The year is 1842, and Maria Merryweather is on her way to her family’s ancestral home, Moonacre Manor. Thirteen-year-old Maria is an orphan. Her mother died when she was a baby, and now, her father has died. Their house in London had to be sold to pay his debts, and now, Maria is going to live with a distant cousin, Sir Benjamin Merryweather, in the country. She is traveling with her nurse, Miss Heliotrope, who has taken care of her since she was little and is like a mother to her, and her dog, Wiggins. Maria and her father were never really close. Maria isn’t sure that she’s going to like living in the country because she is accustomed to city life and the luxuries that come with it. She fears that life in the country will be rough and full of deprivation.
Maria begins to feel better when she actually sees Moonacre. It’s a lovely, romantic, castle-like manor house. The manor also gives her an odd feeling of home because so many Merryweathers have lived there for so long. Sir Benjamin welcomes her, and she likes him immediately. Oddly, Sir Benjamin refers to has as “one of the silver Merryweathers”, saying that she was born during a full moon. It’s true that Maria has unusual silvery gray eyes. Sir Benjamin says that he’s a “sun Merryweather”, born at midday, but that’s okay because moon Merryweathers and sun Merryweathers get along well. He does have a rather warm, sunny appearance.
Sir Benjamin shows them around the manor and to their rooms. The furnishings are a little shabby, but they’re quite comfortable, and they like their new rooms. Maria is charmed because her room is in a turret, and it has a very small door that’s really only big enough for a small girl like her to get in. Miss Heliotrope is worried that she won’t be able to get into Maria’s room if she is ill and needs her, but Maria is sure that isn’t going to be a problem. She loves the room because it just seems so perfect for her. Wiggins even seems to be getting along with Sir Benjamin’s big, old dog, Wrolf, although Maria has some doubts that Wrolf is actually a dog because he doesn’t look like any dog she’s ever seen before.
At dinner that evening, Sir Benjamin talks about giving Maria riding lessons, saying that he has a little gray pony who would be just right for her. Maria mentions a beautiful white horse that she saw from the carriage as they were approaching the manor, but Miss Heliotrope didn’t see it and thinks she just imagined it. Miss Heliotrope thinks that Maria imagines things all the time, like the little boy named Robin, who had a feather in his cap and was a childhood playmate, but Maria insists that the boy really did exist and so does the little white horse. Thinking about Robin makes her wish that he was here to keep her company at Moonacre, but she hasn’t seen him for a couple of years and doesn’t know where he is.
There are a few odd things that Maria and Miss Heliotrope notice about Moonacre, though. Aside from the odd dog, Wrolf, Sir Benjamin seems oddly evasive about who and where the servants are. They never see them, yet someone has been doing the cooking and cleaning and making fires in the fireplaces. There’s even a fire in Maria’s room, but she can’t figure out how anyone got in to make one since the door is too small for even an adult Miss Heliotrope’s size.
The next day, a riding habit appears in Maria’s room. It’s very nice quality, even though Maria can tell that it’s second-hand because it’s an older style and a little worn and has the initials LM on it. Maria like it, but who used to own it, and who put it in her room? In the parlor attached to her room, Maria also sees an old painting that contains a white horse and an animal that looks something like Wrolf, although she’s still not quite sure what kind of animal it is. (What’s that “brave-looking” animal that has a tawny mane and a tuft on its tail? I’m sure if we think about it, it will come to us.)
Sir Benjamin tells Maria that she shouldn’t wander the countryside alone, but she is free to explore as long as she’s with her pony Periwinkle or Wrolf. The one place he doesn’t want her to go is Merryweather Bay because there are rough fishermen there. He refers to Maria as a “princess” and the area around Moonacre as her “kingdom,” and from the way he says it, it seems that he somehow means that literally. Even the local people seem to have some kind of awe and respect for her.
Maria finds the nearby village of Silverydew charming. The Old Parson introduces her to the children of the village, and they tell her about the mysterious “Black Men” (because they all wear black, not their race) who hang out in the woods and by Merryweather Bay. They set traps for animals and steal livestock from the locals, and everyone is afraid of them.
Maria also discovers that Robin is here in the village of Silverydew, and he rescues her from an encounter with the Black Men. Robin tells her that her ancestor, Sir Wrolf, who founded the Merryweather family, was the one responsible for making the Black Men as evil as they are, and because of that, his soul has been unable to enter Paradise. Locals say that his spirit rides around nearby Paradise Hill, weeping because of what he did, and he will continue to do it until someone finds a way of solving the problem he caused.
Maria asks what exactly Sir Wrolf did, and Old Parson tells her the story of Sir Wrolf and how he acquired the lands around Moonacre. At first, Sir Wrolf just owned the land where the manor house sits, but he wasn’t satisfied with that. Although he was known for being brave and jovial, he was also a greedy and selfish person who thought that he was entitled to take anything he wanted from anyone. First, he kicked the monks out of the monastery on Paradise Hill and used the monastery for a hunting lodge. A fierce lightning storm made him abandon it later because he believed that it was sent by the monks as punishment. Then, he decided that he wanted the woods and bay around Moonacre for hunting and fishing, but they belonged to another nobleman called Black William. He tried various ways to take those lands from Black William, including direct warfare, but he was unsuccessful. Then, it occurred to him that Black William had a lovely daughter, his only child, and if he married her, he would share in her inheritance. Sir Wrolf put on a show of apologizing to Black William and demonstrating that he had mended his ways so he could win the affection of Black William’s daughter. The daughter, who was called the Moon Princess because she was as fair and lovely as the moon, believed that Sir Wrolf was sincere and married him. Sir Wrolf did end up falling in love with his bride, and they had a child together, but the lands he expected to acquire through her were still on his mind. Then, Black William suddenly remarried, and his new wife gave birth to a son, who replaced the Moon Princess as the heir to Black William’s lands. Sir Wrolf was outraged by this reversal of fortune, and while he ranted about it, he let slip how he had married his wife in the hopes of getting her lands. The Moon Princess was shocked and hurt, and although her husband insisted that he had come to love her even though he had married her for selfish reasons, she no longer believed him. She grew to hate him for his deception and even turned against the son they had together. She wanted no part of Sir Wrolf’s life anymore. Then, worse still, word reached them that Black William had mysteriously disappeared and his young son was dead. Although there were no indications of foul play, and it was possible that neither of them had really died at all, the Moon Princess came to believe that her husband was a murderer. One day, she rode away on the little white horse that her husband had given her when they married, and she was also never seen or heard from again. With Black William and his son and daughter gone, Sir Wrolf finally had possession of the lands he had coveted for so long, but he was no longer happy. He genuinely missed his wife and felt guilty for what he had done, and he couldn’t enjoy his prize.
The Old Parson explains that the sins of the past still affect the present and will continue to do so until someone makes them right again. The Black Men who now inhabit the disputed lands are probably the descendants of Black William’s supposedly dead son. The Old Parson believes that the boy’s mother probably feared what Sir Wrolf might do to the boy when his father left them, so she pretended that he was dead already. Every generation of Merryweathers since then have tried to push the Black Men out of the disputed lands, but they’ve never been successful. Also, every generation, a young woman very much like the Moon Princess comes to Moonacre, and she gets along well with the sun-like Merryweathers, but so far, a quarrel has always separated them. Maria worries about that because she likes her cousin Sir Benjamin and doesn’t want to leave Moonacre. Old Parson tells her that part of the legend of Moonacre is that, some day, there will be a Moon Princess who will come and will not leave. The legend states that she will right the wrongs of the past and make peace again, but only if she can get over the prideful nature that all Moon Princesses have and love a poor man who is below her station. The townspeople are in awe of Maria because they hope that she will turn out to be that Moon Princess.
Maria adopts the mission of righting past wrongs, reconciling old quarrels, and bringing peace to the valley once again, but she’ll have to be careful. Not everyone is ready for peace yet, and she has to guard against falling into the same bad habits that others have before her. Before she can complete her destiny, she must speak directly to the Black Men in their castle and when she does, they make a bargain with her. They agreed to end their poaching and thievery if she can prove that Black William wasn’t murdered by Sir Wrolf and if she will restore not only their lands but the pearl necklace that belonged to the original Moon Princess. However, that necklace has been missing since the first Moon Princess disappeared. How can Maria give them something that she doesn’t have and doesn’t know how to find?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Chinese). There is also a movie version of the story called The Secret of Moonacre.
My Reaction and Spoilers
I didn’t read this book as a kid, but it’s one that I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I saw the movie version years ago, and I was curious about what the book was like. The movie and the book set up a somewhat different situation for the quarrel between the two families. In the movie, the quarrel was about the fabulous pearls owned by the first Moon Princess and not about land. Also, Loveday and Robin were members of Black William’s family in the movie, which they weren’t in the book, changing the dynamics of their relationships with Sir Benjamin and Maria.
This story is an enchanting light fantasy. The setting by itself is magical, and Maria’s rooms in the manor are like every little girl’s dream! The story also includes odd, seemingly intelligent animals with unusual capabilities, such as the Zachariah the cat, who takes messages for people and lets them into the manor house or guides them around, and Wrolf, who is clearly a lion, even though everyone calls him a dog. The fact that Wrolf is a lion dawns on Maria toward the end of the book, and Robin confirms that’s true, saying that they all keep calling him a dog because it sounds less scary, and they don’t want to alarm anyone.
Maria’s family history is not something to be proud of, as Old Parson points out. Her ancestors were not the greatest people, in spite of their land-ownership and high status. People are looking to Maria to be better than the others who came before her and to make past wrongs right.
From Robin’s mother, Loveday Minette, who also becomes like a mother to her, Maria learns a little more about what it means to be one of the Merryweather “Moon Princesses.” Gradually, it is revealed that Loveday was the last Moon Princess before Maria. She was in love with Sir Benjamin, and the two of them were going to be married, but like all Moon Princesses and Merryweather men, they had a stupid quarrel and parted. Loveday married someone else and had Robin, but even though she has remained near Moonacre and secretly helps the household, she has been careful not to see Sir Benjamin ever since. Over the years, she has come to realize that she made a terrible mistake with Sir Benjamin and regrets it, but like other Moon Princesses, she has too much pride to admit that she was wrong and apologize. She is more mature now, and she sees that, in some ways, she was aggravating to Sir Benjamin and provoked him, and having provoked him to anger, because Moon Princesses tend to love men with tempers (one of the curses of the Merryweather men), was too proud to make up with him. By the same token, Sir Benjamin was legitimately disrespectful of her and her feelings, and when he attempted an apology, it was a half-hearted effort that attempted to preserve his pride more than demonstrate care for Loveday’s feelings, which is why Loveday didn’t feel like she could accept it.
Members of the Merryweather family and the people they marry have a tendency to attach enormous importance to and emotional investment in small things (geraniums, the color pink, etc. – they either passionately love these things or are violently or oppressively against them), and then they blow up at each other when their partner doesn’t feel exactly the same way about them, taking it as personal insult if someone likes something they don’t like or doesn’t like something they do like. (Like in the Internet meme, “Stop liking what I don’t like!”) They don’t know how to tolerate interests they don’t share, not sweat the small stuff, or live and let live. I would say that a lot of it has to do with poor relationship skills and, ultimately, a lack of respect for other people, even the people they love. They don’t respect each well enough to find out why the other person cares so much about something that seems small and annoying. They are self-absorbed in their own feelings, seeing situations only from their own point of view and putting their own feelings first. They see every conflict as some kind of contest about who’s right, with the drive to win against each other, which puts them both in a position of being on opposite teams instead, where one of them has to get the better of the other in some way, instead of on the same winning team. The result is that neither of them ever really wins, and even if one of them defeats the other in something, they ultimately end up losing their whole relationship, so it’s a net loss for everybody.
This is the cycle that has repeated for generations in this family. Loveday realizes that, for this destructive cycle to end, the Moon Princess has to learn not to provoke the one she loves as well as overcome her sense of pride. Also the Moon Princess’s love (it’s pretty clear to everyone that it’s going to be Robin, in this case) has to learn to control his temper, not respond to things as if they were some kind of personal attack, and consider the well-being of others, especially his princess. Both of them need to learn caring and consideration for others and how to put aside pride and self-interest for the sake of peace, both in their personal relationship with each other and for the sake of the wider community. Loveday emphasizes to both Maria and Robin that they must not quarrel with each other. People are depending on them to put things right in the area, and their own future happiness depends on learning to get along with each other.
