Posted on by TracyC

The Little House Cookbook

The Little House Cookbook by Barbara M. Walker, illustrated by Garth Williams, 1979.

This children’s cookbook is based on the foods eaten in the Little House on the Prairie series. The series follows a farm family, and food is very important in the stories. I like the book because it provides historical explanations about the types foods that frontier families would eat. The illustrations in the books come from the original books.

The chapters in the book are:

Food in the Little Houses

The first chapter of the book explains about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family and how much of their time on the frontier was occupied with finding and producing food. The foods that they ate were ones they grew and hunted themselves. They had to prepare everything from scratch, and even the children in the family helped. When they had difficult times, there was often little to eat.

The chapter also discusses the nutrition of a pioneer diet. They didn’t understand much about the science behind vitamins and nutrition, but because their lives were based around hard physical labor, they were able to tolerate diets that were heavier in starches and sweets than most modern people would have.

It also describes how celebrations and social occasions centered around food.

The Cook’s Domain

This chapter discusses what pioneer and farming families had in their kitchens and how they would cook and store food.

Staples from the Country Store

Although pioneers tried to be as self-sufficient as they could, nobody could ever make absolutely everything they needed. Country stores supplied a variety of good, especially the things that farmers couldn’t make by themselves, like farm tools, cooking pots, sewing supplies, guns, and some food staples that wouldn’t be produced by farms in the area or that required processing, like molasses and cornmeal. Country stores also allowed farmers to buy on credit or trade produce and other goods they had for ones they needed because they didn’t always have cash on hand.

The first two chapters were just informational, but this is the chapter where recipes start appear. Each of the recipes is accompanied by a quote from one of the Little House books where the dish is mentioned and some historical information. The recipes in this chapter are:

  • Fried salt pork with gravy
  • Hasty pudding
  • Fried cornmeal mush (a dish my grandmother said she ate growing up on a farm in Indiana in the 1920s and 1930s)
  • Johnny-cake
  • Corn dodgers
  • Cornbread
  • Crackling cornbread
  • Baked beans
  • Bean soup
  • Bean porridge
  • Oyster soup
  • Codfish balls

Foods from the Woods, Wilds, and Water

Pioneer families relied heavily on animals they could hunt and plants they could forage for food, like berries. This chapter discusses how they would process and prepare animals they hunted and what they could make with foods found in the wild. Personally, I have no interest in hunting, but the historical information is interesting. The recipes in this chapter are:

  • Stewed jack rabbit and dumplings
  • Spit-roasted wild duck
  • Blackbird pie
  • Fried fish
  • Roasted wild turkey with cornbread stuffing
  • Cranberry jelly
  • Blueberry pudding with a sauce
  • Huckleberry pie
  • Sun-dried wild fruit
  • Stewed dried fruit
  • Crab-apple jelly
  • Plum preserves
  • Husk-tomato preserves
  • Strawberry jam

Foods from Tilled Fields

This chapter discusses the crops farms produced, particularly wheat. There are recipes for different types of bread, biscuits, dumplings, crackers, doughnuts, and pancakes. There’s also a recipe for hardtack, which was a staple food for people going on long journeys because is wasn’t as perishable as other foods.

Foods from Gardens and Orchards

This chapter is about the types of fruits and vegetables that a family like the Ingalls would grow. It explains that these vegetables have changed over time because farmers developed new varieties of familiar foods, like potatoes. The flavors of these newer varieties aren’t quite the same as the old ones, but the newer varieties produce more food and are more resistant to disease.

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Mashed potatoes
  • Potato cakes
  • Fried potatoes
  • Hashed brown potatoes
  • Creamed carrots
  • Dried corn and creamed corn
  • Fried parsnips
  • Succotash – a dish of mixed vegetables with lima beans and corn
  • Lettuce leaves with vinegar and sugar
  • Ripe tomatoes with sugar and cream
  • Baked Hubbard squash
  • Raw turnip snacks
  • Mashed turnips
  • Stewed pumpkin
  • Pumpkin pie
  • Green pumpkin pie – It uses an unripened pumpkin, and it tastes a lot like an apple pie.
  • Apple turnovers
  • Apple pie
  • Birds’ Nest pudding – an apple dessert
  • Fried apples ‘n’ onions
  • Dried apples
  • Dried apple and raisin pie
  • Apple-core vinegar
  • Tomato preserves
  • Beet pickles
  • Green cucumber pickles
  • Green tomato pickles

Foods from the Barnyard

This chapter is about the types of animals kept on a farm as sources of meat, dairy, eggs, and fat.

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Lard and cracklings
  • Baked spareribs
  • Homemade sausage
  • Roasted pig
  • Mincemeat
  • Poached fresh eggs
  • Fried chicken
  • Chicken pie
  • Stuffed roasted hen
  • Roasted stuffed goose
  • Butter
  • Cottage cheese balls
  • Hard cheese
  • Pot roast of ox with browned flour gravy

Thirst Quenchers and Treats

This chapter covers special treats that farming families would have made or been able to buy at the general store. It explains the history and evolution of penny candies and other store-bought treats.

The recipes included in the chapter are:

  • Eggnog
  • Ginger water
  • Cambric tea
  • Lemonade
  • Pulled candy
  • Molasses-on-Snow candy
  • Vinegar pie
  • Custard pie
  • Heart-shaped cakes
  • Vanity cakes
  • Pound cake
  • Laura’s wedding cake
  • Sugar frosting
  • Ice cream
  • Parched corn
  • Popcorn
  • Popcorn balls
  • Popcorn and milk

There is a glossary in the back and a table of conversions.

One more thing I want to note is that the book refers to Native Americans as “Indians”, which is common in older books. There isn’t much information about Native Americans in the book because the focus is on pioneer farming families, but they are mentioned occasionally when there’s historical information about the origin and evolution of certain types of foods.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Inside the Secret Garden

Inside the Secret Garden by Carolyn Strom Collins and Christina Wyss Eriksson with illustrations by Tasha Tudor and Mary Collier, 2001.

This is a how-to book with activities, crafts, and recipes that fit the themes in the classic children’s book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The book has some of the classic illustrations from The Secret Garden by Tasha Tudor, and there are also illustrations by Mary Collier.

