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Red Caps and Lilies by Katharine Adams

Another book first published in 1924, Red Caps and Lilies is historical fiction set during the first days of the French Revolution. An aristocrat family attempts to come to terms with the rapid descent into chaos and revolution that begins in Paris, 1789. Soon it is obvious that thirteen year old Marie Josephine, her older brother Lisle, and their beloved maman, along with servants and relatives and friends and other various and sundry folk, must flee Paris and even France to ensure their own safety. But who will help them? Whom can they trust? And will they be betrayed by their own pride and disbelief that their lives could possibly be in danger in the first place?

I could quibble with this historical novel from another generation. The plot is a little creaky at times, with lots of unexpected meetings and paths crossing at just the right time. The events of the family’s escape are told and then retold and retold again as the family gathers and each one recounts his adventures to the others. Some character growth is evident in Lisle, the proud aristocratic teen, who is humbled by his experiences, and in Grigge, the peasant who has good reason to hate the aristocratic family but finds reason to help them anyway, All in all, though it’s a harmless little story with a fairly happy ending.

I guess I’ve become accustomed, for better or for worse, to something a little more ambiguous and and a little more unpredictable. I knew from the beginning, or at least near the beginning, that the family would escape and that all would turn out well. There was just no real suspense in the story, even though I think the author tried to create some. Still, if you want a historical novel that give a young adult reader some introduction to the time of the French Revolution with good and noble characters and a few daring escapes, you could do worse than reading about these French “lilies” cast out to fend for themselves among the “red caps” of the mobs of Paris.

You can read this “oldie but goodie” on Internet Archive if your library doesn’t give you access to a copy.

Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo by Frances Winwar

I read the Landmark book about Adolf Hitler earlier this year, and I couldn’t help comparing as I read this Landmark book about another would-be conqueror, Napoleon. The author of Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo has the advantage, and the disadvantage, of distance from her subject. Maybe the havoc and death that resulted from Napoleon’s ambition over two hundred years ago just doesn’t feel as bad as Hitler’s evil deeds that are only seventy-five or so years in the past. Or maybe Napoleon, unlike Hitler, did have his good side.

Anyway, Winwar tells the story of Napoleon well, and with the semblance of objectivity. She goes through the events of his life from his birth in 1769 to a Corsican rebel lieutenant and his wife to his defeat at Waterloo and his exile and death on another island, St. Helena. Napoleon’s father was a rebel against the French occupation of the island of Corsica, and Napoleon himself became the personification of French identity and patriotism. I learned some facts about Napoleon and his empire, built and lost. And Winwar’s summary at the end of her book seems fair:

“Napoleon, however, left behind him a legend and a moral lesson. He showed what a man can accomplish through strength of purpose, courage, and imagination. He destroyed the last remnants of feudalism in Europe and abolished the Inquisition in Spain. He helped to build the modern code of laws. He encouraged art and science and education.

But once he gained power he paired it with his colossal ambition. The two, like fiery steeds driven recklessly for his own glory, plunged him and his empire to destruction. So great was his fall at Waterloo that since then all defeat has been known by its name.”

I can’t quite imagine a similar recitation of Hitler’s legendary feats and his fall. And yet Napoleon’s ambition and egomania was responsible for a great deal of suffering and death for the French people and for the other peoples of Europe. His colossal ambition was just as disproportionate and damaging as Hitler’s was, but without the tanks, sophisticated and deadly weaponry, and death camps. I wonder if the people of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who were closer to the results of Napoleon’s reign would have given him credit for “strength of purpose, courage and imagination.” Distance in time can give us perspective, but is it an accurate and truthful perspective?

The Horse Without a Head by Paul Berna

Paul Berna was the pseudonym for French journalist Jean Sabran who wrote children’s books in French during the latter half of the twentieth century. The Horse Without a Head (French title: Le Cheval Sans Tête, 1955) was also published in English with the title A Hundred Million Francs, and it tells the story of a gang of poor working class French children who own one treasure: a headless horse on tricycle wheels that carries them on dangerous and thrilling rides down the narrow streets of Louvigny, a small town in northwest France. The story takes place just after World War II, and there are a few references to leftover bomb craters and deserted warehouses that were abandoned during or after war.

I was reminded as I read of the movie, The Goonies. The ten children in the self-styled “gang” are all under thirteen, street savvy, but also honest and innocent. Their leader, Gaby, “purposely kept the numbers down and never accepted anyone over thirteen, for as he said, ‘When you turn thirteen you get dopey, and you’re lucky if you don’t stay that way for the rest of your life.'” Each child has a distinct personality, but the central figures in the story are Gaby, Fernand, the original owner of the headless horse, and Marion, a somewhat mysterious dog whisperer and amateur vet.

