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Incident at Hawk’s Hill by Allan W. Eckert

Jan14

Benjamin MacDonald is the six year old younger son of William and Esther MacDonald. The year is 1870, and the place is somewhere to the north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. In this prairie land the MacDonald family own a farm, and Ben, a child who in today’s parlance would certainly be called “neurodivergent”, has lived his life so far on that farm, exploring those prairie lands. In 1870, folks just say that Ben is “dreadful queer,” “some sort of monster or throwback, an animal-boy.” Ben seldom speaks to people even in his own family, and he has a strange attraction to and affinity for all sorts of animals–farm animals, wildlife, even birds and insects. He spends most of his days following, observing, and mimicking the creatures he finds on the farm and out on the prairie. And the animals seem to respond to Ben and accept his overtures of friendship, even kinship.

So, this Newbery Honor book from 1972 is a nature story with lots of close description of wild creatures and how they live. Although the Newbery Award and Newbery Honor are intended to be awards for children’s literature, Incident at Hawk’s Hill was originally published as an adult novel. Many older children would still appreciate the book. However, sensitive readers should be warned that the Nature pictured is indeed “red in tooth and claw.” Eckert doesn’t shy away from describing–in detail– predators hunting and eating their prey, animals fighting and and defending their young, and eventually the deaths of some of those predators at the hands of men.

The author prefaces his story with this note, “The story which follows is a slightly fictionalized version of an incident which actually occurred at the time and place noted.” An historical magazine, Manitoba Pageant, in 1960 published an article entitled “The Boy Who Lived in a Badger Hole”. The article tells about an 1873 reported incident of a lost boy, found after ten days living in a badger hole. Eckert may have based his Ben’s story on this magazine report. In the book, one day in June, Ben becomes lost on the prairie, and the story becomes a tale of his survival. It’s a somewhat grisly and nearly unbelievable survival story as a wild badger befriends Ben and shares its den and its food with him, and ultimately Ben almost forgets his humanity as he becomes absorbed in badger life.

The ending is a bit disturbing, too, with a fight between two men, almost to the death. If violent death and threats of death, for both animals and people, are too much for you or your child reader, this book is not for you.

Nonetheless, I found this 1972 Newbery Honor book to be fascinating thought-provoking, and quite well written. The language is descriptive and evocative of a prairie world, almost a fantasy world. In fact, at one point in the story, the storyteller writes about Ben’s getting lost, “It was certainly well past midafternoon now but still nothing looked at all familiar to him and he had the momentary panicky feeling that somehow, like the little girl in the story his mother had read to him, he had stepped into another world.” (Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865?)

The cover blurb calls Incident at Hawk’s Hill “a poignant story of human courage and change, a simple fable rich with wonder.” I’m not so sure about the “fable” part, but the story is rich with wonder. Several characters call Ben’s survival a miracle and attribute it to God’s intervention. I like the way the story points, without preaching, toward tolerance and understanding for people whose engagement with the world does not fit inside the “normal” template. Those readers with an interest in nature, wildlife, and natural history will also find the descriptions of the habits and ways of various animals in the story to be quite engaging and informative.

Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery

Sep2

Rilla of Ingleside is L.M. Montgomery’s eighth and final book about Anne Shirley Blythe (Anne of Green Gables) and her family. Rilla is Anne’s youngest daughter, named for Marilla of Green Gables, but affectionately called Rilla, or sometimes Rilla-my-Rilla. The time setting is 1914, just at the beginning of World War I, which makes this book a perfect read for teens who are interested in that time period or in finishing out the story of Anne and her family.

As the book begins Rilla is fourteen years old, and according to her mother, “her sole aspiration seems to be to have a good time.” Over the course of the book and of the war, Rilla grows to become a woman of courage and perseverance as she accepts responsibilities far beyond her years. News about the war is interspersed throughout the story, but that news is digested by the family at Ingleside and by their friends and neighbors as it applies to their own lives and to the men they have sent off to war.

