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The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton

Jul14

Edward and Eleanor, brother and sister, live in a big old house in Concord, Massachusetts, with their Aunt Lily, a piano teacher, and their uncle Freddy, an addled literary scholar who deeply admires the Transcendentalists, especially “Waldo” Emerson and Henry Thoreau. The problem is a financial one: the bank is about to repossess and raze their home. This impending disaster sets Edward and Eleanor on a quest to find the hidden jewels and treasures that their long lost Uncle Ned And Aunt Nora may have received from an Indian prince, Krishna, and may have left behind when they disappeared as children. Clues in the form of a poem etched into an attic window guide Eddy and Eleanor to enter into dangerous adventures in the form of dreams that really happen, all to find enough treasure to save their home.

This book reminded me of Edward Eager’s books, Half Magic and others, and of Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays and Spiderweb for Two. The adventures of Eddy and Eleanor are both real and dreamlike, and the dreams are dreams with a meaning where the two children participate in a joint-dream but learn life lessons along the way. The dreams and the adventures are all intertwined with the writings and lives of Thoreau and Emerson and Louisa May Alcott as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell in a way that is child-friendly and yet speaks on a different level to adults, too.

For example, in one chapter’s dream Eleanor and Eddy travel through a mirror, like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, and find themselves confronted with a long series of reflections of themselves stretching out to the left and to the right. The children must choose again and again which reflection to follow, and as they follow the sometimes more desirable but wrong path their choices narrow and narrow until the only reflection they can choose is a horrible, degraded and degenerate version of themselves. However, when they go back and choose the right path the land of reflections behind the mirror opens up into a multitude of wonderful choices of who each child could become.

Instead of two choices, there were many. They were unable to choose which was the best, so they picked one at random. And beyond that choice lay a hundred, and beyond the next a thousand. Just as the other maze had led them down a narrowing path until there was no choice left, this one opened out into wide and shining worlds of possibility.

And that scene in its turn reminds me of C.S. Lewis and The Great Divorce and Narnia and “further up and further in.” There’s another dream or vision that the children have at Christmas time of all of the light-bearers of history, from ancient times up through the present day, and one of them is Jesus, perhaps the brightest but only one of a multitude of greater and lesser “lights” who add to the accumulated light of the centuries. It’s not exactly right, but it’s close.

Anyway, I loved this book, and I’m pleased to see that there is are sequels, in fact eight books in all about the Hall family of Concord, Massachusetts, one of which is the Newbery Honor book The Fledgling. I’ve actually read The Fledgling a very long time ago, but all I remember is something about flying and perhaps geese? Anyway, The Diamond in the Window is the first book in the series (Hall Family Chronicles), and the second book, which I hope to read soon, is called The Swing in the Summerhouse. The other books are:

  • The Astonishing Stereoscope
  • The Fledgling
  • The Fragile Flag
  • The Time Bike
  • The Mysterious CIrcus
  • The Dragon Tree

I actually have The Fledgling and The Time Bike in my library. I purchased The Diamond in the Window from Purple House Press, so I have that, too. But it looks as if the others in the series are out of print, so I’ll have to find them used or from the public library if I want to continue reading about the Hall Family and their escapades.

The Last Mapmaker by Christina Soontornvat

May5

Christina Soontornvat, author of Newbery Honor book A Wish in the Dark, has written another middle grade fiction novel with an imaginary world setting, and this one is also set in a place that feels southeast Asian or Asian Pacific but is in fact completely imaginary. Sai, our protagonist, is a girl from the slums who is pretending to be an educated, middle class girl with a chance at a future. However, in the Kingdom of Mangkon, future prospects depend on lineage, the number of respected and verified ancestors that one can claim, and Sai not only has no money, she also has no lineage, only a criminal for a father and a mother who disappeared when Sai was a child. Sai managed to finagle her way into becoming Assistant to Mangkon’s most celebrated mapmaker, Paiyoon Wongyai, but when she doesn’t get a “lineal” on her thirteenth birthday, everyone will know that Sai is an imposter and a usurper. Her only chance is to go with Master Paiyoon on an expedition to the south seas, discover the fabled Sunderlands where the dragons live, and come back a heroine.