The things Loveday and other adults emphasize for the children are personal skills that real people do need to learn in order to have relationships with other people and be mature members of a peaceful, stable community:
Don’t aggravate people. You can’t have peace if you’re always teasing or provoking people, and picking fights.
Choose your fights carefully, and wherever possible, avoid turning small disagreements into big fights. Remember that any battle comes with a cost, and the costs of petty fighting are higher than the rewards.
Be considerate of other people’s feelings and respectful of their property. You don’t have the right to do what you want with other people’s property just because you want it or it bothers you that they have it.
Understand that nobody is perfect, including you.
It is not your partner’s responsibility to please you in every way or give you everything that you want. It is your responsibility to deal with your own emotions and control your own choices and behavior.
Sometimes, you really are in the wrong, and you can’t always have everything you want. Accept both of these facts with maturity and take responsibility for your choices.
Being wrong can be embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing or destructive as not dealing with situations that need attention or problems that need to be solved.
The problems you cause affect more than just you, and problems do not go away when they are ignored.
Whatever the circumstances, no matter who or what you’re dealing with, it’s never just about you.
The word “responsible” has two meanings. The first is being at fault. (Sir Wrolf was responsible for the situation in the valley and the problems it caused.) The second just means taking charge of a situation and doing what needs to be done, sometimes because you’re the only one who can or is willing to do it. (Maria didn’t cause the problems, but she was responsible because she fixed the problems.) The second type of “responsible” is necessary for successful relationships, no matter who the first type applies to.
Love requires understanding and accepting each other and allowing each other to be their own person with their own likes and dislikes.
Caring means making each other a priority, working as a team, and doing what’s best for the team, even if it requires some compromise and self-sacrifice.
Building a shared life or solving shared problems is team effort, not a competition with each other. There is no “winning” unless it’s a shared victory. Otherwise, everyone loses.
It’s not exactly a spell, but the children’s mission is based around learning to function as a couple and to control their tempers and personal behavior. Magical things do start to happen when they learn to consider others’ feelings and not just their own.
There does seem to be some magic in the story. Robin later explains to Maria that the reason why nobody else could see him playing with her in London when they were younger is because he was always in or around Silverydew or Moonacre. He says that he traveled to London to play with her when he was asleep, so he wasn’t physically there. It’s like a form of astral projection or out-of-body experience. Also, like Sir Benjamin’s “dog” turns out to be a lion, the “little white horse” turns out to be a unicorn.
I couldn’t help but notice that all of the known Moon Princesses since the first one and the men that they seem to love before before they quarrel with them seem to be cousins of each other. Loveday Minette and Sir Benjamin were cousins of each other because their fathers were brothers, and Maria and Robin are more distant cousins of each other because their grandfathers were brothers. The idea of marrying a cousin or even loving them romantically seems odd for modern times, but that did happen in noble families in the past, so it might not seem so odd for the characters and others in the story.
This book also taught me what a mangel-wurzel is. They just mention it in passing, like readers should know what it is. It has such a strange name that I had to look it up. It’s a kind of beet, and apparently, it has also been used to make “punkies” or jack o’lanterns in areas where people didn’t grow turnips, before people adopted pumpkins for the purpose. Just an odd bit of trivia.
The Hidden Treasure of Glaston by Eleanore M. Jewett, 1946.
The
year is 1171. Twelve-year-old Hugh, a
somewhat frail boy with a lame leg, arrives at the abbey of Glastonbury with
his father on a stormy night. Hugh’s
father is a knight, and in his conversation with Abbot Robert on their arrival,
he makes it known that, although he loves his son, he is disappointed in the
boy’s frail condition because he can never be a fighter, like a knight’s son
should be. The abbot rebukes him, saying
that there is more to life than war and that he, himself, is also of noble
blood. The knight apologizes, and says
that, although it is not really the life that he would wish for his son, he asks
that the abbey take him in and educate him.
Although the knight (who refuses to give his name, only his son’s first
name) says that he cannot explain his circumstances, the abbot senses that the
knight is in trouble and is fleeing the area, perhaps the country of England
entirely.
It is
true that the knight is in trouble, and he is fleeing. Since Hugh’s health is delicate, his father
cannot take him along in his flight.
Realizing that the abbey will provide him with a safer life, Hugh’s
father wants to see him settled there before he leaves and gives the abbey a
handsome gift of expensive, well-crafted books as payment for his son’s
education. The abbot is thrilled by the
gift, although he says that they would have accepted Hugh even without it. Then, the knight leaves, and the monks begin
helping Hugh to get settled in the abbey.
Hugh is upset at his father’s leaving and the upheaval to the life he has always known, although he knows that it is for the best because of his family’s circumstances. Although the story doesn’t explicitly say it at first, Hugh’s father is one of the knights who killed Thomas Becket, believing that by doing so, they were following the king’s wishes. Hugh’s father did not actually kill Beckett himself, but he did help to hold back the crowd that tried to save Beckett while others struck the blows, so he shares in the guilt of the group. Although Hugh loves his father, he knows that his father is an impulsive hothead. Now, because of the murder, Hugh’s father is a hunted man. By extension, every member of his household is also considered a criminal. Their family home was burned by an angry mob, their supporters have fled, and there is no way that Hugh’s father can stay in England. However, the prospect of life at the abbey, even under these bleak circumstances, has some appeal for Hugh.
Hugh has felt his father’s disappointment in him for a long time because his leg has been bad since he was small, and he was never able to participate in the rough training in the martial arts that a knight should have. Even though part of Hugh wishes that he could be tough and strong and become the prestigious and admired knight that his father wishes he could be, deep down, Hugh knows that it isn’t really his nature and that his damaged leg would make it impossible. Hugh really prefers the reading lessons he had with his mother’s clerk before his mother died. His father always scorned book learning because he thought that it was unmanly, something only for weak people, and Hugh’s weakness troubles him. Hugh’s father thinks that the real business of men is war, fighting, and being tough. However, at the abbey, there are plenty of men who spend their lives loving books, reading, art, music, and peace, and no one looks on them scornfully. For the first time in Hugh’s life, he has the chance to live as he really wants to, doing something that he loves where the weakness of his bad leg won’t interfere.
The abbot is pleased that Hugh has been taught to read and arranges for him to be trained as a scribe under the supervision of Brother John. Hugh enjoys his training, although parts are a little dull and repetitive. Hugh confides something of his troubles in Brother John, who listens to the boy with patience and understanding. Although he does not initially know what Hugh’s father has done, Hugh tells his about the burning of his family’s home, how they struggled to save the books that they have now gifted to the abbey, and how there were more in their library that they were unable to save. Hugh tells Brother John how much he hates the people who burned their home and how much he hates the king, who caused the whole problem in the first place. His father would never have done what he did if the king hadn’t said what he said about Thomas Becket, leading his knights to believe that they were obeying an order from their king. Brother John warns Hugh not to say too much about hating the king because that is too close to treason and tells him that, even though he has justification for hating those who destroyed his home, he will not find comfort in harboring hate in his heart. He also says that not all that Hugh has lost is gone forever. People who have left Hugh’s life, like his father, may return, and there are also many other people and things to love in the world that will fill Hugh’s life. Brother John urges Hugh to forget the past and enjoy what he has now. When Hugh says how he loves books but also wishes that he was able to go adventuring, Brother John says that adventures have a way of finding people, even when they do not go looking for them.
One
day, when Brother John sends Hugh out to fish for eels, Hugh meets another boy
who also belongs to the abbey, Dickon.
Dickon is an oblate. He is the
son of a poor man who gave him to the abbey when he was still an infant because
he was spared from the plague and wanted to give thanks to God for it. Dickon really wishes that he could go
adventuring, like Hugh sometimes wishes, although he doesn’t really mind life
at the abbey. Because Dickon is not good
at reading or singing, he helps with the animals on the abbey’s farm. Although he is sometimes treated strictly and
punished physically, he also has a fair amount of freedom on the farm,
sometimes sneaking off to go hunting or fishing. He also goes hunting for holy relics. Dickon tells Hugh about the saints who have
lived or stayed at the abbey and how the place is now known for miracles. He is sure that the miracles of Glaston will
help heal Hugh’s leg, and he offers to take him hunting for holy relics. Hugh wants to be friends with Dickon, but at
first, Dickon is offended that Hugh will not tell him what his last name
is. Dickon soon realizes the reason for
Hugh’s secrecy when a servant from Hugh’s home, Jacques, comes to the abbey to
seek sanctuary from an angry mob that knows of his association with Hugh’s
father.
The abbot
grants Jacques temporary sanctuary but tells him that he should leave the country
soon. When Dickon witnesses Jacques’s
explanation of why the mob was after him, comes to understand his connection to
Hugh. Although the mob does not know
that Hugh is actually connected to Jacques, Dickon spots the connection and
tells Hugh that he forgives his earlier secrecy. Dickon even helps Jacques to leave the abbey
the next day, in secret.
Now
that Dickon knows Hugh’s secret, he lets Hugh in on his secrets and the secrets
of the abbey itself. He shows Hugh a
secret tunnel that he has discovered.
There is an underground chamber between the abbey and the sea where more
parchments and some other precious objects are hidden. Dickon doesn’t know the significance of all
of the objects, although there appear to be holy relics among them. Dickon’s theory was that monks in the past
created this room and tunnel to store their most precious treasures and get
them away to safety in case the abbey was attacked and raided. At some point, part of the tunnel must have
collapsed, blocking the part of the tunnel leading to the abbey. The boys are frightened away when they hear
the ringing of a bell and can’t tell where it’s coming from. Could there have been someone in a part of
the tunnel that is now blocked off from the part where they entered?
Since Hugh is sworn to secrecy concerning Dickon’s discovery, he can’t ask Brother John about it directly, but he gets the chance to learn a little more when Brother John asks him to help clean some old parchments so they can reuse them. Most of them are just old accounting sheets for the abbey that they no longer need. Brother John said that they were stored in an old room under the abbey. Hugh asks Brother John about the room and whether there are other such storage rooms underground. Brother John says that there are rumors about a hidden chamber somewhere between the abbey and the sea where they used to store important objects for safety, but as far as he knows, no living person knows where it is or even if it still exists. Hugh asks Brother John about treasures, but as far as Brother John is concerned, the real treasures of the abbey are spiritual. However, when Hugh notices some strange writing on one of the parchment pieces that doesn’t look like accounting reports and calls it to Brother John’s attention, Brother John becomes very excited and orders him to stop cleaning the parchments so that he can check for more of the same writing. Among the other scrap parchments, they have found pieces that refer to Joseph of Arimathea, who provided the tomb for Jesus after his crucifixion. According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea also took possession of the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, which was supposed to have special powers, and that he left the Middle East and brought the Holy Grail to Glaston, where it still remains hidden. This story is connected to the legends of King Arthur, who also supposedly sought the Holy Grail. The parchments may contain clues to the truth of the story and where the Holy Grail may be hidden.
This story combines history and legend as Hugh and Dickon unravel the mysteries of Glastonbury and change their lives and destinies forever. Although Hugh and Dickon both talk about how exciting it would be to travel and go on adventures, between them, Hugh is the one whose father would most want and expect his son to follow him on adventures and Dickon is the one who is promised to the abbey. However, Hugh loves the life of the abbey and serious study, and Dickon is a healthy boy who is often restless. Their friendship and shared adventures at the abbey help both Dickon and Hugh to realize more about who they are, the kind of men they want to be, and where they belong. Wherever their lives lead them from this point, they will always be brothers.
There are notes in the back of the book about the historical basis for the story. In the book, the monks find the tomb of King Arthur and Guinevere. Although the story in the book is fictional, the real life monks of Glastonbury also claimed to find the tomb of King Arthur. The bones they claimed to find were lost when the abbey was destroyed later on the orders of Henry VIII, but this documentary (link repaired 2-27-23) explains more about the legends and history of King Arthur. The part about Glastonbury is near the end.
The story of Alice in Wonderland is over 150 years old, and the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, is now 150 years old, as of 2021. These books have been reprinted in many different languages and editions. The edition that I’m using for this review is actually a combined edition of the two from 1960 with added notes by Martin Gardner. (Although I used a cover image from a different edition above.) I like editions with added notes because there is quite a lot to explain about both Lewis Carroll and his stories.
