The Mystery of the Missing Treasure by Janet Lorimer, 1987.
Pete’s family has moved from the city to a small town because his father has taken a new job, and the move hasn’t been easy for him. Besides leaving his friends and his school, he’s had to give up roller skating because there’s no roller rink and judo because there’s nowhere to take lessons. So far, there are really only two things that Pete likes about his new town: his new friend Danny and the local legend of Captain Scalawag and his treasure.
When Pete asks Danny for details about Captain Scalawag and his treasure, Danny explains that Captain Scalawag (real name Seth Delaney) had been a captain the Confederate army during the Civil War. He was injured and invalided out of the service, so he became a traveling peddler, although he didn’t have much luck with that. Eventually, he came to their small town in California and took a handyman job with the woman who once owned the house where Pete’s family now lives. Many of the people who had settled the town had come from the South, and Captain Scalawag (as he came to be known later) told them stories about the suffering in the South because of the war. Sympathetic townspeople gave Captain Scalawag their jewelry and raised money for him to take back to the South to set up relief efforts. However, Captain Scalawag was a conman and had no intention of using any of that money for its intended purpose. When the townspeople confronted him about it, he refused to return the money and refused to tell anybody where he hid it. The angry townspeople hanged Captain Scalawag for his theft and deception, but they never figured out what he did with their money and jewelry.
Pete is intrigued by the story and says that he wants to find the treasure, but Danny doesn’t think he has much of a chance. Over the years, many people have searched for the treasure, and they’ve never found anything.
Danny takes Pete swimming in the nearby river with some other boys from the town. Pete gets irritated because one boy, Duffy, teases him about being from the city, and the two of them have a diving contest near some dangerous rocks to prove which of them is the best. They both succeed in making their dives, but although the are declared equals, Pete has the feeling that their problems with each other aren’t over.
After the swim, Danny suggests that they go into town and watch people setting up for the play that they have every Fourth of July, which is a reenactment of the story of Captain Scalawag. Pete is interested, but he feels strange and passes out.
When he wakes up, people are fussing over him, and he seems to be in some kind of old-fashioned general store. A woman in old-fashioned clothing, who calls herself his mother is worried about him, and for some reason she calls him Zeb. Then, Pete wakes up again and finds himself in the local doctor’s office. The doctor said that he had heat exhaustion from being out in the sun too long while swimming. Pete’s father is there, and Pete tries to tell him about his vision of being in the general store in the past. Pete’s father thinks he just had a strange dream, although the doctor says that his office is on the site of the town’s old general store, which burned down years ago.
Pete continues to have trouble fitting in with the local kids. One evening, Duffy and Danny take him on a “snipe hunt“, abandoning him in the woods. (This is an old prank, often played at summer camps, but I think this book was actually the first place I heard of it as a kid.) When Pete realizes that he’s been the victim of a joke, he tries to walk home, but gets lost and falls in the mud. Finally, dirty and disheveled, he makes his way to the road and hitches a ride from Bob, the local deputy his older sister is dating.
When Pete explains to Bob what happened, Bob offends him by laughing. Bob explains that it’s an old prank, and he’s amused that anybody is still doing that. Seeing how angry Pete is, he tries to tell him not to be too angry over the prank and to reassure him that the local boys aren’t so bad, in spite of the prank. He says that the boys are just trying to have fun. It’s almost like a kind of hazing or initiation, and although Bob doesn’t quite explain it this way, he seems to think that if Pete accepts it with good grace, it will put him on a better footing with the other boys. Bob thinks that, given time, Pete will start to see the humor in it, and the next time some other new kid moves to town, Pete might well be the first to suggest taking the newbie on a snipe hunt himself, having become one of the initiated.
In spite of Bob’s apparent indulgence for youthful pranks, he does seriously ask Pete who was involved because, as a responsible adult, he can see that there are more serious issues involved in the prank. It was bad enough that Pete ended up dirty and humiliated, but if he had gotten more seriously lost or had fallen in the river, trying to find his way home after dark, none of it would be funny at all. Bob thinks that he should have a word with the other boys about the the consequences of their actions and give them a warning against pulling pranks where people could get hurt. Pete refuses to say who exactly was involved because he thinks that would just make him a snitch and make everything worse for him socially than it already is. Bob decides to let it go for now, just taking Pete home.
That night, Pete has another dream, where he seems to be seeing things through the eyes of Zeb. He sees the house where he’s living now as it used to be in the past, and he sees the man called Captain Scalawag, persuading the people who live there to contribute to relief efforts in the South due to the war. Then, Pete feels ill and seems to pass out in the dream, waking up in modern times in his own bed. He could just shrug it off as a dream, brought on by the stories he’s been hearing about Captain Scalawag and the old things his parents have discovered around the house and the barn that hind at events in the past. However, when his mother shows him more old photographs she’s found, Pete realizes that the details in his dream were far too accurate for him to have simply imagined them, from the details of the house in the past to the faces of the people he saw talking to Captain Scalawag.
More and more, Pete comes to realize that his dreams are no ordinary dreams. For some reason, he is able to see the past through the eyes of Zeb, a boy who died young around the time that Captain Scalawag conned the local people out of their money and treasures and hid the loot somewhere. Is Zeb himself trying to tell him something or show him something that everyone else has missed?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
I remember reading this book as a kid, although I had forgotten many of the details. I remembered Captain Scalawag stealing/scamming people out of valuables and then hiding them, but I had forgotten that the basis of his scheme was convincing people to donate to support the Confederacy during the Civil War. That was surprising because the story is set in California, and the concept of supporting the Confederacy is never appealing to me. I think I forgot that part because, as a kid, the important idea is that Captain Scalawag was a conman with a hidden treasure, and that’s all I cared to remember.
I remember finding it spooky that Pete was seeing things through the eyes of a dying/dead boy. Pete in the story does worry about getting stuck in Zeb’s body in the past, knowing that Zeb doesn’t have much time left to live. However, Zeb is trying to tell Pete something that he realized that indicates what Captain Scalawag did with the treasures he took from the townspeople. Zeb tried to tell people before he died, but because he was severely ill and delirious, nobody understood what he was really trying to say. It turns out that the treasures have been in the barn the entire time, but Captain Scalawag changed their appearance, so the townspeople have overlooked them the entire time. It’s a case of hiding in plain sight.
Pete’s confrontations with the local bully add a subplot to the story. Danny apologizes to Pete about joining in Duffy’s prank against him, and Danny admits that Duffy scares him, too. Eventually, Pete has to fight Duffy physically, but Duffy doesn’t know that Pete took judo lessons in the city, so he’s not as defenseless as Duffy thinks. During the course of their fight, Pete also saves Duffy from being bitten by a snake, so Duffy has to admit that he has some gratitude toward Pete. He’s also impressed by Pete’s fighting techniques. The two of them end up working out a compromise with each other, with Pete agreeing to teach Duffy some judo and Duffy agreeing to teach him some of the knowledge he has from living in the country, like how to kill a snake. (Pete warned Duffy about the snake, but Duffy is the one who killed it.) Because they were fighting out behind the barn, Duffy is also on hand when Pete has his final revelation from Zeb, so he gets to be part of the discovery of the treasure, along with Pete and Danny.
I wasn’t happy when Bob laughed off the kids’ snipe hunt prank against Pete at first. I don’t like pranks, and I think it should be more understandable that some people just don’t want to be part of them, especially when Bob has directly seen the aftermath of the prank. He did redeem himself a little for me when he realizes that the prank could have had much more serious consequences and that, as a responsible adult, he really should point that out to the boys involved. The potentially serious consequences of pranks is part of the reason why I don’t like them. There’s just too much potential with many of them to go horribly wrong. The way Bob seems to be looking at the snipe hunt is like it’s some kind of local initiation stunt for newcomers, although he doesn’t exactly use those words to describe it. However, the idea of it being a kind of initiation doesn’t really redeem it for me. Fraternity initiations and hazing often go wrong, and that’s why universities often crack down on them.
As I recall, this book was the first place I heard about the concept of a snipe hunt. Years later, I was on a church retreat in college, and someone joked about taking someone else on a snipe hunt. I’ll admit that I was briefly gleeful about knowing what that was when the other person didn’t. I almost did go along with it, but I just didn’t have the heart to let someone else in for a prank like that. I would have felt bad if something happened to that person in the woods at night, and I figured they would at least be upset. Since the person did seem worried and asked directly what a snipe hunt is, I told them, so I spoiled the joke before it really happened. I think I made the right decision, though.
It’s summer, and 11-year-old Maria Foster’s parents have rented a house near the sea for their summer holidays. Maria is an only child, quiet and given to daydreaming. Maria is shy and socially-awkward and her parents are often preoccupied with their business and thoughts. It often seems like their parents are socially-awkward and don’t know quite what to do or say to Maria as a child, which is why she doesn’t always know what to say to other people. Because she frequently doesn’t have anyone else to talk to and doesn’t always know what to say to other people, Maria often finds herself having imaginary conversations with objects or animals.
