Posted on by TracyC

Tom’s Midnight Garden

Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, 1958.

This is one of the most famous time slip stories for children! I remember either reading it or having it read to me when I was a kid, but I have to admit that I really remembered only the broad strokes of the story until I reread it as an adult.

When the story begins, Tom Long is sad and angry because his brother, Peter, has caught the measles, and it’s going to ruin their summer holidays. The two of them originally planned to spend the summer building a tree house in the apple tree in their backyard garden, but now, Tom is being rushed away from the house (sent into exile, as he thinks of it) so that he won’t catch the measles from his brother. Tom thinks that he would rather be sick with Peter than sent away by himself.

Tom is going to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen. His aunt and uncle are kind people who like kids, and in a way, it makes Tom feel worse because it makes him seem unreasonable for resenting spending the summer with them. If they were cruel, he could run away and everyone would tell him he was right for doing so, but when people are nice to you, there’s less to complain about, and Tom is in a complaining mood. The major problem with staying with Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen is that they live in a small flat with no garden. Tom can’t even get out and see the sights of the city because he’s supposed to be in quarantine for awhile, just in case he’s already caught the measles from Peter and it hasn’t started to show yet. (It takes about 10 to 14 days after infection before measles symptoms start to show, so Tom has to stay in quarantine that long to be sure he’s not sick. Anybody with experience of coronavirus quarantines knows the drill, even if they didn’t before.) So, basically, Tom is going to be temporarily shut up like he’s sick, with the goal of making sure that he’s not sick and not going to be, but without the company of his brother or the comforts of his own home. They’re doing it for Tom’s welfare because measles can have serious side effects, and it’s not something anybody wants to get. There are sound reasons for trying to both protect Tom from infection if he hasn’t been infected already and also trying to protect others that Tom might infect while they’re waiting to make sure that he’s really okay, but it’s still a depressing situation. They’re planning on Tom quarantining for ten days with his aunt and uncle, just about a week and a half, provided that he doesn’t show any symptoms that would force him to quarantine for longer. The only people Tom is allowed to see during his quarantine period are people who have already had measles and are now immune to it, like his aunt and uncle.

The flat where Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen live is in an old house in or near Ely, England that has been divided up into flats. It’s not a bad house, but Tom doesn’t think it seems particularly welcoming. He’s also a little offended that the guest room where he’s supposed to be staying used to be a nursery and has the characteristic bars on the windows that old-fashioned nurseries have to keep children from falling out. Aunt Gwen explains that those are left over from when the house used to be a private home and aren’t meant for him, but Tom is in no mood to be treated like he’s a baby. The one feature of the house he likes is the old grandfather clock that belongs to Mrs. Bartholomew, the owner of the house and his aunt and uncle’s landlady, who lives upstairs. The clock’s chimes can be heard all over the house, and it’s something of a joke and a source of irritation to the people living in the house because, even though the clock keeps perfect time, it never chimes the right number. The chimes are always some random number for no apparent reason. Of course, there is a reason.

Tom is bored and restless. All he has for entertainment is crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and his aunt’s old books from when she was a kid, and the books are just school stories for girls, so Tom doesn’t find them interesting. Tom helps his aunt in the kitchen, and he loves her cooking, but it’s a bit rich and gives him indigestion. Because of that, he often has trouble sleeping, but his aunt and uncle insist that he get ten hours of sleep a night because that’s what kids his age are supposed to need. They won’t let him read or get up or do anything when he can’t sleep, so he just has to lie awake, bored.

One night, while lying awake in bed, Tom hears the clock downstairs strike thirteen. That strikes him as odd because he’s never heard a clock strike thirteen times before, and he didn’t even think it was possible for a wrong clock to do that. He starts considering that maybe there is actually a hidden, thirteenth hour of night that his uncle knows nothing about, so that one free hour should belong to Tom, to with as he wishes. He’s not sure that idea really makes sense, but he feels compelled to get up and go downstairs to investigate.

When Tom gets downstairs, he can’t read the clock because it’s too dark, and he can’t find the light switch. Then, he gets the idea to open the back door so he can read the clock by moonlight. However, when he opens the back door, he sees a beautiful lawn and garden instead of the empty yard his aunt and uncle told him was there. At first, Tom is angry that they lied to him about there not being a garden. He thinks to himself that he’s going to come back and see the garden in daylight. As he’s heading back inside to look at the clock, he encounters a young maid. He’s surprised to see the girl enter someone else’s flat without knocking or ringing the bell in the middle of the night. Then, he begins to notice that the house is different from the way he saw it during the day. The grandfather clock is still there, but the laundry box, milk bottles, and travel posters have been replaced by an umbrella stand, a dinner gong, an air gun, and a fishing rod. The girl calls out that she’s lit a fire in “the parlour,” and Tom watches as she crosses to another room, kind of melting through the door instead of opening it like a living person would. Is Tom seeing a ghost? Then, the vision fades, all of the old-fashioned furnishing are gone, and everything in the downstairs hall looks the way Tom remembered it from his arrival.

In spite of realizing that the house might be haunted, Tom is happier from his adventures and knowing about the beautiful garden outside. He now has something more exciting to think about than just being bored. However, he’s still mad at his aunt and uncle for keeping him in the dark about the garden outside. He tries to hint to them that he knows about it, but when he mentions seeing hyacinths blooming, his aunt tells him that’s impossible because it’s summer, and hyacinths are out of season. Tom is unsettled by that, and he runs downstairs to check. When he gets there, the lock on the back door is different from what he remembered the night before, and when he opens the back door, there’s no garden there, only the dust bins his aunt and uncle mentioned and a man working on a car. Tom asks the man, who lives in the flat where Tom saw the maid enter to light a fire if he has a maid, and man tells him no. Tom tries to ask him about the garden, but he starts crying when he realizes that the garden couldn’t have been real. The man tries to ask him what’s wrong, but Tom doesn’t want to explain it. He stops Tom from running into old Mrs. Bartholomew, who has come downstairs to wind the grandfather clock. Tom watches the winding process with fascination and feels calmer.

Tom begins to reason out how he could have seen a garden the night before when there isn’t one there now. He’s sure that he didn’t just dream it or imagine it, so he decides to conduct an investigation. He considers the different pieces of the puzzle – the house that looks different at night, the clock that chimes thirteen times, and trees that are now in the backyards of neighboring houses but which must have been part of the large garden he saw. Tom begins writing a series of letters to his brother about what he’s experiencing and his investigations into it, which he asks Peter to burn after reading. At night, he stays up, waiting for the clock to chime thirteen again … and it does. When it does, everything is as he saw it before – the different furnishings downstairs, the different latch on the back door, and best of all, the garden.

Tom visits the garden every night, noting that every time he goes, it’s a different time of day or a different season of the year. Time in the garden doesn’t correspond to time in the real world. Months can pass between his visits, even though Tom goes there every single night. It seems like, no matter how long Tom spends there, exploring, only a few minutes of the night has passed when he returns. One night, he sees a tree struck by lightning, but the next time he looks, the tree is just fine. Tom starts a discussion with his aunt and uncle about time without fully explaining why he wants to know how time works. When he poses the question of how a tree could fall over and then be standing upright again later, his aunt thinks that he’s talking about fairy tale or something he dreamed or imagined. His uncle says that it’s impossible without turning back the clock. The mention of a clock being turned back intrigues Tom, but his uncle says that’s just an expression, meaning to relive the past, which nobody can actually do. It’s a clue to Tom, though, about what’s really happening in the garden.

Tom also quickly realizes that he seems to have little substance when he’s in the garden. He can climb trees in the garden, but he can’t open doors by himself, for some reason. If he concentrates hard, he can walk through doors like a ghost, which is both frightening and fascinating. Also, most of the people he encounters can’t see him. Animals react to his presence, but people tend to look through him or past him and don’t seen to hear anything he says. There are three brothers who spend time in the garden, and Tom thinks that he’d like to be friends with the middle boy, James, but James never sees or hears him. The boys have a younger cousin, Hatty, who follows them around. They’re not very nice to her and often ignore her or exclude her from their activities, but Tom discovers, to his surprise, that Hatty can both see and hear him. Hatty becomes Tom’s friend, and they begin talking to each other, playing, and exploring the garden together.

Hatty is a sad and lonely girl who often plays imaginary games by herself in the garden. She tells Tom that she’s a captive princess, that the cruel woman who claims to be her aunt isn’t really her aunt, and that the mean boys aren’t her real cousins. The truth is that Hatty is an orphan and that her aunt resents her being her responsibility. Hatty’s aunt and cousins have money and servants, but Hatty is emotionally neglected. She has no one to be close to and share secrets with except for Tom.

