Posted on by TracyC

In the Circle of Time

In the Circle of Time by Margaret J. Anderson, 1979.

This is the second book in the In the Keep of Time Trilogy. There are a couple of characters from the first book that appear in this one, but most are new.

Robert lives on his family’s farm outside of a small town in Scotland.  He loves to draw, but his father doesn’t think much of Robert’s art.  He wants Robert to take over the family farm when he’s grown, especially since Robert’s older brother, Duncan, disappeared two years earlier.  Everyone assumes that Duncan just got tired of the farm and ran off to the city to find work, but Robert has trouble believing that.  Duncan always loved Robert and looked after him, and Robert can’t believe that Duncan would just run off without even telling him.

One day, Robert goes to the ancient circle of stones that stands near his town, known as the Stones of Arden, to draw before school.  There, he happens to meet Jennifer, an American girl who has recently moved to the area because her father is working in the nearby city.  Jennifer has an interest in archeology, and she points out to Robert that there are depressions where there used to be stones in the middle of the circle that aren’t standing anymore.  She persuades Robert to help her do a little digging to see if they can find them.  As they dig, a strange fog comes in, and Jennifer sees a vision of dark-haired people also digging.  However, no one is really there because the ground where they were digging is undisturbed.  Robert doesn’t see the people, but he believes Jennifer when she tells him what she saw.  There are a lot of strange stories about the stones, and Robert has heard many of them from his grandfather.

Jennifer, although spooked by what she saw, refuses to believe any superstitious stories.  She persuades Robert to come back to the stones with her so that she can take another look at them.  However, when they do, the strange fog comes, and the kids suddenly find themselves many years in the future.

The kids learn where (or when) they are when they meet a boy named Karten, who was digging in the spot where Jennifer had seen him digging in her earlier vision.  He tells them that the year is 2179 (two hundred years after the book was written).  The kids can suddenly hear the sound of the ocean from the stones when they couldn’t before, and when they ask about it, Karten tells them that the polar ice caps melted in the 21st century, raising the level of the ocean and bringing the water much closer to the stones.

The future is a harsh place, and Karten fears the people he calls “the Barbaric Ones.”  The Barbaric Ones are people from “across the sea” who, as Karten and his people explain, “have retained the ways of people who lived long ago. They are interested in wealth and machines and factories.” The problem is that resources are in short supply, so the Barbaric Ones kidnap people to use as slaves, gathering as much of the scarce resources as they can to sustain their standard of living.  Karten and his people don’t want to fight the Barbaric Ones if they can avoid it because they have lost people who tried to fight them and because they believe in the values of love and trust above all.

Jennifer is quick to insist that she and Robert return to the stones where they entered this strange and disturbing future, but Robert persuades her to stay awhile and meet more of Karten’s people. Karten particularly tells them about an older woman who told him before about other people from the past who came to their time (the kids from the first book in the series), and Robert is hopeful that this woman will not only be able to tell them how to get home but maybe also what happened to his brother, Duncan. Robert has started to suspect that when Duncan suddenly disappeared, he may have come to the this time period the same way he and Jennifer did and may still be there.

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

My Reaction:

I don’t generally go in for dystopian novels because I find them depressing. The real world has enough problems without trying to imagine new and worse ones. However, I do find it interesting that this book, which was written a few years before I was born, has a vision of the future that specifically addresses things that are of major concern to people in the early 21st century. It imagines that the polar ice caps have melted and the sea level has risen. Many of the old coastal cities are gone, and there are new cities and communities in areas where there weren’t before.

Because of what’s happened, the world’s population has separated into two parts that have different ways of coping with the situation. The “Barbaric Ones” are much more technology-oriented, but what makes them barbaric is the way they exploit other people to serve their purposes and support the lifestyle that they want to maintain, which is much harder to maintain in this new future. Karten’s people, on the other hand, have developed a more old-fashioned, communal style of living. In fact, it’s unusually communal, to the point where young children are raised collectively by the adults of the community, nobody really knowing or caring about who their birth parents are. When children are nine years old, they select families they want to join, usually because of similar interests they have, and are raised as children of that family. Karten also likes art, and so he joined a family of artists.

These two types of societies are extreme in their views and lifestyles, polar opposites of each other, and neither is really the sort of society that Jennifer or Robert want to be part of. Jennifer is unnerved that people in Karten’s society don’t really know or care who their parents are and just kind of pick families for themselves without attachment to their birth parents. It just seems unnatural to her. Karten explains that their view is that children belong to the community as a whole. If everyone is part of the same big community, what does it matter who they live with? Their concept of marriage or partnership is never fully explained, but there don’t seem to be any rules or even social conventions about who can live with whom. One girl, called Lara Avara, tells Jennifer that her chosen parental figures/mentors are a pair of women, which surprises Jennifer, who thinks of family in terms of mothers and fathers, one of each per family. However, the future people have a different concept of family that seems to be centered more around sharing personal interests, with no particular conventions around how the family should be shaped. The chosen parental figures/mentors raise the younger members who chose to join their family, teaching them skills and professions they have mastered, according to their interests. It is not explained in the story if these older women are or were married or lovers, and it doesn’t seem to be important to any of the characters in the story, either. Lara Avara just tells Jennifer, “There cannot be rules deciding whom you love and from whom you learn.” I see one disadvantage to not knowing who one’s parents and full-blooded siblings are because there would be no way to ensure against incest, which is worrisome because that tends to bring out certain genetic health problems and weakens the genetic pool of the community, especially if it goes on for generations (unless this society has thought of that and just doesn’t mention their solution during the course of the story – maybe the elders of the community who remember who has the same birth parents and who doesn’t will intervene if siblings try to match up with each other). In some ways, Robert is attracted to this style of life because it would make things easier for him. In his own time, his family undervalues his artistic gifts and his unpleasant, temperamental father forces him to do hard physical labor on the family farm. There are times when Robert would love to exchange his problematic family for one that would help him hone his craft and appreciate his personal talents.

For awhile, Jennifer worries that Robert likes these future people so much that he wants to stay there, and she’ll be stuck in the future with him. Unlike Robert, Jennifer is close to her family and happy in their time, and she wants to go home. The two of them are accidentally separated from each other when a character from the previous book in the series (Ollie) brings Robert back to their own time without Jennifer, through the tower that the previous set of characters had used for their time travels. As Robert figures out how to rescue Jennifer from the future, he discovers the truth about Duncan, who has not traveled through time at all (although it looked like that was the way the story was going to go) but really did run away from home, as people thought he did. Like Robert, Duncan was also unhappy about their home life. Although Duncan is better suited to the farm work than Robert, he also found life there stifling, constantly having to work for their father and deal with his angry moods. Their father’s attitude problems are what makes the farm life difficult for both boys, and Duncan also seems to have been feeling overworked and unappreciated. Although life as a teenage runaway has been difficult for Duncan, he has at least managed to find work (paid, unlike the farm work he was doing for his father, and payment is a monetary form of appreciation as well as providing the worker with a living) and the freedom to begin building a life of his own.

Rescuing Jennifer means returning to the stone circle where their time travels began. After Jennifer returns home to their time, she and Robert talk about their experiences. They feel badly that they were not able to help the future people more with their problems and dangers, but Robert says that maybe what’s important is what they’ve learned from the experience themselves and how it’s changed them. Their problems (just like Robert’s brother, Duncan) have always been in their own time, and they have to live their lives in the present. What they do in the present may also change the future and help make it a better place. By the end of the book, Duncan returns to his family’s farm to tell his parents that he’s all right. Duncan will not work on the farm again, as he once did, but he decides to take a new job nearby and help out on the weekends, which will make things easier for Robert. Their family has some healing to do. A talk with Robert’s grandfather also reveals that other members of Robert’s family have traveled through time in the stone circle, and although Robert’s grandfather did his time traveling many years earlier, the vision he got of the future was actually after Robert and Jennifer’s adventures. They can tell that it was further along in time by the people and things he saw, and it reassures them that their future friends will be all right in spite of everything.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Cupboard

The Mystery of the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, 1993.

This is the fourth book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. It’s also the longest book in the series and the one that reveals the most about the history of the magical key and cupboard and how their secrets tie into the secrets in Omri’s own family. It was my favorite book in the series when I was a kid!

Omri’s parents have surprised him by telling him that they’re planning on moving to a new house again. Omri wasn’t exactly happy with their last move, and his room and other parts of their new house were damaged after his last adventure with time travel, when his friend Patrick brought back a tornado with him. However, now that the house has been repaired and he’s settled in, Omri doesn’t like the idea of having to pack up and leave and get used to a new place again. His parents want to move to the country, but it’s not even the area where Patrick now lives. Instead, they’re planning to move to a house that his mother has just inherited.

The house Omri’s mother has inherited belonged to an older cousin of hers she never actually knew. He didn’t leave his house specifically to her; it’s just that he died and left no will, and Omri’s mother happens to be the nearest living relative his lawyers could find. When they finally see the house and find out how much land is attached to it, it turns out to be much better than Omri expected.

There are just two things that concern Omri. The first is the package that he asked his father to store at a bank for him – the magical cupboard and key. Although Omri asked his father to put them in a bank deposit box to keep them safe and prevent himself from being tempted to use them again because it’s too dangerous, he doesn’t like the idea of them being too far away from where he’s living. His father promises to have them transferred to a bank near their new home. The second thing that worries him is that his cat mysteriously disappears soon after they move into the new house. (The cat is okay, she just sneaked away to have kittens.) His parents say that she’s just roaming her new territory and might be a little angry for being moved from her old home and that she’ll come back to Omri once she’s settled in, he still worries about her.

One night, he think he hears his cat crying and goes looking for her. He doesn’t see her, but he stumbles on something that was hidden in some old thatch that fell of the roof of the house. It turns out to be a metal box and a notebook belonging to someone named Jessica Charlotte Driscoll, written in 1950. Omri doesn’t know who she is, but the notebook is a story of her life, in which she describes incredible things happening to her which her family doesn’t believe. Omri wonders if she could be a relative of his, and the name Charlotte reminds him of his grandmother, Lottie. He never knew his grandmother and his mother doesn’t even remember her mother because she died in a bombing during WWII, when she was very young. The woman who wrote the notebook couldn’t have actually been his grandmother because she would have been dead for several years by 1950, but perhaps it was a family name.

Omri questions his mother about the cousin who owned the house and her family’s history. Jessica Charlotte turns out to be the sister of Omri’s great-grandmother, his mother’s great-aunt. Great Aunt Jessica Charlotte was the younger sister of his mother’s grandmother. After her mother was killed in the war, Omri’s mother was raised by her grandmother. Omri’s mother had asked her about her younger sister when she was a girl, but her grandmother didn’t like to talk about her. Apparently, Jessica Charlotte had been an actress with a somewhat scandalous past. However, the cousin who used to own this house was Jessica Charlotte’s son, Frederick. Frederick never married, and although Omri’s mother thought that Jessica Charlotte had lived abroad somewhere, it’s possible that she lived at this house for a time.

