Posted on by TracyC

The Invisible Island

The Invisible Island by Dean Marshall, 1948.

The four Guthrie children (Dit, Allen, David, and Winkie – short for Winifred) find it difficult to play in their family’s apartment, where they always have to be careful not to disturb the neighbors. One rainy day, while their mother is at a dentist appointment, the children act out a scene from The Swiss Family Robinson, where they’re throwing the animals overboard from the shipwreck to swim to the desert island when they accidentally break part of the floor, which is also the same as breaking part of the ceiling for the neighbors underneath. When they get a knock at their door, shortly after, they figure that the neighbors have come to complain.

However, it turns out that their visitor is the neighbors’ cousin, who is staying with them. The children explain about The Swiss Family Robinson, the shipwreck, and how they were throwing particularly heavy ducks overboard from their wrecked ship. The neighbors’ cousin is a good-natured man who enjoys talking to the children. When the children’s mother comes home, she apologizes for the damage and explains that she and her husband are currently looking for a new house with more room for the children to play, but they haven’t found a place yet. The cousin says that he comes from a smaller town himself, Anchorage, Connecticut, and he might be able to help them find a place to buy there.

The Guthries do rent a house in that town that has some land attached to it, and the children are excited about the move. They want to be able to camp out on their land, like castaways from their favorite book. When they stop in town to buy some supplies before heading to their new house, they are surprised that there don’t seem to be any children around. The shopkeeper explains that there’s a measles epidemic going around town, and most of the children have it right now. He asks the Guthries if their children have had measles before, and their mother says they have … except for the youngest, Winkie. She decides that, for safety’s sake, she should keep the children close to home until the epidemic is over, and the kids should wait to try to make some new friends in town.

The children are hoping to find some new friends, but there’s plenty to do at their new house in the countryside to keep them occupied for a while. On their first day there, they are delighted to find out that there’s a brook and a lake on their property. The children convince their father to come exploring with them, and he has them help him to make a map of the area, knowing that they will want to camp out later. After walking around a piece of land that’s bordered by the lake and the brook, they realize that it’s actually an island because it is bordered on every side by water. The lake is on one side, the brook on another, and there are two more brooks or streams on the other sides that separate it from the land around it and make it into a sort of oblong-shaped island. They call it “The Invisible Island” because it isn’t obvious that it is actually an island until someone walks all the way around it and realizes that it’s actually surrounded by water on all sides. As far as they know, nobody else besides them is even aware that it’s an island.

The children’s mother has some reservations about the children camping out on the island, but the children agree to some safety rules and bringing along some practical camping supplies. They make a raft to carry their supplies across the water to the island. The children begin calling their new house “The Wreck”, imagining that they are rescuing supplies from a shipwreck, like The Swiss Family Robinson. They create a hiding place for their tents, and they find a spring on the island, although their father won’t let them drink from it until he has the water tested to make sure that it’s safe.

The children have enough supplies to camp on the island for a week, and they begin having an idyllic summer, with little adult supervision. They swim and bathe in the lake, using colorful soap on a rope that Winkie found when the family bought supplies at the store in town. They feed the birds, explore, and pick wild strawberries. They get ideas for how castaways are supposed to act from The Swiss Family Robinson and The Mysterious Island.

Their parents do come to visit them and check on them, playing along with the shipwreck theme by calling themselves friendly “savages” when they visit the camp. Their father helps the children to bring stones from a quarry to build a hut. Their mother tells them that she has started to meet the neighbors, and they have some nice children who could make good friends for the Guthries, once they’re out of quarantine from the measles. Both the nice man who helped them find the house to rent and the local doctor have nieces and nephews. The children don’t care that their mother thinks the children are well-mannered. They’re more concerned about whether or not they’ll be adventurous types, who would have fun with them on their special island. They think that they would hate to share their island with “apron-string children” who would be too tied to their parents and home and wouldn’t appreciate the independence and adventure the island allows. The truth is that the children have been enjoying their freedom on the island so much that they’re not sure that they want to give it up yet to make friends with the local children, and in a way, they’re grateful to the quarantine for giving them this time to explore by themselves.

However, there are some strange things that the children have started to notice about the island. One day, Winkie’s soap on a rope disappears and reappears in a different place, strangely looking less used than when they last saw it. The children’s wishes also seem to be granted by a mysterious, unknown person. When they wish aloud for a book about castaways that they haven’t read before and book about birds so they know more about the birds they’ve been seeing, they soon find a wooden box that contains books matching that exact description. When they wish that they had more strawberries, they suddenly find more strawberries in their icebox that they can tell came from a store instead of the wild strawberry patch. Winkie has a bizarre encounter with a “dryad”, and the footprint of a 6-toed giant suddenly appears on the beach. Maybe they’re not as alone on the island as they thought, but who else is there with them?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (in audio form!)

