Posted on by TracyC

The Talking Earth

The Talking Earth by Jean Craighead George, 1983.

Billie Wind is a Native American girl from the Seminole tribe in Florida. When the story begins, Billie has been brought before the tribe’s elders because she doesn’t believe in the tribe’s legends about talking creatures, nature spirits, and other supernatural phenomena. It was her older sister Mary who reported her to the elders, and many of the elders are also her relatives, including her uncles. At first, Billie doesn’t take it seriously. She’s always been a very practical, literal-minded girl who has questioned all of the things that her elders have told her since she was small, and she doesn’t expect their response to be very different from any of the ways they’ve responded to her youthful doubts and questions. However, this time, the elders ask her what she thinks would be an appropriate punishment for her. Billie, thinking the whole thing is ridiculous, suggests that they send her out into the Everglades alone until she finds some animals who talk to her. She expects that the elders will veto that idea because she is probably too young to go out there alone for an indeterminate period, and it’s ridiculous for anyone to expect her to find talking creatures. To her surprise, they approve of the idea and begin preparing for her journey.

Although it was her suggestion, Billie is angry because she doesn’t really want to make this trip. She asks her sister why she reported her to the elders in the first place. Mary says that, ever since she started attending the school at the Kennedy Space Center, she’s been too scientific and that, someday, she’s going to be the head of her family. When that happens, Billie will need more than science to lead a family wisely. Still, Billie is resentful.

As she sets off in her little boat, Billie reflects on what makes her different from her sister. Billie takes after her mother, who is a very practical woman (while her uncle wants to send her off on the trip with a good luck blessing, her mother provides her with food and useful tools), and her father works for the Kennedy Space Center. Both Billie and her brother chose to attend the school there, which is very modern and whose scientific principals appeal to Billie’s practical side and her desire for facts and real answers to her questions about how the world works. Billie is very concerned with the major world issues of the day, which include the possibility of nuclear war (the book was written during the Cold War) and environmentalism. These issues are far more real to her than anything in her tribe’s folk tales, and she believes in her father’s assertion that the development of space travel is important because humans may eventually need to find another planet to live on. By contrast, Mary has refused to attend the Kennedy Space Center school and is deep into the folk tales and traditions of their people. Billie looks to the future, science, technology, and the possibilities that lie out among the stars for answers, while Mary immerses herself in ancient legends and her people’s strong connection to nature and the Earth.

Alone in the Everglades, Billie listens to the calls of birds, wondering if that qualifies as “talking animals”, but she decides it doesn’t. She can make hooting noises at an owl, but it can’t speak back to her in any human language. Looking around for a place to camp, she finds a cave by noting geographical features that indicate that there is probably a cave nearby. Does that qualify as the Earth speaking to her? Then, animals around her become frightened and flee! She wishes that the animals would actually speak and tell her what frightened them, but the smell of smoke soon tells her: there’s a wildfire! Realizing that she can’t possibly paddle her boat fast enough to outrun the spreading fire, she does the best she can to wet herself down with water and take refuge in the cave.

Huddled in the cave during the terrifying fire, Billie thinks about what she knows about wildfires. She knows that occasional fires are necessary for the environment because they clear out underbrush, and that they don’t normally burn hot enough to burn the trees. She also knows that white people, who aren’t as familiar with the environment, try to clear out underbrush to fight fires, which inadvertently makes them burn hotter and makes them more dangerous. Billie also wonders whether her tribe will see the fire and try to rescue her, but they probably don’t know that she’s caught up in it because they probably think she went in a different direction.

As Billie explores the cave a little more, she finds an ancient clay bowl. At first, she thinks that means that the cave was once used as a burial place by her people, but then, she realizes that the bowl is intact. If it was meant to be placed in a burial, it would have been broken. Exploring a little further, she realizes that someone once used this place as a home, and there are other artifacts and the remains of a bed that may have belonged to a distant ancestor. She lies down to keep herself safe from breathing too much of the smoke until the fire dies down.

When it’s safe, Billie explores further, finding carved steps in the stone. She thinks about what she knows about her people’s history and her ancestors. When she goes home and tells everyone where she’s been, she plans to bring her uncle, Charlie Wind, and maybe an archaeologist to investigate this place. However, she also discovers that the ground outside the cave is still hot from the fire, too hot for her to leave. She doesn’t have much food left, and she worries that she might die in the cave before she can manage to leave. Then, she thinks about the turtle and snakes that sought refuge from the fire in the pool nearby. They could be a source of food.

Hearing a sound that makes her think that it’s a call that Charlie Wind makes, she looks around, thinking maybe he’s come to rescue her. It’s not a human, though. At first, she thinks that she sees a little person looking out of the ground, like something from one of her people’s folk tales. It turns out to be a young otter in a hole. She befriends the little otter and manages to catch some fish from the little pool that helps them to survive in the cave. The little otter shows her that the little pool is deeper than she thought, and the little otter catches another fish. It explains to Billie what happens to the fish during fires. They take refuge in underground rivers and pools. She considers whether her ancestors carved these underground rivers on purpose to bring fish to her people. Searching the cave further, she finds many more ancient artifacts from her people, including an old, forgotten medicine bundle.

The destruction of the fire makes Billie think that her father and the other scientists must be right about the Earth dying and people needing another planet to live on. Yet, she soon finds growing plants in an unexpected place. Because the trees burned, light is reaching a place where it couldn’t reach before, and new plants are growing. In some ways, nature turns out to be more resilient and adaptable than Billie expected.

When Billie finally gets the opportunity to leave the cave and go home, she realizes that her boat has burned. She salvages what she can and a few useful artifacts from the cave, and she and her otter friend set out to find another way home. Billie manages to carve a new boat for herself, witnesses the destruction of the little island with the cave that sheltered her because of white people’s development, comes to understand more about the environment and cycles of nature, and befriends an orphaned panther cub and a turtle. The longer Billie has to learn to survive by herself in the natural environment, the more she comes to appreciate her friendships with animals and to understand that she needs a connection with nature itself. She talks to them and learns to read some of the signs nature gives her. Perhaps, after a fashion, animals and the forces of nature do speak to people who are prepared to listen.

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

My Reaction

This story is marvelous blending of coming-of-age and survival!

Some other reviewers on Goodreads took offense to the repeated criticism of white people ruining things. I didn’t feel the same way. For one thing, although the main character is a Native American girl, the author, Jean Craighead George, was a white woman. I don’t doubt that real Native Americans feel the way the main character does, but the author is still the one delivering the criticism. Jean Craighead George came from a family of naturalists, so it’s understandable that she would be critical of anybody who disregards or damages the natural environment, and she might well take issue even with the society/culture she was born into because of its treatment of nature.

That leads me to my second point, which is that the criticism delivered in the story isn’t about white people ruining everything and doing everything wrong but focuses, repeatedly, on two things that white people do that trouble the main character. First, the white people accidentally disrupt the natural environment, sometimes while trying to do things that they think will help, because they haven’t studied the environment well enough to understand the effects that their choices have. The way the character notes that clearing underbrush in an effort to stem wildfires actually makes the fires worse when they happen is an example of that. Second, white people destroy parts of the environment and what should be archaeological sites because they prioritize other things, especially development and urbanization. These things, while unpleasant, are true. The story isn’t inventing these problems, just noting them.

Billie doesn’t entirely give up her belief in science. However, through her experiences in the Everglades, she does learn to understand and appreciate the world where she lives more than she did before. Although space and the possibilities of the future are fascinating, so is the Earth, and Billie comes to realize that people need to understand and take care of the world they have rather than expecting to find another one. She doesn’t believe now that there is another planet exactly like Earth anywhere in the universe, and she realizes that, rather than searching for a new, more ideal world in space, people can find what they’re looking for by changing the way they look at the world where they live.