To an adult reader, the book is obviously a translation and of a different era. Some of the dialog is awkwardly phrased in English, and the transitions in the action and logic are sometimes abrupt and difficult to follow. At one point in the story, one of the children brandishes an old rusty revolver and says that although he knows it won’t shoot, “I don’t feel so frightened when I’m holding it.” This bit of business, not at all vital to the plot, would certainly be excised by any editor nowadays. The crooks in the story actually shoot real guns at the children, but of course no one is injured. This is an adventure story, not a treatise on violence and gun safety. The horse rides themselves are quite dangerous, described as going forty or even sixty miles an hour (probably exaggerated) downhill and involving inevitable crashes and spills along the way. The adventures of the children are not meant to be imitated at home, although they very well may lead to some experimentation with wheeled vehicles.

I found the book to be quite a nice escape on a rainy Monday evening, and I would recommend it, if you can get past the Frenchiness and playing with guns. My Scholastic paperback edition from 1964 carries a price of 45 cents on the cover, and I surely got at least 45 cents worth of entertainment from the story. (The price has gone up to about $10.00 for a used paperback, more than twenty for a used hardcover copy.) I thought as I was reading that The Horse Without a Head would make a good movie with some editing and rearranging, and I see that Walt Disney made a movie based on this book; it’s available to rent from Amazon Prime video. Has anyone seen the movie? Or read this little French gem?

Village of Scoundrels by Margi Preus

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loiredepartment in south-central France. Residents have been primarily Huguenot or Protestant since the 17th century. During World War II these Huguenot residents made the commune a haven for Jews fleeing from the Nazis. They hid them both within the town and countryside, and helped them flee to neutral Switzerland. In 1990 the town was one of two collectively honored as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel for saving Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

~Wikipedia

Village of Scoundrels is a fictional depiction of the activities of the villagers of Le Chambon during World War 2, especially the teens and children who were either refugees or resistors or both. The book doesn’t really have a clearly defined protagonist, but some of the heroes and villains in the books are listed in the opening pages, and these characters are mostly based on the lives and actions of real, living people:

  • Celeste is a high school student who becomes a courier for the Resistance.
  • Jean-Paul is a Jewish teen who wants to become a doctor, but who find that his talent for forgery is in demand.
  • Jules the Scoundrel is a ten year old goatherd who plays dangerous games with the French policeman who is collaborating with the Nazis to uncover the secrets of Le Chambon.
  • Henni and Max are German Jews, boyfriend and girlfriend, who take refuge in Le Chambon.
  • Philippe, a high school student from Normandy, hides refugees and smuggles them to Switzerland.

This book is gaining lots of accolades this year, and indeed the subject matter cries out for a good novelization or narrative nonfiction telling (maybe there is a good nonfiction book about this WWII event?). However, the mix of fiction and nonfiction in this one was not that well done. It should have either been more fictionalized to make the story flow with a clear protagonist and plot or just straight nonfiction with chapters telling the stories of each of the various children and young adults who were active in the French Resistance in Le Chambon. I found it interesting, but hard to follow.

The last part of the novel, where the story coalesces around the French policeman, Perdant, and Jules the Soundrel, is pure fiction and better reading than the rest of the book. Then, the afterword attempts to help the reader sort fact from fiction, but I found it just as confusing as the preceding chapters. Again, can anyone recommend a well written nonfiction book on this subject? Preus provides a bibliography of twenty or more titles at the end of the book, but which one is the best?

The Pilot and the Little Prince by Peter Sis

The Pilot and the Little Prince: The Life of Antione De Saint Exupery by Peter Sis. Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2014.

Like Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, written and published in the midst of the author’s exile from his native France, during World War II, is an odd book, hard to classify. Is it a book for children or for adults? Is it a philosophical parable or a simple fantasy, or both? Is it full of deep insights, or simply a silly story about a space-traveling prince? It’s certainly, like Alice again, a matter of taste. Some, like me and my youngest daughter, love it, while others find it abstruse and just plain weird. Early critics, when it was first published in New York, said that it was not at all a children’s book, but rather an adult parable in disguise. Therefore, it is fitting that Peter Sis’s picture book biography of author Antione de Saint Exupery is a bit hard to classify—and to read sequentially— as well.

Sis writes a straightforward biographical text that appears at the bottom of each page, but the illustrations are far from straightforward or clearly linear. Mr. Sis gives us much more information about Saint-Exupery, his life, and his times in the context of the pictures that are filled with facts, and maps, and timelines, and anecdotes, than he does in the actual biographical story that parades across the bottom of the pages of his book. This style may not be appealing to every reader. I confess I find it somewhat tedious to read text wrapped in a circle around a small picture or words that wiggle over a mountain or fly up the page instead of across from left to right.