My Reaction and Spoilers

Copies of this book are difficult to find now. It’s become a collector’s item, and copies go for hundreds of dollars on Amazon at the time of this writing. It’s a shame because it’s really a charming story, and I think it would really appeal to fans of Cottagecore. If I hadn’t found a copy on Internet Archive, I couldn’t even talk about this book at all.

There were many children’s book series published in the mid-20th century about children having adventures in the countryside and independent of their parents and guardians, like The Boxcar Children series or many of the books by Enid Blyton. Some of these books and series seem a little more realistic than others. Most require the children’s families to be at least middle-class or wealthy to be able to set the children up for their adventures. Some books, particularly the ones by Enid Blyton, feature parents who are preoccupied with their own problems or activities and seem less concerned with the children’s welfare than about getting the kids out of their hair. I thought The Invisible Island had a good balance of independence for the children and adult supervision.

The adults in this book know that the children have been camping before, so they have some basic camping skills, and they come to visit the children about every two days, to see how they’re doing and make sure they aren’t having any problems. The kids pride themselves on their independence (they brag that they’re “not apron-string children”), but at the same time, their parents do regularly check on them and are aware of developments on the island, sometimes more so than the children realize. The children confide to their parents some of the strange things they’ve noticed on the island, but not everything because they’re enjoying their adventure so much that “the castaways” don’t want to be “rescued.” Eventually, readers come to understand that the parents know who’s been hanging around the island and that the children are not in any danger.

Adults will probably realize pretty quickly that some of the neighbor children are also camping out in the area, and that these children are the ones moving things around, giving them things, and staging fantastical stunts, like the appearance of the “dryad” and the giant’s footprint. It’s just that they can’t introduce themselves to the Guthrie children yet because the quarantine is still on, and they have to stay mostly separate. As the quarantine ends, they’re able to let the Guthrie children see them and interact with them more, although the game doesn’t completely end until the official end of the quarantine and the surprise party they hold to celebrate. The book ends with the children and their new friends making plans for more adventures that summer.

One of the great things about this book is that it’s one of those children’s books that reference other children’s books. There are other vintage children’s books like this, where the child characters take their inspiration for their games of imagination from their favorite books. The books are named throughout the story, and presumably, child readers from the time when this book was originally printed, would also know these stories and identify with the children’s pretend play. The main favorite book of the Guthrie children is the classic The Swiss Family Robinson, which inspires them not just to camp out but to turn their camping trip into one big game of imagination in which they’re shipwrecked. Most of the things they do in the story are based around that concept, although some fantasy elements also creep in, like fairies and dryads and granted wishes, because the children also enjoy fantasy books and poems. The new friends they make in the area turn out to enjoy similar stories, so some of the mysterious incidents they stage are also based on those stories, further appealing to the children’s imaginations as well as their sense of adventure.

I wasn’t completely sure if the book that their new friends gave to the Guthrie children was meant to be a real book because there are many books with titles like The Smuggler’s Island, and I had trouble locating a book from before 1948 with that exact title. Since the other books and poems they reference are real, The Smuggler’s Island might be real, too. If anybody knows what it is and who wrote it, please let me know. On the other hand, that book, because the children say they’ve never read it before, might just be invented by the author to represent that general genre of children’s fiction.

Other real books, stories, and poems referenced by this story include The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (which is a sequel to both his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways), The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll (at one point, David recites the lines from the poem, “His intimate friends called him “Candle-ends”, And his enemies “Toasted-cheese”), and the poem Overheard on a Saltmarsh by Harold Munro (which was the inspiration for the dryad scene because it contains a nymph and a goblin and a necklace of green glass beads).

The concept of a quarantine probably would have made this an excellent story for the coronavirus pandemic, but the setting is idyllic and enchanting for any time. The children are clever in the way they set up their camp, trying to keep it as secret as possible. Their island also includes a spring (which is safe to drink from) and a cave, and they start building a stone hut in this book.

There’s only one thing I can think of to complain about in this book, and that’s the concept of the “savages.” When the parents describe themselves as “savages” when they visit the children, they’re playing on themes from earlier vintage books with islands and shipwrecks. “Natives” and “savages” in those stories can either be helpful or, more commonly, threats to the castaways. I’ve complained about this before in previous book reviews with similar themes because there are stereotypes around these generic “natives” and “savages”, and modern children should be taught not to talk about people in those ways. However, there is no malice behind it in this story. The characters aren’t making fun of anyone or disparaging anybody for being “primitive.” It’s just that they’re playing a game of imagination built on these earlier stories, and they’re using this concept as a plot device to work themselves into the story as something other than visiting parents, preserving both the children’s sense of independence and the imaginary world of the children’s game. Anybody who can understand that should be fine with this book.