The seaside house where the Fosters are staying is an old one, built about 1820. It’s lovely and has a beautiful view. The interior has brown wall paneling. The furniture is old-fashioned, Victorian, and rather grand. When Maria chooses a bedroom for herself, she finds a collection of labeled fossils in a small chest of drawers, which she finds fascinating. The only modern touches are just a few bits and pieces left behind by the family that had rented the house before them and left the week before, like some half-eaten boxes of cereal. There’s also a tabby cat who appears to come with the house, and Maria begins to imagine conversations with it.
When they first arrive, Maria is sure that she hears the creaking of a swing and a dog barking, but when she goes looking for them, she can’t find them. When she begins exploring outside, she finds some small fossils in the rock, and her mother says that they’re ammonites and that the area is famous for them. She accidentally breaks one while trying to get it out, and she decides that it’s better to leave the others where they are. Exploring further, she finds some loose fossils and fossil fragments that she can collect more casually without hurting them. She begins making her own fossil collection, and she uses the old fossil collection and some books she finds in the house to begin labeling her own specimens. She begins to think that the fossil notes and sketches she finds were written by a girl around her age, and she tries to imagine what she was like.
When they meet the landlady who rented the house to them, Mrs. Shand, she says that she grew up in the house herself with several brothers and sisters. She says that the room that Maria chose for herself was once the old nursery. Mrs. Shand now lives in a small flat in the old guesthouse nearby, and she invites them to call on her if they have any questions about the house.
Maria observes a family with several children at a nearby hotel, and she even briefly speaks to a boy her age, but she doesn’t know how to ask them if she can play with them. Later, she and the boy, Martin, meet again and realize that they have a mutual interest in the natural world. Martin tells her the names of some plants and birds, and Maria impresses him with the name of a fossil she’s learned. Martin warns her about the cliffs nearby, which have a tendency to crumble after rain.
Mrs. Shand invites Maria to her house to get a book that she would like to loan her. Maria doesn’t really know what to say to Mrs. Shand, but Mrs. Shand tells her about the collection of stopped clocks she has. She says that they belonged to her grandfather, who was a scientist, and that they have been stopped as a gesture of respect to her grandfather since his death. Maria notices a stitched Victorian sampler on the wall, and Mrs. Shand says that she can look at it because the girl who made it was about her age. It has a the typical alphabet and an embroidered quotation about death, but it also has the image of a house with a tree and a swing, a little black dog, and some fossils. Maria realizes that it’s the house that she is now staying in and that it confirms that there was once a dog and a swing there, like she keeps hearing! An inscription says that the sampler was started by a ten-year-old girl named Harriet in 1865 and completed by her sister, Susan.
Maria begins to think about time and how the lives of people who had once lived in the house where her family is staying, like Harriet, have left traces behind, not unlike the fossils in the cliffs or Mrs. Shand’s stopped clocks, full of past times. Maria begins to wonder about Harriet and what happened to her. She lived over 100 years ago, so she would be dead by Maria’s time (the 1970s, contemporary to the writing), and Martin says that Harriet probably grew up, got married, and had children, like most girls. Yet, Maria finds herself thinking that maybe Harriet didn’t grow up and get married. When Mrs. Shand lets her and Martin look at her old photo albums, Maria notices that, after a certain age, Maria doesn’t seem to appear in family photographs. Mrs. Shand says that her own mother was Susan. The lack of Harriet in the photographs and the fact that Susan finished the sampler leads Maria to conclude that something tragic happened to Harriet.
Then, one day, Maria thinks she hears the dog again, barking frantically with the sounds of a landslide and shouting children. Nobody else can hear it, but Maria is sure that she’s hearing an echo of a past tragedy, and she becomes convinced that Harriet was killed in that past landslide. The existence of the metal swing that once hung in the tree is confirmed when she and Martin find it and restore it. When Maria swings on it, she feels like she’s gone back in time, almost like she was Harriet with her dog and sister Susan nearby.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
I enjoyed the themes of time and what people leave behind. There are comparisons all through the story between clocks, fossils, and echoes of the past, and it all relates to the passage of time. More specifically, Maria starts seeing changes in herself, emotionally and mentally, as she matures.
Some of this story obviously takes place in Maria’s imagination. As a shy, socially-awkward introvert with parents who are also introverted, Maria tends to live in her own head much of the time. She often has imaginary conversations with objects and animals, and many of these are reflections of Maria’s concerns at the time. Through much of the story, Maria isn’t happy with herself as she is, realizing that she is socially-awkward and doesn’t know how to approach people and connect with them. When Maria imagines conversations with the tabby cat at the house, the cat tends to be critical of her. It’s a reflection of Maria’s own insecurity and self-criticism.
Maria’s parents love her, but they interact with her in a kind of off-handed way, which feeds her insecurity and social awkwardness. Maria knows that her parents love her, but she can tell that they don’t always know what to say to her or do with her, which makes it harder for Maria to learn how to interact with other people. Maria’s parents are both very introverted and try to avoid social occasions, if they can. However, Maria has realized that she needs to connect with other people and make friends. Through her experiences with Martin and his siblings, Maria becomes more outgoing and confident, and she finds it easier to interact with other people.
In some ways, Maria doesn’t entirely fit in with her parents because she’d like to be a little more outgoing than they are. Similarly, Martin sometimes doesn’t fit in with his family, either. Martin’s family is boisterous, and he is something of an intellectual. There are times when he likes doing quieter activities with Maria, talking about plants and fossils.
When Maria visits a local museum with Martin, and they look at the fossil exhibit, they talk about evolution vs. creationism. Maria decides that she doesn’t believe in the Noah’s Ark story about animals in the Bible, but at the same time, she thinks that studying animals through time makes it look like someone was experimenting with different designs of creatures and improving them with each generation. Martin says that’s nonsense and that it’s just evolution. Maria and Martin both seem to believe in evolution, but the difference between them is that Maria thinks that it seems like there’s a hand guiding it, and Martin credits just natural, scientific forces. In some ways, Maria and Martin are kindred spirits in their thinking, but Maria leaves a little more room in her personal understanding for feelings and the supernatural. Maria seems to be the only person in the story who is sensitive to the sounds and echoes of Harriet’s past.
At the end of the story, Maria decides that she’s going to give up imagining the conversations with the cat because she’s feeling a little more confident in herself through her friendship with Martin, her new understanding of the echoes of the past, and her realization that she herself is moving forward into her own future. She has a sense that she is leaving her past self behind, much like Harriet did. A part of Maria may always be young in this particular summer, but like Harriet, Maria herself is moving on.
What Really Happened to Harriet? (Spoilers)
As Martin guessed, Harriet did grow up and get married. She didn’t die young as Maria thought, based on the echoes of the past she’s been hearing, although she is correct that there was a landslide by the beach and that a tragedy occurred there. Before Maria’s family leaves at the end of the summer, Maria finally asks Mrs. Shand about Harriet and the landslide. Mrs. Shand explains that Harriet and her sister managed to escape the landslide, but their dog was killed. They were very upset about it and buried the dog near the old house. When Maria visits the grave, she discovers that this is the anniversary of the dog’s death.
Because I love dogs, I was still upset about the dog’s death, but Maria is at least reassured that Harriet herself survived. She asks Mrs. Shand why there aren’t any pictures of Harriet with the family after that summer, and she says that there are pictures of Harriet grown up, just not many because she wasn’t living at home anymore. The fall after her dog died, Harriet went away to boarding school. Her sister finished her sampler, both because Harriet was leaving for school and because Harriet never liked sewing. After Harriet graduated from her school, she got married and moved away. She did visit with her family after that, but because she was living somewhere else, she just wasn’t present for all the occasions when her family had their photographs taken.
So, because Maria guessed wrong about Harriet’s fate, readers might wonder if she just imagined everything she experienced related to Harriet’s memories and the landslide. However, the book indicates that Maria didn’t imagine it all. She drew the wrong conclusions about what was sensing, but she did sense things that she would have had no reason to know about, hearing the dog’s bark and the sounds of the swing before she had reason to know that either of them were ever there. When she’s on the swing and feels like she’s becoming Harriet in the past, she also manages to come up with the dog’s name before anybody tells her what it is. Because Maria is an introvert who often interacts with things in her environment more than she interacts with living people, it seems that she has a kind of sensitivity to her environment. At the end of the summer, though, when she senses that she’s changing as a person, she considers that, even if she were to return to this place again, she probably wouldn’t experience it in the same way. She’s moving on, mentally and emotionally, and that changes her perceptions of things.
Anna is traveling alone by train to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Pegg for the summer. Anna lives with Mrs. Preston, who she calls her auntie, but the truth is that Anna is a foster child. She knows that her mother and grandmother are dead. Anna feels different from other children and has trouble relating to them. Anna often feels like an outsider around other people. She also suffers from asthma, which gets worse when she is stressed, and it’s been interfering with her going to school. Her vacation in the countryside with the Peggs is meant to help improve her health, but her health problems are partly based on her inner turmoil, which accompanies her to the countryside.
The Peggs are nice. Mrs. Pegg tries to get Anna to be friendly with a local girl, Sandra, but it doesn’t go well. Anna takes offense that Sandra cheats at cards, and she calls Sandra a pig. Sandra insults Anna by saying that she looks like “what she is.” Although the vague insult is probably because Sandra couldn’t think of anything better at the time, it stings because Anna really doesn’t think much of herself, and she constantly worries that it shows on the outside.
