Posted on by TracyC

The Time of the Ghost

The Time of the Ghost cover

The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, 1981.

This isn’t a very long book, but it packs a lot in! This is both a time travel story and a supernatural ghost story, but with the odd twist that we don’t initially know who the “ghost” is, and she isn’t really dead. She’s trying to save her own life.

In the beginning, although this book is from the first person perspective, we don’t know quite who the narrator is. Even the narrator isn’t quite sure who she is or what has happened. Her last memory is that there was some sort of accident, and her mind doesn’t seem to be working right. Now, she seems to be walking through the countryside, but she can’t remember what happened earlier that day or even what she had for lunch. When she looks down to see what she’s wearing that day, she realizes in a panic that she can’t see herself. She has become a ghost!

It takes her some time to get her panicked thoughts together, but she gradually begins to recognize the countryside. She is surprised that she can look over a hedge, thinking that it was something she had always wanted to do before, and she must have grown. There is a small hut nearby, and she recalls that there is an old rag doll called Monigan inside. Exploring further, she finds herself at a school and locates a classroom she recognizes. To her surprise, she discovers that it’s a Latin class full of boys, and although she has no body, she is sure that she’s a girl, so this can’t be her class. However, she does recognize the teacher as someone familiar but also intimidating.

Leaving the classroom, she continues exploring the school, and she finds people she is sure are her family. She remembers that the woman is called Phyllis, and Phyllis is her mother. There are also girls called Imogen, Fenella, and Charlotte. The ghost thinks that these are her sisters and that her name is Sally because Phyllis seems to call her Sally, although nobody really seems to see her. Sometimes, people just seem to have a sense that someone is there, and the dog, Oliver, seems to know she’s there. Pieces of information click in the ghost’s mind. This family’s last name is Melford. The teacher in the Latin class is her father. Sally is short for Selina. Charlotte is called Cart as a nickname.

The ghost finds herself angry and hating her family. She wonders if she could have died in the accident she vaguely remembers and if she came back to get some sort of revenge on her family, but the idea horrifies her, and she’s sure that she wouldn’t have thought of it in other circumstances.

The ghost watches as Fenella goes to the little hut and pretends to worship the doll Monigan and call her forth, like the doll is some kind of oracle. The ghost remembers that Cart was the one who started this game a year before and that she always thought that it was a boring game. Cart started the game because the four sisters had been fighting over the doll or playing with it too roughly one day, and they had each grabbed an arm or leg and pulled the doll apart. Cart had felt guilty about that, so she sewed the doll back together (badly, because she’s bad at sewing), and she turned the doll into a kind of oracle that the girls would worship to make it up to the doll that she had been ruined. Now, the doll is moldy and mildewy from being left in the little hut for a year. Only little Fenella still plays this game, although the doll has never actually done anything magical when they’ve called on her.

Gradually, the ghost begins putting the pieces of her memories together. Her parents manage a boarding school for boys. The girls help out with chores at the school, but they’re mostly expected to stay out of the way. Although they attend a different school themselves, it feels like they never get a break from school because they live at one. They never even get summers off because there are summer courses for disabled children at the boarding school.

Sally the ghost listens to her sisters complaining about her in her absence. They resent her for being overly sweet and a perfectionist and for defending their parents when the other girls criticize them. Sally is angry with them for the things they say behind her back and for their constant bickering and drama. Imogen gets melodramatic and picks at her sisters because she’s worried about not achieving the music career she really wants. Cart keeps trying to shut Imogen down because she feels overwhelmed by sentiment and emotions, and admittedly, Imogen’s emotions are frequently overwhelming. This dynamic between Imogen trying to express her overwhelming emotions and Cart trying to shut her down is a large part of the quarreling between the girls. Fenella, the youngest of the sisters, is just being a silly little girl, and she is rather fed up with her older sisters. At one point, Sally finds a poem that Fenella wrote that explains her relationship with her sisters:

“I have three ugly sisters
They really should be misters
They shout and scream and play the piano
I can never do anything I want.”