My only other complaint is that this book is so rare and so long out of print. I really do think it would appeal to modern audiences, especially fans of cottagecore.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Haunted Lighthouse

Three Cousins Detective Club

#7 The Mystery of the Haunted Lighthouse by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1995.

Sarah-Jane’s parents have been planning a trip, and her cousins, Titus and Timothy are coming, too. At the request of an old family friend, Ned, they are going to visit him and take a look at an old lighthouse that he is thinking of buying. He wants to turn the lighthouse into a bed and breakfast.

However, strange things have started happening at the lighthouse. Someone has vandalized the outside, and Sarah-Jane sees a frightening face up in the tower. Could the old lighthouse be haunted?

The theme of the story is faithfulness.

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

My Reaction and Themes

Since this is a Christian-themed mystery, readers can guess that there won’t be any real ghosts. This is more of a light, pseudo-ghost story, like Scooby-Doo mysteries, with another explanation for what’s happening.

There’s more than one kind of haunting. People can be haunted by memories, and living humans are also attached to the places associated with their happy memories. There is someone who has an attachment to the lighthouse and is unhappy that it’s being sold. This person needs to reconcile their feelings to the situation.

Some Christians don’t like the concept of ghost stories at all. In the book, Sarah-Jane likes hearing ghost stories, although she admits that she doesn’t like remembering them later, when she’s alone at night. She enjoys a little spooky excitement, as long as she knows it’s just a story, and she’s hearing it in a safe setting.

Posted on by TracyC

Maria’s Comet

Maria’s Comet by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by Deborah Lanino, 1999.

This picture book is a fictional story about a real person, Maria Mitchell. (She pronounced her first name “ma-RYE-ah”, not “ma-REE-ah”.) Maria Mitchell was born into a Quaker family on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts in 1818, and she became the first female astronomer in the United States. She is known for discovering a comet only viewable through a telescope in 1847, and she also became the first astronomy professor at Vassar College. She is the namesake of the Maria Mitchell Association, a science center on Nantucket. She was also an abolitionist, although this topic is not touched on in the book. Maria’s father taught her about astronomy when she was young and encouraged her interests and career at a time when not many women were encouraged to pursue careers or higher education.

Maria’s papa is an astronomer. At night, he goes up on the roof their house to use his telescope, and he explains how the telescope works, gathering and focusing light to make distant objects look larger and closer than they would with just a person’s eyes. He especially likes to look for comets. In their time, they’re not entirely sure what comets are made of, and that’s part of what makes studying them interesting. Maria imagines what it would be like to travel across the sky with a comet, encountering the different planets.

Most of Maria’s life centers around their house and family in Nantucket. There are nine children in the family, so Maria helps with chores and tells her siblings bedtime stories. Sometimes, she and her brother Andrew go into the attic and use an old atlas to pretend that they’re explorers. When they read books, Maria likes books about astronomers, but Andrew likes books about sailors. He wants to be a sailor himself.

When Andrew gets older, he runs away from his family to go to sea on a whaling boat. The entire family is sad that he is gone, and Maria soothes her siblings by telling them stories about all of the amazing places their brother will go. That night, after supper, Maria asks her father if she can come with him to look through his telescope or “sweep the sky” as she thinks of it. For a moment, Maria thinks they will say no, but they agree. Maria wants to be an explorer of the sky, like her brother wanted to explore the seas.

Maria’s father points out Polaris, the North Star, to Maria and says that sailors use it to navigate. Maria wonders if Andrew might be looking at the same star right now. Then, she sees a comet streak across the sky.

There’s an Author’s Note in the back of the book that explains about the real life of Maria Mitchell. It has some comments about what people of her time knew and didn’t now about the planets. When she was young, people only knew about seven planets in the solar system. Neptune was discovered during her lifetime (although not by her), and Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930, after she had died. There is also a section about the astronomy terms used in the story and famous astronomers.

My Reaction

I enjoy books about historical people, although the author admits in the Author’s Note that this particular story about Maria Mitchell is fiction. I have mixed feelings about that. I don’t like to fictionalize real people, and I’m not entirely sure whether there’s any truth to the story about Maria’s relationship with her brother and how she felt when he left to become a sailor. On the other hand, I did appreciate how the book showed Maria becoming interested in astronomy by watching her father and joining him in his studies of the sky, which is apparently true. Overall, I did enjoy the story.