Tom is so captivated by his shared time in the garden with Hatty that he tells his aunt that he’d like to stay longer. His uncle is mystified that Tom is really that interested in staying with them because he knows their apartment is boring, but his aunt is enthusiastic about him spending an extra week beyond his quarantine so she can show him some of the sights of the city. Then, Tom catches a cold that requires him to stay in bed for longer, but he is still able to visit the garden at night.

By this time, Tom has figured out that the garden once existed in the history of the house and that Hatty was someone who lived in the house at some point in the past, but he doesn’t really understand how or why he is able to visit her in the no-longer-existing garden at night. He still thinks that Hatty might be a ghost and even the garden might be some kind of ghost that haunts the house. However, Hatty tells Tom that she thinks he’s the ghost. Tom denies it, knowing that he’s not dead in his own time, but it’s true that, whenever he’s in the garden with Hatty, he is somewhat non-corporeal, unable to affect physical objects but able to walk through solid objects when he tries, and he is invisible to most people. Tom says that the only reason why he can walk through closed doors is that the garden itself, and every physical thing in it, is a ghost – he’s not passing through them so much as they’re passing through him because he’s solid, and they’re not really. Tom and Hatty argue about who’s a ghost and who’s not because, from each of their perspectives, they’re both real and alive, but yet, the entire situation is unreal. Tom sees pieces of the past changing and disappearing, and he knows what’s real in his time. However, Hatty can also say the same – she knows what’s real in her time, and Tom has a definite ghostly quality when he’s in her garden. What is the truth, and how long can the two of them continue meeting like this?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Chinese). It’s been made into tv versions (parts sometimes appear on YouTube) and a movie in 1999. The movie is also available online through Internet Archive.

If you’re interested in other time slip stories, see my list of Time Travel books.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Things to Do

First of all, I just have to get it out of my system: Tom’s family is not a creative bunch. I know the aunt and uncle took Tom in on short notice, but I’m just saying that with a little imagination, they could find more things for Tom to do during his quarantine. Two weeks is not that long if you have things to do and think about. There were always art supplies at my house when I was a kid, and even if you don’t have them on hand, paper and colored pencils or crayons aren’t very expensive. The cooking is a good activity, and maybe the aunt could teach Tom some new recipes that he could make by himself. With as much as the aunt is cooking, she’s also probably using things that come in boxes and cans, and boxes and cans can be made into things. Also, they could get the kid a book on something more interesting he can learn and use, like magic tricks he can practice or secret codes. They wouldn’t have to buy him books for just a couple of week, either. They could just go to the local library and ask the children’s librarian for some recommendations. They could teach him how to fold different kinds of paper airplanes or carve things out of soap (save the shavings in an old nylon stocking – it’s almost like soap on a rope you can use in the shower) or make a kite he can fly in the park when his quarantine ends. Heck, if he had a deck of cards, he could at least learn different types of solitaire games. There are over one hundred variations, and the kid just has to be entertained for a couple of weeks, 14 days. The activities don’t have to be very impressive if you can think of enough of them to have a different one each day for him to try to break up the monotony of the the more usual stand-bys, like reading and puzzles. Just to prove that it’s possible, I made a list:

  1. Drawing – I mentioned before that paper and crayons or colored pencils aren’t too expensive, and he doesn’t need to be any good at it. It’s just a challenge and would give him something creative to do, maybe while listening to music on the radio or something. Bonus points if you know enough about art to tell him about different styles of art and suggest that he try some different styles, like cubism or surrealism. He could also use art supplies to map out things, like a plan of the tree house he and Peter want to build. After he’s done that, he could draw a creative map of an imaginary castle or mansion or a haunted house or an entire amusement park or an elaborate clubhouse he would build if there were no restrictions on space or money. It doesn’t have to be possible or even drawn particularly well as long as it’s entertaining.
  2. Paper airplanes or origami – You can make some fun things out of folded paper, and if you know how to make different styles of paper airplanes or can find a book about it, you can conduct tests to determine which styles fly the best. Yes, you then have a lot of paper airplanes laying around, but if your goal is to pass the time, cleaning up also takes up time.
  3. Card games – I covered that. There are a lot of things you can do with a deck of cards, even if you’re just playing solitaire. He could try to build a house of a cards. He could also learn card tricks and the order of poker hands. (I know that not every family would be okay with a kid learning the rules to a gambling game, but my parents never minded as long as we didn’t gamble with money, and it’s the sort of mildly daring activity that appeals to kids. Besides, this kid has nobody else to play with right now, except for his aunt and uncle.)
  4. Magic tricks – I covered this one. There are (and were back then) books of magic tricks that a boy could study, many of which use ordinary objects that a person could find around the house. He could practice a new trick each day or spend an entire day with one book, trying anything that looks interesting.
  5. Secret codes – Again, they had books about this even back then, and once you know a few principles, you can start making your own codes. When I was a kid, I liked to experiment with basic alphabet shifts, and secret codes often formed the basis of treasure hunts that I had with my brother. Tom can’t have a treasure hunt for his brother yet, but he could be encouraged to plan one. Give him a notebook where he can practice his codes and make notes of possible hiding places. He can also write coded messages to send to his brother and challenge him to read them.
  6. Current events – Kids don’t often read the newspaper, but his aunt and uncle could introduce him to features of the newspaper and what’s happening in the world. A new newspaper arrives every day, and it’s a source of reading material. At least, he could look at the comics or the sports pages, if he likes sports.
  7. Model town or castle – As I said, there are probably cardboard boxes and cans being thrown out of this house, and they could be appropriated for some kind of craft project, ideally one that would take awhile for Tom to build and that he could add to each day. One of the best things to make out of random junk would be a town or a castle. Tin cans are towers and turrets, and cardboard boxes are the main buildings. Cover the outsides of the cans and boxes with plain paper and draw on them for decoration. Make people out of paper and cardboard. It could turn out amazing if he’s willing to put the time into making it as detailed as possible, but if it doesn’t turn out amazing, it’s okay because it was just junk anyway.
  8. Plan for the future – This quarantine will end. Tom can mark off days on the calendar until he’s in the clear. Give Tom a guidebook to the city and tell him to make a list of places he wants to go and things he wants to do when the quarantine is over. It could be amusing for at least an afternoon. He’ll learn about the sights and landmarks of the city and be mildly entertained thinking of fun things to do in the near future. It will give him something to look forward to. It’s also an incentive for Tom to behave himself because his aunt and uncle can tell him that they’ll take him places he wants to go if he’s good about abiding by the rules of the quarantine until it’s over. Admittedly, Ely is one of the smallest cities in England, so there wouldn’t be as many sights to see as in London, and Tom already knows about the Cathedral, but there are shops, restaurants, and museums there. Some of them were founded after the 1950s, but there were some in Tom’s time, too. He visits at least one museum with his aunt at the end of the quarantine and goes to the movies with her. If they can’t find enough to do just in Ely when Tom’s quarantine is over, they could also spend a day visiting surrounding towns.
  9. Discover or develop your mental powers – The amusement potential with this one depends on whether the kid has reached that phase where kids get fascinated by things like psychic abilities. Many kids go through a phase like that, and since Tom seems to like the idea of being in a haunted house, he’s probably the right age. If you can get him a book about psychic powers or telekinesis, he’d probably find it a fascinating read. The aunt and uncle could talk to him about whether or not such things actually exist, and he could try to test himself to see if he has any such powers. I had an English teacher in middle school who actually did that with us. There was only one test I really did well. Most people don’t do those types of tests well at all, but it’s amusing for at least an hour or two to try or talk about. If he happens to do better than average on anything, he could brag about it to his brother and his friends, telling them that he discovered and honed his psychic powers in a spooky old house during his vacation.
  10. Write a story or poem – All you need is paper, a pencil, and some imagination. Writing a long story and trying to do it well could cover the entire quarantine period by itself, it would give him something to think about, and he’d have something to show for his relative isolation. Of course, the real goal is to be entertained and pass the time, so the story or poem doesn’t have to be great. It can be as crazy as Tom wants to make it, as long as he’s amused.
  11. Start learning a language – Two weeks isn’t enough to really learn to speak a language, but it’s enough to learn a few words and phrases. If his aunt or uncle has an old textbook lying around from their student days, they could use that, or they could pick up a used one cheaply or get one from the local library. It might make Tom groan because it’s a little like school, but it would be a challenge to practice using words from another language. Of course, that depends on which words and phrases the kid learns. There can be a lot of amusement potential in learning to insult people in other languages, although that lesson should also come with the warning that you never know which languages other people might know.
  12. Board games – A classic! If they’re not into card games, Tom can spend evenings playing board games with his aunt and uncle. Most people have chess and checkers sets (his uncle does offer to teach him chess later in his visit), and Monopoly and Clue (or Cluedo) were common back then. Monopoly games are notorious for taking a long time to finish.
  13. Invent a game – There are a lot of things you can do if you have paper and pencils, and one of them is to design your own board game. It can be about anything, and the rules can be anything you want. When you think you’ve got it the way you want, try playing it and see if there are any adjustments you need to make. Tom can also make his own jigsaw puzzles by cutting up a picture he’s drawn or gluing a magazine picture to a piece of cardboard and cutting it up. The cardboard can come from an empty cardboard box or he can remove the cardboard back of a drawing pad, if he no longer needs it.
  14. Jokes – Get Tom a joke book and have him mail his brother a new joke every day. When he’s done reading the book, they could challenge him to try to make up some jokes of his own. Sending and receiving mail is an activity by itself, and Tom does write to Peter during the story.
  15. Learn to dance – This is assuming that the aunt and uncle also know how to dance, but I think it was pretty common back then for people to know at least a couple of basic dances. Tom could practice with his aunt in their living room (if they have to rearrange the furniture to do it, that’s another time-consuming activity), and it would give him something to do for some mild exercise. Even if a boy might be embarrassed to dance with his aunt, nobody’s going to see them while he’s in quarantine, he doesn’t have to tell people who taught him, and if he’s willing to learn, it could help him later at school dances.

