A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Kate Seredy’s A Tree for Peter, which the library catalog listed as a Christmas book although it has actually just one (admittedly pivotal) Christmas scene. Little Peter lives in Shantytown, a miserable poverty-stricken slum. But his life changes when he meets a tramp, also named Peter, who gives him a red spade and promises to plant a tree for him if he’ll dig a hole for it. Peter does, and on Christmas Eve tramp Peter plants a spruce tree all decorated for Christmas. The candlelight draws the other residents of Shantytown out, and in the warm glow they see that if they worked together to clear out the junk and enlarge Peter’s garden and make the drafty shanties air-tight, they could make this a pleasant place to live… A classic 1930/40s story about common folk banding together to improve their lives.

I also read Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, a romystery that is two part romance to one part mystery which is, unfortunately, the opposite of my preferred mystery-to-romance ratio. I also found it annoying that ( spoilers )

Sadly I think I need to accept that Ally Carter is simply not for me. I’ve tried a bunch of her books and I always come away with the same feeling of “too much boyfriend, not enough spy school and/or mystery-solving.”

By this time I was getting frankly a bit tired of Christmas books, so I took a semi-break with Agatha Christie’s What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! (4.50 from Paddington outside the US), which just barely squeaks within the parameters of the Christmas book challenge because What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw is a murder in a passing train at Christmastime as she is on the way to visit her dear friend Miss Marple.

My first Miss Marple! I’ve been kind of meh on Christie in the past, but I really enjoyed the experience of reading this one although I found the final solution to the mystery somewhat unconvincing. However, I am not reading mysteries for the solution! I read mysteries for the journey and if the journey happens to end in a convincing solution, so much the better.

What I’m Reading Now

This week in Ruth Sawyer’s collection The Long Christmas, a story from the Dolomites about a town of rich, greedy, gluttonous, selfish folk, every single one of whom refused to give shelter to a traveler on a cold Christmas Eve, for which sin the town flooded and became a lake. If you stand on its shores at Christmas Eve, you can still hear the bells ringing for the midnight Mass.

This story is centuries old and therefore not intentionally a parable for global warming and/or the crisis of global economic inequality. However, if the shoe fits…

What I Plan to Read Next

My hold on J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story has arrived!

I figured some of you would be interested in Newbery books with Jewish themes, so I’ve made a list. (As usual, it’s entirely possible I’ve forgotten some, since I’ve been reading this books for nigh on thirty years.)

1931: Agnes Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. A kindly older Jewish couple help matchmake our hero and heroine and also lend money to the king of Portugal for voyages of exploration. (The modern reader may have a low opinion of voyages of exploration, but in Hewes’ eyes these are very much a Good Thing.) The entire Jewish community gets kicked unjustly out of Portugal.

1941. Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree features not only a kindly Jewish shopkeeper but an extended musing on how Hungary was formed when everyone - Hungarian landowners, Jewish shopkeepers, some third group that I’m forgetting right now - came together as one. This is a building block toward the book’s central theme: not only are all the people of Hungary one, but in fact all human beings on this earth are one, and therefore can’t we stop tormenting each other with the horrors of war? (A cri de coeur in 1941.)

Then a trifecta of short story collections, written in Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer and then translated into English: Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1967), The Fearsome Inn (1968) (actually a short story made into a picture book), and When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories (1969). Stories of eastern European Jewish life, often very funny or with a supernatural twist.

Then in 1970, the Newbery committee followed this up with Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie (Jewish life in the Lower East Side in the 1900s) AND Johanna Reiss’s hiding-from-the-Nazis memoir The Upstairs Room. Another Holocaust memoir followed in 1982: Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944.

2008: Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village is a series of poetic monologues told by different members of a medieval village, including a Jewish child.

2017: In Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, the narration rotates between the three magical children, one of whom is Jewish. (I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to plug Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies and Max in the Land of Lies, even though they’re not Newbery books. Yet. Max in the Land of Lies is eligible for 2026! Just putting that out there, Newbery committee!

