Book Review: Pran of Albania

[osprey_archer]

One nice thing about the Newbery project is that I learn so much about places that I previously knew nothing about. For instance, until I read Elizabeth Miller’s Pran of Albania, I knew nothing about Albania except the sworn mountain virgins, women who swear to remain virgins and hitherto go dressed as men with a rifle slung across their back.

(Miller, searching for a reference point her readers will understand, once describes them as “nuns,” which inevitably made me think of demon-fighting nuns from anime. Nuns! With guns!)

For a while it looked like this book wasn’t going to have any sworn mountain virgins, but I should have had more faith in the 1930s Newberies to go charging right into whatever Gender is available to their plucky heroines. Of course there are sworn mountain virgins in this book! Indeed, Pran herself is a sworn mountain virgin for five whole chapters!

Then she realizes that the man she is betrothed to IS in fact the boy she has a crush on and decides that after all she wouldn’t mind getting married, because at the end of the day it’s still the 1930s and the toys have to go back in the box at the end. But before that, she uses her sworn mountain virgin status to speak at a council meeting (only men and old women and sworn mountain virgins can speak) in favor of continuing the truce that has temporarily put a halt to the law of blood feud.

The truce is in place because the mountain tribes of Albania had to band together to fight off a Slav invasion earlier in the year. During this war, Pran had an epiphany about the futility and ugliness of all war, and her later speech against the blood feud is a step on the long, long pathway toward getting rid of war entirely.

Now, to be honest, I normally groan over children’s books with the message War Is Bad, simply because I’ve read so many of them at this point. Yes, yes, war is bad, tell me something I don’t know. But it worked for me here, I think because Miller is not simply parroting received wisdom but sharing her own passionate, personal conviction, in a literary world where children’s books will argue other sides of the question.

In Miller’s Pran of Albania and Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree, war is bad. But Herbert Best’s Garram the Hunter is an argument that war preparedness is necessary for any people who means to remain free. In Julia Davis Adams’ Vaino: A Boy of New Finland, the people of Finland win their freedom through a war that is dangerous and frightening but above all necessary, a point she makes again in Mountains Are Free, a retelling of the tale of William Tell.

You don’t know what you’re going to get, and it means that whatever you end up getting is interesting. There’s a lot to be said for cultivating the unexpected.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Miller, searching for a reference point her readers will understand, once describes them as “nuns,” which inevitably made me think of demon-fighting nuns from anime. Nuns! With guns!

Now we just need a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen style-mashup of Sworn Virgin Women Warriors. Pran's sworn mountain virgin friends! Artemis' huntresses! Demon-fighting anime nuns!

[osprey_archer]

They all fight demons and the Scourge of War.

[asakiyume]

Human experience definitely shows us that we need multiple stories expressing multiple viewpoints so that we can deploy the right one for the right situation. It's kind of like how the devil can quote scripture--because scripture says contradictory things. Because LIFE.

Only men and old women and sworn mountain virgins can speak

Me, engaging in rules lawyering: So if you're an old woman who was a sworn mountain virgin, can you speak twice as much as anyone else? Or does your old-woman status trump your sworn-mountain-virgin status, or the other way round? Can a man be a sworn mountain virgin? Not that he gains much, I guess, but then he doesn't have to father children and lord it over others, which might be a relief.

[osprey_archer]

I suspect that an old lady sworn mountain virgin gets to speak as much as anyone will allow them, but if they try to speak twice as much as anyone else they might lose everyone's interest.

I don't think men get to be sworn mountain virgins. They can become a priest, though. And maybe there are monks? Miller doesn't go deeply into the options for men.

[asakiyume]

By the way, SUPREMELY HILARIOUSLY to me: last night I was able deploy my newly acquired knowledge (thank you, Osprey Archer) of sworn mountain virgins at a homeowners association meeting. One of the guys at the meeting said, near the end, that he'd be busy on such-and-such a day because he was going to an Albanian festival, being Albanian.

"Oh!!" says I. "Do you know about sworn mountain virgins???"

Perhaps predictably, he did not. I will have to send him a Wikipedia entry, if there is one.

[lirazel]

Oh this sounds so interesting! Thanks for sharing about it!

[osprey_archer]

It was an interesting read!

[sovay]

For instance, until I read Elizabeth Miller’s Pran of Albania, I knew nothing about Albania except the sworn mountain virgins, women who swear to remain virgins and hitherto go dressed as men with a rifle slung across their back.

I didn't know there was a children's book about them from 1929!

[osprey_archer]

They don't show up till late, so the book isn't exactly about them, but the whole concept definitely plays a key role in the story.

[hyperion_swan]

Hello! This is off topic from this post, but I wanted to slide into your inbox somewhere the fact that I, an on-and-lurker of your social media and reader of your books, had did a tiny bit of fan art for The Sleeping Soldier. Thank you for sharing your books and blogging. Your novel was very charming, so I felt inspired to try to capture the characters’s shenanigans in scribbled art. Another tangent, your Hummingbird Cottage blogging was so picturesque to read… just like reading a series of old timey journals about birds and flowers and playing the dulcimer in painterly tableau 🫶🦋

https://www.tumblr.com/magickedteacup/784276932928962560/some-quick-scribble-fan-art-for-ospreyarcher

[osprey_archer]

Ah, those pictures are so charming! I love Russell's hair, and the smile on his face in the last picture, and the still pretty worried expression on Caleb's face... difficult to know what to do with it when you've just been shoved against the wall by an angry handsome man and now he's less angry and even better looking!

I should make a new Hummingbird Cottage entry. Earlier this week I saw a hawk.

[hyperion_swan]

“an angry handsome man and now he's less angry and even better looking!”
lol yes Caleb was living the dream