Sai is a typical middle grade fantasy protagonist, a poor and challenged child with special talents, looking for a way to move up in the world. She is interesting insofar as she makes some bad choices but manages to come through in the end, and she never discovers that she is anything other than the poor child of criminal and often absent parents, although her father does have some saving character traits in the end as well. I like the idea that Sai doesn’t have to discover that she’s really a princess in disguise to become a worthy and productive member of society.

There’s also a touch of anti-colonialism in the story as Sai learns that discovering a new territory and annexing it to the kingdom of Mangkoon, sometimes means exploiting that new place and oppressing its people. And she finds a way to undermine that move toward colonial exploitation without having the story become didactic and heavy with messaging.

Christina Soontornvat is fast becoming one of my favorite contemporary authors of middle grade fantasy fiction, and I can’t wait to read more of her work. I’m especially interested in reading her other Newbery honor book, the nonfiction All Thirteen: the Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team.

The Court of the Stone Children by Eleanor Cameron

Apr28

The New York Times said of this book, back in 1973, that it was “not just a fine book but a brilliant one—and, in an age when writers are engulfing children with an almost gratuitous realism, it is exciting to read a story that glances back into the literary shadows of memory, fantasy and dream.” In 1974, The Court of the Stone Children won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Eleanor Cameron, who also wrote the Mushroom Planet books, was indeed an accomplished writer, and The Court of the Stone Children is an excellent story, appealing to both adults and children.

It’s a sort of a ghost story. Only Dominique, nicknamed Domi, the girl that Nina meets in the French Museum in San Francisco, isn’t really a ghost. It’s also sort of a time travel story, but Nina doesn’t really travel back in time, except in dreams, and Domi, a French girl of the early nineteenth century, just continues to live a semi-ghostly existence in order to stay close to the objects of her childhood home and perhaps to clear her father’s name. Domi’s father was executed as a traitor and murderer during the reign of Napoleon, and Domi needs Nina to help prove his innocence.

The French Museum that Nina falls in love with, along with museum life in general, is a key component of the story. Anyone who is fascinated with museums and how they work would love this book. And Nina’s growth from an immature and unhappy girl who was forced to move to San Francisco against her will into an understanding seeker of beauty and truth is also a part of what makes the novel shine. The way Ms. Cameron ties all these themes and storylines together—the love of beauty and the past, the search for truth, the nature of reality, the complications of making friends and loving family—all these things make for a beautiful and memorable story that children will carry with them into adulthood.

One minor issue didn’t bother me, but I’m sure it would some readers: in the past, early 1800’s, a fifteen year old girl falls in love with a thirty-five year old man, and he with her, and the two are betrothed to be married. This romantic relationship is presented as somewhat unusual, even for the times, but ultimately wholesome and good. Nothing explicit, or illicit, is described or even hinted at, and although I wouldn’t condone such a relationship nowadays, times were indeed different over two hundred years ago.

I thought The Court of the Stone Children was an excellent book, deserving of the National Book Award and worthy of its place in my library.

A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond

Apr5

A String in the Harp was a Newbery Honor book in 1977. (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was the Newbery Award winner in 1977.) A String in the Harp is a long book, with lots of descriptive passages that evoke a sense of setting in the Welsh countryside. Mrs. Bond, an American, wrote her novel after spending two years going to library school in Wales. In fact, Wales itself, its scenery and its history, is almost the central character in the book. One critic said, “Without the traditional Welsh materials, A String in the Harp would be just another adolescent problem novel.” Well, without the entire setting in Wales, there would actually be no novel at all. It made me want to visit Wales, in spite of the cold and the incessant rain that are emphasized in the book.

