Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

Mandy

Mandy by Julie Andrews Edwards, 1971.

At St. Martin’s Orphanage, there are usually about 30 children at a time, and the matron does her best to nurture her parentless charges. Mandy is a ten-year-old girl who has lived in the orphanage her entire life. She is intelligent, and she loves reading and daydreaming. She is allowed to work part time at a grocery store, and she spends most of her money buying books. She also loves nature and taking walks by herself. She enjoys spending time alone because she likes to daydream and admire flowers and other beauties of the natural world.

However, Mandy isn’t really happy, either. Even though the orphanage is kind to her, she gets along well with the other orphans, and she has her books and other things to keep herself busy, she is lonely and still misses having parents and the family life she’s never known. Because she has no memory of these things, it’s difficult to say whether she truly understands what she’s missing, but she definitely feels the lack of them in her life. As she gets older, she begins to feel more and more melancholy about it. She knows only that something is missing from her life, and she becomes more desperate about it. She craves a place that she can call her own, a place where she really belongs.

There is a wall behind the orphanage, and Mandy, with her vivid imagination, becomes increasingly curious about what’s on the other side of the wall. She asks Ellie, the maid at the orphanage about it, but as far as Ellie knows, it’s just more of the countryside. She’s never actually explored it herself. Mandy likes to imagine that there might be a castle and a unicorn beyond the wall.

One day, Mandy decides to try climbing over the wall to see for herself. What she sees is an apple orchard and a path through it. When she climbs down from the wall and follows the path, she finds an old, disused cottage with the remains of a garden. The cottage is empty of furniture. Mandy lets herself into the cottage and finds it dusty and in need of repair, and there’s no sign than anyone has been there for years. However, there is a marvelous room in the small house that is decorated with real seashells! Mandy is fascinated, and she wonders who used to live there.

The idea comes to Mandy that she could “adopt” the house and care for it as if it was her own. Obviously, nobody has been there for a long time, and nobody would know or care if she cleaned it up, but she would feel good, having a place of her own and something to care for. When she returns to the orphanage, Ellie tells her that she asked the matron what was on the other side of the wall, and she says that it’s a large, old estate, where nobody lives anymore. Mandy is pleased with that because, if no one lives on the estate where the cottage is, there will be no one to notice when she goes to visit the cottage.

She asks for gardening advice from the gardener at the orphanage without telling him exactly why she wants to know, and he even lets her borrow some tools. Mandy loves tending to her very own garden, and she uses some of her pocket money from the grocery store to buy seeds for the garden and some things for the house. Mandy loves seeing how the cottage and garden improve under her care, but her roommate, Sue, begins to wonder where she keeps disappearing to, and the adults begin to wonder what she is doing with the things she buys and borrows.

The matron tells Mandy that she’s worried about what Mandy is doing because it could be dangerous for her to go off alone where nobody knows where she’s going. Mandy lies to her, saying that she had a project of making a garden for herself but that she gave it up because it was too much work. The matron says that she understands why she would want to have a place to call her own and offers her a spot in the orphanage garden to tend as her own. Mandy feels terrible about lying to the matron, but the thought that the matron might make her give up the special place she’s found because it doesn’t really belong to her or because it’s too dangerous for her to go there alone is just too much.

As the seasons change, Mandy enjoys slipping away to her cottage whenever she can, working in her garden and watching the animals that live nearby. However, the matron has become increasingly suspicious of Mandy’s odd behavior, Sue is angry with her for keeping secrets from her, and there are signs that someone has been at the cottage while she wasn’t there. There are footprints outside the cottage and the hoofprints of a horse, and there are signs that someone has been fixing things. Fortunately, this mysterious person doesn’t seem to mind her being at the cottage. Her mysterious friend leaves little presents and notes for her. More and more, Mandy fears that her secrets will be discovered, but when she becomes ill and needs help at the cottage, she becomes grateful for the help of a friend who knows where she is. Having a place to call your own is good, but having friends and a family who care make a place a real home.

