates it’s all really happening, but readers can still decide for themselves.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Lives of Christopher Chant

The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones, 1988.

This is the fourth book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different dimensions, and in each of those different dimensions, there are alternate versions of our world, and there are copies of every person in the world.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. There is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across their duplicates in the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions and between worlds, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course. This book is about the childhood of the current Chrestomanci, Christopher Chant, and how he came to be the Chrestomanci.

Young Christopher Chant’s early childhood isn’t very happy. His parents have a very unhappy marriage, and his father never pays any attention to him at all. In fact, Christopher hardly even sees him and isn’t confident that he’d recognize him if he met him anywhere. Christopher later learns that his parents’ marriage was one of convenience. His mother has a great deal of money, and his father is from an important family. Christopher’s social-climbing mother wants him to be very important when he grows up. Christopher is mostly raised by a series of nannies and governesses, none of which stay very long. Servants in general don’t stay very long in the Chant household because the parents’ angry bickering and the passive aggressive notes that they force servants to pass to each other when they eventually stop speaking to each other directly make life unbearable. Christopher only learns that this is not how most households are when his nannies and governesses apologize to him before they leave.

Eventually, his parents’ relationship collapses entirely after his father loses a great deal of money, and his father either leaves his mother or is sent away in disgrace. His mother brings her brother, Christopher’s Uncle Rafe, to live with them instead, and she lets Uncle Rafe run the family finances and attend to Christopher’s education. Christopher enjoys having Uncle Rafe in the house because Uncle Rafe is a jolly man and actually pays attention to him, unlike his own father.

Something else that Christopher first thinks is normal but later learns isn’t normal at all are the strange dreams he has. Christopher often dreams of a strange place filled with valleys. Every time he enters one of the valleys, he has adventures there, and people give him presents. He often loses the presents before he returns home, but sometimes, he manages to keep them, waking up with them in his bed in the morning.

One day, the new governess Uncle Rafe hired catches Christopher playing with one of the strange objects and asks him where he got it. When he tries to tell her about his dreams, she doesn’t believe him at first. Thinking that he may have stolen the strange object from somewhere, she takes him before his mother and Uncle Rafe. However, Uncle Rafe does believe Christopher’s explanation. He says that Christopher seems to be a spirit traveler, having the ability to go to other worlds in his sleep, and he is amazed that Christopher was able to bring an object back with him.

Uncle Rafe asks Christopher to try a few tests of his abilities. First, he asks Christopher to look for a man in his dreams and to bring back a package from that man. Christopher does so successfully. The man is called Tackroy, and Tackroy explains more about the other worlds to Christopher. Every valley Christopher sees is a different world. There are series of worlds, and those series of worlds have numbers. The world where Christopher lives is number 12. At first, Tackroy thinks that there are only 12 worlds, but Christopher says that there are many more than that. Christopher can see better in the space between worlds because, as Tackroy realizes, he is actually there physically, where Tackroy can only be there mentally or in spirit. It is because Christopher can go to other worlds physically that he can bring back objects. Tackroy has hardly any substance in these other worlds, being almost like a ghost, until Christopher realizes that he can help make him more substantial. Both Tackroy and Uncle Rafe are excited by Christopher’s abilities.

Then, they decide to do a test of whether Christopher can carry something living from one world to another. Tackroy asks Christopher to get one of the cats from a temple in world 10. When Christopher enters the temple, he meets a young girl, just a little younger than he is. She says that she is the living embodiment of the goddess Asheth, which gives her special powers. However, she is not allowed to leave the temple except once a year to do a blessing, and she can’t interact much with anything or anyone from outside the temple. It’s a very boring life, and she isn’t very happy in it. When Christopher explains to her about wanting one of the temple cats for his uncle, she agrees to give him the most disagreeable cat in exchange for some books from his world because she is so bored. Christopher agrees, and she helps him to capture the cat. Unfortunately, the cat gives him away when he tries to leave the temple. Christopher is actually killed when a temple guard puts a spear through his chest! That is the first indication that Christopher has nine lives.

When Christopher wakes up, he is in his own bed at home, he has no injuries, and he still has the cat. At first, Christopher’s lack of injury makes him think that the other worlds might be a kind of dream after all, but that doesn’t explain how he still has the cat. Then, he has an accident while pursuing the cat in his room that brings down the curtain rod, which stabs him in the chest again! When he screams, the governess rushes in and tends him.

When Christopher wakes up again, he hears the governess and Uncle Rafe talking. The governess has placed healing spells on him, and she thinks he will recover. Uncle Rafe says that the cat from the Asheth temple is very rare and magical and that wizards would pay a lot of money for parts from the cat. Later, when Christopher sees that the cat is pleading for Christopher to let it go, he does so. As much as a he wants to please his uncle, it does seem cruel to kidnap an animal from its own world and take it to another to be killed and have its parts sold off, even if it’s a mean cat that almost got him killed. When the governess looks for the cat later and can’t find it, Christopher just reminds her that it is a magical cat, so she supposes that it just vanished.

Then, unexpectedly, Christopher’s worried father comes to see him without his mother’s knowledge. His father tells him that he had placed a spell on Christopher to monitor his life, and it seemed like the spell had told him that Christopher was dead. Christopher assures him that he’s fine. His father is relieved, but he is also still worried. He tells Christopher that he did Christopher’s horoscope and that the next year and a half will be dangerous for him. He also warns Christopher that his Uncle Rafe isn’t a nice person and that he should avoid getting mixed up in his business.

