A Certain Slant of Light

I am happy to report that Joan Aiken had mercy after all, and started Dido and Pa with the reunion between Dido and Simon which she denied us at the end of The Cuckoo Tree. At long last they see each other again! They are delighted to be reunited and have a lovely supper at an inn.

However, their reunion is short-lived, as Dido hears a song that reminds her of her father’s tunes. She goes out to investigate (musing all the time that her father never played for her, not once, in her entire childhood) and runs into her father, who informs her that her sister is extremely ill! and wants to see her! so just get into this carriage and stop asking questions!

You will be unsurprised to hear that Dido’s sister is not ill. Indeed, Dido’s father has no idea where Dido’s sister is. He is kidnapping Dido to make her take part in another wicked Hanoverian plot. This plot has been slightly complicated by the fact that the last Bonnie Prince Georgie just died, oops, so the Hanoverians no longer have a contender to the throne, but never fear! They will come up with a way to plot wickedly anyway.

(I was reading a history book the other day which mentioned Hanoverians and I needed to pause a moment to remember that Hanoverians are (a) real and (b) not constantly wickedly plotting in real life.)

Dido’s father starts this book as a terrible father and only goes downhill from there. He is also music master to the Hanoverian ambassador and actually a wonderful musician and composer, which causes Dido painful confusion. How can he be such an awful person and such a wonderful artist? I feel you, Dido. If only the two were incompatible, things would be much easier for us all.

But he continues to be the worst, up to and including walking whistling away from a burning building with over a hundred children in the basement, while also being such an amazing musician that his music actually has healing properties. (Pity Queen Ginevra in The Stolen Lake didn’t discover the life-extending properties of music rather than porridge made from the bones of children.) Beneath the barmy plots, Joan Aiken is a stone-cold realist about the contradictions of human nature.

In The Cuckoo Tree, Dido Twite at long last returns to England! Her adventures on the voyage over were actually written post-Cuckoo Tree, so we are not going to be hearing anything here about how Dido helped the reincarnation of King Arthur regain his throne in New Cumbria (South America) or how she helped restore Dr. Talisman to her rightful place as heir of Aratu.

We do, however, hear that Dido and company fought in the China Tea Wars and captured a French frigate, neither of which were detailed in those earlier/later books came to be written. Joan Aiken, never change.

Anyway! Dido is back in England with Captain Hughes, who carries an urgent dispatch related to the upcoming coronation of King Richard IV, a.k.a. King Davie Jamie Charlie Neddie Geordie Harry Dick Tudor-Stuart, NO we will not be explaining which Tudor married which Stuart. Unfortunately, on the road back to London, their carriage overturns, leaving Captain Hughes wounded and forcing Dido to go for help.

The nearest source of aid proves to be Tegleaze Manor, an almost abandoned and generally gothic place in the hands of an eccentric old lady who has gambled away much of the family fortune. She has a cousin Wilfrid who has made a doll-size copy of Tegleaze Manor and a grandson Tobit who is obsessed with peashooters, but not as obsessed as Lady Tegleaze herself is with contagion. The moment she hears Captain Hughes is not well, she banishes Dido and the captain to Dogkennel Cottages (despite Dido’s remonstrances that carriage accidents are not catching), where Dido finds herself in company of a kindly blind shepherd and a not at all kindly witch…

This book also includes such Aiken favorites as lost heirs, girls dressed as boys, alcohol used as medicine (Dido is at one point revived by a porridge made of wine), and animals who thrive on the dubious diet of hot buttered buns and marmalade pie. The animal in question this time is an elephant, Rachel, who perhaps is not quite as amazing as the pink whale in Nightbirds on Nantucket, but listen, who could compete with the pink whale/whaling captain love story?

Also Dido is reunited with her father, who tells her that most of her family is dead, which Dido accepts with equanimity, as they were never good to her and anyway she’s got adventures to be getting on with. He also leaves her tied to a post by the baddies. Still the worst father. Fascinated how he and Dido will rub along together in the next book, Dido and Pa.

More important, who will Dido put on a throne in the next book? Always a kingmaker, never a king. Will Dido someday manage to crown herself?

