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Hurry Home, Candy by Meindert De Jong

Feb1

It’s a hard-knock life for Candy, a small terrier whose misfortunes multiply throughout this story, in which the dog does not die, but has many near-death experiences. Abused as a puppy, then lost, abandoned, and hungry as a stray, Candy loses his name, his owners, and his home several times over. If stories of animals being mistreated, neglected, and injured make you or your child sad or angry or both, this book is not for you.

Nevertheless, the book reminded me of The Incredible Journey, our book club book for this month, and it does have a redemptive and hopeful ending. I was also reminded of the story of the prodigal son and the Prodigal Father who welcomed him home. The writing is especially luminous and life-giving on the last few pages of the book (spoiler warning for those who want to read without knowing the ending):

“The little dog stood up; the little dog had started to obey. And in a moment he would walk across the open yard and through an open door. And then he would be in. Then he would not merely have a pan of food, he’d have a home, he’d have a name, he’d have a love for a great, good man. A love for a man that would grow and grow in a great, good life with the man. A love so huge, and so complete and so eternal, the little dog would hardly be able to encompass it in his one little timid heart.”

Meindert DeJong was a Dutchman who emigrated to the United States to the United States with his family as a boy and began writing children’s books at the suggestion of a librarian. (Yay, librarians!) His books won a record four Newbery honors (Shadrach; Hurry Home, Candy; The House of Sixty Fathers; Along Came a Dog) and one Newbery Medal (The Wheel on the School), and yet another book, Journey From Peppermint Street, won the National Book Award for Children’s Literature in 1969. The illustrations in Hurry Home, Candy are by Maurice Sendak.

One more fair warning: Candy must weather hunger, loneliness, neglect, abandonment, mistreatment, misunderstanding, attack by a pack of wild dogs, gun violence, injury, and disappointment to get to that happy ending. This Newbery Honor book from 1953 is worth reading, but not for the faint or tender of heart.

Spunky Girl Spies and Tries (To Keep Hoping)

Jul1


Harriet M. Welch.
Ramona Quimby.
Jo March.
Trixie Belden.
Flavia de Luce.
Nancy Drew.
Hazel Kaplansky.
Star Mackie.

One could go on listing spunky girl heroines, wannabe spies and detectives, and just generally nonconformist and stubborn females in children’s fiction for a long time. (In fact, Jen Robinson made just such a list of 200 “cool girls from children’s literature” a few years ago.)

I read Hope Is a Ferris Wheel by Robin Herrera and The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill by Megan Frazer Blakemore back to back, and the female protagonists, Star and Hazel, will forever be associated and somewhat confused with one another in my mind. Star and Hazel definitely fit into the cool, spunky female character category. If you read one of these two books and like it, you’ll probably like the other.

Hazel Kaplansky of Spy Catchers is a girl sleuth who models her detective activities on the famous Nancy Drew. Set in 1953, Spy Catchers of Maple Hill has as its historical background and key conflict the Cold War and the Red Scare of the 1950’s. Hazel is determined to find and expose the “Commie” spies that she is sure are conspiring to infiltrate and destroy Maple Hill, Vermont—if not the entire United States.

Hazel is relentless and somewhat arrogant in her search for truth, justice, and the American way. “What’s the point of modesty?” she says at one point to her friend and fellow detective, Samuel. “I’ll be modest when other folks start to realize how remarkable I am.”

By the end of the book Hazel has come to a few realizations herself—and received a bit of a comedown when she finds out that her unfounded suspicions have hurt good people. However, the last few pages of the story show Hazel, as determined and undaunted as ever, spinning new theories and visualizing herself as “Hazel Kaplansky, star student, holder of knowledge, solver of mysteries, and future double agent.”

Star Mackie in Hope Is a Ferris Wheel is just as stubborn in her sense of right and wrong and her quest to make sense of her world as Hazel. Star is a little younger than Hazel, and in spite of Star’s somewhat dysfunctional family life, she’s a bit more innocent than Hazel. Star’s father disappeared when she was a baby. Her mother says her dad is a no-good bum and won’t let Star even communicate with him. Her sister Winter, whom Star idolizes, has been kicked out of school for writing horror stories with lots of “characters in them [that] have the misfortune of dying horrible deaths, like having all of the blood explode out of their bodies” and a “family of inbred mutant cannibals” who happen to have the same names as her classmates.