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

Update: A site reader pointed out that I should have explained that Julie Andrews Edwards is the same Julie Andrews who played Maria Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins in the Disney musical, and the queen in The Princess Diaries movies. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that she also wrote children’s books. She is also known for writing The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, which I haven’t covered yet. Julie Andrews’s early life was difficult because her parents divorced and each married other people during WWII. At various times, Julie Andrews lived with each of her parents and stepparents and traveled around as she began performing with her family as a child. Her family was poor, and she later described her stepfather as being a violent alcoholic. Her chaotic early life may have been a factor in this story about a lonely girl looking for a place to belong and a real sense of family.

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is a sweet story about having a place to call home and a real family. Mandy craves for these things, even before she truly understands what it means to experience them. Parts of the story are sad and sentimental, but others are just enchanting. This book fits well with the Cottagecore aesthetic. The cottage in the orchard is charming, and Mandy’s care for it reminds me of other children’s books, like Dandelion Cottage, where children have their own secret places to fix up and care for.

Mandy gets wrapped up in her special secret place, tending the garden and watching the animals there, but it gets her into trouble with her friend and roommate, Sue, and with the matron of the orphanage because of the secrets she’s keeping and the way she keeps helping herself to things she really shouldn’t take and slipping away to spend time at the cottage without telling anyone where she’s going. Mandy loves the cottage because she can imagine it as her own home, a place that belongs to her and where she belongs, but Mandy needs people, too. Sue’s friendship for her helps her when she gets into trouble, the matron turns out to be more understanding than Mandy feared, and Mandy’s adventures with her cottage bring her into contact with people who become the family Mandy really needs. Once Mandy has the family she needs, she no longer feels compelled to keep the cottage all to herself, and she decides to share it with the other girls at the orphanage. Mandy’s new home with her new family is every bit as charming and magical as her cottage. It’s a big, old house with secret passages that she explores with her new brother.

However, I think that it’s important to note that not everything in the story is easy and happy for Mandy. All through the story, she struggles with her emotions, experiencing sadness and loneliness and trying to understand what they mean. Her new family doesn’t fully accept her immediately, either. They are never mean or rejecting of her. They are friendly and helpful people from the first time they meet Mandy, but it takes some time of them getting to know her before they decide that they want her to be a permanent part of their family. There isn’t a lot of high drama, and her new brother is never jealous of her or mean to her. However, the family does take some time to make their decision after Mandy spends Christmas with them, and that adds to Mandy’s inner distress.

There are points in the story when Mandy’s fate seems uncertain, and she considers running away from the orphanage. The headmistress becomes concerned about Mandy because of her melancholy and tells the family considering her that Mandy has begun asking her questions again about her parents and how they died, something that she hasn’t done for years, showing that she has become preoccupied with the concept of family life and her lack of it. The family is concerned for Mandy and understanding of her feelings, but I thought that having the family take time to get to know Mandy and to consider what having her join their family would mean was realistic. I think the drama was softened a little to keep the gentle feel of the story, but there’s enough emotion and inner turmoil that it doesn’t feel like Mandy’s problems resolve too easily.

Sue and Mandy bring up the question about whether Mandy’s discovery of the cottage and her new family was a matter of luck. Sue is envious because it seems like everything happens to Mandy. Mandy asks her new father if that’s a matter of luck, but he says that Mandy is special and that things happen to her because she is brave and goes looking for them. She is a quiet person, but she takes her life into her own hands and pursues what she wants, where other people might be too timid to do it. Technically, Mandy broke rules and took some risks to care for her secret cottage, but she did it because it was important to her, and it worked out in the end. Her new father seems to appreciate Mandy’s spirit and determination.

Posted on by TracyC

The Children of Green Knowe

Green Knowe

The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston, 1954, 1955, 1982, 1983.

Seven-year-old Toseland is traveling by train to stay with his great-grandmother Oldknow at the old family home, Green Noah, for Christmas. His mother is dead, and his father now lives in Burma with his new wife, who Toseland doesn’t know very well. He has no brothers or sisters, and he spends most of his time at boarding school, so he is often lonely, wishing that he had a family outside of school, like the other boys. His great-grandmother is the only other relative he has, and he has never met her before. He is a little nervous at the idea of meeting her because he knows that she must be very old.

When Toseland arrives at the station, it’s raining, and there has been flooding, but there is a taxi-man waiting to take him to the house. When he arrives, he is immediately fascinated by the large, old house and all of the things in it. It reminds him of a castle, and he marvels at how his great-grandmother could live in such a place. He is surprised at how at home he feels there and how easily he likes and gets along with his great-grandmother. For the first time in his life since his mother died, he really feels at home, and when he asks if the house partly belongs to him, too, his great-grandmother reassures him that it does.