I explained a lot of Lewis Carroll’s background and some of the controversies surrounding his life in my review of Alice in Wonderland. One important point about the Alice stories is that they are full of puzzles, riddles, word games, in-jokes, and parodies of poems that were popular in the author’s time. Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician and scholar at Oxford, and he liked to play with logic puzzles and word games. Sometimes he would hide people’s names within poems or parts of the story by rearranging the letters of their names or using them as the beginning of lines in a poem, as an acrostic. There is an acrostic poem which is dedicated to Alice Liddell, the real girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. This poem is printed as part of some editions of Through the Looking Glass, including the one that I’m using. The acrostic poem also references Row, Row, Row Your Boat, which is apparently older although its origins aren’t completely certain. If you read down the beginning letters of the poem, you find out that Alice’s middle name was Pleasance.
The chess game in Through the Looking Glass is meant to be part of an actual chess game with real moves that can be mapped out on a board. The game and the moves in the story are explained in the preface of my copy of the book. Alice begins as a white pawn in the game, but when she reaches the other side of the board, she becomes a queen, which is part of the rules of chess – pawns that successfully reach the opponent’s side may be exchanged for other pieces. The colors of the chess pieces in Alice’s game are red and white instead of black and white because red and white are old traditional colors. Although black and white are common today, many different color combinations have been used, and the red and white combination dates back to the Middle Ages.
The story begins on the day before Guy Fawkes’ Night. (Alice has been watching the bonfire preparations out the window.) Alice is trying to wind some yarn, and her pet cat Dinah’s little black kitten keeps playing with it. Alice chastises the kitten, and then begins talking to the kitten about the way it was watching her play chess earlier in the day. Alice likes to play games of pretend, and she starts to pretend that the kitten is the red queen from the chess game. The kitten doesn’t cooperate in posing like the chess queen, so Alice holds it up to a looking-glass.
As they look in the mirror, Alice gets the idea of a “Looking-glass House” – a house on the other side of the mirror that can be reached by stepping through it. Alice starts to imagine what it would be like to enter the world on the other side of the mirror. She gets up on the mantle over the fireplace and steps through the mirror into the looking-glass house to see what is there.
Things in the looking-glass house are very strange. The clock and the pictures seem to be alive, and so are the chess pieces. Alice helps the pieces back onto their table after they’ve been knocked off, but they don’t seem to understand what has happened and are alarmed. Alice then picks up a book on the table near the chess board and reads the poem Jabberwocky, which is about the defeat of a horrible monster. The poem is written in backwards writing, and Alice has to hold it up to a mirror to read it. The poem is a nonsense poem that contains many made-up words, which are explained later on in the story.
Alice decides to see what is outside the house. She discovers that the flowers can talk to her, but they are rude and insulting. Then, Alice encounters the Red Queen, who has grown taller than she was in the house. (The flowers say that it’s because of all the fresh air outside.) The Red Queen is both commanding and contradictory, but she gives Alice directions to other “squares”, addressing her as a chess pawn.
Pawns get to move two squares on their first turn, so Alice gets to go by train. In the train carriage, Alice meets many strange characters, including a gentleman dressed in white, a Goat, a Beetle, and a Gnat, who keeps whispering in her ear and suggesting that she make jokes based on puns. Through the Gnat, Alice meets other strange insects, like the snap-dragon-fly, the rocking-horse-fly, and the bread-and-butterfly. The Gnat tells Alice that the creatures in the woods don’t have names, and when Alice goes through the woods, she temporarily forgets her name, getting it back again on the other side.
Soon after, Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (Lewis Carroll didn’t invent these characters. They are nursery rhyme characters.) They ask Alice if she likes poetry, and they tell her the tale of The Walrus and the Carpenter. (This is one of the most-quoted poems in the Alice stories – many people remember the part where they “talk of many things” – “Shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.”) At the end, Alice can’t decide which of the two characters she likes the best because both are sneaky and eat the oysters that trusted them, so she decides that she doesn’t like either of them. (Yeah, I can think of others stories where I’ve felt the same way.) Alice hears a strange sound, and they tell her that it’s the Red King snoring and that the Red King is actually dreaming about her right now. Tweedledum and Tweedledee insist that Alice isn’t a real person, only part of the Red King’s dream, and that she’d disappear if he were to wake up, which upsets Alice. Alice starts to cry, which she thinks is proof that she’s real, but they claim that those aren’t real tears. Finally, Alice decides that they’re just talking nonsense and that there’s no point in crying over it. Tweedledum and Tweedledee want to have a battle (as in their poem), but a large crow interrupts them and frightens them away by producing a great wind.
Alice catches hold of a shawl that was being blown away by the wind and returns it to its owner, the White Queen. The White Queen speaks very strangely, and she says that it’s an effect of living backwards. Because she lives backwards, her memory works both ways, and she can remember things that haven’t happened yet. The White Queen screams with pain before she pricks her finger, so she doesn’t have to do it again after her finger is hurt. Alice cries when she talks about how lonely she is in the woods, and the White Queen distracts her by telling her to consider things because no one can think of two things at once (which is true). The White Queen talks about considering and believing impossible things (sometimes she believes “six impossible things before breakfast” – one of the most famous lines that is often quoted from this story).
As Alice asks the White Queen if her finger is better, she suddenly and inexplicably finds herself in a shop and talking to a sheep, who asks her what she wants to buy. Alice tries to look around, and the Sheep asks her if she’s a child or a teetotum (a kind of spinning top used in old games, sometimes by itself and sometimes as a replacement for dice or a spinner – dreidels are a kind of teetotum) because of the way she’s turning around. The Sheep is knitting and keeps picking up more needles to knit with. For awhile, the shop disappears, and Alice finds herself in a boat with the Sheep, but then the shop returns, and the Sheep asks her again what she wants to buy.
Alice decides to buy an egg, and the egg that she buys turns into Humpty Dumpty when she approaches it. Humpty Dumpty is a bit rude and insults Alice’s name because he doesn’t think it means anything. Alice mistakes Humpty Dumpty’s cravat for a belt because he’s egg-shaped and doesn’t have a true neck for wearing a tie. Humpty Dumpty reveals that the cravat was an un-birthday (a concept that Lewis Carroll invented) present from the White King and Queen. All through the conversation, Humpty Dumpty uses words in unusual yet strangely nit-picky ways, making words mean only what he wants them to mean in the moment. Because he’s so particular about the meanings of words, Alice asks Humpty Dumpty about all the strange words in the Jabberwocky poem, and he explains what the made-up words mean. Humpty Dumpty recites another poem for Alice that doesn’t seem to have a true ending and then abruptly dismisses her.
As Alice leaves, she meets the king with all of his horses and men (from the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme) and is introduced to one of his messengers. Alice is amused by the name and description of the messenger and starts playing a game of “I Love My Love” out loud with the messenger’s name. (The two messengers are called Haigha and Hatta and are shown looking like the March Hare and Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland in the illustrations.) The messenger informs the king that the lion and the unicorn are fighting for the crown again (another nursery rhyme reference). The king says that it’s all a joke because the crown is his and neither one of them is going to get it no matter which of them wins the fight.
The unicorn is amazed to meet Alice because he never knew that children were real before. As at the end of the rhyme, they are given plum cake, and they hand the dish to Alice for her to cut the cake. However, Alice finds that she can’t cut it, so they ask her to hand the cake around first and then cut it afterward, which surprisingly works.
After the others are drummed out of town, also as part of the rhyme, the Red Knight attempts to capture Alice, but the White Knight shows up to save her. The White Knight tells Alice all about his inventions, none of which make any sense, and sings her a song which apparently has several names and is set to the tune of a song Alice recognizes as “I give thee all, I can no more” (which is another name and the first line of the song which is really titled My Heart and Lute, which is part of the on-going joke about the song’s real name).
Then, Alice reaches the final square of the board and becomes a queen, finding a crown suddenly on her head. The Red Queen and the White Queen appear suddenly, and the Red Queen tells her that she must pass an examination before she can truly become a queen. The queens ask her a series of questions that are supposed to be math questions but are actually a combination of riddles and nonsense. Their general knowledge questions are a combination of nonsense and puns. Eventually, the Red Queen and White Queen both fall asleep to a parody of “Rock-a-bye Baby.”
Alice finds herself in front of a door labelled “Queen Alice,” but the old frog who comes to the door doesn’t seem to want to let her in. Alice enters anyway and sits next to the Red Queen and White Queen. They introduce her to the food being served at the feast, but they don’t actually allow her to have any because it isn’t polite to cut and serve something you’ve been introduced to, and the plum cake verbally protests when Alice tries to serve it anyway.
The White Queen tells Alice a riddle in poem form about fish. The riddle is never answered, but everyone drinks to Alice’s health. The Red Queen tells Alice that she should make a speech, and as she gets up, many strange things begin happening in the room. Alice thinks that the Red Queen is responsible and grabs hold of her, threatening to “shake her into a kitten.” Alice suddenly wakes up, holding her little black kitten.
Like in Alice in Wonderland, everything that Alice experienced was a dream. However, the end of the book poses the question of whether the dream was Alice’s or the Red King’s. The question is never answered; it’s just something to make the readers think. That’s actually what I like most about the Alice stories, that they are partly meant to make the reader think. The stories are somewhat disjointed and constantly changing, kind of like dreams do, but I appreciate all the references and parodies in the stories.
Charlotte Mary Makepeace is a new student at a boarding school in England. The school is big and confusing, and there are so many new people to meet that she immediately feels overwhelmed. Starting life at a new school can be intimidating for anyone, but things are about to get particularly strange for Charlotte.
An older girl, Sarah, helps Charlotte to find her room and choose a bed, recommending a bed by the window. Charlotte is a little puzzled at why Sarah singled her out and helped her, and the other girls are jealous that she got to the room first and got first choice of the beds. Still, Charlotte is grateful. She is exhausted, and she feels like she isn’t herself. When she wakes up in the morning, she really isn’t herself.
The room where Charlotte sleeps is called the “Cedar” room, and when she first enters the room, the name puzzles her because there are no cedars nearby. However, when Charlotte wakes up in the morning, there is suddenly a large cedar outside the window. The tree did not grow during the night. In Charlotte’s time, the cedar is gone, but Charlotte is now back in the past, when the cedar was still there. Things in the room are arranged differently, although Charlotte’s bed is still in the same place, and instead of seeing her roommates, Charlotte finds herself alone with a girl she has never seen before, who calls her “Clare.”
Charlotte is very confused. Earlier, she was feeling like she wasn’t herself, and now she has the sense that maybe she has really become someone else. Charlotte doesn’t notice any differences about herself in the mirror, but the other girl doesn’t seem to notice that she’s not Clare, whoever Clare is. The girl just keeps talking to Charlotte as if they already know each other. The other girl’s name is Emily, and it turns out that she is Clare’s younger sister. Charlotte finds herself feeling toward Emily the way that she feels toward her own sister, Emma.
Charlotte is forced to go through the rest of the day, her first at boarding school, as Clare. People keep talking about “the war,” and Charlotte doesn’t know what war they mean at first. When she went to bed, it was the 1960s. At the end of a very confusing day, she returns to bed in the Cedar room, where she finds a diary with the name “Clare Mary Moby” written on it and the date, September 14, 1918. The diary really makes Charlotte realize that she has spent the entire day in the past, and she further realizes that the war everyone was talking about is World War I. However, there is nothing else for Charlotte to do but go to bed. When she wakes up in the morning, she is once again Charlotte. Emily is gone, and Charlotte is back in her own time with her regular roommates. However, it quickly becomes clear that this was not just a dream, and this strange incident repeats itself each day, after Charlotte sleeps in the same bed.
Whenever Charlotte shifts to take Clare’s place in the past, she loses a day in her own time, which helps to convince her that she is not dreaming when she is Clare. Every other day, Charlotte switches places and times with Clare, and she sees the school as it was in the past, toward the end of World War I. Apparently, Clare is living Charlotte’s life whenever Charlotte is living hers, and nobody around them seems to have noticed the switch. Charlotte has no idea why this is happening, other than the fact that she and Clare happen to be sleeping in the same bed, in the same room.