See? If you think about it, there are plenty of things to do for just a couple of weeks. There are even more if you’re willing to invest in buying things like craft kits or model kits or other things necessary to start a new hobby, but I was trying to be as basic as possible, mostly relying on inexpensive books and paper and pencils. However, the plot of the book requires Tom to be bored and lonely, so they can’t do those things, and that brings us back to the story.

Measles

How readers receive the beginning premise of the story, that Tom was sent away from home because his brother has the measles, depends partly on their generation. I have never actually seen a live case of the measles in my entire life, as of this posting. I was born in the early 1980s, and growing up, everyone I knew who had the measles was an older person who had it as a child in the 1950s or earlier, before the time that this story was written. Vaccines against measles have been available in the United States since the early 1960s, too late for my parents but well before I was born.

I know that this disease still exists, and it’s been the subject of recent controversy because there’s been a recent outbreak in the American Southwest among unvaccinated people (2025), but I grew up in a community where measles vaccines were required for going to public schools. Because all of the kids I knew when I was young went to the same school with the same requirement, everybody I knew in my own generation was vaccinated, and none of us ever got measles.

I’m pointing this out because the first generation of children to read this story would have found the situation familiar, but it’s not something that happened to me or anybody else I knew as a kid. When I was a kid, I used to think of measles as an old-timey old people’s disease, one of the diseases that your characters could get in the Oregon Trail computer game that could either delay or kill your characters, but not something that I ever expected to encounter in the real, modern world. When I read books like this as a child, that was kind of how I thought about it. For me, it marked the time period of the story as “old.”

The closest equivalent from my youth was chicken pox because that was a spot-causing disease that I knew people had to be quarantined for, and it was unavoidable because there was no vaccine available in my earliest years. I did have chicken pox as a small child, which is why I have a scar on my face now, and I was isolated from other children when it became obvious that I had it. However, my younger cousins were vaccinated for chicken pox when that vaccine became available in the 1990s, so they’ve never experienced the disease that afflicted me. For the next generation, I get to be the older person who has a story about an old-timey disease because life moves on. It’s just part of the cycle of time and history. But, just as background for my mindset as a child reader, when I was a kid, I pictured measles as a kind of old-fashioned but more serious chicken pox. That’s not medically true because they’re separate diseases, but I just never saw or experienced actual measles, and that was the closest equivalent I could imagine at that age.

For younger generations, the covid pandemic of the 2020s might be what they picture when someone talks about quarantines.

The Truth About Hatty (Spoilers)

So, what is the truth about Hatty and the midnight garden? This is a time slip story, not a ghost story, although sometimes the two of those go together in books. In this case, the time slip is not based around ghosts but around memory. When Tom is seeing the garden as it was in the past, he is seeing it as it existed in Hatty’s memories. He is somewhat correct in saying that he is non-corporeal there because the garden itself is non-corporeal – it’s a memory. Hatty is still alive in Tom’s time, and Tom is able to enter the garden when she revisits it in her memories and when she remembers him.

The twist in the book (spoiler) is that Hatty is Mrs. Bartholomew, the current owner of the house and the landlady of the flats. When Tom is trying to figure out whether Hatty’s a ghost, he briefly considers asking Mrs. Bartholomew about the history of the house, but he rejects the idea because his aunt and uncle told him that Mrs. Bartholomew only moved to this house fairly recently, after the death of her husband, so Tom assumes that she has no connection with or knowledge of Hatty and her family.

I liked the part where Tom tries to do some research and figure out what time period child Hatty lives in based on the types of clothes people wear in her time. He has some difficulty finding a good source with details about the variations in clothing styles over the years. He does realize that Hatty was a child in the Victorian era, between the 1830s and the early 1900s, but he ends up guessing earlier in the Victorian era than she actually lived, which is why he thinks she’s definitely dead and a ghost instead of an elderly lady in the 1950s.

As Tom continues his time travels into the past, Hatty gradually ages because Mrs. Bartholomew is remembering different times in her life. Eventually, Tom sees Hatty fall in love with a young man she calls “Barty.” Tom is hurt because, when she falls in love with Barty, Hatty seems to forget about him and is suddenly unable to see him any more. It’s because Mrs. Bartholomew’s focus is shifting in her memories, focusing more on remembering Barty than remembering Tom. The last time when Tom tries to go back in time, the garden is suddenly not there, and he crashes into the dust bins outside. His aunt and uncle think he was walking in his sleep, and Tom is depressed that Hatty seems like she’s gone forever. He learns the truth when Mrs. Bartholomew insists that he come upstairs and apologize for waking her by knocking over the dust bins.

Mrs. Bartholomew thought for years that Tom was some kind of ghost who became harder and harder to see as she got older, probably because, as she got older and started thinking about other things, like Barty, she wasn’t concentrating so much on Tom. The night when the garden didn’t appear, Mrs. Bartholomew was dreaming about her wedding, so she wasn’t thinking about the garden. When Tom crashed into the dust bins, he called out her name, and she woke up and recognized his voice. Tom is happy that Hatty remembered him all these years, that she didn’t deliberately forget him, and that she’s not dead or a ghost. Mrs. Bartholomew tells him about what happened in her life after to marriage to John Bartholomew/Barty. Hatty and her husband moved away from the house, and they had two sons, who both later died during World War I. She and her husband continued living together for many years, until his death, when she returned to the house where she’d grown up.

The Time Traveling

So, now you know who Hatty is, but what does the clock and its thirteen chimes have to do with her memories and Tom’s time traveling? The mechanics of the time traveling in time slip stories are rarely fully explained, but the characters in this book do consider and discuss the possibilities. Part of it seems to involve the Biblical reference engraved on the clock about “Time no longer” from Rev. 10 1:6. I thought it was an interesting approach, bringing religious references into the story. When Tom tries to talk to his uncle about how time works, his uncle goes into scientific theories of time and gets annoyed with him when he tries to talk about the angel in the Bible. After talking to his aunt, Tom gets a sense that his uncle believes in a different version of “Truth”, and that makes it difficult to talk to him. Most of what his uncle says about more philosophical and scientific explanations of time goes over Tom’s head.

What Tom eventually figures out from bits and pieces of his uncle’s explanation and his own reflection about his time-traveling experiences, is that perspective matters in relation to time. He has his perspective of how time moves – he’s been traveling back to the garden every night for a few weeks during the summer. However, Hatty has her own perspective of time – Tom has appeared to her in the garden roughly every few months over a period of about ten years of her life. When Tom considers the situation from Hatty’s point of view, he decides that people’s individual experiences of time are just pieces of the much larger experience of time and history. This is the point when Tom realizes that neither he nor Hatty are ghosts, just two people whose experiences of time have crossed. When Tom enters into Hatty’s time, she perceives it as the present and him as a ghost because he’s outside of his natural time period and not fully a part of her present. Similarly, the maid appeared ghost-like to Tom at first because she had somewhat entered into Tom’s present before fading back to her present, appearing to vanish like a ghost. Time in the garden appears to jump around because Tom is entering into different sections of Hatty’s time. That’s why he sees the tree in the garden standing, then struck by lightning and fallen, and then standing again, and it’s also why he sees Hatty as being around his age, then younger, and then getting older. All of those things he sees are just sections of Hatty’s timeline that Tom experiences in isolation from each other, a different one every night.

