Posted on by TracyC

Don’t You Know There’s a War On?

Don’t You Know There’s a War On? by Avi, 2001.

In 1943, 11-year-old Howie Crispers lives in Brooklyn and goes to public school. Although he’s still a kid in school, every part of his life and every part of the lives of people he knows, like his best friend, Denny, has been impacted by WWII. Howie’s father is in the Merchant Marines, which means that he’s away most of the time, taking supplies overseas. Howie never knows exactly where his father goes because people aren’t supposed to talk too much about the movement of people and supplies for the war. The phrase “Loose lips sink ships” has special meaning for Howie. When letters from his father arrive, they arrive censored, with pieces of important information cut out of them, so Howie’s father can’t accidentally give away information that might potentially be important to an enemy if the letter was intercepted or if his family mentioned things that they shouldn’t from his letters.

Denny’s father is in the army somewhere in North Africa, and other classmates have fathers or brothers overseas or family members involved in war work in some way within the United States. The kids also participate in volunteer activities related to the war effort, like gathering useful scrap materials that can be made into supplies. Many things are rationed, and people can’t always get what they want. Sometimes, there are blackouts and air raid drills. Whenever someone has to make do with things as they are or put up with abnormal situations, they tend to shrug it off and say, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Howie’s noticed that phrase seems to be an excuse for a lot of things.

Howie and Denny, like other kids, love listening to plays on the radio, and popular entertainment also frequently focuses on the war. Howie and Denny are especially fascinated by stories of spies, and they start wondering if there could be spies around them even now. Their primary suspect for being a spy is their school principal, Dr. Lowminster. With most of the men they know away fighting or working in some capacity related to the war, they wonder why he isn’t also in the armed forces or doing some kind of war work. Dr. Lowminster is a strict man, and when Howie spots him leaving the school one morning just as classes are about to start, he realizes that this is something out of character for him and his usual routine.

Skipping class himself, Howie follows Dr. Lowminster and overhears a conversation between him and an unknown woman about firing Howie’s teacher, Miss Gossem! Howie likes Miss Gossem and even has a secret crush on her, and he’s appalled that Dr. Lowminster wanted to get rid of her. He doesn’t give an exact reason for firing her during the discussion Howie overhears, only saying something vague about Miss Gossem not maintaining the correct moral standards. Howie doesn’t know what that means, but he’s sure that sweet, pretty Miss Gossem couldn’t have done anything bad enough to get fired.

Since he’s already suspected Dr. Lowminster of being a spy, he also starts thinking of him like the villains in radio show or movie serials, who do cruel things to get revenge on pretty women who refuse to marry them, and he considers that this could be a similar situation. Maybe Dr. Lowminster is just mad at Miss Gossem because she doesn’t love him or something. In such cases, in movies or on the radio, a hero steps in and saves the lady from the villain, so Howie decides that he’s going to be Miss Gossem’s hero!

Later, when he can talk to Miss Gossem in private, Howie confides in her that he knows that she’s being fired and that he wants to help her. Miss Gossem, who has only just learned about it herself is surprised how Howie knew, and he’s forced to confess the embarrassing details about how he spied on the school principal because he thought he was a spy. Miss Gossem says that she doesn’t think the principal or anyone else at the school is a spy and that the woman the principal was talking to was Mrs. Walsh, who is the acting school superintendent and the principal’s boss. Howie asks Miss Gossem if there’s anything he can do that would help her, but Miss Gossem says that this is something that she’ll have to work out for herself. She only asks that he not tell the rest of the class about it yet. Howie agrees, although he’s already told Denny.

He and Denny talk it over, and Denny’s still convinced that the matter might have to do with spies or something related to the war. One evening, when Howie is caught outside during an air raid drill near Miss Gossem’s apartment, a policeman tells him to get off the street, so he asks Miss Gossem if he can come in. She lets him in, and she asks him how he knew she lived there. Howie admits that he’s spied on her, too. Miss Gossem tells him that he shouldn’t be spying on her. When he sees a picture of a young man in an Air Force uniform on her table, he asks her who it is, and Miss Gossem admits that it’s her husband. She still goes by her maiden name because not many people knew that she got married. They got married rather suddenly before he went overseas, and now, she’s worried because she hasn’t heard from him and doesn’t know where he is. She worries that he might be dead. Howie confides in her that he worries about his father, too, and how he sometimes has nightmares about horrible things happening to his father.

As teacher and student confide their worries to each other, Howie asks Miss Gossem again about why she was fired and learns some things about her situation. Miss Gossem asks him not to tell the rest of the class what he knows, but he does anyway because he thinks they can help prevent Miss Gossem from being fired. Miss Gossem is upset with Howie for revealing her secrets, and she worries that, if the principal finds out, it will make her situation worse. Miss Gossem insists that she is an adult and has to deal with things herself. Howie is upset because he was only trying to help.

Howie doesn’t know what else to do, but his little sister, Gloria, who listens to romantic soap operas instead of hero stories, offers him another perspective and some suggestions that help to change the situation. Dr. Lowminster is a man, but the nature of Miss Gossem’s problems might get more sympathy from adult women … like their mother and Dr. Lowminster’s boss, Mrs. Walsh.

My Reaction

This story contrasts with another by the same author, Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?, which is also about a boy growing up in the United States during WWII, coming to terms with the effects of the war on daily life and the people around him, and indulging in a little fantasy and adventure based on radio plays and popular entertainment of the time. The difference between these two stories is that the boy in Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? lives far more in the world of fantasy and his own imagination than Howie is in this story. Both boys are inspired by radio play adventures, but the boy in Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? has some serious problems coping with the mundane and hard realities around him and frequently acts and speaks as though he’s living in a radio play.

In this story, Howie is much more accepting of the realities of situations around him, once he understands what the realities are. He is genuinely worried about his teacher’s problems and the effects that they are having on her life. At one point, he sees Miss Gossem looking out over a cliff and worries that she might be contemplating suicide because of her despair at her situation. Fortunately, she isn’t, and although she finds Howie’s efforts to help her somewhat embarrassing, he and his friends and sister are able to get some help for Miss Gossem, at least enough that she is able to finish working until the end of the school year.

However, while Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? had a somewhat idealized ending in spite of the characters’ troubles and the chaos around them, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? ends on a more realistic and imperfect note. The characters in Don’t You Know There’s a War On? can’t solve all of the problems around them in the end. At the end of the story, the war ends, and the characters’ lives change yet again, as they shift into a new mode where they they can’t keep saying, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” We don’t fully get the end of everyone’s story because Miss Gossem and Denny both move away, but we know that they have to go on with their lives as they are now, changed because of the war. It’s not exactly a happy ending although it’s not completely unhappy, either, because the characters’ lives will go on. It’s somewhere in the middle between happy and unhappy with an element of uncertainty about exactly what’s going to happen and how things will ultimately end up, which is very realistic.

Because Don’t You Know There’s a War On? was written after Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?, I had the feeling that the author wanted to revisit that time and a similar setting in a more realistic way than he did in the previous book. Both books are enjoyable, but reading each of them is a different experience. That’s not unlike real life, too. Different people can experience the same situation in different ways. There are common threads between the two stories because the boys are experiencing some shared events and elements of popular culture in their time, but because their situations aren’t exactly the same, and they have very different personalities, their stories take different directions.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?

Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? by Avi, 1992.

World War II is happening, but Frankie Wattleson mostly spends his time thinking about his favorite radio shows, like Captain Midnight, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, and The Green Hornet. He spends a lot of his time listening to radio shows and daydreaming about them, and his parents and teacher are getting concerned about him. He doesn’t do his homework, just copying his friend Mario’s homework because he’s too busy with his favorite radio shows. He and Mario get caught reading radio fan magazines in class, when they’re supposed to be reading the class reader. Frankie keeps narrating his life like it’s a radio show or talking like a radio advertisement, and even Mario is getting annoyed with him.

Frankie gets Mario into trouble with escapades that he tries to act out like they’re radio shows, like when he sneaks Mario into his family’s house so they can sneak into the bedroom of the medical student who’s renting Frankie’s brother’s room while he’s away in the army. The boys wanted to get a look at the skeleton that the medical student keeps in his room, but the medical student catches them and reports them to Frankie’s mother. Frankie’s parents try to impress on him that his behavior is serious. His father works hard at two jobs and is frequently tired, his brother is away at war, and their boarder provides their family with another source of needed income. They don’t want to lose him as a boarder. Frankie’s mother forbids him to listen to the radio for a week, but he sneaks listening to the radio by visiting Mario and listening to his radio. The boys sneak back and forth between their houses, using a board between their bedroom windows.

Then, Frankie’s parents tell him that his brother, Tom, is coming home from the army. Tom has been wounded, and Frankie is thrilled at Tom coming home as a wounded hero. Frankie’s parents try to explain to him the reality of Tom’s condition. They don’t know how serious his wound is, but they know that he will need peace and to recover. At first, Frankie thinks that his parents will get rid of the medical student boarding with them so Tom can have his room back, but to his horror, his parents tell him that’s not the case. They still need the money from their board badly, so they’re giving Tom Frankie’s room.

Frankie protests that it’s not fair for him to have to give up his room, but his parents say it’s necessary. When Tom comes home, he’ll need quiet and privacy. Frankie asks where he’ll be sleeping, and his father says that they’re going to make up a new bedroom for him in the basement. It sounds terrible to Frankie. The basement is dark and smelly, and if Frankie goes down there, he won’t have his radio or the board for crossing over to Mario’s room. It’s like being sent to a dungeon!

