Posted on by TracyC

Aqua Volume 1

Aqua Volume 1 by Kozue Amano, 2003, English Edition 2007.

I debated at first about whether or not I wanted to include any Japanese manga or light novels in this blog. When I was in high school and college, I knew a lot of people who were really into anime and manga, and I know that there are teens who still are, and my overview of children’s literature in different decades wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention that. However, the variety is pretty extensive, some of the series run very long, and it’s impossible to just skip around in some series because the story-telling is very linear, and I didn’t want them to take over the blog. Also, I tend to like the less popular ones, so I’d be bound to get some grumbling from manga fans about why I chose these when there are so many others that are more exciting or more iconic. Notice that I didn’t say “better.” “Better” is subjective, and I like what I like. I decided to go ahead and make an exception in this case because this is one of my favorite manga series and because I think this is something that people could really use right now. The stories are very calming, and they’re good to read during stressful times.

This book is the first volume of a series. I don’t have them all because they haven’t all been published in English yet, but know how it ends, and it’s a really good series with a happy ending. If you’re not familiar with manga, they’re basically graphic novels from Japan. I can’t read Japanese, so I rely on the English translations. However, manga like this typically follow the Japanese format of reading from right to left instead of left to right, like in English, so the books open and the pages flow in the opposite direction. When you look at the panels on a page, remember to look at them in right to left order.

The Aqua and Aria series is unusual because it combines elements of science fiction and fantasy, but most of the stories themselves aren’t really either science fiction or fantasy. That’s just the setting for the stories. The stories themselves are more slice-of-life, about daily events or small adventures in the lives of the characters and sometimes lessons they learn from them. There is a lot of emphasis on slowing down and enjoying the simple pleasures in life.

The series takes place in the future, when Mars has been terraformed and renamed Aqua (because of all the water on its surface). The human colonies on Aqua are designed to resemble cities on Earth (called Manhome here). The people of Aqua prefer a much slower pace of life than people on Manhome, and aspects of life on Aqua more closely resemble Earth’s past.

A young girl, Akari Mizunashi, comes to Aqua to learn to become a gondolier in the city of Neo Venezia, which resembles Venice. Female gondoliers, called Undines, give tours of the city, giving Akari plenty of time to admire the beauty of her new home and meet interesting people.

There are two parts to this series, called Aqua and Aria. The two Aqua books are the prequel to the main series, Aria. Aqua is only two volumes long, and it covers Akari’s arrival on the planet, her introduction to life on Aqua, and the people who will be her friends. In the Aria books, Akari progresses in her training as an Undine. All of the books in both series contain several short stories.

This book, the first one in the Aqua series, focuses on Akari’s arrival on Aqua and her friendship with Aika, the first fellow Undine trainee she meets.

The stories included in this first volume are:

The Water Planet

The series begins with Akari Mizunashi on the shuttle carrying her from Manhome to Aqua. She is typing a message to someone on her computer, but there is nothing to indicate who she is writing to. This is a running theme throughout the series, but the identity of Akari’s pen pal isn’t revealed until the very end of the series, and it wouldn’t make sense if I told you who it is right now. Akari explains a little about the history of Mars/Aqua, and how the melting of Mars’s polar ice caps during the terraforming of Mars 150 years earlier has turned it into a water planet, earning it the name Aqua. Currently, the year is 2301.

One of the nice things about the Aqua/Aria series is the imagery. As Akari’s shuttle arrives at Mars/Aqua, the walls of the shuttle turn transparent, so the travelers can feel like they’re flying in with the seagulls.

On Earth/Manhome, Akari lived in Tokyo, Japan. The modern cities of Manhome are very tidy and convenient, with people able to work and shop from home. Still, Akari has felt like something is missing from her life in all the convenience and tidiness. In Neo Venezia on Aqua, people rely on boats constantly to help them get around town, which is inconvenient, but Akari finds it calming and peaceful, which is why she wants to become an Undine, one of the female gondoliers who act as tour guides and help travelers to navigate Neo Venezia. Overall, life on Aqua and in Neo Venezia has a much slower pace than that on Manhome.

Akari arrives on Aqua and meets a friendly mailman and the only two employees of the gondola company she will work for: her mentor, Alicia, and the company’s president, a Martian cat named Aria. All gondola companies on Aqua have a Martian cat as their mascot/president. Alicia explains that Martian cats are as intelligent as humans, even though they can’t talk, but in many ways, President Aria still acts like a very large kitty.

