Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy

The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy by Jane Thayer, illustrated by Lisa McCue, 1958, 1985.

A puppy named Petey tells his mother that he wants a boy for Christmas. His mother says that he might get one if he’s good, and when Petey is a good puppy, his mother tries to find one for him.

Unfortunately, Petey’s mother just can’t seem to find a boy for Petey anywhere. She suggests trying to see if any other dog is willing to part with his boy. However, no other dog wants to give up his boy.

Eventually Petey comes to an orphanage with a sign that says Home for Boys. Petey decides that if the boys have no parents, maybe they could also use a dog. It’s Christmas Eve, and most of the boys are inside are singing Christmas carols, except for one boy, sitting by himself outside.

Petey jumps into the lonely boy’s lap, and the boy loves him right away. When a lady comes to check on the boy, the boy asks if he can bring the puppy in, and she says yes.

All of the boys in the home love Petey and want to keep him. The lady says that Petey can stay if his mother lets him, and Petey knows that she will. Instead of getting just one boy for Christmas, Petey found fifty!

The story was first published in 1958, but my edition is from 1985 and has different illustrations. In the older book, the puppy looked like a beagle.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Witch of Blackbird Pond

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, 1958.

This is a book that is often used in American schools or recommended to students, but because of the complexity of the story and dark subject matter, I wouldn’t recommend it to young children. It’s more appropriate for middle school level children and older.

The year is 1687, and a sixteen-year-old girl named Kit (short for Katherine) Tyler is traveling by ship from Barbados to the Connecticut Colony. Kit was born in Barbados, where her grandfather owned a plantation, which he received in a grant from the king. However, Kit was orphaned at a very young age, and now, her grandfather has died, so Kit is on her way to live with her Aunt Rachel, her mother’s sister, who is married to a Puritan and is living in Connecticut.

In Barbados, Kit was part of a prominent, slave-owning family, but in Connecticut, she’s just another girl. The people in Connecticut are Puritans, which puts Kit on the opposite site of a political conflict. Her father’s side of her family in Barbados was on the side of the Cavaliers, who supported the king against the Puritans, or “Roundheads” in the English Civil War (1642-1651). Because her Aunt Rachel has married a Puritan, Kit’s Connecticut relatives are on the side of the Roundheads. When Kit first sets off on her journey, she has very little idea of the difference between the two and what it’s going to mean for her future life.

People in Connecticut do things differently, and from the very beginning, Kit strikes them as strange and unpredictable. She is impulsive, and even her grandfather used to warn her about thinking before she acts. Kit is accustomed to living in luxury, giving orders to slaves, and generally being allowed to do as she pleases. It comes as a shock to her that not only can she no longer do these things, but others may heap harsh judgement on her for behaving oddly, even when she does it in the name of a good cause.

Kit gets her first impressions of what life in Connecticut will be like when she talks to the ship captain’s son, Nat Eaton, and an aspiring clergyman named John Holbrook. John Holbrook is the son of a tanner who has had to work by day and study by night since he was young, and he struggles to complete his education because his family doesn’t have enough money to send him to college. Because Kit’s grandfather was wealthy, Kit has never really had to think much about money before. She never had to work or even do chores when she was young, and when she tries to talk to John Holbrook about the books that she’s read, he disapproves of her choice of reading material because he thinks that reading should be reserved for the serious study of religion.

Kit’s naivety and views of slavery are challenged when Nat Eaton talks her about the horrible conditions slaves endure when they are transported from Africa to the Americas and how many of them don’t survive the experience. Kit is accustomed to owning slaves and having them work for her, but just as she has never had to think about the cost of the fancy clothes and other luxuries that her grandfather gave her, she realizes that she’s never given a thought to where slaves come from and how. Kit learns that, while there are people in the North American colonies who own slaves, there are others who vehemently disapprove of the practice, including Nat Eaton. He says that if his family had dealt in slaves, they could have a lot more money, but they’re doing fine carrying more humane cargo and passengers.

Note: Racial issues are more of a side issue than the main part of the story, and this is the part of the story that addresses the issue the most. I can’t say that Kit ever comes to reverse her early view of slaves completely, but this is the beginning of a revelation to her, one of the first indications to her that the life she previously lived is actually the exception instead of the norm, and not everyone looks favorably on people who live the way she used to live. None of the main characters in the story are black.

Kit is dismayed that there seem to be few topics from her old life (politics, money, slaves, the luxuries she owned, the relative freedom she had, not having to work, having plenty of time to read whatever books she liked whether they were useful or instructive or religious or not, etc.) that don’t cause some awkwardness, discomfort, or disapproval from the people who live in the community she is about to join and who will now be playing significant roles in her life. People don’t seem eager to be friends with her, and they look at her suspiciously as a stranger.

As her ship nears its destination, a little girl on board loses her doll overboard and Kit jumps into the water to get it back, alarming everyone. Most of the other women and girls don’t know how to swim, and they think it’s strange when Kit says that her grandfather taught her how to swim when she was little. The sea around Connecticut is too cold for swimming, so they’re not used to the idea of recreational swimming. (This time period was part of the Little Ice Age, so the area was even colder then than it is today.) Some people also consider that one of the tests for witchcraft involves seeing if a woman could float in water, and they begin whispering that Kit might be a witch.

When Kit finally arrives at the town where her Aunt Rachel and Uncle Matthew Woods live, Wethersfield, she is disappointed to see that it’s much more rural than the community where she used to live. The streets are not paved. Kit is dressed in an overly-elegant way for the community and even for her own family. When she finally meets her aunt, she thinks that she must be a servant at first because she is dressed so plainly. Aunt Rachel is happy to see her, and Kit meets her cousins, Judith and Mercy. Judith is very pretty, and Mercy walks with crutches. Kit is surprised at the very simple way they live, and they are taken aback at her fine clothes and all of the possessions she brought with her in her trunks from Barbados.

Her relatives are stunned when they find out that Kit plans to stay with them. They had not even expected her to come for a visit, and they had not heard about her grandfather’s death. Uncle Matthew asks why she didn’t write to tell them that she was coming, and Kit admits that she was afraid to write to them because she didn’t want them to tell her not to come and she didn’t have any other choice but to come to them. After her grandfather’s death, the overseer of the plantation sold off the entire crop and kept the money for himself, and all of the other plantation owners in the area presented Kit with debts her grandfather had with them that needed to be repaid, so she was forced to sell off the slaves and almost everything else to pay them. (From Kit’s description about the sudden influx of supposed debts after her grandfather’s death, I wondered whether at least some of these supposed debts were fraudulent and if Kit was simply too young and naive to challenge them, being accustomed to her grandfather handling all of the family’s money and business arrangements, but I can’t really be sure. She doesn’t go into detail about what proof the creditors offered of the debts or if she simply took them at their word, and its only real importance is in helping to provide her with a reason for going to live with her relatives.) Aunt Rachel says that Kit did the right thing by repaying the debts and coming to them, but Uncle Matthew seems less sure. He disapproves of Kit’s grandfather for being a royalist and seems reluctant to take on a now impoverished relative accustomed to a luxurious life.

Kit tries to share some of her fancy clothes with her cousins when they admire them, and Judith and Mercy love the new clothes, but Uncle Matthew puts a stop to it. He disapproves of Kit’s clothes because they are just too fancy and he thinks they encourage vanity. Uncle Matthew is very direct with Kit, explaining to her that people in this family and in this community live a very different life from the one she is used to, and she is going to have to adjust to their ways if she wants to live with them. Adjusting to this new life, which is so different from everything she knew before, is a major struggle for Kit throughout the story.

Privately, Kit confides in Mercy that she had another reason for wanting to leave Barbados. There was a man there who was a friend of her grandfather’s. Her grandfather also owed money to him, but he would have forgiven the debt and paid the other debts if Kit had agreed to marry him. Other people in Barbados said that it was a smart match and that she should marry him, but he was fifty years old, and Kit couldn’t bring herself to marry someone so much older than herself. That’s why she wanted to leave Barbados in such a hurry and didn’t want to wait even long enough to write to her relatives. (The issue of the girls’ marriage options and what they mean for their family and future lives is a major focus of the story. It is taken for granted throughout the story that all of the girls will get married at some point and that their primary future occupation will be being someone’s wife. However, what being a wife means for them depends on who they marry, what their husband’s occupation and position in society are, and the type of lifestyle they can support.) Mercy says that Kit did the right thing by leaving Barbados and that her Uncle Matthew will get used to her being there if she can demonstrate that she can be useful (an important factor in the occupation of being a wife or daughter of a Puritan family).

Being useful is a problem for Kit, who is unaccustomed to doing work of any kind. She doesn’t know how to do even basic chores. People need to explain to her how to do everything, and even then, Kit is extremely clumsy and lacks the patience to follow their instructions properly. Judith loses her patience trying to teach her and isn’t happy to learn that they’re now going to have to share a bed. Kit appreciates Mercy for her understanding and her quiet strength. Even though some people disregard Mercy because of her disability, Kit knows that Mercy has valuable skills and that she can work as hard as anyone. Life with the Woods family is a monotonous series of chores that previously Kit would have thought of only as labor for slaves that she would never have to do.

Then, there are religious differences between her and her relatives. When Kit lived with her grandfather, they never attended regular church services, but Uncle Matthew’s Puritan household is strictly religious, so Kit is expected to go to church with the family. At the church services, she sees that other people in the community are wearing clothes that are about as fashionable as her own, so not everyone in the community is as strict in their dress as the Woods family is. However, Kit is bored by the services (which last all day), the other parishioners don’t seem very friendly, and it seems like word has spread that Kit is a charity case that her aunt and uncle have taken in. However, she does attract the attention of a young man named William Ashby, and Judith meets John Holbrook for the first time.

As Kit spends more time with her relatives, she discovers that Uncle Matthew is a local selectman but that he has political disagreements with some of the other men in town, and some of them think that he is less loyal to the king than he should be. Kit also becomes involved in the romantic interests of her cousins and confronted with some choices she needs to make about her own future. William Ashby is from a wealthy and socially prominent family, but Uncle Matthew dislikes the Ashby family for being Royalists. Kit learns that Judith was interested in William Ashby before she came, and she worries that Judith will be angry with her for attracting his attention, but Judith tells her not to worry about it because she is now in love with John Holbrook. Kit still feels uncomfortable at William’s sudden interest in her because she has only just come to live in the area, she knows very little about William, and the two of them don’t seem to have much to talk about during his visits with her. However, Aunt Rachel and her cousins encourage her to pursue the relationship because William Ashby’s family is prosperous and he can provide a good living for her. Kit is flattered by William’s attention because he admires her whether she is “useful” or not. With his family’s money and position, William Ashby could give Kit a life similar to the one she had before with her grandfather with nice clothes and relative freedom from routine household chores.

However, Kit’s views and ambitions in life begin to change when she starts helping her cousin Mercy to teach young children in the community’s dame school. Basically, a dame school was when a woman of the community would teach children basic lessons, such as reading and writing, informally in her own home for a fee. (For more information, see Going to School in 1776.) Mercy explains that after children learn to read in the dame school, they can go on to the more advanced lessons in the community’s formal grammar school. Kit always enjoyed reading and discovers that she likes working with the children. As a dame school teacher, Kit earns fees from the students and performs a useful service that she enjoys much more than weeding gardens, scrubbing floors, and other household chores. Kit was not raised to have a profession, but there is more than one kind of work in the world and even in this small community, and this particular kind of work suits her. It pleases Kit that the students appreciate her and enjoy her lessons and stories.

The girls’ romantic dreams and life decisions as they come of age and begin making lives for themselves in the community could make for an interesting historical novel by themselves, but there is more to this story. This is a witch trial story. Kit has already had people making witch comments about her because of her odd behavior, but through her work at the dame school, she demonstrates other odd habits that cause her to get on the wrong side of community members. When she gets the idea of having students act out the story of the Good Samaritan instead of simply listening to it, the situation gets out of hand. She is criticized for using the Bible for play-acting, and the dame school is temporarily closed. Then, Kit befriends Hannah Tupper, a somewhat eccentric widow who lives in an undesirable area near Blackbird Pond that often floods. Nobody understands why she wants to live out there, all alone with her cats, and people in the area say that she’s probably a witch. The truth is that she is known to be a Quaker, and the Puritan community doesn’t like to associate with her because of her religion. Kit likes Hannah because she is kind and understanding to her and calms her when she is upset, but her family doesn’t like her to associate with Hannah, saying that evil can seem innocent at first. Kit also realizes that, while William Ashby admires her, he is also scandalized by her behavior. Hannah, on the other hand, is supportive of Kit and helps her continue to secretly teach a young girl whose mother doesn’t want her to have reading lessons.

Kit’s friendship with Hannah gets her into trouble with community and even puts her life in danger. People in Wethersfield start to die from a disease that has struck the community, and Hannah is blamed. Kit risks her life to save her from an angry mob. Although she successfully gets Hannah to safety, Kit is also accused of witchcraft and put on trial.

I often find stories of people falsely accused frustrating, but this one has a good ending. There is a note in the back of the book that explains the historical background behind the story. Kit Tyler is a fictional character, but there are some real historical characters in the book, and the political situation involving the colony’s charter is real.

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

My Reaction

The time period of the story is a time of witchcraft suspicions, like those that sparked the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts (1692-1693). Historically, suspicions of witchcraft and actual witch trials were more likely to occur in communities suffering from internal divisions and instability, especially when the community suffered some further calamity with no apparent explanation, such as a sudden epidemic of illness (possibly ergotism in Salem), heaping panic on top of existing community tension and anger. Then, the community would take out its feelings on someone who was generally disliked by a majority of community members, usually targeting someone who lacked resources to fight back against the allegations of witchcraft, like a poor woman or a widow. Basically, the community wanted someone who could serve as a convenient scapegoat (as described by the Salem Witch Museum) or whipping boy for the commu,nity’s roiling emotions and real problems that they either didn’t want to address or lacked the means to address. Even when it became obvious in hindsight that they had killed innocent people, most of those involved wouldn’t even suffer feeling guilty or bad about themselves for murder because there was always Satan and his trickery to blame for their own actions and decisions. No one could prove that they hadn’t been honestly deceived by the devil, so they would not be held responsible by their friends, who liked them personally and had been actively involved in the entire episode themselves. The community would already be accomplished at mental blame-shifting, so their minds would be relatively untroubled by personal responsibility. Knowing that they didn’t experience regret or remorse for their actions, that they felt right and good about their personal choices, doesn’t help the people they killed, the families of their victims, or people vicariously experiencing the injustice through history or historical novels. Miscarriages of justice are deeply frustrating, which is why I don’t normally like this type of story, although in the past, I’ve been fascinated by the historical background of this incidents, which is why I wrote a couple of papers on witchcraft trials, both American and European, in college, back when I majored in history. (Don’t make the mistake of saying anyone was burned at the stake for witchcraft in America. It’s not true, not even at Salem. The accused were hanged, and some were pressed to death with heavy rocks, but nobody was burned at the stake for witchcraft in the American colonies. That happened in Europe but not America, and it always annoys me when people get that wrong.)

