Posted on by TracyC

The Moorchild

The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw, 1996.

When Saaski was only a few months old, her grandmother, Old Bess, started to notice that she didn’t look right, compared to the rest of the family or even compared to the way she looked when she was a newer baby. The grandmother tried to brush those thoughts aside, thinking that children change as they grow, and people of the village think that she’s odd herself as a widow who lives alone and knows about herbs. All the same, Saaski seems unusually fussy and throws tantrums, becoming a child who’s difficult to control. It could just be colic, or it could be something stranger.

Old Bess begins to put the pieces together about Saaski’s strange behavior. Saaski seems to hate or fear her own father, and Old Bess realizes that it’s because he is a blacksmith and wears an iron buckle on his belt. Saaski has an aversion to iron. She also has an aversion to salt, and only honey seems to soothe her. Saaski’s eyes change color from time to time, and Old Bess realizes that Saaski not only isn’t her grandchild but that she isn’t even human. Saaski is a changeling, a fairy child switched out for the human child before her christening.

When Old Bess tries to tell her daughter and her husband that Saaski is a changeling, her daughter refuses to believe her. Her husband seems to consider that Old Bess might be right, but he absolutely refuses to do the cruel things to the child that Old Bess tries to tell them will cause the fairy folk to take the changeling back and bring them their real daughter. Old Bess says that Saaski must either be made to tell her true age, which she cannot do because she cannot talk yet, or the parents must do cruel things to her, like beat her, burn her, or throw her down a well. The parents say that they cannot do such things to a baby, no matter what kind of baby it is, and they no longer want to discuss the matter, forbidding Old Bess to tell anyone else of her suspicions.

However, in this case, Old Bess is correct. The child known as Saaski is a changeling, and she knows it herself. Although she is in the form of a human baby, she knows that she is not really a baby. Her fairy name was Moql. She doesn’t know her true age, but she knows that she is a fairy youngling and that she used to live among the other fairies in the fairy mound. She doesn’t like being part of this human family, and she wishes that the fairies would take her back, but she knows that, whatever happens, they never will reclaim her. Even if this family treats her cruelly and the fairies decide to remove her from their house, she knows that they will just place her with a different human family.

The problem is that, unlike other fairies, Moql has no ability to hide from humans. Other fairies can change their shape or color, fade, or just wink out of human vision entirely, but Moql can’t. The fairies discovered it one day when Moql was unable to hide from a human shepherd. She is able to escape from the shepherd, but her blunder isn’t forgiven by the other fairies. Moql’s inability to hide from humans was considered a danger to whole band of fairies. She was taken before the prince of the fairies. When he sees that Moql cannot hide from humans, he remembers that a human man entered the fairy mound some time ago and stayed awhile with a fairy woman. Moql’s mother was a fairy, but her father was that human. As a half-human, Moql will never have the abilities that the other fairy younglings have.

When Moql is considered a danger to the other fairies, they feel little attachment to her or desire to keep her. They don’t consider a half-human likely to work out among the fairies, so they decide to swap her for a human child who might make a good servant to the fairies. They’ve done this before with other younglings like Moql. Moql is frightened because she doesn’t know how to be human. Life in the fairy mound is all that she knows. She is only half human, and if she’s not working out as a half fairy, how can she possibly work out as a human? What if she can’t work out as a human? Will she belong anywhere? What if she belongs nowhere?

The fairies tell her that she will start life all over again as a human baby and that she will forget all about the mound and her past life. The other fairies think nothing of casting her out. None of them really care about her. The fairies don’t feel emotions like humans do, and they don’t feel very much about anybody. Moql’s birth mother doesn’t feel anything for her but a mild curiosity and no concern for her future. Fairy mothers don’t really develop an attachment to their children, who are raised communally in the fairy nursery and school. Most fairies don’t even know who their parents are, and they don’t really develop feelings for their parents any more than parents feel attached to their children. Even fairy couples don’t stay together very long, forgetting about each other when they become bored with the relationship and moving on to others. Fairies don’t really care that much about relationships, like brother and sister, and fairies don’t even have a sense of what being a “friend” means. So far, even Moql hasn’t felt that much for anybody, either. Moql’s first human feelings come with her despair about being torn away from everything and everyone she’s ever known, made worse from realizing that nobody else feels anything for her. In their position, she might not feel anything for the loss of one of them because that’s the fairy way, but the human part of Moql longs for belonging and fears what will happen to her if she can’t find a place or people to belong to.

When Moql wakes the next day, she finds herself as the baby Saaski, but in spite of what the fairies said, she still retains her memories of her fairy life. Everything in this human household is strange. She fears the people who are supposed to be her parents, and most of the things that they offer her to soothe her aren’t soothing to a fairy or half-fairy, which is why she screams and throws tantrums. When she hears Old Bess describe her as a changeling and tries to urge her parents to do things to get rid of her, Moql realizes that she is stuck as a human, no matter what happens. Her only hope is to make herself forget or at least pretend that she doesn’t remember being a fairy and to try her best to be the human baby Saaski. It means pretending that she doesn’t have the ability to do things that a human baby shouldn’t be able to do and that she doesn’t know things that she actually does know. It’s not easy, but Saaski’s memories do fade a bit with time. She has vague memories of her past life, but the longer she lives as a human, the less she remembers of her past.