The story is about the Morgan family: an American professor and his three children, Jennifer, Peter, and Becky. The story is written in third person, but mostly told from the point of view of Jennifer, age 15, and Peter, age 12. The Morgan family has moved to Aberstwyth, Wales for a year for Professor Morgan to teach and pursue research at a university there, leaving Jennifer behind with her aunt so that she can continue high school. As the story opens, Jennifer is coming to join her family in Wales for the winter/Christmas holidays.

There are, of course, problems to be overcome. Peter hates Wales and everything about it. Becky, age 10, just wants the family to be happy. Professor Morgan is distant and impatient with Peter’s inability to adjust to living in Wales. Jennifer is unsure of what her new role in the family is since they are all trying desperately to learn to be a family without their mother who died in a car accident just before the Morgans moved to Wales. All of the problems in the novel have a lot to do with the grief process that each of the Morgans is going through, but the mother is only mentioned a few times in the course of this long novel. We never get to know her, really, and you get the sense that grief is about forgetting and moving on somehow.

Into all of this rather chaotic family emotion and misunderstanding comes a magic artifact, a harp key. Peter finds the key and becomes attached to it, wearing it around his neck on a string as a sort of talisman. He believes that the key is showing him, even taking him into, the past and the life of the sixth century bard and poet, Taliesin. The novel borrows from C.S. Lewis’s with the children, especially Peter, moving into and out of another time and place. At one point a Welsh professor friend is talking to Jen and Becky about whether or not Peter has imagined all of his stories about Taliesin, and he says to them, “What do they teach in your American schools?” The entire conversation is quite reminiscent of the Professor and the children, Peter, Susan, and Edmund, when the professor asks, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” and later, “I wonder what they do teach them in these schools.” Only the Welsh professor is asking more, “Why don’t they teach wonder or magic at these (American) schools?”

There are a couple of minor elements to the story that didn’t bother me, but someone else may find them problematic. The characters curse sometimes, even the children, mild curses, mostly damn and hell. I wouldn’t have expected to find cursing in a children’s book published in 1976, but there it is. And Jen at about the halfway point in the novel offers to stay on in Wales and take charge of the household, cooking and cleaning and mothering her siblings. It’s taken for granted that someone (some female?) has to be at least a parttime caretaker and homemaker for the Morgans, and for the first semester of the school year they’ve had a local woman paid to clean house and cook meals for them. One critic called this minor plot element “sexist.”

There’s usually a place in any good book where I “fall into” the story, so to speak. I am immersed and intrigued to find out how the story will play out and how it will end and what truths and affinities I will find along the way. For A String in the Harp, it took a while for me to fall in, but eventually, I did. I suppose it’s a matter of wanting to know how the story and the relationships of the various characters will finally be resolved. I think this story of family disorder turning to order, and coming of age, and magical occurrences without clear boundaries or explanations, would be a hard sell to twenty-first century readers who are used to more action and less atmosphere. But anyone who loves Narnia or Tolkien or Welsh mythology or Arthurian legend might really appreciate this small gem of a book.

The 6 Best Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction Novels I Read In 2021

Dec30

I only read 14 middle grade fantasy/scince fiction books this year. So these are the best of those I read.

Published in 2021:

  • Once Upon a Camel by Kathi Appelt. My favorite middle grade fiction book of 2021.
  • The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo. My second favorite. At the monastery of the Order of the Chronicles of Sorrowing. Brother Edik finds the girl, Beatryce, curled in a stall, wracked with fever, covered in dirt and blood, and holding on to the ear of Answelica the goat. (Answelica is the stubborn star of the book.) It turns out that the king’s men are searching for Beatryce, but Beatryce doesn’t remember who she is or why the king wants to capture her. Can she elude the search long enough to recover her own story?
  • Stowaway by John David Anderson. A little bit Star Wars and a little bit Ender’s Game or even Dune, Stowaway takes space opera into the middle grade fiction genre and does it well. When Leo is separated from his father and his older brother and lost in space with a bunch of space pirates, he truly doesn’t know whom to trust. But he’s determined to find his father who has been kidnapped (maybe?) by the enemy Djarik soldiers. Can he trust the pirates to help him? Are the Aykari, Earth’s allies in the universal war to control the valuable mineral ventasium, even trustworthy? Can Leo be smart enough to get to his father beforetime runs out, and can he find his brother, too?
  • Children of the Fox by Kevin Sands. First book in a projected series.
  • The Accidental Apprentice (Wilderlore) by Amanda Foody. Also the first in a series.