In the book, the community in Wethersfield has all of the historical elements necessary for producing a witch hysteria. From the beginning, Kit notes the the political divisions in the community. Particularly, her uncle is at odds with other prominent community members about specific local issues and the amount of loyalty owed to the king, and there is also a conflict over the colony’s charter. Even though Kit would be the side of those favoring the king, more so than her uncle, the feelings that community members have about her uncle’s political position would give them a natural prejudice and suspicion toward what they would view as the strangest and most problematic member of her uncle’s family. Then, there is a sudden sickness that causes community members to die. The community also has an outcast who would make a convenient scapegoat, Hannah Tupper. When Kit first hears about her, her cousin Judith tells her that some people already think that she may be a witch. As both a widow and a Quaker outcast, she would have been unable to save herself from the townspeople without Kit’s help. When Kit provided that help, and the community lost their first choice of scapegoat, they picked Kit as their second choice, an acceptable substitute.

On the one hand, my own anger at the injustices of the past leads me to return the witch hunters’ judgement with some harsh judgement of my own. Some of the world’s most judgemental people are so unaware of any other emotions besides their own that they are shocked to discover that other people actually have minds and feelings and an equal ability to look back at them and assess what they see. I suppose that these people wouldn’t have guessed what future people would think when they looked back at them because their views of themselves wouldn’t match what independent observers, seeing their actions and the consequences across time, would see. Human beings often have internal fantasies about themselves where they are more brave, clever, attractive, and on the side of moral right than they actually are, and I think the witch hunters are a definite example of that. I don’t like people who wriggle out of personal responsibility, no matter why they do it, and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, I only consider people as “good” as their own personal behavior and the way they affect other people around them. Nobody’s “good” simply because they say they are or like to think of themselves that way, especially if their real actions say otherwise. Actions speak louder than words. There are many things about the people in the community in this story (as well as in real historical communities) that don’t live up to my high personal standards. Offending me isn’t a criminal offense, and there aren’t many consequences for doing it, but it does provoke a lot of griping.

I think that there’s little point in having standards if you don’t actively live them, and although I think some of that sentiment would have been in the witch hunters’ thoughts, I further believe that everyone has an equal responsibility for both the standards they have and how they choose to demonstrate them. If people would give more thought to the “hows” of their actions and the consequences of what they do, I think there would be fewer problems in the world in general. I also think letting people get away with harmful behavior and not at least clearly criticizing it sets a terrible precedent that is likely to lead to further harm. In the book, once Kit’s name is cleared, she is inclined to forgive her accusers, although she is offered the opportunity to charge them with slander. I understand the reasons why Kit would decide not to pursue these charges, but at the same time, there is clearly one person in the story who was more responsible than the others for the charges brought against Kit and who has also been shown to be hostile toward her own innocent young daughter, and this person does not receive punishment for her actions in this story. I did feel better that the father of the child, realizing that his wife has been wrong about their daughter, falsely labeling her as a half-wit and keeping her from the education that she should have, stands up for the child and her continued education in the end, but I still kind of wanted to see the rest of the community give the mother more of a direct, official warning or censure to bring it home to her that there would be consequences for further misbehavior on her part because of the serious consequences, even possible death, that she almost imposed on others. Sometimes, I feel like this sort of conflict comes to an end too quickly and easily in stories with kind of an air of “We’re all good here now” without some of the underlying problems really being confronted or resolved. It happens sometimes like this in real life, but it’s not very satisfying, and just because some people say “We’re all good here now” doesn’t mean that everything is really fine and everybody involved is really fine. I’m never comfortable with pretending that things are okay that are clearly not. The mother of the child seems to have some mental issues of her own and some kind of emotional conflict over her own child that gives her a warped view of reality. That isn’t fully explained or resolved in the story, probably because the other characters don’t fully understand it, either.

Perceptions are important, but a person’s perceptions don’t stop reality from being, well, real. I know that, in real life, all or many of the supposed witch threats probably seemed real to the individual accusers in the middle of their personal panic, but the reality of the situation is that they did a great deal of harm to innocent people who were unable to stop them. In fact, they specifically targeted people they knew couldn’t stop them, which sounds pretty calculating. They did it because of their own personal problems and the demons that lived in their own minds, whether or not those mental demons had any supernatural help. It’s frustrating because you can’t communicate completely rationally with determinedly irrational people any more than you communicate can with dead people or fictional people and convince them to change their minds. There are times when there’s just nothing you can do when there is no way for the other person to receive new information or they’re just determined not to and no way to help someone who not only doesn’t want help but doesn’t think they need it and would be deeply offended and suspicious at the mere offer. On the other hand, the psychology of such incidents is kind of interesting.

Years ago, I attended a talk given by a team of professional ghost hunters where they said that people who call them to investigate hauntings in their homes tend to be people who are already troubled about something else in their life, such as money problems, marital problems, health problems (mental and/or physical), problems with their kids, or some combination of these. Then, when something happens that seems strange and inexplicable, they get startled by it because they’re already on edge. People who are more secure in their lives and are generally happy might brush off one or two odd things that happen as just rare oddities and forget about them, but people who are already upset about something else tend to seize on them. They become hyper-vigilant. They start noticing more and more odd things that they might otherwise have overlooked and draw connections between these things in their minds, actively looking for more. Soon, they have themselves convinced that they’ve got a full-blown haunting in their house, when at least some of what they’ve experienced is just the ghosts in their own minds. In one case, they said that a man was troubled by a mask he bought at a garage sale. He thought it was cursed because, soon after he got it, a bunch of bad things happened to him. (As I recall, his wife divorced him, he lost his job, and he had health problems.) The ghost hunters said, “To be fair, we don’t think that this mask was cursed when the man bought it. We think it became cursed because he bought it, and he continually blamed it for every bad thing that happened to him around that time, even though these things were probably going to happen anyway.” This is basically the same process that leads to witchcraft trials, except that in witchcraft trials, it happens on a larger scale. Witchcraft trials involve whole troubled communities instead of just a single troubled household.

This still happens in modern communities, but in places where people don’t believe in witches, it’s more likely to take the form of a kind of moral panic, where people get upset about a possible infiltration or excess of people seen as some kind of disruptive moral deviants, rather than a witch hysteria. In both cases, the community experiences extreme fear or paranoia about some perceived threat, but in moral panics, the perceived threat comes from some part of human society, like Communists during the Red Scare or some variety of criminal, not a supernatural force. Actually, I believe that we’ve been living in a state of moral panic in the US for at least the last few years, probably longer, on more than one front. I can’t help but notice that much of what’s been happening in modern times fits all the criteria and follows the typical stages of a moral panic, particularly the parts about the “hidden dangers of modern technology“, a belief in “a ‘hidden world’ of anonymous evil people“, and fear of an “evil stranger manipulating the innocent” (which, weirdly, is what I think is behind the willingness of some people to believe conspiracy theories in the first place as they accept stories that come from apparent “friends”, or at least people who look like people they might want to get a beer with or something – some people use them as their primary source of media, thus checking another box in the requirements for a moral panic and leading up to the final point). In my experience, the fear is particularly about evil people who want to “control” others and tell them what to do, the ultimate community boogeymen where I live. I’ve heard a lot about it for years from real people who habitually like to tell me what to do and how I should feel about things themselves.

This is kind of a digression from the story, but I put it here to illustrate that we might not have to question how people can get themselves into community hysteria over perceived threats, most of which prove to be not that threatening in the long term. Most people might not believe in witches anymore, but they’ve found plenty of creative substitutes for the same basic process over the years. A complete list would take too long to compile, but if you spend any amount of time on social media, you can come up with several “evil” or “deviant” groups or ideological concepts that people hate and fear in the space of a few minutes. Thanks to modern technology, you don’t have to wonder what’s going on in people’s heads. You can Google it. Many people will just tell you right up front what boogeymen are lurking in their minds, and they’ll gladly share that information with untold numbers of total strangers through Twitter, Facebook, and Quora, feeling validated and supported if faceless usernames agree and spread their stories, no matter why they do, and often raging against sinister forces trying to spy on them at the same time. It’s not rational, but it is recognizable. I put it to you that a few moments of honest self-reflection, considering not how you feel but what you’re actually going to do and what it’s going to mean in real terms, can be the stitch in time that saves nine. There are dangers to modern technology, but I don’t think they’re really that hidden. They’re the same dangers human society has caused itself in the past, just much faster, and they come mostly from the demons in the minds of the people involved. There is nothing online that wasn’t designed, written, promoted, spread around, and ultimately accepted by individual humans. It’s when people lose touch with the realities of the situation and the consequences that their actions have for real people around them in the real world that I really worry. It seems to me that blaming the Internet or the media for the things people have decided to do themselves has become the 21st century version of “The devil made me do it.”

Posted on by TracyC

Cassie Bowen Takes Witch Lessons

Cassie Bowen Takes Witch Lessons by Anna Grossnickle Hines, 1985.

Cassie Bowen and Brenda Bolter have been friends for years, but lately, Brenda has been getting friendlier with Sylvia, another girl in their fourth grade class at school. Sylvia is a mean girl, and the favorite target of her meanness is Agatha Gifford, the new girl at school. Sylvia likes to call her “Saggy Aggy” and “Thrifty Gifford” because Agatha always comes to school wearing dresses that are too loose on her and Sylvia thinks that she probably got them at a thrift store. Most of the girls at school wear brand new jeans, not dresses. Agatha doesn’t bother to fight back when the other girls tease her, and Cassie doesn’t know what to say or do about it, even though the teasing makes her uncomfortable, too.

Even if the other girls are right about Agatha wearing used clothes, Cassie can understand. Cassie wears jeans like most of the other girls, but hers are actually hand-me-downs from an older cousin. (The story of my own youth, too. Thrift stores are the story of my present because I still don’t have much money, and anything I don’t spend on clothes is something I could potentially use to buy books, most of which will also be used because I like older books and because it maximizes my buying power. Life and budgets are about priorities.) Cassie’s mother hasn’t had money to buy new clothes since Cassie’s parents got divorced. The book is vague about what happened in Cassie’s family before the divorce, but Cassie’s father now lives in another state and doesn’t even write or communicate with the family, and he’s certainly not sending money. Cassie’s mother says that he’s got to sort out his life, and Cassie says that her father is kind of a “creep” now, but the book doesn’t go any deeper into it. It’s more important that Cassie’s family is now tight on money, and Cassie has mixed feelings about the divorce. On the one hand, she misses her father and wishes that the divorce had never happened, but on the other, she’s also angry with her father for his part in the divorce and the ways that he changed from the father she knew and loved before. Cassie’s mother says that everyone changes over time, and sometimes, when they change, they grow apart. Cassie will soon come to understand that better through her experiences with Brenda.

Cassie doesn’t like the ways that Brenda is changing, and she resents Brenda sharing the secret hideout they built with Sylvia without even talking it over with her. One day, when the girls are going to their secret fort, they pass the old house where Agatha lives with her grandmother. There are neighborhood rumors that Mrs. Gifford is actually a witch because her old house looks kind of creepy and she often does odd things, like talking to her plants. As the girls pass her house, they hear her talking to her flowers, and suddenly, Sylvia trips up Brenda so that she goes sprawling into the flower bed. As Mrs. Gifford laments about her flowers, Sylvia dramatically exclaims that they must pick some flowers and actually starts yanking more out of the bed until Mrs. Gifford angrily chases them off with a broom.

Cassie is appalled by the entire incident, although she admits that it was funny, watching Mrs. Gifford chase the other girls. Brenda is fascinated with Sylvia because of the daring way she likes to show off and grab attention, and it inspires her to do the same thing, finding ways to make fun of people or cause trouble. It upsets Cassie, who just wants Brenda to be the same Brenda she’s always known. Brenda also tells Cassie that Sylvia has amazing things in her room, like a collection of glass animal figurines. Sylvia even gives her one to keep. Also, Sylvia’s parents supposedly let her stay up as late as she wants, and she can usually get her way with them just by throwing a tantrum. Brenda thinks that all this is cool, which makes her different from the kids I knew growing up. Most self-respecting fourth graders were beyond tantrums and would have been called babies if they had admitted to having one at that age. Having great clothes and a lot of cool stuff in her room would have gone a long way, though.

When the children’s teacher, Mr. Gardner, assigns the kids partners to work on presenting a story to the rest of the class, Cassie hopes that she and Brenda will be partners so that things can be like they were before. However, Brenda and Sylvia end up being partners, and Cassie is assigned to Agatha. Cassie isn’t enthusiastic about it, and Agatha notices, but Cassie decides that she’s going to be as friendly as she can. She asks Agatha about which story she would like to present to the class because she doesn’t like reading that much, and Agatha says that she knows because she’s noticed that Cassie is better at math. Cassie is surprised that Agatha would know that, considering how new she is, and Agatha says that she envies her because she’s been having trouble with fractions. Agatha says that she really likes the story The Nightingale because it reminds her of a beautiful music box that her grandmother owns, and Cassie is fascinated.

One day, when Cassie’s brother is off playing baseball and Brenda and Sylvia are working on their project together, Cassie passes by Agatha’s house and is invited in. Cassie hesitates at first because the house is creepy, but she has to work on the project with Agatha, so she accepts. Agatha’s grandmother serves the girls rose hip tea and cookies. Cassie thinks that rose hip tea sounds weird at first, but it tastes nice. Mrs. Gifford is an eccentric lady, but rather sweet. She introduces Cassie to Roberto, her favorite plant. Part of the reason why she talks to plants is that she lived alone and was lonely before Agatha came to live with her. She is also a member of the same gardening club that Cassie’s mother belongs to. Cassie uses the cookies at tea to explain fractions to Agatha, and Mrs. Gifford shows Cassie her music box, which is beautiful. The music box is special to Mrs. Gifford because it was the last present her father gave her before his death, when she was about the age of the girls now. Cassie understands the feeling because she prizes the teddy bear that her father gave her before he went away.

The more Cassie learns about the Giffords, the less strange they seem, and she no longer believes that Mrs. Gifford is a witch. Agatha tells Cassie that she lives with her grandmother because her parents were killed in a car accident. The only other family she has is an older sister who is away at college, which is why Agatha can’t live with her. Cassie acknowledges that Agatha’s situation is worse than hers because, even though Cassie misses her father, she’s not an orphan. Agatha also explains that the reason why she wears those dresses to school is that her old school was a private church school, where all the girls were required to wear dresses. When Cassie explains to Agatha’s grandmother that there is no requirement about dresses at their school and that most of the girls wear jeans, Agatha’s grandmother is surprised and says that she didn’t realize, so she buys Agatha some new clothes, taking Cassie with them on their shopping trip.

The new clothes fit Agatha better, and Cassie hopes that they will help her fit in better at school, but Sylvia and Brenda won’t let up on the teasing. In fact, Sylvia seems irritated at Agatha dressing more normally and mocks her, saying, “What’s she trying to do? Act like a normal person?” Cassie tries to tell them that Agatha is normal, but they don’t believe her. Soon after, Brenda asks Cassie if she wants to hang out when she’s on her way to see Agatha again about their project. In an effort to get Brenda to ease up on Agatha, Cassie asks Brenda to come with her so that she can see for herself that Agatha and her grandmother are fine.

The Giffords are nice to Brenda, but during the visit, Mrs. Gifford’s special music box disappears. Agatha says that Brenda stole it, and Cassie gets offended by the accusation, saying that Agatha is making it up and telling her that she doesn’t want to be friends anymore out of loyalty to Brenda. Unfortunately … Agatha was right, and Cassie is shocked when she discovers the truth. Cassie retrieves the music box from Brenda, but with Brenda and Sylvia both angry at her for taking the music box back and Agatha and her grandmother probably mad at her for bringing Brenda to their house in the first place and siding with her over the theft, what is Cassie going to do?

