students – Page 3 – Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

Posted on October 16, 2023 by TracyC · 1 Comment

Down a Dark Hall

Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, 1974.

Fourteen-year-old Kathryn Gordy, called Kit, is going to boarding school for the first time. She doesn’t really want to attend the Blackwood School for Girls, but her widowed mother has remarried, and she and Kit’s new stepfather, Dan, will be going on an extended honeymoon in Europe. Kit tried to persuade her mother to take her with them on the trip to Europe, but Dan is firm that she can’t come on their honeymoon trip. The Blackwood School has a good reputation, and graduation from the school would guarantee Kit entrance to a good college. At first, Kit thought it might not be so bad if her best friend, Tracy, could attend the school, too, but although Tracy applied to Blackwood, she wasn’t accepted there. Kit hates the idea of going there alone. Worse still, when her mother and Dan take her to the school, it’s an imposing, castle-like mansion that gives Kit the creeps. Her mother and Dan think it looks impressive, but just the sight of the building gives Kit a terrible sense of evil. Even though she doesn’t want to stay, her mother and Dan insist.

Because her mother and Dan have to leave on their trip, Kit has arrived at the school a day early, before classes will start. Madame Duret, the headmistress of the school, welcomes them and explains a little about the school’s history. The school is fairly new. Before it was a school, the mansion was the private home of a man called Brewer, who died about ten years ago. Because few people would want a house that size outside of town, the building was vacant for some time before the Blackwood School moved in, and there are some ghost stories and urban legends about it in the area. Kit’s mother and Dan laugh it off.

Madame Duret gives them a tour of the school and mentions her art collection. She says that she enjoys collecting lesser-known works by famous artists. The dorm rooms are incredibly luxurious. Each student will have a room to herself with a private bath and a canopied bed with velvet draperies. Art is important to Madame Duret, and she says that she wants the surroundings to inspire her students. When it comes time for Kit’s mother to say goodbye to her, her mother asks her if she thinks she could be happy at the school. If Kit really feels like there’s something wrong with the place, her mother is willing to delay her trip and make other arrangements. Shrugging off her earlier misgivings, Kit tells her mother that she will be fine, and her mother and Dan leave.

The school still bothers Kit, but she feels like she has to try to do well there for her mother’s sake. She knows that things have been hard for her since her father died several years before. Although nobody believes her, Kit remembers seeing her father’s ghost in her room the night he died in a car accident while he was on a business trip. Her mother has managed since then, but she wasn’t really happy until she met Dan, and Kit appreciates that her mother needs adult companionship. Still, Kit senses that this school is very strange, and there are things wrong it it. She can’t figure out why her friend, Tracy, was rejected by the school. The canopied bed is luxurious but kind of creepy because it reminds her of a scary story. Then, she notices that the bedroom doors have locks on the outside of the doors but not the inside.

At dinner that evening, Kit meets Professor Farley, who is a teacher at the school, and Madame Duret’s son, Jules. Professor Farley teaches math and science, and Jules, who has only recently gotten his degree, will teach music, giving the students piano lesssons. Madame Duret herself teaches languages and literature, and apart from these three, there are no other teachers at the school. Professor Farley says that he is the one who convinced Madame Duret to open a school in the United States, having seen her success at her school in England. A young cook named Natalie also works at the school, but strangely, Natalie says that Madame Duret doesn’t want her to speak to the students much.

When the other students begin arriving, Kit realizes that there aren’t going to be many students at this school, either. In fact, there are only three other students besides Kit: Sandy, Lynda, and Ruth. All of the girls also seem to be somewhat removed from their families. Sandy is an orphan who lives with her grandparents, who don’t drive, so they didn’t even drop her off at the school. Lynda and Ruth have both been to boarding schools before, and they were dropped off by a chauffeur. They say that Blackwood isn’t like their old school. Kit still wonders why Tracy wasn’t accepted to the school when there are so few students. Kit realizes that she herself isn’t a top student, and the other three students at this school are quite different from each other. However, Professor Farley says that there are other qualifications besides grades, and all of the girls at this school have the qualities they were looking for. Madame Duret refuses to discuss test results at all.

Kit does her best to settle into the school. Everyone acts nice to each other, and the classes are like having private tutors because there are so few students. However, Kit is still nervous and having strange dreams. She never remembers what she’s been dreaming about, but she dreads these strange dreams, so she has trouble getting to sleep. The only way she can get to sleep is to exhaust herself by reading and writing letters late at night until she is exhausted.

One night, while Kit is writing a letter to Tracy late at night, she hears a scream that is choked off suddenly. Although Kit is afraid, she feels like she has to investigate and find out if there is someone in trouble. She thinks the scream came from Sandy’s room. When Kit tries to check on Sandy, Sandy doesn’t answer, and she has trouble getting into Sandy’s room. Kit feels like there is someone in Sandy’s room, and the room is weirdly cold. When Kit finally gets the light on, Sandy is a little disoriented. She doesn’t remember screaming, but she remembers a strange dream about a young woman in old-fashioned clothing, who was watching her. Sandy tells Kit that she’s had strange dreams like this before, although not about this particular woman. When her parents were killed in a plane accident, Sandy sensed the accident when it happened, and she saw her parents in a dream, not unlike the apparent dream that Kit had about her father when he died. The next day, Kit talks to Lynda and Ruth and learns that they have also been having strange dreams that they have trouble remembering.

These dreams seem to be the one thing that all four of the Blackwood girls have in common, and all of them find them disturbing. When Kit has morning piano lessons, she feels strangely tired and her fingers are sore, as if she’s been playing the piano for hours already. Kit tries to talk to Jules about the strange things that have been happening and her own sense of unease. He tries to give her reasonable explanations, but from the way he speaks, Kit has the uneasy feeling like he knows something that he’s not telling. Jules tells Kit that he’s had some strange dreams himself, but he thinks it’s just the atmosphere of the strange old house. Kit asks him if he’s still having the dreams, and he says he is, but he also likes the house and thinks that it’s just a matter of getting used to the place.

Strange things continue to happen at the school. Lynda wakes up from a nap and suddenly draws an incredibly realistic portrait of Kit when she’s never even taken art classes or done any drawing before. Then, someone steals the portrait out of Kit’s room. Letters and post cards from Kit’s mother and Tracy reveal that they haven’t received any of the letters that she’s been writing to them. Sandy tells Kit that she has a sense that Blackwood School is evil, just like Kit felt when she first arrived.

Ruth is the one who realizes that all of the girls have ESP. Sandy and Kit both experienced ESP when they saw visions of their dead parents. Ruth admits that her excellent grades are only partly due to her naturally high IQ. She can also sense the contents of books without reading them and read the minds of people giving her tests, so she can give them exactly the answers they’re looking for. Lynda isn’t as bright as the other girls, but Ruth has been friends with her for a long time and has discovered that Lynda has memories of herself in a past life, when she lived in Victorian England. Ruth realizes that the girls’ psychic abilities are the reason why the four of them, and only the four of them, were chosen to be students at Blackwood School. The school has a dark purpose beyond providing an education, and these four isolated girls are there to fulfill that purpose.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It was also made into a movie in 2018.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I read this book because it was mentioned as a book a character was reading in another children’s book, The Shimmering Ghost of Riversend, and because it occurred to me that it would fit the Dark Academia genre that’s been popular in the last few years. The reason why this book was mentioned in the other story is that both books involve ghosts who have the ability to act through other people and help them to do things that the living people couldn’t do by themselves. I have a tolerance limit on scary stories, but I felt like I had to read this one because it was mentioned in the other book, and I was curious about it. I’m not sure that I want to see the movie because trailers of the movie make it look even darker than the book, but the book didn’t go beyond my tolerance limits.

In Down a Dark Hall, Madame Duret has psychic abilities of her own and is using girls with psychic abilities to channel the spirits of famous dead people so they can complete works that they were unable to complete in life. Lynda draws and paints pictures that she shouldn’t be able to produce because she has no natural talent for art or training in it. She also begins signing her pictures with the initials TC because she is actually channeling the spirit and abilities of Thomas Cole. Sandy begins writing sonnets without having any prior interest and ability in poetry before because she is channeling Emily Bronte. Ruth finds herself making mathematical notes that are really too advanced for her and barely within her understanding. She’s not sure who she’s been channeling because the scientific and mathematical principles she’s been receiving have little personality attached to them. The reason why Kit’s fingers are always sore and she’s so tired every morning is that she’s been channeling Schubert and other musicians, playing piano music at night. There is one night when multiple musicians fight to control her and get their music out.

The girls are not channeling these spirits through any will or conscious effort of their own. Each of these episodes occurs either while the girls are asleep or just after they wake up from having been asleep. Madame Duret isn’t just facilitating this possession for the sake of art, literature, and scholarship, but also out of greed. She is known for having an impressive collection of works of little-known works of art from famous artists, but what no one else knows is that those works were not produced within the artists’ lifetimes. She has performed this same trick of using the psychic abilities of students to channel the spirits of dead artists to produce new works before, and she artificially ages these works so no one knows that they are new instead of previously-undiscovered works.

Being possessed by the spirits of the dead is disturbing enough, but the girls of Blackwood School also come to realize that the psychic bonds between them and these famous spirits are getting stronger over time. If they don’t find a way to escape Blackwood School soon, they will become permanent. Records in Madame Duret’s office reveal that some of her previous students died from their experiences, and others lost their minds and ended up in mental institutions. No one could stand this type of channeling over the long term and keep their sanity intact, and the spirits themselves don’t seem to have much or any concern for the well-being of the girls channeling them. They seem to have so many ideas that they want to get out that they push the girls harder and harder to produce them. Some of the spirits are gentler and more personable than others, but some regard the girls simply as tools to be used. They can even get violent when the girls resist them or when different spirits interrupt each other’s work. This is a very creepy book, and the girls have some close calls, but fortunately, it has a good ending. I like atmospheric books, but I don’t like books that are overly dark, and I was relieved that all the girls survived. I would have found it hard to take if children died during the course of the story.

Although I knew before reading the book that the story involved ghosts and possession, I initially thought that the isolation each girl has from family and friends was part of the reason why these particular girls were chosen for the school. Before I found out that each girl has psychic abilities, I noticed that none of them are in a position where they are very closely watched by their relatives. Kit’s mother and stepfather are going to be traveling through Europe, so they won’t be trying to visit the school anytime soon, and it would make sense if they didn’t hear from Kit for a while. Sandy is an orphan whose grandparents can’t travel easily, so they won’t be coming to check on her every weekend. Lynda’s mother is an actress who now lives in Italy, so again, there is a separation by great physical distance. Ruth’s parents are busy professionals with doctorates. None of the girls is likely to have any visitors while she’s at school or anybody who would be overly concerned about not hearing from them for a while. At first, I thought that could have been part of the reason why Tracy was rejected as a student, because she has both parents living, and those parents would be in more of a position to check on her and more likely to go to the school themselves if they didn’t hear from her. However, it turns out that her rejection is really because she isn’t psychic, like Kit. The chosen students’ relative isolation from family is just icing on the cake to their psychic abilities and plays into the plot as a reason why nobody outside the school realizes all the weird things that are going on.

I thought that the build-up of the sinister atmosphere at the school was great! Kit has a blatant sense of evil when she first arrives, which feels at first like we’re just being told that the place is evil, but there are also a lot of little details that support it. First, the place is overly luxurious for a boarding school, especially one with so few students to support it. Kit is quick to spot that the girls’ doors can only lock from the outside, which is chilling, although Jules says that’s just to keep people from going into their rooms when they’re not there themselves. However, someone does enter Kit’s locked room to take the portrait of her that Lynda drew, indicating that the girls’ rooms are not safe from anyone and that it’s possible for them to be locked in and unable to get out.

There are also hints from the beginning of the book that Madame Duret and Professor Farley are sinister. Blackwood is actually Madame Duret’s third school that we know about. She had one in France, one in England, and now, one in the US. For some reason, she tends to move countries, which seems odd for someone building a reputation as an elite educator. Boarding schools often have an air of tradition, and their reputations rest on long-term success, which is built over time. Moving around is actually a warning sign, at least to me, that Madame Duret doesn’t want to stay places long enough for people to figure out what she’s really been doing at her schools. Even Jules admits that he doesn’t know things about his mother because he has spent most of his life at other boarding schools himself, not at her schools, so the two of them have mostly been living apart. However, he does know about the possessions of the girls because he has the recordings of the music Kit plays at night. It’s just that he doesn’t fully realize the harm being done to the girls until the end of the book or the harm his mother has already done to previous students.

The old mansion the school is in has a sinister history. The former owner, Mr. Brewer, lost his wife and children, including a baby, in a fire at the house, mostly due to smoke inhalation because the fire didn’t damage the building too badly. After that, he lived as a recluse, and he would act like his family was still alive, buying things for them in town. He could have just lost his mind from grief, but there are indications that his family still haunted the house as ghosts. Locals started telling ghost stories about the place after a plumber heard a baby crying in the house.

Recent reprintings of this book have been updated to include the concepts of laptops, cell phones, and emails, which were not in use when the book was first written. The explanation for why the girls can’t use their laptops to email anybody or get outside help is that there is no Wi-Fi or Internet access at the school. They can write reports on their laptops, but they can’t do much else. Their cell phones don’t get signals, so they can’t call or text anyone.

The version of the book that I used for the cover image is one of the new, revised books with modern technology, and it also has an interview with the author, Lois Duncan, in the back, in which she talks about the inspiration behind the story, her own beliefs about ghosts and psychic abilities, and how she was impacted by the murder of her own daughter, which she earlier documented in a book called Who Killed My Daughter?, in which she consulted psychics for insight into her daughter’s death because the police seemed unable to make progress in the case. Her daughter’s murder happened in 1989, years after Down a Dark Hall was written. Lois Duncan wrote many suspense books for children and young adults, but after her daughter’s death, she gave up writing suspense because it was too upsetting for her to write about girls in danger. She started writing picture books instead. Duncan had already passed away by the time one of the suspects in the case confessed more than 30 years after the murder.

Posted on October 2, 2023 by TracyC

Witch Week

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones, 1982.

This is the third book in the Chrestomanci series. In this series, there are many different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person. Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. However, there is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds. This person is called the Chrestomanci. All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives. The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions and between worlds, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course.

This story takes place in a world where witches are being burned at the stake in the 1980s. At a boarding school for troubled children and orphans, everyone is aware of what an accusation of witchcraft can mean. One day, one of the teachers finds a note in a social studies book saying that one of the students in class 6B is a witch. It’s a serious accusation, but how seriously should anyone take it? This is, after all, a school for troubled children, and children in general play pranks. Mr. Crossly finds the note worrying. Some of the teachers are convinced that this is just a prank or someone playing up for attention. Miss Hodge says that there is a sick mind in class 6B. Mr. Wentworth, whose own son, Brian, is in that class, says that he’s sure that all of the kids in class 6B have sick minds, but that’s just typical. He thinks it’s best if the teachers take no notice of the note. But, the note is correct. There is a witch in class 6B.

Strange things start happening in class 6B and to the students in that class. A flock of assorted birds swarms into their music class. In gym class, Nan Pilgrim can’t manage to climb the rope, no matter how hard she tries. When she and two other students are called to have lunch with the headmistress, Nan finds herself making disgusting comments about the food without her even wanting to say anything, but for some reason, the headmistress can’t hear a thing she says, even though the other students can. Then, it is revealed that Nan’s real name is Dulcinea, which is the name of a famous witch. Could Nan secretly be the witch in class 6B?

Although she can’t openly admit it, Nan is descended from the famous witch Dulcinea, who tried to stop the persecution of witches, and she is also what is called a “witch orphan”, meaning that her parents were witches. However, Nan insists that she’s not a witch herself, and Nan isn’t the only suspicious student in the class. Everyone there is troubled in some way. Brian Wentworth is often picked on for being the son of a teacher. Simon Silverson, Dan Smith, and Theresa Mullet are bullies. They are all eager to point fingers at Nan for being a witch, but could that be to cover up for themselves?

Charles Morgan was sent to the boarding school because his parents think that he is troubled and disobedient and a bad influence on his younger brother. In a way, he is very troubled, but he can’t explain what is really troubling him. When he was younger, he witnessed a witch being burned, something that still traumatizes him. Then, he helped another witch who was being hunted to escape. He can’t admit to his parents that he helped this witch because it was illegal, but the witch promised him good luck for doing so. So far, he hasn’t noticed any good luck, and he feels terrible every time he hears about another witch being burned, thinking that it might be his witch. It all makes him angry and depressed, and he hates the boarding school and everyone there.

Miss Hodge tries to investigate the students by having them act out witchcraft inquisitions. Since most of the children don’t know what happens at an inquisition and aren’t very good actors, most of them are terrible at it. But, she comes to think maybe Charles is the witch because he gets angry at Nan over all the disgusting things she said at lunch and taunts her about them in a way that makes it sound like he’s saying some kind of spell.

When Miss Hodge tries to tell Mr. Wentworth about it, he shrugs it off because he also heard the things Nan said at lunch. Mr. Wentworth interviews Nan about why she said all those things at lunch, but she can’t explain herself. She doesn’t know what made her say those things. Sometimes, she just can’t seem to help herself, and she felt almost possessed. Mr. Wentworth knows about her family’s history and warns her to be careful.

Then, when Charles is trying to escape from some bullies, he somehow manages to turn himself invisible. He doesn’t understand it, but he tries to do something else magical as a test. Since Dan Smith hid his spiked shoes earlier, Charles tries making Dan’s spiked shoes disappear. To Charles’s horror and astonishment, he succeeds! Somehow, he has apparently been a witch the whole time without knowing it. Charles thinks maybe he did some of the other strange things without knowing it, too. He’s always heard that witches are evil, and he thinks maybe he has secretly been evil this whole time and had better confess. An accidental mix-up when he goes looking for the headmistress stops him from confessing immediately, but it leaves him unsure what to do.

