A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mary Stolz’s Cezanne Pinto: A Memoir is a novel in first person about a boy who escaped from slavery just before the Civil War. Cezanne Pinto is the name our hero and his mother chose for him together the night before she was sold down the river to Texas; he promises her that he’ll escape once he’s older, and indeed he does, along with the ferocious cook Tamar. (I love Cezanne, but powerhouse Tamar who learned to read from the Bible and talks like it might be my favorite character.) After the war, Cezanne sets out for Texas to find his mother.

Cezanne is telling us this story decades after the fact, and he tells us very early on that he never saw his mother again. This was a clever decision on Stolz’s part: the book would be terribly depressing if you read it in hope of a reunion only to have that hope dashed on the last page, but since you go into it knowing, it’s sad but not devastating, and you know that the real point of the story is not the quest but the friends Cezanne makes along the way.

Another decision I quite liked is that, although Cezanne mentions his wife and it’s clear he loved her deeply, the story ends before he actually meets her. It would have imbalanced the book to shove in a “How I Met Your Mother” plot. The heart of the story is Cezanne’s mother, and that is as it should be.

I also read picture book, Carol Ryrie Brink’s Goody O’Grumpity, which sounds like it should be about a grumpy old woman but is in fact about a woman baking a toothsome spice cake that all the children want to eat. Charming illustrations by Ashley Wolff, woodblock painted with watercolors, which set the tale in a Puritan village.

Also Vivien Alcock’s The Red-Eared Ghosts, which is a wild ride of a book. Young Mary Frewin is an average, everyday, indeed slightly dull young Londoner – except for one thing: ever since she was a baby in her pram, she’s been able to see red-eared ghosts that no one else can see. Over the course of the book we learn what these ghosts are and where they come from, an explanation which hares off in several unexpected directions.

I didn’t think this book came together as well as some of Alcock’s others, but I have to admire the sheer weirdness of it all. Red-eared ghosts! Why not! (And in case you are wondering, no, although we learn quite a number of other things about Mary’s ghosts, we never learn why their ears are red.)

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford this week. But I have to go to the BMV this Saturday to update the address on my driver’s license, so I may make excellent progress while I wait.

What I Plan to Read Next

I now have a university library card! Although I may, at some point, get around to more scholarly fare, at the moment I am trawling through the spooky little children’s section tucked back behind the magazine archives. I got Mary Stolz’s Night of Ghosts and Hermits and Rumer Godden’s biography of Hans Christian Andersen… I should see if they have any Anne Lindbergh or Sorche Nic Leodhas.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

One more Newbery Honor book: Elizabeth Janet Gray’s Young Walter Scott, a novelized biography of the youth of Sir Walter Scott. Fascinating to get a glimpse of life in Edinburgh in the last decades of the 18th century - the ‘45 still cast a long shadow!

Also Vivien Alcock’s Stranger at the Window, which I would have LOVED if I had read it as a child, as it’s a book about a hidden child and I LOVED books about hidden children. (Why yes, I did obsess over Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden, in which families are required by law to stop at two children so third children have to be kept hidden. The rest of the series never lived up to the first book, IMO.)

In this book, young Leslie realizes that there is a child hiding in the attic of the house next door in London. Soon, she realizes that the neighbor children are hiding an illegal immigrant… whom they can no longer hide, as their mother has become suspicious, so Leslie has to hide him! Wonderful. A++. You know how in the sixth book of the Samantha series, Samantha hides her best friend Nellie and her two little sisters in the attic? This pushes all those buttons.

Given the premise, you might expect Stranger at the Window to delve into the whys and wherefores of illegal immigration more than it does. But goddammit, I’m not here to learn anything, I’m here for adventure.

Also Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Pink Motel. Just before Christmas, the Mellen family inherits a bright pink motel in Florida from Great-Uncle Hiram. They head down to put the place in order and sell it, only the children are instantly smitten and want to stay there forever on account of the quirky guests: an itinerant handyman who carved weather vanes for all the cottages at the motel, a gangster who cuts paper lace, and an artist from Greenwich Village who carries a possibly magical hamper (always full of whatever food you happen to need, including on one occasion Alligator Food).

Is Miss Ferris in fact magical? The book never commits to an answer on this question, but (a) that magical hamper, (b) she keeps saying things like “[shooting apples off people’s heads] is a nice trick that originated in Switzerland, I believe, a long time ago when I was just a girl,” and (c) she spins and weaves an entire theater curtain in less than a week.

