A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Onward in the Newbery Honors! I read Julia L. Sauer’s The Light at Tern Rock, a very short book about an older woman and her nephew who end up spending Christmas tending the lighthouse on Tern Rock. Lots of fun if you are into lighthouses (I am into lighthouses). Also interesting in that it has strong religious themes, which show up intermittently in Newbery Honor books in the 1950s, but not really thereafter. What’s curious is that you also don’t see these themes in the 1920s Newbery Honors; I’m interested to see if this is a 1950s aberration (the 1950s being the era of God and Country) or if it will show up in the 1930s and 40s too.

I also finished Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Crystal Tree, the final book in her charming trilogy about Nancy, who is sent to live with her Swedish-American not-actually-grandparents (they’re friends of the family, but, like, emotionally they are grandparents) and has all sorts of good times. In this book, the good times revolve around discovering the history of the little silver house which Nancy’s parents intend to rent; Nancy and her friends start interviewing everyone in town on the topic and hear lots of delightful stories, not only about the house but about all sorts of other things too. Just really enjoyable all around. Someone ought to consider reprinting these.

And I read Annie Fellows Johnston’s Mary Ware’s Promised Land, which is the LAST of the thirteen (!) Little Colonel books, and ends with Mary Ware settled down in wedded bliss with her beloved Phil Tremont, right across the road from her idol Lloyd Sherman (a.k.a. the Little Colonel). What more could a girl want? A career, you say? Well, I am thrilled to tell you that Mary Ware is ALSO going to be pursuing her passion for housing reform, lobbying for legislation to force greedy landlords to update their dwellings so the poor no longer live in windowless rooms with one single spigot for the whole building!

What I’m Reading Now

Mrs. Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, simply because it was mentioned in Jennie D. Lindquist’s The Golden Name Day. (It’s the book the main character is reading on the stairs when the light slants through the stained glass window just right to cast colored shapes on the page.) Delighted to discover that it’s a children’s fantasy book! The cuckoo in the clock is taking our heroine Griselda on magical adventures, starting with a visit to the little room in the cuckoo clock where the cuckoo lives, with the walls all lined in red velvet and two little red velvet chairs. (The edition on Gutenberg has gorgeous illustrations.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Not sure yet... following my whim!

I just read the most enchanting book! It's Jennie Lindquist's The Golden Name Day, a Newbery Honor book from 1956, which is what I think of as a picnic book: the characters don't always have literal picnics (although in this book there are at least three), but the book is made up of a series of good times like beads on a string, picnics and parties and reading a beloved book below a stained glass window so the rich colored light falls on the book just right.

In this book, young Nancy has been sent to spend the year with her Swedish grandmother, who still keeps many of the Swedish customs of her youth before she immigrated to America. One of these customs is the Name Day, which gives the book its title and also provides the string on which to thread those good time beads: Nancy yearns for a Name Day, but as Nancy is not in the Swedish almanac, she and her companions all spend the book contemplating how to get her one.

The good times take place with her grandmother and grandfather, her three cousins, her Aunt Martha, her new friend Alex who lives down the street (he uses a wheelchair, with the book deals with in a breezily matter-of-fact way), and many delightful animals, not least a kitten who is discovered at one of those aforementioned picnics and acquires the name Cuckoo Clock.

It's simply a lovely warm bath of a book. I've never read it before, but nonetheless the experience felt nostalgic. And it has perfectly enchanting illustrations by Garth Williams, who illustrated the Little House books as well as E. B. White's children's books. There are two sequels and of course I'm looking forward to reading them.