In spite of his father’s warnings, Christopher continues to participate in his uncle’s experiments in other worlds with Tackroy. Tackroy apologizes to Christopher profusely for the incident with the spear, saying that he would have felt horrible if Christopher had been killed. It becomes clear that Uncle Rafe’s “experiments” involves a business collecting and selling rare objects from one world to people in another. As Christopher helps Tackroy with it, the two of them become friends, and they enjoy exploring and learning about other worlds.

Things change when Christopher is sent to boarding school. He likes school and making his first friends with other boys. He does well in most of his subjects, although strangely, he can’t seem to do any magic in his magic lessons. It’s strange because Tackroy had told him that he’d probably be really good at magic because of his ability to travel through worlds. He hates to give up on magic studies because he really does want to learn more about magic.

Remembering his promise to bring some books to the goddess girl, Christopher asks a school friend with a sister for advice about what girls like. He buys a set of books about a schoolgirl called Millie. Unfortunately, he can’t seem to travel in his dreams at school, like he did at home. His uncle becomes impatient with him for not keeping his appointments with Tackroy, too. Christopher can’t think what’s wrong. Was there something special about his night nursery at home? Is he growing out of his old abilities?

When the school matron notices that Christopher is having trouble sleeping, she removes the new braces that he had put on his teeth, thinking that they’re causing him pain. Suddenly, Christopher is able to travel in his dreams again. He is able to deliver the books to the goddess girl and rejoin Tackroy in their work in the other worlds. Then, another accident that kills him again reveals his secret, extra lives to everyone, including his parents.

At first, it’s difficult to prove that Christopher has multiple lives, and his parents (of course) argue about what to do about it. After learning that Christopher’s mother secretly plans to take him abroad, Christopher’s father quickly removes him from his boarding school and takes him to Cambridge to be tested by an expert. In spite of his earlier apparent neglect, Christopher’s father does care about him, and for Christopher’s own good, needs to confirm a few things that he has already suspected about Christopher. The expert not only discovers the reason why Christopher was unable to perform magic in class (a sensitivity to silver that shuts down his powers whenever he comes in contact with it) but also proves that Christopher is a rare, nine-lived enchanter. Being one of those rare enchanters means that Christopher is destined to become the next Chrestomanci!

Christopher is shocked and dismayed when he is immediately made the ward of the current Chrestomanci, Gabriel DeWitt, and sent off to Chrestomanci Castle. It’s really the best place for him to learn about his new-found abilities, but Christopher fights it. DeWitt embarrasses him by telling him things about both of his parents and why neither of them is really suited to be his guardian. It’s all true, but that only makes it more embarrassing.

Christopher is lonely as the only child in Chrestomanci Castle, and while he is considered very important, nobody there seems to consider his feelings at all. Nobody cares that he would rather be a professional cricket player than a Chrestomanci! If it wasn’t for his natural abilities, which were just an accident of birth, nobody would have any interest in him at all. Also, even the heavy enchantments of Chrestomanci Castle can’t seem to stop the series of bizarre accidents that begin robbing Christopher of his extra lives. The only person who seems to understand Christopher is his secret friend, the goddess girl in world 10. Like Christopher, she is also a prisoner in her temple, being used by other people for her abilities but not really cared for as a person. More than anything, she wishes she could be an ordinary girl, like the girls in the books Christopher brings her, going to school and having friends.

Christopher wants to keep on working with Tackroy for his uncle because he loves exploring the other worlds and because it gives him some freedom from his life in Chrestomanci Castle, but Tackroy points out that his uncle has also been taking advantage of him. His uncle is getting rich off their activities, and he hasn’t even been paying Christopher for making them possible. Tackroy now knows that Christopher has died or nearly died more than once for his uncle’s business. Christopher has been getting deeply involved in something he doesn’t fully understand. The full truth is going to hurt, but Christopher needs to see it to save the lives he has left and realize his proper place in the world(s).

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Some book lists place this book first in the Chrestomanci series because, if you follow a linear timeline of events in the stories, it does come before the other books, but it was originally the fourth book published, and I think it’s best to read the other books first, especially Charmed Life. The books in this series are fantasy, but they’re also mystery stories. There are secrets to be revealed in every book, and if you read this book first, it spoils some of the mysteries in Charmed Life.

It is a good book to read, though, because it provides some of the missing backstories of some of the other characters. At the end of Charmed Life, Christopher (as the current Chrestomanci) tells Eric/Cat about how he found out that he had nine lives and that he was going to be a Chrestomanci even though he couldn’t cast spells at first. His sensitivity to silver is a part of the story, and the way it is revealed in this book matches his earlier description in Charmed Life.

During the course of the book, we also learn a little more about the extended Chant family and get brief glimpses of Christopher’s cousins, who later go on to marry each other and become the parents of Cat and Gwendolyn Chant. The Chants are known for being a powerful magical family that produces enchanters, who are much more powerful than ordinary witches. Once every generation, they produce a disreputable one, which happens to be Christopher’s father in this generation. Christopher’s father is an enchanter, so he’s more powerful than general witches, but not nearly as powerful as Christopher. He has an over-reliance on the horoscope charts he draws, and they don’t always turn out right.

Christopher’s mother and his Uncle Rafe are part of the Argent family, which is also magically powerful but has a bad reputation. DeWitt doesn’t even specify at first what they are known for, only that he would never associate with them. It’s Christopher’s father, who does care about his son even though he doesn’t really know how to care for him, who points out that “Argent” means “silver”, and this is part of the reason for Christopher’s sensitivity to the metal. The Argent family, including his mother, and especially his Uncle Rafe, are toxic to Christopher in ways that he doesn’t fully understand and finds difficult to accept. Christopher’s mother doesn’t actually mean him any harm, like his Uncle Rafe does, but she is foolish and easily swayed by Rafe. Christopher comes to forgive her because he was also tricked by Uncle Rafe into doing his evil business when he was too young and naive to understand.