Time passes, and Saaski grows into a child, but the humans around her have an odd feeling about her. They whisper about her behind her parents’ backs. She doesn’t look like other human children, and odd things seem to happen around her. Saaski doesn’t trust Old Bess because she knows that Old Bess has always suspected she was a changeling. Other children in the village have heard their parents whispering about Saaski, and they start asking her if she really is a changeling. By that point, Saaski isn’t sure anymore what that means.

Old Bess does look for an opportunity at first to get the fairies to take back the changeling, considering shoving her into a pond at one point. However, when she realizes that Saaski has real feelings, she cannot bring herself to do it. She realizes that Saaski is also a victim of the switch when she was exchanged for the real Saaski. She doesn’t really belong among them, Saaski knows it, and Old Bess can tell that it hurts that she’s different and that others don’t accept her. Old Bess isn’t sure how much she understands about herself, her past, or her situation, but it’s been as unfair to her as it has been to the real Saaski and her family. The sense of belonging Saaski craves eludes her.

The only place Saaski really feels at home is out on the moor by herself, although she doesn’t really remember why anymore. That is where she first meets the orphan boy, Tam, who travels with the tinker. Tam knows what other people say about Saaski, but he isn’t afraid of her and likes her anyway. He is the first person who really seems to accept Saaski. For a time, her father forbids her to go on the moor again after she has a distressing encounter with a shepherd, who seems to recognize her as being a fairy.

Surprisingly, Old Bess turns out to be an ally of Saaski’s, urging her parents to let her go to the moor again. She knows how restless Saaski has been, confined to their home. The only thing that has soothed her is the old bagpipes that once belonged to her father’s father. She seems to know how to play them without anyone ever teaching her. Eventually, her parents allow her to return to the moor, partly so she won’t keep playing the bagpipes at home. When she’s able to see Tam again, he is happy to see her, and she shows him how she can play the bagpipes.

There are other things that Saaski seems to know without knowing how she knows. She sometimes sees strange symbols that no one else seems able to see. When Old Bess realizes that she can see these symbols, called runes, the two of them discuss it. Old Bess can’t see them herself, but she knows about them. She learned a lot about such things from an old monk she once cared for and from the books he left behind, which is also where she gained her knowledge of herbs.

Old Bess admits to Saaski that, like her, she is considered strange and that she doesn’t quite belong to the village where they live. She was brought to the village as an infant after she was found abandoned in a basket at a crossroads. They left her at the miller’s house, and she was raised by the miller and her wife. She doesn’t know who her birth parents were, where they came from, or why she was abandoned as an infant, and she was told that the gypsies who found her almost drowned her as a changeling before deciding to leave her in the village.

Saaski also knows that she doesn’t belong in the village, although she can’t think where she does belong. She can’t explain how she is able to see and understand fairy runes or do the other things that she seems able to do, apparently without anyone teaching her. Over time, she gradually discovers or rediscovers the things she could do and knew as a fairy. She discovers that she can see fairies when she spots one stealing Tam’s lunch. Later, a group of fairies try to steal her bagpipes. To Saaski’s surprise, she is able to understand their language, and they seem to recognize her.

Then, after the children in the village bully Saaski again, an illness comes to the village, afflicting all of the children but Saaski. Old Bess says it’s a normal childhood illness she’s seen before, and the children probably got it from the gypsy band who recently passed through town. However, the villagers, who have always been suspicious of Saaski whisper that Saaski is responsible, that she has cursed the other children. Saaski denies is, but the villagers are becoming increasingly hostile. They want her out of the villager, but if Saaski can’t stay there, where can she go?

When Saaski tries to bargain with a fairy for some help to hide from the villagers, the fairy reminds her that she was a fairy herself and that she was never able to disappear. Saaski is stunned at this confirmation of the villager’s suspicions about her being a changeling. When she tells Old Bess about it and about the memories that are now returning to her, Saaski realizes that she really doesn’t belong in this human village, at least not fully. Yet, she remembers that she doesn’t fully belong among the fairies, either. Once again, it leaves her the question of where she does belong. Saaski is going to have to take her fate into her own hands, but before she does, she wants to do something for the family that raised her and has loved her, in spite of everything: find the original Saaski in the fairy mound and return her to her parents.

The book is a Newbery Honor Book.

My Reaction

I enjoyed the story because it is a unique portrayal of the folkloric idea of changelings. Another book I read on the same topic, The Half Child, is told from a real world, historical point of view, without fantasy. In that book, changelings are disabled children or children who aren’t “normal” in some way who are labeled as being something other than human or “real” children because people of the past couldn’t understand why they were different or what was wrong with them.

The Moorchild, however, is fantasy and builds on the folklore concept. In other books with changelings, we see the changelings from the point of view of other people, who wonder about their true nature, but this book includes multiple viewpoints, including that of the changeling herself. In folklore, it isn’t entirely clear why the fairies would want to change their children with human children, leaving them to be raised by other people and possibly never seeing them again. This book builds on that concept, portraying the changeling children as being half human and/or flawed in some way, compared to the other fairies. They do use the human children they gain in the swap as servants, which is a folkloric concept, but this story explains why the fairy child left in exchange for the abducted human child is an acceptable loss to the other fairies.

