Posted on by TracyC

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed by Virginia Hamilton, 1983.

It’s Halloween 1938, and Willie Bea’s relatives have gathered at the old family farm, near where she lives. Money is tight because of the Great Depression, but one of her aunts lives and works in the city, making more money than the others, and is willing to help fund family dinners and provide a little extra for her nieces and nephews when they need something, like new clothes. The aunt is a little scandalous in their family for her multiple marriages, but the others appreciate her generosity, and the nieces and nephews like getting some extra attention and a few treats from her.

The family gathering is a bit chaotic with children running around and getting into trouble. One of Willie Bea’s cousins gets into particular trouble with her mother for using his bow and arrow set to shoot a pumpkin off of Willie Bea’s younger brother’s head. Their mother panics when she catches them doing it because he could have missed and killed the little boy, but Willie Bea tries to calm her mother. Willie Bea was less worried because she knows her cousin’s archery skill and that he wasn’t going to miss, but she understands that adults think of the risks and aren’t fully aware of what the kids are capable of doing. (I’m siding with the mother on this one. Even people who are very good at something can miss now and then, and it’s a big risk to take with someone’s life.) Willie Bea also realizes that the decision to use her little brother for the William Tell act actually came from another cousin because the cousin doing the archery wouldn’t have thought of it himself, and it’s not fair that her mother doesn’t know to blame this other cousin.

Willie Bea talks to her father about the incident, hoping that he’ll understand how unfair it is. However, her father tells her that what her cousin did was dangerous, no matter why he did it. Even though he has a reputation for being good with archery, even people who are good can still miss, and accidents can happen. (See?) Her father lets Willie Bea know that he’s aware that she and her cousins do risky things sometimes when they’re playing with each other, but as an adult, he and the other adults have a responsibility to tell them when something they’re doing is too risky and to put a stop to it. No matter how many times they’ve done some of these things without having an accident, some things are just accidents waiting to happen. They should never assume that an arrow can’t go wrong just because it hasn’t yet or that they can’t fall from a high place just because they haven’t fallen yet.

Willie Bea is a little embarrassed by the talk and feels like her father still doesn’t understand. However, Willie Bea herself has been starting to understand a few things about her relatives this Halloween, things that she either hasn’t noticed before or only half noticed. She can see that one of her cousins is too manipulative, noting the little tricks she uses to get her way and the things she says and does when she wants to be spiteful. She can see that her other cousin has trouble asking up for himself and is particularly vulnerable to manipulation.

Willie Bea also begins to notice things about the adults in the family and their relationships with each other. Aunt Leah, the aunt who has more money than the others and has been married multiple times seems glamorous and fascinating to Willie Bea. Aunt Leah is into horoscopes and fortune telling, and when she reads Willie Bea’s palm, she predicts something special for her. Although Willie Bea loves her own mother, she is intrigued by the family gossip that her father was seeing Aunt Leah before falling in love with her mother, and Willie Bea fantasizes about what it would be like to live with Aunt Leah in the city. She imagines that it would be exciting, and she asks her father why he chose her mother instead of Aunt Leah. Her father knows that Willie Bea doesn’t entirely understand what it’s like to make that kind of choice and what living with a woman like Aunt Leah would really mean. (It occurred to me that the multiple divorces Leah has had might be a clue.) He just explains to Willie Bea that his choice became clear after he got to know her mother as well as her sister, Leah. He knew her mother was the right choice because she was the kind of steady woman who would always be there for him.

That evening, while Willie Bea is putting together her hobo costume and the ghost costumes for her younger siblings and her parents are listening to the radio, Aunt Leah suddenly bursts in and starts having hysterics about it being the end of the world! It takes Willie Bea’s parents a while to get a clear answer from Aunt Leah about why she’s so upset. When she recovers enough to explain things, she says that she was listening to the radio, and she heard that Martians have invaded New Jersey! She describes the horrible, terrifying reports that the radio announcer made about the Martians destroying army troops with their deadly heat ray. Aunt Leah was so terrified by what she heard that she not only turned off the radio but unplugged it, and she says that she’ll never plug it in again, which might be a moot point, if aliens really are here to destroy the world. (If you know what was infamously broadcast on Halloween 1938, you know what Leah heard and that it’s not what she thinks it is.)

While Willie Bea’s parents are trying to decide what to make of Aunt Leah’s story, Willie Bea’s Uncle Jimmy arrives. He says that the rest of the family has also heard what Aunt Leah heard and that they’re all gathering at the old family farm. Rumor has it that people have seen the terrible invaders over at the Kelly farm. Willie Bea’s mother gathers the children and heads to the family farm that Willie Bea’s grandparents own to be with the rest of the family, while Willie Bea’s father tries to see if he can find the station that Leah was listening to and hear the reports for himself. It occurs to him that it might not be an invasion of the Martians but could actually be Germans and German war machines because they’ve all heard about the Nazi takeover of Germany, and he remembers the horrible Hindenburg disaster. If Germans could make a blimp that explodes into a fiery terror like that, then he thinks maybe they could make something that resembles an alien invasion.

At her grandparents’ farm, Willie Bea watches as various relatives panic, cluster around the radio, trade rumors, and try to figure what’s going on. Rumor has it that there are Martians on the Kelly farm, so Willie Bea convinces young Toughy Clay to go over there and try to see them for themselves. At Willie Bea’s insistence, they use the stilts that the children like to walk on to give themselves longer legs, so they can get there faster. Nothing is as it seems this Halloween, and Willie Bea’s expedition to see the Martians definitely doesn’t go as planned.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including a short picture book version).

My Reaction

Almost of the characters in this book are African American. I don’t think it’s ever stated directly because there’s no need in the story to describe them, compared to anyone else, but I think it’s subtly implied. There is only one point in the story where race is mentioned at all, and that’s when Willie Bea is hurt, and the doctor comes to see her. Willie Bea describes the doctor as an old man who delivered most of the babies in her family and knows everybody in the community, and she says that he visits everyone, black or white, rich or poor. Willie Bea’s family is at the poorer end of the community because the doctor knows that people like them don’t normally call the doctor unless it’s something that they really can’t handle by themselves.

I found the family relationships in the story confusing at first. The kids are all referred to by nicknames, and when they are first introduced, it’s difficult to keep it straight who is whose sibling and who is a cousin, and who is older and who is younger. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. Relationships are explained gradually as the story continues, along with characters’ real names as well as nicknames, but it takes some time to get to the explanations.

The story has a slow start, and the real adventure doesn’t begin until about halfway through the book. In some ways, it’s a coming of age story for Willie Bea because she finds herself seeing her family in ways that she never has before, becoming more aware of different sides of their personalities and gaining more insights into their relationships with each other. She also comes to see firsthand what her father means about the stunts that she and her cousins pull and how she should never assume that they can’t get hurt just because they haven’t before. Much of this book is what I would call “slice of life”, a sort of glimpse into Halloweens of the past in a rural community, especially one particular Halloween that would have been memorable for anyone who was alive at the time in the United States.

The radio broadcast that has Willie Bea’s family and others in the community panicking over an alien invasion is The War of the Worlds, a play based on the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells. This type of panic over this particular radio performance was a real, historical incident because the radio play was presented in the format of news broadcasts at the time, and some people who tuned into the program late misunderstood what they were hearing and thought that it was a real news broadcast about an actual emergency. It wasn’t a widespread panic because, first, people who started listening to the broadcast from its beginning knew what they were listening to, and second, not everyone was listening to the broadcast at all. Still, there was enough panic over the radio performance that it became newsworthy and has become a piece of American history and lore.

I enjoyed the historical details in the story, particularly all the radio play references throughout the story. Willie Bea’s family likes to listen to radio shows, and I’m familiar with some of them because I also enjoy old radio plays. Her family likes to listen to The Shadow and Little Orphan Annie. Willie Bea likes to amuse her siblings by imitating people from the radio, singing theme songs and reciting jokes from Jack Benny, like the famous “your money or your life” joke.

Posted on by TracyC

Moon Window

Moon Window by Jane Louise Curry, 1996.

Joanna Ellen Briggs (usually called JoEllen or Jo) lost her father five years ago, when he died in a car accident. Since then, it’s just been her and her mother. Jo has adjusted to the loss, and she and her mother have been happy together. At least, that’s what Jo keeps telling herself. Now, her mother is getting remarried, and Jo feels like her life has been completely turned upside down. Her new stepfather, George, is a nice man, but Jo can’t stand the idea of her life changing. George is a law professor, and Jo’s other relatives like him, but Jo is afraid of what this marriage will mean for her. She and her mother will be moving to George’s house in Boston, and she is afraid that nothing will ever be the same again.

At the heart of her worries is the fear of losing her mother, just as she lost her father. The truth is that Jo has never fully adjusted to her father’s death. She participates in a wide range of classes and activities, but it’s not because she really loves any of these subjects or activities. Her gymnastics, choir practice, piano lessons, and the host of other classes and hobbies that she pursues with so much energy and perfectionism are to keep her mind occupied so she won’t have to think about her father or her worries about what might happen to her if something happens to her mother. Ever since her father died, there has always been the lingering fear of something happening to her mother, and that’s why Jo fears change in her life. She has settled into a routine that makes her feel relatively safe and keeps her from thinking too much about what might happen in the future. George’s entry into their lives has broken the routine, will bring even more changes, and has caused Jo’s tightly-controlled feelings to creep to the surface.

Even during the wedding, Jo privately hopes something will happen that will stop the ceremony and keep all of these frightening changes from happening, but nothing does. However, Jo’s grandmother has noticed how upset Jo is, even though Jo tries to keep a blank face and hide her feelings. Her grandmother realizes that Jo is bottling up her emotions, and she sees the moment when Jo finally lets loose, just as her mother and George leave on their honeymoon. Instead of throwing birdseed after the car, like everyone else, she turns and throws her little bag of birdseed at one of George’s young nephews, hitting him in the eye.

Originally, the plan had been for Jo to stay with George’s brother and his family while her mother and George are on their honeymoon. However, because of her bad behavior toward George’s nephews, the boys’ mother refuses to have her as a guest. Jo’s grandparents hurriedly consider other arrangements for Jo. They would take her themselves, but they will soon be traveling to a conference they are attending. Jo’s grandmother laments about Jo’s behavior and moods, and that reminds her of Witch Ellen, an ancestor in an old painting at Winterbloom, the old house where her frail great-aunt lives. Granty Nell, as they call her, is actually a distant cousin and is over 100 years old, but she loves children. Jo’s grandmother remembers that one of Jo’s cousins recently visited Granty Nell at Winterbloom and had a wonderful time. Winterbloom is a strange old house near Walpole, New Hampshire, but Jo’s grandmother has fond memories of the place, and Granty Nell has live-in help, so she won’t be dealing with Jo alone.

Granty Nell accepts Jo as a visitor, but Jo is stunned that she has so suddenly been dumped with a relative she doesn’t even know, in an old stone house in the middle of the woods. At first, Jo plans to run away and go back to the apartment where she and her mother have been living and stay there until her mother comes to get her so her mother will regret leaving her and think twice about ever leaving her again. However, Winterbloom is no ordinary place, and leaving is much more difficult than Jo realizes.

Granty is unexpectedly sharp in spite of her age, and she can read Jo like a book, noting her thinness and chewed fingernails. She speaks openly to Jo about her feelings about her new stepfather on her first day at Winterbloom. Granty lets her speak and doesn’t criticize her feelings. Instead, she tells Jo a little about the house and their ancestors, and she offers to let her explore the house and choose one of the guest bedrooms for herself. When she decides which room she wants, she can tell the housekeeper, Mrs. Craig. Mrs. Craig’s husband Thomas and son Tom take care of the grounds and garden of Winterbloom. The three of them live in a little cottage nearby, so only Granty and Jo will be living in the big house.

