The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, 1977.
Mr. Plumbean lives in a neighborhood where all the houses look alike. He and his neighbors all think of the uniformity as making their street “neat” and tidy, and they appreciate it. Then, something happens that makes them reconsider.
For reasons that nobody ever understands, a seagull carrying a can of orange paint happens to fly over Mr. Plumbean’s house and drops the can, leaving a big orange splot on Mr. Plumbean’s roof. Mr. Plumbean realizes that the big orange splot means that he’ll have to repaint his house, but the painting project makes him think.
Instead of painting his house to look like everyone else’s, the way it was before, he gets a bunch of wild colors and turns the exterior of his house into a rainbow explosion, working around the big, orange splot on his roof! He adds paintings of animals and other things he likes and colorful patterns. It’s such a wild and crazy design that his neighbors think he went mad. Before long, he adds a clock tower onto his house and an alligator and some trees with a hammock in the front yard.
The neighbors think he’s gone too far, but Mr. Plumbean says, “My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams.”
One of Mr. Plumbean’s neighbors tries to talk some sense into him, but instead, Mr. Plumbean talks to him about his dreams. The next day, the man goes out to buy some building supplies. It turns out that he always loved ships, so he turns his house into the ship of his dreams!
With Mr. Plumbean’s encouragement, other neighbors also start to change their homes to reflect their dreams, changing their quiet, “neat” street into a magical wonderland of imagination!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
I remember this book from when I was a kid, and I always liked the pictures! It’s fun to imagine all the creative themes a house could have and what you might choose if you had the opportunity to live in a house that could look like anything you wanted. The houses shown in the pictures of the neighborhood end up looking nothing like their original shapes, except for Mr. Plumbean’s house, oddly. The others are vastly different from their original shapes, and the windows aren’t even in the same places, making them look like they’ve been completely rebuilt. This level of renovation would be difficult and costly in real life, but this story is meant to be fun and to celebrate imagination and the capacity people have to add a touch of color to their lives. If you read this book with a child, you can invite them to decide which of the house was their favorite at the end (mine was the one that looked like a castle) or what they would do if they could make their house look like anything they want.
In real life, I’ve never particularly liked those neighborhoods where all the houses look alike. I’m not the only one because tract homes and uniform suburbs were controversial from their beginnings in the mid-20th century. In the early 1960s, a song called Little Boxes (listen to it on YouTube) poked fun at the uniformity of suburban houses and the lives of the people in them (although the houses in that song were still different colors – just saying). The connection between the uniformity of homes and the conformity of the people living in them is a topic that resurfaces periodically in popular culture and other songs, like “Subdivisions” by Rush (listen to it on YouTube).
The themes of non-conformity and self-expression are pretty profound, but the story is lots of fun and isn’t too deep for kids. If you read the back section about the author, it explains that the inspiration for this story came from a time when he spilled orange ink on his own pair of new yellow boots.
This picture book is a fun story about non-conformity and self-expression. In the beginning, Mr. Plumbean is as content as anyone with his neat, uniform neighborhood until a strange, inexplicable accident creates a situation where Mr. Plumbean has to paint his house. Once he’s confronted with the task of repainting his house, Mr. Plumbean begins to consider the creative opportunities this chore provides, and he enjoys exploring the possibilities and changing his house to be more of a reflection of the wild and wacky person he really is or dreams of being. Once his creative side is unleashed, it begins to get his neighbors thinking along similar lines. True, they liked it when their street was neat and uniform because they could see the appeal of having things orderly, but it turns out that each of them also has an inner creative side that’s been waiting for a chance to get out. The non-uniformity and non-conformity of their street becomes more comfortable for each of them as they each embrace those sides to their personalities that they don’t normally show. When they come to accept and embrace their own dreams and each other’s, it doesn’t matter to them anymore that they’re not all alike. They’re comfortable with the wacky and whimsical parts of their personalities, and they’re not afraid to show them anymore. They’re happy with themselves, their homes, and their different visions.
I really liked the art style of the illustrations in the book. It’s very simple but colorful, and you can tell that the artist used markers because you can see the marker lines, especially in the backgrounds of the drawings. It makes it different from more modern books that use digital art. I like seeing signs of the physical materials used, and it gives the story a funky, organic feel that goes well with the theme.
As I said earlier, I did notice that many of the new home designs in the pictures don’t take into account where the houses’ windows used to be, but that’s just part of the whimsy of the story. We don’t need to worry about how these people accomplished these drastic changes so quickly and easily. It’s just fun to think about how you can personalize your space to reflect what’s important to you.
This isn’t a very long book, but it packs a lot in! This is both a time travel story and a supernatural ghost story, but with the odd twist that we don’t initially know who the “ghost” is, and she isn’t really dead. She’s trying to save her own life.
In the beginning, although this book is from the first person perspective, we don’t know quite who the narrator is. Even the narrator isn’t quite sure who she is or what has happened. Her last memory is that there was some sort of accident, and her mind doesn’t seem to be working right. Now, she seems to be walking through the countryside, but she can’t remember what happened earlier that day or even what she had for lunch. When she looks down to see what she’s wearing that day, she realizes in a panic that she can’t see herself. She has become a ghost!
It takes her some time to get her panicked thoughts together, but she gradually begins to recognize the countryside. She is surprised that she can look over a hedge, thinking that it was something she had always wanted to do before, and she must have grown. There is a small hut nearby, and she recalls that there is an old rag doll called Monigan inside. Exploring further, she finds herself at a school and locates a classroom she recognizes. To her surprise, she discovers that it’s a Latin class full of boys, and although she has no body, she is sure that she’s a girl, so this can’t be her class. However, she does recognize the teacher as someone familiar but also intimidating.
Leaving the classroom, she continues exploring the school, and she finds people she is sure are her family. She remembers that the woman is called Phyllis, and Phyllis is her mother. There are also girls called Imogen, Fenella, and Charlotte. The ghost thinks that these are her sisters and that her name is Sally because Phyllis seems to call her Sally, although nobody really seems to see her. Sometimes, people just seem to have a sense that someone is there, and the dog, Oliver, seems to know she’s there. Pieces of information click in the ghost’s mind. This family’s last name is Melford. The teacher in the Latin class is her father. Sally is short for Selina. Charlotte is called Cart as a nickname.
The ghost finds herself angry and hating her family. She wonders if she could have died in the accident she vaguely remembers and if she came back to get some sort of revenge on her family, but the idea horrifies her, and she’s sure that she wouldn’t have thought of it in other circumstances.
The ghost watches as Fenella goes to the little hut and pretends to worship the doll Monigan and call her forth, like the doll is some kind of oracle. The ghost remembers that Cart was the one who started this game a year before and that she always thought that it was a boring game. Cart started the game because the four sisters had been fighting over the doll or playing with it too roughly one day, and they had each grabbed an arm or leg and pulled the doll apart. Cart had felt guilty about that, so she sewed the doll back together (badly, because she’s bad at sewing), and she turned the doll into a kind of oracle that the girls would worship to make it up to the doll that she had been ruined. Now, the doll is moldy and mildewy from being left in the little hut for a year. Only little Fenella still plays this game, although the doll has never actually done anything magical when they’ve called on her.
Gradually, the ghost begins putting the pieces of her memories together. Her parents manage a boarding school for boys. The girls help out with chores at the school, but they’re mostly expected to stay out of the way. Although they attend a different school themselves, it feels like they never get a break from school because they live at one. They never even get summers off because there are summer courses for disabled children at the boarding school.
Sally the ghost listens to her sisters complaining about her in her absence. They resent her for being overly sweet and a perfectionist and for defending their parents when the other girls criticize them. Sally is angry with them for the things they say behind her back and for their constant bickering and drama. Imogen gets melodramatic and picks at her sisters because she’s worried about not achieving the music career she really wants. Cart keeps trying to shut Imogen down because she feels overwhelmed by sentiment and emotions, and admittedly, Imogen’s emotions are frequently overwhelming. This dynamic between Imogen trying to express her overwhelming emotions and Cart trying to shut her down is a large part of the quarreling between the girls. Fenella, the youngest of the sisters, is just being a silly little girl, and she is rather fed up with her older sisters. At one point, Sally finds a poem that Fenella wrote that explains her relationship with her sisters:
“I have three ugly sisters They really should be misters They shout and scream and play the piano I can never do anything I want.”
It’s a pretty accurate description of what goes on in their house. All of the girls are loud and argumentative, and a large part of the tension in their house comes from the inability of any of them to do what they want to do. Sally notices some pictures on the walls and remembers their father (whom the girls only refer to as “Himself”, never as “father” or “dad”) yelling at them and calling them “bitches” for stealing art supplies from the school for drawing and painting. Imogen’s drama about her music career is because she’s not allowed to use the music room at the school for practicing, and she thinks that she’ll never get a chance to develop her abilities. The parents pay more attention to the students at the school than they do to their own daughters, even forgetting to leave the girls any supper sometimes. The girls’ home life is not happy, and that’s why they’re not happy with each other. The two oldest girls especially are not happy with their parents because of their neglect.
As Sally listens to her sisters talking about her, Cart and Imogen admit that they’re both jealous of Sally because she gets to be somewhere else that will be important to her future career. Sally wishes that they would say where she’s supposed to be because she can’t remember. She finds a few unfinished rough drafts of letters that she wrote to her parents, trying to tell them that life at the school didn’t have much to offer her and that she was going away, but Sally can’t imagine where she would have gone. One of the letters even says that her life is in danger, but from what?
There is a bright spot in the girls’ lives, and that’s a secret friendship they’ve developed with some of the boys at school. The boys visit them in the kitchen after dinner, and they have coffee together. As ghostly Sally watches one of these visits, the boys ask the girls what happened to Sally, which ghostly Sally is (literally) dying to hear. Sally’s sisters explain that Sally’s disappearance is part of a Plan the girls have.
It’s obvious that the girls’ parents neglect them. While Sally has always been defending their parents to the other girls, the other girls want to prove to her that their parents would never notice if something awful happened to one of them. A lot of the strange things that Sally has witnessed them doing that day are part of this Plan. Fenella has been going around the entire day with big knots tied in her hair, and their parents haven’t noticed. Fenella says that if they continue to not notice, she’ll act like she’s fallen seriously ill. Sally’s sisters say that Sally has gone to stay with a friend named Audrey Chambers, but their parents don’t know and still haven’t noticed that she’s even gone.
