Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

One Morning in Maine

One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey, 1952.

This cute picture book features Sal, a little girl who also appeared in Blueberries for Sal. She and her family live or are staying on an island off the coast of Maine. One morning, Sal wakes up and is excited because she remembers that she and her father will be going to Buck’s Harbor (a real place).

She helps her little sister, Jane, to get ready, and while they’re brushing their teeth, she feels that one of her teeth is loose. She’s never had a loose tooth before, and she runs to tell her mother. Her mother tells her not to worry about it because everyone loses their baby teeth when they’re growing up. She say that a new, bigger tooth will grow in when the old tooth falls out. Her mother says that if she puts her baby tooth under her pillow, she will get a wish, but she shouldn’t tell anyone what the wish is.

On her way to the beach, where her father is digging clams, Sal proudly tells all the animals she sees about her loose tooth. When she reaches her father, she tells him about the tooth, too. Then, she joins him in digging for clams.

Then, Sal realizes that she’s already lost the tooth somewhere. She’s really disappointed because she wanted to make a wish. As she and her father walk back to the house, Sal sees a feather that a gull lost. Since the feather is kind of like a tooth because a new feather grows in when one falls out, she decides that she can make her wish on that.

When it’s time to go to Buck’s Harbor, the motor on the boat won’t run, so the girls’ father has to row the boat. When they go to get the motor fixed, Sal tells the mechanic about her tooth. When the spark plug in the motor is replaced, Sal compares the old plug to her lost tooth and gives the old plug to Jane so she can have something to wish on, too.

She also tells the men at the grocery store about her tooth, and she ends up getting an ice cream cone, exactly what she wished for! The book ends with Sal, her father, and her little sister all going home for clam chowder for lunch.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). It’s a Newbery Honor Book!

My Reaction

This is just a cute little story about a little girl who is proud of losing her first loose tooth. It’s a sort of rite of passage that all small children go through. Her parents don’t tell her about the tooth fairy or promise her money for her tooth, but she does get a wish. Because her wish is a simple one, it’s easily fulfilled.

The different animals that can be found on the coast of Maine would also be interesting to child readers. Sal and her father also talk about which of the animals have teeth and which don’t. The birds and the clams don’t have teeth, but seals do. Sal keeps making comparisons between her tooth and other things that have to be replaced eventually, like the bird’s feather and the old spark plug, finding a kind of magic in things that are discarded and replaced with something new.

Sal and Jane are based on the author’s real life daughters, and their family did live in Maine. The setting of the book is the family’s summer home.

Posted on by TracyC

The Light at Tern Rock

The Light at Tern Rock by Julia L. Sauer, 1951.

Not long before Christmas, the lighthouse keeper at Tern Rock, Byron Flagg, approaches Martha Morse, asking her if she would be willing to temporarily take the job of tending the lighthouse while he takes a vacation. The lighthouse can never be untended because ships rely on that light, and it can be difficult for Mr. Flagg to find someone to take over his duties for an extended period of time, especially so close to Christmas. Mr. Flagg wants to hire a substitute with experience tending the lighthouse. Mrs. Morse lived there for 14 years while her late husband was the lighthouse keeper. Although many people would be daunted by the isolation of the lighthouse, Mrs. Morse actually loved it because she enjoyed the beauty of the sea and nature. She knows that she would enjoy staying there again. However, she hesitates to take the job of temporarily tending the light because she is caring for her young nephew, 11-year-old Ronnie. Ronnie might enjoy the adventure of staying in a lighthouse, but he would have to miss some school.

Mr. Flagg appeals to Mrs. Morse’s sense of nostalgia about the lighthouse and points out that Ronnie could bring along some of his schoolwork to study during their stay. Mr. Flagg says that their stay will only be for two weeks, and that he’ll return and relieve them on December 15th. Mrs. Morse points out that the weather around Tern Rock can be unpredictable and that he might not be able to return when he says he will, but Mr. Flagg says he is confident that he can. They talk to Ronnie about it, and Ronnie says that he would like to see the lighthouse, but he wants to be home for Christmas. Mr. Flagg assures them that won’t be a problem and that they will enjoy their stay at the lighthouse, so they agree to go.

When they arrive at the lighthouse, Ronnie is awed by rugged environment of Tern Rock and daunted by the isolation of the lighthouse. His Aunt Martha says that she understands how he feels, that he wonders if they’re up to the task, but she assures them that they are. The job they will do is a necessary one because, without the light, the rocks in this area are a danger to ships.

As they settle in, Ronnie becomes fascinated with the lighthouse. The interior is comfortable and designed to be compact, almost like the interior of a ship. His Aunt Martha establishes their schedule, teaching Ronnie what they need to do. She turns off the light at sunrise and lets it cool down while they have breakfast. Then, they clean the lamp, polish its lens, and do other chores to keep the light in working order. Ronnie does his schoolwork in the afternoon, and they turn on the light when the sun goes down. They spend their evenings doing quiet activities, like reading and playing games. Although Aunt Martha wasn’t sure that the quietness and monotony would appeal to an active boy like Ronnie, Ronnie finds the newness of the environment and the change in his usual routine fascinating.

Ronnie’s feelings change when December 15th arrives, and Mr. Flagg doesn’t. The weather is good, so there’s no reason why a boat shouldn’t approach Tern Rock, but Aunt Martha says that there may have been some other problem that delayed him. She doesn’t think an extra day or two at the lighthouse will hurt them, but the days go by, and still, Mr. Flagg doesn’t come. They are still comfortable in the lighthouse and there haven’t been any problems with the light, but Ronnie is angry because he realizes that Mr. Flagg lied to them. Christmas is approaching, and it becomes clear that Mr. Flagg never had any intention of being back at the lighthouse in time for Christmas.

Ronnie has trouble understanding and excepting Mr. Flagg’s lies and broken promises. Ronnie and Aunt Martha discuss the importance of honesty and the meaning of broken promises. Ronnie thinks that Mr. Flagg has been wicked. He has certainly been unfair, but Aunt Martha says that there are worse kinds of wickedness, and before they jump to conclusions about what has happened, they need to know the reasons for it.

Aunt Martha says that the Christ Child visits every home on Christmas, and no place is too distant for Him to reach, so they should make the lighthouse ready and prepare for Christmas. Ronnie doesn’t see how they can because they didn’t bring any decorations or anything for Christmas. Ronnie considers firing the cannon that would signal an emergency to bring someone out to the lighthouse, but Aunt Martha firmly tells him no. The cannon is only for serious emergencies, when there are lives in danger, not for mere disappointment and self-pity. However, Mr. Flagg has left some special surprises for them.

It is true that he intentionally deceived them about being back in time for Christmas. When Ronnie finds a sea chest with a Christmas message, he knows for certain that Mr. Flagg was lying to them the entire time, which makes him angrier. However, a letter that Mr. Flagg left explains his reasons, which earns their sympathy. To soften the blow of his deception, he has also left them some special presents and treats gathered from exotic places. This still isn’t the Christmas that Ronnie and Aunt Martha had originally planned, and being lied to doesn’t feel good. Still, in the end, this Christmas is pretty special and memorable, and they both realize that they are exactly where they need to be.

The book is a Newbery Honor book. It is recommended for ages 8 to 12 years old. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The author, Julia L. Sauer, also wrote Fog Magic.

My Reaction

I wasn’t familiar with this story when the Coronavirus Pandemic started, which is a pity because this would have been a great book for the type of Christmas we had in 2020. Still, this is a lovely Christmas story, and the pandemic isn’t quite over yet. Things have improved considerably since 2020 because people have been vaccinated, but for those who still need to be cautious and are disappointed that things aren’t completely back to normal or anyone who has hard feelings toward someone or is having a rough Christmas for any other reason, this story is a useful reminder that disappointments are still temporary, and sometimes, the place where you find yourself is exactly where you need to be. Also, disappointments and inconveniences can come with compensations, if you’re open to experiencing them.

Mr. Flagg shouldn’t have lied to Mrs. Morse and Ronnie. He acknowledges in his letter that this was a hurtful thing to do, and he explains his reasons. Basically, he was lonely and desperate. As a lighthouse keeper, he is what we might call an “essential worker”, someone who can’t easily take time off from his work because he does a necessary job that can only be done in a particular place. People’s lives depend on the light from the lighthouse, so Mr. Flagg can’t leave his job for any length of time unless he finds someone qualified who is willing to take his place. This story is set during a time before lighthouses became automated, so there must be a human in this role.

Mr. Flagg is in his 60s, and he explains in his letter that he has spent most of his Christmases either alone or with other adults because of his life as a sailor and lighthouse keeper. He has a niece who has several children and who would be happy to have him for Christmas, but he has never managed to find anyone who was willing to relieve him from his duties during Christmas before. He was desperate to spend at least one Christmas with his family, so he resorted this deception out of desperation, but he left all the presents and special treats for Aunt Martha and Ronnie because he didn’t want them to be miserable.

Aunt Martha is getting older herself, and she understands how Mr. Flagg feels, having lived a similar sort of life. When she lived at the lighthouse, she and her husband were together, but Mr. Flagg has never married, and he was desperately lonely. Ronnie has more trouble understanding the feeling because he is younger and hasn’t experienced this type of loneliness before. Aunt Martha points out that Ronnie will have many more Christmases before him, more than either she or Mr. Flagg have left. One disappointing or just bizarre Christmas won’t mean that much to him in the long term. With maybe 50 or more future Christmases to come as well as the ones he’s already experienced, this strange Christmas in the lighthouse is just one more memory or story to tell other people in Christmases to come.