Fairies in this story don’t have the same types of feelings as humans. In fact, they don’t seem to feel much at all, making most of their lives literally care-free because they just don’t care that much about others or the consequences of their actions. However, they don’t feel much emotional attachment to each other, either. Saaski/Moql’s birth mother doesn’t feel much of anything for her daughter or for the man whose life she changed and worsened through her seduction and rejection. She is completely unconcerned about what has happened to them or what will happen to them because of her. Later, Saaski realizes that the fairies are aware that Saaski is blamed for pranks they played, but they don’t mean it spitefully. They genuinely don’t care whether Saaski or someone else is blamed for things they do as long as they never get caught themselves. When Saaski realizes that the other fairies genuinely don’t care about her or what happens to her, she knows that they will never take her back and that she will never rejoin them.

Saaski feels more emotion than full fairies feel, but she doesn’t always respond in acceptable or predictable ways to the humans she lives with because she doesn’t share all of the emotions they feel. She craves a sense of belonging, but she doesn’t really know how to get it or create it. At times, she feels love and gratitude without being entirely sure what she’s feeling or how to express it. Strangely, she also doesn’t experience hate and resentment in the same way humans do. Tam tries to explain it to her, and Saaski recognizes that the children in the village who bully her feel hatred and resentment to her, but she doesn’t feel those emotions herself. She doesn’t like it when they bully her, and she feels hurt by them, but the emotion of hating and wanting to hurt them back isn’t there. I thought that was an interesting concept, exploring someone with non-conforming emotional reactions. Saaski’s emotions in the story are explained by her fairy heritage, but what made it interesting to me is that neurodivergent humans also have different ways of experiencing and showing emotions that can change the way they are accepted by or interact with other people, which brings the idea of changelings full circle, back to the concept of children who aren’t like other children from birth or a young age.

I thought it was fascinating that we get to see things both from Saaski’s point of view and from the point of view of other people, particularly Old Bess. Old Bess is the first to realize that Saaski is a changeling and not her “real” granddaughter. She understandably wants her real granddaughter back, and she knows the folklore that fairy folk will take back a changeling who has been abused. However, Saaski’s parents, even knowing or suspecting that Saaski might be a changeling, cannot bring themselves to do anything cruel to her, and Old Bess comes around to that point of view herself. By observing Saaski, she sees that Saaski is a child, if not an entirely human child, and an innocent victim of the switch herself, with feelings and a difficult life ahead of her because she doesn’t fit in with this community.

Old Bess also recalls and admits to Saaski that her own past isn’t quite normal and that she also doesn’t quite fit in. I wondered if we would ever get the full story of Old Bess’s past, but unfortunately, we don’t. We know that she was abandoned as an infant, apparently rejected by her birth family or guardian, but we never learn why. I had wondered at first if Old Bess would turn out to be a grown-up changeling. It seems that people once suspected that about her, but apparently, she isn’t because she can’t see the fairies or fairy writing in the way Saaski does. It seems that Old Bess is fully human and not half fairy. In the end, the important point is that, when Old Bess is honest with herself and Saaski about her past, her story has some elements in common with Saaski’s situation. They have both known rejection and abandonment, the difficulties of trying to fit in when they don’t entirely fit in, and the love of people who accepted them and cared for them in spite of it all.

I appreciated that Saaski’s parents do their best to love and care for Saaski even when they know she’s strange and may not be their daughter. They stand up to the people who bully their daughter and pressure them to get rid of her. In fact, in the end, even after Saaski and Tam set out into the world together and they have their birth daughter back, they still think of Saaski and miss her sometimes. Saaski was no replacement for the daughter they lost when they were switched, but at the same time, they realize that their birth daughter doesn’t entirely replace Saaski in their lives and affections. In the end, it’s like they’ve had two daughters, both of them “real”, although one didn’t fit in and eventually left to start a new life elsewhere.

Posted on by TracyC

The Girl Who Loved Caterpillars

The Girl Who Loved Caterpillars adapted by Jean Merrill, illustrated by Floyd Cooper, 1992.

This story is a rendition of a 12th century folktale from Japan.

Izumi is the daughter of an important man, a provincial inspector who serves the emperor in Kyoto. Court life is full of elegance, and Izumi is a pretty and clever girl. Her parents have high hopes that she might become a lady-in-waiting or marry a nobleman, but she is mainly known for one thing: her peculiar love of caterpillars.

A beautiful and elegant woman who lives nearby is known for her love of butterflies, and she is considered to be The Perfect Lady. She has all of the skills that a noblewoman could aspire to, and Izumi’s parents think of her as a great role model for their daughter.

However, Izumi doesn’t see the appeal of beautiful butterflies. After all, they come from caterpillars, and caterpillars are much more interesting. Izumi also loves worms, toads, insects, and other things that most people would find unappealing. She likes to keep them as pets and observe how they live and grow. Izumi’s parents don’t approve of the lower-class boys who bring Izumi new creatures for her collection, and nobody else understands her fascination with these creatures.

Izumi just loves the natural world. To her, court life and the beauty standards for women there are too artificial. She also believes in reincarnation and the idea that any person might have been one of these unusual creatures in a past life or could be one in the next. Her parents love her, and they understand how she feels when she explains her reasoning to them, but they also worry about her future. If she doesn’t conform more to the standards of the court and develop more “normal” interests, will she ever make a desirable marriage? People at court gossip about Izumi and her odd tastes.