As Jo explores the old house alone, she notices that the furnishings are rich but old and shabby. She wonders why Granty hasn’t replaced them because she is supposedly wealthy. Each of the bedrooms has a fireplace that has an iron Franklin stove fitted inside and wardrobes instead of closets. The furnishings are all old-fashioned and a little shabby, but there is something in every room that catches Jo’s attention, like an interesting painting or an embroidered stool. In spite of herself, Jo finds herself liking things or becoming intrigued by them, although she is still determined to run away. Then, while exploring the attic, she finds an old turret room with a round window, the kind that her mother likes to call a “moon window.” Jo tries to open the window, but she discovers that someone has painted it shut. She manages to pry it open anyway, using a knife that she finds in Granty’s desk drawer. Outside the window, there is a large tree, good for climbing. Jo realizes that, with her gymnastics skills, it would be easy for her to climb down the tree and escape when it’s time for her to run away.

Thinking that she’ll probably only stay for one night before running away, Jo chooses the yellow bedroom, the one with a high bed with yellow brocade curtains that has a step stool for climbing into it. Granty tells her that is the room where her grandmother stayed when she came to visit Winterbloom when she was young. Winterbloom is undeniably charming, in spite of its shabbiness, and Jo can’t help but think that the dining room, with its tapestries and long, candlelit table looks like it’s set for a fairy tale feast.

To Jo’s surprise, Granty tells her a little of her own history at dinner. Like many of the women in their family, Granty’s first name is Ellen, although the younger generations think of her as Granty Nell. Jo had assumed that Granty had grown up at Winterbloom, but actually, she originally lived in New York. Like other young girls in the family, she also came to visit Winterbloom as a child when the woman that she once called Granty lived there. When Granty Nell was 17 years old and having one of her visits to Winterboom, both of her parents died in a flu epidemic. (I thought at first that she was referring to the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic, but later events in the story show that the dates don’t line up. Her parents must have died earlier.) As an orphan, she continued living at Winterbloom with her Granty until the following September, when she went away to college. She was a schoolteacher for a time until her Granty died, leaving her Winterbloom and all of her money, on the condition that she change her last name to Macallan, which is the family’s maternal surname. Granty Nell wasn’t originally happy about having to change her name, but she did it anyway because she loved Winterbloom. Jo wishes that someone would give her a house to live in so she wouldn’t have to live with George. George’s house in Boston is very modern and definitely not charming. Granty Nell tells her to be careful about what she wishes for because, since she returned to Winterbloom, she hasn’t traveled very far from it, and there are many interesting places she has never seen. Clinging too much to one particular place can keep a person from moving on to other, more exciting places.

Although someone (possibly Mrs. Craig or Granty) has tried to make the yellow room more cozy for Jo by moving all the things that she admired in the other rooms into that room, Jo is still determined to run away. She almost resents how comfortable Winterbloom is for her, making it difficult for her to leave. Early in the morning, Jo slips out through the moon window in the attic and climbs down the tree from the house. She originally planned to ride her bike the two miles from Winterbloom into town because her grandparents left her bike there for her to use, but she can’t find the bike when she reaches the ground. She assumes that the Craigs must have moved it and that she’ll have to walk to town to catch the bus.

However, during her early morning walk to town, it slowly begins to dawn on her that something isn’t right. She overhears some children talking about a cannon, which is strange. Then, she has an encounter with a man on horseback, who talks like he’s a local doctor who’s been out to see patients. Since when do doctors ride around on horses to see their patients? Jo becomes more uneasy, and when she reaches the town, she realizes why. The town doesn’t look the way it did when she passed through it with her grandparents. Suddenly, there is no Interstate highway, and there is a covered wooden bridge that isn’t there anymore in Jo’s time. Somehow, it looks like going through the window has sent Jo back in time, although she’s not sure when or if that’s really what is happening. Disoriented and terrified, Jo returns to Winterbloom and climbs back up to the moon window, leaving her knapsack hidden in some bushes to retrieve later.

The next day, Jo tries to tell herself that what happened early that morning was only a dream, but there are hints that it wasn’t. Not only is her bike exactly where she left it, like it never moved, but the bush where she left her knapsack isn’t there anymore, and there’s no sign of the knapsack. Jo searches the area to check if she was just mistaken about where she left the knapsack, but it really isn’t there. When Granty suggests that they go into town for lunch, Jo sees that the gate to Winterbloom isn’t the same in the present as it was in the past, and the road to town is paved while the road she walked along in the early morning wasn’t. Yet, there are aspects of the countryside that are eerily familiar, which indicates that what she experienced wasn’t just a dream. She might have been able to dream about the road and town as they were in the past, but she shouldn’t have been able to accurately dream about features of the area that she hadn’t seen before and that have been there for a long time.

Their trip to town is cut short because Granty becomes ill. Young Tom, who is driving them, says that Granty suffers from agoraphobia, which is why she gets ill or panics when she gets too far from Winterbloom. This is part of the reason why she has not traveled very far since she inherited the house. Granty later says that this isn’t entirely the case, but through many years of living at Winterbloom, it has become more and more difficult for her to leave it.

Jo still plans to run away, and she realizes that she left her flashlight in her knapsack, wherever that is now. She decides to search the attic for something she can use instead. In spite of herself, she finds the old clothes in the trunks in the attic charming and decides to try wearing some of them. Then, at the bottom of one of the trunks, she finds her knapsack! The knapsack isn’t the way it was when she last saw it, though. It has clearly aged, and so have the things inside. The flashlight no longer works, the clothes are yellowed with age, and the leather and rubber on her hiking boots has hardened and cracked. It’s like they’ve been stored in the attic for more than 100 years! The boots are wrapped in a newspaper, now deteriorated, but when Jo examines it, she finds the date of July 1809 and references to some of the people and things she encountered during her early morning excursion. Now, Jo is really scared.

Jo races to the turret room and looks out the moon window, but what she sees frightens her more. Although it’s afternoon in Winterbloom, it’s dark outside the moon window. More than that, there’s no tree outside the window, and the countryside that she sees isn’t the woods that surround Winterbloom. Jo recognizes what she sees as the same scene in a painting in her room at Winterbloom. The moon window is no ordinary window. It looks out on different times and places.

Once she gets over her fear, Jo is intrigued at this “window of time” and wants to know more about how it works. She even thinks that, if she can learn to control it, she might be able to go back in time to just the right moment to keep her mother from getting married again, which she thinks will solve all of her problems. However, the next time she tries the window, she finds herself meeting a young Granty Nell in 1897, when she was just a girl about her age called Nell, which is short for Ellen. Nell catches her sneaking around in a dress that looks very much like her dress. (Really, it’s the same dress, just aged about 90 years because Jo found it stored in the attic and tried it on.) Jo attempts to explain to her who she is and how she got there, taking Nell to the turret room in the attic and showing her the moon window. Jo is curious where the moon window will lead if they go through it in the past, wondering if it will take them to the future, but it ends up leading them further into the past. Jo and Nell end up in 1764, when the house was first being built. They are both caught sneaking around by a young Indian (Native American) and the stonemason who is building the house for Ellen Hawke. Ellen is a common name for women in their family, and this Ellen was the one who created Winterbloom and the one for whom all the other Ellens were named, including JoEllen. She is also considered a “wise woman”, and she is the Witch Ellen who appears in a painting at Winterbloom. Jo recognizes the stonemason’s last name as her grandmother’s maiden name, making her wonder if they are also somehow related. She wonders if maybe the stonemason will marry Ellen Hawke, making him her distant ancestor.

As Jo begins to consider people’s complex relationships across time, it occurs to her that, if she and Nell aren’t careful, they might accidentally change something in the past that will endanger their own existence. For the first time, she also begins to wonder what might happen if she successfully changes things so her mother never meets or marries George. Is it possible that she would be preventing the potential birth of a half-sibling, and if so, is that what she really wants to do?

Back in the present day, Granty Nell begins remembering an incident from her youth that she always thought of as a dream with a girl named Joanna and a trip back in time, and she begins connecting it with some strange questions Jo has been asking her. Years ago, Granty Nell had removed the furnishings from the turret room (the ones which Jo had delighted in and are now her the Yellow Bedroom that she is using) and scattered them through the house. She had the moon window painted shut and kept the door to the turret room locked, sensing that the moon window was magical and dangerous. Now, in spite of Nell’s precautions, things are coming full circle, and Jo is doing what Nell realizes she has done before.

Although Granty Nell loves having Jo at Winterbloom, she begins to realize that she must get Jo away from the place as soon as possible, before Jo becomes trapped in the same web that has kept Nell herself tied so tightly to Winterbloom all these years. Solving the mysteries of Winterbloom and the spell it has on the other Ellens in the family means exploring the past of the first Ellen, Witch Ellen.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed this story and its atmosphere! I think fans of Cottagecore would enjoy Winterbloom, with its old-fashioned, comfortable shabbiness and rooms with quaint, magical touches. This is also one of those books that mentions what the characters eat. I’m not much of a foodie, but there were a couple of things that interested me about their meals at Winterbloom. I find it interesting when books mention unusual dishes or foods that they call by unfamiliar names. At one point, they have what Granty calls “Indian cake” for lunch. It’s described as a type of corn bread, so I think it’s named for Native Americans rather than Indians from India. (I ask that question almost every time I see “Indian” in writing, unless it’s specified.) I’d never heard of that before, so I tried looking it up, and from the description, I think it might be similar to this recipe for a corn bread pound cake from 1827. I’m not 100% sure it’s the same thing, but it seems reasonable because it’s described as both a corn bread and a cake. As charming as Winterbloom is, though, it also has a dark side that Jo must confront.

Themes

Jo’s immediate problem is obvious from the beginning of the story. There have been many other children’s books about children adjusting to changes in their lives, including the remarriage of a parent. It’s understandable that children who are accustomed to having only one parent might cling to that parent and be afraid of changes that might cause them to lose that parent or experience less of that parent’s attention and affection. Although adults might say that coming to love someone else doesn’t mean loving other people less, but Jo already knows that, when her mother spends more time with George, she spends less time with Jo. Her mother still loves her, but Jo feels neglected and forgotten, fearful of what this will mean for her future and her relationship with the only parent she has left. Even before her mother married George, there were times when her mother was so preoccupied, thinking about George, that she forgot to get breakfast for Jo or buy groceries, as she normally did, making Jo nervous about her mother still providing for her through this relationship with George. I’m sure that her mother doesn’t mean to give Jo this feeling. It’s just part of the awkwardness of making a major change in their lives and adjusting to a new normal. I’ve reviewed others on this theme before, including The Haunting at Cliff House, which also features time travel.

There are a couple of things that make this story different from others that I’ve read. One that surprised me at first is that Granty Nell knows about the magic of the window. In many books for kids that involve magic and time travel, the adults don’t know what’s going on and never learn. The magic or time travel is meant to give the children in the stories perspective on their lives and problems and teach them lessons, not to do anything for the adults. Typically, the adults either don’t know what’s going on, while the children learn about the magic or face their problems on their own, or the adults don’t find out what’s been happening until after the child has resolved the situation, like Rose in The Root Cellar, which is about an orphan adjusting to a new life with her relatives. In this story, Granty Nell has known about the magic of the moon window since she was young, when she first met Jo on one of her time travel excursions. At first, Nell thought that Jo was a dream, but through her years with the house, she came to understand the dangers of the window and the hold that the house can have on people, particularly on young girls named Ellen, who are coping with the loss of a home or a parent.