I think the ending of the story is very realistic, although it does leave some things unresolved. Agatha does forgive Cassie for not believing her after Cassie returns the music box. Cassie doesn’t tattle on Brenda and Sylvia because they had accused her of being a tattletale earlier, but she does eventually tell her mother everything that has been happening with Sylvia and Brenda. Her mother reassures Cassie that she did the right thing, even if Brenda didn’t. She says that it sounds like Cassie is angry at Brenda for a lot of things besides this, and Cassie agrees that she doesn’t like it that Brenda is so mean sometimes. Cassie mother says that everyone changes, and sometimes, they change for the better and sometimes for the worse. Cassie doesn’t think she and Brenda will ever be friends again, and her mother says that someday Brenda will also get tired of Sylvia’s meanness, but even if she doesn’t, Cassie will find plenty of other friends. Cassie realizes that she and Agatha really do understand each other, and she’s glad when they make up. At school, Sylvia and Brenda both tease Cassie now, saying that she’s taking witch lessons from the Giffords. It hurts Cassie’s feelings to see her old friend turn against her, but she follows Agatha’s advice and ignores them.

Sylvia and Brenda are never punished for the things they’ve done, which is sadly the case for most of the little bullies I knew as a kid. However, it is nice that Cassie and Agatha realize that they are better friends for each other than either Brenda or Sylvia would have been. I noticed that there is also potential for them to be friends with other people in their class besides Brenda and Sylvia. When Cassie got to school at the end of the book, a girl named Stacy asked her if she wanted to play tether ball, which shows that other girls don’t think badly of her for hanging out with Agatha. I also wished that the book would show more of Pam, who had been Sylvia’s best friend at the beginning of the book before Sylvia and Brenda started hanging out. After being abandoned by Sylvia, perhaps she would also be open to making some new friends. Cassie and Agatha might have other options for making new friends.

There is no magic in the story or witchcraft of any kind. In fact, Brenda and Sylvia probably never really believed that Agatha or her grandmother are actually witches. It’s more that, for reasons of their own, Sylvia and Brenda were looking for someone to pick on, and the “witch” accusations were just their excuse. That’s why they were so irritated when Agatha started dressing like the other girls. If their excuse for bullying Agatha disappeared, they didn’t want to lose their ability to bully her. It was never about making Agatha dress or act like the other girls; it was always about Sylvia and Brenda’s need to have someone to victimize. The truth is that even if the Giffords had seemed less strange in the beginning, Sylvia and Brenda probably would either have picked on them anyway or maybe selected some other victim, perhaps going straight to Cassie as their first choice, because they were looking for a victim and would have found one eventually because that was always their goal.

Posted on by TracyC

The Vanishing Scarecrow

The Vanishing Scarecrow by Phyllis A. Whitney, 1971.

Joan Lang and her mother are moving from their town in Connecticut to Rainbow Island, where Joan’s Great Uncle Agate Benson owned his own amusement park. However, the move is sad because Great Uncle Agate’s death in a skiing accident has so closely followed Joan’s father’s death from a long illness. Joan and her mother knew that they were going to have to move to a smaller house because they could no longer afford their bigger one, and Uncle Agate’s sudden death means that they will inherit his house on Rainbow Island and the amusement park that goes with it. Joan and Uncle Agate had been writing letters to each other since her father’s death, and he made her feel less lonely, so Joan knows that she will miss him, but she is looking forward to seeing the amusement park that he had described to her.

However, the terms of Uncle Agate’s will are unusual, and his lawyer is vague on some aspects of them. What they know is that they must live at Rainbow Island and manage the amusement park for three years in order to gain full ownership. If they decide to leave before that time, Uncle Agate has another plan for the amusement park, but the lawyer refuses to tell them what it is immediately.

When they arrive at Rainbow Island, they meet Mrs. Fuller, who works at the amusement park’s gift shop and lives there with her two sons, Peter and Kent. Mrs. Fuller hopes that Kent and Joan will be friends because they’re close in age. Kent doesn’t seem particularly friendly at first, and when Joan confronts him about that, he says that he’s just trying to figure out what she and her mother are going to be like. Kent, like other people who live and work at Rainbow Island, was very attached to Uncle Agate. He appreciated his vision and imagination, and he misses him now that he’s gone. He has trouble believing that things will ever be like they were with Uncle Agate.

Mrs. Fuller and Kent both mention strange things that have been happening at the amusement park recently, including a scarecrow that frightened Mrs. Riddell, the wife of Wilson Riddell, who manages the park, but she says that she’d better let Mr. Riddell explain the situation. When Joan and her mother go to Uncle Agate’s old house to begin unpacking their things, Mr. Riddell comes to talk to them. He doesn’t seem particularly welcoming, either. Joan’s mother tries to ask him about the scarecrow incident, and he explains that someone, possibly a teenage prankster, has been pulling tricks around the park lately. Earlier that day, someone ran right through the Riddell house, terrifying Mrs. Riddell. Mrs. Riddell is described as being a very nervous person who is somewhat unwell, so Mr. Riddell seems uncertain whether his wife actually saw a person dressed as a scarecrow, as she described, or if that was her imagination. Earlier, she also claimed to see a witch. The idea of someone in a scarecrow costume is plausible because the amusement park includes a field of scarecrows, and they do have a spare scarecrow costume that they’ve used in the past to make it look like one of the scarecrows has come to life, to give guests a bit of a thrill. However, the employee who normally wears the costume hasn’t worn it for some time, and it seems like the recent scarecrow sightings are the work of a prankster.

As Kent shows Joan around the amusement park, they meet up with Peter in the Wizard’s Fortress, where he points out that someone has been messing around with the dioramas of historical scenes, moving some of the little figures around to scenes where they don’t belong. In the dungeon of the fortress, Joan meets up with Mr. Riddell’s daughter, Sheri, who is also about her age. Sheri has found the costume the scarecrow was wearing under some straw. Joan isn’t sure that she trusts Sheri because of the strange way she acts and how she seems to be sneaking around, keeping secrets, and playing weird pranks and tricks.

Could Sheri have something to do with the mysterious scarecrow, or could it be Emery Holt, the man who did odd jobs for Uncle Agate and sometimes wore the scarecrow costume as an act in the park? Another suspect could be Jud Millikin, an escaped convict who used to live in the area and who still has family living nearby. Joan and her mother hear people whispering about him, wondering if he might have come back to see his sick daughter, although people say it isn’t likely that he’d show his face in town since the police are looking for him. But why would he want to sabotage the Rainbow Island amusement park? Joan considers that there might be an answer closer to home when she learns that the Riddells and the Fullers don’t really get along, and there seems to be a silent power struggle between them for control of the park. Either of the families might want the other to leave, plus Joan and her mother, so they can be in charge.

Joan finds a message and an audio recording left behind by Uncle Agate for her, in which he seems to have had a premonition of his impending death and saying that the reason why he wants Joan and her mother to manage the park with Mr. Riddell is that the park needs someone with a fresh imagination to keep creating new exhibits and keep the park interesting for new generations of children. Joan wants to find out who is sabotaging the park and to keep Uncle Agate’s vision for the park alive, but her mother isn’t so sure that the situation is going to work for them.

Joan does have a fantastic imagination. She loves writing and making up stories, and she finds the atmosphere of the amusement park inspiring. However, Joan’s mother worries sometimes that Joan lives too much in her stories and doesn’t face up to reality enough. When Joan accuses her of not liking her stories, her mother says it’s not that, it’s just that writers also need a grounding in real life and the real world, and that it’s not good to use fantasies as a way of ignoring real life. She says that Uncle Agate was like that. Uncle Agate and his sister were orphaned from a young age, and while his sister was adopted by a family, Uncle Agate remained in the orphanage for the rest of his youth. When he grew up, he became successful in the toy industry, which was how he gained enough money and expertise to start his amusement park. However, Joan’s mother believes that much of what he did with the park was trying to live out childhood fantasies from his deprived youth and forget the hard realities of it. Joan’s mother says that she finds the real world outside of the amusement park more compelling, and she doesn’t want Joan to live too much in fantasy.

Joan is attracted to fantasy, but she’s realistic enough to know that there won’t be any hope for the park until she learns the true identity of the mysterious scarecrow that is trying to sabotage it. In the recorded message he left for Joan, Uncle Agate refers to a “right place” where Joan will find instructions that will tell her what to do. As Joan explores the the amusement park, familiarizing herself with the attractions and exhibits, she searches for the place that Uncle Agate referred to. Along the way, she has frightening encounters with someone dressed as a witch and the dangerous scarecrow among the regular figures in the exhibits.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The atmosphere of the story is great, and the author does a good job of making everyone Joan meets look like a potential villain or accomplice. All through the book, I kept changing my mind about who the real scarecrow was, and there are red herrings in the form of other people dressing up in costumes. Joan is never sure who to trust. There is a major twist toward the end of the book that turns the entire situation on its head. The rest of the ending after the scarecrow’s identity was revealed seemed a little abrupt to me, but the story has a good overall message.

At the beginning of the story, Joan does actually look at the amusement park on Rainbow Island as a kind of fantastic sanctuary from her problems, where she can escape from the sad loss of her father and uncle and the problems she’s been having at school. However, she learns that the amusement park isn’t really a sanctuary because it has problems of its own and the people associated with it also have their problems. However, these are problems that Joan is more motivated to solve because they are more exciting than her problems back home, and the stakes are high.

Joan and her mother have a frank discussion about facing up to life’s problems, and Joan points out that her mother’s impulse to run away from the park isn’t that different from her reluctance to face up to her problems with her schoolwork. Joan’s mother doesn’t find the park as interesting as Joan does, so she’s not as interested in trying to save it as Joan is. It’s similar to the way that Joan was unmotivated to work harder at school because it bored her, it was less imaginative than the creative writing she likes to do, and she was preoccupied with other major changes in her life. Joan’s mother acknowledges the truth of that, that it’s easier to try to solve a problem when you’re more motivated to work on it, and the two of them agree that, whatever else they do with their lives, they can’t just abandon the park without trying to catch the saboteur.

All of the characters in the story get new perspectives on their lives from this adventure, seeing how the park and their problems fit into a much bigger picture of life. Joan comes to understand that there are some problems that she’ll still have to face up to, like her school problems, no matter what else happens, and she sees that understanding the real problems that real people have is what will give her characters and stories greater depth.

Posted on by TracyC

A Spell is Cast

A Spell is Cast by Eleanor Cameron, 1974.

This story is fascinating and magical, partly because of other the stories that it reminds me of and partly because, at various points in the story, I was pretty sure that I knew what kind of book it was going to be, but I was never more than partly correct.

When young Cory Winterslow arrives at the airport in California, she expects to be met by her Uncle Dirk. Uncle Dirk has sent her letters before and a picture of himself, but they’ve never actually met in person. Cory is supposed to be spending Easter vacation with her relatives, the Van Heusens, a wealthy family living on an estate called Tarnhelm. Her mother, Stephanie, sent a telegram to the Van Heusens to tell them when Cory would arrive on the plane from New York, where they’ve been living, but no one shows up to meet Cory at the airport. This seems almost like the beginning of a gothic novel, with a young heroine on her way to meet people she’s never met who turn out to not really be expecting her and aren’t what they appear to be, but that’s not really the case here.

Fortunately, a sympathetic older woman who was also on the plane, Mrs. Smallwood, talks to Cory, who explains the situation. Mrs. Smallwood knows the Van Heusens, and she calls both the house at Tarnhelm and Uncle Dirk’s office. Apparently, Uncle Dirk never mentioned to his secretary that he needed to meet anyone that day, and he’s away on business until late. Nobody is home at Tarnhelm, but Mrs. Smallwood is optimistic that it’s all just an oversight. She says that she’ll give Cory a ride to the house. Cory is hesitant to accept a ride from a stranger because she and Mrs. Smallwood have only just met, but it’s raining and she doesn’t know what else to do, so she goes with her. This part seems a bit worrying, but you don’t have to worry because it’s not a kidnapping story.

On the way to Tarnhelm, Mrs. Smallwood points out local sights, and Cory asks her a bit about her relatives. Cory’s mother has always been reluctant to talk about her relatives in California. Mrs. Smallwood describes Uncle Dirk as a young man who never smiles. She says that his mother, Cory’s grandmother, as a high society woman who sometimes acknowledges acquaintances in public and sometimes doesn’t, depending on her mood, something that often offends Mrs. Smallwood, as one of those acquaintances. They also pick up a boy called Peter Hawthorne, who was out walking in the rain and needed a ride. He introduces himself to Cory as the president of the Explorers Club. His description of Cory’s Uncle Dirk doesn’t sound very favorable, either. However, he mentions that the sign for the mansion at Tarnhelm has a unicorn on it, just like the unicorn on the pendant that Cory wears, which she thinks of as her “amulet”, and Cory takes that as a hopeful sign.

Unfortunately, the Smallwoods’ car runs out of gas. Since it’s not raining anymore, Peter offers to walk Cory the rest of the way to Tarnhelm. Then, it starts to rain again, so they take shelter in a cave that Peter knows. While they wait out the storm, Peter asks Cory more about herself. Cory explains that she usually refers to her mother as “Stephanie” because she’s actually adopted. She later reveals that she doesn’t know anything about her birth parents because Stephanie doesn’t like to talk about them, saying that it makes her sad. Stephanie is an actress, and they’ve had to move around sometimes. Because she’s had to switch schools several times, Cory hasn’t made many friends her own age. Cory doesn’t always go with Stephanie when she travels for work, often staying at home with housekeepers (which she calls “lady-helps”) so she can continue going to school. Stephanie isn’t married, so Cory doesn’t have a father to take care of her. The reason why she has come to stay with her relatives during this school break is that Stephanie needs to travel again for her work and couldn’t manage to find new help to stay with Cory. This is the first mention that Cory’s “mother” isn’t really her mother and these relatives that she’s going to visit aren’t blood relatives. This is central to the plot of the book, but there’s a twist coming, and it’s not the twist that I expected. I had theories about the identities of Cory’s biological parents at this point that turned out to be completely wrong.

When the rain lets up a bit, Peter takes Cory the rest of the way to the house, although they leave her luggage in the cave because it’s too hard to carry it over the muddy ground. When they arrive at the house, the housekeeper, Fergie, welcomes Cory. She says that everyone has been in a tizzy about her because Stephanie actually sent multiple telegrams with different sets of instructions for picking up Cory, so nobody knew when she was really arriving. (This is the first indication that Stephanie is unreliable.) Fergie and her husband, Andrew Ferguson, both work for the Van Heusens, and they make Cory feel welcome at Tarnhelm, fussing over her and giving her and Peter a hot dinner. However, they tell Cory not to mention the cave to her grandmother because she wouldn’t understand, and she might be unhappy about Cory showing up at the house wet and muddy. Peter promises to bring Cory’s luggage up to the house later. If this were a gothic novel style of story, the servants would be strict, unhappy, uncaring, or putting on a facade of caring while being just plain sinister, but the Fergusons are exactly as caring and friendly as they seem to be. This isn’t that kind of book.

The Fergusons are Scottish and a bit superstitious. At dinner, they notice that Cory is left-handed, “cawry-fisted”, as they call it. Peter is intrigued that “cawry” sounds like “Cory”, and the Fergusons say that there’s a superstition that left-handed people are enchanted or bewitched. However, the Fergusons don’t think it’s a bad thing that Cory is left-handed and possibly bewitched; it’s just more of an interesting idea to them. This story isn’t as supernatural as I originally expected.

