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Giant by Judith McQuoid

Jun10

Published by independent Irish publisher, Little Island, and written by debut author Judith McQuoid, Giant is the the imagined story of a working class boy named Davy and his upper middle class friend, Jacks, in Belfast, c.1908. Jacks Lewis is an imaginative ten year old who lives in a big house with his mother and father and sometimes his brother Warnie, who is away at school for most of the story in our book. Davy lives on the other side of Belfast, near the shipyards, where his father drives a delivery cart. Davy’s little sister Minnie is his only sibling, and his mother works as a maidservant for the Lewises.

You may have already guessed that “Jacks” is the Belfast boy who grew up to become the famous professor and author, C.S. Lewis. Judith McQuoid, who is Irish herself, born in Belfast, wanted to write a story about Lewis’s boyhood and how his growing up years in Belfast might have shaped his later life and writings. In Giant, Jacks Lewis is seen through the eyes of Davy, and he becomes Davy’s mentor and inspiration and most of all friend, even though Jacks is a bit younger, much more wealthy, and less worldly-wise than Davy. Davy shows Jacks something of the real world outside his middle class home, and Jacks inspires Davy to see the magic and wonder that exists in that world despite Davy’s poverty and limited opportunities.

The boys share and communicate through the media of books and storytelling and drawings. There are so many references to Jacks’s favorite books and stories, books that he shares with Davy. But the stories and the everyday magic of nature and art are a contrast to Davy’s dangerous and difficult working life as a heater boy and later a rivet boy, working on the huge ships that were built in the Belfast shipyard, ships like the Olympic and the Titanic.

For Lewis fans who are ready to get a picture of some of the background for Lewis’s Narnia tales, Giant is great read. And for anyone interested in a visit to Northern Ireland, its history and landscape, Giant is a must read. I enjoyed all of it: the history, artfully woven into the story with a light touch, the Lewisian and literary references, and just the story of a boy growing up with grace and courage in difficult circumstances. I’d say it’s appropriate for readers ages nine or ten and up.

I actually met author Judith McQuoid a few years ago in England, and I even read an early draft of her manuscript for Giant. I think she solicited my advice on the story, but I had very little to give. I am a reader, not an author or and editor, but Ms. McQuoid, with this book, shows that she is indeed a first class writer. Her love for all things Irish and Belfastian shines throughout the book. I hope she writes more books. We need more books in the world about C.S. Lewis and about Ireland from people who love them both.

Drovers Road by Joyce West

Jun2

West, Joyce. Drovers Road: Adventures in New Zealand, Book 1. Bethlehem Books, 2019.

I ordered this trilogy of books set on a New Zealand sheep ranch on the strength of a recommendation from Sara at Plumfield Moms. And she did not steer me wrong. The narrator, Gay Allan, tells about her life growing up in rural New Zealand, and the story is a delight. It’s a bit like All Creatures Great and Small with all the animals–sheep and goats and dogs and horses, even bees–but from a child’s perspective.

“I have made up my mind that while I lie here waiting for my sprained ankle to mend, I shall write a book. It will be about ourselves, the Allan family, about Drovers Road and all our adventures here, and then when we are grown up we can read it, and remember how happy we were.”

I think Gay is about twelve years old in this book. She lives with her Uncle Dunsany, the owner of the sheep station, and her orphaned cousins, Hugh, Eve, and Merry, and their Great Aunt Belle, who mothers them all. Drovers Road is a very horsy book, as the children and the grownups ride horses just about wherever they go, and the sheep ranch is also a horse raising concern, And of course, there are dogs, sheep dogs and stray dogs and a special dog named Bugle who saves Gay’s life at one point in the story.

Or perhaps I should say, stories. The chapters in the book are episodic, with stories about a ghost, and a hunt, and an elopement, an old romance, and a new one. There’s even a Christmas story and a running-away-from-home story that nearly ends in disaster. The narrator, Gay, weaves all these stories together as she tells about her own coming to maturity in the context of a loving family in the remote hill country. I think I noted one curse word in the book with several mentions of men cursing without the specifics of words used. Merry, who is Gay’s best friend and partner-in-crime, does get a whipping from the schoolteacher when he brings an army of frogs to the one room schoolhouse where both cousins attend classes.