However, the rumors about Izumi reach a young nobleman who is as clever as Izumi, and he is fascinated at the idea of a pretty girl who isn’t afraid of the creeping creatures of the Earth.

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

My Reaction

I remember this story from when I was a kid! When I was a kid, I didn’t bother to read the Afterword of the book, which explains more about the origins of the story. Izumi’s story actually seems to be part of a much longer story about court life in Medieval Japan. The original author of the story is unknown, and Izumi’s part of the story is incomplete. It ends with the promise that what happens next will be revealed in the next chapter, but the rest of the story is unknown. We don’t know if she ends up marrying the nobleman who has developed a fascination with her or not.

I have a theory, based on a comment that Izumi made, comparing caterpillars to their adult forms and asking why people are only interested in the adult forms, that Izumi’s love of caterpillars is based both on her young age and perhaps a hidden affinity for children. Perhaps Izumi will grow to love butterflies as well as she grows up and be viewed as more of a butterfly herself, or maybe the nearby lady who loves butterflies will admit to a secret love of caterpillars as well. None of us stay young, and we all evolve as we grow, but part of us always remembers being in those early, awkward stages. Maybe everyone has a secret soft spot for the young, even when they’re fuzzy or grubby crawling things, and a desire to see them become the best form of themselves.

Whatever her future brings, readers get the impression that Izumi is happy and at peace with herself as she is, whether anyone else agrees or not. We can hope that the young nobleman will also love her for the person she is, but Izumi seems to believe that being true to her own nature is the way to achieve inner peace.

In other times and places, as the Afterward observes, Izumi might have been a scientist, naturalist, or philosopher. The traits that make her seem odd for her time and place are actually desirable ones that could make her more successful in other circumstances. In the early 21st century, Izumi’s sense of individualism and her value of the natural world would probably win her many friends. People who enjoy the aesthetic of Goblincore would probably relate to her feelings about caterpillars and other crawly creatures.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Big Orange Splot

The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, 1977.

Mr. Plumbean lives in a neighborhood where all the houses look alike. He and his neighbors all think of the uniformity as making their street “neat” and tidy, and they appreciate it. Then, something happens that makes them reconsider.

For reasons that nobody ever understands, a seagull carrying a can of orange paint happens to fly over Mr. Plumbean’s house and drops the can, leaving a big orange splot on Mr. Plumbean’s roof. Mr. Plumbean realizes that the big orange splot means that he’ll have to repaint his house, but the painting project makes him think.

Instead of painting his house to look like everyone else’s, the way it was before, he gets a bunch of wild colors and turns the exterior of his house into a rainbow explosion, working around the big, orange splot on his roof! He adds paintings of animals and other things he likes and colorful patterns. It’s such a wild and crazy design that his neighbors think he went mad. Before long, he adds a clock tower onto his house and an alligator and some trees with a hammock in the front yard.

The neighbors think he’s gone too far, but Mr. Plumbean says, “My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams.”

One of Mr. Plumbean’s neighbors tries to talk some sense into him, but instead, Mr. Plumbean talks to him about his dreams. The next day, the man goes out to buy some building supplies. It turns out that he always loved ships, so he turns his house into the ship of his dreams!

With Mr. Plumbean’s encouragement, other neighbors also start to change their homes to reflect their dreams, changing their quiet, “neat” street into a magical wonderland of imagination!

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

My Reaction

I remember this book from when I was a kid, and I always liked the pictures! It’s fun to imagine all the creative themes a house could have and what you might choose if you had the opportunity to live in a house that could look like anything you wanted. The houses shown in the pictures of the neighborhood end up looking nothing like their original shapes, except for Mr. Plumbean’s house, oddly. The others are vastly different from their original shapes, and the windows aren’t even in the same places, making them look like they’ve been completely rebuilt. This level of renovation would be difficult and costly in real life, but this story is meant to be fun and to celebrate imagination and the capacity people have to add a touch of color to their lives. If you read this book with a child, you can invite them to decide which of the house was their favorite at the end (mine was the one that looked like a castle) or what they would do if they could make their house look like anything they want.

In real life, I’ve never particularly liked those neighborhoods where all the houses look alike. I’m not the only one because tract homes and uniform suburbs were controversial from their beginnings in the mid-20th century. In the early 1960s, a song called Little Boxes (listen to it on YouTube) poked fun at the uniformity of suburban houses and the lives of the people in them (although the houses in that song were still different colors – just saying). The connection between the uniformity of homes and the conformity of the people living in them is a topic that resurfaces periodically in popular culture and other songs, like “Subdivisions” by Rush (listen to it on YouTube).

The themes of non-conformity and self-expression are pretty profound, but the story is lots of fun and isn’t too deep for kids. If you read the back section about the author, it explains that the inspiration for this story came from a time when he spilled orange ink on his own pair of new yellow boots.