The Fergusons tell Cory that her grandmother and uncle are good, kind people, but they aren’t used to children and are fussy about some things. Uncle Dirk is known to be moody, and Cory’s grandmother likes things quiet and orderly. Cory starts to think that she might be happier with just the Fergusons, although she is still curious about her relatives. She hopes that they will like her, and maybe if they like her enough, they’ll let her stay longer so she can go to Peter’s school and join his Explorers Club because she badly wants friends. Issues about how to make friends add an element of teen drama to the story, but there’s more going on here than that.

The house is beautiful and charming, and Fergie gives Cory Stephanie’s old room, which Cory loves. It has beautiful, old-fashioned furniture and its own fireplace! She also shows Cory a collection of carved wooden masks hanging on the walls of the hallways that her Uncle Dirk made. Uncle Dirk is an architect, but he’s also been a wood carver. In Stephanie’s room, there is even a mask of Stephanie’s face, which Cory recognizes. During the night, she half wakes up and is aware of her grandmother and Uncle Dirk in her room, whispering about her, saying that she looks rather plain and something about somebody “getting used to” something. They don’t deny this conversion later when Cory asks them about it, and there is less sinister significance to it than it seems at first.

The next morning, Cory meets her grandmother and Uncle Dirk at breakfast. They greet her politely, but her grandmother says that she wants to have a word with Peter about how he should have taken her to his house until the rain stopped, not made her walk through the mud to Tarnhelm, ruining her shoes. Cory asks her not to say anything to Peter because she really wants to join the Explorers, and they wouldn’t let her in if they thought that she was afraid of a little mud. However, her grandmother reminds her that she’s only there for a short visit, and she doesn’t want her getting hurt or doing anything dangerous. Uncle Dirk is more sympathetic and offers to teach her to swim.

Mrs. Van Heusen brings up the subject of Stephanie, and during the conversion, she lets slip that Stephanie has never legally adopted Cory. Now, we’re getting to a major plot point of the story! Stephanie is consumed by her acting work and not good with paperwork, and Mrs. Van Heusen thinks it’s about time that she took care of the issue of Cory’s legal adoption. The news comes as a shock to Cory, who thinks that, not being legally adopted, she doesn’t really belong to the family at Tarnhelm. Both her grandmother and Uncle Dirk hurriedly reassure her that she is family to them and belongs at Tarnhelm and that the official paperwork doesn’t really make a difference to them. There is no danger in the story of Cory being rejected by this family, and they don’t have any objection to her visit or Stephanie’s guardianship of her. However, this is another of the early indications that Stephanie is not as attentive as she should be as Cory’s guardian and that there are aspects of Cory’s life and well-being that are being neglected. Cory is starting to develop a new awareness of these issues.

Cory asks her grandmother and Uncle Dirk about her birth parents because Stephanie has never explained who they were or what happened to them. Her grandmother says that it’s only right that she knows and that Stephanie really should have told her before. Uncle Dirk explains to Cory that her parents’ names were Lawrence and Coralie Winterslow and that they were friends of Stephanie’s when they were young, before they were even married. They all liked to go skiing together. Cory’s parents lived in England for awhile after they were married, and Cory was actually born in London. Then, her parents were killed in a skiing accident in Switzerland. Stephanie had been with them on that skiing trip, and before Cory’s mother died from her injuries, she asked Stephanie to take three-year-old Cory because she had no living relatives on her father’s side and she didn’t want to leave her child with her own relatives, for some reason. Cory is glad to know the story of her parents but sad at the same time and worried about not being legally adopted. Fergie suggests to her that she write to Stephanie about it and see what she says. (At first, I was expecting that there would be more intrigue about Cory’s parents’ deaths, but there’s nothing suspicious about their cause of death. The story that Uncle Dirk tells Cory is exactly what happened. The Winterslows were also definitely Cory’s biological parents. I thought that there might be some intrigue about that, but her birth parents were who Uncle Dirk says they were.)

Later, Cory also asks Uncle Dirk about the unicorn on the sign at Tarnhelm and about her own silver unicorn pendant. Uncle Dirk tells her that he has a fascination for British history and heraldry, which is why he carved the unicorn as the symbol of Tarnhelm. He also says that the pendant used to belong to Cory’s mother and that her father had a matching unicorn tie pin, although he doesn’t know what happened to it after his death. Cory wishes that she’d thought to ask Stephanie about it in her letter.

All of this explanation about Cory’s parents’ history sounds pretty straight-forward, although sad. However, the story doesn’t end there. Everyone has a history, and there are things about her Uncle Dirk that Cory doesn’t know yet as well as the reasons why Stephanie has never completed Cory’s adoption papers.

Cory becomes sick and feverish, spending a few days in bed. During this time, she has strange dreams, but not all of them are actually dreams. She remembers dreaming about a room with a chess set that has carved unicorns instead of horses as the knight pieces. Later, when Uncle Dirk plays chess with her, with a normal chess set, she mentions this dream, and both Uncle Dirk and her grandmother act strangely about it. Eventually, Cory comes to realize that her “dream” wasn’t just a dream, that she actually did get out of bed and wander around while she was feverish, but it takes some time before the full meaning of the chess set becomes clear to her.

Various people comment to Cory about Uncle Dirk’s moods and personality, hinting at past problems he’s had. Cory’s grandmother makes a comment to Cory about Uncle Dirk harming himself more than anyone else, except perhaps for one person, hinting at relationship troubles in Uncle Dirk’s past that contribute to his dark moods. Nosy Mrs. Smallwood also refers to the strange behavior of the Van Heusen family, often rude and unfriendly. While Mrs. Smallwood is a busy-body with issues of her own, she is correct in noticing the casual harm that various members of the Van Heusen family have done to people around them. It’s never intentional and they rarely notice the consequences of what they do, but that’s part of the problem. The Van Heusens are often selfish, thoughtless, and out-of-touch with other people’s feelings and the effects of their actions on others. Even Uncle Dirk acknowledges that members of the family are often hard on each other even when they care about one another.

However, the Van Heusens aren’t all bad, and some of them have changed somewhat over time. Mr. Smallwood, who is a more optimistic and level-headed person than his wife, tells Cory that his wife likes to live in the past, and while Uncle Dirk was a rather thoughtless young man who wouldn’t have made a good husband, he’s grown up since then. He says that Uncle Dirk has become friendlier and more thoughtful toward others, in spite of his occasional dark moods. But, since Uncle Dirk has never been married, what did Mr. Smallwood mean about him not making a good husband?

On the grounds of the Van Heusens’ estate, Cory spots what looks like the foundations of a house that was started to be built but never completed. Peter says that he and the other Explorers sometimes play around these foundations. Cory wonders who was planning to build a house there and why they never finished it. Uncle Dirk gets angry when he catches Cory and Peter snooping around the tower at Tarnhelm, where he keeps some of his old wood-carving things and where Peter finds some mysterious poetry.

Peter later takes Cory to visit Laurel Woodford, a young woman Cory met on the beach earlier, who helped Cory find her necklace when she lost it. Laurel is a weaver. Laurel lives by herself, but she says that she isn’t lonely because she has plenty of things to do that keep her busy. However, there is a kind of sadness about Laurel, and she has secrets of her own. She knows the Van Heusen family herself, and it wasn’t a happy experience for her.

Slowly, without Cory really doing any intentional investigating, the pieces of the past start coming together – Uncle Dirk, a marriage that didn’t take place, a house that wasn’t completed … and two identical unicorn pendants.

The story is haunting and magical, but not because of an real spells or magic. The only ghosts are the ghosts of the past. The book reminds me of a couple of other books that I’ve read, but explaining which ones involves some spoilers. I don’t mind giving spoilers for this story because I haven’t found a copy of this book that’s available to read online, and it’s something of a collector’s item now, with copies typically costing at least $20 and frequently more, although it’s sometimes possible to find one for less.

My Thoughts and A Few Spoilers

One of the interesting things about this book is that it reminds me of other books that I’ve read and liked. Some children’s books are mentioned in the course of the story because Cory likes to read, like The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and The Story of the Amulet, but these aren’t the books that the story reminds me of.

Throughout the book, the Fergusons use various Scottish words and phrases, sometimes singing old songs or quoting from poems. Mrs. Van Heusen says that she particularly likes the Fergusons because her family was also from Scotland, and they remind her of her youth, which is a comfort to her. The Scottish element and the young orphan learning to make friends and become close to a new family remind me of Mystery on the Isle of Skye, although that book was actually set in Scotland. The books also have a similar feel in the way they approach the element of mystery in the story and the element of “magic” and “spells” that aren’t really magic spells. Both books have an enchanting quality to them, but it’s because of the atmosphere of the stories, not because there’s any actual magic.

During the course of the story, Cory learns more about what it takes to make friends. Peter realizes that Cory isn’t particularly good at making friends and confronts her about the reasons why. It’s partly because Cory has had to change school multiple times, but Peter has also noticed that Cory always waits for other people to approach her with offers of friendship and invitations to join in. If they don’t, she just feels hurt and left out instead of voicing her desire to join in. Even when she gets an invitation, her impulse is to reject it if she thinks it was only offered out of pity. Peter finds it annoying that Cory seems to need people to practically beg her to be their friend and join in activities. It reminds Cory of advice that Stephanie has tried to offer her before that she should just join in and not worry or assume that people don’t want her around. Even Fergie told her that if she wants to make friends, she’ll have to drop her pride, meaning that she’ll have to learn to make the first move and approach other people instead of waiting for them to come to her. This criticism is partly true, but Cory’s experience of life is that many of the things she wants also depend on the decisions of other people, and Peter comes to rethink some of what he said when some of his friends are less than accepting of Cory. It isn’t nice to be invited into a place where you aren’t really made to feel welcome and accepted. This is also a fitting description of Cory’s life with Stephanie, being largely raised by her hired help.

When Cory finally receives Stephanie’s reply to her letter, Stephanie’s selfishness and detachment from Cory’s life become increasingly apparent. Cory shares the letter with her grandmother and Fergie and outright asks her grandmother if she can stay in California. Her grandmother asks her if she won’t miss Stephanie because Stephanie is the only mother she’s known since she was little, but Cory says she won’t because Stephanie is gone so much and busy with her acting, leaving her with hired help. Fergie, while being hired help herself, is more maternal and says that situation is unacceptable, but Cory’s grandmother says that she’s not sure that she’s up to raising another child, that she’s old and wants her peace and quiet now. Even while Cory’s grandmother knows that her daughter is self-centered, she has a kind of self-centeredness of her own. When her grandmother gets dramatic about the worry Cory puts her through when she’s running around the caves with her friends, Cory realizes that Stephanie has been imitating her during her dramatic acts.

Cory begins to get the answers about her past and Uncle Dirk’s when Peter shares some treasure with her that he and other members of the Explorers have found and are hiding in a cave on the Van Heusens’ property. This treasure is part of the reason why some of the other Explorers have been less than welcoming to Cory, not wanting to share it and their secret hiding place with her. They’re worried that she’ll give their secrets away to the Van Heusens, and then, they’ll lose their treasure and their secret hiding place. However, among their treasures is a carved wooden box that Peter found, and it looks like Uncle Dirk’s carving work. Cory points out that the carved wooden box probably belongs to Uncle Dirk, and since it was on the Van Heusen land, he probably hid it in the cave himself. Peter, as the finder of the box, lets Cory have it to return to Uncle Dirk.

In the box, Cory finds four colorful feathers, four pretty seashells, a poem about an angry quarrel signed with the initials “L.W.”, a carved wooden bracelet, a woman’s scarf, and a small silver pendant that is identical to the one that Cory wears. However, the back of this particular unicorn has a rough spot where it used to be mounted on something else, and Cory realizes that this is the one from the tie pin that Uncle Dirk told her about, turned into a necklace. From these pieces, Cory begins to realize that the contents of the box are Laurel’s – her initials on the poem and a necklace made for her that Cory thinks must have come from her father. If that’s true, Cory thinks Laurel must be some kind of relation to her.

Cory also explores the room off the tower in Tarnhelm that contains the amazing chess set with the unicorn knights, and now that she’s no longer sick, she sees that the room also holds other furniture that Uncle Dirk made. Uncle Dirk was the person who started to have the house built, and he was making furniture to go in the house, but for some reason, he stopped and stored the furniture away because there was no new house to put it in. There are also carved masks of Laurel in the room.

Early in the morning, Cory decides to go see Laurel about what she’s found, knowing that if she waits, she’ll miss her because she’s about to leave on a trip. When Cory shows her the box that she’s found and asks her about the unicorn pendant and whether or not they’re related, Laurel tells her that they’re not related but that the unicorn did come from her father’s tie pin. Like my earlier theories, Cory’s theories about Laurel are partly right and partly wrong. After Cory’s parents died, Stephanie sorted through their belongings. She gave the little unicorn necklace to Cory, and she gave Cory’s father’s tie pin to her brother, Dirk. After Dirk got the unicorn tie pin, he had it made into a necklace for Laurel.

Laurel explains that, about seven years earlier, she and Dirk got engaged while they were still in college. However, Dirk was very spoiled by his mother after his sister left home and went to New York to do her acting. He was a very talented wood-carver and looked at himself as an artist who would never have to earn a living because his mother was very wealthy, and she encouraged him in his art. Dirk wanted to drop out of college and just spend his time doing wood carving, without caring much whether he ever made any money at it. Laurel argued with him about it because she didn’t like the idea of living on Mrs. Van Heusen’s money, and she broke off the engagement. Looking back on it, Laurel regrets doing that. She finished college and could have worked to support herself and Dirk independently, just as she’s been supporting herself these last several years, ironically with an art of her own, and with Dirk’s talent at carving, he might have ended up making money at his art anyway, doing something he really loved to do.

It was all about pride. Laurel was too proud to rely on Mrs. Van Heusen, who was happy to support her son’s art, and Dirk was both proud and spoiled and wanted everything his own way on his say-so without working things out with Laurel. Dirk was being a little selfish, but Laurel comes to realize that she was a bit selfish too because she refused to acknowledge how important Dirk’s art was to him and wanted him to be something else. At one point, Laurel wanted to make up with Dirk and talk things out, but he ignored her and refused to talk to her. She got so mad that she left the box of treasures in the cave where she and Dirk used to play as children and threw the engagement ring in the ocean. Since that time, she and Dirk haven’t been able to talk to each other, even though they both wanted to. Dirk gave up the woodcarving that he loved because it was a painful reminder of the reason why he and Laurel broke up. Instead, he went back to college and became an architect so he would have a profession of his own. However, he is given to dark moods because he misses both Laurel and his woodcarving and doesn’t know what to do about it.

The situation gets straightened out when Dirk, realizing that Cory is missing from the house and that fog is coming in, goes to Laurel’s house to make sure that Cory is safe with her. The three of them talk things over, and Dirk asks Cory to give him some time to talk to Laurel alone. Dirk and Laurel make up, and Laurel agrees to marry Dirk as they planned, on the condition that they both adopt Cory because she’s come to love Cory as a niece. Cory is overjoyed to hear the news, and Dirk plans to begin construction on the house that they’d started years before.

The story of the lovers parted by a prideful quarrel and the unicorns that bind them together reminded me of The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.

