A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Agnes Hewes’ The Codfish Musket, third and last in her trio of boring 1930s Newbery Honor winners. I can only imagine that the committee felt that the “Rah rah MANIFEST DESTINY” message was good for the Youth, because my God these books are dull. How can books be so dull when there are so many deadly conspiracies?

But maybe it’s because Hewes is actually not great at deadly conspiracies. The best part of this book by far is the non-deadly middle, when our hero Dan Boit goes to Washington and accidentally becomes Thomas Jefferson’s secretary after he finds Jefferson’s lost notebook full of observations about when the first peas come up and the frogs start peeping.

In modern-day Newbery Honor winners, I finished Chanel Miller’s Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All, a short and charming tale in which Magnolia and her new friend Iris try to return orphaned socks from Magnolia’s parents’ laundry to their owners. In the process, they explore New York City and learn more about the denizens of their neighborhood.

I also read Susan Fletcher’s Journey of the Pale Bear, about a Norwegian boy accompanying a captured polar bear to England as a present for the king. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Fletcher wrote a related picture book, but that focuses more on the bear’s experiences, while this is more about the boy and the boy-meets-bear of it all. Who among us has not wished for a bear friend!

What I’m Reading Now

In Our Mutual Friend, Lizzie Hexam’s father has DIED. This may be a lucky escape for him, as he was about to be arrested on suspicion of murder (at the word of his wicked lying former business partner), but I’m very concerned what will become of poor Lizzie.

My suspicion that Mr. Rokesmith is in fact the dead John Harmon has only grown stronger as he has insinuated himself in the Boffin household as an unpaid secretary. What is his ultimate goal here? A more suspicious soul than Mr. Boffin might wonder who on earth would offer himself up as a secretary without pay, and consider the possibility of embezzlement, but blessed Mr. Boffin is not concerned a bit.

What I Plan to Read Next

Onward in the Newbery books! I am ten books from the end of the historical Newberies, and I intend to finish the project while Interlibrary Loan is still alive.

Yesterday evening, I decided I might as well get started on my 2025 Newbery reading, and picked up Kate O’Shaughnessy’s The Wrong Way Home to read a couple of chapters before bed. Then I read the whole book in one sitting, and lay awake for the next three hours or so thinking about it.

This is particularly impressive because I felt lukewarm about the premise of the book. Our heroine Fern starts off in a back-to-nature cult in New York, only to be yoinked out by her mother who drives her across the country to California to start a new, mainstream life.

Now, I love cult stories, but to be honest I’m much more interested in the cult aspect than the “return to mainstream life” thing. I know what mainstream life is like. I want to read about a day in the life of the cult, I want cult rituals, I want a deep dive into cult beliefs. My favorite cult story is the movie Midsommar, which ends with Dani ecstatically joining the cult of flower-bedecked Swedish human sacrificers. I mean, yes, technically bad, but don’t we all practice a spot of human sacrifice from time to time – what is the death of the uninsured but a human sacrifice on the altar of Freedom and Capitalism! – and, more importantly, Dani feels held by them.

The Wrong Way Home grasps that in order for Fern (and the reader) to root for Fern to stay out here, she has to find a mainstream community that she also feels held by, without the cult drawbacks of “when you come of age you have to go on a coming of age ritual which might kill you.” Driftaway Beach is Fern’s mother’s tiny oceanfront California hometown, and although her mother’s parents died long ago, her godmother Babs is still there, running an extremely pink teashop called Birdie’s after her dead wife.

Then Fern starts school. She’s much more enthusiastic about this once she realizes the school has computers, which she can use to help her find the Ranch’s address so she can write to Dr. Ben to come save her. And her science teacher is pretty cool, and really concerned about the environment in a way that makes Fern realize that you can care about the environment and also NOT live in an isolated rural compound that you never ever leave, and she starts to make friends, and also Babs invites her to come to the teashop for treats anytime she wants, on the house, and she hasn’t had sugar in years and the petit fours completely blow her mind…

But she still really misses her friends back home at the Ranch, and the chickens and the forest and the feeling of building a community that will sustain life in a future wracked by climate change and societal collapse.

And she’s also having trouble finding the Ranch on the internet, not least because she hasn’t used the internet since she moved to the Ranch when she was six. So she hires a private investigator, using money that Babs is paying her to clear out a bunch of clutter left behind by her wife’s sudden death years ago.

But earning money takes time, and a private investigation also takes time, and time is what it takes to put down roots. And when you hire a private investigator, well, he might turn up more than you’ve bargained for…

Just an incredibly readable book. I really meant to put it down and go to sleep, but I kept having to read just another chapter or two, and then somehow the book was done.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The first time I attempted Jane McIntosh Snyder’s Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho, I got quite cross at the book for not being the book that I wanted it to be: that is to say, a book about what we can learn about society in sixth-century Lesbos based on Sappho’s poetry, and about the ancient classical world in general based on the fact that Sappho was called the tenth muse and her poems remained so popular that they were quoted in books in rhetoric centuries after her death, which is how we come to have as many snippets of her work as we do.