Charlotte
is fascinated by her trips to the past, but they are disorienting. She now has two sets of names to learn, the
people in the past and the people in the present. There are different school rules in the past,
too, and she was still getting used to the rules in her own time. Charlotte and Clare also need to do some of
each other’s homework for classes, and there are some things they can’t
do. Charlotte can’t write an essay about
Clare’s holidays because she has no idea what Clare did on her school holidays,
and Clare is very bad at arithmetic, giving Charlotte bad grades.
The next time she makes the switch, Charlotte learns that Clare and Emily do not usually sleep in the Cedar room. Because of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, girls have been shifted around as the sick ones are quarantined. Meanwhile, in the 1960s, Clare has created a new diary in an exercise book with Charlotte’s name on it. In the book, Clare has written a letter to Charlotte about their situation. She asks Charlotte to look after Emily when they’re together and to write messages back to her. Clare doesn’t think they should tell Emily about what’s happening. Clare worries that Emily will be confused and frightened.
However, Emily soon discovers the truth, and Charlotte comes to rely on her as the only person in the past who knows who she really is. Emily notices differences between the way Charlotte behaves and the way that Clare behaves, but they are uncanny in their resemblance and behavior in other ways. In many ways, Emily is bolder than both Charlotte and Clare, although her boldness is often to the point of being brash or callous. She is sometimes impatient with Charlotte and Clare’s softer natures, but their apparent softness is due to their greater sense of life’s consequences and their sense of responsibility for Emily. Emily finds talk of the war and bombings exciting, but Charlotte and Clare are both aware of the dangerous reality. As Emily gets to know Charlotte, she points out the ways that she and Clare are similar yet different, and she says that the more time Charlotte spends in 1918, the more like Clare she is becoming. Charlotte worries about the resemblance between her and Clare and how natural it is becoming for her to act like Clare.
In the present, Charlotte is initiated into the usual pranks of a British boarding school by her new roommates, and in the past, she sees soldiers in World War I uniforms. In 1918, students whisper about whether a classmate with a German father could actually be a German spy, and Charlotte is introduced to air-raid alarms. In the 1960s, Charlotte’s roommates wonder about her funny moods, her odd need to be alone, and her reluctance to be friends and join them in activities. In both time periods, Charlotte is constantly afraid of giving everything away by saying something that would be out of character for the person she’s supposed to be or asking questions that she should already be able to answer if she were living every day in one time period. The one element that seems constant throughout these shifts is the bed that she and Clare share in the Cedar room. However, Clare and Emily will soon be sent to board with a family in town, only returning to the school as day pupils. When the Cedar room is turned into another quarantine room for the sick, Charlotte is trapped in the past as Clare, and she worries that she may never return home again. What will happen to her, and will she lose her identity as Charlotte, becoming Clare forever?
This book is a modern classic in children’s literature! I decided that I had to read it because so many people have nostalgic memories of this book and have written positive reviews about it. The Cure even did a song and music video inspired by the book. The song even contains words from the book in the lyrics. This is the original music video that goes with the song. (It’s also on YouTube.)
The book is the third book in the The Aviary Hall trilogy. It is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The other two books in the trilogy are also available on Internet Archive, but Charlotte Sometimes is often regarded as the best of the three and is the best known.
Note: Strangely, this book has three different ending, depending on the edition of the book. Older editions (the original and printings from the 1970s) contain the full text, and newer editions are cropped in two different places. The copies on Internet Archive are different editions and have different endings. This one contains the full text of the original. This one and this one have the endings that include Emily’s letter but not the final scene with Charlotte going home from school. The others don’t have the part with Emily’s letter at all. In order to learn the difference between these endings and the significance of Emily’s letter, you’ll have to read the part of my review that includes spoilers.
Further Thoughts
I was amused by the part where Emily laughs at the name Charlotte because she thinks that it’s kind of old-fashioned in 1918, yet Charlotte is from the future. Names often go in cycles of popularity, and certain classic names have comebacks at regular periods. Right now, in the early 21st century, the names Charlotte, Emma, Emily, and Clare (or Claire) are all pretty popular. In fact, Charlotte has seen a recent resurgence in popularity in the United States. Modern children reading this would actually find many of the names very familiar, thanks to a trend of reviving vintage and classic names. In fact, some of the 1918 names are more popular these days than some of the 1960s names, like Janet and Susannah. Don’t worry, they’ll have their turn again.
I also liked the part where Charlotte tries to consider whether she and Clare really look alike. Emily is a little vague about whether Charlotte and Clare really resemble each other, saying that she might have just seen “Clare” in her because Clare was who she expected to see and that she never really looked at her properly until she realized that she was actually Charlotte. Charlotte thinks about a time where she tried to draw herself by studying her own features in a mirror, but the longer she stared at herself, the more disconnected that she felt from the features she was seeing. This is actually a real phenomenon, and I’ve read other books where people have mentioned it. You can get some odd feelings by staring at yourself in a mirror for too long. I’ve tried it myself, and it can get a little eerie, especially if you look yourself right in the eyes and try not to blink. The longer you look, the more eerie it gets. That’s how that old sleepover trick, Bloody Mary, works. This is sometimes called the “strange-face illusion.” Although Charlotte is having a kind of identity crisis from switching places with Clare, this mirror phenomenon is something that anyone can experience.
Further Note: At the time that I first published this review, January 1, 2020, I hadn’t yet heard of the coronavirus, and I had no way of knowing that there was going to be an outbreak that would eventually turn into a pandemic. Now, in February 2020, I’d like to point out some things to anybody who is as creeped out as I am about this disease. (I had the images of the influenza in this story in my mind when I first started hearing about the coronavirus outbreak, and it didn’t do a lot for my peace of mind.)
Coronavirus and the 1918 influenza have some similarities and differences. Normal seasonal influenza has a death rate of approximately 0.1%. The influenza epidemic of 1918, colloquially called “Spanish Flu“, had a death rate of approximately 2.5%, and it was frightening because many of its victims had been young and apparently healthy before infection, and they died fairly quickly after becoming ill, in a matter of days. (I have more information about that down below.) It spread remarkably fast because of the mass movements of people between countries due to World War I and soldiers returning home toward the end of the war, to the point where it’s never been firmly established exactly where the virus originated.
The coronavirus (as of February 2020, estimates may change later) has a death rate of approximately 2.3%, and most of those deaths have been people who are very old and/or had underlying health problems. It’s bad, but oddly, also somewhat hopeful because, unlike the 1918 influenza, where it wasn’t always obvious who was the most as risk, we can tell ahead of time with the coronavirus who is most at risk, which is helpful for protecting people who are the most vulnerable. We know where the coronavirus started, and although it has spread to countries around the world, public health officials have been taking steps to quarantine people who have contracted the disease or who have been to regions with known infections. It has spread, but perhaps not as rapidly as the Spanish Flu because the 1918 public health officials didn’t understand what they were dealing with at first and didn’t take the steps that we are taking now. If there was any good side to the 1918 influenza epidemic, it was probably that it taught us a few things about how to handle pandemics, including what not to do when one is occurring. The two viruses aren’t precisely the same, but being aware of what we have learned from past experience may help us to stop the situation from becoming worse than it might be otherwise. I know that what is happening and what is probably about to happen is not going to be good because this is just not a good situation, and that can’t be helped, but what can be helped is how we respond to it and make use of what we already know. This current situation is not going to last, but what we do while the situation still exists is going to determine how well we come out of it.
This is not a good time for international travel, and if you can avoid traveling until this crisis is over, I would recommend doing that. If you are in a safe place, I recommend staying there until the crisis passes, and wherever you are, follow the instructions you are given by your public health officials. Before this is over, you may actually get the coronavirus. (I might, too, and I know that as I type this. I live in Arizona, and we’ve only had a few cases so far, but that’s so far.) Health officials are working on a vaccine, but that takes time, and it may not be widely available until next year. However, if you are not in one of the at-risk groups, you will likely survive the experience if you get it, and if you do what your health officials tell you to do, you can help yourself to recover from the disease and avoid spreading it to others. If you think you may be in one of the at-risk groups, follow the instructions that your doctor gives you and seek help (by telephone first) if you think that you may be ill. Try not to be too afraid because, although I know this all sounds scary, one of the first steps to handling difficult situations is believing that it is possible to handle them and taking the steps you know how to take. Take care of yourselves, and consider others as much as possible, too.
Further update: I am now fully vaccinated as of May 2021! I got the reaction that a lot of people got from the Pfizer vaccine; I felt like I had the flu for about a day after getting the second shot. But, after that, I was fine, and I recommend it to other people (provided that you aren’t allergic to anything in the shots – that seems to be the one real caveat to getting them). If you’re a conspiracy theorist, I have not experienced any weird mind control, and I don’t feel any different than I did before. I’m still reading and reviewing children’s books, making various random craft projects, listening to the same YouTube videos, and getting irritated with people I think are jerks, so my version of normal is still basically what it was before. I wouldn’t say that the pandemic is completely over yet because many people are still getting sick and haven’t had their shots, but having more people vaccinated is a good sign. My home state ended up being hit pretty hard during the worst of it, and we have seen some improvement since then because more people are being vaccinated. With vaccinations now open to people age 12 and over, I’m hopeful that there will be more improvement by the end of summer.
Themes and Spoilers
There is a lot more that I’d like to discuss about this book, but I wanted to save this discussion for the end because discussing this story and my opinion of it in depth reveals some major spoilers.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
First, I love stories with historical background! When I was in school, my teachers didn’t cover World War I and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in detail. My high school history teacher, for example, was a major Civil War buff, and she spent so much time going over the major battles of the American Civil War and making us watch Gone with the Wind (which I had already seen and didn’t like because I never liked the character of Scarlett O’Hara) that she kind of rushed through the early 20th century with us, charging onward to World War II. If she said anything about the Influenza Pandemic, it wasn’t much, and it didn’t make much of an impression. In fact, I think that the first time I ever heard about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (although I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of it) was through fiction, even though one of my own family members died in that pandemic. However, this was an important, worldwide event that came right at the end of the First World War, and it was shocking because the people who were frequently hit the hardest by the disease were people who were normally young and strong, the people who would usually have been the ones most likely to survive under normal circumstances.
No one knows precisely where and how the pandemic began, although people have attempted to go back through the records and isolate the first cases. This is more difficult than it sounds because the earliest cases of the influenza were lighter, not fatal, and people didn’t think that much about them at first. Also, because of World War I, the mass movement of people across countries due to the war, and the masses of troops returning from the front, the disease was spread farther and faster than it might have been otherwise. Charlotte Sometimes shows some of that real-life pattern. Early in the story, when Charlotte first begins switching places with Clare, a member of the school’s faculty in the past talks about how Clare and Emily were shifted from their old room to the Cedar room because they needed a room for the sick children at the school. At this point in the story, people don’t seem to be panicking about the illness because this was the first phase of the epidemic, when people were getting the earlier, less serious form of the disease, but it’s foreshadowing later events. At one point, Charlotte in the past is blocked from entering the Cedar room and returning to her own time because the disease has spread further through the school and the Cedar Room is also turned into a sick room.
This is a major spoiler, but after Charlotte finally returns home to her own time to stay, she learns that Clare is not alive in her time because she also became ill with influenza, the more deadly form, and she died not long after the end of the war and the end of their time-traveling adventures. At the time of her death, Clare was about thirteen years old and apparently healthy otherwise, which is in keeping with the way this particular illness affected many of its victims. There were a couple of factors which made younger people more vulnerable:
Unprepared immune systems and the body’s overreaction – Young people may have had less exposure to less serious forms of the same disease from earlier years that would have primed their immune systems to respond appropriately when they encountered this influenza. The human body has certain natural defenses against diseases, like the way it can raise a fever to kill off invading germs with higher temperatures, but sometimes, a disease can strike so hard that the body overreacts to fight it (the technical name for this reaction is “cytokine storm“), causing more damage to itself. Sometimes, this can even happen to the point where the body’s own defenses damage the body itself so much that the person dies or develops a secondary problem, such as pneumonia, that could potentially lead to their death. This is an important factor to consider when evaluating why this form of influenza tended to kill otherwise healthy young people – their immune systems were the strongest and also less primed than older adults, so they were the most likely to overreact. This is where modern vaccines can help, providing the priming the body’s immunity system needs to properly cope with serious diseases it has never seen before.