Part of this story is about forgiveness, but they don’t use that word at all in the story. People have different views about what forgiveness entails, but I think it’s important that Aunt Martha and Ronnie don’t excuse Mr. Flagg’s actions. They come to understand his motives, and they feel pity or sympathy for him for the kind of rough and lonely life he’s lived, but that doesn’t make lies to them good or right. He did something hurtful by betraying their trust, and there will probably be some kind of reckoning between them when Mr. Flagg eventually shows up. Mr. Flagg acknowledges that in his letter, that the knowledge that he betrayed their trust will keep him from fully enjoying Christmas with his family, even when he’s finally getting the kind of Christmas he has wanted, and he can’t blame them for whatever they’re feeling as they read his letter. So, the story never says that what Mr. Flagg did was okay or that it didn’t hurt that he lied to the people who were helping him. Lying was wrong, and it was hurtful, and the characters are honest about that. They don’t try to pretend that they’re not hurt, which I think would have made their feelings worse in the long run. Instead, it’s about looking past that hurt to something better and finding things to be happy about even in a situation where they didn’t want to be.

Aunt Martha sees that what’s really preventing Ronnie from enjoying Christmas as they happen to have it is his anger, disappointment, and bitter feelings and the way he broods about them. Brooding about the angry things he wants to say to Mr. Flagg when he sees him isn’t making his Christmas any better. Aunt Martha compares cleaning out negative emotions to cleaning house before the holiday. You have to clear out all the dust and negativity to let in something better. They will eventually see Mr. Flagg, and there will probably be words between them, but those words can wait while they enjoy themselves as best they can for this Christmas. By then, each of them will probably have a better sense of just how they really feel about the situation and what they want to say about it anyway.

Once Ronnie works through his feelings and is able to put aside his anger, he realizes that this Christmas is something special. He does miss the class Christmas party the rest of his school is having, but in return for that sacrifice, he is experiencing something truly unique that his school friends will probably never experience. He doesn’t fully consider how unique this experience actually is at first, but he senses that there is a unique feel to Christmas in the lighthouse, with its giant light. Ronnie considers the tradition of putting candles in windows at Christmas, to guide the Christ Child or other travelers. (They emphasize candles as welcoming the Christ Child in the story, but when I first heard of the tradition, it was to welcome travelers or absent family members.) He realizes that, by tending the lighthouse, he and his aunt are doing the same thing, but they’ve got the biggest candle of anyone!

Whatever your Christmas happens to be this year, wherever you’re spending it, and whoever you’re spending it with (even if it’s just yourself), don’t forget to do the little things to make it special and enjoy it for whatever it is! Merry Christmas!

Posted on by TracyC

Sign of the Beaver

Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare, 1983.

The story begins in the late 1760s with twelve-year-old Matt’s father leaving him alone in the log cabin that he and his father built for their family in the Maine territory. The rest of their family is still in Massachusetts, and Matt’s father is going to get them and bring them to their new home. Their family will be the very first to settle in what will soon be a new township. However, for now, Matt is alone at their cabin, surrounded by miles of wilderness, while he waits for his father to return and the rest of his family to arrive. Matt will be looking after the cabin and the field of corn that he and his father planted, but he finds the silence and solitude unnerving.

Before he left, Matt’s father left his watch and rifle with Matt. After his father leaves, Matt tries the rifle. He doesn’t hit anything, and he decides that it will take getting used to. He learns to hunt with it, and Matt finds that he is very busy with hunting, fishing, and chores, which helps pass the time. Every day, he makes a notch on a stick to mark the days that pass.

Gradually, Matt becomes aware that someone is watching him. Someone seems to be hiding and following him. Since there are no other white families living for miles around, he can only assume that it must be an “Indian” (Native American). They know that there have been some in the area, although they haven’t really met any yet. Matt finds the prospect a little worrying because he isn’t sure what to expect from them, but his father always told him that, if he met an Indian, he should just be polite and respectful. Matt is nervous that whoever is watching him is also hiding from him, though.

One day, Matt hears someone wearing heavy boots tramping in the woods, and Matt thinks that maybe his father has returned early for some reason. However, it turns out to be a stranger in a blue army uniform. Although Matt has missed having company, he finds himself reluctant to talk much to this stranger, and he doesn’t want the man to know that he is there completely alone. Still, the stranger is hungry, so Matt agrees to let him share a meal with him. The stranger, who calls himself Ben, stays the night with Matt, uninvited. Matt can’t bring himself to turn away someone who needs hospitality in the wilderness, and Ben tells him stories of his past adventures. Matt still has misgivings about Ben, and he’s sure his stories are tall tales. When Ben mentions leaving a town because there was trouble there, Matt thinks maybe Ben ran away because he’s a criminal. Matt plans to stay awake that night to keep an eye on Ben, but he eventually falls asleep. When he wakes up, Ben is gone, and so is his father’s rifle. Ben is a thief! Matt realizes that he was right to be suspicious of Ben and is angry that he let him get away with stealing the rifle.

Without that rifle, Matt can’t hunt. He can still feed himself through fishing, but he loses more of his supplies when he forgets to properly bar the door while he’s out fishing, and a bear eats most of the food in the cabin. Reduced to eating only fish, Matt gives in to temptation and tries to get some honey from some bees he finds in a nearby tree. It’s a bad idea, but this decision changes everything for Matt.

Matt is badly stung by the bees, and when he tries to escape them in the water, he nearly drowns. Fortunately, Matt is saved from drowning by the Indians who have been watching him. It turns out to be a grandfather and his grandson. The grandfather, Saknis, takes Matt back to his cabin, brings him food, and treats his wounds. When he realizes that Matt hurt his ankle and lost his boot in the water, he gives Matt a crutch to use for walking and a new pair of moccasins to wear.

Matt is both grateful for this much-needed help but also very self-conscious about it. He can tell that the grandson, Attean, doesn’t like him and thinks that he’s a fool for getting hurt like this, which is embarrassing. Matt also thinks that he should repay them for what they’ve given him, but he doesn’t have much to offer. The only thing he can think of to give them is the only book he owns, a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Matt is embarrassed when he realizes that the Saknis can’t read, and he thinks maybe he will be offended at this type of gift, but the older man realizes that Matt’s knowledge of reading is a gift that they badly need.

In broken English, the old man explains that his people have made treaties with white people before, but because they can’t read English, they never really know what’s written in the treaties. When white people break the treaties or tell them that they’re no longer allowed in certain areas of land, there isn’t much they can do, since they don’t even know for certain what was in the original agreements. He realizes that his people can’t afford to be ignorant. There are more white people moving into their territory all the time, and his people will have to know how to deal with them. Therefore, Saknis proposes a kind of treaty with Matt: they will continue to bring Matt food if Matt teaches Attean to read.

Attean immediately protests this plan. He really doesn’t like Matt, or any white people in general, and he doesn’t want these reading lessons. However, his grandfather is firm that this is something he needs to do. Matt also isn’t sure about this plan. He does owe them for their help, but he’s never taught anybody to read before. His own early lessons didn’t go particularly well, although he likes reading Robinson Crusoe now. Also, Matt thinks of Attean as being a “savage” and a “heathen” who doesn’t even really want to learn, so he’s not confident that the reading lessons are going to go well. Still, Matt does owe them for saving him and could use their continued help while he recovers from his injuries, so all he can do is try.

When Attean gets frustrated during the first reading lesson and storms out of Matt’s cabin, Matt thinks that the lessons are already over. Yet, Attean does return for more lessons. Gradually, Matt thinks of ways to make the lessons more interesting to Attean, reading the most exciting parts of Robinson Crusoe out loud to Attean to get him interested in reading the story himself and finding out what will happen to the main character. It isn’t easy to get Attean interested in learning because Attean is initially determined not to be interested or impressed by anything Matt has to say.

When Matt becomes curious about some of the things Attean and his tribe do, like how Attean hunts rabbits without a gun, Attean opens up a little and shows Matt some of the things he knows. Matt begins to admire some of the unique skills Attean shows him and learns to use them for himself. Matt is aware that his first efforts must look clumsy and childish to Attean as he tries to learn skills that Attean has known for years, but it puts the boys on a more equal footing with each other. Each of them has something to learn from the other, and it’s all right for each of them to look a little awkward to the other while learning. Matt gets embarrassed sometimes when he does something clumsy in front of Attean, but he learns that he must also persevere. Attean teaches him some good, practical skills for making things without using some of the manufactured goods that he and his father brought with them from Massachusetts. When Matt loses his only fish hook, Attean shows him how to make a new one. Attean teaches Matt to be self-reliant and to use new methods to accomplish his goals.

During the part where Matt reads the part of Robinson Crusoe where Robinson Crusoe rescues the man he calls Friday, and Friday, out of gratitude, becomes his slave, Attean protests that would never happen in real life. Attean says that he would rather die than become a slave. Matt is surprised because he never really thought that much about how someone like Friday would feel in real life. Matt learns to look at the story as Attean would, reading the best pieces to him, the ones that emphasize the friendship between the two characters rather than servitude.

Gradually, Matt and Attean become friends. Matt doesn’t think he’s very good at teaching Attean to read, but Attean does slowly learn. Although Attean resists learning to read because he’s trying to prove that he doesn’t need this skill that he associates only with white people, his spoken English becomes better as he and Matt talk. Attean admits that he tells parts of Robinson Crusoe to his people, and they enjoy hearing them, so Matt moves on to stories from his father’s Bible. Attean finds the Bible stories interesting and compares them to stories that his people already tell. (It is interesting, for example, how many civilizations around the world tell stories about great floods.) The boys are fascinated by the common themes in their stories.

The boys also enjoy doing things together, and Matt feels less lonely when Attean comes to visit. Matt doesn’t always like Attean because he has a disdainful attitude toward him, but they learn to trust each other, and they find interesting things to do together. Matt comes to realize that his irritation at Attean’s attitude is because it’s so difficult to earn Attean’s respect, and he really wants Attean’s respect. Although Matt doesn’t like Attean’s attitude toward white people, he does agree with Attean about some things, and he has to admit that he cares about what Attean thinks. Matt does get some respect from Attean later when the boys have a hair-raising encounter with a bear. Attean is the one who actually kills it, but Matt proves his usefulness during the struggle. Matt also comes to understand Attean’s resentment against white people when Attean eventually tells him that he’s an orphan and that his parents were killed by white people. That’s why he lives with his grandparents.