Mr. Wentworth has a private conversation with Charles about Miss Hodge’s suspicions about him. He knows what Charles was really talking about when he was arguing with Nan, but he points out to Charles how bad it might sound to someone who didn’t know what he was talking about. Information about witches and the past witch uprisings is drastically censored. There is almost nothing about it in the school library, but Mr. Wentworth understands the situation and explains it to Charles in a no-nonsense way. Nan’s ancestress, Dulcinea Wilkes, had been an advocate for witch’s rights in the 18th century, particularly the right not to be murdered. She said that witches couldn’t help being witches because they were born that way, and it wasn’t fair for them to be murdered for something they just couldn’t help. She said that witches would only use their powers in good ways if people would stop hunting them and burning them, but the murders and burnings continued, and Dulcinea lost her temper. She retaliated with violent spells that frightened people so much that they also murdered Dulcinea by burning her. In remembrance of that, people still continue to burn effigies of her, like they do of Guy Fawkes. Mr. Wentworth says that he thinks what happened to Dulcinea was unfair, but he is worried about his students because there has never been so much stigma against witches at any earlier point in history. Although his students wouldn’t remember it, there was a major witch uprising around the time they were all born. The news of this uprising was largely hushed-up, but the witches attempted to take over the entire government. The revolutionaries were all civil servants, and they were all burned when the uprising was crushed, but the government has been paranoid about anyone with any sign of witchcraft since. When they learned that the leader of the uprisings started showing signs of witchcraft when he was about 11 years old, they even started allowing children to be arrested for witchcraft, even on slight suspicion. The inquisitors have powers that go largely unchecked. Mr. Wentworth knows that any of his students can be hauled away and executed with little recourse.

Even though Mr. Wentworth is concerned with protecting Charles, Charles gets angry with him for giving him a black mark as a reminder to control his behavior, and he glares at Mr. Wentworth. It’s a terrible mistake. It turns out that Charles has the evil eye, and it seems like he accidentally makes Mr. Wentworth disappear. Although Charles tries to pretend like everything is normal, he is desperate on the inside. Soon, someone will realize that Mr. Wentworth is missing and that Charles was the last person to see him. He even tries burning his own finger on a candle to remind himself that burning hurts, and he needs to control himself to avoid being burned to death. When he tries to fix what he’s done with magic, Mr. Wentworth does return, but everyone’s shoes mysteriously disappear.

To Charles’s surprise, the memories of the witch he saw burned and the witch he helped to escape stop bothering him so much after he knows and accepts that he is a witch himself. It’s like he’s always known, inside, that he would be a witch, and once he becomes reconciled to his true nature, he becomes calmer and more self-confident. He knows that he can’t stop being a witch. He can only try to avoid being caught. However, it turns out that he is not the only student who has witchcraft, and when the desperate students seek help or a method of escape from this prison-like school, they accidentally summon Chrestomanci to straighten everything out.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).

My Reaction and Spoilers

Alternate Worlds

Like all of the books in the Chrestomanci series, this book takes place in an alternate world or alternate reality. It explores not only the suspicion and paranoia that go with witch hunts but also the mechanism by which these alternate worlds or realities are created. When the students who have realized that they are witches try to escape, they are given a spell that calls Chrestomanci from his world to theirs. Chrestomanci is accustomed to being summoned to random places on short notice (it’s just one of the hassles that come with the job), but he finds this particular world puzzling. He knows from the similarities between this world and others in the series of worlds that contains his own that he must be in that particular series of worlds, but he recognizes immediately that there is something wrong with it. It has way too many similarities with the world that is “our” world in the series, but yet, there shouldn’t be any witch trials or burnings in the 1980s. He explains that alternate worlds are created when there is some major event that has only two outcomes with an equal chance of happening. Every time that happens, the world splits into two separate worlds where each of the possibilities happen. Because this world is so much like the world that is “ours”, he knows that whatever event caused the split happened fairly recently in history, but for some reason, the split wasn’t complete. There is no real magic in “our” world, but this odd, dysfunctional, split-off world is full of it.

By talking to the students about what they know about the history of their world, Chrestomanci is able to pinpoint the event that caused the problem. As with other Chrestomanci books, Chrestomanci doesn’t just magically solve the problem all by himself, but once he understands the situation, he shows the students at the school where the problem lies and what they need to do to fix it themselves, making use of their own powers, and even some of the mistakes they’ve made, to set their world right and re-integrate their world with “our” world. Once their world is repaired, it’s as if all the witch trials never happened. People who were burned are alive again, and people who were in prison are living perfectly normal lives. The children must sacrifice their magical abilities and all or most of their memories of their old lives to join with our world, which some of them are initially reluctant to do, but once they do it, all of their lives change for the better. Orphans have their parents back, the school is now a day school instead of a boarding school where the children were basically prisoners, and the children are all much friendlier toward each other now that they are no longer part of that toxic atmosphere, where suspicions always surrounded them and everyone is afraid of exposure.

Themes and Spoilers

Parts of the story were stressful because of the bullying among the students and the constant threat of imprisonment or death for any child who was proven to be a witch. Most of the adults are not that concerned with the welfare of the students because this entire society is engulfed with paranoia, and everyone is desperate to protect themselves at all cost. The adults are often so preoccupied with saving themselves that they would be willing to throw the children to the wolves rather than face imprisonment or death themselves. The major exception is Mr. Wentworth, who tries to warn children who show signs of witchcraft that they need to be careful. His efforts to protect the children are touching because he has more to lose than some of the other teachers who play along with the politics and paranoia of their society. (Spoiler!) Mr. Wentworth and his son Brian are both witches, and Mr. Wentworth is being blackmailed for most of his salary by the headmistress. Mr. Wentworth advocates self-control to the students as the best way to avoid being caught, but it soon becomes apparent that nobody with witchcraft abilities can fight using them forever. That’s why some of the children’s abilities come out unconsciously, without them even being fully aware of what they’re doing. That’s where the mystery of the story comes in.

Chrestomanci books always contain an element of mystery in some way or other, and from the beginning of the story, there are the questions of who wrote the note about there being a witch in class and who the witch is. We never learn who wrote the note (I don’t remember that being definitely revealed), and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. When Charles realizes that he is a witch, that seems like the answer. However, Charles is not the only witch in class. As one of the other students points out, all of the weird things that have been happening at the school are very different in character, so there is more than one person involved. By the end of the book, it is revealed that (spoiler) the vast majority of the students at the school are witches. Some have been doing magical things unconsciously as their powers have started asserting themselves, and some have done things on purpose because they know they can. Chrestomanci realizes that many more people in their society in general are witches than these paranoid people ever suspected, and witches are only regarded as a minority because of the atmosphere of fear they live in. Everyone has been trying so hard to conceal any sign of abnormality that they all have a warped view of who they all really are and what their society is actually like.

I couldn’t help but notice that, witch or not, absolutely nobody in this society can be called an innocent person. Everybody is doing something illegal, unethical, or simply deceptive. They all have secrets, and they all do things to cover up what they’re doing. Even non-witches are often doing horrible things that they have to cover up. The apparently sweet and proper headmistress is actually a cold-hearted blackmailer. Teachers are manipulative for personal and professional reasons. The so-called “normal” (or “real”, as Nan thinks of it) children are all either secret witches or just horrible bullies and rotten human beings. Like their elders, the “normal” children are sneakily manipulative and practice blackmail and brutality against the other students, knowing that’s the way to get to top of their social heap. As I said, the entire society is toxic, not just the school, and everything the children do is a reflection of their elders (and vice versa, when you think about it). Grown-up witch hunters are like overgrown child bullies, and people like the headmistress probably started their blackmail and manipulation at a young age, just like the students, as tools of survival and self-promotion in this cold, toxic, pitiless world.

The normalization of the toxic parts of this world is both stressful and worrying. People can adjust to many awful things if they are not given any alternative, and that’s what this dysfunctional world represents. There are moments of lightness, though, and some characters are more caring than others. The story is told from the point-of-view of different characters, and much of this book is a psychological study in the different ways people deal with bullying, suspicion, and paranoia. As I said, Mr. Wentworth risks himself sometimes to help students in danger and make them see the seriousness of their situation. Some of the students band together to try to help each other survive their mutual risk, while others are more self-centered, prepared to throw each other under the bus to save themselves. It’s a relief to see all of that end when the world is set right, but it occurs to me that the story has exposed all of the characters’ true characters, what each of them are capable of doing in extreme circumstances. The extreme circumstances brought out the worst in some characters, while others were more creative and caring in spite of everything.

Posted on September 18, 2023 by TracyC

The Secret Language

The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom, 1960.

“Sooner or later everyone has to go away from home for the first time. Sometimes it happens when a person is young. Sometimes it happens when a person is old. But sooner or later it does happen to everyone. It happened to Victoria North when she was eight.”

Victoria North is attending boarding school for the first time at the Coburn Home School. Victoria is only eight years old, and this is her first time being away from home at all, so she is very nervous and shy. When she arrives at the school, she is met by an older girl named Ann, who shows her where her room is in the dormitory. Ann shares a room with Victoria and is supposed to show her around and tell her the rules, but she doesn’t really explain much. Victoria still feels lost and has trouble even finding the table where she is supposed to sit at dinner.

At dinner, one of the other girls, Martha Sherman, starts uses funny words, and she tells the other girls that they are part of a secret language that she made up. However, she refuses to tell anybody what they mean. Martha is moody and rude to the other girls at dinner, so the housemother sends her to her room before the meal is over.

Overcome with homesickness, Victoria cries at dinner and during the songs they have to sing afterward. No one has any patience with poor Victoria. Ann tells her that she’s being a crybaby. Other girls laugh at her when they see that she’s been crying. Victoria doesn’t know how she’ll be able to handle boarding school if every day is going to be like this!

The other girls in the dormitory say that Miss Mossman, the housemother, is strict. She blows her whistle at them and makes them line up for inspection every morning. Miss Blanchard, another teacher, is nicer, and she tries to reassure Victoria that things will get better when she gets to know the other students and makes some friends. However, nobody seems to want to be friends with Victoria. Nobody except Martha.

Martha is the only girl who seems interested in talking to Victoria. Martha doesn’t like Coburn Home School, either. More than anything, Martha wants to live at home and just go to an ordinary day school instead of being boarder. Victoria knows just how Martha feels! The other girls are surprised at how well Martha seems to get along with Victoria because Martha doesn’t usually want to be friendly with anyone.

The two of them start to talk about their homes and families. Martha’s father is an importer. She keeps saying that her parents are going to let her come home from boarding school and just go to day school, but it quickly becomes apparent that it isn’t likely. Victoria only has her mother, who works and sometimes needs to travel for work. She doesn’t even remember much about her father. Martha likes math, a subject which Victoria finds hard, but Martha says that she doesn’t reading, which is Victoria’s favorite subject. The two complement each other well.

Although Martha misses home, like Victoria does, and doesn’t really want to be a boarder, she is more experienced about boarding school life, and she helps Victoria to adjust to the school. Martha starts teaching Victoria about pieces of boarding school lore, like school rhymes and the traditions made up and passed down by students, and she also begins teaching her the secret language that she made up. There are only three words in Martha’s secret language, but Martha explains to Victoria what they mean, and the girls decide that they’ll make up more together. Martha becomes Victoria’s best friend all through the rest of her first year at boarding school.

Being friends with Martha makes boarding school feel better to Victoria. Martha still constantly talks about hating boarding school and how she definitely won’t come back next year, although Victoria realizes that’s just a wish of hers. Victoria also comes to realize that many other kids at the boarding school feel the same way. Even the ones who like the school admit that they’d really rather be at home with their parents. They daydream about just going to school during the day and coming straight home afterward, where they can just relax at home and eat what they want and not have to answer to whistles or line up for inspections. When Ann’s family decides to bring her home, Martha and Victoria ask Miss Mossman if they can share a room, and she agrees as long as the girls behave themselves.

Victoria is fascinated at the things that Martha knows about life at boarding school. Martha teaches her about “pie beds.” (I always heard it called “short-sheeting” when I was a kid, although I was never good at making beds the normal way in the first place, so I never fully grasped how to pull off the trick, and I didn’t go to summer camp or boarding school, where people typically did this anyway.) The girls argue about what costumes to wear to the school’s Halloween party, but the school’s handy man helps them make ice cream cone costumes that win a prize for the most original costume. The costumes are uncomfortable to wear, but Victoria is pleased and thinks that Martha should get the credit because the costume concept was her idea. Martha says that, next year, they’ll start planning their costumes earlier and come up with an even better idea. That’s the moment when Victoria realizes that Martha is no longer talking about how she’s definitely not coming back next year.

After the girls come back from Christmas vacation, Victoria is homesick again, but it turns out that their old, strict housemother has left to take care of her father, who is ill. Instead, they get a new housemother, Miss Denton, who is much nicer. She doesn’t blow whistles at the girls to wake them up. Victoria likes Miss Denton right away, and even the other girls in the house start calling her “Mother Carrie” as Miss Denton requests, even though the name strikes them all as silly at first. Martha finds Miss Denton to be overly sweet (“ick-en-spick” in the secret language), although she admits that she’s better than Miss Mossman.

Martha also finds herself liking Miss Blanchard, who teaches math. Miss Blanchard was nice to Victoria in the beginning, but Victoria can’t bring herself to like her much because she has so much trouble in math. Victoria has a fanciful imagination and likes to imagine that certain numbers are boys and others are girls, and Martha finds it frustrating because the idea doesn’t make sense to her, and Victoria doesn’t even follow an exact pattern, like odds vs. evens in her designation. Meanwhile, Victoria is confused by the math tricks that Miss Blanchard teaches Martha. Martha thinks they’re fun, but Victoria isn’t as good at math and has trouble following them.

The two girls find themselves arguing sometimes because of their different preferences, but they remain friends. It’s more that, now that they’re getting comfortable with each other and their school, more of their individual personalities are coming out. Victoria is also surprised to realize that, while she still frequently misses her mother, she no longer agrees with her mother about certain things. When her mother comes to visit the school, she worries about Victoria sleeping in the top bunk of their bunk bed, but Victoria herself loves it and has to assure her mother that she likes the top bunk. One thing that boarding school has done for Victoria is to give her a sense of independence and room to develop her own identity and preferences. She no longer has to get her mother’s permission for everything she does, as long as her housemother approves.

Victoria and Martha are both imaginative, and they begin enjoy their shared adventures at school. They try to hold a midnight feast in their room and search for hidden passages or secret compartments in the dormitory because Martha has heard or read that these things happen in boarding schools. Neither of those adventures goes as planned, but Miss Denton allows the girls to build a little play hut of their own with help from the school’s handy man. Miss Denton also gives the girls a little lockbox to keep some of their treasures in, and they hide it so they can have a buried treasure.

As the year comes to an end, Victoria knows that she’ll be coming back to boarding school next year, and the prospect doesn’t seem so bad as it did before. Martha isn’t sure whether she will or not, talking sometimes about what they’ll do next year but still hoping to live at home with her parents. But, if Martha doesn’t come back to school, it just wouldn’t be the same for Victoria!

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

One of the things I found interesting about this book is that it is set in the US. The iconic boarding school stories for children tend to be British stories, but the Coburn Home School is in New York state. The girls’ parents live in New York City.

Most of the story focuses on the girls’ relationship with each other and their growing sense of self-identity and confidence at their boarding school. They talk about classes they take and how they each feel about the other’s favorite subject, but they aren’t shown in classes themselves. The school is also a co-ed school, with both boys and girls, but the boys don’t enter into the story much because most of the action takes place around the girls’ dorm. The boys live in a different dorm. There is only one instance where a boy is shown talking to Victoria, with a hint that he might have a crush on Victoria, another new development in Victoria’s life at school. The little developments in the girls’ lives and attitudes through the school year and each little experience and adventure they have are the main focus of the story. These are the things that are helping the girls understand and develop their identities, self-confidence, and sense of independence.

Toward the end of the book, Miss Denton encourages the girls to think about all of the things they’ve learned this year, and not just the ones they’ve learned in class. The girls don’t fully understand and appreciate that Miss Denton is talking about personal growth and development, but they do consider things they’ve learned, like how to make beds, that midnight feasts aren’t as fun as they sound, and how Victoria learned not to be homesick. These are some of the little things that are part of their school experience and that are slowly making them more grown up and independent than they used to be.

Although Martha is a little older than Victoria and sometimes chides her for being babyish about some things (like putting a lose tooth under her pillow) or still homesick, the truth is that Martha has been just as homesick the entire time. Martha doesn’t appear to be as upset about boarding school as Victoria because she is not a new student in this book, like Victoria. She already went through her first year at boarding school before Victoria got there, so she no longer openly cries about being away from home. Still, the reason why she keeps talking about going home and living with her parents all the time is that she misses them. While the girls’ adventures during the school year and Victoria’s realizations about how boarding school gives her the opportunity to do things and be with people she wouldn’t at home make her feel better about coming back next year, Martha still feels uncertain about it. Martha has also come to love being friends with Victoria and even loves Miss Denton, but her feelings of homesickness leave her feeling torn about what she really wants.

There are hints that Martha will probably return to boarding school anyway, but Miss Denton reassures Victoria that she will be fine at boarding school even if Martha decides not to come next fall, reminding Victoria that she is now one of the “old girls” instead of a scared new one, like she used to be. Victoria also starts to feel that way herself. Martha will probably be back the next year to be with Victoria, Miss Denton, and Miss Blanchard, but readers can be reassured that, even if she doesn’t return, Victoria will be all right with her new sense of identity and independence. This first year at boarding school with Martha may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship or just one step to Victoria finding herself and building other friendships. Maybe it’s both. Victoria’s future life will be fine in general as she continues growing up and finding her way, learning to manage her life one step at a time.

There is a modern 21st century documentary about young children going to boarding school for the first time at 8 years old, What’s Life Like in a Private British Boarding School? | Leaving Home at 8 Years Old, on YouTube. The school in that documentary is British, but I was struck by the common feelings in the documentary and the book, even though they take place decades apart in different countries. There are just some parts of the human experience that last through the generations. The documentary also shows the parents’ side of the boarding school experience, the reasons why they choose to send their children to boarding school, and how they cope with their feelings about sending their children away and being separated from them.

Boarding school isn’t always easy for parents in terms of emotions, and there are hints of that in The Secret Language. We never see Martha’s parents in the book, so we don’t know what’s going on with them, but Victoria’s mother fusses over Victoria when she gets the chance, and she talks about how great it would be if she could arrange things so that Victoria can be home with her all the time again, too. If Victoria’s mother wasn’t a working single mother who has to travel for work, she probably wouldn’t have sent her away to boarding school at all. Miss Denton is very in tune with people’s feelings, and I think that she’s aware of all the complexities in the lives of the girls and their parents. She does her best to look after the girls emotionally, and that’s part of her urging the girls to consider other people’s feelings, to be thoughtful about each other, and to think about the ways they’ve been changing inside as well as outside. I think that the universal nature of the girls’ and adults’ feelings in the book are a sign of the author’s emotional awareness, understanding of how different types of people feel.