Throughout the story, Billie combines aspects of her people’s legends with scientific concepts that she understands, like “oxidation” and “air pressure”, and she sees how scientific disciplines, like archaeology, can help people to understand the past and how life has changed. Her new knowledge of the natural world doesn’t eliminate her understanding of science but augments it. She learns to read the body language and behavior of animals, realizing that this is a form of “talking.” By the time she encounters a Native American boy on a name quest of his own, Billie realizes that she believes in her people’s stories more than she thought she did. Explaining it to the boy, who also has a very modern view of life, helps her to clarify and share what she’s learned.

Posted on by TracyC

The Little Leftover Witch

The Little Leftover Witch by Florence Laughlin, 1960.

Young Lucinda Doon has a great time on Halloween, running around the neighborhood in her ghost costume. During the night, though, she wakes up to hear someone crying or trying not to cry. When she looks out the window, she sees a young witch. The little witch says that her broom broke, and without her broom, she won’t be able to fly. If she doesn’t get back with the other witches by sunrise, she’ll have to stay on the ground and live among normal humans for an entire year.

Lucinda feels sorry for the little witch and tries to help her. She offers the little witch her mother’s broom, but it doesn’t fly because it isn’t magic. They also try Mrs. Doon’s mops and vaccuum, but they don’t work, either. The little witch doesn’t know what to do. Lucinda offers to let the little witch sleep in her bed for the rest of the night, saying that they can talk to Lucinda’s father in the morning. The little witch insists on sleeping in the closet, though, because she likes the dark.

In the morning, the little witch tells Lucinda that her name is Felina. Lucinda introduces Felina to her parents and explains Felina’s situation. They consider whether a helicopter could help Felina, but Felina says that the only thing that can help her is a magic broom, and even then, witches can only fly on Halloween. Felina says that she’s stuck among humans for the year.

Lucinda is eager to have Felina say with them, and Mr. and Mrs. Doon discuss the situation quietly. Felina has a grouchy disposition, but the Doons can see that she’s lost and in need of help. They don’t seem to think that Felina is really a little witch, although they call her one. They say that they had better report finding Felina to the police, in case someone is looking for her. The police take pictures of Felina and take her fingerprints, and Mr. Doon, who works for the newspaper, makes sure that a report about a lost little witch appears in the newspaper. There are a lot of rumors around town that Felina could have been left behind by traveling gypsies or that her family could have been killed in an accident outside of town. However, none of the rumors come to anything, and nobody comes to claim Felina. Because no one claims her, the Doons take Felina to the court house and get a permit to keep her for a year.

The Doons insist that Felina follow their rules while she’s living in their house. They clean her up by brushing her hair and giving her a bath, although she doesn’t want one. They cannot accommodate Felina’s taste for bat wing soup, so she has to eat what they serve. They also insist that she wear pajamas at night and sleep in bed instead of the closet. When Felina acts up, Mr. and Mrs. Doon sometimes threaten to spank her, but they never do. Instead, they explain to her that, sometimes adults know what’s better for a child than the child does. There are some things that they will let her decide for herself, but when they tell her that something is an “order”, she will have to do it for her own good. Reluctantly, Felina agrees.

During her year with the Doons, Felina has many new experiences, doing things that witches never do. She has to go to school, and she learns to read. She attends a birthday party. Felina plays some mean tricks at the party because she is upset that the other children have birthdays, and she doesn’t. Lucinda’s grandfather, who has accepted Felina as another grandchild, says that problem is easy to solve because Felina can have his birthday, which happens to be October 31. Felina thanks him, the first time she’s ever thanked anybody, and she also apologizes to the birthday girl for spoiling the party, the first time that she’s ever apologized to anybody.

Felina spends Thanksgiving and Christmas with the Doons. Before Christmas, Felina gets upset because a mean boy in the neighborhood tells her that she won’t get anything for Christmas because she’s just a bad little witch and that she’ll get whips and stones instead. Since Felina is sure that she won’t get presents for Christmas anyway, she acts out more. However, Felina does get presents for Christmas, and the Doons assure her that she’s not a bad child but a “dear little witch” and that they love her.

When Felina finally takes off her witch’s hat and lets the other children use it for a making a “snow witch”, she finally loses her witchiness and seems more like a regular little human girl. She doesn’t seem to mind this, discovering that she has other interests besides being a witch and that she likes living with a family that really cares about her. When Halloween comes again and Felina has the chance to return to the other witches, she decides to stay with the family she has grown to love and that really loves her.

My Reaction

I remember reading this book when I was a kid! It’s a good Halloween story, although much of it is set in November through New Year’s. The story speeds through much of Felina’s year with the Doons after January. Felina’s difficulties in learning to cope with family life as a little witch who has never experienced it before mostly take place over a few months, through the fall and winter.

In the end, the judge who grants the Doons the right to keep Felina permanently marvels over her transformation since he saw her the year before, thinking that it’s like magic. Felina being a witch adds a little magic to what is essentially the story of a foster child who hasn’t experienced love or a caring home before and acts out until she realizes that she is safe and loved, which is ultimately the “magic” that leads to her transformation. Felina doesn’t seem sad in the end to not return to the witches or even experiencing inner conflict in choosing between her old life and her new one. Being a witch was magical, but being among people has given her many new experiences, especially the experience of love and caring, which she never seemed to have among the witches. Nobody among the witches seemed to worry about whether or not she was healthy, celebrated her birthday as a special day, cared about her feelings, or encouraged her to consider the feelings of others.

Because, in the context of the story, Felina does turn out to be an actual young witch with real magic rather than merely a lost little girl pretending to be a witch, I remember being a little sad that she essentially gives up her magic and her original witchy personality when she becomes an ordinary little girl. She barely seems to remember that she ever was a witch. In the end, she even gives up her name to name herself after the members of the Doon family at her formal adoption, taking the name Mary Lucinda George. I thought that was a bit much. It made me feel almost like the Doons completely took over her personality in the end and that she became a little too much like another Lucinda rather than a more human version of herself. I would rather have seen her remain Felina but to keep the part about discovering that she has greater interests in life beyond being a witch and that her accomplishments as a human girl have a kind of magic to them.

Still, it is a nice story for Halloween about the magic of family love, and it does carry a sense of nostalgia. It isn’t a very long book or a difficult read, and it’s a charming story that’s great for any time.

Posted on by TracyC

The Trouble with Miss Switch

The Trouble with Miss Switch by Barbara Brooks Wallace, 1971.

Rupert is a budding young scientist, just entering the fifth grade, and his new teacher is an unusual woman called Miss Switch. A lot of teachers say they’ve got eyes in the back of their head, but it seems like Miss Switch really does. Right from the first, she seems to know what kids in class are doing when she’s definitely not looking. She even seems able to read minds at times, and when kids act up in class strange things happen. A spit ball thrown by a student ends up coming back and hitting him, and a class bully seems to get stuck while getting a drink from the drinking fountain.

In spite of the strange things that happen around Miss Switch, the kids in class like her, though. She makes their lessons interesting, and their grades improve. She’s also much more fair than most of their other teachers. Other teachers play favorites in class, having “teacher’s pets” or treating the girls much better than the boys, but Miss Switch treats everyone the same. That means, when she’s in a bad mood, everyone suffers, but when she’s happy, everyone benefits. The students appreciate the equality, but Rupert can’t help but wonder how Miss Switch is able to do some of the odd things she does.