Toward the end of the book, Tom tries to take advantage of the way time seems to stand still in his own time while he’s in the garden, so he can stay longer with Hatty. He thinks maybe he’ll stay for days or even forever, safe in the knowledge that time back home is standing still, and he can return there whenever he wants, enjoying carefree days of playing in the garden forever. However, he has not fully reckoned that time is still passing for Hatty even when it seems to pause for him while he’s in her time. Hatty has gradually grown up, and is moving forward with her life. She can’t stay a little girl, playing in the garden forever.

When Tom talks to the elderly Mrs. Bartholomew later, she observes that “nothing stands still, except in our memory.” When she was younger, she had always thought that the garden would stay the same forever, but it didn’t. She realized that when she saw the tree in the garden get struck by lightning. Everything changes, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly, but time always moves forward. The property was eventually split up by her cousin James when he was having trouble with his business and needed money. He sold off pieces of land at a time, so parts of the garden were built over by new houses. Eventually, all that was left was the main house and part of the old yard. When James decided to sell off what was left and move to another country to start over, Hatty and Barty bought the old house and some of Hatty’s favorite things, including the grandfather clock. Hatty admits to Tom that she used to intentionally misunderstand what time it was chiming on the clock and often got up extra early in the morning to go play in the garden. This is apparently the source of the clock’s weird chimes that don’t match the real hour. The clock is now connected to Hatty’s memories of the house and the garden, and Hatty’s memories are what controls what time it is in the garden when Tom makes his nightly visits.

Old Hatty was controlling the timing of Tom’s visits through her memories, although young Hatty was unaware of it. However, Tom realizes that even old Hatty wasn’t completely in control, either. Old Hatty comments that this summer, she’s thought of the garden far more than she ever had before and how much she wanted someone to play with when she was little. Tom realizes that old Hatty is describing his desires. When he first came to his aunt and uncle, he was bored and lonely and just wanted to play with someone, like he would have with his brother in their garden. It seems like Tom’s mood influenced Mrs. Bartholomew’s memories and dreams of the past, and their shared wish for friendship produced the midnight garden, so they could play there again.

In the end, Tom decides that “Time no longer” means that both the past and the present are both real and connected, not separate from each other, just as he and Hatty were always both real and connected to each other through their sharing of the same time. They were not separated by time but joined each other in it.

According to Wikipedia, the theory of how time works in this story is based on a book called An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne. When he was young during the late 19th century, Dunne had dreams that seemed to be visions of the future, seeing himself flying in a sort of airplane before airplanes had even been invented. He eventually became an airplane designer, and he also theorized about the nature of time. Dunne’s theory of time, called serialism, postulates that human beings are only conscious of traveling along a base timeline, where we experience the past, present, and future of our physical lives, but that there is also a higher level of time that can be experienced by a higher level of the mind or human spirit. Part of his theory states that, while people eventually die a physical death in the lower timeline, their spirit or consciousness lives on in the higher timeline for eternity. This is partly the conclusion Tom comes to when he starts seeing his time and Hatty’s as being part of some bigger timeline, and it’s referenced by the phrases “time no longer” and “exchanged time for eternity.”

Posted on by TracyC

Miss Bianca in the Salt Mines

Miss Bianca in the Salt Mines by Margery Sharp, illustrated by Garth Williams, 1966.

This book is part of the Rescuers series.

When this story begins, Miss Bianca, who is Perpetual Madam President of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society, is evaluating candidates for the Tybalt Stars award, which is given for mice who are brave in the face of cats. Bernard, the secretary of the society, is helping her. Each of the candidates is undeniably brave, but Miss Bianca notices that each of them also had a self-serving motive behind their bravery, which seems disappointing for a benevolent society. When they stop for lunch and Bernard goes to fetch some salt for them, he finds a note in the salt that says, “Someone please get me out of the salt mines.” The note is signed “Teddy (age 8).” Naturally, Miss Bianca is eager to help the poor boy! Bernard is a little more doubtful about the mission because the salt mines are about a thousand miles away, extremely dangerous, and extremely well guarded. Nevertheless, the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society cannot refuse to help a prisoner, and neither can its President.

Soon, Miss Bianca has members of the society trying to learn anything they can about a missing boy named Teddy, but apparently, no one has reported a boy by that name or age as missing. Bianca uses the lessons of the boy who owns her to learn more about the salt mines and how to get there. In order to get to the salt mines, they’d have to go by train, and it’s a very dangerous route. At the next meeting of the society, Miss Bianca asks for volunteers to go rescue Teddy, but everyone is reluctant to go, and many members of the society don’t like it that Miss Bianca doesn’t even seem to have any facts about Teddy or his situation that could help them. Miss Bianca says that, even though she can’t be more specific about Teddy’s background or how he came to be in the salt mines, the important fact is that he shouldn’t be there, and he needs help getting out. Since no one else wants to volunteer for the rescue mission, Miss Bianca says that she’ll go herself, and of course, Bernard insists on coming with her.

To Miss Bianca’s surprise, her biggest opponent, a curmudgeonly mouse called the Professor (his real name is George) who teaches mathematics, also volunteers to join the mission. Bernard and Miss Bianca are even more surprised when the Professor insists on bringing his friend Caerphilly along. Caerphilly is very elderly, but he’s also a professor of geology. Caerphilly has never actually been to the salt mines before, but he’s always wanted to see them and study them. Bernard and Miss Bianca aren’t sure that Caerphilly is up to handling the dangers that they’re likely to encounter on the mission. Miss Bianca reminds Caerphilly that this is supposed to be a rescue mission, not a scientific expedition. Caerphilly is unconcerned, saying that they can handle the rescue, and he’ll handle the science. Miss Bianca says that the Professor should warn his friend just what risks a rescue mission involves, but the Professor is also unconcerned, saying that the geology department at the university thinks too much of itself, and he wouldn’t mind seeing his friend chased by bloodhounds. (Some friend he is.) Miss Bianca is concerned both because of the danger and because their self-serving motives are just what she was concerned about before.

In spite of that, they decide to proceed with the mission, bringing the two professors. They take some time to make their preparations. Bernard and Bianca research the trains they’ll need to take. The Finance Committee allows them to take along the society’s Treasure – there’s only one, a single gold coin they found in a ruined building. Teddy might need this to pay for his train fare after they get him out of the mines. The Ladies’ Guild also knits mittens for the unfortunate boy because the salt mines are reportedly very cold. Miss Bianca tells the boy she lives with not to worry if he doesn’t see her for a week or so because she’s going to be writing an epic poem and needs privacy.

As they finally set out on their mission, the Professor is pessimistic, but the train journey is uneventful. When they arrive at the salt mines’ train station, it’s a very bare and gloomy building. Bernard finds a wooden door with some steps heading down.

At the bottom of the steps, they find themselves in an underground cavern filled with stalactites and stalagmites. There is also an underground lake surrounded by crusts of salt. The Professor realizes that they have entered the salt mines through a disused and forgotten entrance. In the distance, they hear the sounds of prisoners mining the salt.

It’s a long walk to the active part of the mine, but along the way, they make an important discovery – a mouse-sized city carved out of salt! Each of the buildings in the miniature town are unique and resemble famous buildings from around the world. Miss Bianca thinks that the buildings were probably carved by prisoners who made buildings to resemble the places where they used to live. It’s the perfect place for the mice to stay, though.

Bernard, inspired by this strange place, tries to write a poem for the first time in his life, which isn’t very good. Miss Bianca tries to be nice about it, but he can tell that she doesn’t like it. Bernard is upset enough to try to drown himself (that part of the story struck me as rather shocking, although it’s handled so matter-of-factly as just a product of the weird atmosphere of this place), but he can’t because he just floats in the salt water. It seems like most of the members of the expedition temporarily forget about Teddy. Only Miss Bianca isn’t affected by this strange little town because she lives in a porcelain pagoda at home that her boy gave to her, so these buildings are very much like what she already knows.

Fortunately, the expedition gets some help from some friendly bats who live in the mines. The younger bats in the group say that they’ve seen little Teddy serving the governor of the salt mines, who tends to stay apart from most of the prisoners because the prisoners have attacked him before. This is fortunate news because it means that Teddy is closer to the little salt town than they thought, and it won’t be as difficult to find him as they anticipated. He’s on an island in the middle of the lake of salt water, and that’s not too difficult to reach because Bernard has already proven that it’s easy to float in salt water.