Much of the story is told through entries in Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. When Omri begins to read the notebook, written toward the end of Jessica Charlotte’s life, he learns, to his shock, that Jessica Charlotte was the original owner of the magic cupboard and that she had her own Little People who visited her from other times and were her friends. After Omri reads that, he questions Gillon, the brother who gave him the cupboard, and he admits that he didn’t really find it in an alley, like he said. He actually found it in the basement of their old house with a bunch of other junk. He just didn’t have the money to buy Omri a birthday present at the time, and Omri had kind of a fascination for secret drawers and boxes, so Gillon thought that he might have some fun with the old cupboard, and he made up the story about mysteriously finding it to make it more interesting. (I suspect that the author was just retconning this part to make it agree with the idea that the cupboard was passed down through Omri’s family, but I like the way this comes out, so I’m okay with that.)

The notebook further explains that Jessica Charlotte had been envious of her older sister because she was prettier, luckier, and often seemed favored by everyone. However, in mocking the young men who came to court her older sister, Jessica Charlotte discovered that she had a talent for mimicry, which led her to become an actress, although her family thought that it was a disreputable profession and disapproved. Jessica Charlotte also discovered that she was psychic and sometimes had visions of the future. She eventually left home and became an actress. Her sister, Maria, still visited her secretly sometimes, against their parents’ wishes.

After awhile, Jessica Charlotte became pregnant with Frederick, which was when she first came to the old house where Omri’s family now lives. She didn’t have any money and couldn’t work while pregnant, and because she was unmarried, she would have been considered shameful if people knew. At that time, the house was a farmhouse belonging to a relative of Frederick’s father. By that point, Jessica Charlotte realized that her boyfriend wasn’t a good person and wasn’t going to be a good father to their son, but he did arrange for this relative of his to help her through her pregnancy. Frederick was born in the house, and because he was illegitimate and sensed his mother’s complicated feelings about him and the circumstances of his birth, he and his mother were never as close as they really should have been.

Meanwhile, Maria got married and had a daughter, Lottie, who was Omri’s grandmother, the one who was killed in the war. Jessica Charlotte says that she did something that wronged Maria and Lottie, and Omri stops reading the diary for a time, but he decides that he really has to continue and know the full story.

Over the years, Jessica Charlotte lived a hard life, supporting Frederick through a mixture of acting and other odd jobs, including fortune telling because of her psychic abilities (although she never used her gift to see into the future for herself or anyone close to her because she was afraid she might see something bad happen to them and be unable to stop it). Meanwhile, Maria was living a very comfortable life with her husband and daughter. Even after their parents died, Maria still had Jessica Charlotte visit secretly because of her tainted reputation, and she never wanted to meet Frederick or talk about him because his birth was the cause of her sister’s scandal. Still, Jessica Charlotte continued to see her sister and became fond of Lottie.

However, Maria was basically a pampered snob who didn’t understand her sister’s life and hardships and also had a streak of self-centeredness. One day, when Lottie was a young child, Maria said that when Lottie was older, she didn’t want her to see so much of her aunt, implying that Jessica Charlotte would be a bad influence on her. Jessica Charlotte was deeply offended by that, but she was also fearful about losing the last family members who were still speaking to her. She had lost so many of her other relationships that she still felt the need to be close to Maria and Lottie as much as she could and visit their pampered and comfortable little world, enjoying occasional tastes of their happier and more comfortable lives.

Yet, Jessica Charlotte’s jealousy for Maria’s pampered life and anger at her callousness continued to eat at her. One day, when Maria was showing her all of her nice jewelry, Jessica Charlotte got the urge to steal a beautiful pair of earrings. First, Maria was being, at the very least, thoughtless and callous for showing off all of her nice jewelry to her much poorer sister, who could never have things like that herself. Maria not only had no concept about what her sister’s life was like outside of her occasional visits, but she purposely never asked her about how she was doing, how her son was doing, or even where they were living, how they were getting by, if they needed anything, or if she could help them in any way. She didn’t know because she didn’t want to know any of these things, and the fact that she didn’t want to know any of that indicates that she knew enough to understand that their circumstances weren’t pleasant. To show off all of her pretty things like that just seems like rubbing it in. Second, Jessica Charlotte had been in need for so long that she saw all of the pretty jewels as symbols of Maria’s comfortable life, something she hungered for herself. The pair of earrings weren’t something that Jessica Charlotte wanted just for the sake of having them but because of what they represented to her, the life that she couldn’t share in and which she knew that Maria would soon shut her out of when she declared that her visits with her young niece would have to stop soon.

Jessica Charlotte planned out the theft in advance, making a duplicate key for her sister’s jewelry box and thinking that her sister would just assume that she’d mislaid that one pair of earrings somewhere. Unfortunately, when Maria noticed that the earrings were gone, she thought Lottie had done something with them, and when she kept insisting that Lottie tell her where they were, Lottie got upset and ran out of the house into the street. Matt, Maria’s husband and Lottie’s father, chased after her and was hit by a cab and killed. Jessica Charlotte felt terrible when she heard the news because she hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt, but there was nothing she could do to take it all back.

Omri knows how Maria and Lottie’s lives went after that point because of what his mother told him about their family history. After Matt died, Maria and Lottie didn’t have very much money to live on, just a little pension, and then their house was burgled, and many of Maria’s nice things were stolen, including the rest of her jewelry, so she couldn’t sell them for extra money. Maria had to move to smaller, cheaper lodgings and get a job for the first time in her life in order to support herself and her daughter, living a life closer to what her sister had been doing. When Lottie was grown and married, she and her husband helped to support her mother, but after they were killed in WWII, Maria took in Lottie’s daughter (Omri’s mother) and had to keep working in order to raise her. Although they were now living in more equal circumstances, the two sisters did not become close again because of Jessica Charlotte’s guilt about what she’d done. Jessica Charlotte ended up buying the old house in the country where her son had been born and told her sister that she was going to live abroad, never telling her exactly where. She had not expected to see Maria again anyway since Maria was planning to cut her out of her daughter’s life before Jessica Charlotte stole the earrings, and after Matt died, Jessica Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to face Maria. Jessica Charlotte lived in the country house until her death in 1950.

When Jessica Charlotte became too weak to write any longer, shortly before her death, she had Frederick finish the story in the notebook. Aside from the difficult feelings between Frederick and his mother because of the circumstances of his birth and the rough and poor childhood he endured, Frederick also says that the two of them don’t really get along because they are very different types of people. When he was grown, Frederick went into business as a metal smith, eventually owning his own factory that made toy soldiers and other metal toys. During WWII, the government had him convert his toy factory to manufacture munitions. He wasn’t happy about it, but it did make him fairly well-off. After the war, Frederick had hoped to go back to making metal toys, but plastic was coming into vogue as the material of choice for toys, and Frederick couldn’t stand the stuff. He thought that the newer plastic toys were cheap and shoddy compared to his detailed works of art in metal. (It was kind of true.) There were basically two choices before Frederick: convert to making the cheap plastic toys he hated or switch to making different types of metal products. He switched to making metal boxes and cabinets.

Frederick never really believed in his mother’s supposed psychic powers, but when he was upset about plastic ruining his metal toy business, he admits that he let his mother talk him into participating in a silly ritual. He was so angry and upset that his emotions were ruining his health, so his mother told him to build something to put his feelings into and shut them away. Frederick built Omri’s magical metal cupboard. When he was finished making it, his mother had him visualize cleansing himself of all of his anger and hatred of plastic and shutting that feeling away in the cupboard. To his surprise, his mother shut and locked the cupboard with a different key from the one that he’d made to put in the cupboard’s lock (her key to her sister’s jewelry box). He thought that this ritual was kind of crazy at first, but he did feel better after he did it. He felt weak for a time, but then he recovered. He still didn’t like plastic, but not to the point where it harmed his health anymore.

Jessica Charlotte had said her son had also inherited her psychic “gift”, even though he didn’t believe in it. Apparently, his strong feelings about plastic produced a kind of magic spell or curse that affected the key and the cupboard and created the effect of bringing plastic toys to life. Jessica Charlotte discovered this herself because her son had given her a set of plastic figures in order to demonstrate to her how these little figures were inferior to his metal ones. Jessica Charlotte put them in the cupboard and brought them to life, and these little friends of hers brought her some happiness in her final days. Frederick thought that her mother was imagining that she was talking to fairies or something and never found out about his mother’s little friends or the magic of the cupboard.

When Jessica Charlotte realized that she was dying, she used the cupboard to send her little friends back to their own time periods, except for one little maid named Jenny, who refused to go back because she’d had a terrible life in her own time. Instead of making her go back, Jessica Charlotte confided in one of the workmen fixing the thatch on her roof and gave Jenny to him. This man, Tom, was lonely because his wife left him for someone else, so Jenny was good company for him for many years, until one day, she simply turned back to plastic suddenly. When Omri finds Tom as an old man and introduces himself as Jessica Charlotte’s distant nephew, Tom explains all of this to him, saying that all he can think of is that Jenny’s physical body must have died in her own time after having been in an apparent coma for years. He buried her little plastic figure respectfully. Tom is also the one who sent the cupboard and key to Maria after Jessica Charlotte died along with a note dictated to him by Jessica Charlotte, hinting at the nature of the cupboard and key and tacitly admitting to the theft of the earrings, so Maria knew the truth of the theft before her own death.

Omri comes to realize that the metal box that Jessica Charlotte left behind, and which was sealed with wax, must contain her collection of little figures. When his friend, Patrick, comes to visit him at his new house, Omri explains the whole situation to him, and Patrick suggests that Omri’s magic key will probably open this metal box, too. Of course, he also points out that if Omri opens the box with that special key, it will bring the figures inside to life, just as it has with the cupboard and Omri’s old trunk. Omri sees Jessica Charlotte’s old figurines as a way of finishing her story and feels compelled to bring them back to life one last time, although he knows that bringing figures to life always comes with complications, and he will have no way of knowing who or what the figures are until the box is open.

When Omri gets the chance to talk to Jessica Charlotte’s little friends, he not only learns more about his great-great-aunt’s past and the history of the cupboard but also sees an opportunity to change the past of his mother and great-grandmother by preventing the robbery that made them poor. But, if he meddles in the past, what will that mean for his future?

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

My Reaction:

This is my favorite book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. I suspect that the author of the series didn’t originally have an explanation for why the cupboard and key were magic, but that’s just a guess on my part. The explanation behind the magic in this book makes sense, and those parts that didn’t quite mesh with the earlier books (like Omri’s brother’s original explanation of finding the cupboard in an alley) were briefly explained. Sometimes, when book or movie series try to explain something magical or a mysterious secret they’ve left hanging, it turns into a let-down because the explanation feels rushed or implausible or fits clumsily into the earlier parts of the story, but this one was pretty smooth, intriguing, and also opened up some new story possibilities.

