A Certain Slant of Light

As you may know, the latest American Girl series takes place in 1986. Now, most of the other American girl series begin in years ending in four - 1774 for Felicity, 1864 for Addy, 1944 for Molly, etc. - so I was wondering why they settled on 1986: the Challenger explosion? Hands Across America?

I’m sure that Mattel thought those were nice things to include, but I’m also 900% sure that the reason they picked 1986 was because that was the year American Girl released its first dolls, because there is ABSOLUTELY a lengthy sequence in this book where Courtney finds the American Girl catalog! And pours over it with her friend Sarah! (I was pouring over the catalogs a decade later, but the mood is absolutely the same. Like Courtney I usually wasn’t a big doll girl, but those early catalogs were FASCINATING. Soooo many pages of dolls and darling little doll toys.)

And begs for a Molly doll! And buys the first Molly book at the bookstore, even though the purchase uses up all her arcade money, and refuses her dad’s offer of more arcade money because she wants to go home and read about Molly! Because she and Molly are SO alike. She feels CONNECTED to Molly. Like, emotionally, not because Courtney knows deep in the bottom of her heart that SHE TOO is a doll, although that is definitely something that’s on MY mind. It’s like standing in between two mirrors that reflect each other endlessly back and back and back.

...Then the book takes a sharp left turn when it turns out that Courtney’s new friend Isaac has HIV, which he caught from a blood transfusion for his hemophilia, and I am the wrong person to review this story because I HATE illness stories in general and HIV/AIDS stories in particular. (When I was in third grade I was in a scarring performance of The Yellow Boat, which is about a character in the exact same tainted blood transfusion situation.)

Anyway, I kept waiting for the book to be about something else again, and eventually we DID get a scene where Courtney gets a Molly doll as an early Christmas present, which mostly served to remind me how in the old days all the American Girl series had an entire Christmas BOOK. Truly American Girl has come down in the world. (The illustrations in this book continue to be awful, by the way. I’m going to die salty about this.) But then it’s right back to more illness.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. At some point I’ll read The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, but first I need some emotional recovery time. (She also has a book called Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II. Had I known it existed, I could have used the material to make Gennady’s childhood even more heartbreaking, so possibly it’s just as well for everyone that I didn’t.)

I also got back in the saddle with Newbery Honor books with Jane Leslie Conly’s Crazy Lady!, which I thought was going to be a story about a misunderstood zany neighbor, but in fact turned out to be a story about junior high student Veronon’s wildly alcoholic neighbor, Maxine. Maxine tries to control her drinking in order to care for her disabled son Ronald, whom she loves deeply, but neither her love for her son nor the support of her neighbors (one of whom takes Ronald in for two weeks while Maxine is in jail on drunk and disorderly charges) are enough. In the end, she sends Ronald away to live with a kindly aunt and uncle.

It’s a well-written and well-observed book, but bleak - bleak - bleak; the tragedy of watching someone try as hard as they can, and fail.

Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Shameless: A Sexual Reformation is an argument against American Evangelical Christian beliefs about sexual purity: purity rings and pledges not to even kiss until one’s wedding day and so on and so forth. Eh, it’s fine. There’s nothing particularly new here, and also nothing that seems likely to convince a reader who isn’t already on board with the book’s basic message.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on keeping on with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope. Another quote:

What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for direct instructions and foolproof prescriptions.

Food for thought in a time when many of us (myself very much included) would like nothing more than for the course of history to be made smooth.

What I Plan to Read Next

DID YOU KNOW that there’s a new American Girl? She is a 1980s girl and I suspect her books are horrible because all the books have been horrible since American Girl got too cheap to pay for illustrations… but I’ll probably read them anyway because I have an American Girl problem.

A brief note before our regularly scheduled Wednesday Reading Meme: I’m annoyed at my state for swapping our Democratic senator for a Republican, but on the whole the outcome of the midterm election was quite satisfactory. Maybe the news cycle will be less overwhelmingly awful on a daily basis now? Is that too much to hope for?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Enid Blyton’s First Term at Malory Towers. Where as this book been all my life? Clearly on bookshelves in every English-speaking country on earth except America. WHY.

I love boarding school stories and this one is top-notch. Not so much in terms of writing quality - Blyton is a pedestrian writer at best - but she does have the one skill that is absolutely necessary in a school story, which is that of sketching in a lot of characters quickly but memorably. They generally start with one quality (Mary-Lou is timid, Gwendolyn is selfish, Sally Hope is Mysterious) and then develop a bit more complexity as they go along, which is surprisingly effective.