There is a scene when Stephanie shows up to claim Cory and take her back to New York, but the family talk it out with her. Stephanie admits that she took Cory partly because that was her promise to her old friend and partly out of guilt because the skiing trip where Cory’s parents were killed had been her idea. Mrs. Van Heusen tells her not to blame herself because she couldn’t have known what was going to happen and Cory’s parents chose to come on the trip with her. Stephanie further admits that she didn’t legally adopt Cory because she was aware that her lifestyle wasn’t particularly suited to bringing up a child, although she’s done her best, and because she knew that Cory did have other relatives. She doesn’t quite admit that she was hoping that one of these other relatives might take her someday, but she gives that impression. Cory’s relatives on her mother’s side haven’t tried to claim her because her grandmother on that side of the family was too old to look after her, and her aunt already had a large family and not much money. Stephanie loves Cory, even though she doesn’t really know how to raise a child and has found it difficult to care for her, and she feels betrayed at first when Cory says that she’d rather stay with Dirk and Laurel. However, Stephanie later apologizes to Cory for making a scene about it because it really would be better for everyone if Cory stayed in California, where she would have a stable life and Stephanie wouldn’t have to worry about her. Stephanie returns to New York on her own, and Cory tells Peter that she’s going to stay in California. Peter and the other Explorers welcome her into their club. Now that Cory knows that she’s going to be staying, everyone feels more like she truly belongs.

Posted on by TracyC

Murder at Midnight

Murder at Midnight by Avi, 2009.

This story is a prequel to Midnight Magic.

Fabrizio was an orphan living on the streets of the medieval city of Pergamontio before he was taken in as a servant by Mangus and his wife, Sophia. It was really Sophia’s idea that Mangus needed a personal servant. Mangus says that he is able to take care of himself, and he is impatient with Fabrizio because Fabrizio is ignorant and uneducated.

When Sophia goes to visit her sister, Fabrizio tries extra hard to please Mangus so that Mangus will continue to let him live in his house. Mangus is primarily a scholar, but he supplements his income by performing magic tricks at a local tavern. That evening, a black-robed figure appears at the magic show, warning of danger coming to Mangus. The next day, the magistrate, DeLaBina, accuses Mangus of spreading papers with treasonous messages about the king around the city. During this time, all writing is by hand, and no one can understand how these papers can all look so identical unless they were produced by magic.

At first, DeLaBina offers to let Mangus go if Mangus gets rid of the papers and reveals the identity of the traitor. When Mangus protests that he cannot do real magic and that he knows nothing about the papers, he is arrested. Shortly afterward, DeLaBina is murdered. Fabrizio’s only hope of saving his master, and himself, is to find the real traitor.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

I didn’t like this book as well as I liked the original Midnight Magic.  Partly, the problem was that I feel like some of the events of this story should have changed people and events in the other book, and they don’t because this book, which is supposed to take place earlier than the other story, was actually written after the other story. It all just seems out of order, and I didn’t like the addition of Prince Cosimo to the royal family.  In this book, Prince Cosimo is the crown prince of Pergamontio, not Prince Lorenzo from the previous book.  Prince Cosimo did not appear in Midnight Magic (although his absence is explained by the end of this book) and was never even referred to in that book (which is the part that really bothers be me everyone in that book would have known all about him and what happened to him, and I feel like Fabrizio should have at least thought about him in passing, it’s just weird when characters suddenly exist in a series that you know didn’t exist before).

Basically, there is a plot (although not by the person who did the plotting in the other book) to overthrow the king, who is wildly superstitious. The printing press is a relatively new invention in this time period, and Pergamontio has never had one before, which is why no one can understand why the writing on the papers is so strangely uniform.  This is the other thing that bothers me about this book.  Pergamontio is supposed to be somewhat backward in comparison to other kingdoms, partly because the king is so superstitious, but it just seems like going a bit far for people to suspect that oddly-uniform writing would be a sign of witchcraft because people of that time would already be aware of the existence of signet rings and official seals which were used as stamps in wax to mark documents, like a kind of signature.  Like a printing press, those would also produce an identical image, time after time of use.  Basically, they’re all just complex forms of stamps.  Superstitious or not, I think that people of that time who were capable of reading probably would have been able to tell that a stamp of some kind was being used, even though they might not have seen one as complex as a printing press before.

In the story, a family has recently brought a printing press to the city, and printing the treasonous papers was the first job they were hired to do. Shortly afterward, Maria, the daughter of the family, was arrested while passing out the papers. Her parents are taken into custody by Count Scarazoni, who is a sinister character in his own right but is actually in opposition to the real traitor in this book.

Scarazoni was the figure in the black robe who tried to warn Mangus. Fabrizio is arrested when he tries to gather up more of the papers for Mangus so they can learn where they came from.  He is nearly executed for treason, but he is saved by Scarazoni because Scarazoni realizes that the real traitor wanted him dead because he feared that Fabrizio might know too much. At the prison, Fabrizio meets Maria and helps her to escape as well. Maria explains to him the true origins of the papers, and they find DeLaBina’s body.  This is the murder referenced in the title of the book, and they must solve it to uncover the identity of the real traitor!

As in the other book in this series, Fabrizio and Mangus use a magic trick at Mangus’s trial to shock the traitor into revealing himself.  Although, at the end of the story, the king still believes that Mangus is a real magician, Scarazoni points out that without Mangus’s “magic” the real traitor might not have been discovered. The king tells Mangus that he will let him go provided that he confine himself to his own home and no longer practice magic, setting events up for the beginning of the other story.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Changes for Samantha

American Girls

Changes for Samantha by Valerie Tripp, 1988.

This book is part of the Samantha, An American Girl series. This is the last book in the original series of Samantha’s stories and explains the changes in the lives of Samantha and her friends, especially Nellie. When Samantha met Nellie in the first book in the series, Nellie was a poor girl working as a servant girl in a neighboring house. Later, Nellie and her family moved to Samantha’s town, Mount Bedford, and Nellie and her sisters were able to attend school for the first time.

Now, Samantha has moved to New York City to live with her Uncle Gard and his new wife, Aunt Cornelia. Samantha likes living with them, although their housekeeper, Gertrude, is strict and often makes her feel like she’s doing things wrong. Samantha’s grandmother, a widow, has remarried to her long-time friend, the Admiral. Samantha’s life has changed considerably since the first book. Since her move to New York City, Samantha hasn’t seen Nellie or her sisters, but their lives have also changed, and not for the better.

When the book begins, Samantha and Aunt Cornelia are making Valentines to give to friends and family. Samantha receives a letter from Nellie that says that her parents have died of the flu and their employer, Mrs. Van Sicklen, is sending her and her sisters to New York City to live with her Uncle Mike. Nellie says that she’ll try to visit Samantha in New York City soon. Samantha is upset to hear that Nellie’s parents are dead, but Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia reassure her that Nellie’s uncle will take care of her and that she’ll soon be living much closer to Samantha.

After some time goes by and Samantha doesn’t hear any more from Nellie, she begins to worry about her. Uncle Gard decides to call Mrs. Van Sicklen and find out Nellie’s new address, but she doesn’t know where Nellie’s uncle, Mike O’Malley, lives. All Mrs. Van Sicklen knows is that he lives on 17th or 18th Street, but New York City is so big, that doesn’t help much. Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia say that maybe Nellie has had to get a job or look after her sisters and that she’s just been too busy to visit, but Samantha is still worried that something is very wrong.

Samantha decides to start asking around 17th and 18th Streets to see if she can locate Mike O’Malley, and she finds a chestnut seller who knows Mike O’Malley. However, he warns Samatha not to get involved with him because Mike O’Malley is a “hooligan.” Samantha worries about that, but it’s just another reason for her to want to check on Nellie. When she reaches the apartment where Mike O’Malley last lived, he isn’t there anymore. His neighbor explains that Mike O’Malley was a drunk who simply abandoned his nieces in his old apartment. The neighbor took the girls in for a while, but she is a poor woman with children of her own to raise, so she had to turn Nellie and her sisters over to an orphanage, the Coldrock House for Homeless Girls.

Samantha tells her aunt and uncle what she’s learned, and they’re upset that she went to such a dangerous part of the city alone. However, Aunt Cornelia agrees to take Samantha to the orphanage to see Nellie. The directoress, Miss Frouchy, is a stern and sneaky woman, but she agrees to let Samantha see Nellie, even though it isn’t a visitors’ day. It is difficult for the girls to speak candidly with Miss Frouchy watching them and monitoring everything that Nellie says. When Aunt Cornelia asks if Nellie and her sisters need anything, Miss Frouchy interrupts and says that they don’t. However, Samantha notes how thin Nellie looks and suspects that there is more going on than Nellie is being allowed to say, and Miss Frouchy even confiscates the cookies meant for Nellie and her sisters right in front of Aunt Cornelia and Samantha.

Aunt Cornelia asks Miss Frouchy for a tour of the orphanage so that Nellie and Samantha can be alone, and so the girls are able to speak openly. Nellie confirms that things are hard at the orphanage and her sister, Bridget, isn’t strong. Miss Frouchy thinks that Bridget is lazy and doesn’t want to work, so Nellie tries to cover Bridget’s chores as best she can. Samantha says that Nellie could come and stay with her and her aunt and uncle, but Nellie says that they probably don’t need any more maids. Samantha offers to hide Nellie and her sisters, but Nellie thinks that plan is too risky. More than anything, Nellie wants to keep her sisters together. She says with a little more training, she could find a job as a maid and support them.

Samantha returns to the orphanage again with her aunt and uncle to visit all three girls, and she and Nellie arrange to meet secretly at the time when Nellie is supposed to take the fireplace ashes out to the alley for disposal. At their next meeting, Samantha finds out that Miss Frouchy took the gloves that they had given Nellie and even punished her for having them because she said that she must have stolen the gloves. However, there is worse to come. Soon, Nellie tells Samantha that she has been chosen to be sent out west on the Orphan Train, but because her sisters are too young to go, they’ll be left in New York alone. With the sisters about to be split up, Samantha’s plan to help the girls run away and hide is looking better.

Together, Nellie and Samantha help to sneak the younger girls out of the orphanage, and Samantha hides the three of them in an upstairs room in the aunt and uncle’s house that isn’t being used. She sneaks food and toys upstairs to them, and Nellie sneaks out during the day to go looking for work. However, Gertrude soon gets suspicious about how much food Samantha seems to be eating and how she seems to be sneaking around with it. When the girls are finally caught, Samantha owes her aunt and uncle some explanations, but admitting the truth of what has happened changes things for the better for all of the girls.

In the movie version of the Samantha series, which combined all the stories from the Samantha books into one, the story ends at Christmas, but in the book, it’s Valentine’s Day. The Christmas ending is nice, but Valentine’s Day does make for a nice difference, and love is appropriate to the theme of the story. Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia end up adopting Nellie and her sisters, so they officially become part of Samantha’s family. Unlike other characters in the story, who see the orphans as either an inconvenience or a source of cheap labor, Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia genuinely love them and want to raise them.

Something that struck me about the book was that both Nellie and Samantha are orphans, but their lives were very different at the beginning of the story because Samantha is from a wealthy family with an uncle who loves her and Nellie is a poor girl with an irresponsible uncle. If Samantha had been poor, she might have been destined for an orphanage or the orphan train herself. Because she wasn’t and because her family looks after children well and is willing to share what they have with others, Samantha has a secure future, and Nellie and her sisters become part of their family.

The book ends with a section of historical information about all the changes taking place in Samantha’s time, from technological changes, such as the first airplanes and new cars, to the increasing sizes of cities and new immigrants arriving in the United States.

As girls like Samantha grew up, society continued to change. In earlier books, Samantha’s grandmother talked about how young ladies aren’t supposed to work but learn how to be ladies and take care of a household. By the time Samantha was an adult, in the 1910s and 1920s, it was becoming more common for women to hold others jobs, although they would often stop working when they got married so they could focus on raising their children. The profession of social work evolved to help care for children like Nellie and her sisters. Some social workers also helped immigrants to learn English and train for new jobs when the came to the United States. The book specifically mentions Jane Addams, who founded the settlement house, Hull House.

Change is a major theme of all of the American Girl books, and a girl like Samantha would have seen some drastic changes in the ways that people lived as she got older. Over time, fewer immigrants looked for jobs as domestic servants, and newer forms of household technology, like washing machines, made it easier for housewives to do more of their domestic chores themselves. The section of historical information ends with examples of the changes in styles of women’s clothing through the 1920s, explaining how the changes in clothing styles were part of the changes in the types of lives the women wearing them were leading.

Although the book doesn’t go into these details, I would just like to point out how old Samantha would have been at various points in the 20th century. She was born in 1894, and ten years old in 1904, so that means that she would have been:

  • 23 years old when the US entered World War I in 1917
  • 26 years old when the 19th Amendment granted women’s suffrage in the United States in 1920
  • 30 years old in 1924 (Jazz age and Prohibition)
  • 35 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression
  • 47 years old in 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, and the US entered World War II, and 50 years old in 1944, when the Molly, An American Girl series takes place.
  • In her 50s during the early days of the Cold War. She would have to live to be 95 to see the end of it.
  • In her 60s through her early 70s during the Civil Rights Movement.

I like to think about these things because it puts history in perspective, and it gives us some sense of what Samantha’s future life might have been like. When she was a young woman, she may have joined the women’s suffrage movement with her Aunt Cornelia. She probably knew young men her age who went to fight in World War I. (Eddie, the annoying boy who lived next door to Samantha’s grandmother, would have been old enough to fight and may have been a WWI soldier himself.) Perhaps, Samantha’s future husband was a soldier. When she was older, Samantha could have either joined the temperance movement behind Prohibition or visited a speakeasy or at least knew people who did. It’s difficult to say what happened to Samantha’s family during the Great Depression. Depending on their professions and what they may have invested their money in, they may have lost their fortunes in the stock market crash, or they may have ridden out the whole thing in relative comfort. By World War II, Samantha may have had a son who was old enough to fight. One of the things I find interesting about historical novels with children is imagining what their future lives may have been like, and Samantha was born at a time when she would have witnessed many major events throughout her future life. The book shows how women’s fashions changed as Samantha grew up, but I’m fascinated by the events in Samantha’s life that I know must be coming, just because of when she was born. By the end of her life, the world would be a very different place from what she knew when she was young.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Samantha’s Surprise

American Girls

Samantha’s Surprise by Maxine Rose Schur, 1986.

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

Christmas is going to be different this year for Samantha and her family. Uncle Gard is bringing his girlfriend, Cornelia, to spend the holidays with them. Christmas had started out so hopeful for Samantha, with an invitation to a friend’s Christmas party, elaborate plans for building a gingerbread house, and the secret presents that Samantha has been making for everyone. Cornelia’s visit changes Samantha’s plans.

For Samantha, Cornelia’s visit makes Christmas more difficult. At first, she says that she will help make Cornelia feel welcome and thinks to herself that she will have to get a present for Cornelia that is as elegant as she is. However, when Samantha tries to put up the usual homemade decorations that she made herself, the maid angrily takes them down, calling them “dustcatchers.” The house must be perfect for Cornelia’s visit, and Samantha is insulted that people see her decorations as an eyesore or inconvenience. The cook, who was going to help Samantha with her gingerbread house, says that there probably won’t be time for it now because her grandmother has asked her to make extra, special foods for Cornelia’s visit. Grandmary even tells Samantha that it would be better for Samantha to “stay out of the way” of their Christmas preparations.

With Cornelia coming, no one seems to notice or care about Samantha. Samantha finds out that she won’t be able to attend her friend’s party because it is the night that Cornelia is arriving. It doesn’t seem likely that her grandmother will care about her secret Christmas wish for the beautiful Nutcracker doll in the toy store window. Samantha has been without a doll since she gave her own beloved doll, Lydia, to Nellie, who had never owned a doll before. Cornelia is an extra person Samantha needs to supply a present for, but she can’t summon up any enthusiasm for giving a present for someone who is making things so difficult for her.