Most recently, Ruth Behar’s 2025 Across So Many Seas is a generational saga of a Sephardic Jewish family, based loosely on Behar’s own family history. The story begins in the 1400s when the family is forced to leave Spain, then continues in the 1900s when a daughter of the family emigrates to Cuba for an arranged marriage. (Behar based this section on her own grandmother’s story, which she recounts in the afterword. The real story seems much more romantic than the tale Behar told to tell instead, which is such a strange choice.) Her daughter becomes a brigadista teaching peasants how to read until she emigrates to the US, and then her daughter vacations in Spain which the family was forced to flee so many generations before.

Edited to add: landofnowhere pointed out that I forgot Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, which is both embarrassing and inexplicable because I read that approximately 500 times as a child, and have reread it at least twice as an adult.

And also E. L. Konigsburg's The View from Saturday, but that one is much less embarrassing, as I read that book once and remember nothing except the fact that I didn't understand any of it. (And also during the quiz bowl at the end, the judges would allow posh to count as an acronym, but not tip. Why did this stick with me? The human mind is a mystery.)

I technically didn’t need to reread Kate Seredy’s The Good Master for my Newbery project, as I already read it as a child and liked it so much that it survived repeated cullings of my childhood book collection… but I didn’t actually remember anything about it, aside from the vague sense that “This might be a good book for my Problem of Tomboys post.”

And how. The book begins when Jancsi’s Cousin Kate arrives on the train from Budapest. Over the course of the next few chapters, Kate:

- throws a temper tantrum when she realizes she’ll have to ride in a horse cart rather than a proper taxi;
- pushes Jancsi and his father off the cart, takes hold of the reins, and whip the horses home while standing in the cart like a charioteer in Ben Hur;
- climbs into the rafters to eat sausages (which are stored in the rafters);
- cuts her skirt with a pair of shears so Jansci can give her a riding lesson;
- and then, at the end of the first riding lesson, screams like a banshee just for the fun of seeing Jancsi’s horse try to buck him off.

After this, Kate becomes slightly less of a danger to life and limb, but not less of a tomboy. In fact, after the skirt cutting incident, Jancsi’s mother dresses Cousin Kate in Jancsi’s cast-off clothing (which Kate has already anathemized as looking like girl’s clothes, with those wide pleated trousers). If she’s going to run wild, might as well have the proper clothes for it!

In general, if you wish to read about children behaving badly for no particularly good reason, the 1930s are a fruitful decade in which to look.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple of Unread Book Club books: G. Clifton Wisler’s Red Cap, which is far less emotionally moving than one might expect of a book set largely in Andersonville prison (the largest and deadliest Confederate prison in the American Civil War). Ah well. They can’t all be winners, I guess.

And also Ann Turner’s Elfsong, which sounds like it ought to be a thing I like: a girl who accidentally meets an elf while out searching for her lost cat, which the elf has enticed away to be his new mount, what could go wrong?

But I felt it was trying too hard to awaken a sense of wonder. The elves can hear the songs of all the things on earth, and pass this ability on to Maddy and her grandfather. And these are not just regular birdsong or the pleasant plash of a brook or whatever, but songs with words, so wherever you go you’ll be surrounded by baby mice singing

My place, mine
my turn, mine

or rocks rumbling

We were here before you.
We were a river of fire,
then a river of stone.

Which would be delightful and magical - I rather like the little poems - if you could make it stop. But it sounds like Maddy is going to surrounded by a constant inescapable din for the rest of her life and that sounds dreadful.

What I’m Reading Now

Sheila O’Conner’s Sparrow Road, which I plucked from a Little Free Library a few months back purely because the cover seemed promising - and I was right! So far it is atmospheric and mysterious and there are possible ghost orphans (I think they’re metaphorical rather than real ghosts but still) and I’m feeling it.