The book sort of sits at the intersection of mid-century children’s fantasy and mid-century children’s books about family hijinks, so if you like either of those things you might like it. Carol Ryrie Brink is always a good time, in any case. (I bought this book cheap at a used bookstore and if anyone would like it, I would be happy to send it.)

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford this week. Having returned young Anne-Hilarion to his grandfather in London, the Chevalier de la Vireville has landed once again on the coast of Brittany… only to realize that his foot is more badly injured than he realized, and he may not be able to climb the rocky cliffs off the beach!

What I Plan to Read Next

The library has another autobiography by another mid-century woman children’s writer that I like (Carol Ryrie Brink). I’ve learned my lesson from the debacle after I put a hold on L. M. Boston’s autobiography last week: I’m going to Central Library in person to pick Carol Ryrie Brink’s A Chain of Hands up myself in my hot little hands!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Finished my St. Patrick’s Day books! (Well, except Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which will just have to wait another year.) R. A. MacAvoy’s The Grey Horse is a lively story about a grey horse in late nineteenth-century Ireland who is in fact a puca, come to court Maire Standun, the black-haired young Nationalist with a fiery temper on her. Good fun, with a bit of a deeper bite; I particularly enjoyed the part where the priest baptizes the puca who then murders a government inspector (as one does) and then goes to the priest and is all, I broke my vow to keep all Ten Commandments. An interesting collision of worldviews between the fairy world and the Church.

Also finished Meindert DeJong’s Hurry Home, Candy, another Newbery Honor book, this one about a dog named Candy who gets lost and spends a year in shivering terror in the countryside before ( spoilers )

And I read Carol Ryrie Brink’s Family Sabbatical, in which the Ridgeway family takes a sabbatical in France! As a child I always hoped my father would take a sabbatical in France (my parents did this before I was born, but never after!), so I read this with the greatest attention, and it’s full of just the sort of incidents one would want to happen on a sabbatical in France: a German princess lodging at your hotel, a box of sweets cunningly disguised to look like rocks, an attempt to throw an American-style Halloween party… Lots of fun.

What I’m Reading Now

Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. It may have been a mistake to read this so soon after David Copperfield, as a direct comparison with Charles Dickens rarely does other authors any favors. Particularly baffled by Kingsolver’s decisions with regard to Agnes, who in the original overflows with such warmth, patience, and love for humanity that she befriends Dora Spenlow, evidently sincerely, even though ( Spoilers )

Now I understand why Kingsolver might wish to make the character a bit less angel-in-the-housish, but I have no idea why she decided to effect this update by making Agnes (Angus in this version) a raging misogynist who has no female friends because she thinks girls are full of bullshit. (Teenage boys as we all know are crystal-pure fonts of bullshit-free discourse.) Especially not mad keen about Kingsolver giving this attitude to the girl who was the moral center of the original book.

Does this aspect of Demon Copperhead ever improve? And is it a general theme in Kingsolver’s work? Because I’ve been meaning to check out some of her books for years, but wow, if this is a recurring character type then I won’t bother.

What I Plan to Read Next

At the back of Family Sabbatical there’s a list of other classic family stories, most of which I’ve read, but also Brenda Wilkinson’s Ludell which I’ve never heard of, so of course I’m giving that a try.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind, the last book in the Earthsea series. I deeply enjoyed Tenar’s discussions with the Kargad princess who has been dumped on the archipelago without a word of the language among people she has been raised to believe are wicked soul-stealing sorcerers. That intense culture shock - that’s the good stuff.

Otherwise… hmm. I admire Le Guin’s willingness to blow up her own worldbuilding from earlier books without necessarily admiring the way that she executed said explosion. In particular, I really struggled with the big shift in dragon worldbuilding in book four, and unfortunately the dragons are big in all three of the last books so you just can’t get away from it.

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Family Grandstand is a family story of the kind beloved and popular in the mid-twentieth century: think Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-King Family or Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats. I don’t think many books in this subgenre are being published now, but perhaps it’s due for a revival.

Anyway, I particularly enjoyed this one as it takes place near Midwestern University, the large land-grant college where the children’s father works as a professor, and in short reminded me a lot of my own childhood. Of course in some ways this milieu changed a lot between the book’s publication in 1952 and my own 1990s childhood - one of the plot points in the books is that it’s shameful that the Terrible Torrances are so badly behaved that they still need a babysitter even though they are six years old (and that babysitter is eleven!) - but the atmosphere of a college town on a football weekend remains absolutely spot on.