We also learn the origins of Christopher’s future wife, Millie, in this book. She is very powerful in Charmed Life, but this book explains why she is so powerful. One thing that I don’t think is adequately explained is how Christopher’s children, Julia and Roger, are not Chrestomancis themselves. After all, there is only one of their father, so I think it should be assumed that there are no duplicates of either of them in the other worlds, but they may be exceptions somehow because there was never a chance that they could have had duplicate selves or because their mother is actually the incarnation of a goddess.

The books in this series blend dark parts with some humor, which make the books lighter to read than they otherwise would be. Because of the dark parts, I wouldn’t recommend these books for anyone younger than the middle school level. Christopher does get killed multiple times in the book (although he still has extra lives left at the end), and there is trading in human lives and souls. The goddess girl, who takes the name of Millie, comes to realize that she is meant to be sacrificed when she gets too old to be the young incarnation of the goddess, which is a horrifying revelation. She runs away to Christopher’s world and begs him to help her go to a boarding school, like in the books she likes to read. Her goddess’s followers pursue her to Christopher’s world, and there is more bargaining for her life. Fortunately, the old priestess who has been caring for her is not as heartless as it seems at first. When she finally meets with the girl in front of Gabriel, she admits that she usually finds a way of sparing the young goddess incarnations, buying their lives with one of the nine lives from the temple cats. She has to do it in secret, but she has saved up enough money in jewels to pay for Millie’s education where she can be safe in this other world. To spare Christopher and the cats the children love from losing their lives, Gabriel kindly gives the priestess one of his own spare lives because he still has several lives left. He also accepts the responsibility of having Millie as his ward and arranging for her education.

Through his adventures and having to take charge as the Chrestomanci and rescue Gabriel when he is in trouble, Christopher comes to more fully understand what it means to be the Chrestomanci. He also comes to understand Gabriel a little better. He is surprised to realize that Gabriel has hated the job of Chrestomanci. Like Christopher, he also felt forced into the role and resented it, but he made himself do the job anyway because it is a vital job for the protection of his world and others. To Christopher’s even greater surprise, he realizes that when he does the job for real instead of just having boring lessons, he actually likes the job much better than Gabriel does and no longer resents being trained for it. Gabriel has also realized how lonely and isolated Christopher is, and he says that he is taking steps to bring other young magicians to the castle to work and be trained, so Christopher will have companions. The story ends happily, and there is even a reconciliation between Christopher’s parents.

Posted on by TracyC

Witch Week

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones, 1982.

This is the third book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. However, there is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions and between worlds, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course.

This story takes place in a world where witches are being burned at the stake in the 1980s. At a boarding school for troubled children and orphans, everyone is aware of what an accusation of witchcraft can mean. One day, one of the teachers finds a note in a social studies book saying that one of the students in class 6B is a witch. It’s a serious accusation, but how seriously should anyone take it? This is, after all, a school for troubled children, and children in general play pranks. Mr. Crossly finds the note worrying. Some of the teachers are convinced that this is just a prank or someone playing up for attention. Miss Hodge says that there is a sick mind in class 6B. Mr. Wentworth, whose own son, Brian, is in that class, says that he’s sure that all of the kids in class 6B have sick minds, but that’s just typical. He thinks it’s best if the teachers take no notice of the note. But, the note is correct. There is a witch in class 6B.

Strange things start happening in class 6B and to the students in that class. A flock of assorted birds swarms into their music class. In gym class, Nan Pilgrim can’t manage to climb the rope, no matter how hard she tries. When she and two other students are called to have lunch with the headmistress, Nan finds herself making disgusting comments about the food without her even wanting to say anything, but for some reason, the headmistress can’t hear a thing she says, even though the other students can. Then, it is revealed that Nan’s real name is Dulcinea, which is the name of a famous witch. Could Nan secretly be the witch in class 6B?

Although she can’t openly admit it, Nan is descended from the famous witch Dulcinea, who tried to stop the persecution of witches, and she is also what is called a “witch orphan”, meaning that her parents were witches. However, Nan insists that she’s not a witch herself, and Nan isn’t the only suspicious student in the class. Everyone there is troubled in some way. Brian Wentworth is often picked on for being the son of a teacher. Simon Silverson, Dan Smith, and Theresa Mullet are bullies. They are all eager to point fingers at Nan for being a witch, but could that be to cover up for themselves?

Charles Morgan was sent to the boarding school because his parents think that he is troubled and disobedient and a bad influence on his younger brother. In a way, he is very troubled, but he can’t explain what is really troubling him. When he was younger, he witnessed a witch being burned, something that still traumatizes him. Then, he helped another witch who was being hunted to escape. He can’t admit to his parents that he helped this witch because it was illegal, but the witch promised him good luck for doing so. So far, he hasn’t noticed any good luck, and he feels terrible every time he hears about another witch being burned, thinking that it might be his witch. It all makes him angry and depressed, and he hates the boarding school and everyone there.

Miss Hodge tries to investigate the students by having them act out witchcraft inquisitions. Since most of the children don’t know what happens at an inquisition and aren’t very good actors, most of them are terrible at it. But, she comes to think maybe Charles is the witch because he gets angry at Nan over all the disgusting things she said at lunch and taunts her about them in a way that makes it sound like he’s saying some kind of spell.

When Miss Hodge tries to tell Mr. Wentworth about it, he shrugs it off because he also heard the things Nan said at lunch. Mr. Wentworth interviews Nan about why she said all those things at lunch, but she can’t explain herself. She doesn’t know what made her say those things. Sometimes, she just can’t seem to help herself, and she felt almost possessed. Mr. Wentworth knows about her family’s history and warns her to be careful.