In the last few Smiley books, John Le Carre did not rip out my heart and stomp on it, so I entered The Secret Pilgrim with a false sense of security. The Cold War is in its death throes, the new world is dawning, no one’s sure what’s coming next, and on the verge of retirement, our protagonist Ned is looking back over his life. His reminiscences are loosely strung along the thread of a talk that Smiley is having with the new recruits Ned has been training for the Circus.

This was a mistake. This book destroyed me not once, not twice, but three times.

( Spoilers )

In my freshman year of high school, we read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The rest of the class was not impressed, but I loved it.

Ten years passed. I was slowly making inroads into classic literature, and since I’d loved The Great Gatsby so much, I decided to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. (He only finished four.) I read This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, and then, crushing between the aimless floating ennui depicted in the two novels, decided I would circle back around for the fourth book later.

Ten more years passed. “Later” finally arrived, and at long last I’ve read Tender is the Night. It turns out that this is also a depiction of aimless floating ennui, in which the promising young psychologist Dick Diver fails in all his promise because (a) he married a patient and taking care of her takes up his time, (b) said patient is super rich so he doesn’t actually have to work, (c) but then Dick buys an interest in a Swiss sanitarium so he is working and that seems to be what really unravels him?

Or else it’s his affair with the dazzling young movie star Rosemary Hoyt, which begins rather puzzlingly after they’ve both fallen out of love with each other. Okay. Why not, I guess.

Anyway, the combined weight of intermittently insane wife/unearned riches/working at the asylum/having an affair drive Dick to drink. And then more drink. And then he starts drinking on the job sometimes, and on a trip he gets in a fight with a taxi driver, which leads to a fight with the police, in which he thinks he loses an eye but it seems like maybe he doesn’t but Fitzgerald never totally clears up this point.

Meanwhile, Nicole has an affair with another man, who tells Dick that Dick and Nicole are getting divorced, and Nicole is healed and goes off to marry the other man and is no longer Dick’s problem, and Dick goes back to America and appears to be in the process of drinking himself into less and less prestigious posts as a doctor. The end.

Sometimes as a young person one makes foolish vows and “I’m going to read all of Fitzgerald’s novels!” may have been one of them, but hey, at least he only wrote four. I’m all done!

Near the end of Black Hearts in Battersea, Dido Twite is apparently lost at sea. Sophie says she has a feeling that Dido’s probably all right, and back in 1964 that was where the matter rested for two long years until Nightbirds on Nantucket came out.

Fortunately, littlerhymes and I could simply sail smoothly on to the next book, which begins with Dido asleep on the deck of a whaling boat under a pile of sheepskins. She has been sleeping under these sheepskins, it appears, for ten months, kept alive on a concoction of whale oil and molasses, which is so potent that she has grown six inches.

As our story begins, she awakes, and springs into action none the worse from her coma. Soon she befriends the captain’s shy but extremely stubborn daughter Dutiful Penitence, who locked herself into a closet in the captain’s cabin after her mother died months ago, where she has been living on a diet of beach plum jelly.

(Everyone in this book has a stomach of cast iron. Later on, a donkey inhales a bowl of clam chowder, the self-same captain is soothed in a brain fever by an entire bottle of huckleberries preserved in alcohol, and a whale enjoys a snack of cream buns and corn dogs.)

Naturally Dido manages to coax her out. But it’s when they land on Nantucket that their adventures really begin. Captain Casket rushes off to chase the pink whale with which he is obsessed, leaving the girls in the care of Aunt Tribulation… who is not Aunt Tribulation at all, but our old nemesis Miss Slighcarp, who is part of a Hanoverian plot to assassinate King James III using a very long gun that will shoot all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and hit his palace with pinpoint accuracy!

This is deranged. It makes no sense. I love it. The giant gun was invented by a German scientist named Breadno who can’t quite grasp that shooting a giant gun is a bad idea, especially given that the recoil will push Nantucket into New York harbor. If they can’t shoot at the king in his palace, couldn’t they shoot at the arctic? Or the moon? Or something? “Is not having bigbang?” he begs, but the others are adamant that they do not want Nantucket ripped from its sandy moorings.

Everyone promised me that Joan Aiken would get very weird indeed and I’m so glad to see that they were right. We’re only on book three and it’s already nuts.

***

Next on the docket, we have The Stolen Lake, Limbo Lodge (Dangerous Games in the US, because American publishers love generic titles), and The Cuckoo Tree. Then maybe The Whispering Mountain? Possibly Midnight is a Place? Potentially Dido and Pa? More than any other series we’ve read, the reading order is unclear, although at the same time it also probably matters the least.

