A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Christmas books! So many Christmas books. Look, the problem is that so many Christmas books are short, all right? Like Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal, a slim novella that I definitely should have read last year when The Appeal was still fresh in my mind, as I spent about half of The Christmas Appeal remembering who was who. But it was still a fun fast read and there was a cameo by my girl Issy, who remains just as Issy as ever, bless her little heart.

Continuing this murder kick, I read J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White, a fascinating example of the genre in that the closest thing the book has to a detective is a guy from the society of psychic research who keeps murmuring about how it’s like the crime WANTS to be solved… well, that’s one way to explain why the heroes keep literally stumbling upon the evidence. Enjoyed the snowy atmosphere and the character portraits, especially the chorus girl Jessie, who should have gotten David in the end IMO. Not sure they were really that well-suited, but I was annoyed that a more class-appropriate girl appeared three-quarters of the way through the book.

And also Agatha Christie’s Murder for Christmas, known in the UK has Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, but presumably American publishers were afraid that without the word murder in the title American readers might assume that Poirot is having a holly jolly Christmas eating plum pudding without any murder at all. Quite enjoyed this one. Always nice to see a horrible family dynamic play out in a murder mystery.

Also Ruth Sawyer’s The Long Christmas, a collection of Christmas legends from around the world and a reminder that the Christmas Spirit, for all its current holly jolly picture-perfect Hallmark movie reputation, can in fact be pretty metal. The Christmas spirit is not about giving a bit of spare change to a photogenic waif before retreating to your mansion with the gingerbread on the eves perfectly outlined in Christmas lights. The Christmas Spirit says, “Oh, none of you are going to share your fireside and your last crust of bread with this weary footsore traveler on Christmas Eve? Well, then, I am going to raise the floods and drown your entire selfish town.”

Although Sawyer’s This Way to Christmas did not repeat this particular story, some of the other stories overlap with The Long Christmas. Published in 1915, the story centers on a little boy facing a lonely Christmas on a snowy mountain where none of the neighbors speak to each other, for they are of all different nationalities and races: German-American, American Black, Brazilian Portuguese, and small Ruritanian country that just got invaded by Germany.

However, our hero (inspired by a visit from a fairy wearing a squirrel suit) visits each cottage, hears a Christmas story from each person, and in the end inspires his foster parents to invite them all to Christmas, invitations in the form of signposts saying THIS WAY TO CHRISTMAS, hence the title.

And in the archives, I read Lee Kingman’s The Magic Christmas Tree, illustrated by Bettina. Little Joanna is lonely because she’s the youngest of ten and always in the way, until she finds her own special secret place: clearing in the woods with a pine tree just her size. Little Julie is lonely at home because she’s the only child in a vast mansion, but finds solace when she finds a little pine tree in the woods perfect for a hideaway. And then at Christmastime, Joanna hides a beloved doll by the tree… and Julie, thrilled by this magical appearance, brings the mystery doll a little doll bed and fur coverlet… and when Joanna returns with a baby doll so her doll won’t be lonely, she in turn is astonished…

OMG. So cute. I do wish it were longer so there was more time for the girls’ friendship to develop after they finally meet.

What I’m Reading Now

Unable to face another Christmas book, I broke down and started Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle... which turns out to start on Christmas Eve! The German POWs are having a Christmas tree. One of the other zeks is making a Christmas present. I can’t even. I’ll never escape.

What I Plan to Read Next

Non-Christmas books! Anything but Christmas! In particular, I’ve got Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and Mai Ishizawa’s The Place of Shells checked out, while Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin and Elizabeth Enright’s Then There Were Five are on hold.

Despite some scheduling complications, I’ve kept up with the Picture Book Advent calendar. A strong week! Very Jan Brett-forward.