However, when Frankie and Mario look through the stuff in the basement, they find what looks like some kind of old radio! Frankie’s father says that it used to belong to his Uncle Charlie. Frankie doesn’t remember Uncle Charlie, but his father is tired and doesn’t want to talk about him. Frankie isn’t good at fixing things, but he persuades Mario to help him repair the radio. It turns out to be a different kind of radio than Frankie thought, the kind for sending and receiving messages, not the kind of listening to radio shows. Still, Frankie thinks maybe Mario can help him use it to listen to the radio in Mario’s room when his family bans him from using the radio in their house.

When Tom arrives home, he’s different from how Frankie imagined he would be as a returning hero. He is wounded in the leg and uses a crutch to walk. He’s quiet and depressed, and he doesn’t want to go anywhere, do much of anything, or see anyone. Frankie, who is caught up in the ideas of the adventure stories that he listens to on the radio, tries to get Tom to tell him what the war was like and what it was like being wounded, thinking that the stories will be exciting, but Tom tells him he doesn’t want to talk about it.

The idea of having an adventure and being a hero is what keeps Frankie so enthralled with radio shows. His daydreaming and narrating his adventures with Mario as if they were a radio play is all based around his desire to be a hero and escape from the dull or difficult parts of his real life. The problem is that Frankie doesn’t know what it takes to be a real hero or what real-life “adventures” are actually like, and even when he tries to ignore real life, it doesn’t ignore him. His attempts to live out the adventures he imagines go awry, and his teacher makes it clear that, if he doesn’t start paying attention to reality, he’s going to fail the sixth grade.

My Reaction

I didn’t read this when I was a kid, although I loved historical novels and books by Avi. The boy in this story has an obsession with radio plays the way kids of my time sometimes got obsessed with tv shows. His family, his teacher, and even his best friend know that Frankie’s taking his obsession too far, but Frankie uses his love of radio to both hide from difficult things in real life and to imagine that he can be a hero, like the heroes on the radio.

In between parts of the story, there are interludes with snippets of radio programs and advertisements, showing readers what Frankie’s listening to and where he gets his ideas. I’m a fan of radio plays myself, so I was already familiar with some of the programs that Frankie listens to and their general style. I could recognize many of the tropes of the radio plays in Frankie’s fantasies from the beginning.

Frankie’s radio-based exploits are amusing, but also cringey because readers as well as Frankie’s family and teacher know that he’s headed for trouble by not paying attention to reality. Even his best friend is losing patience with him. I kept waiting for the moment when he would snap out of it and accept some of the hard realities around him. There is a moment when he does get a dose of reality that shatters some of his illusions, the moment when he meets is Uncle Charlie. Up to that point, Frankie was working his Uncle Charlie into his fantasies, imagining him as some kind of secret hero, but Uncle Charlie’s secrets turn out to be more ordinary and not at all romantic or noble. Uncle Charlie accepts the reality of his own situation for what it is, and he knows things ahead of him will be hard and that he has himself to blame for what his life is now. Frankie finds it hard to hear, and his brother’s confession of what war is really like similarly shatter’s some of Frankie’s illusions. It makes him realize that he’s made some mistakes in his thinking and plotting, and Frankie does try to put an end to a romantic scheme that he’s put in motion. However, Frankie’s scheme, while causing chaos, does actually result in a happy ending, so he is able to maintain some of his fantasies and illusions, even in the end.

This story contrasts with another by the same author, Don’t You Know There’s a War On?, which is also about a boy growing up in the United States during WWII, coming to terms with the effects of the war on daily life and the people around him, and indulging in a little fantasy and adventure based on radio plays and popular entertainment of the time. The difference between these two stories is that the boy in Don’t You Know There’s a War On? is more realistic in his views that Frankie is in this story. Both of them are inspired by radio play adventures, but the boy in Don’t You Know There’s a War On? isn’t living in a fantasy world as much as Frankie is and is more open to accepting the mundane and hard realities of life once he understands some of the situations around him.

Posted on by TracyC

Snow Treasure

Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan, 1942.

The story takes place in Norway, during the winter of 1940. A group of children are sledding on a hillside when they see Peter’s Uncle Victor walking with a friend of his. Uncle Victor is a fisherman, and Peter loves hearing the stories he tells whenever he’s back from a trip. The children call and wave to him, and he waves back, but he doesn’t stop or call back to them. It seems a little out of character for him because he usually gives them more enthusiastic greetings and likes spending time with him. Peter is surprised that his uncle is even there because it seems early for him to arrive.

The children continue playing in the snow, starting a snowball fight. When it starts getting dark, the children realize that they have to get home to supper. At first, they think that their parents will be angry that they’re late, but the parents seem preoccupied and don’t seem to notice. When Peter mentions that he saw Uncle Victor, his father suddenly jumps up, looks alarmed, and says that he has to go out. Peter wonders if Uncle Victor is in some kind of trouble, and when he tries to ask about it, his mother doesn’t want to talk about it. He just says that Peter’s father has been working hard at the bank and that they just had a visit from a treasury official. Peter’s sister worries that the bank might be in trouble, but their mother says that the bank is fine and that it has more gold than ever. Peter asks if it has something to do with the war because even the children know about the Nazis taking Poland and how worried that the adults have been since. Peter’s mother says, yes, it’s about the war, but she doesn’t really explain more.

Later, Peter wakes up and hears his father and some other men talking about gold bouillon. The men talk about how they’re going to keep Norway’s gold out of the hands of the Nazis. When the men notice that Peter is watching them and listening, Peter’s father tries to send him back to bed, but Uncle Victor insists that Peter stay because Peter has just given him an idea. Peter is almost thirteen years old, and Uncle Victor realizes that he and his friends can help them. He asks Peter about how many children are in the local school and how many are over 10 years old. It’s a small school, and Peter thinks that there are about 20 children in the local school who are more than 10 years old, including the girls. Uncle Victor asks him about how he and the others could handle making a really long sled ride to the place where he docks his boat. It’s miles away, but Uncle Victor and the other men used to do it when they were children, and Peter says that he and his friends could do it, too.

The men send Peter back to bed while they talk over their plans, but they say that they’ll talk to Peter more later. As Peter lies in bed, he thinks about what they’ve told him so far. He knows that they have a large amount of money in gold bouillon, and they want to be sure that it stays out of the hands of the Nazis, but what is the point of the sleds and Uncle Victor’s boat? As he thinks about it, he realizes that they mean for the children to transport the gold to the boat on their sleds. They were talking about other modes of transportation that they’ve considered, and they’ve decided to have the children carry it for them. Peter wonders how much weight their sleds can carry because gold is very heavy.

The next day, as he and his sister walk to school, they watch some of the men building what looks like strange-looking sheds. The men say that they are building bomb shelters. When Peter and his sister ask them if they’re afraid of bombings from the Nazis or the Russians, the men say that they’re not really afraid of bombings from either one. The bomb shelters are just in case.

Other children have also noticed the bomb shelters, and everyone at school is restless and uneasy. Some of the younger children are so upset that they start crying, and some children have to be sent home. Then, Uncle Victor comes to talk to the students. Instead of telling them one of his sea stories, he’s there to help them form a special club and that they’re going to do something to help their country. He calls it the Defense Club, and he appoints Peter as the club president. Uncle Victor says that everyone is in the Defense Club and that they must all follow Peter’s orders.

The next day, Peter’s father says that he’s going to show them the route that he wants Peter to lead his friends along. He wants to be sure that Peter remembers the way to go and can do it without help. Along the way, they talk about the gold and the importance of keeping it out of enemy hands. The treasury official who recently visited the bank has decided that the best thing to do to make sure that their country’s gold can’t be captured by the enemy is to send it to a safe place. Other countries have sent their gold to the United States for safe-keeping, so Norway plans to send at least part of its gold bouillon to the United States as well.

However, there has been a recent development. Enemy ships have been sighted off the coast of Norway, laying mines. This is going to make getting the gold out of Norway by ship difficult and dangerous. Peter’s father and his friends lead Peter to a cave that Peter never knew existed before. The men say that the reason why Peter never knew there was a cave there is that they dug out this cave themselves. This is where they will hide the gold.

The following night, April 8, Norway is under black-out conditions in case of bombings. Not a single light is allowed after dark, and people are afraid. The bomb shelters are ready, and they have blocks of ice ready in place of sandbags. Soon, Peter’s father will leave to join the army, and he says that Peter will be the man of the house while he’s gone. Peter asks him what to do about the gold, and his father says that Uncle Victor will tell him when and if they need to move it. In the meantime, Peter is to pretend that he knows nothing about it and not tell anyone anything.

When Peter speaks to Uncle Victor, Uncle Victor tells him that he wants Peter to make sure that he and his friends go sledding regularly in the area. If the Germans are watching, and they see the children often sledding, they’ll start ignoring them. It would only look weird if the children started going places where the Germans haven’t seen them before. He also explains that the children will be divided into teams of sledders with Peter and some of the other, oldest children leading each team. Peter asks Uncle Victor why it’s important to move the gold when the sea is mined. If Uncle Victor doesn’t know where the mines are and can’t navigate around them, he won’t be able to get the gold out anyway. Uncle Victor says that he will be learning the locations of the mines, and he wants the gold ready to go when the time comes, so he can get it out quickly. He adds that Peter is not to question orders from this point forward. The adults teach the children how to tie and untie the gold from their sleds.

