Family Stories: The Moffat Books by Eleanor Estes

We had a delightful time reading The Moffats aloud last year, and the girls are eager for more Moffat adventures. So I caved to their begging and pleading and am reading the second book in the Moffat series, The Middle Moffat.
If you are not familiar with The Moffats, the stories -written in the early 1940's- revolve around an American family living in Cranbury, Connecticut before and during the first World War, that includes Mama, Sylvie, Joey, Jane, and Rufus. Their father died before we meet them in the first book. Their mama supports the family with her sewing and tailoring, but it's not an easy living. There's a lot of scrimping and making do, and the children have a lot of freedom to come and go, in a manner unfamiliar to children in our day.

The first book's overarching theme is that Moffat family house, which all the young Moffats have grown up in, is only a rental, and the landlord has put a "For Sale" sign on the house. With this looming over their heads, the Moffats proceed with life.

In these somewhat autobiographical books, based on Eleanor Estes' childhood memories, each chapter of the books is a complete story about some episode in the children's lives. My girls' favorites from The Moffats were the Halloween chapter, where they make a ghost in their attic to try to scare the obnoxious neighbor boy, and the chapter about Jane losing their coal money.

The second book, The Middle Moffat (winner of the Newbery Honor), finds the family adjusting to life in a new house, neighborhood, new friends, and for Jane, a new school.

The appeal that Eleanor Estes' books have is that she is able to capture the mind set of young people, their impishness, their curiosity, how they see the world, etc., in a way that transcends the passage of time. And Louis Slobodkin's whimsical sketches helpfully highlight the story. (These books are also an interesting look at American children's lives during this time in history.)

We've enjoyed getting to know the Moffats and we're looking forward to more of their adventures.

Here are the books, in order:
The Moffats
The Middle Moffat
Rufus M.
The Moffat Museum

Children's Classics: The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes; illustrated by Louis Slobodkin

This is the story of Wanda, a poor immigrant girl who is left out of the games the other girls play, through her own innate shyness and their careless small cruelties.  One day, after being taunted for her differences yet again, Wanda claims to have a hundred dresses, which makes the girls turn more cruel as they know she can't possibly have them. It becomes a game: to taunt Wanda about her made-up dresses. Told in third person narrative, through the "eyes" of Maddie, one of the taunters (a girl who fears that she herself will become the taunted) this is also the story of how her experience with Wanda changes her forever.  It is a timeless story that children (and adults) can relate to today just as much as when it was written 66 years ago.

Through Estes' understated, unemotional writing, the little cruelties of the girls stand in sharp relief, and Maddie's moral dilemma is more poignant. One of the things I love about this story and what makes it so effective, is that the ending is so bitter-sweet, much like real life. Maddie learns a deep, lasting lesson, but too late to change how she treats Wanda. It is questionable how much of a lesson the other girls have learned. Again, much like real life. We, the readers, absorb the lesson, and at the same time, learn that some situations in life are not cut and dried, so to speak, but full of contradiction and nuance. We learn to be careful, because we can't always right the wrongs we do.