It isn’t obvious right away, but this is also a story about generational trauma, but with a magical/supernatural twist. Like other Ellens in the family, the first Ellen, Ellen Hawke (maiden name Ellen MacAlpin, also called Ellen MacAllan or Witch Ellen) also suffered the lost of her father and home early in life. The family’s ancestral home, Castle MacAlpin in Scotland, was destroyed by fire, and her father died in the fire. Ellen wanted to save him, but she couldn’t. The MacAlpins were unusual people, who possessed real magic, and Nell thinks that they might actually be descended from elves. After her father died, Ellen married, and later in life, after her husband died, she went to New Hamsphire to start over. People were always nervous about her and her magical abilities, so whenever it looked like people might be about to put her on trail for being a witch, she would move and start over.

Like Granty Nell, Witch Ellen has also lived an unnaturally long life, and (spoiler) she is still living secretly in Winterbloom. At least some of the other Ellens in the family were also her, pretending to be one of her own descendants. When she came to New Hampshire, she built a new version of the home that she had lost, which is Winterbloom. The shabby, old-fashioned belongings in the house are actually a clue to the house’s true problem. Granty can’t change things too much, even when she wants to, because Witch Ellen won’t let her. The house is a monument to her old life, and she can’t let go of it. However, Ellen eventually discovered that Winterbloom was a poor substitute for her lost home. It’s undeniably a charming house, but it’s not the original castle, so it just couldn’t be the same and would never feel the same to Ellen.

When Jo finally speaks to Witch Ellen directly, she admits that, rather than bringing her solace, Winterbloom haunts her because it can’t be what she wants it to be. Witch Ellen tells Jo that, for a long time, she has been waiting for a descendant of hers to undo a terrible mistake that she made years before, which has kept her bound to the house. That is, assuming that Witch Ellen is telling the truth.

For most of the book, readers don’t know what’s behind the magic of the house or if the witch in the family is in control of what’s happening. I expected at first that Witch Ellen would be a sympathetic character who would help Jo to understand the magic and maybe teach her something to help her cope with her situation, but that isn’t the case. Jo must confront the question of whether the mission that Ellen gives her would really break the spell of Winterbloom or if the curse of Winterbloom was always Ellen’s inability to accept life as it came and to try to control the outcomes. Ellen was always a controlling person, and her own children left her and Winterbloom years ago because she frightened them. Witch Ellen was never satisfied with her life, even the parts that were really good, because she couldn’t let go of the old home that she lost. Her new home, the men she married, and even her own children were never good enough for her because she was clinging to her memories of her old life and her plan to get it back. It was an obsession with her, and it has guided everything she has done. When Ellen became Nell’s guardian as her “Granty”, she began controlling her, keeping her bound to Winterbloom all these years to accomplish what she wanted. When Nell wouldn’t do it, Ellen began searching for another descendant who would, which is why she keeps inviting other young descendants to visit Winterbloom.

Jo is capable of doing what Ellen asks, but she has begun to see Ellen’s selfishness for what it really is. Ellen is prepared to sacrifice the lives and futures of her descendants to change the past, without regard for what that would mean for anyone else. Jo is different because she can see the bigger picture, and she does care about other people. She worries about her future, and that’s why she is afraid of the changes brought by her mother’s remarriage, but she has come to see that there are limits to what she’s prepared to do about that because of her concern for the welfare of other people. Jo realizes that she doesn’t want to be trapped at Winterbloom forever or to endanger her very existence and the existence of other people in her family to accomplish Ellen’s mission.

In many books about children coming to accept stepparents, the children come to suddenly love the stepparents at the end of the book, or at least find something about them to appreciate or an ability to see things as the adults around them do. That isn’t the case with this book. Maybe Jo will come to appreciate George once she becomes more accustomed to him and her new life, but for now, she has come to see that trying to control other people’s lives can be truly damaging, not just to them but also to other people around them and even to herself, and that it isn’t healthy to remain stuck in the past. Although accepting change can be difficult and can sometimes mean accepting bad outcomes along the way, Jo comes to see that she would rather keep moving forward in life and letting others move forward.

If something bad hadn’t happened in their family centuries before, maybe none of them would even exist now. Maybe accepting her mother’s marriage to George will one day mean accepting a younger half-sibling and having to share her mother with George and that sibling, but Jo recognizes that this half-sibling has the right to exist as much as she does. The half-sibling is only a potential idea at this point, not a firm reality, but the knowledge that there could potentially be one someday causes Jo to think about the effect that her decisions can have on people, including possible future generations. Letting her mother, George, and the potential half-sibling have their lives will mean having to make some changes to her own life, but Jo sees that it also allow her room to consider new possibilities for her own life in the future and to keep moving forward. The contrast between having the ability to move forward and being stuck in the past is enough to convince Jo to stop fighting her mother’s marriage and to focus on moving forward and seeing what life holds.

Children’s Literature References

This is one of those children’s books that also references other children’s books. Because generations of children have visited Winterbloom, Jo finds old children’s books on the shelves there, like The Five Children and It by E. Nesbit and a Nancy Drew book from the 1930s. When Jo reads The Five Children and It, she reads a part about how people can make themselves wake up at a particular time without an alarm clock by really focusing on the time they want to wake up before they go to bed. I haven’t read this book yet, but I have done that before, made myself wake up at a particular time because I had it in my mind that was when I wanted to get up. It does seem to work at least sometimes, although The Five Children and It says that it only works if you really, really want to wake up at that particular time. If you don’t really want to get up, it won’t work. When Jo reads the Nancy Drew book, she tells Granty that she’s surprised that Nancy Drew is that old, and Granty tells her how the Nancy Drew books are periodically rewritten to update them with the current time and habits, changing language and technology to be current. This is true, and I’ve talked about that on this site before. As this story notes, in the original books, people were driving roadsters and using typewriters, and in the updated versions, they have sports cars and computers.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Understood Betsy

Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1916.

Elizabeth Ann is an orphan who lives with her Great-Aunt Harriet and her first-cousin-once-removed Frances, who she calls Aunt Frances. Her relatives took her in when she was only a baby, after her parents died, and her life with them is the only one she has ever known. Her relatives love her, and Aunt Frances is particularly devoted to her. Ever since Elizabeth Ann came to live with them, she has devoted her entire attention to the little girl. She reads anything she can find about how to parent a child and makes it a point to know everything that’s going on in Elizabeth Ann’s life at school and sympathize with her over ever difficulty and misfortune she encounters. Elizabeth Ann certainly doesn’t lack for attention and affection, but Aunt Frances’s devotion and sympathy often go a little too far.

Aunt Frances is rather an anxious person, and she has unintentionally transferred many of her worries and anxieties to Elizabeth Ann, making her a rather timid and fearful little girl. She has also made it such a point to shield Elizabeth Ann with so much attention that Elizabeth Ann is never allowed to go anywhere or do anything by herself, making her feel like she can’t do things alone. Aunt Frances tries so hard to shield Elizabeth Ann from anything difficult or unpleasant that any difficulty she does encounter seems unbearable. While Aunt Frances’s intentions are good, and she tries hard to always understand and sympathize with Elizabeth Ann about everything, but there are some things about both Elizabeth Ann and herself that Aunt Frances doesn’t really understand. Then, when Elizabeth Ann is nine years old, something happens that changes her life forever.

When Great-Aunt Harriet gets sick, the doctor says that she must go to a warm climate and that Aunt Frances is going to have to take care of her. However, the doctor is adamant that Elizabeth Ann shouldn’t go with them because he doesn’t want to risk the girl catching Great-Aunt Harriet’s disease. Elizabeth Ann can’t imagine life without Aunt Frances, and Aunt Frances worries about where Elizabeth Ann will stay. Her relatives in Vermont, the Putneys, say that they are eager to have her. They would have taken her when she was a baby, but Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances never trusted the Putneys. They say that they are not sympathetic enough and that life on their farm would be too harsh for the delicate, sensitive little girl they have decided that Elizabeth Ann is. Instead, they decide that she should go live with some other cousins who live in the same city they do.

However, these relatives aren’t particularly eager to have her, and after Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances have already left town on their train, they discover that a member of their household has come down with scarlet fever (what strep throat can turn into if it isn’t treated with antibiotics) and that the household must be quarantined. There is a brief moment of panic when they realize that they can’t even bring the girl into their house. Then, they remember the Putneys. If Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances couldn’t bring themselves to send Elizabeth Ann to these other relatives, these cousins can. In fact, they must, and there’s no way Elizabeth Ann can argue, even though she is afraid of the Putneys because of all the negative things she’s heard her aunts say about them.

A relative who is traveling on business takes Elizabeth Ann partway by train and then makes sure that she gets on the right train to go to the Putney’s town in Vermont alone. Timid, fearful little Elizabeth Ann finds herself traveling completely alone for the first time to go to a place she’s never been and meet relatives she is sure she won’t like. Fortunately, many of Elizabeth Ann’s preconceived ideas are turned on their head from the first moment she steps off the train and is greeted by Great-Uncle Henry.

If it had been Aunt Frances greeting her, Aunt Frances would have immediately worried and fussed over her and asked her how she stood the ordeal of traveling. However, Uncle Henry acts like Elizabeth Ann hasn’t been through any ordeal at all. Instead, he just greets her cheerfully and helps her into his wagon. In fact, as they drive along, he unexpectedly gives the horses’ reins to Elizabeth Ann and lets her drive while he does some math. (We don’t know why he needs to do this; he just says he does.) He just tells her to pull on the left rein to make the horses turn left and the right rein to make them go right. Being handed this unexpected responsibility is terrifying for timid little Elizabeth Ann, and she has a moment of panic, worrying that she doesn’t always remember her left from her right. Then, Elizabeth Ann has an unexpected revelation: it doesn’t really matter if she doesn’t remember the names for the directions or which is which because she can just look and see where she wants the horses to go and pull the reins in that direction, no matter what that direction is called. After all, it’s not like horses really understand the words “left” and “right” anyway, just the direction of the pulling. This is an important revelation for Elizabeth Ann, who is usually accustomed to Aunt Frances doing everything for her, including her thinking. She has never really had to figure out things by herself before. When she voices this revelation to Uncle Henry, he simply agrees that she is correct, and Elizabeth Ann feels a rare sense of pride in her accomplishment.

When they reach the Putney Farm, Great-Aunt Abigail and Cousin Ann are glad to see her, but they don’t overly fuss, either. They call Elizabeth Ann “Betsy” and show her the hook where she can hang her cloak. Betsy is a little offended that they don’t help her take it off and hang it up for her the way Aunt Frances did. Their lack of fussing and expecting her to do things for herself makes her feel at first as if they don’t really care about her. Their farmhouse is also fairly small, it’s lit with kerosene lamps, and they do their own cooking instead of having a servant, like Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances did. These things make Betsy realize that the Putneys are poor, and she has a moment where she is overcome, thinking that she will be miserable in a poor, deprived household. Then, Aunt Abigail hands Betsy a kitten and tells her that, if she likes it, it can be her cat.

Betsy always wanted a kitten, but Aunt Frances would never let her have one because she was afraid that they would carry disease. Betsy forget her worries and misery while playing with the kitten, which she names Eleanor. She is also relieved that her relatives don’t fuss about her not liking certain foods. Aunt Frances always tried to make her eat her beans for nutrition, but the Putneys don’t care when she avoids them because she has a good appetite for everything else on the table. In fact, Betsy eats much more at the Putney farm than she ordinarily does because she is allowed to eat more of what she likes and nobody fusses over how much she’s eating or if she’s eating the right things. For her first night at the farm, Betsy has to sleep with Aunt Abigail because her room isn’t ready yet, but she ends up finding Aunt Abigail’s presence reassuring.

In the morning, her relatives decide to let her sleep in because she’s tired from traveling. When Betsy wakes up, she lies in bed for a while, waiting for someone to tell her to get up. When no one does, she get the idea, for the first time, that she can get up when she’s ready and doesn’t need for someone to tell her to do it. She also dresses herself and does her own hair for the first time. In a way, it’s a little thrilling because Betsy realizes that she can do her hair the way she wants it instead of the way Aunt Frances does it, and she copies a hairstyle she envied on one of her old classmates. However, it does bother her a little that her relatives don’t seem to care about whether or not she needs help and aren’t stepping forward to help her automatically. She does fine, but she’s accustomed to an adult hovering over her as a sign of caring.

