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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.

The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish

Jan11

A Guest Review from Terri Shown of The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish, a 1925 Newbery Honor book.

Embark on a tranquil journey through the pages of The Dream Coach, a 1924 publication that, while potentially lulling readers into a peaceful slumber, may not resonate with every audience. Despite its promise of a celestial odyssey, the collection unfolds with narratives that are predominantly lengthy, meandering, and easily forgettable.
The initial tale, “The Seven White Dreams of the King’s Daughter,” follows the unfortunate Princess Angelica on her unhappy birthday, marred by the burdensome formalities of royal life. Witnessing her distress, an angel endeavors to uplift her spirits by bestowing seven white dreams, each portraying moments of freedom – a daisy in a field, a little white cloud in the blue sky, a lamb frolicking in lilies, a butterfly in flight, a small egg in a soft nest, and a snowflake dancing.
Next, “Goran’s Dream” unfolds in Norway, where six-year-old Goran faces solitude as he cares for the animals in his grandmother’s absence. The story takes an unusual turn as Goran’s dream, a whimsical and somewhat perplexing Alice in Wonderland-type scenario, adds a layer of complexity to his winter experience.
In “A Bird Cage With Tassels of Purple and Pearls (Three Dreams of a Little Chinese Emperor),” the Dream Coach shifts its mission, aiming to impart a lesson rather than providing comfort. The young emperor, having confined a songbird, experiences a transformative dream where he understands the hardships of captivity. Filled with newfound empathy, he releases the bird, demonstrating personal growth.
Concluding with “King” Philippe’s Dream, the narrative takes us to France, where a young boy envisions his relatives transformed into natural forces during a slumber. He dreams that all his close relations turn into forces of nature like river, rain, wind, and snow. His little cousin becomes spring and the dream goes on till he awakes to find he is back with his parents.
While the tales may not be exceptional, there’s a sweetness and a touch of exoticism that might appeal to certain readers. The charming highlight of the book, however, seems to be the black-and-white illustrations, which are visually appealing and serve as a complement to the narratives.

The Dream Coach may not captivate many modern readers. Yet, for those seeking a calming bedtime experience, there may be some enjoyment within its pages.

Theras and His Town by Caroline Dale Snedeker

Jan10

This fiction book recommended for children grades 5+ begins with the author very obviously teaching her child readers about Ancient Greece and Ancient Greek culture, Athens in particular. We get short sections about how seven year old Theras of Athens goes to school, goes to the marketplace, worships Athena on the Acropolis, etc. Finally, something actually happens, and Theras is in danger. But that episode ends quickly and happily, and we are back to Theras’ daily life: Theras and his mother, Theras and his father, Theras wants to become a soldier, etc.

The book is written in three parts, and the second part is about how Theras goes to live in Sparta, obviously written to contrast life in Athens with life in Sparta. Athens is much better. Theras, and we along with him, get to experience what it’s like to be a Spartan boy. Then in part three we get a travelogue, an exciting journey but a travelogue nonetheless, through Ancient Greece with stops in Orestium, Mantinea, Corinth, the Bay of Salamis, and Eleusis before Theras and his friend Abas finally return to Athens. This third part of the book is actually the best with rather stirring adventures and mishaps and near escapes, but it still feels like a teaching book rather than a storybook.

I can see why this book is recommended in many homeschool curricula. There is a dearth of good historical fiction set in Ancient Greece. And I did enjoy learning about and being reminded of the way of life in the Greek cities of Athens and Sparta around the time of Pericles and Herodotus, who both make an appearance in the book. But to say that this book is a “living book” with excellent writing and living ideas would be a stretch. Educational, yes. Enjoyable, maybe. Life-giving, not really.

There are some ideas that parents may want to discuss with their children who are reading about Theras and Athens and Sparta and the rest. For instance, when Theras and his father visit the temple of Athena, the author tells us that the Athenians believed that Athena frequently visited and blessed her favored city of Athens and its citizens:

“All this Theras believed. But you must not think him foolish for so believing. Athena was his goddess. The wise, grown-up men in Athens believed in her, respected her, and loved her. And often they prayed to Athena so truly and thought her so good and kind that their prayers reached to the true God after all.”

I didn’t care for the pedantic style of the writing in this book, a style that I didn’t find so prominent in the other (later published) books that I have read by the same author. Theras is written for a younger audience than either The White Isle or The Forgotten Daughter, both books by Snedeker that I read and reviewed. I think Ms. Snedeker either improved in her writing skills or was just better at writing for an older audience. Theras and His Town is OK, but just not excellent or very memorable.