It’s a pretty accurate description of what goes on in their house. All of the girls are loud and argumentative, and a large part of the tension in their house comes from the inability of any of them to do what they want to do. Sally notices some pictures on the walls and remembers their father (whom the girls only refer to as “Himself”, never as “father” or “dad”) yelling at them and calling them “bitches” for stealing art supplies from the school for drawing and painting. Imogen’s drama about her music career is because she’s not allowed to use the music room at the school for practicing, and she thinks that she’ll never get a chance to develop her abilities. The parents pay more attention to the students at the school than they do to their own daughters, even forgetting to leave the girls any supper sometimes. The girls’ home life is not happy, and that’s why they’re not happy with each other. The two oldest girls especially are not happy with their parents because of their neglect.

As Sally listens to her sisters talking about her, Cart and Imogen admit that they’re both jealous of Sally because she gets to be somewhere else that will be important to her future career. Sally wishes that they would say where she’s supposed to be because she can’t remember. She finds a few unfinished rough drafts of letters that she wrote to her parents, trying to tell them that life at the school didn’t have much to offer her and that she was going away, but Sally can’t imagine where she would have gone. One of the letters even says that her life is in danger, but from what?

There is a bright spot in the girls’ lives, and that’s a secret friendship they’ve developed with some of the boys at school. The boys visit them in the kitchen after dinner, and they have coffee together. As ghostly Sally watches one of these visits, the boys ask the girls what happened to Sally, which ghostly Sally is (literally) dying to hear. Sally’s sisters explain that Sally’s disappearance is part of a Plan the girls have.

It’s obvious that the girls’ parents neglect them. While Sally has always been defending their parents to the other girls, the other girls want to prove to her that their parents would never notice if something awful happened to one of them. A lot of the strange things that Sally has witnessed them doing that day are part of this Plan. Fenella has been going around the entire day with big knots tied in her hair, and their parents haven’t noticed. Fenella says that if they continue to not notice, she’ll act like she’s fallen seriously ill. Sally’s sisters say that Sally has gone to stay with a friend named Audrey Chambers, but their parents don’t know and still haven’t noticed that she’s even gone.

The sisters and the boys decide to try holding a seance for fun, and ghostly Sally uses this as an opportunity to communicate with them. Although she has some difficulty and misspells her message, she manages to convince Imogen that she’s the one communicating and that she’s dead. Imogen gets hysterical, but the others calm her down by phoning her friend’s house and confirming that Sally is there and that she’s fine. Ghostly Sally can’t understand it. She’s sure that she’s really Sally, but how can that be if Sally is definitely at her friend’s house?

Ghostly Sally seeks out living Sally, and to her surprise, she finds her, although she feels disconnected from this girl. She also learns that this Sally has been secretly doing things with a boy from the school, Julian, performing nighttime rituals with the doll, Monigan. Although ghostly Sally remembers having been friends with Julian, seeing him from outside herself makes her realize that Julian is actually sinister and disturbed. In her spirit form, she also realizes that their rituals with Monigan have stirred up something genuinely supernatural, apart from herself.

As things become more clear to her, the ghost begins to think that she was wrong about being Sally. She is still sure that she is one of the four sisters, neglected at her parents’ school, but she doesn’t think that she’s Sally after all, and that’s why she had no knowledge of Sally’s secret rituals with Julian and couldn’t remember where Sally was or what she was thinking. She also realizes that everything she has seen happened when she was younger. Somehow, after her accident, her spirit went back into the past, seeing things that she and her sisters used to do.

As the “ghost” wakes up in the hospital in the present day, she also realizes that she is not actually dead. She’s been having an out-of-body experience. Worse, her “accident” wasn’t really an accident. Someone tried to kill her. Julian, also older now in the present day, shoved her out of his car while they were driving somewhere. He was deliberately trying to kill her! Something that happened during that time in the past, during the time with the Monigan rituals and the girls’ Plan to confront their parents over their neglect led up to this attempted murder.

The “ghost” still can’t remember everything that happened in the seven years since then, leading up to the attempted murder, and she’s still confused about who she really is. She only senses that Monigan tried to kill her through Julian. Although the girls once thought that Monigan was just a game, Monigan is actually a real, evil spirit. Seven years ago, Monigan told them that it would claim a life, and now, Monigan is trying to do so. Can the “ghost” regain her memories and figure out what to do in time to save her life before the next attempt?