Her relatives explain that they were letting her sleep as late as she wanted that day because they knew she would be tired. Cousin Ann gives her breakfast and lets her have as much milk as she wants because, unlike in the city, they produce their own milk from cows rather than buying it in quarts, so they don’t have strict limits on how much they can have in a day. Betsy is pleased by this, but she has another moment of panic when Cousin Ann tells her to wash her dishes after breakfast. Betsy has never washed her own dishes before and doesn’t know how. Seeing Betsy’s hesitation, Cousin Ann offers a view brief instructions, and Betsy accomplishes the task.

On her first day, she also sees Aunt Abigail making butter, something that Betsy has never seen before. She is accustomed to buying butter, not making it, and she didn’t even know before what butter is made from. Aunt Abigail is astonished that Betsy doesn’t know these things, but Uncle Henry points out that city life is different, and Betsy has probably seen things they haven’t, like how roads are paved. Betsy gets excited because roads being paved is a familiar sight to her, but she becomes embarrassed and confused when her aunt and uncle try to ask her questions about how the workmen do it. While she has seen roads being paved before, she took the sight for granted and never really noticed the details. Aunt Abigail suggests to her that she watch the butter making process closely and even take part in it so, if someone asks her later how it’s done, she can tell them all about it. Betsy accepts the lesson and even has fun making butter.

Then, her relatives surprise her by telling her that it’s time for her to go to school for afternoon lessons. They let her miss the morning lessons so she could rest, but now that she’s rested and had some time to look around the farm, she should go to the afternoon lessons. Worse still, they tell her that she should walk there by herself. Betsy panics again because Aunt Frances never let her walk to school by herself, but her relatives just give her a few directions to the school and a sugar cookie to take with her and send her out the door. Betsy could balk at this and say that she can’t do this and won’t, but their expectation that she can and will and her hesitancy to tell them differently make her walk down the road in the direction they say.

She almost misses the schoolhouse because it’s a much smaller building that she expected. Her school in the city was a multi-story building, but the local school is just a small, one-room schoolhouse. Fortunately, the teacher has been expecting her and looking out for her arrival, so she calls Betsy inside as she passes. Betsy is astonished at how few students there are, compared to her old school, and because there are so few, all the grades are just in that one schoolroom.

Even more confusingly, Betsy learns that this little school doesn’t do grades the way her old school did. Because there are so few students, and they’re all sharing the same room, it doesn’t matter too much what grade each student is studying in which subject. The teacher just moves them up and down as necessary to help them learn at their own, individual levels. At her age, Betsy knows that she should be in the third grade at school, but when the teacher has her read out loud with the other students at the third grade level, Betsy does much better than they do. She loves reading, and she reads all the time on her own, so she has progressed much faster in her reading skills than other children her age. Her teachers at her old school just never noticed because they were trying to keep track of so many students that they couldn’t pay that much attention to individual students’ progress. Her new teacher decides that she can read at a seventh grade level. Betsy is stunned and proud. The idea that she could move up multiple grade levels at once never occurred to her before as an option, but then, she worries that she can’t move up to seventh grade because she isn’t very good at math. She tries to explain this to the teacher, but the teacher isn’t concerned because she doesn’t make students study at one, consistent grade level for every subject. They can move ahead faster in some subjects than in others. When they’re struggling with one subject, she holds them back in that subject alone until they’ve mastered it. She does put Betsy back one grade level in math when she sees that Betsy is struggling, telling her that she can move up later when she’s had some time to review the material and improve.

It’s what Betsy really needs, but Betsy finds it disorienting that she isn’t part of one, consistent grade level at school. She says that she doesn’t know what that makes her, and the teacher replies that she is simply Elizabeth. Before, Betsy’s concept of school was that, every year, the students would simply move up one grade level, and that the goal of school was just for the students to move up through the levels appropriate to their age. Now, she is being introduced to the concept that the goal of education is for her to master the concepts being taught to her, regardless of the grade level, so that she will have the ability to do things like math, reading, and spelling. As long as she can learn to do these to a satisfactory level and keep improving, her specific grade doesn’t matter. In fact, when Betsy is upset later about failing an examination at school because she was nervous and made a lot of mistakes, Cousin Ann tells her that there’s no need to be nervous and that her grade on a single examination doesn’t matter because, regardless of how she did on that particular test, she knows that she actually does know the material and can use that knowledge in daily situations.

Betsy is also unexpectedly given the responsibility of looking out for a younger girl at the school, Molly. Because Molly is so good at reading, the teacher has Betsy listen to Molly read at the first grade level and asks her option of how Molly did and if she seems like she could manage the second grade level reading. Betsy has never had an adult ask her to supervise anyone younger before, and she unexpectedly discovers that she likes it and likes teaching someone younger. Later, Betsy is asked to hold Molly’s hand while they cross a log over a stream because the teacher wants older children to hold the hands of the younger ones and help them. Actually, holding Molly’s hand helps Betsy more than it helps Molly because Molly has walked on this log before and Betsy hasn’t, but being responsible for someone younger makes Betsy more bold. Although she would have been afraid to walk that log if she had to do it by herself, she can’t refuse when she has the responsibility of helping Molly. Later, she also helps to rescue Molly when Molly falls in a hole and needs help to get out. Betsy wanted to run for help at first, but when Molly begged her not to leave her alone, Betsy decides that she should do what Cousin Ann would do and figure out how she can use the things around her to solve the problem, spotting a branch that helps the younger girl climb out. Even though Betsy gets scared, when she has someone smaller than herself depending on her, she finds her courage.

Betsy has other adventures with Molly and her other new friends while living with the Putneys. When Molly’s mother becomes ill and has to go to the hospital, Molly is upset because she will have to move in with some cousins in the city who don’t really want her. Having been in this type of situation before herself, Betsy is immediately sympathetic, and she gets her relatives to agree to let Molly stay with them. Molly becomes like a little sister to Betsy, and they share in other adventures together. Along with some other girls from their school, they form a sewing circle to make some clothes for a poor boy at their school who lives with a stepfather who spends all of his money on alcohol. The book doesn’t shy away from describing how the boy is neglected, and the girls in the sewing circle are moved to tears when they go to the boy’s house to deliver the new clothes and see the circumstances he lives in. The Putneys also become concerned about the boy’s welfare, and they help arrange for him to be adopted by a man they know who has been talking about adopting a boy. Later, for Betsy’s birthday, Betsy and Molly go to the fair with some neighbors, but they are accidentally left behind when the people who were supposed to give them a ride home had to leave to tend to an emergency. Betsy is terrified, but with Molly to look after, Betsy manages to keep her head and think of a way to earn some money so they can buy train tickets home.

Betsy has been living with the Putneys for about a year when she gets a letter from Aunt Frances, who says that she will arrive soon to reclaim her. Aunt Frances thinks that Betsy must have been having a miserable time without her, but Betsy has actually come to think of the farm as home and loves it there. She doesn’t want to hurt Aunt Frances’s feelings or seem ungrateful for all the love and attention that Aunt Frances has lavished on her over the years. It seems like Betsy has to resign herself to returning to her old life in the city … unless Aunt Frances has also been making some changes to her own life since they were last together. When Betsy and Aunt Frances meet again, they truly come to understand each other, and they find a way for them all to live their best lives.

This book is now public domain and is available to read for free online through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (multiple copies, including audiobooks).

My Reaction

Educational Themes

I really enjoyed this book! I’d heard about it for years and never got around to reading it before. Dorothy Canfield Fisher was an early advocate of the Montessori method of education in the United States, and in particular, this book presents many of the principles of the Montessori method and how it can help children. The educational themes in the story are obvious when Betsy sees the differences between the one-room schoolhouse in the country and her old school in the city.

The benefits of the smaller class size are immediately obvious. Betsy loves reading but she always hated her reading class in school because each student took turns reading, so the most any particular student could read was one or two sentences, and even then, they might not get a turn if the class ran out of time before they got to all of the students. This description feels like an exaggeration of how reading classes might have gone at a bigger school, but there may be some truth in it. When I was at school, my classes typically had about 20 to 30 students in them, and when we took turns reading, we did more than that. It’s difficult to say for sure because I don’t think Betsy ever said exactly how many students were in her class, but I would think they would have to have at least twice as many as that to be as bad as she described. According to Going to School in 1876, some large city schools could have classes of 50 to 60 students during the late 1800s, so that is possible for a class in the early 1900s or 1910s as well. I do take the point that it’s easier for a teacher to keep track of the progress of individual students when the class size is smaller.

I also appreciated what the teacher said about allowing students to progress faster in subjects that are their strengths, even if they have to take extra time for problem areas in other subjects. When I reviewed The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room, there is a boy in that book who was held back a year in school because of his problems in reading, and he was embarrassed about not moving to the next grade with his classmates. If he could have moved forward in some subjects, it might not be so embarrassing for him to be held back in the one subject that gave him the most trouble. The problem is that he couldn’t do that because the classes at his elementary school are organized the way the ones at my old elementary school were – one single teacher at a particular grade level teaching all of the subjects for that grade level. Under that system, remaining at a particular grade level in one subject means remaining at that grade level, with that teacher for all subjects.

There is only one teacher at the one room schoolhouse in the story, so there’s no conflict about a student seeing one teacher for some subjects and another teacher for other subjects at a different grade level. All of the students are in just that one room with one teacher all the time, so the only difference when a student moves up or down in level for a subject is the book that the teacher gives them to study. That means that changes in grade level can be done informally for any or all subjects, whenever the teacher decides that a student is ready to move to the next level. The student just turns in their old book and gets a different one to study. If most grade levels were determined that easily for different subjects, I think there would be fewer parents who would be concerned about the prospect of holding a child back a grade temporarily to give them a better grounding for moving forward later, and students would experience less embarrassment about problem subjects if they could receive acknowledgement for better skills in other subjects. However, I can see that this system would be complicated in bigger public schools, and there would have to be a point when the student would have to master their series of subjects at a particular level to know when they could graduate from their school. I think that’s part of the purpose of the examinations Betsy describes in the book, but because the book only covers a single year, we don’t see what happens when a student is ready for graduation.

Emotional Management

In the beginning, Aunt Frances, in spite of all of her good intentions and research into psychology and raising children, unintentionally transfers her personal anxieties to Betsy without really giving her the tools that she needs to manage them, so they feel overwhelming to Betsy. The solution to this problem, as presented in the book, seems to be mostly being around people who do not express worries about things (if they’re nervous about anything, they mostly cover it up and don’t talk about it, except for one time, which I’m going to talk about) and who present manageable challenges to Betsy to show her that she can handle more than she thinks she can. I like the part about giving Betsy manageable challenges and some basic instructions for how to accomplish them when she doesn’t seem to quite know what to do. If they had just thrown challenges at her with no instruction at all, in a kind of sink-or-swim fashion, I think she would have been just overwhelmed and more panicky. However, I think there’s a point in the story that could use more clarification.

The differences between Betsy’s sets of relatives is initially presented, particularly by the aunts she’s been living with, as one of understanding and sympathy. Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances initially don’t like the Putneys because they don’t seem sympathetic enough, especially with people who are sensitive and nervous. Aunt Frances dedicates herself to sympathizing with Betsy about everything and talking to her about everything in her life, and the book presents this as a negative because their sympathetic conversations about the worries they have end up being a way of making each other more nervous. I think, in real life, there’s a happy medium between never talking about worries and wallowing in them.