Anna is happiest when she’s left to wander and explore by herself and try not to think about all the things that bother her. As Anna explores the area alone, she finds a large, old house that intrigues her. She has the odd feeling like the house has been waiting for her and an odd sense of familiarity with it. Mr. and Mrs. Pegg say that’s the old Marsh house and that nobody lives there now, although they’ve heard that someone has bought it. Anna likes to imagine that the house belongs to her and that the family that will move into it belong to her, too. She thinks she sees a blonde girl in one of the windows, getting her hair brushed.
Then, one evening, she meets a pretty blonde girl with a little boat. The two of them hide and listen to the girl’s parents talk, and they begin to develop a kind of odd friendship. The two girls continue to meet in the evenings in the blonde girl’s boat. The blonde girl, who calls herself Marnie, says that she wants to keep their friendship a secret, and she would rather that they get to know each other slowly, only asking one question about each other in turn. For some odd reason, though, when Anna is with Marnie, she has trouble recalling details of her present life, and anytime she stops to focus on the present, Marnie suddenly disappears, although Marnie claims that Anna is the one who suddenly disappears.
Marnie and Anna explore the countryside together, gathering mushrooms, and talking a little to each other about their lives. Anna admits to Marnie what she can’t bring herself to tell anyone else, the reasons why she’s been so upset. She fears that her foster family doesn’t really love her. She thinks they kind of do, but she has recently learned that they’ve been receiving payments from the local council for her support. Since she found out about the money they’re receiving for her, she’s felt a sense of betrayal and abandonment. She used to think they felt like she was their own child, but now, she thinks that they’re mostly just being paid to care for her.
It seems like, all her life, Anna has been abandoned by the people who were supposed to live her the most. She doesn’t really remember her parents at all. She knows that her father abandoned her and her mother when she was small and that her mother remarried but died shortly after that. Anna’s mother had left her with her grandmother while she went away on her honeymoon, but then, she and her new husband were both killed in a car crash, so they never returned for her. Anna remembers a little about her grandmother, who took care of her after her mother died, but then, her grandmother also got sick and died. Anna tells Marnie that she hates them all for going away and leaving her. Marnie points out that dying wasn’t their fault, but Anna says that, before her grandmother went to the hospital, she promised to return soon. She broke her promise by dying. Ever since, Anna has had the feeling that she can’t trust anybody because people leave and break promises. Her feelings of not being able to trust people are at the root of her difficulties in forming friendships and confiding her true feelings to her foster family. Marnie hugs Anna and tells her that she really loves her and that they’ll be friends forever, and for the first time in a long time, Anna feels happy and feels like she can believe Marnie.
At first, Anna envies Marnie’s privileged life in the big house. Marnie’s father is wealthy, and her mother is beautiful, and it seems like Marnie has everything she could want. Anna even gets to attend one of the parties Marnie’s parents hold at the house when Marnie convinces them to let her in as a little beggar gypsy girl (the book’s description) selling sea lavender for luck. (There is minor alcohol use at this point because the people at the party give Anna a little glass of wine. People are also smoking at the party.) However, when Marnie explains a little more about what her parents are like and what really happens in her house, Anna comes to see that Marnie isn’t fortunate at all. Her parents are rarely home because her father is often away, in the navy, and her mother likes to spend most of her time in London. Marnie doesn’t exactly say what her mother does in London, but the implication seems to be that she spends a lot of time partying and hob-nobbing with high society. While they’re away, Marnie is looked after by her nurse, who can be abusive when she’s angry with Marnie, and sometimes she and the maids threaten to lock Marnie in the old windmill nearby, knowing that she’s afraid of the place. Anna thinks that’s horribly cruel, and she says that no adult in her life has ever hurt her or tried to frighten her on purpose. Marnie doesn’t think of herself as being so unfortunate because this is the only life she’s ever known, but Anna knows that not everybody treats children like that. Her heart goes out to Marnie, and she declares that she loves Marnie, too.
Anna’s relationship with Marnie teaches her how to open up to other people and trust them, but that trust is shaken after a frightening experience at the old windmill. Marnie’s distant cousin Edward, who seems to be the only person in her life who truly looks out for her, is also a bit strict and teasing with her when it comes to the things that she’s afraid of. He thinks that fears should be confronted, so he convinces her that she should be brave and get over her fear of the windmill. In an effort to face her fears, Marnie tries to go inside the windmill alone and climb up the ladder to the loft. However, once she’s up there, she becomes too afraid of the ladder to climb down again. Anna also climbs up and tries to comfort Marnie, but no matter what she says, Marnie is too scared to climb back down. The girls fall asleep in the windmill, and when Anna wakes up, Marnie is suddenly gone. Anna is angry at Marnie for leaving without telling her when both of them had been frightened. Once again, she feels betrayed and abandoned by someone she thought she could trust.
Then, during a storm, Anna sees Marnie gesturing to her from a window of the Marsh house. Marnie calls out to her that she’s sorry about leaving her and that she can’t come out because she’s locked in and is being sent away the next day. She just wants Anna to know that she loves her. Anna, seeing that Marnie didn’t mean to hurt her, forgives her and says she still loves her, too. To Anna’s shock, though, when she tries to look inside the windows of the Marsh house, the place looks empty and abandoned. Confused and upset, Anna stumbles and falls into the water nearby, nearly drowning, but she is rescued by a local man.
After that experience, Anna is ill and sad because she realizes that Marnie is gone from her life. When she recovers, though, she goes to look at the Marsh house again and encounters the children of the new owners, the Lindseys. Anna feels a surprising sense of connection to them, and they to her. As they get to know each other and become friends, one of the Lindsey children, Scilla, reveals that she’s found a diary in the house that tells her about Marnie’s life. At first, she thought Anna was Marnie when they met. Anna is shocked because she’s been starting to think that Marnie was only an imaginary friend of hers. When Anna and Priscilla read the diary, they learn more about the history of the Marsh house and Marnie. The diary is old and refers to the First World War as an event that is currently happening, bringing into question who and what Marnie really was when Anna was becoming her friend. Mrs. Lindsey says that they can ask their family friend, the elderly Gillie about Marnie. Learning about Marnie’s past awakens some of Anna’s memories and reveals some things about Anna’s own past. Understanding who and what Marnie was helps Anna to understand that her birth family, who seemed to have abandoned her, actually loved her. Accepting Marnie’s love helps Anna to understand and accept the love of her foster parents and new friends.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. This book has also been made into a Studio Ghibli movie of the same name, although they changed the location of the story from England to Japan. Changing the location of the story changes some of the historical details, but the essential parts of the story are the same as well as the lessons Anna learns from her experiences.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Probably, most people today are familiar with this story because of the Studio Ghibli movie. The movie is pretty faithful to the original book, although changing the setting from England to Japan changes some of the details. It kept the general sense of Anna’s family’s history, her personal connection with Marnie, and the lessons that Anna learns about love, trust, forgiveness, and connecting with other people. In both the book and the movie, Anna comes to realize that the feeling of being “outside” or “inside” relationships with other people is largely a reflection of how the person feels inside themselves. Anna is troubled because she has long-term trauma and inner turmoil that needs to be resolved. Finding out the truth about Marnie and her own past, especially now that she’s old enough to understand the situation, helps to resolve Anna’s feelings.
This is one of those stories where it’s difficult to talk about the book in detail without spoilers, so from this point on there are going to be some major spoilers.
Who is Marnie Really?
Readers will probably get the sense that there’s something odd about Marnie pretty quickly. There are a few odd time discrepancies when Anna’s with Marnie. Marnie vanishes at odd moments, especially when Anna tries to remember details of her present life in Marnie’s presence. For some reason, it takes a lot of effort for Anna to remember her present life when she’s with Marnie, and when she tries to focus on the present day, Marnie disappears.
Why do I keep talking about the “present”? Because this is a time slip story. It’s not immediately obvious to Anna that, when she’s with Marnie, she’s in a different time period because they’re spending time in the countryside with no signs of modern technology or the absence of modern technology, like television or radio, to give away the time periods. Marnie never goes into the Peggs’ household, and the only time Anna goes into the Marsh house with Marnie is during a party, where everyone is dressed up. There are a couple of minor clues, like Marnie referring to what Anna’s wearing as boys’ clothes because she’s wearing pants instead of a dress or skirt, but other than that, there are few references that would clarify the time period for Anna. Anna’s difficulty of thinking of or being in two different time periods at once also keeps her from making the connection.
After Marnie leaves and Anna knows that she is gone, Anna partly concludes that she was only an imaginary friend of hers, but the diary makes it clear that Marnie was a real person. It also adds some details that confirm Anna’s experiences with her and add some extra information that Marnie didn’t discuss with Anna that clarifies when she really lived in the Marsh house.
The truth is that Marnie was Anna’s grandmother, who is now deceased. The Marsh house was familiar to Anna because it was her home with Marnie during her earliest years. The things that Gillie has to say about Marnie help to fill in the blanks and connect Marnie’s story to Anna’s.