The sisters and the boys decide to try holding a seance for fun, and ghostly Sally uses this as an opportunity to communicate with them. Although she has some difficulty and misspells her message, she manages to convince Imogen that she’s the one communicating and that she’s dead. Imogen gets hysterical, but the others calm her down by phoning her friend’s house and confirming that Sally is there and that she’s fine. Ghostly Sally can’t understand it. She’s sure that she’s really Sally, but how can that be if Sally is definitely at her friend’s house?
Ghostly Sally seeks out living Sally, and to her surprise, she finds her, although she feels disconnected from this girl. She also learns that this Sally has been secretly doing things with a boy from the school, Julian, performing nighttime rituals with the doll, Monigan. Although ghostly Sally remembers having been friends with Julian, seeing him from outside herself makes her realize that Julian is actually sinister and disturbed. In her spirit form, she also realizes that their rituals with Monigan have stirred up something genuinely supernatural, apart from herself.
As things become more clear to her, the ghost begins to think that she was wrong about being Sally. She is still sure that she is one of the four sisters, neglected at her parents’ school, but she doesn’t think that she’s Sally after all, and that’s why she had no knowledge of Sally’s secret rituals with Julian and couldn’t remember where Sally was or what she was thinking. She also realizes that everything she has seen happened when she was younger. Somehow, after her accident, her spirit went back into the past, seeing things that she and her sisters used to do.
As the “ghost” wakes up in the hospital in the present day, she also realizes that she is not actually dead. She’s been having an out-of-body experience. Worse, her “accident” wasn’t really an accident. Someone tried to kill her. Julian, also older now in the present day, shoved her out of his car while they were driving somewhere. He was deliberately trying to kill her! Something that happened during that time in the past, during the time with the Monigan rituals and the girls’ Plan to confront their parents over their neglect led up to this attempted murder.
The “ghost” still can’t remember everything that happened in the seven years since then, leading up to the attempted murder, and she’s still confused about who she really is. She only senses that Monigan tried to kill her through Julian. Although the girls once thought that Monigan was just a game, Monigan is actually a real, evil spirit. Seven years ago, Monigan told them that it would claim a life, and now, Monigan is trying to do so. Can the “ghost” regain her memories and figure out what to do in time to save her life before the next attempt?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
Earlier, I covered The Headless Cupid, in which children play at being witches and doing magical rituals that are clearly nonsense, but this book has children who are coerced by some ancient supernatural spirit into doing “real” occult rituals. The children’s rituals involve blood and cruelty to animals, which I didn’t like when I was reading the story. We don’t fully get to know what Monigan actually is, although there are indications that Monigan might be some kind of ancient goddess that craves sacrifices, especially human sacrifices. Monigan seems to remember receiving sacrifices before, in the distant past. Although Cart thinks that she invented Monigan, that Monigan is just a doll they tore, and that all of their rituals are just playacting, the “ghost” realizes that they were all being manipulated by the spirit called Monigan into thinking that. Monigan took advantage of the neglected children and their mentally ill friend for its own purposes. I think Monigan was based on Morrigan from Irish mythology. We are told in the story that this British boarding school is built on a site that has been inhabited from ancient times, and the girls’ father is obsessed with the archaeology of the area, which may also be responsible for stirring up this ancient spirit.
The intriguing part of this story is first that the readers aren’t sure whether or not the “ghost” is actually dead, and then, the readers as well as the ghost have to determine the ghost’s true identity. At first, the “ghost” thinks that she knows who she is, but then, she thinks that she was wrong. (Or was she?) Even when she is awake in the present day, her mind is still confused, and even two of her sisters, while they know that Julian’s attempt to kill her was part of Monigan’s curse, find it difficult to remember everything that happened when all of this started. The “ghost” has to go through the events of the past, with Monigan working against her all the time, to figure out what set off this threat against her before she runs out of time. She knows that Monigan plans to kill her before the day is over, and she doesn’t have much time left to break this curse or prevent it from happening in the first place. The “ghost” isn’t sure at first that she can change the past, but she gradually manages to get through to the other children and figure out a solution with the help of her sisters.
I found the parents in the story not just neglectful but actually cruel and infuriating. The father keeps calling his daughters “bitches” when he gets angry at them. When the girls appeal to their mother about how they’re not being fed and have to keep begging food from the school’s kitchen, the mother shuts her eyes and tells them to stop bothering the cook. The cook is also revealed to be stealing food from the kitchen herself, which may be the reason why both the girls and the students have little to eat, but when the girls tell their mother about it, their mother doesn’t want to hear about it. She just doesn’t want to go to the bother of finding another cook. I’m amazed that the girls haven’t actually died at some point before this or that social services hasn’t gotten involved. The girls do attend a different school from the one their parents manage, so they would have the opportunity to get help and attention from an outside source.
At one point, Fenella openly tells her mother that she’s neglecting them while she only pays attention to the boys at the school, and her mother says that girls can look after themselves while boys can’t. It’s like her mother looks at the girls like some people look at pet cats when they just let them roam and hunt for their own food. I don’t even approve of people neglecting their cats, like they don’t even have pets so much as a nodding acquaintance with feral animals. Even in the present day, when our “ghost” lies in a hospital bed after a murder attempt, their mother doesn’t come to see her because she’s too busy helping the boys at the school to pack their trunks. The father is openly hostile to his daughters, and the mother doesn’t seem to have any feeling or concern for them at all.
The concept of the book was interesting, but it’s not one that I would care to read again because I found it dark and frustrating, although it does end well. Things do improve for the girls in the past after their father discovers their weird rituals and sends them off to their grandmother’s house, angrily declaring that he never wants to see any of them again. The father’s rejection of them is actually a blessing. At their grandmother’s house, they get regular food and the attention that they desperately need. The mother partly redeems herself at the end of the book by coming to see her daughter after all, saying that she felt obligated to get the boys all packed but now that’s done, so she is free to stay with her daughter until she’s fully recovered. The girl does recover, and she begins reconciling herself to her past traumas, both the supernatural ones and the ones resulting from her parents’ neglect and her tumultuous relationship with her sisters.
One thing that the “ghost” accomplishes is that she gets a look at her past and herself as they really are, viewing herself and everything that happened from a neutral position as the “ghost.” Seeing herself from the position of a third person, she discovers that she doesn’t like the things she’s done or the person she’s been during these last several years. That’s why she has felt so disconnected from herself and her memories and why she couldn’t even recognize herself or the things she did in the past. The “ghost” is so upset with herself and ashamed of her life choices that she wonders if she’s really worth saving from Monigan. Fortunately, her sisters truly love her and know that she’s worth saving. Their bad choices and poor behavior to each other have been largely the result of their parents’ neglect, a trauma they all share and understand. Although the ghost doesn’t remember everything at first, the other sisters know that, after they went to live with their grandmother and received the attention and care they really needed, they all improved and their relationships with each other improved. They’ve been trying to move on from their past ever since, and they need to settle the matter about Monigan once and for all to truly be free to go forward in their lives. One of the sisters knows exactly what kind of sacrifice will finally appease Monigan and save her sister’s life.
Monigan wants something perfect as a sacrifice, but our “ghost” isn’t a perfect person. Nobody is perfect, and our “ghost” has become truly aware of her flaws and the nature of her troubled past through her out-of-body experiences. However, things can be perfect in someone’s imagination, and one of the sisters has a more powerful imagination than the others. Someone has a dream that is perfect, at least in her mind. When she gives Monigan that dream, she not only frees her sister from Monigan but herself from something that her future self has realized that she doesn’t really want. Both she and her sister have been clinging to things that were harmful to both of them, making them into the kind of people neither of them really wanted to be. It was their insecurity from their parents’ neglect that made them cling to things that they thought would make them special and distinct. Once they are free from these harmful influences, not only does Monigan stop trying to take their lives, but they are truly free for the first time to become something better. Monigan does claim one life at the end of the story, but in that case, it’s only justice.
“Sooner or later everyone has to go away from home for the first time. Sometimes it happens when a person is young. Sometimes it happens when a person is old. But sooner or later it does happen to everyone. It happened to Victoria North when she was eight.”
Victoria North is attending boarding school for the first time at the Coburn Home School. Victoria is only eight years old, and this is her first time being away from home at all, so she is very nervous and shy. When she arrives at the school, she is met by an older girl named Ann, who shows her where her room is in the dormitory. Ann shares a room with Victoria and is supposed to show her around and tell her the rules, but she doesn’t really explain much. Victoria still feels lost and has trouble even finding the table where she is supposed to sit at dinner.
At dinner, one of the other girls, Martha Sherman, starts uses funny words, and she tells the other girls that they are part of a secret language that she made up. However, she refuses to tell anybody what they mean. Martha is moody and rude to the other girls at dinner, so the housemother sends her to her room before the meal is over.
Overcome with homesickness, Victoria cries at dinner and during the songs they have to sing afterward. No one has any patience with poor Victoria. Ann tells her that she’s being a crybaby. Other girls laugh at her when they see that she’s been crying. Victoria doesn’t know how she’ll be able to handle boarding school if every day is going to be like this!
The other girls in the dormitory say that Miss Mossman, the housemother, is strict. She blows her whistle at them and makes them line up for inspection every morning. Miss Blanchard, another teacher, is nicer, and she tries to reassure Victoria that things will get better when she gets to know the other students and makes some friends. However, nobody seems to want to be friends with Victoria. Nobody except Martha.
Martha is the only girl who seems interested in talking to Victoria. Martha doesn’t like Coburn Home School, either. More than anything, Martha wants to live at home and just go to an ordinary day school instead of being boarder. Victoria knows just how Martha feels! The other girls are surprised at how well Martha seems to get along with Victoria because Martha doesn’t usually want to be friendly with anyone.
The two of them start to talk about their homes and families. Martha’s father is an importer. She keeps saying that her parents are going to let her come home from boarding school and just go to day school, but it quickly becomes apparent that it isn’t likely. Victoria only has her mother, who works and sometimes needs to travel for work. She doesn’t even remember much about her father. Martha likes math, a subject which Victoria finds hard, but Martha says that she doesn’t reading, which is Victoria’s favorite subject. The two complement each other well.
Although Martha misses home, like Victoria does, and doesn’t really want to be a boarder, she is more experienced about boarding school life, and she helps Victoria to adjust to the school. Martha starts teaching Victoria about pieces of boarding school lore, like school rhymes and the traditions made up and passed down by students, and she also begins teaching her the secret language that she made up. There are only three words in Martha’s secret language, but Martha explains to Victoria what they mean, and the girls decide that they’ll make up more together. Martha becomes Victoria’s best friend all through the rest of her first year at boarding school.