Ursula Nordstrom, the author of the book, was actually a famous children’s book editor. She is credited with helping to transform mid-20th century children’s literature to have more of a focus on children’s feelings, experiences, and imagination instead of being morality tales, focused on what adults want children to know or understand. The Secret Language was the only children’s book that she wrote herself. This YouTube video explains about her life and career.

Posted on September 11, 2023 by TracyC · 3 Comments

Go Jump in the Pool!

Go Jump in the Pool! by Gordon Korman, 1979.

This is the second book in the Bruno and Boots series (also called the MacDonald Hall series), which is about a pair of boys at a Canadian boarding school for boys and their humorous adventures and pranks.

Once again, Bruno and Boots are faced with a problem when Boots’s parents consider sending him to a different school. MacDonald Hall, unlike its athletic rival York Academy, doesn’t have its own swimming pool. MacDonald Hall is superior to York Academy in academics, but they often lose to them at swim meets because the MacDonald Hall team can only train at the local YMCA once week. Boots’s father is an athlete who once competed in the Olympics, and athletics are very important to him. Because of York’s superior athletic facilities, he’s considering sending Boots there instead. Bruno and Boots ask their headmaster why the school doesn’t have a pool, and he says that they want to build one but haven’t been able to raise the necessary money. Of course, Bruno, the idea man, immediately starts getting ideas.

Boots loves MacDonald Hall and doesn’t want to leave his friends, especially his best friend and roommate, Bruno. Although Bruno’s schemes often cause chaos, they do produce results in the end, so he is able to convince his friends to go along with them. While Boots writes letters home, talking about how great MacDonald Hall is and how much he loves it there, hoping to sway his parents’ minds, Bruno begins scheming for a way to raise the money so that MacDonald Hall can build a new pool.

First, Bruno gets the other students at the school to hold a rummage sale, selling things of their own and even some furnishings from their dorm rooms. The girls from Miss Scrimmage’s school across the road also join in their efforts, including donating some items that they liberated from their headmistress’s rooms. Mr. Sturgeon, the headmaster of MacDonald Hall is upset when he finds that the boys are holding a large public sale without his permission, and there are some complications because of the items that the girls stole from Miss Scrimmage, including the shotgun that she keeps for protection. While almost everyone would be relieved by someone else buying that gun and removing it from Miss Scrimmage’s dangerous hands, the purchaser turns out to be a robber, who uses the gun in a holdup. Chaos ensues when the police come to arrest Miss Scrimmage because the gun had her name and address engraved on it. However, Mr. Sturgeon manages to get the situation under control by explaining about the sale and giving Miss Scrimmage an alibi for the crime, and he is persuaded not to punish the boys by his wife, who is sympathetic to the boys, and a member of the school’s board of directors, who is impressed by the boys’ initiative and school spirit. However, Mr. Sturgeon tells the boys not to hold any more sales and that he needs to know about any future fundraising efforts.

Their next fundraising project is a talent show with students from both MacDonald Hall and Miss Scrimmage’s. It doesn’t go too badly, although there are complications. Mrs. Sturgeon’s attempts to take pictures of the performers startle the performers with bright flashes that cause a few accidents. Elmer’s bird calls accidentally attract an owl that flies away with Miss Scrimmage’s hat. Then, several of Miss Scrimmage’s girls modify their dancing costumes to make them skimpier, scandalizing Miss Scrimmage. In spite of the incidents of minor chaos, Mr. Sturgeon appreciates that the boys have managed to raise more money, and they’ve also managed to get some of the more shy students, including Elmer, to participate in school activities.

Mr. Sturgeon does put a stop to some of Bruno’s more inappropriate ideas. He refuses to let them hold a casino-themed fundraising event or bet on a race horse because he can’t condone gambling, and he won’t let them enter a fellow student in an eating contest out of concern for the student’s health. However, Bruno convinces his fellow students to enter any contest they can find with a cash prize. Unfortunately, some of the contests also have non-cash prizes, which is how they end up with a massive amount of jelly beans and a refrigerator. When Bruno asks Mr. Sturgeon for permission for them to hold a funny photo contest at the school, he agrees on the condition that the photos be tasteful enough for a school environment. Of course, the students’ attempts to deliberately produce humorous pictures also lead to some antics and bizarre pranks.

After that, the boys hold a kind of carnival that they call “Individual Effort Day” because each student gets to do their own kind of fundraising effort, making and selling things or producing some form of entertainment. While everyone, including the girls at Miss Scrimmage’s school, who are also participating, tries to come up with an original idea, some of the students try spying on each other and stealing ideas. Mr. Sturgeon particularly enjoys the game that Bruno and Boots are holding, where people pay to throw wet sponges at them. He accurately hits both of them and also hits Miss Scrimmage when she passes by. Cathy and Diane’s haunted house scares Miss Scrimmage, and Mr. Sturgeon gets hooked on an elaborate pinball game built by Elmer.

When Mr. Sturgeon points out that the boys have mostly been getting money from the students and parents of MacDonald Hall and Miss Scrimmage’s, Bruno takes his attempts to get money from the public too far by setting up a toll stop on the road that runs by the school. It’s illegal to get money under false pretenses, so Mr. Sturgeon calls a halt to all the fundraising efforts. However, he changes his mind when he finds out that some of the boys’ parents, including Boots’s parents, have been considering sending their boys to York Academy because of the pool issue. Realizing that the boys have been trying to save the school and continue going to school with their friends, Mr. Sturgeon lifts their punishment, although he still gives them a warning that if they do anything illegal again, it will jeopardize the rest of their lives.

The boys still have the problem that they are thousands of dollars short of their goal, even after Cathy wins a large cash prize in a recipe contest. There is still one student at the school who hasn’t contributed to all the fundraising efforts, though: Boots’s old roommate from the previous book in the series, the wealthy but stuffy and fussy hypochondriac, George. George has resisted getting involved in all the weird activities happening on campus because he considers them all “vulgar”, but when they finally explain to him that the point of it all is to raise funds for the school, he approves. If there’s one thing George knows how to do well, it’s manage money. George convinces them that they don’t need to raise more money from other people if they know how to put their money to work for them in the stock market. The other boys are a bit dubious about letting George invest their money, but George knows what he’s doing. Meanwhile, Boots’s parents have been taking all the letters he’s been writing them about how great MacDonald Hall is and how happy he is there to heart. In the end, they just want their son to be happy.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). It’s also one of the MacDonald Hall books that was made into a movie. You can sometimes see the trailer for the movie or clips of it on YouTube.

My Reaction

I always liked the Bruno and Boots series when I was a kid. The pranks aren’t quite as funny to me as when I was a kid, but I like it that the boys’ antics always have a purpose. I don’t like stories where people play pranks just to be mean, but the boys’ escapades in this series are always in support of their school and their friends.

There are also aren’t really any villains in the series, and there are no villainous characters in the story. Even when people are in opposition to the boys, they aren’t really evil. There is the rival school, which is snobby and rude to the boys, but other than giving the boys a motive for fundraising for the pool project, they don’t play much of a role in the story. The headmaster of MacDonald Hall is a good man who really cares for the boys, and even when he punishes them, he has their welfare at heart. The boys, especially Bruno, have a tendency to go too far with their schemes, and they do need someone to restrain them at times. George wasn’t a very likeable character in the previous the book, and even here, he’s kind of fussy and not too fond of Bruno and Boots. However, he also cares about the school, and this time, he has just the talents that they need. The other boys at the school also appreciate what George does for them, and they hail him as a hero.

I also appreciated that, in the end, Boots’s parents acknowledge that it’s more important for him to be happy with his school and his friends than for him to seriously train for the Olympics. Boots’s letters are overly enthusiastic about the things he’s been learning in class, and I’m sure his parents know that he’s not really that excited about his math lessons, but they can read between the lines and realize that the purpose of his letters is to indirectly ask them not to make him switch schools. Even if MacDonald Hall wasn’t able to get a swimming pool of their own, I think his parents would have agreed to let him stay there if he insisted that he just wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.

Posted on August 28, 2023 by TracyC

The Mystery of the Blue Ring

Polka Dot Private Eye

The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.

When Dawn Bosco first joined Ms. Rooney’s class at Polk Street School, she stole Emily Arrow’s toy unicorn. Now, that incident has come back to haunt her. When the book begins, her theft of Emily’s unicorn was just weeks ago. Now, she and Emily are starting to be friends, although their friendship is a bit shaky.

At school, the teachers are talking about vegetables because it’s Good Vegetable Day. Everything is geared around vegetables all day, and the art teacher has the children make sculptures of vegetables out of clay. Dawn is bored because she’s been reading a mystery book, and she’d rather be finding mysteries and learning to be a detective than making silly vegetables out of clay.

Dawn gets irritated with Emily when she says that she’ll make a cucumber, which is what Dawn was going to make because it’s easy. The teacher won’t let Dawn make a cucumber because Emily already claimed that idea, so Dawn has to make a carrot instead. (Not that much different in shape, really, except one end is more narrow.) However, she still resents Emily for using the cucumber idea first.

As the girls push against each other by the sink, cleaning up from using the clay, Dawn spots a ring next to the sink. Later, Emily says that her ring is missing. It’s a special ring with a blue stone that she got for her birthday. Dawn is pleased that she’s found a mystery to solve. Remembering that she saw a ring next to the sink in the art room, Dawn proudly goes back to the art room to see if she can find the ring and return victorious. However, the ring isn’t there when she checks.

Then, suspicion turns to Dawn herself. After all, everyone knows that Dawn stole Emily’s unicorn before. Instead of being the hero detective, Dawn is turning into the main suspect in this crime. Now, she really needs to find the ring to clear her name!

Dawn’s grandmother, Noni, gave her a special detective kit for her birthday. Dawn uses it to turn into The Polka Dot Private Eye to hunt down Emily’s ring.

The book is available to borrow online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I liked the way the series returned to the subject of Dawn’s theft and used it to spark a spin-off mystery series. This is the first of the Polka Dot Private Eye books. In this series, Dawn becomes a more likeable character than she was when she first appeared in Fish Face, and she gets a little comeuppance for her earlier, unpunished theft of Emily’s toy unicorn in the form of her classmates’ suspicion of her. When I read this book for the first time when I was a kid, I hadn’t read the book where Dawn was first introduced, Fish Face, so I didn’t really understand the relationship between Dawn and Emily and how Dawn took Emily’s toy unicorn. We never really find out in either book exactly why Dawn took the unicorn, although in this book, she thinks of herself as having “borrowed” it instead of having stolen it.

Reading Fish Face isn’t necessary to understand the basic story in this book, but after having read it, I appreciate Dawn’s position in this book a little better. By now, everyone knows what Dawn did, and although Dawn thinks of “weeks ago” as a long time ago, it’s not really that long, and it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. Dawn is still a relatively new kid in class, and one of the few things everyone knows about her is that she has a history of taking things that don’t belong to her. It is a logical conclusion that Dawn might have helped herself to another of Emily’s belongings when everyone knows that she’s done it before. As my grandfather used to say, it’s easier to keep a good reputation than to redeem a bad one, but Dawn works at it and learns that she likes being a detective and that she has a talent for figuring things out. After Dawn figures out where Emily’s ring is, the two of them become better friends. Solving the mystery also makes Dawn a class hero and begins to establish Dawn’s reputation as a person who likes to solve mysteries and crimes rather than commit them.

This book gets bonus points from me for mentioning jelly sandals. Jelly shoes were a regular part of my childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s, and I’ve seen some of them return again in the early 2000s, probably partly because people my age now have children, and they’re nostalgic for some of the things from their childhoods. Jelly shoes (or “jellies,” as we called them) are sandals and sandal-like shoes made from flexible plastic in different colors, some clear or with sparkles inside. They were cheap when I was a kid, and I used to get a new pair or two when the weather turned warm. Eventually, they wear out, and the plastic bits snap. I’d wear them around my backyard with my toes sticking out the front as they started breaking, and I started growing out of them. By the time they were too broken to use anymore, my toes were usually beyond the bottom of the shoes, and I was always kind of proud of that because it was a sign that I’d grown over the summer. It wasn’t much of a loss when the shoes wore out because they’d be too small for me at that point anyway, so we’d throw them away, and I’d wear more solid shoes when the weather turned cold. Jellies, flip-flops, and cheap canvas shoes were a major part of what I wore when I was young and growing out of shoes fairly quickly. They were all inexpensive, and while they didn’t last very long, they lasted about as long as they needed to before I needed the next size and weren’t much to lose when I was rough on them.

Posted on September 2, 2022 by TracyC

Frindle

Frindle by Andrew Clements, 1996.

Nick is a creative boy in elementary school who is known for pulling elaborate stunts, like turning his classroom into a tropical paradise with fake trees and real sand. When he gets to fifth grade, he has Mrs. Granger as his language arts teacher. Mrs. Granger has a sense of humor about some things, but she also has some strict rules and is all business when it comes to her specialist subject. Her vocabulary lists for her students are extensive, and her favorite thing is the unabridged dictionary. Nick likes words and enjoys reading, but he finds the dictionary to be boring. When he sees a word he doesn’t know, he would rather ask someone else what it means than look it up in the dictionary.

In most classes, Nick is good at asking teachers questions to sidetrack them from assigning homework. The other kids know he does this, so they aren’t surprised when he asks Mrs. Granger about her big unabridged dictionary and where all the words in it come from. Unfortunately, for Nick, Mrs. Granger is also onto his trick, and rather than answering the question herself, she assigns Nick to look up the answer and tell the rest of the class what he’s learned the next day in addition to his usual homework assignment. Nick is upset because he usually doesn’t have much homework at all, and now, he has to do more.

When Nick gets home, he reads about dictionaries in his encyclopedia, but he’s not sure that he understand everything he’s read, and it all sounds terribly dull. Then, Nick gets one of his creative ideas that he thinks will make this boring assignment more fun. When it’s time for Nick to give his report, even he is surprised at how much he has to say about the dictionary. Mrs. Granger loves his report, although even she tries to cut Nick short when he goes on for too long. Although the other kids were initially bored, they begin to enjoy Nick’s report when they realize that he is actually using it to waste an entire class period. Eventually, Mrs. Granger tells Nick that he’s at a good stopping place in his report, and she praises him for all of his work. Nick, annoyed that she’s making him look like a teacher’s pet, decides to ask one more question. He says that he still doesn’t understands who decides what the meanings of words are, like who decided that the word “dog” refers to a dog. Mrs. Granger tells him that everyone who speaks English does. Words mean whatever the people who use them agree that they mean. People who speak other languages use different words to refer to the same animal, but those words are valid to them because they all agree on the meaning of the words.

Then, Mrs. Granger says something that really starts Nick thinking. She says that if everyone in their classroom decided that they wanted to call a dog by some other word, and they got other English-speaking people to agree on it, that word would come to mean “dog.” If enough people agreed to use their new word and agreed on its definition, the new word would be put into the dictionary. To answer Nick’s original question, people who speak a language determine the words of that language and whether they are included in the dictionary. Mrs. Granger adds that the dictionary is the work of many experts over many years, and there are good reasons why each of the words included in the dictionary are there. The dictionary contains the laws of the English language, and while those laws can change, it takes time.

Later, when Nick is walking home with his friend Janet, Janet finds a fancy pen. Nick thinks about what Mrs. Granger said about how people like him, who use a language everyday, decide what words mean. It reminds him how, when he was little, he used to use a baby word that his family understood meant “music.” He had to give up using that word when he went to preschool because nobody outside of his family understood that word, but Nick understands how the word had meaning in his family because they all understood what Nick meant when he used it. While he’s thinking about it, he bumps into Janet, who drops the pen. On impulse, when Nick gives the pen back to her, he decides to give the pen a new name. He calls it a “frindle.”

At first, Janet is confused about what Nick means by “frindle.” It’s the beginning of a new experiment for Nick. Out of curiosity, Nick tries to see if he can teach a saleslady at a local store that the word “frindle” means “pen.” He goes to the store and asks for a frindle, pointing to the pens. Then, he gets some of his friends to do the same thing. After several kids all ask the same lady for a “frindle”, she begins to respond to it by automatically reaching for a pen. Nick is excited because he has just created a new word. “Frindle” now means pen because he decided that it did, and he got other people to agree on the meaning. Nick is making language history!

To make sure his word becomes part of language, Nick gets his friends to use the word “frindle” instead of “pen” at school … in Mrs. Granger’s class. Mrs. Granger isn’t amused by the class’s excessive use of the word “frindle” for pen because she knows that this is another of Nick’s stunts, and it’s a distraction from school lessons. She tries to discourage Nick from promoting it at school, and Nick points out that he’s only doing what she said about how words are made. Mrs. Granger explains how words in language evolved from other words that also have meaning, but “frindle” doesn’t have that kind of evolution because Nick just made it up, based on nothing. Nick insists that “frindle” means something to him and his friends, and they’ve already sworn an oath to each other to keep using it.

To Nick’s surprise, Mrs. Granger responds by showing him a sealed envelope. She tells him that it’s a letter for him, but she doesn’t want him to read it now. The letter is for him after the question of “frindle” is resolved. For now, she just wants Nick to sign the envelope and date it so that he’ll know what she hasn’t switched envelopes or tampered with the letter in any way. Nick is confused, but he does sign the envelope, and Mrs. Granger mysteriously says, “And may the best word win.” It seems like Mrs. Granger is declaring a war of words, pen vs frindle, but are Nick and Mrs. Granger really on opposite sides?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is a fun and humorous story that does a great job of showing how languages evolve and the purpose and meaning of language. Nick and his friends unwittingly give themselves an education during the course of their stunt. The reason why Nick had to sign and date the envelope is that Mrs. Granger is also enjoying their experiment, and she has made a prediction about how it will all turn out. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a small child who has learned a bad word can guess what Mrs. Granger has realized and how her own actions are calculated to make sure she gets the result she really wants.