Once they find Teddy, they also have to get him onto a train to get him away from the salt mines, which may not be as easy.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

I generally prefer the plots of the Disney movies to the original books in this series, but this was still a fun story. I was a little disappointed that they never actually used the two professors’ specialties. I thought at first that they would use the geology professor to spout some interesting and useful facts about caves or mines, but they didn’t, and there was nothing in the story where a mathematics professor would be particularly useful. It just seems like a missed opportunity there.

There were some funny moments in the story. I liked the part where one of the bats, not really seeing Bianca clearly because bats are near-sighted, comments to another that, whatever it, if it moves, you should salute it, and if it doesn’t, you should paint it. Bianca takes that as a sign that this particular bat has completed his National Service, also noting that being near-sighted isn’t a barrier for bat National Service because, if it was, no bat would be able to participate.

In a twist at the end of the story, it turns out that Teddy used to live with his uncle and that Teddy’s uncle is the tutor for the boy that Miss Bianca lives with. Once Teddy is restored to his uncle, he comes to the house with his tutor and becomes friends with Miss Bianca’s boy.

Posted on by TracyC

Sidney’s Ghost

Sidney’s Ghost by Carol Iden, illustrated by Paul Galdone, 1969.

Nine-year-old Sidney Robinson’s best friend is a girl named Megan McKenna. The two of them have many interests in common, including fishing, cars, ghost stories, and horses. Megan’s father owns a stable, and Sidney envies Megan for having her own pony. Because Megan’s father sells horses to other people, the kids are used to seeing horses come and go. When Megan’s father can’t find a buyer for a horse, he’ll try to sell it at public auction. However, if he can’t sell a horse at auction at all, he sometimes sells it to the slaughterhouse, where they use the horse parts for glue and dog food. It’s sad, but the kids accept this as part of life until Megan’s father acquires a retired police horse whose former owner died, and Sidney realizes that he can’t let this beautiful black horse suffer this terrible fate.

The horse, officially named Sergeant O’Hara but called Uncle Charley by Megan’s family is a beautiful animal with a gentle temperament. Sidney wishes that he could persuade his parents to buy the horse for him. He is easy to ride and obeys commands, and he has an excellent history of his time as a police horse.

Megan’s father isn’t completely honest as a horse seller. The book goes into some detail about how he prepares horses for sale, painting on dapples and filing their teeth down to make them seem younger than they really are. Even Sergeant O’Hara gets this treatment, although Sidney worries that it hurts the horse. (I looked it up, and it turns out that it can be beneficial to file the sharp points off of a horse’s teeth, which is called teeth floating. However, this is something that should only be done by someone who has been trained to do it because it can hurt the horse to file the teeth down too much.)

Sidney and Megan love to watch the horse auctions and pretend they’re bidding on the horses, but Sergeant O’Hara is auctioned off as planned. Megan’s brother Michael let him loose in the paddock when he was supposed to be watching him, and he got all dirty, so he isn’t fit to be shown. Then, to Sidney’s shock, Megan tells him that her father is planning to just sell Sergeant O’Hara to the slaughterhouse instead of trying again at the next auction. If Sidney and Megan are going to save poor Sergeant O’Hara’s life, they’ve got to do something, fast!

Megan tells Sidney that she’s thought of a plan to save Sergeant O’Hara. The two kids sneak out and take the horse in the middle of the night and hide him in an old barn. As they go to hide the horse, they see a shadowy figure near the barn. Megan is afraid, and Sergeant O’Hara wants to chase the figure because of his police training, but Sidney stops him.

However, even with the horse safely in the barn where hardly anybody ever goes, there is the very real worry that they’ll be caught. The horse will need exercise, so Sidney will have to go ride him at night or when they’re sure nobody else will be around. Still, they feel like they need to come up with an additional plan in case the horse is spotted. Then, Sidney takes a hint from the way Mr. McKenna painted dapples on a horse earlier and suggests that they could paint Sergeant O’Hara a different color so he won’t be recognized. Megan thinks that’s a great idea, and they decide to paint him white, like the Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver.

They get the painting supplies from Sidney’s father’s hardware store, but Sidney grabs a can of paint labeled “Super Glo – White.” It turns out that it’s not just a really bright white; it’s a glow-in-the-dark white. The kids don’t figure it out until they’ve already painted half of the horse. When Sidney sneaks out to feed and exercise Sergeant O’Hara again, he’s frightened when this big, glowing thing comes out of the darkness at him. Somehow, the horse got out of the barn and scared him by running out in the dark, glowing. Sidney realizes after a moment of panic that’s what happened. Because they only painted half of the horse before they stopped, one side of Sergeant O’Hara is glowing white, and the other is pitch black. When the horse gallops back and forth, he looks like a glowing ghost that vanishes with each turn. It’s a neat effect, but having a ghost horse certainly isn’t inconspicuous.

One night, Sidney accidentally frightens his old teacher, Miss Winthrop, when she’s walking home from visiting a friend. Soon, she spreads the story of her ghost sighting all over town. Most people think that she’s getting a touch of senility in her old age, but Mr. McKenna thinks it over and notices Sidney’s comings and goings in the area. When he goes to the old barn to investigate what Sidney’s been doing. Seeing the horse and the glow-in-the-dark paint, he realizes what happened. He appreciates that Sidney and Megan wanted to save the horse and sees the humor in their unintentional ghost act.

Since the kids feel that strongly about wanting the horse and are taking good care of him, Mr. McKenna decides to let them continue to do so, but there’s still one thing that nobody has answered: Who was that mysterious figure they saw around the barn? The answer comes when this mysterious person sets fire to the McKenna’s stables and Sergeant O’Hara has the opportunity to show his skills as a police horse.

My Reaction

When I first read this book as a kid, I was expecting it to be a mystery. It kind of is, but the mystery isn’t about the horse or about any ghost. There are hints from the very beginning of the story that there is a thief in the area, but the story doesn’t really focus on that until near the end. Sidney and Megan hear people talking about a prowler, and they do see the mysterious prowler around the barn, but they’re too busy with their plans to save the horse to pay too much attention. Fortunately, their horse and his ghostly appearance help them to catch the the thief, and the reward money for catching him straightens out a lot of problems so Sidney can keep Sergeant O’Hara.

The gimmick of the “ghostly” painted horse has stayed in my mind for years since I first read this story, but it’s not the only memorable part of the book. One of the things that I remembered best about this book from when I read it as a kid was the difference in Sidney and Megan’s homes and families. The book puts some emphasis on the difference in their family lives, and it’s shown when each of the kids has dinner at each other’s home. Megan has several siblings, and their house is always noisy and boisterous. Sidney is Sidney is a fussy eater at home, but he just eats what’s put in front of him at the McKennas’, like the other kids do. Megan gets a rap on the knuckles from her father for starting to eat before Grace is said. One line from the book that stuck with me for years was when Megan’s brother, Frank, says Grace with this joking prayer: “We thank the Lord for the next meal – we’re sure of this one.” I still think of this whenever someone says Grace aloud.

By contrast, dinner at the Robinson house is much calmer, quieter, and more formal. Sidney is an only child, and his father owns a hardware store, so the Robinsons can afford nicer things. Megan is impressed at the nice tile in the bathroom, and the table is set with embroidered placemats and matching cloth napkins. Megan accidentally bites into one of the cloves in the ham, and when it burns her mouth, she spits the bite of food into her cloth napkin, feeling terribly guilty about it because the napkin really seems too nice for that sort of thing.

I could identify with the feelings the children have about being in houses where people have different habits. There were times when I was young when I felt a little out of place because they were either more formal than I was accustomed to being or more boisterous than I feel comfortable being. People always feel more comfortable with what they’re used to.

Posted on by TracyC

Deadline at Spook Cabin

Deadline at Spook Cabin by Eugenia Miller, 1958.

Twelve-year-old Mitch Adams is a newsboy for the summer, but the bicycle that he uses to deliver his newspapers is old and frequently breaks down. He often has to stop and fix it, which means that getting anywhere and delivering his papers takes him longer than it does for the other newsboys. If he doesn’t do something about it soon, his bike might break down completely, and he won’t be able to keep his paper route.

However, the paper he works for is having a contest for the newsboys, and the prize is a new bicycle. If Mitch can win the new bike, his problems will be solved. He’s been saving some money that he could use to get a new bike, but he’s hoping that, if he wins the new bike, he can use the money to buy a special present for his mother – a piano to replace the one they had to sell because they needed money after his father died. It’s an important present because his mother now has a job playing the piano for a dance studio, and she’s been thinking that, if she had a piano of her own again, she could also give piano lessons. In order to win the newspaper contest, Mitch has to be on time with his route, not get any complaints from customers, and sign up more new subscribers this month than any of the other newsboys. Mitch has been working hard at it, and by his count, he’s tied for first place with another boy. If he can keep up the good work to the end of the week, he stands a good chance of winning.

