Book Review: The Wind Boy
May. 17th, 2013 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe local library has special children’s classics section. On the one hand, this is very convenient for me. They have all the Green Knowe books! And I can finally read The Wind in the Willows! Etc.
But I wonder if segregating out all the classic books makes actual children less likely to read them - if only because they aren’t on the regular shelves to stumble over by browsing.
Anyway, in the course of discovering this special shelf, I stumbled on Ethel Cook Eliot’s The Wind Boy, which I’ve been meaning to read for years. It features Gentian and Kay, a pair of refugee children - the book is deliberately obscure about exactly which war they are refugees from - who are having a hard time of it, because the rest of the villagers think they’re weird.
But who should appear, but a girl with a dress “the color of sunlight on a brown forest path when the sun is low behind the trees” and “sandals that looked as though she had made them herself out of bark and braided weeds.” Her name is Nan, and she has come to be their housemaid/nanny/etc, never mind they can’t pay.
It’s a bit like Mary Poppins, although the focus remains firmly on Kay and Gentian rather than their magical nanny. Gentian is named after a flower that has “all the sky folded around in its soft fringes.” This is, as you may be guessing, a book with a lot of nature imagery. As well as Mary Poppins, it reminds me a bit of a grown-up version of Barbara Newhall Follett’s The House without Windows
Grown-up, both in the sense that it has rather more plot and character development, but also in that it lacks the peculiar moral anarchy that gives Follett’s book its charm. The Wind Boy is a book with a number of morals, not least of them being “I don’t care if they talk funny, be nice to refugee children.”
But Nan and the fairies - or Clear Children, as they’re mostly called - although charming in themselves, also seem to be a metaphor for religious ideas, just as the Magic is a religious metaphor in Burnett’s The Secret Garden. (As a side note: Nana specifically tells us that she’s not a Clear Child or a fairy. It’s not at all clear what she is, which makes her the most interesting character to me.)
Perhaps the most obvious morality play is the scene where Gentian is weaving herself a nightgown of “starry-brightness” - dark blue fabric that seems thin but is so deep that you seem to be looking into it, like the night sky, to see the stars glimmering - and the weaving tangles up every time she has a selfish thought.
It also, peculiarly, tangles when she thinks how nice it would be to weave a robe for her mother. “This is kind of a robe each one must make for oneself,” the Twilight Girl, who taught her to weave, tells her gently. I’m not sure what life lesson we are meant to learn from this. (Balancing the duty you owe to others and the duty you owe to yourself is a common theme in early twentieth-century girls' books, though.)
In any case, it’s a rather sweet book, and I liked it enough to get Ethel Cook Eliot’s The Little House in the Fairy Wood, which is available free on Kindle. I don’t know if anyone else shares my strange affection for peculiar old children’s books with lots of nature, a little philosophizing, and outcroppings of fairies, but The Wind Boy is a good example of it if you do.
But I wonder if segregating out all the classic books makes actual children less likely to read them - if only because they aren’t on the regular shelves to stumble over by browsing.
Anyway, in the course of discovering this special shelf, I stumbled on Ethel Cook Eliot’s The Wind Boy, which I’ve been meaning to read for years. It features Gentian and Kay, a pair of refugee children - the book is deliberately obscure about exactly which war they are refugees from - who are having a hard time of it, because the rest of the villagers think they’re weird.
But who should appear, but a girl with a dress “the color of sunlight on a brown forest path when the sun is low behind the trees” and “sandals that looked as though she had made them herself out of bark and braided weeds.” Her name is Nan, and she has come to be their housemaid/nanny/etc, never mind they can’t pay.
It’s a bit like Mary Poppins, although the focus remains firmly on Kay and Gentian rather than their magical nanny. Gentian is named after a flower that has “all the sky folded around in its soft fringes.” This is, as you may be guessing, a book with a lot of nature imagery. As well as Mary Poppins, it reminds me a bit of a grown-up version of Barbara Newhall Follett’s The House without Windows
Grown-up, both in the sense that it has rather more plot and character development, but also in that it lacks the peculiar moral anarchy that gives Follett’s book its charm. The Wind Boy is a book with a number of morals, not least of them being “I don’t care if they talk funny, be nice to refugee children.”
But Nan and the fairies - or Clear Children, as they’re mostly called - although charming in themselves, also seem to be a metaphor for religious ideas, just as the Magic is a religious metaphor in Burnett’s The Secret Garden. (As a side note: Nana specifically tells us that she’s not a Clear Child or a fairy. It’s not at all clear what she is, which makes her the most interesting character to me.)
Perhaps the most obvious morality play is the scene where Gentian is weaving herself a nightgown of “starry-brightness” - dark blue fabric that seems thin but is so deep that you seem to be looking into it, like the night sky, to see the stars glimmering - and the weaving tangles up every time she has a selfish thought.
It also, peculiarly, tangles when she thinks how nice it would be to weave a robe for her mother. “This is kind of a robe each one must make for oneself,” the Twilight Girl, who taught her to weave, tells her gently. I’m not sure what life lesson we are meant to learn from this. (Balancing the duty you owe to others and the duty you owe to yourself is a common theme in early twentieth-century girls' books, though.)
In any case, it’s a rather sweet book, and I liked it enough to get Ethel Cook Eliot’s The Little House in the Fairy Wood, which is available free on Kindle. I don’t know if anyone else shares my strange affection for peculiar old children’s books with lots of nature, a little philosophizing, and outcroppings of fairies, but The Wind Boy is a good example of it if you do.
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Date: 2013-05-17 04:14 pm (UTC)I liked the phrase you used, moral anarchy, to describe The House without Windows.
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Date: 2013-05-17 06:50 pm (UTC)Gutenberg does have The Little House in the Fairy Wood. I'm also terribly curious about The House Above the Trees, but despite the fact that it was published in 1921 it doesn't seem to be online anywhere.