Being friends with Martha makes boarding school feel better to Victoria. Martha still constantly talks about hating boarding school and how she definitely won’t come back next year, although Victoria realizes that’s just a wish of hers. Victoria also comes to realize that many other kids at the boarding school feel the same way. Even the ones who like the school admit that they’d really rather be at home with their parents. They daydream about just going to school during the day and coming straight home afterward, where they can just relax at home and eat what they want and not have to answer to whistles or line up for inspections. When Ann’s family decides to bring her home, Martha and Victoria ask Miss Mossman if they can share a room, and she agrees as long as the girls behave themselves.
Victoria is fascinated at the things that Martha knows about life at boarding school. Martha teaches her about “pie beds.” (I always heard it called “short-sheeting” when I was a kid, although I was never good at making beds the normal way in the first place, so I never fully grasped how to pull off the trick, and I didn’t go to summer camp or boarding school, where people typically did this anyway.) The girls argue about what costumes to wear to the school’s Halloween party, but the school’s handy man helps them make ice cream cone costumes that win a prize for the most original costume. The costumes are uncomfortable to wear, but Victoria is pleased and thinks that Martha should get the credit because the costume concept was her idea. Martha says that, next year, they’ll start planning their costumes earlier and come up with an even better idea. That’s the moment when Victoria realizes that Martha is no longer talking about how she’s definitely not coming back next year.
After the girls come back from Christmas vacation, Victoria is homesick again, but it turns out that their old, strict housemother has left to take care of her father, who is ill. Instead, they get a new housemother, Miss Denton, who is much nicer. She doesn’t blow whistles at the girls to wake them up. Victoria likes Miss Denton right away, and even the other girls in the house start calling her “Mother Carrie” as Miss Denton requests, even though the name strikes them all as silly at first. Martha finds Miss Denton to be overly sweet (“ick-en-spick” in the secret language), although she admits that she’s better than Miss Mossman.
Martha also finds herself liking Miss Blanchard, who teaches math. Miss Blanchard was nice to Victoria in the beginning, but Victoria can’t bring herself to like her much because she has so much trouble in math. Victoria has a fanciful imagination and likes to imagine that certain numbers are boys and others are girls, and Martha finds it frustrating because the idea doesn’t make sense to her, and Victoria doesn’t even follow an exact pattern, like odds vs. evens in her designation. Meanwhile, Victoria is confused by the math tricks that Miss Blanchard teaches Martha. Martha thinks they’re fun, but Victoria isn’t as good at math and has trouble following them.
The two girls find themselves arguing sometimes because of their different preferences, but they remain friends. It’s more that, now that they’re getting comfortable with each other and their school, more of their individual personalities are coming out. Victoria is also surprised to realize that, while she still frequently misses her mother, she no longer agrees with her mother about certain things. When her mother comes to visit the school, she worries about Victoria sleeping in the top bunk of their bunk bed, but Victoria herself loves it and has to assure her mother that she likes the top bunk. One thing that boarding school has done for Victoria is to give her a sense of independence and room to develop her own identity and preferences. She no longer has to get her mother’s permission for everything she does, as long as her housemother approves.
Victoria and Martha are both imaginative, and they begin enjoy their shared adventures at school. They try to hold a midnight feast in their room and search for hidden passages or secret compartments in the dormitory because Martha has heard or read that these things happen in boarding schools. Neither of those adventures goes as planned, but Miss Denton allows the girls to build a little play hut of their own with help from the school’s handy man. Miss Denton also gives the girls a little lockbox to keep some of their treasures in, and they hide it so they can have a buried treasure.
As the year comes to an end, Victoria knows that she’ll be coming back to boarding school next year, and the prospect doesn’t seem so bad as it did before. Martha isn’t sure whether she will or not, talking sometimes about what they’ll do next year but still hoping to live at home with her parents. But, if Martha doesn’t come back to school, it just wouldn’t be the same for Victoria!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
One of the things I found interesting about this book is that it is set in the US. The iconic boarding school stories for children tend to be British stories, but the Coburn Home School is in New York state. The girls’ parents live in New York City.
Most of the story focuses on the girls’ relationship with each other and their growing sense of self-identity and confidence at their boarding school. They talk about classes they take and how they each feel about the other’s favorite subject, but they aren’t shown in classes themselves. The school is also a co-ed school, with both boys and girls, but the boys don’t enter into the story much because most of the action takes place around the girls’ dorm. The boys live in a different dorm. There is only one instance where a boy is shown talking to Victoria, with a hint that he might have a crush on Victoria, another new development in Victoria’s life at school. The little developments in the girls’ lives and attitudes through the school year and each little experience and adventure they have are the main focus of the story. These are the things that are helping the girls understand and develop their identities, self-confidence, and sense of independence.
Toward the end of the book, Miss Denton encourages the girls to think about all of the things they’ve learned this year, and not just the ones they’ve learned in class. The girls don’t fully understand and appreciate that Miss Denton is talking about personal growth and development, but they do consider things they’ve learned, like how to make beds, that midnight feasts aren’t as fun as they sound, and how Victoria learned not to be homesick. These are some of the little things that are part of their school experience and that are slowly making them more grown up and independent than they used to be.
Although Martha is a little older than Victoria and sometimes chides her for being babyish about some things (like putting a lose tooth under her pillow) or still homesick, the truth is that Martha has been just as homesick the entire time. Martha doesn’t appear to be as upset about boarding school as Victoria because she is not a new student in this book, like Victoria. She already went through her first year at boarding school before Victoria got there, so she no longer openly cries about being away from home. Still, the reason why she keeps talking about going home and living with her parents all the time is that she misses them. While the girls’ adventures during the school year and Victoria’s realizations about how boarding school gives her the opportunity to do things and be with people she wouldn’t at home make her feel better about coming back next year, Martha still feels uncertain about it. Martha has also come to love being friends with Victoria and even loves Miss Denton, but her feelings of homesickness leave her feeling torn about what she really wants.
There are hints that Martha will probably return to boarding school anyway, but Miss Denton reassures Victoria that she will be fine at boarding school even if Martha decides not to come next fall, reminding Victoria that she is now one of the “old girls” instead of a scared new one, like she used to be. Victoria also starts to feel that way herself. Martha will probably be back the next year to be with Victoria, Miss Denton, and Miss Blanchard, but readers can be reassured that, even if she doesn’t return, Victoria will be all right with her new sense of identity and independence. This first year at boarding school with Martha may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship or just one step to Victoria finding herself and building other friendships. Maybe it’s both. Victoria’s future life will be fine in general as she continues growing up and finding her way, learning to manage her life one step at a time.
There is a modern 21st century documentary about young children going to boarding school for the first time at 8 years old, What’s Life Like in a Private British Boarding School? | Leaving Home at 8 Years Old, on YouTube. The school in that documentary is British, but I was struck by the common feelings in the documentary and the book, even though they take place decades apart in different countries. There are just some parts of the human experience that last through the generations. The documentary also shows the parents’ side of the boarding school experience, the reasons why they choose to send their children to boarding school, and how they cope with their feelings about sending their children away and being separated from them.
Boarding school isn’t always easy for parents in terms of emotions, and there are hints of that in The Secret Language. We never see Martha’s parents in the book, so we don’t know what’s going on with them, but Victoria’s mother fusses over Victoria when she gets the chance, and she talks about how great it would be if she could arrange things so that Victoria can be home with her all the time again, too. If Victoria’s mother wasn’t a working single mother who has to travel for work, she probably wouldn’t have sent her away to boarding school at all. Miss Denton is very in tune with people’s feelings, and I think that she’s aware of all the complexities in the lives of the girls and their parents. She does her best to look after the girls emotionally, and that’s part of her urging the girls to consider other people’s feelings, to be thoughtful about each other, and to think about the ways they’ve been changing inside as well as outside. I think that the universal nature of the girls’ and adults’ feelings in the book are a sign of the author’s emotional awareness, understanding of how different types of people feel.
Ursula Nordstrom, the author of the book, was actually a famous children’s book editor. She is credited with helping to transform mid-20th century children’s literature to have more of a focus on children’s feelings, experiences, and imagination instead of being morality tales, focused on what adults want children to know or understand. The Secret Language was the only children’s book that she wrote herself. This YouTube video explains about her life and career.
A Meeting of Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1999.
This is the final book in the Minds series. Each book in the series begins shortly after the previous book ends, and this one starts only three weeks after the last book.
Princess Lenora and Prince Coren are still in Andilla for their impending wedding when, while simply walking down a hallway of the castle, they suddenly find themselves transported to a land of snow. The world in which they now find themselves is our world (which, I guess would be distant past of their world, the late 20th century). Disoriented and cold, Lenora and Coren go inside a shopping mall to get warm. At first, Coren thinks that Lenora has caused their present predicament (because, usually, she does, either consciously or unconsciously), but Lenora denies having anything to do with it.
At the time they’d been walking down the hallway, they’d been discussing the exhibition at the castle in honor of their upcoming wedding and Lenora’s desire for a better world. The exhibition was called “A Meeting of Minds” and designed to showcase the ways that different groups of people in their world live and what they envision as a perfect world. The entries in the exhibit were chosen as entries in a contest, and a panel of judges from different countries would choose winners from among them. The winning entries would be adopted as real laws in the hope of fulfilling Lenora’s wish of making the world a better place for everyone. What could go wrong? (Seriously, things in this world always go wrong when people try to enforce some vision of perfection, so what’s it going to be this time?) Could the exhibition have something to do with their present predicament?
Lenora and Coren briefly consider different possibilities, including the possibility that some unknown enemy has sent them to this strange place, but nothing really makes sense. Lenora has the uncomfortable feeling that something she’s done may have cause this problem after all, although she can’t think what it is. Either way, they are stuck in a strange land.
They stop a passing girl and ask them where they are, and she tells them that they’re in a mall called Portage Place. That doesn’t really explain much to Lenora and Coren, so the girl tells them to buy a map. Lenora and Coren don’t understand the concept of “buying” (in the last book, they didn’t know the word “economy”). When they try to ask her the name of her “world”, it turns out that the girl is an alien conspiracy theorist, wearing a shirt with a picture of an alien on it and the words “The Truth is Out There” (the slogan from the X-Files tv show). The girl is very excited, thinking that Lenora and Coren are space aliens. She tells them that they’re in Winnipeg on Earth and asks them where they’re from. Coren recognizes the name “Earth” as the old name for their world. This confirms that, although there are fantasy elements in these stories, Lenora and Coren are actually from the distant future of the Earth, although the three of them work out that they might actually be from a parallel universe of our Earth. However, her helpfulness ends when she suddenly seems to suspect them of being “Mindies” and making fun of her. Lenora and Coren don’t know what she’s talking about.