The first problem with Aunt Frances’s attempts to sympathize with Betsy is that she makes assumptions that things that bother her will also bother Betsy, and this becomes the way that she accidentally transfers her anxieties to Betsy. Second, when Aunt Frances sympathizes with Betsy about worries or problems, she tends to dwell too much on the problem itself and how bad it feels, magnifying the issue and making Betsy feel worse. What I’m trying to say is that Aunt Frances’s attempts to sympathize would have worked much better if she had been willing to listen to Betsy’s concerns and sympathize a little about how certain things can make a person nervous but then move on to offering practical tips to deal with these feelings and different ways of looking at situations to take some of the anxiety out of them.

I didn’t like it when Cousin Ann seemed to shut Betsy down when she was talking about how tests at school make her nervous because I don’t like the idea of shutting people down when they’re talking about something important to them, but what made it better to me was that she did listen to Betsy for a bit before that and had already offered her a different way to look at tests that makes them seem more fun and less scary. When Cousin Ann cuts the conversation short seems to be the point when discussing and sympathizing is about to turn into brooding and dwelling on the negative. My only thought on that conversation is that it might have helped for Cousin Ann to point that out. Rather than asking if Betsy really wanted to keep talking about this, which makes it sound like disinterest in what Betsy’s saying, I think it might have been better to point out that, if she keeps dwelling on the parts of the experience that make her feel bad, she won’t let herself move forward, to see the parts of the experience that could be exciting opportunities and possible triumphs. Perhaps, it would be good to add that one poor test experience doesn’t mean that others will feel the same way or that she can’t do better the next time, especially if she spends her time in between tests focusing on how much she enjoys what she’s learning and how it can be fun to show others what she’s learned and what she enjoys about her lessons, putting herself in a better frame of mind for the next time someone asks her questions about what she’s learned. I just think that approach would help emphasize the lesson that Cousin Ann would really like to teach Betsy about reframing challenges in her mind and also help clarify that she’s not ending the conversation because she’s not sympathetic but because it’s better to give the positive thoughts time to take hold rather than dwell on the worries.

I think it’s also important for both Betsy and Aunt Frances to recognize that it’s okay to feel nervous but that it’s possible to handle situations even though they make them nervous. As someone who has had life-long issues with anxiety, I can also attest that one of the best approaches is learning not to be afraid of feeling afraid of something. That is, learning to recognize that being nervous isn’t a sign that a situation is unmanageable or that the feeling of anxiety itself is necessarily going to be overwhelming, something that Betsy learns through practical experience in the story. There are still times in the story where Betsy is afraid and has to handle difficult situations, but she learns that she can proceed and do what she needs to do even though she’s nervous and isn’t sure at first how things will work out. It isn’t explicitly spelled out in the story, but this is probably the most important lesson that Betsy was missing from her time living with Aunt Frances.

Betsy’s Family

There are no villains in this story. Although readers can see at the beginning that living with Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances has caused some emotional complications for Betsy because she has taken on their worries and anxieties, they do mean well and have made real efforts to understand Betsy and support her, as best they know how. Great-Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances just have very different, more timid personalities than the Putneys and don’t find their style of communication reassuring or appealing. However, Betsy discovers, to her surprise, that she does come to appreciate the Putneys and that they are a good influence on her, helping her to come out of her shell, discover new abilities and interests, and develop some self-confidence.

At first, Betsy is a little offended that her Putney relatives don’t fuss over her like Aunt Frances did, and it makes her feel like they don’t care about her, but they do care. They are just more low-key in showing the ways that they care. They are a family that doesn’t like to fuss about anything. Personally, I thought that Cousin Ann should have let Betsy talk a little more when Betsy was distressed about doing badly on her exam, but I do see her point that Betsy’s talking about it seemed to be upsetting her more because she was dwelling on the problem rather than consoling herself and looking for solutions or new ways of thinking about the situation. Cousin Ann points out that exams aren’t always negative, and even when one doesn’t turn out so well, it’s not the end of the world, giving Betsy a new way of looking at the situation and defusing Betsy’s sense that every little setback is a tragedy.

The Putneys show how much they truly care when Betsy and Molly are accidentally left behind at the fair. When Betsy manages to get Molly home, she sees her relatives rattled and upset for the first time when they realized that the girls were lost, and they do some rare fussing over the girls, praising Betsy for her ingenuity in handling the situation. Although the Putneys normally make it a point to deal with things coolly and calmly, they do care about the girls and can get upset if they think there is a serious problem. They are not without feelings. They are also genuinely upset when they think Aunt Frances is going to take Betsy away, each finding their own way to show Betsy how much they care and how much they will miss her.

Spoilers

Fortunately, Betsy is allowed to stay with the Putneys in the end. When Aunt Frances comes to get her, she reveals that, in the year they’ve been apart, she has met a man and fallen in love. She is going to marry him, but marrying him means making some changes to her life, the greatest one being that they are not going to return to their old house. Great-Aunt Harriet has recovered from her earlier illness and has gone to live with another relative, and because her new husband has to travel constantly for business, Aunt Frances won’t be keeping a settled house at all. Aunt Frances, although usually timid, is actually looking forward to doing some traveling. She is still afraid of things like animals and would never be an outdoor/country kind of person, but travel to different cities sounds like her kind of excitement. However, she can see the difficulty of traveling with Betsy. Constantly moving would be difficult for her education, a complication that I was surprised that the characters didn’t spell out when they were talking to each other, given the educational themes of the story.

Betsy and Aunt Frances come to a new understanding of each other and the differences in the lives they want to live when they talk about what these changes would mean for their lives. Aunt Frances doesn’t want to simply abandon Betsy to the Putneys if she isn’t happy with them, but she can see that Betsy does like living there and would be happy to stay. Betsy hadn’t wanted to make Aunt Frances feel abandoned and unappreciated by telling her in the beginning that she wanted to stay with the Putneys, but when she learns that Aunt Frances will be happily married and enjoying the new experience of travel, she is able to tell Aunt Frances that she can see that having her come along would be inconvenient for her and that she would be happy to stay with the Putneys. Neither of them is offended or worried about living apart now because they can see that each of them will be happier with Betsy living with the Putneys. Aunt Frances is now free to get married and go where she wishes with her husband, assured that Betsy is doing fine and living in a stable home with people who care about her, even if it’s not quite living the lifestyle that she would like herself. Aunt Frances also promises to come visit sometimes, so it’s not a permanent goodbye.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Kirsten Learns a Lesson

Kirsten, An American Girl

Kirsten Learns a Lesson by Janet Beeler Shaw, 1986.

It’s November, 1854, and now that nine-year-old Kirsten’s family has settled in their new home in Minnesota and the harvest season is over, it’s time for the children to go to school. Kirsten and her brothers, Lars and Peter, will go to the small local school with their cousins, Lisbeth and Anna. Powderkeg School is a one-room schoolhouse in a little log cabin. Lisbeth and Anna’s stories about what Powderkeg School is like worry Kirsten. They talk about how strict their teacher, Mr. Coogan, is. Sometimes, the boys in class get rowdy and fight, and Mr. Coogan uses physical punishment on them. However, the girls tell Kirsten that she probably won’t have any problems with Mr. Coogan because he likes children who are well-behaved, and Kirsten is well-behaved. Still, Kirsten is nervous about what her new school will be like.

When they get to school, they learn that Mr. Coogan was injured in a fall from his horse, so they will have a replacement teacher, Miss Winston, who has only recently arrived from Maine. When one of the mean boys in class says he hops the horse also stepped on Mr. Coogan, Miss Winston tells him that nobody talks out of turn in her class and, although they live in the country, “we are not savages like the Indians.” (This is a 19th century attitude toward Native Americans, but this concept is challenged later in the story.)

Miss Winston has each of the children in class introduce themselves so she can get to know everyone. When it’s Kirsten’s turn to say her name, she forgets to address her teacher as ma’am, like the other students. Miss Winston insists that she say “ma’am”, and when she sees Kirsten struggling with the language, she asks Kirsten if she speaks English. Kirsten says that she speaks a little, and her cousins explain that her family just came from Sweden and that they speak Swedish at home. Miss Winston says that “practice makes perfect”, so Kirsten will practice her English in school. For now, she will have the easiest lessons and share seven-year-old Anna’s schoolbook.

When the mean boy, Amos, laughs at Kirsten, Miss Winston glares at him and strikes the school’s iron stove with her ruler, startling the students. Miss Winston says that her father was a ship’s captain, so she knows how to be in charge of her students, like he was in charge of his crew. Then, she deconstructs the sentence “Miss Winston hit the stove”, pointing out which words are the subject, verb, and direct object of the sentence. Then she warns the class to “Be careful that the direct object of hit isn’t the student.” The implication is that Miss Winston is just as willing to use physical punishment against her students as Mr. Coogan was.

When Amos introduces himself to Miss Winston, we learn that he is nineteen years old, the same age as the new teacher, but the new teacher says that, in spite of being the same age, she’s still the teacher, and he’s the student. In spite of being more a young man than a boy in age, Amos has only just finished the third reader, and Miss Winston says her role is to help him read and do math like a man would, embarrassing Amos. (He can’t use his age to put himself on an equal footing with the new teacher because they are not intellectual equals. She’s the same age, but she has graduated from her own school and become a teacher, and he’s still struggling along with low level math and reading.)

Anna helps Kirsten with her lessons, and Miss Winston praises her for helping to teach Kirsten, but she doesn’t praise Kirsten for doing a good job. At the end of the school day, Kirsten and her cousins talk about the new teacher. Anna thinks that Miss Winston seems nice, but Kirsten thinks that Miss Winston doesn’t like her and that she seems very strict. She asks if that was what Mr. Coogan was like, and Lisbeth says he was worse. The best part of the day for Kirsten was lunchtime, when the children were allowed some play time. When she ran around and played tag with the other children, it didn’t matter if she didn’t speak much English.

When the girls play school with their dolls, Anna imitates Miss Winston and her comment about “savages.” Kirsten asks the other girls what that word means. They say it means “wild.” Kirsten asks them if the Indians (Native Americans) are really like that, and they say that some people say they’re kind and will help people if they need food but others day that they’re “cruel and bloodthirsty.” They’ve seen an Indian man before. He came to their house when their mother was roasting meat, and he left when their mother gave him some. They thought he looked pretty “savage” because his face was painted, and he had eagle feathers in his hair. The girls say that Native Americans also wear knives and live in tents. As a farmer, their father is concerned about the Native Americans. He knows that, if the farmers take too much of their usual hunting grounds for farming, it will drive away the animals, and the Native Americans will be starving and angry. While he is happy that he has been able to secure some farmland for his family (I explained a little about the famine conditions and lack of farmland in Sweden around this time that caused people like the Larsons to leave their country when I covered Meet Kirsten), he is aware that the Native Americans also need land for their survival.

At school, Miss Winston announces that each student will memorize a poem and recite it for the class. When they recite their poems, she wants them to say them with feeling and show the emotions their poem is trying to convey. Kirsten worries about this assignment because she’s still learning English. It’s hard enough for her to learn to read anything in English and understand the meaning of the words. She doesn’t know how she can also learn to memorize an entire poem and say it in front of everyone. Miss Winston gives Kirsten a short poem to learn, but having even a short one doesn’t seem to help Kirsten.

Meanwhile, Kirsten has her first encounter with a Native American when she spots an Indian (Native American) girl watching her while she’s getting water from the stream. The girl runs away, but Kirsten finds a blue bead that she dropped. Kirsten takes it and leaves her a little pretend cake that she and her cousins made for their dolls. Later, she finds that the cake is missing and that there’s a green duck feather in its place. She and the Indian girl trade little objects in this way, gradually becoming friends.