As a child herself, Marnie really was the poor little rich girl whose wealthy parents neglected her and frequently left her alone with an abusive nurse. Marnie was somewhat isolated as a child and, like Anna, was frequently happiest exploring the countryside or going out alone in her boat. The only person she felt that she could confide in was her distant cousin, Edward, who was older and tried to look after her, although he was also stern and not as emotionally understanding as he probably should have been. The summer that Anna experiences with Marnie was the summer when Marnie’s life changed forever, partly because of the windmill incident.
Marnie really did go into the windmill by herself in an effort to conquer her fear, and she did get trapped there because she was afraid to come down. Her nurse and the maids, unable to find her and not knowing where she went, finally called for a search party for the missing girl, but it was Edward who figured out where she was. He found her in the mill, unconscious, either passed out from fright or having fallen asleep from exhaustion, and carried her down the ladder himself, which is why Marnie was gone when Anna woke up. Edward didn’t see Anna there, probably because she had either shifted back to her own time while the girls were asleep or because not everybody is able to see Anna when she’s caught between times. The fact that the nurse had no idea where Marnie was exposes her neglect of Marnie, and when Marnie tells Edward about how the nurse and maids made her afraid of the windmill by threatening to lock her in there and how her nurse has given her abusive punishments, he makes sure that the nurse is fired. The reason why Marnie called out to Anna that she was being sent away was that, when the nurse was discharged, her family decided that it would be best for her to go to boarding school instead. Marnie’s father, who was in the navy during WWI/The Great War, was killed during the war, not very long after that party that Anna attended as the little beggar girl, and after boarding school, Marnie married Edward. They moved somewhere else, and they had a daughter of her own.
Unfortunately, Marnie’s life and family were plagued with problems, some of their own making and some beyond their control. When Anna and her new friends, the Lindsey children, try to ask Gilly who was responsible for how things turned out for Marnie, she says that the answer is complicated. The older a person gets, the more they realize that there are many factors involved in how a person’s life turns out, and it’s difficult to point to any one thing as a cause.
Marnie’s parents obviously neglected her, and although Edward really did love her, he wasn’t very understanding about emotional needs. Marnie herself, although she wanted to be a better parent to her daughter than her parents had been to her, didn’t really know how because she didn’t have good parental role models to follow and hadn’t been brought up to understand her own emotional needs, let alone how to care for the emotional needs of a child. She hadn’t fully matured emotionally by the time she became a mother, and outside events complicated her relationship with her daughter, Esme. Esme was young during WWII, and she was sent away to the United States as a child evacuee to escape the threat of bombing. Although Marnie sent Esme away for safety, they were separated for a period of years when Esme was very young. When Esme came back, she didn’t feel much connection to Marnie. She felt abandoned for being sent away from her mother and accused Marnie of never really acting like her mother because she wasn’t there for her, physically or emotionally. Marnie tried to repair her relationship with Esme, but as soon as Esme was out of school, she ran away and got married to Anna’s father.
We never learn who Anna’s father was. He is probably still alive somewhere, but Gillie describes him as having been too young and immature for the role of a husband and father. It wasn’t long before he and Esme divorced, and he was out of Anna’s life forever. The story seems to imply that he might have been from Spain because he has a darker complexion than Marnie or Esme and because he liked the Spanish sound of the name Marianna, the name that Esme originally gave to Anna as a baby and which came from Marnie’s mother. (We are told that Anna was unaware that her legal name is still Marianna and that Anna is a nickname that her foster family gave her.) Because her marriage failed when Anna was only a baby, Esme turned Anna over to Marnie almost immediately, so Marnie really was the one who was raising Anna the entire time. Esme tried to get her life straightened out, and the man she married next seems to have been a nice person. The family might have managed to get themselves back together as a family after that, but Esme and her new husband tragically died in a car accident on their honeymoon. Marnie genuinely loved Anna and tried to continue caring for her, but her own health was failing, and the shock of Esme’s sudden death made it worse. Marnie desperately wanted to recover and return to Anna at the Marsh house, but she really couldn’t help dying. When Anna fully comes to understand all of this, she manages to forgive her mother and grandmother for leaving her, knowing that they loved her and that leaving her the way they did wasn’t what they wanted.
Anna’s new sense of inner peace and acceptance of her family’s love for her, flawed as they all were, helps Anna understand and accept her foster family’s love. She and her foster mother also have a heart-to-heart talk about the payments they’ve been receiving to help support Anna. Mrs. Preston says that she hadn’t wanted to talk to Anna about the payments because she hadn’t wanted Anna to feel self-conscious about them or to think that the Prestons didn’t want to support her themselves, although the money has helped with Anna’s expenses. Mrs. Preston admits that she’s tried to avoid mentioning things that would make Anna seem more separate from the Preston family or less than fully hers, and she had noticed that Anna was uncomfortable when she was younger and Mrs. Preston tried to tell her what she knew about her mother and grandmother. Anna had been uncomfortable hearing about them because she was angry with them for their seeming abandonment of her, but Mrs. Preston hadn’t understood and was too uncomfortable herself to probe Anna’s feelings deeper, although she now sees that it’s better to be open about things, even when they’re uncomfortable. Anna’s relationship with her “auntie” improves because of their new understanding of each other, their feelings, and Anna’s past. I think Anna also sees that Mrs. Preston has treated her much better than Marnie’s own parents ever treated her, which shows that being blood relations isn’t always a guarantee of a close and loving relationship or the best treatment. Although, realizing that she originally did come from a family who loved her as best they could and that her grandmother really was her first real friend helps give Anna the basis she needs to establish loving relationships with other people.
What is Marnie Really?
As I said, this is a time slip story. Anna apparently really does go back in time, speak to Marnie as a living person in her time, and interact with other people at the party when Marnie pretends that she’s a little gypsy beggar girl (the book’s description) selling sea lavender. The beggar girl incident also appears in Marnie’s diary. Marnie doesn’t refer to Anna by name, but it seems to indicate that Marnie actually experienced the incident with Anna and that it wasn’t just a dream.
Although, I have seen other reviewers suggest that Anna could have been dreaming or imagining some of these things as the presence of the house awakens Anna’s memories of living there with Marnie and stories that Marnie might have told her about her childhood. Yet, the fact that Scilla saw Anna once looking up at the house and seeing Marnie in the window while none of her siblings could see Anna at that time suggests that something supernatural was happening and that only certain people can see Anna when she’s caught between time periods.
So, does that mean that Marnie was a ghost or that Anna was a type of ghost when she was slipping between time periods? It’s a possible explanation, and I think one of the characters makes that comparison. We don’t have an exact explanation for how the time slips happen except that Marnie and Anna have a strong emotional connection to each other and to the Marsh house. Marnie’s death and Anna’s unresolved feelings create a need for the two of them to meet again, almost for the first time, and come to understand each other.
I think the movie version somewhat implies Marnie deliberately reaching out across time to reconnect with her granddaughter and assure her of her love, but in the book, it seems as though Marnie is unaware that they are actually family. Marnie just loves Anna as Anna, not trying to justify their family’s circumstances but just being herself as she was when she was young and letting Anna see the person she really was. Just as Anna couldn’t climb down the ladder for Marnie, only trying to help her do it herself, Marnie can’t do all the emotional understanding for Anna. Her presence just helps Anna to come to a new understanding of her and their shared past.
In beginning, Anna was angry that her teachers accused her of “not even trying” at school or at getting along with others, but the truth is that she was missing some important pieces of information and understanding to make the efforts she needs to make. Marnie’s life turned out the way it did partly because she was also missing some understanding about emotions, relationships, and what it takes to be a good parent. We don’t know why Marnie’s mother was the way she was. Perhaps she was similarly raised by neglectful parents and distracting herself from her own past traumas in those constant parties she gives and attends. As Gillie says, it’s hard to know exactly where these things start when you begin to look at the bigger picture. However, Anna’s new understanding indicates that her life is likely to turn out better than the previous generations of her family. In an odd way, it seems she both needed both her connection to them and a kind of separation from them to get there and break their cycle.
Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie by Peter and Connie Roop, pictures by Peter E. Hanson, 1985.
The book begins with a note from the authors about the real life Abbie Burgess. The story is based on a real girl and her family who lived in a Maine lighthouse in the 1850s and a real incident when Abbie’s father had to leave to get supplies, so Abbie had to tend the lights during a terrible storm in his absence.
Captain Burgess is a lighthouse keeper in the mid-19th century, and his family lives in the lighthouse with him. One day, while his wife is ill, he decides that he needs to go for supplies. His wife needs medicine, and the family also needs food and more oil for the lamps in the lighthouse.
While he is away, he puts his daughter, Abbie, in charge of tending the lights. Abbie is the eldest of his three daughters, and although she has never tended the lights alone before, she knows how to carry out the necessary chores of cleaning the lamps, trimming their wicks, and adding oil to the lamps. Ships approaching land on this coast depend on the lights of the lighthouse to help guide them, so they must be kept burning.
Abbie is a little nervous about handling the task by herself, and her sisters worry about what will happen if there’s a storm. Abbie assures them that they will be able to handle it, as long as they are careful about how they use their remaining supplies. If there is a storm, she knows that her father’s return will be delayed. As the girls go about their routine and taking care of their mother, they see that the sky is darkening and a storm is approaching.