Secondary infections – The people who died of the influenza tended to die of the pneumonia that set in as a secondary infection in their damaged lungs, possibly partly as a result of the body’s overreaction. This was before the development of antibiotics like penicillin, which we use to treat such infections now. This is also where vaccines come in handy because people who can avoid getting sick also avoid developing secondary problems from the illness. Unfortunately, there was no vaccine available in 1918. It wasn’t even obvious to the medical professionals of the time what they were really dealing with, and they lacked medicines that could have helped because they were developed later.
This is basically what happened to Clare, an otherwise healthy teenager, when she caught the influenza. Clare, of course, is a fictional character, but her life and fate were based on real people of the time. This was part of what made the pandemic so scary. People of the time noticed that even people who otherwise seemed young, strong, and healthy were dying of this disease, and it was happening fast. If you read grown-up Emily’s letter to Charlotte in the longer endings to the book, Clare died in a matter of a few days after becoming ill. (This still sometimes happens, but in this particular epidemic, it was happening on a massive scale.) It was happening all over the world, in small towns as well as big cities, and there was nowhere anyone could go to escape it.
Because of the shocking spread of the disease and the tragic youth of many of its victims, the event has found its way into fiction, even children’s literature. Before it was depicted on the television show, Downton Abbey, it was named as Edward Cullen‘s impending cause of death if he hadn’t been turned into a vampire in the Twilight young adult series (he was also a teenager, although older), and it was also described in one of the books of the Sarah, Plain and Tall series, set in the American Midwest. (None of the main characters die in that story, although Anna becomes a nurse and the others fear for her safety, and they witness the burial of a baby who died from the disease, as one of my grandmother’s younger brothers did in real life.)
I added a note above, discussing some of the ways the coronavirus and the 1918 influenza were similar and different. What I’ve described regarding the 1918 influenza’s effects on younger people does not seem to be the case with the current coronavirus (as of February 2020). There may be exceptions, just like more typical seasonal forms of influenza occasionally become serious even in cases of normally healthy young people (I’m not an expert, so I can’t say what the chances of that are, it seems that an overreaction of the immune system is still a primary concern with the coronavirus), but the pattern for the coronavirus so far is that it is most dangerous to the very old and those with underlying health problems. In this situation, we can do a lot to help them by protecting those we already know are most vulnerable.
World War I (or, The Great War)
There are many other historical nuggets in this book besides the influenza epidemic. As I mentioned before, Charlotte learns about life in British boarding schools in the past, finding the discipline harder and the food not as good (possibly due to war rationing).
Some of her 1918 classmates are suspicious of another classmate, Elsie, whose father is German, and they talk about how their parents think that Germans living in England should be interned in camps to isolate them from the rest of the population because some of them might be spies. Emily asks what kind of information a schoolgirl like Elsie could possibly find to pass on to harm the war effort, and one of the other girls says that if one of them comments about a letter they’ve received from their father, saying that he is with the troops in France, Elsie could pass that to her parents, and they could pass it along to Germany. Emily says that’s silly because everyone knows that there are British troops in various places in France, and even Charlotte knows that all British mail is read and censored during this time. In other words, nobody could say anything specific enough in a letter to their children that would be a risk if little Elsie happened to hear about it. Elsie is also plainly uncomfortable with the other girls’ suspicions. Modern adults would see Elsie for what she is: a little girl, very much like the others, born and raised in England, with little personal connection to the country where her father was born. She’s been caught up in the circumstances of the wider world against her will, suddenly finding herself labeled as an outsider in the only home she’s ever known. As a child, there’s not a lot that Elsie can do about this situation, and one wonders if the adults would do anything to help if they knew about it. This was the level of wartime paranoia, and the children were getting it from their parents. It’s difficult for children to learn to behave calmly and reasonably when the adults in their lives are not doing so themselves.
The war is always present in the lives of the 1918 children. Charlotte is also forced to take part in an air-raid alarm at school. When she and Emily board with the Chisel Brown family, they talk about Arthur, their son who was killed in the war, and at one point, they hold a seance to try to contact him. This is also based on real life. There was a rise in spiritualism and spiritualist practices because of the war, just like there was after the American Civil War. When society has been through something traumatic and lost loved ones, they sometimes turn to practices like this for comfort and the hope of reaching out to the people they’ve lost. When Charlotte and Emily witness the seance, they hear Clare’s voice calling to Emily. The girls are not able to communicate with Clare further than that, and there’s no real explanation for why this happened. It’s before Clare dies in her time, and we never hear from Clare’s perspective at any point in the book.
The family, especially Mr. Chisel Brown, have bitter feelings about the war because of Arthur’s death. The bitter feelings are reflected in the way they speak. At one point in the story, Mr. Chisel Brown says, “Damned peace-talk, damned conchies (conscientious objectors – people who refused to fight for moral reasons), hun-lovers (German sympathizers). Should all be hanged, I say.” This is about the strongest language in the book. The girls’ bedroom at the Chisel Brown house has a rather horrifying anti-German poster in it called “Mark of the German Beast,” and when Mr. Chisel Brown thinks that the girls aren’t behaving themselves, he says that they have “hunnish manners,” using references to Germans as derogatory terms.
Different Editions, Different Endings
Charlotte Sometimes, 1970s Cover This edition of the book has the full ending.
Another reason to explain about the fate of the characters is so I can explain how different editions of this book are different from each other. There are three possible endings to the book, depending on which edition you have. In all versions, the reader learns that Emily is Sarah’s mother, and that is the reason why Sarah singled out Charlotte and guided her to that particular bed at the beginning of the book, because her mother asked her to be nice to Charlotte and to help her, knowing what was going to happen with Charlotte and Clare.
Some of the more modern printings of the story omit sections at the end of the book that were part of the original story in which Charlotte hears from the adult Emily in modern times and where Charlotte heads home for Christmas at the end of the term. Even books that say they are unabridged (including the one that I have from Vintage Classics) sometimes include the letter and package from Emily but omit the part where Charlotte goes home on the bus with the other children, for some reason. I’ve seen all three ending formats, and each time one of these sections is cropped off the end of the book, it changes the tone of the ending and some of the subtle meaning of the story.
In books without the letter from Emily or the bus ride home, the ones with the shortest ending, the story ends with Charlotte finding Clare’s old diary hidden in the bedpost of their bed with her last message to Clare and no reply, and the book simply ends. It’s just kind of a sad reflection that Clare is now gone, and the adventures are over. Charlotte is just left with the memory of what happened with no further reflection on what’s it’s going to mean for her life in the future. I find this ending rather stark and unfulfilling, and I don’t know why this was done to the book.
In the first section of the book that is sometimes omitted, Emily writes a letter to Charlotte and sends her some toys that they were given as children in 1918: a bag of marbles, a solitaire board (the board game played with marbles as pieces), and some toy soldiers. Charlotte puts the marbles in a glass of water on her dresser (like Emily once did in the past because the marbles look bigger and shinier in water), the first personal touch that she’s given to her place in the dorm because she’s really only spent about half her time there, and she reflects on how her experiences as Clare have become part of her personal identity. She compares her experiences as Clare and the impact that it has had on her to the country’s experiences of the war and how it has changed life for all of them, far after the events were over. World War I changed the world and will remain part of history, just as Clare is now a part of Charlotte’s personal history. I thought it nicely summed up Charlotte’s feelings about how aspects of Clare have become part of her own personality, although there is one further point to be made about Charlotte’s future.
In the final section of the book, which is omitted the most often and is apparently only found in the oldest editions of the book, pre-1980s, Charlotte takes the bus home from school at the end of term after getting the letter and package from Emily. Charlotte is looking forward to Christmas, and she and other children chant a variation of the “No more pencils, no more books” rhyme. (Their variant doesn’t actually use that phrase, although it has the same format.) Charlotte reflects that the countryside doesn’t really look any different in modern times than it did in 1918 and remembers that this is Sarah’s last term at school, so she may never see her (and, consequently, may never hear from Emily) again. The ending that ends just after Charlotte receives the letter from Emily and displays the marbles leaves Charlotte considering how Clare and her experiences in 1918 will always be a part of her, but the bus ride ends with her feeling more comfortable that she is truly Charlotte again, even after these experiences, and will be heading back to her family and her life in the present day. She is changed, but she is now sure of who she is, without her earlier quandaries about her own identity.
Each time a little piece is left off the end of the story, it changes the tone of the ending, but I like the full ending that includes the bus ride the best because, while Clare and the past will always be a part of Charlotte, Charlotte has regained her sense of identity as herself. She is a changed person because of her experiences, but she is still her own person, and her life is going to continue in the present, not stuck in the past. I also think that the part with Emily’s letter is important for settling unanswered questions for both Charlotte and the reader about what happened after the time travel ended and Clare died. In older Emily’s letter to Charlotte, she says that she knows that Charlotte is the worrying type, like Clare was, and she wants her to know that there is no reason to worry about her or her younger self because of Clare’s death. Emily reassures Charlotte that, although she was upset at Clare’s death, her life has turned out well. After Clare died, Emily continued attending the school, staying with her aunt on school holidays. Her father rejoined her and her aunt later when he was finally discharged from the army. When she grew up, Emily got married and had four children, even though she had said as a child that she didn’t want children at all. Emily also tells Charlotte that she has decided to keep the doll among the toys they were given for herself because it reminds her of another that her family used to own, which is another change in her attitude. When she was a child, she pointedly preferred the toy soldiers to the doll.
I like the versions that included the letter from Emily because, otherwise, her story seems incomplete. I also liked the idea that Emily got married and had children even after saying that she wouldn’t. When she was young, Emily didn’t like the idea of having children because of the way she and Clare were bounced around to different homes and schools after the death of their mother. Young Emily didn’t think it was fair to have children and then die, leaving them alone and at the mercy of other people, but as adult, we can suppose that Emily came to realize that dying isn’t the expectation of most parents. Her mother’s death wasn’t something that her mother could have anticipated any more than Clare’s was, and people can’t live their lives based solely on what might happen. Presumably, Emily eventually met and fell in love with a nice, stable man who helped to convince her that they could manage to raise a family together. Emily doesn’t describe her husband to Charlotte in her letter or go into detail about what he’s like, but she says that attitudes change as people grow up and her life has been generally happy. Life often takes people in directions that they never predicted when they were young. Some people who want to get married and have children never do, for one reason or another (there is a teacher at the school whose fiance was killed in WWI in 1918, and she is still unmarried in the 1960s, having devoted her life to teaching), and some who never thought that they would do anyway. As long as a person can be satisfied with their life, even if it’s not the one they originally imagined when they were young, they’re doing pretty well. Knowing that Emily is satisfied with her life as it turned out gives the readers as well as Charlotte a sense of completion at the end of the story.
The Vintage Classics copy that I have also had an extra section in the back with a list of the characters in the book (helpful for the time jumps) and additional information about the author and World War I.
Magic or Psychic Phenomenon?
This brings us to the reason why Charlotte and Clare were switching places, another factor that is impossible to discuss without considering Clare’s ultimate fate. The book never gives an exact reason why it all happened in any version of the story, although the characters speculate about and draw a few conclusions. Their speculations appear in all of the books , even the ones with the shorter endings. Charlotte and Clare have some similarities in their names (they share the same initials and the same middle name) and lives (they are of similar age, their mothers are both dead, they each have a younger sister with similar-sounding names, and they just recently started going to the same boarding school in their respective times). They might possibly look alike since most people don’t seem to notice many differences between them. It’s possible that the physical resemblance might be a product of whatever magic or psychic phenomenon is causing them to switch places, but I don’t think so or at least not entirely because they are definitely physically switching places and not just transferring into each other’s bodies. We know that they are physically switching places with each other instead of moving into each other’s bodies because, in the final switch at the end, Charlotte accidentally goes to bed while wearing Clare’s bathrobe, and when she wakes up in her own time, she’s still wearing it, causing her to wonder what people will think in 1918 because Clare’s bathrobe has inexplicably disappeared. (This is not Freaky Friday, which was about a body swap.)