The Guide on the Water

Akari wakes up on her first morning at the gondola company Aria, and she meets Aika, who is a trainee at Himeya, another gondola company. She catches sight of Aika hanging around, watching Alicia, and Aika witnesses Akari’s first time practicing in a gondola under Alicia’s watch.

Akari is embarrassed to learn that when she practiced rowing on Manhome, she was doing it backwards, standing in the front of the boat, which would block the view of her passengers. Because Akari practiced the wrong way on Manhome, she can row very fast the wrong way, but is clumsier when she tries to row the correct way.

However, Aika tells Akari that Alicia is the best of the Undines, and Akari is reassured that under Alicia’s guidance, she will do better. Aika hero-worships Alicia (for reasons that are explained further in later books), and she agrees to become Akari’s friend partly so that she can see more of Alicia. Aika and Akari become best friends through the course of the books, sharing their training and adventures.

The City Submerged

Akari wakes up one morning and is shocked to find that the lower floor of Aria company has flooded, but Alicia explains to her that this is a natural phenomenon in Neo Venezia in Spring.

Much of the city is flooded during this high tide, causing many of the businesses in town to close temporarily and making it unsafe to go out in gondolas. However, when President Aria needs more of his favorite food, Akari decides to venture into the city on foot.

On the way home, Akari and Aria are stranded when it starts to rain and travel become more dangerous, but Aika sees them and invites them to spend the night at Himeya Company with her. Himeya Company is a much larger gondola company than Aria Company, with many more employees living there.

Aika and Akari have a sleepover in Aika’s room, and Aika asks Akari who she’s always writing to, but Akari tells her that it’s a secret. When the rain stops, Akari admires the view of the water by moonlight. (There are two moons in the sky because this is Mars.)

The Kingdom of Cats

President Aria sometimes ventures off alone, and Alicia tells Akari the story of Cait Sith and the mythical kingdom of cats.

When Akari and Aika practice their rowing together, Akari convinces Aika to help her follow President Aira to see if there’s any truth to Alicia’s story perhaps get a look at the kitty kingdom ruled by the legendary king of the cats, Cait Sith.

However, the trip is stranger than they bargained for. The girls find themselves on a strange waterway through apparently abandoned buildings, going around in circles until President Aria points the way out. Akari only gets a glimpse of the cats before they leave.

The Hill of Hope

Aika shows up at Aria company one morning to brag about how she has been promoted to single (the next step up in gondola training, as shown by the gloves that the girls wear – as the trainee Undines learn the techniques to row their boats more skillfully, they get fewer callouses and need their gloves less, removing them one at a time as they are promoted to new levels).

Akari tries to ask Aika what the promotion test is like, but Aika refuses to tell her. The Undines traditionally keep the test a secret from their trainees until they pass the test. When Alicia hears about Aika’s promotion, she decides to take Akari on a special picnic, giving her the opportunity to prove her skills and introducing her to the concept of aquatic elevators, or canal locks. There is a special surprise for Akari at the end of the journey.

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Samantha Learns a Lesson

American Girls

Samantha Learns a Lesson by Susan S. Adler, 1986.

This is part of the Samantha, An American Girl series.

Samantha attends Miss Crampton’s Academy for Girls in Mount Bedford. She is doing well and has some friends at school, but she misses her friend Nellie. She knows how poor Nellie’s family is and worries about how they are doing.

One day, Samantha comes home from school to a surprise: Nellie has returned to town with her family. Samantha’s grandmother recommended Nellie’s family to a friend, Mrs. Van Sicklen, who has hired Nellie’s father as a driver and Nellie’s mother as a maid. Nellie and her sisters will also be helping with household chores. They will also get the chance to go to school, although they will be attending public school and not the private school that Samantha attends.

When they begin attending school, Nellie’s younger sisters do fine in the first grade, where they are expected to be beginners, but Nellie herself has trouble in the second grade. Nellie is a little old for second grade, so the other children make fun of her for being there, and she is so nervous that she makes embarrassing mistakes in front of her teacher and the other students. Nellie thinks that perhaps she’s too old to start going to school, but Samantha realizes that what she needs is a little extra help.

Samantha talks to her own teacher and explains the situation. She says that she would like to help teach Nellie what she needs to know, but she is not sure what Nellie needs to know in order to pass the second grade. Samantha’s teacher, Miss Stevens, thinks that it is nice that Samantha wants to help Nellie and gives her a set of second grade readers to study with pages marked for assignments. Samantha tells her grandmother what she is planning to do, and she says that it is fine, as long as the extra tutoring doesn’t interfere with Nellie’s house work too much.