Admiring the illustrated endpapers of The All-I’ll-Ever-Want-for-Christmas Doll, I mused, “That looks like a Gee’s Bend quilt.” Then I flipped to the first page, where I learned from the author’s note by Patricia McKissack that the book grew out of her interviews with one of the Gee’s Bend quilters, who glowed with joy at the memory of receiving a store-bought doll one Christmas. Luminous illustrations by Jerry Pinkney. I especially love the way he draws the children in this book, most particularly the scene where the three sisters are having an argument and their poses are just so perfect.

The Christmas Anna Angel, by Ruth Sawyer, illustrated by Kate Seredy. In Hungary, near the end of World War I, Anna’s family has no white flour for Christmas cakes, let alone nuts or honey. But Anna wishes on her angel (the Anna Angel), and on Christmas Eve, the angel shows up to bake cakes… Enchanting illustrations by Kate Seredy, who grew up in Hungary and is recreating the world of her youth, with the extra magical touch of the baking angel who summons some bees to make honey from the real flowers decorating her white skirt. (As she settles down to the serious business of mixing the cake, she hangs her halo off the knob on a chair, a businesslike touch.)

Who’s That Knocking on Christmas Eve?, written and illustrated by Jan Brett. For the past few years, a bunch of mischievous trolls have been bursting into Kyri’s house to eat up the Christmas feast. But this year, a traveling boy knocks on the door with his ice bear, and the trolls get a surprise! Very cute. Love the cabin interior and the aurora.

Home for Christmas, written and illustrated by Jan Brett. Naughty troll boy Rollo runs away from home, living with an owl, a bear, an otter, a moose, but comes home in time for Christmsa. I must admit that every time I read a book about a naughty boy running away (i. e. Where the Wild Things Are), a part of me is gunning for the folks back home to decide that life is actually so much better without him and they’d like him to stay away, please.

The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree, written by Gloria Houston, illustrated by Barbara Cooney. In Ruthie’s Appalachian village, it’s tradition for a different family to provide the church Christmas tree each year, and this year it’s her family’s turn. But with Ruthie’s father gone to fight in the Great War, will Ruthie and her mother be able to get the tree to the church? Lovely mountain landscapes. One thing I love about Barbara Cooney’s work is the botanical exactness: she doesn’t just draw flowers, she draws columbine and honeysuckles, very simple but still recognizable.

Jan Brett’s The Nutcracker, written and illustrated by Jan Brett. A mild disappointment, perhaps because no picture book (no matter how detailed) can quite match the richness of a two-hour ballet.

The Christmas Boot, Lisa Wheeler, illustrated Jerry Pinkney. Coming full circle with another Jerry Pinkney! Hannah Grayweather finds a big leather boot in the snow… and when she puts it on, it molds itself to fit her foot. “If only I had another one just like it,” Hannah muses that night, and wakes up to find a second boot waiting for her in the morning… An enchanting fairytale.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Forever Christmas, an account of Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s Corgiville Cottage, with absolutely luscious pictures of Tudor making the yearly Advent wreath (hung from the ceiling with crimson satin ribbons from her parents’ wedding!), decorating gingerbread cookies for the tree (cut fresh from the forest and lit with candles), dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh…

Just gorgeous. Two of my life dreams are to ride in a sleigh and see a Christmas tree actually lit with candles.

And I popped back to the archives for Katherine Milhous’s The First Christmas Crib, which is not (as I expected) an account of Jesus’s birth, but rather a recounting of the first Christmas creche, created by Saint Francis of Assisi. Older Christmas picture books tend to be more religious than the newer ones, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does slightly, just because overall the older Newbery books were not particularly religious. Christmas books were the last outpost for a rearguard action, perhaps.