Then, when Charles is trying to escape from some bullies, he somehow manages to turn himself invisible. He doesn’t understand it, but he tries to do something else magical as a test. Since Dan Smith hid his spiked shoes earlier, Charles tries making Dan’s spiked shoes disappear. To Charles’s horror and astonishment, he succeeds! Somehow, he has apparently been a witch the whole time without knowing it. Charles thinks maybe he did some of the other strange things without knowing it, too. He’s always heard that witches are evil, and he thinks maybe he has secretly been evil this whole time and had better confess. An accidental mix-up when he goes looking for the headmistress stops him from confessing immediately, but it leaves him unsure what to do.

Mr. Wentworth has a private conversation with Charles about Miss Hodge’s suspicions about him. He knows what Charles was really talking about when he was arguing with Nan, but he points out to Charles how bad it might sound to someone who didn’t know what he was talking about. Information about witches and the past witch uprisings is drastically censored. There is almost nothing about it in the school library, but Mr. Wentworth understands the situation and explains it to Charles in a no-nonsense way. Nan’s ancestress, Dulcinea Wilkes, had been an advocate for witch’s rights in the 18th century, particularly the right not to be murdered. She said that witches couldn’t help being witches because they were born that way, and it wasn’t fair for them to be murdered for something they just couldn’t help. She said that witches would only use their powers in good ways if people would stop hunting them and burning them, but the murders and burnings continued, and Dulcinea lost her temper. She retaliated with violent spells that frightened people so much that they also murdered Dulcinea by burning her. In remembrance of that, people still continue to burn effigies of her, like they do of Guy Fawkes. Mr. Wentworth says that he thinks what happened to Dulcinea was unfair, but he is worried about his students because there has never been so much stigma against witches at any earlier point in history. Although his students wouldn’t remember it, there was a major witch uprising around the time they were all born. The news of this uprising was largely hushed-up, but the witches attempted to take over the entire government. The revolutionaries were all civil servants, and they were all burned when the uprising was crushed, but the government has been paranoid about anyone with any sign of witchcraft since. When they learned that the leader of the uprisings started showing signs of witchcraft when he was about 11 years old, they even started allowing children to be arrested for witchcraft, even on slight suspicion. The inquisitors have powers that go largely unchecked. Mr. Wentworth knows that any of his students can be hauled away and executed with little recourse.

Even though Mr. Wentworth is concerned with protecting Charles, Charles gets angry with him for giving him a black mark as a reminder to control his behavior, and he glares at Mr. Wentworth. It’s a terrible mistake. It turns out that Charles has the evil eye, and it seems like he accidentally makes Mr. Wentworth disappear. Although Charles tries to pretend like everything is normal, he is desperate on the inside. Soon, someone will realize that Mr. Wentworth is missing and that Charles was the last person to see him. He even tries burning his own finger on a candle to remind himself that burning hurts, and he needs to control himself to avoid being burned to death. When he tries to fix what he’s done with magic, Mr. Wentworth does return, but everyone’s shoes mysteriously disappear.

To Charles’s surprise, the memories of the witch he saw burned and the witch he helped to escape stop bothering him so much after he knows and accepts that he is a witch himself. It’s like he’s always known, inside, that he would be a witch, and once he becomes reconciled to his true nature, he becomes calmer and more self-confident. He knows that he can’t stop being a witch. He can only try to avoid being caught. However, it turns out that he is not the only student who has witchcraft, and when the desperate students seek help or a method of escape from this prison-like school, they accidentally summon Chrestomanci to straighten everything out.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).

My Reaction and Spoilers

Alternate Worlds

Like all of the books in the Chrestomanci series, this book takes place in an alternate world or alternate reality. It explores not only the suspicion and paranoia that go with witch hunts but also the mechanism by which these alternate worlds or realities are created. When the students who have realized that they are witches try to escape, they are given a spell that calls Chrestomanci from his world to theirs. Chrestomanci is accustomed to being summoned to random places on short notice (it’s just one of the hassles that come with the job), but he finds this particular world puzzling. He knows from the similarities between this world and others in the series of worlds that contains his own that he must be in that particular series of worlds, but he recognizes immediately that there is something wrong with it. It has way too many similarities with the world that is “our” world in the series, but yet, there shouldn’t be any witch trials or burnings in the 1980s. He explains that alternate worlds are created when there is some major event that has only two outcomes with an equal chance of happening. Every time that happens, the world splits into two separate worlds where each of the possibilities happen. Because this world is so much like the world that is “ours”, he knows that whatever event caused the split happened fairly recently in history, but for some reason, the split wasn’t complete. There is no real magic in “our” world, but this odd, dysfunctional, split-off world is full of it.

By talking to the students about what they know about the history of their world, Chrestomanci is able to pinpoint the event that caused the problem. As with other Chrestomanci books, Chrestomanci doesn’t just magically solve the problem all by himself, but once he understands the situation, he shows the students at the school where the problem lies and what they need to do to fix it themselves, making use of their own powers, and even some of the mistakes they’ve made, to set their world right and re-integrate their world with “our” world. Once their world is repaired, it’s as if all the witch trials never happened. People who were burned are alive again, and people who were in prison are living perfectly normal lives. The children must sacrifice their magical abilities and all or most of their memories of their old lives to join with our world, which some of them are initially reluctant to do, but once they do it, all of their lives change for the better. Orphans have their parents back, the school is now a day school instead of a boarding school where the children were basically prisoners, and the children are all much friendlier toward each other now that they are no longer part of that toxic atmosphere, where suspicions always surrounded them and everyone is afraid of exposure.