After I finished Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword, I begged skygiants and genarti to join me in reading the sequel. “It will be fun!” I assured them.

“Will it,” they said doubtfully.

“It will be an experience!” I insisted.

They could not argue with that, and so we embarked on the voyage of Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions.

This book picks up seconds after Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword picked up. Doi’s lookalike brother Hisashi has just returned from Shin, Peasprout is considering whether maybe she can transfer her affections from Doi-pretending-to-be-Hisashi to Hisashi himself, and also Hisashi brought along a girl who claims to be the Empress Dowager’s great-great-granddaughter.

Except that is ridiculous, because Wu Yinmei’s feet are unbound, and everyone knows that all the women in the Emperor’s family have bound feet! Clearly a spy, insists Peasprout. How can you insist that she’s a spy when everyone spent last year insisting YOU were a spy just because you come from Shin and also kept being accidentally in the vicinity of buildings that were being sabotaged? demand her friends. It’s DIFFERENT, insists Peasprout.

Well, maybe it’s different, or maybe Peasprout’s just jealous that her potential new love interest shows up with a potential girlfriend of his own in tow. Everyone else in Pearl is bowled over by Yinmei, a real live princess who is as beautifully tragic as the moon (as Peasprout herself grudgingly admits) and as sweet as a Disney princess, if Disney princesses sometimes took a break from warbling to the woodland creatures to say things like “If you attack an enemy city, the first thing you should do is capture the schools and take the children hostage.”

Yinmei/Peasprout MAY have overtaken Doi/Peasprout in my top shipping ranking, simply because Yinmei and Peasprout’s relationship may be even more deranged and emotionally fraught than Peasprout and Doi’s.

(Most boring relationship in the book: Peasprout and Hisashi. Relationship that seems most likely to be endgame: Peasprout/Hisashi. But book three isn’t out yet and if there’s one thing you can count on from Henry Lien, it’s bonkers plot twists, so I’m not losing hope.)

Anyway. In part because of Peasprout’s questionable life choices in book one, the city-state of Pearl and the empire of Shin are now on the brink of war. Thus, the Pearl Famous Academy of martial arts ice skating focuses its energy that year on discovering new defense strategies in case Shin attacks. The students divide into battle bands, which will battle each other for points to see which strategy works best.

After a hilarious scene where Peasprout and Doi both politely offer the other the leadership position, and then Doi politely offers again and Peasprout is like “THANK YOU absolutely I will take it,” Peasprout becomes leader of her battle band. As leading a battle band involves working with other people, Peasprout is not great at this job! As evidenced by the fact that her quarrel with her battle band members leads to the band naming itself “Nobody and the Fire Chickens.”

Other things that happen in this book:

If you magnetize sea water, you can ice skate on it because the magnetization will repel your skate blades.

Also, if you beat drums at the right frequency, you can hover above the Pearl and zoom around in little drum-powered hovercraft.

One of the battle bands goes into battle with all the members standing on each other’s shoulders or possibly on an armature to create a human kaiju? I don’t understand how this works.

Yinmei and Peasprout’s brother Cricket are both on the verge of DEATH because they have taken ivory yin salts, which depending on dosage delay male puberty or make it impossible for you to take more than five steps without your heart swelling like a balloon.

(Listen, this is a series where ice-skating martial arts is a serious war strategy, why would you expect “physics” or “biology” to work in a sensible way.)

GIANT CLIFFHANGER ENDING.

And unfortunately no sign of book three! Peasprout 1 came out in 2018, Peasprout 2 came out in 2019, and since then… there has been no Peasprout 3. It might still happen! But it also might not, in which case we’ll all be left on a massive cliffhanger. So in a sense it’s hard to recommend these books, but in another sense: my god, they are SUCH a wild ride. Simply an amazing time! Not always a good time exactly, but certainly an experience.

littlerhymes and I continued our Joan Aiken readings with Black Hearts in Battersea, the very loosely connected sequel to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Move over, Bonnie and Sylvia; our hero this time is Simon, Bonnie's friend the goose boy who lives in a cave in the woods and discovered a talent for art as he was helping Bonnie and Sylvia escape to London.