Round the Year in Pudding Lane by Sarah Addington

Jan6

A Guest Review from Jeannette Tulis of Green Door Children’s Heritage Library in Soddy Daisy, TN. Round the Year in Pudding Lane by Sarah Addington

This book was so clever, it made me laugh out loud. It’s an especially good book to read aloud if your children know a lot of nursery rhymes because there are so many references to classic Mother Goose rhymes, and they are worked into the story in such a charming fashion.

This is a story of one year in Pudding Lane where Santa Claus, a young boy, lives with his family: Mr. and Mrs. Claus, and the twins, plus a new baby. On Pudding Lane are also the Woman who lived in a Shoe with all her children, Old Mother Hubbard, The Candlestick Maker and, well, you get the idea.

Round the Year in Pudding Lane is a book full of kindness and generosity. Each chapter deals with a different holiday or season of the year. I especially enjoyed the last chapter of Christmas surprises. This book was published 100 years ago (1924), and I read the e-book free on Internet Archive. I had recently read another book by this author, The Boy Who Lived in Pudding Lane, which was about the boyhood of Santa Claus and how he grew up to be the famous personage of Christmas. It is available as a reprint. 

The Christmas Camera by Alta Halverson Seymour

Dec19

Another entry in the Christmas Around the World Series from Purple House Press, The Christmas Camera (originally Erik’s Christmas Camera) is the story of the twelve year old Swedish boy Erik Dahlquist and his cousin Bertil and the reclusive old fisherman Gunnar Eklund. It’s a gentle story, as is the rule with Ms. Halverson Seymour’s fiction. Bertil comes from the big city of Stockholm and is at first a bit haughty and inclined to look down on his country cousins. But all is well in the end. Gunnar Eklund is a somewhat secretive and scary character at first, but it soon becomes apparent that he is also good at heart.

The art of photography and Erik’s interest in it tie the story together much more than the actual plot does. And Erik’s pursuit of excellent and artistic photos gives the author an opportunity to work into the story a number of Swedish customs, celebrations, and folkways that make the book appealing in a different way. The children with their families celebrate Midsummer’s Eve, a bicycle trip, crayfish parties in August, St. Lucia Day, and finally Julafton (Christmas Eve). Anyone who wants to know more about traditional Swedish holidays and pastimes would enjoy reading about Erik and his photographic adventures.

The other books in the Christmas Around the World Series by Alta Halverson Seymour are:

And a few other books that fit a Christmas Around the World theme are:

The Boy Whaleman by George Fox Tucker

Nov8

In searching for children’s books published 100 years ago in 1924, I found a set of three books called The Three Owls, edited by New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore. In these three volumes Ms. Moore collected various thoughts, essays, and booklists, written by herself and others, related to the children’s literature of her day. In the first volume of The Three Owls, a children’s author named Henry Beston (later to become husband to children’s author Elizabeth Coatsworth) reviews The Boy Whaleman, saying, “Of all the accounts of whaling voyages I have read for some time, quite the best is this boy’s book by George F. Tucker. It is the record of a youngster’s one cruise in an old-time whaler, which was rather a decent ship as whalers go.”

Mr. Beston and I are in agreement, not that I have read that many accounts of whaling voyages to compare. The book is more of a travelog than a story, although travel is not quite the word for the experience of a sailor who took ship on a whaler. More appropriate terms come to mind: hard work, danger, adventure, or “stink, grease, and backache” as the description of a whaleman’s work went at the time. The book takes place in the early 1860’s as the boy Homer Bleechly, age fifteen, takes ship from New Bedford, Massachusetts on the whaler, Seabird. He will be eighteen and a man by the time he returns to his home in New Bedford.

“My father, when a young man, went whaling for a single voyage which lasted for more than three years. He was a sailor, or, to use the regular phrase, a foremast hand, and at the end of two years, he became a boat-steerer or a harpooner. When I was a little boy he used to take me on his knee and tell me stories about the life of the whalemen, –of chasing whales and harpooning them, of angry whales smashing boats and chewing them to bits; of towing whales to the ship and cutting them in and trying them out; of losing the ship and remaining all might in the open boats; of encountering great storms and riding them out in safety; of meeting after many months another New Bedford vessel, and getting the latest news from home; and of visiting in the Pacific Ocean islands inhabited by savages.”