As time goes by, Matt becomes increasingly worried about whether or not his family will ever arrive. He worries that maybe something happened to his father and that the rest of the family won’t know where the cabin is and won’t be able to find him. When it passes the time when his family should have arrived, Matt fears that maybe they will never come at all. What if he is left alone? He has survived so far, with some help from Attean and his people, but can he live alone forever? Or could there be a place for him among Attean’s people?

Saknis has also been thinking about this, and he has noticed that Matt’s family has not yet come. He knows that it would be dangerous for the boy to remain alone in the cabin when winter comes. As the seasons change, the Native Americans are preparing to move to their winter hunting grounds. Saknis invites Matt to come with them, and Matt has to decide whether to accept the offer or stay and wait for his family.

This book is a Newbery Honor Book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

This story reminds me a little of The Courage of Sarah Noble, where an 18th century white child who is afraid of Native Americans comes to learn more about them by living with them and interacting with them. I actually read The Sign of the Beaver when I was a child, and I only read The Courage of Sarah Noble as an adult. I’m not sure now if I prefer one of these books over the other. For a long time, I forgot the title of The Sign of the Beaver, although I did like this book the first time I read it. I remembered the concept of the boy living alone while he waited for the rest of the family to join him. One part that stuck in my mind the most was the part near the end of the story where Matt makes a cradle because he knows that his mother was expecting a baby when he last saw her and thinks that it would be nice to have a cradle ready for his new younger sibling, but when his family arrives, he is told that the baby died. That tragic image just stayed with me for years.

Some of the prejudiced language in the story, like “savage” and “heathen” and some anti-Catholic talk from Ben early on, is a little uncomfortable, but this is one of those stories about changing attitudes and overcoming prejudice. The main character has to show some fearful and/or prejudiced thoughts toward Native American initially for readers to appreciate how far he comes and how much his thinking changes after he makes friends with them and learns more about them.

Ben, of course, is a villain character, so his prejudiced talk is a reflection of that. He’s selfish and a thief, so his views of other people are based on what puts him in the best light or justifies things that he’s done. When he talks about the people of the last town he was in being against him and making trouble so he had to leave, both the readers and Matt realize that Ben was the one who started the trouble. Ben blames other people for problems he creates himself. The stories he tells Matt about his earlier, supposedly brave adventures are based around the French and Indian War, which is where the Catholics enter the discussion.

Several times during the story, Attean uses the word “squaw” to refer to women. I didn’t think too much about that sort of thing when I was a child because I assumed that both the author and characters in books that used that term knew what it meant and were using it correctly. Since then, I’ve heard that it actually has a rather vulgar meaning, although I’ve also heard conflicting information that it’s not always vulgar. The contradictory accounts make it a little confusing, but according to the best explanations I’ve read, the contradictions about the meaning of this word have to do with similar-sounding words in different Native American languages. Not all Native American tribes have the same traditional language, and some have words that sound like “squaw” and refer to females in a general way, while others have words with a similar sound that refer to female anatomy in a more vulgar way. For that reason, something that might seem innocuous to one native speaker might sound crude to another, and non-native speakers of any of the languages involved may not fully understand all the connotations of the word. In the end, I’m not sure how much of this the author of this book understood, but my conclusion is that it’s best not to use certain words unless you’re sure of their meaning, not only to you but to your audience. I only use the word here to make it clear which word appears in the book. Other than that, I don’t think this word is a necessary one, at least not for me. I understand what Attean is referring to in the context of the story, and I think that’s what really matters in this particular case. Whether that’s the right word for Attean’s tribe to use at this point in history would be more a matter for a linguist. I’m willing to accept it in the book as long as readers understand the context of the situation and are content to leave the word in the book and not use it themselves outside the context of the story.

When Attean talks about women in the story, it’s typically to point out certain types of work that he considers women’s work instead of men’s work. Matt is a little offended sometimes when Attean tells him that some chore he’s doing is for women instead of men. Matt’s family doesn’t have the same standards for dividing up chores as Attean’s tribe does, and the fact is that Matt is living alone at the moment. There are no women in Matt’s cabin, only Matt. Any chore that needs to be done right now is Matt’s to do because there simply is no one else to do any of it for him. I think when Attean tells him that he’s doing women’s work, he’s trying to needle Matt because, otherwise, he comes off as sounding a little dense. Sure, Attean. We’ll just have the women who aren’t here do this stuff that needs doing right now. During the course of the story, Matt comes to appreciate how the Native Americans live differently because it makes sense for the place where they live and their circumstances, but this is one instance where Attean could be a little more understanding about Matt’s circumstances.

One thing that I had completely forgotten about in this story was the part where Matt thinks about how Attean smells bad. Earlier, when I did a post about Mystery of the Pirate’s Ghost by Elizabeth Honness, I was irritated at the author for having one of the characters imagining smelly Native Americans because I had never heard of that as a stereotype before (I thought at the time), and I didn’t know where that idea came from. A site reader suggested that the trope came from the Little House on the Prairie series because there is talk like that in those books, but The Sign of the Beaver actually offers an immediate explanation as soon as Matt thinks about the cause of the smell. Matt realizes that Attean has smeared a kind of smelly grease on his body that is meant to repel mosquitoes. Matt has heard of people doing this before, and he understands that there is a useful purpose behind it, but he just hates the smell so much that he thinks he’d rather just put up with the mosquitoes. That explanation really helps to put everything into context. When there’s no explanation about things like this in stories, it makes it sound like Native Americans are just smelly because they’re “savages” who don’t bathe or something, but when you hear the explanation, it’s just that the smell is an inconvenient side effect from something that has a real, practical purpose. It might be unappealing to Matt, but there is a point to it. So, on the one hand, I feel a little bad about getting down on Elizabeth Honness for throwing that idea into her story without an apparent basis, but still irritated because, if she knew that was the explanation, she could have said something about it instead of just throwing that out there, like everyone reading the story would already know. I have similar feelings about some of the things Laura Ingalls Wilder put in her books, too. Context is important, and some authors are better at providing it than others. I also think that context is something that books from the late 20th century and early 21st century often provide better than books from earlier decades, although there are some exceptions.

At the end of the story, we don’t know for sure whether Matt and Attean will meet again. When Matt’s family arrives, they tell him that other white families will be arriving soon. Matt knows that the tribe he befriended will likely lose their hunting grounds to the town that will be built there. Matt is concerned for their future, but he is glad to be reunited with his family and still considers Attean his friend.

Posted on by TracyC

Sing Down the Moon

Sing Down the Moon cover

Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell, 1970.

The story begins with a young Navajo girl, Bright Morning, admiring the beginning of spring, but she is caught in a storm and hurries home without the sheep she was supposed to be tending. When the girl’s mother realizes that she abandoned the sheep, she takes the girl back to the sheep, and they watch them all night. The sheep are very important to the family, and the girl’s mother refuses to allow her to take the sheep out by herself again for the rest of that spring.

When Bright Morning finally proves that she can be responsible and not leave the sheep to tend themselves, she is allowed to take them out again. Bright Morning likes to talk to the other girls, Running Bird and White Deer, as they watch all of their sheep together. The girls like to talk about their futures, who they will marry and what kind of children they have. They like to tease each other. Bright Morning’s friends know that she is likely to marry a young man called Tall Boy. The rumor is that Tall Boy’s parents want him to marry her because her mother owns so many fine sheep. Bright Morning knows that her friends tease because they are curious about Tall Boy and want her to talk about him, but she refuses. The girls know that he is supposed to be riding out with the warriors soon, and they tease that maybe he will bring back some other girl from the Ute tribe, but Bright Morning ignores them.

After the warriors have left for their raid on the Utes, the girls see some white men on horses approaching the village. The girls recognize them as oldiers and are worried that their village could be vulnerable to attack without the warriors. Later, the girls encounter more white men, but these men are not dressed as soldiers. They stop to talk to Bright Morning and Running Bird, asking them for directions, but the girls realize that they are slavers. They kidnap both girls and ride away with them!

They take the girls to a town of Spanish people and separate them from each other. They sell Bright Morning to a woman who uses her as a servant. The woman has other Native American girls as slaves, including a younger girl called Rosita. Rosita doesn’t mind her captivity or her life as a servant much. She came from a tribe that was very poor, and since she was brought to this woman’s household to work for her, she has had better food and clothing than she did at home. Rosita tells Bright Morning that the family they work for isn’t bad, and Bright Morning is allowed to keep her dog, who followed her when she was abducted. However, Bright Morning can’t stand her captivity. The woman who owns the house gives her new clothes, but Bright Morning doesn’t care. All she wants to do is find a way to go home.

Bright Morning is reunited with Running Bird when another captive girl comes up with a plan for the three of them to escape. They manage to steal horses and ride away from the town. Along the way, they meet up with Tall Boy and one of his friends, and the boys help fight off the Spaniards who are pursuing the girls. Unfortunately, Tall Boy is badly injured in the fight. He loses the use of one of his arms, and the other Navajos know that he can no longer be a warrior. Bright Morning still cares about Tall Boy, but her mother and sister tell her that she should no longer consider marrying him.

However, the Navajos’ troubles are just beginning. They haven’t heard the last of the soldiers. The American soldiers return and drive the Navajos off their land. They destroy all of their homes and eventually round them up and start them on a long march with little food, where many of them die. The Navajos fear that all of them will die. How will Bright Morning and her family survive, and will they ever see their homeland again?

The book is a Newbery Honor book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I remember reading this book when I was about 13 years old, in middle school! It takes place in my home state, the northern part, where the Navajo reservation is now, in the Four Corners region. I’ve been to Canyon de Chelly (“Chelly” is pronounced like “shay”, like in French) before, although I hadn’t been there at the time when I first read this book. Since I read this book as a kid, I’ve been to places and seen things that helped me understand the setting of the story better. As an adult, I appreciate the historical aspects of the story even more because I know more about the background. The book doesn’t give a date for the story until the postscript at the very end of the book, but the death march described in the story is Long Walk of 1863 to 1865.

The second half of the book is very depressing because there are horrible conditions and many deaths, including the deaths of children. I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to revisit this book at first because I remembered that it was depressing, but the book is well-written. The narrator describes events in an exciting, compelling way.