Something that not even Nick fully reckons with until his experiment is well underway is that, now that all of the kids at school know about “frindle”, he can’t stop them all from using the word, even if he wants to. Although Nick originally created the word, words in a language belong to everyone who uses them. This is both a thought-provoking book about the nature of words and language and a good story for stopping periodically and having kids make their own predictions about what will happen next.

Even kids have power because they are also language-users, and they have the ability to influence the language and understanding of everyone around them by the words they choose! Nick is very much an idea person, but after “frindle” starts getting so much national media attention, he starts to get intimidated by the level of power he has. He has become more conscious of the consequences of his ideas and how they can affect large numbers of people. For a time, he becomes more shy because of that realization, but Mrs. Granger gives him some encouragement. She tells him that he has many good ideas and that she’s sure he will go on to do great things with them. Nick regains his confidence and realizes that he can use his powers for good, supporting good causes.

Posted on August 20, 2021 by TracyC · 2 Comments

Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall

Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall by Alice B. Emerson, 1913.

Since Ruth and her friends have helped her Uncle Jabez to recover his stolen cash box in the previous book, Uncle Jabez has decided to send Ruth to Briarwood Hall, the boarding school that her best friend, Helen Cameron will attend, so the two of them can stay together. Briarwood Hall is an exclusive school, where the primary entrance requirements are academic records and teacher recommendations. Ruth has already graduated from the local school in her uncle’s town although she is a little younger than Helen, and she is ready for the high school level. Helen’s twin brother, Tom, will be attending a military academy close to the girls’ boarding school.

The three of them travel alone to their schools, without adult chaperones. They amuse themselves by seeing if there are other students bound for their schools traveling on the same train and steamboat they take to their boarding schools, but they can’t find any. However, they do see an interesting older lady with a veiled hat who attracts their attention because she looks doll-like and speaks French. For some reason, this lady seems greatly upset by a strange man with a harp who is part of a musical group entertaining passengers on the steamboat.

The mysterious French woman turns out to be the girls’ new French teacher at Briarwood Hall. She seems very nice to the girls when they are introduced to her as they’re riding in a coach to the school after they get off the boat. Mary Cox, a fellow student who is older than Ruth and Helen, rides to the school with the girls and the French teacher. On the way to the school, Ruth notices that Mary seems to oddly ignore the French teacher, speaking only to her and Helen.

Mary is a Junior at the school, and tells the girls about the school clubs. The two main clubs at Briarwood are the “Upedes” and the “Fussy Curls.” I was glad that Ruth and Helen thought that these sounded by strange names for clubs, too. Mary explains that they’re just nicknames for the official club names. The Upedes are members of the Up and Doing Club, a group of girls who like lively activities. There are other groups at school, like the basketball players, but the Upedes and Fussy Curls have a particular rivalry for members. Mary is a member of the Upedes, although, in spite of the groups’ rivalry for gaining new members, Mary strangely doesn’t invite Ruth and Helen to join her group and doesn’t seem to want to explain what the rival group does.

When the girls leave the coach, Mary says that she doesn’t like the French teacher because she’s a poor foreigner, and Mary doesn’t know why she’s at the school. (Mary sounds like she’s rather a snob.) Mary says that she thinks it’s strange that the French teacher never wears any nice clothes and doesn’t seem to have any personal friends or relations. (Yeah, definitely a snob toward someone who just seems a bit unfortunate, like it’s some kind of moral failing, not having nice clothes or personal connections to show off.) Helen says that the French teacher does have personal acquaintances because she seemed to know the harp player on the boat, something that seems to interest Mary. Ruth has the uneasy feeling that they shouldn’t have mentioned it, not knowing exactly what the teacher’s connection to the harp player is. Helen likes Mary, but Ruth has reservations about her friendship.

Mary Cox shows the girls where their dorm room is. Helen and Ruth are sharing a room by themselves. Another girl, a senior named Madge Steel, comes by to talk to the girls and invites them to a meeting of the Forward Club (known as the “Fussy Curls” because of its initials) that evening. Ruth wants to go to that meeting because Madge seems very nice, and the Forward Club includes members of the school faculty. However, Helen says that she’d rather attend the meeting of the Upedes that evening that Mary told her about. Helen thinks that they owe Mary their loyalty because she was the first to meet them and was helpful in finding their room. Besides, the Upedes have no teachers in their club, and Helen thinks that it sounds more exciting and free from supervision than the Forward Club. Ruth thinks that she would prefer to get closer to her new teachers and some well-behaved girls instead, and it’s the first major disagreement that the friends have. Mary talks Ruth into going to the meeting of the Upedes that evening because that was the invitation that they received first, but Ruth says that she won’t join any club officially until she’s had a chance to see the other girls involved and learn what the clubs are really like. Ruth’s stance seems to be the wise one as the school’s headmistress tells the girls that joining clubs on campus are fun but that they should beware of getting involved too much with girls who don’t take their studies seriously and waste their time, and they learn that Mary Cox’s nickname at school is “the Fox”, suggesting that she’s as sly as Ruth has sensed. Although Mary didn’t mention it to the girls before, she’s actually the leader of the Upedes.

That evening, the girls are introduced to other students, and at the meeting of the Upedes, the school’s very own ghost story. Briarwood wasn’t always a school. It used to be a private mansion, and a wealthy man lived there with his beautiful daughter. The wealthy man was the one who commissioned the creation of the fountain with the marble statue that still stands on the school’s grounds. Although people on campus say that nobody really knows what the statue of the woman playing a harp in the fountain is supposed to represent, the ghost story claims that the figure was modeled after the beautiful daughter of the mansion’s former owner. However, according to the story, the girl fell in love with the man who sculpted the statue of her, and the two of them eloped, leaving her father alone and sad. Rumor had it, though, that the girl and her new husband must have died somewhere after they ran away because people started hearing mysterious harp music at night on the grounds of the mansion. Eventually, Briarwood was sold, and the school’s founders, the Tellinghams, bought it, and sometimes, people still hear harp music on the school grounds. Every time something strange or momentous happens at the school, people hear the twang of the harp.

That night, Ruth and Helen become the targets of a frightening hazing stunt by the Upedes that seems to bring the ghost story to life, but when something happens that frightens even the hazers, it brings into question how much of the ghost story is really true.

The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.

Spoilers and My Reaction:

I liked this story much better than the first book in the series because it is more directly a mystery story than the first book, and Ruth makes a deliberate effort to untangle some of the puzzling things happening at her new school.

It’s pretty obvious that there is a connection between the ghost story of the girl with the harp and the French teacher’s apparent discomfort at the suspicious harpist. Ruth finds out pretty quickly that the harpist from the boat is lurking around the school. That revelation explains the frightening happenings at the hazing incident, although it still leaves the question of the connection between the harpist and the French teacher. At first, I thought that it was going to turn out that there is some truth to the ghost story the Upedes told, but that actually has nothing to do with the real situation. In some ways, I felt like the real situation was a little to straight-forward and resolved a bit too quickly at the end, considering the build-up they’d had about it. It is interesting that, of the students at the school, only Ruth comes to learn the full truth of the French teacher’s secret. Even Helen doesn’t know what Ruth eventually discovers, partly to save the French teacher’s reputation and partly because Ruth and Helen’s friendship is suffering for part of the book.

Unlike newer series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, characters in the older Stratemeyer series, including the Ruth Fielding series, grow, age, and develop their lives and personalities. In this book, when the girls go away to boarding school, the differences in Helen and Ruth’s backgrounds and personalities become more obvious. It leads them to clash in some ways, and they both worry about endangering their friendship with each other, but by the end of the book, each of the girls develop a greater sense of who they are and what they really stand for.

Helen is more familiar and comfortable than Ruth is with the traditional rituals of boarding school, even taking some glee in the mean hazing ritual of the Upedes, and she badly wants to fit in with the cooler older girls at school, willing to put up with their mean bossing to take part in their schemes for the fun and excitement. However, Ruth, is naturally more serious and shy and less accustomed to having things her way or telling others what to do anywhere she’s lived than the wealthy Helen. Ruth overcomes some of her shyness and learns to be more assertive as she stands up for herself and the other new girls at school, called “Infants” by the older girls. Ruth decides to refuse to join either the Forward Club, which has a reputation of being made up of girls who toady up to the school faculty, or the Upedes (which was initially founded as a protest group to the Forward Club, which is why most of the activities of their club involve breaking various school rules and instigating pranks), after experiencing their mean pranks and bossiness. Instead, she takes a joke of Helen’s seriously and decides to form a secret society of her own. She talks to some of the other new girls at school, and they feel the same way they do, that they don’t want to choose between either the Upedes or the Fussy Curls and would rather have a club of their own, where they won’t be dominated or hazed by the older girls. Helen gets upset at Ruth starting this new group because she thinks that they won’t gain any new friends or have any real fun or really be a part of this school if they don’t join an already-established group. Helen thinks that a group of new girls would look ridiculous because they wouldn’t know what to do with their club and will look like a group of babies. However, Ruth realizes that this is nonsense. There are enough interested girls among the newcomers to give them a good group of friends and they can think of their own things to do where they can be the leaders. Ruth turns out to be more of a leader and Helen more of a follower, and Ruth is also more creative, thinking of new possibilities in life instead of stuck with someone else’s creation. I wish that the book had gone into more details about what Ruth’s club actually does. She and some of the other girls periodically go to meetings of their club, but they don’t say much about what they do at the meetings.

Helen and Ruth temporarily go separate ways at school. Helen joins the Upedes, and Ruth and some of the other new girls carry out the plan to form a new club that they call The Sweetbriars. The other girls who help form The Sweetbriars are as independently-minded and creative as Ruth and like the idea of forming their own school traditions. Helen criticizes Ruth for being a stickler from the rules because she doesn’t want to take part in school stunts that might get her in trouble, but although Helen is more inclined to break rules in the name of fun, she is still less independent in her mind than Ruth because her rule-breaking is done following the dictates of the Upedes and the traditional school stunts of having midnight feasts with other girls in their dorm rooms. They are not stunts of her own creation or particularly imaginative, and while she is brave about school demerits, she is not very brave about what other people think about her. After the Upedes have treated Ruth very badly and spread rumors about her, Ruth finds the courage to tell Helen how hurt she is that she continues to be friends with people who have treated her so badly when she wouldn’t have put up with people mistreating a friend of hers. She doesn’t ask for an apology and says that she’s not sure that one is even warranted, but she wants Helen to know how she feels. Helen has felt like hanging around Mary Cox has made her act like a meaner person, and she feels like she can’t help herself in Mary’s company. Understanding how Ruth really feels reminds Helen that she risks damaging her relationship with her best friend if she doesn’t do something about her behavior, and when Mary is ungrateful and lies to Helen after Ruth and Helen’s brother help save her life during a skating accident, Helen begins to see Mary for what she really is.

In the second half of the book, the Mercy Curtis from the first book in the series reappears. In the first book, she spent most of the time being bitter because she had a physical disability that prevented her from walking, and she was overly sensitive about how people looked her. However, at the end of the first book, Mercy received some treatment from a surgical specialist that has enabled her to regain her ability to walk. She still walks with crutches, but her spirits have improved now that she is able to move more easily on her own, without relying on her wheelchair. Because she had previously spent much of her time alone, studying, she qualifies for admittance to Briarwood and decides that she would like to join her friends, Ruth and Helen. When Mercy comes to the school, she is still sharp-tongued, although less bitter about herself. She rooms with Ruth and Helen and joins the Sweetbriars. She adds a nice balance to Ruth and Helen’s friendship. Ruth gets to spend some time with Mercy and the other Sweetbriars when Helen is with the Upedes, and Mercy is very serious about her studies, so she insists that her friends not neglect theirs, keeping then on task in the middle of their social dramas.

As a historical note, there is a place in the story in, Ch. 22, where the book describes Ruth as wearing a sweater, defining it as if readers might not know exactly what a sweater was, calling it “one of those stretching, clinging coats.” The reason for that is that sweaters were actually a relatively new fashion development for women in 1910s, although men had worn sweaters before. Women often wore shawls in cold weather before sweaters became popular, but sweaters left a woman’s arms more able to move freely than a shawl would allow, as this video about women’s clothing during World War I from CrowsEyeProductions explains.

Posted on August 9, 2021August 9, 2021 by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Rover Boys at School

The Rover Boys

The Rover Boys at School by Arthur M. Winfield (aka Edward Stratemeyer), 1899.

The three Rover boys, Richard, Thomas, and Samuel (called Dick, Tom, and Sam), live with their aunt and uncle in the country, but they learn that they are going to be sent to boarding school. The boys have been restless on the farm because they used to live in the city.

The boys’ father, Anderson Rover, is a mineral expert and made his fortune in mining. The family had lived in New York, so the boys are accustomed to city life. The boys’ mother died of a fever when they were young. After his wife’s death, the boys’ father traveled restlessly because of his grief, leaving the boys at boarding school in New York. Then, he had the notion to go to Africa and left the boys with their Uncle Randolph. The boys and their uncle haven’t heard from him since, and they worry that something has happened to him.

When the boys first arrived at the farm, they enjoyed the outdoor life of the country, but there isn’t much variety to the activities, and the boys start getting to trouble when they get bored. Their Uncle Randolph spends all of his time in studying scientific farming, and he can’t understand why the boys can’t take an interest in the subject or at least give him some peace and quiet for his work. The boys aren’t too impressed because, so far, their uncle doesn’t seem too successful at it. Richard (Dick) is the oldest of the three boys and is often quiet and studious, so he gets along better with Uncle Randolph than the others. He is 16 at the beginning of the series. Thomas (Tom) is fun-loving, likes to play pranks, and is 15 years old. His pranks are part of the reason why the boys are driving their uncle and aunt and their cook crazy. Samuel (Sam) is 14 years old and athletic.

Uncle Randolph doesn’t know much about kids or young people, so boarding school seems like the ideal solution. The boys’ aunt and uncle think that the boys need some discipline. They do, but the boys are also looking forward to seeing something of the world and having some adventures, so the prospect of going to boarding school sounds exciting to them. They’ve been to boarding school before, but they think it would be exciting to go to a military academy.

Before the boys leave the farm, Dick is attacked by a tramp, who steals his watch and pocketbook (wallet). The boys chase him and get the wallet back, but Tom almost drowns and Sam is almost swept over a waterfall while they try to pursue the tramp, who escapes in a boat with the watch. The boys are sad about the loss of the watch, which belonged to their father.

Tom gets a letter from his friend, Larry Colby, to say that he’s going to be attending the Putnam Hall Military Academy soon, and Larry’s father has recommended the school to the boys’ uncle. Uncle Randolph says that he’s decided to take the suggestion. The boys think it sounds exciting, and they’re glad that they’ll be going to school with someone they know. Uncle Randolph says that the headmaster of the school, Captain Victor Putnam, is a former military man who has a reputation for being kind to his students but strict on discipline, so it sounds like what the boys need.

Later in the story, they explain that Captain Putnam is a graduate of West Point and that he used to serve under Major General Custer, helping to put down Indian uprisings (Native American) until he was injured in a fall from his horse. For this book’s original audience of boys living in the late 19th century, this probably would have sounded exciting and noble, but not to people from the early 21st century. However Captain Putnam would have looked at it, quelling Native American uprisings would be essentially admitting to being part of their oppression because they weren’t uprising for nothing, and that fall from his horse is probably the only reason why he would even still be alive at the time of this story, given what eventually happened to Major General Custer. Because Custer had been a Civil War hero, people were shocked and saddened by his sudden and violent death. As with many people who die young, they romanticized his past and exaggerated his story, turning him into a legend for young people to live up to. Eventually, the romanticism wore off, and the reality stayed (he was the bottom of his class at West Point, not a student parents would really want their kids to emulate, and there were darker sides to his life and personality than most people in the 1800s would have known and which wouldn’t be appropriate talk for children), which is why his modern legacy isn’t as great as people a hundred years or more ago would have thought. Captain Putnam doesn’t look as exciting and heroic as advertised by association, but it’s enough to know that the Rover boys would have thought that it sounded impressive because of what their elders would have told them and so would their earliest readers, for similar reasons.

Before the boys leave for school on the train, Tom plays one last trick on the unpleasant station master by throwing a firecracker into some trash that the station master was burning, setting the mood for the boys’ eventual arrival at school.

After the train ride, the boy have to continue part way by boat. On the boat, they meet three pretty girls (how fortuitous) and a bully who also goes to their new school, Dan Baxter. The bully is harassing the girls by continuing to try to talk to them when they want him to leave them alone. Dan doesn’t say anything shocking to the girls, it’s more that he’s off-putting because he’s rather pushy and full of himself and can’t read a room to see that he’s making the girls uncomfortable because of the way he talks. It’s awkward. The Rover boys step in and try to get Dan to leave the girls alone, making an enemy of Dan. The girls (Dora Stanhope and her two cousins, Grace and Nellie Laning, who belong to prosperous farming families in the area) are grateful for the intervention and think that the Rover boys are better behaved than Dan is. The boys talk to the girls about their new school and learn that they don’t live far from the school, although they don’t mix with the students there much because the students at Putnam Hall don’t leave the campus very often. The boys hope that they’ll have the chance to see the girls again while they’re at Putnam Hall. (You know they will.)

Tom’s Putnam Hall experience starts off with a bang … literally. As the boys arrive at the school, Tom decides to give the other students a “salute” by scaring them with another of his firecrackers. That’s when Tom gets his first taste of military discipline from the Head Assistant Josiah Crabtree, the second in command at the school and the strictest disciplinarian in the place. Most of the school would have given the prank a pass, especially from a new boy, but Josiah Crabtree takes exception to Tom’s attitude and doesn’t accept his excuse that he doesn’t need to answer to Crabtree because he has only just arrived at the school, isn’t an official student yet, and shouldn’t be subject to the school’s rules. (Tom may have thought that military school would be exciting, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have the first clue what military discipline is about.) Crabtree marches Tom off and locks him in the guard room to wait for Captain Putnam to return to the school and administer his discipline. This is actually in Tom’s favor because Captain Putnam understands that his students are still boys, and therefore, he isn’t as strict with them as he would be full adult soldiers.