In previous books, Omri and Patrick both did impulsive things with the cupboard that put their small friends, themselves, and other people in danger, but in this book, both of the boys seem to have matured. Although Patrick thinks of Jessica Charlotte as a bad person and a thief for stealing her sister’s earrings, Omri tries to explain to him that she was a much more complex and conflicted person than that. Yes, Jessica Charlotte was a thief, but her motives were beyond mere greed, and it wasn’t long before she regretted what she’d done and the lasting hurt that she’d caused her family. In considering Jessica Charlotte’s theft and the theft that the burglar who was one of Jessica Charlotte’s little friends later committed against Maria, partly out of personal greed and partly as retribution against Maria on Jessica Charlotte’s behalf, Omri and his mother both come to terms with their family’s history. Patrick, who in previous books had been the more impulsive one when he and Omri interacted with the little people from the past, acts as a restraining influence in this book when Omri is tempted to change his family’s past for the better by preventing the thefts that left his great-grandmother without money. Patrick is the one who makes it clear to Omri that, just as Jessica Charlotte’s theft of a single pair of earrings radically changed the lives of her sister and niece, if Omri tries to stop those events from happening, he might change his family’s past so much that he might accidentally prevent himself or even his own mother from being born in the first place. After Omri tells the thief to give back the jewel box he stole, Omri worries that he’s gone too far, but it turns out that one request was actually fated to happen, just as it turns out that Jessica Charlotte later realized that she had met Omri briefly in what she thought was a dream when he brought her plastic figure to life. Not all of Omri’s “meddling” with the past was really meddling but was actually part of what was fated to happen and has already had an effect on the past even before he knew it.

At the end of this book, something that Omri has alternately dreaded and wanted to happen: his father discovers the secret of the cupboard and meets Omri’s small friends. In books, there is usually this assumption that if parents ever find out about their children’s magical adventures, they will end because the parents will put a stop to them or somehow, the magic will be ruined. However, in this case, the magic is not ruined, and there is one more book in this series where both Omri and his father take part in the magic.

Posted on by TracyC

Ramona and Her Father

Ramona and Her Father by Beverly Cleary, 1975, 1977.

It’s September, and second-grader Ramona Quimby is already making out her Christmas list. However, Christmas this year might not be what Ramona expects. Her father comes home and explains that he’s been laid off from his job because a larger company bought the company he worked for and laid off the extra workers. Mrs. Quimby has a part time job, but it doesn’t pay much. Everyone in the Quimby family soon becomes worried about money.

Mrs. Quimby finds another job that’s full time, but Mr. Quimby still struggles to find work. Ramona doesn’t like to see her father so worried and stressed, and she tries to think of some way she could also earn money. When her father comments about how much money a boy on a television advertisement must have made, Ramona sets herself to memorizing various advertising phrases and repeating them, hoping to be discovered and hired to make an ad herself. Unfortunately, things that people say on ads don’t work in real-world settings, especially when you tell your teacher that her wrinkled stockings look like elephant skin.

The family has to eat food that they don’t particularly like in order to save money, and they start buying cheaper cat food for their cat. Picky-picky refuses to eat the cheap cat food, and before Halloween, he eats part of the girls’ jack o’lantern in desperation. Beezus, upset at the idea that their cat is apparently starving and desperate, angrily asks her father why they can’t afford Picky-picky’s usual cat food when they seem to have enough money for his cigarettes. (It’s a valid question. During my first semester of college, I totaled up a classmate’s expenses on cigarettes and realized that what she spent on them for a year was about the same as full-time student tuition at our community college, by early 2000s standards.) Her father tells her that’s none of her business, and Beezus retorts that it is her business. Cigarettes are harmful, and Mr. Quimby is spending money on them that the family desperately needs.

Ramona is worried because this is the first time that she’s heard that cigarettes are bad, although Beezus says that she learned it in school. Ramona tries to ask her father if what Beezus said is true, and he just says that he expects to be an old man someday, the kind that tells reporters on his hundredth birthday that he owes his longevity to cigarettes and whisky. This joke doesn’t reassure Ramona. Ramona decides that she’s going to get her father to stop smoking.

Ramona gets Beezus to help her make anti-smoking signs. At first, their father tries to ignore the signs, and then he starts getting annoyed with them. Ramona worries that she’s been mean to her father and upset him too much, but he later admits that she was right and that he’s going to try to quit smoking. Ramona takes him at his word and throws his cigarettes away, although he said that he would rather have cut down gradually. Still, his wife and daughters are happy about him quitting. For awhile, Mr. Quimby is edgy and irritable as he tries to get used to not smoking as well as still looking for a job.

As Christmas approaches, the girls’ Sunday school begins preparing to put on a Nativity play. Beezus gets cast as Mary, which pleases her because Henry Huggins is going to play Joseph. Ramona is so excited about the play that she wants a creative role for herself, and after the shepherds are cast, she says that she wants to be a sheep to go with the shepherds. The Sunday school teacher says that sounds like a good idea, but they’ve never had any sheep in the play before and don’t have a costume for her. Ramona says that her mother could make her one, and other children also say they want to be sheep.

However, as Beezus points out, now that their mother is working full time, she doesn’t really have time to sew a costume. Their mother also says that they can’t afford to buy new cloth for a costume, and the best she can do is an old white bathrobe that she might be able to alter into costume. Ramona’s father snaps at her that she’s been inconsiderate for expecting her to do something like this without asking first. Ramona feels badly and overhears her father calling her a spoiled brat. With his irritability, he’s been picking at her for various things, and one day, Ramona argues with him when she comes home from school and smells cigarette smoke.

Ramona’s father reassures her that he hasn’t purchased any new cigarettes. He just found an old one in a pocket that he forgot that he had and decided to smoke it to see if it would help him feel better. The two of them have a heart-to-heart talk about Ramona worrying about why they can’t be a happy family. Ramona’s father tells her that their family is happy. It’s just that no family is perfect and nobody’s life is perfect, and everyone goes through hard times now and then. The people in Ramona’s family still love each other and do their best for each other even when things are hard and they don’t always get along.

Things improve for the Quimbys as Christmas approaches. Mr. Quimby finally finds a new job. Ramona almost backs out of the Nativity play because her mother didn’t have time to make her a full costume, and she feels silly with what she’s wearing, but she changes her mind with the help of three older girls who were recruited to replace the Three Wise Men who backed out of the play.

One thing that kind of surprised me in the story was that Ramona’s parents seemed mildly scandalized when Ramona and Howie sang “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Beezus, who learned the song at summer camp and taught it to Ramona says that the neighbors will probably think they’re beer guzzlers after hearing Ramona and Howie sing it all up and down the street. It struck me as weird because I remember that everyone knew that song when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, and nobody thought anything of it. I certainly never heard of anyone being scandalized by it. It’s just a silly counting song, and nobody really thought that any kid singing it had ever had beer. In fact, it was a common song for parents to get their kids to sing on long car trips because it takes a long time to finish, and during that time, the kids aren’t complaining or asking, “Are we there yet?”

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

Posted on by TracyC

Nellie’s Promise

American Girls

Nellie’s Promise by Valerie Tripp, 2004.

This book is a companion book to the Samantha, An American Girl series, focusing on Samantha’s best friend, Nellie. Personally, I don’t like the companion books to the main American Girls books as well as the original books, but this book does follow up on the events to the main series. At the end of Samantha’s series, Samantha’s aunt and uncle took in Nellie and her sisters, Bridget and Jenny, after their parents died. Nellie and her sisters were from a poor family and had to start working from a young age before their parents died. After their parents died, their disreputable uncle abandoned them, and they were sent to an orphanage before Samantha discovered where they were. Samantha’s aunt and uncle are wealthy, and the girls’ lives have improved considerably.

Nellie’s happiness is threatened by the sudden reappearance of her Uncle Mike. Uncle Mike sees Nellie walking down the street in her nice new clothes and wants to know what rich family the girls are living with. Nellie runs away from him, but he threatens to find out where she’s living and to take her and her sisters back, saying that it’s his right as her uncle. He says that he means to put the girls to work earning money for him. Nellie is afraid that he might be able to reclaim them from Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia because he is a blood relative.

At first, Nellie is afraid to tell anyone that she’s seen her uncle and that he threatened to take her and her sisters back. Before her parents died, her mother made her promise to look after her younger sisters, so Nellie makes up her mind that’s what she’s going to do.

Nellie worries about the future for her and her sisters. She feels like she doesn’t fit in with the wealthy girls at Samantha’s school, who have had very different lives from hers, and the lessons they learn are the type of lessons for fine young ladies who will marry rich men and spend most of their time raising families, overseeing a house with servants, and entertaining friends and their husbands’ business associates, not preparing for practical professions outside the home. Nellie thinks that it’s important that she have some kind of job skills because the future can be very uncertain, and she wants to know that she can provide for her sisters, no matter what happens.

Samantha senses that Nellie is unhappy, and she asks her if she likes living with Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia. Nellie tells her that she does, but she hesitates to explain what’s really worrying her. Instead, she lets Samantha think that she just wants to feel like she’s doing something useful for the family. Before her parents died, Nellie used to get sewing lessons at a settlement house (a place where immigrant families could go to learn English, new job skills, and other skills they would need in their new lives in the United States) run by Miss Brennan. Aunt Cornelia is involved with many good causes, and she wants to visit a settlement house and get an introduction to Miss Brennan. Because Nellie knows Miss Brennan, she can help arrange that. It’s in a rough part of town, but Nellie is more accustomed to navigating rough neighborhoods than Samantha or her aunt. It also occurs to Nellie that she could ask Miss Brennan what to do about Uncle Mike.

Miss Brennan is glad to see Nellie, and she lets her show Aunt Cornelia and Samantha around the settlement house. They have many different types of classes for children as well as adults. Nellie says that she likes the practical classes that she used to have there, and even the types of dances that they do seem more practical than the more purely artistic ones that they do at the school she now attends with Samantha. Aunt Cornelia is pleased with the classes that they offer for women, and because she is interested in women’s education, decides that she wants to help out at the settlement house. However, the visit to the settlement house leaves Samantha irritated for reasons that Nellie doesn’t fully understand.

As Nellie begins spending more time with Aunt Cornelia at the settlement house, Samantha begins spending more time with Bridget and Jenny, and Nellie becomes jealous of how Samantha seems more like their older sister than she is. However, the others still don’t know about Uncle Mike’s reappearance, and Nellie is still fearful of what he might do and what will happen to her and her sisters if Uncle Mike tries to take them away. She feels like her only option is to try to prepare herself for a better job than that of factory worker.

When Nellie finally gets the courage to tell Miss Brennan about her worries, Miss Brennan tells her that she needs to discuss the situation with Uncle Gard. Uncle Gard is a good man, but he’s also a lawyer, and he will know how to legally stop Uncle Mike from trying to take custody of the girls. However, Miss Brennan adds that, whatever else happens, Nellie will still need to make some decisions about her future and what she wants to do with her life and education. The more Nellie thinks about it, the more certain she is about what she wants to do. She wants to become a teacher, like Miss Brennan.

Nellie provokes more drama by applying to the boarding school in Boston where Miss Brennan said that she trained to be a teacher without talking to Aunt Cornelia, Uncle Gard, or Samantha about her decision or about her uncle. However, when the truth comes out about Uncle Mike, everyone understands that she was trying to hide and protect her sisters from him. It turns out that Uncle Gard has actually been looking for Uncle Mike because he already has the documents that he needs to legally adopt Nellie, Bridget, and Jenny, and he just needs Uncle Mike to legally release them into his custody. At first, Uncle Mike tries to extort money from Uncle Gard for the girls, but Nellie gets up the courage to tell him off, promising that if he doesn’t sign the papers and leave, she’ll tell everyone about how he stole all of their money and abandoned them to freeze the last time they were in his custody. The book ends happily, with Aunt Cornelia and Uncle Gard adopting the girls and understanding Nellie’s ambition to be a teacher. They enroll Nellie in a school in New York that teaches the skills she really wants so that she can continue living with them and not go to Boston. It also turns out that Samantha was mostly uncomfortable at the settlement house because she felt so sorry for the young children there and that spending time taking care of Bridget and Jenny was part of her way of trying to help Nellie by leaving her more free to do some of the things that she felt like she had to do. With everything out in the open, Nellie and her sisters are able to more fully become part of the family.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about orphans and adoption in the early 1900s. There were not many laws and regulations governing care of orphans. Usually, orphans would be taken in by relatives, like Samantha was when her parents died. If a child didn’t have any relatives who were willing and able to take them, the child might be sent to an orphanage and possibly sent west on an orphan train as Nellie almost was at the end of the Samantha series. Families didn’t usually adopt children from different levels of society.