“The funny part is that when he went home he quite bragged about how hard Susan could hit, and admired her very much for it. He insisted upon showing us all the imaginary marks on his legs. My Uncle Dunsany shouted with laughter when he heard about it, and said that he had not been so pleased for years, and he was going round to call upon this little teacher who had spunk enough to put Merry in his place.”

There’s a lot of laughter and reasons for it, in the book, and I am looking forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy in which Gay grows up to become a young lady and an adult.

A Papa Like Everyone Else by Sydney Taylor

May29

Sydney Taylor, author of the beloved series of All-of-a-Kind Family books, also wrote this story of a Jewish Hungarian family living in a newly constituted Czechoslovakia just after the end of World War I. The family consists of Mama and her two daughters, Szerena, about 12 years old, and Gisella, age 8. (As far as I can find, the book never gives their exact ages.) The family has a papa, too, but he has been absent in America for seven years, most of Gisella’s life. In fact, Gisella doesn’t even remember her papa, and whenever she thinks about him, she mostly feels some mixture of confusion and resentment. Gisella longs to have a “papa like everyone else”, but she does not want to leave her village, the only home she has ever known, and go to America to join a papa she doesn’t really know at all.

The story paints a vivid picture of life in a small Eastern European village. The girls celebrate holidays, Jewish holidays like Passover and Sabbath, and also secular Hungarian holidays like May Day. They herd and pick the feathers from their geese, help Mama spin the flax into linen, raise silkworms, go to school, and help with all of the multitude of tasks to be done on a small family homestead. And all the while they are anticipating their eventual journey to New York City where Papa is living. Mama has had to take care of her girls mostly by herself all through the war and its aftermath, and she and Szerena are looking forward to the time when Papa will have enough money saved for them to join him in America.

This year-in-the-life-of book reminds me a little bit of All-of-a-KInd Family, except for the fact that in this story Papa is absent and the community is a rural village in Hungarian Czechoslovakia. A Papa Like Everyone Else also reminds me of Kate Seredy’s The Good Master and The Singing Tree, set in rural Hungary at about the same time period, during World War I. These books are so wonderfully descriptive of Hungarian and Jewish life during that time. I felt transported to another place and time.

Even though it might be a difficult book for any child who is missing a beloved father, deployed perhaps or just having to travel for work, A Papa Like Everyone Else might also be cathartic for children in that situation. And everyone can enjoy the depiction of farm life and Jewish life with just enough detail about how the family make plum preserves, lechwar, or how they fatten the geese by force feeding them, or how they do all the other tasks that support their meager, but also rich, family and community life.

A few content considerations: A robber comes when the family is away from home and steals almost all of their possessions. This robber is said to be a “gypsy”, and the constable slaps one of the Roma suspects, showing the usual contempt and prejudice that was current at the time for Roma people. One of GIsella’s cousins is whipped by the schoolteacher for the cousin’s lack of preparation for his lessons. And a neighbor shoots the fox that has come to steal the chickens and geese in the barn.

All’s well that ends well as Gisella and Szerena and Mama do leave the village and go to join Papa in America. The ending, in case you’re a reader of endings, is:

“As Papa caught them both in his strong arms, the girls buried their faces against his dark jacket, too overwhelmed to speak. Gisella thought, Szerena and I aren’t orphans with only a Mama to love, anymore. We’re a real family now–a family with a mama and a papa.

Papa knelt down and tipped Gisella’s chin up.

“Papa!” she whispered in shy happiness. “Oh, Papa!”

A Papa Like Everyone Else would be a perfect read aloud book for Father’s Day (or really anytime). Maybe it would give us all a renewed appreciation for our own fathers.

The Bicycle Man by Allen Say

May3

Say, Allen. The Bicycle Man. Parnassus Press, 1982.

Allen Say is a Japanese-American author, born in Yokohama, Japan. Say came to the U.S. just after WWII with his father. His father enrolled him in a military school in California, and Say hated the school and the United States. He was expelled from military school after a year, enabling him to explore California on his own. He began to write and illustrate children’s books while doing advertising photography for a living.