Published before 2021:

10 Best Adult Novels I Read in 2021

Dec28
  • Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (re-read)
  • That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (re-read)
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
  • Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  • His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
  • The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  • Reunion by Fred Uhlman
  • Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (re-read)

First there are the re-reads: Hannah Coulter, That Hideous Strength, and Mansfield Park. Hannah Coulter was just as good as I remembered it. This fictional memoir of an old woman remembering her life and the lives of her children made me think about my grown children and how their lives have taken such different turns and directions from what I expected. Russell Moore writes about “why you should read Hannah Coulter”, and I second his motion.

“Most people now are looking for a ‘better place’, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. . . . There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. and it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it, and keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven.”

~Hannah Coulter, p. 83

I re-read all three of Lewis’s space trilogy books this year: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. I must say that I enjoyed That Hideous Strength the most of the three, whereas previously I thought Perelandra was my favorite. That Hideous Strength is just so prophetic. How did Lewis know that men and women would become so confused about gender roles or that mixing Christianese (talk) with pagan concepts would become such a problem? Or that many would move past naturalistic materialism straight into the occult? Just like 1984 by George Orwell, which I understand was written partially as a response to Lewis’s book, That Hideous Strength is full of images and ideas that speak directly to today’s issues: the manipulation of the press/media, police brutality and accountability, psychological techniques used for rehabilitation, crime and punishment, education, gender roles, procreation or the lack thereof, and much more. I read That Hideous Strength with Cindy Rollins’ Patreon group, and we had lots of good discussion about all of these ideas.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Reunion were two more books I read along with the Literary Life podcast folks (Angelina Stanford, Thomas Brooks, and Cindy Rollins), and I’m sure I enjoyed them extra-specially because of the podcast discussions. Both books are novellas, rather than full length novels, and both are well worth your time.

“He felt that he was trapped in such a mesh of lies that it was difficult to make sense out of anything. Everything she did for him was done strictly for her sake; and she told him she was doing for her sake what she actually was, making this seem so incredible that he was bound to take it to mean just the reverse.”

~The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham was a book read back in February, about a woman torn between fidelity to a seemingly loveless marriage and adultery with a seemingly exciting and passionate man. The keyword is “seemingly.” I didn’t review this book, but here’s a review at Educating Petunia that includes thoughts on the movie version as well. I think I’d like to watch the movie sometime, and I was reminded of this reading project that I’d like to restart in 2022. So many projects, so little persistence.

“You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.”

~The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham

Our Mutual Friend was my Dickens novel for the year, and although it’s not my favorite Dickens, any book by Dickens stands head and shoulders above the pack. I also watch duh mini-series of OMF and enjoyed that quite a bit. I plan to read Hard Times (with the Literary Life folks) and maybe re-read David Copperfield (my favorite Dickens novel) in 2022.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.”

Our Mutual Friend, Mr. Rokesmith

I discovered Naomi Novik’s fantasy novels early in 2021, both Spinning Silver and her Temeraire series about Napoleonic era dragons and men working together to defeat Napoleon and remake the world, especially England, as a comfortable and welcoming place for friendly working dragons. These book are just fun, and if you like adult fantasy, with some non-explicit hanky-panky going on (not the focus of the novels), then I recommend these.

I also read Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive trilogy in early 2021 while I was coughing with Covid, beginning with The Way of Kings. It was good, absorbing, with lots of good character development and plot twists that I didn’t see coming. This author is so prolific, more than thirty, mostly huge, sprawling novels published, that I will never read all of his books, but I may dip back in again to his Cosmere (fantasy world), from time to time. The following quote was particularly timely:

“There are worse things . . . than a disease. When you have one, it reminds you that you’re alive. Makes you fight for what you have. When the disease has run its course, normal healthy life seems wonderful by comparison.”