I quite enjoyed all the emphasis on the girls’ friendships (our heroine Darrell spends much of the book searching for a particular friend, as her first choice already has a best friend), and also all the parallels between this book and Harry Potter: you’ve got the train ride, the carriages to the school, settling into the dorm, etc. etc. I’ve seen Harry Potter described as a classic boarding school story and now I know why!

I’ve finished the Nanea duology, the latest American Girl books - I am forever bitter that American Girl series used to have six books and now have merely two - and these books are moderately pleasant but not good enough to overcome that bitterness or the fact that American Girl books no longer have illustrations. BRING BACK THE ILLUSTRATIONS, AMERICAN GIRL! I might even be able to forgive the reduction in number of books if they at least had illustrations.

I also read the graphic novel Compass South, because I’ve seen it out and about and any graphic novel set right before the Civil War might be interesting… but in practice it didn’t grab me. But a graphic novel is such a quick read that I finished in anything.

What I’m Reading Now

The Twins at St. Clair’s, which has not grabbed me quite like First Term at Malory Towers, maybe because the Enid-Blyton-boarding-school-story-shaped-hole in my heart has been filled? Or possibly because the twins already have each other and don’t seem interested in making friends yet so there’s much less friendship than in Malory Towers.

Also Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War, which is a companion nonfiction book to the TV series Mercy Street, but more informative and well-researched than you might suppose. So far I haven’t learned much about wounds (then again, how much detail do I want to know about Civil War wounds?) but quite a bit about the bewildering array of organizations that popped up to supply nurses to the army, the Army Medical Corps being utterly insufficient in itself. The more I learn about the Civil War, the more ad hoc and disorganized it all seems. How did either side ever manage to fight the war at all?

What I Plan to Read Next

I put a hold on Lee Israel’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, but apparently I wasn’t the only person who had this thought after seeing the movie, so it will be a while before I get it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Little’s The Lady and Sada San, a sequel to The Lady of the Decoration, in which the Lady returns to Japan for complicated plot reasons and, on the voyage, befriends young Sada - who is the product of a mixed-race marriage between an American man and his Japanese bride, who unfortunately were washed away in a tidal wave when Sada was but a babe, so she was raised in Nebraska by a missionary lady (who found baby Sada in the ruins of her washed-away village in Japan, but had to move back to Nebraska because of her own failing health).

Now Sada is returning to the beautiful land of her birth, confident that all shall be well! You have probably read enough fiction to guess that it will not be so simple.

So if anyone ever wants to write a novel with a mixed-race white & Japanese heroine in the deepest Midwest in 1911 - you can now point to this book as an unimpeachable source if anyone complains about your historical accuracy.

What I’m Reading Now

I meant to save Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for later, on the grounds that one shouldn’t binge read a new favorite author’s entire oeuvre and then be left without anything else by that author to read (I did this with Jane Austen when I was a teenager, oops) buuuuut then I went to the library and it was in and I just couldn’t resist. It’s not grabbing me quite as much as his other books - the man-versus-nature aspect is what really got me in his other books and that’s not really present here - but Krakauer is still Krakauer and it’s still fascinating.

William Dean Howells Venetian Life, a travel book about Venice - where Howells was American consul during the Civil War - and Howells’ first book. The writing doesn’t flow as well as his later books, either because it is his first or possibly because long, ornate, multi-clausal sentences became less fashionable as the nineteenth century wore on. In any case I’m finding it rather slow going - but vivid - his description of the Venetian winters made me shiver. (And it seems the stereotype of the comfort-loving American who is baffled by the poor heating in other lands was already in place by the 1860s.)

I’m also working on Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby, but sloooowly. For whatever reason it’s just not grabbing me.

What I Plan to Read Next

Will the library ever get me Fire and Hemlock? WHO KNOWS. I had better start haunting used bookstores in quest of it, I think.

I have also discovered that American Girl has a new series out, set in Hawaii in 1941, but they have broken my heart TOO MANY TIMES and I am reluctant to read it.

American Girl has a new series out, Melody Ellison in 1964 Detroit, which I read with some trepidation because I was so very disappointed last year by their 1950s series about Maryellen.

But fortunately, the Melody books a good deal better than the Maryellen books, anyway, not least because the Melody books were clearly conceived as two books, not six books that were then awkwardly glued together in two with no craft or artistry. (Yes, I'm bitter.)

And, because the Melody books take place during the Civil Rights Era (and because Melody is black), unlike the Maryellen books they actually make use of the historical conflicts of their era. In fact, when I was first reading them, I found it a little ham-fisted - everything in Melody's life ties back into the Civil Rights movement, everything, and it would have been nice if she had at least one conflict that was basically small and personal, like Addy during the Civil War trying to learn double Dutch.