Themes and Spoilers

Parts of the story were stressful because of the bullying among the students and the constant threat of imprisonment or death for any child who was proven to be a witch. Most of the adults are not that concerned with the welfare of the students because this entire society is engulfed with paranoia, and everyone is desperate to protect themselves at all cost. The adults are often so preoccupied with saving themselves that they would be willing to throw the children to the wolves rather than face imprisonment or death themselves. The major exception is Mr. Wentworth, who tries to warn children who show signs of witchcraft that they need to be careful. His efforts to protect the children are touching because he has more to lose than some of the other teachers who play along with the politics and paranoia of their society. (Spoiler!) Mr. Wentworth and his son Brian are both witches, and Mr. Wentworth is being blackmailed for most of his salary by the headmistress. Mr. Wentworth advocates self-control to the students as the best way to avoid being caught, but it soon becomes apparent that nobody with witchcraft abilities can fight using them forever. That’s why some of the children’s abilities come out unconsciously, without them even being fully aware of what they’re doing. That’s where the mystery of the story comes in.

Chrestomanci books always contain an element of mystery in some way or other, and from the beginning of the story, there are the questions of who wrote the note about there being a witch in class and who the witch is. We never learn who wrote the note (I don’t remember that being definitely revealed), and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. When Charles realizes that he is a witch, that seems like the answer. However, Charles is not the only witch in class. As one of the other students points out, all of the weird things that have been happening at the school are very different in character, so there is more than one person involved. By the end of the book, it is revealed that (spoiler) the vast majority of the students at the school are witches. Some have been doing magical things unconsciously as their powers have started asserting themselves, and some have done things on purpose because they know they can. Chrestomanci realizes that many more people in their society in general are witches than these paranoid people ever suspected, and witches are only regarded as a minority because of the atmosphere of fear they live in. Everyone has been trying so hard to conceal any sign of abnormality that they all have a warped view of who they all really are and what their society is actually like.

I couldn’t help but notice that, witch or not, absolutely nobody in this society can be called an innocent person. Everybody is doing something illegal, unethical, or simply deceptive. They all have secrets, and they all do things to cover up what they’re doing. Even non-witches are often doing horrible things that they have to cover up. The apparently sweet and proper headmistress is actually a cold-hearted blackmailer. Teachers are manipulative for personal and professional reasons. The so-called “normal” (or “real”, as Nan thinks of it) children are all either secret witches or just horrible bullies and rotten human beings. Like their elders, the “normal” children are sneakily manipulative and practice blackmail and brutality against the other students, knowing that’s the way to get to top of their social heap. As I said, the entire society is toxic, not just the school, and everything the children do is a reflection of their elders (and vice versa, when you think about it). Grown-up witch hunters are like overgrown child bullies, and people like the headmistress probably started their blackmail and manipulation at a young age, just like the students, as tools of survival and self-promotion in this cold, toxic, pitiless world.

The normalization of the toxic parts of this world is both stressful and worrying. People can adjust to many awful things if they are not given any alternative, and that’s what this dysfunctional world represents. There are moments of lightness, though, and some characters are more caring than others. The story is told from the point-of-view of different characters, and much of this book is a psychological study in the different ways people deal with bullying, suspicion, and paranoia. As I said, Mr. Wentworth risks himself sometimes to help students in danger and make them see the seriousness of their situation. Some of the students band together to try to help each other survive their mutual risk, while others are more self-centered, prepared to throw each other under the bus to save themselves. It’s a relief to see all of that end when the world is set right, but it occurs to me that the story has exposed all of the characters’ true characters, what each of them are capable of doing in extreme circumstances. The extreme circumstances brought out the worst in some characters, while others were more creative and caring in spite of everything.

Posted on by TracyC

The Magicians of Caprona

The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones, 1980.

This is the second book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different dimensions with different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history across the dimensions, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. There is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course. This book begins with a brief explanation, although most of this was established in the first book in the series, Charmed Life.

In the world where the Chrestomanci lives, magic not only exists but is a known and accepted profession, and society is a little more old-fashioned than in our world. Also, there is a kind of alternate history, and some of the countries are organized differently. This story is set in Italy, which is not a unified country in this world, but a series of small dukedoms. The Chrestomanci series is a somewhat loose series, meaning that, while Chrestomanci appears in the different books and always plays some kind of role, he is not always one of the main characters. This story sets up a Shakespearean kind of feud between two families.

The dukedom of Caprona is known to having the best spell-makers in the world. The problem is that the best spell-makers belong to two particular families, the Montanas and the Petrocchis, who have a long-standing feud. The adults in the families never explain how, exactly, the feud started. They just warn the children to avoid to avoid the children of the other family. When members of the two families meet in public, they usually ignore each other, although sometimes fights break out. The fights are particularly bad when they use magic. Locals and tourists alike are alarmed by these fights and get out of the way to avoid being caught up in them.

Because the adults don’t talk about the cause of the feud, the children of the two families tell each other stories about it. In the Montana family, the children say that it started because the Duke of Caprona favored their family over the Petrocchis. The children also tell each other stories about the other family’s atrocious habits. Young Rosa Montana particularly likes telling her siblings and cousins scandalous stories about how the Petrocchis never bathe and sometimes kill their unwanted babies or eat their own family members. Because the members of the two families almost never see each other, the other Montana children can only suppose that the stories they hear about the Petrocchis are true.