The two of them explore the mall, getting into trouble when they try to stop two girls from taking another child’s toy and end up having security called on them and not having money to pay for food in the mall food court. Fortunately, a couple of other young people in line offer to pay for their food. These young people, Barb and Thomas, seem to recognize them as Princess Lenora and Prince Coren, but strangely, Lenora and Coren learn that they think that they’re in costume and only pretending to be themselves. It slowly comes out that the authors of the book series live in Winnipeg and that there’s a fan convention in town for the books in which Lenora and Coren are fictional characters. (I’ve never actually heard of a convention specifically for this series of books, but I don’t live in Canada, so I can’t swear that it never happened. However, the characters later meet someone dressed as Spock at the convention, so it’s possible that this is supposed to be part of some larger book or sci-fi/fantasy-themed convention.)
Lenora and Coren don’t fully understand the concept of the fan convention, but Lenora sees it as a possible lead to what’s happening, so she insists on going to the convention center. At the convention center, Lenora and Coren encounter other people who are apparently trying to dress like they do and pretend to be them. Some of them even criticize what Lenora and Coren are wearing because their real outfits don’t agree with the fans’ interpretations of the characters. (Fandoms are like this in real life. The more someone likes something and spends time with it, the more they consider themselves an authority on it. They kind of are, but sometimes, fans get wrapped up in their own vision of what they’d like characters to be like that they kind of depart from the original story or get out of sync with the vision of the original authors. It’s almost like they mentally create an alternate reality of a world that was already fictional, which fits very well with the themes of this entire series.) Lenora and Coren think that they’re all very rude for criticizing the way they dress, telling them how they should talk to be in character, and thinking that Coren is a wimp or geek or that Lenora is annoying or arrogant, which some of them say right in front of them.
At this point, someone comments that Lenora sounds just like she does in the books, and the people at the convention start talking about all of the books in this series, which I’ve already reviewed. Finally, Lenora and Coren understand that these people know about them and are imitating them because they have read books about them. Coren is embarrassed when these fans start talking about some of his more embarrassing moments like they’re common knowledge. Lenora gets angry and decides that they need to talk to the authors. (Which seems to have been the goal of this book.)
Coren and Lenora get in line to talk to the authors of the books, but when they meet them, the authors also just think they’re fans of the books who are putting on a little skit for them. There’s some banter with the authors (including some inside jokes that Carol and Perry seem to have with each other, like how bad Perry’s handwriting apparently is), and the authors remark how much Lenora and Coren sound like their characters, although they don’t think they really look like them (which is interesting, as if they have a completely different vision of them in their minds). Lenora gets angry with them and accuses them of stealing from their lives to write their books, so she grabs some of the books the authors and signing and runs away with them.
As Lenora and Coren hide from security with their stolen books, they start reading about themselves. They find that the books do describe their previous adventures together, and they seem to capture some of what they were thinking and feeling at the time, but not everything is correct. In a twist that makes this book a little more interesting than it started out, not everything in the books they read is like the real-life Minds books. Lenora and Coren start noticing that Sayley plays a very prominent role and is described in glowing terms and that her favorite word, “scrumptious” appears frequently. Then, Lenora and Coren discover that one of the events at the convention is a worship service for the “Divine Sayley.” One of the other convention attendees tells them that the Sayley in the books was named after the Divine Sayley, who is a real figure in their world, an angelic-looking girl with divine powers, who seems to be a glowing version of their Sayley.
It seems that Lenora and Coren have discovered the source of this strange world and everything that has been happening to them, but how and why did Sayley do it? Or, did she really do it at all? And how can Lenora and Coren get home when their powers no longer work?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers:
First, I’d like to talk about why the authors wrote this book. It’s somewhat of a departure in theme and tone from the rest of the series, and because of that, it annoyed me. At first, I guessed that this book was just the authors’ excuse to have their own characters meet them in the story, to show off a few inside jokes for their own amusement, and to kind of toot their own horns. That sort of story annoys me. I don’t like it when authors do that. When I read a series that I like, I want to do it for the sake of the characters and the stories, not for the sake of the fandom, and any inside jokes the co-authors have with each other are not jokes I am personally in on, so I’m just not going to get the same charge out of them. (There’s an in-joke in this book about Perry Nodelman having some kind of special underwear. I don’t know what it is because it isn’t described, but I’ve seen lots of funny undershorts in those catalogs that come around Christmas, and I don’t really care which pair he owns. Younger readers would probably get more of a kick out of that bit of trivia than I do.)
However, I looked it up, and I found this explanation, written by one of the co-authors, Carol Matas:
Why We Wrote A Meeting of Minds
In thinking about the imaginative powers of the people of Gepeth, it suddenly struck us that they could have imagined us. After all, the Gepethians have the power to make whatever they imagine real, so why not this entire world of ours, including the city of Winnipeg and everyone who lives there–including us? Lenora and Coren are figments of our imaginations–but we might also be figments of theirs. In A Meeting of Minds, that is exactly what happens. Lenora and Coren and the authors Carol M and Perry N come face to face, as Lenora and Coren find themselves stuck without their powers in the city of Winnipeg and unable to get out. Who created whom? And will Lenora and Coren ever manage to escape this frightening city, worse than their worst nightmares? You’ll have to read the book to find out!
That explanation did make me feel a little better about the book, that more thought went into it than just a bunch of inside jokes for fans. The Minds books all focus on the power of the mind and the imagination and the nature of reality. A meta plot, like trying to decide if the authors created the characters or the characters created the author does fit with the theme of the theme of the series, almost like the end of Through the Looking Glass, where the reader is left to decide whether Alice dreamed the Red King or if Alice was just part of the Red King’s dream. However, by the end of this book, the question is resolved, as far as people in Lenora’s world is concerned. According to the story, Sayley really did create Winnipeg and everything in it, including the authors of this book and their books and fandom. There is something a little unsettled about the end of the book, but that’s not what it is.
I can’t talk about my full opinion of this story without some spoilers, though, so get ready: The current problem is actually a plot by Leni and Cori, the annoying doubles of Lenora and Coren created two books ago in the series, although it also turns out that their plot is part of the machinations of someone else.
It’s important to remember that Leni and Cori are basically Lenora and Coren themselves, sharing all of their memories up to the point in time when Lenora created them as separate people, but with twists to their personalities. She created Leni on purpose as a double of herself so she could go off and do what she wanted and people wouldn’t know she was missing, but she made Leni a distinct personality, who would like all of the boring things she didn’t like about managing a household and planning a wedding, so Leni would be happy to stay home and do those things while Lenora herself went adventuring. Cori was an accidental creation, when Lenora’s powers where acting erratically. She was in trouble and wished that Coren was there to help her, but she also wished that Coren was a braver, more action-oriented person, so Cori appeared as a kind of white knight figure to rescue her. Once Lenora created Leni and Cori, she didn’t have the heart to un-imagine them into non-existence because they are now distinct people and personalities by themselves.
Unfortunately, while Leni and Cori are pretty well-suited to each other, they both come with their annoying defects. Leni is frivolous and vapid, getting too wrapped up in petty details, like hair, clothes, and makeup, to care about larger issues. Cori is brave but reckless. He doesn’t have the real Coren’s thoughtfulness and rushes right into danger because his only solution to anything is fighting. Lenora and Coren come to appreciate each other more after seeing what their doubles are like and experiencing their annoying sides. Coren realizes that he doesn’t want Lenora to be like Leni, and Lenora stops complaining that Coren thinks too much. They don’t like their doubles, but the feeling is actually mutual. Because Leni and Cori have personalities that are almost opposite to Lenora and Coren, they find Lenora and Coren as annoying as Lenora and Coren find them, just for different reasons. Cori thinks that Coren is a wimp, and Leni thinks that Lenora is irresponsible and tasteless.
Part of the problem is that, while everyone knows that Leni and Cori are recently-created doubles instead of the real Lenora and Coren, Leni and Cori are still real people with all of the memories of Lenora and Coren. So, while the public and their royal parents acknowledge Lenora and Coren as their real children and the real princess and prince, Leni and Cori are angry and dissatisfied because they are no less “real” and have all the memories of being princess and prince. They are not treated as equals to Lenora and Coren, and their own parents don’t really consider them their children. Leni resents being treated like she’s secondary to Lenora, especially since Lenora made her to be the embodiment of all of the qualities that her parents wished she had. Leni is (for the most part) quiet and obedient, focused on spending all of her time looking the part of a princess, and rarely uses her powers in order maintain the Balance. While all of the preparations are going on for Lenora and Coren’s grand wedding, preparations that Lenora and Coren themselves don’t even find particularly interesting because they just don’t like all of the fuss and pageantry, Leni and Cori are also engaged to be married and actually want the pageantry of a grand wedding instead of the quieter ceremony being planned for them. With Lenora and Coren put out of the way, they can take over the wedding themselves, and Leni thinks that, once people get used to her instead of Lenora, they will think of her as an improvement and forget about Lenora.
Sayley did create the little world of Winnipeg that Lenora and Coren are trapped in as a display, her entry in the A Meeting of Minds contest, but Leni is the one who trapped Lenora and Coren in that world. In another twist, it turns out that Sayley created Winnipeg not as her example of the best world possible but as her example of the worst world possible, which she created for contrast. (Sorry, real world Winnipeg. It turns out that Sayley thinks snow is dreadful, but on the bright side, none of you will ever have to worship the Divine Sayley, which by itself makes real world Winnipeg immediately a better place for everyone.) When Sayley discovers what Leni and Cori have done, she wants to tell Coren’s parents, but Cori reads her mind and Leni banishes Sayley to her own exhibit along with Lenora and Coren.
By Sayley’s logic, what really makes her version of Winnipeg so bad is that nobody there believes in the power of the imagination. Everyone there likes to imagine things and they enjoy hearing about the power of imagination, which is why they are fans of Lenora and Coren, but none of them believe that imagination is real or that they can actually create the things they imagine. Their lack of belief in the powers of the mind is what prevents Lenora and Coren’s powers from working. Even though they worship Sayley as “divine”, Sayley says that they don’t really believe in her, they just consider her to be a symbol. Because of that, nobody there respects the real Sayley or listens to her. Sayley is unable to get the authors, Carol and Perry, to listen to them even though she tries to prove to them that she actually made them because she knows all about the embarrassing pair of underwear that Perry owns. Carol and Perry are still unconvinced and think that Sayley needs “help.”