As Norway becomes occupied by the Germans, the children have a scare when they run into a Nazi patrol, but the Nazis move out of the children’s way to let them sled. One of them comments to the children that he wouldn’t interrupt their sledding because he liked to sled when he was a boy, too. The children are thrilled with their brush with danger and how the Nazis just let them through. In spite of the friendliness of the Nazi soldiers, however, the children refuse to talk to them. The adults ordered them to not speak to the Nazis so they can’t let anything slip to them. The Nazis try to offer the children candy to make friends with them, but the children won’t take it or even say a single word to them.

Transporting the gold is a long process because the children can’t carry much at a time. The adults are nervous because it won’t be much longer before the snow melts, and the children won’t be able to sled. Also, Uncle Victor’s boat hasn’t been where he usually docks it, so the children have been burying the gold in the snow at the docking point until he returns. Then, a late blizzard comes.

The blizzard is unusually fierce, and it lasts for days. The Norwegians don’t find it too difficult because they are prepared for storms like this, and they spend the blizzard at home. The Nazis have suffered during the blizzard because they weren’t prepared for it, and they’re in a bad mood when it’s over.

One day, one a commandant tries to offer Peter a job living in their barracks and shining his shoes. (These aren’t even tempting conditions.) When Peter still refuses to even talk to him, the commandant gets angry, and he says it’s a sign of how stupid the Norwegians are. He says that the children are stupid because they’ve been out of school too long, and it’s time for them all to go back to school. At first, the children aren’t too concerned about this threat because they know that the schoolmaster of their small school has left to join the army, and there’s no one in town to teach the school. However, the Germans say that the school will reopen even if one of the German soldiers has to teach it. This is a worry because, while the snow dumped by the blizzard has bought them some time to finish their sled deliveries of gold, if the children are back in school all day, they won’t have enough time after school to finish the job. The adults have to come up with a plan that will keep the children out of school long enough to finish their mission.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The story was later made into a movie in 1968. The movie is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video, or the movie or clips of it sometimes appear on YouTube.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Based on Real Events?

I liked this story because of the combination of historical events and adventure. What interested me most about the book is that the it was written and published during WWII itself, and the author claimed that it was based on real events, although she admitted that some of the details were invented for the story.

There are many stories about people resorting to unusual and imaginative methods to smuggle items and people past enemy soldiers during the war, so it does beg the question about whether real children helped to smuggle gold past the Germans on their sleds. There are no definitive sources to verify that the story about the sleds is true, and some people doubt it, although the smuggling of gold out of Norway is true. It is true that, in 1940, about $9,000,000 worth of gold bullion from Norway arrived by in Baltimore, Maryland, carried by a freighter called Bomma. At the time, the ship’s captain told a story about children transporting gold secretly on their sleds, which is probably where the author got the idea for the story.

The author herself said that, in real life, there were more children and adults involved than she included in the story, which is also true, although whether or not they used sleds as part of their operation is the part that is still difficult to verify. There was an article in an Australian newspaper from 1941 which described a large-scale military and civilian effort in Norway to smuggle gold bullion out of the country by various means, including trucks and small, private boats. Some of the details of this account shed a little light on the larger situation. According to the story in the Australian newspaper, some civilians acted as village guides, helping to guide gold-carrying trucks through forests to reach the sea, where it would be loaded onto ships. There, some of the gold was loaded aboard a British destroyer and cruiser, but the cruiser had to leave early due to German bombing, and some of the gold was left behind. Civilians, including patriotic men, women, and children helped in the efforts to transport the remaining gold to a freighter, using small, private boats, traveling by night along the edges of the fjords.

It does seem that at least some children were involved in the effort, but their exact roles are uncertain. From the Australian description, it seems that some of them may have been aboard the small boats transporting gold. If sleds were also used to transport some of the gold, the article doesn’t mention it, but the absence of a mention doesn’t necessarily mean that it didn’t happen at all. Even if most of the gold was transported by other means, it is still possible that sleds were used to carry some of it, part of the way. Because the smuggling of the gold was meant to be secret, I suppose the people involved couldn’t really admit to their involvement at the time or offer too many details. Since the end of the war, it seems like nobody has claimed to be one of the children who transported gold on their sleds, so that part of the story remains unverified, and it could be exaggerated or legend.

Spoilers

The plan that the adults come up with is to fake an epidemic in town that will keep the schools closed. The town doctor is in on the plot, and he paints the younger children in town with spots to make it look like they have something like the measles. He insists that the school remain closed until the illness that the people in town call “the plague” (because they can’t pronounce what the doctor claims it is) has passed. In the meantime, he wants the older children in town to stay away from the younger children and spend as much time outside as possible. The younger children are to stay inside under quarantine, and the doctor cautions the German soldiers to stay away from the children to avoid catching the disease.

Of course, they can’t keep up this deception forever, and Peter himself is later in danger when he offends the German commander and is later take prisoner. However, there is a twist to the story because one of the German soldiers is secretly on their side and resents being pressed into the service of the Nazis. This unexpected ally helps Peter to make his escape and fulfill his family’s mission.

Posted on by TracyC

The Bracelet

The Bracelet by Yoshiko Uchida, illustrated by Joanna Yardley, 1976, 1993.

Emi is a young girl, a second-grader, in a Japanese American family in 1942. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there was widespread paranoia about people of Japanese descent in the United States. In response to the fear that these people could secretly be spies for Japan, many of them were ordered to go to internment camps for the duration of the war. Emi’s family is one of those families.

When the story begins, her family has packed and is preparing to report to one of these camps. Emi is sad to leave her home and worried about where they are going. It’s particularly hard for her to leave her best friend. Before they go, her friend stops by with a special present, a bracelet for her to remember her friend by. Emi promises that she will always wear it.

The move to the camp involves a long bus ride and crowds of people. When they get there, Emi’s family is assigned to a barrack made out of an stable because the camp is in an old, converted racetrack (this is a description of Tanforan Assembly Center from real life), and it’s not a very homey place. It’s dirty and still smells like horses. The camp is surrounded by barbed wired wire, and they have to line up with everyone else for meals. They know that this is a temporary camp and that they will later be sent somewhere else. (They will be sent to Topaz.)

Then, Emi suddenly realizes that she no longer has her bracelet. She must have lost it somewhere in the move to the camp! They look everywhere, but they can’t find it. How is Emi going to remember her best friend without that special present?

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

My Reaction

The author of this book, Yoshiko Uchida, has also written other books about Japanese internment camps during World War II and the experiences of the people there and their experiences with returning to normal life after the war. When she was a young woman, she and her family were also held in the Japanese internment camps, giving her direct knowledge of the conditions there and insight into the affect that the camps had on the lives of ordinary people. The experiences of the people in her stories follow the experiences of her own family.

This particular book would make a good introduction to the concept of Japanese internment camps for children. It shows one of the camps through the eyes of a young girl, and it’s not a very friendly or welcoming place because it is essentially a prison. It’s an unfair prison because the people there haven’t done anything wrong, and that comes through in the story. (“They hadn’t done anything wrong. They were being treated like the enemy just because they looked like the enemy. … They loved America, but American didn’t love them back. And it didn’t want to trust them.”) They’re only there because some people are suspicious that some of them might do something wrong because of their ethnic background. Kids can understand the unfairness of the situation and Emi’s feelings at leaving her home and her friend. It’s not an easy topic to discuss, but the feeling of unfairness is a universal one, experienced by humans of all ages. Everyone has experienced something in their life, big or small, that was unfair, so the emotion isn’t difficult to understand.

Nobody is physically hurt doing the story, and nobody is called any racial slurs, making this a relatively gentle introduction to a difficult topic. There are soldiers with guns watching the people going to the camp, and they wonder if those guards are really going to shoot anyone who tries to run away, but nobody is shot. The presence of the armed guards is the most overtly scary part of the book, although there is also an atmosphere of general uncertainty because Emi and her family don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Through Emi’s thoughts, kids can understand that these are ordinary people who have been caught up in something larger that has changed and complicated their lives. The book doesn’t cover much about life at the camp because it’s a short book that mainly covers Emi’s feelings at leaving home and her arrival at the camp, but it sets the scene well for longer, more difficult books, to fill in the blanks.

The bright side to the story is that Emi realizes that her memories of her friend don’t depend on a physical object, like the bracelet. She has memories of all the fun things she and her friend did together, and as long as they remember each other, they will still be friends. We don’t know from this book whether Emi will ever see this friend again or not, but I think that Emi appears as a secondary character in other books by the same author. I think she’s a friend of Yuki in Journey to Topaz and Journey Home.

The edition of the book that I used for my review is the one from 1993. There is a section in the back of the book with historical information about the Japanese internment, and the section in my edition has updated information that wouldn’t have been in the original version of the book. The story was first printed in 1976, but the historical section in my edition ends with the conclusions reached in 1982 by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians established by President Carter to investigate the causes of the Japanese internment. The conclusion of that commission was the Japanese internment was the product of racism, paranoia, and hysteria on the part of the public and a failure in leadership on the part of the government for trying to placate the hysterics at someone else’s expense instead of holding firm, providing reassurance and firm leadership, and emphasizing the true reality of their unreasonable fears. (Remember, that doesn’t just come from me or from this picture book. Those were the very real conclusions of an official government commission. I do agree with that assessment of the situation, though. I strong feelings against people who are obsessed with conspiracy theories and insist on spreading them because rumors do very real harm.) I think the earlier edition also had different illustrations because the copyright on these illustrations is only for 1993. I really liked the pictures in this book. They’re colorful pictures that look like watercolor paintings. They have almost a dream-like quality that fits well with the theme of memory.