Brightness Shallon in The Way of Kings, p. 506

Fanny Price and Mansfield Park. I knew I had read Mansfield Park before, but all I could remember was the play-within-a-novel that turns into a disaster. I initially found both the book and the protagonist somewhat lackluster and plodding, but the more I read, and the more I listened to The Literary Life podcast episodes about the book, the more I grew to love Fanny. I can only aspire to the humility and servanthood that she exemplifies. (Aspiring to humility is something of an oxymoron, but it actually makes sense in a Chestertonian sort of way.) Anyway, I would like to be able to keep my mouth shut more often as Fanny does and to think of myself less and others more. I think that sort of attitude comes by practice, though, and it’s hard to be willing to practice humility.

So, what are the themes that emerge from all this fictional reading? Endure hardship patiently. And brighten the corner where you are. If I could learn these two lessons, deep in my soul, by means of story or situational experience, I’d be, well, certainly better, farther along the path to virtue. Not that I read to become virtuous, but stories do seep into the soul.

What fiction formed your life in 2021? What novel(s) will you be reading in 2022?

2021 MGF: Children of the Fox by Kevin Sands

Nov19

Warning: this book ends with the main characters setting off on a new quest to save a life. So, it’s the beginning of a series, the Thieves of Shadow Novels, and although the story itself is tied up in a somewhat satisfying way, the ending is only a beginning.

That said, I enjoyed Children of the Fox. It reminded me of Megan Whalen Turner’s Thief series, and I would definitely recommend Children of the Fox to fans of Turner’s novels. If references to pagan gods, in this case Shuna the Fox Spirit and Artha the Bear Spirit, and spooky magic mediated by a jeweled Eye, are bothersome to you, you won’t like this story at all. I take these things as story, not as invitations to the occult, but your convictions may be different.

A group of children are hired to steal the powerful magical artifact, The Eye, from the palace of the most powerful sorcerer in the country because the adults have failed to even get close, and this heist can only be performed by children. The team consists of Callan, the gaffer or conman, Oran, the muscle, Meriel, the knife-thrower and charmer, Gareth, the scholar, Lachlan, the scrounger, and Foxtail, a masked and mute mystery girl who can climb walls and infiltrate fortresses. As well as being skilled at thievery, the children are all survivors of trauma, and that means that learning to trust each other and work as a team may be the hardest part of the job.

Why does Mr. Solomon, the children’s recruiter and employer, want The Eye? Why is he willing to pay so much money to get it? How did the adult thieves who already tried to steal The Eye fail? Why did one of those adult thieves lose his sanity in the attempt? How can each of the children use his or her particular skills to contribute to a successful heist? Can the team encounter and deal with magic without getting burned? And what will they do with all that money if they do succeed?

Kevin Sands, author of the Blackthorn Key Adventures (I read the first book in this series, but decided not to continue), has written an intriguing start to a new fantasy adventure series. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, Seekers of the Fox, due to be published in 2022.

2021 MGF: Sisters of the Neversea by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Nov6

This take-off on Barrie’s Peter Pan with Native American characters (to correct the portrayal of “injuns” in Barrie’s story) starts off great. The characters, twelve year old sisters, Wendy and Lily, and their little four year old brother, Matthew, are complex and engaging. Their family dynamics and structure are a little bit confusing: Wendy and Lily are step-sisters, and Matthew shares a mother with Lily and a father with Wendy. (There’s also an older brother, John, who remains a minor background character.) Lily and Matthew both have Native American heritage, while Wendy is of British extraction. This ethnic heritage is emphasized in the story, partly to counteract the unfavorable characterization of Native Americans in Barrie’s original story.