The whole family, Star, her mom, and Winter, have moved from Oregon to California in search of a fresh start, and their home is “the pink-tinted trailer with the flamingo hot glued to the roof” in Treasure Trailers trailer park. Star (like Hazel) is unpopular with her new classmates because of her trailer park origins and general lack of conformity, and so she tries starting a club to make new friends. But Star, again like Hazel, is rather bossy and stubborn, and friendships are hard to initiate.

I liked the fact that both of these books feature imperfect young protagonists, and not everything is resolved in the end of either book. Hazel doesn’t become subdued and older but wiser. Star doesn’t really connect with her father, and her new friends are, well, a little flaky and unreliable. Nevertheless, as Star would say in imitation of Emily Dickinson, “Hope is a Ferris Wheel. . . Hope becomes A Thing/ That, When you’re getting Off,/ You take With you to Bring.”

There’s still hope for Hazel Kaplansky and Star Mackie to grow into strong young women with wisdom tempered by experience. And they’re the kind of girls who will experience a lot because they aren’t going to sit around and wait for life to come to them. If you’re a fan of Harriet the Spy or Flavia de Luce, you might very well enjoy either or both of these middle grade novels.

1953: Events and Inventions

Jan24

All year, 1953. The First Indochina War: French forces continue to fight the Viet Minh independence movement in Vietnam. The French have been fighting to retain control of the Indochinese countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam since the end of World War II.

'DNA' photo (c) 2006, Mark Cummins - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/January 14, 1953. Communist leader and war hero Josip Broz,also known as Marshal Tito, is elected president of Yugoslavia. Tito is a dedicated Communist, but he and the other leader of the Communist bloc, Josef Stalin, are openly estranged and at odds with one another.
Tito’s message to Stalin in : “Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (…) If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.”

March 5, 1953. Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years, dies of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 73.

April 25, 1953. Scientists Francis Crick and James D. Watson of Cambridge University in England publish their discoveries of the double helix structure of DNA.

May 29, 1953. Sir Edmund Hilary of New Zealand and Nepali Tenzing Norgay become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world.

'Mount Everest' photo (c) 2007, watchsmart - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/June 18, 1953. Army leaders depose King Faud of Egypt and declare Egypt a republic.

July 27, 1953. The Korean War ends after three years of fighting and over two million lives lost. United Nations, South Korea, the United States, People’s Republic of China, and North Korea sign an armistice at Panmunjom.

August 8, 1953. Soviet prime minister Georgi Malenkov announces that the Soviet Union has a hydrogen bomb.

August 19, 1953. The United States and the United Kingdom help to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and retain Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the throne.

November 9, 1953. Cambodia becomes independent from France.

1953: Books and Literature

Jan23

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison wins The National Book Award for 1953.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Not my favorite Hemingway. I can appreciate Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls, but the whole man against nature angst of Old Man and the Sea is way outside my enjoyment zone.

The Christopher Award, presented by The Christophers, a Christian organization founded in 1945 by the Maryknoll priest James Keller, to honor books, movies and television specials that affirm the highest values of the human spirit”, is given to the book Karen by Marie Killilea. I read the book Karen, written by her mom about a girl who lives with cerebral palsy, when I was a teenager, and I found it quite inspiring. Cerebral palsy was a much misunderstood condition, both then and even now, and it was educational for me to read about Karen and her family, dedicated Catholics who were determined to help Karen to grow up to be the best that she could be in spite of her physical challenges.

Ann Nolan Clark’s The Secret of the Andes wins the Newbery Medal. Charlotte’s Web wins a Newbery Honor. This year of Newbery picks is often cited as a mistake by critics who think it evident that Charlotte’s Web is the better book and should have won the Newbery. I don’t disagree, but I have read Secret of the Andes. It’s a fine story and works quite well as a read aloud. Ms. Clark should be accorded due respect for her writing and not always compared to E.B. White.