Now Simon is on his way to London to study art at Dr. Furneaux's academy. He is supposed to lodge with Dr. Field, an artist-doctor whom he met in the previous book... but when he arrives at the Twite's lodging house, Dr. Field is nowhere to be found, and the Twites insist he was never there!

On the bright side, Simon does run into his old friend Sophie, whom he met in the workhouse before he ran away to be a goose boy. Sophie is now the lady's maid to the duchess of Battersea! Also, before she was in the workhouse, she was raised by otters.

This is mentioned once and never again, which is extremely Joan Aiken. Another author might make "raised by otters" the entire plot, but Aiken has far too many fish to fry to linger on it for more than a sentence. We have Hanoverian conspiracies to deal with! (They are yearning for Bonnie Prince Georgie to come over the sea and overthrow King James III. Aiken is having a fantastic time.) A wolf attack to defeat using croquet mallets and billiard balls! No less than three assassination attempts, all foiled by Sophie with the aid of the tapestry that the duchess is embroidering! A kidnapping, a boat-burning, a hot air balloon ride from Yorkshire to London...

Also the introduction of Dido Twite, who is, I believe, the heroine of most of the rest of the series, who ends this book completely AWOL but for Sophie's confident assertion that she's sure Dido is fine somewhere, a plotting choice that Joan Aiken somehow gets away with even though it would I think drive me up the bend from anyone else. She's just having such a good time that you have to have a good time too.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this means our Joan Aiken list is growing: we have already agreed to add Midnight is a Place and Dido and Pa onto our original five-book plan. Will this end with us reading the complete Wolves of Willoughby Chase series? We shall see.

A few months ago, skygiants reviewed Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword. “This sounds UNHINGED,” I crowed, delighted and appalled and fascinated all at the same time. “Don’t have time to read it, though.”

Of course I ended up reading it.

Even if you have no desire to read a book about a girl who is Determined to Become the Ice-Skating Martial Arts Champion, it’s worthwhile to experience it vicariously through skygiants’ hilarious and on-point review. Also, the comments have some fascinating info about the probable influences on this book.

Even without this background info, however, I think it’s obvious from reading this book that Kevin Lien has watched a LOT of anime in his life. Moreover, he clearly adheres to the C. S. Lewis school of fantasy worldbuilding, where you throw in everything you love and who cares if anyone else thinks “talking animals and Greek mythology and Jesus don’t go together,” except Lien’s things are “sports anime and ice-skating martial arts battles and intense early teen lesbian drama and the geopolitical situation between China and Taiwan, but in a sometimes-goofy way where the Great Leap is literally millions of people jumping all at the same time to create an earthquake.”

Also amazing food descriptions, and a very distinctive voice for Peasprout, who is the very best martial arts ice skater in Shin and has been crowned Peony Brightstar by the Dowager Empress and is now in Pearl as a goodwill ambassador at their elite martial arts ice-skating academy, where everyone keeps telling her that the ending flourishes on her skating moves are SO out of fashion, but WHATEVER, the manual said that they’re the latest thing so Peasprout will continue her ending flourishes!

This tragic inability to learn anything except ice-skating martial arts unless it is explicitly spelled out for her (and often not even then) makes Peasprout a divisive character. Possibly because I went into the book forewarned, I loved Peasprout. She’s an amazing example of a certain type of person, who is superlatively good at one socially rewarded trait (in this case ice-skating martial arts, but you see this also with people who are good at football, math, music, etc.) and therefore doesn’t see the point of learning anything else. Music? Architecture? Social skills? She’s the Peony Level Brightstar! Why should she bother?

If she were thirty-four this would probably make me grind my teeth. But a lot of people are like this at fourteen – heck, I was like this at fourteen! Although less so than Peasprout because I was not the Peony Level Brightstar. And most of us learn some life lessons and move past it by the time we are twenty-two or so.

In fact, my only criticism is that at the end of the book, Peasprout suddenly starts learning these life lessons faster than seemed to me quite plausible. However, I have high hopes that in book two she will have backslid here and there. (Although hopefully not the one about My Little Brother Has a Different Life Path from Mine and That’s Okay. She’s trying so hard to be a good big sister in this book and she’s so bad at it and I really would like to see her level up there.)

Because yes! Not only am I reading book two (Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions), but I’ve induced skygiants to read it too. If you hear high tinny shrieking on the breeze, it’s probably the sound of the two of us screaming about Peasprout’s latest disaster choices.