Nellie accepts Samantha’s help at their secret, private “school” that Samantha calls “Mount Better School.” During their lessons, Samantha discovers that Nellie is very good at math because she used to have to help her mother with shopping and had to keep track of her money. Nellie cannot always come for lessons because of her work, but Samantha’s tutoring helps her to improve.

One day, when Samantha is walking home from school with Nellie and her sisters, a mean girl from Samantha’s school, Edith, sees them and criticizes Samantha for spending time with servants. She says that her mother would never allow her to play with servants. Samantha asks her grandmother what Edith means, and her grandmother says that Edith is a young lady. When Samantha asks why she is allowed to play with Nellie, her grandmother says that they are not really playing, that Samantha is helping Nellie, which makes it different. That explanation doesn’t entirely satisfy Samantha.

However, her grandmother is both understanding of the help that Samantha has been giving to Nellie and serious about the need to help others. When Edith’s mother and other ladies of the neighborhood come to visit and complain about Nellie’s family and how Samantha is spending time with them, Samantha’s grandmother defends them and says that Samantha is doing good.

Meanwhile, Samantha’s school is preparing for a public speaking contest with the theme “Progress in America.” To prepare for her speech, Samantha asks her grandmother, her Uncle Gard, and other people what they think about progress and what the best inventions are. They mention inventions like the telephone, electric lights, automobiles, and factories. Samantha is fascinated by the idea of factories and the variety of products that they can make. However, when Samantha reads her speech to Nellie, Nellie is not nearly so enthusiastic about factories as a sign of progress. Nellie used to work in a factory herself, and she knows that they are not pleasant places. She tells Samantha how factories are noisy and how dangerous the machines are for the workers. The factory workers are also very poorly paid, which is why the products they make are so cheap.

Nellie’s stories about factories bother Samantha. When it is time for the public speaking contest, Samantha delivers a changed version of her speech in which she discusses the dangers of child labor and how some form of progress, particularly ones that endanger children, are not good forms of progress. Samantha’s thoughtful speech wins the contest, and her grandmother understands that Samantha has been learning things from Nellie even while teaching her.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about education and child labor during the early 1900s.

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

Posted on by TracyC

A Fence Too High

The Land of Pleasant Dreams

A Fence Too High by Jeanine Bartelt, Jeff Parker, and Tony Salerno, 1986.

Peter falls asleep while counting sheet jumping over the fence and meets Lacey the Lamb in his dream. Lacey the Lamb is sad and worried because, even though she’s growing up to be a fence-jumping sheep, there is one fence that she just can’t get over. Peter offers to take a look at the fence with her and see if he can help. When he does, it turns out to be a giant rainbow.

It’s important that Lacey make it over this fence because she is taking part in a fence-jumping contest in less than an hour. Lacey doesn’t think that she can learn to jump this fence in so little time. However, Peter encourages Lacey to try again.

After a few more tries in which she hits the blue stripe on the rainbow and then the yellow stripe and then the orange stripe, Lacey is ready to give up. She thinks that it’s hopeless. Peter points out that it isn’t hopeless because each time that Lacey has tried, she has improved, gradually hitting higher and higher marks on the rainbow. He doesn’t think that Lacey should give up so easily.

Even though she’s still feeling very unsure of herself, she decides to participate in the contest. This time, Lacey does make it over the fence, and she feels much better about herself because of her success. She thanks Peter for giving her the encouragement to try one more time.

Moral: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.

It’s a nice story about the importance of making an effort, trying again, and not giving up just because there are obstacles and challenges. Life has many challenges, and just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it’s impossible or not worth doing. People don’t need to be perfect; it’s enough to be willing to improve.

This book was made into an episode for the tv show version of the series with puppets.

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The Little Indian Pottery Maker

PotteryMaker

The Little Indian Pottery Maker by Ann Nolan Clark and illustrated by Don Perceval, 1955.

By “Indian,” the author means Native American.  This book specifically focuses on the Pueblo Indians who live in the Southwestern United States, specifically New Mexico and Arizona.  The story is about a young girl who is starting to learn the traditional art of pottery-making, and the book goes into the process involved in making pottery, step by step.   Although the use of “Indian” instead of Native American is somewhat anitquated, the book has something of an interesting history and the picture it provides of the practice of traditional crafts is fascinating. The beginning of the book explains a little about Pueblo Indians, their history, and where they live.

PotteryMakerGettingClay

The young girl tells the story of how her mother introduces her to the traditional craft of making pottery and teaches her how to make her first pot.  She describes every step in the process, from when they collect the clay themselves from a hillside until the pot is finally complete.

PotteryMakerMixingClay

The girl’s mother explains about the different methods used to make pots, and pictures show how pots are shaped.