I would call Rilla of Ingleside a gentle romance story and also a coming of age story. Rilla herself is a fine character, and her growth into womanhood provides a model for young adults, teen girls in particular, to think about and perhaps even emulate in some aspects. Susan, the Blythes’ cook and housekeeper is something of a counterweight to the seriousness of the wartime novel with her wry humor and optimistic attitude that persists throughout the book.

Rilla’s romantic interest, Kenneth, is a rather vague character, not too well fleshed out, just as the war itself is rather vague and far away over in Europe, even though the war news is almost a central character in the story. Nevertheless, the man that Kenneth becomes will have a lasting influence in Rilla’s life just as the events and tragedies of a war far across the ocean will change the lives of all those who live at Ingleside.

Rilla of Ingleside is much more of a serious novel than Anne of Green Gables or any its other sequels. Rilla gets into “scrapes” and there are various humorous incidents and characters, but the war and its battles and casualties hang over the lives of the family at Ingleside like a dark cloud. It’s an old-fashioned young adult novel, nothing gory or ugly, and even the description of the death of one of the characters in battle is more tragic and sad than it is bloody and violent.

Rilla of Ingleside is recommended for Anne Shirley fans and for anyone looking for a tender but unshrinking introduction to the difficulties and sacrifices required of a young girl who is living through a major war while growing up and becoming a mature adult. Warning: this story may evoke both tears and admiration.

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber

Nov4

I read this memoir conversion story on my Kindle back in 2011 when it first was published. I said then that I enjoyed the story, but it left me feeling . . . incomplete and sort of lacking in understanding. I don’t think I read well on an e-reader, and that may be why I was ambivalent about Surprised By Oxford when I read it back in the day. So, when I heard about the movie that recently came out, based on the book, I thought I’d watch that.

It was a good movie, not great, but solidly good. Now I had to re-read the book that I really didn’t remember much about, since I read it over ten years ago, and since I have a leaky brain. I didn’t review the book back in 2011 when I read it the first time, which is another reason I couldn’t remember much more than a vague impression of possible dissatisfaction or maybe appreciation from my first read through.

The story is deceptively simple: Agnostic Canadian feminist gets a scholarship to Oxford. She is dazzled by the Oxford experience, meets a group of “serious Christians” (and others who are not Christian at all), and eventually becomes a Christian herself. The hook is that Ms. Weber tells the story of her Oxford education and conversion to Christianity with a great deal of poetic language, wordplay, puns, Brit-speak, simile, metaphor, and philosophical thought processes. It’s not always easy to follow Caro, as she is called in the story, as she winds her way through Oxford and through literature to get to Jesus.

The influences in Caro Weber’s conversion are many and varied. There is surprisingly much less C.S. Lewis in the book than I thought there would be. Caro does attend a meeting of the C.S. Lewis Society at one point in the story, but the speaker there talks about joy and prayer rather than about Lewis specifically. Lewis sometimes enters the discussions, but not that often. Her influences seem to be more tilted toward the Romantic poets that she is studying, as well as John Milton, George Herbert, William Blake, and the other students and professors who engage with her in many conversations over the course of a year at Oxford. These conversations, sometimes adversarial, sometimes encouraging, make up most of the book, and they are indeed both surprising and challenging.

There’s also a lot of Caro’s family history in the book. The author has, or had, “daddy issues”, rightly so since her father sounds like a very broken and abusive man. (As far as I can tell, she has since reconciled with her father, who has shown some signs of repentance and change.) Of course the father issues translate to God issues, and a large part of her conversion is due to her coming to understand that God is not like her father.

The book is better than the movie, but also harder to digest. Caro sees metaphors and signs everywhere and in everything, and sometimes the language she uses to describe her thought processes is obscure and difficult to follow, at least to me. If you are more well read than I am, you may understand more clearly. I did enjoy the book more this second time than I did the first time, and I do recommend it to Anglophiles and seekers and lovers of poetry who want to read a Romantic (in the literary sense) memoir.

I would like to read Carolyn Weber’s second book, Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present. And maybe her most recent one, Sex and the City of God: A Memoir of Love and Longing?

This book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

The Letter on the Tree by Natalie Savage Carlson

Jul31

Carlson, Natalie. The Letter on the Tree. Illustrated by John Kaufmann. Harper & Row, 1964. Read for The 1964 Project.