Mitch also has ambitions of becoming a reporter some day. When one of the best reporters for the paper, Jim McCain, says he wants to talk to Mitch about something, Mitch is delighted. Jim invites Mitch to meet him at the newspaper office early the next day so he can show him how the reporters get information from the police and fire department for their stories. Mitch is excited because he’s been asking Jim about that and agrees to meet Jim the next morning.

The next day, Jim actually lets Mitch do some of the calling to the fire department himself after first coaching him about what to say. In particular, he teaches Mitch to base his questions around the “five W’s” – who, what, when, where, and why – that make up a story. Because they live in a small town, there isn’t any particularly startling news from the fire department or the police, but Jim explains that people will want to know what’s happening in the area anyway. Some people may have heard the sounds of a fire engine recently, so they’ll check the newspaper to find out where the fire was, even if it was just a little brush fire.

After Mitch is done with his work for the newspaper, he meets his friend Lyle and Lyle’s younger brother Beanie for a bike ride and a cookout. As they look for a good place to set up a camp fire, they find an abandoned cabin in the woods and decide to take a look inside. There’s not much there, and the boys think that it might be fun to fix it up like it’s their secret hideout and camp there some night. They give the old house the nickname “Spook Cabin” because Beanie thinks it’s kind of creepy. Exploring a little further, they also discover that there’s a tree house in one of the trees surrounding the cabin that’s hard to see from the ground.

Soon, some exciting news comes to Mitch’s paper after all. There was bank robbery in a nearby town. One of the robbers got away, and the police are searching for him. Police officers patrol the town, on the lookout for the fugitive.

Then, a report about a campfire that was left unattended comes from the local fire department. From the description of the campfire, Mitch knows that his friends were the ones who set it because they made it the way they said they would for sending smoke signals. However, they never would have left their fire unattended. Mitch knows that something bad must have happened, and his friends need his help!

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

My Reaction

This is a pretty short chapter book, and I thought it was pretty obvious where the missing bank robber was going to end up, but I really liked the story. The part I liked best was all of the information about how a newspaper works, or rather, how it worked in the mid-20th century. The book would have been educational for its time, and it still is, but many of the processes involved in putting together a newspaper would be done electronically now, using computers. The characters in the story are using manual typewriters, printing presses, and teletype machines. There’s a scene where Mitch asks Jim how the teletype machines work, and Jim explains that they’re “a combination telegraph and typewriter.” The machines in the story would be considered antiques or at least somewhat outdated now, but Jim’s tips for asking the right questions to write a story still apply. When I was a kid, though, my teachers usually said it as the “five W’s and an H” – to write a story or essay, you need to know who, what, when, where, why, and sometimes how something happened.

Posted on by TracyC

Somewhere in Africa

Somewhere in Africa by Ingrid Mennen and Niki Daly, illustrated by Nicolaas Maritz, 1990.

I didn’t read this book when I was a child, although it’s old enough that I could have, but I was fascinated when I found it in a Little Free Library because this is an American edition of a book that was originally from South Africa. I enjoyed the colorful painted pictures, and I think it’s a good book for explaining to American children what it would be like to be a kid in South Africa. For a child living in a city, life actually wouldn’t be too different from the lives of American children living in cities. Africa isn’t all savannas and animal safaris.

A boy named Ashraf lives in Africa. He doesn’t live in a place with lions, crocodiles, and zebras, though. He lives in a very busy city. Ashraf likes animals, and he reads about them in his favorite library book.

As Ashraf goes to the library, he sees all of the busy traffic of the city and passes by shops with fascinating things in their windows. In the market, there is a fruit seller singing about his products. Other people are selling flowers, and there are street musicians.

When Ashraf gets to the library, he checks out the same book about African animals again.

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

Posted on by TracyC

My Father’s Dragon

My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett, 1948.

This is a fantasy book where the author tells a story about her father’s adventures rescuing a dragon when he was a boy.

It all starts when the boy, Elmer Elevator, brings home an alley cat that he found. However, his mother doesn’t like the cat and doesn’t want Elmer to keep her. When he tries to feed the cat secretly, she throws the cat out and punishes Elmer. The boy and the cat take a walk in the park together, and the boy confides his wish to learn how to fly airplanes when he grows up. The cat says that he doesn’t have to wait until he grows up to learn how to fly.

The cat explains that she has traveled a great deal, and not too long ago, she visited the Wild Island, which is inhabited by wild animals. The island is divided in half by a river inhabited by crocodiles. Normally, the animals have to take the long way to get around the river to avoid being eaten by the crocodiles, but a few months before the cat visited the island, a baby dragon fell of his cloud and landed next to the river with an injured wing. The other animals on the island captured the poor baby dragon, and when his wing healed well enough for him to fly, they started forcing him to carry passengers and cargo over the river. They work the poor baby dragon too hard and mistreat him. The cat made friends with the little dragon and wanted to help him but didn’t know how because she couldn’t untie the rope that holds the dragon prisoner. The cat suggests to Elmer that the dragon would probably be happy to give him a ride if he helps to free him, and Elmer decides to do just that. Besides, he’s angry with his mother for mistreating the cat and doesn’t mind leaving home for awhile.

The cat decides that she’s too old to travel, so she stays behind, but she helps Elmer to prepare for the trip. Elmer stows away on a ship to the nearby Island of Tangerina and gets to the Wild Island by climbing over the rocks between them. When he reaches the Wild Island, he decides to look for and follow the river, but he has to be careful of the animals on the island.

Elmer is found by some tigers who say that they’re hungry and curious to know what little boys taste like. However, remembering some of the cat’s advice, he offers the tigers some chewing gum because (apparently) tigers love it. He also tells them that it’s special chewing gum that will change colors when they chew it, and then, they’ll be able to plant it in the ground to grow more chewing gum. The tigers fall for it and forget about Elmer, who sneaks away.

Elmer also has a dangerous encounter with a rhinoceros after he drinks from his “weeping pool.” The rhino wants to toss Elmer into his pool to drown him, but Elmer asks him what he has to weep about. The rhino says that he’s upset that his tusk is no longer as white and pretty as it used to be, and Elmer gives the rhino his toothbrush and toothpaste. The rhino lets Elmer go and begins using the toothbrush to clean his tusk, but by now, the boars have realized that there is someone on the island who doesn’t belong.

Elmer continues onward, helping a lion with a messy mane and a gorilla with fleas and befriending the crocodiles by offering them all lollipops, until he finally finds the dragon and rescues him. They fly away from the island together, but it’s not the end of their adventures.

There’s a reason why the author and illustrator’s names are very similar but not identical. If you read their short biographies, they explain that the illustrator was the stepmother of the author.

This book is a Newbery Honor Book, and it’s also the first in a trilogy about Elmer and the dragon and their adventures together. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Peter and the Wolf

Peter and the Wolf by Walt Disney Productions, 1974.

This is the picture book version of Disney’s cartoon from 1946 based on Peter and the Wolf, which was originally a musical symphony for children, written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 for the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow.

Young Peter lives with his grandfather near a forest in Russia. Peter’s grandfather warns him to stay away from the forest because there are hungry wolves there, but Peter thinks that he can catch a wolf himself. One day, while his grandfather is asleep, Peter sneaks out of the house to go catch a wolf.

Along the way, Peter’s friend, Sasha the bird, also warns him that there really are dangerous wolves in the woods and that he can’t hope to catch one with his toy gun. Peter insists that he’s going to try anyway, and Sasha says he’ll go along and help.

As they venture further, they are also joined by Sonia the duck. Ivan the cat tries to eat Sasha, but Peter makes him let Sasha go. Then, suddenly, a wolf appears!

The wolf chases Sonia, and at first, the others think he actually caught and ate her. They manage to catch the wolf by the tail. Sasha attracts some help from some passing hunters.

At first, the hunters want to shoot the wolf, but Peter asks them to take the wolf to the zoo instead, realizing that the wolf was just hungry. It tuns out that Sonia is safe after all, and they all take the wolf to show Peter’s grandfather.

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

Posted on by TracyC

The Lost City of Faar

Pendragon

The Lost City of Faar by D.J. MacHale, 2003.

Press and Bobby have followed Saint Dane to the territory of Cloral, a world completely covered by water and occupied by peaceful people who live in floating cities.  Of course, with Saint Dane on the loose, things aren’t going to stay peaceful for long.  An entire city of people are killed when they eat poisoned food, and it looks like Cloral’s entire food supply may be in danger. 