This picture book is a fun story about non-conformity and self-expression. In the beginning, Mr. Plumbean is as content as anyone with his neat, uniform neighborhood until a strange, inexplicable accident creates a situation where Mr. Plumbean has to paint his house. Once he’s confronted with the task of repainting his house, Mr. Plumbean begins to consider the creative opportunities this chore provides, and he enjoys exploring the possibilities and changing his house to be more of a reflection of the wild and wacky person he really is or dreams of being. Once his creative side is unleashed, it begins to get his neighbors thinking along similar lines. True, they liked it when their street was neat and uniform because they could see the appeal of having things orderly, but it turns out that each of them also has an inner creative side that’s been waiting for a chance to get out. The non-uniformity and non-conformity of their street becomes more comfortable for each of them as they each embrace those sides to their personalities that they don’t normally show. When they come to accept and embrace their own dreams and each other’s, it doesn’t matter to them anymore that they’re not all alike. They’re comfortable with the wacky and whimsical parts of their personalities, and they’re not afraid to show them anymore. They’re happy with themselves, their homes, and their different visions.

I really liked the art style of the illustrations in the book. It’s very simple but colorful, and you can tell that the artist used markers because you can see the marker lines, especially in the backgrounds of the drawings. It makes it different from more modern books that use digital art. I like seeing signs of the physical materials used, and it gives the story a funky, organic feel that goes well with the theme.

As I said earlier, I did notice that many of the new home designs in the pictures don’t take into account where the houses’ windows used to be, but that’s just part of the whimsy of the story. We don’t need to worry about how these people accomplished these drastic changes so quickly and easily. It’s just fun to think about how you can personalize your space to reflect what’s important to you.

Posted on by TracyC

The Story of Ferdinand

The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, drawings by Robert Lawson, 1936.

Ferdinand is a young bull living in Spain. He has been different from the other young bulls since he was a little calf. While the other young bulls liked to run around and butt their heads together, Ferdinand preferred to simply enjoy the peaceful countryside and smell the flowers. His mother sometimes worried about him, sitting all by himself under his favorite tree. She was afraid that he would be lonely, but Ferdinand told her that he just liked sitting under the tree and smelling flowers and that he didn’t want to play rough with the other young bulls. As long as Ferdinand was happy, his mother was content to let him do what he wanted to do.

As time went on, Ferdinand and all of the other young bulls grew up big and strong. The young bulls who had always played rough together were fascinated by the bull fights held in Madrid. They thought that it would be exciting to be picked to participate in the fights. But, Ferdinand had no interesting in fighting of any kind. Although he was big and strong, he still preferred to just enjoy his flowers and his favorite tree.

When some men come to the field to pick out bulls for the bull fight, the other bulls try to show off for the men. Ferdinand doesn’t, but by accident, he sits on a bee and is stung. When the men see him jumping around in pain, they assume that he must be the fiercest bull in the field!

Poor Ferdinand is carted off to Madrid, but no matter what the bull fighters do in the arena, they just can’t get Ferdinand interested in fighting them. There is only one thing that interests Ferdinand, and that’s flowers. When the men put him in the bull fighting arena, he just sits and looks at the pretty flowers that the women in the stands are wearing in their hair, enjoying the smell. They are so disappointed at the lack of fighting that they put Ferdinand back in the cart and put him back in the field … which is exactly where he wants to be.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages). It has been reprinted many times. It has not been out of print since its first publication, and it has been made into a movie.

My Reaction and A Little History

I remember that I didn’t care for this book when I first read it years ago. I was really worried for poor Ferdinand when he was picked to join the bullfight. Because the book is for young children, it doesn’t make it fully clear that the bullfight is supposed to end with the death of the bull. The bullfighters all have spears and swords “to stick in the bull”, and the book says it’s to make the bull mad, but adults and older kids realize that they’re really going to hurt and kill the bull during the fight. There are vultures in some of the pictures as a clue that death is a real risk.

Fortunately, nothing bad happens to Ferdinand in the story. Because Ferdinand is a peaceful bull, who has no interest in fighting and only wants to enjoy flowers, he is not exciting enough for the bullfight, so he gets sent home to the field and the peaceful life he loves. The other bulls may not know that their lives could be much shorter because of their willingness to fight.

It’s also interesting to note that this book was written in the 1930s, when the world was headed for World War II. It was also published shortly before the Spanish Civil War. Because of its pacifistic themes, it was banned by both Franco and Hitler. The author, Munro Leaf, said that he didn’t really mean the story to be a serious one, but its themes resonated with even the adults of his time, in different ways, as this article from Sotheby’s notes:

“In 1937 Leaf wrote that he had published a book he “thought was for children… but now I don’t know” and in 1938 The New Yorker wrote “Ferdinand has provoked all sorts of adult after-dinner conversations.””

It wasn’t just Hitler and Franco who were suspicious of the book’s intentions. Some people also suspected it of being “Red Propaganda” or “Fascist Propaganda”, presumably because some people feared the pacifism in the story would encourage people not to fight communists or fascists. Some people also questioned the book’s message on the topic of masculinity. I could see that the story could be regarded as a commentary on men who think they have to tough, macho fighters, like the bulls. Even though Ferdinand might be regarded as a failure as a bull for not engaging in the fighting and rough play of the other bulls and not going through with the bullfight, he lives a happier, more peaceful, and ultimately, longer life because of it. Maybe he’s not a failure after all but just smarter than the average bull. Ferdinand is certainly a non-conformist who finds a way to make it work for him. How any reader might feel about that could depend on what they think conformity means and how they feel about that.