“Albert Caron is really my name but everybody calls me Bébert . . . . ‘It rhymes with gray bear,’ I taught them. Then they liked to say, ‘Hey, there, Bébert, the gray bear.'”

Bébert is a ten year old French Canadian boy who lives with his family on a small dairy farm in Quebec. The family is poor, and although Bébert longs for an accordion like the one he has heard played on the family’s radio, his Papa says that they are too poor to buy one from Pére Noel (Father Christmas). Mamie says that it is God’s will that they are so poor, but perhaps if they work hard, it won’t always be God’s will to keep them in poverty. Bébert tries to think of ways to make the cows that they have give more milk or ways for Papa to earn more money, but none of his ideas work out—until the day that Bébert goes with his Papa to cut Christmas trees to sell. Bébert gets the wonderful idea of writing a letter to whoever gets one of the trees, asking for an accordion for the poor little French boy in Canada whose family is too poor to provide a Christmas gift. Of course, the poor little French boy is Bébert himself.

So, the rest of the story is a lesson, clothed in story, about contentment and hard work and creative problem solving and honesty, but it’s not a preachy or didactic lesson. The book also gives readers a glimpse into a year in the life of a French Canadian farm boy of the mid-twentieth century, with church holy days to celebrate, friends to play with, and always, every day, twice a day, the cows to milk. Bébert is a stolid little boy with ideas that carry him into difficulties sometimes, but also other ideas that truly are a help and support to his family. Bébert learns gratitude for what he has and not to make snap judgements about people over the course of the year, and in the end Bébert has made new friends and grown to love the life that he has instead of longing for what he does not.

The Letter on the Tree is only 116 pages long, and the reading level is about third grade. Boys and girls will enjoy the story of Bébert and his life on the dairy farm, and the book would make a good read aloud bedtime story any time of the year, but maybe especially around Christmas or birthday time when it is easy for children (and adults) to become discontented and greedy and anxious about the gifts that are given and received.

Natalie Savage Carlson wrote several books set in Canada, among the French Canadian people, perhaps because although she was American, born in Virginia, she was of French Canadian descent. Her first published book was The Talking Cat and other stories of French Canada, a collection of folk tales and family stories. She also wrote Jean-Claude’s Island, about a French Canadian boy, living on a small island in the St. Lawrence River, and Chalou, the adventures of a lost farm dog in French Canada. Some of Ms. Carlson’s other stories are set in France, including the Newbery Honor winning book, The Family Under the Bridge and the series about a group of French orphans, The Orphelines.

This book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

The Voyages of Henry Hudson by Eugene Rachlis

Aug16

The Voyages of Henry Hudson, World Landmark #54, is all about the quest “to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China.” The first attempts to find a way to Asia via the North Pole were not directed at finding the Northwest Passage but rather a number of dangerous and ultimately fruitless journeys north up the coast of Greenland and then east to find a way north of Norway and Russia to get to China and Japan. Hudson’s first two voyages were unsuccessful as he was following this route.

But Henry Hudson, encouraged by the stories of his friend Captain John Smith, thought that the passage to the East lay to the west in the New World. So in his third and fourth voyages, Hudson wanted to go west, but most people still thought that he should try going east again—or that the whole idea of a passage to the to Asia in the northern seas was hopeless. And so it was. The fourth and last voyage was a total failure: the ship was trapped in the ice, food ran low, the crew mutinied, and Hudson was abandoned in the ship’s boat in icy waters never to be heard from again.

So why is Hudson remembered, and why are a major river and and a bay named for him? Well, he didn’t discover the Northwest Passage because there is no Northwest Passage, but he did pave the way for Europeans, Dutch, French, Swedish, and English, to map the New World and to begin to settle it and eventually build two nations, Canada and the United States.

Henry Hudson was one of the earliest ship’s captains to keep a meticulous ship’s log. There’s a note on sources in the back of this Landmark book, and author Eugene Rachlis tells readers:

“All the known documents pertaining to Hudson are available. Some are scarce and can be found only in the reference rooms of major libraries. Others, or at least parts of them, are more readily obtainable. Those in Dutch and Latin have been translated into English. The Hudson documents are the major sources for the facts in this book, along with a dozen or so other books which provided material on the items in which Hudson lived, the places he visited and the people he saw.”