Settlement houses were important resources for poor immigrant families, and the education they received allowed immigrants to enter higher professions than servant or factory worker, which had been the primary source of income for many of them. It was common for settlement houses to help train young women to become teachers. There are still similar institutions and organizations in operation in 21st century America.

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

My Reaction and Further Historical Information

Part of the reason why I don’t like the companion books as much as the original American Girls series is that they tend to get more dramatic than the original books, and sometimes, I feel like the attitudes of the characters are less realistic for their time periods than they were in the original books. I think what made the original books more realistic was the restraint of the stories – they had their share of excitement and sometimes drama, but they never went overboard. The return of Nellie’s disreputable uncle struck me as both unlikely and unnecessary to Nellie’s and Samantha’s larger stories.

The historical details in this book are good. What they say about orphans of the time is basically true, although they note in the historical information section in the back of the book that Nellie’s experience of being adopted by a wealthier family was not typical of the time, and I think that’s part of what bothers me. Adoptions in general during the early 1900s were less formal than they are in modern times, and the idea of Uncle Gard hiring a private detective to find Uncle Mike and get him to sign legal documents doesn’t seem entirely realistic. I think it would have been more realistic to me the way that the last Samantha book ended, with Uncle Mike leaving and the assumption that none of the characters would see him again.

The reason why Nellie and her sisters were sent to the orphanage and why the orphanage was considering sending Nellie west on the orphan train was that no one expected that Uncle Mike would ever want to see the girls again. He’d already taken everything he could from them and left with them with no concern for what would happen to them. In the time that has passed since then, I would have expected that Uncle Mike would already have gotten into trouble that would keep him busy and out of their lives, maybe ended up in prison for being drunk and disorderly or hopping from job to job or begging for money as their little money ran out. Even if Uncle Mike had some thought of finding the girls, I don’t think it’s likely that he would have succeeded or even gotten close on his own because he is not that bright and he is not the kind of person who makes friends in places where he’s been before. I doubt that his former neighbor who took his nieces to the orphanage would have told him much if he had shown up again, looking for them. She knew that he was a drunk who abandoned the girls, and she made it clear that she didn’t like him. The people at the orphanage would have probably sent him away with no information because they would probably view the situation as closed since the girls are already placed out and Mike may not even have any proof of his identity and relationship to the girls. There is no such thing as a driver’s license during this period and many people did not even have birth certificates, so it’s possible that the people at the orphanage could simply choose to disbelieve this disreputable character and send him away. When I was watching a documentary about the orphan trains, former orphan train riders said that the orphanages that sent them west deliberately took notes from them that had their living parents’ addresses and otherwise cut off contact with living parents because they wanted the children to sever their ties to their difficult pasts and devote their attention to their new families, not maintain contact with the parents who were unable to care for them financially, so I wouldn’t expect that anyone at the orphanage in these books would go out of their way to reunite the orphaned girls with a rather shady uncle when they knew that the girls were already placed with a wealthy family and no longer their responsibility. Without help, which would be unlikely to be forthcoming, it doesn’t seem likely that Uncle Mike would be able to stumble on the girls by accident. As mentioned in Changes for Samantha, New York is a big city, people can be difficult to find if you don’t have a hint of where to look, and the wealthier part of the city where Nellie and her sisters live now is not a part of town where a guy like Uncle Mike would be likely to hang out. They could all easily live in New York City for years without meeting each other.

I feel like the situations in the story were a little contrived. By now, I would have thought that Nellie would know that Uncle Gard is a lawyer and would be the best person to ask about the laws. I don’t recall the earlier books saying what Uncle Gard did for a living, but Nellie lives with him now, and I would think that someone would have mentioned Uncle Gard’s profession by now. In the book, it oddly seems like as much of a surprise to Nellie as it is to the readers. I could believe that Nellie would go to the settlement house and do volunteer work there with Aunt Cornelia because it was already established in the previous books that Aunt Cornelia supports good causes, and although women of her level of society didn’t usually work for living, supporting good causes and charitable works would have been acceptable. Nellie’s level of knowledge seems a little odd, considering that she needed extra tutoring in basic subjects, like reading, in Samantha Learns a Lesson. In that book, Nellie never mentioned settlement house lessons, which she would have done if it hadn’t been a sudden decision to insert that this in book. Here, Nellie talks about classes that she had at the settlement house, where I would have expected to have more lessons to improve her reading, and it seems like she learned more there than she seemed to know before, even knowing a few words of foreign languages. In Samantha Learns a Lesson, one of Nellie’s skills was her ability to do math quickly handle money because she used to do the shopping for her mother, and in this book, she mentions that she helped to teach immigrants about American money, which she never mentioned before. These things are necessarily contradictory, but it all just seems a little off because they don’t quite fit into Nellie’s established character and history, and it implies that Nellie has had more education and training than she seemed to have before. It’s not necessarily impossible for a girl of Nellie’s time to know some of these things, but it’s the departure from what was already established about Nellie and her situation in life than kind of grates on me.

I think it could be reasonable for Nellie to develop the ambition to be a teacher. Even Samantha has previously some interest in that direction, having helped to tutor Nellie before. Not all women of this time went on to higher education, but those who did might attend a normal school, which is basically a college that focuses on training teachers. By contrast, the daughters of wealthy, high society families would be more likely attend a finishing school that emphasized social skills and entertaining more than academics. Both Samantha and Nellie are about twelve years old during this story and would be a little young for either of these options, but Samantha’s school seems to be more inclined toward preparing the girls for a finishing school. Given Aunt Cornelia’s interest in education and social causes and Uncle Gard’s support of it, I would expect that Samantha would be more likely to attend a women’s liberal arts college when she gets older, preparing her to marry a well-educated and culturally aware man as well as a wealthy one and probably engage in some form of social work and/or the arts in her spare time, but that’s just a guess. (I discussed some of this already in my review of Happy Birthday, Samantha. See also the book Daddy-Long-Legs for a description of what that might have been like for a girl of Samantha’s and Nellie’s time. The book was written a little later in than the time period of this book, but it’s set at about the right time for Samantha and Nellie to be old enough for college and includes characters of approximately their social backgrounds.) This book doesn’t really go into the subject, but if that’s the case, Samantha’s future might not be as different from Nellie’s as it first seems, and there might be a kind of middle path that both of them could choose. The Finch College in Manhattan, which was a fairly new preparatory school in Samantha’s and Nellie’s time, seems like it would have been a good option for both Samantha and Nellie, catering to upper-class girls while focusing on a more practical liberal arts education than the less academic finishing schools. Its founder, Jessica Finch, was a women’s rights activist and may have moved in similar circles to Aunt Cornelia. Her attempts to balance theoretical and practical knowledge sound like they would have appealed to the characters in the story. I’m not an expert on the Finch College, only having heard a little about it, but I think a school like that would present an intriguing possibility for the girls’ futures.

Posted on by TracyC

No More Magic

NoMoreMagic

No More Magic by Avi, 1975.

Chris has a fun time on Halloween with his best friend, Eddie.  The two of them are dressed as superheroes.  Eddie is Batman, and Chris is the Green Lantern.  However, the next morning he discovers that his bike is missing.

Chris loves his bike because of its wonderful green color.  He thinks of green as a magical color, and the bike has a great shimmery kind of green paint that reminds him of the Green Lantern.  Although his green bike was a little old and his mother gets a good deal on a newer yellow bike, Chris misses his old one and begins investigating, trying to figure out who could have taken it.

At first, the challenge seems difficult.  On Halloween night, lots of people were running around in costume.  However, Chris’s community isn’t too big, and he is able to identify many of the people who came to the house around the time that the bike disappeared.  One kid that he doesn’t know well is Muffin, a new girl at school, who came to the house in a nurse costume.  There was also a mysterious kid who came in a warlock outfit, with a cape and a tri-cornered hat.

When Chris interviews Muffin to see if she knows anything about his missing bike, he learns that the warlock costume originally belonged to her.  She had made it herself and was proud of it, but someone stole it while it was hanging up to dry.  The nurse costume was a last-minute substitute.  Chris thinks that whoever was wearing the warlock outfit is the most likely suspect for stealing his bike because the local police chief told him that a man had complained that someone riding a bike like his and wearing a costume like the warlock costume ran into him.  He suggests that the two of them team up to find the mysterious warlock/thief and get their stuff back.

Muffin is kind of a strange girl and is oddly evasive about her life and family.  At first, all she will tell Chris is that her real name is Maureen (but she doesn’t like that name) and that she has come to town to live with her aunt because her parents “aren’t around.”  Her aunt seems somewhat strict, and Chris donates some of his own money to Muffin to help her buy a used bike so the two of them can ride around together, looking for clues.

One of the first things they learn is that the person wearing the warlock costume won the prize for the best costume at the Halloween parade downtown.  Chris didn’t attend the Halloween parade, but his friend, Eddie, says that he went.  However, Muffin and Chris notice that Eddie’s name wasn’t on the list of attendees.  When they try to ask Eddie about it, he becomes strangely angry.  Chris doesn’t want to think that his best friend could have stolen his bike or the warlock costume or both, but why would he try so hard to avoid answering their questions if he didn’t have something to hide?

Then, Chris learns why Muffin is so secretive about her life.  The school counselor has noticed that Chris has made friends with Muffin, which she thinks is good, but she tells Chris’s mother about Muffin’s circumstances because she thinks that they should know.  Muffin’s parents recently split up.  For unknown reasons, her mother walked out on her father.  Muffin’s father was distraught when his wife left, and he decided that he should go after her and try to straighten things out with her.  He left Muffin with her aunt and went to try to find his wife, although no one really knows exactly where they went or when Muffin’s father might be back to get her.  The part that worries the school counselor is that Muffin seems to be blaming her parents’ problems and their mysterious absence on magic.  She thinks that magic made her mother go away and that magic is what’s keeping her father away.  The school counselor thinks that being friends with Chris, who is a pretty practical kid (even though he also believes in magic a little), will help bring Muffin down to Earth, and Chris’s mother encourages him to be nice to Muffin and bring her over for dinner.

Still, Chris can’t shake the thought of magic from his head.  He has the strange feeling that, somehow, his magic bike and the magic that Muffin is looking for to get her parents back are connected.  One night, he even thinks that he sees the warlock flying across the sky with his bike, although his father thinks that he dreamed the whole thing.  Neither of his parents believes in magic, and Chris even comes to question whether Muffin is to be trusted.  However, as Chris’s father says, it’s often a matter of asking the right questions before ending up with the wrong answers.