The thing about the Newbery project is that it forces you to read all sorts of books you never would have chosen on your own. Sometimes this works out well: who would have imagined that I would enjoy children’s biographies from the 1930s, for instance? How else would I have ever found Jennie Lindquist’s The Golden Name Day?

However, there are times when this backfires.

Case in point: Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says, one of the Newbery Honor books of 2024. So as you read this review, please bear in mind that this is the bitter carping of a reader who didn’t want to read a book about a school shooting in the first place, and is therefore extra-irritated by flaws that might not otherwise have registered.

***

Okay, first of all, a couple of things I liked about this book. It appears that we may finally have left behind the victim-blaming era of “I’m not saying that school shooters are justified, but just think how their classmates must have bullied them to push them to this point!” (Todd Strasser’s Give a Boy a Gun, Nancy Garden’s Endgame, that one Criminal Minds episode, countless internet comments.) (If you struggle to see the problem with this formulation, consider: “I’m not saying wife-beaters are justified, but just think what their wives must have done to force them to this point!”)

Admittedly Simon Sort of Says sort of side-steps the issue by making the shooter some adult off the street rather than a student, but still, kudos.

Also, Erin Bow is often quite funny.

Now, to the things I disliked about this book.

I’ve mentioned before that modern children’s book authors have a Cell Phone Problem; that is, that most children’s book authors (now and always) are in a sense writing about their own childhoods, and contemporary children’s book authors did not, for the most part, grow up with cell phone and internet, whereas these have a large impact on contemporary children’s lives. Different authors solve this problem different ways.

1. You just straight-up set the book in your own childhood. (Pedro Martin’s Mexikid.)

2. You set the book more generally in The Past. (Amina Luqman-Dawson’s Freewater.)

3. You set the book in a fantasy world. (Christine Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker.)

4. You make the book a sci-fi space adventure on a spaceship that seems curiously devoid of personal communication devices and/or surveillance despite being a dystopia. (Donna Barbra Higuera’s The Last Cuentista.)

5. The heroine breaks her cell phone two chapters in and the town is curiously devoid of other internet devices. (Lisa Yee’s Maizy Chen’s Last Chance.)

6. The family has only one computer and all three children have to share it to do their homework because it’s Covid, plus sometimes the adults need it, so the kids get lots of time to play outside and have fantasy adventures. (M. T. Anderson’s Elf Dog and Owl Head.)

7. The family lives in the back of beyond and has no cell phone reception or internet. (Kyle Lukoff’s Too Bright to See.)

8. The hero is the sole survivor of a school shooting, so he’s thrilled when his parents decide to move to the National Quiet Zone where no one is allowed to have internet or microwaves because these interfere with the local “listening for aliens” project. (Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says.)

The resulting media attention was nearly as traumatic as the shooting itself, but Simon is convinced that in the Land of No Internet, no one will recognize him. He is so confident that this will work that he doesn’t even bother to, for instance, change his name.

I understand why actual child Simon O’Keeffe would believe this, but his parents and Erin Bow who was born in 1972 have no excuse. Newspapers exist. (Bow mentions newspapers, but apparently has forgotten that their function is to spread news.) This extremely famous shooting happened in the very same state as Simon’s new town, and was such a big deal that Simon’s new school has a memorial event for it, inexplicably two days before the actual anniversary, because Bow wants Simon to have the trauma of attending a memorial event but also realizes he’s probably not going to go to school on the anniversary itself.

And, in fact, Simon’s very first teacher on the very first day of class recognizes him. In the book, apparently she locks this knowledge in her heart and never tells anyone, because Simon’s incognito remains intact until one of his classmates (on a trip to family outside the Quiet Zone) looks him up on Youtube.

But let’s be real. An actual human being would spill the beans the moment she made it to the teacher’s lounge, for the noble reason of “Is he getting the support he needs???” By the end of the day, all the teachers in the school will know. That evening, all their spouses will get an earful, and presumably at least one of them has a child who will overhear. The child will tell their friends (either over the landline phone or at school the next morning), and by lunchtime every single child in this combined junior high/high school with one hundred students will know.