The book begins with an explanation of the story of The Secret Garden and the life of Frances Hodgson Burnett. In the description of the author’s life, the book discusses some of the places where she lived and people she knew who provided inspiration for aspects of the story of The Secret Garden. There is also a timeline of world events during the author’s lifetime.

The second chapter describes the setting of the story with descriptions of Misselthwaite Manor and its gardens. It explains how a large manor house like Misselthwaite would function and the types of staff and servants it would have. It also explains the types of gardens and plants that would have been grown in the kitchen gardens of English manors and cottages.

The third chapter in the book has recipes and menus based on the foods the characters eat during the story. Food is important in The Secret Garden because Mary and Colin didn’t have appetites when they were unhealthy, but after their time working in the garden and getting fresh air and exercise, their appetites improved. The recipes in the book are based on things the characters eat during the story.

The recipes in the book include:

  • A pot of tea
  • Porridge (oatmeal)
  • Treacle (They use molasses with corn syrup and honey to make it.)
  • Orange marmalade
  • Homemade bread
  • Snow-white eggs (soft boiled)
  • Raspberry jam
  • Clotted cream
  • Muffins
  • Ham
  • Oatcakes
  • Doughcakes
  • Apple Crumble
  • Crumpets
  • Robin cake
  • Roasted eggs (The instructions call for cooking them in an outdoor stone oven, like they did in the book, but it also discusses how to make an indoor version.)
  • Roasted potatoes (The instructions call for cooking them in an outdoor stone oven, but it also discusses how to make an indoor version in a standard oven.)
  • Currant buns

A book of activities based on The Secret Garden wouldn’t be complete without gardening activities! The fourth chapter has suggestions for creating your own garden. The gardening tips and suggestions are based on the plants the characters used in The Secret Garden. I’m not sure all of them would grow well in every climate, and planting seasons can vary by region.

The gardening activities include:

  • Planting a spring bulb garden
  • Planting a rose in a flowerpot
  • Making an indoor “secret garden” with potted plants in a tray or pa

The fifth chapter has a selection of crafts and activities related gardening. They include things you can make to use in your garden and things you can make our of plants from the garden, including:

  • A twig tool holder
  • Plant labels (little signs for labeling plants in your garden)
  • Moss-covered flower urns
  • Key wind chimes
  • A planter in a watering can
  • A twig trellis
  • Pressed flowers and a pressed flower scrapbook
  • A bouquet of roses
  • A topiary flower arrangement
  • A miniature arrangement
  • A bird feeder
  • A bird bath
  • Nest-building station

It also explains how to make your own skipping rope, like the one Mary had in the book, and there is a section of traditional jump rope rhymes.

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

My Reaction

I liked the chapters about the history of The Secret Garden and the life of Frances Hodgson Burnett. I thought it was interesting to see some of what inspired her to write the story. I particularly like the chapter that describes how a manor like Misselthwaite would be run because I like seeing the historical background to stories.

I don’t think that the gardening tips are really universal. I grew up in Arizona, and I know from personal experience that plants and gardening techniques that would work well in cooler and wetter climates don’t work as well in a hot, dry desert climate. However, some of the garden-related crafts looked intriguing. I particularly like the idea of the wind chime that uses old keys as the chimes. I’ve seen antique stores and places that sell crafting supplies that also sell old keys, so know it’s possible to get them.

I like the selection of recipes the book provides, and I think most of them would be pretty easy to make. The most difficult ones are probably roasted eggs and roasted potatoes because they require an outdoor oven, like the kind the characters in The Secret Garden used. The book briefly describes how to make the kind of outdoor stone oven they mean, but I don’t think that kind of oven can be built just anywhere. It’s more for camping and the countryside, where you can safely have fire pits away from buildings. Fortunately, the book also includes instructions for making those dishes inside, in a standard kitchen.

Posted on by TracyC

The Secret Garden Cookbook

The Secret Garden Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden by Amy Cotler, illustrations by Prudence See, 1999.

This book is a cookbook with recipes based on the types of foods eaten by characters in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Food is important in the story because Mary and Collin didn’t have any appetites when they were unhappy and unhealthy, but their appetites improve when they begin working in the garden and getting more fresh air and exercise. Most of the recipes are types of foods that are specifically named during the course of the story, but others are ones that the characters would have been likely to eat for the time and places where they lived. Because the original story focused on gardening, there is also an emphasis on using foods that would be grown in kitchen gardens

Most of the illustrations in the book are simple green and white drawings of different types of foods that accompany the recipes.

The recipes in the book are sorted into different categories, and each section has historical information about different meals and types of food. Individual recipes also have historical information, trivia, and quotes from The Secret Garden related to the dishes. Some traditional English foods need to be explained to Americans. For example, the word “pudding” refers to a specific type of dairy dessert in the US, but in England, it’s a more general word that can refer to any type of dessert.

I liked the selection of recipes, and I really liked the historical information provided with them!

The sections of the cookbook are:

Yorkshire Breakfasts

These are breakfast foods that the characters in the story ate or might have eaten during the Victorian era.

  • Porridge
  • Coddled eggs – Eggs cooked in a cup
  • Cheese muffins
  • Little sausage cakes
  • Cocoa

A Manor Lunch

This section explain the types of things that people of different classes ate as their mid-day meal in the Victorian era.

  • Yorkshire pudding – These are popovers with meat drippings.
  • Roasted fowl with bread sauce
  • Potato snow
  • Welsh rabbit – This is melted cheese on toast.
  • Cabinet pudding – This is a molded custard dessert with fruit.
  • Jam roly poly

An English Tea

This section explains things that Victorian people ate at afternoon tea.

  • A proper pot of tea
  • Cucumber tea sandwiches
  • Scones
  • Fruit tea loaf
  • Lemon curd tartlettes
  • Brandy snap baskets with whipped cream

The Kitchen Garden

This section is about things people would make from fruits and vegetables that they would grow in their kitchen gardens.

  • Fresh spring peas with mint
  • Glazed carrots
  • Summer pudding – This is a molded dessert made with bread and different kinds of berries.
  • Two fools – “Fools” are old-fashioned fruit-based desserts.
  • Raspberry jam
  • Raspberry vinegar
  • Molded spiced pears
  • Strawberries and cream

Dickon’s Cottage Food

Poor people, like Dickon’s family, would have eaten different things from the wealthier people in Victorian society.