At sundown, Abbie climbs to the top of each of the two the lighthouse towers and lights each of the lamps. However, she cannot sleep that night, worrying about the possibility of the lights going out. When she goes to check on them, she discovers that ice is covering the windows, so she has to scrape it off so the lights will show. The next day, she cleans the lamps and gets some sleep.
That’s fine for one night, but the storm gets worse, and Abbie has to tend the lights for longer than expected. Because of the weather, her father’s return is delayed for over a week. Abbie saves her chickens from a huge wave, and she is nearly washed away herself! Abbie and her mother and sisters move into one of the towers for more protection. Their supplies run low, and Abbie is exhausted from the work of tending the lights, but she manages to keep them burning!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). It’s a Reading Rainbow book.
My Reaction
I think remember this book from when I was a kid, although I think there was another version of this story that I might be remembering.
Lighthouse stories offer a fascinating look at a way of life that has vanished. Modern lighthouses are electronic and fully automated, so there is no need for anyone to live in a lighthouse now. The lights that Abbie tends are huge oil lamps with large reflectors behind them to make them look brighter for passing ships. During the 19th century, lights like that needed constant tending to make sure that the lights were cleaned of grime from the smoke when they were cool enough, relit and refueled with oil when necessary, and the windows of the lighthouse kept clean and clear. It was physically intense work that required someone to be constantly on duty at the lighthouse to take care of the routine chores and deal with any emergencies that arose.
Because lighthouses were off the coast, positioned to warn ships away from dangerous areas with rocks, they were isolated places. The people who lived there rarely left, and when they did, they had to make sure that someone who knew how to tend the lights was there, on duty. It could be a somewhat lonely life, and the people who did that type of job and the family members who helped them had to take care of whatever was necessary to keep the lights burning because other people’s lives were depending on them. It can be easy to romanticize lighthouse keepers’ self-sufficiency or the idea of living with family apart from society and in touch with nature, but it was a very difficult life. That’s what makes Abbie’s story so heroic. She had to do a difficult job that not every young girl would be able to manage. It was hard, exhausting work and not fun, but it was an important job that preserved the safety of passing ships and the lives of people on them.
Island Boy story and pictures by Barbara Cooney, 1988.
When the Tibbetts family first moves to the island, they build their house and give the island its name, Tibbetts Island. As time passes, there are eventually twelve children in the Tibbetts family, and the youngest of them is little Matthais.
The boys in the family help on their family’s farm and go hunting and fishing. At first, Matthais’s older brothers think he’s too little to help. As he grows up, though, he learns how to be more helpful, and he joins the other children in their lessons in reading and writing.
As time passes, the Tibbetts children grow up and leave the island to get married or get jobs working in their uncle’s shipyard. Eventually, Matthais becomes a cabin boy on one of his uncle’s ships. After years of experience, Matthais become the captain of the ship. He visits many places as a sailor, but he finds himself wanting to return home.
When Matthais marries a young schoolteacher named Hannah, they move into his family’s old home on the island and restart the farm because his aging parents have moved to the mainland. Together, they have three daughters.
Over time, Matthais’s daughters grow up, and he and Hannah grow old. His daughters marry and move away, and Hannah dies. Around this time, new people begin moving to the area, building vacation homes and bringing pleasure boats. Unlike the Tibbetts family, they’re there to enjoy the countryside for fun and not for farming. They’re called “rusticators” because they enjoy the rustic lifestyle. One of Matthais’s daughters points out that he could sell the family’s island to these people, but he can’t bring himself to do it because it’s the family’s old home.
Following the death of her husband, one of Matthais’s daughters moves back to the island with her small son, also named Matthais. The elderly Matthais helps to raise his young grandson and teach him about life on the island. The elderly Matthais eventually dies in a boating accident in rough weather, and many people come to pay their respects and reflect on his long life, but the younger Matthais’s life is still beginning.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I love the charming, old-fashioned pictures in this book, and it’s a sweet story about a man’s long life and the passing of one generation to the next. As characters comment at the end of the story, Matthais has lived a long and full life. He’s experienced the cozy family life on the island and the beauties of nature, and he’s also traveled and had adventures at sea. He’s raised a family of his own, and he’s set up a home for his daughter and her young son. The end of the story indicates that the cycle of life will continue in this family as the younger Matthais thinks about becoming a sailor like his grandfather and then returning to the island himself.
There’s a sense of stability to the island and its cycles of life and generations. Even when things are changing in the world around them, the nature of the island remains pretty constant, and it’s always a place for members of the family to come home.
The book starts with the phrase, “This is what I learned last summer:” On every page, there’s a different “rule of summer”, something that the kid and his brother learned from their summer adventures.
However, they’re not having the ordinary kind of summer adventures. He apparently learned not to leave a red sock on the clothesline when a giant red rabbit appeared, and he learned not to drop his jar when he and his brother were catching falling stars.
The pictures show all kinds of strange things happening, like a giant lizard and weird plants spilling into the living room, which apparently taught the boy not to leave the back door open overnight and a tornado that came after the boy stepped on a snail.
At the end of the book, the two boys sit in front of their tv with pictures of all the strange creatures they’ve seen pinned to the wall. Are they pictures from the boys’ imagination or memories of a fantastic summer?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
The book is set in a gritty, urban environment where some surreal things happen. Either that, or the surreal adventures all take place in the boys’ imaginations. They could be turning regular adventures in the city where they live into sci-fi, dystopian epics. There is no backstory to anything in the book, so it’s all up to the readers’ imaginations whether anything in the book actually happened or not.
Their world may be post-apocalyptic (at least in their imaginations), peopled by all kinds of strange creatures and robots. There are no other humans in the book other than the boys. I don’t really like gritty or dystopian style books or art, but this book appealed to me because it leaves so much up to the imagination, including whether or not the boys just imagined everything. To me, the last picture, where the boys are just sitting in front of their tv with pictures they’ve drawn all over the walls suggest that they imagined their fantastic summer adventures, but that’s never clarified. In fact, there are a couple of additional pictures after the story ends that suggest maybe it wasn’t all imagination, but you can make up your own mind.
A disease has killed off all of the adults on Earth, leaving only children. In a world without adults, all of the laws, rules, and structure of society are gone, and the children struggle to survive by themselves. When they run out of food in their own homes, they raid the grocery stores and other people’s homes to get more. However, even those sources of food are starting to run out, and they need to find new sources of food. Children are starting to form gangs and raid each other, desperate for food and resources.
In one particular neighborhood, a girl named Lisa Nelson, struggles to look after her little brother, Todd. She also begins to realize how much her friends in the neighborhood are struggling and the dangers around them posed by other kids. Lisa is more practical and organized than many of the other children, and she begins to emerge as the leader of their neighborhood.
Lisa considers where food comes from before it ends up in grocery stores, and she reaches the conclusion that it’s usually transported from farms and stored in warehouses before being shipped to individual stores. Since the adults died, nobody has been taking food from the warehouses to restock stores, so there are warehouses somewhere that are still filled with food and supplies. She recruits help from other kids in the neighborhood to find a warehouse of food and raid it. However, to maintain control and keep the other children organized, she claims ownership over the warehouse and the distribution of food from it. She even threatens to burn the whole thing down if people start raiding it for food without her permission.
If the children manage their resources wisely, they will be secure for a long time while they figure out how to begin producing new food themselves. However, a gang of children from another neighborhood led by a boy named Tom Logan have been raiding the area and attacking children from Lisa’s neighborhood. The children in the neighborhood struggle to defend themselves from Tom’s gang, but Lisa realizes that their neighborhood doesn’t provide adequate defense. The only way the kids from Lisa’s neighborhood will be safe is if they relocate to a place that offers more protection and will easier to defend.
Lisa chooses the high school, Glendbard, as the children’s new home. It’s an ideal location to create a fortress because it’s surrounded by fences and has a limited number of entrances and exits. It’s self-contained, offering many rooms with indoor corridors with facilities in place for the children to use. Lisa persuades the children from the neighborhood to relocate there, set up organized defenses, and move stores of food into their small fortified city.
Under Lisa’s leadership, the new little city of Glenbard is run efficiently, and it offers the children improved safety, but nothing for them is entirely secure. When Lisa is injured in a battle with Tom’s gang and retreats to a farm outside of town with some of her friends, the children consider what the future of the civilization they want to rebuild will be. Tom and his gang are the immediate threat, but sooner or later, there will be others. Tom knows how to raid and conquer, taking things from other people, but he doesn’t have Lisa’s ability to organize, govern effectively, produce new food and supplies, and inspire real loyalty. If everyone is going to survive, they need an effective leader, someone who can organize everyone and make use of their individual talents to grow and protect their society. If Lisa is going to be that leader, she has to not only learn to fight people like Tom but also help them to see her vision of the future.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book has also been made into a graphic novel, although some of the details from the original story were changed in the graphic novel.
My Reaction
I remember reading this book in a middle school English class when I was about 13! It has always reminded me of the episode from the original Star Trek series, Miri, about a planet of children living without adults because all of the adults were killed off by a disease that only affects people adolescents and adults. The Star Trek episode is from 1966, older than this book, so if there is a connection between them, it would have been the Star Trek episode that inspired the book.