All these stories from Homer’s father are a foreshadowing of almost exactly what happens to Homer Bleechly on the Seabird, and Homer narrates his voyage with gusto and with much intelligent detail about the life of a whaleman. Some parents may cringe at the gory descriptions of slippery blood and guts covering the ship’s deck, of plunging a harpoon into the whale’s eye, or of scooping the spermaceti out of the whale’s head cavity. But a young person who is hungry for adventure can take these things in stride just as Homer apparently did. There are also mentions of the South Sea islanders as savages and uncivilized and of cannibalism both in the islands and in sailor stories that Homer and the others tell each other, but these things are not dwelt upon.

The work and culture of a whaling ship are the main focus of the book, and the story is somewhat slight in comparison to the details about the sea, the lore of whales, seamanship, financial matters in regard to whaling, and Homer’s shipmates in forecastle. It’s something of a coming of age story, but again the emphasis is not on Homer himself but rather on the Seabird and its job and the events of the voyage.

Reading this book made me want to read more about so many things: Tahiti, whales, Commodore Perry, whaling and seagoing, Captain Cook and his voyages, the Essex, the Bounty mutiny, Pitcairn Island, whale ships, missionaries to Polynesia and Micronesia, Magellan, the opening of Japan to Western influence, ambergris, and much more. I have a whole list of books to read next, but, alas, not enough time to read them all in addition to my many other reading projects.

Billy Mink by Thornton Burgess

Oct26

Do you think children are traumatized by reading about animals who hunt and kill and eat other animals?If the book is straight nonfiction or even narrative story about a particular animal, I think most children will take the encounters between predator and prey rather matter of factly, as long as the descriptions aren’t too gruesome and bloody. Everybody has to eat, and it’s just true that larger animals often eat smaller ones.

However, in this first book of animal stories that I’ve ever read by Thornton Burgess, the animals behave like animals, but they are also anthropomorphized to some extent. Billy Mink hunts and is hunted by other predators, but he also wears clothing in the illustrations. He lives and acts like a mink, but he also thinks like a person. And he is given a human-like personality with feelings of delight and anger and frustration and satisfaction. Billy is an engaging little fellow, and the reader can’t help rooting for him to escape from the traps that are set for him by a hunter or from Hooty Owl who swoops down and surprises hime, almost catching him.

But the problem with this story, and perhaps Burgess’s books in general if they’re all similar to this one, is that both predator and prey are given names and personalities like Jumper Rabbit and Reddy Fox and Billy Mink. So as I read I wanted Billy Mink to escape his predators, and I wanted him to be able to eat and not starve to death, but I didn’t want him to actually eat Jumper Rabbit. (Spoiler: Jumper escapes, but several of the Robber Rats do not.) I suppose it’s okay for Billy Mink to eat a couple of rats. Nobody really loves rats, do they? But the whole hunter and hunted part of the story could be disturbing for some children.

All that said, Billy Mink is a well told little story. I can picture reading it aloud to a class of kindergartners or first graders. Burgess uses fairly simple sentence structure but somewhat challenging vocabulary to tell an engaging story. I wasn’t bored even though it’s a story for younger children, and I can see this series becoming one that a certain kind of child would fall in love with.

Billy Mink was published 100 years ago in 1924. It’s a good book, but not the kind of book I can imagine being published or popularized in the twenty first century. If you want to read something by Burgess with your children, I’d suggest starting with Mother West Wind’s Children or The Burgess Bird Book for Children, unless you’re particularly interested in minks.

Perfect by Kiri Jorgensen

Sep15

Finding the perfect snowflake could solve the perfect crime.

“Saloma Hammond is not your typical twelve year old. Sal counts her steps between classes, wears a school uniform that isn’t required, and prefers to stay locked inside her tightly controlled OCD world. But when the lure of the perfect snowflake entices her to join the Weather Club, her anti-social shell begins to crack. At the same time, dozens of phones have gone missing, and her classmates are getting suspicious. If Sal can unlock her pattern-driven mind to identify the workings of the real thief, and then set an irresistible trap at the Science Fair, she may just learn how powerful friendship can be.”

This middle grade novel about a girl with OCD who learns to make friends and analyze snowflakes and solve crimes is the first of several middle grade books released by a new small press, Chicken Scratch Books. The mission of Chicken Scratch is “to be a company whose focus is quality literature for kids.” You can read more about that mission here. Suffice it to say, the publisher has made a good start with Kiri Jorgensen’s book, Perfect.