For those who are studying Canada and Canadian history, this book, along with World Landmark #8, Royal Canadian Mounted Police by Richard Neuberger and #24 The Hudson’s Bay Company by Richard Morenus would provide a good introduction to the Canadian story. Other Landmarks that impinge upon Canadian history are Evangeline and the Acadians by Robert Tallant, Rogers’ Rangers and the French and Indian War by Bradford Smith, General Brock and Niagara Falls by Samuel Hopkins Adams, and The Alaska Gold Rush by May McNeer.

The Hudson’s Bay Company by Richard Morenus

Aug14

This Landmark history book is really about the French voyageurs and the men of the Hudson’s Bay Company: Pierre Radisson, Medart Chouart des Groseilliers, Le Moyne d’Iberville, Henry Kelsey, Alexander MacKenzie, James Knight, Louis Riel.. And it’s about the fur trade and the ongoing centuries-long dispute between the French, the British, and the Native Americans over who would control that fur trade and reap the riches to be gained from it.

The focus of the book is Canadian history, although events do dip down south of the Canadian American border from time to time. This spotlight on Canada only makes sense since The Hudson’s Boy Company is World Landmark #24, not American. The story features a lot of fightin’ and cheatin’ and thievin’ between 1649 when the book opens and the first half of the twentieth century when it ends. Mr. Morenus chronicles all the ups and downs of the the fur trade and the men who were engaged in it, and he uses language that was appropriate for 1956 when the book was published but may sound jarring to twenty-first century ears (words such as Indian, half-breed, Eskimo, savages).

No one, except for the Royal Canadian Mounties who “brought law to the West and kept it”, is a complete hero in this story. The voyageurs are hardworking, brave, skilled, thieves, poachers, and cutthroats. The Native Americans (in Canada nowadays the correct term is First Nations peoples) are cunning, sometimes friendly, sometimes violent, victimized and drugged with alcohol by the white men. The British and French military and governing authorities are mostly greedy, power hungry, and willing to do almost anything to maintain control of the fur trade. Maybe the fifth Earl of Selkirk who brought a large number of Scots to colonize various parts of Canada, could be considered a “good guy”, but he didn’t have a happy ending. And Alexander MacKenzie seems to have been an intrepid explorer. But the rest of these guys are not anyone you would want to meet in a dark alley.

Anyway, the Hudson’s Bay Company ruled a great portion of Canada for many years. In fact, Hudson’s Bay Company was thought by some to be more powerful and certainly richer than the British government of Canada itself. Now they are a department store conglomerate, also in the real estate and investments business. Their history is integral to the history of Canada and of the northern United States.

Read more about Canada and Canadian history:

  • The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a World Landmark book by Richard Neuberger, tells more about the Mounties who brought law and order to Rupert’s Land, the territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
  • The Canadian Story by May McNeer gives a brief introduction to the sweep of Canadian history, with short chapters for elementary age children.
  • Alexander MacKenzie: Canadian Explorer by Ronald Syme tells of the explorer who made the first journey across Canada to the Pacific coast.
  • The Real Book about Canada by Lyn Harrington is another accessible history/geography narrative about the Canadian story.

Evangeline and the Acadians by Robert Tallant

Feb8

This Landmark book, #74 in the series, published in 1957 (the year I was born), tells the story of the Acadians, or Cajuns as they came to be called in Louisiana and Texas, who were exiled from their homes in Nova Scotia. These Acadians were French farmers who settled in Nova Scotia when it was named Acadia by the French, and they were forced to leave Nova Scotia by the British who distrusted them and questioned their loyalty during the many years of war between France and Britain.

It’s a sad story. Tallant compares the plight of the Acadians to the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. While the Acadians were not taken to extermination camps, they were torn from their homes and dispersed up and down the Eastern seaboard, with many of them ending up in prisons or forced labor or just poverty. Families were separated, and many Acadians died on crowded, unsanitary ships or in homelessness after they reached shore.