PotteryMakerRollingClay
PotteryMakerMakingPots

Making pottery is a long process that takes days to complete, including shaping, scraping and smoothing the sides, drying, decorating, and finally firing the pottery.  The girl is proud of the first pot she has ever made.

PotteryMakerFiringPots

I found this book at a thrift store a number of years ago and recognized it because I already owned a related book, The Little Indian Basket Maker, that I liked when I was a young child.  I hadn’t realized then just how old the books were and that there were more of them by the same author.

The book, which was written in the mid-1950s, was one of a group of stories (not exactly a series because they didn’t have a specific set of characters in common and the themes varied somewhat) written by a woman who was a teacher with the United States Indian Service.  The other books that she wrote, including The Little Indian Basket Maker, focus on members of different Native American tribes.  She was not Native American herself, and the modern view of Indian schools is not favorable (for good reasons), so one might be a little suspicious of a book written about Native Americans by an Indian school teacher. However, these books interest me because of their explanation of traditional crafts. There are no white people in the stories at all, and they have a timeless quality to them.  Reading them, it’s hard to get a sense of exactly when the stories take place because it’s never mentioned, and there aren’t many clues (no mentions of modern technology, it’s all about the crafts).  I haven’t found any of the other books that the author wrote, but these two are very respectful in their tone, and they begin with explanations of the history of the tribes involved in the stories.  According to Andie Peterson in A Second Look: Native Americans in Children’s Books, the author was deliberately trying to write books that her Native American students could relate to.

The art style of the books vary because they had different illustrators.  The illustrator for this particular book was not Native American (unlike some of the illustrators of other books), but he was adopted into a Hopi tribe, apparently as an adult because of his accomplishments in representing Hopi culture in art.

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The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room

The Kids of the Polk Street School

BeastMsRooney#1 The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1984.

It’s the start of a new school year, and Richard Best (nicknamed “Beast”) is embarrassed to find himself in Ms. Rooney’s room once again because he was held back a year for his poor reading skills.  Everyone he knows has moved on to the third grade, and he’s still in a second grade class with kids who were first grade babies last year.  He feels awkward, being the tallest, oldest person in class, and kids in his old class tease him and refuse to let him play baseball on the playground with them because he’s a pathetic “left-back.”

At first, Beast tries to pretend that it was all a horrible mistake that will be straightened out soon, but that just makes him feel bad for lying.  The kids who are now in the same class he is, who he still thinks of as “babies,” try to make friends with him, but he doesn’t accept them at first because of his embarrassment at being older and still not as good at reading as some of them are.

BeastMsRooneyPic1However, even though he’s embarrassed at having to attend special reading classes with Mrs. Paris while most of the rest of his class has normal reading, these special classes really help him, not just to improve his reading skills, but to connect with other kids in his new class who have the same reading difficulties he does and who understand how he feels.

Beast discovers that it’s no shame to not know something or to have trouble doing something because everyone has different skills and it can take some people longer to learn certain things than others.  Emily Arrow, the girl who now sits next to him in class is a whiz at math but has as much trouble reading as he does.  Beast learns some new skills from his new, younger classmates and realizes that they’re not really babies.  They also really appreciate him and help him see some of the good things about himself.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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Going to School in 1776

School1776Going to School in 1776 by John J. Loeper, 1973.

“The grass is green,
The rose is red,
Remember me
When I am dead.
Ruth Widmer”

This is a non-fiction book about what it was like for children to go to school around the time of the American Revolution.  The quote that begins the book, a short poem, was written by a real girl from 1776 in her copybook.  The book’s introduction says that it was included to remind readers that, “History is not just facts.  History is people.”  Part of the purpose of the book is to remind people about the lives of ordinary people, of real children, making history come alive in a way that mere recitation of important names and battle dates never can.

The book explains some basic facts about the Americas in 1776 and what led up to the Revolutionary War.  Then, it begins discussing what it was like to be a child at the time in different parts of the American Colonies.  The colonies were largely rural and even major cities were not the size that they are today.  However, there were differences in the ways families lived and the type of education the children received, depending upon where they lived and if they lived in towns or in the countryside.

School1776Pic1These explanations are told in story form, rather than simply explaining listing the ways children could live, learn, and go to school, trying to help readers see their lives through the eyes of the children themselves.  The children’s lives are affected by the war around them.  As the book says, many town schools in New England were closed during the war, so the students would attend “dame schools” instead.  A dame school was a series of lessons taught in private homes by older women in the community.  In other places, such as cities like Philadelphia, official schools were still open.  Discipline was often strict, and school hours could be much longer than those in modern schools.  Sometimes, children would argue with each other over their parents’ positions on the war.