Josiah Crabtree’s ultra-strictness has caused him to be not well-liked by other students at the school. When he and Tom discuss Tom’s prank while waiting for Captain Putnam, Tom continues to argue the point that he is not yet a student at the school and that Crabtree has no right to lock him up like he has. Tom tells him that he wants to be released to stay at the hotel in town so he can contact his guardian because he may not wish to join this school after all, threatening to tell his uncle of his mistreatment. Crabtree is correct that setting off a fire cracker to scare people isn’t the best way to start off on the right foot with the faculty (I wouldn’t have liked it if someone did it to me, and this is a school where people learn to fire real guns, so you can’t have people who treat firearms and explosives like toys), but Tom’s point that immediate imprisonment before he’s even really joined the school and been notified of the school’s rules is a valid criticism, and he is not so committed to the school at this point that he can’t leave if he wants to. If Tom makes false imprisonment a public issue, it would damage the reputation of the school. That threat is worrying to Crabtree, who knows that he has already rubbed others the wrong way and made a few enemies of his own.

Tom runs away from Crabtree and hides in the forest outside the school. He plans to walk into town, but along the way, he spots a campfire. He listens in on the conversation of the men sitting by the campfire. He discovers that one of them is the tramp who stole their father’s watch before, and he listens to the men discussing some clandestine “mining deal.” When they catch Tom spying on them, Tom confronts the man called Buddy about stealing his father’s watch. Buddy and his friend deny it, and Tom fights with them before running away and getting help at the Laning farm, where he meets Grace and Nellie again and the family gives him a room for the night. When he explains his story to the family, he learns that Josiah Crabtree has been courting Dora Stanhope’s widowed mother because she owns a sizeable farm and has money from her first marriage.

In the morning, Tom returns to the school and makes his case to Captain Putnam, arguing as he did the night before that he had not yet officially joined the school before Josiah Crabtree imprisoned him and confiscated and searched his luggage. Captain Putnam makes it clear to Tom that certain things, like fire crackers, are forbidden at the school, and he will have to accept that if he’s serious about being a student there. Tom asks what the point is of him joining the school if he’s going to have marks against him before he’s even had a chance to properly start, and Captain Putnam says that if Tom still wants to join, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones and let him start school with a clean slate. Captain Putnam sees Tom as intelligent and spirited even though he’s undisciplined, and is willing to give him a chance. Tom accepts and joins the school, although Crabtree is still annoyed at Tom getting away with his prank and running away the previous night. When Tom rejoins his brothers, he tells them about seeing the thief who stole the watch, and they discuss how awful it would be for Dora if the martinet Crabtree became her stepfather.

Because The Rover Boys is an early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, there is more adventure and the general friendships and rivalries of life at a boarding school than there is mystery. The boys and their friends get used to the routines, rules, and drills of military school, getting into fights with the bullies, playing sports, and pulling stunts with their friends. However, there are villains in the story with secrets for the boys to learn. Josiah Crabtree hasn’t been honest with Dora Stanhope’s mother, trying to use pressure to get her to marry him so he can use her money and property for his purposes … including money and property entailed for Dora under her late father’s will. Crabtree claims to have money of his own, bur shows no evidence of it. Although, who has been giving the bully, Dan Baxter, large sums of money and for what purpose? What about the watch thief and his friend? Why do they keep hanging around?

By the end of the book … not too much is resolved, compelling readers to continue on to the next book in the series to find out what happens.

This book and others in the series are now public domain and are easily available online in various formats through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (including audiobook).

My Reaction

I never read any of this series of books when I was a kid, but having grown up with other Stratemeyer Syndicate books, like Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, I was curious about this first series produced by the Syndicate. I picked several of the books to get a feel for the series, and I had several reactions. First, the Rover Boys, like other early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, is almost but not quite a mystery series. It has some elements of suspense, but the little mysteries and secrets of the villains in the story come secondary to physical adventures and the drama of boarding school life for much of the book. In fact, the action kind of breaks for stories about football and baseball games the boys play at school, which don’t really have anything to do with the villains’ plots and are just part of school life. Although, the bully Dan Baxter loses favor with other boys at school when they discover that he actually placed a bet against the school’s own football team before a game, which seems pretty disloyal. I also suspected at first that at least some of the villains’ threads would be connected, but really, they have very little to do with each other, which was disappointing.

Stratemeyer Syndicate books have a pattern of ending chapters on cliffhangers in order to keep kids reading to find out what happens, which begins to show in this book, and often, the mystery/suspense elements in early stories help to set up these cliffhangers while the plot is more about the characters’ lives. Personally, I prefer stories that are more definitely mysteries, where the characters are making active efforts to solve problems and discover the villains’ secrets instead of just randomly stumbling on information. This particular story kind of annoyed me because the entire book ends on a cliffhanger. In fact, the only problem/mystery that gets resolved in the story is that Dick eventually gets his watch back. The other villains are still hanging around. At the end of the book, Crabtree is still hanging around, in spite of multiple interventions, trying to get Dora’ mother to marry him and turn over Dora’s inheritance from her father. The bully, Dan Baxter, left the school, but is apparently hanging around with Crabtree. It also turns out that Baxter’s father is secretly an old enemy of the Rover boys’ father and thinks that Anderson Rover cheated him out a mine years ago and still has the paperwork to prove it, possibly carrying it with him to Africa, for some reason. The Rover boys’ father is also still presumably lost somewhere in Africa, doing who-knows-what there. All of these problems are left hanging, apparently to be resolved in later books with other problems probably being added along the way. The only thing that I felt really certain about at the end of the book is that Dick is probably going to marry Dora in the future because he is already trying to be her protector, and his brothers will probably marry her convenient cousins, Grace and Nellie, in some order.

Second, I was bracing myself throughout the story to watch for its use of racial language. One thing to watch with old Stratemeyer Syndicate books is racist language and attitudes. In the 1950s and 1960s, with the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the Syndicate revised and updated its different series. They changed and removed outdated language, including racial terms, and also updated references to culture and technology. The version of this particular book that I used for my review is the old public domain version. I already talked about Captain Putnam’s service with Major General Custer and how people at the time would have felt about that compared to modern people, but there is also a black man called Alexander who works at Putnam Hall. He doesn’t have a very big role in the story, but I wanted to talk about him because of the way the book describes him. The book describes him using the words “colored” and “Negro”, which are outdated now although acceptable for the time period (that’s why they’re part of the names of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909, and the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944). However, during the Civil Rights Movement, people wanted to distance themselves from terms that were used during periods of high discrimination, so they began shifting to the use of “African American” as the specific term and “black” as the generic. This is the sort of language update that the Stratemeyer Syndicate books received in later reprintings.

Later in the book, one of the boys’ friends jokingly imitates a “Negro minstrel” in an old minstrel show (an entertainment people of this time would have been familiar with which included caricatured characters of black people), saying “That’s the conundrum, Brudder Bones. I’se gib it up, sah!” (“Brudder Bones” was a stock character in one of those shows, although I don’t know much about it because I’ve never seen a real minstrel show. I think there was a similar reference to the name “Bones” as a minstrel show character in the book Cheaper by the Dozen as well.) This is another cultural element that would be removed from later Stratemeyer Syndicate books and that also appeared in other older children’s books that were written prior to the Civil Rights Movement, including at least one of the Little House on the Prairie books. These references get a bad reaction in modern times because this type of caricature is a mean style of humor that probably wouldn’t have lasted very long against anybody who had the authority to complain about it at the height of its popularity. To put it another way, it’s the kind of humor where someone is definitely being laughed “at”, not “with,” and some even included songs with descriptions of horrifically violent things happening to black people masked as comedy. If you’ve never seen this kind of reference to minstrel shows before, you are not missing anything for having grown up without it. There’s nothing inherently funny in the friend’s little joke, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who didn’t know what the reference referred to. It seems to be one of those things that only becomes amusing when someone recognizes the source of the reference, and as I said, I’m not even sure exactly who “Bones” was supposed to be, other than some kind of stock character. I vaguely know what the reference is from, but not enough to connect with it in the way the original audience might have, and anyone younger than I am probably wouldn’t recognize even that much. I don’t want to put undue emphasis on this line in the book because it was only one line, and the Rover boys weren’t really into it either because they were worried about a problem they had at the time that wasn’t really funny, but I thought that I should explain the background of this comment and point it out as another reason why the Stratemeyer Syndicate books needed revising.

When referring to their father, who is still missing in Africa, the boys also worry that maybe he was killed or taken prisoner by “savage” tribes. “Tribes” in many children’s books of this period are described as “savage.” The exact location their father was trying to reach is not specified, just somewhere in Africa where there is a jungle, although a later book in the series has more about it.

Some general old slang in this book really dates it, like the use of the word “fellows” instead of “guys” and the word “peach” for “tattle” or “tell on” someone. Even later Stratemeyer Syndicate series, like the Hardy Boys, use language that would sound dated to modern people, like the word “chums” for “friends.” These old slang terms were also changed and removed from later reprintings.

There were also some features of this story that took me by surprise. Pranks and stunts are regular features of boarding school stories, but I was surprised at some of the roughness of the boys at the school as well as some of the punishments. At one point, the boys realize that Crabtree has pushed Dora’s mother to marry him, and they’re on their way to town to get married immediately. The Rover boys tell their friends and get them to swarm the carriage, pretending that it’s part of a game they’re playing, trying to delay or disrupt their trip to town and their wedding plans. The boys cause an accident with the carriage that causes Mrs. Stanhope to get a broken arm and a cracked rib. They’re lucky nobody broke their neck. It’s a pretty violent way to interfere, even though they’re trying to save Mrs. Stanhope and Dora from Crabtree’s machinations.

One thing I did enjoy was the description of the game of Hare and Hounds (also called Paper Chase) that came right before the carriage scene. I’d never heard of the game before, but apparently, it’s been a popular game in British schools for centuries. Probably, the reason I’ve never seen it played is because the playgrounds and yards of the schools I attended wouldn’t have been large enough to make a really good game. One person plays the role of the “hare” and is given a head start, leaving a trail of bits of paper behind him as he goes. The other players are the “hounds”, and they try to find the hare by following the trail of paper bits, like they were hounds following a scent. The object of the game is for them to catch the hare before he reaches a designated finishing point. At a school where you can see pretty much the entire playground and everyone on it at once, there wouldn’t be any point in following a trail or any real challenge to the game, but it sounds like an interesting game to play if you can find a large enough space for it.

Posted on August 13, 2020April 15, 2024 by TracyC

Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book

Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book by Betty Miles, 1980.

There’s a lot to discuss here, so I’m going to break up this whole entire review into themed sections and because this is going to be pretty long, I’m giving the link to the copies of the book on Internet Archive here.

Introducing Kate

Kate thinks of herself as a perfectly ordinary middle school girl. She’s certainly trying her hardest to be normal and cool and hang out with the “right” people. (In that compulsive way some people have when they’re just really trying way too hard because they feel like they’re supposed to. I’ll be honest, I found Kate to be a very trying character for about the first half of the book, and I have things to say about that in my reaction.) She’s very deliberately “normal” and her biggest worry is figuring out who the “right” people are to be friends with that it takes her completely by surprise that volunteering to take part in an English class project lands her right in the middle of a community scandal.

It’s Kate’s first year of middle school, and so far, Kate likes English class and her teacher, Ms. Plotkin. English was always her favorite subject, and Ms. Plotkin is one of those people who can make any subject or project sound exciting. Ms. Plotkin has a friend who is a first grade teacher at a local elementary school called Concord, and the two teachers think it would be a good interschool project to have middle school kids volunteer to read to the younger students to get them excited about reading and books. Kate volunteers right away because she loves reading and little kids. She’s been thinking that she’d like to earn some money by babysitting, so this reading project would be good experience that she might be able to use to get babysitting jobs.

Kate hopes that her best friends from elementary school, Jackie and Rosemary, will also volunteer for the project so they can do it together, but they don’t. The only other kid in class who volunteers is Maudie. Maudie has already been unofficially labeled as one of the uncool kids that all the cool kids avoid because they’re just not like the other, cool kids. There’s nothing seriously wrong with Maudie, but she’s a bit fat and Kate thinks of her as a kind of “dope” because she isn’t trying to act cool or normal like Kate and her friends do and generally isn’t trying to be like them. Kate even actively participates in all of the jokes and mean comments about Maudie that the other kids make behind her back because these shared “jokes” and slurs about Maudie are part of their bonding process with each other and define their in-group as being not-Maudie type people. (Oh, yes, I definitely have issues with Kate that I will rant about later.) That’s why Kate is horrified at first that she might have to actually work with and talk to Maudie if they’re the only ones doing this project together. Maudie is kind of fat, doesn’t quite dress like the other kids in small ways, and just kind of gives off an uncool vibe that’s sure to get Kate labeled as “uncool” if she has to hang out with her for this project. If that happens, she might become (gasp!) a not-popular person because the “right” people will avoid her. (Oh, noes! However will you manage?)

Being Nasty and Condescending to Maudie

Maudie tells Kate that she volunteered for the project partly because she really likes working with kids, like Kate does, and she was hoping that she and Kate might be friends since they like the same sort of things. Maudie comments that she doesn’t like the atmosphere of this middle school because of people’s attitudes and obsessions with hanging out with the “right” people and being part of cliques. These are mature, sincere comments that shows insight into someone else’s character, and Maudie is correct that Kate is part of an exclusionary clique with Jackie and Rosemary. Maudie’s comments are actually a rather unsubtle hint at Kate that she’s being a bit of a snob and that she could be a nicer person if she could think outside of her snobby clique. Maudie is fully aware of what Kate and her friends are saying about her, and this is an invitation to Kate to change and be a friend, but Kate doesn’t get it at first. She’s too worried about seeming too friendly with uncool Maudie and what other kids will think of it, particularly Jackie and Rosemary.

Kate even thinks that she feels sorry for Maudie, wondering what it’s like to be her and mistaking her sincere offer of friendship for a desperate need to make a friend. Maudie’s actually just being a normal level of friendly in this conversation, but Kate’s assumptions about uncool people have given her a false view of reality. When Kate tries to imagine what it’s like to be Maudie, she’s not actually imagining herself as the real Maudie because she doesn’t really know Maudie at all and wasn’t really listening to Maudie when she was talking because she spent that time thinking about how not to say too much to her or be too friendly. Even though Kate kind of acknowledges that there’s nothing really wrong with Maudie, she still thinks of Maudie as a problem because of the social implications of seeming to like a person the “right” people don’t like, not realizing that the meanness she’s helping to enable is the real problem. (There’s nothing really wrong with Maudie, and I see a lot wrong with Kate and her friends because of their attitudes and the way they think about things. I’d also like to point out that Kate is not filled with sympathy at this point; she’s been nothing but self-pitying because of what she thinks is going to happen to her popularity at school for being seen with the wrong person. She’s projecting that self-pity onto Maudie who is, by herself, just expressing honest sincerity.)

At first, Kate tries to think if there’s a way that she can back out of the project, but in the first glint of honesty about her, she admits that she actually wants to do the project for the sake of the project itself. I always like people who have a particular hobby, cause, or interest that they like for its own sake because that’s a sign of a real personality or character. Standing up for a special interest and doing it anyway, even if nobody else is, also shows a strength of that character that’s worthy of respect. This is the one trait that made me willing to stick out the book with Kate, even though I seriously didn’t like her, because it showed the promise of character development.

Kate also finds additional willingness to continue with the project when Jackie passes her a note telling her to get out of the project so she won’t be “stuck with fat Maudie.” Even though Kate realizes that she was thinking the exact same thing and might have even said so out loud among her friends, it actually looks really bad and mean written out on paper in black-and-white. Kate thinks that writing it down makes it worse, not realizing that there’s really no difference at all, and it’s the thinking behind it that needs to change. Also, she finds it irritating that Jackie seems to think that she can tell her what to do. (I think that’s a legitimate complaint.) After they get out of class, Jackie even snubs Kate to hang out with other kids, and Kate knows that she’s lying to her about the reasons why.

Kate’s mother is actually glad when she hears that Kate will be doing the project with Maudie. Kate’s mother says that she doesn’t like it that Kate is so clingy with her old elementary school friends and that she’d like to see her branch out and meet some new people. (She doesn’t say why she wants Kate to do that, but at this point in the story, I’d already figured out why.)

When it’s time for Kate and Maudie to go to their volunteer project, a girl in class whispers a mean joke about Maudie to Kate, and Kate giggles. Then, Kate sees Jackie whisper something to the other girl and the two of them giggle. Kate suddenly wonders if Jackie is making mean jokes about her, and suddenly, it doesn’t seem as funny anymore.

(Oh, good grief! Is this the first time in her life she ever thought of this? You know, people who gossip and make fun of others (surprise!) spend their time gossiping and making fun of others. It’s what they do, and yes, they do it to different people, depending on who they’re talking to at the moment and who isn’t around to know. If someone gossips meanly about someone else to you, then yes, you can be confident that they’re gossiping meanly about you and making fun of you with someone else when they think you’re not listening. It’s their mode of communication and how they bond with people, and they have no idea why you’d have a problem with them doing to you that because you laughed with them before about someone else, so you must be okay with it and have no reason to get mad. I get impatient with people who don’t think about these things, and if Kate had the imagination to really put herself in someone else real shoes before, she should have thought of this long ago. She should know the kind of person Jackie is from years of experience with her, and she should have figured out that she wouldn’t like other people to say things about her that she’s been saying about Maudie. I feel like Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, saying that if she had any real imagination, Kate could have put herself in someone else’s place and figured out what other people might be feeling, but she doesn’t do that because she’s too self-absorbed and doesn’t get it until someone does it directly to her within her hearing. Kate has plenty of self-pity but no sympathy, at least not at this point.)

The first chapters of this book were pretty painful for me because I had to put up with the kind of people I really hate, including the one telling the story, but fortunately, it does get more interesting from this point on. As they walk over to the elementary school, Kate and Maudie have a fun moment where they throw snowballs at a stop sign, and Kate forgets to be “cool” and snobby. At the elementary school, Kate has fun meeting the cute little first graders, and the first grade teacher reads Make Way for Ducklings to the class. Maudie also introduces Kate to the elementary school librarian because this is Maudie’s old elementary school, and she knows the faculty. The girls talk about Maudie’s time at Concord, and Maudie admits that she kind of misses it because it just seemed so much more friendly than Revere Middle School. Kate feels a little sorry for Maudie because she mentions that her best friend has moved away, and she asks if she’d like to go to the library together to pick out some books. Maudie accepts and says that she can hang out at her house afterward, if she wants, and Kate gets worried again that Maudie is starting to think that they’re actually friends or something. (Once again, oh, noes. However will you manage, Kate? You might accidentally give off vibes that you might be a likeable person or something, and how ever will you be popular if too many people in that vast sea of “wrong” people outside of your tiny clique like you?)

