Laughing Boy

Finished Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge. It won the Pulitzer in 1930. It's the story of a young Navajo man who marries a woman who was born a Navajo, but who was taken from her family and sent to an an American school as a young girl. There she was made to turn her back on her heritage and assimilate. When she meets Laughing Boy she feels that she has finally found someone to bring her back to the Navajo way of life. The novel is the story of their relationship. It is an interesting juxtaposition of American and Native American culture in the early 20th century.

I liked this book. It was an easy read. There were moments of personal honor that reminded me of Shane. La Farge was concerned with the rights of Native Americans and served as president of the Association on American Indian Affairs.

Tales from Silver Lands

How do I hate this cover....let me count the ways. I read the 1924 edition from the University Library. It had wonderful block prints inside. The publisher should have used one of those for the cover.

Tales from Silver Lands by Charles J. Finger won the Newbery Medal in 1925. It is a collection of folktales from Central and South America. Reminiscent of Kipling's Just So Stories these are wonderful, original stories that seemed more like fairy tales than folk tales. In general I prefer to read novels because there is a long story to get engrossed in. So it took me quite a long time to finish this book. Reading individual tales is much less satisfying to me, so my interest wanes easily. Sigh...the next medalist, Shen of the Sea is a collection of Chinese folk tales....

Barkis

Barkis by Clare Turlay Newberry is a lovely book for families to read together. The 1966 edition I read is a large square book. It would be nice for a child and a grown up to each hold an end of it as the story is read. The text is fairly dense, so smaller children will need someone to read it to them. There is sibling rivalry over a new puppy in the family. This is resolved very reasonably. The drawings are soft, velvety, dreamy. It's a charming book that won the Caldecott Honor Medal in 1939.

This was another interlibrary loan book. It came from the Community District Library in New Lothrop, MI, Northeast of Flint. Markings in the book indicate that it was once called the Twin Township Library. The back of the book says, "Hand-set in Weiss Antiqua type by Arthur Rushmore and Elaine Rushmore at the Golden Hind Press, Madison, New Jersey, 1938."

Clare Turlay Newberry won the Caldecott Honor several other times for April's Kittens (1941), Marshmallow (1943) and T-Bone, the Baby Sitter (1951).

The House on Mango Street

My daughter is reading Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street for her Women's Lit class. This was one of the books on the syllabus that I hadn't read. I really enjoyed it. It's quite short. Made up of little vignettes. It's the story of 12 year old Esperanza coming of age in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. This book won The American Book Award in 1985.

The vignettes contain numerous finely detailed characters. The prose is quite beautiful, even poetic. At one point Esperanza describes her mother's voice, singing along with a record of Madame Butterfly that she has checked out of the library, her lungs velvety and strong like morning glories.

Esperanza checks many books out of the library and reads quite a lot of children's lit classics, including The Water Babies, Rip Van Winkle and "The Carpenter and the Walrus" from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This is the second time in the last few months that Rip Van Winkle has come up. I really should get around to reading that...

Wee Gillis

Finished Wee Gillis, written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson. It won the Caldecott Honor Medal in 1939. This is Lawson's second Honor Medal. The story is set in Scotland. Wee Gillis, whose full name is Alistair Roderic Craigellachie Dalhousie Gowan Donney-bristle MacMac (!!!!), alternates living with his mother's relations in the Lowlands tending cows, and his father's relations in the Highlands stalking stags. In both scenarios he exerts himself in ways that make his lungs strong. Eventually he is forced to choose his path in life, become a Lowlander or a Highlander. Just at the point when all his relations expect him to choose, who comes along but a bagpiper. It was easy to see where this was going, which is fine. It's an original story that shows children that it's okay to choose a different path.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Wanda Gág won the Caldecott Honor Medal in 1939. The story stays very close to the tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. There are moments when Snow White is first in the house of the dwarfs and tries their food and beds until she finds what is just right for her. This seemed very "Goldilocks" to me, but upon checking the Grimms' text (which I haven't read for many years) I found that it was indeed part of the original story. At the end the wicked queen puts on red hot shoes and dances until she is dead. This was reminiscent of Anderson's The Red Shoes and my daughter and I were very surprised by it.

The illustrations are charmingly drawn and detailed. The timing of the publication of this book seems interesting. With Disney's first full-length animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs having been released in 1937. This book includes the three attempts (as opposed to the Disney film's one) of the wicked queen to kill Snow White: tightly drawn laces, poisoned comb and finally, poisoned apple.