Some schools were similar to modern public schools, open to all children of a certain area and operated by the town fathers.  Others were church schools and included religious lessons.  Families with money were more likely to send their children to school than poorer families, who could not always afford tuition, although public schools would not always charge the students an extra tuition fee because the schools were funded with local taxes.  These systems varied throughout the colonies, and poor children in the South were less likely to be formally educated.  Wealthy plantation owners would open schools for the upper class children, and lower class children might receive lessons in “field schools.”  The field schools were just occasional, informal lessons given to the children in the fields by any adult who happened to be interested in the task.

Teaching in schools was not easy.  Sometimes, teachers were itinerant, moving from one school to another and finding work in agricultural areas between the growing seasons, when children would be free from chores to attend school.  Some teachers were even indentured servants, forced to remain in the employ of a person to whom they were indebted, often because that person paid for their passage from Europe to the Colonies.

School1776Pic2There were different standards for what girls and boys were expected to learn because their learning was guided by what they were each expected to do with their adult lives.  A typical school might teach boys subjects like, “writing, arithmetick [sic], accounting, navigation, algebra, and Latine.”  Generally, “reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion” were common elementary school subjects.  Latin lessons and other advanced subjects were typically for boys who planned to become lawyers or clergymen.  Girls were likely to receive little formal education beyond reading and writing, and black people were less likely to receive even that.

Of course, not every child went to school.  There were other ways for children to learn, depending on what they expected to do with their lives.  Apprenticeships were common.  Boys would go to live in the house of a person with a particular profession and learn that profession from the master.  Aside from basic training for a profession, the master would provide room, board, basic necessities such as clothing, and training in the “three Rs”, which were “reading, ‘riting, and reckoning.”  In return, the apprentice would provide his master with his labor for a period of time.

Girls could also serve apprenticeships, although theirs were more focused on the domestic arts because most of them were expected to marry, and they often married young, about the age of sixteen.  Beyond reading and writing, girls would also learn practical skills such as various kinds of needlework and also music and dancing.  The book describes in some detail the various types of needlework a girl could learn and the materials they used.  Typically, girls would create a “sampler” to show off all the stitches they’d learned, kind of like an apprentice’s master piece or a certificate of completion done in cloth.  Unlike modern “samplers”, these would not be just cross-stitch alone because the idea was for the girl to demonstrate her skill and versatility, and using only one stitch would not impress anyone.  Commonly, the sampler would include the alphabet and the numbers one through ten, which would all be done in cross-stitch (which was the basic embroidery stitch), but there would also be an inspirational quote, message or Bible verse, the girl’s name and the date of the sampler’s completion, and other decorative embellishments, which would be done in other stitches such as tent stitch, eyelet stitch, chain stitch, and French knot.  There could be as many as twenty different types of stitches in a single sampler, depending on the girl’s skill and what she had learned.  Girls hoped to do at least as well as their mothers in terms of the number of stitches they knew and skill in execution.

There are also sections in the book which describe the lessons that children learned, the types of school books they used, discipline in the classroom, ways children liked to have fun, and types of clothing that children wore in 1776.

This book is currently available through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Totally Useless Skills

uselessskills

Totally Useless Skills by Rick Davis, 1994.

The name of this book is intentionally deceptive, but only partly.  What I mean by that is that the little tricks and stunts in the book may not have much of a practical application except for just having fun and amusing your friends, but the techniques for learning them can be applied to learning just about anything.

This book describes how to do fun tricks that don’t require any special equipment and are mostly based upon knowing things work, like the blind spot in the human eye (such as using the blind spot in your eye to make it look like your teacher’s head has vanished) and where your center of balance is (used in the trick showing how a girl can pick up a chair when a boy can’t). The tricks include making it look like your arms are lengthening or shrinking, making it look like you’ve broken your nose, how to hang a spoon from your nose, how to jump through a single sheet of paper, how to make a pencil float, how to make your leg disappear, and how to pronounce the longest word in the English language.

uselessskillspic1

Kids will enjoy learning these little tricks to entertain their friends. However, the book also contains useful tips for learning these skills that can be used to learn anything you want to learn. The author emphasizes the importance of trying new things, practicing what you’ve learned, going slowly and dividing big tasks into smaller ones when trying to master something difficult, and making tasks interesting so they will be easier to learn. Aside from the fun of learning these little tricks, the book’s main purpose seems to be helping kids to develop self-confidence and new learning skills.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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