When young Tonino Montana starts school, he is very upset. Things don’t seem to come as easily to him as they do to his siblings and cousins, and he feels awkward when the teacher tells him to do things differently from the way he’s always been taught to do them or repeats things that he’s already learned. When Tonino runs off into the city by himself because he’s upset, the rest of his family worries about him. Old Niccolo, the head of the family, talks to Benvenuto, the head cat in the Montana household, about Tonino. The Montana family keeps cats, who help them at their spell-making, but not everyone in the family has the ability to talk to the cats and understand them. Old Niccolo can communicate with the cats, but even Tonino’s father, Antonio, can’t. Benvenuto tells Niccolo that he will look after Tonino and not to worry about him. Tonino, like Niccolo, can talk to cats, and he hasn’t fully appreciated the talent yet.

Benvenuto becomes Tonino’s special friend. He helps Tonino to understand that, like the kittens he talks to, he’s still young and learning. Tonino needs to give himself time to develop. Benvenuto also tells Tonino that it’s fine to tell his teachers what he already knows, and Tonino comes to realize that he is far ahead of the other students in some ways, having already learned to read. His talent for talking to the cats also gives him a special place in his family. Benvenuto also allows Tonino to give him brushings, which he would never allow from any other family member before, so he becomes more well-cared for.

As time goes on, however, Tonino comes to realize that the adults in the Montana family are worried about the state of their family and the state of Caprona itself. Other dukedoms around them are becoming more powerful, and some of the old spells that the two families made to protect Caprona are breaking down. Of course, the Montanas blame the Petrocchis for the weakness of the spells and for not maintaining them properly, but Tonino realizes that the old Montana spells are breaking down as well. It’s not, as the older Montanas said, that they have had to bear the weight of making up for the weak Petrocchi spells.

Tonino gets his first look at the Petrocchis when both families are summoned to the duke’s palace to discuss the state of their spells and the rival states that are seeking to conquer Caprona. Speaking together for the first time in a long time, both families come to realize that, even though they have separately been working to make their spells stronger, each year, the protective spells they cast on Caprona have been getting weaker. There is a rumor that there is an evil enchanter who has been working against them on behalf of their enemies. Naturally, both Petrocchis and the Montanas secretly suspect each other of being involved. They also can’t help but notice that something is seriously wrong with the duke himself. He seems strangely childlike, and his wife seems to be running everything.

The Montana family offers a solution that even they aren’t sure they can fulfill. There is an old story that all of the children know about an angel who once protected Caprona with a magical song. Everyone thinks that, as along as the song is sung, Caprona will be safe. The children learn this song in school, but what they don’t know is that the words they learn to the song aren’t the original words to the song. The tune is original, but the original words were lost to time. The Montanas know that the song is a powerful spell, but it won’t function correctly until the original words to the song are restored. In their pride against the Petrocchis and their worry about the state of Caprona, the Montanas have pledged that they will find the original words to the song. Also, naturally, the Petrocchis have promised the same. Neither family knows exactly how they will do that, but they are each determined to somehow do it before the other family can.

There is only one person both of the families accept and who can work with either family without earning the resentment of the other: Chrestomanci. The situation is serious, war is pending, and Chrestomanci has also been summoned for help. As the most powerful enchanter in the world, he has the respect of all sides. Since Chrestomanci is British, he admits that he is somewhat limited in how far he can interfere in Italian affairs. His main interest is in the evil enchanter and their misuse of magic, although he will help Caprona and his friends in the magical families, if he can.

Chrestomanci notices that, aside from being able to talk to cats, Tonino also has an ability to tell when someone is an enchanter without being told. Chrestomanci says that he needs to go to Rome to make some inquiries, and he asks Tonino to stay close to his grandfather when his grandfather has to meet with anyone, to see if he can spot the evil enchanter. However, the evil enchanter already knows too much about the two families and about Tonino in particular.

When Tonino is kidnapped by the evil enchanter, his family immediately blames the Petroccis and sets out to confront them … only to be met halfway by the Petrocchi family, on their way to confront the Montanas about kidnapping one of their children, Angelica. The feud between the two families becomes worse than ever, but an accidental encounter between Tonino’s brother Paolo and Angelica’s sister Renata reveals that neither family has kidnapped anyone. The evil enchanter is playing both of the families against each other to distract them from what they really need to do: find the children and prepare to defend Caprona from its enemies. Paolo and Renata have trouble convincing either of their families of the truth because they are already too convinced that the other family is their real enemy, so they struggle to figure out how to save Tonino and Angelica themselves.

Meanwhile, Tonino and Angelica team up in captivity to find a way to escape and tell their families where to find the secret words to the angel’s song. While they are being held captive together, Tonino and Angelica argue about the nature of their families, but by talking together, they come to realize that each of their families has held half of the answer to the problem all along. If only the children can get together and reach their families to tell them the truth about the angel’s song and the identity of the evil enchanter!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).

My Reaction

During the course of the story, we never learn the original cause of the feud between the two families. It might have been something with one family thinking that the other was being favored by a past duke, or maybe it was some private quarrel between the heads of the two families. The cause is less important than the result. For generations, each family has been quietly maligning the other to the children of the family, who have continued to pass on the stories.

When the younger members of both families finally meet and talk to each other, they are initially offended that the other family has been saying the same horrible things about them that they’ve been saying about the other family, but it’s also an eye-opening experience. The two families are actually very similar to each other, both in their professional work and in their private family life. In fact, they live nearly identical lifestyles. The fact is that both families have been contributing to the spells maintaining their city for centuries, working together since before their feud began. Their spells were always intertwined and made to work together. Since the feud started and the families stopped working together, they have still had to work together in the service of their city and duke, but the feud has also served as a distraction from the real sources of danger.