Kirsten’s secret friendship with the Native American girl becomes a comfort to her when school is stressful. Frontier teachers often board with families who live near the school, and when Miss Winston comes to stay at Kirsten’s aunt and uncle’s house, Kirsten feels like school is following her home. What’s worse is that Kirsten’s family will be joining them for dinner, and they will practice English during the meal. Kirsten knows that the meals, instead of being comfortable family time, will now be like lessons, and they will struggle to say things they would want to say because her family still hardly knows English. Worse yet, Miss Winston is cross with Kirsten because she can’t seem to memorize even her short poem.

Sneaking away to visit the Native American girl, who is called Singing Bird, gives Kirsten an escape from her struggles with English. Somehow, Kirsten and Singing Bird manage to communicate well enough with each other, even though neither of them speaks each other’s language. Then, Singing Bird takes Kirsten to see her village. To her surprise, Kirsten realizes that she has been gradually teaching Singing Bird English words without realizing it. However, Singing Bird’s people are going to be moving on soon. Kirsten’s uncle is correct that farming is driving away the animals the Native Americans depend on for food, and they’re suffering for it. Singing Bird invites Kirsten to come with her tribe when they leave, and it’s tempting to think of living an exciting life, traveling with Singing Bird and not going to school. But, is that what Kirsten really wants?

The book ends with a section of historical information about frontier schools in the mid-1800s.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Along with the first book in the series, this is the book that I remember the best of the Kirsten books. I think I either didn’t read the others or didn’t finish them because there are some sad things in the Kirsten stories that I didn’t like. In the first book, Meet Kirsten, another child Kirsten befriends on the journey to Minnesota dies of cholera. It’s historically accurate that some children died of disease on the journey west, but it was still hard to take. I also talked about how the reason why families like Kirsten’s wanted to come to America was that Sweden was experiencing famine around this time. The first book didn’t say much about that, but in this book, Kirsten remembers experiencing hunger in Sweden when her father’s crops failed and how her little brother cried from hunger.

Kirsten understands the plight of the Native Americans when they have to move to a new area when their food supplies run low. However, when Singing Bird invites Kirsten to come with them, she realizes that would mean leaving the rest of her family, and she can’t do that. While it’s tempting to go with her friend and escape the problems in her life, Kirsten can’t do that without also giving up the good things in her life and trading the problems in her life for a different set of problems. Although there are appealing aspects to their lives, the Native Americans also have their own struggles. To use an old adage, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. People say it in different ways, but just because someone else’s situation is different doesn’t always mean that it’s better.

In this book, we also see what it’s like for Kirsten’s family as they begin learning English, so they can communicate with other people in their new country, and the children begin going to school. The little frontier school is different from other schools they’ve experienced before, and the teachers are strict. They have to be strict because some of the students are rough and fight with each other physically, and they have to make it clear that they’re not going to put up with that. This is a real-life aspect of schools from this time period. Fortunately, we never see the teacher actually using physical punishment against anybody. She just threatens to do it so her students will think twice about misbehaving.

When Miss Winston comes to board with Kirsten’s relatives, Kirsten thinks that everything is going to be worse, that she’s constantly going to be bombarded with lessons and the problems she’s been having at school. However, it turns into an opportunity for Kirsten and Miss Winston to get to know each other better. At first, Miss Winston can’t understand why Kirsten is having such a difficult time remembering her poem, even though it’s pretty short and easy. It’s partly because she’s still having difficulties with her English, but also, the content of the poem has no relation to anything currently happening in Kirsten’s life. It doesn’t interest her, and her mind is preoccupied with all the changes happening in her life, making it difficult for her to focus on the poem and remember it. When Miss Winston shows Kirsten a model of her father’s ship, it brings back memories of the ship Kirsten’s family traveled on when they came from Sweden. Miss Winston realizes that Kirsten has strong memories of the ship, so she gives her a different poem to memorize, one about a ship. Kirsten finds this poem easier to remember because it connects to memories she already has.

Although Miss Winston can be tough, she genuinely does care about Kirsten and looks for ways to help her learn. It just takes time to figure out the best way to help her, and Kirsten also needs time to adjust to her new language and new home. Once Kirsten sees that it’s possible for her to learn and for her new home to begin feeling like home, she begins to feel better about her new life in Minnesota.

I enjoyed the realistic aspects of the story and the references to historical events and real life conditions on the frontier. I think I liked this story better as an adult because I understood more about the historical background than I did when I was a kid. Parts of this series are still sad. Kirsten remembers people being sick and dying on the journey to America, and although she doesn’t go into detail about it, her family did suffer genuine hardship in Sweden.

Posted on by TracyC

Meet Kirsten

Kirsten, An American Girl

Meet Kirsten by Janet Beeler Shaw, 1986.

It’s the summer of 1854, and Kirsten Larson is traveling by ship to America from Sweden with her family. There have been storms during the voyage, and the sailing has been rough. It’s crowded on the ship, and people have been seasick. On board the ship, Kirsten makes friends with another girl her age, Marta. The two girls play with their dolls together and talk about the things they’ll do when they finally reach America. The reason why the Larsons are traveling to America is that Kirsten’s Uncle Olav is already there. He has established a farm in Minnesota, and he has married a widow with two daughters. He wrote to the Larsons and asked them to join him and his new family in Minnesota and help on the farm.

When their ship finally reaches America, it docks in New York. No one is allowed to leave the ship until the health inspector declares that they are healthy. Health inspectors will not allow anyone with a serious, contagious disease, like cholera or typhoid, to go ashore. When they are allowed ashore, Kirsten’s father finds an agent to help them change their money at a bank and buy train tickets for their trip west. The agent, who is also from Sweden, will even accompany the family to the Mississippi River as a guide. The family needs help because they can’t speak English yet.

When they go to buy food in New York, Kirsten is accidentally separated from her father and gets lost. Because she can’t speak English, nobody understands what she’s saying, so Kirsten can’t ask for directions. Kirsten is frightened, but a kind lady sees her distress and tries to ask her what’s wrong. Kirsten can’t tell her, but then, she realizes that she can draw a picture, so she draws a picture of a ship. The lady leads Kirsten back to the dock, and she manages to find the rest of her family in the nearby Battery Park.

The next day, Kirsten says goodbye to Marta because the Larsons are leaving the city before Marta’s family. Because Marta’s family is also going to Minnesota, they hope that they will meet again there or somewhere on the way.

Kirsten has never seen a train before, and her first ride on one is frightening at first. The trip lasts for days, but finally, they arrive in Chicago. There, they will meet up with other pioneers heading to the Mississippi River. At the boarding house in Chicago, Kirsten reunites with Marta, whose family will also be traveling with them!

The pioneer families take wagons to the Mississippi River, and then, they board a riverboat. Kirsten’s mother worries because, when they boarded the riverboat, she was sailors burying a passenger who died of cholera. (A disease caused by ingesting contaminated food and water.) Cholera is a serious risk, and her worries are justified. On their third day on the boat, Marta becomes ill with cholera and dies from it.

Kirsten is distressed at Marta’s sudden death, but fortunately, the Larsons all make it to Minnesota. All along, Kirsten has been struggling with homesickness and is still grieving the loss of the only friend she had in America, but she is cheered when she is greeted by her new cousins, Anna and Lisbeth. With her cousins as her new friends, Kirsten thinks that Minnesota might come to feel like home after all.

The book ends with a section of historical information about immigrant families, like Kirsten’s.

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

My Reaction

Although I liked the American Girl books when I was a kid, I didn’t like the Kirsten books, partly because of Marta’s death. I don’t think any of the other American Girl books has a child death in the first book. In fact, I don’t even remember any other children dying in any of the series, unless it happens in one of the newer books I haven’t read yet. It is realistic for a child to die while traveling west. Diseases like cholera were a real-like risk to pioneers. I’ve visited places along the old Oregon Trail, and I’ve seen the graves of real pioneer children who died of disease. There’s also a doll at one of the local historical museums in my area that once belonged to a little girl who died on the trip west. I know that children died on the journey west in real life, but it’s still depressing to read about, which is what bothered me about the Kirsten books. For this reason, I don’t think I read all of the Kirsten books when I was a kid, or at least, I don’t remember much about most them.

Reading this book again as an adult, I found it easier to deal with Marta’s death. I knew it was coming, so there was no shock to me. Marta’s illness is only a small portion of the book, and Kirsten doesn’t see Marta dead. We do get a picture in the book of the riverboat sailors carrying Marta’s coffin away for burial.

I always appreciate the sections of historical information in the back of American Girl books. This one discusses immigrants, the reasons why they wanted to move to a new country, and the conditions they encountered during their journey.

Earlier, when I covered Rasmus and the Vagabond, I mentioned that the characters hide in an abandoned village, and Oscar tells Rasmus that the reason that the village is abandoned is because, years before, the people in the village all decided to emigrate to America together, specifically Minnesota (a popular destination for Scandinavian immigrants).  The Library of Congress has more information about Swedish immigrants and the major periods of immigration.  Around the time that Kirsten’s family emigrated to the United States, Sweden was suffering problems from overpopulation, lack of adequate tillable farm land, and famine. We don’t hear the Larsons describe any particular problems they had in Sweden or suffering. We are told that they had a farm in Sweden with a house with a maple tree near the door and a barn, but we don’t know if the family was suffering in spite of owning the farm. The important point is more that conditions in general were bad in Sweden, so the promise of rich farm land in Minnesota was attractive to them. The historical information included in the back of Meet Kirsten doesn’t cover this information about conditions in Sweden. Instead it focuses on what immigrant families might pack to bring with them on such a journey and what the traveling conditions would have been like.

Posted on by TracyC

The Windy Hill

The original cover is public domain and available through Wikimedia Commons

The Windy Hill by Cornelia Meigs, 1921.

Oliver and Janet are spending the summer with their mother’s cousin, Jasper, who is a wealthier man than the rest of their family. Janet is enjoying the visit and Jasper’s grand house so far, but Oliver is very uneasy there. Oliver doesn’t like the vast, empty house, and he’s noticed that Jasper’s manner seems different from he remembers the last time they saw him. Oliver senses that something is troubling Jasper, something that he doesn’t want to discuss. Jasper is usually a cheerful person who enjoys his cousin’s children, but during this visit, he hardly pays attention to them and never smiles. Janet finds things to do to keep herself occupied, but Oliver is terribly bored and bothered by Jasper’s odd behavior.

Then, one evening, Jasper sees Oliver looking at a nearby house. He says that the people who live in that house are also cousins of theirs, but he’s been too busy lately to see much of them. Jasper apologizes for having neglected Janet and Oliver during their visit so far, and he says that he will invite Eleanor, the daughter of the cousin who lives in that house, to lunch the next day. Eleanor is close in age to Janet and Oliver, and Jasper thinks that they will be friends and that a visit from her will liven up the visit for them. Janet is pleased at the idea of another girl cousin visiting, but Oliver is at that phase where he doesn’t like girls. He can’t imagine that he would have anything in common with this unknown girl cousin, and he thinks he’ll be bored while Janet and Eleanor have fun together. He tries to tell Jasper as much, but Jasper is just amused by his attitude and tells him that, if he is afraid of girls, the sooner he gets over it, the better.

When Jasper orders his car and driver to take Janet and Oliver to see Eleanor, Oliver decides to rebel by going to the train station and trying to get a train home. However, while he is waiting at the train station, he becomes curious about the countryside around him and the nearby river he hasn’t yet investigated. He wanders off to explore a little and encounters a man and a girl at a nearby cottage. The man and the girl ask him to help them with their beehives. Oliver is a little nervous of the bees at first, but he follows the beekeeper’s directions and finds himself enjoying the work. The beekeeper and his daughter, Polly, invite him to join them for lunch afterward. After a lunch of biscuits, honey, and iced cocoa, Oliver feels much better about everything.