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

My Reaction

Earlier, I covered The Headless Cupid, in which children play at being witches and doing magical rituals that are clearly nonsense, but this book has children who are coerced by some ancient supernatural spirit into doing “real” occult rituals. The children’s rituals involve blood and cruelty to animals, which I didn’t like when I was reading the story. We don’t fully get to know what Monigan actually is, although there are indications that Monigan might be some kind of ancient goddess that craves sacrifices, especially human sacrifices. Monigan seems to remember receiving sacrifices before, in the distant past. Although Cart thinks that she invented Monigan, that Monigan is just a doll they tore, and that all of their rituals are just playacting, the “ghost” realizes that they were all being manipulated by the spirit called Monigan into thinking that. Monigan took advantage of the neglected children and their mentally ill friend for its own purposes. I think Monigan was based on Morrigan from Irish mythology. We are told in the story that this British boarding school is built on a site that has been inhabited from ancient times, and the girls’ father is obsessed with the archaeology of the area, which may also be responsible for stirring up this ancient spirit.

The intriguing part of this story is first that the readers aren’t sure whether or not the “ghost” is actually dead, and then, the readers as well as the ghost have to determine the ghost’s true identity. At first, the “ghost” thinks that she knows who she is, but then, she thinks that she was wrong. (Or was she?) Even when she is awake in the present day, her mind is still confused, and even two of her sisters, while they know that Julian’s attempt to kill her was part of Monigan’s curse, find it difficult to remember everything that happened when all of this started. The “ghost” has to go through the events of the past, with Monigan working against her all the time, to figure out what set off this threat against her before she runs out of time. She knows that Monigan plans to kill her before the day is over, and she doesn’t have much time left to break this curse or prevent it from happening in the first place. The “ghost” isn’t sure at first that she can change the past, but she gradually manages to get through to the other children and figure out a solution with the help of her sisters.

I found the parents in the story not just neglectful but actually cruel and infuriating. The father keeps calling his daughters “bitches” when he gets angry at them. When the girls appeal to their mother about how they’re not being fed and have to keep begging food from the school’s kitchen, the mother shuts her eyes and tells them to stop bothering the cook. The cook is also revealed to be stealing food from the kitchen herself, which may be the reason why both the girls and the students have little to eat, but when the girls tell their mother about it, their mother doesn’t want to hear about it. She just doesn’t want to go to the bother of finding another cook. I’m amazed that the girls haven’t actually died at some point before this or that social services hasn’t gotten involved. The girls do attend a different school from the one their parents manage, so they would have the opportunity to get help and attention from an outside source.

At one point, Fenella openly tells her mother that she’s neglecting them while she only pays attention to the boys at the school, and her mother says that girls can look after themselves while boys can’t. It’s like her mother looks at the girls like some people look at pet cats when they just let them roam and hunt for their own food. I don’t even approve of people neglecting their cats, like they don’t even have pets so much as a nodding acquaintance with feral animals. Even in the present day, when our “ghost” lies in a hospital bed after a murder attempt, their mother doesn’t come to see her because she’s too busy helping the boys at the school to pack their trunks. The father is openly hostile to his daughters, and the mother doesn’t seem to have any feeling or concern for them at all.

The concept of the book was interesting, but it’s not one that I would care to read again because I found it dark and frustrating, although it does end well. Things do improve for the girls in the past after their father discovers their weird rituals and sends them off to their grandmother’s house, angrily declaring that he never wants to see any of them again. The father’s rejection of them is actually a blessing. At their grandmother’s house, they get regular food and the attention that they desperately need. The mother partly redeems herself at the end of the book by coming to see her daughter after all, saying that she felt obligated to get the boys all packed but now that’s done, so she is free to stay with her daughter until she’s fully recovered. The girl does recover, and she begins reconciling herself to her past traumas, both the supernatural ones and the ones resulting from her parents’ neglect and her tumultuous relationship with her sisters.