Anyway, diversity aside, the story is exciting, and the themes of family bonding and dealing with anxiety and responding with grace to change are well handled without becoming too preachy. Although divorce is a possibility—the girls’ parents aren’t getting along well—no one reading this book will feel as if they are being duped into a “book therapy” session. Peter Pan in this iteration is a self-absorbed bully, but again his characterization is a part of the story, not an exercise in the psychology of bullies.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and I was completely absorbed in figuring out how Wendy and Lily were going to save Matthew from becoming one of the Lost Boys and how they were all going to escape from Neverland. I wanted to know what would happen to Peter. Would he reform and grow into maturity or remain a selfish tyrant in Neverland? Would his shadow come back to him? Could the Native children on one side of the island, the Lost Boys on the other side, and the pirates in their ship, not to mention the innumerable, mostly invisible, fairies, ever come to terms and be at peace with one another? Was Neverland big enough for all of these groups, or would someone need to “leave town”, so to speak.

BUT just FYI, although it’s well written and engaging, about halfway through, the author introduces a minor character named Terri who goes out of her way to tell the reader that she is “two-spirit”. What in the world? The book never explains what the designation “two-spirit” is supposed to mean (not even in the author’s note at the end), and the Wikipedia article is more confusing than illuminating. But I gather that it’s some sort of alternative gender designation, and it was totally unnecessary to the story for Terri to be introduced with that identity. I found it to be confusing and propagandistic. As you can see, by my need to look it up and then try to understand what purpose the two-spirit identity had in the story, that particular passage, a very minor part of a good story, completely threw me out of the narrative. I think children will either skim over it or be similarly confused and inquisitive.

If “two-spirit” indicates a kind of third or fourth or whatever number alternative gender, the gender confusion that is rampant in our society at this particular juncture in history doesn’t need to be inserted into children’s literature. If it’s an indicator of some sort of Native American spirituality, the lack of an explanation doesn’t serve the reader or the story. In fact, this propaganda unfortunately rather spoils the entire story.

Knee-Knock Rise by Natalie Babbitt

May5

“I can claim to be tolerably detached on the subject of ghost stories. I do not depend upon them in any way; not even in the sordid professional way, in which I have at some periods depended on murder stories. I do not much mind whether they are true or not. I am not, like a Spiritualist, a man whose religion may said to consist entirely of ghosts. But I am not like a Materialist, a man whose whole philosophy is exploded and blasted and blown to pieces by the most feeble and timid intrusion of the most thin and third-rate ghost. I am quite ready to believe that a number of ghosts were merely turnip ghosts, elaborately prepared to deceive the village idiot. But I am not at all certain that they succeeded even in that; and I suspect that their greatest successes were elsewhere. For it is my experience that the village idiot is very much less credulous than the town lunatic. On the other hand, when the merely skeptical school asks us to believe that every sort of ghost has been a turnip ghost, I think such skeptics rather exaggerate the variety and vivacity and theatrical talent of turnips.”

~G.K. Chesterton: ‘Illustrated London News,’ May 30, 1936

So, Knee-Knock Rise by Natalie Babbitt, also author of Tuck Everlasting, is a fairy tale about the necessity of mystery and belief in the supernatural. It’s also about the distinction between foolish credulity and wisdom. But I’m not at all sure that the questions raised in the story are ever settled.

Perhaps this bit of poetry that forms a part of the story is key, but what is the answer to poem’s riddle?

I visited a certain king
  Who had a certain fool.
The king was gray with wisdom got
  From forty years of school.
The fool was pink with nonsense
  And could barely write his name
But he knew a lot of little songs
  And sang them just the same.
The fool was gay. The king was not.
  Now tell me if you can:
Which was perhaps the greater fool
  And which the wiser man?

The writing in this book is lovely:

  • “a countryside that neither rolled nor dipped but lay as flat as if it had been knocked unconscious.”
  • “Around her neck a thick roll of extra flesh fanned out soft fur into a deep, inviting ruffle and her ears drooped like rich brown velvet triangles. She was old and fat and beautiful and Egan was instantly enchanted.”
  • “Uncle Anson smoked his pipe and dreamed into the flames, devising new and daring clocks, while Sweetheart, curled into a furry wad in Ada’s lap, looked the very picture of innocence, a picture which from time to time he spoiled by stretching out a long foreleg and arching the claws wickedly from a taut, spread claw.”
  • “The Instep Fair! . . . They came in carts, in caravans, on foot, all dressed in their holiday clothes and carrying baskets, boxes, and bundles packed with picnics so special and exotic that even the most finicky of the children were frantic for suppertime.”