However, the book also received a lot of positive support. There is an anecdote that Gandhi loved it, and President Franklin Roosevelt requested a copy. The Sotheby’s article also recounts a story that I first heard from my children’s literature teacher when I was in college, that 30,000 copies of the book were sent to Germany after World War II as a peace gesture. When my teacher told the story, she explained that few children’s books were published during the war (and if you’ve already read my review of Emil and the Detectives, you already know that even children’s books were not exempt from book burnings if they had anti-war themes), so the distribution of the copies of The Story of Ferdinand were welcome, and the children who received them loved the story.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Magic or Not

MagicNot

Magic or Not? By Edward Eager, 1959.

Laura and her twin brother, James, are practical children who are fond of useful facts, but still have imaginations and appreciate fantasy stories. In this part of the Tales of Magic series, all of the previous books in the series are fictional books that the characters have read and enjoyed, and real magic may or may not exist, as the title suggests. All throughout their coming adventures, the children are never quite sure how much of what happens is magic and how much isn’t, but they’re bound for an amazing summer.

Laura and James’s family has recently bought a house in the country, and the story begins with the twins taking the train to their new town while their parents follow in the car with their luggage and their baby sister, Deborah. Laura and James haven’t seen the new house yet, but they know that it’s pretty old, and they speculate if it could be haunted or maybe even magical, like something from a fantasy story. James doesn’t think so.  He thinks that magic, if it existed, is a thing of the past. Then, a strange girl on the train tells them that magic does exist. She insists that her grandmother is a witch and makes a comment about how they should “drop a wish in the wishing well, and wait and see!”

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Laura and James don’t know what she means, but it turns out that there is an old well on the property of their new house. James ignores it, but Laura can’t resist giving the wishing thing a try. After struggling to come up with something appropriate to wish for, she finally writes a note that says, “I wish I had a kitten” and tosses it into the well. The next day, when they meet the boy next door, Kip (short for Christopher), they find a basket with two kittens in it sitting on the edge of the well. Kip figures that Lydia found the note that Laura wrote in the well bucket and decided to make her wish come true by leaving a couple of stray kittens for her.

It turns out that the girl from the train is Lydia Green. Kip says that she lives nearby with her grandmother. Lydia’s grandmother is an artist, and both of them are eccentrics. Lydia is kind of a wild child who likes to spend her time riding around on her black horse. She’s something of an outcast in the community, and she knows it. When the other children go to see her to ask about the kittens, Lydia seems prepared for them not to like her and for her not to like them, either. However, when she finds out that Laura’s names for the kittens were inspired by the book The Midnight Folk, she warms up to them because she also likes fantasy stories, and Laura offers to share the magic of the well with her.

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James is more skeptical about Lydia and insists that she prove that there’s magic around, if her grandmother is really a witch. Lydia is reluctant at first, but then she shows the other children her grandmother’s garden. She insists that one of the plants in the messy garden (which does look like it might belong to a witch) can bring visions when it’s burned and maybe even a visitor from another world. (Sounds trippy.) The others want to see it work, so they decide to burn some. Nothing happens, and when James demands to know how long they have to wait, Lydia gives a vague answer that it might not be the right time or that maybe she just made the whole thing up. James believes the second explanation, but Laura is willing to give Lydia (and magic) more of a chance.

The two girls bond over their shared love of fantasy stories, and Laura invites Lydia to come to their house the next day. The boys admit to Laura that they kind of like Lydia, although she’d be easier to get along with if she didn’t have such a chip on her shoulder. Kip says that she’s always like that, and that’s why kids at school don’t get along with her either.  Even so, Lydia is an interesting person.

When Kip gets home, he finds more of the strange plant that Lydia burned growing around his house, and his mother tells him that it’s an ordinary wildflower. Still, the next day, something happens which makes it seem like Lydia’s notion that it “makes unseen things appear and seen things disappear” has come true – the old lawnmower that came with the house is now missing, and there’s a young tree on the property that wasn’t there before. Coincidence? Maybe, but Lydia had also said that it could “transform people so they’re unrecognizable overnight”, and suddenly little Deborah has a new, weird haircut. When Deborah happily announces that she’s been transformed by magic, James realizes that it’s a trick and that Kip arranged everything. Lydia is angry that Kip was playing a joke, but he says that it isn’t really a joke, that he just wanted to keep the game going. Lydia says that it isn’t really a game to her, although she finally admits that she left the kittens.

Laura turns on the boys and says that it’s obvious that Lydia only did those things because she wanted to make friends. Lydia tries to deny it at first, but then admits that it’s true, but that she is never able to make friends and that she doesn’t know how. Laura says that she is Lydia’s friend, and the boys are, too. James agrees, saying that he just likes “to get the facts straight,” but now that the facts are known, he hopes that they can all start over again. The children each apologize to one another for the awkwardness, and Laura says that she is a little disappointed that there isn’t any real magic.

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This part could be a story all by itself, but, not so fast! Just as the children are making amends with each other, a strange woman comes up to them in a horse-drawn carriage, looking like a visitor from another world in strange, old-fashioned clothing. They ask her if she came because they wished for her, and she says it’s difficult to say, but wonders why they would think so. The children say that they were playing a game and wished for a visitor from another world. The woman says that, in a way, she is from another world. She says that when she lived in this same valley, when she was young, life was very different, so it’s like she has come from the past to the present. The woman, Isabella King, lives in a house by the old silver mine. She invites the children to come and visit her sometime to have some of her silver cake and see the old mine. After she leaves, the children debate whether Isabella was brought to them by magic, but James says that it doesn’t matter because it looks like they’re going to have an adventure, magical or not.