The pictures in the book are wonderful. They capture the coziness of an old-fashioned 19th-century home and also the wonderment of looking to the skies and imagining exploring the big, wide world and the stars beyond it.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Aunt Flossie’s Hats (and Crab Cakes Later)

Aunt Flossie’s Hats (and Crab Cakes Later) by Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard, paintings by James Ransome, 1991.

On Sunday afternoons, a pair of sisters, Susan and Sarah, go to visit their Great-Great-Aunt Flossie. They love her house because it is full of interesting things, especially Aunt Flossie’s hat collection.

When their aunt welcomes them in, she offers them tea and cookies and promises that they will get some crab cakes later. After they have their tea and cookies, Aunt Flossie lets the girls try on her hats and tells them stories about them.

The girls are fascinated by the different colors and styles of the hats, but to Aunt Flossie, they represent memories. As the girls pick hats to try, Aunt Flossie tells them what the hats remind her of.

One hat that still has a slight smokey smell reminds Aunt Flossie of a big fire she witnessed in Baltimore. Another hat, one with a red feather, reminds Aunt Flossie of the parade she saw at the end of the Great War (what WWI was called before WWII).

Aunt Flossie’s favorite hat has pink and yellow flowers, and it reminds her of the time when she almost lost it, but it was rescued by a friendly dog. The girls love Aunt Flossie’s stories about her hats, and they love the crab cakes they get later with their family!

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

My Reaction

This is a sweet, slice-of-life story about an elderly aunt sharing her memories with her young nieces. The girls enjoy their time with their aunt, trying on the hats in her collection and getting glimpses of the past through her stories. By spending time together, getting together for tea (and crab cakes later) and trying on the hats, the girls are also building new memories. Years later, they will be able to tell stories about the afternoons they spent with Aunt Flossie and the stories she would tell them about her hats. A note in the book’s dedication indicates that the story is based on memories of the author’s own elderly Aunt Flossie.

The pictures in the book are colorful, like the colors of the aunt’s hats, and they’re also a little soft. I think the soft quality of the images is a good match for the memories the aunt shares with the girls and the new memories they’re creating by sharing stories and spending time together as a family.

Posted on by TracyC

Mirandy and Brother Wind

Mirandy and Brother Wind By Patricia C. McKissack, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, 1988.

It’s springtime, and “Brother Wind” (the wind personified) is striding through the valley. Young Mirandy is getting ready for the junior cakewalk, and she imagines that, if Brother Wind was her partner, she would be sure to win the cakewalk. Her mother says that anyone who can catch the Wind can make him do whatever they want, so Mirandy decides that she’s going to catch Brother Wind before the cakewalk and make him dance with her!

That’s easier said than done. Mirandy doesn’t know how to catch the Wind, and her grandmother doesn’t think such a thing is possible. She asks different people what to do, and she tries different ways of catching him. She tries catching him in a quilt, but he gets away.

Then, Mirandy tries visiting Mis Poinsettia, the conjure woman (a sort of witch or woman with magical knowledge), and she asks her if she has a potion that would help. Mis Poinsettia’s advice is to trap the Wind in a bottle of cider, but that doesn’t work, either.

Eventually, Mirandy manages to trap Brother Wind in the chicken coop. Once she has Brother Wind, he has to give her a wish. However, on the night of the cakewalk, Mirandy realizes that there is someone else she wants for a partner besides Brother Wind, and she asks Brother Wind for help in a different way from the one she had planned.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I thought this was a charming picture book, with bright, colorful illustrations that really conveyed that sense of lightness and air in the presence of Brother Wind! The old-fashioned clothing of the characters is part of the charm, and I like this sweet introduction to the concept of a traditional cakewalk. Cakewalks were a kind of traditional African American dance contest with a cake as a prize for winning. The people participating are dancing as they parade around the room, which is a little different from the cakewalks or candywalks that some modern people do at school or church carnivals as a kind of raffle game. In the game version, the players are just walking, not dancing, and they stop on numbered spots whenever the music stops, winning prizes if the number of their spot is drawn. For Mirandy, winning the cakewalk isn’t a matter of stopping in the right place but actually dancing well.

All through the book, there is a boy who likes Mirandy, but Mirandy doesn’t think of him as a dance partner because she has her heart set on Brother Wind as the perfect dance partner, and the boy is kind of clumsy. Mirandy really wants to win the contest, so it’s important to her to have the best partner she can. However, when one of the other girls at the cakewalk talks badly about the boy and his clumsiness, Mirandy can’t stand to hear him being insulted. She boldly declares that the boy will be her partner, and they will win in the contest together … with a little help from Brother Wind.