In the Star Trek episode, when any of the children gets too old, they also start showing signs of the disease, and it eventually kills them, until the crew of the Enterprise figures out a way to cure it. In this book, it isn’t clear whether or not any of the children are going to be at risk as they get older. The implication seems to be that the disease died off with the last of the adults. Presumably, the children who are alive now will live to grow up and will rebuild their society, as long as they can figure out how to manage their resources, develop new food production, and maintain order well enough that they don’t kill each other off.
Dealing with their own fears is as much of a struggle for the children as simply finding food and supplies, and it fuels much of the violence between them. Children who lack resources more than the others and don’t have the imagination, knowledge, or skill to figure out how to get more turn to bullying and violence to get what they need. They are simply desperate for survival and doing what they know how to do, which for some kids, is more about taking from others rather than scavenging for themselves or about using violence and destruction instead of creating and building. Lisa is more successful than most because she’s a thinker and planner, and she has some knowledge about how the world usually works, which she can use to fill in the gaps left by the adults (like realizing the connection between farms, warehouses, and stores and that what’s missing now is people to produce food and transport it to the places where it’s usually stored and accessed by others, so she can trace resources back through the supply chain). Lisa realizes that thinking things through is the key to survival. She has her worries, like the others, but she manages her emotions and directs her focus on making plans and accomplishing things rather than panicking and taking out her feelings and needs on others.
Around the time this story was written, in the 1970s, there were a number of other dystopian books about people needing to rebuild society after a disaster. (See In the Keep of Time Trilogy for an example.) What makes this particular book different from other dystopian books of its time is that other books tended to focus on nuclear war as the reason for the society-ending disaster. The 1970s were part of the Cold War, and nuclear threats were on people’s minds. In this book, though, the cause of the disaster is a disease, and children are the only people left on Earth. All of the infrastructure is intact, and the primary challenge is for the children to figure out how to use it. The focus on children trying to build a society of their own is great for keeping children interested in the story!
One of the things I liked about this book when I was young was how the children adapted the school into a city. Sometimes, I used to imagine how it would be to live in other unconventional places – a library, a museum (like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), or a shopping mall. Some of the features of the school do lend themselves to communal living or a small city. The school’s gates offer them protection from outsiders, the classrooms provide living space, and they have a library, an infirmary, and a cafeteria.
The school in the story is based on a real school. The story is set in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, which is a suburban area near Chicago, where the author lived, and the school, Glenbard, is a real high school there. The children in the story, Lisa and Todd Nelson, are named after the author’s own children.
There is a new graphic novel version of this book. I haven’t read the entire the graphic novel version yet, although I’ve read selections of it. In some ways, what I’ve read so far bothered me because it seemed to me that they made Lisa meaner in the beginning. In the original book, Lisa shares the spoils from her scavenging with other kids, telling them that she would be willing to help them, if they ask her. In the graphic novel, she makes it a point to tell Todd that they got everything they have because they’re smart and work hard, and other people should just learn to do the same. It’s a very conservative/libertarian attitude, but it isn’t completely faithful to Lisa’s original character or the themes of the original story. I have to admit, though, that there are strong connections in the story to libertarian/Ayn Rand philosophy that didn’t occur to me when I was 13 years old because I hadn’t heard of Ayn Rand at that age. As an adult, it jumps out to me more now, and there’s another book reviewer who has noted the connection. The original author was a firm libertarian, which is something else I didn’t know until I was an adult. It just seems to me that the graphic novel version of the book bore down on the callousness of libertarian attitudes, that “I’ve got mine, and screw everyone who doesn’t get their own because I don’t owe you anything that’s mine” kind of attitude, than the original book did.
In the original book, Lisa realizes that she is proud of herself and Todd for learning to survive by their own efforts rather than by resorting to violence and stealing, like other kids have, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t also willing to share whenever she could or thought someone really needed help. The times when she was reluctant to share were when someone had already stolen from her, and she no longer trusted them, not merely because she thought that they weren’t smart enough, not hard-working enough, or too undeserving to merit help. In the original book, Lisa wants to rebuild community and society, and you just can’t be part of a community or society with people who would hurt and betray you if they thought they could get something they wanted for doing that. She does realize that working toward survival is useful for building community and also provides an individual sense of purpose. Like she points out to Jill, who has made it her mission to look after the youngest children, having chores to do and feelings of accomplishment are important to making the younger children feel less afraid because they can see that they have agency (although the book doesn’t use that term), that they are capable of making a difference in their own lives. Lisa works through her own fears and develops her own sense of self-confidence by realizing that she is capable of handling situations, and she wants to help the other kids build that sense of agency and capability. Lisa’s vision for building a new society is for the mutual protection and welfare of everybody, not just self-promotion or personal enrichment. At one point, she thinks to herself how she and her brother can’t focus on just their own survival alone or just getting things for themselves because, for the other kids to be willing to listen to her ideas, they have to be part of the same community with them, sharing their concerns and looking after their mutual welfare. She says to herself, “All the brilliant ideas in the world will be useless if the world collapses around me and I’m the only one left to steal from.”
That’s an issue that I often have in real life with fans of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand focused a lot on how special her main characters were and that society didn’t appreciate how brilliant and how much better they were than other people and didn’t acknowledge how much more deserving they were than anybody else. Frankly, Ayn Rand’s characters strike me as a kind of wishful thinking Mary Sue. As others have pointed out, the only characters considered “good” in any respect in Rand’s books are the ones who agree with her philosophy, and she just completely trashes everyone else. It’s not that Randian heroes are never compassionate, but they only seem compassionate to people who support them or provide personal validation. To everyone else, they’re ruthless, and anybody who disagrees with them is a villain with no positive traits on purpose.
Lisa kind of represents an Ayn Rand type character in the sense that she has more vision of what is possible for the children as they attempt to rebuild society and better organizational skills, but the focus of the original book isn’t about “look how great Lisa is and other people should acknowledge her greatness as the superior person and defer to her.” Lisa has a sense of communal welfare and an understanding that, while she and Todd have managed so far on their own, they really do need other people. She doesn’t want only rugged individualism and competition with everyone else to prove her own worth or place herself above others. Lisa doesn’t seem to see her position as leader of her new society as some kind of reward for being special or better than other people, and she isn’t trying to hoard all she has for herself as the rewards of her hard work or some kind of token that she’s the most deserving of having things. What she gathers has a purpose beyond simply enriching herself and securing her own future welfare.
She is definitely not laissez-faire in her leadership style, either. When she reveals the existence of the warehouse to the other kids and claims ownership of it, she lets everyone know that she can supply them with things they need but she would rather destroy it all if any of them abuses or misuses it. She uses its existence as a tool to gain and keep their loyalty and get them to do what she tells them, which seems a bit authoritarian. However, there are no adults left, and it seems that Lisa has realized that there always has to be an adult in the room to provide guidance and direction. Although she might not realize it, she effectively creates a kind of welfare state that provides housing, mutual protection, food, and other essentials in exchange for labor and cooperation. Providing for everyone is necessary because they’re going to have to keep everyone alive while they’re preparing for their future. The warehouse has a lot of food in it, but it will run out eventually or things will expire, and to provide for their future, they’re going to have to study food production and get crops growing again. It’s going to take time, and for them to make it to that point, they need to regulate their usage of food and supplies. Lisa is acting as the adult to guide that process.
The other kids are expected to participate and contribute in their new society, although not all kids can contribute in precisely the same way or to the same degree because some of them are much younger than the others. This is something that she discusses with Jill, who thinks that younger kids need more protection. In some ways, they’re both right and wrong in their approaches. Lisa proves correct that younger kids are sometimes capable of more than Jill thinks and that they start to feel better about themselves and the frightening loss of their parents when they realize that they can accomplish small tasks. However, Lisa does sometimes expect too much of them, and Jill is correct that little children would be frightened to patrol as night guards and wouldn’t really make intimidating guards against the bigger kids anyway. Lisa has high expectations of others and high ambitions, but her friends help to keep her more realistic about what other kids can do and what their priorities as a new society should be. When Lisa gets carried away with their accomplishments so far and excited about all the things they can do now that they’re free to do anything they want without adults, she talks about learning to fly an airplane, and one of her friends has to remind her that their first priorities should be to secure sources of food and restore water and electricity.
It seems that Lisa provides goods equitably (she doesn’t seem to provide extra to special favorites, elites, or people she deems as more deserving than others in her society) as long as everyone is willing to go along with her plans. Her primary reason for wanting to be in control is to keep the system functional and equitable. She also relies on people like Jill, who have some altruistic motives and are willing to provide nurturing care for the very young and people who are sick or injured, those least able to help themselves without help from someone else. Lisa and Jill don’t have quite the same philosophy, but building a society requires different people with different types of focus. Both of these characters are necessary for building the new society. Jill even takes in Lisa and Todd after their house burns, so Lisa benefits from Jill’s altruism, which gives her the support she needs while she recovers and makes other plans.