So my question was: how did so many of the Acadians end up in southwestern Louisiana where they made a new home for themselves? To find out, you’ll have to read the book, or do your own research. It’s a fascinating saga, and Longfellow’s famous poem, Evangeline, only tells a small, fictionalized part of the story. As indicated in the title, Tallant refers to Longfellow’s poem over and over again throughout the book, and readers of Tallant’s book can learn a good bit about what parts of the poem are fiction and what parts are true. The fictional character, Evangeline, looking for her lost love, Gabriel, made the Acadians famous the nineteenth century, and today Cajun culture and history is celebrated in food, song, dance, literature, and entertainment.

Evangeline and the Acadians not only gives the history of the Acadians, but since those Acadian people were a large part of the history of Louisiana itself, the book is a sort of capsule history of the state of Louisiana. Mr. Tallant wrote two other books in the Landmark series, The Louisiana Purchase and The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans, and the three books taken together would be an excellent introduction for elementary and middle school students to the culture and history of Louisiana (and even southeast Texas). If I were helping my students of Louisiana heritage to study the history of their own state and region, I would certainly read these three Landmark books with them.

Of course, as I said these books were published in the 1950’s. The last two chapters of Evangeline and the Acadians talks about Cajun life and culture “today.” Children who read the book might need to be reminded that the “today’ of 1957 was much different from the twenty-first century “today.” I doubt very many Cajuns speak French as a first language nowadays or even use Cajun English dialect as the Cajun people have become even more assimilated into the greater American culture.

In addition to this book and the other two Landmark books by Robert Tallant, for those interested in the history and culture of Louisiana and of the Acadians, I would recommend:

Picture Books

  • Freedom in Congo Square by Carole Boston Weatherford.
  • Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges.
  • If I Only Had a Horn: Young Louis Armstrong by Roxanne Orgill.
  • Mr. Williams by Karen Barbour.
  • Little Pierre: A Cajun Story from Louisiana by Robert San Souci.

Children’s books

The Christmas Pony by Helen McCully and Dorothy Crayder

Dec3

The Christmas Pony by Helen McCully and Dorothy Crayder, illustrated by Robert J. Lee. Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. (Christmas in Nova Scotia, Canada, 1912)

Catching the apple, Helen had been tempted to smile, but since the best way to enjoy the marsh was to be unhappy, she was determined to remain so.

The McCullys and the cats coexisted with the understanding that people were people and cats were cats and it was neither possible nor desirable for it to be otherwise. This understanding made for mutual enjoyment.

Mrs. McCully did not believe in her children’s being sick and consequently they very rarely were. And when they were, they were never allowed to be very sick. Being sick was for people who had nothing better to do.

Every year, two days before Christmas the doors to the Big Rooms and the dining room were closed tight and were not to be opened until Christmas morning. To the children, it was always as if a stage were being set behind those closed doors and when at last they were opened, the play would begin.

The children now began a two-day siege compounded of excitement, fidgets, and the need to be on their best behavior or Santa Claus might have some second thoughts. Deep down in their hearts, the children believed that Santa Claus was a loyal, generous friend who accepted the good with the bad, but they were leery of making a test case of it.

Helen McCully, one of the authors of this brief Christmas novelette (101 pages), is also one of the three children who celebrate a Christmas to remember in this story set in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada. The tone and writing of the story, which is sampled in the quotes above, reminded me of old-fashioned magazine story writing from the 1950’s and 60’s, and indeed Ms. McCully and Ms. Crayder both had experience writing for women’s magazines as well as radio plays and television. The Christmas Pony tells about Helen, her brother Robert, and her little sister Nora and the surprise gift that they received one Christmas.

This book would make a wonderful read aloud story sometime during the Christmas season, but there is a rather big risk. The book begins with the statement, “Every child should have a pony.” If you think you can read the story and remain indifferent to the desire for a real, live pony of your own, or if you think your children can contain themselves, then this book is a delight.

Lost in the Barrens by Farley Mowat

Apr15

I realized that I have in my library three books written by Canadian environmentalist and author Farley Mowat—Lost in the Barrens, Owls in the Family, and Never Cry Wolf—but I had not until now read any of them. Mowat’s writing is somewhat controversial; he was accused of fabricating some of the events and the science in his nonfiction books. His response that he “never let the facts get in the way of the truth” did nothing to refute or placate his critics.