Saloma is a great protagonist, sweet, kind, a rule-follower, and someone who lives inside her own tightly drawn boxes, but thinks outside the boxes of others. It’s fun to read about how she manages to shift and change over the course of a school semester and all because of snowflakes and the Weather Club. The book references lots of meteorological science, and my very nonscientific brain was intrigued. It made me want to go back and reread Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, a biography of the scientist Wilson Bentley who first developed a way to photograph individual snowflakes.

Chicken Scratch Books has only been in existence for about a year, and they have already published several middle grade fiction novels. I’ve only read Perfect, but if it’s an example of the kind of work this publisher is putting out, I’m all in, so to speak. I will be reading more books from this start-up publishing company.

A Bit of Earth by Karina Riazi

Sep11

The Secret Garden, with a bit of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, some neurodiversity, and Middle Eastern/Bengali culture thrown in—for middle grade readers. If that sounds like a strange mix, it is, but it works pretty well. The author is a “diversity advocate and an educator” with an “MFA in writing for children and young adults from Hamline University.” That resume doesn’t exactly appeal to my instincts for choosing a good story, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the book.

There is one basic problem: the main character, Maria (pronounced MAH-ria, not ma-RI-a) is distinctly unsympathetic. Like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, Maria is an orphan with a bad attitude. Unlike Mary Lennox, Maria seems to have been born with, or at least believes she was born with, her grumpy, oppositional defiant personality, and she doesn’t so much change over the course of the story. Instead, Maria just persuades everyone else to accommodate her difficult and rude demeanor. She’s described as “grumpy”, “prickly”, “unpleasant” and many more such adjectives, and her words and actions certainly bear that description out.

And yet . . . I grew to rather like Maria. Maybe I’m a sucker. I’m not sure I could be as loving and forgiving and patient as the adults in the story are if I had a Maria to deal with in real life. But I wanted to be patient with this child who had lost her parents and been wounded by life in many ways. I wanted the secret garden in the story to redeem and renew first Maria, then Colin who is the second grumpy, unlikeable character in the story. And it does . . . to a certain extent.

All that to say, I had mixed feelings about A Bit of Earth. It’s an intriguing retelling of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic story, and Maria did worm her way into my heart despite her angry and sullen appearance (which is not reflected in the cover picture of a beautiful and pleasant-looking Maria). Nevertheless, I did want her to see that she could be more than just a grumpy old Oscar the Grouch, that she could let her guard down and be vulnerable and still survive and even thrive.

If you read A Bit of Earth, let me know what you think about the story and the characters. One mark of a good story is that it gives you ideas to think about. And this middle grade fiction story did indeed make me think.

All Aboard for Freedom! by Marie McSwigan

Aug11

The author of this book, Marie McSwigan, also wrote the popular World War 2 story, Snow Treasure, which is based on a true story of children outwitting the Nazis to rescue the country’s gold reserves. All Aboard for Freedom! is also based on a true story of a group of children outwitting oppressive authorities, this time in Czechoslovakia in 1951. And the oppressors are not Nazis but rather their own countrymen who have bought into the Communist regime aided by the Russians.

Ludmila Novak is foster mother to five children, orphaned by the war. The oldest, age thirteen, is Franta Kristufek. When the Communist authorities threaten to separate the children and their beloved foster mother from each other and send the children to state run institutions, Fran comes up with a plan to keep them all together. However, the plan involves a train, the help of adults, and a very dangerous, time-critical strategy for escape. Who can Fran trust to help him escape Czechoslovakia to freedom in Germany? How can he keep his plan a secret with four other children involved, the youngest only four years old? What if “they” (the Communists) come for the children before they can put their plan into action?

This book, published in 1954, is very 1950’s, very anti-communist and pro-American, and very exciting. The children, especially Fran, are believable but also intrepid and imaginative. The story reminds me of one of Helen MacInnes’ Cold War spy novels, but it’s written for children, not adults. And it pictures characters, a time, and a situation that we in the West are in danger of forgetting—the people of Czechoslovakia who suffered under communist rule and yearned for the freedom we now take for granted. One more plus to this book: Fran stops to pray for God’s guidance and protection several times during the story. And that resort to prayer seems quite believable and wise, too.

All Aboard for Freedom is a book for train lovers, patriots, and adventurers. Pair it with Snow Treasure for a double dose of good reading.