Muffin’s belief in magic comes from what her father said after her mother left.  He said that “the magic had gone,” and he blamed himself for being too self-centered to realize it.  Adults would realize that “the magic” the father was talking about is the romantic feelings that come with love, but Muffin had interpreted the phrase literally.  When her father decided to go after her mother and try to work things out, he said that he was going to “go and find the magic and make it work again.”  Again, Muffin believed that was literally what he was going to do.

It turns out that there are perfectly logical explanations for what happened to both Chris’s bike and the warlock costume, and the two missing objects are not necessarily connected.  Much of what happened on Halloween night involved a series of coincidences, deceptions, and misunderstandings, but even when the full truth becomes known, Chris and Muffin can’t shake the thought that there was a kind of magic behind it all.  Plus, as the kids had guessed, Muffins parents return when they find Chris’s magic bike.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

The School at the Chalet

The School at the Chalet by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, 1925.

This is the first book in the Chalet School Series.  This series is uncommon in the United States.  People from Britain or countries with heavy British influence would be more familiar with this series.  It’s considered classic!

When the story begins, Madge and Dick Bettany, who are brother and sister, a set of twins, are discussing their family’s situation.  Their parents are dead, and they have very little money and no family members they can rely on.  Madge and Dick are grown and are ready to begin making their own way in the world, but their younger sister, called Joey, is still a child, and her heath has been poor.  Dick has a job, but he really can’t afford to support his sisters.  However, Madge has had an idea: she wants to start a school.  Dick worries that they don’t have the capital necessary to start a school, but Madge says that she could start one in continental Europe instead of England, where they are from, because the costs would be lower.  She even has a specific place in mind, a chalet near a lake, close to a town called Innsbruck in the Tiernsee (Austria).  Joey could live with her at the school and continue her education in the company of the other students, and Madge thinks that the climate there might even be better for her than England.  She has already written a letter to find out if the chalet is available, and it is.  If they sell most of what they own in England, Madge thinks that they’ll have enough to buy what they need in Europe.  Madge says that she thinks she could handle about a dozen girls, between the ages of twelve and fourteen or fifteen.  She knows someone who could help her teach, Mademoiselle Lepattre, and between them, they are qualified to teach French, German, sewing, and music.  Dick is still a little concerned about whether or not Madge can pull off the school, but he agrees that she should go ahead with her plans (since she likely will anyway) and says that if she runs into trouble, she should contact him for help.

Madge even knows who her first pupil at the boarding school will be: Grizel Cochrane.  Madge has already had her as a student, and she is friends with her family.  She knows that Grizel has been unhappy at home since her father remarried because she and her stepmother do not get along.  Grizel’s stepmother has already been pressuring her father to send her away to boarding school, but he loves her and has been reluctant to part with her.  However, Grizel has been miserable, and her father decides would be more willing to send her away with someone he already knows.  Grizel is pleased at the idea of joining Madge and Joey at a school in Europe, and the Madge gains her first student.

Dick and Mademoiselle Lepattre go to the chalet first to take the larger trunks and belongings and begin getting settled, while Madge, Joey, and Grizel follow them.  Along the way, they see some of the sights of Paris.  By the time they arrive at the chalet, Mademoiselle Lepattre’s young cousin, Simone Lecoutier, has arrived at the school to be a pupil, and Madge has arranged to accept an American girl named Evadne Lannis, who will arrive later.  These four girls, Joey, Grizel, Simone, and Evadne, are the school’s first boarders.  The school soon acquires a few day pupils who live nearby: Gisela and Maria Marani (a pair of sisters), Gertrud Steinbrucke, Bette Rincini, Bernhilda and Frieda Mensch (also sisters).  Maria is much younger than the other girls, only nine, but her mother asked that she be admitted along with her older sister. There are public schools for children in Innsbruck, but the father of one of the new local pupils thinks that the Chalet School might be healthier for his daughter because, while he doesn’t think much of English educational standards (Grizel takes exception to that comment), they shorten the school day (compared to the average school day of Austria or Germany of the time) and encourage participation in sports and games. The local girls are curious to see what things are going to be like at an English style school, and if it will be like other English schools they’ve heard about.  The school also soon gains more students and boarders:

  • Margia and Amy Stevens – ages 8 and 11, their father is a foreign correspondent from London who needs to travel for his work, and the girls’ parents wanted to find a stable place for the girls to stay.
  • Bette Rincini’s cousins, who have come to stay with her family
  • A pair of sisters from another town across the lake
  • Two more children from a nearby hotel
  • Friends of Gisela from Vienna
  • Rosalie and Mary, two girls Joey and Grizel know from England

As the school grows and the girls settle into life at the school, they make friends with each other, although it’s awkward in some cases.  Madge notices that Simone is often by herself and she asks Joey if she and the other girls are being nice to her.  Joey says that they try, but Simone often sneaks off alone, and she doesn’t know where Simone goes.  Joey tries to ask Simone if she’s unhappy, and Simone tries to deny it.  The truth is that Simone is really homesick.  Joey finds her crying by herself later and comforts her, and Simone finally admits how much she misses her mother.  Simone also says that she feels left out because everyone else at the school has someone to be close to.  Other girls at the school share nationalities with at least some of the other students.  Simone is the only French girl at the school.  The Austrian girls are close to home, and Joey and Grizel already knew each other before they left England.  Seeing the other girls being such close friends makes her feel more left out.  Joey apologizes for making Simone feel left out and assures her that she will be her friend.  Simone asks her to be her best friend because she really needs someone to confide in, and Joey agrees, although she finds Simone rather needy and clingy. 

It turns out to be a difficult promise because Simone gets very jealous when Joey makes friends with other girls, and she tries to convince Joey to only be friends with her.  Simone is very dramatic, and she even ends up cutting off her long braid in an effort to impress Joey and get her attention when she learns about the other girls who will be coming from England.  Simone is so desperately lonely and finds it so difficult to make new friends that she is terrified that Joey will abandon her completely when she has other friends.  Joey gets fed up with her behavior and tells her that she’s being selfish. Joey knows that Simone would find it easier to make more friends herself if she would stop moping and being sad and gloomy.

After Juliet Carrick, another English girl, joins the school, Gisela is made head girl, and other girls are made prefects.  Bette is a sub-prefect, and one day, when she tells Grizel to put her shoes away, Grizel is rude to her, and Juliet laughs.  Gisela and the prefects discuss the situation and agree that Grizel, who wasn’t causing problems before, is now acting up because Juliet thinks that it’s funny.  When Gisela sends someone to bring Grizel to the prefects’ room to talk about it, Grizel refuses to come and see them, and she realizes that something needs to be done.  If the head girl and prefects let a girl get away with disrespecting them or not following the rules, the prefect system and student government would fall apart.  Grizel feels a kinship for Juliet because neither of them has a happy home life. Juliet has been raised to believe that the English are superior to everyone else, and she has no shame in showing it.  Juliet encourages Grizel to adopt her prejudices, but at a school in Austria with students of varying nationalities, that can’t be allowed.  Madge supports the prefects, and Grizel is punished for her behavior.

Juliet is still a bad influence, sometimes encouraging other girls to act up with her. When Madge refuses to allow the girls to pose by the lake for some film makers, Juliet convinces some of other girls to sneak away with her and volunteer to be filmed without Madge’s knowledge.  However, the father of one of the local girls catches them. He explains to the film makers that it would be inappropriate to film the girls because they don’t have permission from either the girls’ parents or teachers, and he takes the girls back to the school.  Grizel’s temper and excessive patriotism also get the girls into trouble when they encounter a German tourist who makes it plain that she is disgusted at the presence of the English girls. (This is after The Great War, World War I, so that may be the reason.)  While the German woman was being deliberately rude and insulting to the girls, Joey points out that Grizel’s hot-headed reply to her has now caused them more trouble.  Grizel does apologize for not using more restraint.

Juliet’s home life turns out to be even worse than the other girls know, but they learn the truth when Juliet’s father sends a letter to Madge saying that he and his wife relinquish their custody of Juliet to the school.  The letter says that Madge can do whatever she likes with Juliet.  If she wants to keep Juliet at the school and have her work for her future tuition, that will be fine, and she is also free to send Juliet to an orphanage.  The point is that her parents have left the country, they consider Juliet a burden that they would rather not bring with them, and while they might one day feel able to reclaim her, chances of that are not looking good.  When Juliet learns about the letter, she cries and says that she had been afraid that they would do something like this.  Her parents tried to abandon her at a different school once before, but the school had insisted that they take her back.  Madge now has no idea where Juliet’s parents are.  However, she can’t bear to turn Juliet over to an orphanage, so she promises Juliet that she will keep her and that she can help to pay for her tuition by working with the younger children at the school.  Although Juliet’s behavior hasn’t been very good up to this point, Juliet is grateful to Madge and does earnestly try to please her and to maintain her place at the school. Before the end of the book, Juliet’s parents die in an automobile accident, giving Madge and the school permanent custody of her. Most of the other students (except for Joey) do not know that Juliet’s parents tried to abandon her before they died.

Through the rest of the book, the girls have adventures together and forge the new traditions of their school.  They celebrate Madge’s birthday, get stranded in a storm and have to spend the night in a cowshed, start a magazine for the school, and play pranks on each other. When Grizel’s pranks and disobedience go too far and she is punished harshly for it, she gets angry and runs away from the school, becoming stranded on a nearby mountain. Joey goes after her to save her, and both girls are ill after their experience.

The book ends with Madge and a few of the girls caught in a train accident. Fortunately, they escape the accident without serious injury, and they also manage to help the German woman who had insulted the girls earlier. A man named James Russell helps them. The book ends at this point, and the story continues in the next book in the series. James Russell is a significant continuing character.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

Mystery of the Pirate’s Ghost

Mystery of the Pirate’s Ghost by Elizabeth Honness, 1966.

Abby and Kit Hubbard’s mother has just received a letter telling her than her half brother, Jonathan Pingree, has died and left her the old Pingree mansion.  He has left over bequests to other family members as well, and money to be held in trust for Abby and Kit.  It’s exciting news, and the family may move to live in the mansion they have inherited, although it partly depends on Mrs. Hubbard’s other relatives. 

Mrs. Hubbard, who was born Natalie Pingree, has never met her half-brother or half-sister.  They were her father’s children, from his first marriage.  She doesn’t know much about her father’s early life because he died when she was very young, and all that she knows about him is what her mother told her.  Apparently, her father’s first marriage was not a happy one.  He stayed in that marriage long enough for his first two children, Jonathan and Ann, to become teenagers.  Then, he made sure that his first wife and children were settled comfortably enough in the family home and left them to move to Philadelphia to start a new life by himself.  Sometime later, his first wife died and he married Natalie’s mother, who was much younger.  After his death, Natalie and her mother moved in with her mother’s sister, Aunt Sophie.  When Natalie got married, Aunt Sophie sent a wedding invitation to Johnathan and Ann, but they never came to the wedding or made any reply.  Natalie assumed that they felt uncomfortable about their father’s remarriage and didn’t want to see her, which is why she’s so surprised about Jonathan leaving the family home to her.  The only reason she can think of why he would do that is that neither he nor his sister ever married or had children of their own, so there was no one else to leave the house to.  Both of them were more than 30 years older than Natalie, and Ann is now an elderly woman, still living in the house.  Jonathan’s will has made provision for her as well, and the Hubbards go to see her at the Pingree mansion.