Rupert tries to put his scientist’s mind to the question to figure out what’s going on with Miss Switch, and he comes to a startling conclusion: Miss Switch is a witch! Before telling anybody what he suspects, he decides that he has to satisfy himself that this is the case and then discuss it with Miss Switch herself. That would only be fair, and since Miss Switch has been fair with her students, Rupert thinks he should be fair with her. He does some research at the library about witches and plans a midnight excursion to the school to have a look around his classroom for clues. However, when Rupert sneaks into the classroom at night, he is started to find Miss Switch waiting for him.

Miss Switch isn’t angry that Rupert is in the classroom at night. In fact, she was hoping that he would do just that because she needs to talk to him. Miss Switch admits that she is a real witch, but she also tells Rupert that she’s in trouble. The whole world has become more modern, and computer-oriented, and the witches are no exception. They’ve recently started using a special computer to evaluate their performance as witches, and the trouble is that the computer gave Miss Switch a bad grade. It says that she isn’t “original” enough with her magic. The computer assigned her to teach Rupert’s class at school while she’s coming up with ways to make her magic more “original”, but if she can’t find a way to do it, she’ll have to spend the next 150 years sweeping the witches’ mountain with her broom. Miss Switch knows that Rupert has a creative and scientific mind, and she’s hoping that he can help her come up with some ideas.

Rupert’s first idea is for Miss Switch to improve the school’s next football game. The school’s team always loses to their rivals, and the school band is terrible. If Miss Switch can improve the band and make the team win for a change, that would be original. Unfortunately, Miss Switch’s attempt is only half successful. She definitely improves the band, but because she enchanted the number of the school’s quarterback instead of the quarterback himself, the other team also benefits because they have another player with the same number. Miss Switch gets a good rating but an F for successful completion. (Personally, I didn’t think that was fair because she was half successful. I think that should actually give her a C average.)

Meanwhile, Amelia, an old friend and fellow classmate of Rupert, has also figured out that Miss Switch is a witch and confronts Rupert about what he knows. Rupert brings Amelia along to his next meeting with Miss Switch, and she asks them for another idea for original magic. While they’re thinking it over, Rupert suddenly realizes that Miss Switch has already been using her magic in successful and original ways in her role as their teacher. To prove it to the other witches and their computer, Rupert persuades Miss Switch to take him and Amelia to the witches’ mountain on Halloween so he can make his case to the computer itself.

This is the first book in a series about Miss Switch, and it’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There’s also a cartoon movie based on the book that you can see sometimes on YouTube.

My Reaction

I remember both the book and the cartoon movie from when I was a kid! The copy of the book that I have uses a picture from the cartoon on the cover. The cartoon movie is a shorter version of the book, and there were parts of that I remembered better than the book.

I completely forgot the part in the book about Rupert doing experiments on his pets, overfeeding one and underfeeding the other. That sounds cruel, and I’m surprised that his parents knowingly allowed him to do that. Fortunately, when Miss Switch’s magic causes his pets to talk, they tell him how they really feel about his experiments and that he’ll probably kill them if he continues. When Rupert realizes that he’s harming them, he listens to them and stops the experiments.

One of the parts of the book that I remembered the best was the punch cards that they use for the computer. Most kids in the 21st century probably aren’t familiar with punch cards. They were still around when I was a young child in the 1980s, but they were on the way out. My father was a computer programmer, and he told us that punch cards were what he used when he first learned programming. When I was in first grade, we also used some as bookmarks and reading guides (holding them horizontally across the page, just under the line we were currently reading). I have no idea what the punch cards we used as reading guides were originally for. They were just left over from some old project. Even though I never actually used punch cards for their original purpose, I’m still a little nostalgic about them just because they were around when I was young.

I like the part at the end about how Rupert manages to convince both the computer and the other witches of Miss Switch’s original use of magic by simply describing what Miss Switch has done with her magic at school. The idea of a supernatural or magical teacher who uses their abilities to keep order in the class and/or make learning more fun is a great topic for a children’s book, and it’s also explored in other children’s books, such as Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots. Kids like stories that combine familiar, ordinary school life with something fantastic.

However, there are parts that I think adults can also appreciate, both because of the nostalgic pieces of the story (like the computer punch cards) and because the computer that the witches use to evaluate their performance seems like the type of performance evaluation that adults encounter in their own jobs. Like some forms of work performance evaluation that are initially touted as “innovative”, this one also proves faulty and unpopular, even among the witches who have been receiving passing grades up to this point. When Rupert accidentally gives the computer a nervous breakdown, many of the witches are actually relieved to be done with it!

Posted on by TracyC

The Worst Witch Strikes Again

The Worst Witch Strikes Again by Jill Murphy, 1980.

It’s a new term at Miss Cackle’s Academy, and Mildred Hubble is back! In spite of the headmistress’s gratitude toward her for saving the school the previous semester, it isn’t long before Mildred finds herself in hot water again. She still manages to get her lessons wrong, and admittedly, sometimes goofs around or does naughty things out of boredom.

In an effort to teach Mildred some responsibility, Miss Cackle makes Mildred responsible for the new girl at school, Enid Nightshade. Mildred is supposed to show Enid around and make sure that she knows what she’s doing. Miss Hardbroom, the potions teacher, is dubious about this because it often seems like Mildred herself doesn’t know what she’s doing. Although Miss Cackle is hopeful that this new responsibility will give Mildred the incentive she needs to improve, so she can set a good example for Enid. However, what no one seems to consider is whether Enid is going to be a good influence on Mildred.

During their chanting lesson, Enid sings funny on purpose, and it makes Mildred laugh, getting her into trouble again. Enid also keeps a pet monkey in her room, even though only cats are allowed at the school, and Mildred accidentally lets it loose! After the monkey causes chaos in the school, it is revealed that the monkey is actually Enid’s cat. Enid changed it into a monkey for fun, but Mildred is blamed for doing it. Mildred can’t bring herself to tattle on Enid. Worse still, Mildred’s best friend, Maud, takes offense to Mildred spending so much time with Enid instead of her. Mildred can’t help it because she knows that Miss Cackle is expecting her to help Enid, but Enid keeps getting her into trouble, and Maud starts hanging out with the insufferable Ethel instead.

Enid continually gets Mildred in trouble, putting her in danger of getting expelled, while nobody seems to suspect Enid. Yet, Mildred has trouble getting angry with Enid because she doesn’t seem to mean the trouble she causes. At least, she doesn’t seem to mean for Mildred to take the blame, although she doesn’t step up to take responsibility and clear Mildred’s name, either. It seems like, rather than setting a good example for Enid, Mildred’s lessons in responsibility will be learning how to stand up to Enid and her escapades!

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

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

The idea of a teacher helping a student to learn responsibility by making that student responsible for a younger student is a classic boarding school story trope, dating back to Tom Brown’s School Days. However, this story humorously inverts the concept because Enid is a mischievous girl who ends up getting Mildred into more trouble than Mildred ordinarily gets into by herself! I was a bit annoyed at Enid because of how she causes trouble for Mildred and doesn’t take responsibility for it at first. The story makes it clear, though, that Enid doesn’t realized just how much trouble she’s causing for Mildred at first. When Enid realizes that Mildred is in serious trouble with the headmistress, she’s prepared to take responsibility.

It takes a nasty trick played by Ethel to really bring Mildred, Enid, and Maud together. Mildred and Enid pull off a wild stunt to get out of Ethel’s trick, and Maud stands up for Mildred and Enid, helping them to pass off the escapade as an ambitious tribute to the school. Fortunately, it’s enough to smooth things over with both the headmistress and the strict potions teacher!

