Ты говоришь русский язык?

You guys! You guys! A miracle has occurred! I can read Russian!

But let me back up: in Russian class we're reading Sofia Petrovna. On Friday we read the chapter where Sofia's son Kolya just got arrested, and the suspense was simply unbearable, so on Saturday I ensconced myself before the fire and finished the book. Which took four hours and gave me a monstrous headache.

But then next class we were reading aloud, like we do. I read Russian like a dim third-grader: everything in a muttering monotone, stuttering over the hard words (a.k.a. "words with more than five letters") and stumbling against every piece of punctuation as if I've never met a comma before in my life. It is so embarrassing.

Except! Except! THIS TIME FINALLY I READ LIKE A NORMAL PERSON! My Saturday reading marathon must have flipped a switch in my brain, transmogrifying the hitherto esoteric and terrifying Russian orthography into words!

My professor was so transfixed that she let me read for three paragraphs. "Очень хорошо!" she cried at the end - "Very good!"

(My professor is awesome. She reads us Russian poetry! Tomorrow she is bringing us a Russian fairy tale! She has a necklace that looks like lifesavers!)

***

In other happy language news, the local library has the Spiderwick Chronicles in Spanish. I was a bit too old for the Spiderwick books when they first came out, but I figure reading them in Spanish will be like reading them as a child, because in Spanish I read so much more slowly.

Last year I reread Number the Stars in Spanish, to test this theory. I read it the first time the summer after second grade - my teacher for summer Spanish camp gave it to me, though in English; funny how things loop back like that. It was the first serious book I read, and had such an effect on me that though I didn't reread it till I read the Spanish version, I remembered the scenes, even the details, before I read them. It gave rereading an eerie echo effect.

Book Review: Blue Willow

One of my many (many, many) favorite books as a child was Doris Gates' Blue Willow. The title refers to the only beautiful object that our heroine Janey's family owns: a blue willow plate, which Janey loves with an almost religious fervor. The plate, to her, is a feast for the imagination and an escape from her family's sometimes desperate poverty.

The plate is their last memento of more prosperous times. Ever since losing their farm in the Dust Bowl, the family has followed farm work around the country. They hover on the brink of disaster.

That's the basic set-up. What do I love about this book? Well - JANEY. She's such a treat of a character, real enough to pop off the page: proud and prickly, curious and imaginative, and wistful. She wants more than anything to stay in one place long enough to make real friends and go to a real school with bright new books.

She can't have most of that quite yet, but she's got a new best friend: Lupe, the little Mexican girl from across the road. Gates is so very excited about the fact that she writing a Mexican girl that she describes Lupe as "the Mexican girl" every time she shows up, which gets irritating. But otherwise Lupe is darling: kind and, more importantly and more unusually, tactful.

There's a great scene: Lupe's family, more prosperous than Janey's, has taken Janey to the carnival. Lupe thinks Janey doesn't have money to ride the carousel, and concocts a little story to convince Janey to accept a free ride (which Janey would never, never do if it were offered outright). The dialogue is just right. And the description of the carnival is just wonderful - Janey feels like she's in a sort of fairyland, and the wonder of the experience flows off the page.

Gates' descriptions are beautifully evocative. The book starts with a description so rich that you can see Janey's shadow on the sun-baked boards, the heat shimmer hovering in the air... The rich description and occasional flashes of beauty (the carnival; the wonderful scene where Janey's family goes fishing beneath the willows on a nearby stream) soften the grimier aspects of Janey's life without occluding them.

And this balance is the thing that makes the book great: it's so beautifully crafted. Flashes of wonderful soften the painful, grimy backdrop of everyday life. Janey is a delicate blend of virtues and flaws, realistic and sympathetic and wonderful. The plot flows like a stream, always moving but never jolting.

(And - minor spoilers! though nothing you probably hadn't guessed - the happy ending is so well-earned and beautiful and beautifully constructed: radiant, yet realistic, with a starring role for Janey. It's hard to make a little girl the heroine of a realistic and rather grim story without breaking the realism; the only other book I can think of that manages it so well is Number the Stars.)

Blue Willow is such a wonderful book. I loved it when I first read it, at nine or ten, and loved it again when I reread it this fall, and I hope this review convinces someone else to read it and fall in love with it too.