Posted on by TracyC · 4 Comments

The Diamond in the Window

The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton, 1962.

Eleanor and Edward Hall are orphans who live with their Aunt Lily and Uncle Frederick in their family’s big but somewhat shabby old house in Concord, Massachusetts. The family has lived there for generations, and they are intellectuals with a particular interest in the literary history of Concord. Uncle Freddy is obsessed with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, although he doesn’t share Eleanor’s love of Louisa May Alcott. When a couple of the town leaders threaten to take the family’s house because of unpaid back taxes and to destroy it because they think it’s an eyesore, the children come to learn that their house holds more secrets and history than anyone knows.

As Eleanor and Edward look at the house from the outside, they suddenly realize that there’s an window at the top of the house that’s shaped like a key and made of colored glass. They’ve never seen that window from the inside of the house, so there must be a secret room! The children search the attic and find a trap door that they never realized was there before. When they look into the hidden room, they find a pair of children’s beds and toys.

The children ask Aunt Lily about the room, and she sadly admits that she hadn’t wanted to tell them about it. Then, she begins to explain more about the family’s history and the aunt and uncle the children never knew. Aunt Lily is their father’s sister, and Uncle Freddy is their brother, but there were once two more children in the family, called Ned and Nora. Eleanor and Edward were named after them, but Ned and Nora mysteriously disappeared years ago. Aunt Lily still believes and hopes that, somehow, they will return someday, so she has always kept their room ready for them.

When she shows the children pictures of Ned and Nora in the family’s album, they also see a picture of a young man in a turban and ask about him. Aunt Lily says that the man is Prince Krishna, son of the Maharajah of Mandracore. Their Uncle Freddy has written books about Emerson and Thoreau and was once considered an expert on the Transcendentalists. People who were interested in Transcendentalism, like Prince Krishna, used to come and study with him. Aunt Lily wasn’t really interested in Transcendentalism, but she explains, “I think he said that the Transcendentalists believed that men’s minds were very wonderful, and that they could know all kinds of important things without being taught about them through their eyes and ears –because they were part of something called an Over-Soul.” Eddy approves of this concept because it sounds like it’s about learning without school, and he approves of anything that involves no school.

Everyone was fond of Prince Krishna while he lived and studied with the family, and Aunt Lily said that he used to make up fun games for Ned and Nora, like treasure hunts with real jewels as prizes because the prince was very rich. The children get the sense that Aunt Lily was in love with Prince Krishna, but he also vanished shortly after Ned and Nora did. When they discovered that Ned and Nora were missing from their beds one morning, Prince Krishna dashed around, looking for them, but suddenly, he was also gone, and no one knew where or how.

Eleanor and Eddy return to Ned and Nora’s room upstairs to have another look at it, and they find a mysterious poem called “Transcendentalist Treasure.” From the handwriting, which matches a note that Prince Krishna wrote to Ned and Nora with a present he gave them, Eleanor and Eddy realize that Prince Krishna also wrote the poem. Since the poem seems to be some kind of treasure hunt, the children think that it was probably part of the treasure hunts that Prince Krishna used to make for Ned and Nora. They try to figure out what the clues in the poem mean and what it might lead to, hoping that it might be the jewels that Aunt Lily told them about and which haven’t been seen in the house since Ned, Nora, and Prince Krishna vanished. If they could find those jewels, they could pay the back taxes and save their house!

However, they don’t really begin to grasp the full importance of the poem until they ask Aunt Lily if they can spend the night in Ned and Nora’s room. During the night, they have a bizarre dream, in which they’re climbing an elm tree with Ned and Nora and find a harp, which is something that was mentioned in the poem. A dangerous wind blows them out of the tree, and they wake up. They could have believed that it was only a dream except that they realize that they both dreamed the same thing, Eleanor has bruises and a scratch on her leg that she got from falling out of the dream tree, and Eddy has located the harp in Ned and Nora’s bedroom.

They show the harp to Aunt Lily, and she says that Prince Krishna had given it to Ned and Nora years ago, hanging it in a tree so that they would hear the wind blowing across it. The poem and the dreams that Eleanor and Eddy have seem to be hinting at the treasure hunts that Prince Krishna had with Ned and Nora. Eleanor and Eddy begin to think that solving the riddles in the poem may not only lead them to the jewels but to the truth about what happened to Ned, Nora, and Prince Krishna.

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

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

The book introduces the concept of Transcendentalism. I remember my English and history teachers discussing the Transcendentalists when I was in high school, but for some reason, they didn’t appeal to me back then, even though I went through a kind of phase where I was interested in metaphysical topics. I think my teachers put a lot of emphasize on their interest in nature, and I wasn’t an outdoorsy person. The background information in this story revived old memories of my high school classes and actually clarified a couple of points for me. The kids visit real places in Concord, Massachusetts, including the house where Louisa May Alcott once lived, and the book is full of discussions of literary figures and their lives and quotations from their works.