I had forgotten many details of the story, but there were some things that jumped out at me as an adult that I hadn’t noticed the first time. The postscript at the end of the story explains how life and Navajo culture changed after this traumatic event. If you see photographs of Navajo in “traditional” costumes now, they often include velveteen clothing, but that’s actually a relatively new tradition. The velveteen was adopted from white people during their captivity because they didn’t have access to wool to make their older style of traditional clothing. When Bright Morning was held captive in the Spanish town, she was given velveteen clothing there.

Another odd topic that is touched on only very briefly but that I know more about from other sources concerns the subject of flour. The book mentions that the Navajo were unused to eating wheat flour until it was their only form of rations during the Long Walk. Until then, their staple grain was corn, and when they started eating wheat flour, it made them feel sick. Their bodies just weren’t used to it. The book doesn’t explicitly explain this, but I know from other sources that the Long Walk and those flour rations were the origins of Navajo fry bread. Fry bread was not part of Navajo diet until that point. I grew up eating it on special occasions as a treat because it is greasy but good with powdered sugar, and it’s often served at carnivals and fairs here. However, as an adult, I came to realize that its origins as a food come from a very dark source. It was starvation food. It can keep you alive if there’s nothing else, but it’s not going to keep you healthy if you eat nothing else. It’s greasy and fatty, and it has little nutritional quality. Even now, I don’t have as much tolerance for it as I did when I was a kid. I can’t stomach it well these days if it’s too greasy or I eat too much.

That’s actually not a bad metaphor for the events described in this book. They’re heavy, and the more of it you understand and absorb, the sicker you feel. I absorb much more now than when I was a kid and only half understood the full significance of the events, and it makes me feel much worse than I did the first time.

So, do I recommend this book for kids? Actually, yes. I’m not a fan of depressing books with a lot of death, and I struggled through some depressing books when I was in school. If you had asked my 13-year-old self whether books with this much death and suffering were worth it, she might have had trouble answering that question, but time and further understanding have changed the way my adult self feels. There are some depressing topics that are worth the struggle to absorb them, but if I were the one teaching the lessons, I think I would do it a little differently than my teachers did for me back then.

I think this book is still a good introduction to topics that can be difficult to discuss. It’s worth reading once to understand the historical background of these events and what they really meant to the people who experienced them directly. It’s painful to read the bad parts, but it’s the kind of pain that leads to something better: real understanding. I recommend the book for kids in their early teens because I think that’s the best level for understanding it and accepting the bad parts. I think it should also be accompanied by nonfiction history lessons about the time period and events and discussion about their feelings about the story and historical events. I remember being told some of the history the first time I read this book, but I think that maybe there should have been more discussion about feelings.

I think it’s important to discuss feelings because they’re the hardest part of this book and they’re also the reason why it’s difficult to study some of the darker parts of history. I had a hard time with this when I was younger, and I still do in some respects, but I think understanding what causes those feelings is key to handling them. Reading books like this while discussing tools to handle difficult feelings could help students to better handle their emotions in other areas of life as well.

One of the first points that I think is important to understand and which my teachers didn’t really explain to me is that it’s natural to feel bad when you hear about bad things happening to other people, even when the bad things happened generations before you were born or even when those individual characters are fictional. (Bright Morning and her friends and family are fictional characters even though the events around them are historical. Real Navajos did experience what they experienced.) Empathy is a natural human emotion, and it’s an important tool for living with other people. Humans are social creatures. We live as part of larger groups, and we need at least some empathy to understand other people’s emotions and circumstances, how our actions affect them, and how to treat other people as we ourselves would truly like to be treated. The ability to experience empathy is a sign that you are mentally and emotionally healthy. It’s really only worrying when someone can’t feel it.

One of the most disturbing feelings about this story comes from realizing that the soldiers who are inflicting all of this death and pain either don’t feel empathy for the people they are harming or have actively chosen to ignore it to further their own purposes. That’s not a sign of being mentally or emotionally healthy or behaving in a moral way. When the readers feel repulsed by the soldiers and what they’re doing, it’s because they recognize that these people are a serious danger to others, and they are not functioning in a normal way. Your brain is warning you of a threat. It’s a past threat rather than an immediate one, but if you find the soldiers and their actions upsetting, it’s a sign that your brain has accurately assessed the risk associated with these people and the harm they do. You have accurately connected the suffering of other people for whom you feel empathy with the people who are the direct cause. I’m not saying that the soldiers were necessarily psychopaths, but lack of empathy and remorse and calculated manipulation are all symptoms of psychopathy and should raise alarms for anyone confronted with those signs. So, feeling bad about this situation and the people causing it is a sign that you yourself are mentally and emotionally healthy and have correctly recognized the seriousness of the situation and the harm being done to other people. What I’m saying is that, even when you’re feeling bad, it’s for good reasons, and that deserves recognition.

When I was young, I felt angry and frustrated by stories where people were doing terrible things to others. I still do because that’s part of empathy, but I also came to realize that part of my frustration when it came to historical situations came from my inability to change the situation. When harm has been done, it’s impossible to undo it. What was done was done. I can’t help the people who died, and I can’t even punish the wrong-doers because they’re dead now, too. It’s frustrating to find yourself confronted by a situation where nothing can change. But, I think it’s important to realize that change has happened and is currently happening. History is being written all the time, not even just through writing but through the ways that people live their lives every day. Even when a particular event is over, events and people keep moving. Bad events can cast long shadows, causing harm long after the initial event. That’s part of what makes them so bad. However, as time moves on, new people enter the scene, and new things happen, including things that people in the past would never have foreseen. It eventually reaches a point where the things that continue to happen rely on what we, the living, continue to do or allow to be done. History takes the long view, and I think people need to be reminded of that.

Do you suppose that the people in this story who act as villains thought of themselves like that? Further point, how much does it matter how they thought of themselves? Maybe they thought of themselves as winners at the time because they were getting their way and the people they were hurting were unable to stop them from hurting and killing them, but is that really “winning”? Lazy historians frequently brush things off by saying that “history is written by the victors“, but if that were really true, would we even be hearing or reading stories like this? Would we ever hear about slaves or care about the victims of war and atrocity? Would we ever consider the perspectives of people who died at all? Or does it change your mind about what “winning” really is and who’s really a “winner”? Maybe, in life and history, there aren’t any “winners” because neither of those was ever really a contest to begin with. (Or, as some put it, life is a collection of contests that people can simultaneously be both winning and losing. Personally, I think life is just for living, not for winning against someone else who is also trying to just live and probably couldn’t care less about you “winning” or not.) Apparent victories aren’t always real accomplishments, and people who see that reality are the ones who write the most accurate histories. Individual human lives only last so long, so any apparent “win” by an individual or group is never more than temporary. Our sense of what history includes and what people in the past were really like changes as we increase our knowledge of it and reconsider the context, not unlike the way my 40-year-old self has a deeper understanding of this book than my 13-year-old self did.

Remember that, at the beginning of this particular story, the Navajo warriors were going to raid the Utes. We never really find out in the book why they were going to do this, but does it matter anymore when the Navajos themselves get raided and subjected to something that might be even worse than what they were originally planning to do to their enemies? The story drops this subplot when the march begins. Life is like that, constantly moving, ever changing. History goes on and on. Sometimes, a young warrior who was praised for his prowess gets shot in the arm and can’t pull a bow anymore. Sometimes, a 40-year-old woman from the 21st century looks back on 19th century soldiers who may have thought of themselves as heroes and wants to tell them, to their faces, that they couldn’t be more wrong about that. If they’re not evil psychopaths, they’re doing a dang good job of pretending, and I never once thought of them as being “heroes” in my entire life. That’s life for you. Each of the people who have read this book or ever will read it are among the new people entering the story and its sequels, and we all have the ability to decide what role we want to play in the on-going story of history.

What happens after the book ends, is important, too. If I were teaching this, I would follow up this particular chapter of Native American and Navajo history by talking about some of the developments that continued to happen in their history, including some of the better moments, like the development of the written form of the Navajo language (for much of it’s history, Navajo was only a written language – that’s why the soldiers in the story couldn’t leave a written message in Navajo) and how code talkers used the Navajo language during WWII. The people who realized that these things were possible and something worth working toward were creative individuals. Rather than seeking to destroy something or repress it, they found creative ways to make use of what was there and put people’s talents to good use, helping others. The worst moments of history have been when people without empathy use others or seek to destroy them for personal gain, but the triumphant moments are when people take what they have and find a way to make it better. Noting these positive moments doesn’t make the bad parts of history any better than they actually were, but what we want is more of these positive moments of creativity and development and the type of people who are willing to work to make them happen.

It helps to balance out the explanations of what went wrong and people who did wrong with examples of what was better. Some teachers stress how we teach the bad moments so people learn from the past and don’t repeat it, and that’s true. However, I think we also need to add on what has worked and what we want people to do instead. A “don’t do this” needs to be followed up by “do this instead” to be an effective instruction. As a society, we don’t want more destroyers and takers. We want innovators and makers. We want creative people who find new uses for resources, including human resources and talents, and who are dedicated to truly helping others and human society as a whole instead of merely helping themselves to what others have that they want. This book demonstrates the dark side of humanity, but as I said, history is still being written every day with new players.

On the lighter side of this story, I enjoyed the descriptions of the coming-of-age ceremony for young women that Bright Morning has and the marriage ceremony later. During her time in captivity in the Spanish town, Bright Morning also attends Easter celebrations. She doesn’t understand Christianity and has never heard of Jesus before, and she doesn’t understand what the holiday is about or what’s going on. Rosita tries to explain to her who Jesus is in terms of Navajo religion. I found the explanation fascinating, but Bright Morning is still confused.

Posted on by TracyC

The Dark-Thirty

The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural by Patricia C. McKissack, 1992.

There are ten short, scary stories in this book, not thirty. The author explains in the beginning that the name of the book comes from an expression kids used when she was young. The “dark-thirty” was the last half hour of light before it became truly dark outside, when the kids had to hurry home so they wouldn’t be out after dark, when the monsters came out. The author was African American, and the stories in this book have African American themes. They were based on stories that the author heard from her grandmother when she was young.