Unfortunately for me, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho has no interest in being that book. It’s a close reading of Sappho’s works to investigate how she articulates lesbian desire, and also an argument with Ye Commentators of Olde who insisted on reading all of Sappho’s love poems to women as bridal songs, because it’s the done thing to get up at a wedding and sing “The bride is so hot that my knees are shaking and I can’t even speak.” (I mean, maybe it was the done thing on ancient Lesbos! This is where some context would be useful.)

My first introduction to Sappho’s work, so I’m glad the poems were quoted so copiously. And it’s an interesting work on its own terms. But those were not the terms I was hoping for.

After a hiatus, I’ve returned to the 1930s Newberys with Nora Burglon’s Children of the Soil: A Story of Scandinavia, a delightful story about everyday life for a couple of crofter’s children in northern Sweden in the 19th century. This is one of those books that derives most of its interest from the description of everyday life in a certain time and place, which is the sort of thing that I love. (I wonder if one could write a fantasy novel of this type. That would be cozy fantasy, right?)

What I’m Reading Now

In Vanity Fair, Amelia Sedley was PINING AWAY because she was forbidden to marry her beloved George Osbourne. But when Osbourne’s friend Captain Dobbin went to visit Amelia (who of course Captain Dobbin secretly adores) and found her on the POINT OF DEATH because of her THWARTED LOVE, he convinced Osbourne to marry Amelia in the teeth of paternal opposition. (The pater wanted Osbourne to marry a mixed-race West Indian heiress of immense wealth.)

What I Plan to Read Next

At long last, I’m going to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

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.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m still trundling along with the 2024 Newbery winners. This week, I read Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson’s Eagle Drums, a retelling of an Inupiaq legend about a boy who is kidnapped by eagles who can shift into human form, because they want to teach him to… Well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, because part of the pleasure of the book comes from figuring out just what the eagles DO want. I enjoyed all the details about traditional life in arctic, and also that feeling you really only get from old legends and retellings thereof that this story is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction.

Gary Paulsen’s The Quilt, another short memoir about a visit to his grandmother as a child. This time, he’s about six, and he goes to visit his grandmother and they go to stay with a neighbor who is about to have a baby… and while they wait, all the neighboring women come over (the men are all away for World War II) and get out a memory quilt that they’ve made, a patch for every member of their little community who has died over the past few decades.

Moving. And I think the book explains something about Paulsen's fiction, which is that although his main theme is masculinity, he doesn't have the that obnoxious male chauvinist attitude that so many writers do who are writing about Manly Men Being Manly. He respects women, and this is not merely an attitude he parrots but a thing that he knows in his bones from his childhood and his time with his grandmother.

What I’m Reading Now

Still traipsing along in Shirley. We have now moved into the POV of Martin Yorke, an obnoxious young lad who has become the go-between for Caroline and Robert Moore now that Robert is sorely injured and convalescing in the Yorke’s house. NO SHIRLEY for pages and pages! Woe.

What I Plan to Read Next

Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says, the last of the 2024 Newbery winners.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A week of mildly disappointing reading. First, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Ghosts of Rathburn Park, which is entertaining enough but doesn't really come together. There’s a big creepy house that we don’t spend nearly enough time exploring, a swamp that we cross but don’t explore at all, and a burnt-out church with a hut inside that gets a little bit of exploration but, again, not nearly enough. Also one of the ghosts is definitely not a ghost and the other ghost is only maybe a ghost, and I just feel that the ghost quotient in a book called The Ghosts of Rathburn Park should be higher.

Second, one of this year’s Newbery Honor books, Daniel Nayeri’s The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams. The Silk Road setting was fun, but unfortunately the book didn’t sell me on the idea that anyone would want to assassinate Samir, let alone want him assassinated so badly that they would hire half a dozen murderers of various nationalities simultaneously in order to give it a try. What a waste of capital, you know? At least wait for one to fail before you outlay the cash for another!

And finally (please don’t throw rocks at me), P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith. I’ve been really enjoying the Jeeves and Wooster email readalong so I thought I’d give Psmith another go, and I do enjoy Psmith himself (in a “but I can see why people would like to slightly strange you” kind of way), but not the Mike and Psmith books as a whole. Maybe the problem is Mike? Sorry Mike. You just care about cricket too much, kid.

What I’m Reading Now

Houston, we have a Shirley! I don’t remember a whole lot about this book, but I did remember almost word for word the bit where Shirley Keeldar first meets Caroline Helstone and instantly - before even speaking to her - presents her with a nosegay, and “put her hands behind her, and stood bending slightly towards her guest, still regarding [Caroline], in the attitude and with something of the aspect of a grave but gallant little cavalier.”