The two of them talk about what to call each other. Toseland’s great-grandmother asks him to call her Granny (although she is still often called Mrs. Oldknow throughout the book), and she asks him if he has any nicknames. Toseland says that the boys at school call him Towser and his stepmother calls him Toto, but he doesn’t like either nickname. Granny Oldknow says that Toseland is a family name and there have been other Toselands before him. The last one was his grandfather, and his nickname was Tolly, so Granny asks him if he would like to be called that also. Toseland says that he likes that nickname better than the others, and his mother used to call him that, so he is called Tolly from that point on.

Granny Oldknow shows Tolly to his room and helps him begin to unpack. It’s a wonderful room with many old toys that used to belong to the other children who have lived in the house in the past. Among the toys is an old dollhouse which Tolly realizes is a miniature version of the house they’re in. When he finds the miniature version of his room, he notices that there are four beds in it instead of one. He asks Granny Oldknow if other children stay at Green Noah, and she cryptically says that they do sometimes, and he might see them, but they come when they want to.

Tolly becomes fascinated by a portrait of three children in old-fashioned clothes with their mother and grandmother. Granny Oldknow tells him that those three children lived in the house long ago. The oldest boy was an earlier Toseland, who was nicknamed Toby. His younger brother was named Alexander, and their little sister was named Linnet. Granny Oldknow had been an orphan when she was a child and was raised at Green Noah by an uncle. Because she was an only child, she often lonely and liked to pretend that the children in the picture were her siblings, so Tolly decides that he’d like to do the same thing.

Tolly asks his great-grandmother questions about Toby, Alexander, and Linnet and learns details of their lives. Toby had a sword because he was going to be a soldier when he grew up, a pet deer, and a horse named Feste who loved him. Alexander had a book in Latin that he loved to read and a special flute. Linnet used to keep birds in a wicker cage that is still in Tolly’s room, along with the toy mouse that used to belong to Toby. Sometimes, Tolly thinks that toys in his room move when he’s not looking, and at night, he hears children moving about and laughing, and he thinks that it’s the three children from the painting.

Tolly comes to the conclusion that the three children are still around Green Noah and that they’re playing hide-and-seek with them. He tries to play with them, too, and the children apparently give him a twig in the shape of a ‘T’. Granny Oldknow tells him that she used to play hide-and-seek with the children when she was young, and they would give her an ‘L’ twig because her first name is Linnet, like the little girl in the painting. Later, he hears the children singing Christmas carols. Tolly becomes frustrated that the children tease him and never really show themselves to him, but Mrs. Oldknow tells him that “they’re like shy animals” and that he has to give them a chance to decide that they’re ready to come to him.

He finds the key to the old toy box in his room, and inside the box, he finds more things that belonged to the three children. When he shows them to Mrs. Oldknow, she talks about how things were when the three children were alive at Green Noah. Tolly is shocked when he realizes for the first time that Toby, Alexander, and Linnet are all dead. Mrs. Oldknow gently tells him that they lived at Green Noah centuries ago and could not be alive now. Sadly, the children all died young in the Great Plague during the 17th century. Their illness was sudden and brief, and they all sickened and died in one day along with their mother. Tolly and his great-grandmother are descended from the children’s older brother, who wasn’t at home when this happened. However, the children never left Green Noah, which used to be called Green Knowe years ago. Tolly still loves the children, even though they’re ghostly and elusive. He craves the sense of family he gets from them, having been deprived of family feelings for so much of his young life.

Mrs. Oldknow continues to tell Tolly stories about the three children and other members of his family. As his connection to his ancestors grows, Tolly begins to catch glimpses of the children more and more, and eventually, he’s able to see them and talk to them. He asks the children about their mother, and the children say that she’s in heaven but doesn’t mind them coming back to visit their old home from time to time. The children don’t seem sad at being dead, enjoying the freedom of playing around their old home with the animals and the spirits of their old pets, who keep them company. Their final illnesses had only lasted a few hours before they died, and their deaths happened so long ago that they say that they hardly remember the Great Plague and what it felt like. Tolly is still sad and frustrated that the children appear and disappear so suddenly, but his attachment to them grows and so does his attachment to Green Noah itself. As Christmas comes, Tolly develops a bond with his family, both living and dead, and a realization that the old family home that connects them is also his home, a place they can all return to.