I’ve also begun Kate Seredy’s The Chestry Oak, which kicks off with a Hungarian prince in his castle listening to planes pass overhead during early World War II… and I can already tell this is going to be a tale of woe and disaster and I’m sort of dreading it honestly.

Also Isabel R. Marvin’s A Bride for Anna’s Papa, which gets points for being set in a Minnesota iron mining camp, just because I’ve never read a book set in such a place before. Have only just started this one. Will let you know how it goes!

What I Plan to Read Next

I need to decide what to read for this month’s reading challenge, “a book published before you were born.” The Chestry Oak fits the bill, but I was planning to read that anyway, so maybe I ought to branch out.

But on the other hand I may not get through it without the additional incentive of fulfilling my reading challenge. It will probably not be that harrowing, self, there is no reason to believe that this is Grave of the Fireflies: If It Were a Book Set in Hungary.

More Newbery medal books! In case you don’t want to wade through it all, this entry contains: Marguerite De Angeli’s The Door in the Wall, medieval historical fiction novel about a youth who loses the use of his legs, Kate Seredy’s Hun epic The White Stag, and Eleanor Estes’s family adventure with dog, Ginger Pye (with bonus discussion of Estes’s The Hundred Dresses).

Marguerite De Angeli’s medieval historical fiction novel The Door in the Wall features Robin, who awakens one morning mysteriously unable to walk. Robin learns to lope around on crutches, to swim, to play the harp and write and whittle wonderful things; the door in the wall is a metaphor for finding another way forward when one’s original plans, like Robin’s plan to be a knight, are blocked by unexpected barriers. He can’t be a knight if he can’t walk; but he finds other talents he can use.

I am almost positive that long ago I read, or had read to me, the first chapter or two. I suspect we stopped reading because I was terrified by the idea that you could go to bed one night, just as usual, and wake up unable to walk. (We also stopped reading Susan Fletcher’s Dragon’s Milk because I found Lyf’s plague too upsetting - though I did get back to that series while I was still a child. I am not a fan of books about sudden and terrible diseases.)

Second, Kate Seredy’s The White Stag, which is not a novel. Oh, it has many of the accoutrements of a novel, chapters and illustrations (and lovely illustrations they are, too); but it is in fact an epic.

It spans generations, larger-than-life hero succeeding larger-than-life hero, all of them referred to not by name but by epithet: Nimrod, Mighty Hunter before the Lord; Magyar and Hunor, Twin Eagles of Hadur; Bendeguz, White Eagle of the Moon; ending, at last, with Attila the Conqueror. And the narration sustains the elevated, mythic tone set up in these names.

Personally I find mythic diction - indeed, epics in general - airless and dull. So I didn’t enjoy the book very much, but it’s well-done for what it is, and I suspect children who have a taste for the epic find this a soul-stirring introduction to the genre.

And finally, Eleanor Estes’ Ginger Pye, an engaging comfort read about featuring Rachel and Jerry Pye, who adopt a dog (Ginger Pye, naturally), only to have their dog stolen. The stolen dog storyline provides a light framework for the book, which is mostly a digression-laden meander through their small town and Pye family stories. It reminds me of a much lighter and more New England To Kill a Mockingbird.

I think this is a case where the right author won, but for the wrong book. I enjoyed Ginger Pye, but Estes clearly should have gotten the medal for The Hundred Dresses, a gentle and sensitive story about bullying. Maddie disapproves but does not try to stop her friends’ teasing of a classmate named Wanda, only to realize too late just how badly that teasing hurt Wanda.

What I like particularly like about this book is that Maddie’s realization comes only after Wanda has moved away, when it’s too late to make amends. Realizing that you have done wrong and can’t right it except by doing better towards others in the future is an uncommon literary theme: it’s melancholy (because the harm is irrevocable) without being hopeless (because Maddie will try to do better). It’s a difficult mood to capture.