However, Clare and Charlotte never meet face-to-face and apparently never see pictures of each other, so Charlotte is entirely dependent on other people’s descriptions of how much she and Clare look alike. It seems that they look enough alike to fool people who aren’t really paying attention, but the people who know them the best and are the most observant can spot which of them is which, even if they can’t exactly articulate how. In real life, the author of this book was one of a set of twins, so some of this seems to be based on her own experiences with her twin and how one person’s identity can be tied to another. According to a blog the author kept, the school in the story is based on the boarding school that she and her twin sister attended in Kent. She does not identify this school by name, but she provides pictures, including one of the cedar tree on the campus that provided the inspiration for the cedar tree in the book, and the pictures are of The New School at West Heath, the school that Princess Diana also attended as a child but at a later date than the author. The school used to be called West Heath Girls’ School and is now called simply West Heath School (this page contains a virtual tour of the school that also shows the cedar tree by the playground – link repaired May 13, 2022). It now accepts both girls and boys and provides special help for children suffering from emotional disorders, learning difficulties, and other personal problems.
What I suspect is the final key to the switch, aside from their odd similarity, is that Charlotte and Clare also may have been in a similar state of mind at the time the switches began taking place that made them more vulnerable to losing their identities. This is speculation, but in the beginning, Charlotte was feeling out-of-place and not quite herself in her new school, and it’s possible that Clare was in a similar emotional state, putting them even more in sympathy with each other.
One of Charlotte’s 1960s roommates, Elizabeth, learns the truth of the girls switching places and comes to be friends with Clare, helping Clare in the present as Emily was helping Charlotte in the past. At the end of the book, Charlotte and Elizabeth become better friends and discuss what made the time switch possible. They discuss the similarities in Clare and Charlotte’s lives and the common dates when the switching began taking place, drawing a few conclusions about the switching and how it was able to happen. Part of what they conclude has to do with the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, but they also take into account the fact that Clare is dead in their time. Although they don’t use these exact words to describe it, it all seems to revolve around two souls that are kindred spirits, but also the idea that human souls cannot be duplicated or divided.
Personal identity is an important theme in the story. Charlotte often finds herself worrying about losing her identity as she is forced to pretend to be Clare and to keep up the pretense of being something like Clare even when she’s in her own time so that her personality won’t seem to shift too abruptly. She and Clare seem to have some similarities in their personalities, but Emily and Elizabeth, the only two people who ever know about the switching, both say that Charlotte and Clare aren’t exactly alike. When Charlotte worries that she’s losing her own identity, she tries hard to look for ways that she and Clare are different, which is difficult for her because, again, while Charlotte is living Clare’s life, she never actually meets Clare and has to rely on others’ descriptions of her personality. Even Emily and Elizabeth never see Charlotte and Clare side-by-side to compare. Charlotte is pleased whenever Emily comments that something she says or does isn’t exactly what Clare would have said or done in the same situation. Toward the end of the book, Charlotte tries to press Elizabeth more about the differences between herself and Clare, trying to clarify her own personality by what makes her different from Clare. Elizabeth tries to explain it by comparing the two of them to another pair of girls in their dorm at school. Those two girls are best friends and often like the same things and do similar things, but they are still very distinct people, like Charlotte and Clare are. It’s not an explicit answer, but it does show that Elizabeth can recognize Charlotte and Clare as different people, independent of each other, in spite of what happened and even though others didn’t notice the differences between them. Yet, the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, and perhaps their similar states of mind, seem to be central factors that allowed them to switch places with each other. Two very similar girls in sympathetic states of mind, happened to be occupying the same physical space (the bed at school) at the same time of year (the beginning of the school year), just years apart.
There is also the matter of Clare’s early death. Both Charlotte and Elizabeth are sad when they learn that Clare died back in 1918, but Elizabeth reasons it out, saying that it makes sense that Clare died and that Emily was Sarah’s mother all along. As Elizabeth explains, Charlotte couldn’t have remained in 1918 and grown up there to become Sarah’s mother (as Charlotte feared might be the truth) because, by the time she was an adult, she would also have been born into their time as Charlotte, and there would have been two Charlottes alive at the same time. If Clare had lived to adulthood and become a mother, there would also be two Clares alive at the same time when the girls started switching places. Both of those situations would have been a logical impossibility because no single person can be two different ages, child and adult, in the same period of time. Even if they were in two different bodies, it would be the same soul because it would be the same person, and there could not be duplicates of a unique, individual soul or personality.
I like it that the book takes the fascinating premise that, even if human souls can swap places with each other or be accidentally confused for one another, they are still unique, individual, and whole, separate from each other, indivisible, and impossible to duplicate. As Elizabeth puts it, Clare was the only one who even could have made the journey through time to swap with Charlotte (or anyone else occupying that bed) because there was no living Clare in the 1960s to create a paradox, just as there was no Charlotte in past because she hadn’t been born yet. If Clare was not already fated to die young, the time journey would have been completely impossible. This is also the reason why nobody else switched places while sleeping in that particular bed. Not only did they not happen to have a similar counterpart occupying the same space at a different point in time, as Clare and Charlotte did, but everyone else who slept in that bed survived and was present in both the past and the future. Elizabeth says that it’s like Clare was a kind of ghost, although she was very solid and alive throughout the switching and her death from influenza took place after it was over. The idea bothers Charlotte because that would have made her a kind of ghost when she traveled back in time, too. Is it possible for someone to be a ghost before they’ve died?
There is no complete answer to that. Part of what makes the book fascinating is the possibilities it raises and allows the reader to consider. There are no magic spells in the book. There is a seance scene, as I mentioned in the section about WWI information, during which Emily and Charlotte hear Clare’s voice instead of the young soldier killed in the war that the family was attempting to contact. However, the main phenomenon of the story doesn’t seem to rely on magic so much as some kind of psychic phenomena – kindred spirits who happened to be sharing a particular space and ended up sharing each other’s lives across time.
Years ago, Aunt Morbelia inherited the Fearing family estate, Harrowwood, after her cousin died. Aunt Morbelia goes to England to inspect the estate and make some decisions about its future. The estate is in disrepair, and taxes have been eating up the funds intended for its upkeep. Todd and his friend, Jeff, also go to England with Aunt Morbelia to see the family estate and famous places in London.
Some of Aunt Morbelia’s fascination with creepy stories becomes apparent as she recounts the dark history of the estate and the mysterious death of her wicked, possibly murderous, uncle. He was apparently killed by animals after his cruelty to the animals on his estate was discovered. When they spend the night at the estate, Todd and Jeff hear a frightening howl. They are only too happy to move on to London and go sightseeing.
At Harrowwood, Todd finds an old journal belonging to his aunt’s cousin, Albert, and he thinks it would be interesting to see the places that he visited when he went to London years ago. Albert was an eccentric man who died in an insane asylum because people thought he was crazy for going around town making bird sounds all the time. Still, Todd is fascinated by the strange drawings and cryptic notes in the journal. Before Todd can figure out what they mean, he and Jeff spot mysterious characters following them around, and someone leaves a threatening note at the bed and breakfast where they are staying. Todd is determined to find out who their mysterious stalkers are and put and stop to it!
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
The first book in this two-book series wasn’t a mystery, but this one is. (The first book in the series focused more on Todd and Aunt Morbelia getting used to each other when she moved in with Todd and his parents, and it had more discussion of Todd’s dyslexia in it than this one did.) There are things that Aunt Morbelia doesn’t know about her family and the family estate. The estate has meaning for her, but it has greater meaning for someone else, and so does the journal that Todd found. The Fearings have always been an eccentric bunch, and when they learn who has been following them around, Todd and Aunt Morbelia have some suggestions that change things for the better.
Aunt Morbelia didn’t know it, but her cousin had a son before he died, and he is bitter that Morbelia inherited the estate instead of him. He and his family have been secretly living on the estate for years, and they are afraid that Morbelia will have them thrown off. They admit that they were trying to scare Aunt Morbelia and Todd away so they could have the estate to themselves. They also want the journal that Todd found and has been carrying around the whole time. The journal contains Albert’s notes of his research on birds and bird calls. Albert believed that he had discovered the language of birds and could communicate with him. His son wants to carry on his strange work and maybe learn to communicate with other animals, too. Todd gives the journal back to them, and Aunt Morbelia assures them that she will not throw them off the estate. In fact, she suggests that they give nature lessons to tourists in order to support the upkeep of the estate. Because they demonstrated their skill with disguises and acting while following them around London, she also suggests that they put on mystery plays and host mystery weekends on the estate. They enthusiastically agree to the plan, and Aunt Morbelia and Todd talk about visiting next year to see how things are going.
This is the sequel to Mairelon the Magician. When the book begins, it has been about a year since Kim and Mairelon’s previous adventures. Kim has been living with Mairelon as his apprentice, and he has been teaching her both reading and magic. (In the previous book, Kim was living on the streets of early 19th century London. She did not know how to read, and at the end of the previous book, she learned that she had the ability to become a wizard, prompting Mairelon to take her on for training.) Although Kim enjoys spending time with Mairelon and appreciates what he’s teaching her, other aspects of life with Mairelon’s wealthy family are less appealing. Kim gets bored reading by herself while Mairelon continues his work with the Royal College of Wizards, and Mairelon’s aunt, Mrs. Lowe, is trying to turn Kim into a proper young lady. The pressures of the social niceties and obligations wear on Kim, and even more worryingly, Mrs. Lowe has been considering Kim’s marriage prospects.
In
order to be socially-acceptable, Mrs. Lowe thinks that Kim should be
considering a socially-acceptable marriage for her future. For most of her life, marriage was about the
last thing on Kim’s mind. She spent most
of her youth pretending to be a boy in order to be safer on the streets. Since she became Mairelon’s apprentice, the
challenges of reading and magic have occupied most of her time. When Mrs. Lowe brings up the subject of
marriage, the idea seems ridiculous to Kim.
With her poor background, she can’t imagine what kind of “respectable”
man would want to marry her, and she can’t imagine anyone among the upper-class
people of London she would want to marry.
However, she sees Mrs. Lowe’s point that she won’t be able to stay Mairelon’s
apprentice and ward forever. At some point,
she will need to decide what to do once her training with Mairelon is
complete. It’s a little worrying to her
that Mairelon (known to most people by his real name, Richard Merrill) hasn’t
discussed the future with her and doesn’t seem to be making any plans.
Then,
one night, Kim overhears someone breaking into the library in their house. At first, Kim can’t imagine what someone
would want in the library. She
interrupts the thief, and he manages to escape.
After colliding with her in the hallway, the thief leaves behind one of
his buttons and a small piece of wood that seems to be magic. When Mairelon examines the wood, he says that
it appears that someone stored a spell inside it temporarily, to be used by
someone else. Also, whoever put the
spell together didn’t do a very good job and probably didn’t really know what
they were doing.
As for
what the thief was looking for in the library, Mairelon discovers that he was
particularly looking through a collection of books that his father purchased
years ago from a French wizard who had come to England after fleeing the French
Revolution. In particular, the thief seems
to be trying to obtain the memory book that belonged to the wizard’s wife. A memory book is exactly what it sounds like –
a book that that keeper would carry around with him or her and use to record certain
things that he or she would particular want to remember, a little like a journal
but often containing bits of important instructions, like notes about favorite
recipes or cold remedies (not necessarily the entire recipe, just general
reminder notes) or, in the case of a wizard, notes about important spells.
As they
investigate further, they learn that the wizard and his wife were part of a
larger society of wizards in France before the Revolution and that someone has
been trying acquire all of their old books and notes to learn the secret of one
of their spells, specifically a spell for sharing magical power. The person who wants this knowledge has a
nefarious purpose for it, and when Mairelon tries to interfere with his plans,
he uses the knowledge he has acquired to block Mairelon’s own magic! This spell and its power-hungry master has
already harmed other magicians, and now, Mairelon is in danger, too.
Meanwhile, Mairelon and his family have decided that, in order for Kim to truly be accepted in society, she must have a coming out party. The mystery and intrigue of the story mix with Kim’s new lesson in dancing, fashion, and social etiquette and the unexpected attention that she receives from young men as she begins truly mingling with the upper classes of society. Part of the mystery actually does involve the tensions between social classes, social mobility, and the extent to which birth and natural ability influence both. As Kim discovers that she is more acceptable in society and desirable to at least some of the upper-class young men, she also finds herself becoming jealous of the attention that Mairelon receives from young women in search of a good husband.