Kate and her friend Rosemary talk about the project a little, and Rosemary asks her what it’s like working with Maudie. Kate says that Maudie isn’t bad when you get to know her, and she is pretty good with the younger kids. Rosemary says that she’s been thinking that the comments people keep making about Maudie are really mean and she doesn’t deserve them because there’s nothing really wrong with her. Kate agrees.

Kate feels a bit bad about going to the library with Maudie because Jackie and the others are going skating, and Jackie is acting like she doesn’t even care that she isn’t going to be there. (It occurred to me that Jackie might actually care that Kate’s doing something with someone else and is trying to play it cool, but it’s dumb because that attitude just drives people away anyway. Either that, or she’s realized that Kate is somebody else to make fun of or gossip about with other girls, and that’s easier to do when she’s not there to defend herself.) Kate not only feels a little bad that she’s missing out on something with her friends, but she comes to realize that she’d rather go to Maudie’s house after the library after all because Maudie at least acts like she wants her around and Jackie doesn’t. Jackie seems to dodging her and trying to get rid of her to hang out with others. Also, it seems like all the other girls are obsessed with the new boy at school, Steve. Kate knows Steve slightly because his parents bought their house through her parents, who are realtors. (Ah, perhaps that’s why Jackie is acting weird! Instead of seeing Kate as her old friend, she’s starting to suspect her of being a rival for a cool guy at school.) However, Kate doesn’t really know Steve very well, and she finds the other girls’ fawning attitudes toward him embarrassing.

At the library, Kate and Maudie talk about their favorite kids’ books and try to pick out some books that will really please the first graders. Kate remembers that one of the first graders had told her that he was excited about getting a puppy, so she decides that she’d like to get a book about puppies. The librarian, who is actually a distant cousin of Kate’s, suggests a book called The Birthday Dog. It’s about a boy who wants a puppy for his birthday. The dog who lives next door is going to have puppies, but the puppies won’t be born in time for his birthday, and he’s disappointed at not getting a puppy for his birthday. Then, he gets a birthday card that says that he can have one of the dog’s puppies after they’re born. The boy and his father even get to see the first puppy being born and how the puppy grows until he’s big enough to leave his mother. The librarian says it’s a good book because the pictures are clear and realistic. The girls decide that they’ll use this book because of the puppy theme and because the boy in the story is about the same age as the first graders. This is where the censorship issue comes into the story. (More on this below, much more.)

Note: The Birthday Dog is not a real book, at least not as far as I can tell. Some of the children’s books mentioned in this book are real books, but some of them aren’t. I think it’s better for the purposes of the story if this picture book is not real because real books often have emotional baggage attached to them, possibly because of feelings of fond nostalgia because people liked them when they were young, resentment because of something the books said or the manner in which teachers or parents forced the books on them, or things people have heard other people say about books, even if the listeners haven’t actually seen the books themselves. For the purposes of this story, which is about examining people’s reactions to controversy, it’s better to approach this particular book with a clean slate, seeing it for what it’s described as being in the story and people’s reactions to it for what they are, removed from any personal emotional baggage. Assume from this point on that the book is exactly as the characters who read it describe it as being, nothing more and nothing less and that all reactions to the situation are exactly as described, nothing more and nothing less.

Kate does go to Maudie’s house, and she starts to learn that she and Maudie have some things in common and that even their mothers act very much the same way. Maudie’s mother has also been pressing her to make some new friends. Kate discovers that Maudie also enjoys old Marx Brothers movies and Maudie has a talent for impersonation. (Finally! A thing that you like, Kate! Early in the story, she was mainly about what she didn’t like and her preoccupation with being liked by the right people. Cool people in stories (and frequently in real life) never seem to genuinely, unironically like anything, especially things that are honest, goofy fun. It’s especially heartening to me that she likes something that not all of her friends like, so Kate is actually showing more signs of independent thoughts and feelings and interests beyond generic coolness and popularity-building. I’m emphasizing this because this was the point in the story to me that Kate started seeming like she might be a real person with an actual personality. Up to this point, she seemed like a two-dimensional wanna-be popular mean kid snob with no self-awareness.) By the end of the day, Kate actually begins looking at Maudie like a real friend and doesn’t seem to mind the idea. (Which means that Kate will finally stop getting on my nerves with her snobby, unaware mean girl act, and I can stop belaboring that point.)

A Delicate Discussion and an Indelicate Response

Note: This is the part of the story where we get into issues of censorship and controversy in children’s literature. I think the earlier social machinations, cliques, and using negativity and putting other people down for the sake of personal promotion also ties in with this theme, which is why I went into detail about that before getting into this part of the book, but I’m going to discuss why it’s important later. One thing to keep in mind is that it isn’t unpopular Maudie who selects and reads the controversial book; it’s Kate, the one who’s been trying desperately hard to fit in with the “right” people and be popular and “normal.” Kate is about to be the one who will be ferociously judged by both other kids and adults for doing something controversial. For now, let’s get into the book controversy.

The next time the girls go to the elementary school, they show their books to Ms. Plotkin before they leave, and she approves of their choices. (This is key for the censorship issue. Keep in mind that the girls didn’t choose their books by themselves. They had recommendations from a librarian and the approval of their teacher for their specific selections.) Maudie reads her book, Little Bear, to the class first, and then Kate reads The Birthday Dog. The part where the puppy is born describes the mother dog’s stomach rippling, how she pushed the puppy out, and how she bit at the thin sac that covered the puppy when it was first born. Kate is reassured that the kids seem to like the story, but then the first grade teacher allows the students to ask Kate questions about the book, and Kate isn’t prepared for what the kids ask.

When one of kids ask how the puppy got inside its mommy, Kate looks at Ms. Dwyer, the first grade teacher, and Ms. Dwyer just nods at Kate to answer, not giving her any help or advice about what to say to a first grader about this.

(I just have to step in again at this point and say, if it were me as the adult present for this scene, I’d have noticed Kate’s discomfort, recognized this as a sensitive topic, and stepped in and said, “I’ll take this one, Kate,” and then said something that answers the question in the simplest, most literal terms without getting too deep or detailed. In this case, I might have said something about how that’s simply the way that babies begin to grow. It’s normal for babies to grow inside their mothers before their born because they are very small and weak at first and need some time for their bodies to develop before they can do even simple things like move around, eat, and breathe air on their own. Some animals lay eggs, like chickens, and the babies grow inside them and hatch out of them when they’re ready, and some animals have the babies grow inside their own bodies, like dogs, until they’re ready to come out. The mother’s body helps to protect them and give them what they need so they can grow. People are like that, too, and that’s why pregnant women look big around the middle before their babies are born, because the baby is growing inside them. But, it’s not a good idea to make a big deal about the way people look because you don’t want to make them feel bad or too self-conscious about their appearance (and I hope you know that I mean you too, Kate). Just be extra nice to pregnant people because it’s hard work carrying a growing baby around. If you want extra details, I recommend that you ask your parents because they’ve had kids before, and I haven’t, so they could describe how that feels better than I could.)

Kate stumbles about a bit, searching for a way of describing it, saying something about the father dog, but stopping because she isn’t sure what she should say or if she’s saying too much. But, some of the first graders begin blurting out bits and pieces of what they know, and some of them know more than Kate expected. One of the kids says that the father dog puts a seed into the mom. Kate says that’s correct and that’s called “mating.” Soon, little first graders are using words like “vagina” and “penis.” It’s important that the first graders are the ones who introduce these words into the conversation themselves, not Kate or the teacher or the book. Little kids like to receive recognition for things they know or things they have, so some of the kids are more than happy to show off what they know and to publicly declare which of those two they have. The first grade teacher just says that what they’re saying about the mother and father dog mating are correct and that’s how puppies start. Kate has a moment of panic when she’s afraid that the kids will start thinking about human babies and how she doesn’t want to go into detail on this subject, and she’s relieved when the kids return to the subject of dogs and start talking about their pet dogs’ names. Again, kids like to receive recognition for things they have and to compare things they have with others. When it’s pet dogs, it’s not as embarrassing.

When it’s time for Kate and Maudie to leave, Ms. Dwyer says that Kate handled the situation well, saying, “Kids this age can be embarrassingly frank! But I don’t want them to think there’s anything wrong with their natural curiosity. I’m glad you could answer them so matter-of-factly.” The girls bond over this odd, embarrassing incident, and they think that Kate seems to have handled it okay. Kate even reads the book to her elderly Aunt Lucy at her nursing home and some of the other elderly people there, and they like it, too. Then, the girls and their teacher start getting parental complaints.

The complaining parents in the story don’t handle the situation with grace and understanding, and they make things worse. Rather than defusing the situation and diverting focus from an issue that they didn’t want to discuss in the first place, they blow it up to the point where nobody in the community can ignore it. They phone the principal of the elementary school and the principal of the middle school. They go down to the library and demand to see copies of The Birthday Dog. Soon, everybody in the area hears some version of what happened in the first grade classroom, and just like in a game of Telephone, the events become mangled and confused. This is what I mean about misconception and misrepresentation and how people use these to further an agenda. Be prepared for more of this.

When the girls return to school after the weekend, Ms. Plotkin tells the girls that they need to have a talk with their principal. In the principal’s office, they tell the girls that some parents have complained about The Birthday Dog and the discussion that took place afterward. Ms. Plotkin and Ms. Dwyer take responsibility for allowing Kate to read the book and discuss it with the younger kids, and Ms. Dwyer says that she thinks Kate handled the discussion well. The girls feel like this situation is unfair. They didn’t really do anything wrong, and there are other people involved who also didn’t really do anything wrong. They don’t want the principal to blame their teacher for what happened. Kate feels responsible for having chosen the book in the first place, and Maudie even defends her, saying it was a good book and Kate didn’t do or say anything wrong. Kate appreciates her support because nobody had a problem with the book that Maudie read, and she didn’t have to stick up for her. The librarian helped Kate to choose it. Kate picked it based on her recommendation, so she’s involved, too.

The principal tells Kate that he wants to see the book in question, and he asks Kate to recount the entire discussion in the first grade class. It’s an uncomfortable conversation because Kate is a young girl and the principal is a grown man who is not related to her in any way, and Kate doesn’t like the idea of being forced to discuss anything related to sex with him, even if it’s an innocent recounting of a mildly embarrassing conversation. (If some parents don’t like being put on the spot discussing the issue with their own children, just have a little imagination and understand that this is even more uncomfortable for Kate, who is not related to the principal or anyone else involved with the exception of the librarian, and she is also subject to their authority because she’s a student and a minor. This is what their reactionary complaints have led to, and there’s worse to come.) Kate is accurate in her description, and the principal warns Ms. Plotkin about the importance of choosing appropriate materials for students because of parental anxiety about sensitive issues. Even though the principal acknowledges that the book seems pretty innocent from their description, the anxious, complaining parents can cause a lot of trouble for the schools, so they’re going to suspend the interschool reading program for the present.

Misconception, Misrepresentation, and the Fallout

This is where Kate begins to experience the varying reactions that people have to the incident, and the ways in which people approach the situation and Kate herself say things about their characters and their relationship with Kate. Kate begins to discover who her real friends are and has to face the wrath of people who are more concerned with their own agendas than they are with her or even the little first graders.

Of course, word spreads around the middle school that Kate and Maudie were called to the principal’s office, and rumors spread about the reasons why. Some of the students have heard bits and pieces of the story, and they’ve become exaggerated, just like the mean girl comments that people were making about Maudie in the beginning. Josh, Kate’s older brother, seeks her out at lunch and demands to know what people are talking about when they say that she was reading a dirty book to first graders and got called to the principal’s office about it.

Kate defends herself, saying that the book wasn’t dirty. She hates it that people are calling the book dirty because they’re making her seem like she’s a dirty person for reading it. Kate is afraid that people are looking at her like she’s a monster, even though she didn’t do anything wrong, and that they’re all going to hate and avoid her now because people are saying things about her behind her back and everyone will think that there’s something wrong with her when there isn’t. (Oh, gee, why does that sound familiar? This is where the story about censorship starts to tie back into the social maneuvering and nasty gossip from before. Kate started out being one of the active participants in this type of behavior, along with what she considered the “right” people, and now, she’s seeing what it’s like being on the receiving end of that same behavior from the same “right” people.) After hearing Kate’s description of what happened, Josh advises Kate not to panic and not to let anybody get to her or to try to explain the situation to anyone because it’s nobody else’s business. Their parents will support Kate and defend her to the complaining parents.

Rosemary also gives Kate a kind response, asking if she’s okay and telling her that not to feel bad if people are trying to make her feel bad for no reason. Kate does confide in her about the situation, and Kate, Rosemary, and Maudie also share a laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation because it was kind of funny to see the little first graders saying all of that stuff, completely unaware that it was potentially embarrassing, and even the principal looked embarrassed when Kate honestly recounted what the first graders said. Rosemary invites Maudie to join her and Kate in having lunch with Jackie and Christine. Jackie pesters Kate for details about what happened, but Kate decides that she doesn’t want to discuss it with them, and Jackie acts jealous when Steve says hi to Kate. Jackie and Christine leave the other three girls, confirming that an imagined rivalry over Steve is part of the reason why they’re acting like jerks.

Kate even thinks, “I didn’t know why Maudie would want to sit with us, if Jackie and Chris were going to act so snotty. I suddenly wondered why I should always sit at the same table. At least every time. I realized that no one was making me. I could sit anywhere I wanted. Maudie and Rosemary would probably go with me.” This is exactly what I was thinking and glad that Kate had this realization. Rosemary is a real friend who is worth retaining, but Jackie is drifting away, and it’s just as well for the other girls to let her go and develop a budding friendship with Maudie.

Kate’s parents are supportive of her, but they also worry that a fight over censorship could tear their community apart. Kate’s mom said that the elementary school principal would be required to take any complaint by parents seriously, but Kate points out that, by choosing to take this complaint seriously to spare the feelings of the adults seems to legitimize the complaint, like a tacit acknowledgement that something inappropriate happened even when it didn’t and that Kate did something wrong, even when she didn’t. In trying to spare the feelings of the uninformed and panicky parents, Kate feels like the adults seem prepared to throw her under the bus and slander her all over town. The middle school principal’s obvious lack of support for Ms. Plotkin also seems to be throwing her under the bus. It’s also already too late to worry about a fight starting, because it’s already begun and battle lines are being drawn.

I’d also like to point out that, to an extent, the battle lines were already drawn before Kate ever joined the reading program and read the book. The way that people react to issues stems from the issues in their own lives, their emotional baggage (you can’t live to adulthood without having at least some because real life experiences do that), and the goals that people want to accomplish. Kate was just unaware that these adults cliques and issue-based factions already existed, which is why she didn’t see this situation coming and accidentally put herself into the middle of it as their latest, hot-button target issue. It seriously bothered me because some of the adults in the story are bonding with their respective factions over the negative things they’re saying about young Kate, not unlike how Kate and her friends were originally bonding over saying nasty and derogatory things about Maudie.

The Millers, a difficult family who have been routinely complaining to Kate’s parents about a house they bought from them, frequently demanding that they solve problems that the Millers caused themselves, phone yet again to complain to them about Kate because the child of a neighbor of theirs was in the class where Kate read the book. (Note: It was not their child in the class, it was a neighbor’s, and we are not told how the neighbor feels about it. The neighbor likely does not know that Mr. Miller is even making this telephone call.) Mr. Miller thinks that Kate’s dad owes him an explanation for something he didn’t witness and no member of his family was involved in and that he just kind of vaguely heard about. This issue has nothing to do with the Millers and is none of their business, but from the descriptions of their behavior, the Millers have personal issues and a desire to make others accountable for things while not being accountable for things they do themselves. This is part of how people’s personal issues dictate where they stand on public ones and how they demonstrate what they’re thinking and feeling. It wouldn’t matter to the Millers what Kate said or did because they’re just the type to want to stick something to someone, anyone, for any reason they can find. It doesn’t have to make sense because the Millers are unreasonable people, so they do unreasonable things. That’s what makes them unreasonable people. Maybe it does make a kind of sense when you think about it.

Right after that, a parent of one of the students in Ms. Dwyer’s class calls to express her support for Kate and offer her a babysitting job, like Kate originally she wanted. In every conflict, there are going to be supporters as well as haters, and it’s not all bad to be part of a controversy when you’ve got the right supporters. The same choice or set of circumstances will get different reactions from different people, and Kate is learning that there’s no such thing as being popular with everyone. No matter what she does in her life, she will draw some people to her who understand and accept her while others will be pushed away, and it’s just a question of who she wants to bond with and how. In this parent who understands the situation and approves of how Kate has been handling it, Kate has finally found a “right” person to be friendly with who is using helpfulness and positivity instead of meanness and negativity and someone to bond with over shared values.

Ms. Plotkin comes to Kate’s house after a meeting of the teachers and principals involved and the librarian, and she says that they’ve come up with some ideas for defusing community complaints. However, word of the controversy has already spread, and Kate’s entire family is feeling the impact. People are writing angry letters to the editor of the local paper, and one of those people happens to be the father of Josh’s girlfriend, Denise, prompting her to break up with Josh. Kate reads these letters and feels horrible. They imply that she’s immoral or that she’s a dope. Kate thinks, “I wished I could just laugh at them, but I couldn’t. Those dumb letters hurt my feelings. Whoever made up the poem about ‘sticks and stones’ was wrong. Words do hurt you.” I’m glad that she realizes that, but I still would have liked it better if she hadn’t been a snob at the beginning of the book and said the things she said about Maudie before she got to know her. Kate has improved as a character, but I have less sympathy for someone when they’re on the receiving end of something that they carelessly dished out to others.

Denise’s father’s letter actually isn’t too bad, but Kate feels bad that he points out that it’s not right for someone who doesn’t know a child personally to bring up the topic of reproduction before a child is ready to hear about it, and “it is impossible for even the most well-meaning teacher to know when the moment is right for every child in class.” Kate doesn’t want to think that she accidentally pushed a little kid into learning something difficult before they were really ready and shocked them. Still, Kate remembers that Denise’s father wasn’t there and didn’t see the book or hear the discussion and might not understand what really happened. Kate finds out that Denise actually isn’t upset with her family; she’s upset with her parents for being closed-minded and making a fuss. She didn’t break up with Josh because she’s upset with him or with Kate or the rest of their family. It was because she’s worried about what they all might be thinking of her because of her father’s public reaction and criticism of them. She’s embarrassed by the way her father wrote that letter and added to the controversy, although Kate appreciates it for being one of the more thoughtful and less hateful letters.