What I Plan to Read Next

Traipsing onward through the Newbery books of 2024! I’d really like to read Mexikid next, and… it looks like it’s actually been turned back in, finally, after being checked out for about two months! So maybe indeed that will be next.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. K. Broster’s Couching at the Door, a suitably chilling short story collection for Halloween. Again, the creepiest story in the last section was the one with no magic. Cousins Ellen and Caroline are visiting Italy, only Caroline is spoiling the trip by reading the Baedeker loudly at every sight. Ellen, miserable, bitter, trampled-upon in this as everything else, wishes that she could have just one day without Caroline… and realizes that she can. All she has to do is kill Caroline!

“That seems excessive,” I gasped, even as Ellen strangled Caroline with a silk scarf. Thereafter Ellen jaunted off to Florence, had a lovely day despite concerns that Caroline might appear at any moment, and more or less instantly lost all her money. It’s unclear if Ellen is wholly incompetent because Caroline has tyrannized over her for so long, or if Caroline has dominated Ellen because she truly can’t look after herself on account of being just a touch insane, as witness her conviction that the dead Caroline will reappear and take over her life again.

I also read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Trespassers, in which a brother and sister sneak into a neglected mansion, and find a wonderful old nursery full of delightful toys, and possibly also a ghost. Wonderful atmosphere, reminiscent of The Velvet Room. Goes off a bit into Problem Novel territory once the owners of the house show up. I enjoyed Grub’s doom and gloom attacks, as I was also a child prone to doom and gloom attacks.

Also Gerald Durrell’s The Overloaded Ark. This was Durrell’s first book, and he hit the ground not quite running, but certainly skipping along at a good clip. It’s not quite as funny as his later books (I only laughed aloud once) and the metaphors are not quite as astoundingly apt (though I did love the comparison of a bat’s nose to a Tudor rose), but still a very Durrell read.

And a surprise read! As I was checking the graphic novel shelves for Pedro Martin’s Newbery Honor Mexikid, I stumbled upon a hitherto unsuspected Hayao Miyazaki graphic novel, Shuna’s Journey, translated by Alex Dudok de Wit. Miyazaki wrote and illustrated this book in the early eighties, and it prefigures much of his later work: the hero and heroine who trade off saving each other, the fascination with strange machines and stranger creatures, the wide vistas of grass blowing in the wind.

What I’m Reading Now

Creeping along in Shirley. Caroline Helstone is madly in love with her distant cousins Robert Moore, who loves her too but has (I’m pretty sure) decided that a man in his position must marry an heiress, and therefore has crushed Caroline’s heart on the rocks.

What I Plan to Read Next

Mexikid is still checked out, so my next Newbery Honor book will be Daniel Nayeri’s The Many Assassinations of Samir, Seller of Dreams. I flipped through and it has charming illustrations.

On Friday, we had an advising conference in the morning in Indianapolis (why a three-hour conference a two hour round trip from where we work? Ours is not to reason why), and afterwards I skipped merrily across town to the Indiana State Library to plunder their Newbery books for Caroline Snedeker’s The Forgotten Daughter.

The previous Snedeker books I’ve read have all taken place in America in about 1820, so I was briefly startled to realize that this book takes place in ancient Rome. (It has beautiful illustrations by Dorothy Lathrop.) Our heroine, Chloe, is the daughter of another Chloe who was kidnapped from the island of Lesbos by a Roman centurion, but he was SO impressed by the first Chloe’s bravery that he married her… only to abandon her at his country estate and take another wife in Rome!

The first Chloe died in childbirth, leaving our Chloe as a slave on her father’s estate, where she is raised mostly by her mother’s friend Melissa, who was also kidnapped from Lesbos. She therefore entertains Chloe with whatever she can remember from the poems of Psappha (Sappho), the plays of Euripides, snatches of Pindar, etc. etc., which fascinates the young gentleman from the neighboring estate when he meets Chloe. A slave girl who can compare his riding skills with those of Hippolytus? For Chloe has of course sneaked off to watch him ride…

This is in short a story of gentility in straitened circumstances, and a young girl of good breeding who returns to her rightful class by winning the heart and hand of a gentleman of appropriate status.

In this case, through a plot twist worthy of an ancient Roman comedy, it turns out that Chloe’s father didn’t forget her; he never knew she existed! His family, appalled that he had married some nobody from Lesbos, imprisoned him in Rome and sent messengers to the first Chloe that he had married someone else, thus hastening her decline. After she died, fearing for baby Chloe’s life, Melissa told the steward that the child had been born dead. Chloe’s father didn’t learn otherwise until years later, when the plague forced him to leave Rome for the estate he had shunned, conveniently just in time to arrange the marriage between his daughter Chloe and her Roman beloved.