But other readers may become lost (in a good way) in the variations in style and color and format that Sis uses to tell his story about the pilot who became a writer and then a photographer in the French war effort against Nazi Germany.

“The boy would grow up to be a pilot. He would write about courageous flights, but also about places you might find if you were to fly long enough and far enough. What did he find on the earth? What did he find in the sky?”

“On July 31, 1944, at 8:45 a.m., he took off from Brogo, Corsica, to photograph enemy positions east of Lyon. It was a beautiful day. He was due back at 12:30. But he never returned. Some say he forgot his oxygen mask and vanished at sea. Maybe Antoine found his own glittering planet next to the stars.”

The Pilot and the Little Prince could keep an aspiring pilot or writer or Little Prince aficionado amused and enthralled for quite some time. There’s plenty to explore and learn in this busy, beautiful book about a busy man who was an artist with beautiful and meaningful words.

If you are interested in purchasing ($5.00) a curated list of favorite picture book biographies with over 300 picture books about all sorts of different people, email me at sherryDOTpray4youATgmailDOTcom. I’m highlighting picture book biographies in March. What is your favorite picture book about a real person?

Christmas in Fontainbleau, France, c.1955(?)

Natalie Savage Carlson, author of The Family Under the Bridge, another story set at Christmas time, wrote five books in the Orpheline series about a family of French orphans who live in a castle south of Paris. A Grandmother for the Orphelines is the fifth and final book in the series, and as noted, it takes place during the Christmas season. The twenty little girls called collectively the Orphelines have already gained a home, three mothers, thirty-one brothers, and multiple pets in the other books, and now they are longing for a grandmother, “one with a big soft lap and an apron that smells like gingerbread.”

These French orphans are both mischievous and delightful as they wheedle and eavesdrop and discuss and connive to get themselves a real grandmere who can tell them stories about the past and hold them in her capacious lap. And intertwined with the story are details about a traditional French Christmas and the French customs and stories to entertain and captivate readers everywhere. This book would make a great Christmas read aloud for primary age children and a good introduction to the series, even though it’s the last one. The series doesn’t have to be read in order, and I can see reading this one to introduce children to the orphelines and then giving a set of this one plus the other four books as a Christmas present if this one appeals.

“Kelig was not to be outdone. After supper, she gathered the orphelines around her.

‘Madame told you the donkey’s name,’ she said, ‘but not about the wonderful thing that happens on Christmas Eve. At midnight the beasts in the stable talk together in human tongues. They were given this power because they shared the stable with the Little Jesus. And the oxen warmed Him with their breath.’

Josine was entranced.

‘I wish they would talk every day,’ she said. ‘I wish they’d talk to me.’

She could hardly wait for morning to find out if they could be drawn into conversation before Christmas Eve. While the girls were in school, she climbed the stile over the stone wall. She went to the barnyard where the oxen and the donkey were awaiting their day’s work.”

Can Josine entice the animals to talk to her? Where can the orphelines find a real grandmother who will agree to be grandmother to twenty little girls, not to mention thirty-one little boys? And what will Father Noel bring the orphelines for Christmas?

The Orpheline books are all available for checkout at Meriadoc Homeschool Library:

The Happy Orpheline
A Brother for the Orphelines
A Pet for the Orphelines
The Orphelines in the Enchanted Castle
A Grandmother for the Orphelines

The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett

The Ringed Castle, Book Five in the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett.
Checkmate, Book Six in the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett.

I can’t believe I read the whole thing, but I’m glad I did. I began reading this six volume series back in December 2013 with Game of Kings, the first book in the series. In this novel, a young Francis Crawford of Lymond, second son of a nobleman and landowner in fourteenth century Scotland, cavorts and carouses his way through wartorn southern Scotland and back and forth across the border with the enemy, England. Francis is a giddy young man with a facile and garrulous tongue, but also a leader in war and romance, with an undercurrent of danger and subversive rebellion running through his character. He’s a medieval/renaissance Scottish James Bond, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Scarlet Pimpernel all rolled into one.

Queen’s Play and The Disorderly Knights deal with Lymond’s adventures in France and around and about the Mediterranean as he serves and politics the king of France, Henri II, the child Mary of Scotland, later to become Mary Queen of Scots, and the Knights of Malta or the Knights Hospitaliers. After a stirring and tragic (for Lymond’s inamorata, Oonagh O’Dwyer) escape from the Turkish invaders in Tripoli, Lymond and his second in command, Gabriel, both return to Scotland where Lymond puts together a small private army, trained in all of arts of war and intended to keep the peace along the Scottish border.