Gág won another Caldecott Honor in 1942 for Nothing at All. She also won two Newbery Honors, Millions of Cats in 1929 and ABC Bunny in 1934. This always seemed odd to me since these two are picture books, but it is important to remember that the Caldecott Medal was not established until 1938 and so there was no other award for which to nominate picture books until then.

Before Green Gables

Perhaps a better title would have been Anne's Depths of Despair. I stumbled across this book at Nichola's Books right after it was released in February. It was in the children's section, but I don't think this is a children's book. Its best audience is perhaps adults who grew up with Anne and are intrigued enough to take a chance on a prequel by a different author. I've spoken with a number of Anne fans who have no interest whatsoever in this book. They cringed and shuddered at the thought of a prequel. I recently read William Horwood's sequel to Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows and enjoyed it very much. So I took the chance myself.

The novel is well researched. Time and place are very well mapped out. How household tasks were performed and the artifacts used to do this are all explained. We learn the origins of many things like Anne's imaginary friends Katie Maurice and Violetta, the source of her advanced vocabulary and how she learned to administer ipecac for croup. This is all satisfying to the Anne fan, but not really enough to make the journey through cruelty, alcoholism, tragic death and betrayal worth it.

This book, while compelling, is rather exhausting. Anne's life of horrendous drudgery and disappointment is very depressing. There are a few kindred spirits here and there but they have too little authority to rescue Anne from her life of toil and pain. When I finished this book I immediately re-read the first several chapters of Anne of Green Gables in order to see Anne safely to a better place.

Mei Li

Finished Mei Li by Thomas Handforth. This is the second book to win the Caldecott Medal, in 1939. It is the story of a small girl in China who sneaks away from her family to attend the New Year's Fair. She is continually scolded, especially by her brother, who says "what can a girl do?" She does what she wants, that's what she does. She asks a girl acrobat to balance her upside down in the palm of her hand, she feeds bean curd cake to a trained bear, has her fortune told and gives one of her lucky pennies to a beggar girl. She has a wonderful time. The story is a bit wacky, but probably fun for the target audience of 4-8 year olds. The drawings look like a combination of ink and charcoal. Once again I am reminded of Robert McCloskey's style.

I had to request this book through interlibrary loan. It came from the Pere Marquette District Library in Clare, Michigan, 144 miles Northwest of here. Markings inside the book suggested that it was once the Garfield Memorial Library. The book itself is large, 9.25 inches by 12.25 inches. As you can see it has a bright cover with a picture of Mei Li and her brother San Yu at the fair. The interior illustrations are black and white. This seems a shame since so much color is mentioned in the text, but I suspect that books with color illustrations were a bit pricey in 1939.

All Things Bright and Beautiful

Finished All Things Bright and Beautiful, the second book in James Herriot's series. I think I liked this one more than the first book All Creatures Great and Small. More time is spent on James tending to his various patients and their unusual and droll owners. This book is funny and charming. It is very interesting to consider what new drugs appeared that changed the veterinary world forever, antibiotics for example. Various bizarre and old fashioned remedies come to light, many suggested by the local farmers. It is a comfortable read populated by characters I know and love, especially Siegfried Farnon.

The Ballet Shoes

Finished Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. People who saw me reading it asked, "Isn't that the book from You've Got Mail?" The answer is yes. When Kathleen Kelly has to close her children's bookstore she wanders into the children's section at the big, bad Fox Books megastore and overhears a woman asking a clerk to help her find "the shoe books." He is clueless and Kathleen steps in and tells the woman the author, several titles, and says "I'd start with Theater Shoes. It's my favorite, but it's out of print!" and she bursts into tears. The scene is poignant because it illustrates not only the death of the independent children's bookstore, but the disappearance of all the specialized knowledge that went with it.

Ballet Shoes was Streatfeild's first book, originally published in 1936. A wacky old paleontologist rescues a baby from a shipwreck. He adopts her and secures his widowed niece, her daughter and the daughter's nanny to live in his house and look after the baby Pauline. In his travels collecting fossils he picks up two more babies over the years, Petrova and Posy. He leaves on an expedition and does not return. Meanwhile the babies grow into little girls and the money he leaves for their care begins to run out. The girls eventually enroll in the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, to study performing arts in order to gain employment as children. They enroll for free and pay the academy a percentage of their earnings in return for their training. The girls take "Fossil" as their last name. The three Fossils support the family and learn quite a lot about the theater and themselves.