Like the first Mairelon book, this one is a nice mixture of mystery, fantasy, history, and comedy of manners. Both of the Mairelon books are a fun mixture of intrigue and humor, and this one also has a nice romantic element as Kim realizes that the only man she could ever see herself marrying is Mairelon. He’s eccentric and sometimes aggravating, but she loves him, and he has loved her all along, from the time when she was just a thief in the marketplace to her beginnings as a wizard and her transformation into a young lady. The book ends with Kim and Mairelon engaged to be married, and I’m sorry to say that there are no more books in the series after that. I really wish that there were because I think that there’s a lot more room for character development.
The
villain’s plot in this book hinges on the earlier established principle that wizards
are born, not made. Only certain people
have the ability to use magic. For some
people, like Kim, the ability to use magic can lift them to higher positions in
life, and it can be a source of real power.
For a person who is unable to use magic, there aren’t as many
options. The villain in this book thinks
that he’s found a way around the problem, but as Mairelon guessed from the
first, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing.
Even though this book has been a favorite of mine for years, I noticed something this time that hadn’t really occurred to me before. Mairelon’s aunt and mother in the book look at fashion and social obligations in a similar manner to people in high society and the business and legal professions (categories that overlap) in modern society, whereas Mairelon, who is considered pretty eccentric for a man of his family’s social standing, and other wizards seem to look at fashion and social obligations more like modern day academics, engineers, computer programmers, and other tech experts (at least, the ones I know because those are the kind of circles I tend to move in). Within each of these categories, some of these characters are more knowledgeable about fashion or more socially adroit or intuitive, but I noticed that there are two basic schools of thought going on here. For the high society types, fashion is essential and social activities are their main focus in life because that is how they build their connections, make the best possible marriage matches, gain support from others, and generally move up the social scale, always aiming to do a little better that they did before or set the stage for their children to move up. For the wizards and academic types, fashion and social obligations are of secondary importance because what makes the biggest difference in their lives is knowledge and skill. They even say that wizards are always considered socially acceptable because of their abilities and professional standing. Because of that, they’re socially allowed some eccentricities in personal habits and dress, and many of them take those liberties as much as possible because most of them are kind of socially introverted and prefer either the privacy of their own studies or the company of others who share their professions and interests.
At first, Mairelon doesn’t do much about Kim’s social education because it is not a subject that’s important to him and he knows that she can go pretty far in the field of magic by putting most of her efforts into building her magical skills. However, what Mairelon’s mother and aunt try to impress upon both Mairelon and Kim is that they both need some social skills in order to function in wider society. This is kind of like how tech experts may have some great ideas for creating new software or a new form of online business, but in order to get their ideas off the ground, they have to have some business knowledge or connections. Wizards may be allowed to be a little less social or more eccentric than other people, and it’s generally understood and expected, but they do much better if they learn to balance their preferences with society’s expectations. Because the people who normally occupy high society love the latest fashions and attending prestigious social events, they can’t understand why other people don’t. As the story says, they would leap to the assumption that a wizard, who is always acceptable in society, would naturally want to participate in society, and if the wizard didn’t, it must be that they are either not really a wizard or at least not a good one. In other words, they would assume that something was wrong with the person or their skills, not recognizing that their choices are simply a matter of personal taste. In order for Kim and Mairelon to truly rise in their professions, they also have to learn to manage their social obligations.
In the book, Renee is an example of a character who has learned this type of social, professional, and personal balance. She is a wizard, and as a single female, is regarded as something of an eccentric, but she understands that social skills are important. She is a longtime friend of Mairelon’s, and she lectures him somewhat on his social obligations and acts as something of a big sister/fashion mentor to Kim, along with Mairelon’s female relatives.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
This young adult book takes place in an alternate history version of Regency England. In this world, magic is a normal and accepted part of society. “Wizard” is an accepted profession, and there is even a Royal College of Wizards dedicated to magic. Not everyone can be a wizard because not everyone has the ability to use magic. It is a skill that people are either born with or born without, similar to people who have an innate talent for art or music, compared to people who are born tone-deaf or color-blind.
In this early 19th century world, there is a teenage girl, Kim, who lives on the streets and survives by her own wits, taking whatever jobs she can and committing a little petty thievery whenever she needs to. She has spent most of her life dressing like a boy and pretending that she is one because life on the streets is even more precarious for a girl. For a time, she was part of a gang of child thieves run by a woman call Mother Tibb. As far back as Kim can remember, Mother Tibb was the only one who took care of her as a child. Kim has no memory of her parents or any knowledge about what happened to them. She doesn’t even have a last name. However, before the story begins, Mother Tibb was caught and hanged for her crimes. Some of the other child thieves were apprehended and put in prison or exiled to Australia, but Kim managed to escape. Since then, she has been on her own. So far, she has managed to avoid being pressured in to joining up with other gangs or turning to prostitution to survive, but the fear of that haunts her. Her future is uncertain.
At the
beginning of the book, Kim is hired to sneak into the wagon of a traveling magician
who is performing in the market and to see what he keeps among his
belongings. The man who hired her doesn’t
want her to take anything, but he is particularly eager to see if the magician
has a particular silver bowl in possession.
It’s a strange request, but the money that the man offers Kim is too
good to pass up.
However,
the magician, who calls himself Mairelon, isn’t quite what he seems. He is not just an ordinary traveling
entertainer using some sleight of hand to amuse people in the market. Kim discovers that he can do real magic as
she searches his wagon and is knocked unconscious by a real magical spell that
Mairelon uses to protect his belongings.
When Kim wakes up, Mairelon and his servant, called Hunch, have tied her up. Unlike Hunch, Mairelon has also realized that Kim is actually a girl, not a boy. The two of them question Kim about why she sneaked into the wagon, and she tells them the truth about being hired to do it. When she describes the man who hired her, it seems that Mairelon recognizes the description. The part about the silver bowl also unnerves him.
Surprisingly, Mairelon makes Kim an offer to come with him and Hunch when they leave London. He is fascinated by Kim’s skills in picking locks, even the lock on the booby-trapped trunk that knocked her unconscious, and he thinks that Kim might be useful to him and Hunch, perhaps helping with the magic act. In return, he offers to teach Kim some of his magic tricks. Hunch is dubious about Kim because she has obviously been a thief, and Kim also isn’t sure what to make of Mairelon. She knows that he’s hiding something, but she isn’t sure what. No one with real magical abilities like him would ordinarily be making a living with simple magic tricks in the market.
However, Kim does accept the offer because she’s been worried about one of the major criminals in the area, Dan Laverham, who has been showing too much interest in recruiting her. He is heavily involved with a number of criminal activities, and he knows that Kim is a skilled lock pick. If he found out that she was a girl, he would probably also press her into prostitution. Dan Laverham would be a good reason to get out of London for a while. Also, Kim realizes that if she learns a few magic tricks from Mairelon, she might be able to set herself up as an entertainer and make an honest living, safe no matter who finds out that she’s female. Besides, Kim realizes that if she’s not satisfied with the situation, she could always run away later.
Before
leaving London with Mairelon, she returns to the man who hired her, at Mairelon’s
suggestion, and tells him that she didn’t see a silver bowl in Mairelon’s wagon
(which is true because she was knocked unconscious and didn’t see anything in
the trunk). The man is angry, but Mairelon,
who followed her in disguise, helps to create a distraction so that she can get
away from the man. They leave London in
the middle of the night because Mairelon says that he was spotted by someone who
recognized him when he went out to get magic ingredients.
On the
journey, Kim gradually gets to know Mairelon and his situation. The silver bowl, which Mairelon does have, is
actually part of a set of magical objects which, when used together, can compel
people to tell the truth without interfering with their ability to answer
questions intelligently. Mairelon’s real
name is Richard Merrill, and he is, or was, part of the Royal College of
Wizards. Years earlier, the Royal
College of Wizards was analyzing this particular set of magical objects and the
unique spell that they control, when they were suddenly stolen, and Merrill was
framed for the theft. At the time, Merrill
was unable to prove his innocence (at least not without sounding as if he had
done something inappropriate with a lady, which he also did not do – they were
just together at the time of the theft because she was helping him and another
friend with a magical experiment), but he was also recruited by his friend in
the government to be a spy against the French, so the story of his supposed
theft gave him a plausible reason for wanting to leave the country. In the time since then, he and his friend
have continued to look into the matter of the theft, and they have made some
progress in tracking down the other pieces of the magical set. At the time that Kim met him, he was on his
way to the next piece of the set, a silver platter.
To
their surprise, however, they soon discover that someone has been making copies
of the platter. The copies are not
magical, but they do confuse the issue.
Who is making the copies and why would they want copies, since they do
not have the powers that the original has?
As Kim and Mairelon investigate, they crash a house party at a lavish
country estate and spy on a meeting of a rather inept society of druids. All the while, they are getting closer and
closer to finding the original thief.
I loved the combination of mystery, fantasy, history, and humor in this book! It’s one of my all-time favorites. It has a happy ending with Mairelon’s name cleared and the thief caught. They also discover that Kim has the ability to use magic, and Mairelon offers to take her on as his apprentice, saving her from the streets forever. There is a sequel to this book called Magician’s Ward, about Kim’s life and adventures as Mairelon’s student. The hints of romance in this book are also much stronger in the next one. There are only two books in this series, which is disappointing because the characters are so much fun, and I think that there is a lot more room for their development. By the end of the next book, Kim’s future is looking more certain, but her past is still murky. Originally, I had expected that there would be secrets revealed about Kim’s past because of her ability to use magic, possibly something that was passed on to her by her parents. However, by the end of the second book, Kim still doesn’t know who her parents were/are, and it doesn’t look like there’s any chance that she will ever know. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes, secrets are more tantalizing when you imagine the answers than when you actually find out.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
The Ravenmaster’s Secret by Elvira Woodruff, 2003.
Forrest Harper is the son of the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London in 1735. The story begins by explaining the tradition of keeping ravens at the Tower of London because of the superstition that the Tower would be conquered by its enemies if the ravens ever abandoned it. This superstition led to the creation of the job of Ravenmaster, who looks after a flock of ravens that live at the Tower with wings clipped so that they can’t fly away.
Forrest Harper lives at the Tower with his parents and sisters, training to become a Ravenmaster, like his father. He likes the ravens, and they like him. He is pretty good at caring for ravens, but there is something that bothers him: he thinks that he isn’t brave enough and that others think that he is a coward, too. He is smaller than the other boys and is often teased. He has trouble cutting up the squirrels that the rat catcher’s boy (his only real friend, although his mother doesn’t approve of him) brings to him to feed to the ravens. Even though it’s necessary, Forrest doesn’t like the sight of blood and feels kind of sorry for the squirrels. Worse still, when Forrest’s family attends the public hangings (which were treated as a kind of festival day with music and entertainment in Forrest’s time), Forrest is unable to look at the criminals who are being hanged. The one time he does try it, he throws up, and again, the other boys tease him mercilessly for it. Forrest’s problem, as readers will see, isn’t so much that he’s a coward as he has more empathy than the other boys, both for animals and people, and that isn’t really as much of a problem as he believes. His father tells him to ignore the bullies because they are foolish, and their foolishness will show in time.
Forrest sometimes dreams of going out into the wider world, beyond the Tower, where he could do something brave that would impress everyone. The rat catcher’s boy, whose real name is Ned although most people just call him Rat, also dreams of running away because he is an orphan, treated harshly by his master and always in danger of being turned over to the chimney sweep to be used as a climbing boy. He doesn’t think that Forrest has a real problem because his life at the Tower is pretty good, living comfortably at the Tower with his parents, whatever the local bullies say. Still, the two boys often imagine what it would be like to go to sea together and have adventures. When there is an announcement that a new prisoner will be arriving at the Tower, a Scottish Jacobite rebel, Forrest thinks that helping to guard a dangerous rebel will make the Tower bullies respect him.
To Forrest’s surprise and embarrassment, this rebel actually turns out to be a girl. She is the daughter of the rebel Owen Stewart, who is being held in a different tower at the Tower of London (the Tower of London is actually a fortress with multiple towers – she is imprisoned in Bloody Tower and her father is in Bell Tower). She has been charged with treason, along with her father and uncle. Forrest isn’t happy about being given the task of taking food to a girl prisoner.