Fortunately, there is one person in this world who Sayley allowed to have the power of imagination, Michael, and he believes that Sayley, Lenora, and Coren are all who they say they are. Michael figures out how to help them all to escape from the exhibit, but when they do, they still have to face down Leni and Cori and the evil force that is controlling them – Lenora’s old alter-ego and nemesis, Hevak.
The evil way that Leni behaves in this book is a clue that she isn’t quite herself. Normally, being well-behaved is a part of her personality, and her scruples would prevent her from doing any of the things she did, even though she secretly wanted to in the back of her mind. Hevak explains that, because Leni is another version of Lenora, he a part of her as well as Lenora. When Leni was feeling jealous and resentful about the wedding, it awakened him in her mind, and he used his influence to force her to overcome her normal inhibitions and do what she was thinking of doing. At first, I was thinking that having Hevak come back seemed like a bit of a cop-out and seemed a little like those cliched scenes in anime where the villain changes into their “final form” and reveals their “true power”, but that explanation actually does make sense for the way this world functions.
Just as Hevak and Lenora are poised for their ultimate battle, however, it all just kind of comes to an end. Defeating Hevak proves easier than it seems like it should because Hevak himself has changed, even though it doesn’t really seem like it from the rest of the book. What Hevak decides is that he’s been through just about everything – he tried to create perfection and failed, people have called him evil (because he does evil things), he tried to be perfectly good, and for a long period, he was stuck in a state of nothingness. Now, he wonders what it’s all for. He hasn’t really accomplished much, and he doesn’t really see the point in continuing on this way. He’s thought about it so much that he’d really rather return to nothingness and not have to think about anything. It’s a little anti-climactic for how much of a nemesis Hevak is.
However, Lenora can’t bring herself to imagine him as not existing permanently because he was always an extension of herself, so instead, she takes Michael’s suggestion and sends him to Winnipeg, which gives the authors a chance to make a few more jokes about life in Winnipeg. Michael says that there are many unimaginative people there who spend time not doing much or thinking much, so without his powers, Hevak will fit in nicely and feel comfortable. Sayley promises to make Winnipeg a little nicer than it is now without changing its character completely, giving it other seasons besides winter and making it part of a much larger world, so people in Winnipeg won’t feel trapped there if they don’t like the climate and can experience some variety. Unfortunately, she also says that, since Winnipeg was supposed to be her worst world, she’s going to give the other seasons a downside, too, which is why she decides to invent mosquitos for Winnipeg’s summer. (So, now we all know who to blame.) Michael isn’t worried because he says that people in Winnipeg are tough. I kind of liked Hevak’s banishment to Winnipeg for the humor value, even though it felt like a rather easy wrap-up to the story.
This is the final book in the Minds series, and from the way it ends, I think there could be room for another one after it, even though one was never written. The book ends with Lenora and Coren’s actual wedding, stopping just as the ceremony ends. It appears that they are going to live happily ever after with the form of perfection they’ve selected taking effect as the ceremony ends, but exactly what that means is never clarified, probably because perfection is a difficult thing to imagine and maybe complete perfection is impossible to achieve. Lenora and Coren are both happy, although Coren does have some slight misgivings about whether the perfection is going to be too perfect in some way. (Remember, this series is all about Balance.) However, he brushes his worries aside to complete the ceremony. Then, we don’t know what happens after that. Is their new perfect world everything they’ve ever wanted and keep everyone happy forever, or will there be new, unforeseen complications after their marriage? Would new, unforeseen complications actually make Lenora happier than a completely settled world because she actually likes excitement and new problems to solve? Could that actually be her version of perfection? Is there a chance that Hevak will return from Winnipeg or has he finally found his true niche there, shoveling snow? There are no answers to these questions because the series is over, so we’ll never know, but I’ll leave you with a final thought – this world is all about imagination and the power of the imagination to create, so if you imagine something after this, that’s what you’ve created.
Charlotte Mary Makepeace is a new student at a boarding school in England. The school is big and confusing, and there are so many new people to meet that she immediately feels overwhelmed. Starting life at a new school can be intimidating for anyone, but things are about to get particularly strange for Charlotte.
An older girl, Sarah, helps Charlotte to find her room and choose a bed, recommending a bed by the window. Charlotte is a little puzzled at why Sarah singled her out and helped her, and the other girls are jealous that she got to the room first and got first choice of the beds. Still, Charlotte is grateful. She is exhausted, and she feels like she isn’t herself. When she wakes up in the morning, she really isn’t herself.
The room where Charlotte sleeps is called the “Cedar” room, and when she first enters the room, the name puzzles her because there are no cedars nearby. However, when Charlotte wakes up in the morning, there is suddenly a large cedar outside the window. The tree did not grow during the night. In Charlotte’s time, the cedar is gone, but Charlotte is now back in the past, when the cedar was still there. Things in the room are arranged differently, although Charlotte’s bed is still in the same place, and instead of seeing her roommates, Charlotte finds herself alone with a girl she has never seen before, who calls her “Clare.”
Charlotte is very confused. Earlier, she was feeling like she wasn’t herself, and now she has the sense that maybe she has really become someone else. Charlotte doesn’t notice any differences about herself in the mirror, but the other girl doesn’t seem to notice that she’s not Clare, whoever Clare is. The girl just keeps talking to Charlotte as if they already know each other. The other girl’s name is Emily, and it turns out that she is Clare’s younger sister. Charlotte finds herself feeling toward Emily the way that she feels toward her own sister, Emma.
Charlotte is forced to go through the rest of the day, her first at boarding school, as Clare. People keep talking about “the war,” and Charlotte doesn’t know what war they mean at first. When she went to bed, it was the 1960s. At the end of a very confusing day, she returns to bed in the Cedar room, where she finds a diary with the name “Clare Mary Moby” written on it and the date, September 14, 1918. The diary really makes Charlotte realize that she has spent the entire day in the past, and she further realizes that the war everyone was talking about is World War I. However, there is nothing else for Charlotte to do but go to bed. When she wakes up in the morning, she is once again Charlotte. Emily is gone, and Charlotte is back in her own time with her regular roommates. However, it quickly becomes clear that this was not just a dream, and this strange incident repeats itself each day, after Charlotte sleeps in the same bed.
Whenever Charlotte shifts to take Clare’s place in the past, she loses a day in her own time, which helps to convince her that she is not dreaming when she is Clare. Every other day, Charlotte switches places and times with Clare, and she sees the school as it was in the past, toward the end of World War I. Apparently, Clare is living Charlotte’s life whenever Charlotte is living hers, and nobody around them seems to have noticed the switch. Charlotte has no idea why this is happening, other than the fact that she and Clare happen to be sleeping in the same bed, in the same room.
Charlotte
is fascinated by her trips to the past, but they are disorienting. She now has two sets of names to learn, the
people in the past and the people in the present. There are different school rules in the past,
too, and she was still getting used to the rules in her own time. Charlotte and Clare also need to do some of
each other’s homework for classes, and there are some things they can’t
do. Charlotte can’t write an essay about
Clare’s holidays because she has no idea what Clare did on her school holidays,
and Clare is very bad at arithmetic, giving Charlotte bad grades.
The next time she makes the switch, Charlotte learns that Clare and Emily do not usually sleep in the Cedar room. Because of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, girls have been shifted around as the sick ones are quarantined. Meanwhile, in the 1960s, Clare has created a new diary in an exercise book with Charlotte’s name on it. In the book, Clare has written a letter to Charlotte about their situation. She asks Charlotte to look after Emily when they’re together and to write messages back to her. Clare doesn’t think they should tell Emily about what’s happening. Clare worries that Emily will be confused and frightened.
However, Emily soon discovers the truth, and Charlotte comes to rely on her as the only person in the past who knows who she really is. Emily notices differences between the way Charlotte behaves and the way that Clare behaves, but they are uncanny in their resemblance and behavior in other ways. In many ways, Emily is bolder than both Charlotte and Clare, although her boldness is often to the point of being brash or callous. She is sometimes impatient with Charlotte and Clare’s softer natures, but their apparent softness is due to their greater sense of life’s consequences and their sense of responsibility for Emily. Emily finds talk of the war and bombings exciting, but Charlotte and Clare are both aware of the dangerous reality. As Emily gets to know Charlotte, she points out the ways that she and Clare are similar yet different, and she says that the more time Charlotte spends in 1918, the more like Clare she is becoming. Charlotte worries about the resemblance between her and Clare and how natural it is becoming for her to act like Clare.
In the present, Charlotte is initiated into the usual pranks of a British boarding school by her new roommates, and in the past, she sees soldiers in World War I uniforms. In 1918, students whisper about whether a classmate with a German father could actually be a German spy, and Charlotte is introduced to air-raid alarms. In the 1960s, Charlotte’s roommates wonder about her funny moods, her odd need to be alone, and her reluctance to be friends and join them in activities. In both time periods, Charlotte is constantly afraid of giving everything away by saying something that would be out of character for the person she’s supposed to be or asking questions that she should already be able to answer if she were living every day in one time period. The one element that seems constant throughout these shifts is the bed that she and Clare share in the Cedar room. However, Clare and Emily will soon be sent to board with a family in town, only returning to the school as day pupils. When the Cedar room is turned into another quarantine room for the sick, Charlotte is trapped in the past as Clare, and she worries that she may never return home again. What will happen to her, and will she lose her identity as Charlotte, becoming Clare forever?
This book is a modern classic in children’s literature! I decided that I had to read it because so many people have nostalgic memories of this book and have written positive reviews about it. The Cure even did a song and music video inspired by the book. The song even contains words from the book in the lyrics. This is the original music video that goes with the song. (It’s also on YouTube.)
The book is the third book in the The Aviary Hall trilogy. It is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The other two books in the trilogy are also available on Internet Archive, but Charlotte Sometimes is often regarded as the best of the three and is the best known.
Note: Strangely, this book has three different ending, depending on the edition of the book. Older editions (the original and printings from the 1970s) contain the full text, and newer editions are cropped in two different places. The copies on Internet Archive are different editions and have different endings. This one contains the full text of the original. This one and this one have the endings that include Emily’s letter but not the final scene with Charlotte going home from school. The others don’t have the part with Emily’s letter at all. In order to learn the difference between these endings and the significance of Emily’s letter, you’ll have to read the part of my review that includes spoilers.