Polly thinks that she and her father have somewhere they need to be after lunch, but her father tells her not to worry about that. Instead, he entertains Oliver and Polly with a story about a Native American medicine man, a boy who is curious about what lies beyond the ocean, and their first encounter with white people. By the time the story is over, Oliver realizes that he has missed his train. He decides to return to Jasper’s house, where he is told that Janet didn’t go to see Eleanor because Eleanor was delayed somewhere. (Guess where.)

More and more, Jasper’s odd mood becomes apparent. His servants have also noticed how worried he’s been, and it seems like he’s always more upset after a mysterious and disagreeable man comes to see him. Nobody knows who he is or what his visits are about. Oliver knows how to drive, and Jasper has Oliver drive him out on a mysterious errand one evening to see someone. Oliver doesn’t know who Jasper talks to or what they say to each other, but the visit takes a long time, and it makes Jasper angry.

Oliver’s visit with Jasper gets better because Jasper allows him to use the car by himself from that point on. He takes Janet to visit the Beeman and Polly. Although Oliver is still not enthusiastic about girls, he likes Polly because she is very different from how he imagines that cousin Eleanor must be. The Beeman says that they have to pick up some new beehives that day, and Oliver volunteers to take the girls to get the hives from a man named John Massey. John Massey complains about his landlord, who hasn’t been maintaining the dikes. Massey has had to take it on himself, and the burden is becoming too great for him to bear.

It turns out that Massey’s landlord is Anthony Crawford, the unpleasant man who has been troubling Jasper. Crawford also seems more than happy to let Olive and Janet know that he is also a cousin of theirs. He seems to be under the impression that Jasper has cheated him in some way. Jasper says that he’s already given him what he’s entitled to have, but Crawford says that his share should be more than that. Crawford says that, if Jasper doesn’t give him what he really owes him, he can take everything Jasper has and destroy his reputation in the process. There are secrets in their family’s past that would cause a scandal if the public knew about them, and Crawford says that if people knew that there was one crook in their family, they would all be suspicious that Jasper is much the same way.

Oliver doesn’t know what to think of Crawford’s insinuations or his threats. Not knowing who else to turn to, Oliver explains the situation to the kindly Beeman and asks him what he should do to help Jasper. The Beeman knows far more about everything that’s been happening than Oliver knows, and he say that Crawford has unknowingly been laying a trap for himself. Crawford thinks he’s pretty sharp in his dealings with other people, but he’s been neglecting something very important. Actually, multiple things.

In a series of stories that the Beeman shares with the children, he indirectly tells the children the history of their family and quarrels that go back generations. He tells them about a family with a shipping business that restored their lost fortunes during the War of 1812 by turning to piracy. He tells them about siblings divided by quarrels over money during the Gold Rush. Although the Beeman doesn’t admit to the children that all of his stories are true in the beginning, they soon come to realize that they are and that they are directly connected to the them and the current situation.

Toward the end of the book, the Beeman ties all the pieces of the puzzle together before telling them the final story, the one about three cousins named Jasper, Anthony, and Thomas, who were all raised together and were very close, until they had a falling-out over Anthony’s scheming and his unethical dealings. There are reasons for everyone to resent Anthony for his meanness and greed, but the Beeman is correct that Anthony has set himself up for a fall. He really should have listened when everyone tried to tell him to fix the dike.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies) and Project Gutenberg. Because it is in the public domain, there is also a LibriVox Audiobook recording.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The Family’s Story

In some ways, the story of the family in the book is also a celebration of American stories. The short stories about different generations in their family are set at turning points in American history. Something that fascinated me about these stories was that they were not all glowing about these points in American history and their associated legends. There are parts of the stories that emphasize the bold American values of adventure and ingenuity, but there are also dark sides and downsides to the stories and flawed characters. The family fortunes were set partly by piracy, but one of the heroes of the family was the man who realized when it was time to stop. Members of their family have been consumed by greed and quarrels, although some have overcome their flaws and misconceptions to come together and be a family again. Again, the Gold Rush story resolves happily when the brothers involved also realize the folly of endlessly pursuing riches at the expense of relationships with the people they love. There is even a slight rebuke against the westward expansion of the United States – portrayed heroically but also as highly costly as people died and killed others over land and gold and promoting an endless, unhappy quest for more and more, with people living their whole lives never feeling satisfied. In short, the family, like the stories and American history itself, is a mixed bag, and they are at their best when they realize their wrongs and make the decision to change. For a book from the early 1920s, a period of heightened patriotism and prejudice after WWI, it seems remarkably insightful and self-aware.

It was Anthony’s decision to forge a relative’s name to get money to cover his unethical dealings that ruined his relationship with his family. It was only by their charity and intervention that he wasn’t charged with his crime and sent to prison. He’s fully aware of that, but he’s been resentful about it rather than grateful. Even from a young age, Anthony had always coveted what other people had. Even if he didn’t really want things for their own sake, he would go through elaborate schemes and bitter fights to get what someone else had, just because someone else had it. Out of greed and spite, he has resurrected old property quarrels in their family. He not only got the old house that was originally willed to Jasper, but he has been scheming to get Jasper’s new house. The Beeman (who is the third cousin in the last story and father of Eleanor, who is called Polly as a nickname) says that Anthony should have headed the lessons learned by their family during the Gold Rush, that always reaching and reaching for greater prizes means never being satisfied with what one has and risking its loss in pursuit of the unattainable.

In the end, when Anthony’s scheming and corner-cutting leave him with no one to turn to but the family members he has harassed and schemed against, he finally experiences a change of heart. I find stories where the villain has a sudden change of heart after long-term villainy to be unrealistic, but the crisis that Anthony realizes he caused is sudden and serious. Because he has neglected the dike and driven away the people who were helping to cover his negligence at their own expense, he suddenly realized that he has endangered many lives, and everyone knows that it’s all his fault. He schemed to get control of that land but didn’t take care of it when he had it. Everyone knows what he did, nobody’s going to cover for him, and while he’s unscrupulous enough to scheme to get others’ property, he doesn’t want to be responsible for killing people. It’s enough to make him swallow his pride and acknowledge the reality of the situation to his cousins. They help him for the sake of the people in danger, and in return, he decides to leave the area.

In the end, Anthony takes a hard look at himself and his life, and he realizes that he and his wife and children were better off when they lived in another community, where he was forced to work for a living instead of by his schemes. He now fully understands his weaknesses and temptations, and rather than continuing to resent the things and people in his life that stop him from furthering his schemes, he has come to welcome them as the guiding forces that keep him from making destructive decisions. The way he phrases it struck me as a little corny, almost like the end of a PSA, but I approved of the sentiment. His family members made him angry because they saw him for who and what he was, but the point is that he now understands who and what he is himself. Although the others are willing to allow him some leniency because of the way he handles the crisis, Anthony realizes that he must give himself the discipline he needs and be the changing force in his own life.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty good story, although there are a few issues with racial language related to Native Americans. I’m not sure if there is a modern revised version of this story or not. The version that I’m reviewing is the original from the 1920s.

Native Americans in the Story

I found the first story the Beeman tells, the one about the Native Americans, fascinating because the story contains the concept that Native Americans arrived in the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean and moving eastward across the continent. I know that’s the modern concept of the origins of Native Americans, but I was surprised to find the concept in a book from the early 1920s. I didn’t realize that people in the 1920s had that concept because I thought the older theory was that Native Americans crossed a land bridge.

During the story about the Native American medicine man, the book uses the term “squaw”, which is a controversial term because, although it apparently can mean just “woman” in some Native American languages, it can mean something vulgar in others. Modern books avoid the use of the word, but it appears in some older books, like this one, because white people weren’t always aware of the connotations the word could have. This is the danger of using words you don’t fully understand. It isn’t meant in an insulting way in this book, but be aware that the word appears here and that it isn’t a good word to use yourself. If you’re referring to a Native American woman, just say “Native American woman”, and leave it at that.

The book also uses the word “Indian” instead of Native American, something that also appears in older books. I’ve explained before that this hearkens back to a much earlier misunderstanding about who Native American peoples were, and the nickname has stuck to a certain degree. However, modern convention is just to say “Native Americans” because it’s both a more accurate description and less confusing than explaining American Indians vs. Indians from India. I don’t mind the use of that term too much because it isn’t insulting. However, the book also occasionally uses the term “Red Man” to refer to Native Americans. The characters saying that don’t seem to use it out of malice, but I still think it’s inappropriate. I think that sort of thing went over my head when I was a little kid because I knew people were referred to as “white people” and “black people”, but after I was old enough to understand that there were other connotations to the term it became one of those terms that I think of as “derailing terms.” Even if the characters use it in a non-hostile way or kind of thoughtless way, we (the readers) know that there are hostile or demeaning connotations to the term. It just derails the train of thought of readers like me because we stop to process whether or not the character is trying to be insulting or demeaning, and it just distracts from the rest of the sentence and the thread of the story. I’m generally in favor of reprintings of books like this, with the racial terms updated because, provided that the author and characters are not trying to be demeaning or insulting, a change in the language can clarify attitudes and put the readers’ attention back where it belongs – on the story itself.

Native Americans also appear in the story about the Gold Rush, as risks encountered by westward travelers. Their appearance in the story is minimal, if stereotypical.

Posted on by TracyC

A Chair for My Mother

A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams, 1982.

A girl explains how her family is saving up for a new chair after a fire destroyed all the furniture in their old home. The fire happened before the story really begins, but the girl explains how she and her mother returned from a shopping trip and discovered that their home was on fire.

The girl’s grandmother and the family cat escaped from the fire, but everything they had in the house burned.

The girl, her mother, and her grandmother all moved in with the girl’s aunt and uncle until they could move into a new apartment. However, they didn’t have any furniture in the apartment. Their relatives, friends, and neighbors all helped them by giving them food and pieces of furniture they didn’t need anymore.

It was a big help, however, a year later, they still don’t have a sofa or comfortable armchairs. The girl’s mother works in a restaurant, and when she comes home, she’s very tired from being on her feet all day. She wishes that they had a comfortable armchair where she could rest after work.

The mother starts saving part of her tips from the restaurant in a coin jar to save up for a new chair. Sometimes, the restaurant owner even pays the girl to do little chores, and she saves part of her money for the chair. Whenever the girl’s grandmother saves money on food she buys, she also puts the savings into the jar. They say that when the jar is full of coins, they will buy the new chair they want.

Eventually, the jar is completely full. They count the coins, roll them in coin wrappers, and take them to the bank to change them for ten-dollar bills. Then, they go shopping for a new chair! There are many chairs to choose from, but they know exactly what kind of chair they want.

The book is a Caldecott Honor Book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Spanish).

My Reaction

I remember this book from Reading Rainbow when I was a kid! The pictures are bright and colorful, and the story offers comfort and hope.

The people in the story have been through a tragedy where they lost almost everything they had, but the book shows how they recover. Although the fire was sad, the story starts after the fire happened, and the girl talks about the help they’ve received and what they’re doing to make their new home more comfortable. They’re over the initial shock of the fire and concentrating on improving their situation from there. This book felt both comforting and very real. I liked how it showed the family recovering from their ordeal through a combination of help from relatives and friends and their own efforts. Other people help them with some basic household items as they move into a new apartment, and they also save up their money for the chair they want to make their new place feel more like home.

Posted on by TracyC

We Help Mommy

We Help Mommy by Jean Cushman, pictures by Eloise Wilkin, 1959.

In this classic Little Golden Book, two small children help their mother with various household chores throughout the day. There is a note in the beginning of the book that says that the children in the story are based on the author’s own children, Martha and Bobby, but the children shown in the pictures are based on two other children, who were asked to pose by the illustrator.

When the two little children in the story get up in the morning, the first thing they do is change from their pajamas into their clothes for the day. Sometimes, they need a little help from their mother because they’re still little. Then, they go downstairs and start making breakfast.