I suppose that even after having been expelled from military school, Mr. Say still had some respect for the American military and its soldiers and an appreciation for his adopted country and its new relationship with Japan and the Japanese. His book The Bicycle Man is set in Japan immediately after World War II. In the story, two American soldiers visit a Japanese schoolyard on “sportsday” and show the children tricks on a bicycle. Actually, while one of the two soldiers is a red-headed white guy, the one who does the bicycle tricks is a black soldier. It’s a story of international and even interracial healing and understanding after World War II, an event that tore the world apart in many ways and places.

The school in The Bicycle Man looks a lot like the school that Allen Say describes from his childhood.

“When I was a small boy I went to a school in the south island of Japan. The schoolhouse stood halfway up a tall green mountain. It was made of wood and the wood was gray with age. When a strong wind blew, the trees made the sound of waves and the building creaked like an old sailing ship. From the playground, we could see the town, the ships in the harbor, the shining sea.”

Allen Say wrote this autobiographical story from his memory of that school and of a special sports day in which the American occupiers and the children and educators of a small Japanese school came together to enjoy an innocent performance of bicycle tricks. And Say’s illustrations take the reader back to that time and place and show off the budding friendship that began to take place between the U.S. and Japan despite the terrible memories of war and destruction.

Say also won a Caldecott Award for his book Grandfather’s Journey about his own grandfather’s immigration to the United States.

Valley of Dragons by Christina Baehr

Apr24

The series, The Secrets of Ormdale by Christina Baehr:

  • Wormwood Abbey, Book #1
  • Drake Hall, Book #2
  • Castle of the Winds, Book #3
  • City of Serpents, Book #4
  • Valley of Dragons, Book #5

I already reviewed the first book in this series, and now that I’ve finished all five books in The Secrets of Ormdale saga, I’m going to give you my thoughts on the entire series, rather than review each book individually. My immediate reaction is: excellent fantasy and romance fiction! Set in Victorian London and Yorkshire, these books are appropriately Victorian, with a nod to “new ideas” (at the time) such as women’s suffrage and equality of the sexes and classes. Each book tells a separate contained story, and yet each one leads on to the next. The themes and characters are obviously influenced by Christian and Charlotte Mason ideas and principles, but with a light touch, not at all didactic. There is some exploration of the status and plight of Jewish people in England during the time period when many Ashkenazi Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe to come to British shores. And the central character and narrator, Edith Worms, is a part of a delightful and deeply Christian family who live their commitment to Christ and his teachings rather than grounding their Christianity in Victorian cultural morality.

So, that’s the overview. As for Book #5 in the series, Valley of Dragons, it is much longer than the other four books in the series, clocking in at 499 pages. But the author needed all of those pages to finish her story. As the story commences in Book #5, there are yet many secrets to be revealed, prisoners to be released, enemies to be defeated, and dragons to be tamed.

About those dragons, these stories do feature reptiles, many kinds of serpents, salamanders, cockatrices, basilisks, sea monsters, wyverns, and lizards–even a Quetzalcoatl–all collectively termed as dragons in this alternate world. Indeed, Britain harbors at least four families of dragon keepers who have kept their many species of dragons safe and secret for centuries.

Some literary experts insist that dragons and serpents must always only be shown in literature as “bad guys”, archetypal monsters and symbols of satanic influence, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Anyone who writes about a “good dragon” or a dragon ally or pet is inverting the symbols and distorting the fundamental meaning of the literary tradition, and maybe even Scripture itself. However, Edith Worms and her father, a clergyman, and I beg to differ:

“‘You said once that the church had been a comfort to you when you were young, Father, because it mentioned dragons. But aren’t they always a symbol of evil in the scriptures?’

‘A symbol, yes. To say evil is like a dragon is to say evil is deadly and long-lived. . . . But not all of the dragons in the scriptures are evil. What of Job’s leviathan? You will not find a passage more full of wonder than that. Everything was good when it was created. . . .’