However, in Simon Sort of Says, the cruel bean-spiller is Simon’s classmate’s mother, who happens to be the leader of the “listening for aliens” project, presumably because if the good doctor has Wronged Simon by telling people about his identity, which realistically all of them would already know, not only because of the gossip mill but also because everyone seems to be surprisingly well informed about every aspect of Simon’s school shooting except the fact that Simon was there—

If the good doctor is responsible for blowing Simon’s incognito, as I was saying, then it’s okay for Simon and a couple of classmates to carry through their plan to prank the “listening for aliens” project by faking a message from aliens with a microwave.

Unfortunately for Simon and company, this kind of plotline has always filled me with rage. I’m still mad at Curious George for the time that he destroyed a dinosaur skeleton. Does he KNOW how much work it takes to excavate a dinosaur skeleton? Does he know how much possible scientific knowledge was lost when he destroyed it? Jail for monkey! Jail for monkey for ten thousand years!

And now similarly Simon and co are potentially undermining decades of scientific research for the LOLs. (Well, okay, they have more complicated reasons than that. Their reasons are still stupid.) Thanks! I hate it!

Oh, and as it turns out, there IS internet in the National Quiet Zone. You can’t use WiFi or cell phones, but wired internet, like landline phones, is fine. So even if YouTube WAS the only source of information on the entire planet, Simon’s incognito could have been blown the moment a classmate went to the computer lab.

As a child, one often has one’s own names for favorite books and movies. In my mind, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius was The Lupine Lady, An American Tail was Fievel (and A Land Before Time was of course Littlefoot), and Jostein Gaarder’s The Christmas Mystery was The Magic Advent Calendar.

At the beginning of the book, young Joachim finds a handmade advent calendar in the bookstore. The owner lets him have it for free, and when Joachim opens the first door, a thin slip of paper falls out, beginning the story of a little girl named Elisabet who follows a stuffed lamb out of a department store because she wants to pet its fleece.

Thus Elisabet begins a pilgrimage: she is running backwards in time and southeast through space, picking up angels and shepherds and wise men along the way as they all travel, to quote the shepherd Joshua, “To Bethlehem! To Bethlehem!” They are going to witness the birth of the baby Jesus.

As Joachim reads each installment, he becomes convinced that the advent calendar is indeed enchanted: each time he opens a door and reads another installment, he finds new details in the picture on the advent calendar itself. Surely they’re appearing as he meets the characters in the story? As a child I believed this just as much as Joachim, and also loved the suggestion that the story in the advent calendar was true or at least built on truth—that not only John the in-book creator of the calendar, but Jostein Gaarder himself had discovered a series of unusually similar angel encounters throughout history and woven them into a story.

(This was around the same age I had a so-called nonfiction book called The Flight of the Reindeer, which had a serious science-y discussion of the aerodynamics of reindeer antlers which enabled them to fly. Did I believe this? No, not exactly, but the idea so enchanted me that I also didn’t exactly not believe.)

As an adult, I am fairly sure that the picture on the magic advent calendar is simply an example of the magic of art, where the longer you look at a picture the more details you see. I’ve also relinquished the idea that Gaarder built the story from a series of historical angel tales featuring angel processions that all mysteriously included sheep and Wise Men and a little blonde girl.

But in recompense, I’ve come to a greater appreciation of Gaarder’s artistry in constructing a story that functions so perfectly as an advent calendar: it’s exactly 24 chapters long and it really does work best if you read one chapter each day of advent, although it’s hard to stop at the end of each chapter! And I’ve learned a greater appreciation for Elizabeth Rokkan’s work as a translator. I often find books in translation a bit stiff, but this one is supple and fluid, and although I can’t compare it to the original Norwegian, Rokkan has created a lovely storybook rhythm with certain repeated phrases and ideas: Joshua’s aforementioned “To Bethlehem! To Bethlehem!”, or the idea that beautiful things like flowers are “part of the glory of heaven strayed down to earth.”

It also occurred to me for the first time on this reread that this book is extremely Christian. Since our heroes are literally going on pilgrimage to Bethlehem to see the birth of the baby Jesus, one might reasonably ask how I failed to notice. Some of this can probably be chalked up to the general dimness of childhood, but I think part of this also lies in the way the story is told: as a wonder-tale, a magical adventure, which offers postulates about how things work in its magical universe but doesn’t demand that you accept them as general truths in the workday world. It would like the reader to consider that perhaps we as a species should stop killing each other, but also it just wants to tell a fun story about a little girl chasing a runaway toy lamb back through time.