In the original book, her leadership and the resources that she has gathered are treated largely as tool that Lisa uses to achieve her ultimate goal of rebuilding a society. Lisa doesn’t seem opposed to the concept of “common good”, and she really wants to be part of a society. She especially wants a society that actually cares about all of its members and provides what all of its members need, and she recognizes that any society that doesn’t care for its members or provide for them sufficiently isn’t going to survive because nobody’s going to want to join something that doesn’t care about them or provide what they really need. Many of these other kids are also her long-term neighborhood friends, so she has some personal feelings for them. They’re not just there as underlings, and they have worth beyond just serving the system or proving themselves as earners.
The original book’s philosophy has some strong libertarian leanings, but it didn’t strike me as being purely libertarian in the way that the graphic novel seems to. From what I’ve read, it seems like the graphic novel doubled down on the more callous and self-centered form of individualism and took away at least some of Lisa’s consideration for other people. For me, it made her a less likeable, sympathetic character and less inspiring as a leader, and these are frequently requirements of mine when I consider literary characters. Just as people don’t tend to join societies with nothing to offer them, I lose interest in books and characters that don’t offer me what I’m looking for. The graphic novel didn’t grab me in the same way the original book did because it took out some of the aspects that appealed to what I was looking for.
Because of the subject matter, this book is best for older children. According to Wikipedia, it’s recommended for ages 12 to 15, and that estimate seems about right to me. There is real violence in the story. The children start using weapons against each other, and Lisa gets a gunshot wound. When her friend is treating her wound, she gives Lisa alcohol to drink because they don’t have any better painkiller.
The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts, 1980.
Katie has recently moved from the country to an apartment in the city to live with her single mother. Katie’s parents divorced when she was young, and for years, she lived with her grandmother in the country. However, her grandmother has now died, so she has gone to live with her mother. Katie has mixed feelings about living with her mother again after years of living without her, and she somewhat blames her mother for not keeping Katie with her instead of leaving her with her grandmother. Katie can’t live with her father because he moves around too much, and she doesn’t even know where he is right now.
At first, Katie wonders if things are going to be different in the city, but Katie soon realizes that the same problems that plagued her in the country have followed her to the city because she still has the same abilities she has always had and can’t resist using them. Katie has always made people nervous, including her own parents and grandparents because she’s not like other children. For one thing, she has strange, silver eyes that surprise everyone who sees them because they seem unnatural. For another thing, Katie has the ability to make things move just by looking at them and concentrating on them. She tries to use this ability only when no one can see her doing it, but people can’t help but notice that odd things happen when Katie is around. Somehow, things move around Katie without Katie apparently moving herself. Sometimes, when things happen by ordinary accidents, people blame Katie for them just because she was around, and they’ve all come to think of Katie as somehow causing strange things to happen. Secretly, many people think that there’s something seriously wrong with Katie, like she might be a witch or something, and they try to avoid her.
Katie knows that she’s never met anyone else like herself, but she wishes that she did because she’s often lonely. It’s hard to make friends when people think you’re strange or dangerous, and even your own family is distant with you because you frighten them a little. Although Katie tries to pretend normality as much as possible, the urge to use her powers is too strong, particularly when someone has made her upset. She subtly uses her powers to spook her mother’s crass boyfriend, Nathan, and her mean babysitter in the hopes of driving them both away.
After Katie succeeds in spooking the babysitter, she overhears her mother talking to Nathan about her. From their conversation, Katie learns things about her mother’s history and herself that she never knew before. Her mother, Monica, had lost another baby before her after being in a car accident, and then she went to work at a pharmaceutical company. She liked the work there and the other women she worked with, and she has stayed in touch with some of them. However, she left the job when she got pregnant with Katie, and some of the other women there also got pregnant around the same time. Originally, Monica had hoped to return to the job after giving birth to Katie, but the company stopped making the product they were working with, and none of the other women who had children returned.
Ever since Katie was born, Monica knew that Katie was odd because she never cried, and she’s always had those silver eyes, yet her mother has trouble thinking that anything could be seriously wrong with Katie because she seems healthy and is very intelligent. Nathan asks Monica whether the drug she was working with could have had some effect on Katie, and whether that could be why Katie is the way she is. At first, Monica doesn’t think so because she says, if that was the case, her friends from that time would have had children who were similar to Katie, and she thinks they would have said. Nathan asks her whether she’s sure that her friends would admit that their children were strange and a little frightening, and whether Monica has ever seen any of these children for herself. Monica has to admit that she hasn’t. Nathan suggests to Monica that Katie’s condition and whatever the conditions of her friends’ children might be could be the reason why the company stopped production of that medicine.
Katie is stunned at this information. She has always assumed that she was a random freak of nature, and it never occurred to her that there might be scientific explanation for her strange abilities. Although she still doesn’t like Nathan, she has to admit that his questions and his theory are sensible. She also begins to wonder about the children of her mother’s old friends and whether they are also like her, with silver eyes and the ability to use telekinesis. She secretly goes through her mother’s belongings to figure out who her mother’s old friends were so she can track them down and meet their children.
When Katie makes friends with a nice older lady, Mrs. Michaelmas, who lives in the same apartment building and persuades her mother that she would make a better babysitter than the others that her mother has tried, Katie finds someone to confide in for the first time. She isn’t alarmed when she discovers that Katie can talk to and understand her cat, and Katie finds herself telling her all about herself and the other things she can do. The older lady takes it calmly, saying that, at her age, she’s seen may things before and doesn’t get too worried about things. They talk about why people get scared of people who are different, and the older lady says that people are often afraid of someone they think might be somehow more powerful than themselves. Katie has powers that other people don’t have, and people are afraid of what she’s able to do that they can’t.
When a new tenant, Adam Cooper, moves to the apartment building, he seems open and friendly with Katie. Unlike other people, he doesn’t seem concerned about her silver eyes, and she wonders whether he could be a confidant, like Mrs. Michaelmas. At first, she thinks Mr. Cooper might be interested in her mother and could make a better boyfriend for her than Nathan, but then, she overhears him talking to her mother and asking questions about her. Mr. C seems way too interested in Katie and why Katie’s babysitters haven’t gotten along with her. In fact, it sounds like he’s planning to call her old babysitters and ask more questions about her. Katie doesn’t know why Mr. C is so interested in her, but she no longer thinks his intentions are merely friendly. When she hears Mr. C asking Mrs. M about whether Katie’s ever done anything odd around here, Katie is sure that Mr. C knows that she has powers that other people don’t have. Then, he tells Mrs. M that he’s been making inquiries about Katie in the town where she used to live, and some people there really think she’s a witch and that she may have caused her grandmother’s death. Katie is horrified because, while she knows that she didn’t do anything to her grandmother, it would be hard to prove because he grandmother died from an accidental fall downstairs. Even having someone open an inquiry into her grandmother’s death and suggesting that she could have been at fault would reveal Katie’s secret powers to the world!
Katie doesn’t know who Mr. C really is or what he wants with her, but she fears that, if he convinces other people that she’s dangerous, she could be locked up for life! She decides that her only hope is to find the other children who are like her. They may be the only people who could understand her and be willing to help.
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
I didn’t read this book when I was a kid, although I saw it around. For some reason, I just put off reading it, although it’s similar to other books that I did read about kids who have mysterious powers. When Katie eventually meets the kids of the other women her mother used to work with, they admit that they all feel like misfits and have wondered for years why they’re so different from everyone else. One of them says he thought that he might secretly be an alien, given to a human family to raise, which reminds me of Escape to Witch Mountain, which was written before this book. However, Katie and the other kids are all human, just mutated by the pharmaceuticals their mothers worked with.
Sadly, there are real-life cases of children changed by their mothers taking dangerous medications while pregnant, but in real life, those children are born with birth defects rather than psychic or telekinetic powers. A famous case of that was the Thalidomide scandal of the 1950s and 1960s, when babies were born with severe deformities after their mothers used the tranquilizer Thalidomide. Most of these cases happened in Europe because the FDA refused to approve the drug in the US due to inadequate testing.
In some ways, this book also reminds me of Matilda by Roald Dahl, but The Girl with the Silver Eyes was published first, so it’s not an imitation of that book. Like Matilda, Katie has powers of telekinesis and pointedly doesn’t like to watch tv but she loves books. I enjoy children’s books that also mention other, real children’s books, and Katie mentions some that she’s read. Among the books that the story mentions her reading are The View from the Cherry Tree, Gentle Ben, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Boxcar Children, The Headless Cupid, and The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Mentions in the story of the dangers of child molesters and her mother has books that are inappropriate for children and stops her daughter from reading them. Katie’s mother thought she might be “retarded” when she was a baby.
Some Spoilers
I had several theories about who Adam Cooper could be and what he might want with Katie. At first, I wondered if Adam Cooper could be the father of one of the other children who are like Katie, secretly investigating the children of other women who worked with his wife to see if they all have the same condition. Then, I thought maybe Adam Cooper worked for the pharmaceutical company and was checking up on the children of their employees for years to find out what happened to them. I was hoping that he wouldn’t be part of a secret government organization, like the one in Stranger Things because that’s been done a lot, and sometimes, I feel like it’s become kind of a conspiracy theory cliche. Actually, none of those are the real explanation.