This is a book that I remember a school librarian introducing to us when I was in elementary school, probably around age 10 or 11. My memories of it are a little vague. I had forgotten most of what the stories were about, although the title stuck with me, and I remembered thinking that I should read it again someday. I have to admit that most of the emotions that I experience while reading this book as an adult were anger and frustration. The sad truth is that those are the emotions that permeate much of African American history, from the harsh conditions of slavery to the injustices of racism, and those are the aspects of the stories that stand out to me most as an adult. As I recall, I did think more about the ghost parts of the stories when I was a kid, but I didn’t have as deep an understanding of the background of the stories then. Maybe part of the lesson here is that human monsters are more terrifying than anything supernatural, partly because it’s the people who are or should be closest to you in a shared humanity are the ones who have the most opportunity to cause harm, if that’s what they’ve decided to do. That’s a rather dark thought, but these are dark stories with dark themes.

On a lighter note, I found the stories that introduced pieces of folklore fascinating. I’ve had an interest in folklore since I was a kid, which is part of why this book stuck in my mind for so many years.

I wouldn’t recommend this book for kids younger than 10 years old because of the dark themes. There is also derogatory racial language in the stories (including the n-word), particularly used by the villains, which helps show why they’re villains. I think, before kids are ready for this book, they need to have some background information on the subjects of racism and slavery to understand what’s going on, and they should also know that there are certain words they shouldn’t use themselves, even if other people do.

The book is a Newbery Honor Book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Stories in the Book:

The Legend of Pin Oak

The story is set during slave days. Harper McAvoy, a plantation owner, has resented one of his slaves, Henri, since they were both young. Harper was neglected by his father after his mother died giving birth to him, and years later, when his father finally returned to their estate, called Pin Oak, he learned that his other had another son with a free black woman, Henri. Their father had hoped that the two boys might be friends and that Henri would help Harper run the estate one day, but Harper always resented Henri for being more like their father than he was and for receiving the attention that his father never showed him. After their father died, Harper thought that he could sell Henri and be rid of him forever, but Henri has actually been a free person all along because his mother was free.

When the slavers try to take Henri anyway, he and his wife run away with their baby. They apparently die jumping to their deaths at a waterfall, although some say that they actually turned into birds and flew away while Harper is killed pursuing them. Others think that Henri and his family may have survived by jumping into a cave behind the waterfall, although there is evidence that Henri didn’t know there was a cave there. Their fate is left ambiguous.

We Organized

As part of the government’s effort to get people back to work during the Great Depression, the Library of Congress employed writers to record the stories of people who had been slaves. This chapter is a poem based on one of those stories.

Justice

This story is about the Ku Klux Klan. A wealthy and influential man called Riley Holt is murdered. The identity of the murderer is unknown, but local people are so shocked and angry at the crime that they are determined to get “justice” … one way or another. A bitter and suspicious local man called Hoop Granger blames a young black man named Alvin Tinsley. However, Alvin has an alibi, and the chief of police, knowing that Hoop is a bully and a liar and has a history of pushing Alvin to take responsibility for things he’s done himself, asks Hoop if he has an alibi, too. He says that he was working at his service station and his friends will vouch for him, but Chief Brown doesn’t think much of any of them as witnesses.

Hoop is a member of the KKK, and to throw suspicion for the murder from himself, he convinces his fellow KKK members that Alvin is guilty and needs to be punished. They capture Alvin and lynch him, but before Alvin dies, he promises to come back and prove his innocence. Hoop and his friends tell everyone that Alvin hanged himself after confessing to Holt’s murder. Not everyone in town believes the story, but they have no way of proving it’s a lie, and the authorities seem satisfied with the explanation (mainly because the mayor’s son was also part of lynch mob, and the mayor is forcing everyone to cover for him). However, Hoop can’t forget what Alvin said about coming back to prove his innocence. He seems haunted by Alvin’s words. Soon, he starts seeing things and becomes convinced that Alvin is coming back for him. Is it really a restless spirit or Hoop’s own guilty conscience?

The 11:59

This story is about train travel and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had stories that they liked to tell each other, like this story about a phantom train called the Death Train or the 11:59.

A retired porter enjoys telling the younger porters stories about how the Brotherhood was formed and the truly great men among the porters. Many of his stories are tall-tales. One of his stories is about the 11:59. When a porter hears the whistle of this phantom train, he only has 24 hours left to live, and nobody can escape it. Not even old Lester.

The Sight

There’s an old superstition that babies who are born with a caul over their heads will have psychic abilities and could be able to see the future or spirits. A boy named Esau gets “the sight” and is able to tell the future from a young age. However, people with “the sight” have to be careful who knows they have that power because some people will try to use them for unethical purposes, which might cause them to lose their gift, and Esau’s father is a con man. Esau knows that his father can’t be trusted, but when he feels compelled to warn his father of danger, his father learns what Esau can do. His father forces him to help him win at gambling with his gift until the gift finally fades. Then, his father deserts him and his mother. Esau’s mother says maybe it’s just as well to lose the sight, and Esau agrees, not liking it when he sees that bad things are about to happen.

Years go by, Esau grows up, and he eventually becomes a soldier in WWII. He manages to make it home safely, but he is surprised by the sudden return of his gift just in time to save his family.

The Woman in the Snow

This story involves the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s.

Grady Bishop, a white man with a bad history and a chip on his shoulder, has recently started working as a bus driver, although he’s never happy when he has to take the less prestigious route through the city, where a lot of black people catch the bus. Driving makes him feel powerful, but he considers this route beneath him.

One day, during a bad snow storm, a poor woman with a sick baby begs him for a ride although she doesn’t have money to pay. She’s afraid if she can’t get the baby to the hospital, she’ll die. Grady refuses to give her a free ride, convinced that she’s making too much out of nothing and just trying to get a free ride. Later, he hears that the woman and baby froze to death in the storm. A year after that, he sees the same woman again on the same route. Startled, Grady crashes his bus and is killed.

Years later, a black bus driver has that route, and other drivers tell him about the ghost lady with the baby that they see whenever it starts snowing. He becomes the last person to see the ghost lady … because he’s the first to give her a ride.

The Conjure Brother

This story explains that “conjure women” were women who sold herbal cures and practiced folk magic to help people change their luck.

A girl named Josie is tired of being an only child and wants a brother. However, her mother shows no signs of being pregnant, even though Josie keeps asking her for a brother. When she hears a couple of women talking about the local conjure woman, Josie decides to go see her and ask if she can help her get a brother. The conjure woman gives her a set of instructions to follow, but Josie performs the ritual too early at night. Instead of getting a baby brother, Josie gets an older brother, called Adam. Her parents act like Adam has always been their oldest child. Adam is bossy, and some of the things that used to belong to Josie now belong to Adam. Josie starts to think of Adam as a pest and returns to the conjure woman to ask her to do something about Adam, but instead, she learns an important lesson about sharing her life and house with a sibling.

Boo Mama

This chapter talks about the tumultuous times of the late 1960s and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Some people felt so overwhelmed by everything that was going on that they just wanted to “drop out” of society and ignore the chaos around them.

Leddy has been a social activist since she was in her teens, but then, her husband is killed in the war in Vietnam, leaving her with a young child. After the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy soon after her husband’s death, Leddy feels completely overwhelmed. She’s been putting forth all of the effort she has for a long time, and the deaths of the man she loved and the people who inspired her feel like too much. She has a breakdown and starts questioning whether everything she and her friends have done has really accomplished anything. Deciding that she needs a change of scene for her and her son, she moves to a rural community in Tennessee.

At first, her young son seems to do better in the countryside, and Leddy finds the change of pace relaxing, but then, her young son disappears. He wanders away while his mother is hanging out the laundry. The locals put together a search party. They search for days, but all they can find is the boy’s teddy bear. Everyone is convinced that he’s dead, but Leddy can’t give up hope that her son is still alive. Her son does turn up, but he is strangely different. Where has he been, and what has happened to him?

The Gingi

There is an old superstition that “Evil needs an invitation.” Among the Yoruba people of West Africa, there is a belief that evil spirits need someone to welcome them into a house before they can enter, so they will try to trick unsuspecting people into giving them an invitation. They use special talismans called gingi to guard against evil.

A woman named Laura is fascinated by a strange statue that she sees in a shop window. However, when she tries to buy it, the shopkeeper says that she’s never seen it before and warns Laura that evil spirits sometimes disguise themselves to trick people into taking them into their homes. Laura thinks this is just superstition and insists that she wants the statue. The shopkeeper charges her a price that’s too high to discourage her from buying the statue, and it almost works, but for some reason, Laura feels compelled to buy it and pays for it anyway. Seeing that she can’t prevent Laura from taking the statue, the shopkeeper insists that she take a small complementary talisman and keep it with her. The talisman is a small doll, and she gives it to her young daughter to play with.

The Chicken-Coop Monster

The final story in the book is semi-autobiographical, inspired by the author’s feelings when her parents got divorced when she was a child.

A young girl named Melissa is upset about her parents’ divorce. Her parents send her to stay with her grandparents in Tennessee while they’re sorting things out, but she becomes convinced that there’s a monster living in the chicken coop on her grandparents’ property. She and her friends are part of a group called the Monster Watchers of America. Melissa’s grandmother doesn’t believe in the monster, but her grandfather teaches her an important lesson about facing up to life’s monsters.

Posted on by TracyC

The Dark is Rising

The Dark is Rising Sequence

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, 1973.

The day before his eleventh birthday on Midwinter, Will Stanton has an uneasy feeling that something is about to happen. First, the rabbits that his family keep behave oddly. Then, other animals seem to be afraid of him when they never have before. When he and his brother James go to pick up some hay from Mr. Dawson, Mr. Dawson makes an odd comment about “the Walker” being abroad and that it’s going to be a bad night. Then, Mr. Dawson says that he has something for Will for his birthday. He gives Will an odd iron ornament and tells him to keep it safe and not talk about it with other people. Everything about this day seems odd to Will, but he accepts this unusual gift.