From this point on in the series, Mildred, Maud, and Enid are all friends with each other.

Posted on by TracyC

The Worst Witch

The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy, 1974.

Mildred Hubble is a girl at Miss Cackle’s Academy for young witches, but she can’t seem to do anything right! It’s only about halfway through her first term, and it seems like she’s always getting confused and making the wrong potion in her potions class. Then, when she gets into a fight with a snobby girl named Ethel, she accidentally turns Ethel into a pig instead of a frog. When the girls at school receive their black cats, they run out of black ones, so Mildred gets a tabby cat, who seems to have even more trouble learning to ride on broom than Mildred did, and that’s saying a lot! Miss Cackle, the headmistress, is kind and tries to be understanding with clumsy Mildred, but Miss Hardbroom, the potions teacher, seems to think she’s a lost cause.

On Halloween, Mildred’s class at school is selected to make a special display. Miss Hardbroom decides that they will do a broom formation. Mildred is nervous about how she will do on her broom, and the mean Ethel sees an opportunity to get revenge on her for the pig incident. Because Mildred accidentally damaged her own broom, Miss Hardbroom orders Ethel to lend Mildred her spare broom for Halloween. Ethel puts a spell on the broom that causes it to act up in the middle of the formation, ruining the whole thing.

Everyone is mad at Mildred, thinking the incident was just more of her clumsiness and inattention. She knows that she will be called to a conference with Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom the next day. Unable to face them, Mildred decides to run away. However, outside the castle, she comes across a group of strange witches, talking about an evil plot to take over the school. Mildred is the only one who knows that the school is danger. Can the worst witch at the school manage to save it?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). This is the first book in a series. There was also a movie from 1986 (also on Internet Archive) and a tv show based on the series. (You can sometimes find the movie or some of the tv episodes on YouTube.)

The 1986 movie is fun and and contains a very trippy scene where Tim Curry, as a wizard, sings a song about Halloween. In the movie, Mildred is played by Fairuza Balk, who later played in the more serious witch movie The Craft in 1996.

My Reaction

When I was in high school, and the Harry Potter books were popular, a friend of mine pointed out that The Worst Witch was basically Harry Potter before Harry Potter existed. It’s true, too. I wouldn’t say that Harry Potter is a rip-off of The Worst Witch because there are many differences between the two series. Harry Potter has much more serious themes about death, prejudice, and oppression that you won’t see in The Worst Witch. The Worst Witch is definitely much lighter in tone. However, it is fun to notice some of the parallels. Both series are about a kid attending a magical school, and there’s a nasty potions teacher, a more privileged student who’s a snob and bully, and a villain who plots to take over the school. (Could the fact that the nasty teacher is always the one teaching the potions class possibly be an indication that many of us still carry traumatic memories from our chemistry teachers?)

I enjoyed The Worst Witch, although the stakes are much less serious than in Harry Potter. It’s a good series for younger children, combining boarding school style antics with magic and villains that aren’t overly scary but still threatening enough for Mildred to be a hero in defeating them. Mildred is a lovable misfit who constantly messes up (sometimes through her own fault and sometimes through someone else’s) but who always manages to come out on top!

Posted on by TracyC

No Such Thing as a Witch

No Such Thing as a Witch by Ruth Chew, 1971, 2013.

A new neighbor moves into one of the apartments in the brownstone next door, and the first sign that Nora and her brother Tad notice that this new neighbor isn’t a normal person is when they spot a squirrel who appears to be reading a tiny newspaper. The “newspaper” turns out to be one of the neighbor’s business cards. Maggie Brown has a business taking care of people’s cats and other animals. She seems to have a strange ability to communicate with animals and get them to do what she wants.

Nora begins to suspect that Maggie Brown might be a witch when she seems to communicate easily with their dog and when her brother starts getting along with Maggie’s cat, Henry, when he normally doesn’t like cats. The secret turns out to be Maggie’s fudge, which she says she makes from an old family recipe. A person who eats one piece loves animals, even if they didn’t before. Two pieces allow a person to talk to animals and understand what they say.

Tad has little restraint when it comes to the fudge, and when he eats too much, the kids understand just how powerful the fudge really is. Eating three pieces makes a person act like an animal, and four pieces will turn the person into whatever animal they were thinking of at the time. Tad accidentally turns himself into a cat, and Nora has to help cover for him until he turns back into himself. The effects of the fudge are always temporary, no matter how many pieces a person eats, so Tad doesn’t suffer any ill effects.

The children are intrigued by Maggie Brown and become friends with her, although Nora is unsure at first how much they can trust her. She is sure that magical Maggie must be a witch,her fudge can cause problems when their animal escapades go too far, and she doubts whether Maggie is even taking care of her animals when she finds that Maggie has been plucking out a bird’s feathers. She changes her mind after a trip to the zoo, where Nora learns that the bird has a problem with its feathers and Maggie has only been plucking out the bad ones to allow new ones to grow.

However, other people have problems with Maggie. A local shopkeeper resents Maggie after she confronts him about a cat he tried to abandon, and her landlady, who is not an animal lover, becomes concerned about the animals she’s been keeping in her apartment. When the landlady decides to call the health department and get someone to inspect Maggie’s apartment for health violations, Nora and Tad decide to see if they can turn her into an animal lover with the help of Maggie’s fudge.

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

My Reaction

It’s a fun story about a magical neighbor and her magical fudge, which allows people to talk to animals or even turn into animals, if they eat enough. The two kids in the story enjoy having a little magic enter their lives in their otherwise ordinary neighborhood. Maggie never actually admits to being a witch, but she comes to realize that the kids understand that her fudge is magical, and she trusts them with the secret. The adults in the story never figure it out, even though some of them also eat the fudge.

Although the effects of the fudge are temporary, they do help change people’s attitudes about animals even beyond when the effects wear off. Tad continues liking Henry the cat after he gets used to him, and Nora develops better feelings for Maggie’s pet lizard once she gets to know him. The fudge allows them to get to know the animals better, look at them in a different light, and generally give them a chance. The kids hope that, once the landlady has had some samples of Maggie’s fudge, she will also develop better feelings for animals over the long term.

One other thing I wanted to mention is that, while the kids refer to Maggie casually, their mother is always trying to correct them, insisting that they call her Mrs. Brown instead, because she’s an adult. It’s traditional for children to address adults in a formal way as a sign of respect, although people in general have become much more relaxed about that. When I was a kid in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was always taught to refer to adults formally, by last name, although when I was in college in the early 2000s, that habit weakened. I had professors who preferred to be called by their first names, in spite of their academic credentials, and friends’ parents starting wanting to be called by their first names. People in Arizona are largely informal anyway, and many people even have business acquaintances call them by their first names. As a now middle-aged adult in the 21st century, I also prefer people to call me by my first name, partly because I feel more relaxed with the informality, partly because it’s what I’ve been called for most of my life, and also because my last name is a little long and some people find it difficult. I don’t care if kids even call me by my first name because that’s just who I am, and I think they probably have an easier time if they just think of me by first name.

Posted on by TracyC

What the Witch Left

What the Witch Left by Ruth Chew, 1973, 2013.

Katy and her friend Louise are bored one day at Katy’s house. They start snooping around a drawer that contains things that Katy’s Aunt Martha left behind after her last visit, even though Katy’s mother told her not to mess with them. At first, they seem pretty ordinary. There’s a pair of boots, a bathrobe with a pretty design, a pair of flesh-colored gloves, and a mirror. Katy tries on the pair of gloves, but to her surprise, they fit so well that they can’t be seen or felt once they’re on her hands. Then, Katy’s piano teacher shows up to give Katy a lesson, and Katy starts the lesson without taking the gloves off. To everyone’s surprise, Katy plays unusually while she’s wearing the gloves. Everyone else just assumes that Katy has been practicing more or trying harder than she usually does, but Katy wonders if the gloves have something to do with it.