However, Lost in the Barrens is fiction, a survival story about two teen boys who are lost and forced to survive during winter in northern Canada. So, if the boys, Jamie and Awasin, are a bit too lucky and plucky and skilled to be believed, and they are, it makes a good story, nonetheless. The book, published in 1956, calls Awasin a Cree Indian rather than Native American or First Nations, and his people’s traditional enemies are called Eskimos. Both groups and the individuals in them are presented in a way that is respectful and admiring of their culture and traditions. Jamie is non-native, of Scottish Canadian extraction, and he is the more impulsive and foolhardy of the two boys. It is Jamie’s fault that the boys are lost, and it is mostly Awasin’s skill and strength and courage that saves them, although Jamie is said to contribute “inventiveness” and “persistence” to the partnership that the boys form.

I must admit that I found myself skimming the many passages in this book that describe exactly how Jamie and Awasin hunt and preserve their food, build their cabin, manage their fuel supply, and do all of the other multitude of things required for survival in a Canadian winter wilderness. I couldn’t tell you if the solutions and inventions that the boys come up with to keep themselves from freezing or starving to death are actually workable and believable or not, and I couldn’t tell even if I had read about them ever so carefully. It all seemed possible, and it made for a good story.

Fans of survival stories such as Hatchet by Gary Paulsen or My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George would probably enjoy Lost in the Barrens. Lost in the Barrens is a little more challenging in terms of vocabulary and detail than either of those two books, but there are no content considerations other than vivid descriptions of hunting and killing animals for food and of the steps involved in curing and preserving the parts of the animals that were killed. I would recommend the book to children ages twelve and up, younger if the child has an interest or experience in outdoor life and hunting in particular.

Mr. Mowat is a good storyteller, factual or not. (Oh, and there’s a movie version of this story. Anybody seen it? Recommended or not?)

The Discoverer of Insulin: Dr. Frederick G. Banting by I.E. Levine

Oct2

I read this Messner published biography back in the summer, but I’m just now getting around to reviewing it. The dust jacket blurb says in a nutshell somethings of what I learned from the book:

“When Frederick Banting discovered insulin, he gave millions of doomed diabetics the gift of life. . . . Banting grew up on a farm in Canada. When his tomboy playmate Jane died at fourteen of diabetes, he was determined to one day find the cause of this mysterious disease. . . . Banting became a university instructor and researcher. He was still puzzled by the mysterious disease of diabetes. . . With Charles Best, his assistant, Banting sweated in a grimy attic laboratory, racing the time allotted him by Toronto University. Alternately sure of success and plunged into despair, they hung on grimly through a series of experiments. They succeeded in discovering Hormone X, but it took many, many months before they perfected the wonder drug—insulin.”

That’s the short version of the story. But I learned so much more about medical research and diabetes and early twentieth century medicine. Did you know:

* Until insulin, six out of every ten diabetics died of coma. And almost every juvenile diabetes sufferer died within a few years of diagnosis. Diabetes was a death sentence.

* Banting started out as an orthopedic surgeon, not an internal medicine doctor.

* Banting and Best killed a number of dogs in their experiments to isolate and produce what they called “isletin” (insulin), but they considered the dogs as “soldiers in the war against disease” and treated them as humanely as possible.

* Much of the research time they spent was unpaid. Banting and Best lived in poverty while they conducted their experiments to find the hormone that would control diabetes in those who were diagnosed with the “sugar sickness.”

* Banting received the Nobel Prize for his work on insulin, but instead of recognizing Charles Best as co-discoverer, the Nobel Prize committee named Dr. Macleod, the head researcher at Toronto University, who had been less than encouraging in the research of Banting and Best and not present for most of it.

As I have often said, I am interested in many things. This biography of a revolutionary doctor and medical researcher was an inspiration to persevere in the calling that I have been given, no matter how small. I’m not going to change the lives of millions of people with an incurable disease, but I am called to be faithful just as Banting was.