After their father leaves for work, they help make their parents’ bed. Then, they dust furniture and sweep the floors and put their clothes in the washing machine. Martha hangs her doll’s clothes up on a small clothesline, while her mother hangs up the family’s clothes on the high one. The children go to play with some friends next door.

Sometimes, the children go to the supermarket with their mother to buy groceries. When they get home, they put the groceries away and make lunch.

After lunch, they wash their dishes, and Martha makes a special little pie for their father for dessert.

At the end of the day, the children put away their toys. Their father comes to tuck them in when it’s time for bed, and he thanks Martha for the pie and both of the children for helping their parents.

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

My Reaction

I remember reading this book with my mother when I was a little kid in the 1980s. It’s just a cute, simple book for young children about helping their mother with daily chores. We still sometimes quote the line from this book, “Napkins for us all” when we set the table because, for some reason, that stuck in all of our minds and just got repeated for years.

At the time, I was too little to think about what year the story is from, and there was nothing in the book that was too seriously out of line with my experiences as a little kid. You can tell by the pictures that it’s from an earlier decade because of the family’s clothes and hair styles (particularly the parents), and the carpet sweeper the mother uses is older than I am. However, I have to admit that my parents still had one of those types of carpet sweepers in the 1980s, so I knew what it was when I saw it in the picture. They hang their clothes up to dry instead of using a clothes drier, but even that isn’t too far out of line because, even today, some people prefer to dry their clothes on a clothesline. In fact, there are 21st century people who consider it more environmentally friendly. The style of the clothesline they use is very mid-20th century, but my grandmother had one like that in the 1980s, too, so I had seen it before. Some of the things I was familiar with as a young child were hold-overs from previous decades, just like this book. Modern children might not be as familiar with some of these things, but this book is such a simple story about small children helping with daily chores that I think even 21st century children would understand it, even if it looks a little old-fashioned in some respects.

When I was a kid, I missed the part at the very beginning of the book about the children in the story being based on the author’s children, but I found it interesting when I looked at the book again as an adult. There is another Little Golden Book called We Help Daddy, which we also had when we were little kids. The two books read a little like companion books and were illustrated by the same illustrator, although We Help Daddy was written by a different author and features a different brother and sister. In We Help Mommy, the children mostly help their mother with chores around the house and buying and preparing food. In We Help Daddy, two kids help their father with yard chores, which somewhat shows how people in the mid-20th century typically expected domestic chores to be divided: the mother doing work inside the house and related to cooking, while the father mostly tends to chores outside the house. I don’t think this is a problem because, when the two books are taken together, both parents are still helping out and spending time with the children, but I thought it was interesting to notice that dynamic as an adult.

One of the things the mother and children buy at the grocery store in this book is a picture book. I didn’t understand that part as a little kid, but as an adult who studies and collects children’s books, I know that this is a reference to Little Golden Books because they were often sold at grocery stores, making them accessible to many families as inexpensive books for young children, sold where families would normally shop anyway. In fact, if you look closely at the cover of the Little Golden Book that the boy is taking out of the shopping cart, you can tell that it’s specifically Kittens: Three Complete Stories.

Posted on by TracyC

The Most Beautiful Place in the World

The Most Beautiful Place in the World by Ann Cameron, drawings by Thomas B. Allen, 1988.

Juan is a little boy living in the town of San Pablo in Guatemala. It’s not a very big town, but it is very busy. The town is on a lake with several other towns around it, but Juan has spent his whole life in San Pablo.

Juan is from a poor family, although he doesn’t consider his grandmother poor because she owns her own house and is able to take in other relatives whenever they fall on hard times. He knows that his father was the caretaker of a big house in the town, but he abandoned him and his mother when Juan was still a baby. His mother says that his father wanted to continue partying with his friends like he did when he was a single man, spending more than they could afford. After they argued about it, he left his family and went to a bigger city and never tried to see them again. Juan’s mother moved back in with her mother, so Juan grew up in a crowded little house filled with other relatives who needed help because they had gotten sick, lost their jobs, had marital problems, or various other things going wrong in their lives.

Juan’s grandmother supports herself by making arroz con leche and selling it in the marketplace. When Juan is still a small boy, his mother remarries to a man who doesn’t want anything to do with Juan, so his mother abandons him, leaving him with his grandmother. Juan is distressed by his mother’s abandonment, but his grandmother continues to look after him and begins preparing him to live an independent life from a young age. She has him help her sell arroz con leche in the marketplace, and later, she teaches him how to shine shoes so he can earn his own money. Juan is still very young, but his grandmother knows that life will tough for him without his parents.

Juan knows that his mother has had another child, and he feels jealous of his younger half-brother because he gets to live with his mother, and he doesn’t. (I question whether the younger half-brother is really going to be better off in the long run, but I’ll explain why below.) However, he is really jealous of the other children in town who get to go to school. Not all children in town go to school because many are from poor families, who need them to work and earn money, but Juan wishes that he could go to school, too.

He quietly teaches himself to read the signs in town and a newspaper, but he’s afraid to ask his grandmother about letting him to go school at first. He’s worried that, if he asks for that, his grandmother may tell him that she only cares for him because of the money he earns. If his grandmother abandoned him or withdrew her affection for him because he asked for too much, Juan doesn’t know what he would do. However, when he finally brings up the subject of school with his grandmother, he learns how much she really does care for him, how much she plans for his future, and how proud she is of him.

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

My Reaction

Juan’s family is poor, and at first, Juan doesn’t understand fully how poor they are. His grandmother’s life is more secure than others because she owns her own house, while others don’t, but even she has limited resources. The house has running water, but it doesn’t have electricity because she can’t afford it. She takes in other relatives when they are in trouble because she cares about her family, but she also has to make sure that everyone does whatever they can to support themselves because she can’t do it alone.

At first, Juan thinks that maybe she just keeps him because he earns money shining shoes, and she keeps most of his wages. However, when he talks to her about school, he learns that she has not spent any of his wages on herself or on other relatives. Instead, she has secretly saved them up because she knew that he would need money for his education, and she uses it to buy school supplies for him. At first, his teacher doesn’t want to accept him in class because the school year has already started, but when he demonstrates that he has already learned math from working in the marketplace and has taught himself to read, she accepts him. He exceeds everyone’s expectations for him, and his teachers even say that they will contribute to his education, if necessary, to keep him in school.

Juan’s grandmother cannot read, and she reveals that her parents wouldn’t let her go to school when she was young, even though she wanted to go. Her parents were afraid that she wouldn’t learn to do any practical work in school, so they didn’t want her to get an education, but she’s always felt disadvantaged because of it. She’s managed to get by in life, but she realizes that she could have done better with an education. She says that if Juan continues to work after school and does well in school, she’ll support his education, as far as he wants to go, even to the university. She says maybe he’ll even be able to figure out some of the big questions in life, like “why some people were rich, and some were poor, and some countries were rich, and some were poor, because she had thought about it a lot, but she could never figure it out.” Juan worries that he won’t be able to live up to his grandmother’s expectations for him, but she tells him not to worry about that. She just hopes for the best for him and wants to see him do the best he can because she loves him, and that’s what Juan really needs to hear.

The title of the story comes from a tourist poster that Juan reads to his grandmother, calling their town, “The Most Beautiful Place in the World.” Juan’s grandmother thinks that the most beautiful place in the can be anywhere where a person can be proud of who they are, but Juan privately thinks that the most beautiful place in the world is somewhere with someone you love and who loves you back. Juan has been deprived of love because of his parents’ abandonment of him, but he has found the love and support he needs from his grandmother, who wants him to succeed in life because she loves him and not just for what he can do for her.

Parts of the story are sad because Juan’s parents callously abandon him, and even his mother tries to act like it’s nothing because she knows his grandmother is taking care of him. I tried to decide how selfish Juan’s mother is in the story. On the one hand, I can see that she is poor and desperate and may have felt compelled to accept the first marriage proposal she was offered just to get out of her mother’s house, but she is very callous to her little son and his feelings and needs.

At first, he doesn’t even quite understand why his mother has left him, not even leaving him the bed they shared, so he has to sleep on some empty rice bags. He goes to his mother’s new house and tries to spend the night there. His mother lets him stay the night but hides him because she says his stepfather will beat him if he catches him in the house, which is why Juan never goes there again. I don’t know whether the stepfather ever beats Juan’s mother or the child they later have together, but the mother’s comment makes me think that it’s likely. Yes, Juan’s mother succeeded in getting remarried and out of her mother’s house, but I don’t think she’s really headed for a better life, and I have doubts about the future her younger child will have. It looks like the stepfather is selfish and temperamental, probably every bit as immature as Juan’s father was, and the children’s mother will always place her own needs first. As hurtful as it was for Juan to be abandoned by his mother, his mother is not going to nurture him and his future in the way his grandmother does. His grandmother has to be tough sometimes because of the family’s poverty, but she still does her best to look after everyone, even at her own expense, because she does love her family and wants the best for them and their futures, not just to get what she wants from other people and get ahead by herself. I would say that’s the quality that makes her different from Juan’s mother. At one point, she even marches Juan to her daughter’s new house and demands that she and her new husband at least provide a real bed for her son, reminding them of their responsibilities.

The book doesn’t go into the details of Guatemalan society and events in the 1980s, when this book was written, which was something I wanted to see. It’s pretty simple story for elementary school level children, but there is more going on behind the scenes that Juan would be aware of as a young boy living in a small town. The time period when this story was taking place was during the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. The war and sharp differences in social class are partly responsible for the economic and societal inequities that Juan’s grandmother describes, although the economic and social disparities in Guatemalan society were part of the reason for the war in the first place. There was also general dissatisfaction with government incompetence and interference in Guatemalan affairs on the part of the United States, which sought to use Guatemala as part of its Cold War strategy, including using it as a training ground for Bay of Pigs Invasion against Cuba. These are complicated and long-term situations that would require more explanation than a children’s book of this level can provide, and because the characters in the story live in a small town, they may not be seeing many of these events directly. As he gets older, Juan will probably become more aware of the wider world and the circumstances that have shaped his family’s lives, as his grandmother hopes and expects, especially if he does end up going to the university in the capital city.

Posted on by TracyC

Grandma’s Records

Grandma’s Records by Eric Velasquez, 2001.

Every summer, a boy goes to visit his grandmother. He loves summers with his grandmother because she plays records from her record collection, teaches him to dance, and tells him stories about life in Puerto Rico, where she grew up.

She instills a love of music in her grandson and uses it to share memories with him about his grandfather and their home town. Sometimes, she lets him choose records from her collection to play, complimenting him on his choices. The boy likes art, and he makes sketches based on the album covers.

Then, his grandmother’s nephew comes to visit from Puerto Rico, along with his band. The boy is thrilled to meet them, and they give the boy and his grandmother tickets to see them perform in New York.

It’s a special occasion! They love the performance, and afterward, they visit with the band backstage. The boy and his grandmother continue sharing music with each other as the boy grows up, and as an adult, he continues to play it in his art studio.

At the end of the book, there are lyrics to one of the songs, In My Old San Juan (En Mi Viejo San Juan – YouTube video), both in English and Spanish. It’s a popular sentimental and nostalgic song for Puerto Ricans living abroad, as this YouTube video explains. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Spanish).

My Reaction

The story is really about the author/artist of the book and his own grandmother. At the end of the story, the picture he’s drawing in his studio is the cover of this book. It’s a touching tribute to his grandmother and the special memories he shared with her as they bonded over music! Parts of the story reflect on their Puerto Rican heritage, which is something they share and discuss with the grandmother’s nephew and the members of his band. I like how the author emphasizes that what makes the music so special are the memories associated with it. At first, the memories are his grandmother memories, but through his experiences with his grandmother, he builds memories of his own associated with the music they’ve shared. It is these memories as well as the music that helps to fuel his art.