  • Tattie broth – A potato soup.
  • Pease pudding
  • Yorkshire oatcakes
  • Cottage loaf – This is a basic bread recipe.
  • Dough-cakes with brown sugar – A basic dessert made with bread dough.
  • Parkin – A kind of oatmeal gingerbread.

A Taste of India

These are the types of foods that Mary might have eaten during the time she lived in India.

  • Fruit lassi – This is a kind of fruit shake made with yogurt.
  • Sooji – A hot breakfast cereal similar to cream of wheat.
  • Little bacon and coriander pancakes
  • Fresh mango chutney
  • Mulligatawny soup – This soup was invented in India for the British colonists. It’s curry coconut soup whose name means “pepper water.”
  • Florence Nightingale’s kedgeree – Florence Nightingale has nothing to do with the dish, but the Victorians named it after her because she was famous. It’s a rice and fish dish that was often made from leftovers and served for breakfast or lunch.

Garden Picnics

These are foods that can be prepared outside or are easy to pack for a picnic.

  • Roasted potatoes and eggs
  • Currant buns
  • Crumpets
  • Cornish pasties – These are savory pies or turnovers with meat and veggies, meant to be eaten with the hands. They’re sort of like larger, better-tasting Hot Pockets.
  • Chocolate picnic biscuits

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

Posted on by TracyC

Seven-Day Magic

SevenDayMagic

Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager, 1962.

John and Susan are brother and sister, living in a perfectly ordinary town in Connecticut. They are tall, good-looking, and good in school and at sports, so they are generally popular and are often chosen for positions like class president. However, their home life is unusual because they are orphans who live with their grandmother, who sometimes requires them to look after her as much as she looks after them. Their grandmother isn’t very strong, but she is spirited and is sometimes tempted to do things that she probably shouldn’t do at her age, like climbing trees. Because John and Susan feel like they have to look after their grandmother, it’s sometimes difficult for them to get out and do some of the things that other children their age are doing, like going to parties. They’re glad when Barnaby and his sisters move to a house nearby because they make life more exciting.

SevenDayMagicChildren

Barnaby and his sisters, Abigail (called Abbie) and Fredericka, become friends with John and Susan. Their father is a singer in advertisements, and their mother is a realtor. Because their parents work a lot to make ends meet, the children are often left to their own devices.  Barnaby is opinionated, stubborn, and sometimes hot-tempered, which causes him to get into fights at school, but John likes him because he’s imaginative and full of interesting ideas.

Barnaby wants to be a writer. He’s secretly writing a story of his own, and he encourages the others to read more. Before meeting Barnaby, John hardly read anything at all, and Susan was mostly into the Sue Barton books, about a young woman who becomes a nurse (a real series that was popular in the mid-20th century, realistic fiction). Barnaby introduces them to a whole new world of fantasy stories, full of adventure. One day, while visiting the library together, the children talk about the kinds of stories that they like and wish that they could find a really good book full of magic and kids that are like themselves. Their wish comes true in a peculiar way.

On impulse, Susan checks out a rather worn-looking book with a red cover, not really knowing what it’s about but thinking that it just looked kind of interesting. The librarian seems a little uneasy when she takes it and warns her that she can only keep that particular book for seven days, which is surprising because that’s the limit usually imposed on new books, not old ones.

On the way home, the children show each other what they got and read parts of their books aloud to each other. When Susan opens the red book, they are all startled to find out that the book is about them. It starts out just like the real life book and tells about their lives and backgrounds and has their conversation about books they like, word-for-word. The children can tell that this is a magic book, but even while the idea is thrilling, it makes them uneasy. There is nothing written beyond their conversation about books, and the book won’t let them turn pages to see what might come next or how their story will end.

As much as the children like the idea of being the stars of their own magical book, it’s worrying. They don’t know what they’re in store for, and they even worry briefly that maybe their entire lives are fictional, that they might just exist in someone’s imagination, although they don’t really believe that because they can remember their lives before the story began. Barnaby points out that the book specifically mentions that he and his sisters recently moved to the area, but he remembers having lived elsewhere before that.

The children carefully consider everything they had originally wished for in a book: that children, just like themselves, would be walking home from somewhere and a magical adventure would start before they even realized that it was happening and that they would have to figure out the rules of the magic in order to use it for their own purposes. Since the first part of their wish has literally (very literally) come true, they decide that they’re going to have to figure out what the rules of this magic are before they decide what to do next. Since looking ahead in the book seems to be against the rules, they decide that they will have to be very careful about anything they wish for next because their wishes seem to be what writes the story, and they need to discuss it first and come to an agreement about it.

SevenDayMagicDragon

Unfortunately, little Fredericka (the youngest of the children) is too impatient for discussion and immediately wishes for an adventure with wizards, witches, and magic, and she wants it to start right away so that they’ll know that the magic is really working. A minute later, a dragon suddenly appears and scoops up Fredericka, flying away with her!

The others try to figure out where the dragon came from, and it turns out that a stage magician who lives nearby was practicing his act at the time that Fredericka made her wish. When she wished for a magical adventure, the rabbit that the magician was supposed to pull out of his hat turned out to be a dragon. The magician, The Great Oswaldo, is mystified, but he’s destined to play the part of Fredericka’s requested wizard. The children ask him to help them, and he says he’ll try, although he’s not sure how.

As Oswaldo tries various tricks in his magic supplies, they don’t work in the way they usually do. Finally, he is able to make his landlady’s house fly after the dragon, much to the landlady’s horror (she’s cast in the role of the witch in Fredericka’s story). In the magical land where the dragon lives, the peasants inform them that the dragon is always carrying off girls and young women to eat them, and they have to think of something fast before Fredericka becomes his next meal!

This is where the children discover that the contents of the magical book change depending on who reads it. When the magician reads it, it’s full of magic spells. When the landlady, Mrs. Funkhouser, takes it from him, it has household hints. For the dragon, it’s all about dragons. Surprisingly, it’s Mrs. Funkhouser’s household hints that save the day, although it’s Oswaldo who gets most of the credit because one of his pet cats eats the dragon after Mrs. Funkhouser shrinks it.