As with other Chrestomanci stories, Chrestomanci doesn’t solve all of the problems of the story himself. Instead, he acts as a helper, revealing key information and providing guidance to help the other characters to solve their own problems. As a neutral observer, Chrestomanci sees both of the families and their quarrel for what they really are. He also helps to reveal the true villain of the story for who they really are.

Chrestomanci also points out the hidden talents of the children in the story. Although Tonino doesn’t think he’s as good as magic as others in his family, he does have other talents and magical abilities. At the end of the story, he goes to England with Chrestomanci to study for a while. His adventures in England are part of one of the short stories in Mixed Magics.

Posted on by TracyC

Kiki’s Delivery Service

Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono, English translation by Lynne E. Riggs, 1985, 2003.

More Americans would probably recognize the title as the title of a Studio Ghibli animated film for children than as a book title, but the book came before the movie, and it is actually the first in a series, which continues the story about Kiki’s life and adventures, although I don’t think the later books in the series have been translated into English (at least, I haven’t found them in English). The original Japanese version of this book was written in 1985, and I read the English translation from 2003.

Kiki is a young witch, and in keeping with the traditions of young witches, she is expected to leave home at age 13 and live for a year in a city with no other witches.  It will be a test of her developing skills and a coming-of-age experience, helping her to recognize her talents and find her place in the world.

When Kiki sets out for her journey with her cat, Jiji, she doesn’t know exactly where she is going to go or what she will find when she gets there. Some young witches know early on what their talents are and how they plan to support themselves during their year away from home, but Kiki is less sure (like so many of us who “don’t know what we want to be when we grow up”).  The term “witch” just refers to a person’s ability to do magic.  It’s not a job title by itself, and witches are expected to develop a specialization, such as brewing potions or telling the future. Kiki’s mother has tried to teach Kiki her trade, growing herbs and making medicines from them, but Kiki hasn’t had much patience with it.  The only major ability Kiki has is flying, which is something that witches are expected to do anyway.  Still, she has an adventurous spirit and is eager to set out and see what life has to offer.

Once Kiki locates a city with no other witches, she has to find a place to stay and a job to earn money. She finds a city by the sea, which seems exciting to her.  As she explores the city, she meets Osono, a woman who owns a bakery with her husband. When she helps deliver a baby’s pacifier to a bakery customer who left it behind, flying to the customer’s house on her on her broom, Osono offers to let her stay in a small apartment attached to the bakery. Kiki feels a little overwhelmed by the big city at first, but she realizes that, in a large city like this, there are probably a lot of people who have small delivery errands that wouldn’t be covered by ordinary parcel delivery services.

Kiki opens a delivery service, delivering small packages and running errands for people around the city.  At first, business is slow, and some people are afraid of her as a witch. During a trip to the beach, a curious boy borrows her broom and breaks it. Kiki is distressed, and the boy apologizes. The boy’s name is Tombo, and he is part of a club of other kids who are interested in flying. He has made a study of flight and had hoped to learn more about how witches fly by trying Kiki’s broom, but Kiki expains that only witches can fly with brooms and that the ability is inherited. Kiki has to make a new broom, and it takes her a while to break it in, but it actually works to her benefit. People who were initially afraid of her for being a witch become less afraid of her and more concerned about her when they see that she is just a young girl, clumsily trying to master a new broom. Kiki gets some additional support and business from people who feel moved to help a struggling young witch. Tombo also makes it up to her and becomes a friend when he helps Kiki to figure out a way to carry a difficult object on her broom.

During her very first delivery assignment, Kiki was supposed to carry a toy cat to a boy who was having a birthday, but she accidentally dropped it. When she searched for it, she met a young artist, who was enchanted by Kiki as a young witch and painted a portrait of Kiki with Jiji. When the artist asks Kiki to take the painting to the place where it will be on exhibit, Kiki isn’t sure how to carry it at first. It’s kind of a bulky object to carry on her broom. Remembering that Tombo has made a study of flying, she asks him for help. Tombo ties balloons onto the painting to make it float and tells Kiki that she can now pull the painting along on a leash, as if it were a dog. The idea works, and when people see Kiki pulling a painting of herself along through the sky with balloons tied to it, it acts as advertising, bringing her more business.

Some of Kiki’s new jobs are difficult or awkward, and some customers are more difficult to deal with than others. There are times when Kiki finds herself missing home or trying to remember how her mother did certain things, wishing that she had been better at watching and remembering what her mother did. Still, Kiki learns many new things from her experiences and acquires new skills.

Kiki’s experiences also help her to realize a few things about herself and life in general. Like other girls, Kiki worries about how boys see her. When Tombo makes a comment that he can talk to her when he can’t talk to other girls, Kiki worries that he doesn’t see her as a girl at all. A job delivering a surprise present to a boy from another girl her age helps Kiki to realize that everyone is a little shy and uncertain about romance and even people who act confident feel a little awkward about first relationships.

As her first year away from home comes to an end, Kiki wonders how much she’s really changed over the year. Although she has successfully started a new business and done well living away from her parents, she still experiences a sense of imposter syndrome, where she doesn’t quite feel like she’s really done all of the things she’s done. Her first visit home to her parents reminds her that her new town has really become her new home. She has become a part of the place, and she feels her new business and friends calling her to return.

In 2018, the author, Eiko Kadono, was awarded the Hans Christian Anderson for her contributions to children’s literature.