The book is the first in a series and is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is a ghost story, but it’s not a scary ghost story. There’s nothing frightening about the three ghost children. It’s sad that they died so young, but at the same time, they’re not very sad about it themselves. They seem to enjoy playing together endlessly with the animals around their old home and seeing the new relatives who inhabit the house, their older brother’s descendants. Even their former pets are no longer sad at the children’s passing because they are also spirits who continue to play with them through the centuries. There is one semi-scary part of the story involving a witch’s curse placed on an old tree called Green Noah, which is how the name of the house was changed from Green Knowe, but Tolly is protected by the ghosts of his ancestors.

There is never any desire for the characters to rid Green Noah of its ghosts. They are family and are part of the place, as much a part of it as the living are. The ghosts do not feel trapped there, either. They are just revisiting the home they loved and the family members who now live there. They can come and go as they please, and the ghost children often do.

This also is not the kind of story where a child knows that a place is haunted but can’t convince the adults or tries to hide the ghosts’ presence from the adults. Mrs. Oldknow is fully aware that the ghosts are there and has known about them since her own childhood. Generations of children in the family have probably known about them and played with them, and they are also not the only family ghosts who inhabit the old house. At one point, Tolly and Mrs. Oldknow hear a woman singing and the rocking of a cradle, and Mrs. Oldknow says that she’s heard it before around Christmas, a grandmother singing to a baby. Tolly is confused because even little Linnet wasn’t a baby when she died, and Mrs. Oldknow says that this isn’t the children’s grandmother but somebody from generations earlier than the three children. This grandmother ghost has been around so long that Mrs. Oldknow doesn’t know who she or the baby are supposed to be, although we are told that they are about 400 years old, where the three children died about 300 years earlier. Generations of the same family have lived in the house and have all left their mark on it, and part of them is still there. Now, Tolly has also become part of this family home, and it’s also a part of him. The ghosts are hesitant to fully show themselves to Tolly at first and seem more attached to Granny Oldknow, probably because she’s lived there longer, since she was an infant. The ghosts know her, and she knows all of their stories. However, they are all family, and Tolly develops a new connection to his family as his great-grandmother tells him the stories about them, and he can hear and see the ghosts more often.

Really, that feeling of connection and connectedness is the primary focus of the story. In the beginning, Tolly is lonely, feeling like he doesn’t have a family and doesn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. His father lives far away in Burma with his new wife, and Tolly doesn’t feel connected to them. His mother is gone, and he spends most of his time at school, even having to remain there during the holidays when other students are going home to their families. His great-grandmother inviting him to Green Noah is the first time that Tolly feels a real connection to anyone in his family since his mother’s death, and through her stories and his encounters with the ghosts, he comes to see that he really is part of a much larger family, going back ages. Just because most of his family is now dead or scattered doesn’t mean that they’re not his family. They still love him, and he loves them, even across the centuries. Green Noah really is a family home, and it’s a place that family can return to, even those who seem to be gone forever. It’s a place that has known both the joys of a happy family and the tragedies of loss that families experience from time to time. Through it all, it’s still home, and importantly, it becomes the home that Tolly has been wishing for.

The story takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and by Christmas, Tolly has received important presents. First, the ghostly Alexander grants him the give of his special flute, which had been a reward from King Charles II for singing so beautifully for him when he was alive. Tolly also has musical talents, and his great-grandmother decides to switch him to a different school so he can develop his talents and so he can stay at Green Noah during his school holidays. On Christmas, Tolly also receives his own pet dog, very much like the one that the ghostly Linnet owned, and he names his dog after hers, just as he has been named after all the other Toselands who have gone before.

In some ways, the story reminds me a little of When Marnie Was There (some people might know the story from the Miyazaki movie version), which has similar themes of family and belonging and ancestors reaching out across time to remind children that, while life is brief and often complicated, love is eternal and everyone belongs somewhere and to someone. However, The Children of Greene Knowe is a much gentler story, and it also contains some shorter stories about Tolly’s family.

Posted on by TracyC

The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat

The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat by Thornton W. Burgess, 1914.