Oswaldo and Mrs. Funkhouser decide to stay in the magic land (which the children think might actually be Oz, in its early days), where they are hailed as heroes, sending the children home by themselves with the help of Mrs. Funkhouser’s vanishing cream. As expected, this adventure is now written in the magic book when the children have another look at it (although Fredericka argues that the illustrations don’t really do her justice).

SevenDayMagicCoin

Susan, as the borrower of the book, says that she wants their next adventure to be calmer, the kind of everyday magic that just creeps up on you. This is the part of the story where it crosses over with the events in Half Magic (another book in the same series as this one). In these children’s world, Half Magic is a fictional book that they’ve read and liked. Susan’s requested adventure picks up where Half Magic left off, explaining what happened after the other four children (Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha) left their magic coin to be discovered by a new owner. Susan and her friends delight in explaining to the young girl who found the coin what it does. The girl says that she had thought that the coin might be magic, but was confused because she didn’t get her wish to go into the future and meet some other children. Because the coin only grants wishes by halves (interpreting that pretty liberally), Susan and her friends (who live in the future), came to meet her instead.

Once again (as is common in this series), it leaves the matter of what is fiction and what is reality open to question. Was it the girl’s wish that brought the other children to her, or their wish that took them into her story? Or Both? Was that fantasy story secretly real, or are Susan and her friends more fictional than they like to think? The author likes posing questions like this, but of course, you never completely know the answers, and in some ways, it hardly matters because the adventure doesn’t require anyone’s understanding for them to take place, which is something that, ironically, it has in common with real life – things frequently happen regardless of whether or not you understand the reasons why. Sometimes, figuring out how things work and to deal with them is about all you can do, never getting the complete “why” behind everything.  That’s pretty much how all the stories in this series go.

After the children explain to the girl what the coin is and how it’s supposed to work, she makes a more careful, doubled wish to go to the future with the other children. Unfortunately, when they get there, she panics when she realizes that she forgot to bring her one-year-old baby brother with her and makes a hurried half-wish for him to be there, too.   Because she didn’t wish right, what she gets is her brother at the age he would be in the other children’s time (about age 37) but still mentally the baby he was back in 1924 (the girl’s time). The “baby” is amazed when he realizes that suddenly he can walk and talk much better than he could before and that he’s suddenly much bigger and stronger than he used to be. He gets hold of the coin and refuses to give it back, telling his little “big” sister that he can do what he wants now, not what she tells him to do. Noting that he can even pick her up and carry her around now, he does that, with the others chasing after him to get the charm and bring him under control. (A somewhat similar incident, where a baby grows up too fast and is dangerously immature, happens in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It – another instance of Edward Eager playing off her books.)

It’s chaos for awhile because a 37-year-old man who acts like a 1-year-old can’t help but attract attention, especially when he gets it into his head that he wants to drive a train. Eventually, they get the “baby” back under control and to his proper age, allowing his sister to take him back to their own time and plan her future adventures with the coin.

Then, Susan and John’s grandmother gets hold of the book, and it takes her and her grandchildren back in time, to when the grandmother was a young woman working as a prairie schoolteacher. Susan makes a wish for the other children to join them, and they help their grandmother and her students to survive a sudden blizzard. They come to appreciate their grandmother’s youthful personality and formidable spirit even more from the experience. They even get to meet their grandfather, who died before they were born, seeing him rescue their grandmother and her students when he was a young man.

SevenDayMagicPlaywright

Then, Abbie decides that she wants to try to help her father’s singing career. He typically has to work long hours and never makes very much money, just being part of the chorus on advertisements. She thinks things will be so much better if they can help him to be discovered as a great talent. The others are kind of doubtful about her plan because the book seems to send them on rather “bookish” adventures, related to other stories they’ve read or people’s memories, like in their grandmother’s case because her early life actually did somewhat resemble things from the Little House on the Prairie series (a series which the grandmother enjoys reading for that reason). The other children just don’t know what would happen if Abbie tries to use the book for something more modern and everyday, like their father’s career. She tries it anyway, with some unpredictable results.

During a recording at a television studio (which the children are present to witness), the magic makes their father sing wonderfully but he also does his singing part out of sync with the other singers. He’s sure that he is singing his part at the right time, but for some reason, the other members of the chorus are silent when he sings. The director gets mad at him for singing out of sync and messing up the performance, and the singer who was supposed to be the star gets mad about being upstaged, but the reviewers end up loving the performance. So, while at first it looks like the father is going to be fired, he ends up with more singing parts because of the episode. The only problem is that all the singing parts are silly jingles, like the typical advertising jingles he gets. While he’d welcome more money, he always dreamed of being able to get better parts. However, the magic isn’t quite done, yet. When Abbie meets a playwright who is looking for a new talent to sing in his play, it turns out that he has seen Abbie’s father on tv and likes his voice.

SevenDayMagicWings

Abbie’s wish is so great and does so much for their family that the kids start thinking that it might be the end of the magic. The seven days are really up, and the book has to go back to the library the next day. However, John and Barnaby haven’t had their chance to wish yet, and each of them wants to have a turn before the book goes back. Barnaby even suggests that perhaps they can keep the book an extra day, turning it in late. Surely a little late fee isn’t too much to ask for an extra day of magic, is it? Abbie is afraid, though, that keeping the book overdue would be breaking the rules and that the magic might go all wrong. She’s right.

Even with the idea of keeping the book for extra time, John and Barnaby argue over which of them will get to go first. The book’s magic, angry about not being returned to the library, turns sour on them, causing them to fight. John angrily tells Barnaby that just because he’s usually the group’s idea man doesn’t mean that he’s the only one who’s allowed to have ideas. (Which, in a way, is something that Barnaby needs to hear because that’s part of the reason why he often gets into fights – he always thinks he knows best.) John and Barnaby fight over the book, and the book gets torn. John ends up with a few pages, and Barnaby gets most of the book, which he uses to make a wish that he refuses to tell to the others. Barnaby disappears, and the others realize that the pages that Barnaby is holding are the last few pages from the end of the book, still blank. Without them, the book can’t end, and Barnaby could end up stuck in the book forever! Can the others find him and get him (and the book) back before it’s too late?