‘When I look at the dragons, I see something beautiful–something worth protecting,” I said. . . . “But the people of Dale, they see something fearful. Something only an archangel can save them from.’

‘God made both people and dragons, my dear. What we must find is a way for us to live together peacefully–as He intended. . . ,’ Father said encouragingly.”

Dragons can certainly signify evil and danger and monstrosity with in the literary tradition, but they can also simply stand for power and peril and wonder within that same tradition. Stories are not bound by such petty rules of literary nitpicking. Nor is Scripture. The serpent on a pole that Mose was instructed to elevate before the Israelites in the wilderness was a symbol and vehicle of healing (Numbers 21:4-9). The dragons in The Secrets of Ormdale are certainly dangerous, like lions and tigers are dangerous, but they are subject to men (and women) to whom God gave the job of tending His creation, including all kinds of reptiles, even dragons.

Dragons aside for the moment, these books are all about secrets, especially family secrets, and how they can destroy relationships and even block love itself. The books do involve romance as Edith learns to “open her heart” and accept the pain and loss that loving someone can entail. The romantic scenes themselves are completely chaste, with only a few kisses described, but there are allusions to the perversion of sexual attraction as one character recalls being sexually assaulted and another is kidnapped and almost forced into an unwilling marriage.

I thought these books with their emphasis on freedom and openness and the free choices of responsible men and women to care for each other in mutual, self-sacrificial and loving relationship were a perfect antidote to the typical Gothic romance with its brooding atmosphere of secrets and seduction. In The Secrets of Ormdale, all secrets are eventually brought out into the open, and the happily-ever-after is built on a firm foundation of mutual respect and truth.

The entire series, The Secrets of Ormdale, is available for check out from Meriadoc Homeschool Library for adults and young adult who are prepared for romantic themes, practical young heroines, and of course, beautiful and perilous dragons.

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower

Apr18

Brower, Beth. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volumes 1-4. Rysdon Press, 2019-2021.

I saw these books recommended here and there on the internet, and the synopses and reviews sounded interesting, so I decided to try the first volume of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion. (I assume that “unselected” means “unedited”.) Miss Lion’s journal in its first volume was a brief read, only 107 pages, but it was indeed enticing enough to make me immediately order a copy of Volume 2. Which led to Volumes 3 and 4, and I am hooked.

In Volume 1 we meet Miss Emma M. Lion as she arrives at Lapis Lazuli House in the neighborhood of St. Crispian’s, London on March 5, 1883. Miss Lion’s journal entries are filled with intriguing and mysterious references to various incidents and persons such as “The Great Burning of 1882” and “The Incident which led to The Scar” and “the monkey’s head Maxwell sent me” and “the Roman centurion (ghost) at Jacob’s Well” and more. Some of these are explained as one reads on; others are left to the imagination and most probably to later volumes. This first volume of the journals really just introduces Emma Lion and a cast of characters who include a nefarious uncle, a formidable aunt, a few friends and cousins, and various inhabitants of the slightly magical, eccentric neighborhood of St. Crispian’s.

In Volume 2, Emma, determined to remain in her home, Lapis Lazuli House, despite financial and social difficulties, begins to enter into multiple adventures and schemes and to add a bit a romance to her life. Even though Emma is not particularly interested in romantic entanglements or marriage, and even though she is not particularly eligible, having little or no money, she does have an awful lot of young men in her orbit: the photographer to whom she rents a room, her childhood nemesis turned into a handsome bachelor, the duke who lives in the neighborhood, a poetic and somewhat eccentric Church of England curate, and a charming scoundrel named Jack, to name a few. Emma navigates all of these with grace and wit, while also doing the bidding of her autocratic Aunt Eugenia, somewhat reluctantly, and managing at least a stand off with her arch-enemy Cousin Archibald.