What I’m Reading Now

Ruth Sawyer’s holiday story collection The Long Christmas, illustrated by our friend Valenti Angelo of Newbery fame. The book was first published in 1941, and although Sawyer doesn’t directly reference the war in the introduction, she is very conscious of the need for a light in the darkness, a repetition of the message “peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then the first story is about Satan rising in the fields of Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’s birth, intent on storming the stable and killing the baby messiah, but his evil plan is thwarted when the archangel Michael descends from heaven and vanquishes him in pitched battle.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got my eyes on Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I was so charmed by The Fairy Circus that I decided to see if the university archives had any of Lathrop’s other books, and indeed, they have The Colt from Moon Mountain... and the colt is a unicorn colt!!!!!!! Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have spoiled that, I went into the archive not knowing and nearly squeaked with delight when I saw the cover, but as it IS on the cover it’s probably not a serious spoiler. Unicorn befriends farmgirl! Delightful.

The archive people know me, by the way. I was rooting through my purse for my ID and the desk clerk was like, “Don’t worry, I’ve seen you before.”

I also read Dick Francis’s Whip Hand, the sequel to Odds Against. In Odds Against, iron woobie Sid Halley had been forced out of his jockey career by a tragic accident that resulted in a horrifyingly deformed left hand, which led to him becoming a private investigator, which over the course of the book led to him losing said left hand entirely.

About three chapters into Whip Hand, the baddie trains a shotgun on Sid’s right hand at point-blank range and threatens to shoot it off. Sid endures in stoic (but deeply terrified) silence; I the reader screamed like a tea kettle. “IS HE GOING TO LOSE ONE APPENDAGE EACH BOOK?” I shrieked with horrified delight at this new horizon of whumpiness.

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Another quote from A Sand County Almanac: “Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

What I Plan to Read Next

Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery! Which comes with a side mystery: Gaarder has published a number of books since the 1990s, most of which have indeed been translated into English, and yet most of them are not available through any of the various libraries to which I have access. Why not? Where are they? A mystery worthy of Gaarder himself.

My romp through the archives continues! This time, I read Zhenya Gay’s Sakimura, a picture book about Gay’s real-life Siamese cat Sakimura (usually called Saki). She drew this cat from life, and you can tell, because he’s just bursting with life, individuality, and cattish charm.

Saki, in the story, is a cat with everything a cat could want. He has a yellow water bowl and a green food bowl, which is filled daily with cubes of raw beef. (This was before the days of kibble, and a cat could live well.) He has a catnip mouse and a ball and a window where he can watch people pass by on the street.

But what he doesn’t have is a friend. And so Saki sneaks out and traipses away into the woods, where he tries to befriend a bird, and a squirrel, and three fat frogs, whereupon he falls into a pond with a splash and decides (after paddling frantically to shore) that perhaps the woods is not the best place to find a friend.

So he goes on, and finds a farmhouse, where he is too big to befriend the ducks and the chickens and too small to befriend the horses and cows. After a long drink of milk, he decides to take just one last look for a friend…

…whereupon he finds a tiger cat sunning on the porch! They take one look at each other and are bosom friends. They run and play on the lawn, and then when they are tired they curl up to sleep.

About a year ago, I realized that some of the older children’s books that I wanted were available in the archive of the university where I work. “If only I knew where the archives were and how to request books there,” I mused, without of course making the faintest effort to acquire this information.

But I have become incrementally better at turning ideas into reality, so it took only a year before I learned where the archives are (the top floor of my favorite library, which incidentally is the library closest to my office) and how to request an appointment to read a book there. Then I traipsed over to the archives for The Little Angel: A Story of Old Rio, illustrated by Katherine Milhous of The Egg Tree, which is the real reason I wanted to read it, although I was also nothing loath to renew the acquaintance with the author, our old friend Alice Dalgliesh of Newbery fame.

The archives are not quite as fancy as the Lilly Library Reading Room: no mural of Great Thinkers in History! But they make up for it with comfy rolling chairs, and the archivists do still bring you your book on a pillow, which is the most important thing.