Isabella King really does like to live in the past, maintaining her house and the old, disused silver mine that her father left her in the way that she’s sure he would want them to be maintained. However, her house and mine are threatened when the bank announces that it will foreclose on the mortgage. The children badly want to help Miss King, so they decide to go see the banker, Hiram Bundy, about it and try to persuade him to give her some leniency. Before they go to see him, Laura decides to make another wish on the wishing well because, in spite of Lydia’s earlier confession, she thinks that the well still might be magic.

Hiram Bundy agrees to talk to the children partly because he enjoys Lydia’s grandmother’s paintings, but he tells them that money isn’t the only concern about Miss King. Her family has a reputation for getting “peculiar” as they get older, and people have voiced concerns to him that Miss King is no longer capable of handling her own affairs and that she might be better off living in a nursing home. The children angrily deny that Miss King is mentally incompetent, giving him some of the cake that Miss King had baked for them as proof that she is still capable of doing things. Miss King is an excellent baker, and Mr. Bundy admits that he is impressed. Lydia also finally speaks up about the way the people in town, including Mr. Bundy himself, look at her and other people who are eccentrics. Lydia’s grandmother is allowed to be eccentric because she’s a talented artist and people make allowances for her, but those same people look at Lydia as if she’s terrible just because she likes to spend time by herself, riding her horse around. Adults in town are always saying that she’s a disgrace and that “somebody ought to do something” about her just because she doesn’t like things that other people like and wants to live her own life, doing her own thing. It’s not that there’s really anything wrong with either Lydia or Miss King so much as some of the people in town simply don’t like them and the way they do things. Because they aren’t the town’s little darlings, they are unfairly characterized as being worse than they really are and ostracized. Mr. Bundy admits the hypocrisy, which he is also guilty of, and assures her that he will take responsibility and straighten things out with Miss King.

When the children later see Mr. Bundy having cake and talking with Miss King at her house, Laura remembers that part of her wish at the well had been that Miss King would have Mr. Bundy eating out of her hand, and once again, the wish seems to have come true, literally. Although it still isn’t positive proof that Mr. Bundy’s change of heart was due to the well’s magic, the children think it might have been.  They start considering that perhaps the well came through for them because they were doing a good deed, and perhaps they ought to try to do the same for others, thrilling in the apparent power they have to change people’s lives.

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Testing out their theory proves difficult at first because they have trouble finding another person with a problem for them to solve. At first, the only person who seems to want their help is the woman downtown who asks them to help with setting up for a local art show to encourage amateur artists. The art show is open to anyone in town, and the kids think that maybe they should enter it, too.  However, the only art supplies that they can afford are paper and crayons, and only Lydia manages to draw something that’s any good.  Lydia doesn’t particularly like her drawing, saying it’s just a doodle, but Laura stops her from throwing it away. Then, the clerk at the store asks them if the small boy in the store is their little brother. It appears that the little boy is lost, so they decide that their good deed for the day will be helping him to get home.

They do find the boy’s home, and he turns out to be the child of a wealthy family who wandered off while his nurse was talking to a friend in town and ignoring him. The nurse at first blames the children for kidnapping the boy when they come to return him. The boy’s father doesn’t believe that, but he does reprimand the children for taking all day to return him because they had wanted to find his house themselves with the help of the wishing well instead of the police and allowed themselves to be sidetracked with something else they had also wanted to do. In the end, the children question how much they really helped the “lost heir”, as they think of him, because he might have been found sooner without their interference. However, one good thing does come out of their adventures: Lydia wins a prize in the art contest because Laura entered her picture on her behalf.

Lydia (as Laura had expected) is at first angry that Laura entered her in the contest without her permission, but Laura explains to her that she’s realized something about Lydia: Lydia prefers to think that no one cares about her or will ever appreciate her because she fears their rejection too much to risk trying to do anything that might earn their approval. Laura points out that their interest in her art proves that people really do appreciate her. Lydia’s grandmother even apologizes for not realizing before that Lydia has artistic talent. Lydia is amazed because she never really thought of her doodles as being anything special before. Kids at school had always made fun of her “crazy pictures,” and her teacher had always insisted that she “paint from nature” instead of drawing what she really wanted to draw.

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But, the children aren’t done with the wishing well yet. Mrs. Witherspoon, the head of the local garden club and self-appointed arbiter of all that’s right and what everyone should think and do, has set herself against the new school that is planned for the area. She doesn’t like the idea of more traffic, more kids running around, and the possible risk to property values. However, many families with children live in the area, and they really want the school for their kids. Mrs. Witherspoon has set herself against them because she’s accustomed to people simply agreeing with what she wants (often just out of habit). She’s one of the big voices that enforces conformity in their town. She’s so awful that the kids consider making a voodoo doll of her, but then, it occurs to them that she might be much worse if she were actually in pain instead of just busy being one. They decide maybe she really needs people to be extra nice to her in order to make her more agreeable, but she refuses to accept any of their gestures of kindness because she thinks that they just want money from her, and she calls them juvenile delinquents. Can the power of the wishing well do anything to change her mind? Or, do they really need it?

A surprising friendship with Mrs. Witherspoon’s son, Gordy, leads the children on one last adventure that may (or may not) involve a ghost from the past and answer the question of whether or not the wishing well is really magic (unless there’s another explanation).