Sir Winston Churchill wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Also published in 1953:
Journey Cake, Ho! by Ruth Sawyer. A picture book based on the story of the Gingerbread Boy, but set in Appalachia with a “journey cake” substituting for the the gingerbread boy.

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. Can anyone recommend (or not) this acclaimed novel?

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. My mom took a Jewish American literature class in graduate school when I was a teen, and read some of her books, including this one by Saul Bellow. I can’t say I understood it or liked it at the time. I wonder what I would think if I read it again now.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Classic science fiction, dystopian fiction, and indictment of book-burning and censorship.

The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler.

After the Funeral and A Pocketful of Rye by Agatha Christie.

The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. The Robe is one of my all-time favorite books, and it became the number one bestseller of 1953. The novel tells the story Marcellus, a Roman tribune who ends up carrying out the crucifixion of Jesus and winning Jesus’ robe as the soldiers gamble at the foot of the cross.

The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. My favorite scene from Narnia is in this book: Puddleglum and Eustace and Jill are trapped underground in an kingdom ruled over by the Green Lady (the White Witch again), and they are about to be spellbound by her fascinating voice. Then Puddleglum says:

“One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

Go, Puddleglum!

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming. The first James Bond novel.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Miller’s play uses the Salem Witch trials as a metaphor for and illumination of the McCarthy and the Committee on Un-American Activites (U.S. House of Representatives) blacklisting of suspected communists in government, entertainment and business. Its initial production on Broadway in 1953 won a Tony Award.

Set in 1953:
The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer, 2008. Recommended at Literary License.

Keeping Score by Linda Sue Park. Semicolon review here.

Penny from Heaven by Jennifer L. Holm. Reviewed by Miss Erin. Also reviewed at Jen Robinson’s Book Page.

Children’s Fiction of 2008: Keeping Score by Linda Sue Park

Oct4

Keeping Score is a children’s novel about baseball and prayer. About baseball fans and prayer. It’s a new genre: theological sports fan-fiction.

Maggie-o is named after Joe DiMaggio, her dad’s favorite Yankee baseball player, but Maggie’s love is reserved for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Dem Bums. They’re one of three New York teams in 1953 when this story is set, and they’re the team that breaks its fans hearts every year by not winning the World Series, never, not even once. Maggie is the Dodgers’ most loyal fan, and as she listens to the Dodgers’ games on the radio, she begins to bargain with God for victory for her team. Then the bargaining and the praying get mixed up with scoring the games and superstition and her friend Jim in who’s fighting in Korea, and it all becomes a confusing, emotional, growing up roller coaster of wins and losses and dashed hopes and renewed hope and lots and lots of baseball.

I’m not a baseball fan. I’m not a sports fan. Sometimes while I was reading this book, I wanted to shake Maggie and tell her, “Baseball is not the center of the world! Don’t live and die according to fortunes and misfortunes of the Dodgers!” But I know that some people really, really invest their emotions, hopes, and dreams in the win/loss record of a particular sports team. I think it’s crazy, but I’ve seen it too many times to not believe in Maggie-O’s particular obsession with the Dodgers.

And I liked Maggie. I liked the way she and her brother Joey-Mick argued over whether or not they could both have Jackie Robinson for a favorite player. I liked her ruminations over prayer and which prayers God would accept and answer and which He would not. They seemed a bit childish to me, but of course, Maggie is a child. Then I suddenly realized that we adults do exactly the same thing. Will God heal my child if I ask Him? What if I have a really good reason to ask? Something unselfish? What if I sacrifice something I love so that God will heal my loved one? What if I pray for the hurricane to go somewhere else, not to save my house, but to save someone else’s? Will God say yes to that prayer? Does prayer “work”? If so, how? Why does God seem to answer some prayers and not others?

Maggie comes to some profound conclusions about prayer and about baseball toward the end of the story, but I don’t want to tell you what those are and spoil the ending. Suffice it to say that I think this book would fit quite well in any Catholic or Protestant school or church library and into the public school and the public library, and that’s quite a feat. It’s ambiguous enough for the secularists, and respectful and engaging with the Christian faith in particular.

Oh, and did I say, it’s got a lot of baseball??