The children’s surrealist dreams connect to real objects in their lives and in the history of the family and their house. The dreams follow the poem that Prince Krishna left behind, and in each of their dreams, they see Ned and Nora up ahead of them, so the Eleanor and Edward realize that they’re following their path. The poem and the dream reference pieces of Transcendental literature and thought, and the children’s uncle explains the references throughout the story.

Many of the dreams also show the children’s personal and mental growth. In one dream, the children examine different images of their future selves, seeing how different choices they make can lead their lives in different directions, and they make up their minds which version of themselves they want to aim to be. In another dream, the children are trapped in a nautilus shell, and they discover that they have to think their way out of it. The thoughts they have help them work their way through each chamber of the nautilus, but they have to use thoughts with increasing depth and complexity to make progress. At first, remembering nursery rhymes is enough to help them move forward, but as they go further, they have to concentrate on more complex poems and higher-level moral and philosophical thoughts.

Although the dreams the children have are very surreal, and readers have no idea where they might be leading, the children do find Prince Krishna and their missing aunt and uncle. When the three of them return, Prince Krishna does explain where they were the entire time they were missing. He doesn’t offer a detailed explanation because they were trapped in a sort of magical/metaphysical prison, but he does explain who trapped them and why. There is a villain in the story, but it takes a while to grasp who and what the villain is because readers don’t really see it/him in his true form and don’t understand who he is and what his motives are until Prince Krishna explains. Eleanor and Eddy end up understanding more than Aunt Lily and Uncle Freddy do in the end, but finding Ned and Nora, Prince Krishna, and Prince Krishna’s treasure changes everyone’s lives for the better. Throughout the book, Uncle Freddy is mentally unbalanced, eccentric at the best of times and outright crazy at others. Local people want to see him committed to an asylum, but his mind was unbalanced by Ned and Nora’s disappearance. Once they’re back, he regains his senses.

The author wanted to write realistic children as her protagonists to appeal to real children. Eleanor and Eddy have their own insecurities and dreams which play into their characters all through the book and appear in the visions of the futures and choices they have to make in their dreams.

Posted on by TracyC

The Little Fir Tree

The Little Fir Tree by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Jim Lamarche, 1954, 2005.

A little fir tree feels lonely among the large trees in the forest, but something happens that changes his life forever – he is chosen to be a living Christmas tree for a little boy!

One winter, the boy’s father carefully digs up the tree and brings it home to his young son, who cannot walk because of a lame leg. The boy has been wanting to see the trees in the forest, but since he can’t go to the forest himself, his father has brought a free to him. The little fir tree loves being decorated, and the next evening, guests come and gather around him, singing Christmas carols.

In the springtime, the boy’s father takes the tree back to the forest, where he found it, and he plants the tree again so it will continue to grow. However, the following winter, the boy’s father returns to dig up the tree again and take it back to the boy for Christmas.

The little fir tree loves this ritual of visiting the boy and his family and being their Christmas tree every winter, but the next winter after that, the man doesn’t come to dig him up. The little tree is disappointed and lonely, but he is in for a surprise. This winter, the boy and his family come to see him in the forest!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, although that copy has different illustrations.

My Reaction

I mainly know Margaret Wise Brown for Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, but I found this Christmas story charming. I don’t like Christmas stories from the point of view of trees that are cut down, like the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Fir-Tree, which has a really depressing ending. I like it that this family in this book keeps the tree alive, returning it to the forest every year to continue growing. Things change for both the boy and the tree over the years, as they both continue to grow, but they change for the better, and they continue to be fond of each other and a source of inspiration for each other.

When I was a kid, our elementary school had a large tree on a hill on the kindergarten playground, and the story behind it was that it was once a living Christmas tree from the very first kindergarten class at the school. That tree is still there and alive today, about 50 years after it was first planted there and more than 30 years after I used to play under it. I like to imagine that it will be true of the little fir tree, too, that it will continue growing over the years.

Earlier versions of this book had different illustrations, but personally, I love the illustrations in this printing because they’re detailed and realistic. The version on Internet Archive has illustrations by Barbara Cooney, who is known for Roxaboxen and Miss Rumphius. Cooney’s illustrations are also good, but not as realistic as Larmarche’s, and they’re in a limited color range.