Before the end of the book, John does prove that, although he might not be as quick to come up with ideas as Barnaby is, he does get good ones. After he and the others find Barnaby, John uses his wish to get them back home and to return the book to the library in a most unusual way.  (Actually two unusual ways because he couldn’t quite make up his mind about which was best.  Both of them are homages to incidents in E. Nesbit’s books.)

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

The Time Garden

TimeGarden

The Time Garden by Edward Eager, 1958.

About a year after the events in the previous book in the series, Roger and Ann are excited when their father writes a play and announces that it will be performed in England. Unfortunately, their parents aren’t planning to take the children to England with them because the trip there will be just business, focusing on getting the play together. If the play is a success, they plan to send for the children so they can do some sightseeing in England, but until then, the children will need to stay somewhere else during summer vacation. Their mother, Martha, calls her sister Katharine to see if the children can come visit their cousins, but it turns out the Katharine is also looking for a place where Eliza and Jack can spend the summer. By coincidence, Katharine and her husband are also planning a business trip to Europe.

TimeGardenMrsWhiton

The adults talk it over and end up arranging for all four children to stay with Katharine’s husband’s great aunt, Mrs. Whiton, who lives in a house by the sea, not far from Boston. The children don’t find this prospect very exciting. Then the adults tell them that Mrs. Whiton writes children’s books, Eliza is sure that she’ll be trying to analyze them for inspiration for her stories, but Mrs. Whiton turns out to be better than they thought. She is unsentimental, something that Eliza appreciates, and her house is very nice. There is a pretty garden there, and a staircase that leads right down to the beach.

One day, when Mrs. Whiton sends them out to play in the garden, they find an old sundial that has a motto written on it: “Anything Can Happen When You’ve All the Time in the World!” The children have had experience with magic before, so they begin to suspect that this garden isn’t quite what it appears . . . and they’re right. A strange, toad-like creature call the Natterjack introduces himself to the children and tells them that the thyme garden, where there are many varieties of thyme growing, is also a time garden. He explains that he and his family have helped this garden grow since his grandfather’s grandfather was brought there from England along with a shipment of primroses and that they’ve put all of their magic into the garden and its plants. If the children would like to visit another time, all they have to do is to pluck a sprig of thyme and smell it.

TimeGardenWhitonHouse

Jack, who has decided that he’s too old for magic and is now only interested in girls, refuses to try it at first, denying the existence of magic, even in spite of the talking toad. The other children try it and find themselves at the same house during the time of the American Revolution. Everyone who sees them seems to think that they are the Whiton children of that time, and they end up participating in a ride very much like Paul Revere’s, riding through the countryside to alert people that the British are coming. At first, their ride is thrilling and successful, but if you know the other books in this series, you can guess that things are going to go wrong at some point.

When the kids reach a tavern, they try to tell the drunken men inside that the British will be at Lexington soon, and they say that they don’t care. As far as they’re concerned, if the British are going to Lexington, let the guys in Lexington deal with it. The children are offended that they don’t want to help and try to appeal to their patriotism and fellowship with other Americans. It turns out that they don’t have much patriotism (the United States isn’t a separate country yet, so there is that) or feelings of fellowship because their plan for if the British are defeated is basically “every man for himself.” (I understand this scene so much more now as an adult than I did when I read this as a kid. I think I’ve met their descendants.) The children are angered at this mercenary attitude, and Ann accuses them of being pro-British. One of them insists that they’re not because, “We ain’t pro-anything.” (Yep, this is familiar. Some people just want to be contrary until there’s something in it for them to gain.)

It gets worse when the anti-British talk causes the Natterjack, in a surge of British patriotism, to cry, “Rule, Britannia!” The drunks in the tavern then decide that the kids were trying to deceive them about the British coming because they’re actually on the side of the British, trying to distract them from the British army’s real plans. When they discover that the voice actually came from a talking toad, they declare that it’s witchcraft and decide to throw the children into the pond to see if they will float (an old test in witchcraft trials).

In a bizarre twist, they are saved by a band of attacking American Indians. (Native Americans ex Machina?) There’s no real reason for a tribe of American Indians to be attacking at this particular moment, and the kids in the story seem to realize that.  This incident, like many others in this series, is partly based on other books in classic children’s literature, especially the works of E. Nesbit, the author’s favorite children’s author.  A similar incident occurs to the children in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, although under different circumstances.  The author of this story frequently pokes fun at tropes of classic children’s literature in his books and makes pop culture references from the 1950s, so the more old books you’re familiar with, the more you see the jokes, although I admit that, even knowing the background, this scene still bothers me. In the grand tradition of cheesy 1950s westerns, there’s a vague description of the carnage of the attack with the requisite scalping and tomahawking (yes, they use it as verb). Ann is upset about the attack and covers her eyes, although Roger says that he doesn’t think that this attack could really have occurred in real life because they would have heard about it if it were a real, historical event. Ann worries that they somehow caused it by messing with history. When the tribe is done tomahawking their attackers, the children are worried that they’ll be next, but the Natterjack tells the children that they can escape by smelling the thyme again.

Before we move on, I should point out here that, in different books in this series, it’s never entirely clear how much of the children’s adventures occur in the real world or in some kind of magical, alternate reality or maybe in their own minds, and this is actually intentional. The idea of sniffing a magical herb and being transported through time sounds kind of trippy. The whole “savage painted Indians” (their words, not mine) trope was a staple of old western shows, the kind that kids growing in the 1950s might have watched because that genre was popular, particularly in the late 1950s, when the book was published, so the children’s experiences may be partly patterned after what a 1950s kid might have imagined after watching those shows. (Sort of like the Arabian fantasies that their mothers had in previous books in the series, probably inspired by The Sheik.) So, this incident in the book is partly a take-off on similar ones in other children’s books, but it might also be the author’s commentary on the types of shows that were popular and children’s expectations.  Perhaps some of the implication is that the children’s expectations, based on things they’ve read or seen on tv are what caused this weird, otherwise inexplicable attack in the first place. (It’s like on tv, kiddos, and now you can see it in full color!  You expected it, so you got it.  Still think this stuff is fun?) Part of the problem with this scene for me is that it’s difficult to tell exactly how the author means it. I can guess a little, given the author’s taste for making literary references and parodying tropes of children’s stories, but even as a parody, it’s uncomfortable by modern standards and still makes very little sense why it’s even happening at all. This scene is just plain needless and cringe-worthy in my opinion, but you sometimes run into things like that with older children’s books.  It’s some consolation that this is the worst scene in the entire book, so it’s good to get it out of the way early.