That night, Will has an increasing sense of terror, and a rook apparently breaks the skylight in his room during a snow storm. The next day, Will can’t seem to wake up his sleeping family. He puts on warm clothes and leaves the house with a strange feeling that this is somehow his destiny. Things in the area look different, as if he is now in a different time, sometime in the past. Eventually, he sees a man he knows who works for Mr. Dawson, John Smith. John Smith is working on horseshoes for a black horse that belongs to a mysterious stranger in a dark cloak. The mysterious stranger offers him food and a ride on his horse, but Will refuses both. The stranger gives him an uneasy feeling, and without really knowing why, Will says that he is looking for “the Walker.” The cloaked stranger tells him that “the Rider is abroad” and tries to grab him, but John Smith pulls him out of the way, and the stranger is angry. John Smith tells Will that he is just newly woken and will have to figure things out for himself but to trust his instincts today. A beautiful white horse appears, and John Smith says that Will can ride it, if he wants, but Will’s instincts tell him that he needs to go on alone. As he leaves, Will sees John Smith giving the white mare shoes that look like the iron ornament that Mr. Dawson gave him.

As he explores the countryside further, Will encounters a wandering tramp that he saw attacked by rooks the day before and confronts him as being “the Walker.” The Walker is defensive and suspicious, and he asks Will to show him “the Sign.” Will realizes that he must mean the iron ornament that he now wears on his belt, but before he can show it to the Walker, the Rider comes and frightens the Walker away. The Rider sees his Sign and comments that Will only has one of them so far, and that won’t help him much. Fortunately, the white mare comes and carries Will away from the Rider.

The white mare carries Will away into the hills, he has a sensation like he’s falling, and then, he finds himself alone in the snow near a pair of carved wooden doors that appear to be standing by themselves, attached to nothing. Will pushes on the doors and finds himself in what seems to be a great hall, hung with tapestries. There is an old woman and a tall man standing by the fireplace, and they greet him. Will tries to ask them about the doors and why they seem to be standing by themselves, but the doors have vanished behind him. The man says that Will’s first lesson is that nothing is what it seems to be.

The man introduces himself as Merriman Lyon (introduced in the previous book in the series), and he says that he and Will were born with the same gift, the power of the Old Ones. Now that it’s Will’s eleventh birthday, his gift is awakening, but he must learn how to control it. At first, Will doesn’t think that he has any particular gift, so Merriman shows him how he can receive mental pictures from someone else’s mind and send them a mental picture and how he can even put out a fire with his mind. Will becomes convinced that he does indeed have powers that normal boys don’t have. Merriman tells him that this gift is a burden, like many special gifts, but he was born with this gift for a special purpose.

Merriman says that he doesn’t want to tell him too much yet because the full knowledge of his destiny may be dangerous for him while he is still learning to use his gift. However, he does tell Will that he is actually one of the Old Ones, the first of his kind to be born in the last 500 years, and he will be the very last of them. Like other Old Ones, he will play a role in the battle between good and evil. His first role is that of the Sign-Seeker. He must find the six Signs and guard them. The iron ornament is the first Sign, but the others won’t be as easy to find.

Will returns to his family and his ordinary life, buying Christmas presents for his siblings for the coming holiday, but he knows that his life is no longer ordinary. He has much to learn about how to use his powers, and the sinister forces that pursue him to try to stop him from carrying out his mission.

The book is a Newbery Honor Book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book was adapted as a movie called The Seeker in 2007.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Fantasy books sometimes have to deal with the subject of religion and the relationship between magic and religion. This book also does so somewhat, but I noticed that it also seems to try to remove itself from consideration of the issue at the same time. At one point, Merriman discusses the idea of witches and witchcraft trials with Will, telling him that none of those involved were Old Ones, like the two of them. He says that everyone involved with witchcraft trials were ordinary humans, most of the people who were called “witches” were innocent victims although a small number were genuinely evil, and generally, the witchcraft trials were the result of human madness and irrationality, not genuine magic. In other words, readers don’t need to worry about trying to reconcile the power of the Old Ones with witchcraft because the author says that the two of them are two different, unrelated things.

Will and his family celebrate Christmas during the course of the book, and they go to church, so it’s apparently fine for an Old One to also be a Christian. Yet, there is a scene at church on Christmas where Will and John Smith have to stop the forces of the Dark attacking the church. The minister tries by calling on the powers of God and exorcising the evil spirits, but John Smith says that the minister’s efforts don’t work because “This battle is not for his fighting”, apparently indicating that the powers of Light and Dark as portrayed in this story are somehow outside of any religion or the interference of any god because they are forces that are completely unto themselves. The traditional Christian view would be that God commands the forces of good and light while the devil commands the forces of evil and darkness, but they’re saying here that’s not the case in this story. Will’s thought is that there is a place that exists out of time where all the Gods that ever were came from and also all of the forces and powers in the world, and it seems like some of these exist independently of each other, that they don’t have any beginning and so none of them is less old than any of the others. There is an element of pagan and folklore traditions that runs through these books, and I think that part of this concept references that, but I also see that looking at the battle between Light and Dark in this way, as being something independent of absolutely everything else, leaves the author of the stories free to have it play out in whatever way makes a good story without having to make it adhere to any rules and traditions other than the ones she’s chosen.

Of course, even fictional magic has to follow some rules in order to make logical sense to the readers. As I said, there are pagan and/or folklore traditions that are implied to be true or to have more significance than most people would suspect. Will uses holly as a form of protection for his home during Christmas. Aside from its association with Christmas, there are also many folkloric superstitions about holly. It is also revealed that part of what makes Will so special is that he is the seventh son of a seventh son, another concept from folklore.

A theme that is carried over to this book from the first one in the series is that evil can sometimes appear innocent and even friendly. People who have appeared as friends before can be revealed to be secretly evil or coerced to the dark side, even people who have been close before. Those who aren’t as in tune with the battle between good and evil may be fooled by friendly smiles, charming manners, and a pleasant appearance, but those who are aware of the difference between dark and light can feel when someone isn’t right.

There is one case in this book where a previously good person turns to the Dark because he feels betrayed about how Merry put his life at risk for the cause of the Light. I feel like this could have been avoided if Merry had been more honest with him in the beginning about the risks of what they were doing and the reasons why it was so important, but Merry seems to feel like it was all inevitable, something that was fated to be. Yet, at the end of this person’s life, Merry emphasizes that all of the choices this person made were his own, and although he went through much suffering because of things that had to happen as they did, he could have still had a better life even while undergoing his ordeals if he had made different choices along the way. I think I see what he means, that there are some things in life that are unavoidable but people can make them better or worse through their own choices and behavior, but I still feel like Merry set him up for this bad situation because he didn’t explain things properly when he should have. Maybe that was Merry’s bad decision, too?

Parts of this book actually reminded me of The Box of Delights, a vintage children’s fantasy book that also takes place at Christmas. In both books, Herne the Hunter, a character from folklore, makes an appearance, and the boys in each story get turned into different animals through their adventures with magical books.

Posted on by TracyC

My Father’s Dragon

My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett, 1948.

This is a fantasy book where the author tells a story about her father’s adventures rescuing a dragon when he was a boy.

It all starts when the boy, Elmer Elevator, brings home an alley cat that he found. However, his mother doesn’t like the cat and doesn’t want Elmer to keep her. When he tries to feed the cat secretly, she throws the cat out and punishes Elmer. The boy and the cat take a walk in the park together, and the boy confides his wish to learn how to fly airplanes when he grows up. The cat says that he doesn’t have to wait until he grows up to learn how to fly.

The cat explains that she has traveled a great deal, and not too long ago, she visited the Wild Island, which is inhabited by wild animals. The island is divided in half by a river inhabited by crocodiles. Normally, the animals have to take the long way to get around the river to avoid being eaten by the crocodiles, but a few months before the cat visited the island, a baby dragon fell of his cloud and landed next to the river with an injured wing. The other animals on the island captured the poor baby dragon, and when his wing healed well enough for him to fly, they started forcing him to carry passengers and cargo over the river. They work the poor baby dragon too hard and mistreat him. The cat made friends with the little dragon and wanted to help him but didn’t know how because she couldn’t untie the rope that holds the dragon prisoner. The cat suggests to Elmer that the dragon would probably be happy to give him a ride if he helps to free him, and Elmer decides to do just that. Besides, he’s angry with his mother for mistreating the cat and doesn’t mind leaving home for awhile.

The cat decides that she’s too old to travel, so she stays behind, but she helps Elmer to prepare for the trip. Elmer stows away on a ship to the nearby Island of Tangerina and gets to the Wild Island by climbing over the rocks between them. When he reaches the Wild Island, he decides to look for and follow the river, but he has to be careful of the animals on the island.

Elmer is found by some tigers who say that they’re hungry and curious to know what little boys taste like. However, remembering some of the cat’s advice, he offers the tigers some chewing gum because (apparently) tigers love it. He also tells them that it’s special chewing gum that will change colors when they chew it, and then, they’ll be able to plant it in the ground to grow more chewing gum. The tigers fall for it and forget about Elmer, who sneaks away.

Elmer also has a dangerous encounter with a rhinoceros after he drinks from his “weeping pool.” The rhino wants to toss Elmer into his pool to drown him, but Elmer asks him what he has to weep about. The rhino says that he’s upset that his tusk is no longer as white and pretty as it used to be, and Elmer gives the rhino his toothbrush and toothpaste. The rhino lets Elmer go and begins using the toothbrush to clean his tusk, but by now, the boars have realized that there is someone on the island who doesn’t belong.

Elmer continues onward, helping a lion with a messy mane and a gorilla with fleas and befriending the crocodiles by offering them all lollipops, until he finally finds the dragon and rescues him. They fly away from the island together, but it’s not the end of their adventures.

There’s a reason why the author and illustrator’s names are very similar but not identical. If you read their short biographies, they explain that the illustrator was the stepmother of the author.

This book is a Newbery Honor Book, and it’s also the first in a trilogy about Elmer and the dragon and their adventures together. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E. L. Konigsburg, 1967.