Over the weekend, I popped down to the library with the goal of picking up Elizabeth Wein's Cobalt Squadron, only to discover that it wasn't on the shelf. As I was idly browsing, I noticed a Newbery book (the Puffin Newbery bindings are very distinctive once you've read 47 of them), and then with mounting horror realized that I didn't recognize the title.

"But I've read all the Newbery books between 1940 and 2023!" I wailed. "None of the remaining books are available except through interlibrary loan! HOW CAN THIS BE."

It turns out that when I was copying out the Newbery list for the 1950s, I somehow skipped Ann Weil's Red Sails to Capri. Of course I had to check the book out and read it instantly, and I am happy to report that it was an enjoyable read, except for the fact that its overlooked existence has rocked my sense of certainty to its foundations. (I have since checked the Newbery lists and I BELIEVE this is the only one I missed, but then I believed that I had them all before, now didn't I.)

In 1826, three travelers arrive at the island of Capri during the winter, when the tourist trade is low. For young Michele's family, which owns the less successful of the two inns in town, their arrival is a godsend - until the travelers get it into their heads that they'd like to visit the Forbidden Cove.

Now, if you have read a few books about Natural Landmarks Forbidden by Folk Superstition, you know there is one of two ways that this story can go. Either our heroes are going to be driven to death and/or madness by the Thing in the Cove, leaving behind only a salt-stained notebook in which to tell fragments of their tale; or reason is going to triumph over superstition and they will discover there is nothing to fear at all.

Generally speaking, folk horror is not a big Newbery genre, and Reason Triumphing Over Superstition IS. (Also, if you know something about tourist landmarks on Capri, I bet you can guess what they're going to discover.) But although I figured out the destination pretty quickly, the journey was still fun.

***

Also, I've since discovered that Cobalt Squadron is in fact shelved under J FIC STAR (as in Star Wars), so I'll amble back to the library to pick it up. But thank God I didn't bother to look it up before, or who knows if I ever would have discovered that I'd missed Red Sails to Capri!

The one drawback of reading all of L. M. Montgomery’s books in publication order was that, in my memory, the last book Anne of Ingleside is pretty dire. So I picked it up with an inward moan, but in fact (perhaps this is a case of suitably lowered expectations?) it’s not nearly as bad as I remembered.

What it is, on the whole, is inessential. These feel like the sort of stories that a modern author might share on Patreon, cute little tales about the characters that don’t change your understanding of them or their world in any way, but might satisfy your need just to stay in that world a little while longer.

They’re pleasant enough tales of the hijinks and youthful mishaps of Anne’s children, mostly, enjoyable enough to read and eminently forgettable thereafter. Except the one where six-year-old Walter walks home alone at night because he’s realized he’s been sent away because Mother is sick, and he’s convinced she’ll die before he returns. That one perhaps has a little more heft than the others.

And I did remember the Anne stories that bookend the book, which is probably responsible for my remembered low opinion. The beginning of the book features Anne and Diana spending a lovely day together, which would be delightful except that the narrative keeps insistently reminding us that Diana is FAT. Now, Diana has always been a plump girl, and if the book mentioned it and moved on as the earlier Anne books do that would be one thing, but it comes up again… and again… and again… It comes to seem so mean-spirited. Just let Anne and Diana enjoy their ramble in the woods in peace!

Then at the end of the book, Anne suddenly becomes convinced that Gilbert no longer loves her! Why? No reason. No, literally, there is no reason. She’s just out of sorts with life, that’s all. Eventually she realizes her folly and then she and Gilbert are off to a medical conference in Scotland, HOORAY, but first we have to bushwhack through a few chapters of pointless jealousy.

And, I mean, sure, people do get these notions into their heads sometimes. I can’t argue that it’s unrealistic. But I don’t read L. M. Montgomery for her stone-cold realism! I read her so that the characters and I can saunter together down the White Way of Delight!

***

And that concludes the L. M. Montgomery readthrough! Which of course means that it is time for me to tackle some other reading plans.

1. First, I’m going to complete the Jane Austen reread that I started... back in 2022 or so... okay, so it’s been on hiatus a bit, but it is halfway done. Next up is Mansfield Park.

2. Then I intend to get around to the Newbery books of 2024, which I have disgracefully neglected thus far this year.

(2.a. Yes, indeed, I am still working on the Newbery project! It’s whirring slowly away in the background. I have seventeen books left to go in the 1930s, which means that at the current rate I’ll probably finish it... sometime in 2026. Good grief.)

3. Then John Le Carre’s Smiley books! I’m not sure how this will go, to be honest; I may end up deciding that I need long breaks between books, as Le Carre can be so bleak. But I’m looking forward to it all the same. There’s just nothing like a Cold War spy novel, you know?