Review: Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

This chatty, conversational children's novel about a young orphan girl who goes from one set of relatives to another set and blossoms with the change is a complete delight. It's another one I had never read as a child myself but picked up because of the Shelf Discovery Challenge. Elizabeth Ann is a small, somewhat sickly, very timid child who lives with her Aunts Harriet and Frances, neither of whom are actually aunts but are related more distantly than that. Aunt Frances, who has the main care of Elizabeth Ann loves Elizabeth Ann dearly but fosters in her a very dependent relationship. She is quite fond of declaring that she "understands" this little girl left in her care. When Aunt Harriet suddenly takes sick and must go away, needing Aunt Frances, who is actually Aunt Harriet's daughter, to attend to her health, Elizabeth Ann is sent to yet more distant relatives who, not really wanting to be responsible for her care, in turn send her to her mother's aunt's family. This upheaval and plan strikes fear and shuddering into the little girl as she has heard these cousins of hers disparaged as horrible for as long as she can remember. But lo and behold, when she is finally with the "horrid Putney cousins," she comes out of her shell and starts to relish life instead of jumping at her own shadow. She learns independence and resourcefulness under the laconic and easy care of these country-living folks. Rechristened Betsy, she is expected to help around the house and to master her own fears. She finds sympathy when she needs it but is not coddled, and stops thinking that her every thought and action is of utmost importance to Cousin Ann, Aunt Abigail, and Uncle Henry. Over the months of living with these cousins, Betsy grows into a sturdy, healthy child who learns much of life and of another way to love and be loved. Written in 1917 and set in that decade, the slower, simpler way of life at the time is now nostalgic for readers. The characters are appealing and wonderful and Fisher manages to show that Betsy is happier and healthier with the Putney cousins without disparaging Aunt Frances and her more fearful, fluttery parenting style. This is a sweet book and one that I'm glad I finally made the acquaintance of.

Review: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

I can't imagine how Joan Aiken escaped me when I was growing up. Her books have just the right amount of gothic to have fired my childhood imagination. And yet somehow she never hit my radar until I was an adult. So I was more than pleased to see one of her books included in Shelf Discovery, giving me the perfect excuse to read it. (As if I needed the excuse! The book was already sitting on my own children's bookshelves unappreciated and untouched so it was only a matter of time before I snagged it and tried to entice them with it anyway.)

Bonnie's parents are leaving in order to try and strengthen her mother, who is frail and ill, and have found a shirt-tail relative to act as Bonnie's governess while they are gone. This personage strides into the book nasty and parsimonious and prune-faced. She's a puppy kicker of the first degree. Shortly after her arrival, Bonnie's cousin Sylvia arrives as well, having come by train and braved the terrifying, ravening wolves that live and prey on things near Willoughby Chase. With her is a man who has been struck unconscious on the train. As in the best gothic traditions, he will turn out to be not as he appeared on the train and will add to the menace of horrible Miss Slighcarp. Need I mention that somehow the terrible Miss Slighcarp arrived without having to face the awfully frightening wolves?

Once Bonnie's parents have gone, things go from bad to worse for forthright Bonnie and shy Sylvia. All the servants, except for those who are untrustworthy anyway, are turned off. The lowly governess takes to wearing Lady Willoughby's clothing. And finally, Miss Slighcarp informs them that Bonnie's parents have died when their ship went down, sending them off to a hideous school that is more a children's workhouse than anything resembling a school. The girls must escape to survive. Relying on the kindness of the goose boy and former servants, they manage to evade capture and head off to foil the dastardly plans of Miss Slighcarp and her compatriots in crime.

I love that there is no Disney Dead Mom syndrome here. Yes, Bonnie's parents must disappear for the girls to have their scary adventure but we aren't faced with the plucky orphan syndrome that pervades so much of children's literature and film these days. Aiken has created a delightfully gothic world that won't be too terrifying for children but she maintains the important conventions like having the weather and the natural world reflect the plot. Her wolves are scary and the visual of the girls slogging through an initially grey, winter world on the way to London and redemption in the colorful spring pays homage to the best of gothic writing. Bonnie and Sylvia are charming characters, if Sylvia's tendency to weakness and all around goodness is a tad irritating. The secondary characters are not intrusive but help move the little girls along in their quest, providing the warmth that counteracts the nastiness of the adults ostensibly in charge. I can't say how this would hold up as a re-read but as a first read, even as an adult, it's a delight. Good is rewarded and evil punished but there's no heavy handed moralizing here. I do think middle grade readers will eat it up, given half a chance and adults who appreciate middle grade books will find much to appreciate as well.