Throughout the book, Samantha considers different presents that she could give to Cornelia, beginning with the most basic, convenient token gifts that she could give and then forget about, unlike her homemade, heart-felt gifts for everyone else. However, Samantha’s attitudes toward Cornelia change as she gets to know her better during the holidays and comes to see her as a source of fun and support.

When Cornelia actually arrives and begins participating in the usual Christmas activities, Samantha sees that she is far less fussy than the people who were preparing for her arrival. Unlike most other grown-ups, Cornelia is not too dignified to have fun while sledding or get messy while making gingerbread houses. Cornelia even suggests sledding, to Grandmary’s surprise. Cornelia always mentions how nice it would be to decorate a gingerbread house, like she did when she was a girl, Samantha says that she would like that too, but the cook is too busy to help this year. Cornelia says that is no problem because she and Samantha can make the gingerbread house themselves. Cornelia even makes sure that some of the decorations that Samantha made are prominently displayed on the Christmas tree.

By the end of the book, Samantha changes her mind about Cornelia completely. While everyone else seemed to be ignoring Samantha and going out of their way to make Cornelia feel welcome, Cornelia was paying more attention to Samantha and really thinking about what would make Samantha happy at Christmas. Cornelia is the one who correctly guesses what Samantha would really like for Christmas, and in return, Samantha decides to give her best present to Cornelia.

The story ends with Uncle Gard officially engaged to Cornelia.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how people would celebrate Christmas during the early 1900s.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery in the Old Cave

Mystery in the Old Cave cover

Mystery in the Old Cave by Helen Fuller Orton, 1950.

Mystery in the Old Cave nut gathering

Andy and Joan Draper are excited about spending the fall and winter in the country. Usually, they live in an apartment in New York City and only go to their family’s vacation home in Vermont during the summer. However, this year, some friends of their father will be moving to New York, and they’ll need a place to stay because they are having trouble finding an apartment of their own. The children’s father has decided to rent their apartment to his friends while his family stays in Vermont. That means that the children will have to go to school in Vermont, but the children like the idea because they will be able to do things that they normally can’t do when the seasons change, like gathering nuts. When the first frosts come, the hickory nuts on the trees fall to the ground, making it easy to collect them.

After Andy and Joan collect nuts for the first time, they decide to store them in the old sugarhouse on the property. Normally, the family doesn’t use the sugarhouse for anything, but it used to be used during the times when their vacation house was a working farm and people tapped the maple trees for their sap to make maple syrup. They would process the sap in the sugarhouse. Sometimes, farm hands also used to sleep there during the harvest.

Soon, the children begin to suspect that there’s a stranger hanging around the property. Their dog, Ponto, barks at someone the children don’t see and comes running back to them, acting like someone kicked him. Later, a strange man approaches them and asks them if they know anything about a cave in the area. Andy and Joan don’t know anything about a cave. The man tells them that it’s supposed to be near the old sugarhouse, but if the children haven’t seen it, it might have caved in or something. He seems very secretive and doesn’t want the children to tell anyone that he’s been asking questions, and the children wonder if he could be the one who kicked their dog earlier. Later, someone (perhaps this strange man) steals many of the nuts that the children gathered and even some cookies. The children change their minds about storing things in the sugarhouse and decide to keep their gathered nuts in an unused room in the main house. The only clue to the identity of who’s been sneaking around is a red pencil that the person dropped.

Mystery in the Old Cave store

The children make friends with a boy named Phil who lives nearby. Phil is an orphan who lives with his Cousin John (who he sometimes calls Uncle John because he is so much older), a mean and stingy old man who doesn’t treat him very well and makes him work hard around the house instead of going to play after school with the other kids. He doesn’t even replace Phil’s clothes when they get old and torn. Phil gets a job at the local store to earn some money for a new sweater, but Cousin John even confiscates Phil’s earnings.

Mr. Lane, who owns the local store, is nice, and he tells Andy and Phil about how maple syrup and maple sugar are made, something that everyone in town used to participate in so that it was like a community party. The boys think it sounds like a lot of fun, and while they are talking about the old sugarhouse, Mr. Lane mentions that, once, some thieves joined in when they were making making syrup. Nobody knew they were thieves at first; they were just a couple of strangers who came along with everyone else and started helping out. Later, there were some robberies in the area, and the thieves were found hiding in a cave near the sugarhouse. Mr. Lane says that he and his friends used to play in that cave when they were young, and Andy and Phil decide that they want to find it.

Mystery in the Old Cave bones

The boys take some tools with them while they’re looking for the cave, in case the entrance has been covered over, which turns out to be the case. Once they dig through the entrance, the rest of the cave appears intact. They find some old bones inside that probably belonged to a bear. They can’t look around much more because the cave is too dark, so they decide that they’ll return later with some lanterns. Mr. Lane tells the boys that there still might be stolen loot around because they never did find everything that the thieves took, including a pearl necklace that belonged to Andy’s grandmother, who was living there back then. Could these things be what the mysterious stranger is looking for?

Mystery in the Old Cave stove in store

During the course of the book, Mr. Lane begins to notice that Phil’s cousin isn’t giving him enough food. Cousin John denies Phil food when he refuses to turn over the extra money that he’s been earning to him. Mr. Lane gives Phil food from the store to eat. While Phil is at the store, he overhears the stranger, who calls himself Joe Williams, talking to Mr. Lane. Joe Williams admits that he’s looking for treasure in the area. Mr. Lane says that he doesn’t have high hopes that Joe Williams will find anything around the cave because the whole area was searched thoroughly years ago.

Phil tells Mr. Lane that he can’t stand living with his cousin anymore and wants to run away. Mr. Lane tries to persuade him not to go, saying that he can deal with Phil’s cousin, but Phil has had enough and worries that his cousin will make life hard for anyone who tries to help him. When Phil hides out in the old sugarhouse, he meets up with Joe Williams, who explains to him more about how he knows about the treasure that may be hidden in or around the cave. He’s about ready to give up the search, but Phil finds something that everyone else has overlooked.

In the end, Andy and Joan’s parents decide to take Phil in. Phil’s cousin agrees to sign over custody to the Drapers, provided that he gets to keep the money from Phil’s job that he took and the money that Phil’s mother left for Phil’s upkeep. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal and that the courts and social workers would have something to say about that if this story happened in real life in the 21st century, but in the story, Mr. Draper accepts the deal and basically uses the money that was meant for Phil to pay off his cousin to surrender custody of the boy. The story ends at Thanksgiving, with Phil sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with his new family, who will really love him and treat him much better than his cousin did.

Mystery in the Old Cave hiding

This is one of those older mystery stories that’s really more adventure than mystery. There’s really only one suspect for the odd person sneaking around, and his reasons for sneaking around turn out to be exactly what he said they were. There is no other hidden purpose or secret past behind that man other than what he said, and in the end, he just kind of leaves the story. The kids don’t have many clues to the location of the stolen items, and in the end, Phil finds them more by accident than anything else.

Sometimes, when I’m unsatisfied by the ending of a story, I like to make up an alternate one of my own. If I were writing this, I’d have had Phil’s nasty cousin be involved in the robbery and the hunt for the hidden loot. For example, maybe he was actually one of the original thieves and had a falling out with his partners, and he’s secretly searching for the rest of the loot they hid for years. Maybe he’s had to redouble his efforts recently because they’re getting out of prison soon, and he wants to get to the hidden loot before they do. Cousin John is money-hungry enough that it could be plausible, and that would allow the story to end with him being sent to prison, which seems fitting.

This isn’t important to the story at all, but I just wanted to say that the copy I have of this book is damaged in a very odd way. On some of the beginning pages, someone has cut out a few of the words, ransom-note style. I don’t know why that happened. There aren’t enough missing for a real ransom note, and some of the cut-out words are still stuck in the pages, but since this is a mystery book, I kind of like the image of someone using it to write some kind of mysterious secret message.

I haven’t been able to find an online copy of this book yet, but Internet Archive has others by the same author.

Posted on by TracyC

So Dear to My Heart

So Dear to My Heart by Sterling North, 1947.

The original form of this story was actually from 1943, when the book was called Midnight and Jeremiah. In that book, the black lamb was named Midnight, not Danny, and many of the subplots that came to dominate this edition of the book didn’t exist. This edition of the book was rewritten and published after the Disney movie of of the story, which is why it was given the same name. The Disney movie was half live-action and half animated, and it made some changes to the story that were reflected in this rewrite/reprint. Naming the lamb “Danny” after the race horse Dan Patch was Disney’s idea. I actually think that I would have liked the original book better because I didn’t like the way some of the characters were portrayed in this book.

I have to admit that I was really frustrated with one of the characters in the story, and because of that, I found it difficult to wade through the parts dealing with her. However, it is important to actually finish this story once you begin because, otherwise, you won’t get the full picture of the story. It’s not that the ending is particularly surprising, and I can’t say that I ever really became fond of the character I didn’t like, but the more you pay attention to how the story gets to the ending, the more you realize what the one of the points of this story really is. This story is about the love between a boy and an animal. It has Christian themes and themes about hatred, prejudice, and loss. However, what struck me the most in the end is that this is also a story about knowledge and perspective. Knowledge and being open to knowledge can change a person’s perspective, but also having a different perspective in the first place can give a person knowledge or leave them more open to gaining it.

I’ll warn you that this is going to be a rather long review, and parts are going to seem a little repetitive because the way my review is organized is based somewhat on the way this book was organized, giving bits and piece of information about the same underlying situation accompanied by reactions to it. At the end, I’ve also included some odd historical information that relates to things mentioned in the story.

Jeremiah Kincaid, called Jerry, lives with his grandmother on the Kincaid family farm in Cat Hallow outside of the small town of Fulton Corners, Indiana in 1903. His parents are dead, having died in a fire when he was young. The full circumstances behind their deaths are not explained until the end of the book, and there are a few things in the book about their deaths and some current happenings that seem a bit mysterious. This book is not really a mystery story, but in way, parts of it play out a little like a mystery because there are missing pieces of information that need to be filled in before you really understand what’s going on. Knowing exactly what happened to Jerry’s parents and why eventually helps Jerry and his grandmother to resolve some of their feelings about their deaths and their relationship with each other. For most of the book, Granny Kincaid thinks she knows what happened, but it doesn’t take long for readers to realize that she’s unreliable as a narrator. Jerry’s Granny Kincaid is a very strict and strongly religious woman, and she is the character I did not like, who almost discouraged me from finishing the book. It wasn’t being strict and religious that made me not like her. I wouldn’t have minded that so much by itself; it’s the rest of the story of what she is that got to me. In a way, that feeling of not wanting to look further also plays into the story and the desire of whether or not you want to know more about what is behind a bad situation. In an odd way, Granny actually did remind me of something, but I’d like to save what she reminded me of until near the end because it will make more sense then.

When the book begins, Jerry is angry with Granny for selling his beloved bull calf to a butcher. Jerry loved the calf because he had raised it himself, but to Granny, it was just part of the routine of farm work. To Granny, animals are meant for food unless they are specifically work animals. Jerry feels more of a personal connection to the animals, which is also important to the story. Jeremiah longs for an animal that he can actually keep and love. This is what guides Jerry throughout the story.

Jerry gets his chance of an animal to love when the new lambs are born and one of them is a black lamb, rejected by its mother. Granny would be content to let the little black lamb die, thinking of it as an evil omen. Her casual cruelty and callous attitude when Jerry points out that it’s just an innocent lamb who couldn’t help being born black and is scared and hungry and will surely die without care were, frankly, pretty disgusting from my perspective. Granny is very religious but without compassion or empathy. For her, animals are to be used, and whatever or whoever is meant to die isn’t something she’s going to bother herself about. Not only that, but part of her callous, unfeeling nature is based on bitterness toward events in her own past, which are clarified through the story. There is/was a bitter history between the Kincaids and the Tarletons, who owned the next farm over, and Granny knows that the little lamb was sired by the Tarletons’ old black ram. Even though I didn’t like Granny, I kept reading because the most compelling part of the book is learning the full history of the Tarletons and the Kincaids, which comes out bit by bit as the book goes on. The way that this knowledge of the family’s history is given to the readers, piece by piece, is important. Each time that Jerry learns a little more about his family’s history, the story changes a little, giving not only Jerry, but the readers, a slightly different impression of what happened and why.

To help explain it, I’ll give you a kind of summary of what Jerry learns in the first chapters of the book. In her youth, Granny Samantha Kincaid married David Kincaid, Jerry’s grandfather, who is now deceased. David’s rival for her affection was Josiah Tarleton. Before Samantha and David were married, the two men had a terrible fight over her which had left David the victor but permanently injured. Following the marriage of the Kincaids, Josiah settled on a farm near theirs. Over the years, the Kincaids experienced hardships of various kinds, while Josiah became a wealthier man and flaunted that wealth at the Kincaids to show Samantha what she had missed by not marrying him. Even after Josiah married a woman named Lilith, things were still bitter between the two families. Samantha became convinced that Lilith was a witch who cursed their sheep with illness, although David said that was only superstition. Although Lilith is now dead (as are Josiah and David), Samantha is still afraid of anything associated with the Tarletons, thinking of it as evil. That is Granny Samantha’s frame of mind, as it has been for years, and that is the basic reason why she regards the black lamb as evil, because of its association with the Tarletons. As far as the beginnings of the bitter Kincaid/Tarleton feud goes, it’s an accurate description of the situation. From this basic description, it sounds like the Tarletons were mean, greedy, and vindictive, lording their better fortune over the Kincaids and maybe even doing things to make life harder on them. However, that is not the entire story. That description barely scratches the surface of the real situation.

Granny is a callous person with some vindictiveness of her own. Jerry himself has been on the receiving end of Granny’s callousness, and the story mentions that his birth was “unwanted,” like the lamb’s, something that he senses from his grandmother (a major reason why I didn’t like her). Part of the reason why Jerry craves love in his life and shows it to the animals is because he doesn’t get it from family, what’s left of it. Jerry insists on taking care of the little unwanted lamb, naming him Danny. He persuades his grandmother that the lamb will give good wool. As the lamb grows and gets into trouble, Granny says that it’s proof that she was right to think of the lamb as evil. However, Jerry defends the lamb, saying that Danny is just an animal that doesn’t know what it’s doing and forbidding his grandmother to turn Danny into food, a sentiment echoed by Uncle Hiram.

“Uncle” Hiram Douglas is the local blacksmith, a family friend, not related by blood to anyone else in the story, although he acts as a father to Jerry, having no children of his own. Uncle Hiram knew both the Kincaid and Tarleton families for years, observing their feud from a different, more distant perspective, and his account of what happened is more reliable than Granny’s. He was careful not to involve himself directly in the families’ troubles because their situation was toxic, and he knew it. Early in the story, Uncle Hiram sees the parallels between Jerry and his lamb, both of which have been deprived of love and proper care through no fault of their own. He tells Jerry that both of them are from good stock and not to pay attention to the superstitious nonsense that Granny tells him. It is Uncle Hiram who suggests to Jerry that he should take Danny to the County Fair when he’s bigger and show him off because Danny has the potential to be a champion. Jerry seizes on the idea, and it gives him hope. For much of the story, saving his lamb from Granny and taking Danny to the fair are his main goals.

