Book Review: Sparrow Road

[osprey_archer]

...kids are always part of grown-up problems. Even when the grown-ups think they aren’t.

So Raine tells her grandfather in Sheila O’Connor’s Sparrow Road, thus summing up the theme of the book: you can’t protect your kids from the problems in their lives just by refusing to talk about them. The kids will notice those problems on their own - in Raine’s case, the problem of her missing father, who disappeared when she was a baby.

I really liked this book. The themes may be heavy, but the story itself is a summer idyll. Explorations of the vast old house at Sparrow Road, once an orphanage and now an artist’s colony. Getting to know the artists who live there: reading poetry with fragile Lilian, going to town for ice cream with exuberant Josie who makes her own patchwork dresses, rowing on the lake with Diego of the booming laugh. Raine begins to discover her own talents, too: inspired by the attic dormitory, she begins to write an orphan story of her own.

It does have one peculiar quality. Although Sparrow Road was published in 2012 and it’s never explicitly stated that it’s set any time but now, it feels like it’s set at least twenty years before. No one has a cell phone, no one’s ever heard of the internet, and Raine was born during her mother’s “hippie years.” When did people last have hippie years? 1975?

I think this time warp effect gives Sparrow Road some of its timeless idyll quality, so this isn’t a criticism so much as an observation. And, now that I think of it, a lot of the best children’s book writers write books set in their own childhood era. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Maud Hart Lovelace both wrote explicitly autobiographical books series; Anne of Green Gables, IIRC, is also set during L. M. Montgomery’s childhood years. (Perhaps also Emily of New Moon? I know Pat of Silver Bush is intended to be set when it was written, which just makes it seem more old-fashioned.)

Maybe I should start plotting a 1990s magnum opus. The characters occasionally get on the internet long enough to watch Hamster Dance, except then Mom wants to use the phone, so they dash outside again to ride their bikes down to the park to… uh, play pogs maybe?

In any case. Sparrow Road! A neglected gem.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I think this happens when writers draw on their own vivid memories of childhood: the older the writer, the more this effect is noticeable. Let's say you're 30: your memories of what it was like to be 12 are already 18 years old. Some books are explicit about it--they make it clear with little details that you're *supposed* to know it's the past. But others don't.

I notice this sometimes with generational things in books. A writer can carefully make the youthful protagonist into the right things and reference current stuff, but then makes the parents remember things that the writer's own parents would remember, and same with grandparents. You can fudge things a little (because people can have kids late in life), but not infinitely.

Sometimes I notice it in non-children's books, too. We read The Thirteenth Tale in my book group. In that book, the narrator works for a bookseller who sells used books, but all communications and research is done without reference to the Internet or cell phones, although the book was published in 2006. Admittedly, most of the book is the story of this very old woman, but the frame story is set in the book's present.

[osprey_archer]

I think once the writer gets old enough that their book is recognizably historical fiction, this nostalgia effect becomes an asset rather than a problem - there isn't the cognitive dissonance of "this is supposed to be now, but..." And the writer can stop pretending the story is supposed to be now and just indulge in childhood nostalgia.

And also a writer who really grew up in that time is going to have a better feel for it than someone who merely researched it.

Re: the research in The Thirteenth Tale - I haven't read that book in particular, but I do wonder if sometimes authors make a conscious decision in favor of dramatic effect. An internet search is more likely in the present day, but it's just not as atmospheric as on the spot research in dank basements or dusty attics or little-used library annexes where the dim lightbulbs sputter as the protagonist makes her way down the narrow corridors between the tall looming shelves of books...

[asakiyume]

What you're saying down below to evelyn_b also figures in--trying to make (or succeeding in making) something completely up-to-the-minute is often distracting and pointless.

In the end, I guess the proof is in the reception. People loved The Thirteenth Tale. Although I found the present-day set-up distracting, clearly it was not a deal-breaker, generally speaking, and even for me, it was only a minor annoyance.

[staranise]

I noticed this a lot with Sherwood Smith's Coronets and Steel. Things like computers appear when it's important to the worldbuilding to have considered if they'd be there or not--but when the heroine is travelling Europe she communicates with her American family by dropping a postcard in the letterbox; when getting tickets to a show, she asks her pension to book them instead of going online. It seems built more on memory than modern contrivance.

[asakiyume]

Good point! Yeah, that's the sort of thing I mean.

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, that's a great example. There's a lot of time-related weirdness with the characters' backstories in those books too - people who supposedly fought against the Soviets in their youth, except that this would make them at least forty when the books take place. The whole thing would make more sense if it were set in the early nineties.

[evelyn_b]

Hm. I didn't have "hippie years," but my sister definitely had more than a few in the late 90s-early 2000s. "True" sixties hippies might look down on them, but that doesn't mean that someone now might not think in terms of their hippie years.

I like ambiguous fictional past-present settings. They often feel more "real" to me - probably because they are built out of memory - than attempts to be up-to-the-minute (in a medium that can't ever actually be up to the minute). At least until enough time has passed that "up to the minute" is now a possibly-unreliable historical document, whereupon I'll probably start liking it again. But I was a total Pat as a kid, so can't judge what other kids would be into, now or then.

(I'd totally read a 90s magnum opus, though I'd probably learn as much as I got nostalgic about. What on earth is Hamster Dance? There was no "watching" on my 90s internet, only "reading" and "arguing").

Sparrow Road does sound like a gem!

[osprey_archer]

I agree; books that attempt to be up to the minute tend to date almost instantly. When I was a teenager I cringed at books that attempted to replicate teenage slang. It's impossible to get it right from the outside! And even if someone managed it, it would still be dated by the time it got through the publishing process.

Whereas books that build their setting partly out of memory do tend to feel more solid, which is perhaps why I can think of so many classics that are constructed that way? Something to think about. I think they're often emotionally right because the author is tapping into their younger self, and that's far more important than using the latest slang or referencing that hot new app (which will be outdated by the time the book hits the shelves).

Hamster Dance apparently debuted in 2000 - time is so weird and slippery like this; I could have sworn it was a 90s thing. (But then I kind of think the 90s continued on until September 11, 2001, culturally speaking.) IIRC it was a website with... dancing animated hamsters? Who perhaps sang?

[staranise]

Hampster Dance also got made into an actual song, which was a #1 hit single in Canada. The first time I heard an internet meme on the radio, it was like the Titanic hitting an iceberg. Nothing was ever the same again.

[asakiyume]

Decades always spill across the decade line--I agree with you about the 1990s.