But after Trump's election - well, being ham-fisted about a message like "stand up for the things you believe in and make your voice heard" is hardly the worst thing that a book could do.

It still has no illustrations, though. I think I have mentioned this in every single thing I've written about American Girl ever since their horrifying decision to cut the illustrations, but IT IS SO HORRIFYING, OKAY, I just can't get over it.

Ugh, though, and these books could have had such good illustrations. Melody plants a goddamn garden! WITH HOLLYHOCKS, who doesn't want some gorgeous hollyhock illustrations??? And there's also a great scene where she gets a beautiful cream-colored coat for her birthday, which is clearly designed to move doll coats, and wouldn't it sell even MORE doll coats if the eight-year-olds of America could see the coat in the book and covet it from that moment? If American Girl won't do it for the sheer joy of having beautiful illustrations, they ought to do it for the marketing opportunity.

***

I will say, though, if you want to read a recent children's book about the civil rights struggle - or just read a really good book in general - I would recommend Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming. It's both more politically engaged/radical than the Melody books, and includes a nice smattering of subplots that don't revolve around politics, which makes the heroine and her world feel more well-rounded and alive.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

No Ordinary Sound, which is the first book (of two) in the newest American Girl series, Melody Ellison in 1964. I’m going to write about it at more length once I’ve finished the series; for now I will just note that it’s better than the Maryellen books (although that doesn’t say much), but there are still no illustrations, which is a goddamn tragedy. There’s a scene in this book where Melody’s older sister walks down the stairs, dressed all in orange, to reveal her new Afro to the family! Does that not cry out for illustration???

What I’m Reading Now

I’m working on Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir A Circle of Quiet, which Netgalley had for some reason - I guess it must be a reprint? Anyway, I’m enjoying it so far; it reminds me in its meditativeness of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea.

What I Plan to Read Next

littlerhymes and I have agreed to give the Billabong books a go, so we’ll be reading A Little Bush Maid. I could only get a smattering of them free on Kindle, so I’ll be reading the ones I have - A Little Bush Maid, Mates at Billabong, Captain Jim and Back to Billabong - so we’ll see how that goes.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Eva Ibbotson’s Madensky Square, and I enjoyed it so much that I nearly flung myself headlong into The Star of Kazan, which is the other Ibbotson book that I own, but then I decided to restrain myself and save The Star of Kazan for the next time I need a feel-good book. Most of Ibbotson’s books are quite reliable for that (except maybe The Morning Gift).

I highly recommend Madensky Square for the parts about creation, the description of Vienna, the musings on sadness and mortality and getting on with life (there’s a lot of sadness in it for such a happy book; but on balance it is a very happy book), and also because Ibbotson has the rare gift for writing child characters just as well in adult fiction as in her children’s books. They always feel like real people, not child-macguffins.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a short book about her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. The first quarter of it (and it’s not a very long book) is entirely taken up with her voyage to the hospital; I am thinking that perhaps it won’t have as many nursing details as I hoped.

Oh, and my hold on Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On FINALLY came in! I’m enjoying it so far, although it’s really surprisingly bleak - or maybe I shouldn’t say surprisingly. It’s riffing off Harry Potter, and it just brings the bleakness that’s mostly hidden by whimsy and sense of wonder in Harry Potter right up to the surface.

(I used to think that J. K. Rowling created the Wizarding World without realizing how astonishingly dark it was beneath the jokey exterior, but now that I’ve read her adult detective novels I’ve decided that she probably knew exactly what she was doing.)

I think I’m going to write a longer review once I’ve finished reading; Carry On is doing some interesting things in its riff off of Harry Potter’s world-building (in particular, I think it’s responding to a lot of criticisms of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), and I’ll be able to articulate it better once I’m through.

What I Plan to Read Next

I also have Louisa May Alcott’s Moods on my Kindle, so I may read that once I’ve finished Hospital Sketches. Or maybe Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy’s Cousin Joy, which is a children’s book published about the same time as Little Women?

OH OH OH, also American Girl has a new historical character out! I feel leery, given how disappointing I found their last new series (Maryellen the 50s girl, who totally deserved better!), but this one is about the Civil Rights struggle in the sixties so I am cautiously optimistic that it might be good. At very least, it won’t be able to totally ignore the hard parts of history the way the Maryellen books did.