(It occurs to me at this point that Denise’s father himself might be one of those “well-meaning” adults who maybe don’t know “when the moment is right” to say something because they don’t fully understand the situation or how his decision to say something affects other people. After all, he has directly affected his own daughter, the kid he should know the best, because he hasn’t considered her feelings or her position or talked her about the situation before he made his public reaction. Maybe just being someone’s parent alone isn’t enough to fully understand the child or the child’s life without that necessary communication.)

Steve tells Kate that some parent told his mother that “young children had been exposed to explicit sex materials” and was up in arms about the general reading materials in schools. This woman and some other parents had a private meeting about campaigning for “decent books.” Steve’s mom wasn’t impressed by that because she’d read some of her kids’ books from school and thought they were fine. The woman, Mrs. Bergen, accused Steve and his sister of reading smut behind their mother’s back and said that their mother should make them show her the books they didn’t show her before. Steve says that, when he used to live in California, there was a big controversy because an eighth grade teacher wanted kids to read Anne Frank’s diary, and the parents said all of the same things about that. (In the unabridged diary, there are parts where Anne Frank reflects on the concept of sex, getting her period, and her body parts, which she looked at on herself using a mirror. If a kid makes it to eighth grade (about 13 or 14 years old) without knowing what these things are or being afraid of them, they’ve got bigger problems than their reading material. That’s my opinion. Kids normally talk among themselves about these things, and for a person not to know any this stuff, they would have to be restricted from forming close friendships with other teenagers, denied the opportunities to discuss it honestly with family, and in modern times, restricted internet access where various sexual references abound and information is a mere Google search away. None of that would be healthy for a person who is only 4 or 5 years away from legal adulthood in our society.)

Kate is actually glad that Steve understands the issue and has opinions about it. She thinks that she wouldn’t like a boy who had no opinions. That was actually a major part of my original complaint about Kate. In the beginning, she didn’t seem to have any kind of individual personality or opinions of her own beyond her desire to fit in with the popular mean kids. By this point in the story, I felt that Kate was becoming a much deeper, more thoughtful character than the shallow, thoughtless little snob she seemed to be at first, so I was happy to see her coming to this realization and to agree with her about something.

Conflict Resolution and the Issue of Control

Kate’s feelings finally overwhelm her in English class, after she’s been confronted by many people about the “dirty” book. Mrs. Bergen, a character who has not actually appeared anywhere in the story until this point, has been busily calling other parents and generally stirring things up with an exaggerated story that bears little resemblance to the real incident. Mrs. Bergen is clearly a woman with her own agenda and is taking advantage of the situation to manipulate others into doing what she wants. Kate goes on a rant in class about how unfair the situation is and how she doesn’t want everyone to look at her like she’s a monster or a sex maniac.

The class has a real discussion about the issues of censorship and freedom of speech and what teachers have to consider when they’re choosing “appropriate” material for the kids in their classes. Ms. Plotkin says that there are even some books that she’d rather her students not read until they’re older and have more life experience. (I have a story about that from when I was ten, when a friend “borrowed” a romance novel of her mother’s and told me the most shocking bits, much of which I didn’t really understand at the time. Oddly, that’s not what I ultimately took away from that incident, but since we’re on the topic, I will tell you what I took away from that below.) One boy in class talks about how his parents say that there are things that kids should only learn from their parents, and another boy says what if parents don’t tell the their kids things they really need to know because kids have to learn it somewhere. Jackie comments that she thinks some parents are just too embarrassed about things themselves and so they don’t want their kids to know about them, not because the kids can’t handle it but because the parents can’t. (I thought this was actually a surprisingly perceptive comment from her. Actually, I don’t think that Jackie isn’t perceptive. I just think that she doesn’t always use her social perceptions for good.) Mrs. Plotkin says that’s part of it, but also parents are genuinely concerned for their kids. They worry about a lot of terrible things that kids get exposed to through TV and life in general, and most of it is beyond their control, so they focus on the parts that they can control, like the kids’ reading material.

The kids in the English class say that this whole situation is unfair because none of the complainers were there during the original reading and discussion. Not all of these people even had kids who were involved, most of the complainers haven’t even seen the book in question, and a number of them have only gotten upset because they talked to someone like Mrs. Bergen, who wasn’t there and stirred them up with her exaggerated story. They’re reacting in some over-the-top ways when they don’t really know the real situation and don’t even stop to consider that they don’t know the real situation. Their reaction is having a negative effect on innocent people’s lives, by needlessly damaging innocent reputations, and that’s irresponsible. How people approach a situation and try to control their lives impacts others. While we’re discussing the issue of control, it’s also questionable how much some of these adults are controlling themselves, which is the one thing that everybody truly can control in life, even if they have no control over anything else. While these adults are yelling at people at the supermarket and writing angry letters to the editor, there’s something else that they’re not doing that’s even more important and would be much more responsible: sitting down with their kids to have an honest talk about life and their feelings and getting real feedback from their kids about it all to see how they’re really affected.

Mrs. Bergen finally makes an appearance when she confronts Kate’s mother at the supermarket, trying to get her to join her new group, Parents United for Decency. Kate’s mother tells her off before revealing that her daughter is the one who read the book at the school. Mrs. Bergen and her followers are shocked, and some of the mothers seem suddenly uncomfortable to have to deal with the people they’ve been maligning face-to-face, in a setting where they seem perfectly normal and can see that there is nothing really wrong with them. Mrs. Bergen calls Kate’s mother prejudiced because it’s her daughter who read the book, and Kate’s mother tells her that she’s the prejudiced one. She says that the librarian who recommended the book is her cousin and graduated at the top of her class, and she trusts her professional opinion of the book over their “misinformed ranting” when they haven’t even read it.

The local paper also prints some sympathetic letters about Kate and the book, including one written by her great aunt in the nursing home, saying that Kate read the book to her and her friends, and none of the senior citizens were shocked by it.

The issue ends up being discussed at a special public meeting of the school board, where the board votes about whether or not to allow the interschool reading project to continue. Kate feels awkward when her family sits with Denise’s family at the meeting, after the letter that Denise’s father wrote. However, Josh and Denise have made up, and their fathers are actually old friends who worked together, so the families don’t want to sacrifice that relationship for just this one issue. Personally, I agree with Kate’s awkwardness and feel like, if they were real friends, the two fathers could have just talked to each other privately and directly about what happened before Denise’s father sent one of the public letters that stirred the pot. Not only didn’t Denise’s father talk to his daughter, he didn’t even talk to his old friend about the issue before writing an impersonal public letter, read by the whole community! I don’t know why people don’t think of these things. Kate thinks that people around them at the meeting are looking oddly pleasant and civilized, considering how angry and ranting they were in the letters they wrote and realizes that you can’t always tell who’s a mean person because people don’t always look mean when they act it. “It would be more convenient if mean people looked mean so you could tell.”

When the middle school principal gets up to speak, he describes the reading project in a way that makes it sound dull but harmless. When Mrs. Bergen gets up to speak, she spins a story about how the whole thing was a dastardly, premeditated plot on the part of the teachers, who were scheming to tell impressionable children about sex and undermine their morals. (This book was published in 1980, 40 years ago and two years before I was born, so here, I paused for a moment to consider what Mrs. Bergen would have thought about things that “impressionable” children routinely type into Google, completely unprompted. When inquiring minds want to know something, they seek out sources of information, and kids today know way more about some of that stuff than I had the opportunity to learn, not counting that incident when I was ten. Actually, kids write things on the internet that aren’t exactly clean, either. Who needs books and teachers to corrupt innocent children when they can innocently corrupt each other and themselves? I’ve read fan fiction online.)

Mrs. Bergen’s speech doesn’t go over well, to Kate’s relief, and several other people talk. Then, one of the parents of a girl who was actually in the first grade class gets up and is dreadfully upset that they actually named male and female bodily organs in the class. The woman can’t even bring herself to say these words in mixed company because it’s so embarrassing, something that some of the other adults laugh at in the meeting. Kate senses that her mother is about to get up and speak, but she decides that she’d rather speak for herself. Kate says that she’s not embarrassed or ashamed by these words or by the book she read and that the words in question weren’t even in the book at all, the little kids supplied them themselves in a completely innocent way. Also, Kate thinks that it’s good for kids to learn the real, proper names of their body parts and not get embarrassed or ashamed like some adults, and if anyone wants to criticize the book, they really should read it all the way through, not just the one page with the birth. Kate’s impromptu speech is well-received and even Denise’s parents congratulate her.

The school board votes to allow the interschool project to continue with only one dissenting vote. It’s a victory for Kate, but there is something still bothering her. She knows that, while the dissenters are in the minority, her haters still hate her and are against her, and they’re still around, unpersuaded. They might be back to make trouble later, if they find the opportunity. Also, Kate has developed more of an ability to really see things from other people’s point of view with real depth (something she was unable to do even with Maudie at first). Now, she can think about how it would feel to be on the losing side of this conflict, and even to have a little empathy for Mrs. Bergen. She knows that she wouldn’t like to be in her position. Kate even starts to realize that there are limits to things like a person’s individual rights because, sometimes, those rights can encroach on another person’s rights. Where is the dividing line between having the freedom to say something and the freedom not to hear something? (Where is the dividing line to say what you want about another person and the freedom not to be bullied or have your name slandered? Where is the dividing line between freedom of association and the freedom to walk away from harmful relationships? What do you have a right to control or not control?) There is depth to these issues, and because Kate has matured through her experiences, there is depth to Kate’s thoughts about it. The world and other people are more complex than Kate has ever realized before.

Kate’s father says that all of these issues are complex, and there isn’t always a perfect solution. People just have to do the best they can to work things out as they go. Democracy is just like that.

My Reaction

I edited my review of this book from the way I originally wrote it because I wrote the first review more as stream-of-consciousness, and I decided that it was too awkward and difficult to follow. I left some of my reactions in the middle of the story summary because there were things that made more sense to discuss in the moment rather than trying to do a call-back to them later, but I decided to explain more of my reactions at the end of the summary.

I remember censorship and book banning were topics in children’s literature and tv shows when I was a kid. Generally, the opinion of those books and shows was that too much censorship was a problem, and there was a recurring theme in such stories that the people who were most vehement about banning books were the ones who had never read them and didn’t know much about what the books were really about. This particular book also has that element, but it goes deeper into the various motivations of people who are concerned about the content of children’s books and the varying degrees of concern they have. I thought that it also had some thoughtful insights into social maneuvering and the nature and behavior of cliques (much of which irritated me, even though I think it’s largely accurate, because cliques always irritate me), and some of it also ties into the nature of the public controversy about the book in the story.

Social Maneuvering and the “Right People”

Right up front, I have to explain that this book is about two major issues, but there’s a connection between them. The major issue of the story is censorship, particularly about sensitive topics presented to children. It’s an issue that still resonates today. In the early 21st century, there has been a revival of concern about certain issues in children’s literature, with an intensity and both legal and social consequences for people who tread too close to the edge that have children’s educators and librarians genuinely concerned for both their livelihoods, their own physical safety, and even that they may be sent to prison. However, this story closely examines the social consequences of being a controversial person or one who has been labeled as as someone outside the “right” kind of people. Beginning with the behavior of the girls in the story toward each other, the story examines how groups of people use their reactions to other people to bond with each other or solidify their own public image and promote themselves. What bothers me is that we see that type of social maneuvering echoed in the way the adults behave when the controversy over the book Kate read in class begins. It’s not just kid stuff; it’s people stuff, regardless of age.

This type of using other people for social maneuvering is a big pet peeve of mine. I’m very much against one-upmanship in all of its forms (and I complain about it constantly), so the way the girls in the story were trying to increase their own social cred and bonding with each other by putting down Maudie got on my nerves immediately and stayed on my nerves through the entire story. I personally consider it immature, but as someone who now qualifies as being considered middle-aged, I’m well aware that some adults don’t behave that much different from the way they did when they were young teens. Bowling for Soup made fun of that phenomenon in their song High School Never Ends (song and lyrics on YouTube – it also mentions sex – some adults are still as obsessed with finding out who’s having it with whom and what other people are saying about it as teenagers are):

“And you still don’t have the right look
And you don’t have the right friends
Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends
High school never ends”

I talked about my annoyance with that throughout the story summary as incidents happened. I didn’t like Kate as a character from the beginning because she was an active participant in this without any self-awareness. Kate does improve as a character throughout the story, but it’s only after she’s on the receiving end of something similar to what she and her clique were dishing out. I was glad for the improvement, but it was hard to feel too much sympathy for someone who had previously been on the bandwagon with that.

The major issue hinted at in the title of the book is censorship, but that doesn’t actually come into the story until several chapters in (although the chapters aren’t very long). Before that, from the very beginning of the book, there is another issue about popularity and being part of the in-crowd, particularly that catty form of bullying so often found in schools and all too often afterward in workplaces because some people just never mature emotionally and socially. In particular, I noticed the misconceptions that develop around people because of this type of behavior. The concept of being friends with the “right people” especially bothers me. “Right” for what, specifically? In the beginning, Kate is worried about being popular, but she hasn’t stopped to think about popular with whom. As I pointed out in some of my reactions to the story during the summary, nobody on Earth is popular with absolutely everyone. Life is about making choices, and being in agreement or popular with some people very often means passing up connections with others at the same time.

Kate understands from the beginning that any friendship with Maudie means compromising friendship with her existing friends, who are against Maudie, particularly Jackie. What it takes her a long time to understand is that the same is true of being friends with Jackie. Jackie is mean, manipulative, and controlling, and being friends with her means shutting herself off from relationships with anyone who can’t stand the way that Jackie behaves and the way that Kate behaves in Jackie’s presence. Maudie indicates that’s the case when she has that honest conversation with Kate about how unfriendly people seem at their school, although Kate doesn’t get it at first.

Admittedly, I would never have had this conversation with Kate as a kid in middle school because I was the quiet, introverted type who more often watched others rather than speaking up, and I frequently made decisions without consulting other people about them, especially people I didn’t like. Maudie was trying to talk to Kate to give her a chance to be friends, but in all honesty, I would not have wanted to give Kate a chance as a kid. I wouldn’t have liked what I saw of Kate and her friends, and I would have seen that Kate’s behavior is completely intentional, so I would never have talked to her about anything if I could avoid it. It would have taken a great deal of effort to get along with people like that and, in real life, where there are no guarantees of a redemption arc, like in books and movies, the odds of all that effort paying off would be extremely low. People like that are the way they are because they like being that way, and more importantly, they get some kind of social payoff for it, so I wouldn’t expect them to change that and sacrifice whatever payoff they’re getting or think they’re getting just because someone who wasn’t part of the already-established “right” crowd was nice to them or honest with them. I would have completely written Kate off, and she would probably be too busy snubbing me to even notice that I was avoiding her, so it would probably never matter. She would think that she won by driving uncool me away, and I would be rid of her, so I’d win in the long run. Unless she changed and started being different, but I’d still rather skip associating with her until after that change happened because otherwise, I’d just burn out on her in a hurry.

In dealing with such a person in real life, I know that my existence wasn’t be the reason why she started acting the way she did in the first place, so having her in my life could never be the reason why she’d ever stop being like that, in the absence of another, more negative influence. In a way, the story illustrates my logic in this type of situation. Although she does change during the course of this book, it’s not really because of Maudie’s friendliness by itself. Maudie does present her with an alternate friend and a more positive influence, but what really turns Kate’s character is being treated in the way she has treated Maudie and seeing how awful it is, being gossiped about and treated as abnormal and “wrong” when she didn’t really deserve it. Kate just doesn’t get it in the beginning because nobody has ever treated her like she’s treated Maudie before and doesn’t have the imagination or empathy to figure it out without experience that type of hurt directly herself. What I’m saying is that, in a way, a person like her has to be hurt in that way to understand how it feels because they lack the ability to figure it out all by themselves. Maudie was offering friendship and positivity, but it wasn’t until she started experiencing the pain of the same type of negativity that she was dishing out herself that Kate had the incentive to accept those offers of friendship and more positive influences. If she hadn’t had that type of negative experience, I think it would have taken Kate much longer to make that type of change, or it might never have happened for her at all.

Really, when you begin to think about it, much of this story is about control, both the social aspects and the censorship ones. Kate comes to realize that she has the ability to choose her friends, that she has control over who she spends time with, and that she really would prefer to be with people who are kinder and less controlling of her than Jackie is. It’s Jackie’s attempts to control what Kate does and who Kate sees that begin to turn her away from Jackie, and as I said, I think that’s a valid complaint. The “right” people that Kate wants to be popular with in the beginning seem to be the ones who are in control of who is “in” and who is “out” and who associates with who, until she realizes that she doesn’t like that kind of manipulation and control, and she starts to see that there are other options outside of that negative, manipulative, and controlling group.

This talk about control and manipulation seems a bit dark, darker than the book actually reads, but there are some threads that run all the way through life, and the issues of the classroom do carry on to adulthood and into adult behavior. What kids learn in and out of the classroom shapes what they do and the kind of people they become because kids are all about learning how the world works and how to behave in the world to get what they want. The back of the book specifically talks about popularity and how the main character, for whom popularity is extremely important, has to learn to stand up for what she really believes in even if it’s not popular with everyone. Kate has to accept that she can’t always control how other people see her and how they talk about her, but she still has to learn to control what she stands for, how she expresses herself, what she is willing to do for the sake climbing the social ladder, and where her limits are.