One thing that the “ghost” accomplishes is that she gets a look at her past and herself as they really are, viewing herself and everything that happened from a neutral position as the “ghost.” Seeing herself from the position of a third person, she discovers that she doesn’t like the things she’s done or the person she’s been during these last several years. That’s why she has felt so disconnected from herself and her memories and why she couldn’t even recognize herself or the things she did in the past. The “ghost” is so upset with herself and ashamed of her life choices that she wonders if she’s really worth saving from Monigan. Fortunately, her sisters truly love her and know that she’s worth saving. Their bad choices and poor behavior to each other have been largely the result of their parents’ neglect, a trauma they all share and understand. Although the ghost doesn’t remember everything at first, the other sisters know that, after they went to live with their grandmother and received the attention and care they really needed, they all improved and their relationships with each other improved. They’ve been trying to move on from their past ever since, and they need to settle the matter about Monigan once and for all to truly be free to go forward in their lives. One of the sisters knows exactly what kind of sacrifice will finally appease Monigan and save her sister’s life.

Monigan wants something perfect as a sacrifice, but our “ghost” isn’t a perfect person. Nobody is perfect, and our “ghost” has become truly aware of her flaws and the nature of her troubled past through her out-of-body experiences. However, things can be perfect in someone’s imagination, and one of the sisters has a more powerful imagination than the others. Someone has a dream that is perfect, at least in her mind. When she gives Monigan that dream, she not only frees her sister from Monigan but herself from something that her future self has realized that she doesn’t really want. Both she and her sister have been clinging to things that were harmful to both of them, making them into the kind of people neither of them really wanted to be. It was their insecurity from their parents’ neglect that made them cling to things that they thought would make them special and distinct. Once they are free from these harmful influences, not only does Monigan stop trying to take their lives, but they are truly free for the first time to become something better. Monigan does claim one life at the end of the story, but in that case, it’s only justice.

Posted on by TracyC

The Witches of Hopper Street

The Witches of Hopper Street by Linda Gondosch, 1986.

Kelly McCoy and her friend, Jennifer, are offended that another girl from school, Rae Jean, is having a Halloween party and didn’t invite them. Jennifer says that they could just throw their own party on Halloween, but Kelly says that’s no good because everyone else they know is going to Rae Jean’s. It isn’t so much that Kelly really likes Rae Jean; it’s more that she hates being excluded.

The girls talk about what they want to dress as for Halloween, and Kelly suggests that they be witches because she’s fascinated by the witches she saw in a play of MacBeth. Kelly also has a book called “Magic and Witchcraft”, and she says that they could study the book and become real witches. Jennifer doesn’t see the attraction of becoming a witch, but Kelly promises that they’ll only perform white magic, where you use magic to perform good deeds, instead of black magic, which involves cursing people. Although, she might make an exception for just a few little black magic spells against Rae Jean. Jennifer says that Kelly can’t be serious, but Kelly says that she is because it’s awful being the only ones in the sixth grade not invited to Rae Jean’s party. Jennifer points out that Adelaide also wasn’t invited. The girls know that Adelaide isn’t popular because she’s overly tall and awkward and much smarter than the other kids. Then, Kelly gets an idea – there were three witches in MacBeth, so maybe they should invite Adelaide to become a witch with them.

When the girls see Adelaide on her way to Rae Jean’s house to help her with her math homework, they stop her and suggest to her that she join them as witches. Kelly tells her that Rae Jean is dangerous and that dangerous things will happen at her party. Adelaide says that she’s not going to the party anyway. Then, Kelly pretends to tell the future with a deck of cards, predicting that there will be a mysterious death in 24 hours. Her prediction comes shockingly true when Rae Jean’s cat kills her pet parakeet.