Further Thoughts
I was amused by the part where Emily laughs at the name Charlotte because she thinks that it’s kind of old-fashioned in 1918, yet Charlotte is from the future. Names often go in cycles of popularity, and certain classic names have comebacks at regular periods. Right now, in the early 21st century, the names Charlotte, Emma, Emily, and Clare (or Claire) are all pretty popular. In fact, Charlotte has seen a recent resurgence in popularity in the United States. Modern children reading this would actually find many of the names very familiar, thanks to a trend of reviving vintage and classic names. In fact, some of the 1918 names are more popular these days than some of the 1960s names, like Janet and Susannah. Don’t worry, they’ll have their turn again.
I also liked the part where Charlotte tries to consider whether she and Clare really look alike. Emily is a little vague about whether Charlotte and Clare really resemble each other, saying that she might have just seen “Clare” in her because Clare was who she expected to see and that she never really looked at her properly until she realized that she was actually Charlotte. Charlotte thinks about a time where she tried to draw herself by studying her own features in a mirror, but the longer she stared at herself, the more disconnected that she felt from the features she was seeing. This is actually a real phenomenon, and I’ve read other books where people have mentioned it. You can get some odd feelings by staring at yourself in a mirror for too long. I’ve tried it myself, and it can get a little eerie, especially if you look yourself right in the eyes and try not to blink. The longer you look, the more eerie it gets. That’s how that old sleepover trick, Bloody Mary, works. This is sometimes called the “strange-face illusion.” Although Charlotte is having a kind of identity crisis from switching places with Clare, this mirror phenomenon is something that anyone can experience.
Further Note: At the time that I first published this review, January 1, 2020, I hadn’t yet heard of the coronavirus, and I had no way of knowing that there was going to be an outbreak that would eventually turn into a pandemic. Now, in February 2020, I’d like to point out some things to anybody who is as creeped out as I am about this disease. (I had the images of the influenza in this story in my mind when I first started hearing about the coronavirus outbreak, and it didn’t do a lot for my peace of mind.)
Coronavirus and the 1918 influenza have some similarities and differences. Normal seasonal influenza has a death rate of approximately 0.1%. The influenza epidemic of 1918, colloquially called “Spanish Flu“, had a death rate of approximately 2.5%, and it was frightening because many of its victims had been young and apparently healthy before infection, and they died fairly quickly after becoming ill, in a matter of days. (I have more information about that down below.) It spread remarkably fast because of the mass movements of people between countries due to World War I and soldiers returning home toward the end of the war, to the point where it’s never been firmly established exactly where the virus originated.
The coronavirus (as of February 2020, estimates may change later) has a death rate of approximately 2.3%, and most of those deaths have been people who are very old and/or had underlying health problems. It’s bad, but oddly, also somewhat hopeful because, unlike the 1918 influenza, where it wasn’t always obvious who was the most as risk, we can tell ahead of time with the coronavirus who is most at risk, which is helpful for protecting people who are the most vulnerable. We know where the coronavirus started, and although it has spread to countries around the world, public health officials have been taking steps to quarantine people who have contracted the disease or who have been to regions with known infections. It has spread, but perhaps not as rapidly as the Spanish Flu because the 1918 public health officials didn’t understand what they were dealing with at first and didn’t take the steps that we are taking now. If there was any good side to the 1918 influenza epidemic, it was probably that it taught us a few things about how to handle pandemics, including what not to do when one is occurring. The two viruses aren’t precisely the same, but being aware of what we have learned from past experience may help us to stop the situation from becoming worse than it might be otherwise. I know that what is happening and what is probably about to happen is not going to be good because this is just not a good situation, and that can’t be helped, but what can be helped is how we respond to it and make use of what we already know. This current situation is not going to last, but what we do while the situation still exists is going to determine how well we come out of it.
This is not a good time for international travel, and if you can avoid traveling until this crisis is over, I would recommend doing that. If you are in a safe place, I recommend staying there until the crisis passes, and wherever you are, follow the instructions you are given by your public health officials. Before this is over, you may actually get the coronavirus. (I might, too, and I know that as I type this. I live in Arizona, and we’ve only had a few cases so far, but that’s so far.) Health officials are working on a vaccine, but that takes time, and it may not be widely available until next year. However, if you are not in one of the at-risk groups, you will likely survive the experience if you get it, and if you do what your health officials tell you to do, you can help yourself to recover from the disease and avoid spreading it to others. If you think you may be in one of the at-risk groups, follow the instructions that your doctor gives you and seek help (by telephone first) if you think that you may be ill. Try not to be too afraid because, although I know this all sounds scary, one of the first steps to handling difficult situations is believing that it is possible to handle them and taking the steps you know how to take. Take care of yourselves, and consider others as much as possible, too.
Further update: I am now fully vaccinated as of May 2021! I got the reaction that a lot of people got from the Pfizer vaccine; I felt like I had the flu for about a day after getting the second shot. But, after that, I was fine, and I recommend it to other people (provided that you aren’t allergic to anything in the shots – that seems to be the one real caveat to getting them). If you’re a conspiracy theorist, I have not experienced any weird mind control, and I don’t feel any different than I did before. I’m still reading and reviewing children’s books, making various random craft projects, listening to the same YouTube videos, and getting irritated with people I think are jerks, so my version of normal is still basically what it was before. I wouldn’t say that the pandemic is completely over yet because many people are still getting sick and haven’t had their shots, but having more people vaccinated is a good sign. My home state ended up being hit pretty hard during the worst of it, and we have seen some improvement since then because more people are being vaccinated. With vaccinations now open to people age 12 and over, I’m hopeful that there will be more improvement by the end of summer.
Themes and Spoilers
There is a lot more that I’d like to discuss about this book, but I wanted to save this discussion for the end because discussing this story and my opinion of it in depth reveals some major spoilers.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
First, I love stories with historical background! When I was in school, my teachers didn’t cover World War I and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in detail. My high school history teacher, for example, was a major Civil War buff, and she spent so much time going over the major battles of the American Civil War and making us watch Gone with the Wind (which I had already seen and didn’t like because I never liked the character of Scarlett O’Hara) that she kind of rushed through the early 20th century with us, charging onward to World War II. If she said anything about the Influenza Pandemic, it wasn’t much, and it didn’t make much of an impression. In fact, I think that the first time I ever heard about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (although I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of it) was through fiction, even though one of my own family members died in that pandemic. However, this was an important, worldwide event that came right at the end of the First World War, and it was shocking because the people who were frequently hit the hardest by the disease were people who were normally young and strong, the people who would usually have been the ones most likely to survive under normal circumstances.
No one knows precisely where and how the pandemic began, although people have attempted to go back through the records and isolate the first cases. This is more difficult than it sounds because the earliest cases of the influenza were lighter, not fatal, and people didn’t think that much about them at first. Also, because of World War I, the mass movement of people across countries due to the war, and the masses of troops returning from the front, the disease was spread farther and faster than it might have been otherwise. Charlotte Sometimes shows some of that real-life pattern. Early in the story, when Charlotte first begins switching places with Clare, a member of the school’s faculty in the past talks about how Clare and Emily were shifted from their old room to the Cedar room because they needed a room for the sick children at the school. At this point in the story, people don’t seem to be panicking about the illness because this was the first phase of the epidemic, when people were getting the earlier, less serious form of the disease, but it’s foreshadowing later events. At one point, Charlotte in the past is blocked from entering the Cedar room and returning to her own time because the disease has spread further through the school and the Cedar Room is also turned into a sick room.
This is a major spoiler, but after Charlotte finally returns home to her own time to stay, she learns that Clare is not alive in her time because she also became ill with influenza, the more deadly form, and she died not long after the end of the war and the end of their time-traveling adventures. At the time of her death, Clare was about thirteen years old and apparently healthy otherwise, which is in keeping with the way this particular illness affected many of its victims. There were a couple of factors which made younger people more vulnerable:
Unprepared immune systems and the body’s overreaction – Young people may have had less exposure to less serious forms of the same disease from earlier years that would have primed their immune systems to respond appropriately when they encountered this influenza. The human body has certain natural defenses against diseases, like the way it can raise a fever to kill off invading germs with higher temperatures, but sometimes, a disease can strike so hard that the body overreacts to fight it (the technical name for this reaction is “cytokine storm“), causing more damage to itself. Sometimes, this can even happen to the point where the body’s own defenses damage the body itself so much that the person dies or develops a secondary problem, such as pneumonia, that could potentially lead to their death. This is an important factor to consider when evaluating why this form of influenza tended to kill otherwise healthy young people – their immune systems were the strongest and also less primed than older adults, so they were the most likely to overreact. This is where modern vaccines can help, providing the priming the body’s immunity system needs to properly cope with serious diseases it has never seen before.
Secondary infections – The people who died of the influenza tended to die of the pneumonia that set in as a secondary infection in their damaged lungs, possibly partly as a result of the body’s overreaction. This was before the development of antibiotics like penicillin, which we use to treat such infections now. This is also where vaccines come in handy because people who can avoid getting sick also avoid developing secondary problems from the illness. Unfortunately, there was no vaccine available in 1918. It wasn’t even obvious to the medical professionals of the time what they were really dealing with, and they lacked medicines that could have helped because they were developed later.
This is basically what happened to Clare, an otherwise healthy teenager, when she caught the influenza. Clare, of course, is a fictional character, but her life and fate were based on real people of the time. This was part of what made the pandemic so scary. People of the time noticed that even people who otherwise seemed young, strong, and healthy were dying of this disease, and it was happening fast. If you read grown-up Emily’s letter to Charlotte in the longer endings to the book, Clare died in a matter of a few days after becoming ill. (This still sometimes happens, but in this particular epidemic, it was happening on a massive scale.) It was happening all over the world, in small towns as well as big cities, and there was nowhere anyone could go to escape it.
Because of the shocking spread of the disease and the tragic youth of many of its victims, the event has found its way into fiction, even children’s literature. Before it was depicted on the television show, Downton Abbey, it was named as Edward Cullen‘s impending cause of death if he hadn’t been turned into a vampire in the Twilight young adult series (he was also a teenager, although older), and it was also described in one of the books of the Sarah, Plain and Tall series, set in the American Midwest. (None of the main characters die in that story, although Anna becomes a nurse and the others fear for her safety, and they witness the burial of a baby who died from the disease, as one of my grandmother’s younger brothers did in real life.)