However,
Madeline McKay Stewart, the girl prisoner, is pretty tough in her own right. Although Maddy’s been separated from her
father and uncle and all three of them are likely to be executed, she is being
pretty brave about it. She talks to Rat
and Forrest. She is interested in
Forrest’s pet raven, Tuck, and tells him about how she used to feed baby owls
back home. She talks about her life and
family in Scotland, and Forrest realizes that he’s starting to think of her as
a friend instead of an enemy to be guarded.
While
Forrest is used to hearing English people criticize the Scots for being “savage,”
he is astonished and a bit offended when Maddy talks about English people being
“evil.” For the first time, it makes him
think of the situation from the other side.
He knows that not all English people are evil and realizes, having seen
that Maddy actually has refined manners, that Scottish people aren’t “savage.” One day, at Maddy’s request, he takes a
message to her father in exchange for her ring, which he plans to sell in order
to buy Ned back from the chimney sweep after the rat catcher loses his term of indenture
to the chimney sweep in a game of cards, sparing him from the horrible life and
health problems that the young climbing boys suffer. Then, Owen Stewart gives Forrest a message to
take back to Maddy. Without really
meaning to, Forrest realizes that he has suddenly become a go-between for the
rebels and could be considered a conspirator under English law.
As
Forrest considers the fate that lies ahead for Maddy and the nature of war
between England and the Scottish rebels, it occurs to him that the adults in
his life have often done the opposite of the things that they have always
taught him were important. His father
always emphasized fairness, yet the war and Maddy’s possible execution are
unfair. Maddy shares Forrest’s feeling
that the world might be a better place if people didn’t become adults and
abandon their values.
Then,
Maddy’s father and uncle are shot while attempting to escape, and Maddy is left
completely alone. Forrest feels badly for
Maddy. Soon after, he is unexpectedly
approached by a carpenter who seems to know that he has become friends with
Maddy. The carpenter, who is a stranger
to Forrest, tells him that Maddy will soon be executed by beheading but that he
has a way to save her life. Forrest has
to decide if he is willing to trust the stranger and save Maddy, knowing that
doing so would make him a traitor himself.
One of the parts of this story that interested me was how Forrest noted the hypocrisy in the adults around him as he was trying to decide what he should do. Qualities that adults often praise and try to instill in their children are often ignored in the way that the adults live and even in how they treat other children, like Ned and Maddy. Abandoning values, even the ones that they really want their children to have, isn’t something that adults have to do as they grow older, but it is something that some adults do if they think they must in order to live as they want to live or accomplish something that they want to accomplish. The adults who think that Maddy should be beheaded would probably say that they were doing it for the greater good in promoting their cause against the rebels. However, treating Ned as a piece of disposable property is something that they mostly do because they can and because they know that there is nothing that Ned can do to stop them. Ned actually tries to repay his indenture legally with money that Forrest gives him, but although the sweep accepts the money, he refuses to let him go, saying that no one will take Ned’s word over his and that he could always use the money to make sure that Ned is hung as a thief if he tries to make trouble. It is this type of attitude and situation that make the children realize that they are on their own to solve their problems and that working within the law is not going to be an option for them because the law is not just and it is not on their side. It’s a frustrating situation, and I often feel frustrated when I encounter this type of thing in books, but fortunately, things do turn out well in the end.
This is one of those coming-of-age stories where a boy must decide what he stands for and where he really belongs. Through Maddy and the inscription on her ring, which means “Face Your Destiny,” Forrest comes to understand the destiny that is right for him as he helps both Maddy and Ned escape to a better life elsewhere.
The book also includes some interesting historical information. There’s a map of the Tower of London in the front of the book, and in the back, a short history of the Tower with information about famous prisoners and escapes. There is also a glossary of English and Scottish words that modern children (especially American children) might not know, such as breeches, wench, loch, and tattie-bogle (scarecrow).
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive. (To borrow a book through Internet Archive, you have to sign up for an account, but it’s free, and then you read the book in your browser window.)
Spoiler: In the last chapter of the book, it explains what happened to the characters after the story ends. Forrest does become the Ravenmaster after his father, realizing that it is the right kind of life for him and that he no longer desires to have adventures outside the Tower. He has a wife and daughter, and years later, he receives a message from Ned, who says that he has become a captain in the Royal Navy and that Maddy has gone to live in the colonies with other Stewarts (something that my own Jacobite ancestors did, which is how I got to where I am now).
Poor Mouse works as a scullery maid in a castle in Medieval England. She has lived there all her life, since someone abandoned her at the castle as a baby. She has no idea who her parents are, when her real birthday is, or exactly how old she is (the cook once said she was about eleven, but he wasn’t sure). She doesn’t even have a real name; Mouse was simply the name given to her by the cook, who makes her work hard and beats her if she makes a mistake. Mouse’s life is hard, but then one day, she makes a big mistake, and the cook gets in a rage and attacks her with a meat hook. Mouse escapes from him and flees the castle. She knows that she cannot go back, but she doesn’t know where to go.
For the first time in her life, Mouse’s fate is in her own inexperienced hands. For a time, she joins up with a group of travelers, who take her to the city of York. However, none of them can adopt Mouse, and she must struggle to make a life for herself. In York, Mouse sees a puppeteer performing, and she is inspired to learn to be a puppeteer herself. Through a mixture of trickery and pleading, Mouse convinces the puppeteer to take her on as an apprentice.
Although Mouse makes many mistakes at first, and the puppeteer gets angry and threatens to leave her behind, the two eventually learn to get along with each other. Mouse gains skill at making and manipulating the puppets, and her confidence grows. However, danger still lurks in the future, for the puppeteer also has a dark past and dark secrets which pursue the two of them in their travels.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Stories with abused and neglected children are always sad. Mouse is failed by various adults who are mainly focused on their own lives and securing their own positions in life before she finally becomes independent. We don’t know why Mouse was abandoned as a baby, although it was probably because her parents were poor and maybe unmarried, which would have been a stigma at the time. We can be pretty sure that, whatever happened, Mouse’s parents’ position in life was too precarious to take care of her themselves. The castle cook she lives with is mainly worried about his own job and is more of an unwilling employer to Mouse than a parent. In fact, employment is more of a theme in Mouse’s precarious life than family. Even the puppeteer is more of an employer to Mouse than a parent. Mouse learns from the puppeteer, but it’s as an employee, and Mouse is well aware that she can be abandoned at any time if she fails to please her employer. In the end, Mouse gains an independence that pleases her, but I still found it a little sad because it seems like the one and only person who can’t abandon Mouse is Mouse herself and that there is little or no security in trusting or relying on others. The eventual goal turns out to be employing herself so she doesn’t haven’t to rely on someone who can dump her. I suppose that can be true in real life, too, but it’s one of hard, dark sides of life.
Although, the adult characters’ focus on securing their own lives and positions first is also a testament to the nature of the time when the story is set. Opportunities are limited by social level, and there are few sources of support for those who suffer unfortunate circumstances. Although it seems like the adults in the story are cruel and neglectful, there’s also a desperation to their own situations. The one person in the story who is willing and able to offer more generosity to Mouse than other characters is able to do so because of his privileged position in life. Even the puppeteer, while seeming more free than other characters, is living under danger and threat, and there is genuine risk to sharing in her life that Mouse doesn’t come to understand until later.
The puppeteer always dresses in loose-fitting clothes to cover up the fact that she is a woman. Although there is no reason why women cannot be puppeteers, she finds it necessary to disguise herself because she is pursued by an enemy from years ago. Once, her father, who was a master puppeteer, saved the life of a young Duke who was attacked by a man named Ordin. Ordin was trying to steal some of the duke’s lands. The old puppeteer and his daughter stood witness against him, and he was thrown into prison. Later, when he got out of prison, he attacked the party on the road, killing the old puppeteer and his companions. Only the daughter escaped alive, and she became a puppeteer to support herself. Ordin escaped, and she was forced to disguise herself to protect herself. She even refuses to tell Mouse or anyone else what her real name is through most of the book.
However, Ordin recognizes her one day while she and Mouse are giving a performance. He and another highwayman follow them on the road and attack them. The puppeteer kills the other highwayman but is gravely wounded herself. Mouse fights back against Ordin, knocking him into the fire, and he burns to death. They are not far from the duke’s castle, so the puppeteer sends Mouse there to get help. Mouse tells the duke what happened to the puppeteer, and he has her brought to his castle. The puppeteer, realizing that she will not recover from her wounds, finally tells Mouse her story and offers her name if Mouse wants it for herself. The duke offers to let Mouse stay at his castle. Mouse stays the winter, but in the spring, she decides to leave. She has come to love life on the road, and she promised the puppeteer that she would take care of the puppets. Mouse decides to take the puppeteer’s name, Sabine, as her own and sets off on a journey to find a place to perform her new puppet play, one telling the puppeteer’s story.
The Princess in the Pigpen by Jane Resh Thomas, 1989.
Elizabeth is the nine-year-old daughter of a nobleman in London in the year 1600, and she’s very sick. However, while she’s lying in her bed with a terrible fever, she suddenly finds herself in a pigpen in 20th century Iowa with no idea how she got there. At first, she doesn’t even know where she is, and when she is found by the McCormick family, the family who owns the farm, they have no idea who she is or where she came from. That she is very ill is obvious, so they take Elizabeth to the local doctor, who says that she has scarlet fever (what strep throat turns into when it’s neglected, it’s serious and life-threatening) and gives her penicillin, which helps her to recover.
However, there is still the question of how Elizabeth ended up on the McCormick farm in Iowa in the first place. Elizabeth tells them that she is from London and insists that the year is 1600. Ann, the McCormicks’ daughter, who is about the same age as Elizabeth, doesn’t believe that Elizabeth is really from the past. The current year is 1988, and Ann thinks that Elizabeth is probably crazy, but obviously in need of some help. The McCormicks tell the local sheriff about Elizabeth, and he begins looking through reports of missing persons to find one that fits her.
Still,
it’s hard to explain Elizabeth’s strange clothing (Ann is sure that Elizabeth
must be rich because her dress is obviously very fancy) or the antique toys
that were found with her (a doll and a music box). When Ann goes to school, Elizabeth stays at
home with her mother, Kathy, and asks her about all the strange things that she’s
been seeing around her, like cars and electric lights. Kathy assumes that Elizabeth is merely
confused and that her memory has been affected by her illness.
By
coincidence, Kathy is a historian, teaching at a nearby university, and has
studied English history. She is aware of
Elizabeth’s family, including her father, Michael the Duke of Umberland. When Elizabeth asks her if she knows what happened
to her mother, who was also ill when she last saw her, Kathy says that she was
still alive in 1605, which means that she must have survived her illness. Kathy quizzes Elizabeth in English history,
and Elizabeth knows the correct answers because they are all current events to
her. Kathy thinks that someone must have
taught Elizabeth history but notices that Elizabeth really seems to believe
everything she says and knows a surprising amount of detail.
Further research into history and Elizabeth’s family tells Elizabeth the years when her parents and other people she cares about will die, which is distressing to her. Ann begins to believe Elizabeth about her life when Elizabeth describes her home to her, and the description matches one in a book. In the same book,there is also a portrait of Elizabeth’s family from 1605. In the portrait, Elizabeth is a little older than she is now, and her mother has had another baby. Elizabeth’s doll and music box are also in the painting. The book also contains an account of the fire that later destroyed the manor house. According to the book, Elizabeth managed to save the lives of her family by alerting them to the fire and also managed to salvage a couple of valuable books.
Now that Ann is convinced that Elizabeth is really from the past, they must find a way to help Elizabeth to return home so that she can save the lives of her family!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
There were a couple of things that I liked about the time travel in this story. One is that it seems that it was fated to happen. Elizabeth is meant to survive her illness and to save the rest of her family. She was only able to do that because she had been to the future and learned about the dangers they would be facing. When she returns to her own time, she doesn’t change the past but makes sure that things turn out the way they were supposed to.
I also found it interesting that Elizabeth’s family has no living descendants in the late 20th century. Her family continued beyond Elizabeth’s time, but the family line apparently ended before the time period of the modern characters in the story, so we don’t have one of those moments that sometimes occurs in time travel stories where the modern characters meet a descendant of the past characters. That can be a fun moment in some stories, but I appreciate the variety.
At one point in the book, Ann makes a reference to the book A Wrinkle in Time, about other children who get “lost in space and time.”
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 