At this point and into volumes 3 and 4, the story begins to remind one of a TV series (like Downton Abbey or All Creatures Great and Small) with lots of characters, some lovely dialog, little stories embedded into a larger story, and hints and revelations that pique the curiosity and keep one coming back for more. So far the romance is chaste and Victorian, and the language is tame, although there are a very few instances in which characters use God’s name in vain, which I wish were not present. Since I’ve only read Volumes 1-4 so far, I can’t guarantee that Emma remains a paragon of virtue, by twenty-first century standards. By Victorian standards, she’s already lost paragon status by the end of Volume 2. However, her adventures are not really shocking for anyone who is not Aunt Eugenia or of her ilk, and Emma is a church-going, Scripture reading, young lady in all I have read so far.

I love these books, and I foresee spending a great deal of time reading Emma’s journals. Author Beth Brower has promised:  “the plan is to write four years of Emma’s life, give or take. And as every volume covers two months of Emma’s life, that is, indeed, six volumes each year.” So, twenty-four or more volumes. (Volume 2 and succeeding volumes are much longer than Volume 1; 191 pages for Volume 4.) At about $12.00 apiece in paperback, I also foresee spending a great deal of money collecting all of Miss Lion’s journals. If you read books in ebook form, you will have a much less expensive journey, should you decide to read your way through the Unselected Journals. If you can get them from the library, even better; however Rysdon Press seems to be Ms. Brower’s personal imprint, and many libraries do not purchase self-published books as a matter of policy. (Oh, I think Kindle Unlimited may have them for free.)

Still, here I go to order Volumes 5 and 6. At least, you will be able to check out Volumes 1-6 from Meriadoc Homeschool Library in the future. As I said, I am hooked.

A Walk in the Rain by Ursel Scheffler

Apr10

Scheffler, Ursel. A Walk in the Rain. Illustrated by Ulises Wendell. Translated by Andrea Mernan. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986. A Picture Book Preschool book.

I don’t know how I discovered this under appreciated and mostly unknown German picture book, but I know I loved it at first sight, more than thirty years ago. Published in German in 1984, this one is simple, but it stands the test of time for me. It’s out of print, but at present multiple copies are available online, used for less than $10.00.

“Josh loved visiting his grandparents, especially on rainy days. Because Josh’s grandmother loved to walk in the rain.”

So begins our story. Josh appears to be four or five years old, and his grandmother is grey-haired but healthy enough to walk on logs and pretend to be a tightrope walker with Josh walking ahead. The narrative simply details the various things that Josh and his grandmother see and do as they walk in the (gentle) rain: a ladybug, birds sheltering from the rain, leaves collected near a drain in the street, the logs in the forest, mushrooms sprouting.

Josh’s grandmother answers his questions, feeding him a little bit of information about rain and its effects, in answer to his questions. “[T]he birds’ feathers are covered with oil, which helps keep them dry in the rain just like a raincoat.” Mushrooms “sprout everywhere when it rains.” But mostly Grandmother just lets Josh explore the rainy day and the various wonders that the two of them find on their walk.

Before the walk Josh’s grandparents give him a yellow raincoat and rain boots, and afterward the nature explorers dry off, and Grandfather reads a story to Josh as they look out the window at the rain. The illustrations are just as simple and delightful–and rainy–as the story. Artist Ulises Wendell used soft colors, mostly blues and greens and yellow, for the raincoats, and brown for the trees and the dog. Wendell, now deceased, was a prolific illustrator of more than fifty picture books and other children’s books in Europe, mostly published in Spain or Germany.

I like to walk in the rain myself, and I must like the theme of a walk with grandparents because two other books in Picture Book Preschool have this basic plot. In Rain by Sam Usher, a boy goes out to mail a letter with his grandfather after the rainstorm is over. In Gramma’s Walk by Anna Grossnickle Hines, Donnie and Gramma, who is in a wheelchair, take an imagined walk to the seashore and smell the salty breeze, walk barefoot on the warm sand, observe animals, and build a sand castle. Those are both lovely books, but A Walk in the Rain complements the other two rather than replacing them. Read Mr. Scheffler’s simple story specifically before a walk IN the rain, and then take that walk and see what you and your young child or grandchild discover on a rainy day nature walk.