Before we return to the main plot again, I’d also like to say that the children themselves don’t seem to understand exactly how the magic works (like other children in this series) or whether what happened to them was completely real or not.  They debate about it periodically and wonder about the children that they replaced on this adventure (and on later ones as well). They never quite know if those children went somewhere else while they took their place or if both sets of children were just living out the same adventure at the same time, just seeing it in slightly different ways.  These time travel questions are fun to ponder, but are never really explained, just theorized.

When the children get back to their own time from the Revolutionary War period, the Natterjack apologizes for getting them into trouble and asks them to put the plant sprig back in the ground, where it grows again (no “wasting thyme”, ha, ha). He also further explains that the name of the particular variety of thyme they pick in the garden is important because it has some bearing on where in time they will go. The thyme they had chosen was “wild thyme”, and they had to admit that their time was pretty wild. Ann borrows a gardening catalog from Mrs. Whiton’s old gardener and begins studying the different varieties of thyme. When they ask the Natterjack about the massacre at the tavern, he tells them that the mistakes they make or bad consequences of their interference will be erased by the good deeds they do, so their timely warnings about the British coming will have an effect, but that massacre has been erased from history. (Too bad it’s still in the book.  There’s still no real reason for it to be there, dang western trope.) Good deeds performed during their adventures will earn them more adventures, so they have to remember to do some good in every time they visit.

So, while Jack spends most of his time getting to know the local teenage girls and doing normal teenage things and trying to ignore his sister and cousins when they talk about magic, the others get to spend their summer having magical time adventures. The next variety of thyme they pick is “splendid thyme.” Once again, they are taken back in the history of the house, where they are again mistaken for past Whiton children. The time period is around the Civil War, and the house is being used as a station on the Underground Railroad. The children help some escaping slaves to flee to Canada. (Their sentiments are strongly anti-slavery, which is a relief after that massacre scene. The escaping slaves aren’t portrayed too badly, although mostly, they’re in hiding during the adventure and are oddly unquestioning of how the kids managed to use magic to get them to Canada so fast, just embarrassingly grateful for it.)

TimeGardenCrossOver

After that, Eliza wants to know if they’re restricted to historical adventures only or if they can visit times that are fictional as well, referencing their adventures with Ivanhoe in the previous book. It turns out that the time garden is very accommodating, and they are able to go back in fictional time to visit the characters in Little Women (which, fortunately, took place not far from where they are staying), especially since Louisa May Alcott based the characters on herself and her sisters, giving the book a sense of semi-reality. Jack, who has been denying the magic all along, comes with them on this adventure, and spends all of his time fawning over the teenage Meg and Jo. The children help to reform an ungrateful family that has been taking advantage of the girls’ generosity (and, as Jo says, reforming “is punishment enough”).

Sharing in this adventure with the other children is enough to get Jack to admit that they’re having adventures, although he still refuses to look at it as being magic, preferring more scientific terms. At one point, he describes a theory of time as looking down on the world from an airplane. From high above, you can see many different places at once, but it would take a person on the ground a long time to get from one place to another. Similarly, Jack thinks that everything in history is happening all at once, but it just takes people a long time to get from one event to another because of their vantage point.

TimeGardenElizaLondon

Then, the children get the idea to go visit their mothers in England. However, when they use Common Thyme with their wish, they end up seeing their mothers in the past, not the present. This is the point in the story where it crosses over with their mothers’ magical adventures as children in Magic By the Lake.

Eliza then gets the idea of using thyme seeds to travel through time instead of using a full-grown plant. She and Jack end up traveling to England. However, they end up in the wrong period of history, and because the magical rules are broken, everyone sees them as the modern children they really are and not as people from the appropriate time period. When Eliza manages to offend Queen Elizabeth I and ends up in the Tower of London, they need the help of Ann, Roger, and the Natterjack to straighten things out!

I think my favorite part of the story is really the thyme/time garden itself. Not only is it a fun pun, but I thought that it was clever how the titles of particular varieties of thyme relate to the times and places where the children end up. Different varieties of thyme plants really do have some incredible names in real life. At the end of the book, after the children go to England to join their parents because the play was successful, the Natterjack waits in the garden for the next set of children who will go on adventures, and after looking up other varieties of thyme that the book never mentioned, the possibilities for new adventures are tantalizing: Leprechaun Thyme (for adventures with leprechauns), Elfin Thyme (either for adventures with elves or maybe becoming smaller?), and Woolly Thyme (Want to go see a woolly mammoth? On the other hand, maybe it just goes to a sheep farm. This magic stuff never works like you think it will).

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Knight’s Castle

Knight's Castle

Knight’s Castle by Edward Eager, 1956.

Roger and Ann are the children of Martha from the previous two books in the series. Like their mother’s family when they were growing up, they live in Toledo, Ohio. Their Aunt Katharine (one of Martha’s older sisters) used to live close to them in the Midwest but now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Roger and Ann don’t particularly get along with Aunt Katharine’s children, Eliza and Jack, because Eliza is bossy and Jack is only interested in photography. However, the four children end up spending the summer together when Roger and Ann’s father needs to have an operation at a hospital in Baltimore.

Like their mother and her siblings when they were young, Roger and Ann also like fantasy stories, which their father likes to read to them. Roger starts to believe in real magic when it seems like one of his toy soldiers comes to life at night. Roger collects toy soldiers, and he has over 200 of them, but this one is special because his father says that its been handed down in their family for generations. Roger calls it the Old One. It’s rather worn, so it isn’t obvious at first, but the Old One is actually a knight. Worried about his father’s illness, Roger takes the Old One to bed with him (which he thinks is more manly than taking a teddy bear to bed), and then feels it wriggling in his hand.

Knight's Castle Roger

Realizing that the Old One is magic and is coming to life when he holds him, Roger asks him if it’s part of his magic to grant wishes. If it is, then he wishes for his father to get well, and if possible, for him and his sister to have an adventure in Baltimore over the summer. The Old One doesn’t answer him immediately, but over time, he makes it clear to Roger that wishes have to be earned, and that will be the source of his summer adventure.