As I was reading this and writing my review, I tried to remember how old I was when I first learned about Japanese internment camps during WWII and what books I might have read about it when I was a kid. I want to say that I was probably about 10 to 12 when I was first introduced to the topic, and I’m positive that I knew about it by the time I finished middle school, but I can’t remember exactly. I don’t think I read many books about it when I was young, although I remember that Farewell to Manzanar was one that was often recommended. I think my first introduction to the topic was probably either non-fiction, from history class in school and things my parents told me, but I also have a vague memory of being told about Farewell to Manzanar and asking what it was about, so that might have been what started the conversation.

Posted on by TracyC

Listen for the Singing

Listen for the Singing by Jean Little, 1977.

This book is the sequel to From Anna. In the previous book, Anna’s family moved from Germany to Canada both to claim an inheritance from a relative and also to escape the Nazis, whose hold has been increasingly tightening on their country. The inheritance isn’t large, mostly just a house and a small grocery store, but it offers the family a chance to start over, away from the Nazis. Anna, the youngest of her siblings was often clumsy and had learning difficulties that her family did not understand. They were often rough, critical, and impatient with her. However, in Canada, Anna has her first thorough physical with a doctor, who reveals to Anna’s startled parents that Anna has an extremely low level of vision, to the point where she is almost blind. For the first time, Anna gets powerful glasses and special classes that help her to cope with her disability and catch up on the learning she’s missed. Anna’s family repents of how hard they were on her when they didn’t understand her problem, and Anna realizes that she is capable of more than she had ever imagined possible.

The sequel begins about 5 years after the previous book, in the fall of 1939. Anna has been wearing glasses for years now, and she’s adjusted to them well. However, changes are coming for her and her family. She is about to leave the special program that she’s been in for students with vision problems and attend a regular high school. She remembers that she used to have problems in regular classes when she lived in Germany, and she worries that she won’t be able to cope with regular classes. Her family, friends, and teacher all remind her, though, that she’s learned things in the last few years that will help her to do much better now. Her teacher says that she’s ready to move on. Anna gets upset when she learns that her friend Isobel from her old school will be going to a different high school, but Anna’s oldest sister, Gretchen, points out that she won’t be alone in high school. Rudi has already graduated from high school, but Gretchen will still be there, and so will the twins. Gretchen says that she will help Anna register on the first day and help her find her way around.

Anna has also begun to worry about her father, who has been distracted by the news they’ve been hearing about the impending war. Her family left Germany partly because they were worried about the direction it was heading under Hitler and the Nazis, and it seems that everything they worried about is now coming true. Then, they hear on the radio that Britain has now declared war on Germany (marking the beginning of the book as September 1939). The onset of war changes things for the family and creates tensions for them among the people in Canada.

When Anna goes to the first day of high school, she learns that her homeroom teacher will be Mr. Lloyd. Her siblings have had Mr. Lloyd as a teacher, and Anna already knows that he’s mean. He plays favorites in class, even though he teaches world history, he doesn’t actually know much about history. Rudi embarrassed him when he was a student, pointing out things he got wrong, and Mr. Lloyd has no love for him or any of the other Solden siblings. Worse still, Mr. Lloyd has a severe prejudice against students with German last names, asking them in class where they were born and if they were proud of their “Fatherland.”

Anna is upset when she is one of the students he singles out, and she’s not sure what to say, but a couple of other students in class speak up to shut him down. Paula voluntarily tells him that, while her mother is Scottish, she was born in Austria … the same place where Hitler comes from. Mr. Lloyd is taken aback, and Anna is surprised both at how bold Paula is and that Mr. Lloyd doesn’t punish her for talking about. Paula later tells her that her mother works for the local school board and has a reputation for standing up for kids who are bullied by teachers, and Mr. Lloyd knows who she is. He has to be careful what he says to Paula or in her presence, or her mother will deal with him. The other student who spoke up is the son of the local alderman, so his father also has influence. Mr. Lloyd could be risking his job if he pushes them too far or says too much in front of them that they might report to their parents.

Anna is grateful to Paula for her intervention, and she also appreciates some help she gets from Paula’s best friend, Maggie. The girls and their other friend, Suzy, make it a point to walk with her to their next classes when Anna explains that she’s been having trouble getting around because she can’t see well. The four girls become friends, and Anna is happy that she already has a friend group at school on the first day.

However, Anna is still troubled about Mr. Lloyd and his targeting of kids with German backgrounds. When she gets home from school and tells her oldest brother, Rudi, what happened, Rudi gets so upset that he goes to his room and refuses to talk anybody. When Anna walks down to the store that her parents manage, she sees Gretchen upset and arguing with their parents about her name. One of her new teachers is also targeting students with German names and gave her a hard time about being called “Gretchen” when the English version of her first name is “Margaret.” At first, Gretchen tries to persuade her parents that she should change her name to Margaret, but after she calms down a little, Gretchen realizes that a name change isn’t really going to solve the problem. There isn’t really anything she could do to make this teacher like her because the teacher is severely paranoid about Germans and talks about how there are German spies everywhere.

Dr. Schumacher, Anna’s family’s doctor and friend, has also experienced some of the same sentiment that the children are experiencing at school. He’s lost at least one of his patients, who no longer trusts him because of his German background, and Anna overhears some of his other patients gossiping about him and speculating on whether or not he’ll serve in the armed forces. Dr. Schumacher tells Anna and his wife that he isn’t overly concerned about these gossipy women, and he doesn’t consider the patient who switched doctors to be a big loss. He, like other young men, feels called to do something about the situation happening around them, but he cannot join the army because he has a heart murmur from having had rheumatic fever when he was younger. His wife (who is also Anna’s former teacher) is relieved that the army has rejected him because they are also expecting a baby.

As Anna and her new friends get to know each other better, Maggie and Paula ask Anna questions about her vision problems. At first, Suzy doesn’t think it’s kind to ask too many questions about it, and the talk of disabilities seems to make her uncomfortable, but the others let her know that she’s misread the room. Rather than finding it uncomfortable to talk about who vision problems, Anna is actually relieved that she can open up about it and that having these problems isn’t regarded as a shameful secret, and Maggie and Paula say that they genuinely want to know what Anna is experiencing so they can help her when she needs it. Anna admits that, sometimes, she’s not even entirely sure when she needs help because, not being able to see certain things, she doesn’t always know what she’s missing. When Anna needs to use alternate materials in class because of her vision problems, she is nervous that Mr. Lloyd will yell at her or bully her, knowing how he feels about students with German backgrounds, but to her surprise, he doesn’t. In fact, he proves very helpful and supportive to her. Mr. Lloyd treats Anna with more consideration than other students because he understands the nature of Anna’s visual problems better than most.

When Anna has trouble in algebra, her father suggests that she talk to her brother, Rudi, who is a math whiz. However, Anna hesitates to ask him for help because Rudi always used to tease her about her awkwardness, worse than her other siblings. She finds it hard to admit to him that she needs help with anything else. When she does ask him, though, Rudi enjoys teaching Anna about his favorite subject, and he even helps her with other things to help her fit in at high school, like teaching her how to dance and encouraging her to get her hair done.

As the story continues, the war increasingly becomes a larger part of everyone’s life. Anna’s father is upset because word reaches him that his sister was arrested in Germany for being a housekeeper for an elderly Jewish man, who was also arrested. At school, the principal makes a speech on Armistice Day where he acknowledges that the war is going to have a profound effect on all of the students and that they will have to grow up faster because of it. As part of the speech, he quotes a preacher who said, “Faith is when you hear the bird singing before the egg is hatched.” This phrase is what gives the book its title because the principal urges the students to “listen for the singing”, to look to the potentials of the future and have faith that they will get through the crisis that is enveloping the world and that the world contains better things.

Anna tries to discuss the idea of imaging how things will be or could be, like hearing the bird sing before the egg hatches, with Rudi, but he doesn’t understand. Rudi seems like he has a promising future ahead of him. He’s already started college and has a talent for mathematics and engineering. He really enjoys college, but at the same time, with so many other young men like himself preparing for war, he feels the pull to join them. When they hear of their aunt’s arrest in Germany, it only makes it worse. Rudi can’t stop thinking about people he knows back in Germany whose lives have already been affected by the Nazis – people who have fled, been arrested, or simply disappeared. He also thinks of the headmaster of their old school back in Germany, who was known to be a Nazi, and how afraid all the children were of him. Rudi decides that he can’t stand back and let people like that win, so he joins the navy against his parents’ wishes.

It turns out to be a disastrous decision. Rudi is still in Canada when he suffers an accident where cleaning fluid is splashed into his eyes, leaving him blind. The doctors don’t believe that Rudi will ever regain his sight. Although Rudi tries to act brave and calm about his new disability, Anna can see that he’s suffering. Having learned to come out of her shell and cope with her own disability, she has a sense of how difficult this is for Rudi, who is usually accustomed to being able to do things pretty easily. Anna realizes how serious Rudi’s mental state is when she hears him crying one night and even praying to die. Anna knows that Rudi needs help, both physically and mentally. He’s suffered a terrible loss, and he feels like his life is over because he can’t see a way forward. Anna has to help him “listen for the singing”, to envision the possibilities.