Review: All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor

This book is the first in a series about 5 poor little Jewish sisters living with their loving parents in New York City prior to WWI. It is very much a gentle middle grade story, told episodically with only the slenderest of threads keeping it from being related short stories. There is a charm to the novel but it is one that is hard for an adult who doesn't already have fond reading memories of it to pick up and enjoy thoroughly. The historical situation is interesting and the little girls are lovely. The easy introduction of Judaism was natural and likely somewhat exotic when it was published. It seems to me that our world and our experiences are a bit more global now than they were and so it loses a bit of the novelty factor, at least for me and for my non-Jewish but always inquisitive children. Children who enjoy reading about their counterparts in the past will enjoy this series of vignettes and will probably get some good imagination exercising in as they put themselves in the place of these sweet, sunny little girls. Adults may find the excessive cheer and always happy outcomes a bit much but it will appeal to them too if they want an hour or so of sheer, unsullied escapism.

Review: My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel

Did you read this one when you were younger? I thought I had but the fact that I didn't remember it at all makes me think now that I didn't. Did I miss out on something special by not reading it then? I'll never know. But I sure didn't find that something special reading it now as an adult, which was a disappointment.

Maggie and Liz have been friends forever, despite the fact that Liz is pretty and popular and Maggie is fat and awkward and mostly just heor worships Liz. Liz insists on setting Maggie up for double dates when she and boyfriend Sean go out. Dennis, Sean's equivalent to a Maggie although he's gangling and nerdy rather than fat and awkward, is Maggie's date and neither one of them finds all that much appealing about the other but they continue to go out with Liz and Sean. Maggie and Sean, in the meantime, are in love and have to buck their parents to continue to see each other. Their ups and downs dictate in large part the ebb and flow of the fledgling, conflicted, but finally developing relationship between Maggie and Dennis.

Occasional notes passed between the friends or couples are interspersed between the chapters, allowing for Zindel to dispose of large chunks of time in the narration. This isn't entirely successful as it means that the disagreements and avoidances between the friends remains superficial. And there's very little narrative getting from Liz and Sean happy, albeit with Sean, the typical teenaged boy, pressuring Liz to have sex, to the rather predictable denouement of the ending. And while Maggie seems more the focus of the book than the other three characters, Liz and Sean provide the (obvious) object lesson here in a fairly heavy-handed manner. And frankly neither of them end up being terribly appealing characters. Liz is hard to like from the outset and while her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent rejection by Sean is supposed to inspire pity, it doesn't. Sean likewise doesn't grab the reader's empathy despite his frigid and emotionally barren upbringing so his ultimate buckling under to his father's advice leaves the reader feeling a rush of indigestion. And as it's completely in character, Sean comes off as just other unlikeable character in this book of many unlikeables.

The book is dated (published in the 60's) and honestly I can't see it having been terribly interesting to kids of my generation, much less the more sophisticated kids of today. And lest anyone say that society has changed for the worse, Zindel's portrait of society in the late 60's is pretty darn bleak too. Stereotypical characters, superficial plot, and an obvious, belaboured lesson. Do we not give our kids credit for being more intelligent than this? I really didn't enjoy this but I know it is a favorite of many so perhaps I missed something vital here.

Review: Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

I am probably going to be flayed alive by fans of this classic bit of kiddie lit, but I didn't love it. As a matter of fact, far from wondering what it would have been like to have grown up in their family, I was beyond grateful that I didn't. Usually I am all for daydreaming and inserting myself in the appealing, old-fashioned world but not in this instance. I do understand that writing this book was probably a labor of love on Gilbreth and Carey's parts. And I am quite certain that they would be horrified to know that I found their father, at least as depicted here, to be an unpleasant sort. The idea of running a family as a factory or business might seem quaint and entertaining from a distance but it struck me as distasteful. I was particularly interested in the assertion by the authors that he respected children and that's why so many children liked him. Then, completely without irony, they said that he would cut off their dinner conversation by declaring it "not of general interest" and go on to expound on whatever had fascinated or consumed him that day. Respectful? Wow. That's not my understanding of the word.