The book itself is in that particularly mid-twentieth century style where we’re gently drifting through some time in the life of a family long ago and far away. (Sometimes it is just long ago or just faraway, but here it’s both.) We enjoy some street festivals, meet a cute kitten named Gatinho, cheer as the daughter of the house furiously refuses an arranged marriage with a man who just tossed Gatinho across the room (Gatinho is unhurt, except for his dignity), and accept that this is not the kind of book that is ever going to interrogate the fact that this upper-class Brazilian family in the 1820s has slaves. Milhous’s illustrations are charming but not as magical as the illustrations in The Egg Tree or Appolonia’s Valentine.

Nonetheless, pleased by my success, I went back to trawl the library catalog for more books to read in the archives… and discovered they have a copy of one of my remaining Newbery books, Valenti Angelo’s Nino! What a score! So I’ve got an appointment tomorrow at lunch to begin reading.

Because I had an extra personal business day that is set to expire soon, I spent it in the further pursuit of the Newbery Honor project on a trip to the Indiana State Library, where I read Marjorie Hill Allee's Jane's Island.

Jane's Island is set at Wood's Hole, which was (is?) a marine biology research center near Nantucket. Jane is the daughter of one of the researchers, Dr. Thomas; the narrator is Ellen, Jane's babysitter who has been hired for the summer to make sure Jane doesn't attempt to canoe out to sea and drown, and also perhaps convince Jane to show an interest in slightly more mature and ladylike behavior.

I have been contemplating a longer post about Tomboys in the Newberys (possible two posts, one focused on the 1930s and the other more generally). If I ever get around to it, this book will feature prominently, as it features not only Jane (tomboy), Jane's mother (who at first seems like the classic uptight mother trying to tame her wayward daughter but turns out to be protective of her new house but perfectly willing to relax and enjoy a little mess elsewhere, such as seaside picnics), Miss Dubois (a young researcher at the station), and Miss Wareham (a seventy-year-old professor emerita at the station, who comments, "I was a professor of biology right enough...but I practiced domestic science at the same time. It was good for me and I liked it, and I couldn't afford not to!")

However, I must confess that on this read, I was most taken with the visiting German scientist, who was Dr. Thomas's friend when they were both students in Germany before the Great War. During the war, Dr. von Whosit was badly wounded, which left him with a limp, a vivid facial scar, possible shellshock, and a definite chip on his shoulder. He is convinced that nature is red in tooth and claw and he has come to Wood's Hole to prove it, in the face of Dr. Thomas's sentimental insistence that in fact many animals benefit from cooperation. Bah! Humbug! Dr. Thomas repeatedly extends the hand of friendship and Dr. von Whatever limps away, raving bitterly about the fact that he has been FORCED to attend a BEACH PICNIC when he could be doing SCIENCE.

"Von Stalhein, is that you?" I cackled delightedly.

Unfortunately I was so taken with this somewhat vague resemblance that I've forgotten Professor von Whatsit's actual name, so I'm afraid he's going to be Dr. von Stalhein for the rest of this review.

Dr. von Stalhein NEARLY DROWNS. Ellen dives in to save him, and nearly gets drowned herself, but fortunately the others manage to rescue them both. Then Dr. Thompson comes down with appendicitis, and has to be rushed to the hospital, and when the family returns, Jane catches Dr. von Stalhein IN DAD'S LABORATORY, fussing with the equipment, clearly trying to spoil Dad's experiments!!!!

"I'll ruin all of your experiments!" Jane threatens, desperate to do anything to get him out of Dad's lab.

"Go ahead!" says Dr. von Stalhein, which response puzzles Jane so much that she doesn't ruin his experiments after all. This is good, because Miss Wareham shows up soon afterward and explains that Dr. von Stalhein is in fact saving Dr. Thomas's experiments. Because cooperation is valuable! As Dr. von Stalhein's own experiments this summer have shown, which proves Dr. Thomas completely right, much to Dr. von Stalhein's chagrin. But he's a good enough scientist to accept the highly unwelcome news that getting along with others does in fact have a survival benefit.