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

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

From Anna told a complete story by itself, but I still enjoyed this new story with Anna and her family. It was nice to see Anna making progress in school and life, finding new friends, and her family treating her better. Because her mother and siblings treated her badly for years before they realized that Anna was slow and clumsy because she couldn’t see, there are some lingering feelings that affect their relationships. Anna’s mother and siblings have repented about their treatment of Anna and have become much more helpful, supportive, and considerate, but Anna still has some lingering fear of Rudi, who was always the one who was the meanest to her. However, even he admits that he regrets his past behavior. Even before he is afflicted with his own disability, he makes it a point to help Anna with her math lessons, learning to dance, and going to her first hair appointment.

Rudi becomes much more thoughtful and mature in this book. He especially comes to appreciate Anna when Anna helps him through the shock and depression after the accident that leaves him blind. When the story ends, it’s still at the beginning of the war, and we don’t know the ultimate fates of many of the characters. The war is just starting to change people’s lives. We know that, like Rudi, many of them will end up marked for life in some way by the things that are about to happen. Some of the other characters in the book see family members going off to war, and we have no idea whether they will come back or not. Mr. Lloyd comes out of his shell a little around Anna because they come to understand one another, thanks to their shared disability. It turns out that Mr. Lloyd’s vision is also very poor, much more than most of his students know, making him sympathetic to Anna. At the end of the story, things are looking brighter for Rudi, as he realizes that his life isn’t over, and there are ways he can cope with his new blindness and continue the studies he initially abandoned to join the navy. We only get to see the beginning of the war, but it’s enough to show us that it’s going to have a profound change on people in many ways before it’s over. Like Anna, readers must also “listen for the singing” to imagine how the characters will continue forward from this point. There will be hard things because of the war, but also hopeful developments in the character’s lives.

I enjoy the literary references in the story. During the story, Anna is reading the book A Girl of the Limberlost, and Anna enjoys studying Emily Dickinson’s poems. Anna also mentions other books she’s reading and bits of poetry or book characters, like Little Lord Fauntleroy. The movie The Wizard of Oz is playing in theaters at the time of the story, and Anna and her friends go to see it.

People With Visual Impairment

As in the first book, there’s information about people coping with forms of visual impairment, based on the author’s own experiences, growing up with low level vision. There’s also a lot about the attitudes the main character witnesses toward people with disabilities and her own feelings about the ways people treat her and how she wants to be treated. Some people, like Suzy, try too hard to shield Anna from public scrutiny by trying to avoid mentioning her disability or shutting down questions about it, but Anna actually prefers to discuss her vision with people who genuinely care and are trying to help her.

Anna is surprised at how much Mr. Lloyd helps her when everyone knows that he has anti-German sentiment. In fact, he goes out of his way to make sure that Anna has what she needs, sometimes even before she asks. Anna realizes why he is so helpful to her when she looks at the notes on his desk, which are printed larger for him, the way that he ensures Anna’s test materials are printed. The truth is that Mr. Lloyd also has low level vision. He covers up for his disability, but he privately admits to Anna that he also struggled when he was young. His parents got him a private tutor because his vision was so bad, and he admits to Anna that he’s impressed at how well she does in a standard school. Mr. Lloyd has strong feelings about some things, but Anna realizes that he’s also a bit shy and socially awkward. The two of them bond over their shared disability and experiences they’ve had in common.

When Rudi becomes blind, he initially feels like his life is over. He can’t continue in the navy, and he doesn’t know how he can return to his studies. Although he tries to cover up how hopeless he feels, Anna realizes that he feels like he can’t do anything anymore. He even lacks the will to use the resources he’s being offered. Anna pushes Rudi to “see” things differently, showing him how he can do things besides sit around and feel sorry for himself. She introduces him to recorded books (on records, not tapes or CDs, because of the time period) and Braille. When Rudi begins to see that he can still think and study, even if he can’t see, he begins to feel more hopeful and see new possibilities for his future. The part of the story about Rudi’s blindness doesn’t come until the end of the book, about the last third or quarter, but it serves to illustrate the point about envisioning hopeful possibilities for the future, even in the midst of misfortune and the chaos of the world around them.

Anti-German Sentiment

Anti-German sentiment was common among the Allied countries during both World Wars. People were paranoid about spies being among them. In most cases, it was just paranoia, but as with many conspiracy theories, it’s the odd case where it actually turned out to be true that kept people in that constant state of paranoia. Realistically, most average schools during this period did not have enemy spies in them, but the possibility that a spy could be anywhere haunts the characters, and that’s behind some of the prejudice that Anna’s family experiences in the story. (See also Charlotte Sometimes for an example at a boarding school for girls during WWI.) In the story, Mr. Lloyd’s prejudice isn’t just about the rise of the Nazis but also about his own brother’s death in the previous war against Germany. To him, the war that’s just starting brings back painful memories of the last one.

Later in the story, after Anna and Mr. Lloyd come to an understanding with each other over their shared vision troubles, Anna speaks to Mr. Lloyd about his prejudice against Germans. She points out to him that a lot of Germans don’t support the Nazis, and they are also at their mercy. She doesn’t know whether or not she’s ever going to hear from her aunt again after she was arrested by the Nazis. Mr. Lloyd admits to Anna that he’s probably not going to be able to let go of all of his feelings about Germans because he’s had years of resentments about them, but he also apologizes to her that his feelings have made things harder on her. This is a small concession, but it may be a turning point in Mr. Lloyd’s attitude. He tells Anna to give his regards to Rudi and is nice to Anna’s father when they meet. Seeds of change have been sewn for Mr. Lloyd, and we see the beginnings in the story. It’s another point where we see the beginning of something and can imagine how it might play out over time.

Posted on by TracyC

A Stitch in Time

A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively, 1976.

It’s summer, and 11-year-old Maria Foster’s parents have rented a house near the sea for their summer holidays. Maria is an only child, quiet and given to daydreaming. Maria is shy and socially-awkward and her parents are often preoccupied with their business and thoughts. It often seems like their parents are socially-awkward and don’t know quite what to do or say to Maria as a child, which is why she doesn’t always know what to say to other people. Because she frequently doesn’t have anyone else to talk to and doesn’t always know what to say to other people, Maria often finds herself having imaginary conversations with objects or animals.

The seaside house where the Fosters are staying is an old one, built about 1820. It’s lovely and has a beautiful view. The interior has brown wall paneling. The furniture is old-fashioned, Victorian, and rather grand. When Maria chooses a bedroom for herself, she finds a collection of labeled fossils in a small chest of drawers, which she finds fascinating. The only modern touches are just a few bits and pieces left behind by the family that had rented the house before them and left the week before, like some half-eaten boxes of cereal. There’s also a tabby cat who appears to come with the house, and Maria begins to imagine conversations with it.

When they first arrive, Maria is sure that she hears the creaking of a swing and a dog barking, but when she goes looking for them, she can’t find them. When she begins exploring outside, she finds some small fossils in the rock, and her mother says that they’re ammonites and that the area is famous for them. She accidentally breaks one while trying to get it out, and she decides that it’s better to leave the others where they are. Exploring further, she finds some loose fossils and fossil fragments that she can collect more casually without hurting them. She begins making her own fossil collection, and she uses the old fossil collection and some books she finds in the house to begin labeling her own specimens. She begins to think that the fossil notes and sketches she finds were written by a girl around her age, and she tries to imagine what she was like.

When they meet the landlady who rented the house to them, Mrs. Shand, she says that she grew up in the house herself with several brothers and sisters. She says that the room that Maria chose for herself was once the old nursery. Mrs. Shand now lives in a small flat in the old guesthouse nearby, and she invites them to call on her if they have any questions about the house.

Maria observes a family with several children at a nearby hotel, and she even briefly speaks to a boy her age, but she doesn’t know how to ask them if she can play with them. Later, she and the boy, Martin, meet again and realize that they have a mutual interest in the natural world. Martin tells her the names of some plants and birds, and Maria impresses him with the name of a fossil she’s learned. Martin warns her about the cliffs nearby, which have a tendency to crumble after rain.

Mrs. Shand invites Maria to her house to get a book that she would like to loan her. Maria doesn’t really know what to say to Mrs. Shand, but Mrs. Shand tells her about the collection of stopped clocks she has. She says that they belonged to her grandfather, who was a scientist, and that they have been stopped as a gesture of respect to her grandfather since his death. Maria notices a stitched Victorian sampler on the wall, and Mrs. Shand says that she can look at it because the girl who made it was about her age. It has a the typical alphabet and an embroidered quotation about death, but it also has the image of a house with a tree and a swing, a little black dog, and some fossils. Maria realizes that it’s the house that she is now staying in and that it confirms that there was once a dog and a swing there, like she keeps hearing! An inscription says that the sampler was started by a ten-year-old girl named Harriet in 1865 and completed by her sister, Susan.

Maria begins to think about time and how the lives of people who had once lived in the house where her family is staying, like Harriet, have left traces behind, not unlike the fossils in the cliffs or Mrs. Shand’s stopped clocks, full of past times. Maria begins to wonder about Harriet and what happened to her. She lived over 100 years ago, so she would be dead by Maria’s time (the 1970s, contemporary to the writing), and Martin says that Harriet probably grew up, got married, and had children, like most girls. Yet, Maria finds herself thinking that maybe Harriet didn’t grow up and get married. When Mrs. Shand lets her and Martin look at her old photo albums, Maria notices that, after a certain age, Maria doesn’t seem to appear in family photographs. Mrs. Shand says that her own mother was Susan. The lack of Harriet in the photographs and the fact that Susan finished the sampler leads Maria to conclude that something tragic happened to Harriet.