My Reaction

I think of this story as one of those stories that takes on more meaning the older you get.  Young adults can recognize Kiki’s struggles to make her own way in the world and establish herself in life as ones that we all go through when we start our working lives and gain our first independence.  It can be a scary, uncertain time, when we often wonder if we really know what we’re doing. (Life Spoiler: No, we don’t, but no one else completely does, either, so it’s normal and manageable. Some things just have to be lived to be really understood, and that’s kind of the point of Kiki spending a year on her own, to see something of life and how she can fit into it.) However, it’s also a time of fun and adventure as we try new things, build new confidence, make new friends, and learn new things about ourselves. Like so many of us, Kiki doesn’t always do everything right, but she learns a lot and endears herself to the people of her new town.

The Miyazaki movie captures the feel of the story well, although the plot isn’t completely the same. There are incidents and characters that are different between the book and the movie. Tombo appears in both the book and the movie, but there are other characters who appear in the book who weren’t in the movie. In the book, Kiki makes friends with a girl named Mimi, who is her age, and the two of them discuss crushes on boys and how each of them was a little envious of the other because, while each of them is struggling with their own uncertainties in life, they each thought that the other acted more confident. The movie version developed the character of the young artist more. Kiki also didn’t lose her powers during the book, although that might be a part of one of the other books in the series, since I haven’t had the chance to read the others yet.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Blue Ring

Polka Dot Private Eye

The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.

When Dawn Bosco first joined Ms. Rooney’s class at Polk Street School, she stole Emily Arrow’s toy unicorn. Now, that incident has come back to haunt her. When the book begins, her theft of Emily’s unicorn was just weeks ago. Now, she and Emily are starting to be friends, although their friendship is a bit shaky.

At school, the teachers are talking about vegetables because it’s Good Vegetable Day. Everything is geared around vegetables all day, and the art teacher has the children make sculptures of vegetables out of clay. Dawn is bored because she’s been reading a mystery book, and she’d rather be finding mysteries and learning to be a detective than making silly vegetables out of clay.

Dawn gets irritated with Emily when she says that she’ll make a cucumber, which is what Dawn was going to make because it’s easy. The teacher won’t let Dawn make a cucumber because Emily already claimed that idea, so Dawn has to make a carrot instead. (Not that much different in shape, really, except one end is more narrow.) However, she still resents Emily for using the cucumber idea first.

As the girls push against each other by the sink, cleaning up from using the clay, Dawn spots a ring next to the sink. Later, Emily says that her ring is missing. It’s a special ring with a blue stone that she got for her birthday. Dawn is pleased that she’s found a mystery to solve. Remembering that she saw a ring next to the sink in the art room, Dawn proudly goes back to the art room to see if she can find the ring and return victorious. However, the ring isn’t there when she checks.

Then, suspicion turns to Dawn herself. After all, everyone knows that Dawn stole Emily’s unicorn before. Instead of being the hero detective, Dawn is turning into the main suspect in this crime. Now, she really needs to find the ring to clear her name!

Dawn’s grandmother, Noni, gave her a special detective kit for her birthday. Dawn uses it to turn into The Polka Dot Private Eye to hunt down Emily’s ring.

The book is available to borrow online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I liked the way the series returned to the subject of Dawn’s theft and used it to spark a spin-off mystery series. This is the first of the Polka Dot Private Eye books. In this series, Dawn becomes a more likeable character than she was when she first appeared in Fish Face, and she gets a little comeuppance for her earlier, unpunished theft of Emily’s toy unicorn in the form of her classmates’ suspicion of her. When I read this book for the first time when I was a kid, I hadn’t read the book where Dawn was first introduced, Fish Face, so I didn’t really understand the relationship between Dawn and Emily and how Dawn took Emily’s toy unicorn. We never really find out in either book exactly why Dawn took the unicorn, although in this book, she thinks of herself as having “borrowed” it instead of having stolen it.

Reading Fish Face isn’t necessary to understand the basic story in this book, but after having read it, I appreciate Dawn’s position in this book a little better. By now, everyone knows what Dawn did, and although Dawn thinks of “weeks ago” as a long time ago, it’s not really that long, and it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. Dawn is still a relatively new kid in class, and one of the few things everyone knows about her is that she has a history of taking things that don’t belong to her. It is a logical conclusion that Dawn might have helped herself to another of Emily’s belongings when everyone knows that she’s done it before. As my grandfather used to say, it’s easier to keep a good reputation than to redeem a bad one, but Dawn works at it and learns that she likes being a detective and that she has a talent for figuring things out. After Dawn figures out where Emily’s ring is, the two of them become better friends. Solving the mystery also makes Dawn a class hero and begins to establish Dawn’s reputation as a person who likes to solve mysteries and crimes rather than commit them.

This book gets bonus points from me for mentioning jelly sandals. Jelly shoes were a regular part of my childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s, and I’ve seen some of them return again in the early 2000s, probably partly because people my age now have children, and they’re nostalgic for some of the things from their childhoods. Jelly shoes (or “jellies,” as we called them) are sandals and sandal-like shoes made from flexible plastic in different colors, some clear or with sparkles inside. They were cheap when I was a kid, and I used to get a new pair or two when the weather turned warm. Eventually, they wear out, and the plastic bits snap. I’d wear them around my backyard with my toes sticking out the front as they started breaking, and I started growing out of them. By the time they were too broken to use anymore, my toes were usually beyond the bottom of the shoes, and I was always kind of proud of that because it was a sign that I’d grown over the summer. It wasn’t much of a loss when the shoes wore out because they’d be too small for me at that point anyway, so we’d throw them away, and I’d wear more solid shoes when the weather turned cold. Jellies, flip-flops, and cheap canvas shoes were a major part of what I wore when I was young and growing out of shoes fairly quickly. They were all inexpensive, and while they didn’t last very long, they lasted about as long as they needed to before I needed the next size and weren’t much to lose when I was rough on them.