Then he goes back to Germany. As this is 1931, the reader of the future feels rather concerned about this decision. Perhaps Dr. von Stalhein will return to Wood's Hole a few years later when it becomes clear how the wind is blowing, however.

***

I also read Ethel Cook Eliot's Roses for Mexico, which is a retelling of the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Eliot's earlier book Green Doors features a subplot about the mysterious fascination of Catholicism - I mean, that's not exactly the point of the subplot, which is about two Catholics who fall in love but can never marry because the man has an estranged wife whom he cannot possibly divorce because Catholic, and also his new beloved is dying of consumption, but Eliot clearly finds the Catholicism of it all romantic and attractive. I have the strong feeling that at some point between these two books Eliot gave in to that attraction and converted, because Roses for Mexico is EXTREMELY Catholic.

Another journey to the Lilly Library! My last journey to the Lilly Library, at least for now: with these final two books, I’ve wrapped up the Lilly stage of the Newbery Honor project.

Julia Davis Adams’ Vaino, a Boy of New Finland is an adventure tale, set during the then-recent Finnish war of independence, in which the Finns fought not only against the Russian occupiers but also against each other in a miniature echo of the Russian Revolution, Whites against Reds, only in Finland the Whites won.

I knew almost nothing about Finland going in, so this book was quite educational, not only about history but folklore, as well. The narrative frequently stops for the protagonist Vaino’s stalwart, patriotic mother to tell Finnish folktales, often about Vaino’s namesake, the folktale Vaino who is wise and mighty in magic, but never gets the girl. (One girl actually drowns herself rather than marry him.)

Our Vaino is too young to join the White army, but nonetheless helps his older brother and sister in a few commando raids, with the blessings of his mother. In general, the pre-1960s Newbery books tend to treat war as an opportunity for a thrilling adventure yarn, whereas the post-1960s books are mostly in the My Brother Sam is Dead “the horror, the horror” mode. Philosophically I’m on board with “the horror, the horror,” but as a reader I much prefer the venturesome child soldiers.

Eloise Lownsbery’s Out of the Flame, meanwhile, is a more pacifist tale. Our hero Pierre, growing up in the French court as the ward of Francis I, at first ardently yearns to be a knight - only to slowly grow disenchanted with the reality of knighthood. Does he want to take part in pointlessly destructive invasions of neighboring countries, like Francis’s early, disastrous war against Charles V?

That war ended with both Francis’s young sons Francis and Henri living as hostages in Spain for four years. When they finally returned to France - the incident that kicks off this novel - they only spoke Spanish. Henri, in particular, returns brooding and angry, unable to shake off the dark shadows of his captivity, a living testament to the long-term damages wrought by war.

However, the heart of the book is not in war or knighthood, but the ferment of early 16th century intellectual and artistic life. Thomas More and Rabelais visit the court; the king orders famous Italian Renaissance paintings and the construction of new palaces in the exciting new architectural styles. The children visit the house where Leonardo da Vinci lived out his last days, and admire the wonderful notebooks he left behind.

Lownsbery pauses occasionally to point out that this whole patron of the arts gig is built on the backs of ruinous taxation for the peasants, and that court life is riven with petty intrigues and factionalism. This is true, but nonetheless Pierre and the king’s children live in an enchanted atmosphere of never-ending picnic, which is delightful to read but perhaps undermines Lownsbery’s point.

May I have your attention, please! I have polished off the Newbery Honor books of the 1920s, wrapping up with the honorees from 1929, which turned out to be a doozy.

A couple of the books sound cringeworthy based on the titles alone: Grace Moon’s Runaway Papoose and John Bennett’s The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo with Seventeen other Laughable Tales and 200 Comical Silhouettes.