It is Uncle Hiram who tells Jerry more about his grandmother’s long-standing feud with Lilith Tarleton and how she blamed Lilith for an unexpected flood that almost drowned his grandfather and killed some of their sheep (one of many unrelated things that Samantha blamed on Lilith). Samantha had been so sure that Lilith was a witch and caused the disaster with a curse that she actually hid in a place where she knew Lilith would go and waited for her to come along so that she could throw rocks at her, stoning her as a “witch”, and this incident is generally known in the community. Josiah Tarleton may not have been a nice person, but for all of her Bible-quoting, Granny Samantha has a fierce temper and an unpredictable nature. The picture of what happened between the Tarletons and the Kincaids changes a bit with the added information of Samantha’s sneak attack on Lilith.

The book continues like that, shifting back and forth between things happening in the present and Hiram’s explanations of the past. As the descriptions of the past become more detailed, Granny’s views are increasingly shown to be wrong, and her behavior more erratic and hateful. I did not find Granny a likeable or sympathetic character, to say the least. She struck me immediately as callous and unhinged, and that image stayed with me throughout the story. She is unfair and has double standards for how she views the world and human behavior. When misfortune happens to someone else, like an innocent black lamb (as well as other people, as described later in the story), Granny says it’s just the will of God and she doesn’t care, but if misfortune happens to her, it’s evil black magic and she’ll stone the first person she doesn’t like as the one responsible for it. This is how her mind works. When Jerry interacts with the people of the nearby town, readers discover that Granny is hardly seen as a pillar of the community. In fact, she hardly interacts with the community at all. Even the men down at the general store joke about Granny Kincaid being a witch herself. Jerry hears them joking, and it leads him to talk to Hiram more about his family.

When Uncle Hiram explains about the jokes the men make that both of Jerry’s grannies were possibly witches, more of the conflict between the Kincaids and the Tarletons is revealed. Samantha Kincaid doesn’t like to talk about Jerry’s father, who is her dead son, or his wife and is often deliberately callous with Jerry because Jerry’s mother was actually Arabella Tarleton, Lilith’s daughter. Up until this point in the story, Jerry was completely unaware of this or the fact that Lilith was his grandmother, too. Now, Jerry knows that Samantha’s son, Seth, married Arabella, and both of them died in a fire, something which Samantha blames on Arabella. With this information, the story shifts again, looking a little like a Romeo and Juliet type of situation.

Uncle Hiram doesn’t believe in witches at all, and he explains the truth about his grandmothers to Jerry. He says that, whatever Granny Kincaid says, Lilith was never an evil person, and he doesn’t really think that Granny Kincaid is, either. I’m still a little less charitable toward Granny here. Granny’s behavior and attitudes show a definite sadistic streak. I’m not talking about the way she sees animals mainly as food because that’s just a natural side of farming. Samantha is a vindictive person, with an inability to put blame where blame is due, choosing instead to take it out on an innocent victim, possibly because the innocent victim is more vulnerable to attack or because she can’t handle the thought of what or who is really at fault for a situation. In her attacks, she frequently resorts to physical violence, even inflicting harsh physical punishment on Jerry and also some twisted psychology, when you consider some of the things that Granny says to him.

As even more of the history of these two families comes out, you learn that there are pieces of the story that Samantha is deliberately ignoring or distorting in her accounts of what happened. First, Samantha blamed Lilith for Josiah’s jealous vindictiveness, rubbing his successes and the Kincaids’ hardships in her face because she refused his “love.” At least, he did this up until he also suffered hardships and lost much of his money later in life. This is another part of the story that is revealed later. At first, the characters make it sound like Josiah was more prosperous overall and had less hardship than the Kincaids, but it was more the case that his hardships came a little later in life, something that changes his story a bit. The reality of the situation is probably that the families were more equal in terms of their wealth and luck than earlier described. Their farms are literally right next to each other, outside of a small town where nobody is truly rich. Also, one of the misfortunes Josiah suffered was the early death of his wife. It turns out that Lilith died much earlier in life than any of the older generation of adult characters, not even living to see her own children grow up. Samantha and Lilith actually knew each other for far less time than it would sound from the way Granny talks. After Lilith’s death, Josiah seemed to kind of give up on life and generally let his children run wild because he didn’t quite know how to deal with them. In spite of Lilith’s death, Samantha continued to blame Lilith for everything that went wrong in her family’s lives. None of it was Lilith’s fault, but Samantha decided it was because she could not or would not see Josiah, or even members of her own family, for what they really were and Lilith for what she was. Lilith was a gentle soul who died relatively young, but she remained the evil witch and lurking spirit that haunted Samantha’s own troubled mind.

So, what was Lilith really like, and how do I know that she was a gentler person? Uncle Hiram explains that, unlike Granny, Lilith actually loved animals, just like Jerry does. Her father in Kentucky knew the famous Audubon who studied birds, and Lilith was also something of an amateur naturalist. People in Indiana distrusted her because she was more educated than most, and they thought it was weird that she knew all the “fancy names” for different birds and plants. Hiram understands the names that Lilith was using because he actually interacted with Lilith as a friend, and hearing her explanations broadened his experiences. The people who just thought Lilith was strange and “witchy” never figured it out. If I had to live with people like that, I’d probably be more trusting of animals than my fellow human beings, too. Hiram suspects that Josiah may have harbored feelings for Samantha even after his marriage to Lilith (the fuel for his vindictiveness, wanting to see his former love suffer for rejecting him) and that Lilith indulged her love of nature as an escape from her husband’s uncomfortable preoccupation with a woman who never returned his affections (and who lived on the next farm over and liked to call her a witch and throw stones at her like a crazy person for things she never did and possibly knew nothing about before the sneak attack – no, I just can’t let that slide – going out into nature to escape from her husband and study the plants and animals was what Lilith was doing when Samantha violently attacked her), leading to Lilith’s reputation for being a bit strange and possibly a witch.

This picture of Lilith is vastly different from the picture that Granny had given Jerry and even what other townspeople say about her, and it is much more truthful. (There is also more evidence that supports it later in the story.) Lilith was a spirited and loving young woman who defied her father to marry Josiah. She was loyal to him in spite of his obsession with Samantha, and she ran a tidy household, educating her children herself as best she could and teaching her daughter to play the violin. This was the person Granny considers to be evil, even beyond the grave, in contrast to herself.

At one of the points in the story where they discuss Seth and Arabella’s wedding, Granny says that deceased Lilith’s spirit was angry because Josiah, who was still alive at the time, kissed her hand at the wedding. Josiah was a drunkard who had taken a liberty, by Granny’s description, but poor dead Lilith was still the bad one. (Another thing we learn along the way was that Josiah’s mind deteriorated in his final years, an apparent combination of drinking and stress from the early loss of his wife and other hardships his family suffered. This comes from Hiram, not Granny, whose own mind I found suspect from the first.) Possibly, Granny could not bring herself to fully label Josiah has the bad one because he always liked her. Granny is actually somewhat vain and self-centered, and although she was not in love with Josiah and would never return Josiah’s feelings, I get the impression that she was flattered by them. That two men fought over her, even though she had a clear preference for one of them, and that one of them continued to follow her and dwell on her made her feel good, if a bit awkward that Josiah was the more prosperous of the two for a time as well as somewhat vindictive. Lilith, as Josiah’s wife, took at least some of Josiah’s attention away from Samantha when she entered the picture, and I suspect this was probably the basis for her becoming the bad one in Samantha’s mind, for representing a competitor for Josiah’s feelings, even though Samantha was married to the man of her choice and wouldn’t have wanted Josiah anyway. Sometimes, even people who do not want something in particular for themselves still feeling strangely resentful when someone else gets it, especially if the other person seems to benefit from it. Early on in their marriages, Lilith seemed to have gotten the better deal by marrying the richer man … until more of the story is told, and you find out that wasn’t quite the case. It didn’t take that long for things to turn rough for the Tarletons, and Lilith’s life didn’t have a very happy ending.

Uncle Hiram says that he has tried to explain all of this to Granny for the last 30 years, but “She don’t listen, or she don’t understand, or she don’t want to know-cain’t quite figger it out.” (This is one of those books where the author uses misspellings to convey accent.) My theory is what I said before, that Granny blames the wrong person for the source of problems and that blame is based solely on personal dislike. Lilith got the man Granny could have had, even if he was a self-centered jerk who Granny didn’t really love, and a more comfortable, prosperous life (at least, for a time, in a way, on the surface), while Granny’s husband was injured by Josiah and constantly struggled to make a living in the face of repeated misfortunes that were mostly random chance. The longer Granny harbored that irrational hate, nursed it, and indulged it, the more difficult it was to let go of it, not only because it had become habit but because of what it would mean to her personally to admit that she had done something horribly wrong. If Lilith was really her opposite in everything, and it turned out that Lilith was a really good person and a good mother, educated and nature-loving, what would that make Samantha? It would mean that she was not “on the side of the angels” and righteousness, that she was the one causing harm to the innocent rather than being the poor, injured party herself. (I still remember that Samantha is the one who hides in bushes and throws rocks at unsuspecting people, not Lilith. Once you know certain things, you can’t un-know them.) It would be a difficult thing for her to take, the realization that she might be more witch than the supposed witch and hardly an angel. As I said, people in the community have noticed it, too. Lilith may have seemed “witchy” to them because, as Hiram said, she was a little different and they didn’t really understand her, but Granny is witchy for much more obvious reasons.

At one point, Hiram tells Granny directly that she’s being unfair to Jerry and not raising him with the love he really needs, and she angrily tells him that she has to be this tough to keep Jerry from going the way of his parents, whose souls she considers sinful. During the course of the story, she actually tells Jerry that his parents are not in heaven, making up a song about them and how their marriage lead to hell. This is a terrible thing to tell a child and a twisted upbringing to give an orphan! Hiram tells Granny that, while she’s had to struggle and work hard all her life, she’s not the only one who works hard, suffers hardship, and is a good person and that the way that she’s behaving is unfair, but she only responds by both complaining and bragging at the same time about how hard she works and how often she prays and how much she’s done for Jerry, as if that entitles her to behave the way she does. Samantha is stuck on herself but can’t see it because she phrases her vanity in terms of her hard work and personal suffering, which she considers virtues, ignoring the bad behavior she has indulged in and the suffering she herself has caused. The book calls it her “proud bitterness.” (Insert wordless scream of frustration here.)

Because Jerry is Lilith’s grandson as well as hers, Granny Samantha sees evil in him, like she does in the lamb, and Jerry senses that she does not really love him. That is the strongest reason why I dislike Samantha as a character, plus her vindictiveness toward the innocent and helpless and inability to establish limits on how she indulges her vindictiveness. Although I think the author meant us to see her more as sad and warped by sadness than bad, I didn’t really see her that way myself. To me, she was irrational and possibly dangerous, given her history of physical attack, not “purely on the side of the angels” as Uncle Hiram characterizes. Seriously, hiding in the bushes to throw stones at a “witch” is not a healthy coping mechanism. The guys down at the general store know this and that is why they make witch jokes, but Granny doesn’t seem to have grasped how this looks even to people in her own town. Living alone with her grandson on their isolated farm has kept her steeping in her own bitterness and out of touch with reality. Only Uncle Hiram’s influence has allowed Jerry to get in touch with the truth of his family’s past and situation, and this is a central part of the plot.

I’m down on Granny Kincaid a lot, as you can tell by my repeated rants against her, but part of what makes characters like this so frustrating is that they are so obvious as plot devices. If Granny were a kinder, more reasonable person, this book would both be much less frustrating and much shorter. She is deliberately uncaring and unreasoning because she has to be in order to complicate the plot. She is one of the obstacles that Jerry must overcome. There’s no use arguing with Granny because she will and must remain resistant to persuasion, providing necessary plot tension, until the point in the story where the other characters either find a way to get around her or she has a change of heart and redeems herself. Given that Granny is Jerry’s grandmother and that this story has religious themes, I guessed that we would be going the redemption route eventually. However, I also knew that, with about 200 pages in the book, I’d probably have had more than enough of Granny by that point, which made me wonder if it would be worth it. I wouldn’t say that the redemption was worth it for Granny’s sake because I still didn’t really like her at the end, but by the time I got through all of the information that I’ve provided so far about the Kincaid and Tarleton families, I began to notice how the story about the families shifts slightly with each new piece of information about them, as seen from Hiram’s more neutral perspective. There is a larger point to be made here as the story continues, and Jerry learns more about the circumstances of his parents’ deaths, clearing up some additional plot holes that have been left hanging.

What’s left to tell? Notice that, while I told you that Jerry’s parents died in a fire, the Kincaid farm is obviously still standing and so is the Tarleton farm. They have not burned to the ground. So, where was this fire that killed Jerry’s parents? Also, if Josiah, Lilith, and Arabella Tarleton are all dead, who is running the Tarleton farm? Remember, Danny the lamb was sired by the Tarletons’ old black ram. Who owns that ram? Keep these points in mind for a moment.

Getting back to Jerry’s goal of taking Danny to the fair to win a prize, Granny is naturally resistant to the idea of going to the fair at all, but Hiram starts to win her over by suggesting that she show some of her weaving there (a successful appeal to her vanity), and Jerry promises to earn the money they need to go. Earning the money to go to the fair provides another obstacle for Jerry to overcome. Jerry begins hearing violin music at times, although he’s not sure where it’s coming from. He begins to think that it might be his mother’s spirit, trying to encourage him in his goals. There is also a scare when Danny is lost during a storm, and Jerry fears that he will never see him again.

The loss of Danny during a terrible storm is the turning point in the story and the real beginning of Granny’s redemption. Jerry doesn’t know whether Danny is surviving the storm or not, and Granny becomes truly worried about how upset that Jerry is and how she is unable to comfort him. She tries to tell him that whatever happens to Danny is the Lord’s will, and Jerry stuns her by saying that the Lord can’t have his lamb. Granny chastises him for blasphemy, but he refuses to take back what he says. Granny worries that Jerry might feel the wrath of God for what he says, and she actually tries to say that it’s her fault that Jerry says these things, that maybe she hasn’t raised him right, in the hope of sparing him from God’s wrath. This is the most concerned that Granny has been for Jerry since the book began. Jerry says that love isn’t evil, and for the first time, Granny admits that it isn’t, unless a person loves himself more than God. When Jerry asks how he can love a God who took away both his parents and his lamb, Granny is at a loss for an answer. She tries to explain that God is both all-merciful and all-powerful, but Jerry says that if God was really all merciful, He wouldn’t have let his parents die, and if He was all-powerful, He could have saved them. This is part of the age-old problem of why bad things happen to good people. Was there something wrong with God, perhaps even his non-existence? There are some who would argue that. Or was the fault with the people involved in the story, that their fate was punishment for their sins or brought about by their wickedness, as Granny has always believed? Granny has always believed that her son died because of his sins and that Arabella was the one who led him into sin. This belief has been the basis of all of her harshness with Jerry. However, there is another possibility, that is it all more a matter of perspective, that there is more information missing from this story which would make the situation more clear.

Granny’s inability to answer Jerry’s questions about the nature of God and prayer and why bad things happen to good people are what bring about a change in her. The older I get, the more I think that a little uncertainty in life, and even in religious faith, can be a good thing. Uncertainty is what keeps people open to knowledge because they feel like there is more that they don’t know. People who think they know everything they need to know tend to close the books because they don’t feel the need to learn more. People who are sure that they are doing everything that God wants don’t ask themselves what more they need to do, whereas people who aren’t sure are open to improvement. Some of the least confident people in life are the ones who are actually doing the most and trying the hardest because they constantly question what they’re doing, check themselves, and are the most open to learning and improvement along the way, the exact opposite of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. There have been many famous people who have experienced severe self-doubt, and sometimes, that’s what pushes people on to greatness. Even saints, viewed by others as having a special relationship with God and providing others with help and a sense of peace, often experienced their own dark times, self-doubt, and even doubt in God and their service to them. The great thing about saints isn’t that they were superior humans without flaws and human troubles but that they didn’t let those things stop them from doing the great things that they were meant to do. Perhaps the key is in seeing doubt not as defect but as a tool and uncertainty not as a failing but as a guide to learning and improvement.

