A Certain Slant of Light

Mary Norton’s Are All the Giants Dead? is a delight and a half, as you would expect from the author of The Borrowers. It’s a sort of fairy tale mash-up, which can be a hit or miss genre to me, and this one is an absolute bullseye.

The book begins when young James goes on an outing with amiably forgetful Mildred. Exactly how James and Mildred met, and when they began going on outings, is never made clear; but James is clearly well familiar with the routine when Mildred shows up and the two of them float out of the house to visit a fairy tale castle, where Mildred shows copies of the articles she wrote to Boofy and Beau (Beauty and the Beast, now a middle-aged couple with a daughter named Dulcibel).

The names are very characteristic of the book, which is poking fun at fairy tales in the most affectionate way. You can tell Mary Norton loves these stories and is just having the most delightful time tossing them all together in her own splendid fairy tale melange.

When James and Mildred press onward to have supper at the pub owned by the two Jacks (Jack-the-Giant-Killer and Jack-of-the-Beanstalk, now old men), Mildred hears tell of a fairy tale wedding in the neighboring kingdom. Well, of course any self-respecting reporter has to go to that! So off she goes, leaving James in care of the Jacks… and that is when James’s adventures really begin; for it turns out, as you may have guessed from the title, that all the giants are not dead. Jack-the-Giant-Killer missed one…

Just a delightful read all around. My only complaint is that I didn’t particularly care for the illustrations, which look like a grotesque version of Trina Schart Hyman’s work; Hyman herself would have been a better choice, or better yet if the publishers could have gotten Beth and Joe Krush, who illustrated Norton’s Borrowers books. But ultimately this is a minor quibble. The illustrations don’t add anything to the book, but they also don’t detract from it.

Actually, my real complaint is that now I’ve read ALL of Mary Norton’s books! Alas, alas… All good things must come to an end.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I was about five The Borrowers was pretty much my very favorite book in the whole WORLD, so I am aghast and astonished that I didn’t realize that Mary Norton wrote non-Borrower books until the Year of Our Lord 2020, when the Disney adaptation Bedknobs and Broomsticks clued me in.

As is the way with Disney adaptations, the movie and the book don’t have much in common: Bed-knob and Broomstick is set after World War II, not during it, and therefore contains no climactic battle of suits of armor vs. Nazis (although there is a delightful sequence where an uninhabited suit of clothes commits a different act of heroism). The book also - sigh - contains a visit to a cannibal island, cannibal islands being all the rage in 1950s children fantasies; there’s a similar sequence in an Edward Eager novel.

Over the course of the book, the children only go on three adventures, which is not enough to fully explore the premise of a bed that can fly not only through space but also time. Still, that premise is amazing imagination fodder: what child wouldn’t like to lie in bed and imagine being able to fly it away somewhere for a night of adventure?

I liked Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago so much that I ended up rereading the sequel, A Year Down Yonder. Both are set during the Great Depression, and they center on Grandma Dowdel, a trickster figure with a dab hand at piecrust, as told through the admiring memories of her grandchildren. She takes a dim view of cops and bankers, and when she’s not making gooseberry pies she foils evictions, catches catfish out of the country club’s stream to feed the needy, and undermines the social pretensions of the DAR.

I also read Naomi Tamura’s The Japanese Bride, a nonfiction book published in America in 1893, mostly because I was tickled pink to find a book published by a Japanese author in America so early - and completely by accident, too, it was just sitting there on a book list in William Dean Howells’ My Year in a Log Cabin. (In general, I’ve found publishers’ “Here are some other books we sell” lists in the front and end matter to be an AMAZING resource for learning about old books, because they give you such a wide view of what was out there.)

Anyway, in The Japanese Bride, Tamura explains Japanese marriage customs for an American audience, which - because American courting customs have changed so much, starting with the fact that we no longer call it “courting” - also yields interesting information about American courting customs in the 1890s for the modern reader.

Finding this book required a bit of googling, during which I discovered (1) there is a female Japanese pop star also named Naomi Tamura, but the author of this book is in fact a man, and (2) after he returned to Japan as a minister after studying at the Auburn Theological Seminary, The Japanese Bride landed him in hot water, because many people weren’t pleased that he had written so openly about private life in Japan for outsiders in a way that might invite censure.

AND FINALLY I read Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, partly because it’s on my Newbery Honor list but also on the theory that maybe it would offer some insight into why people join up with fascists today. This theory was incorrect; the answer to “Why did people join up with Hitler Youth?” is “Because all their friends joined and there was camping and singing and it was the only path to economic and educational advancement and also at a certain point it became compulsory to all quote-unquote ‘ethnic Germans’ and parents could have their children taken away if they tried to stop them from joining,” much of which is not really analogous to why young people go for alt-right groups today, although probably the “all their friends have joined” bit is sometimes a factor.

(Are we still calling it the alt-right? I feel that it has, at this point, simply become “the right.”)

What I’m Reading Now

I put off reading Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 for years, because I figured it was going to be harrowing, and it is, but so far not for the reasons you might suspect from the title. We haven’t gotten to Birmingham yet; we’re still up in Detroit, stuck in the middle of a bully-o-rama. The new kid gets bullied, the main character gets bullied, his older brother bullies the bully (there’s sticking up for your younger brother, and then there’s chucking a smaller kid repeatedly against a wire fence just because you can, you know?), it is in short A Lot.

What I Plan to Read Next

I want to be the first to call this: thirty to forty years from now, someone’s going to win the hell out of the Newbery with a book set during 2020. Let’s hope that book is called Black Lives Matter and not The Year Democracy Died.

Lo these many years ago, back in… 2012… I signed up for a 100 posts challenge, on the topic “100 Books that Influenced Me,” and then petered out in the early forties.

But it’s occurred to me that if I wrote a post a week, I could finish the challenge in a little over a year, and after all I love writing about my favorite books, so why not? Mostly I write about books that I’m reading now; it will be nice to give myself the opportunity to talk about old favorites.

This week: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, which was my very favorite thing when I was small. The book (actually a sequence of five books) is about a family of tiny people, less than a foot high, who live in the walls of human houses and support themselves by borrowing (well, stealing) from their human hosts.

The heroine is Arrietty Clock, who at fourteen (which seemed to me a most impressive age) has never left her family’s home under the clock in the kitchen of a quiet Victorian country home. But that’s about to change: in the absence of a son, Arrietty’s mother insists that Arrietty needs to learn to borrow, just in case something happens to her father. Because, after all, something has happened to her father: he’s been Seen, seen by a full-size human being, a boy (recuperating from an illness he contracted in India - the most classic Victorian backstory) whom the Clocks didn’t know was in the house until too late.

I loved the adventurous aspect (leaving her home for the first time to experience the wide world!), the setting (this book might be the genesis of my love of Victorian England), the details about tiny people living in a big world: Arrietty rolling an onion down the corridor from the storeroom so her mother can cut a single ring off of it to put in their soup. And of course Arrietty herself: she’s a thoroughly satisfactory heroine.

The US edition is beautifully illustrated by Joe and Beth Krush, who also illustrated Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake. I poured over the pictures of Arrietty’s overstuffed Victorian parlor, all built up of bits and pieces repurposed for the use of tiny people: spools of thread used as stools, postage stamp pictures of Queen Victoria hung on the wall as portraits.

I was so taken with the idea of tiny people that I beguiled many hours in kindergarten envisioning the adventures of tiny people living in the school walls. I spent some time worrying what they ate during summer vacation, when we weren’t around to provide half-eaten rice krispie treats for their delectation, before deciding that they probably migrated to the park up the hill behind the school and lived in bucolic bliss till we all trundled back to school.