Then, one day, Maria thinks she hears the dog again, barking frantically with the sounds of a landslide and shouting children. Nobody else can hear it, but Maria is sure that she’s hearing an echo of a past tragedy, and she becomes convinced that Harriet was killed in that past landslide. The existence of the metal swing that once hung in the tree is confirmed when she and Martin find it and restore it. When Maria swings on it, she feels like she’s gone back in time, almost like she was Harriet with her dog and sister Susan nearby.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed the themes of time and what people leave behind. There are comparisons all through the story between clocks, fossils, and echoes of the past, and it all relates to the passage of time. More specifically, Maria starts seeing changes in herself, emotionally and mentally, as she matures.

Some of this story obviously takes place in Maria’s imagination. As a shy, socially-awkward introvert with parents who are also introverted, Maria tends to live in her own head much of the time. She often has imaginary conversations with objects and animals, and many of these are reflections of Maria’s concerns at the time. Through much of the story, Maria isn’t happy with herself as she is, realizing that she is socially-awkward and doesn’t know how to approach people and connect with them. When Maria imagines conversations with the tabby cat at the house, the cat tends to be critical of her. It’s a reflection of Maria’s own insecurity and self-criticism.

Maria’s parents love her, but they interact with her in a kind of off-handed way, which feeds her insecurity and social awkwardness. Maria knows that her parents love her, but she can tell that they don’t always know what to say to her or do with her, which makes it harder for Maria to learn how to interact with other people. Maria’s parents are both very introverted and try to avoid social occasions, if they can. However, Maria has realized that she needs to connect with other people and make friends. Through her experiences with Martin and his siblings, Maria becomes more outgoing and confident, and she finds it easier to interact with other people.

In some ways, Maria doesn’t entirely fit in with her parents because she’d like to be a little more outgoing than they are. Similarly, Martin sometimes doesn’t fit in with his family, either. Martin’s family is boisterous, and he is something of an intellectual. There are times when he likes doing quieter activities with Maria, talking about plants and fossils.

When Maria visits a local museum with Martin, and they look at the fossil exhibit, they talk about evolution vs. creationism. Maria decides that she doesn’t believe in the Noah’s Ark story about animals in the Bible, but at the same time, she thinks that studying animals through time makes it look like someone was experimenting with different designs of creatures and improving them with each generation. Martin says that’s nonsense and that it’s just evolution. Maria and Martin both seem to believe in evolution, but the difference between them is that Maria thinks that it seems like there’s a hand guiding it, and Martin credits just natural, scientific forces. In some ways, Maria and Martin are kindred spirits in their thinking, but Maria leaves a little more room in her personal understanding for feelings and the supernatural. Maria seems to be the only person in the story who is sensitive to the sounds and echoes of Harriet’s past.

At the end of the story, Maria decides that she’s going to give up imagining the conversations with the cat because she’s feeling a little more confident in herself through her friendship with Martin, her new understanding of the echoes of the past, and her realization that she herself is moving forward into her own future. She has a sense that she is leaving her past self behind, much like Harriet did. A part of Maria may always be young in this particular summer, but like Harriet, Maria herself is moving on.

What Really Happened to Harriet? (Spoilers)

As Martin guessed, Harriet did grow up and get married. She didn’t die young as Maria thought, based on the echoes of the past she’s been hearing, although she is correct that there was a landslide by the beach and that a tragedy occurred there. Before Maria’s family leaves at the end of the summer, Maria finally asks Mrs. Shand about Harriet and the landslide. Mrs. Shand explains that Harriet and her sister managed to escape the landslide, but their dog was killed. They were very upset about it and buried the dog near the old house. When Maria visits the grave, she discovers that this is the anniversary of the dog’s death.

Because I love dogs, I was still upset about the dog’s death, but Maria is at least reassured that Harriet herself survived. She asks Mrs. Shand why there aren’t any pictures of Harriet with the family after that summer, and she says that there are pictures of Harriet grown up, just not many because she wasn’t living at home anymore. The fall after her dog died, Harriet went away to boarding school. Her sister finished her sampler, both because Harriet was leaving for school and because Harriet never liked sewing. After Harriet graduated from her school, she got married and moved away. She did visit with her family after that, but because she was living somewhere else, she just wasn’t present for all the occasions when her family had their photographs taken.

So, because Maria guessed wrong about Harriet’s fate, readers might wonder if she just imagined everything she experienced related to Harriet’s memories and the landslide. However, the book indicates that Maria didn’t imagine it all. She drew the wrong conclusions about what was sensing, but she did sense things that she would have had no reason to know about, hearing the dog’s bark and the sounds of the swing before she had reason to know that either of them were ever there. When she’s on the swing and feels like she’s becoming Harriet in the past, she also manages to come up with the dog’s name before anybody tells her what it is. Because Maria is an introvert who often interacts with things in her environment more than she interacts with living people, it seems that she has a kind of sensitivity to her environment. At the end of the summer, though, when she senses that she’s changing as a person, she considers that, even if she were to return to this place again, she probably wouldn’t experience it in the same way. She’s moving on, mentally and emotionally, and that changes her perceptions of things.

Posted on by TracyC

The Children of Noisy Village

The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren, 1947.

The story is told from the point-of-view of nine-year-old Lisa, a Swedish girl who has two older brothers, Karl and Bill. She and her family live on a farm that people call Middle Farm because it’s between two other farms, North Farm and South Farm. The three farms together are called “Noisy Village” because there are so many children around. The children who live on South Farm are Ulaf and his little sister Kirsten, who is only a year-and-a-half old, and North Farm has two girls, Britta and Anna, who are Lisa’s friends. Ulaf is friends with Karl and Bill. Sometimes, Lisa tries to play with her brothers, but they often tell her that she’s too little, and she sometimes thinks of the boys as a nuisance. Ulaf will sometimes play with girls, although Karl and Bill sometimes tease him about it, but there are also a limited number of children in the area to play with, so being willing to play with whoever is around is a good thing. Through the story, Lisa tells little stories and talks about the things that all of the children of Noisy Village do together.

When Lisa was younger, she used to share a room with her brothers before getting a room of her own. At night, Karl used to tell ghost stories, while Bill likes to talk about adventures. Lisa tells a story about how her brothers scared her one night with a ghost story and how they rigged up a trick to make it look like their room was haunted. Although Lisa sometimes misses the stories that her brothers used to tell her at night, she’s also relieved that she has a space of her own so she doesn’t have to put up with their pranks or them bossing her around all the time. Bill and Karl like their room because their window is close to Ulaf’s window, and the boys like to use the tree between their houses to go back and forth between the two rooms. The room that Lisa has now used to belong to her grandmother, before her grandmother moved in with an aunt. Lisa’s family remade the room for her as a present for her seventh birthday. Lisa’s room faces North Farm and Britta and Anna’s room, so the girls can send each other notes or signal to each other through their windows.

Some of the children at Noisy Village have pets, and Lisa explains how Ulaf got his dog, Skip, from the mean shoemaker, who was mistreating him. Britta and Anna don’t have any pets, but their grandfather lives with them, and the other children at Noisy Village like to visit him. Britta and Anna’s grandfather tells the children stories. One of his stories is about how he ran away from home as a boy. Inspired by the story, Lisa and Anna decide that they should have their own adventure, running away from home temporarily. However, they think that they have to run away during the night, and they both miss their opportunity because they fall asleep.

The children like to play games of pretend on their way home from school, which makes their mothers wonder what they’re doing and sometimes get them into trouble. Anna and Lisa accidentally get on people’s nerves one time, when they try too hard to follow their teacher’s advice about doing things to make people happy. They often end up doing the wrong things because they don’t know what other people really want or what people say they want doesn’t seem like enough. They finally succeed in making someone happy when they share some of their things with a girl from school who is sick.

The children’s adventures continue through the year. The people of Noisy Village have a charming, old-fashioned Christmas. At a Christmas party at a relative’s house, they play old-fashioned party games and tell stories. Lisa also describes a Swedish tradition of finding an almond in porridge, which is supposed to be a sign of marriage in the coming year. The children are allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. The boys scare the girls with some firecrackers, and Britta and Anna’s grandfather teaches the children the tradition of pouring melted lead into water to see what shapes it will form to predict what will happen in the new year. On Easter, the children paint eggs and make egg nog.

Eventually, school lets out for summer vacation. The children go swimming and catch crayfish during the summer. When they go fishing for crayfish, they camp out in the forest, near the lake, with Lisa’s father and the other men. The children make little huts to camp in. The boys try to scare the girls with stories about goblins. The children appreciate their idyllic lives in Noisy Village!

My Reaction

This book is a series of pleasant, gentle, slice-of-life stories about the children who live on a collection of small farms outside of a Swedish town, probably some time in the mid-20th century. Because there is little mention of any form of technology in countryside, it could set almost be any time in history from the 19th century to the time when it was written in the 1940s. The one thing that identified it as the 20th century for me is when they mentioned “turning on lights” in the house rather than lighting lamps. Even into the mid-20th century, not all farm houses had electricity, but it seems that these do. Other than that, these children seem to be living an idyllic, “unplugged” life in the countryside that people who are into cottagecore would aspire to! I think it would be a nice book to read children at bedtime because it’s very gentle.