Kelly knows that the parakeet’s death was partly her fault for taking him out of his cage when Rae Jean brought her cat around, showing off her prize-winning pet, but she also blames Rae Jean for bringing her cat to her house in the first place, and the reason why they took the bird out of his cage was that Rae Jean was goading them about how dumb the bird was. (I think that the kids’ mother shouldn’t even have let Rae Jean bring her cat into the house. The other kids said that they didn’t want to talk to her, but the mother insisted that they let her in because she’s a “nice” girl. That was an irresponsible thing for the mother to do, and she’s not a good example to her children. When you have a pet in the house, you have to make the pet’s safety a priority, especially over being polite to someone who is rude and insulting anyway. Rae Jean shouldn’t have been allowed to bring a predatory pet into their house, uninvited, simply because she wanted to and the mother didn’t have the guts to say no and enforce some house rules. Of course, this is one of those annoying incidents in books that’s used to move the plot forward. If the parents acted anything like mine, it wouldn’t have happened, and this would be a different story.) Adelaide is impressed that Kelly’s prediction came true, and she agrees to be a witch with Kelly and Jennifer.

Kelly walks the others through rituals for being a witch, like signing their names in a Black Book (really, it’s an old brown science notebook), preparing their broomsticks (they’re supposed to be rubbed with the fat of a newborn piglet and belladonna, but the best they can do is strips of bacon and dieffenbachia), and preparing magical rings to protect themselves from evil creatures (Kelly got hers at an estate sale so she’d have one that belonged to a dead person, but the others just got their rings from the quarter machines at the supermarket). The girls pledge to keep their “coven” secret, but then someone leaves a message for them that says, “Midnight is the witching hour. Then you shall be in my power.” All of the girls deny having written it. So, who did? Who else knows about their witchy activities?

Kelly still hasn’t given up her plans to use this witch business to ruin Rae Jeans’ party. She soon acquires a new pet, a skunk, from her brother Ben’s friend Buster, whose father is a veterinarian. She calls the skunk Cinnamon and declares that he is her familiar. To keep the boys quiet about their activities, they have to let Ben and Buster join the coven as warlocks. As an initiation, all of the witches and warlocks have to drink salt water and eat beef liver. Kelly’s mother is perplexed by some of the odd things that they do, but she doesn’t question them too much, and none of the adults ever discover that the kids sometimes sneak out at night to perform rituals. (I could never have gotten away with this sort of stuff as a kid because my mother was always the type to ask a lot of questions about everything and get specific answers.)

Kelly gets the idea of making a voodoo doll of Rae Jean, using an old sweater of hers that Rae Jean’s mother gave her because she helped to get a box of old clothes down from the attic for a sale and because Rae Jean told her that the sweater was scratchy. To get Rae Jean’s hair and nails, the witches open a “spa” business at Kelly’s house. They succeed in getting hair and nail clippings, but Rae Jean gets scared away when their “spa” treatment involves mud that they just dug up in the backyard and has a worm in it. After they make the doll, they decide it looks really awful and sticking toothpicks in it is creepy, so they take the toothpicks out and get rid of it. Instead, they decide to focus on giving Rae Jean the “evil eye” – basically staring at her to make her feel uncomfortable. (That one works whether you’re a witch or not.) When Rae Jean and some others in class get sick, some of the other kids start to believe rumors that the girls have spread about a “poison plague.”

Eventually, Halloween comes, and Kelly gets the idea for her, Jennifer, and Adelaide to use their witch act while passing out candy to the trick-or-treaters. They put the candy in their “cauldron” (an old camping pot), give themselves fantastical names, and perform chants while handing out candy. They have fun with that, but they still feel left out of the party, so they decide to try one last witchy trick on Rae Jean. They decide to brew up a love potion (just apricot juice with honey, and they even think it tastes good themselves), sneak into the party as fortune tellers, and slip the potion into the party punch. Rae Jean’s mother is amused by their fortune telling act and lets them into the party, although Rae Jean isn’t happy to see them.

When Kelly’s new pet skunk gets loose in the party, there is some momentary chaos before Kelly manages to explain that the skunk is deodorized and can’t spray. During their time at the party, the girls learn the true identity of their mystery message writer and have an honest talk with Rae Jean about their feelings and apologize for the witchy things they’ve been doing. Rae Jean also tells them the reason why she didn’t invite them and how left out she felt when she didn’t get invited to a big party that Kelly had soon after she moved to the neighborhood. Rae Jean comes to realize how much she has provoked the other girls into hating her with some of her behavior, and she apologizes bringing cat to Kelly’s house and killing her parakeet. However, Kelly is also forced to acknowledge that she’s also provoked Rae Jean with her quick temper and attempts at revenge. All of the girls owe each other some apologies, and they make up. Kelly and her friends promise to give up all the witch stuff.