In Runaway Papoose, it is at least clear that Moon devoted a lot of research to the Navajo, which sounds like the bare minimum but is, let me assure you, a bar that many early twentieth century books don’t even attempt to step over. I also found it pretty dull, in that puzzling way that I found a lot of the 1920s Newbery-winning adventure stories dull; the committee and I clearly just had diverging tastes. So, overall, unsurprising that this book sank into obscurity over the years.

I went to the Lilly absolutely braced for John Bennett’s The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo with Seventeen Other Laughable Tales and 200 Comical Silhouettes, but perhaps because I went in with such low expectations, it was far better than expected. Only the first of the Laughable Tales takes place in fairy tale China; the Other Seventeen gently parodic stories take place in fairy tale Middle Ages and fairy tale Germany and fairy tale Arabia and fairy tale Spain, all spattered with gleefully deliberate anachronisms (tin cans, sharp Yankee peddlers selling clocks). There are also a smattering of comical American poems and a little play and a wordless comic about two knights who meet for a duel, and one cuts the other’s head off, and the headless knight rides his horse back home carrying his own head on a pike. (Also the 200 Comical Silhouettes are silhouette illustrations a la Boxcar Children.)

This quote from “Ye Lily Mayden & Ye Little Taylor-Boy” is representative of the tone.

Sir Launcelot de Id-i-otte
Of race was so refined
In all the strain there was not brain
Enough to make one mind

To this list of “Oh boy, how racist is this one going to be?” I have to add Cornelia Meigs’ Clearing Weather, partly just because I read Meigs' Swift Rivers and, well, that had some moments. Clearing Weather is a Boy Meets Boat book set just after the Revolutionary War. Actually, two boys meet a boat, and also each other, and I briefly hoped it was going to be slashy, but the Newbery Award has an almost unerring instinct away from that sort of thing.

So the boys are torn asunder because one of them stays to look after the boat-building business while the other goes off on a trading expedition. Which grows to an around-the-world expedition! They’ll stop in the Pacific Northwest to trade for furs with the Indians, then sail to China! The adventure part is actually quite pacy and exciting, but also it’s just about as racist as you would guess.

Elinor Whitney Field’s Tod of the Fens is another one of those bafflingly dull historical adventures that seem to have been so popular with the Newbery committee of the 1920s. This one is set in 15th century Boston (the original English Boston) and features young Prince Hal as a practical joker who decides that it would be droll to steal the keys to the town coffer and then dump them in the shadow of St. Botolph’s Tower, where no one ever goes because it’s supposedly haunted by Satan. Okay, dude? Why, though.

There’s also a side dish of xenophobia: everyone dislikes and distrusts the Easterlings from the Hanseatic League, who at one point kidnap the heroine, just to be evil I guess?, because rather than attempt to get a ransom or anything, they turn her over to an English smuggler. We know he isn’t all that bad because he has a nice sheep dog, and he frees her and sends her on her merry way.

Finally, one I uncomplicatedly liked! Grace Hallock’s The Boy Who Was features a young goatherd named Nino, blessed (cursed?) by a siren to live forever in the hills above Amalfi, across from the island of Capri. Well, it sounds like a curse to me, but it seems to be a blessing for Nino, because he lives on cheerful and unchanged for centuries as his life intersects with various historical events: the eruption of Pompeii, the Children’s Crusade, the attempts of the Carbonari to unite Italy.

(If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Newbery project, it’s how vast is the field of history and how patchy my knowledge. What happened to southern Italy in the centuries between Pompeii and conquest by Austria and/or Spain, I can never remember who got there first? I had no idea, but Nino knew! The Normans invaded, the Goths invaded, and then the Saracens almost invaded, only for their fleet to be sunk by a miraculous storm.)

Aside from this book, Hallock’s writing career appears to have consisted entirely of health manuals. On her very first foray into children’s literature, she won the runner-up to the most prestigious prize in the field - and then never wrote another children’s book again. Baffling.

And that's a wrap on the Newbery Honors of the 1920s!