It turns out that there is an organization that has an interest in children like Katie. They don’t mean them any harm, but they are interested in studying the reasons why children like her end up with special abilities and helping these children to develop their abilities. He confirms that Katie and the children of Monica’s old friends aren’t alone, that there are other children with varying conditions and abilities, some also the children of people who worked with pharmaceuticals and others with no known cause. At the end of the story, Adam asks the children and their families whether the children want to come to the school his organization runs, which sounds a little like Professor X’s school from X-Men or The Mysterious Benedict Society.
However, the children and their parents aren’t entirely sure whether that’s a good idea or not. Adam assures them that the children wouldn’t be prisoners at the school, that their education and development would be prioritized, that they wouldn’t have to hide their abilities from anyone while they were at the school because they would be among others like themselves, and that they wouldn’t be treated like creatures to be merely studied. Still, the children don’t want to be separated from their parents, and the parents are concerned about sending the children away to this unknown school. One of the children asks, since there are four of them living in this area, whether they could form their own day school as a kind of satellite school to the main one, so they can continue living at home and being part of the regular world, not isolated from it. They don’t reach a full decision by the end of the story, but the adults discuss the possibility. Katie and the other kids feel like their lives have already changed for the better, just having each other and realizing that they’re not alone.
The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren, 1947.
The story is told from the point-of-view of nine-year-old Lisa, a Swedish girl who has two older brothers, Karl and Bill. She and her family live on a farm that people call Middle Farm because it’s between two other farms, North Farm and South Farm. The three farms together are called “Noisy Village” because there are so many children around. The children who live on South Farm are Ulaf and his little sister Kirsten, who is only a year-and-a-half old, and North Farm has two girls, Britta and Anna, who are Lisa’s friends. Ulaf is friends with Karl and Bill. Sometimes, Lisa tries to play with her brothers, but they often tell her that she’s too little, and she sometimes thinks of the boys as a nuisance. Ulaf will sometimes play with girls, although Karl and Bill sometimes tease him about it, but there are also a limited number of children in the area to play with, so being willing to play with whoever is around is a good thing. Through the story, Lisa tells little stories and talks about the things that all of the children of Noisy Village do together.
When Lisa was younger, she used to share a room with her brothers before getting a room of her own. At night, Karl used to tell ghost stories, while Bill likes to talk about adventures. Lisa tells a story about how her brothers scared her one night with a ghost story and how they rigged up a trick to make it look like their room was haunted. Although Lisa sometimes misses the stories that her brothers used to tell her at night, she’s also relieved that she has a space of her own so she doesn’t have to put up with their pranks or them bossing her around all the time. Bill and Karl like their room because their window is close to Ulaf’s window, and the boys like to use the tree between their houses to go back and forth between the two rooms. The room that Lisa has now used to belong to her grandmother, before her grandmother moved in with an aunt. Lisa’s family remade the room for her as a present for her seventh birthday. Lisa’s room faces North Farm and Britta and Anna’s room, so the girls can send each other notes or signal to each other through their windows.
Some of the children at Noisy Village have pets, and Lisa explains how Ulaf got his dog, Skip, from the mean shoemaker, who was mistreating him. Britta and Anna don’t have any pets, but their grandfather lives with them, and the other children at Noisy Village like to visit him. Britta and Anna’s grandfather tells the children stories. One of his stories is about how he ran away from home as a boy. Inspired by the story, Lisa and Anna decide that they should have their own adventure, running away from home temporarily. However, they think that they have to run away during the night, and they both miss their opportunity because they fall asleep.
The children like to play games of pretend on their way home from school, which makes their mothers wonder what they’re doing and sometimes get them into trouble. Anna and Lisa accidentally get on people’s nerves one time, when they try too hard to follow their teacher’s advice about doing things to make people happy. They often end up doing the wrong things because they don’t know what other people really want or what people say they want doesn’t seem like enough. They finally succeed in making someone happy when they share some of their things with a girl from school who is sick.
The children’s adventures continue through the year. The people of Noisy Village have a charming, old-fashioned Christmas. At a Christmas party at a relative’s house, they play old-fashioned party games and tell stories. Lisa also describes a Swedish tradition of finding an almond in porridge, which is supposed to be a sign of marriage in the coming year. The children are allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. The boys scare the girls with some firecrackers, and Britta and Anna’s grandfather teaches the children the tradition of pouring melted lead into water to see what shapes it will form to predict what will happen in the new year. On Easter, the children paint eggs and make egg nog.
Eventually, school lets out for summer vacation. The children go swimming and catch crayfish during the summer. When they go fishing for crayfish, they camp out in the forest, near the lake, with Lisa’s father and the other men. The children make little huts to camp in. The boys try to scare the girls with stories about goblins. The children appreciate their idyllic lives in Noisy Village!
My Reaction
This book is a series of pleasant, gentle, slice-of-life stories about the children who live on a collection of small farms outside of a Swedish town, probably some time in the mid-20th century. Because there is little mention of any form of technology in countryside, it could set almost be any time in history from the 19th century to the time when it was written in the 1940s. The one thing that identified it as the 20th century for me is when they mentioned “turning on lights” in the house rather than lighting lamps. Even into the mid-20th century, not all farm houses had electricity, but it seems that these do. Other than that, these children seem to be living an idyllic, “unplugged” life in the countryside that people who are into cottagecore would aspire to! I think it would be a nice book to read children at bedtime because it’s very gentle.
I enjoyed reading about the games that the children play with each other and with their families. The children like playing games of pretend that seem to be inspired by books they’ve read. The girls play at being princesses, while the boys play at being Indians, probably American Indians (Native Americans) because one of young Bill’s ambitions is to be an Indian Chief when he grows up. We don’t really encourage playing at being “Indians” today in 21st century America because that can devolve into caricatures of someone else’s racial group (cowboys are still fair game because that’s a profession, not an ethnicity), but that sort of thing was pretty common in the mid-20th century, even outside of the United States. I’ve read British books from around the same time period that also refer to children playing at being American Indians, so it was something that seems to have captured children’s imaginations, even internationally. The children also pretend that they’re marooned or shipwrecked on a rock at one point, something else that often appears in children’s literature and is based on older books.
I particularly enjoyed some of the descriptions of Swedish holiday traditions through the year. Some of them are very similar to traditions in the United States and Britain around this time and even earlier, like in the 19th century. They have a charming Christmas with friends and family and a party with old-fashioned parlor games. I’ve heard of the tradition of finding an almond in porridge or pudding before, but I think that’s more common in Scandinavian countries than in the United States. In Britain, there are traditions associated with finding things (like a coin or a bean) in porridge or pudding, but it’s not really common in the US. Another thing that stood out to me was that Lisa said they made egg nog at Easter. In the US, people typically have egg nog at Christmas, but when I thought about it, it does make sense for Easter because of the association with eggs.
One other thing that stood out to me in the book was the little huts that the children make when they’re camping out by the lake. It reminded me of the huts that children in The Secret Summer (Baked Beans for Breakfast) made.
A family builds a strong little house in the countryside, dreaming of their descendants living in her. The little house is happy in the countryside, watching the changing seasons as the years come and go.
Over time, things begin to change, though. Other farms are built around the little house, but then, a big road is built, and the little farms gradually give way to suburbs.
Eventually, the houses around the little house turn into bigger houses and apartment buildings. As time goes on, the little house is no longer in the countryside or even the edge of the city, but it’s actually engulfed by the city itself.
The city becomes more and more crowded with taller and taller apartment buildings, more roads and trains, and crowds of peoples. The little house stands empty and becomes run-down. She can hardly see the sky and can’t feel the changing of the seasons the way she used to because there isn’t much nature around her to sense changing.
Fortunately, the little house is rescued from this terrible situation. One day, the great-great-granddaughter of the man who built the house spots the little house in the city and recognizes it as the one her family owned. When she and her husband look into it, they verify that this is her family’s old house, and they decide that they want to move it to the countryside, like when her family lived there.
Because the little house was built so strongly, they’re able to move it intact to the countryside. The little house is happy to once again live in the countryside with the family who always loved her!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
This vintage picture book is about the nature of change. Growing cities do expand into the countryside around them, so a house that was once outside of the city is gradually touched by and then engulfed by the nearby city as it expands. Readers get the feelings of the house as the world around her changes. At first, she’s a little intrigued by the city and isn’t sure if she likes it or not, but as the city becomes overcrowded, the house is neglected, and she can no longer sense the seasons, she decides that she doesn’t like it. When things change for the house again, she is relieved.
I remember this story from when I was a kid, and I remember feeling sad when the poor house was run-down and neglected in the city, surrounded by the towering apartment buildings. However, the book has a good ending. Houses can be moved, and the family that once owned this house remembers it and rescues it from the city, moving it to the countryside, where they all feel more at home. Things change, but sometimes, they change for the better. The house can’t move itself when it isn’t happy, but the family gives it the help and attention it needs.
When I reread this book as an adult, it suddenly occurred to me that this book was originally published during WWII, when the world was changing in some very scary ways. I think a book like this might have been reassuring to children of that time. Life is full of changes, but sometimes, things can change for the better again.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 