Up to this point in her life, Granny Samantha felt absolutely certain about everything. She was as certain of Lilith’s wickedness as she was of her own faith in God. She had thought of all of the family’s misfortunes only in terms of what had happened to her, and now she realizes that Jerry was the one who was truly punished by the loss of his parents while being just an innocent baby, with no sins that needed to be punished. Now, Granny is confronted by the fact that she really doesn’t know everything and that some things may not actually have a definite explanation, or at least not one that is easy to find. Granny experiences doubt for the first time. It affects her so deeply that she tells Hiram that she told God that it’s about time that He answered her prayers about something or she might stop believing in the power of prayer and that He should really let Jerry find his lamb. She feels a little odd about saying this to God, even though she felt strangely better after saying it, but Hiram tells her that he doesn’t think it’s so bad. He says that he’s experienced his own doubts over the years and that he thinks that prayer is basically a way of telling God how you feel and letting him share the burden of worries. It’s natural for human beings to feel things like doubt, worry, and anger when things are going wrong and everything seems unfair. Granny admits that she has felt better since she has admitted her true feelings to God, like she truly has left the problem with Him, instead of keeping all of those negative feelings to herself, as she has for years.

Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending. Jerry does find Danny again after he is lost, and they do manage to go to the fair. Danny does not win the livestock competition because, as a black lamb, the judges decide that he is in a class by himself, but noting his quality, they give Jerry and Danny a special award for being unique. But, what’s important happens while Jerry is still searching for Danny and how he learns the final pieces of the puzzle concerning his parents’ death.

While Jerry was searching for Danny, he also met and connected with his Uncle Lafe, Arabella’s brother and Danny’s only other living relative besides Granny. Lafe is somewhat slow mentally, what the other characters call a “moonling.” He is referred to in passing a few times earlier in the story, but no one explains much about him other than his mental slowness. His slowness was considered one of the misfortunes of the Tarleton family because it caused his parents some worry. Even though Lafe is still living on the Tarleton farm next door and is the owner of the black ram, Jerry has not seen or spoken to him up to this point. However, like Arabella before him, Lafe knows how to play the violin and has kept the violin that once belonged to his sister. Jerry had heard him playing at other times earlier in the story, taking comfort in the playing and believing that it was his mother’s presence, trying to communicate with him. Lafe doesn’t talk much, and although he can read and write a little, he’s not very good. He shows Jerry Lilith’s old collection of books, showing that she was an educated woman, as Hiram said. Lafe cannot read well enough to read all of the books, and Jerry admits that he can’t read that well yet, either. Lafe also shows Jerry where he recorded Jerry’s birth in their old family Bible, a common practice in old times, before modern birth certificates. Jerry realizes that, in spite of the rift between the Tarletons and the Kincaids and the fact that Jerry has never really met his uncle before, his uncle has always accepted him as a full member of his family, giving Jerry an unexpected feeling of belonging.

Before the story is over, Uncle Hiram tells Jerry the final truth about his parents’ deaths. Both Seth and Arabella were fed up with life in Cat Hollow. They were tired of their parents’ feud and the limited opportunities for life there. Arabella loved horses and had real skill with them, so they took a horse with racing potential and tried to start a life in horse racing in Kentucky, where Arabella’s grandfather lived, where both of their families had lived before coming to Indiana. Their involvement in horse racing and gambling was what made Granny decide that they were sinful people. They later died in a burning stable in Kentucky. Granny told Jerry that she believed that Arabella had sent Seth into the burning stable to kill him on purpose, using their race horse as an excuse. She said that they had been living apart before that and that Arabella probably just wanted to get rid of Seth. When Jerry asked her how Arabella managed to die in the fire as well, Granny says that she could never figure it out.

This final piece of the puzzle is solved when the man who managed Arabella’s grandfather’s horses explains the night of the fire to Granny and Jerry. Seth had temporarily gone to Chicago to find a job to support his wife and child, but he had returned to where Arabella was staying with her grandfather to visit her. The fire broke out at night, and when Seth realized that his wife’s beloved horse was in danger, he insisted on going into the barn to try to save it. Arabella actually tried to stop him, but he ran in anyway. Arabella ran into the barn after him to try to save him, and they were both killed. After her earlier humbling at Jerry’s unanswerable questions, admitting her true emotions about the family’s misfortunes, and the victories of both Jerry’s lamb and her quilts at the fair, Granny is finally in a state of mind where she is able to except the truth of her son’s death. It was not caused by his sinfulness, but his love and a set of unfortunate circumstances, and Arabella had tried to save him at the expense of her own life. This knowledge helps Granny to make peace with the ghosts of the past.

I do feel like Granny receives this new picture of what happened to her son with less comment and emotional release than I would have expected. For most people, this would have been a very emotional moment, perhaps with crying or a sense of guilt for having put all the blame in the wrong place for years. Granny even made a quilt depicting a demonic marriage and writing a song to sing to her grandchild about how his parents were wicked and in hell, for crying out loud! So, what does Granny actually say about this final revelation?

“Wal,” said Samantha, “it jest goes to show. Cain’t never tell about true love. Guess I’ll have to change the last few verses of my song ballad.  Burned to a crisp in each other’s arms, no doubt.  It’s a real sad story.”

And that’s her final word on the matter. Great. I guess it just “goes to show” why I really don’t like Granny: she doesn’t have much emotional range or empathy even after her redemption experience. All through the story, it was all about her: her husband who was hurt by the rival for her affections, her husband who was almost killed in a flood, her son who was taken from her, and her duty to raise her grandson. When it was all about her, she had her deepest emotions and was wrathful and vengeful, and after she is made to realize that it’s not really all about her and never was, all we get is, “it jest goes to show” and “it’s a real sad story.” On the plus side, she did demonstrate some real caring for Jerry’s welfare before the end, but she’s never going to really feel bad about all the bad things she did or show a sense of regret, and that’s all there is to it. It’s good for Jerry because the past finally seems to be dead and behind them, and Hiram comments that, one day, Jerry will also inherit the Tarleton properties from his Uncle Lafe as well as the Kincaid properties, which will put him on a much better footing in life. But, somehow, it just seems unfair that Granny never seemed completely sorry for her role in all of this misery that went on for years, and I was left feeling it more than she was.

Something that I didn’t mention earlier, that I was saving for the end and my final reaction, is that Granny’s obsession with the supernatural and her belief in Lilith as a witch/witch’s ghost may not be based not only on her upbringing and religious beliefs but also in an odd human phenomenon that even modern people experience. People expect the world to make sense, and we are all hard-wired to look for cause and effect. Granny has a long history of misinterpreting cause and effect, but she’s not the only one. A few years ago, I attended a lecture given by a group of ghosthunters in my home town. This group said that they are sometimes called in to investigate people’s homes when they think that they are being haunted. In one of their explanations, they implied, although did not explicitly state, that there are psychological roots in much of the haunting phenomena that they investigate. What they actually said was that most of that people who called them in to investigate hauntings were people who were already in very troubled circumstances in their lives. These were people who had suffered financial problems, work problems, marital problems, health problems, or problems with their children, and often some combination of these. Then, in all of these cases, something mysterious happened that they couldn’t explain, and it was just the last straw. People in a happier, healthier, and more stable frame of mind might shrug off something unusual that happened as just momentary bad luck or coincidence, but when someone is already on edge or paranoid, they begin to notice more and more odd things happening that they would otherwise ignore, drawing connections between them in their minds to the point where they become convinced that they are haunted and/or cursed. The ghosthunters did not call these people liars or delusional, and from the way they told their stories, they suggested that, because these people believed that they were haunted, in a way, they became haunted. For example, one man suffered a series of disasters after buying an odd mask at a garage sale to use as a wall decoration, and he became convinced that the mask was cursed. One of the ghosthunters actually said, “I don’t think this mask was cursed before he bought it. I think it became cursed because he bought it.” The disasters that befell this man would have happened to him anyway, with or without the mask, but because they happened around the time when he bought it, he kept attributing every bad thing to the mask, and it did take on a negative influence in his life. It even began to affect the ghosthunters in a negative way after they removed it from his house because they were influenced by the negativity that this man had associated with the mask, making them wonder if some problems they experienced around that time were also associated with it, even though they said that they really didn’t think so. In an odd way, the man actually became the curse on his own cursed mask because of his attitude, just as Granny may actually have been the witch that she always claimed Lilith was, even though she couldn’t see it herself. From this psychological perspective, Granny Samantha’s weird witch obsession becomes more understandable, and she does look a little more like a sad victim of circumstance. Josiah Tarleton set up a toxic situation in the beginning with his early rivalry with the Kincaids, rubbing his early successes and their misfortunes in their faces, so when bad things happened that might have happened anyway, whether the Tarletons had bought the farm next door or not, Granny developed an association between them and her misfortunes that she interpreted as cause and effect. Although, I kind of suspect that Samantha may have been a little unbalanced even before all that, making her more of a candidate for going superstition crazy than her husband, who tried to tell her that it was all just coincidence. Still, I can see that repeated misfortunes can have a negative affect on someone’s view of the world. I have to admit, even now, thinking about it from that angle, I still don’t like Granny for the way she affected innocent people around her and didn’t seem to show remorse for her actions, but this explanation for Granny’s thinking does make sense.

However, I think that the overall message of the story was a good one. Life doesn’t have convenient, tidy answers that can just be summed up in one brief paragraph of explanation. There is no short, easy answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people, and much of the time, we don’t get the full story of what actually happened in the first place because we can’t see it from every perspective, from all of the people involved. I had wondered how the Tarletons responded to Samantha throwing rocks at Lilith, but the story never said. Did they just let the matter slide because the townspeople had also been whispering that Lilith was a witch? Did Josiah actually stand up for his wife in some way? Did David tell Samantha to back down because he didn’t really believe in superstition, and she was acting crazy? At the end of the story, we still don’t know what actually caused the stable fire that killed Jerry’s parents. Was it a human accident or negligence, deliberate arson, or a lightning strike? Even the man who was there at the time doesn’t know or doesn’t say. By that point, it doesn’t matter, because what the characters were most concerned about was the relationship between Jerry’s parents and the character of the the Tarletons, especially Arabella. Having established that, they feel no need to inquire further into the matter. What happened in the past was a combination of bad luck, random chance, and personal choice on the part of the people involved, when they decided how to respond to the emergency. What mattered in the end was how everyone felt about it and what they decided to do because of it. When their feelings and circumstances changed, they were free to make a different choice of what they would do. Being open to new information is key to considering a situation from a different perspective, and a different perspective helped them to gain the new information they needed.

In the original book, Midnight and Jeremiah, the family’s money troubles and the fair are more the central plot than these family issues. Also, the lamb, Midnight, doesn’t get lost until after the fair is over. Uncle Hiram (who is apparently really Jeremiah’s uncle in the original book) and the town decide to celebrate the lamb’s victory at the fair, but the celebration startles the lamb, so it runs off in fright. Jeremiah eventually finds him near the nativity scene at the church on Christmas Eve.

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

As a historical footnote to this story, Jerry mentions early in the book that his family and some others in their little town have Scotch-Irish ancestry and that they migrated into Indiana from Kentucky. This is something that older families in Indiana did during the pioneering and homesteading days of the 19th century. Another book that I reviewed earlier, Abigail, is about a family who traveled to Indiana from Kentucky in a covered wagon, which is what both the Kincaids and the Tarletons did when the grandparents in the story were younger, actually around the time when Abigail takes place. Their circumstances would have been very much like the people in that story, and the girl in the story of Abigail, Susan, also learns how to weave using a loom very much like the one Granny uses in this book.

Scotch-Irish (sometimes called Scots-Irish) is not a term that is generally used outside of the United States because Scotland and Ireland are separate countries. Basically, what it refers to is people with ancestry from Scotland (largely Presbyterian) and Ireland (more specifically Ulster Protestants, who also had some Scottish and/or English ancestry) who came to the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries, settling in the upper parts of what is now the southern United States but ranging as far north as Pennsylvania, generally covering the Appalachian region and states like Kentucky and Virginia. Regardless of which wave of immigration in which individual families first arrived or what mix of ancestries they had at that time, having settled in the same regions of the United States, families intermarried. If an individual has one of those factors in their background, it’s highly likely that they also have the other somewhere in their family tree. Even those with mostly Scottish or English ancestry tended to come to the Americas by way of Northern Ireland, which is why they and their descendants are often referred to by this combined name. Even though England isn’t mentioned in the term Scotch-Irish, these families also often have English ancestry, which you can see in many of their surnames. In fact, some argue that they may be ultimately more English in their origins than anything else. It would take closer examination of an individual’s family tree to mark their exact ancestry or combination of backgrounds, and in casual daily life in the United States, it wouldn’t really make a difference. The communities they formed in the United States lived basically the same sort of life, making them virtually indistinguishable and often interrelated. Sometimes, this name has been considered somewhat pretentious in its use, partly because one of the purposes behind its adoption was to distinguish people with Protestant ancestry from Irish Catholics who came to the United States later. Irish Catholics represent a different group of immigrants here. In spite of that, Scotch-Irish is a commonly-accepted description in the United States and gives a fair explanation of an individual’s family history when you understand basically what it means. Many of their descendants still live in the Appalachian region, but others have branched out to different parts of the country, as the families in this story did. They can be found everywhere in the United States in modern times.

Throughout the story, characters sing old folk songs and hymns, some that are traditional and some that they made up, sometimes accompanied by playing a dulcimer, a folk instrument found in many forms that is also used in Appalachian folk music. The Appalachian dulcimer is probably the one that the characters in the book used, given their background. One of the songs that stood out to me was Putting on the Style. This song comes in different versions, and I’d heard of it before seeing it in this book. It’s basically about how people play roles when they’re out in public and how the way they behave is partly because they’re fond of the image, not because it’s how they actually are in private. As the characters head to the fair at the end of the book, they sing this song and make up some verses of their own.

As another odd historical note, early in the book, when Jerry thinks about and describes the small town of Fulton Corners and how it is more exciting to a young boy than most people would think, he mentions the “haunted graveyard” because it looks old and creepy and is the kind of thing that a child might imagine to be haunted. He mentions that the monuments in the graveyard have different shapes and that the shapes mean things, like a lamb for a dead baby. This is true, and I’ve seen graves like that, even in Arizona, where I grew up. Modern American graveyards don’t do this and tend to have simpler markers, but in the 19th century, people used certain shapes to explain something about the deceased person. Lambs were for babies and very young children because they symbolized innocence and youth, and broken columns indicated a person who died unexpectedly in the prime of life. Jerry mentions other symbols in the story. Part of the reason why I know this is because I took a historic tour of the local pioneer cemetery in Phoenix, and also because there was an article in the local paper awhile back about some hikers who stumbled across an old graveyard that was once part of a ghost town, and they helped themselves to a lamb statue that they thought would make a good lawn ornament. At the time, they didn’t know the significance of the statue, but to anyone who realizes what they took, it’s horribly creepy. The author of the article told them to put it back. This is kind of an odd digression from the story, but since this is one of few books that mentions this odd historical detail, I decided to explain it here.