Saint Dane is commanding a group of pirates raiding cities for their food supplies.  Among the dead is Cloral’s last Traveler, and his successor is his son, Spader, who has no idea what the Travelers are or what kind of dangerous mission awaits him.  Spader takes his father’s dead very hard and vows revenge upon Saint Dane.  As Bobby, Press, and Loor, who Bobby introduces to Spader in order to help explain who Travelers are, acquaint Spader with his new duties as the Traveler of Cloral, they try to convince him that preserving the peace of Cloral is more important than seeking revenge.  Spader is hot tempered, and they try to teach him to use peaceful means to combat Saint Dane, who has superior strength, anyway. 

Before he died, Spader’s father left behind one clue to the solution of their problems: a reference to the lost city of Faar, apparently the last city on dry land on Cloral. According to legend, it sank many years ago, but its advanced civilization may not have been completely destroyed. Centuries ago, the water level of Cloral rose, and the people of Faar realized that their city would soon be underwater.  They built a dome to protect their city, and they have been secretly helping the people in the floating cities by tending to their underwater farms and sharing technology with them.  However, they have been afraid to openly reveal themselves to the rest of Cloral because they were worried about their culture becoming contaminated. 

When Press, Bobby, and Spader tell them that Saint Dane knows where they are and is on his way to destroy them, most of the people flee the city.  The dome is broken, and it looks as though they will be unable to retrieve the equipment that the people of Faar were going to give them to save Cloral’s food supply.  However, the one person who remained in Faar and was killed was talking about making Faar “transpire.” Bobby, wanting to fulfill the dead man’s mission, activates the machinery to make it happen.  It turns out that the people of Faar have made it possible for their city to detach from the ground and float to the surface, like the other cities of Cloral.  Faar and its people have now rejoined the rest of Cloral, and they are able to retrieve the machinery they need.  Sadly, Spader tries to chase down Saint Dane as he escapes through the flume, and Press is killed saving him.  Spader volunteers to accompany Bobby on his mission to stop Saint Dane.

Throughout the books, Bobby, like Spader, has to come to terms with the fact that his life and his entire identity are not what he has always thought they were. Other Travelers also go through the same process as they learn about what it means to be a Traveler and to accept the mission of the Travelers. All through the series, there are other revelations about the nature of the Travelers themselves and how they came to be.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy

The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy by Jane Thayer, illustrated by Lisa McCue, 1958, 1985.

A puppy named Petey tells his mother that he wants a boy for Christmas. His mother says that he might get one if he’s good, and when Petey is a good puppy, his mother tries to find one for him.

Unfortunately, Petey’s mother just can’t seem to find a boy for Petey anywhere. She suggests trying to see if any other dog is willing to part with his boy. However, no other dog wants to give up his boy.

Eventually Petey comes to an orphanage with a sign that says Home for Boys. Petey decides that if the boys have no parents, maybe they could also use a dog. It’s Christmas Eve, and most of the boys are inside are singing Christmas carols, except for one boy, sitting by himself outside.

Petey jumps into the lonely boy’s lap, and the boy loves him right away. When a lady comes to check on the boy, the boy asks if he can bring the puppy in, and she says yes.

All of the boys in the home love Petey and want to keep him. The lady says that Petey can stay if his mother lets him, and Petey knows that she will. Instead of getting just one boy for Christmas, Petey found fifty!

The story was first published in 1958, but my edition is from 1985 and has different illustrations. In the older book, the puppy looked like a beagle.

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

Posted on by TracyC

The Key to the Indian

The Key to the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks, 1998.

This is the final book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. At the end of the previous book, Omri’s father learned the secret of Omri’s special cupboard and key, that it brings small plastic figures to life.

At the beginning of this book, Omri’s father suddenly announces to his family that he wants to take them on a camping trip. It seems like an impulsive decision because this isn’t something that the family usually does, and Omri figures that it must have something to do with the secret that the father and son now share concerning their small friends from the past.

After Omri’s father discovered his secret, the two of them had a serious talk, and Omri explained to him all about his past adventures and the very real consequences that they’ve had, both in the present and in the past. They need to consider carefully what they’re going to do because Little Bear has asked them for help with some trouble that his tribe in the past is having with the British. Knowing the history of the interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, both Omri and his father know that something serious is about to happen to Little Bear and his people, but how can they help? Omri explains to his father that they have the ability to go back into the past themselves, but in order to do that, they need to find something big enough to hold both of them, and someone else would have to turn the key for them to send them and bring them back.

Omri’s father later admits to him privately that he thought up the camping trip as a way for the two of them to disappear for a couple of days without anyone asking questions. Although he proposed the camping trip, he plans to arrange for him and Omri to have a private trip by themselves, discouraging the others from going along. Omri’s father also thinks that he’s figured out what they can use to send themselves back in time – the family car. It’s big enough to hold both of them, it locks with a key, and there’s even an LB in the license plate number, which they take as a hopeful sign. But then, Omri realizes that there’s a problem with that scheme. Even though the car locks with a key, it’s not the kind of lock that an old-fashioned skeleton key could open. They need a key with a different shape, something flatter. They decide that they need the help of Jessica Charlotte, who made the last key. Fortunately, Omri has a way to talk to her because he has the plastic figure of Jessica Charlotte.

When Omri brings Jessica Charlotte back, he finds that she has attempted to drown herself in a river (an event hinted at in the last book) because of her guilt at accidentally causing her sister’s husband’s death. Omri brings back a WWII Matron who has helped them before to treat Jessica Charlotte. When Jessica Charlotte recovers, she thinks at first that she must have died and that Omri is part of her afterlife. Omri assures her that it’s not the case, that she’s still alive. She is still lamenting over having caused Matt’s death and ruined her sister and niece’s lives, but Omri explains to her that he’s Lottie’s grandson. Jessica Charlotte feels better, hearing that Lottie grew up, married, and had children, so her life wasn’t completely ruined. Omri can’t bring himself to explain how Lottie was killed in a bombing during WWII, but he asks for her help to create a new key. Aunt Jessie, as she asks to be called, agrees to help Omri, and he and his father give her their car key to duplicate.

However, when Aunt Jessie returns with the key, they realize that they’ve miscalculated. When a person comes from the past with anything they make or bring with them, it’s always small, like the miniature people themselves. Aunt Jessie’s key is a duplicate of the key they gave her, but it’s small, too small to use in the car. Omri and his father aren’t sure how to get around this problem, so they decide to go on the camping trip with Omri’s brother Gillon, just camping like normal, while they think it over.

It turns out that something magic happened to the car key while it was in the past with Aunt Jessie. When Omri’s father turns the key in the car, Omri suddenly finds himself in the past, but not the past he was hoping to visit. Because they brought some things that belonged to his Great-Grandfather Matt with them on the camping trip, Omri suddenly finds himself in India, during the time that Matt was living there. Omri is inside a puppet in a marketplace, and his great-grandfather buys him. Also, to Omri’s shock, Gillon is also inside a puppet that his grandfather has.

Their mother eventually rescues them by opening the car and turning the key. She was alarmed because it seemed like her husband and sons all passed out in the car. Omri and his father don’t have a real explanation for her, not wanting to explain that the car key is now magic. (She decides that there must have been an exhaust leak, and they were all overcome by fumes.) Gillon was knocked unconscious when his puppet was dropped on its head, and his mother takes him to the hospital, using her spare car key. (When Gillon recovers, he thinks it was just a weird dream he had because of the car fumes.) Meanwhile, Omri and his father talk about the situation, and Omri’s father reveals that, while the boys were taken to India, he ended up in Little Bear’s time because he was carrying some wampum belonging to Little Bear.

So, know they know that it’s possible for them to use their car key to go back in time, but if they try it a second time, who will turn the key for them to bring them back at the appropriate time? The only other person who can come with them on their “camping trip” who knows their secret and can be trusted to help them is Omri’s friend, Patrick. However, Patrick isn’t happy that he’s only there to help Omri and his father go back in time and that he won’t be going himself. He does agree to help them, but unfortunately, he has plans of his own while Omri and his father are occupied elsewhere.

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

My Reaction:

Although Omri’s father wonders at first whether it’s a good idea to try to help Little Bear because of the risk of changing the past and affecting the future, Omri has learned that it’s not quite as simple as that. During his previous adventures, he has felt an irresistible pull to use the cupboard and the key, even when he wasn’t always sure it was a good idea, and there are indications that Omri’s interactions with people in other time periods seem fated to happen. He did save Jessica Charlotte’s life when she tried to drown herself, and other things Omri has done seem to fit with wider events.