Censorship and Control Issues

The censorship issues in the book are also about control. Some of it is about social control, from the way the adults start forming little groups and cliques around the issue of the controversial book, using their badmouthing of Kate and “dirty” books as a bonding issue among themselves, not unlike the way Kate and her friends initially used their badmouthing of Maudie for bonding purposes among themselves. Some adults appear to be using the issue as a way of controlling others and promoting themselves for attention. However, as the teacher and Jackie point out during the discussion in English class, some parents who are worried about the “dirty” book are coming from a place of fear, and it’s specifically a fear regarding their lack of control. The teacher points out that parents try to control their children’s reading material and media consumption because they’re trying to protect them from serious issues and the related consequences, while Jackie’s emphasis is on parents protecting themselves from uncomfortable thoughts and topics by trying to avoid confronting them with their children. I think all of these aspects of control are present in the situation in the book and in real life, to varying degrees in different people, but I also think that both real people and the characters are trying to control things that they don’t actually have the power to control, at least not completely. I think a better response than trying to control the uncontrollable is to develop an attitude of confidence in handling the unexpected and imperfect. Readers can disagree with this interpretation, if they wish, but that’s the way I read this situation.

There are many things in life that are beyond people’s control, from scary world events discussed on the news to unexpected health problems to the awkward things that six-year-olds blurt out in public about their body parts. Human beings do like to have a measure of control because that’s what helps them minimize disaster in their lives, from minor embarrassments to actual harm. I understand the desire for control and certainty. However, I also believe in limits.

I believe that there are limits on what people can control in their lives, whether it’s controlling circumstances or other people, and I think there should be limits on what people can do to assert control over their lives by controlling other people. Human beings are naturally limited creatures. We never have full knowledge of anything, and there some things in life that you just can’t change, like the fact that human beings have certain body parts, and some girls do look at their private parts with a mirror like Anne Frank did because they’re curious about what’s part of their own bodies, and it’s really the only way to do that. Hey, they’re stuck with those parts, and people with female body parts get periods, whether they like it or not. Simply having a physical human body with all the related bodily functions is just one of the many things that nobody can control. Nobody asks anybody ahead of time if they want their bodies to be the way they are. They just are, and as people grow up, they have to learn about what things are and how to deal with them because that’s how the world is. Their bodies will still have the same parts that work the same way, whether they know the names of them or understand their function or not, and everyone reaches a point where they simply can’t avoid knowing.

Denise’s father said that “it is impossible for even the most well-meaning teacher to know when the moment is right for every child in class,” but his assertion, although “well-meaning” itself, also contains a couple of assumptions that may or may not be true. First, is there really such a thing as one, single “right” moment to confront some of life’s realities? Maybe there’s a “right” time for that, and maybe there isn’t. Maybe there isn’t any such thing as a perfect moment, and maybe life is more of a series of moments and gradual learning opportunities. Some realizations don’t come all at once but in stages and steps, some planned and some not. The discussion in that took place in the class of first grade students could be considered one such step in the lives of the students, although the way it reads sounds like it was more of a revealing of the level of understanding that some of the young students currently had rather than a presentation of new information because much of the talk was volunteered by the students themselves.

Second, Denise’s father seems to be assuming that parents are able to tell when when the “right” moment arrives for their children and will act accordingly when it does, and as an adult with over 40 years of life experience, I know that isn’t true. I’ve known and known of girls who were surprised and terrified by their first period because their parents didn’t think that the “right” moment had arrived until after their little girl started bleeding and absolutely had to be told that they weren’t dying and didn’t need to go to the hospital. (See some of the recountings of first periods on the CVS website for examples. I know a couple of others from friends.) It’s hardly a magical, heart-warming “right” moment when it plays out like that. Not everything has to be done immediately, today, but that doesn’t mean that parents always make things better by waiting as long as they want to talk to kids about situations that are simply going to arise at some point, without prior warning. Time waits for no one. Maybe when the “right” time comes in children’s life, the adults around them will recognize it and act accordingly, with the right amount of preparation, and maybe they won’t recognize it or have difficulty accepting that the time has come, so they’ll lose the moment and the kid will panic or turn to someone else for the answers they need instead. That type of situation is what some of the kids in Kate’s English class discuss. They seem to be aware that they need to have some understanding of certain things eventually, even if their parents never reach the point of being emotionally comfortable with the concept of them having that knowledge or sharing that knowledge with them. What I’m suggesting is that we can’t always choose the “right” moment to deal with uncomfortable or difficult things. Sometimes, moments just come, and we just have to react as gracefully as we can, prepared or not. The reading of the puppy book and the kids’ questions about it are just those kinds of circumstances.

Even if the puppy book hadn’t sparked this particularly discussion among the first graders, it could have arisen just from seeing a pregnant woman somewhere or one of the kids talking about a pregnant relative or pet in class. Not everything in life can be controlled, and I had the feeling like some of the adults were trying too hard to control the uncontrollable. Adults talk about controlling the books kids read because books are relatively easy to try to control because they’re physical objects, neatly contained between two covers and can remain closed and unread, but the life moments that books portray are nowhere near that controllable. Seeing pregnant people or animals, getting a period earlier in life than expected, or hearing someone talk about something are just things that can happen with no prior warning, regardless of what anybody is reading at the time. In a way, I think that having a brief introduction to certain concepts from a book might take some of the shock value out of something that the kids later see, hear, or experience than if those same circumstances arise when they are completely unprepared.

I don’t think that facing the unexpected is the end of the world. Life happens, and when it does, it might not matter precisely how it happened or whether the timing was inconvenient as long as adults are willing to deal with whatever happens when it does, even if it’s awkward and uncomfortable and comes sooner than we think it should. Kate’s father says that all of these issues are complex, and there isn’t always a perfect solution. People just have to do the best they can to work things out as they go. Democracy is just like that, and so is just plain life. Life can be complex and unpredictable, but we still have to live it as best we can as we go.

Although I strongly believe that life isn’t something easily controlled and that the ability to respond gracefully to the unexpected is important, I do also agree that there are some limits on what children should be shown intentionally and that adults should give it some thought ahead of time. I don’t think it’s entirely a matter of maintaining full control over what children see or making it everyone’s responsibility to just accept whatever people give them and just deal with it, but rather a combination of both. It’s a delicate balance, and it’s rarely perfect, but I maintain that it doesn’t necessarily need to be perfect because dealing with imperfection is a valuable life lesson by itself. Rather than worry about those imperfections and being fully prepared for them, I think it’s more positive and productive to show children that the unexpected, awkward, and uncomfortable are manageable. Things can take us by surprise, and we don’t always get to pick our ideal moments, but we can still manage things, even if it’s a bit awkward, so there’s no need to worry about exactly how life is going to go.

My Racy Romance Book Story

Earlier, I mentioned that, when I was 10 years old, a friend took a racy romance book that belonged to her mother, read it, and told me all the most shocking parts. At the time, I knew what sex was, and I understood the nature of what my friend described, although I’ll admit that I didn’t actually know all the words used in the descriptions. That is, I had some knowledge, but the book was definitely not suitable for girls our age or at my level of understanding.

So, what was the effect on me from this incident? Probably not the one that most people would expected. I knew my friend was intentionally trying to be shocking and scandalous, so I said “Ew!” at all the expected places for what she was describing, but the issue that ultimately stuck with me from this experience was more about relationships rather than sex.

It’s a little hard to describe without telling you what the book was about. Let’s just say that the woman wasn’t satisfied with her husband because she was craving something more dangerous. (This is putting it mildly, but that’s the general gist of it. I can’t remember what the title of this book was, so I can’t tell you now or even look it up myself.) So, after being delightfully shocked and scandalized by this forbidden book, I started feeling sorry for the husband in the story.

From the pieces of the story my friend told me, he actually seemed like he was a pretty nice guy, and he was trying to do things he though would please his wife. He didn’t know how she really felt or what she actually wanted, and that struck me as unfair. Although the book was from the point of view of the woman, I found myself, even at age ten, really not liking her because I thought she was self-absorbed and unappreciative of the relationship she had. She seemed to be all about what she wanted and didn’t think she was getting, and I didn’t think she was looking at her husband as a person who also had feelings and was trying to make her happy. After the initial thrill of the shocking bits wore off, my impression of the characters and their relationship stayed with me. They didn’t have a good relationship.

It’s true that you don’t always know how things will affect other people, especially young children, and for that reason, I do think information should be presented gradually and with some caution. The reason why I’m telling this story is to point out that unexpected reactions aren’t always negative ones. My experience with this book was similar to the one I had with the book on witchcraft that I saw when I was around the same age. I learned about something I didn’t want (even though the characters in the book were married and having sex, their relationship didn’t look good, and I thought the woman’s priorities were messed up), and I learned that I can reject ideas that are unhealthy. A person who already does consider other people’s feelings and puts high priority on people’s welfare will continue to have those concerns. If you already have certain priorities or behavioral standards that fit with your personality, they don’t just disappear. Even if something new and shocking temporarily shakes them, they’ll come back. I’ve realized before that I have the ability to reject things I see that I don’t like, whether it’s a book or a relationship with another person that just wouldn’t be healthy.

My friend really shouldn’t have taken that book of her mother’s without permission. Maybe my friend’s mother shouldn’t have been reading that kind of stuff, or maybe the book has a better ending that redeems the characters. (My friend never told me how it ended. She just wanted to shock me with the scandalous parts.) Over 30 years later, I still have reservations about those characters and their relationship.

I wouldn’t recommend kids read books like this. Not all of them are going to have the revelations I had when I considered the characters’ relationship. However, I do think that a couple of positive ways to prime kids for moments like this, when something is unexpected sprung on them (no matter why or by whom) are to make sure that they prioritize people’s welfare and consider the feelings of everyone involved (including but not limited to their own) and that they understand that not everything people tell them is going to be a good idea and that they have the right to reject things that wouldn’t be healthy or helpful for themselves. If you understand that you have both the right and the ability to walk away from anything, you needn’t fear much about what others might unexpectedly offer. I’d also still recommend that parents make it a point to talk to kids about what’s going on in their lives and how they feel about things, so if anything unexpected arises, you can respond to it quickly. I do also highly recommend that parents read some of the books their children are reading and/or ask them about what they’re reading and how they feel about it. If you regularly discuss what the people in your life are doing and how they’re feeling, you don’t have to wonder and worry about it.

I think a dose of honesty is also a good idea. I don’t see anything wrong with parents admitting to their kids that something has come up unexpectedly and that they’re not sure that they’re explaining things in a way the kids will understand, but that they’re making an effort to help them understand what just happened or what people are talking about. (“This isn’t quite the way I was hoping you would start learning about these things, and I’m not sure if you’ll completely understand what I’m about to say, but since the subject has come up, there are a couple of things that I think are important for you to know about this … Now, I’d like you to think a little about what we’ve just talked about, and we’ll talk a little more about it later, after you’ve had time to consider what I’ve just said, and I’ve had time to consider what else I should tell you about that.”) There are some things you can do to prepare for life’s difficult issues and conversations ahead of time, and that helps, but I think it’s also important to acknowledge that no one is every 100% prepared for everything. That might feel a little scary at times, but at the same time, nobody has to be completely prepared for everything for everything in life. We can still manage if we’re willing to be open and honest and accept life as it comes, dealing with things in the moment as best we know how. Knowing that it’s possible to do that makes it a little less scary.

Posted on August 12, 2020November 5, 2023 by TracyC

Who Ran My Underwear Up the Flagpole

School Daze

Who Ran My Underwear Up the Flagpole? by Jerry Spinelli, 1992.

It’s still just a few weeks into the first new school year at Plumstead Middle School, and Eddie still feels a little out of place. He still feels like he’s a grade school kid at heart and doesn’t fit in with the big kids at middle school. The most grown-up impulse that he has is to frequently stare and smile at Sunny Wyler, and she doesn’t even like him to do that.

Then, something horribly embarrassing happens. Mr. Hollis, the social studies teacher is so late that the entire class gives up on him arriving and decides to go to the locker rooms to change early for gym. Mr. Hollis storms into the boys’ locker room a minute later and barks orders at the boys to return to his class immediately. Eddie, scared to death of his angry teacher, follows this order to the letter – forgetting that he isn’t wearing any pants and is just sitting there in his underwear. Eddie is the only person who doesn’t get any punishment from Mr. Hollis, who is sympathetic to his plight, but that’s not enough to make up for everyone seeing Eddie in his underwear.

Eddie’s underwear has cartoon characters on it, which is just another thing that makes him feel like a baby in middle school. He enlists the help of his best friend, Pickles, to help him burn his old cartoon character underwear, planning to buy some new ones with money he was saving to buy comic books. Then, Pickles suggests to him that he do something else to see how grown-up he is: try out for the school’s football team.

Unbeknownst to the boys, Salem and Sunny are both trying out for the school’s cheerleading squad. Salem isn’t at all the cheerleading type, but that’s the very reason why she wants to join the cheerleading squad. She wants to be an author, and she’s trying to understand different types of people so she can create more realistic characters. Therefore, she sometimes does things that would otherwise be out of character for her just for the experience or to get inside the head of different types of people. However, Salem realizes that she isn’t a very good cheerleader, so she invites Sunny over to consult her on what to do.

In spite of her grumpy, prickly personality, Sunny is actually a very good cheerleader, but she can’t help Salem to improve enough to make the squad. The girls do see Eddie at the football try-outs, though. Eddie’s uniform is really too big for him, his helmet gets turned around, and he ends up with a nosebleed. The coach complains about everything that’s going on with the team and how little time he has to train them and says that what he needs is a manager, so Salem volunteers for the position. Salem is very good at organizing things. With Pickles as part of the school’s small marching band, the entire group of friends is now involved in the school’s football games.

The four kids still have lunch with the school principal once a week, having developed a friendship with him during their rocky first days of school. They tell the principal about their football involvement, and Sunny brings up the subject of Eddie’s Superman underwear that everyone in the class saw him wearing. Eddie denies having any Superman underwear (which is now true), and Pickles backs him up, saying that one pair was just an old pair that he had to wear that day because the others were in the wash. The principal tries to hint to Sunny that she should stop teasing Eddie, but she takes it too far, and Eddie ends up smashing a Devil Dog snack cake (link repaired Nov. 2023) into Sunny’s face. The principal is actually impressed that timid Eddie had to the nerve to do it, and oddly, Sunny doesn’t even seem upset afterward.

Thus begins Eddie’s first steps at learning to be more grown-up. However, it’s not going to be easy for him. His current reputation is going to be hard to live down. The other guys on the football team are all bigger than he is, and he’s been bullied by the big kids since school started. At one practice meet, his pants fall down because his uniform is too loose, and a big kid hoists him in the air to show everyone that he’s not wearing Superman underwear.

But, what Pickles had told Eddie when they were burning Eddie’s old underwear was correct: Eddie might be a kid, but so are all the other sixth graders at their school. Eddie isn’t the only boy on the football team who is new and small. He’s not the only one who is sometimes timid and awkward, either. As team manager, Salem soon begins helping the new football players tie the drawstrings of their pants more tightly because other players are worried about losing their pants like Eddie did. She also begins soothing their various injuries, fears, and ruffled feelings. Around their coach, the boys have to act tough and not cry, even when they’re scared or hurt, but since their team manager is an understanding girl, the boys can sometimes let down their guard and be more human with her. Salem gets a lot of insight into the emotions of football players, and in return, she helps the young players to understand and manage their emotions, too. Eddie resists most of Salem’s help because he’s trying to prove that he’s tough and grown-up, but without her support, many of the other boys would have quit the team.

As the season progresses, Eddie gets the chance to a football hero, the very first player to score a touchdown at their brand-new school, and Sunny realizes that she’d rather be a mascot than a cheerleader because she’s too grouchy to be a cheerleader and nobody tells a Fighting Hamster to keep smiling. However, even Eddie’s football victory doesn’t end the teasing, and somebody runs a pair of Superman underpants up the flagpole to mock him. In a desperate attempt to cheer him up, Salem promises to arrange the thing she knows that Eddie wants the most – a chance to kiss Sunny. Will it work?

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

My Reaction

The kids do some growing-up in this book, but not unreasonably so for eleven-year-olds. The party where Salem tries to arrange for Sunny and Eddie to kiss is suitably awkward. As the kids talk about the idea of kissing, they tease each other. I didn’t like the part where Salem called Sunny a baby for not wanting to kiss Eddie. It’s not that I don’t think that’s realistic for some eleven-year-olds, but I believe more in the modern idea of giving consent and respecting someone’s “no” when it comes to anything romantic. That didn’t occur to me when I first read this book as a kid, but that’s what real maturity does for you. The word “sex” does appear in the story when Salem challenges Sunny’s maturity, saying that she probably still giggles when someone says that word, to which Sunny quickly replies, “Don’t you?”

“‘No,’ said Salem, ‘as a matter of fact, I don’t. What’s there to giggle about? It’s nature. It’s as natural as trees and cows. Do you giggle when somebody says trees or cows?’
‘If the tree tries to kiss the cow,’ said Sunny, ‘sure, absolutely.'”

As part of their maturity talk, Salem points out that women do mature faster than men, and that’s why some young women marry older men. Well, that’s one explanation for that, although, as an adult, I can think of at least two more.

To her credit, Sunny thinks of a way to deliver a kiss to Eddie without exactly kissing him. She does it in a joking way as part of a game of Truth or Dare.

As a side plot, the kids were also trying to decide whether or not they want to go to the Halloween Dance at school. On Halloween, they all meet in their costumes, and Eddie is over his Superman underwear embarrassment enough to wear a Superman costume. At first, the kids think that maybe they’ll go to the dance, but on the way, they can’t resist stopping to trick-or-treat and end up changing their minds. They’re not really ready to be completely grown-up yet, any more than they’re interested in romance in any serious sense. What’s more, they’re all fine with that.

This is the book where Pickles makes himself a new skateboard out of an old surfboard that’s big enough to carry not only him but all of his friends, too. He calls it the Picklebus.

Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, 1974.

My Reaction and Spoilers

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Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones, 1982.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Alternate Worlds

Themes and Spoilers

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The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom, 1960.

My Reaction and Spoilers

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Go Jump in the Pool! by Gordon Korman, 1979.

My Reaction

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The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.

My Reaction

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Frindle by Andrew Clements, 1996.

My Reaction and Spoilers

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Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall by Alice B. Emerson, 1913.

Spoilers and My Reaction:

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Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book by Betty Miles, 1980.

Introducing Kate

Being Nasty and Condescending to Maudie

A Delicate Discussion and an Indelicate Response

Misconception, Misrepresentation, and the Fallout

Conflict Resolution and the Issue of Control

My Reaction

Social Maneuvering and the “Right People”

Censorship and Control Issues

My Racy Romance Book Story

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Who Ran My Underwear Up the Flagpole? by Jerry Spinelli, 1992.

My Reaction

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