She becomes more sure that the gloves are magic when she discovers that she can do other things unusually well while wearing them. She was never very good at sewing before, but while wearing the gloves, she mends a tear in her dress so well that it’s difficult for anyone to see that it was ever torn. Katy tells Louise that she thinks the gloves are magic and offers to let her try them, too. Louise points out that she’s left-handed while Katy is right-handed, so they can each wear one of the gloves on their dominant hands to test their magic. Like Katy, Louise finds that she can do things unusually well while wearing one of the gloves. She likes to draw chalk pictures on the sidewalk, and while wearing one of the gloves, she makes a drawing so realistic that total strangers stop and tell her how amazing it is. When the girls get to school, they both easily pass their spell test with perfect scores, and they have no trouble writing an essay in class, even though they don’t really understand or remember everything they wrote when they’re done.

It seems like Katy is right that the gloves are magic, but they soon realize that there are drawbacks to relying on magic to do all of their work for them. It turns out that the girls not only wrote the essay too easily but, because they were sharing the pair of gloves, they wrote identical essays. Their teacher accuses one of them from cheating in class and moves Katy to a different seat. Since Katy had more trouble pronouncing the words in the essay that she didn’t really write herself, the teacher also decides that she was the one who copied and assigns her an extra punishment. However, Katy admits to Louise that she’s not really angry about being punished because, although she didn’t cheat in the manner the teacher thought she did, wearing the gloves and making them do her work for her was still a kind of cheating. The girls decide not to wear them to class anymore, although they do wear them while working on their costumes for the school’s Thanksgiving play because they need help with sewing.

Before the play, Louise’s mother tells her that she took the wrong blanket for her Indian (Native American) costume and tries to give her another one to use that doesn’t look as good. Louise is upset because she had gotten her costume looking so good, and she doesn’t want the old army blanket her mother gave her. Katy offers to let Louise use Aunt Martha’s colorful bathrobe for her costume instead, but unbeknownst to the girls, the bathrobe is also magical. They realize it for the first time when Louise walks out on stage during the Thanksgiving play and is completely invisible except for her head, the only part of her not covered by the bathrobe. Some people panic when they see Louise as just a floating head, while others assume that it’s a magic trick to spice up the play. Katy and Louise let everyone think it was just a magic trick and are mysterious about how they accomplished it, but this incident makes them realize that everything Aunt Martha left behind is probably magical in some way.

Louise asks Katy more about her Aunt Louise, but Katy admits that she doesn’t really know much about her. She’s not really a relative, just a friend of her grandmother’s, and she and her mother call her Aunt Martha out of habit. They decide to investigate the rest of the items in the drawer, but they know they have to be careful about how they do it to avoid causing chaos or attracting too much attention from other people.

Investigating Aunt Martha’s magical items leads the girls on fun adventures. The boots turn out to be seven-league boots, and Louise and Katy decide to test them by walking to Florida to go swimming in November. However, they go the wrong way and end up in Mexico instead. There, they meet a girl named Pilar. They help Pilar to weave some straw place mats with the help of their magic gloves, and Pilar lets them ride on her donkey, Pepe.

The girls start to suspect that Aunt Martha is actually a witch, based on her magical objects and Katy’s mother’s description of her. The girls panic when they accidentally lose the key to the drawer with all the magical objects in it down a drain, and Katy’s mother gets a letter saying that Aunt Martha is coming to visit. What will the girls do if Aunt Martha discovers that they’ve been using her magical objects, and what if they have to admit that they lost the key to the drawer?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Ruth Chew is known for writing stories about magic and witches for kids, but what I like about these stories is their gentleness. I think that’s also part of what makes other people nostalgic for these books because they’re very gentle and comforting to read. The kids in the stories have magical adventures, and they get into some minor trouble because of them, but nothing really stressful or dangerous happens. It’s a relatively low-stakes adventure, but sometimes, that’s exactly what you want when you want to relax. Things generally work out well in the end, and it wouldn’t be a bad story to read to kids as a bedtime story.

Aunt Martha is a witch, but she’s a nice witch. She knows what the girls have been doing, and she doesn’t mind. In fact, it is implied that she left these items there for Katy to use one day. It isn’t fully explained why she did this or just how much she knows about the girls’ activities. It seems like their adventures were basically the end in and of themselves, like Aunt Martha just wanted Katy to have some magical fun. That’s typical of Ruth Chew’s magic books. They don’t often explain much about the origins of the magic, and things are often wrapped up at the end without the characters really knowing everything. The characters don’t really seem to mind not getting all the answers because they’ve had their fun, and they’re satisfied with that.

This book has a typical Thanksgiving play of the kind held by many American schools in the mid-to-late 20th century. I’m not sure what schools do in the 21st century, but I also remember plays with Pilgrims and Indians (Native Americans) from when I was a kid in the 1980s and early 1990s. By the time I was in school, teachers were urging kids to use the term “Native Americans” instead of “Indians”, although people were still saying “Indians” as the generic because it was what kids heard from tv, books like this, and things other people said. As an adult, I really do prefer “Native Americans” to “Indians.” It’s a little longer to say when you’re speaking out loud, but it does help to distinguish “American Indians” from Indians from India, and it can be awkward if someone has to ask what kind of Indians you’re talking about. It’s also generally what Native Americans seem to prefer, if someone isn’t naming their specific tribe, and it’s best to call people what they prefer to be called. Nobody in the book discusses this because the Thanksgiving play is just background, an opportunity for the girls to try on the bathrobe and discover that it’s magical because they need something for a costume.

Posted on by TracyC

The Book of Wizard Craft

The Book of Wizard Craft by Janice Eaton Kilby, Deborah Morgenthal, and Terry Taylor, 2001.

One of the things I thought was interesting about this book was that it was published at the height of the popularity of Harry Potter, and many of the things in this book are clearly meant to appeal to Harry Potter fans, referencing activities and pieces of folklore included in the Harry Potter books. My mother gave this to me when it was new because I liked the Harry Potter books, and because my birthday is close to Halloween, she thought I could use some of the ideas in the book for one of my Halloween birthday parties.

The book is divided into chapters focusing on different types of crafts (the “craft” part of the title literally refers to arts and crafts, not “witchcraft”, although there’s a play on words there), activities, decorations, and recipes. Some of these could fall under more than one category. Aside from the crafts and activities, each chapter also has sections of folklore about magic, wizards and witches, supernatural and mythological creatures, and superstitions. The information about folklore and superstition don’t always directly relate to the main subject of the chapter.

Chapters in the Book:

Wizard Regalia – This chapter is about how to make pieces for wizard-themed costumes, including hats, robes, wands, and cloaks. I thought the instructions for making a turban were interesting because wizards are typically known for wearing pointy hats. I think it was included because Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter wore a turban. There are also instructions for making an hourglass pendant, like Hermione’s time-turner. Good for dressing up for Halloween! This chapter also includes folklore about famous wizards and their animals and poltergeists.

The Decorative Arts – This chapter is about how to make wizard-themed room decorations that could also make good decorations for a Halloween party. The decorations include a magic carpet, a magic mirror, a crystal ball, and bats and stars. The folklore for this chapter includes explanations about the hand of glory (not as another craft project, thankfully), screaming skulls, and headless ghosts. (I kind of wish that the headless ghosts were included in the costume chapter because that is a fun kind of costume to make, but then again, it’s not a wizard costume, so it wouldn’t really count.)

