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osprey_archerI’ve hit book fifty on 100 Books that Influenced Me, which means I’m halfway through! So I thought I’d better pick a particularly important book to celebrate, which of course means Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling, although every time I try to write about this book I’m always afraid that I’m going to fail to do it justice.
The heart of the story is Martha and Ivy’s friendship, which begins when they’re in second grade. Martha Abbott - or Mouse, as her family calls her, because she’s shy and timid and tear-prone in a family of hearty extroverted overachievers - meets Ivy when Ivy shows up in class one day, and soon after they become friends when they discover that they both love imaginative games. Snyder has books with real magic and books with perhaps-magic and books, like this one, which are in the workaday non-magical world but full of imaginative games, but all three variations feel magical to me because she’s so good - probably the best children’s writer that I know - at writing imaginative games.
(Although if you have other favorites I am happy to hear about them, because I’m always looking for other authors who do this well.)
One of the games they play a bit later in the book, Green-sky, is about a land where people live in the treetops, so captured Snyder’s own imagination that she wrote a whole Green Sky Trilogy, although the story is rather different than Martha and Ivy’s. They play it in Bent Oaks Grove, which is full of climbing trees with twisted branches, and a cave and a rock that they use for an altar.
But there’s one problem: Ivy is a Carson, one of the younger members of a family of ne’er-do-wells who live in a crumbling old house on the edge of town. Martha doesn’t mind at all: Ivy has explained to her that she’s not really a Carson at all, but a changeling, a magical creature switched at birth for a human baby. Her Aunt Evaline told her about changelings, when Ivy lived with her in Harley’s Crossing, which is where Ivy learned about all sorts of interesting magical things that play into their games.
But Martha’s family looks on the friendship with restrained disapproval. The Abbotts are sturdy, respectable people (Martha’s father is a corporate lawyer) while the Carsons are in and out of jail. But Ivy is after all a very small Carson, and the Abbotts are perhaps hoping the friendship will run its course before she becomes a big one.
But as Martha and Ivy get older, it becomes harder for them to blot out the wider world with games. The social divide between them is powerful enough to disrupt their friendship even though they remain loyal to each other. Imagination runs into reality and loses.
There is a subset of children’s books that revolve around the theme “Reality trumps imagination,” possibly a reaction against children’s books where “imagination is magic!” and solves problems with suspicious ease. Janet Taylor Lisle’s Afternoon of the Elves is a particularly clear example of the genre: imagination shatters upon contact with reality and then the book ends, with the wreckage.
The Changeling is different because, after breaking things, it puts it all back together again. Imagination is not literally magic and you can’t live in a fantasy forever, but that doesn’t mean imagination is powerless. At its best, imagination creates: it builds things, not just cloud castles but things that are real and solid for all that they are incorporeal, like Martha and Ivy’s friendship, and that friendship is ultimately stronger than the social forces that nearly rip it apart.
The heart of the story is Martha and Ivy’s friendship, which begins when they’re in second grade. Martha Abbott - or Mouse, as her family calls her, because she’s shy and timid and tear-prone in a family of hearty extroverted overachievers - meets Ivy when Ivy shows up in class one day, and soon after they become friends when they discover that they both love imaginative games. Snyder has books with real magic and books with perhaps-magic and books, like this one, which are in the workaday non-magical world but full of imaginative games, but all three variations feel magical to me because she’s so good - probably the best children’s writer that I know - at writing imaginative games.
(Although if you have other favorites I am happy to hear about them, because I’m always looking for other authors who do this well.)
One of the games they play a bit later in the book, Green-sky, is about a land where people live in the treetops, so captured Snyder’s own imagination that she wrote a whole Green Sky Trilogy, although the story is rather different than Martha and Ivy’s. They play it in Bent Oaks Grove, which is full of climbing trees with twisted branches, and a cave and a rock that they use for an altar.
But there’s one problem: Ivy is a Carson, one of the younger members of a family of ne’er-do-wells who live in a crumbling old house on the edge of town. Martha doesn’t mind at all: Ivy has explained to her that she’s not really a Carson at all, but a changeling, a magical creature switched at birth for a human baby. Her Aunt Evaline told her about changelings, when Ivy lived with her in Harley’s Crossing, which is where Ivy learned about all sorts of interesting magical things that play into their games.
But Martha’s family looks on the friendship with restrained disapproval. The Abbotts are sturdy, respectable people (Martha’s father is a corporate lawyer) while the Carsons are in and out of jail. But Ivy is after all a very small Carson, and the Abbotts are perhaps hoping the friendship will run its course before she becomes a big one.
But as Martha and Ivy get older, it becomes harder for them to blot out the wider world with games. The social divide between them is powerful enough to disrupt their friendship even though they remain loyal to each other. Imagination runs into reality and loses.
There is a subset of children’s books that revolve around the theme “Reality trumps imagination,” possibly a reaction against children’s books where “imagination is magic!” and solves problems with suspicious ease. Janet Taylor Lisle’s Afternoon of the Elves is a particularly clear example of the genre: imagination shatters upon contact with reality and then the book ends, with the wreckage.
The Changeling is different because, after breaking things, it puts it all back together again. Imagination is not literally magic and you can’t live in a fantasy forever, but that doesn’t mean imagination is powerless. At its best, imagination creates: it builds things, not just cloud castles but things that are real and solid for all that they are incorporeal, like Martha and Ivy’s friendship, and that friendship is ultimately stronger than the social forces that nearly rip it apart.
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Date: 2019-03-08 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-03-10 09:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 06:43 am (UTC)As you know, this one was a big one for me too. There was a twisty old willow tree growing over a creek that I took to calling "bent willows" because of Bent Oaks, and so many details from this are lodged with brilliant clarity in my memory.
Another thing I really loved about it was how the girls incorporate Josie into their games--how Ivy's tasked with childcare, and they make this into a good thing rather than (much more typical in American lit) resenting and complaining about it.
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Date: 2019-03-09 06:01 pm (UTC)And yes! Josie is great. Another thing ZKS is really good at is writing small children: Josie here, Marshall in The Egypt Game (who, it occurs to me, also gets incorporated into the older children's games because they need to watch him), and Esther & Blair in The Headless Cupid.
I also loved Mrs. Smith, the painter whose husband runs the riding stables, and the whole story of Ivy & Martha's horse mad phase and their attempt to steal the patient old horse Dolly when they hear she's in peril. She's like a model for them of a different way of being a grown-up, which I think Ivy already had in Aunt Evaline (I checked this evening and discovered I misspelled her name in this entry, oops), but Martha didn't really and without that I could see her trying half-heartedly to emulate her mother and Cath simply because she's got no other model.
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Date: 2019-03-09 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-03-11 10:16 pm (UTC)I once met ZKS and told her this book was my favorite of hers, and she said people who have it as their favorite tend to be ones who had intense childhood friendships. For me that was true; I was always the more mundane one, like Martha, but I was also (thanks to a military dad) the one who kept moving away.
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Date: 2019-03-12 01:48 am (UTC)I don't know that I ever had a real Martha-and-Ivy friendship, but it was not for lack of willingness on my part to invest excessive intensity into any friendship that seemed promising.
And yes - that moment when Josie shows up and for a moment it's like the entire book has telescoped into one moment and Martha is seeing Ivy again on the day they met. Gosh! It's so beautiful.