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osprey_archer) wrote2022-09-03 08:15 am
osprey_archer) wrote2022-09-03 08:15 am
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Newbery Honor Books of the 1970s, Redux
Another batch of Newbery Honor books from the 1970s! This time I had one dud: Mary Q. Steele’s Journey Outside, a fantasy novel that feels like an allegory, always a hard sell for me. Our hero has grown up on a flotilla of rafts on an underground river that goes round and round in a vast circle. One day he escapes above ground and journeys through the lands that he finds there, stumbling on a valley of good-hearted but feckless communist shepherds, a giant mountain man who spends all his time making food for the birds (and never notices that the birds are in turn becoming food for the tigers), a bunch of desert people who live off the tasteless flesh of a horrible cactus…
These different groups are presumably meant to represent something, but they’re all too schematic to feel real as people. All the shepherds are cheerful but incapable of planning ahead, all the cactus people repeat certain set phrases, and although the mountain man like the cheese stands alone, he never varies from the character established the first moment we meet him: he talks constantly about food and never listens to anything anyone else says.
Happily, the other three books in this batch were more enjoyable. My favorite (to my surprise, as I haven’t enjoyed his other books!) was William Steig’s Abel’s Island. During a thunderstorm, anthropomorphic mouse Abel gets washed away down a stream, tearing him away from his civilized city lifestyle and his beloved wife Amanda. He washes up on an island, and for a year he gathers his own food, weaves himself clothing out of grass, makes a home for himself in a hollow log, discovers his metier as a sculptor when he makes sculptures of all his absent loved ones to help himself feel close to them… A dreamy, meditative wilderness survival story.
I went into Johanna Reiss’s The Upstairs Room with the suspicion that I’d already read it, as I read a lot of Holocaust novels as a child. Indeed I did read this book as a kid: the scene that clinched it is the part where the girls spend a day in a wheat field (their first day outside in two years) and Annie gets heatstroke.
As a kid I was totally focused on the story (I think I was under the impression it was a novel, which may have contributed to my confusion over whether I’d read it before), but rereading it as an adult, I also appreciated Reiss’s stylistic choices. She occasionally dips into stream-of-consciousness prose as Annie tries to pass the long, long hours trapped in a single room, and it’s really effective at showing the thought-splintering boredom of her life, which is exacerbated by the ever-present background of tension and fear.
I know there are one or two people who read this journal who are interested in books with Jewish protagonists that are not about the Holocaust, and you might be interested in Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie, which is set in 1920s London and then New York. Eddie’s father is a gifted teacher and a fiercely devoted Zionist who pours all his emotional energy into his students and his causes and has nothing left for his children. He keeps turning down lucrative opportunities because they clash with his principles, leaving him at loggerheads with his eldest son Eddie, who tries to pick up the financial slack.
I really enjoyed the book’s sense of place, both in London and New York, and the finely-drawn portrait of the family. Despite the title, the book is not just about Eddie, but an ensemble piece about all the children, especially the narrator Sibyl. Eddie is the one who gets the title because he meets the most Newbery fate: undergoing an operation that the doctor hopes might cure his creeping paralysis (maybe caused by multiple sclerosis, but the doctors aren’t sure), he dies.
These different groups are presumably meant to represent something, but they’re all too schematic to feel real as people. All the shepherds are cheerful but incapable of planning ahead, all the cactus people repeat certain set phrases, and although the mountain man like the cheese stands alone, he never varies from the character established the first moment we meet him: he talks constantly about food and never listens to anything anyone else says.
Happily, the other three books in this batch were more enjoyable. My favorite (to my surprise, as I haven’t enjoyed his other books!) was William Steig’s Abel’s Island. During a thunderstorm, anthropomorphic mouse Abel gets washed away down a stream, tearing him away from his civilized city lifestyle and his beloved wife Amanda. He washes up on an island, and for a year he gathers his own food, weaves himself clothing out of grass, makes a home for himself in a hollow log, discovers his metier as a sculptor when he makes sculptures of all his absent loved ones to help himself feel close to them… A dreamy, meditative wilderness survival story.
I went into Johanna Reiss’s The Upstairs Room with the suspicion that I’d already read it, as I read a lot of Holocaust novels as a child. Indeed I did read this book as a kid: the scene that clinched it is the part where the girls spend a day in a wheat field (their first day outside in two years) and Annie gets heatstroke.
As a kid I was totally focused on the story (I think I was under the impression it was a novel, which may have contributed to my confusion over whether I’d read it before), but rereading it as an adult, I also appreciated Reiss’s stylistic choices. She occasionally dips into stream-of-consciousness prose as Annie tries to pass the long, long hours trapped in a single room, and it’s really effective at showing the thought-splintering boredom of her life, which is exacerbated by the ever-present background of tension and fear.
I know there are one or two people who read this journal who are interested in books with Jewish protagonists that are not about the Holocaust, and you might be interested in Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie, which is set in 1920s London and then New York. Eddie’s father is a gifted teacher and a fiercely devoted Zionist who pours all his emotional energy into his students and his causes and has nothing left for his children. He keeps turning down lucrative opportunities because they clash with his principles, leaving him at loggerheads with his eldest son Eddie, who tries to pick up the financial slack.
I really enjoyed the book’s sense of place, both in London and New York, and the finely-drawn portrait of the family. Despite the title, the book is not just about Eddie, but an ensemble piece about all the children, especially the narrator Sibyl. Eddie is the one who gets the title because he meets the most Newbery fate: undergoing an operation that the doctor hopes might cure his creeping paralysis (maybe caused by multiple sclerosis, but the doctors aren’t sure), he dies.
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Anthropomorphic mice (and rats) really are the backbone of children's literature: Stuart Little, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, The Cricket in Times Square... more recently, Kate di Camillo's The Tale of Despereaux... I would add Charlotte's Web in there, too. You could make a whole reading list out of that alone.
I thought William Steig's name rang a bell— it turns out he also wrote Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, which was absolutely horrifying to me as a child. (HE TURNS INTO A ROCK AND HE CAN'T TURN BACK?!)
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SYLVESTER AND THE MAGIC PEBBLE IS TERRIFYING, I'm glad that someone else is with me on this! "Such a beautiful story!" people say. NO. NIGHTMARE FUEL.
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I recall the short animated film which screened on Long Ago and Far Away in 1989 being a nice adaptation, too.
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Goddammit.
I also found Journey Outside to be excruciatingly boring. I'm surprised that I haven't read Abel's Island, I think also because of the author.
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Journey Outside is so dull! Someone could write a fascinating story with that premise but Mary Q. Steele simply did not.
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I can recall seeing the cover of Abel's Island! I never read it though. Please tell me he makes it home and his family is still there for him.
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Beth: didn't he also write the book
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