Mrs. Hubbard is pleasantly surprised that Ann is actually happy to see her.  Ann Pingree explains that the reason why she and Jonathan never replied to the wedding invitation was that, until that invitation arrived, neither of them had known that their father had another child, and they felt awkward about it.  However, Ann has been lonely since Jonathan’s death, being the last of the Pingrees, and she is glad to have Natalie and her husband and children with her and is eager to have them move into the mansion and live there. (Ann doesn’t live in the old mansion itself, but she does live nearby.)

Aunt Ann shows the family around the old mansion and explains more about its history and the history of the Pingree family. It turns out that the house, which has existed since Colonial times, although it has been burned, remodeled, and expanded over time. The house also has a number of secrets. Apparently, there used to be a tunnel running from the basement of the house to the beach that was used to bring in smuggled goods during the Colonial Era. There is also a hidden room behind a fireplace upstairs where the children of the family could hide during Indian attacks. (It doesn’t say how often that happened.) To the family’s surprise, Ann also tells them that the mansion is supposed to be haunted. The kids think it all sounds exciting, although Ann doesn’t explain much about the ghost the first time she mentions it. (Kit uses the phrase, “Honest Injun?” when asking Aunt Ann if she really means it when she says that the house is haunted. This isn’t a term that people use anymore because it isn’t considered appropriate.)

Mr. Hubbard is able to get his job transferred to a different branch of the company he works for, so the Hubbard family decides that they will move into the Pingree mansion. The kids like living by the beach, and their parents tell them that they can use the old ballroom of the house as a kind of rec room. Soon, they meet a couple of other children who live in cottages nearby, Chuck and Patty, and make friends with them. Chuck and Patty have already heard that the Pingree house is supposed to be haunted, although they’ve never seen anything really mysterious, just a light in the house once when they thought that the house was supposed to be empty.

The next time Aunt Ann comes to visit, the four children ask her to tell them about the ghost, and she tells them the story of the first Pingree to live at Pingree Point. This ancestor, also named Jonathan Pingree, built the original house in the late 1600s. He was a shipbuilder who owned several ships of his own, and he wanted to live near the sea. Later, he also became a privateer. When the kids call Jonathan a pirate, Aunt Anne agrees and explains that, unlike a pirate, Jonathan’s position as privateer was all perfectly legal because he had a Letter of Marque. (Yes, privateers operated within the law, but yes, they were also essentially pirates who raided other ships for their goods. In other words, they did the same things, but privateers did it with permission whereas ordinary pirates didn’t get permission. Historically, some privateers continued their pirating even after permission was revoked, so as Aunt Ann says, “the line between that and piracy was finely drawn.”) His son, Robert, was sailing on one of his father’s ships when it was taken by other pirates, and Robert was forced to join their crew. The family never saw Robert again and only found out what had happened from a fellow crew member who was set adrift and managed to make it back home. What happened to Robert is a mystery. His family didn’t know if he had really taken to the life of a pirate and couldn’t return home because he couldn’t face his family, if he had been killed in some fight, if he had been hung for piracy because he had gotten caught and couldn’t prove that he was forced into it. However, members of the family claimed that Robert’s spirit did return to the house and that he knocks at doors and windows, begging to be let back into his old home. Aunt Ann says that she’s never seen the ghost herself, but old houses can make all kinds of noises on windy nights, and that’s what she thinks the “ghost” is. As Chuck and Patty leave, they say, “we hope that old ghost doesn’t show up to frighten you.” Of course, we all know that it will because otherwise this book would have a different title.

One day, Kit is bored and starts playing around in the secret room, pretending that he’s hiding from American Indians. While Kit is in the secret room, he overhears the servants, John and his wife Essie, who have worked for the family for years, talking. Essie seems very upset and wants John not to do something that might risk their home and jobs, but John says that it’s too late and that they’re already “in it” and “can’t get out.” Kit tells Abby what he heard. That night, Abby hears banging and wailing during a storm and fears that it’s the ghost. Soon, other strange things happen, like a desk that mysteriously disappears and a cupboard that also mysteriously appears in its place. The children like John, and they don’t want to think badly of him, but he’s definitely doing something suspicious. One night, the children try to spy on him, and Abby once again hears the wailing and sees a mysterious, cloaked figure in the fog. Is it the ghost?

There are some interesting facets of this story that make it a little different from other children’s books of this type. For one thing, the children confide their concerns to their parents almost immediately, and the parents immediately believe them. In so many children’s mysteries, either the children decide to investigate mysterious events on their own before telling the parents or the parents disbelieve them, forcing the children to investigate on their own. It was kind of refreshing to see the family working together on this mystery. It actually makes the story seem more realistic to me because I can’t imagine that I would have been able to keep worries about mysterious things secret from my parents as a child, and they would have noticed if I was sneaking around, trying to investigate people, anyway. Abby and Kit do something dangerous by themselves before the story is over, but they also confide what they’ve done to their parents at the first opportunity and do not take the same foolish chance again.

The truth of John’s activities comes to light fairly quickly, although it takes a little longer for the family and the authorities to decide how to handle the situation. Investigating John brings to light some of the Pingree family secrets, and Abby and Kit soon discover the fate of Robert the pirate and the truth of his ghost. I’ll spoil the story a little and tell you that the ghost that Abby sees is apparently real, but it isn’t very scary. Once they learn the truth of what happened to Robert and see that his body gets a decent burial, the ghost appears to be at peace.

One thing that bothered me was the way that the characters talk about Native Americans in the book. It’s not the talk about Native American sometimes abducting children because I know that happened. It’s more how they picture that would happen. In the scene where Kit was hiding in the secret room, Kit imagines that the Indians were attracted to the house by the smell of his mother’s cooking and that he went into hiding while his mother fed them to avoid being abducted. As part of his scenario, he imagines that his mother would have wanted to “hold her nose against the Indian smell.” What? Where did that come from? There are all kinds of tropes about Native Americans in popular culture, from the “noble savage” image to that silly “Tonto talk” that actors did in old tv westerns, but since when are they supposed to smell bad? I’ve never seen characters in cheesy westerns hold their noses before, so what’s the deal? I tried Googling it to see if there’s a trope that I missed, but I couldn’t find anything about it. I’m very disappointed in you, Elizabeth Honness.

This book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret

MeMargaretAre You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, 1970.

This is one of the more controversial children’s books because parents raised concerns about the discussions of religion and puberty which are central to the story, and it has been banned or challenged in some libraries.  (Read to the end and see the spoilers before you decide if you agree with that.)

I wouldn’t recommend this book for young children because they wouldn’t understand the issues the story discusses, but it does speak to the concerns that pre-teen girls typically have about growing up, finding their place in the wider world, and fitting in with their friends as well as that haunting fear kids often have that they aren’t normal, compared to everyone else.  This isn’t a spoiler for the story (although there are plenty of those later on because I can’t really describe my thoughts about this book without them), but I just have to say that, in my experience, by the time people are done with college, maybe even by the time they’re done with high school, most of them come to realize that nobody out there is completely “normal.”  Some are just better at giving that impression.  Everyone out there has their quirks or issues, so if you think you’re a little odd in one way or another, or if you think your family is a little weird, you’re in pretty decent company.  Generally, it’s best not to worry too much about it and just get on with life.  In a way, I think that does fit in with the ending of the book.  But, I’ll talk a little more about my personal opinions about the controversial parts later.

When Margaret Simon is eleven years old, her parents decide to move from New York City to a suburb in New Jersey.  Margaret is accustomed to living in an apartment in a big city, and her new town and house seem a little odd to her.  She isn’t sure that she’s going to like her new home, and she knows that part of the reason why her mother wanted them to move was that she was worried that Margaret was becoming too close to her grandmother in New York and too easily influenced by her.

Margaret’s family is a little unusual in that her mother is Christian but her father is Jewish. (This is a little more unusual for when the book was first written than now because marriages of mixed religions are more common now than they were before, although they can still be complicated.)  The religious differences between her parents caused conflicts in their family even before Margaret was born.  Neither side of the family really approved of the match, so Margaret’s parents had to elope to get married.  Margaret’s mother’s parents disowned their daughter because of her marriage and haven’t seen or spoken to the couple in years or met their granddaughter.  However, Margaret’s father’s mother (his father is deceased) continues to spend time with the family, although she admits that it’s mostly for Margaret’s sake.  Margaret’s only close grandparent likes to spoil her and pays for her education at a private Jewish school, which is why her mother has become concerned that Margaret is influenced by her too much.  Margaret’s mother wants some separation so that she and Margaret can become closer as mother and daughter. The move and Margaret’s new friendships in New Jersey raise a number of troubling questions for Margaret about growing up, both physically and spiritually.

Because of the family religious conflicts, Margaret’s parents purposely raised her without a religion, telling her that she could choose for herself when she was old enough.  Until now, Margaret was not terribly concerned about it, but the move, the new friends she makes in New Jersey, and her increasing awareness of how religious differences have influenced her relationships with her family and other people cause her to question the choices she must make and what she really believes.  Throughout the book, she prays frequently in a casual, conversational fashion, telling God about the things that are happening in her life, the questions and problems she has, and what she really wants most.  Sometimes, she gets angry with God or disappointed when things don’t work out well, but the story makes it clear that her relationship with God is evolving, just as Margaret herself is changing as she grows up.  At one point, Margaret worries that, at age twelve, she is too old already to choose a religion and wishes that her parents had just given her one when she was little so she wouldn’t have this uncertainty.  However, growing up is a long process that Margaret is only beginning to appreciate.

The first new friend Margaret makes is a girl her age who lives next door, Nancy.  Nancy is eager to grow up and not at all shy about talking about things like boys, periods, bras, kissing, and even sex.  Sometimes, Nancy talks like she knows a lot about such things, although more mature people (and, eventually, Margaret) would realize that she doesn’t.  She introduces Margaret to two other girls, Gretchen and Janie, and the four of them form a kind of club that they call the Pre-Teen Sensations (PTS for short).  They give themselves secret names and hold meetings, talking about boys, people they know at school, and concerns that they have in their lives, especially related to growing up, periods, and sex (no one has any in the story, but the girls are fascinated by the idea).  One of the requirements of this club is that each of the girls has to wear a bra, and they feel each other’s backs at the beginning of each meeting to make sure.  Up until then, Margaret didn’t have a bra, so she has to buy her first one.  The girls worry about their breast size (none of them has much yet), and they try exercises to see if they can improve it (which is ridiculous, but it is the kind of thing that some pre-teen girls believe).  At the beginning, none of the girls has had their first period yet, and they’re looking forward to it with nervousness and anticipation, wondering what it’s going to be like.  They agree that whoever gets their period first has to tell the others about what it’s like.  Margaret nervously worries that she’ll be the last one to get hers or that she’ll turn out to be “weird” and never have one for some reason, although her mother assures her that it’s not likely and that it’s really just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, Margaret has some awkwardness at her new school, getting to know new people, sometimes making mistakes in the ways she relates to others, and figuring out which boys she likes the best. (She doesn’t get a boyfriend, just crushes.)  Her new teacher is also a little awkward because he’s young and this is his first teaching assignment, and he seems self-conscious that male teachers aren’t as common as female teachers.  Even adults can worry about being accepted by others.  He seems to be a good teacher, however, and he asks the students questions about themselves in an effort to get to know them better.  He learns early on that Margaret doesn’t have a religion and that it bothers her.  When he tells the students to choose a topic for a year-long research project into something that they care about, he allows Margaret to choose the topic of religion.