When Omri and his father are figuring out how to help Little Bear with his problems with the British in his time, they do some research about Little Bear’s time and talk about the ways that 18th century British people treated Native Americans. Knowing what Little Bear is likely to face, they feel like they have a responsibility to help him as best they can. When Little Bear explains in more detail what his people have been suffering at the hands of the British and other settlers, Omri feels guilty, knowing that he’s also British, while at the same time knowing that he was not responsible for things that happened before he was born. This is something that people still struggle with today, hearing about difficult periods of history and knowing that their ancestors (or at least other members of their society, if not literally their direct ancestors) played a role in making life difficult for others, setting up situations where real people suffered or were killed. The best Omri can do is to help Little Bear make the best possible decisions to ensure the survival of his people. Of course, being able to help with that much is part of the time traveling fantasy of this story. Real people can’t actually go back in time and intervene to influence others and change the course of history.

The books in this series aren’t for young children, and as the series progresses, they get more serious in subject matter. There is discussion of suicide, not just with Jessica Charlotte’s attempt to drown herself but when Little Bear explains that his first wife killed herself after being raped by white men. There is violence in the story when the Native American village is attacked and people are shot. Overall, the story is pretty straight-forward in the way in confronts the dark sides of history. Omri and his father advise Little Bear to take his clan to a place where they know that they will be relatively safe and among other Iroquois, but they know and admit to Little Bear that even that won’t solve all of their problems and that there will be other hardships in the future. It’s an imperfect solution to a massive problem, but Omri senses that it is best choice that they could make and that Little Bear and his family will live the safest possible life because of the decision they made, and their descendants will survive.

Omri and his father struggle with knowing that things are going to be hard for Little Bear’s people no matter what choices they make. There is no magical solution to everyone’s problems in the story, and the book doesn’t offer a firm moral or solution to Omri’s guilty feelings when he sees firsthand how badly Native Americans were treated (a form of “white guilt“, although the book doesn’t use that term). Overall, I would say that the book confronts the dark parts of history and human guilt on a very individual level. Omri and his father can’t solve the large issues completely because they can’t control them. They can’t control the past, and they can’t control other people, not even the people who come through the cupboard as miniature ones, like living toys. Everyone is an individual with their own choices to make, and every choice, even the wrong ones, changes the course of history.

After Omri saves Jessica Charlotte’s life, she realizes that what she thought was a dream before she stole her sister’s earrings was real, that she saw and spoke to Omri, and that he could have warned her about what would happen if she went through with her theft, how Matt would have died and how everyone’s lives would be changed for the worse. However, Omri did choose not to warn her because not everything was changed for the worse. After Lottie’s father died and her family lost their money, Lottie still grew up, fell in love, got married, and had a daughter. It’s true that she did die young in World War II, while her daughter was still an infant, and changing the theft of the earrings might have changed that in some way, but not without changing other things. Omri has discovered that changing things about the past, even seemingly small things, can change larger parts of history, and his psychic gift seems to guide him toward making only choices that help the flow of history instead of working against it. If he had prevented the theft of the earrings, his great-grandfather might have lived longer and so might Lottie, but if that happened, would Lottie have ever met the man she eventually married and had Omri’s mother? Omri’s father wouldn’t be happy without his wife and sons, and if Omri never existed, would some of the other things he did that impacted history have happened? Also, if Lottie hadn’t died in the bombing during WWII, would someone else have been where she happened to be and died in her place? The bomb that killed her would have fallen anyway because that was part of someone else’s choices, a person who never enters this story and whose decisions can’t be controlled. Time and history and the ripple effects caused by individual choices are complex. Omri has his psychic gift to guide him, and even his father, who admits that he never used to believe anything he couldn’t see for himself, comes to trust it.

People without this sort of magical gift have only themselves to rely on to make the best choices they can to make the world as good as possible, even in the face of others’ bad decisions. I think that a large part of the choices that Omri makes in the story and dealing with “white guilt” in real life come down to the combination of frustration and the acceptance of choices made by other people who can’t be controlled. Modern people might hate what happened in the past and feel badly if people related to them were part of it, but we don’t have the option to change things that have already happened. There comes a point where you have to accept the knowledge that you can’t control others, no matter how much you might want to make better choices on their behalf. The only person you can control is yourself.

I’m a white person, descended from colonial settlers in America, and I don’t actually see “white guilt” as a negative thing. I see it as a human thing. If you can feel real emotion at someone else’s plight, a wish that bad things didn’t really happen, or a feeling that what happened shouldn’t have happened and an honest desire to change even the unchangeable past for the better, it means that you’re a real, thinking, feeling human being with a sense of right and wrong, and there’s nothing bad about that at all. Feelings are just tools, to give us hints of what we need to do or how we need to behave in our lives. Feelings aren’t always completely accurate, but sometimes, they give us hints of things that need to be fixed or clues that whatever we did before didn’t really work, that we made the wrong choice or did the wrong thing. I think what upsets and confuses other white people about “white guilt” is the conflict between loving ancestors and wanting to be proud of them and admitting that some of them had a real dark side and did some pretty awful things. Some people have trouble dealing with that, thinking that it’s impossible to feel two things at once, loving someone and being angry with them for things that they’ve done, but it really is possible. Two things can be true at once, and you can have mixed feelings about many things.

Feelings are complex, as complex as people are, and I think it’s as possible for a person to both like and hate another person for the things they’ve done as it is to both like a sweater for the way it looks but not want to wear it because it’s itchy and uncomfortable. I think that’s about the best advice that I can actually offer to other white people trying to make sense of that feeling. Sure, that sweater looks pretty impressive. It has a nice color and a cheerful pattern, and you might think it would look impressive on you if you wore it, but honestly, it’s better if you just leave it on the mannequin. It’s overpriced, out of style, and won’t look at all impressive when it makes you constantly want to scratch all of the places where it itches. Let it go.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”

The Serenity Prayer

The frustrating thing about feelings about the past and about other people’s lives is that we can’t fix those particular things. In real life, we can’t go back in time, and we can’t even “fix” other people in our own time because that’s something they have to do themselves, if they’re going to do it. You can suggest things to other people, but there’s always a point where they have to make the decisions themselves. But, the good news is that, if you can’t control other people, nobody can completely control you! The way I see it, the most useful thing about this “white guilt” is remembering that this is something we don’t want. Maybe there’s something charming about the rosy, nostalgic view of the past, but honestly, you wouldn’t be happy living there, and if you actually had to live with your ancestors, you’d probably discover that you wouldn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things and maybe wouldn’t even get along at all. So, why would you want to try to carry their old baggage with you into your life and spend your life and your precious time constantly trying to explain or excuse their bad choices? You’ve got your own to life.

Give credit where credit is due for both the good and the bad things, and let our ancestors’ records speak for themselves. You won’t accomplish anything for twisting your feelings into knots for trying to protect the feelings of the dead and justify their actions. They don’t even feel anything anymore. They are dead. Let them rest. We don’t want to add to bad things that have been done in the past and to keep having things in our lives to feel guilty about, and that’s okay because there are new choices to be made every single day. Put your focus there. You have a present to live and a future to plan. Knowing about the past is interesting and informative, but the past isn’t where we really live. Admire it like a nice sweater on a mannequin, take note of the price tag, and move on. We don’t have to make the same old choices that have made people, including ourselves, unhappy just because that’s the way things have been before or because we feel like we have something to prove about our ancestors. They had their chance to make the choices in their time, for good or bad (and frequently, some of each, but you can’t help that), and now, it’s our turn to make the choices because this is our time.

Speaking of bad decisions, Patrick almost gets Boone and Ruby killed because of his recklessness when he brings them back while Omri and his father were with Little Bear, which he did just because he was bored and felt left out of their magical adventure, which wasn’t really pleasant and fun for them anyway. Boone and Ruby both make it clear how they feel about that, and Omri also makes it clear that this is the end of the magic for him and Patrick. Boone and Little Bear have their own lives to live, and Omri’s gift tells him that it’s time to let them get on with living their lives without interference. Omri still has the cupboard and the key, but he no longer feels the pull he felt before to use them because he has played his part in history and in the lives of his little friends, and there is nothing more he needs to do. He doesn’t feel the need to lock these things away as he did before because he already knows that he will never feel the urge to use them again. When something’s over and the moment has passed, you just know.

Before the end of the story, Omri’s mother admits to him that she knows all about the little figures and that the cupboard brought them to life, although she never actually saw any of them herself. She has also inherited the family gift and is aware of what the cupboard does, even though she has not used it herself. All along, she’s been pretending that she didn’t know what was going on, although she really did. She’s a little sorry that she didn’t see the little people herself, but she knew that not interfering was the right thing to do. She thinks that letting the magic go and not using the cupboard again are the right decisions, and she doesn’t want Omri or his father to tell Omri’s bothers about the magic because, if they do, it will never end, and it’s really time for it to all end. This really is the final book in the series.