I added a note above, discussing some of the ways the coronavirus and the 1918 influenza were similar and different. What I’ve described regarding the 1918 influenza’s effects on younger people does not seem to be the case with the current coronavirus (as of February 2020). There may be exceptions, just like more typical seasonal forms of influenza occasionally become serious even in cases of normally healthy young people (I’m not an expert, so I can’t say what the chances of that are, it seems that an overreaction of the immune system is still a primary concern with the coronavirus), but the pattern for the coronavirus so far is that it is most dangerous to the very old and those with underlying health problems. In this situation, we can do a lot to help them by protecting those we already know are most vulnerable.
World War I (or, The Great War)
There are many other historical nuggets in this book besides the influenza epidemic. As I mentioned before, Charlotte learns about life in British boarding schools in the past, finding the discipline harder and the food not as good (possibly due to war rationing).
Some of her 1918 classmates are suspicious of another classmate, Elsie, whose father is German, and they talk about how their parents think that Germans living in England should be interned in camps to isolate them from the rest of the population because some of them might be spies. Emily asks what kind of information a schoolgirl like Elsie could possibly find to pass on to harm the war effort, and one of the other girls says that if one of them comments about a letter they’ve received from their father, saying that he is with the troops in France, Elsie could pass that to her parents, and they could pass it along to Germany. Emily says that’s silly because everyone knows that there are British troops in various places in France, and even Charlotte knows that all British mail is read and censored during this time. In other words, nobody could say anything specific enough in a letter to their children that would be a risk if little Elsie happened to hear about it. Elsie is also plainly uncomfortable with the other girls’ suspicions. Modern adults would see Elsie for what she is: a little girl, very much like the others, born and raised in England, with little personal connection to the country where her father was born. She’s been caught up in the circumstances of the wider world against her will, suddenly finding herself labeled as an outsider in the only home she’s ever known. As a child, there’s not a lot that Elsie can do about this situation, and one wonders if the adults would do anything to help if they knew about it. This was the level of wartime paranoia, and the children were getting it from their parents. It’s difficult for children to learn to behave calmly and reasonably when the adults in their lives are not doing so themselves.
The war is always present in the lives of the 1918 children. Charlotte is also forced to take part in an air-raid alarm at school. When she and Emily board with the Chisel Brown family, they talk about Arthur, their son who was killed in the war, and at one point, they hold a seance to try to contact him. This is also based on real life. There was a rise in spiritualism and spiritualist practices because of the war, just like there was after the American Civil War. When society has been through something traumatic and lost loved ones, they sometimes turn to practices like this for comfort and the hope of reaching out to the people they’ve lost. When Charlotte and Emily witness the seance, they hear Clare’s voice calling to Emily. The girls are not able to communicate with Clare further than that, and there’s no real explanation for why this happened. It’s before Clare dies in her time, and we never hear from Clare’s perspective at any point in the book.
The family, especially Mr. Chisel Brown, have bitter feelings about the war because of Arthur’s death. The bitter feelings are reflected in the way they speak. At one point in the story, Mr. Chisel Brown says, “Damned peace-talk, damned conchies (conscientious objectors – people who refused to fight for moral reasons), hun-lovers (German sympathizers). Should all be hanged, I say.” This is about the strongest language in the book. The girls’ bedroom at the Chisel Brown house has a rather horrifying anti-German poster in it called “Mark of the German Beast,” and when Mr. Chisel Brown thinks that the girls aren’t behaving themselves, he says that they have “hunnish manners,” using references to Germans as derogatory terms.
Different Editions, Different Endings
Charlotte Sometimes, 1970s Cover This edition of the book has the full ending.
Another reason to explain about the fate of the characters is so I can explain how different editions of this book are different from each other. There are three possible endings to the book, depending on which edition you have. In all versions, the reader learns that Emily is Sarah’s mother, and that is the reason why Sarah singled out Charlotte and guided her to that particular bed at the beginning of the book, because her mother asked her to be nice to Charlotte and to help her, knowing what was going to happen with Charlotte and Clare.
Some of the more modern printings of the story omit sections at the end of the book that were part of the original story in which Charlotte hears from the adult Emily in modern times and where Charlotte heads home for Christmas at the end of the term. Even books that say they are unabridged (including the one that I have from Vintage Classics) sometimes include the letter and package from Emily but omit the part where Charlotte goes home on the bus with the other children, for some reason. I’ve seen all three ending formats, and each time one of these sections is cropped off the end of the book, it changes the tone of the ending and some of the subtle meaning of the story.
In books without the letter from Emily or the bus ride home, the ones with the shortest ending, the story ends with Charlotte finding Clare’s old diary hidden in the bedpost of their bed with her last message to Clare and no reply, and the book simply ends. It’s just kind of a sad reflection that Clare is now gone, and the adventures are over. Charlotte is just left with the memory of what happened with no further reflection on what’s it’s going to mean for her life in the future. I find this ending rather stark and unfulfilling, and I don’t know why this was done to the book.
In the first section of the book that is sometimes omitted, Emily writes a letter to Charlotte and sends her some toys that they were given as children in 1918: a bag of marbles, a solitaire board (the board game played with marbles as pieces), and some toy soldiers. Charlotte puts the marbles in a glass of water on her dresser (like Emily once did in the past because the marbles look bigger and shinier in water), the first personal touch that she’s given to her place in the dorm because she’s really only spent about half her time there, and she reflects on how her experiences as Clare have become part of her personal identity. She compares her experiences as Clare and the impact that it has had on her to the country’s experiences of the war and how it has changed life for all of them, far after the events were over. World War I changed the world and will remain part of history, just as Clare is now a part of Charlotte’s personal history. I thought it nicely summed up Charlotte’s feelings about how aspects of Clare have become part of her own personality, although there is one further point to be made about Charlotte’s future.
In the final section of the book, which is omitted the most often and is apparently only found in the oldest editions of the book, pre-1980s, Charlotte takes the bus home from school at the end of term after getting the letter and package from Emily. Charlotte is looking forward to Christmas, and she and other children chant a variation of the “No more pencils, no more books” rhyme. (Their variant doesn’t actually use that phrase, although it has the same format.) Charlotte reflects that the countryside doesn’t really look any different in modern times than it did in 1918 and remembers that this is Sarah’s last term at school, so she may never see her (and, consequently, may never hear from Emily) again. The ending that ends just after Charlotte receives the letter from Emily and displays the marbles leaves Charlotte considering how Clare and her experiences in 1918 will always be a part of her, but the bus ride ends with her feeling more comfortable that she is truly Charlotte again, even after these experiences, and will be heading back to her family and her life in the present day. She is changed, but she is now sure of who she is, without her earlier quandaries about her own identity.
Each time a little piece is left off the end of the story, it changes the tone of the ending, but I like the full ending that includes the bus ride the best because, while Clare and the past will always be a part of Charlotte, Charlotte has regained her sense of identity as herself. She is a changed person because of her experiences, but she is still her own person, and her life is going to continue in the present, not stuck in the past. I also think that the part with Emily’s letter is important for settling unanswered questions for both Charlotte and the reader about what happened after the time travel ended and Clare died. In older Emily’s letter to Charlotte, she says that she knows that Charlotte is the worrying type, like Clare was, and she wants her to know that there is no reason to worry about her or her younger self because of Clare’s death. Emily reassures Charlotte that, although she was upset at Clare’s death, her life has turned out well. After Clare died, Emily continued attending the school, staying with her aunt on school holidays. Her father rejoined her and her aunt later when he was finally discharged from the army. When she grew up, Emily got married and had four children, even though she had said as a child that she didn’t want children at all. Emily also tells Charlotte that she has decided to keep the doll among the toys they were given for herself because it reminds her of another that her family used to own, which is another change in her attitude. When she was a child, she pointedly preferred the toy soldiers to the doll.
I like the versions that included the letter from Emily because, otherwise, her story seems incomplete. I also liked the idea that Emily got married and had children even after saying that she wouldn’t. When she was young, Emily didn’t like the idea of having children because of the way she and Clare were bounced around to different homes and schools after the death of their mother. Young Emily didn’t think it was fair to have children and then die, leaving them alone and at the mercy of other people, but as adult, we can suppose that Emily came to realize that dying isn’t the expectation of most parents. Her mother’s death wasn’t something that her mother could have anticipated any more than Clare’s was, and people can’t live their lives based solely on what might happen. Presumably, Emily eventually met and fell in love with a nice, stable man who helped to convince her that they could manage to raise a family together. Emily doesn’t describe her husband to Charlotte in her letter or go into detail about what he’s like, but she says that attitudes change as people grow up and her life has been generally happy. Life often takes people in directions that they never predicted when they were young. Some people who want to get married and have children never do, for one reason or another (there is a teacher at the school whose fiance was killed in WWI in 1918, and she is still unmarried in the 1960s, having devoted her life to teaching), and some who never thought that they would do anyway. As long as a person can be satisfied with their life, even if it’s not the one they originally imagined when they were young, they’re doing pretty well. Knowing that Emily is satisfied with her life as it turned out gives the readers as well as Charlotte a sense of completion at the end of the story.
The Vintage Classics copy that I have also had an extra section in the back with a list of the characters in the book (helpful for the time jumps) and additional information about the author and World War I.
Magic or Psychic Phenomenon?
This brings us to the reason why Charlotte and Clare were switching places, another factor that is impossible to discuss without considering Clare’s ultimate fate. The book never gives an exact reason why it all happened in any version of the story, although the characters speculate about and draw a few conclusions. Their speculations appear in all of the books , even the ones with the shorter endings. Charlotte and Clare have some similarities in their names (they share the same initials and the same middle name) and lives (they are of similar age, their mothers are both dead, they each have a younger sister with similar-sounding names, and they just recently started going to the same boarding school in their respective times). They might possibly look alike since most people don’t seem to notice many differences between them. It’s possible that the physical resemblance might be a product of whatever magic or psychic phenomenon is causing them to switch places, but I don’t think so or at least not entirely because they are definitely physically switching places and not just transferring into each other’s bodies. We know that they are physically switching places with each other instead of moving into each other’s bodies because, in the final switch at the end, Charlotte accidentally goes to bed while wearing Clare’s bathrobe, and when she wakes up in her own time, she’s still wearing it, causing her to wonder what people will think in 1918 because Clare’s bathrobe has inexplicably disappeared. (This is not Freaky Friday, which was about a body swap.)