Elizabeth tells the story about how she first met her friend Jennifer one Halloween. Elizabeth is new in town, and doesn’t know many people yet. She doesn’t have any friends to walk with to or from school, and she encounters Jennifer in the woods she passes through on her way to school. When they meet, Elizabeth is dressed as a Pilgrim for the school’s Halloween parade. Jennifer also happens to be wearing a Pilgrim costume, and she’s sitting in a tree. Elizabeth sees that Jennifer is about to lose a shoe because it’s too big for her, so she impulsively pushes the shoe back onto Jennifer’s foot. Jennifer says that witches don’t lose things, and Elizabeth tells her that she’s not dressed like a witch because she’s wearing a Pilgrim costume. Jennifer says that this is what real witches dress like, not like the silly pointed hat costumes. (It becomes more clear later that Jennifer is referring to the accused witches at Salem, Massachusetts.) Elizabeth admires Jennifer’s costume because it looks more authentically old-fashioned than hers does, like a real antique. Elizabeth points out that they’ll have to hurry or be late to school, and Jennifer says that she’ll walk with her in exchange for the cookies Elizabeth is carrying. Elizabeth gives her the cookies because she isn’t hungry and badly needs some company. Jennifer makes it barely on time to her class, but Elizabeth is slightly late because she’s in a different class that’s further down the hall.

Elizabeth describes the Halloween parade at school, and you can tell that this book was written decades ago because there are kids wearing cardboard boxes because their costume is a pack of cigarettes, which would never happen at a 21st century school. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a kid, nobody would have dressed as a pack of cigarettes. There were a lot of anti-smoking campaigns when I was young, our teachers and most of our parents wouldn’t have allowed it, and with more exciting things to be, like super heroes and Ninja Turtles as well as the traditional witches, ballerinas, robots, vampires, and monsters, why the heck would somebody want to be a pack of cigarettes anyway? Lung cancer may be scary, but dressing as a pack of cancer sticks isn’t exactly fun Halloween scary. If you want to be a box of something, at least pick crayons so you can tell people you’re the sharpest crayon in the box. But, I digress.

At the parade, Elizabeth sees Jennifer unsnap the tutu of school mean girl Cynthia, who is dressed as a ballerina, so it falls down. It’s not a serious embarrassment because Cynthia’s still wearing her leotard underneath. Still, Cynthia is one of those two-faced kids who are good-looking and act like perfect angels when adults are watching but turn into nasty little monsters when the adults look away, so this minor embarrassment pleases Elizabeth and many of the other kids. Jennifer also passes a note to Elizabeth to meet her for trick-or-treating that evening, telling her to bring two bags. As the students parade across the stage for the costume contest, Jennifer amazes everyone by wearing a paper bag over her head that doesn’t have any eye holes cut into it, yet she doesn’t have any trouble walking, somehow seeing where she’s going or knowing where to go anyway. This is one of the odd things that Jennifer does that makes Elizabeth wonder if she really does have powers of some kind.

When the girls meet for trick-or-treating, Jennifer tells Elizabeth to give her the bigger bag of the two bags she brought. It’s a bit rude, but Elizabeth is fascinated by Jennifer and lets it go. Also, Jennifer has brought a small wagon with her. Jennifer has invented and mastered an act to get extra candy. At each house, she acts weak and breathless and asks for a drink of water. When the home owners give her a drink of water, she drops her empty bag, so the home owners will feel sorry for her and give her more candy. Then, out of sight of the home owner, Jennifer empties her bag of candy into the little wagon and does the same performance at the next house. Elizabeth wonders how Jennifer is able to drink so much water, but they collect an amazing amount candy from Jennifer’s act.

After Halloween, Jennifer tells Elizabeth to meet her at the library on Saturday, and she invites Elizabeth to become her apprentice witch. Elizabeth thinks it over and decides to accept. Jennifer begins leading Elizabeth through a series of rituals to make her into a witch. The first ritual involves both of them putting a drop of their blood on an old key that Jennifer was wearing around her neck. Afterward, Jennifer gives the old key to Elizabeth to wear. This ritual is kind of like a friendship pact.

Jennifer gives Elizabeth books to read from the library about witches and tells her to eat a raw egg every day for a week (she does it by mixing it into a milkshake), insisting that she also bring her a hard-boiled egg. From there, they progress through a list of other strange foods. When their grade starts rehearsing for their Christmas play, the food of the week is raw onions, which Elizabeth happens to love, in spite of being a notoriously picky eater. People notice the onions because Elizabeth is supposed to be a puppy in their school play that the princess played by nasty Cynthia gets for Christmas, and Cynthia can’t bear to get close to her.

Being Jennifer’s apprentice also means putting up with her rudeness and bossiness. When the girls decide to try making an ointment to change themselves into animals, they argue about what animals they’re going to be. Sometimes, Elizabeth finds Jennifer difficult to deal with because she isn’t considerate of her feelings, but she’s also fascinating because Jennifer is a serious reader and likes to talk about a wide range of interesting things, from witchcraft trials to Vincent Van Gogh to shipwrecks to the guillotines used in the French Revolution to secret codes. Their rituals continue through Christmas and the New Year and into the spring, with Jennifer promoting Elizabeth to Journeymen Witch and assigning her various “taboos”, things that she isn’t supposed to do.

For most of the book, Elizabeth doesn’t tell her mother about being friends with Jennifer. Jennifer, as a witch, is rather odd, and Elizabeth’s mother wants her to be friends with nice, normal children. In particular, she wants her to be friends with Cynthia because, like other adults, Elizabeth’s mother has been taken in by Cynthia’s two-faced act and thinks that Cynthia is a sweet, well-behaved little girl. When Cynthia invites her to her birthday party, Elizabeth knows that the invitation was really from Cynthia’s mother because she and Cynthia aren’t friends. However, Elizabeth’s mother makes her accept the invitation. The party is a trial because, thanks to Jennifer’s taboos, there are many party activities that Elizabeth can’t do (no eating cake, no pin-the-tail-on-the donkey because she can’t touch pins, etc.), but Elizabeth decides to make the most of it and enjoy being an oddball. Elizabeth has some fun when she realizes that she can act mysterious and witchy about knowing certain things and winning at the games she plays. She knows where the treasure is in the treasure hunt because it was just behind a pillow on the couch and she accidentally sat on it earlier, she wins at the clothespin drop game because she’s shorter than the other girls and finds the game easier, and she knows who brought which gift to the party without looking at the tags because she was the first to arrive and remembered what everyone else brought when they came. Of course, she doesn’t explain this to anyone, she just acts mysterious and witchy, like Jennifer. When she talks to Jennifer about the party, Jennifer acts like Elizabeth has actually used her witch powers to do those things, but Elizabeth insists that they were just ordinary incidents and her good memory for remembering the presents. Jennifer seems a little disappointed that Elizabeth doesn’t seem to see what she’s getting at with the witch business, and Elizabeth is disappointed that Jennifer doesn’t seem interested in the gossip she’s collected about the “normal”, non-witchy girls at the party.

The girls get a toad, which they name Hilary Ezra, their first compromise with each other by combining the two names that they wanted. Jennifer says that the toad will help them with their flying spell. They treat the toad like a pet, giving it insects that they’ve caught and measuring how far he can jump. They both love Hilary Ezra, but when Jennifer plans to add Hilary Ezra to their flying potion, Elizabeth refuses to allow it. She makes Jennifer set Hilary Ezra free. Jennifer tells Elizabeth that she’ll never be a witch because she’s too sentimental and dismisses her as her student witch.

Elizabeth is angry at Jennifer and thinks that their friendship is over as well as the witch business. However, after thinking it over, Elizabeth realizes something: Jennifer actually wanted Elizabeth to stop her from putting the toad in the pot with the other ingredients because she changed the order in which the ingredients were added from the order that was given in MacBeth, saving the toad for last and making a big show of dangling him over the pot, waiting for Elizabeth to stop her. Still, it makes Elizabeth mad that Jennifer made her stop her when she could have stopped herself and probably would have if Elizabeth hadn’t intervened.

Elizabeth has a right to be angry, but she also goes back to being lonely, and she doesn’t like that. While she’s alone at her family’s apartment one day, she spends some time looking at the greenhouses on a nearby farm called the Samellson Estate, and some of Jennifer’s cryptic comments about Hilary Ezra’s origins and her father being a “plant wizard” fall into place. The more Elizabeth thinks about it, the more the things Jennifer acquired for their “spells” make sense and the more Jennifer herself begins to make sense. Then, Jennifer makes the first move in repairing their friendship.

The book is a Newbery Honor book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

One of the important points about this story that helps make Jennifer more understandable as a character is that she’s African American and this book was written in the 1960s. The book doesn’t refer to Jennifer’s race or describe her physical appearance apart from her clothes until about halfway through the story, although she does appear in pictures before that. The 1960s was the time of the Civil Rights Movement, and in 1967, when this book was first published, Martin Luther King, Jr. was still live. School desegregations were a recent issue. The only time in the book that Elizabeth mentions race is when she notices Jennifer’s mother at the performance of the school play for the PTA, and she says that she knew that the woman must be Jennifer’s mother because “she was the only Negro mother there.” This one line says, without really saying it, that Jennifer is the only African American kid in her class because, if there was even one other, the black woman in the audience could have been somebody else’s mother.

When the story begins, each of the girls has a reason to feel like an outcast – Elizabeth because she’s new at school and doesn’t know anybody and Jennifer because she’s the only black kid. Both of them are lonely, and they’re actually a good fit for each other in terms of their interests, but in order to become real friends, they have to learn to relate to each other without the cover of their made-up witchcraft rituals. After Elizabeth realizes where Jennifer actually lives and what her life is really like, and Jennifer shows that she cares about Elizabeth’s feelings, the two of them are able to bond as friends instead of witches.