This book is part of a series of stories about the adventures of different animals.

Jerry Muskrat lives with his family and friends in the Smiling Pool and Laughing Brook, near the farm owned by Farmer Brown. Jerry’s mother warns him to look out for the traps that Farmer Brown’s son likes to set, but he’s sure that he can take care of himself . . . until he has a very narrow escape!

Jerry’s mother calls a meeting of the other animals to discuss the threat of traps after Jerry’s close call. They decide to ask Great-Grandfather Frog for his advice. He tells them that they must find all of the traps and use a stone or stick to trigger them. Then, when the traps have been sprung, they will bury them. The animals have some close calls while springing the traps, but they manage to set them off successfully.

However, they soon have a new problem: it seems like the water in the Smiling Pool is getting lower each day. When the animals investigate, they discover that someone has dammed the Laughing Brook that feeds the Smiling Pool! If they don’t do something about it, they might all have to go live on the Big River, and they don’t want to leave their home.

It turns out that the dam was made by Paddy the Beaver, Jerry Muskrat’s “big cousin from the North.” Jerry tries to make a hole in the dam so that the water will flow, but Paddy blocks it again, telling them not to mess with his dam. Jerry has to explain to Paddy why the residents of the Smiling Pool need the water. Once Paddy understands, he lets the water flow again.

The animals in the story refer to the place where they live in terms of their pool and brook and the nearby farm. You don’t really know exactly where they live, but there is one animal who has a Southern accent, “Ol’ Mistah Buzzard.” Ol’ Mistah Buzzard talks like the characters in Disney’s Song of the South, regularly dropping phrases like, “Where are yo’alls going?”, “Fo’ the lan’s sake! Fo’ the lan’s sake!”, and referring to other animals as “Brer Mink” and “Brer Turtle.” The book was written before the movie Song of the South was created in 1946, but long after the book that the movie was based on, Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris from 1881. I suspect that the author of this book was inspired by the animal stories in Uncle Remus and that the Buzzard’s dialect is a salute to that. Unfortunately, that kind of dialect is really annoying for modern readers and may make it a difficult thing to read aloud to children. Mercifully, none of the other characters in the book do this. The parade of animals who hurry to find what has stopped the water in the brook is also a take-off from The Tortoise and the Hare story because the turtle, who was left behind by the others in their rush does become the first to find the source of the problem when the others stop to rest.

This book is over 100 years old and in the public domain now. There are multiple places to read this book for free online, but the one that I recommend the most is Lit2Go from the University of South Florida because it offers audio readings of the chapters in the book as well as the text. The book is also available online through Project Gutenberg.

Posted on by TracyC

This House is Made of Mud

HouseMud

This House is Made of Mud by Ken Buchanan, illustrated by Libba Tracy, 1991, 1994.

The edition of this book that I have is the bilingual edition with English and Spanish.  Originally, the book was written in just English. I like to use kids’ books for Spanish practice, which is why I like this one.  It’s a Reading Rainbow Book.

The story is written in a poetical form (non-rhyming), describing an adobe house, which is why it’s made of “mud.”  It’s a traditional way of building houses in the American Southwest, where I’m from.

HouseMudBeginning

As the book describes the house, it compares it to the land around it and the world in general.  Like the Earth, the house is round, which is how some Native Americans build their houses.

HouseMudRound

Aside from the people who live there, animals also share the house, from the family pets to bugs and mice who live in the walls and under the floor.

HouseMudAnimals

Their yard is the desert, surrounded by mountains and full of cactus.

HouseMudYardCactus

The people who live there have many friends who come to visit, and it is a house full of love.

The book is currently available through Internet Archive.

HouseMudLove
Posted on by TracyC

Daily Life in a Victorian House

VictorianHouse

Daily Life in a Victorian House by Laura Wilson, 1993.

The book begins by giving some background on the Victorian era, which lasted from 1838, when Victoria became Queen of England, to Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. It was a time of expansion and colonization for the British Empire. Society was becoming increasingly industrialized and urban, although there was still great inequality about who had voting rights, and there were great gaps between rich and poor people.