If you’ve made it this far in the series, you’re sure to be hooked by this time, and the fourth book is the climax of the entire story, with a rather infamous human chess game forming the centerpiece of the action. In Pawn in Frankincense, Francis Crawford is at his most vulnerable and his most deadly. The chess game in the seraglio in Istanbul is unforgettable.

Books Five and Six are the ones I read this month as I made my impromptu trip to literary Scotland. In The Ringed Castle, Crawford of Lymond has exiled himself to Russia, the backside of the world in this time period and the land ruled by Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, later known as Ivan the Terrible. In this half-barbarian court of a half-mad tsar, Lymond becomes the Voevoda Bolshoi, supreme commander and advisor to Tsar Ivan. In the meantime, back in England, Phillipa, the teenager that Lymond married in in Book Four, only in outward form in order to save her good name and protect her and her mission, is serving in the court of Mary I (Bloody Mary) and investigating Lymond’s mirky and mysterious past and family background.

Checkmate brings everything in the first five books to a satisfying close, well, almost everything. With a great many starts and stops, hesitations and false starts, triumphs and tragedies, Francis Crawford of Lymond finally meets his destiny, finds his true parents and heritage, and becomes the man he was meant to be. If you have never read these books and you want to, I would recommend that you plan for a marathon reading of all six books in order over the course of a month or more and that you have an English dictionary and a French-speaking translator nearby at all times. A working knowledge of Spanish, Russian, Gaelic, and Scots dialect would come in handy also.

I have a theory that, after the events of these six books were finished, Francis Crawford of Lymond became the actual secret author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

Come With Me to . . . by Gloria Fowler

Come With Me to Paris by Gloria Fowler. Illustrated by Min Heo.
Come With Me to New York by Gloria Fowler. Illustrated by Min Heo.

“Min Heo is an illustrator and recent graduate of the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area of Northern California.” (From Amazon)

The illustrations are what create interest in this series of books exploring the world’s cities. We have Paris and New York, soon to be joined in July, 2016 by a book entitled Come With Me to London. The pictures are simple, yet colorful and intriguing. If you like the cover illustration, you’ll get more similar pictures inside each book.

The text is rhyming, and although the rhythm or scansion is really off in most of the mostly four line poems that describe each site in either Paris or New York, they are readable, short and to the point. Again, I think the pictures are the focal point anyway. For example:

Along the Seine,
Where the bridges do cross;
From Pont Neuf, make a wish,
With a coin we can toss.

(I’ve no idea why there’s a semicolon after the word “cross” in that one?) It annoys me that the poetry is so poor, but the pictures make up for the lack of rhythm.

In Paris, we get a picture and verse for the Eiffel Tower, the Palais Garnier, the Louvre, Sacré-Coeur, Sainte-Chapelle, Notre Dame, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Arc de Triomphe, Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and several other sites. For New York City, there are visits to Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, the Natural History Museum, the Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park Zoo, Grand Central Station, the Chrysler Building, Times Square, and more.

If you’re taking a trip to either city, or to London in the future, these exciting picture books would be a good accompaniment to your vacation. Or if you live in New York or Paris, your child might enjoy getting to know the city through one of these books and then visiting the places that are featured.

Baker’s Dozen: Books to Read for my Around the World Project

I’m planning a new project for 2016, an expansion of my Africa Project. This one is an around the world project in which I hope to read at least one children’s book from or related to each nation of the world. Some countries are easier than others to find books, available in English and written by a citizen of that country. I may have to settle for folktales retold by American or Births authors from some countries or even for books that are simply set in the target country, preferably written by someone who has at least visited the particular setting in the book.

So, here is the page for my Around the World Reading Project. Do you have any suggestions to add to my project list, especially for those countries for which I have no books listed? The books must be for children, available in English (translation or original) in the United States, and preferably written in and popular in the country of origin.

Here are thirteen of the books I already chose that I am planning to read this year:

Blinky Bill by Dorothy Wall. (Australia)

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch. (Canada)

Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson. (Finland)

The Horse Without a Head by Paul Berna. (France)

The Adventures of Maya the Bee by Waldemar Bonsels, 1912. (Germany)

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. (India)

The Shadow of Ghadames by Joelle Stolz. (Libya)

A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer. (American author) (Mozambique)

The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt. (Netherlands)

Platero y yo by Juan Jimenez. (Spain)

The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren. (Sweden)

Go Ahead, Secret Seven by Enid Blyton. (England)

Jamela’s Dress by Niki Daly. (South Africa)

I chose these particular books from the list mostly because I have them or have access to them. Have you read any of them? Any recommended or not?

Happy Birthday, Monsieur Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne, b. 1533.

Advice for bloggers from Montaigne:
Don’t discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

There were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.

He who has not a good memory should never take upon himself the trade of lying.

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.