A Certain Slant of Light

After MUCH TRAVAIL - that is to say, having to email the ILL office TWO WHOLE TIMES to convince them that Best Friends at School a) exists, and b) is a different book than Best Friends - I have received Best Friends at School!

Fortunately it is a delight, well worth a little travail. In previous books, all-American Suzie and French Co Co met, became best friends, matchmade their parents, and are now sisters! (“You mean stepsisters,” one of their new classmates says rather witheringly. Co Co airily replies, “It is not important.”) In this book, their newly-wed parents are off to Japan for an engineering project, so Suzie and Co Co are going to Laurel Crest boarding school!

I love boarding school stories and this is a classic boarding school story, with the overriding importance of finding one’s place at school and becoming a good Laurel Crest girl. (Just as the fantasy of romance novels is that everyone has a perfect match, the fantasy of boarding school stories is that everyone has a perfect niche at boarding school.)

Suzie and Co Co shake into place rather quickly, but their new best friend Puanani, a hulu dancer from Hawaii, struggles to fit in with the school discipline. She is a warm, generous girl, always eager to share the papaya and coconuts that her cousin Bill the airline pilot brings her from Hawaii, and she’s both smart and disciplined when she wants to be: she’s training to be a professional hulu dancer, and her dedication is compared to that of the other special athletic students, like an Olympic skier. But she can’t see the point in working at her studies or following the school rules.

She’s also very homesick for Hawaii. Co Co, who is often homesick for France, is filled with sympathy and at first tries to coddle Puanani out of it. She spends so much time with Puanani that Suzie becomes jealous, convinced that Co Co likes Puanani more than she likes Suzie - a really good depiction of friendship jealousy, I thought.

At last, however, when Puanani threatens to go home one too many times, Co Co realizes that coddling Puanani will not help her settle down at Laurel Crest. She recalls a French saying, which means, “who loves well, also chastises,” and decides that aiding and abetting Puanani in neglecting her homework is not the mark of a good Laurel Crest Girl.

Puanani comes to realize that a dancer must be self-disciplined not only in dance practice, but in other aspects of her life. But realizing this is one thing, actually changing her behavior is another, and the stress eventually proves too much for Puanani: she runs away, goes swimming in a cold pond (she’s missing swimming!), and gets pneumonia! (WOULD it be a boarding school book if someone didn’t run away from school and almost die?)

Everyone rallies to support her. In fact, the whole school loves her so much that they contact Cousin Bill and Puanani’s mother the famous dancer Aolani, and enlist their aid in turning the school’s Thanksgiving feast into a Hawaiian luau to honor Puanani! (At the luau, we discover that Cousin Bill has gotten engaged to the girls’ favorite teacher, Miss Blain. It wouldn’t be a Best Friends book without an engagement!)

Bard clearly did a ton of research on the Hawaiian elements. You can see this in the book itself: not only is Puanani a dancer, but she teaches the girls Hawaiian words that enter the school slang - just as Co Co, in an earlier book, taught her day school classmates French words that they added to their vocabularies.

Bard also mentions the research in the acknowledgments: “Most of the friends who helped me with this book live in Hawaii and they know how much I wanted it to be right. But Miss Clare G. Murdoch of the Library of Hawaii read it for me and corrected it so there wouldn’t be any mistakes. Aren’t librarians the best friends in the whole wide world? I think so too.”

Mary Bard’s 1955 book Best Friends is the kind of children’s book (currently not much in vogue) in which all the main character’s wildest dreams come true. Suzie already has it pretty good: she and her widowed mother live with Suzie’s doting grandparents in a gorgeous house where Suzie’s grandfather has built her a treehouse called the Lookout. Nonetheless, Suzie wants someone to move into the house next door, she wants a best friend, and she wants her mother to get married so she will no longer have to work at Suzie’s school.

(The modern reader may wish this final dream was more progressive. Let it be recorded that Suzie’s teacher, Miss Morrison, who is going to marry the principal over the summer (Suzie is aghast at this romance: they’re so old! Why, Mr. Wagner the principal is thirty!), intends to keep right on teaching after her marriage: she is going to be back next year as the junior high French teacher.)

At the beginning of the book, Susie espies from her treehouse a family moving into the house next door. Soon she discovers that her new neighbor Co Co is just exactly Suzie’s age, and moreover FRENCH (!!!), and also Co Co’s widowed father was Suzie’s widowed mother’s childhood beau (!!!!!) before he went off to France and married a French girl, who tragically died a few years later. (Suzie’s mother, in a brief nod to realism, lost her first husband in France during World War II.)

Co Co and Suzie swiftly become SUCH good friends that during the remodel of Co Co’s new house (which has stood vacant for nearly a decade and needs some cheering up), Co Co designates one of the bedrooms as Suzie’s, and it is exactly like Co Co’s except that Co Co’s is blue and Suzie’s is pink. And also Co Co has a swimming pool! AND ALSO Suzie’s grandpa makes Co Co a Lookout, exactly like Suzie’s, with a Tarzan rope so the girls can swing from Lookout to Lookout!

There is a slight nod toward realism in the classroom drama: Co Co and Suzie must bear the cross of Millicent and her Select Seven, a clique of girls who talk about their classmates in code and whisper about Suzie in that you-are-meant-to-hear this way. However, once Suzie has Co Co by her side, they vanquish Millicent: Co Co rallies the girls left out of the Select Seven with a code of her own (French!), and then invites the whole class to her house for a swim.

(Suzie and Co Co have a Japanese-American classmate, Sumiko, who gets slightly more characterization than most of the other classmates, although admittedly this means Sumiko has a name and one character trait [she swims well!] whereas most of the other classmates are just names.)

The writing about romance is very fifties: part of Millicent’s villainy lies in her boy-craziness, and Suzie frets continually that Co Co might succumb to boy craziness herself (and of course in the course in the book, sixth-grade Suzie and Co Co end up on their first double date - with a pair of twins!). When Suzie and Co Co begin to despair of their parents ever getting with the program and getting married, they decide to act boy crazy themselves: CLEARLY their parents will go mad with worry and that will force them together, as whenever Suzie misbehaves her folks sigh “That girl needs a father” and whenever Co Co misbehaves, her father says “If only she had a mother’s steadying hand”!

I’m on the fence about whether to get the next two books in the series. I’d have to interlibrary loan them, and although the friendship adventures are cute (I didn’t even mention their amazing joint birthday party, because did I mention Co Co and Suzie were born a mere two days apart? PRACTICALLY TWINS), I did find the writing style rather choppy, and outside of Suzie and Co Co the characters are pretty thinly sketched. (I could not, for instance, tell their twin boyfriends apart.) But OTOH the third book in the trilogy sees them at a boarding school…