VictorianHouseEra

To explain what a typical day might be like for people living in the Victorian era, the book introduces a fictional upper middle class family, the Smiths. It explains some of the background of the Smith family and the members of the Smith household. Mr. George Smith, the head of the household, is a lawyer. His wife, Florence, does not need to work, so she spends her time overseeing the household servants, managing the household accounts (how much money is needed for household expenses such as food, clothes, and supplies), visiting friends, and shopping. Mr. Smith’s income is good enough to afford for the family to have a cook, two maids, and a nurse to look after the youngest children in the family.

VictorianHouseFamily

The Smiths have three living children. One of their daughters died in infancy, which was sadly common for that era. The eldest boy in the family, Albert, spends most of his time away at boarding school. The two youngest children, Alice and John, are cared for by their nurse. When John is old enough, he will go away to boarding school, like Albert, but Alice will probably be tutored at home. Their parents spend surprisingly little time with them, even in the general course of a day.

VictorianHouseClothes

There is a map of the Smiths’ house, and then the book begins explaining what each of the members of the house do at different times of the day. Each day, the servants are the first to get up because they need to light the fires to heat the house and start cleaning and making breakfast, which would be a large meal.

Something that I thought was interesting was that the cook typically purchased food from tradesmen who sold their goods door-to-door. This was also important to the maids, who are in their teens, because they worked such long hours that they really wouldn’t have had time to get away and met young men in any other way. Their suitors would likely be the young tradesmen. Of course, the young tradesmen would have met many young female servants at all of the households they visited during their daily rounds.

VictorianHouseKitchen

The maids would have spent their days cleaning, tasks that would have been more time-consuming without more modern inventions. Vacuum cleaners were invented toward the end of the era, in 1899. Cooking was also a time-consuming job, although the book does explain some innovations for the Victorian kitchen. Because Mrs. Smith had servants to do all of her cooking and cleaning for her, she never even went into her own kitchen at all. It was considered improper for a lady with servants to handle menial tasks herself, and the servants wouldn’t have welcomed her interference in their work.

I liked the sections of the book that explained about the lives of children in the Victorian era the best, although I was surprised at how little time children from well-off families would have spent with their parents. Generally, young children would see their parents in the morning for prayers and spend about an hour with their mother in the late afternoon. Other than that, they would spend most of their time in the nursery with their nurse, who would take care of them and didn’t welcome much parental interference any more than the cook would welcome the lady of the house supervising her work.

VictorianHouseToys

I also liked the sections about toys and games and entertainment as well as the description of what young Albert’s life would have been like at boarding school. The book also explains what life and childhood were like for less fortunate people during the Victorian era.

VictorianHouseSchool

Overall, I really liked this book. It’s a good introduction to Victorian history and life, and it does one of the things that I really wish adult books would do more often: have pictures. Pictures really are worth a thousand words, and actually showing the objects that people of this time would have used in their daily lives is far more effective than pages of lengthy descriptions of them in words only.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Egypt Game

EgyptGame

The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, 1967.

EgyptGameGirlsApril Hall has come to live with her grandmother (the mother of her deceased father) because her actress mother is touring with a band as a singer.  April’s mother isn’t a big star, although April likes to brag about her and their Hollywood life.  Really, her mother is mostly a vocalist who occasionally gets parts as an extra, hoping for that big break.  April is sure that when her mother gets back from her tour, she will send for her, and they will live together in Hollywood again. Although, from the way her grandmother behaves, it seems as though April may have to prepare herself for living with her for the long term.  April resents her grandmother’s apparent belief that her mother has dumped her because she is unwilling or unable to take care of her.

April is homesick and misses her mother.  To hide her feelings, she tries to act grown-up and ultra-sophisticated, which makes most people regard her as a little weird.  In spite of that, she makes friends with a girl named Melanie, who lives in a nearby apartment and sees through April’s act to her insecurity and creative side.  April has never had many friends (partly because of her mother’s chaotic lifestyle), but Melanie appreciates April’s imagination.  The two girls realize that they both like playing games of pretend and they both have a fascination with Ancient Egypt.  They go to the library and read everything they can find about Egypt, and it sparks the best game from pretend they’ve ever played.  Along with a few other friends, they start pretending to be Ancient Egyptians, building their own Egyptian “temple” and holding rituals in the old junk yard behind a nearby antique shop.