I enjoyed reading about the games that the children play with each other and with their families. The children like playing games of pretend that seem to be inspired by books they’ve read. The girls play at being princesses, while the boys play at being Indians, probably American Indians (Native Americans) because one of young Bill’s ambitions is to be an Indian Chief when he grows up. We don’t really encourage playing at being “Indians” today in 21st century America because that can devolve into caricatures of someone else’s racial group (cowboys are still fair game because that’s a profession, not an ethnicity), but that sort of thing was pretty common in the mid-20th century, even outside of the United States. I’ve read British books from around the same time period that also refer to children playing at being American Indians, so it was something that seems to have captured children’s imaginations, even internationally. The children also pretend that they’re marooned or shipwrecked on a rock at one point, something else that often appears in children’s literature and is based on older books.

I particularly enjoyed some of the descriptions of Swedish holiday traditions through the year. Some of them are very similar to traditions in the United States and Britain around this time and even earlier, like in the 19th century. They have a charming Christmas with friends and family and a party with old-fashioned parlor games. I’ve heard of the tradition of finding an almond in porridge or pudding before, but I think that’s more common in Scandinavian countries than in the United States. In Britain, there are traditions associated with finding things (like a coin or a bean) in porridge or pudding, but it’s not really common in the US. Another thing that stood out to me was that Lisa said they made egg nog at Easter. In the US, people typically have egg nog at Christmas, but when I thought about it, it does make sense for Easter because of the association with eggs.

One other thing that stood out to me in the book was the little huts that the children make when they’re camping out by the lake. It reminded me of the huts that children in The Secret Summer (Baked Beans for Breakfast) made.

Posted on by TracyC

The Flash Children

The Flash Children by Mabel Esther Allan, 1975.

The Briggs family moves to a new house in July, and the three Briggs children are upset about leaving their old home and friends. Their father tries to reassure them that they’ll make new friends in their new home, but ten-year-old Dilys isn’t so sure. She knows that her mother is also not happy about the move, but it can’t be helped. Her father used to be a cowman on an estate in their old town, but the estate has been sold to be turned into an army training camp, so he has to go somewhere else for a new job.

Their new home will be a cottage near a “flash”, which is a kind of salt lake. Flash Cottage, as their new house is called, turns out to be an ugly modern brick house, not at all like the charming old cottage where they used to live. Their old cottage had a beautiful garden, but this little house doesn’t have much at all. Most of the views from the house are also ugly. The embankment behind the house, where the train tracks are, makes parts of the house dark and blocks the view, and there’s a chemical plant a couple of miles away. There isn’t much else in the area to see. The bright spots of their new home are the lake and the train tracks that run near the house. The fast-moving trains make Dilys a little nervous and they also make the house kind of loud, but eleven-year-old Arthur finds them fascinating. Arthur takes a yellow bedroom at the back of the house, where he can see the trains. Dilys shares a blue bedroom with their little sister, Megan, with a view of the chemical plant in the distance. All three of the children find the house strange and ugly and wonder how they’re ever going to feel at home there.

Dilys doesn’t think she’ll ever like the new house, although she thinks it might be nice if they could go rowing on the lake. Their mother worries about the children falling in the flash because they have to travel across an unfenced causeway when coming to or leaving the house. The children will have to catch a school bus to go to the local school, and Arthur wonders what the other children in the area are like. The children hope to find some friends because, if they don’t, they don’t really know what they’ll do with themselves. There doesn’t seem to be much in the area to do for fun.

The Briggs children meet a boy and girl about their age on their first day at the new house, but the meeting doesn’t go well at first. Arthur stops the other boy and girl from throwing rocks at some ducks. Dilys warns him about making enemies of people because they need some friends in their new home, but Arthur can’t stand to see people being cruel to animals. The other boy and girl already know who the Briggs children are because they were told they would be coming, but Arthur surprises them with a Welsh phrase. The Briggs children’s mother is Welsh, and they grew up near Wales. The boy, whose name is Dan Brown, thinks at first that Arthur was speaking French, but his sister, Edith, recognizes the phrase as Welsh because someone told her that the family was part Welsh. Dan and Edith argue about it, and Arthur asks them if they often argue with each other. The Brown kids admit that they do because there just isn’t that much else to do in the area. Boredom is also the reason why they tease animals, and because they tease animals, they’ve been banned from Colonel Melling’s farm, where Mr. Briggs will now be working with the cows. Sometimes, when they have money, they can take a bus to town to find other things to do, but they don’t always have the money to do that.

Mr. Briggs tells the children that the Brown children are the nearest children in the area. Their mother is dead, and they have an aunt looking after them. Their father also works at Colonel Melling’s farm. The Briggs children aren’t sure that they like the Brown children or want to be friends with them, but they might be their best or only option for friends at all. Their father persuades them to give the Brown children a chance, but Dilys wonders if, before long, they’ll all be so bored that they’ll start throwing rocks at ducks, too.

School isn’t too bad once it starts. Dilys meets another girl she likes, but unfortunately, the other girl lives too far away to see easily when they’re not in school. Some other kids at school tease another new boy named Brian because he’s partially blind. Dan and Edith turn out to be among the worst bullies, and Arthur and Dilys get so angry with them that they get into a fight. Dilys tells Edith that she’s ashamed of how she acts, she thinks it’s disgusting, and she wishes Edith would turn deaf so she can see what it’s like to live with a disability. The other kids back down rather than fight Arthur, and surprisingly, Edith is actually a little embarrassed when she sees how angry and disgusted Dilys is with her. It seems like the behavior of the local kids is as rough and ugly as the area where they live, but Dilys finds herself interested in Brian because he seems to be a different type of person.

Mrs. Briggs is as homesick as the kids for where they used to live, but she starts to make friends with Miss Brown, the aunt looking after Dan and Edith. Mrs. Briggs says that Miss Brown is a nice lady, but she doesn’t entirely know how to cope with the children, and Dan and Edith often misbehave and make trouble. She’s only been living with her brother and the children since their mother died last year.

One day, Dilys and Arthur go exploring, and they find an unexpected green area down a road that makes them feel more like home. They get caught in a sudden storm, so they take shelter under a railway bridge, where they meet Dan and Edith, also taking shelter. They start talking more about the area and places to explore, and Dan and Edith say that they can’t go down by Mr. Lowe’s farm anymore. Arthur asks them why, and they admit that they stole some plums from him and left his gate open, so the livestock got out. Arthur and Dilys can see why Mr. Lowe would be angry, but Dan and Edith defensively add that they didn’t leave the gate open on purpose. They just forgot to close it because Edith got stung by a wasp and was upset, but Mr. Lowe won’t believe them. They say it’s a pity because the area is much more interesting over there. There’s an old manor house, a stream, and a ruined mill over that way.

Things change for the children when Dilys, Arthur, and Megan befriend an artist who lives in a cottage nearby, John Zachary Laurie, and he’s a friend of Colonel Melling. He takes them out rowing on the flash and talks to them about how they like their new home. The Briggs children confide in him how unhappy they’ve been since they moved to the area because everything is so ugly, but the artist points out that it’s not really an ugly place. He says he finds it fascinating to paint because it has certain “dramatic effects.” When he shows them his pictures, they’re very different from the kind of pictures that the children are accustomed to seeing. Rather than conventional flowers and pretty landscapes, they are filled with angles and a lot of grays and browns, but with unexpected dashes of color. They’re unmistakably pictures of the area, but not in a way the children usually see it. The landscape in the paintings is familiar but strange, ugly but also oddly enchanting. John Laurie even gives them one of his paintings, the one he did of their new house, Flash Cottage. He says he knows the children hate the house now, but he thinks it has interesting angles, and if they learn how to look at things a little deeper, they’ll see more than they do now.

Although Dilys isn’t quite sure that she understands it, she begins to feel what the artist is talking about. Things that are strange start to feel familiar, and even in the ugliness of the landscape and the picture of their house, she begins to feel a sense of fascination and attraction. It’s not exactly pretty, but it is compelling.

When school lets out for the summer, the Briggs children once again find themselves bored and lonely. The few other children they like don’t live close to them, like Dan and Edith, and the Briggs children still think Dan and Edith are pains and troublemakers. Looking for something to do, Arthur, Dilys, and Megan decide to explore the old manor house that Dan and Edith mentioned.

It turns out to be a beautiful place, although it’s old and deserted. To their surprise, they discover that the property actually belongs to Brian’s family, the Pelverdens. They live in a little cottage behind the old manor house. Brian has a little sister, Mellie (short for Melinda), who would be a good friend for Megan, but Brian seems less than pleased that Arthur and Dilys have discovered where he lives. Brian’s father explains that they haven’t been living here long. The manor house has been in the family for generations, but it’s fallen into ruin because they haven’t had the money to maintain it for a long time. They only recently inherited the place themselves when Brian’s grandfather died. The Pelverdens don’t expect to ever live in the manor house themselves, but their hope is that, if they get it sufficiently repaired, they might have it registered and preserved as a historic building and get a grant to maintain it. The Briggs children eagerly volunteer their services to help with the project over the summer. They have nothing else to do, and they still miss the garden from their old cottage, so helping to replant the manor garden would be fun for them. The Pelverdens’ cottage and the crumbling old manor house are more beautiful to them than anything else they’ve seen since they moved, and they feel more like home.

Mellie is immediately happy to have found a friend in Megan, but Arthur and Dilys find it harder to make friends with Brian. Brian has known all of his life that he’s different from other kids because of his vision problems, and he’s used to people treating him differently or making fun of him. He tries very hard to be as “normal” as he can and prove to everyone that he can do things other kids can do. Because he feels like he has something to prove to everyone, he’s often less friendly than he could be, but Dilys is determined to earn his trust.