One other difference between versions of the book is that the earlier version also included the musical notes for the carols that the children sing and additional songs that aren’t included in the later version of the book. I enjoy books that include actual music and lyrics, like books that include recipes, because they are fun extras and add an extra dimension to the story by providing an accompanying activity. Although I like the more detailed and realistic illustrations of newer edition of this book, I do prefer the actual music and wider range of songs from the older version.

Posted on by TracyC

Changes for Kirsten

Kirsten, An American Girl

Changes for Kirsten by Janet Beeler Shaw, 1988.

It’s winter, and Kirsten’s brother, Lars, is going to set animal traps in the woods with his friend, John Stewart, who lives nearby. Kirsten is friends with John’s sister, Mary. Trapping animals for their pelts is one of the ways that the boys make some extra money. The local men are all away, working at a logging camp for the winter. Kirsten isn’t really interested in trapping animals so much as she just wants to get out of her family’s little cabin because she’s been cooped up due to the winter weather, so she persuades the boys to let her come along on their trapping expedition.

As they go through the woods, Kirsten spots an animal snare that someone else set out, and John explains that there’s an old trapper called Old Jack who lives by himself in the woods. He has no family and often prefers to be by himself and avoids meeting many people, although he sometimes helps locals with their own traps. The snare is probably one of his traps. When they find a trap that has a baby raccoon caught by the tail, the boys say that it’s too small for them to kill it for its pelt, and Kirsten feels sorry for it. She persuades them to let her take it home and nurse it back to health, like she did with an injured bird, before releasing it into the wild again.

Kirsten is supposed to leave the little raccoon in the barn because, as her family tries to explain to her, wild animals are wild and uncontrollable. However, Kirsten feels sorry for the little thing because the barn is cold, so she brings it into the cabin. It turns out to be a terrible idea. The raccoon gets loose and knocks over an oil lamp that sets the cabin on fire! Kirsten makes her her little brother and sister get out safely, and when she realizes that the fire is spreading too fast for her to stop it, she manages to save the painted trunk with some of her family’s most important belongings. Unfortunately, the cabin is completely destroyed.

Kirsten’s aunt takes in Kirsten, her mother, and her siblings. It’s a little crowded in her house, but at least, they have a place to go. Everyone is understandably upset, although they are not too hard on Kirsten for causing the disaster. However, her mother says that they had been hoping that maybe they could buy a little land with the money Kirsten’s father is making at the logging camp, but she doesn’t see how they can now. They’re going to have to build a new cabin and replace some of essentials that they lost in the fire.

Then, John and Mary Stewart tell the Larsons that their family will be moving to Oregon because their father has found a new job managing a logging camp there. Kirsten is sorry to see the Stewarts leave because they’ve been good friends, but Aunt Inger points out that the Larsons’ problems will be solved if they can manage to buy the Stewarts’ house. The Stewarts’ house is much bigger than the little cabin where the Larsons lived, and the Stewarts will have to sell their home before they can move anyway. The problem is that the Larsons just don’t have the money to afford the Stewarts’ house.

All Lars can think to do is try to make more money through trapping. Kirsten goes along to help him, and one evening, they stay out much later than they mean to and get lost in the dark woods. When the spot some human tracks in the snow, they think that they are probably the tracks of Old Jack, the trapper hermit. Kirsten thinks that Old Jack sounds frightening, but with no one else to turn to for help and shelter, they decide to follow the tracks to where Old Jack lives. When they find Old Jack’s home in a cave that he has turned into a rough house, they make an important discovery that changes everything for the Larsons.

The book ends with a section of historical information that explains how new settlers moving westward turned frontier areas like the area where Kirsten’s family lived into more settled towns. The farms where people lived became less isolated, and railroads connected cities and rural areas across the country. The first transcontinental railroad in the United States was completed by the time Kirsten would have turned 24 years old, changing the ways that people and goods traveled.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

This was one of the books that I remember I didn’t like in the Kirsten series when I was a kid because it’s just so painful when the family’s cabin burns. Reading the book again, I appreciated how the family wasn’t overly hard on Kirsten about bringing the raccoon into the cabin that caused the fire. I couldn’t really blame the others if they were upset with Kirsten because it’s a major disaster that destroys their home and leaves them in a very precarious position. However, even though they’re understandably upset at the situation, it is nice that they don’t lay a guilt trip on Kirsten about it because that would have made it a much sadder story.