All through the book, there are other explanations besides magic for everything that happens. In fact, the wishing well may not do anything aside from acting as a source of inspiration for the children. Mr. Bundy might have been influenced by the children’s arguments even without the well, but the well is what influenced them to become friends with Isabella King and try to help her in the first place. Similarly, Lydia was always talented in art; it was just that no one recognized it until Laura was inspired to enter her drawing in the art show. The strangest episode takes place at the end of the book, when the children supposedly meet the ghost of the woman who may have made the well magic in the first place, but even then, the children realize that the “ghost” may have been the work of someone else, perhaps part of a conspiracy on the part of the people they’ve been helping all summer. However, it’s never established one way or the other, so it’s up to the readers’ imaginations to decide.

Much of the story is about fitting in and finding friends. In the beginning, Lydia was the main outcast in the community, but it turns out that many others, including Gordy, in spite of his mother’s social status, don’t quite fit in, either. In fact, it seems that perhaps more people in town would have liked Lydia more and encouraged her in her art if she had ever felt confident enough before to let people really get to know her. However, here I have to say that it was really the townspeople’s fault for driving her away in the first place. For a long time, Lydia had lost confidence in other people and in her ability to make friends because of the way people treated her. That was why Lydia sometimes purposely acted strange and didn’t try to get people to like her; she was already pretty firmly convinced that they didn’t and never would. It was just the message that everyone seemed to be sending her, and it kind of turned into a vicious cycle that was pushing Lydia further and further away from other people.  Lydia really needed intervention from a third party to end the cycle. When Laura accepts Lydia and convinces the others to accept her as well, it opens up new sides of Lydia’s character and new possibilities for her.

The drive that some people have to assert control over others, enforce conformity within a group, and maintain an “us vs. them” mentality with non-conformists is responsible for many social problems and behavioral issues. Mrs. Witherspoon is an example of this, although it turns out that even our heroes are somewhat guilty in the way that they view Mrs. Witherspoon’s son Gordy at first.

This book taught me a new vocabulary word, purse-proud, which is used to describe Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends. Basically, it means pride in having money, especially if the person lacks other sources of pride. Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends are all wealthier members of the community, which is why they feel that they’re entitled to dictate to others what they should do and how things should be. They think that because they have more, they know best. (I’ve seen this before, but now I have a new word to describe it.) Initially, Mrs. Witherspoon is unconcerned with how local children are educated because she’s wealthy enough to send her son to private schools.  Other people’s needs are of no concern and possibly a source of inconvenience for her. Gordy is the one who changes her mind when he realizes that he has a chance at making real friends with the neighborhood kids if he goes to public school, like they do, and convinces his mother that it’s what he really wants.  Although his family is pretty privileged, Gordy never really made any friends at the private schools that he has attended and has actually been rather lonely. In a way, Gordy receives the final wish of the wishing well (for this book, anyway) in getting the new friends that he has needed and learning that there are other, more imaginative ways to have fun than what he’s been doing.

Gordy is a nice surprise as a character.  At first, he seems to be a kind of clueless trouble-maker, but his friendship with the other kids brings out better qualities in him.  Perhaps a better way to put it is that the others’ acceptance of him encourages him to show more of what he’s truly capable of.   When James and Laura are introduced to Gordy, he doesn’t seem very bright, and he does things he shouldn’t, like swimming in the reservoir instead of the river and throwing rocks at windows to break them just because he can.  In some ways, the other kids are right, that Gordy is thoughtless and doesn’t behave well. However, when they end up agreeing to hang out with Gordy one afternoon after failing to win over Mrs. Witherspoon with kindness, they realize that part of the reason that Gordy acts the way he does is that no one ever suggests to him that he do anything different.  Gordy lacks somewhat for positive influences in his life.  His mother thinks that she knows best in everything but isn’t always aware of what her son thinks and feels.  Other people try to avoid talking to Gordy because they see him as an annoyance or source of trouble, so no one explains to him how his behavior is keeping him from making friends.  However, Gordy does have good points.  Unlike Lydia, Gordy doesn’t seem to hold any grudges in spite of experiencing similar problems with fitting in and making friends.  Even when the other kids are less than enthusiastic about hanging out with him at first, he still keeps trying to be friendly and is quick to forgive their earlier coldness.  Gordy knows that he really wants friends and that part of the key to getting them is to remain open to the possibility of being friends, even when those friends aren’t perfect.  In the end, he is really good at showing the acceptance of others that is part of the theme of this story.  Acceptance of others and willingness to be friendly improves things for everyone.

Another thing that I really liked about this book is the children’s attitudes toward people’s conventional views of art and literature. Many people are eager to tell others what art or writing should be and how it should be done. Lydia said that people had criticized her drawings before for being “crazy” or not from real life. They couldn’t see the imagination and talent that it took to make them because they weren’t what people expected. Even Lydia’s grandmother complains about always having to paint scenes with maple trees in them because that’s what grows where they live. She’d rather paint something else, but people expect maples trees, so that’s what she paints. Kip says that he kind of understands because his teachers always tell him to “write what he knows”, but really, he thinks that the things he doesn’t know well are much more interesting. They all want the freedom to explore new ideas, and that type of exploration is what makes fantasy stories so interesting. There may be magic, and maybe not, but considering the possibilities is half the fun!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.