Margaret decides that her project for the year will be to learn about different religions and to finally choose one for herself.  Her focus is mainly on trying to decide between Judaism and Christianity because that’s what the two sides of her families are, that’s what most of the people her community are, and she says at one point that she doesn’t know anyone who is Muslim or Buddhist, so she can’t talk to them about their religions.   People in this community tend to belong either to the local YMCA or the Jewish community center, and Margaret thinks that if she figures out if she should be Christian or Jewish, she’ll be able to join one of those herself and fit in better.  Her friends help her in her project, some of them letting her come to church with them.  Each of the PTS girls is a different religion.  Janie is Jewish, and Nancy and Gretchen each attend a different Christian church.

Margaret’s friends aren’t particularly concerned about which choice Margaret will eventually make.  They find the story of her parents’ elopement romantic and are sympathetic to Margaret’s feelings.  However, Margaret notices that other people react differently to her project.  It seems like some of them view the idea of winning her to their side as some kind of personal victory for them, which hurts because she realizes that this is how her grandparents view her, even her beloved grandmother.  When her mother’s parents decide to visit them for the first time, there is an ugly scene where the family conflicts over religion come to a head, and Margaret feels so overwhelmed that she wants to give up on God and religion completely.  However, Margaret’s story isn’t over yet.  She’s really just started growing up, and whether she believes it or not at first, God hasn’t given up on her.  Getting what she wants most is really just a matter of time and patience.  Everyone grows up eventually.

So, what’s my overall opinion?  Generally favorable.  I read this book when I was about Margaret’s age and had the same concerns she did (or very similar, no two people are alike) and my friends and I were talking about the same kinds of things she and her friends were.  I think the key to this book is age-appropriateness.  Like I said, girls younger than about ten or eleven years old probably would not understand Margaret and her concerns because they just don’t share them.  It’s like Margaret and her friends themselves: they talk about the concerns that they all share, growing up and their new interests in boys and the idea of first periods.  If the reader isn’t a girl at that phase of her life, she just wouldn’t understand and connect with the story, and a few years later, those girls would likely move beyond all of that and on to other concerns (like whether or not they should go to college, what their major or career should be, etc. – life is full of things to figure out).  The things that seem so new and mysterious at age eleven, like real signs of growing up, later won’t matter so much because they’ve already lived it and found out that it’s not such a big deal.  Girls eager to get their first period or start shaving their legs at age twelve because they want to feel grown-up often start thinking of these things as hassles when they’re older and it’s all just become part of the routine of life.  They groan when a period starts on the day they want to go swimming or wear long pants on days when they’re too busy or just don’t want to bother shaving.  The novelty wears off, and you never look at it the same way again.  When older girls and women enjoy this book, it’s mainly as nostalgia for when they were Margaret’s age and still figuring things out.

The reason why this controversial story still remains popular even decades after its original publication is because it pretty accurately captures the thoughts and feelings of that pre-teen phase of life, when girls are just starting to grasp the complexities of life and the changes that lie ahead, alternately worrying about them and eager to get on with it and grow up.  It speaks to girls who are currently in that phase.  Reading it again as an adult, it reminds me of a time when I was in a similar place in life, although part of me now wishes that I could take young Margaret aside and tell her a few things that she eventually will come to realize:

  • That her friends are still finding their own way in life, just like she is, and even the ones who act like they know a whole lot really don’t (especially Nancy).
  • That growing up doesn’t end when you get your first period or even when you hit 18 or 21 because change is a life-long process and people mature at different rates, mentally as well as physically.
  • That many of the questions she’s struggling with are ones that everyone wonders about.  Some of them, like the religious issues and her own identity, are life-long struggles, even for people raised in more religiously-conventional households.  What human being can say that they thoroughly understand God and the mysterious ways in which He works?  It’s a worthwhile struggle, but not one that people resolve with complete certainty, certainly not by age twelve (Margaret’s age at the end of the book).  Margaret is far from being too old to consider these issues.  Philosophers and theologians have spent entire lifetimes on that subject.

But, even if I could say some of those things to young Margaret, they probably wouldn’t help completely because some things just have to be lived to be understood, which is the main reason why I would say banning the book is a mistake.  The issues Margaret deals with in the book are just common issues that come up in daily living, and the questions she asks about what she believes and what’s ahead for her are things that girls think about anyway and talk about with their friends, whether they read about them or not.  There’s no point in trying to get kids to stop thinking about these things because, at some point, they just have to because it’s a part of life, growing up, and the world around them.   Until they do consider some of these issues, it is difficult to move on to other, even more complex aspects of life, so I think it’s better to face them directly when the subjects come up instead of trying to dodge the subjects or put off thinking about them.

I think that Margaret’s elders were somewhat unhelpful in their approaches to Margaret’s religious life.  Her maternal grandparents are clearly selfish in their motives, caring only about winning the argument for their side, not really taking any interest in getting to know Margaret personally or caring about her feelings.  In fact, they only decide that they want to meet Margaret when they realize that she will be their only grandchild by blood, and even then, they make it clear that they expect the relationship to be on their terms alone.  Margaret’s paternal grandmother is better in her approach, nurturing Margaret from an early age in the hopes that she will grow up in the way she thinks best, but she endangers her relationship with her granddaughter when it seems like her previous nurturing and attention had the same selfish motive, wanting to win the argument in the same way that her other grandparents did.  Margaret wants them to like her for the person she is, not for what she might become or the ego boost they might get from her agreeing with their point of view.  Margaret’s parents are more interested in allowing her to develop her religious side on her own terms, loving her no matter what she chooses. However, Margaret might be correct in that they should have started discussing the issue honestly with her earlier in life, being a little too hands-off in order to avoid trying to win the argument or influence her too much one way or the other.

Even if the adults in Margaret’s life aren’t always the most helpful, children also learn the things that they don’t want to do from their elders.  Margaret at age twelve thinks that she’d like to raise any children she might have with a religion early in life so they won’t have to deal with the uncertainty and conflicts that she has, but she still has a lot of growing up to do, so anything can happen in her future.  Margaret’s future children (if any) will depend in equal measure on who Margaret’s eventual husband turns out to be and what he believes.  Life is a long journey, but Margaret seems headed for good things.

Many of Margaret’s growing-up issues will, like her first period, resolve themselves in time, and when she’s more experienced, part of her will look back and wonder why it all seemed so big and serious back then.  But, that’s just the phase of life she has to live through first.  Her religious issues will probably take a lot longer than physically growing up, but I think it’s important for readers to remember (as well as Margaret herself or anyone in a similar position) that Margaret is still young.  At the end of the story, Margaret still doesn’t know what religion she will choose (if any), but she’s still growing and changing, her life is changing, she’s becoming more aware of the larger world, and her mind may change many times with maturity and experience (like how many of us change majors about two or three times in college and then eventually end up in a completely different career).  Anything could happen in her life, and the range of possibilities in her life are part of the real magic of being young.  Because Margaret is a thoughtful person who seriously wants to understand the bigger issues in life, I think that she will probably be okay in the long run and that her personal relationship with God will continue to develop even if she finds it difficult to connect to an established religion.  That might not seem ideal to many people, but Margaret does the best she can with what she has in life, her circumstances and her understanding, and I think that’s a good sign.

Later editions of this book were revised to reflect new details of modern life, including how women and girls handle periods.  I’ve never actually seen the old belt-style of period pads that Margaret describes in the original version of the book, and later versions of the book describe the ones that are common today.  There is a movie version planned.

Posted on by TracyC

A Hugga Bunch Hello

HuggaBunchHello

A Hugga Bunch Hello by Phyllis Fair Cowell, illustrated by Ron C Lipking, 1985.

Bridget likes having her grandmother living with her and the rest of her family. Her grandmother always has time for her and is willing to give her a hug. Her parents are often too busy, her brother thinks hugs are just for girls, and her Aunt Ruth is too fussy.

Then, Aunt Ruth tries to persuade everyone that Bridget’s grandmother should go live in a nursing home. Bridget doesn’t want her grandmother to leave, but she doesn’t know what to do about it.

While she worries, a strange little person steps out of her bedroom mirror. This little person is Huggins, one of the Hugga Bunch. She says that she knows about Bridget’s problem and thinks that she can help. She invites Bridget to come with her to Huggaland.

HuggaBunchHelloMirror

In Huggaland, the Hugga Bunch take Bridget to see the Book Worm, who may have the solution that Bridget seeks. Both the Hugga Bunch and the Book Worm say that aging can be slowed by affection and “the knowledge that they are needed,” but Bridget thinks that the only solution is to find a way to actually make her grandmother young again.

The Book Worm says that if that’s what Bridget wants, then her grandmother must eat fruit from the Youngberry Tree. Unfortunately, the tree is in the territory of the Mad Queen of Quartz. Although the Hugga Bunch are afraid of her, Bridget is willing to face her for her grandmother’s sake.

Getting there involves going through a few obstacles, including walking sideways on a sideways sidewalk and facing a frightening beast who turns out to be a baby elephant who was under a spell. When they reach the tree, the mad queen takes them prisoner and turns Bridget into a statue. Fortunately, the others manage to break free and save her.

HuggaBunchHelloTree

Bridget is happy at being able to bring the Youngberries to her grandmother, but as she passes through the mirror into her room, she accidentally drops them, and they disappear.

Not knowing what else to do, Bridget runs to give her grandmother a hug before she leaves, encouraging her brother to do the same. Bridget’s father wasn’t happy about her grandmother leaving, either, and seeing how much the children will miss her, he declares that she should stay.

This book was made into a made-for-tv movie.  It is currently available on YouTube.  It follows the plot of the book pretty closely.

Posted on by TracyC · 4 Comments

The Headless Cupid

HeadlessCupidThe Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, 1971.

This is the first book in the Stanley Family Mysteries series.  Some people might be put off by the occult themes in this book, but this is a mystery story, and all is not what it seems.  Read to the end or skip to the spoilers section to find out.

Eleven-year-old David Stanley has had to help take care of his younger siblings since his mother’s death.  In some ways, he feels like his mother knew that she was dying before anyone else did, preparing David to help his father by taking care of his younger sister Janie and the young twins, Esther and Blair.  David thinks that his mother might have been psychic because she tended to believe in some odd things and often knew things before other people did.

Now David’s father, a college professor, has remarried, to a divorced woman with a daughter of her own, Amanda, who is twelve years old.  David likes his new stepmother, Molly, who is an artist, and he appreciates having someone else to help take care of the other kids.  Amanda is a different story.  She was an only child before her mother’s remarriage, and she’s not happy to suddenly have step-siblings, some of whom are rather young.  Amanda has been unhappy in general since her parents’ divorce, and she wishes that she could go to live with her father full time. Her father says that he can’t take care of her because he has to work so much, but he spoils her whenever they spend time together.  David has doubts about the things Amanda says about her father, but he and the others try to make her welcome in their new home.