However, before they cut it out entirely, they have one last thing to do. Adelaide read about an old superstition that explains how to see a real witch at midnight on Halloween night, and before Halloween is over, the whole “coven” decides that they have to try it. What they see is a bit startling, and although it has an apparently logical explanation, gives the kids an appropriately witchy scare. Could there possibly be a real witch in their neighborhood?

I didn’t like the parts of this story about dead animals. I hated the part where the parakeet was killed, and later, I felt sorry for a cat that died (of natural causes, and it was a sickly stray, not Rae Jean’s cat). I never like stories where animals die, especially through human cruelty or carelessness. Yet, I have to admit that I have a particular attachment to this book, which I remember reading when I was ten years old. Some of their rituals are a little gross, but as I a kid, I think I was attracted to the idea of having a secret, mysterious club and intrigued by the identity of the mysterious message-writer. At the end of the story, they think they know who wrote the note, but their last midnight ritual causes them to have second thoughts.

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

My Halloween Story About My History With This Book:

This particular book and I have a history. This book was important to me as a kid because it sparked something formative, but to tell you what that something was, I have a confession to make: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a witch. I was in high school before the first Harry Potter books appeared, so it wasn’t about that. No, my introduction to witches was The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie when I was five years old. I liked Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Dorothy was my favorite character, but I liked Glinda, too. Later, when I saw the movie of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, my interest in witches increased. I also read The Blue-Nosed Witch when I was young, and I was hooked. For a portion of my early childhood, my favorite Halloween costume was a traditional witch costume.

I didn’t want to curse people or be an evil witch, like the Wicked Witch of the West, in spite of my traditional witch costume with the pointy hat. No, I wanted to be a Good Witch and maybe ride a broom and bring suits of armor to life and maybe defeat Nazis in a way that is far less gross than melting them, like in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. I had discernment. I had standards. I also had a fear of heights after falling off the monkey bars when I was four, so that probably should have been a clue that broomstick-riding was out for me, but when you’ve got magic, I guess these things aren’t much of a problem. I can’t say that I was really ambitious about wanting magical powers because I didn’t really do anything to acquire them, it was just that I kind of liked the idea … except for that one time, and that’s what this little side story is leading up to.

When I was about ten years old, I read this book with a friend, and we were both enchanted with the idea of making up our own rituals and becoming “witches” and maybe trying some spells on Halloween, just to see if magic works. I only had sort of a vague notion of what kind of spells that we could do. I guess I was picturing something like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, where you recite a rhyme and something is supposed to happen, but I didn’t know any real spells, just movie stuff, and I was clever enough to realize that the stuff in movies probably wasn’t real. Naturally, being a bookish person, I decided that the best way to learn more was at the library. PSAs on tv always told you to “Read more about it“, whatever “it” was. (This was the early 1990s, and I didn’t have access to the Internet yet. That wasn’t even an option.) If anybody had some real spells books, especially ones placed at a convenient height on shelves that a not-very-tall ten-year-old could reach, it would be my local public library, right? I was actually surprised myself when I found one in the library catalog. I really didn’t think it was going to be that easy. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was when I actually picked up the book and opened it.

Now, I have to admit here that I didn’t read the whole book, and years later, I can’t remember the title or even what the cover looked like. I kind of wish I did because there are people I would like to show this book to just to prove that it actually exists. When I told my mother about it later, she thought that I dreamed the whole thing, but I swear I didn’t.

This book did have “spells” of various kinds. I picked one from the table of contents (I forget what, but something that sounded like something two ten-year-old girls might want to do on Halloween) and looked at the instructions. It was disgusting. It involved things like animal entrails, which I wouldn’t have known where to get and wouldn’t have wanted to touch even if someone handed me a free bag full. There were other things about animal parts on different pages that disgusted me, too. Under no circumstances was I going to kill cute animals just to do some dumb trick on Halloween, and I wouldn’t have wanted these animals parts even if someone else had done the dirty work of getting them. I wasn’t a vegetarian, but these were definitely not things I could just buy at the grocery store, or better yet, cooked and yummy with a side of fries and a plastic toy.