BUT THE LIBRARY DOESN’T HAVE IT YET, WOE. So I guess I won’t be reading it for a while.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Maryellen: The One and Only, the first book of the new American Girl series, which never did transcend its lack of illustrations, alas. The illustrations aren't the only change they made with the format this time around: there are also only two books instead of six, which might have worked better if the first book didn't feel like three books smooshed together with no attempt to make an overarching plot.

Even that might have worked all right if they had at least labeled the separate pieces Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. But they didn't, so instead I was just puzzled by the jumps between chapters when one story ended and another began.

I feel like the shoddy construction is of a piece with a general shoddiness in the book's writing, too. The characters don't have much pop to them; I never did manage to tell all of Maryellen's brothers and sisters apart, for instance. It's all rather disappointing.

I also finished Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind, which turns out (I can't believe I didn't notice this before) to be only the first half of her memoirs, so I will have to tromp off to the university library to acquire the second half. I have rather a list, actually, of books that I mean to check out there; I'm finally going to get around to reading Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and Oliver Sacks' continual mentions of A. R. Luria in his books have convinced me that I ought to read some of Luria's work, too.

What I'm Reading Now

Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks, which I'm enjoying so far, though it could do with slightly less repetition. I can see why Miss Marjoribanks herself informs everyone she meets that her only object in life is to be a comfort to her dear papa (otherwise they might suspect her of overweening social ambitions), but must the narrator repeat it too? I got the joke the first dozen times it was told.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'll probably read the second Maryellen book, if only in the interests of completeness. I was so looking forward to these: it's such a disappointment.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Lauren Esker's Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, which is a shifter romance (werewolves and weresheep, in this case), and very cute, although probably moreso if the tropes of shifter romance are your thing. Unfortunately the tropes that the genre focuses on seem to be the ones that don't do much for me, but that is a problem with the reader rather than the book.

What I'm Reading Now

Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind, yet another book about Stalin's purges and the gulag. I am getting a little gulag'ed out at this point, but I've been meaning to read this book for forever, so I will persevere. I'm going to take a break from the Terror after this, though.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for the library to get me a copy of the first Maryellen book. I am pining to read the latest American Girl series, library! Work with me here!

I'm also going to read Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks. In fact I had it all queued up on my Kindle to start reading on my lunch break at work today, but then I forgot my Kindle at home. :(

On the bright side, I had lunch at Panera, and they have my favorite turkey cranberry flatbread again (it seems to be an autumn special!), so that was nice. And they have a new turkey, apple, and cheddar sandwich, which also looks intriguing, although I feel a bit dubious about the cranberry walnut bread that it comes on, although I'm not sure why, because it sounds like something I ought to like. I mean, it has cranberries in it, right? But the bread may not be sweet enough to mesh nicely with the sweet dried fruit.

I got my holiday American Girl catalog this week (I requested two years ago for my research project, and they have assiduously sent them to me ever since despite the fact that I never buy anything. Thank you, American Girl!), and got the surprise of my life when I opened it, because -

Well, two reasons.

First! They've brought back Samantha Parkington. Yes! The previously retired Samantha has returned. This was nice.

And second. They've redesigned all the historical dolls' clothes. This was appalling. I don't deal well with change. And I don't think this has happened ever. And it looks like they must have redone the illustrations to match, too, because they've put out new editions of the books (omnibus editions, three books in each volume. I have always disapproved of omnibuses. Omnibi?)

And! And! As if this were not enough, they've released a new book for each series: a modern day girl travels through time to visit the historical character!

Yes. American Girl has written its own visitor-from-the-modern-world fanfic. Is that even allowed?

Of course I needed to investigate. So I got the Samantha book out of the library. It's called The Lilac Tunnel, and I figured that the lilac tunnel would be the medium of time transportation, because that has a pleasantly mystical sound to it, and time travel out to be pleasantly mystical when it's not pretending to be scientific, shouldn't it?

Reader, I was wrong. The lilac tunnel is of barely more than incidental importance to the story; the actual medium of time travel is a locket, which probably could be mystical (although not, she says darkly, as mystical as a lilac tunnel. THE PERFECT MEDIUM FOR TIME TRAVEL WAS RIGHT THERE IN THE TITLE, HOW COULD YOU MISS IT?) but wasn't particularly. And! And! The whole thing was choose-your-own-adventure style, which means that none of the story lines were all that well developed, and they ended rather anticlimactically too. The heroine reopens the locket and goes back home. Without any apparent intention of ever returning! I mean really.

And also the whole thing rather requires flattening out Samantha's character, so she's very friendly and...that's about it, really. She's very friendly and a pleasure to meet and completely anodyne, and it's really rather dull.

Not only have they written their own visitor-from-the-modern-world fanfic, but they weren't even competent at it.