On Halloween night, the adults try to keep the children together in groups for safety, but the “Egyptians” sneak off alone to conduct one of their “rituals.”  It’s a dangerous thing to do because a child has been murdered in their area.  A young girl who was apparently abducted was later found dead, and people are frightened that other children could be in danger.  Fortunately, the only thing that happens on Halloween is that the Egyptians recruit a couple of new members when some boys from school find out what they’re doing.

However, the game starts taking on a life of its own when it seems that some other, unknown person has also joined in.  As part of their game, the children make up a new ritual and write messages to their “oracle,” asking questions that they want answered. To their surprise, someone starts writing replies.  Whoever is playing oracle and answering their questions, it doesn’t seem to be a child.

EgyptGameRitual

EgyptGameCostumesThe children are uneasy about this unexpected game player because frightening things are happening in their neighborhood.  The kids wonder if the mysterious messages could be from the crazed killer who murdered the young girl. People have been looking suspiciously at the loner who owns the antique store, an older man who everyone calls the Professor.  However, the kids have become too enmeshed in the Egypt game to give it up in spite of their fears.

When April slips out one night to retrieve a text book she left in “Egypt,” she comes frighteningly close to being the killer’s next victim.

This is a Newbery Honor Book.  It is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).  There is a sequel called The Gypsy Game.

My Reaction

Although there are mysteries in the story (who killed the girl and who the unknown player of the Egypt game is), the development of the characters, especially April, is really at the heart of the story.  All through the story, what April wants most is for her mother to come for her and take her home again.  April fears that her mother doesn’t love her or want her, and at first, that keeps her from even trying to love the grandmother who took her in and really wants her.  However, she finds comfort when she realizes that she is creating a new life with her grandmother and friends, who really care about her.  Her mother does write to her later about coming to stay for a brief visit with her and her new husband (her acting manager, who she married on short notice without even telling April or inviting her to come to their wedding), but by then, April has started to feel at home in her new home and wants to share Christmas with the people who have been sharing in her life and adventures more than her mother has.  She never even tells her mother about her brush with death.

EgyptGameChristmas

The characters in the book are diverse, representing different racial backgrounds, ages, and family situations.  Melanie and her younger brother are African American.  Melanie understands more about human nature and how the world works than April does, partly because her mother talks to her about people and explains things.  Melanie realizes from the way that April behaves and how she doesn’t understand certain things, like the fact that there disturbed, dangerous people in the world, that her mother never really talked to her much or explained things when they were living together.  Melanie helps to ground April’s more flighty, insecure personality.  She joins in her imagination games eagerly, but she also helps to bring April more into sync with reality and other people.

The first new player they add to the game, Elizabeth, is Asian and lives with her widowed mother and other siblings.  Like April, she is a little lonely and looking for new friends in her new home.  Each of the kids, like April, have their own inner lives and personalities.  The Egypt game binds them together and provides them with friendship and insights into their lives.

Posted on by TracyC

What’s a Ghost Going to Do?

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What’s a Ghost Going to Do? by Jane Thayer, 1966.

Gus is a friendly ghost who lives a quiet life alone in his old house, which is run-down and shabby, with winter visits from his mouse friend.  However, Gus discovers one day that the property is being sold.  The government wants the land to turn into a park, and if that happens, Gus’s house will be torn down!  If they decide to tear the house down, where will he go?

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For a time, Gus tries living with another ghost in another old house nearby, but that arrangement doesn’t work because the other ghost doesn’t like Gus rattling chains.  Then, Gus tries living in a hole with his mouse friend, but it’s really too small for him.  The only place that seems right for Gus is his old house, which is in danger of being destroyed!

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In desperation, Gus whispers in the ears of the man in charge of preparing the park for the government, Mr. McGovern, trying to get him to notice the virtues of his house.  Fortunately, Mr. McGovern accepts Gus’s vision of the house as a beautiful piece of the past and finds a way to restore it to its former glory so that Gus can keep his home and others can appreciate it, too.

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Gus’s house becomes a museum in the park, and Mr. McGovern also officially acknowledges Gus as the resident ghost.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It’s part of a series.

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My Reaction

I’ve had this book since I was a little kid. I always felt sorry for poor Gus throughout the book, but the story has a nice ending, with Gus and Mr. McGovern finding a creative way to restore the house and put it to good use, filling it with antique furniture for both Gus and the public to enjoy. I haven’t read any of the others in the series yet because this is the only one I’ve ever had.