As I was staring at this book, I suddenly realized that I had no desire to do anything it described and that I was never going to do anything it said. Then, I had a worse thought: someone else must have thought this was a good idea, or they wouldn’t have written it down. Maybe I didn’t want to mess with animal entrails and body parts to gain magical powers, but someone else obviously would. What kind of person would do such a thing? Whatever kind it was, it wasn’t me, and I knew it. The image of the type of person I would have to be in order to do any of this, in order to take any of this seriously, disturbed and repulsed me more than just what was written in the book itself. I slammed the book shut, shoved it back on the shelf, and ran away. I never saw it again, although I did try to find it again once to show it to my mother so that I could prove that I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t even in the catalog anymore then.

My guess is that, whatever this book was, either someone stole it from the library (it is the sort of thing an aspiring evil witch might do) or lost or damaged it or some parent or librarian realized that this might not be the best book for children and had it removed from the shelves. Since then, I’ve wondered who put that in the kids’ section in the first place. I’m not fond of censorship, but I have to admit that this book was pretty dang gross and creepy. Was that spell book really serious, or did I miss some introductory part that would have explained that it was all part of some larger ghost story or something? What was the point of the book? I’ve often wondered. All I really remember now is that it was in the first row of children’s non-fiction books at the library, probably the 100 or 200 section of the Dewey Decimal System.

I’m actually glad I did look at it, though, because it made me realize a few things about myself. I realized that there were limits to the things that I was willing to do and that I had the power to say no when something was beyond my limits. My friend was disappointed and thought I was a bit of a wimp for chickening out on our witch experiment so soon and not even showing her the book, but I didn’t care that much. I was firm. I also came to realize that sometimes, it’s the things we don’t do or won’t do that define who we really are. In the end, it may not matter what that book actually was so much as that it left me with a stronger sense of who I was. I should have paid more attention to the part in the Bedknobs and Broomsticks movie where Miss Price said that she realized a long time ago that she could never really be a witch because nobody who felt the way she did about “Poisoned Dragon’s Liver” could be a real witch. I came to appreciate the sentiment.

This experience didn’t completely scare me away from stories with witches in them, as evidenced by the Halloween stories I cover here. I was born close to Halloween, and I like the holiday because I enjoy the imaginative costumes and playing pretend. (Not to mention chocolate. I also enjoy chocolate.) I enjoyed the Harry Potter books, too. But, I know where the dividing line is between pretend and real. It doesn’t trouble me now because I already put the book back on the shelf and said no when it was asking too much, and some decisions stick for life. I don’t worry too much about giving fantasy books to kids, either. Everyone has decisions to make in life about who and what they want to be, and I figure that the younger generations might as well learn where the dividing line between fantasy and reality lies early in life. A bit of a scare now and then might even help them to think more deeply about life’s consequences and make better choices.

If that spell book had been less scary and disgusting, like something that Wiccans use that involves pretty things like crystals and herbs instead of entrails, I actually might have tried a few spells as a child, probably raiding the spice drawer in the kitchen or dismantling my rock collection for spell ingredients. However, Jenny Nicholson did a YouTube video, demonstrating how that typically goes for the aspiring witch. I thought it was hilarious, especially after my childhood escapade. I doubt that I would have had quite the range of objects that Jenny describes, and my parents would have been mad at me if I tried to throw eggs at trees, but I probably would have achieved similar levels of results if my friend and I had actually gone through with our experiment that Halloween. As an adult, I mostly think that things like that are more psychological tricks than anything else, and I find descriptions of them amusing now.

Anyway, that’s my creepy experience with “real” magic. If anyone thinks that they know what that creepy spell book was, feel free to tell me. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove magic-wise, but I still have people I’d like to convince that I didn’t just imagine that the book exists.

Posted on by TracyC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction

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

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

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