Works that they perform in include Alice in Wonderland, Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Richard III.

This book was hard to get into at first, but once they began performing and living paycheck to paycheck it became quite compelling. Each of the shoe books seems to feature orphans who must train and perform in order to survive in London. The books have a different cast of characters each time. Ballet Shoes was a fun read. I really felt the excitement of the characters as they went to auditions. I think I'd like to read other books in the series some time in the future.

Two Little Knights of Kentucky

Finished Two Little Knights of Kentucky by Annie Fellows Johnston. This is one of thirteen novels in The Little Colonel series. Originally published in 1899, the edition I have is a reissue by Applewood Books (who also did the vintage reissues of the original Nancy Drew books). It feature numerous illustrations and fun little inside cover flaps that have a paper doll and outfit one can cut out.

The Little Colonel series was extremely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, but has fallen into obscurity. Set in the south, after the Civil War, the stories are very gentle, old fashioned and moralistic, but the portrayals of children and the scrapes they get into are very realistic. The stories are warm and sweet. This one in particular features children acting with concern for those less fortunate than themselves and taking integrity and honor very seriously.

My daughter very much enjoyed The Little Colonel when we read it aloud a number of years ago. Two Little Knights of Kentucky is the only other book in the series that I've seen in print. All of them are available for reading online. I hope to read them all some day.

Andy and the Lion

Finished Andy and the Lion by James Daugherty. It won the Caldecott Honor Medal in 1939. This is a simple picture book, very little text with expressive, possibly hyperbolic, but charming illustrations. Andy goes to the library and takes out a book about lions. He reads it very intently. Meanwhile a lion escapes from the circus and ends up with a large thorn in his paw. Andy stumbles upon him on his way to school and helps him by removing the thorn, then they part ways. Later in the story, while at the circus, one of the lions breaks free and runs ferociously into the audience heading right for Andy. Then suddenly they recognize each other and have a happy reunion. This reminded me a bit of Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, where Lyle is reunited with Mr Valenti his old Vaudeville partner. Also, something about the style of the drawings reminded me a little bit of Robert McCloskey's work.

Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

Finished Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace. This is the fourth book in the Besy-Tacy series. I read the other three to my daughter when she was much younger. Betsy, Tacy and Tib are now twelve, old enough to go downtown and have various adventures. Betsy visits the new Carnegie Library. She's has read all the books her family has at home, so her parents suggest that she visit the new library. She goes one Saturday, applies for a card and has some pocket money for lunch at the drugstore.

A number of plays come to Deep Valley. The first is Uncle Tom's Cabin. I found this ironic since I was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin myself at the time. Rip Van Winkle also comes and all the girls are able to participate in the performance. Other literary works mentioned are The Pickwick Papers (funny, I'm reading this right now too) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The series is set at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tib gets a ride in the first horseless carriage in town. These books were written and published in the 1940s and 50s. As the characters grow in age the reading level of the books advances. The illustrations were done by Lois Lensky. Lensky won the Newbery Award for Strawberry Girl in 1946. The Betsy-Tacy illustrations are simple line drawings. Lenski's illustrations for her own book are softer, more detailed charcoal drawings.

These books are based on Maud Hart Loevlace's own childhood. Deep Valley is modeled after Mankato, MN where there is a Betsy-Tacy Society and the houses that Maud (Betsy) and Frances "Bick" Kenney (Tacy) lived in have been restored. Portions of the restoration were performed by PBS's show "Hometime."

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Finished Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson. A best seller from 1939, it has recently been made into a film. I haven't seen the film yet. This is a Cinderella story of a shy, down on her luck spinster who is sent to the wrong address for a job interview. This mistake changes her entire life in one day. It's a charming, funny, fast-paced read. The edition I read is a reissue by Persephone Books. It includes the original line drawing illustrations. This is a fun, rainy day book.

Seven Simeons: A Russian Tale

Finished Seven Simeons: A Russian Tale by Boris Artzybasheff. It won the Caldecott Honor in 1938. The illustrations are very intricate colorful line drawings. They remind me of Fabergé Eggs. For a picture book the text is dense and lengthy. It's not a book that a small child could read independently. The story is interesting with plenty of surprises. I had to request an interlibrary loan of this book. It came from a junior college in Jackson, MI. They must have a good children's literature program.