And the tale itself is full of ideas and and imaginations just as a good tale ought to be. Egan, the protagonist of the story, longs to know for sure whether the beastly Megrimum lives at the top of Knee-Knock Rise. Some say he certainly does, and the villagers who live below the rise cherish their shivery, scary stories of the Megrimum and his ghostly power. Egan’s Uncle Ott explains away the evidence for the Megrimum with scientific facts and figures. Uncle Anson says, “The only thing that matters is whether you want to believe he’s there or not. And if your mind is made up, all the facts in the world won’t make the slightest difference.”

Certainly, Uncle Anson is right about his second statement. People believe what they want to believe. But doesn’t the truth matter? Are we better off believing in comforting lies and superstitions? Do science and factual knowledge really take the mystery and wonder out of the world, or is there always more to see, more truth to pursue? Who is better off, the worldly wise king or the ignorant fool? Can’t a wise man be happy, and can’t a fool be mired in superstitious fear and misery? Are all ghost stories imaginary, and could a scary Megrimum be real?

Knee-Knock Rise was a Newbery Honor book in 1971. This writer from Wake Forest University thinks the book is anti-religious, or at least questioning religion, but I think it can be read as anti-scientism. Perhaps we both believe what we want to believe.

Parsifal Rides the Time Wave by Nell Chenault

Dec1

I found a copy of this 1962 boy and his dog story while I was in Tennessee a few weeks back. It’s a sweet tale about Colin who is sent a magical helper, Parsifal, because Colin’s need is great. Colin is in the hospital, and although his body is nearly healed from injuries sustained in a bad accident, he is still grieving the loss of his beloved dog, Lad, who saved Colin from being killed in the accident at the cost of the dog’s life. So, Parsifal the Poddley’s first assignment is to help Colin deal with his grief.

Then, by means of a magical time wave, Colin is able to travel back in time to twelfth century Scotland where he meets his hero Robert the Bruce. The time travel part of this simple book is easy enough to understand, but still quite magical. The story is suitable for young readers, ages five to nine, what we would now called a beginning chapter book, but the introduction to the historical heroes of Scotland is sure to inspire further and more challenging reading. The time period, reading level, and length of the story (85 pages) reminded me of the books by Clyde Robert Bulla or Gertrude Chandler Warner (The Boxcar Children), but the magical and time travel elements put this book in a class of its own.

I read some reviews on Amazon for this book in which the reviewers said that Parsifal Rides the Time Wave was a book they remembered fondly from childhood. It’s perhaps a forerunner of the Magic Treehouse books, but the lessons Colin learns are timeless and gentle in their application. (There is a battle scene in which Robert the Bruce fights and kills his would-be assassins, so if violence in books for young children is a problem for you, you might want to skip this one.) I’m glad I found this one, and I’m happy to add it to my library.

Oh, it looks as if there’s another book about Parsifal the Poddley and time travel that came before this one, just called Parsifal the Poddley. Unfortunately this first book about Parsifal seems to be a unicorn, priced at over $100 on used book sites that I checked. If you come across a copy at thrift store prices, I would grab it. From the review at Kirkus Reviews:

Eight-year-old Christopher of Butterfield, Vermont, is badly in need of a Poddley, the special creature who comes to serve lonely little boys. And Parsifal the Poddley, on his first mission shows himself to be ideally suited for Christopher. Not only does he educate him to be more thoughtful, but he takes Christopher back in time to 1659 and introduces him to Vermont in its pioneer period. Christopher participates in a conflict between the Indians and settlers and arrives home just in time to find a neighbor and friend in the person of a new little boy whose family has just moved next door.