Deeply relieved to inform you that Annie Fellows Johnston took pity on us all in Mary Ware in Texas, and decided to allow a successful surgery on Mary’s brother Jack’s horribly painful paralyzing spinal fracture from last book. (I realize that I’m supposed to be against miracle cures for social justice reasons but it was too cruel to inflict that on a character ten books into a series.)

Also fascinated to see that a potential suitor has appeared for Mary’s sister Joyce! I really thought Joyce would end out the series as a spinster artist living with her friends in New York City, but now her old friend Jules is on the scene. Of course Mary dismisses the possibility with the comment “Oh, it never can be anything but friendship in this case... Jules is two years younger than Joyce,” but this seems like an extremely superable obstacle to me, so we shall see!

What I’m Reading Now

In The Yellow Poppy, D. K. Broster has at last introduced the yellow poppy of the title: a late-blooming yellow poppy called bride of the waves. The duchesse plucks one for the duc, only for the petals to blow away at once in the stiff breeze… FORESHADOWING MUCH? However, I recall the cruelly misleading foreshadowing in The Flight of the Heron, and sincerely hope that Broster is playing the same trick on us this time!

In David Copperfield, David is beginning to have a wisp of an inkling that perhaps - just perhaps! - marrying the silliest girl in all England was not, perhaps, the recipe for marital happiness. He is gamely attempting not to allow this realization to bloom to full consciousness, which is probably for the best, given the state of English divorce laws at the time and also the fact that Dora would probably wither away and die if thrust out into the cruel world on her own. You’ve made your bed and you must lie in it, sir!

What I Plan to Read Next

I accidentally another stack of World War I books at the library.

Another installment of Newbery Honor books of the 1930s! These three books made an interesting accidental trilogy on the topic of Attitudes Toward Women in the 1930s, with a special sidebar on What Do We Do about Tomboys?

Hilda van Stockum’s A Day on Skates is a charming and richly illustrated chapter book about a class of Dutch schoolchildren whose teacher takes them for a day-long field trip skating on the canals. They keep stopping for delicious treats, hot cocoa and snow pancakes (made with snow mixed into the batter, apparently!) and poffertjes, and it just sounds like a delightful day out. It annoyed me that the boys got all the adventures, though, while the girls got stuck washing the pancake dishes.

Fortunately an antidote was close at hand in Erick Berry’s The Winged Girl of Knossos, a thrilling adventure story loosely inspired by the story of Daedalus and Icarus - except that Icarus is gender-swapped for a daughter, Inas.

We first meet Inas diving for sponges off the coast of Crete, not because she needs sponges but just for the thrill of the thing. Inas is an all-around tomboy who aspires to jump bulls in the next festival in Knossos and loves to test the new gliders that her father has invented. (The only flying-too-close-to-the-sun is metaphorical: the people of Crete suspect black magic in Daidolos’s flying machines.)

Although the Minoans view the gliders with suspicion, they are not at all bothered by Inas’s tomboyishness: Berry’s answer to the Problem of Tomboys is “there is no problem,” and her vision of Minoan culture (based on new-to-the-1930s archaeological information) features a well-developed tomboy tradition: Inas is only one of many female bull-jumpers in Knossos. Moreover, there’s no tension over her tomboyish ways, and Inas gets along easily with more traditionally feminine women: one of her best friends is Princess Ariadne, who has developed an unfortunate interest in that doltish Greek tribute Theseus…

A lot of Inas’s disdain for Theseus arises from the fact that he (like the other Greek tributes) has no idea how to play the bulls: confronted with bulls in the arena, he clubs them inelegantly on the head. This is an excellent character detail that also says so much about Inas’s culture, and its unthinking assumption not merely of superiority but of centrality. If the Minoans know how to play the bulls, then surely all other civilized people must know too.

I really liked this book. Berry’s Knossos feels real and lived-in, her descriptions of bull-jumping are thrilling, and Inas is a delight. Stylistically it feels much more recent than it is: if I hadn’t gone into the book knowing it was written in the 1930s, I might have guessed the 1990s, or even more recent.

I struggled more with Mabel Louise Robinson’s Bright Island, which has a tomboy heroine in what you might call the “I hate all the other girls” mode. Thankful and her four older brothers grew up on an island off the coast of Maine; now only Thankful is left, and her parents decide it’s time for her to go to the mainland to get some schooling and also learn “what a girl is for.” (An actual chapter title!)