The Art of Horticulture – This chapter is all about things to do with plants. There are instructions for making a container garden and a terrarium with carnivorous plants and for planting a fairy circle with flowers (fairy rings that occur naturally are fungi). There are also instructions for carving “Shrunken Mandrake Heads” out of apples. I’ve seen that Halloween craft before, just called “shrunken heads.” The folklore includes additional information about plants and also information about fairies and giant spiders and snails.

The Art of Animal Husbandry – This chapter contains a field guide to mythological creatures and also apothecary activities. I thought at first that the things an apothecary might make would have gone better in the plant section, but their ingredients supposedly come from animals. The activities are to make things like narwhal bubbles, unicorn horns, and dragon scales, which are supposed to be used in making other things, although later recipes in the book don’t use them. It’s just for play. The folklore in this chapter includes superstitions about animals.

The Book Arts – This chapter is for all things related to writing. There are instructions for making your own journal and scroll, quill pen, and black ink and invisible ink. The folklore includes information about the Druids, King Arthur, and pharaoh’s curses.

The Art of Astronomy – This chapter is about constellations and astrological signs. It shows you how to make flashlight covers so you can shine constellations on your ceiling. There is also a folklore section about creatures like werewolves, vampires, and ghost dogs.

The Art of Alchemy – This is the chemistry chapter of the book. There is a “magic potion cook book” of non-edible recipes for things like fake blood, slime, quicksand, and color-changing water. The folklore section of this chapter explains who alchemists were and about their search for the philosopher’s stone, the protected object of the first Harry Potter book.

The Art of Amusement – This is the party-planning section of the book. There are more decorations in this section and instructions for making crackers of the sort that contain small party favors. There is also a cookbook of edible recipes that would make good party food for a Halloween party, like bat wings (really chicken wings), petrified tree cookies, and crystal candy. The folklore/activities of this chapter are about methods of fortune-telling, including reading palms and tea leaves. (Personally, I thought some of the decorations would have been better in the chapter about decorations, and I would have liked to see more party games in this chapter. I think some of the games that I included on my Halloween Ideas site would be good.)

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

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Juniper

Juniper by Monica Furlong, 1990.

Young Ninnoc was born the daughter of a chieftan in Cornwall. She was raised as a princess in her father’s castle and educated as young royalty. She is generally loved and cared for, but there is one person in her father’s household who doesn’t like her, her father’s sister, her aunt Meroot. Ninnoc doesn’t know why her aunt hates her, but she knows early in life she can’t trust her. Meroot isn’t even nice to her own young son. She has ambitions for her son to be a great warrior, so she forces him to start training him early and purposely keeps him hungry and in discomfort to toughen him up. Ninnoc is friends with her cousin, and she and her nurse offer him food and comfort in secret. Her cousin really wants to be a musician, but his mother would never allow such a thing.

As the only daughter of a king, it initially seems that Ninnoc’s eventual fate will be to marry and to rule after her father, along with her future husband. However, Ninnoc begins showing signs early in life that she has other talents. It begins when she playfully joins a group of men who are dowsing for water, and she is the one who finds it. As she grows older, she also discovers a talent for healing when she heals her cousin’s wounds after his battle training. She adopts an orphaned baby owl as a pet, and when she realizes that she can hear it talking to her, both she and her cousin realize that Ninoc has a talent for magic. Strangely, her cousin comments that his mother also seems to have this ability, something that makes Ninnoc uneasy.

Ninnoc’s father trusts Meroot more than he should because he is strangely fond of his older sister, but Ninnoc and his mother know that Meroot harbors deep resentment toward them. Ninnoc’s father made Meroot one of Ninnoc’s godmothers, although her mother didn’t really approve. Ninnoc’s other godmother is a strange woman called Euny, who lives in a cottage in the wild areas outside of the protection of Ninnoc’s father. Ninnoc doesn’t like Euni when she meets her because she’s raggedy and unkempt, and for some reason, she insists on calling Ninnoc by the name “Juniper.” Ninnoc’s mother says that Euny is a wise woman and that she calls Ninnoc “Juniper” because she says that is her true name. Both of Ninnoc’s parents trust Euny because she has special abilities. Ninnoc’s mother explains that there are different kinds of power in the world. Some people have power like Ninnoc’s father does, with armies of knights and political authority, but Euny has a different kind of power.

Ninnoc isn’t sure what kind of power that is, but she realizes that this is something that she wants to understand it. As a young princess, she is accustomed to be around power and has the sense that she wants to grow into a position of power, expecting that she will probably be queen one day, but at the same time, she realizes that she isn’t a warrior like her father and his knights. Euny’s kind of power might be the kind of power that Ninnoc will one day need. Still, when Ninnoc’s father tells her that she will have to go live with Euny for a year and a day and study with her, Ninnoc doesn’t really want to go. She doesn’t want to be away from her parents, her cousin, and her friends at her father’s castle, and she doesn’t really like Euny. However, the more Ninnoc begins to sense her own growing powers and to become concerned about what powers her aunt might have, the more she realizes that she needs whatever knowledge Euny has to offer her.

When Ninnoc decides that it’s time to go to Euny for training, she is surprised and a little hurt that Euni doesn’t seem too happy to receive her. Euny explains to her that the power she has is that of a Doran, someone who is very in touch with the natural world and the rhythms of life, but she doesn’t explain too much about what that means. In fact, Euny’s lack of explanations and kind treatment almost cause Ninnoc to give up on the idea of training with Euny entirely.

Euny’s small cottage in the countryside is uncomfortable. It’s often cold, and Euny doesn’t feed her much, telling her that she needs to learn what it’s like for people who are born without privilege. Ninnoc tries to bear it as long as she can, but it seems like Euny uses her more as a servant than anything else and doesn’t really explain anything to her. Euny takes her to gather herbs and plants, but she doesn’t initially explain what they are or what they’re for. Euni questions Ninnoc about her observations of the natural world, and Ninnoc’s observations of the world increase, but somehow, Euny never seems satisfied with her improvement. It seems that Ninnoc has been left to endure this treatment and dig out what training she can, but Ninnoc hardly knows just what it is that she’s even supposed to be learning.

Things change for the better then Euny takes Ninnoc with her to visit another Doran friend, Angharad, and her apprentice. Angharad and her apprentice live simply but far more comfortably than Euny and Ninnoc. Angharad has at least provided her apprentice, another girl about Ninnoc’s age, with a proper bed to sleep in, a warm house, and adequate food, which Euny has not. Ninnoc can tell that Euny is uncomfortable at how much Ninnoc prefers Angharad, and she is embarrassed when Angharad insists that she leave Ninnoc with her for the winter. It’s only then that Euny awkwardly admits to Ninnoc that she really does care about her, even though she’s never said so before.

During that winter, Ninnoc comes to some important understandings of herself and what the path of a Doran can be like through her time with Angharad and her apprentice. However, Angharad says that Euny still has some important lessons to teach her. When Ninnoc complains about Euni’s lack of teaching, Angharad encourages Ninnoc to pay attend to Euny and dig out the lessons for herself. Euny has had a hard life, since she was orphaned and homeless at a young age, and she isn’t great at explaining herself or showing her emotions, but Angharad says that she’s still a powerful Doran and that Ninnoc can learn a lot from her. By the time Ninnoc is ready to return to Euny, she has come to understand more about Euny and is more sure of her path as a Doran, and Euny, for her part, comes to realize that the way she was treating her apprentice wasn’t helpful to her. Euny helps Ninnoc to increase her learning of the healing arts, saying that this will be important to her path in life. Ninnoc begins to embrace her true identity as Juniper the Doran.