But the look at the times and the inner workings (even if unusual) of a large family was interesting. Mother Lil was really rather marginalized in this book but I suspect she takes center stage in the next book so perhaps the pair are intended to be seperate portraits of their parents in the milieu that the children knew them best: the family. It is also worth noting that there was only about one year in which all 12 children were at home since the age span between the first and the twelfth is great enough. And since Frank Sr. died when the youngest was merely two, his jovial response to people's wonder at so many children that they come cheaper by the dozen was really only true at the very tail end of his life. The book is almost episodic in nature, with the interesting bits recounted, leaving the narrative flow a bit choppy. And figuring out who all the children were? Don't count on it as they aren't described distinctly enough to differentiate amongst them. But this is a classic and people do love it so perhaps I was just in a terrible mood or completely missed the elusive something that draws readers to a book. The family antics were occasionally entertaining but I had a hard time getting past my dislike of the not quite so genial patriarch. Heresy, but I prefer the movie versions.

Review: In Summer Light by Zibby Oneal

I somehow missed this book when I was growing up. I generally skipped directly from kiddie lit to adult books without ever reading through the offerings available for teens although I do still have my old, yellowed copy of Oneal's The Language of Goldfish so she must have been on my radar at some point.

This book is a symphony of color and image, so viscerally visual that Oneal's descriptions easily inhabit the reader's mind's eye. And this is apropos in a book where main character Kate, a high school senior, is the daughter of a famous painter. She used to paint herself but has given it up in an effort to find something that is truly her own: in her case, language and words. Kate has a complicated relationship with her father, thinking that everything in their family is designed to cater to his painting muse and genius. She in antogonistic about what she sees as his dominance so when a graduate student arrives to catalog his paintings for a retrospective, she expects her father to overwhelm and diminish this latest visitor to their home.

But Ian is easy going and charming, recognizing and admiring Marcus Brewer's greatness but not seeming the lesser for this recognition. And as the summer progresses and Kate recovers from the bout of mono that had derailed her original summer plans, she starts to see life, her father, the future, and even her own long dormant talent at painting in a different light thanks to Ian's outlook. A summer where Kate learns about love and disappointment and where she looks beneath the surface of her father, like looking at the way an artist creates the play of light over an image on canvas, the story of Kate's growing up is beautifully rendered.

Impressive given the age of the novel, this book is not dated in any way. It is not long and certainly doesn't focus on the expected tropes of the YA genre but it is timeless and well done. Kate is realistic as is her attitude. I found her frustrating in the beginning, certain that she knew the way that things should be and the ways in which her parents were so wrong, stubborn in her convictions, and unmoved by others' assertions that she doesn't necessarily have the only perspective on things. But her gradual opening up to a bigger reality than she had accounted for showed a young woman coming into her own and becoming an adult. YA fans would do well to revisit this book and even those who missed it the first time around will appreciate it.

Shelf Discovery Challenge

Yes, I am failing miserably on my challenges this year and yet I am still going to sign up for another one. Julie at Booking Mama is hosting a challenge based on Lizzie Skurnick's book Shelf Discovery. And since it involves choosing 6 books, almost all of which are middle grade or YA, from the over 70 listed in the book, I think I can probably handle this one. It's also nice that it runs Nov. 1 through Apr. 30 so the timing overlaps but doesn't conflict with so many other challenges. Maybe I'll get R. to read along with me! For more information, go to the challenge rules and join up with me. I want to read six books I didn't read as a girl-child and that limits me substantially here since Lizzie Skurnick and I seem to have been reading from the same section of the library (and I love that the covers of the books pictured in Shelf Discovery are in actual fact the covers on the books I read--and in some cases still have!).

Here are my six tentative books:

1. All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
2. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
3. Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth Jr. & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
4. Understood Betsy byDorothy Canfield Fisher
5. My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel
6. An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

As I leafed through Shelf Discovery thinking of the books I read and loved as a girl, I thought also of some of the books I still have that would probably never make it into a book like this or even on anyone else's list. But I know that I still have a copy of at least one of my childhood's sentimental favorites and I plan to read that one too in honor of this challenge, even if it isn't listed in the book and doesn't fit the challenge parameters. So The Witch's Buttons by Ruth Chew, long out of print but still on my bookshelf, where sadly, none of my children have been tempted by the delights inside it, will also join the chosen six as my only re-read.