HeadlessCupidNewsWith their family suddenly much larger, David’s father bought a new house for them to live in.  Actually, it’s a very old house just outside of a small town.  People call it the Westerly house after the former owners.  Not long after the family moves in, they find out that people used to say that the Westerly house was haunted.  Mr. and Mrs. Westerly used to travel around the world with their two daughters because Mr. Westerly worked for the government, but after they settled down to a quieter life in this small town in the late 1800s, strange things started happening in their house.  Rocks would fly around the house, seemingly thrown by invisible hands, and someone (or something) cut the head off the carved cupid on the fancy staircase banister.  The head was never found.  These incidents were reported in the local paper, and people believed that the Westerly family was haunted by a poltergeist.  These hauntings seemed to center around the two Westerly girls, particularly the older one, Harriette, which made some people think that the girls were faking the poltergeist.  However, they were never able to catch either of the girls doing anything.  The strange activities finally ended when the girls were sent away to boarding school, but now that the Stanleys have moved into the house, strange things are starting to happen again.

HeadlessCupidAmandaAmanda is fascinated by stories of the poltergeist.  A friend of hers where she used to live (one her mother didn’t approve of) was teaching her about the occult and how to do magic spells.  When David tells Amanda that he thought that his mother was psychic, Amanda is surprised, and she offers to teach David and the other kids about magic over the summer.  David eagerly accepts the offer because he finds the subject fascinating and because it’s the only thing that Amanda really seems interested in.  The other kids are also fascinated at the idea, even the littlest ones, which takes Amanda by surprise.  She had expected them to be scared.

Still, Amanda begins leading the kids through a series of rituals that will supposedly initiate them into the occult world, all of which have to be done in secrecy, without the parents’ knowledge.  They have to do some bizarre things like spend an entire day not talking (they have to take turns so the adults won’t notice, and it’s harder for some kids than others), spend a day where they can’t touch anything metal (mealtimes are awkward), offer “sacrifices” to the spirits (basically giving Amanda things she likes), and find animals to be their “familiars.”  As some of these rituals and the kids’ strange, secretive behavior cause problems, particularly for David’s stepmother, David begins to suspect that Amanda’s “rituals” have an ulterior motive that has nothing to do with magic at all.  Then, the poltergeist activity begins.

HeadlessCupidKidsJust as with the Westerly family years ago, rocks are thrown around the house or found just laying around.  Things are broken in the middle of the night.  Have Amanda’s rituals somehow awoken the poltergeist once more?  David has his doubts, suspecting that it’s part of Amanda’s playacting, but she is accounted for when some of these strange things happen.  The younger kids are still more fascinated than frightened by these strange happenings, but their stepmother finds them particularly unnerving.

Then, just when David thinks that he understands the situation and Amanda seems to be calming down her occult talk and behaving more normally, something happens which is really inexplicable: the missing head of the cupid suddenly reappears.

This is a Newbery Honor Book.  It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction, Themes, and Spoilers

The reason why I want to explain some of this is because I think this book has received some unfair criticism because of the “occult” themes in the book, and I want to clarify the situation for the benefit of parents and teachers who have not yet read the book and may be concerned.  I’m putting “occult” in quotes because, as I said before, that’s not really what’s going on.  The book is a mystery story, and the “supernatural” stuff is largely window dressing for the real themes of the story, which have to do with unresolved feelings and revenge.  The story even contains a kind of warning about getting involved with the occult, which is another reason why I think the criticism of this book is unfair.

That Amanda is faking at least part of the haunting is pretty obvious even early on, so I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that.  Amanda is an unhappy girl whose life abruptly changed with her mother’s remarriage, and her occult talk and fake witchcraft are part of her way of dealing with her feelings.  She admits to David at the end of the story that she was purposely trying to frighten her mother, trying to “get even” with her for turning her life upside down, first by divorcing her father and then by getting married again, forcing Amanda to move to a strange town where she has no friends and live with a bunch of kids she hardly knows.  Getting to know her new siblings better and sharing adventures with them helps, but it takes the frightening moment when the cupid’s head suddenly reappears to get Amanda to admit that real occult stuff scares her, too, and to confess the truth of what she did and her real feelings to her mother.

HeadlessCupidDavidAmandaThere are some elements of the happenings, particularly the reappearance of the cupid’s head, that are never fully explained, although David ends up knowing more than Amanda by the end.  Some aspects of the situation are hinted at.  There may be a real supernatural event at the end of the story.  Blair appears to have inherited psychic abilities from his mother, and there is a distinct possibility that the Westerly sisters who once lived in the house were just as unhappy with their parents for the changes in their lives as Amanda was with her mother.  Although the “poltergeist” as it first appears doesn’t exist, it may be that the “poltergeist” of the past remembers what it was like to be young and unhappy and that she wanted to make amends for past wrongs and to help another troubled young girl to make peace with her life and family.  But, if you don’t like that explanation, there is a more conventional, non-supernatural explanation that David considers, which equally possible.  Personally, I think it’s a combination of the two, but it’s not completely clear.  I think the author left it open-ended like that to make readers wonder and to preserve the air of mystery after the other mysteries have been cleared up.

As a kid, I enjoyed the creepy aspects of the story and the sense of wonder the kids experience as they go through their “rituals,” trying to bring some magic to their regular lives, wondering if things like ghosts and magic can really exist.  Now, I more appreciate how Amanda researched tricks used by fake psychics and mediums and used them creatively to her advantage.  When I was a kid, I liked magic tricks, and psychics and mediums make use of those types of stage illusions and psychological tricks in their acts.  I still have some books on the subject myself.  I also like the way David sensed the truth behind Amanda and the strange happenings even though he didn’t really understand how or why it was done at first.  David has some genuine curiosity about magic, but even after he realized that Amanda was faking things and was disappointed by it, he didn’t immediately tell the others.  He could have unmasked her as a fraud, but he knew that would only earn her resentment.  He wanted to understand her motives and help her feel better, giving her the chance to make peace with her mother herself and become part of their family.

This book has been frequently challenged because of the children’s inquiries into the occult, but I would like to point out that their “occult” experiments were all fake, pretty obviously so, and it is acknowledged that Amanda’s interest in the occult was fueled by her emotional distress (part of her urge to “get even” with her mother by causing problems).  By the end of the story, Amanda and her mother have an honest talk with each other about everything.  Amanda admitts her true feelings and makes peace with her mother, and she also says that her mother explained some things that Amanda didn’t know before.  The book doesn’t say exactly what Amanda’s mother told her, but from the context, it’s probably something about the circumstances behind her parents’ divorce, something that they might not have wanted to explain to her earlier.  I have a theory about it, although there’s nothing explicit that I could point to to prove it.  I suspect that Amanda’s father had an affair and that the affair is continuing, which I think is the real reason why he doesn’t want Amanda to live with him full time.  If Amanda were to live at his house, she would be sure to find out the truth.  Maybe his girlfriend is even the housekeeper Amanda referred to, the one who doesn’t help take care of children because she’s “not that kind of housekeeper.”  That possibility didn’t occur to me when I was a kid, but it seems kind of odd for a single man, living without children or other people in his house or other household staff to manage and who spends a large amount of time working away from home, to even have a housekeeper instead of simply hiring a maid or cleaning service to come in from time to time.  Households with fewer people require less maintenance.  There is less laundry to do, and single people who work tend to eat out or order in pretty often or make very simple meals, so I doubt he even needs much help with cooking.  But, that’s just my theory.  No one ever says why Amanda’s parents divorced in the story.  The reasons are less important to the story than Amanda’s feelings concerning the divorce.  Some of Amanda’s earlier resentment toward her mother was fueled by things that her father told her, making it seem like her mother was the one who caused the divorce.  After talking with her mother, Amanda seems to realize that some of the nasty things that her father said about her mother may not have been true and that her resentment toward her mother for causing the divorce was needless.  Much of the story involves unresolved feelings and the need to communicate them honestly.

The difference between reality and perceptions is also important to the story.  Although Amanda at first tries to convince the other kids that she is an expert on all things magic, David soon realizes that she’s not: she acts like ordinary, easily-identifiable wild flowers are rare herbs, she can’t control her “familiar” because she has no idea how to handle animals, and when things happen that Amanda can’t explain, she’s the first to be terrified.  In the end, Amanda gives up on the idea of the occult completely, realizing that the things she did were wrong and that she had gotten involved in something that she really didn’t want to be involved in.  Many kids wonder about the supernatural when they’re young, and I don’t think it’s bad to point out to them that they if they experiment with such things, they may be getting involved in something they could regret and that they should consider their motives for wanting to do so.  Playacting when you know it’s pretend is one thing, but not knowing if the scary stuff is real is another.

For further discussion of the dynamics of the blended family in this story, I recommend the SSR Podcast about this book.  The podcast also points out that there is an incident in this story which might be racially problematic.

Anti-Plagiarism Check

I’ve been thinking about how my reviews could be used for plagiarism ever since I caught a couple of those essay-writing companies trying to follow my blog.  It’s difficult for me to review certain books without giving spoilers, but I’d like to point out that none of my reviews explain everything there is to know about the stories.  That would be completely impossible without reprinting the entire text of the book, which plagiarists are too lazy to read anyway.  There are certain plot points which only a person who has actually read the book would understand and be able to explain.  Teachers who suspect that a student has plagiarized a book review or only pretended to read the book should ask them to verbally explain the points that I have not covered in my review, giving them no chance to try to look up the answers elsewhere or try to find them by quickly skimming the book.  I’m not going to print suggestions for questions to ask here because I don’t want to give the plagiarists a hint, and I doubt that teachers who have read the book recently themselves would really need a hint, but any teacher who contacts me via their official school e-mail address can discuss it with me.  I know these stories well because I’ve loved them for years, and I’ve started a file with suggested plot points to discuss.  I will not send this information to anyone who does not contact me from an official school e-mail address.  Keep in mind that I can easily look up the name of the person who contacts me to determine whether I’ve been contacted by a teacher or a student.

It’s one thing for a student to want to discuss the book with someone to clarify confusing plot points, but it’s another to ask someone to do their homework for them.  I know the difference, and I know homework when I see it.  Let me explain something.  All WordPress blogs have built-in analytics, and I’ve been studying SEO, so I pay attention to who has been visiting my site and how they get there.  I know whether you came here by using a search engine or whether you were referred by another site, and I can also see search terms that you used.  I added this note to this review specifically because I noticed that someone has been trying to Google what are plainly homework questions, and I just got a site referral from an online plagiarism checker.  Yeah, I see what you did there.  This is the Information Age, and when you go looking for information, sometimes, there’s someone else looking back at you, even if you can’t see them.  Not everyone with a blog pays that kind of attention to their traffic, but some of us do, and while some may not say anything about it, some of us are also a little more vocal.  I saw what you did, and I didn’t like it.  I don’t know you, but I know you’re a fool, and your teacher has just discovered it, too.  Now, we’re all aware.  It’s your own fault, and it’s too late to whine about it now.  I do sometimes help people who ask for it.  You should have asked for help when you needed it instead of cheating and stealing my words.  Maybe next time you’ll ask for what you need instead of just taking what you want.