She does eventually become friends with her roommate Selina, but mostly because they realize that actually neither of them are interested in their classmate Robert, a handsome boy whose dash and charm obscure his feckless selfishness. (There's a wonderfully done sequence where Robert visits Thankful’s island home and Thankful realizes that, despite his charm, he’s a black hole of self-absorption.) But there’s no real sense of any personal connection between Thankful and Selina.

Near the end of the book, Thankful’s mother falls ill - you can tell this is one of the early Newbery books because she doesn’t die - and as she convalesces, Thankful takes over the housekeeper role, although retaining also many of her earlier tomboy traits, like a preference for old clothes and a habit of taking an early-morning swim in the icy ocean. It’s a gentler and less complete transition than in Caddie Woodlawn, perhaps the ur-tomboy book of the 1930s.

I was getting what you might call vibes from this book, particularly the scene where Thankful throws her girdle into the sea, so I looked Mabel Robinson up on Wikipedia and discovered that she was a lesbian who lived all her adult life with her partner Helen Rose. (Lest you be too impressed by my vibe-spotting, however, I was also getting vibes from Erick Berry, nee Evangel Allena Champlin Best… but she was married twice, so probably not a lesbian.)

”A woman’s work is something fine and noble to grow up to, and it is just as important as a man’s. But no man could ever do it so well. I don’t want you to be the silly, affected person with fine clothes and manners whom folks sometimes call a lady. No, that is not what I want for you, my little girl. I want you to be a woman with a wise and understanding heart, healthy in body and honest in mind. Do you think you would like to be growing up into that woman now? How about it, Caddie, have we run with the colts long enough?”...

Suddenly Caddie flung herself into Mr. Woodlawn’s arms.

“Father! Father!”

When I was a little girl, I was convinced I was a tomboy, despite the fact that I didn’t like sports, physical exertion, boys, or pretty much any of the other things that young tomboys are supposed to love. Mostly I just wanted to sit around and read all the time, but in between the Little House books and Caddie Woodlawn, my reading led to the conclusion that girls were supposed to be tomboys.

I should perhaps put “supposed” in quotes, because these are books at war with their own subtext. On the one hand, the explicit message - and this is especially clear in Caddie Woodlawn, which spells its message out the passage I quoted above (which is one of the few parts of the book I remembered all these years later) - is that tomboys have to grow up, and put aside childish things, and become good quiet housekeepers who learn all those girly things they’ve scorned.

But on the other hand, and all words about “fine and noble” callings aside, man does Caddie Woodlawn make proper ladyhood look unattractive. Caddie’s older sister Clara has been so subsumed by ladyhood that she barely has a personality. She’s the only one in the family who votes to go to England when her father inherits an estate, because only she is blinded by the glitz of the English peerage to the true beauty of the rough frontiers of America.

(Clara does not lose her entire family to a train accident, but nonetheless I think she and Susan Pevensie have something in common.)

Who wouldn’t rather be a tomboy? Tomboys are honest and brave and true and have their own opinions about things rather than just parroting out of the Godey’s Lady’s Book.

I loved Caddie Woodlawn as a girl, and I still love lots of it - there’s a marvelous scene where Caddie tries to fix a clock, for instance, and ends up getting taken under her father’s wing as his clock-fixing apprentice. The nature descriptions are marvelous. (The Indian plotlines are of their time - neither particularly noxious nor particularly progressive for the the thirties, but uncomfortable reading today. I’m sure someone has written about this at length elsewhere.)

But reading it now, what it really draws out for me is how two-faced our cultural vision of how girls are supposed to be is. For a long time, the explicit message - the conduct-book message, one might call it - was that girls should be quiet and polite and thoughtful and ladylike, while the message in books (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Caddie Woodlawn) was that ladylike girls are the most boring thing to ever bore, and girls ought to be exciting and sprightly and tomboyish.

And at some point (gradually, although it was quite common in books I read growing in the nineties), that implicit message became explicit. Girls should be tomboys. They should be fearless! and feisty! and loud! and able to keep up with the boys.

Or - if it’s a story that isn’t specifically aimed at girls - maybe only almost able to keep up. Not too fearless. Not too loud. Not so set in their opinions that it’s annoying, and God forbid not right.

Pretty much the only thing on which there is cultural consensus is that girls had damn well better be pretty.