However, Clare and Charlotte never meet face-to-face and apparently never see pictures of each other, so Charlotte is entirely dependent on other people’s descriptions of how much she and Clare look alike. It seems that they look enough alike to fool people who aren’t really paying attention, but the people who know them the best and are the most observant can spot which of them is which, even if they can’t exactly articulate how. In real life, the author of this book was one of a set of twins, so some of this seems to be based on her own experiences with her twin and how one person’s identity can be tied to another. According to a blog the author kept, the school in the story is based on the boarding school that she and her twin sister attended in Kent. She does not identify this school by name, but she provides pictures, including one of the cedar tree on the campus that provided the inspiration for the cedar tree in the book, and the pictures are of The New School at West Heath, the school that Princess Diana also attended as a child but at a later date than the author. The school used to be called West Heath Girls’ School and is now called simply West Heath School (this page contains a virtual tour of the school that also shows the cedar tree by the playground – link repaired May 13, 2022). It now accepts both girls and boys and provides special help for children suffering from emotional disorders, learning difficulties, and other personal problems.
What I suspect is the final key to the switch, aside from their odd similarity, is that Charlotte and Clare also may have been in a similar state of mind at the time the switches began taking place that made them more vulnerable to losing their identities. This is speculation, but in the beginning, Charlotte was feeling out-of-place and not quite herself in her new school, and it’s possible that Clare was in a similar emotional state, putting them even more in sympathy with each other.
One of Charlotte’s 1960s roommates, Elizabeth, learns the truth of the girls switching places and comes to be friends with Clare, helping Clare in the present as Emily was helping Charlotte in the past. At the end of the book, Charlotte and Elizabeth become better friends and discuss what made the time switch possible. They discuss the similarities in Clare and Charlotte’s lives and the common dates when the switching began taking place, drawing a few conclusions about the switching and how it was able to happen. Part of what they conclude has to do with the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, but they also take into account the fact that Clare is dead in their time. Although they don’t use these exact words to describe it, it all seems to revolve around two souls that are kindred spirits, but also the idea that human souls cannot be duplicated or divided.
Personal identity is an important theme in the story. Charlotte often finds herself worrying about losing her identity as she is forced to pretend to be Clare and to keep up the pretense of being something like Clare even when she’s in her own time so that her personality won’t seem to shift too abruptly. She and Clare seem to have some similarities in their personalities, but Emily and Elizabeth, the only two people who ever know about the switching, both say that Charlotte and Clare aren’t exactly alike. When Charlotte worries that she’s losing her own identity, she tries hard to look for ways that she and Clare are different, which is difficult for her because, again, while Charlotte is living Clare’s life, she never actually meets Clare and has to rely on others’ descriptions of her personality. Even Emily and Elizabeth never see Charlotte and Clare side-by-side to compare. Charlotte is pleased whenever Emily comments that something she says or does isn’t exactly what Clare would have said or done in the same situation. Toward the end of the book, Charlotte tries to press Elizabeth more about the differences between herself and Clare, trying to clarify her own personality by what makes her different from Clare. Elizabeth tries to explain it by comparing the two of them to another pair of girls in their dorm at school. Those two girls are best friends and often like the same things and do similar things, but they are still very distinct people, like Charlotte and Clare are. It’s not an explicit answer, but it does show that Elizabeth can recognize Charlotte and Clare as different people, independent of each other, in spite of what happened and even though others didn’t notice the differences between them. Yet, the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, and perhaps their similar states of mind, seem to be central factors that allowed them to switch places with each other. Two very similar girls in sympathetic states of mind, happened to be occupying the same physical space (the bed at school) at the same time of year (the beginning of the school year), just years apart.
There is also the matter of Clare’s early death. Both Charlotte and Elizabeth are sad when they learn that Clare died back in 1918, but Elizabeth reasons it out, saying that it makes sense that Clare died and that Emily was Sarah’s mother all along. As Elizabeth explains, Charlotte couldn’t have remained in 1918 and grown up there to become Sarah’s mother (as Charlotte feared might be the truth) because, by the time she was an adult, she would also have been born into their time as Charlotte, and there would have been two Charlottes alive at the same time. If Clare had lived to adulthood and become a mother, there would also be two Clares alive at the same time when the girls started switching places. Both of those situations would have been a logical impossibility because no single person can be two different ages, child and adult, in the same period of time. Even if they were in two different bodies, it would be the same soul because it would be the same person, and there could not be duplicates of a unique, individual soul or personality.
I like it that the book takes the fascinating premise that, even if human souls can swap places with each other or be accidentally confused for one another, they are still unique, individual, and whole, separate from each other, indivisible, and impossible to duplicate. As Elizabeth puts it, Clare was the only one who even could have made the journey through time to swap with Charlotte (or anyone else occupying that bed) because there was no living Clare in the 1960s to create a paradox, just as there was no Charlotte in past because she hadn’t been born yet. If Clare was not already fated to die young, the time journey would have been completely impossible. This is also the reason why nobody else switched places while sleeping in that particular bed. Not only did they not happen to have a similar counterpart occupying the same space at a different point in time, as Clare and Charlotte did, but everyone else who slept in that bed survived and was present in both the past and the future. Elizabeth says that it’s like Clare was a kind of ghost, although she was very solid and alive throughout the switching and her death from influenza took place after it was over. The idea bothers Charlotte because that would have made her a kind of ghost when she traveled back in time, too. Is it possible for someone to be a ghost before they’ve died?
There is no complete answer to that. Part of what makes the book fascinating is the possibilities it raises and allows the reader to consider. There are no magic spells in the book. There is a seance scene, as I mentioned in the section about WWI information, during which Emily and Charlotte hear Clare’s voice instead of the young soldier killed in the war that the family was attempting to contact. However, the main phenomenon of the story doesn’t seem to rely on magic so much as some kind of psychic phenomena – kindred spirits who happened to be sharing a particular space and ended up sharing each other’s lives across time.
Heather has lived her entire life (as far as she can remember) in Scotland with her grandmother and her uncle, Donald. Donald has raised her since she was small. He’s been like a father to her, and she loves him like a daughter. However, he recently decided to move the two of them to the United States, taking them to a small town in Wisconsin. Heather can’t understand the reason for the move, and for the first time in her life, it seems like Donald is keeping secrets from her.
Donald seems oddly concerned that Heather shouldn’t tell people that she is adopted, something that he’s never seemed concerned about before. Heather has asked him about her parents before, but all he can tell her is that his wayward brother Ewen brought her to the family farm in Scotland, saying that she was his daughter and that her mother was dead. Ewen simply left her with Donald, never trying to see her or talk to her again and never sending her any money. Heather also knows that, although says that he’s going out to search for a new job, he’s been hanging out in other places, spending time with the mysterious Mr. Worley.
Heather makes friends with a boy named Gus who lives nearby. Gus lets her ride one of the horses that his family owns, Cloud, and invites her to go riding with him sometimes and participate in local riding events called “shodeos.” Heather loves horses and enjoys their rides together.
On one of these rides, the two of them go near a large, old, stone mansion that gives Heather a strange feeling. Gus’s family tells her the tragic story of the family who used to live there, the Selkirks. They were wealthy, but young John Selkirk was killed in an accident the day that his beautiful young wife, Molly, gave birth to their only child, a little girl named Hebron. John’s parents never recovered from the loss of their son and passed away soon after, leaving just Molly and the baby. However, when Hebron was only three years old, she was apparently abducted for ransom and later murdered, and her mother died soon after. The story makes Heather uneasy, and the house gives her a strange feeling, like she’s drawn to it.
However, other sinister things start happening. Someone in a car that looks disturbingly like Donald’s tries to run her and Cloud off a bridge. When Donald spends the night away from home “on business”, someone sneaks into the house. Heather begins to realize that someone is out to get her, some mysterious person means her harm. Memories, dangerous ones, are beginning to surface in Heather’s mind, and someone is determined to try to keep her from remembering.
Part of the mystery is pretty obvious (at least, I thought it was, and you might guess it from my plot description), but the part that I didn’t guess was who was behind it all.
Edward the Emu by Sheena Knowles, illustrated by Rod Clement, 1988.
Edward the Emu lives in a zoo, but he finds it boring. He is so bored that he decides to try living with and acting like the other animals.
First, he envies the seals who live in the pen next to his and always seem to be swimming and having fun. So, one night, he jumps out of his pen to join the seals. The next day, he hangs out with the seals, lying in the sun and balancing a ball on his nose. It’s much more fun than his boring old pen, but then he overhears a zoo visitor say that the lions are “the best thing to see at the zoo.”
Edward once again switches pens, deciding that he’ll try to be a lion. He spends the next day growling and snarling while the lions roar. It’s a lot of fun, but then another visitor comments that he likes snakes the best.
Once again, Edward switches pens and tries being a snake. This time, someone comments about great emus are. Feeling better about himself, Edward decides to return to his own pen.
However, to Edward’s surprise, there is another emu in his pen, his replacement because he disappeared! It’s not a problem, though, because the new emu, Edwina, is glad to see him, and Edward is less likely to be bored now that he has a friend.
A friend sent me this cute picture book from Australia. The story is told in rhyme, and the pictures of Edward trying to be different types of animals are fun.
The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo by Judy Blume, 1981.
Freddy Dissel hates being the middle child in his family. Before his younger sister, Ellen, was born, he had his own room. Now, he has to share with his older brother, Mike. Mike gets new clothes, while Freddy has to wear Mike’s hand-me-downs. Mike and his friends won’t play with Freddy because he’s too little to play their games, and Freddy can’t play with Ellen because she’s too little for him. Freddy hates always being caught in the middle with nothing special to distinguish him from his siblings.
Then, Freddy finds out that there’s going to be a play at his school. Seeing it as his chance to do something special that his siblings haven’t done, he asks his teacher if he can be in it. At first, she tells him that the only kids in the play are older kids, around his brother’s age, but seeing his disappointment, she says that she’ll talk to the teacher in charge of the play, Ms. Matson, and see if there’s a part for him.
When Freddy gets his chance to try out for a part, he demonstrates to Ms. Matson that he can speak up loud and isn’t afraid to hop around on stage in front of everyone. He’s thrilled when she gives him the part of the green kangaroo. Now, his family and everyone else can see him do something that his brother and sister don’t get to do!
Even though he does get a little stage fright right before the performance, working through it and playing his role as the green kangaroo gives Freddy new confidence. From then on, he’s not just Freddy the middle child but Freddy, the one and only green kangaroo!
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 