It also helps that the situation works out for the best in the end. When they hear that the Stewarts are moving, they do want the Stewarts’ house, but they just don’t think they will be able to afford it. What changes for the Larsons is that they receive an unusual sort of inheritance from Old Jack. When Kirsten and Lars are lost in the woods and seek shelter from Old Jack, they discover that Old Jack has died. There doesn’t appear to be any foul play. Old Jack was an elderly man, and he seems to have died from natural causes in his house. It’s a grim discovery, but while Kirsten and Lars shelter in his house with the body overnight, they also realize that Old Jack has a hoard of fine animal pelts. Since Old Jack has no family and no one to inherit his property, there is no dispute that the Larsons can claim his pelts because they found his body and plan to arrange for his burial. With the money that Old Jack’s pelts bring, they are able to afford the Stewarts’ house, which is much better than their old cabin. The Stewarts also leave them some furniture and household supplies.

I do like it that the story worked out for the best, although I wasn’t fond of the theme of trapping animals for pelts. I remember that this was an aspect of other books that I read as a kid, like Where the Red Fern Grows, but I never liked hearing or reading about it. I understand hunting for food, and I know the family in the story traps animals for fur because they badly need money, but it’s not a subject that I enjoy hearing about. The metal traps the boys use for trapping animals are considered inhumane in modern times, and their use is now banned or restricted in many countries and states.

Posted on by TracyC

A Pioneer Thanksgiving

A Pioneer Thanksgiving by Barbara Greenwood, illustrated by Heather Collins, 1999.

This book is part story, part history, and part craft and activity book. It tells the story of a particular pioneer family’s Thanksgiving celebration in 1841 to explain the sort of Thanksgiving celebrations that pioneer families would have at the time, and there are related activities and recipes to accompany the story.

Everyone in the Robertson family helps with preparing the food for the Thanksgiving feast, including the family’s neighbors, who will be joining them. The story is episodic, focusing on different family members and their adventures and activities through the Thanksgiving preparations.

As they begin their preparations, they are worried about Granny, who is unwell. Mrs. Robertson is afraid that she might die because she doesn’t seem to be improving. As Sarah reads to her, Granny expresses a wish to taste her mother’s cranberry sauce one more time.

Sarah decides to go out and gather some cranberries for the sauce herself, but her little sister, Lizzie, tags along with her. The cranberry bog isn’t safe. Lizzie falls in and nearly drowns. Sarah manages to save her, but she’s very upset at almost losing Lizzie. However, her brother George finds Sarah’s basket of cranberries and brings it back to the house. The first activity in the book is a recipe for cranberry sauce.

Willie, one of the boys in the family, almost gets lost while looking for chestnuts for his mother’s chestnut stuffing, and he plays a game of Conkers with a Native American (First Peoples) friend, whose family trades foods with the Robertson family. Part of the story explains about Ojibwa and Iroquois thanksgiving ceremonies, and there are instructions in the book for playing Conkers with chestnuts and a Native American game with peach stones.

The younger children go into the woods to gather nuts, and there are instructions for weaving a nutting basket. Meg, the oldest girl in the family, makes bread with interesting designs, and there’s a recipe for bread. Sarah makes a Corn Dolly, and Granny explains the superstition of making a Corn Dolly and then plowing the Corn Dolly back into the soil at the beginning of the next planting season to ensure a good harvest.

Mr. Burkholder, their neighbor, tells them a story about when his family had newly arrived in North America and they had little food. Then, there is a section about weather and now to make a weather vane. Finally, everyone gathers at the table to say grace and enjoy the feast!

In the back of the book, there is a section about the history of Thanksgiving as a holiday in North America, both in the US and Canada. This book is actually set in Canada, and it explains that the date of Canandian Thanksgiving celebrations wasn’t initially fixed. Sometimes, they could be in October and sometimes in November. Canadian Thanksgiving was finally established as the second Monday in October in 1957.

I couldn’t find a copy of this book online, but I did find a copy on Internet Archive of a related book by the same author about the same pioneer family in Canada.

My Reaction

Although the book doesn’t say exactly where this family is other than North America, the other book about the family establishes that they are in Canada, and the references to Native Americans as “First Peoples” confirms it. When I first started reading the book, I thought that the pioneer family was somewhere in the United States or its territories. The lifestyle that the Canadian pioneers lived seems very similar to the way pioneers in the United States lived around that time, so I think the recounting of this family’s holiday would still be of interest to fans of the Little House on the Prairie series and similar books.

Hearing about Canadian Thanksgiving was interesting, and I liked the inclusion of information about the Thanksgiving traditions of the First Peoples and immigrants to Canada. The family in the story was originally from Scotland, and the grandmother in the story talks about how Thanksgiving celebrations remind her of the Harvest Home celebrations back in Scotland.

The book has a good selection of different types of activities for readers to try, from recipes to games to crafts. It seems like there is something here that could appeal to many people with different interests. Each of the activities appears next to a part of the story that references it, so readers can feel like they’re taking part in the activities along with the people in the story. I also really love the realistic art style in the illustrations!

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.