When the children arrive in Baltimore to stay with wealthy Aunt Katharine while their father is in the hospital, Aunt Katharine gives them presents. Ann gets a new dollhouse, and there is a toy castle for Roger. Since Aunt Katharine has also just taken all the children to the movies to see Ivanhoe, all of them become immediately interested in playing with the castle.

That night, Roger has a strange dream that he finds himself within the story of Ivanhoe, which is being acted out in his toy castle. The Old One is there as well, although he is mainly watching the action as Roger begins to take part in the story. When Roger comes face-to-face with the villain, he accidentally lets Ivanhoe’s plans slip to him. Things are looking pretty bleak when Roger suddenly realizes that the castle is still a toy and everyone around him is just a lead soldier. This revelation ends the magical adventure and brings him back to reality. However, Roger is disappointed that he ended the adventure so early when perhaps he could have done something really heroic.

Seeing the toy soldiers scattered around instead of poised for the battle they were planning the night before, Eliza and Ann think that Roger was just playing with the castle without them, but he explains to them what happened. The girls were just reading The Magic City by E. Nesbit, and they start building their own “magic city” out of random things from around the house, surrounding the toy castle. Roger is upset about the city because he says that it doesn’t fit in with the Ivanhoe story, and he’s sure that it will ruin everything, maybe from preventing the magic from working again at all. The Old One tells Roger that magic works by threes, so the next opportunity for magic will be in three days.

Knight's Castle Magic City

As it turns out, the city does end up becoming part of the story when the magic brings it all to life on the third night. Roger, Ann, and Eliza find themselves in the middle of the city, surrounded by knights attempting to drive modern cars. Ivanhoe has become a fan of science fiction books, via the public library in the city that the girls built. Although Ivanhoe has turned into something of a geek, the children persuade him to come on a mission to rescue the captive Rebecca, and they end up traveling in a flying saucer (made from a real saucer) to the Dolorous Tower, where the adventure ends as soon as Eliza remembers that the villain threatening them is still just a lead soldier.

Knight's Castle Flying Saucer

It was an even weirder adventure than Roger’s first one, but by now, the children are starting to understand the rules that go along with the magic. Jack, who says he doesn’t really believe in magic, accompanies the other children on the next adventure, as they try to prove to him that it’s real. They end up having to rescue some of the others from the “giant’s lair”, which turns out to be Ann’s new dollhouse. The dolls are angry that Ann has been neglecting them, only paying attention to the dollhouse when she and Eliza needed to borrow things for their magic city. They manage to escape again by remembering that the dolls are just dolls.

However, Roger is still worried about their father, who is about to undergo his operation. The Old One had told him that wishes needed to be earned, and he doesn’t think that they’ve managed to accomplish much in their adventures. Roger thinks that they need to do something really heroic so that his wish for his father to get better will come true. The Old One gives Roger a rhyme, hinting at what the children need to do on their next adventure, but Roger doesn’t understand what it means, and he doesn’t know if he can figure it out in time.

Actually, it is Ann who eventually realizes what the rhyme means and provides Roger with the “wisdom” that he needs to earn his wish. All throughout the story, Roger was criticizing his little sister for things she did wrong, saying that she was too little and only a girl. Because Roger thinks of her as being just his little sister, he overlooks what she has to contribute to the adventure. Roger’s acquired wisdom is to value the contributions of others and not underestimate their ability to contribute. Ann, being young and shy, frequently doubts herself, but she also learns confidence when she realizes that she has the answer to the riddle. Jack and Eliza learn lessons as well. Doubting Jack learns to believe in magic, and Eliza learns that she can’t always be the boss, that sometimes it is better to let someone else take the lead when they’re the right person for the job. (Although, she does say at the end of story, “If that wouldn’t be just like that magic’s impudence! Trying to teach me moral lessons!”)

Like other books in this series, there are a lot of references to popular pieces of children’s literature and jokes about things that happen in children’s stories.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Knight's Castle Feast
Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Half Magic

HalfMagicHalf Magic by Edward Eager, 1954, 1982.

Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha are siblings living in the 1920s. Their father is dead, and their mother works for a newspaper. While their mother is at work, Miss Bick takes care of the house and the children, although she isn’t really good with children. The children are often free to amuse themselves on their own during the summer, and they like to pick out books from the library for entertainment. They particularly enjoy the fantasy books by E. Nesbit (a real author, and they reference her real books during the story), and they wish that exciting, magical things like the ones that happen in her stories would happen to them.

They get their wish (and a great many others) when Jane finds a strange coin on the sidewalk that they mistake for a nickel at first. By accident, they discover that this coin grants wishes, but it has a peculiar habit of only granting half of what a person wishes for (and the coin seems to interpret the idea of “half” pretty liberally, depending on the type of wish, so results can be pretty unpredictable).

Jane is so bored after she finds the coin that she wishes that there would be a fire for some excitement. Suddenly, the children hear a fire engine and discover that a child’s playhouse had caught fire. It could have been coincidence, except that their mother borrows some change from Jane, getting the magical coin by accident. While she is visiting the children’s aunt and uncle and finds their conversation boring, she wishes that she were at home, but finds herself unexpectedly by the side of the road halfway home. She is confused but thinks that she must just be very tired or something and forgot that she was walking home. She ends up accepting a ride from a very nice man who happened to be passing her on the road and thought that she looked lost and confused.

HalfMagicChildrenThese early experiences and a series of odd wishes Mark makes when he doesn’t realize that he has the coin demonstrate to the children not only that the coin is magical but that they have to be extremely careful what they wish for when they have it. They have to word their requests very carefully, asking for twice as much of anything they want in order to counteract the half magic of the coin. Even so, they can’t help but make mistakes and get themselves into trouble.

When Katharine uses her turn with the coin to take them back to the days of King Arthur, she ends up causing trouble and disrupting history by defeating Lancelot in a tournament. Fortunately, Merlin realizes what the children have done and forces them to explain themselves and show him the magic coin. After inspecting it, Merlin gives the children a stern lecture about interfering with the natural course of history. He uses the coin’s magic to undo what the children have done and further uses it to restrict the children’s wishes to affecting only their own time period. He warns them to be more careful about what they wish for, keeping their wishes smaller and more personal, adding that the coin’s magic will eventually be exhausted, so they should save their wishes for what is important.