You can check out a copy of A Walk in the Rain from Meriadoc Homeschool Library

Scotland’s Story by H.E. Marshall

Mar27

Marshall, H.E. Scotland’s Story. Illustrated by J. R. Skelton, John Hassall, and J. Shaw Crompton. Living Book Press, 2020. Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1906-7 and in the United States in 1910.

I would love to visit Scotland! I’ve been to England (London and Oxford) and to Ireland for a brief visit, and I’d love to go back to either or both of those countries for more. However, my more immediate travel goal is Scotland. Reading Scotland’s Story by H.E. Marshall only intensified my desire to go to the land of Burns and Bruce and heather on the hills.

I’ve been an Anglophile for most of my life, and I’ve read a lot of British history and historical fiction. I read and enjoyed Thomas Costain’s four volumes about the history of the Plantagenets and England. So good! I thought that in all that reading about kings and queens and commoners in England that I knew a fair amount about Scottish history, too. After all, weren’t the two, Scotland and England, unified as one nation after that regrettable incident concerning the death of Mary, Queen of Scots?

However, for hundreds of years Scotland and England were emphatically not unified, and the two countries were at war or near-war more frequently than not. Scotland’s Story is a collection of legends and true stories from history, written by the author of Our Island Story, as a supplement to that book, focusing on the stories and history of Scotland and the Scots people. The book begins in the ancient mists of once upon a time with “The Story of Prince Gathelus” and continues through ninety chapters of Saint Columba and Macbeth, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and various other kings and battles and lords and ladies all the way down to George III and Sir Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century.

I read this book over the course of about three months (January-March), one or more chapters or stories per day. Each chapter is about two or three pages long, the perfect length for morning time read aloud and for narration, and I found the stories so absorbing that I couldn’t always limit myself to one a day. Sometimes I just had to know what happened next. During my reading, I found out about many episodes and people that I knew very little or nothing about before: the Picts, the alliance between France and Scotland, the full stories of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, James I the Poet King and all the Jameses, the covenanters, Flodden Field, Killiecrankie, and Glencoe. I already knew about Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie and their unfortunate histories, but even about those two and others, I was reminded of stories I had forgotten and I learned new details and stories that I hadn’t read about before.

The book was written by Ms. Marshall for children to introduce them to the tales of Scotland’s history. And it turns out that Ms. Marshall had a special affinity for her subject in this particular book: she was actually a Scot herself and an ardent admirer of that most famous Scottish novelist, Sir Walter Scott! The history of Scotland, especially in pre-modern times, is rather violent and bloody, but Marshall glosses over the actual gore. Any child who is ready to read about actual battles and political intrigues and deaths of traitors and patriots is ready for this book. And anyone who is a Scotophile (just found that word) or interested in visiting Scotland someday should read Scotland’s Story first. You can check out a copy of Scotland’s Story from Meriadoc Homeschool Library, or you can purchase a copy of the book from Living Book Press.

(So, now I want to read A History of France or A History of Germany, both by Marshall also. Or maybe I’ll just read the entire Our Island Story, a book I’ve only dipped into but never read from cover to cover.)

Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown

Mar25

Brown, Daniel James. Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II. Viking, 2021.

Daniel James Brown, author of The Boys in the Boat, has another (2021) book out, Facing the Mountain. Despite my wholehearted support for the idea of “never forget”, I have to admit that I am somewhat jaded and tired of reading about the World War 2 Holocaust, and the Japanese internment camps in the U.S., and really, World War 2 in general. The stories are important and even relevant to our own time, but they are starting to sound like old news.

Nevertheless, this one deserves a place in your reading line-up or stack or To-Be-Read list, wherever you keep those titles that you are planning to read soon. The book covers the internment of Japanese American citizens and legal residents, but the emphasis is on the service of the young men, Nisei–second generation Americans of Japanese descent–“who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible in often suicidal missions.”

Definitely not old news for me. I learned a lot. The story of these men is a lesson in courage and fortitude and persistence that went way beyond my small store of those virtues. There are even a couple of stories that feature peace-making in the midst of war.