When the year and a day are over, Ninnoc returns to her parents, but she is growing up and must now make some important decisions about the course her life will take and how to use her abilities. When she first returns home, she can tell that things have been bad while she was away. The harvest has failed, which is something her father says has happened before, but it seems especially bad. In spite of that, her aunt has decided to remarry and insists on a big wedding feast. Ninnoc is suspicious of her aunt and, because of her training, comes to suspect that Meroot used an evil curse to ruin the harvest.

Having learned things about power and how people crave it or grasp it, Ninnoc begins to understand her aunt in ways she didn’t before. Meroot has always been bitter because, as a princess, she was deprived of her chance to rule when her younger brother, Ninnoc’s father, was born. For a time, she harbored a hope that Ninnoc’s father might not have children, but because he married and had Ninnoc, Meroot found her chances of ever having the throne dwindling. In some ways, Ninnoc shares the feeling that it isn’t fair for a girl to be deprived of her place in succession just because she has a brother or that the “manly” powers of fighting and war are prized more for rules than the powers of wisdom and healing. Yet, she can’t allow Meroot to harm others because of that.

Using her own Doran healing abilities, Ninnoc is able to help undo Meroot’s curse. The land becomes prosperous again, but Ninnoc’s own destiny and desire for power and position are tested when she learns that her mother is expecting another baby and that she thinks it will be a boy. Ninnoc feels some of the jealousy Meroot has always felt at being deprived of power and position, displaced by a younger brother. With Euny’s help, Ninnoc/Juniper begins to see another destiny for herself besides the one she always assumed she would have as her father’s heir, but she must overcome her feelings to protect her mother and younger brother and find her real place in the world as Juniper the Doran.

This book is a prequel to the book Wise Child, written after it but showing Wise Child’s mentor Juniper and her own coming-of-age story. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I remember reading this book as a teenager, after I read Wise Child, and I liked it then, although I have some different perspectives now on the story and some of the characters. I think it’s important to note that the “Dorans” in the story are sort of pseudo-proto-Wiccans, but they’re not really historically accurate. “Doran” isn’t an historical term for a witch or wise woman; it’s just invented for this particular fantasy series.

I had forgotten how much Euny neglected and deprived Juniper during her time as her student. I remember that Juniper was initially a little spoiled from being raised as a princess, but as Angharad realizes, Euny’s lessons in living as an ordinary person and getting in touch with nature go beyond what is actually good for Juniper, keeping her underfed and inadequately housed. That level of neglect isn’t really necessary for Juniper’s path as a Doran, as her time with Angharad and her apprentice make her realize. The true is that Euny is a bad cook and housekeeper and settles for just barely scraping by in her life. Even though Juniper is initially inexperienced with cooking and cleaning, she soon realizes that she’s better at it than Euny is, partly because Euny hardly tries. Angharad says that Euny is a good teacher, but objectively, she really isn’t. What she’s actually good at is getting in touch with the powers of the natural world and healing, but she’s initially bad at explaining things, and her treatment of Juniper is actually preventing her from learning.

The book doesn’t explicitly say this, but Euny seems jealous of Juniper at first for her privileged early life. No matter what Juniper does, she seems determined to mock and humiliate Juniper as the privileged princess, and she is gleeful when Juniper realizes that she’s treating her less as a student and more as a servant because she relishes the role reversal. Euny has lived a life of deprivation, and I think some part of her is still bitter about it. Juniper knows that her father has offered Euny a nice place to live in the grounds of his castle and other gifts that she has refused. She lives the way she does because she has chosen this lifestyle. Juniper’s time with Angharad causes Euny to reconsider her treatment of Juniper and what she’s really been teaching her, so when she comes to reclaim Juniper from Angharad, things change between then. It’s partly due to Juniper’s growing understanding of the path she’s choosing in life, but I think it’s also due to Euny coming to understand the real relationship between herself and Juniper and to reconcile her own feelings. I think it’s important to consider that angle of things because it helps lay the groundwork for Juniper’s later struggle with her own emotions regarding her place in the world.

The society the characters live in relies heavily on social status or power of one kind or another. Juniper’s parents love her, but when her little brother is born, Juniper immediately knows that she is out of the line of succession for her father’s position. It hurts her, and Juniper has to acknowledge and come to terms with that hurt. It’s partly the hurt of being replaced and partly the loss of power, something which matters so much in their society. However, Juniper doesn’t want to become like her aunt, twisted by greed for the one kind of power and authority she can’t have and failing to use the powers she does have in the right way. Meroot uses her powers to manipulate and hurt others, while Juniper genuinely wants to heal and protect others. While it does hurt that others no longer see her as her father’s heir and that she won’t have that type of power, as she once thought she might, Juniper comes to appreciate the power that she does have and that she can use it to create a new destiny for herself.

I still hate the part in the story where Euny makes Juniper kill the pig for food. Like Juniper, I know, intellectually, that the pig is an important food source and that’s what it’s being raised for, but it’s still a bloody business, and I hated reading about it. When Euny neglects Juniper emotionally, Juniper bonds with the pig as one of the few animals Euny keeps, making killing him even harder for her, and it just seems like a cruel manipulation from Euny to make her do it.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Wise Child

Wise Child by Monica Furlong, 1987.

Juniper is an unusual woman in the community where she lives. Wise Child knows that she originally came from Cornwall, and now, she lives alone and unmarried. People also know that she practices magic and doesn’t go to church. Yet, although people are a little suspicious about her for that, they still call on her for help when someone is very ill because she is an excellent healer and can frequently help when others can’t.

Wise Child (a nickname given to her by her family) finds herself alone at the age of nine. Her mother, Maeve, had left her with her grandmother years before and her father, Finbar, is a sailor who is often away. While her father is away, Wise Child’s grandmother dies, and the community has to decide where Wise Child will live until her father returns. She wants to live with her aunt, but her aunt and uncle are poor and already have trouble providing food for their children. After church one day, the village priest asks the villagers if anyone else is willing to give Wise Child a home. Few people are willing to take on an extra responsibility and an extra mouth to feed. At first, the only people who are interested in taking Wise Child are people who want to use her as a little servant or extra worker. Wise Child fears going to live with them because she knows they use their own children as hard workers, feeding them little and beating them for discipline. Then, Juniper speaks up and says that she would like to have Wise Child.

The priest is reluctant to let Juniper take Wise Child, knowing that she isn’t a Christian. Juniper suggests letting Wise Child decide where she wants to live, but Wise Child isn’t sure what to answer. She fears the other families and how they would treat her. Juniper has been kind to her in the past, but Wise Child also fears her because of the stories people tell about her. However, Wise Child’s aunt sees that Juniper would take better care of her than the other families, so she lies and says that her father had previously said that, if anything happened to his mother, he would like Juniper to take care of Wise Child. Nobody contradicts this, so Juniper takes custody of Wise Child.

Wise Child is nervous when she goes to live in Juniper’s house, fearing that she will cast spells on her or that she has dead bodies hidden in her cupboards, like her cousins claimed. When Juniper asks her what’s worrying her, Wise Child surprises herself by admitting that she’s heard all of these stories about her and that she’s afraid. To her surprise, Juniper isn’t angry at her or at the people who have told Wise Child these stories. Instead, she says that she thinks Wise Child is brave for coming to her house even while fearing all of these things, and she reassures her that these stories aren’t true. As Wise Child becomes familiar with her house and with her, she will see that she and her house aren’t as scary as the stories say.

Wise Child finds that this is true. Juniper’s cupboards are full of very ordinary things, and the broom that people say Juniper uses for flying is just an ordinary broom. Juniper also doesn’t beat Wise Child, even when she does things wrong. Juniper promises that she will never beat her.

