This is my last chance to post before my mom comes home (she is arriving back from Mexico any minute now). Even though this is largely a book/homeschooling blog, I thought I’d change things up a bit by listing the menu I prepared for my little sisters’ tea party yesterday afternoon at four o’ clock. We had:

– chicken salad sandwiches
– cucumber sandwiches with mint butter
– milk and honey bread with honey butter
– jam thumbprint cookies
– raspberry tea

It is a lot of fun to have a tea party with four little girls between the ages of four and seven, all gussied up in their best dresses. Though we didn’t have matching blue china, Frances would have approved.

Okay, I haven’t been doing too well on this guest-blogging thing. I’m impressed that my mom finds something to post about as often as she does.

I’m actually sort of exhausted from book-hunting right now. We’re supposed to be able to find all our library books easily because we have a bin to keep them in, but somehow that doesn’t work for all the books, and I’m still missing two out of 38. And we have a rather large fine at the library at the moment, which means we can’t check out any more books or renew the ones we have, until we pay it. This is especially ironic because my mother used to be a librarian.

My little sister who is fourteen checked out a tall stack of young adult books from the library a couple of weeks ago, and I thought to myself, “Why not see what the state of YA fiction is right now? That might be interesting,” so I took three of the ones she had picked out and read them. Here is what I thought of them:

– Dear Great American Writers School, by Sherry Bunin. I thought this story was really sweet. The heroine, Bobby Lee Pomeroy, lives in a small town during World War Two and has recently decided to become a writer. She sends letters concerning the daily happenings of her life to the Great American Writers School, which responds by sending her demands of payment for its writing lessons. Bobby is remarkably innocent for a fifteen or sixteen year old, which I found refreshing. Otherwise, the novel is fairly predictable; Bobbie tries to befriend various local personalities, falls in and out of love, and is ever hopeful, for “no one can predict the future.” Nothing really bad happens to any of the characters, so it is a nice light read which includes just enough real history to be informative. (It’s mostly just fun.)

– The Pigman, by Paul Zindel. One of my sister’s friends recommended this one to her. Zindel wrote this coming-of-age novel in 1968, when the genre was just coming into being (I mean as a genre – I can think of quite a few novels appropriate for teenagers and written prior to the birth of YA fiction), and compared to the previous book, it is quite a downer. This in itself does not make it a bad book; after all, The Great Gatsby and For Whom the Bell Tolls are wonderful novels even though they are depressing. They are tragic, just as Thomas Hardy’s novels are tragic, and appropriately so. However, this book was sad in a sickening sort of way and did not offer any sort of redemption for its characters. John and Lorraine are high school sophomores whose friendship with an lonely old man turns sour when they unthinkingly take advantage of him. I did not like these characters, even though the story was written from their point of view, with the two protagonists alternating as narrators. The main thing I got out of reading the book was the conviction that I would not have liked to go to an American high school in the 1960’s or any decade since.

– Enthusiasm, by Polly Shulman. This one was published just this year, and the premise made me smile when I read the blurb: Julie has always had to put up with and even join in her friend Ashleigh’s crazes, which range from horseback riding to King Arthur, but the latter’s latest obsession is Julie’s own favorite book, Pride and Prejudice. Donning approximations of eighteenth century fashion, the girls crash a local prep school ball and find a twenty-first century Mr. Darcy – only problem is, both of them fall for him immediately. The novel is witty, clever, and satisfying, even if it is apparent early on how the story will end. Julie is a good role model, without being prudish or too unbelievable.

Of the three, I’d recommend Dear Great American Writers School and Enthusiasm with pretty much no reservations – not great literature, but good reads. The Pigman is probably better written than either one, but its lack of sympathetic characters – besides the unfortunate Mr. Pignati – made it hard for me to stomach.

One last YA novel which I reread recently and which I would rate ahead of any of the choices I’ve just reviewed is The View From Saturday, by E.L. Konigsburg (author of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler). Definitely a classic, this novel tracks the emotional and geographical journeys of four sixth-graders, oddballs each in his or her own way, who go on as a team to win the State Academic Bowl. I’ll let you discover this one for yourself. Let’s just say this is what YA fiction/childrens’ lit should be.

Trollope on Jane Austen:

“Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, — what we generally mean when we speak of romance — she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; — and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop.”

Trollope’s Framley Parsonage reminds me of Jane Austen–or maybe a combination of Jane Austen Pride and Prejudiceand Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, with a decidedly clerical atmosphere. The main characters are parsons and deans and bishops —and their wives and daughters —but the concerns of these ecclesiastical persons are the same concerns that Jane Austen’s characters have: Who is going to marry whom? And how rich is the bride and/or the groom?

Lady X is concerned that her son and heir marry a lady of property and education. Lady Y is worried that, since she is not very pretty nor very young, her many suitors have only one goal: to get their hands on her money. Lady G can’t decide whether to encourage her daughter to marry Lord X or Lord Y.

However, it all turns out well in the end, and some of Trollope’s scenes would “move laughter” in a Baptist preacher. I think some Jane Austen fans who have read all of the Austen canon and are in need of a fix would do well to try Trollope’s Barsetshire novels.