One example, many of the soldiers of the 442nd were Hawaiian-born Japanese Americans; others were from the mainland, mostly the west coast. The two groups may have looked similar with the same ancestry, but their cultural heritage and general attitudes were not the same. The Hawaiians, who were called “Buddhaheads” by the mainlanders, were much too easy-going and rule-breaking for the “Kotonks” (nickname given the mainland Japanese Americans). And the Kotonks were too serious and legalistic, having come mostly from the internment camps, as far as the Buddhaheads were concerned. This difference in outlook led to arguments, even fights, while the guys of the 442nd were in training, and it took some time and some hard knocks for the 442nd to become a cohesive fighting unit.

Then, also, the author Brown tells the story of Gordon Hirabayashi who fought his own battle in prisons across the Southwestern United States as a conscientious objector and resistor not only to the war but also to the restrictions that were being placed on Japanese Americans as a result of their ethnicity. And the Japanese American chaplains who served the 442nd are also featured with quotations from letters that these men sent home.

Daniel James interviewed several of the men of the 442nd, “by most reckonings, . . . the most decorated military unit of its size and length of service in American history.” He also talked to their families and descendants and read and shared their letters and notes and memories. The result is a well-written narrative history of the wartime service of several Nisei soldiers as examples of the entire combat team. And readers get a picture of the chronology of all of the battles and assaults and rescues performed by the 442nd, including the rescue of the “Lost Battalion”, a group of mostly Texan soldiers who in late 1944 in Germany were sent into a trap and only saved at the expense of many lives by the 442nd Nisei.

If you’re a World War II buff, you must read this book. If you’re not particularly interested in WWII, but you do like inspiring stories of courage, like Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat, you should also pick up a copy of Facing the Mountain. Finally, if you have a relationship with anyone of Japanese heritage or if you are a Japanese American yourself, this book is a must read. I’m not Japanese at all, but it made me proud to be an American, even though our record as a country in regard to how we have treated people of color is mixed to say the least. Still, the stories of people overcoming obstacles of racial prejudice and mistreatment, and even becoming heroes, belong to us all.

The O’Donnells by Peggy Sullivan

Mar11

I knew this book reminded me of the beloved All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor when I first opened it up. And sure enough, this story does for Irish Catholic families what Ms. Taylor’s books did for Jewish families —and for those who are interested in seeing how families of all different faiths live and grow and work together over the course of a year.

The O’Donnell family consists of Papa, an Irish American police sergeant, Mama, a homemaker and former maid, and five girls: Grace, Ella, Margaret, Rose, and Cis. They live in Kansas City in a small two-story house not far from Saint Aloysius (Catholic) School where the girls attend school. The story begins in the spring and relates the family’s fortunes until Easter Sunday of the following year.

The adventures chronicled in the story are mostly simple, but sometimes dramatic, too. Ella, age eleven, is Papa’s best helper who learns how to lay bricks for a sidewalk and drive a horse and buggy from Papa as well as how to cook and do housework with Mama. Margaret, age twelve is the quieter, more thoughtful, sister, and she and Ella are in the same class at school and are best friends. “Ella liked doing things much more when Margaret was there to share them.”

Sensitive readers will want to know that a neighbor’s dog dies suddenly and tragically near the beginning of the story, and a friend of the family is shot and killed near the end of the book. And one chapter in the book tells about how one of the sisters gets typhoid and comes near death, but recovers. None of these events felt too traumatic for children to read about and take in, but your mileage may vary.

I loved the way work and worship and holidays and feast days were all woven into the story and into the rhythm of the O’Donnell family’s lives. Neighbors and friends and relatives are all a part of the story, too, demonstrating how life was lived in community back in the “good old days” of the early twentieth century–even in the city.

So, yes, this book came from Follett Publishing, published in 1956, in the wake of the success of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family series. And the illustrations are by the same illustrator, Mary Stevens, who did the All-of-a-Kind Family books. Unfortunately, this book about the O’Donnells is the only one Ms. Sullivan published, and it was formerly out of print. Fortunately, a new print edition is now available from Bethlehem Books. So, you can purchase a brand-spanking new copy from Bethlehem, or you can check out an ugly-on-the-outside, but beautiful on the inside, copy from Meriadoc Homeschool Library. I recommend it for your reading pleasure.