Wise Child finds that she likes living with Juniper. She had always wanted to go to school, like some of the other children, and Juniper teaches her many things. She teaches her some practical household skills, and she also begins teaching her about herbs and medicines. Juniper also promises to teach Wise Child Latin, although girls in their area don’t usually learn Latin because they’re mostly expected to be wives and mothers and to learn to take care of households. However, Juniper says that all truly learned people learn Latin. When her cousin, Coleman, comes to visit to see if she’s all right with Juniper, Wise Child assures him that she’s doing fine.

Juniper does have secrets, though. Wise Child isn’t sure what Juniper keeps in the attic of her house or what she does there. She begins learning Juniper’s secrets when Juniper gets a visit from an older woman called Yuni, who insists that Wise Child undergo a bizarre ritual. Yuni and Juniper smear some kind of smelly ointment on Wise Child’s skin that gives her a vision of flying on Juniper’s broomstick!

The next day, Wise Child questions Juniper about this ritual and whether the things she saw in her vision really happened. Juniper explains that she and Yuni are both magic-users. Some people might call them witches, but they refer to themselves as “Doran”, based on the word for “door” or a way into something. It has to do with people who see into things in ways that other people don’t. Dorans “live in the rhythm” of life, nature, and the changing seasons. Wise Child’s vision means that she has the ability to use magic and become a Doran as well.

As Wise Child begins to understand Juniper’s kind of magic, it awakens memories of her mother in her mind. Wise’s Child’s mother used to beat her and eventually abandoned her, leaving Wise Child with her grandmother while she ran away with another man. Wise Child feels hurt that her mother abandoned her instead of taking her along, wherever she went. However, she also begins to remember things her mother had and things she used to do that seemed strange. Wise Child asks Juniper if her mother was also a Doran, but she says no. Maeve practices magic, but it’s a very different kind of magic.

Wise Child comes to understand what Juniper means when Maeve returns and uses her magic to persuade Wise Child to come live with her for a while. She promises Wise Child a life of ease and luxury with no difficult or boring lessons, but when Wise Child sees what Maeve does and how she takes advantage of other people, she comes to appreciate Juniper’s way of life and lessons more. Maeve has even taken advantage of and hurt Wise Child and her father.

Gradually, Wise Child begins to learn the secrets of her own family’s past, the long rivalry between Juniper and Maeve, and other secrets about the land they live in, the things people who have lived there believed, and the things people have done for power and to control other people or the forces of nature. Wise Child feels conflicted between her beliefs in Christianity and the new knowledge that she’s been gaining about the Dorans. She doesn’t want to have to choose between them, although Juniper says that there’s no need. Juniper says that Christianity and the beliefs of the Dorans don’t really conflict with each other, and she also believes in Jesus. However, she admits that not everybody sees it that way. The village priest in particular is suspicious of Juniper and thinks that Juniper has corrupted Wise Child.

During a particularly bad winter, the priest blames Juniper for bringing on the famine and sickness. He brings in an inquisitor to question Wise Child and Juniper, and Wise Child fears what he and the people of the village will do to them. Will they find a way to escape, and if so, where will they go where they can be safe?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It is the first book in a series about the Dorans, although the second book, Juniper, is a prequel to this one, and it focuses on Juniper’s early life.

My Reaction

I remember reading this book in my early teens, but there were many things about the lore it draws on that I didn’t understand back then. For me, it was just an interesting fantasy book. The story draws on witchcraft lore, but it’s not entirely historically accurate. To begin with, the term “doran” to describe witches or magic users is unique to this book and its series. It’s not an historical term.

The time period of the story is never explicitly defined, although it’s set in a small village in Scotland. I think, when I was younger, I took it to be sort of Medieval, and I think that’s probably what the author intended, but if so, there are various anachronisms for the Middle Ages. For example, Wise Child describes Juniper as giving her a kind of tea, but tea didn’t arrive in the British Isles until the 1600s and didn’t really become popular until the 1700s, so Wise Child shouldn’t have had that concept. Because the story’s time period isn’t really defined, I considered that the story could be as late as the 17th or 18th centuries, except that the village is clearly Catholic, with a priest and a monk serving as the inquisitor at the end of the story. There are no mentions of Protestants, and there should be if the story was set in the 16th or 17th century.

To be fair, Medieval people did make hot tea-like drinks of herbs or grains infused with water, but I don’t think they referred to these drinks as being “tea” because they weren’t familiar with the concept of “tea” then. In modern times, we refer to “tea” to mean a variety of infused drinks, but “tea” itself is a specific plant, the one used for black teas and green teas. Herbal teas don’t contain this plant, so they’re technically tea-like, not actually “tea.” I know it’s a technicality, but it’s the kind of thing I notice now that went past me when I was younger. When Medieval people made infused drinks, they didn’t have the tea plant in them, and they called them “waters”, not “teas”, like barley water or sage water.

Returning to the issue of whether or not this is pre-Reformation times or not, while the story seems to be set in pre-Reformation times, the type of witchcraft trial depicted at the end of the story is more in keeping with Reformation and post-Reformation Scotland than Medieval Scotland. The Witchcraft Act of 1563 made witchcraft illegal and led to a period of witchcraft trials that lasted until 1736. This is really the period of intense persecution of supposed witches, not the Middle Ages. Prior to the Witchcraft Act, it was more common for people to skeptically dismiss “witches” as being merely superstitious, delusional, or frauds rather than staging witch hunts and witch trials.

The type of witchcraft lore that the story uses is also somewhat anachronistic based largely around Wiccan lore and feminist sensibilities that had their basis in the 20th century rather than the type of herbal remedy healing that would have been found in the Middle Ages. (This documentary of the life of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, is fascinating and explains some of the background lore.) Juniper has a sense that there’s a connection between psychology and emotional health and physical health that’s more modern than Medieval, and her notions of what to teach Wise Child wouldn’t have just been unusual as concepts to teach a girl vs. a boy but also generally unusual for anyone of their time and location, a small village where people primarily make their living in farming.

She is correct that, to be truly considered a learned person in the Middle Ages, Latin would be expected, but this is the reason why truly literate people were considered so rare during that time. It wasn’t that nobody knew how to read during this period, but books were highly uncommon, being expensively and painstakingly produced by hand. More people could read and write in a vernacular way during the Middle Ages (spelling also not standardized during this period) than most people suppose, using basic writing for utilitarian purposes like keeping business accounts or sending occasional personal messages, but only clerical scholars and those who trained with them knew Latin. What I’m saying is that what Juniper teaches Wise Child wouldn’t have been shocking in Medieval Scotland for being inappropriate for girls and ruining them for being wives and mothers, as portrayed in the story, so much as it should have been shocking as a thing that a woman who lives as a simple folk healer in a small farming community shouldn’t have known in the first place to teach anybody. The prequel book, Juniper, explains that there’s far more to Juniper’s past than most of the characters in this book know and that she was far better educated than most people of her time because she came from a royal family.

The part about the psychedelic ointment that produces the illusion of flying is based on witchcraft lore, and there is a scene in the book that involves the sacrifice of a willing deer that is eaten after the ritual is based around concepts of pre-Christian rituals in the British Isles. Most of the details we have of pre-Christians rituals in the British Isles comes from Roman writings, and details are sometimes questioned. I had forgotten about that part of the story since I read the book the first time, and I didn’t like it the second time around. Even if the animal seemed willing to be sacrificed and was eaten afterward, making it a public meal and not just a wasteful sacrifice, it was still a disturbing scene.