Elizabeth never explains why Jennifer came up with the witch idea in the first place, and the book ends soon after their friendship is repaired, so it’s left up to the readers’ imaginations. It might have something to do with feeling like an outcast because of her race and because her father is a blue-collar worker when the kids who live in the nearby apartment building are the children of white-collar workers. Because Jennifer feels different from other kids and often spends time alone, reading books and playing games of pretend, she might have felt uncomfortable explaining herself to Elizabeth, fearing that she might not accept her. Training Elizabeth to be a witch gave the two girls a reason to see each other, adventures to share, and something interesting to talk about. As long as Elizabeth needed Jennifer to teach her witch things, Jennifer would feel confident that she’d stick around as a friend. The girls gave that up when Jennifer realized that Elizabeth would be her friend anyway and might actually like her better just as Jennifer instead of a witch.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Hundred Penny Box

The Hundred Penny Box by Sharon Bell Mathis, 1975.

Michael’s great-great-aunt, Aunt Dew (short for Dewbet), has moved in with him and his parents because she is one hundred years old and no longer able to live on her own.  It has been a big adjustment for the entire family, but even though Michael has had to give up space in his room for her, he is glad that she has come to live with them because the old woman fascinates him.  She is (apparently) extremely absent-minded, often calling Michael by his father’s name, John, although some of that seems to be deliberate because she wishes that Michael’s parents had named him after his father.  Other times, she seems to forget that she’s no longer living in her old house or just starts singing an old spiritual song, forgetting what she was talking about before.

John is extremely fond of his elderly aunt because she raised him after his parents died in a boating accident, and she loves him like a son.  Aunt Dew’s own sons are long grown and gone.  However, Michael’s mother, Ruth, finds Aunt Dew’s presence in the house difficult.  Ruth thinks that Aunt Dew doesn’t appreciate some of the nice things that she does for her, and she thinks that Aunt Dew doesn’t like her.  It’s not completely true, but Aunt Dew does seem more comfortable around Michael after spending many years of her life raising boys, and Aunt Dew admits to Michael that she finds it difficult to talk to Ruth because they don’t know each other like she and John do. Aunt Dew and Ruth also have a conflict over some of Aunt Dew’s old possessions.

Aunt Dew is upset that Ruth got rid of some of her old things after she moved in with them.  Michael thought it was a mean thing to do, and Aunt Dew misses these objects.  When Michael argues with his mother about these objects, Ruth explains to him that she’s not trying to be mean.  Ruth compares Aunt Dew to a child, like Michael, saying that she “Thinks she needs a whole lot of stuff she really doesn’t.”  Ruth sees it as just clearing out things that are old and worn out and no good in order to make room for newer, nicer things, comparing it to when Michael got old enough to realize that he didn’t need his old teddy bear that was falling apart and was willing to get rid of it along with some other things in order to make room for Aunt Dew to move in.  Ruth sees clearing out old things as a way to move forward in life and thinks that it’s important to help Aunt Dew adjust to her new life with the family.  However, a lot of Aunt Dew’s long life and past are tied in with some of these objects, and as a one-hundred-year-old woman, Aunt Dew has more past behind her than future life to make room for.  Michael helps her to hide some of them in her closet to keep them from being thrown out, but he’s particularly concerned about her hundred penny box.

When Aunt Dew’s husband was alive, he started a penny collection for her with one penny to represent every year that Aunt Dew has been alive.  After his death, Aunt Dew continued to collect pennies, putting another penny into the box every year to represent her age.  Michael loves the pennies in the box because, when he counts them with Aunt Dew, she will stop him at certain years and tell him stories about things that happened during those years, telling him a lot of family stories.  Michael’s mother isn’t interested in taking the pennies, but she thinks that the old box they’re in is too worn out and should be replaced with something else.  However, Aunt Dew sees that box as being like herself: old and worn and holding all of the years of her life.  To throw it out would be almost like throwing out Aunt Dew herself.  Michael’s mother doesn’t see it that way, but Michael sees the connection.  To try to save the box, Michael hides it from his mother.

The conflict about Aunt Dew’s things isn’t really resolved by the end of the story because Michael’s mother still doesn’t understand how Aunt Dew feels, and we don’t know if she will come to understand or if the box will remain hidden or not.  I found parts of the story frustrating because Ruth doesn’t seem to want to listen to either Aunt Dew or Michael, discounting them as the kid and the old lady.  Even though Ruth is frustrated with Aunt Dew, I think that part of it is her fault for not really listening or trying to understand how she feels. This may be part of the reason why Aunt Dew feels like she can’t really talk to Ruth. To be fair, Ruth doesn’t mean to be mean, but at the same time, she kind of is because she’s too stuck on what she thinks is best and that idea that she knows better than a young boy and an old woman to consider that her ideas might not be what’s best for her family and family relationships and that she needs to give a little. My guess is that she’ll understand how Aunt Dew feels when she’s also an old woman, with more past than future ahead, but with a little imagination and empathy, I think she could see that decades sooner.  I remember reading this book when I was a kid and liking it for the concept of the hundred penny box and the old woman’s stories, but I find the lack of resolution a little frustrating now.  It’s one of those books that makes me want to sit the characters down and explain a few things to them, but I can’t.

Besides the concept of the penny box, I’m also fascinated by the name Dewbet, which I’ve never heard anywhere else besides this story.  The pictures in the book are also unusual, and there’s a note in the back of the book that explains a little about the art style.  The pictures, which are in sepia tones, are painted with water colors, and the light areas were made with water and bleach.

This is a Newbery Honor Book, and it is currently available online through Internet Archive.

There is also a short film version that is available to buy or rent from Vimeo. Teachers Pay Teachers has lesson plans for this book. If you would like to see a reading and discussion with the author of the book, there is a copy on YouTube.

Posted on by TracyC

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan, 1985.

This is a popular book to read in schools in the United States, the first in a series.  It’s a Newbery Award winner, and it shows aspects of farm life during the early 20th century and the concept of mail-order brides, a practice from American frontier days where men living in the West or Midwest, where there were not many available women in the population, would write to agencies or advertise for a bride from the East.  The process for arranging these marriages could vary, but it typically started with written correspondence before the man and woman would meet in person.  In this book, the man looking for a bride, Jacob Witting, is a widower with two children who has a farm on the Great Plains.  The story is narrated by his older child, Anna. The book isn’t very long, and it’s a pretty quick read, but it’s filled with colorful imagery and emotion.

Anna has had to help take care of her little brother, Caleb, since he was born.  Their mother died shortly after giving birth to him, and Caleb frequently asks Anna questions about what their mother was like.  Anna’s memories of their mother are fading because she was still very young when she died, but she really misses her.

Then, Jacob tells the children that he has advertised for a bride from the East, the way a neighbor of theirs did.  The children like their neighbor’s new wife and wouldn’t mind having a mother like her.  The father has received a reply to his advertisement from a woman in Maine, Sarah Wheaton.  Sarah has never been married, and now that her brother is getting married, she feels the need for a change in her life.  She loves living by the sea in Maine, but she is willing to move to start a new life.  She says that she would like to know more about Jacob and his children.

Jacob and the children write letters to Sarah, getting to know her better.  They come to like each other, but the children worry about whether Sarah will change her mind about coming to see them or whether she’ll like them or their farm when or if she comes.  When Sarah tells them that she’s coming during the spring, she says that they will know her because she will be wearing a yellow bonnet and describes herself as being plain and tall (the title of the book).

Sarah will stay with the family for a time while they decide if they can be a family together and if she will marry Jacob that summer.  There are adjustments that they will all have to make.  Life on the prairie is very different from what Sarah is used to, and the children still worry that she won’t want to stay.  Sarah brings seashells from Maine to show them, and they teach her about the local wildflowers.  One of my favorite scenes was where Sarah cuts Caleb’s hair, and they put the hair clippings out for birds to use in their nests.  Caleb was particularly concerned about whether Sarah would sing like their mother used to, and Sarah does. 

Through it all, the children can tell that Sarah really misses the sea.  Sarah does say that the land around the farm kind of rolls, a little like the sea, and they play in a haystack, like it was a dune by the sea.  When they visit their neighbors, Sarah talks with Maggie, the mail-order bride who came from Tennessee.  Maggie understands Sarah feels, missing her home in Maine, and it upsets Anna to hear them talk about missing their old homes.  However, Sarah says that things were changing at home, and Maggie comments that, “There are always things to miss, no matter where you are.”  What the women realize is that, although they miss their old homes, they have grown to love the new people in their lives and would miss them if they tried to go back to where they came from.

At one point, Sarah goes to town alone, and the children worry that she won’t come back, but she does.  She just went to town to buy colored pencils in her favorite sea colors.  Sarah does stay and marry Jacob, setting up the rest of the series.

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

My Reaction

There is a movie version of this book, which follows the story pretty well. The book wasn’t specific about the time period, although it seems to take place during the early 1900s. The movie and its sequels are set during the 1910s, which makes sense for the rest of the series. The book also didn’t say exactly where the farm was, but the movie clarifies that it’s in Kansas. The movie also emphasizes how much the whole family, particularly Jacob and Anna, misses the mother who died.  In the movie, Jacob forbids the children to use any of his dead wife’s things and doesn’t want to talk about her.  However, when Sarah realizes that trying to avoid his wife’s memory is hurting Anna, she brings out some of the dead wife’s belongs to use, helping the family to make peace with the past and prepare for the future. 

In the movie, Jacob’s pain over his wife’s death is partly about guilt as well as grief. The book doesn’t really talk about why Anna’s mother died after childbirth, but in the movie, Jacob has a painful discussion with Sarah about how he blames himself for his wife’s death because the doctor had warned them that they shouldn’t have any more children after Anna.  Apparently, Anna’s birth had been difficult and caused complications because his wife was so young, and the doctor had said that having another child would be dangerous.  However, after a few years went by, they decided to try for a son to help run the farm, thinking that enough time had gone by for it to be safe.  When his wife died giving birth to Caleb, Jacob felt terrible, thinking that he should have taken the doctor’s warning more seriously and not tried to have another child.  Confessing all of this to Sarah helps Jacob to make his own peace with what happened.  However, none of this discussion appears in the book.

In both the book and the movie, Jacob also has to adjust to Sarah’s different personality.  Sarah is more stubborn and independent than his first wife, with her own way of doing things.  Living with her is different from living the mother of his children.  However, Jacob comes to love Sarah for the person that she is.