However, Dan and Edith are still problems. The Briggs children fight them off one day when they catch them teasing the Briggs’s cat. Edith is offended that the other kids keep telling them everything they do is wrong. Then, another day, they show up at the old manor house and break a window by throwing rocks. When the Briggs children and Mr. Pelverden confront Dan and Edith about what they’ve done, Dilys come up with a plan that might solve the Dan and Edith problem and prevent them from making further trouble.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is a sequel to this book called The Flash Children in Winter, which is about the children experiencing their new home in autumn and the lead up to their first Christmas there.

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

I thought this book was interesting because it has aspects of a cottagecore style story, but there are parts of it that contrast with the typical cottagecore aesthetic. The main characters in the story, the Briggs children, have come from an environment that would be like a cottagecore dream: an actual old cottage with a beautiful garden attached to an old manor house, where they were allowed to help out. Then, they have to move to a far more plain and conventional house in an ugly area with a view of a chemical plant. It’s understandable that they would feel badly about the move. Moving and starting over again would be difficult for anybody, but most people would find their new environment downright depressing, especially after hearing what their old home was like.

When they find out that Brian’s family lives in a cottage and is renovating their old manor house to turn it into a historic site, the story goes back to the charming sort of environment the children come from. However, it’s not just about the children finding a way back to the kind of environment that has the beauty and charm they crave but also learning to see what makes different types of environments fascinating, even enchanting. The Flash Cottage isn’t a real cottage, and it’s not as pretty as their old home, but after talking to the artist and looking at things from an artist’s viewpoint, taking into account the features of a place that make it unique, Dilys comes to see how a shift in perspective can make many different environments more attractive, in their own way.

Learning to get along with Dan and Edith also involves finding a different perspective and a different way of dealing with them. It’s not just about seeing the good side of Dan and Edith as they are. Frankly, the two of them are pain-in-the-butts. Dilys realizes that their problem is that they are thoughtless. They don’t think about other people, how the things they do affect anyone else or make them feel. Their thoughts begin and end with themselves. They’re bored and feel unwanted at home since their mother’s death, so they cause trouble because they just can’t seem to think anything else to do. Personally, I don’t think either Dan or Edith is very intelligent or imaginative because intelligence could be used to reason out why people react to them the way they do and a little imagination would help them put themselves in other people’s position or help them think of different things to do or ways to approach other people. However, Dan and Edith don’t do any of those things on their own. It never even seems to occur to them that they could. They only get upset when other people are unhappy with them and seem totally unable to understand why.

Even though Dan and Edith don’t seem either very bright or very considerate, it does occur to Dilys that they could learn to be helpful if someone actually set them tasks to do to keep them busy. At her persuasion, Mr. Pelverden and the other children allow Dan and Edith to join their efforts to clean up the manor. Dan and Edith are actually eager to accept the opportunity to help out with the others because they are incredibly bored and seriously need something to do and people to be with. When the others are dubious about whether they’ll actually do any helping or if they even know how to help, they try to prove that they can do things that are useful for a change. It also proves educational for Dan and Edith because, in helping to clean up the manor, they’re also forced to face damage they have caused themselves and begin to realize how things they’ve been doing have caused trouble and made extra work for other people. They’re not used to seeing themselves as other people see them or dealing with the consequences of their actions, and it’s an eye-opening experience for them. Later, they all have to face off against a motorcycle gang that comes to vandalize the manor, and Dan and Edith have come to see where their loyalties really lie and what menaces people can be when they act like they used to.

The story ends happily for the children and for the manor, which is going to be preserved. The Briggs children feel more at home in their new home, Dan and Edith have greatly reformed, and Brian has learned to be more open with people about his disability, so other people come to understand him better and treat him more kindly. Some of the people who made fun of him before admit that they didn’t understand just how bad his vision was, so they didn’t know why he seemed to struggle so much. Dilys still tells off those kids for not having figured it out, but at the same time, she is the one who tells Brian that he has to make things clear to people and not try to pretend that his condition doesn’t exist or that he doesn’t need some help when he actually does.

The author, Mabel Esther Allan is also a very interesting person. During her life, she wrote more than 100 books for children, under different pen names. She struggled with vision problems of her own when she was young, which was part of the inspiration for Brian in the story. During WWII, she worked was part of the British Women’s Land Army, and she also worked as a teacher.

Posted on by TracyC

Home for a Bunny

Home for a Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Garth Williams, 1956, 1961.

It’s springtime, and a little bunny is searching for a new place to call home.

As he looks for a place that might suit him, he asks the other animals about their homes. However, most of the homes of other animals wouldn’t work for him. The bunny knows he couldn’t live in a nest like the birds or in a bog like a frog.

There is a point when the bunny thinks another animal’s home might suit him, when he talks to a groundhog who lives in a log, but the groundhog is not willing to have him as a housemate.

The bunny finally finds his home when he meets another bunny, who invites him to stay!

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

My Reaction

This vintage Little Golden Book is a calm and sweet story about a little bunny finding a home that’s just right for him. I liked how the bunny looks at other animals’ homes to figure out if any of them would be right for him because it shows young children how each animal’s home has conditions that are right for that animal but wouldn’t be right for a different type of animal. The bunny realizes that a nest in tree wouldn’t work for him because, unlike birds, he can’t fly and would fall out of the nest. Similarly, he can’t live in a bog with a frog because he’s not amphibious and would drown. (The book doesn’t use the term amphibian or amphibious, but I think kids would get the idea that some animals are better able to live in and around water than others.)

The story also includes the idea is that what makes a home is also who shares that home. The bunny thinks that the place where the groundhog lives could work for him, but he’s not a groundhog and the groundhog doesn’t want to share his home with the bunny. The place where the bunny eventually finds is rabbit hole he can share with another bunny, who is happy to have him as a companion. It’s a calm story with a happy ending because there is a home for everyone and someone for everyone.

Posted on by TracyC

Princess Megan

The Magic Attic Club

Princess Megan by Trisha Magaw, 1995.

Meg and her friends are planning to perform a short play of Peter Pan at a local nursing home. Her friends chose her to be their director, and Megan is really looking forward to it. Then, her mother does something that threatens to derail the project.

Megan’s mother is a lawyer, and she frequently has to work late. The problem is that, this time, she’s going to have to work on Saturday, interviewing witnesses for a trial. However, that Saturday, Megan’s mother was supposed to be at the high school, receiving donations for a food drive. She asks Megan to take care of the food donations, but the problem is that the play Megan and her friends are supposed to perform is also on Saturday. Helping with the food drive would make it difficult for Megan to get to the play on time. Megan’s mother is tired and in no mood to listen to Megan’s objections that it wouldn’t be fair to derail her project with her friends. Her mother just wants Megan to take care of her obligations for her.

While Megan is fuming about the unfairness of the situation and worrying about what to do, she decides to visit their neighbor, Ellie Goodwin. Megan and her friends have a standing invitation to visit and explore her attic, which has the ability to send them to other places and times when they put on different costumes and look at themselves in the mirror.

This time, Megan tries on a purple princess dress, and she finds herself in a Medieval village in France, near a castle. She meets a peasant girl named Michelle. Michelle tells her that there’s been trouble over the matter of the unicorn and the feast.

When Megan asks what she means, Michelle explains that Lord Claude and Lady Helene are hosting a feast and joust at their castle and that the king (who is supposedly Megan’s father in this world) has been invited as an important guest. At the end of the feast, they want to give the king a unicorn’s horn as a gift, but the problem with that is that they have to kill the unicorn to do that. Alternatively, it is possible to befriend a unicorn and get filings from its horn that also have magical powers, but Lord Claude and Lady Helene want to give the king the whole horn. Michelle confesses to Megan that her mother, who works in the castle’s kitchen secretly released the unicorn that they’d captured for the purpose. If they knew she was the one who did it, she would be in serious trouble.

Megan wants to help Michelle and her mother, and as someone who supposedly has the rank of princess, she should have some authority. However, she’s not entirely sure what kind of influence she can have because she knows that she’s not a “real” princess. Everyone thinks that she’s the king’s daughter, but Megan knows that she’s not. Can Megan find another way to save the unicorn’s life and Jacqueline from punishment, without revealing herself as an imposter princess?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Some children’s books that involve time travel have real, historical information for educational value, but this one, and others in the series, are pure fantasy. Megan doesn’t visit real Medieval France. This is a fairy tale version of the Middle Ages with a unicorn and an invisibility cloak. There are a few accurate details for the Middle Ages, like the practice of using straw or other plants on the floors and the fact that intricate tapestries took years of work to complete. However, the focus is definitely on fantasy.

The invisibility cloak is critical to Megan’s plan to save the unicorn and make the king realize the value and beauty of the unicorn before someone can kill it on his behalf. When the king sees the unicorn for himself and reads the note that Megan wrote for him, he accepts the living unicorn and its presence as his gift instead of the horn. The problem with the unicorn is resolved pretty quickly, and so is Megan’s situation with her mother.

At first, I was expecting that the situation that Megan encountered in the fantasy world would have more of a direct parallel to Megan’s situation in her regular life, but it doesn’t really. It mostly serves as its own adventure, although it does highlight that Megan is creative when it comes to problem-solving and can be relied on in difficult circumstances. What Megan really needs to do is to explain to her mother why it would be difficult for her to take over her mother’s project without compromising her own. When Megan finally explains, it turns out that her mother didn’t know about her project with her friends. Handling both of their projects requires some careful scheduling and a little help from a friend, but they manage to work it out.

I really like the pictures in the Magic Attic Club books because they remind me of the ones in the American Girls books. They have a similar quality.