HalfMagicTheaterThere is one more disastrous experience when the children go to the movies (a silent film because this is 1920s), and Martha accidentally wishes that she wasn’t there while touching Jane’s purse, which holds the coin. Martha, of course, ends up being only halfway “not there,” almost like a living ghost, which terrifies onlookers. Straightening out that mess brings them into contact with Mr. Smith, the nice man who gave their mother a ride home. He owns a bookstore, and he enjoys fantasy stories as much as the children do. He becomes the only adult who knows that the children have been using magic, and he’s fascinated by it, enjoying witnessing their adventures.

When the children’s mother comes to pick them up, Mr. Smith is pleased to meet her again and invites the family to join him for dinner. Mr. Smith is obviously fond of the children’s mother, and most of the children like him, too. However, Jane is uneasy. It’s partly that she worries that Mr. Smith will interfere with their use of the magic coin and partly that she worries about his new relationship with their mother. Of the four children, only Jane, as the oldest, really remembers their father, and she can’t stand the thought that Mr. Smith might become their stepfather and take his place.

HalfMagicSmithWhen Jane argues with the other children about Mr. Smith and rashly wishes that she belonged to another family, the other children call upon Mr. Smith to help them rescue Jane from her foolish wish, her unsuitable new family, and from herself.

In the end, Mr. Smith does marry the children’s mother, and even Jane is happy with the arrangement, having come to appreciate Mr. Smith much better.  Once their mother and Mr. Smith each have what they wished for most — each other and a happy family with the children — they forget about the magic coin.  Although none of the children realize it, the coin also grants Jane one final half-wish in which her father comes to her in a dream-like form, letting her know that he approves of her mother’s remarriage and the children’s new stepfather because he wants them all to be happy.  This gives Jane the reassurance she needs to fully accept Mr. Smith.  The children, deciding that the coin has given them all the wishes it’s going to, leave it in a convenient place for a new owner to find.

You don’t find out what happens with the coin’s new owner apart from when the children see a young girl pick it up and realize that it’s magic when she makes her first wish. However, there is a cross-over scene in another book in the series, Seven-Day Magic, which explains a little more about what happens next.  Books in this series frequently reference and sometimes parody other children’s books that were popular at the time they written, and individual books in the series even sometimes reference each other, even when the main characters have changed.

Speaking of literary references and parodies in this series, sometimes it’s a little difficult to tell for certain which scenes are really meant as parodies and which aren’t.  Knowing a bit about vintage children’s fiction helps, but there may be some scenes in the stories which can make modern readers a little uneasy.  One scene in the book that bothered me was near the beginning, when Mark wishes to be on a desert island.  This was before the children fully realize that the coin only grants half of a wish, so the children just end up in a desert, but not on an island.  The part that bothers me is that they are briefly kidnapped by a kind of wandering Arab man who seems to be planning to ransom or sell them.  This scene is like an old stereotype out of the sort of silent movies that the children would have been watching, and because of that, it was a little painful to read.  The man’s name is Achmed (still in keeping with the stereotype), and they keep referring to him as “Achmed the Arab,” in case you need reminding that that’s what he is.  They get out of their predicament with him by wishing for something that would make him really happy so that he’ll forget about them.  By then, they realize that they need to double their request in order to make the coin work properly, so their wish works.  The coin ends up giving Achmed a beautiful wife and “six plump Arab children” (in case you forgot that Achmed’s children would be Arab as well) and generally improves what Achmed owns, so Achmed becomes a happy family man and gives up his earlier, shady ways.  It’s eye-rollingly stereotypical and cliche, so I think it’s worth telling potential readers that this scene is there.

The cliches and stereotypes (not to mention the constant, unnecessary repetition of the word “Arab” just to remind you that that’s what everyone is, in case you were confused) in that scene were annoying, but unfortunately, things like that crop up pretty regularly in children’s literature from the 1950s and earlier when there are scenes that take place just about anywhere outside of the United States, Canada, or Europe.  That being said, there are a couple of things that make this scene easier to bear.  One is that Mark, realizing that the magic coin can get them out of this situation and that they have the power to put Achmed at their mercy, decides not to do it because it occurs to him that Achmed is probably a desperate man because he is poor.  Mark decides that Achmed would be a better person if he had whatever would make him feel the most fulfilled in life, so he wishes for that for him.  It’s nice that Mark sees him as being a person whose well-being needs to be considered, not just an enemy to be defeated.  Also, it occurs to me that it’s not completely certain that the desert they’re in is a real-life one, even in the children’s fictional world.  I think the assumption is that it is, like we’re supposed to assume that the world of Camelot that they visit is a real part of history, but it may not be.  In fact, the children in different books in this series in general sometimes get philosophical about their magical adventures, wondering about how their magical adventures fit into the real world around them or if they really do, and they never fully get all the answers.   Perhaps the coin took the children to their idea of what a desert or what Camelot would be like, not to those real places.  In 1921, there was a famous silent movie called The Sheik in which Rudolph Valentino played an Arab sheik named Ahmed (Achmed’s name could be a joke on that).  It’s not a movie for children, but it was very popular in the 1920s, and it inspired other movies with Arabian themes, at least a couple of songs, and probably a number of the stereotypes about Arabs of the time.  So, if the kids in the story were imagining an Arabian desert, it would probably be something resembling what they’d seen in movies like that.  This little adventure may have only taken place in the imaginary world, even from the children’s perspective, and the author may be poking fun at the notions children get from popular culture.  Even in the end, the children admit that there are many things they don’t understand about the coin and how it works, like where the other half of Martha went when she was only half there.   In a world where magic works, pretty much anything is possible.  Then again, since the entire book is fictional, it may be best not to worry too much about it.  Still, I just plain didn’t like this scene.  The rest of the book wasn’t so bad.

Overall, it’s a fun story.  Part of the fun for book lovers is in spotting the various literary references in the story because the children talk about the books they like and read and compare their adventures to ones they’ve read about.  The concept of the half-wishes also makes you think.  It’s worth pointing out that, although the children enjoy the general adventure of the coin, most of the children’s wishes, no matter how carefully they word them, don’t turn out the way that they expected, even when they get exactly what they asked for.  Mr. Smith marrying their mother is actually the best wish that comes true in the whole book.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).