Ghosts and Ballet and Mini Reviews, Oh My! (Some read-alouds for the 7-12 age range)

The Children of Green Knowe (L.M. Boston). The story of young Tolly who goes to live with his kindly Great-Grandmother OldKnowe whom he has never met, in an old manor in the English countryside and finds it benevolently haunted by the spirits of three children (Tolly's ancestors) who died during the Plague in the 1600's. Lonely Tolly loves exploring the grounds with their whimsical topiaries, and learning about the history of the house and his ancestors and the three children, Toby, Alexander and Linnet.

Originally published in 1955, this book has a gentle, old-fashioned feel, with a delicious bit of shiver to it. It somewhat reminds me, writing-wise, of Frances Hodgson Burnett's books.
It's suitable for good readers from ages seven and up, it would also make a good read aloud (if your children are okay with the idea of ghosts. Mine are not, even though the ghosts in the story are benevolent.) It is the first of a series.

Ballet Shoes (Noel Streatfeild). Great Uncle Matthew is passionate about collecting fossils and other natural items, and fills his large house with the things he's collected on his travels, including the three abandoned baby girls -each under different circumstances- he brings/sends home on three separate occasions to his niece, Sylvia. When GUM (Great Uncle Matthew) disappears and money gets tight, Sylvia takes in a motley assortment of boarders who all teach the girls something, which allows the three very different but devoted "sisters" to come into their own. 
Written in 1936, it was really quite a progressive book for it's time, when you think about it, in terms of its treatment of women and careers. I like that it shows, in a rather vague way, that every person has something to teach us.
I'm remembering the scene in the movie You've Got Mail, where Meg Ryan's character kind of gushes over this book and the other "Shoe" books by Noel Streatfeild. I'm sorry to say I can't gush, but it was a good story, with solid writing and interesting characters. It just didn't grab me. Maybe because the problems the family faces are easily and conveniently solved with no real character growth on anyone's part. Although it's not one I'm personally anxious to read aloud to my girls, it would make an good read aloud, especially if you have little dancers in your family.
This is the first time I've read this children's classic, and I wonder how I'd have reacted if I'd read it at the right age. Maybe then I would have gushed, but I doubt it. Even then I liked a little more dramatic tension in my stories. (I wish the publisher had put in more pictures by Diane Goode in this version I read. It was too slim on the illustrations.)

Family Stories: The Ingalls Family

Little House in the Big Woods (by Laura Ingalls Wilder) was the first book I read aloud to my girls. Olivia was three and a half years old, Karina was two and Susanna was in utero. We had already read the My First Little House Books, which I had come across at our small local library, and Olivia kept wanting more stories about Laura. But there weren't any more of those books, so I decided to feed her desire by reading her the original book Little House in the Big Woods. It had the added advantage of being about a girl that was close to Olivia's age (Laura is four in that first book) and her family life in the big woods of Wisconsin.

I took it slow, reading only about half the chapter every day. I knew she had an excellent attention span and comprehension for someone her age (a result of being read aloud to almost from birth combined with no television viewing) but some of those chapters have long descriptive passages that were beyond her knowledge base and so could easily lose the attention of one so young. Olivia loved it. It delighted her to encounter the expanded episodes she was familiar with from the My First Little House Books. (I think the pace we took was perfect for her.)  To this day she remembers the story of Ma slapping the bear (thinking it was Sukey the cow), and cousin Charley's version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, where his trouble-making lands him in a yellowjackets' nest, and he has to wrapped in mud and linens to bring down the swelling.

Coincidentally (or maybe not) this is the first novel I remember being read aloud to me, and it made a big impression on my young mind, too.

For those of you unfamiliar with this book -is there anyone unfamiliar with this book?- it tells the story of a family living in the woods of Wisconsin in 1872. Pa is a tall hard-working brown-haired, brown-bearded man with twinkling blue eyes, adored by his little girls. Ma is quiet, gentle, and determined to teach her girls about manners, hard work, and self-sufficiency. Mary is the oldest daughter who, even at five years old, is always obedient and industrious. Laura is four years old, small in size but large in spirit, which frequently gets her into trouble in this and the subsequent books. Baby Carrie is the youngest. This is the story of their life in those big woods.

I remembered the books with such fond nostalgia from my childhood, but reading them as an adult gave me a whole new appreciation for them. What strikes me in reading these books is the background story that's taking place: the hardship the family experiences may be mainly from Laura's point of view, but the tension and thread under the surface is about these two adults who are trying to scrabble out a living while protecting their children as much as possible. Life was very hard for those pioneers and homesteaders. The mere act of living for pioneering people meant working from sunup to sundown just to make sure they had what they needed to see themselves through the cold winters. These are wonderful history books about the pioneering movement and spirit. The fact that Laura gives so many wonderful descriptions of what living that life entailed, means that we get a fascinating glimpse into the early settlement west. Despite what some critics of the books have said, Laura doesn't romanticize the life. She tells the good and the bad matter-of-factly. Some of the bad things that happen in this and the other books of the series have no easy, nicely-wrapped-up resolutions. She knows that life was hard, and yet they found comfort in the little things like Pa's fiddle music, an ongoing motif throughout the series. (See my post about Pas' Fiddle Project for a fun addition to your reading of this series.)

Our family has gone on to read more of the Ingalls family adventures in:

• Little House on the Prairie where the family leaves the Big Woods because they were getting too crowded to Pa and journeys to the Kansas Territory. It tells of life on the trail in the covered wagon, the family building their log cabin and the problems of life on a flat prairie in Indian Territory (wolves, a prairie fire, etc.) (Be aware that this book contains some of the prejudiced attitudes of white settlers at the time. But I thought the scenes where Laura and her Pa discuss those issues were very poignant, since Pa recognized the problem that people like him were creating by their westward expansion -i.e. the Native Americans being booted off their land- but didn't know what to do about it. Toward the end of the book, this forced migration is something Laura witnesses.) In the end, the Ingalls family is evicted from their land by the U.S government as well.
• Farmer Boy is about Almanzo Wilder (Laura's future husband) as a boy in on a large farm in New York state.
• On the Banks of Plum Creek has the family leaving the Kansas territory and settling in a dugout on Plum Creek in Minnesota, before Pa builds a house with machine sawed lumber. In this book Laura and Mary go to a real school and church for the first time, and meet obnoxious Nellie Oleson. The family also has to contend with a plague of locusts, which forces Pa to walk to find a job three hundred miles away in order to feed his family and be able to buy grain for the next planting season. Ma and the girls has to cope with everything in his absence.
• By the Shores of Silver Lake takes place five years after the family first came to Plum Creek and finds the family just recovering from a scarlet fever epidemic. Mary has been blinded by scarlet fever. and Grace has been added to the family. The family (Baby Grace has joined the family) moves to the Dakota territory, where Pa works as the pay clerk for the railroad company. And the family becomes one of the first to settle in DeSmet. (This one was our least favorite so far.)

That's as far as we've gotten in our reading aloud. We will probably revisit the series toward the end of this year, rereading Little House in the Big Woods for Susanna's benefit. She will be delighted to read about a girl who is her age. (She seems a little obsessed by that idea right now.) And my older girls appreciate it more at their "advanced" ages than they did at three and two.

 I would highly recommend the series for young boys. There are tons of exciting things that happen.

The books of the The Little House on the Prairie series:

• Little House in the Big Woods
• Little House on the Prairie
• Farmer Boy
• On the Banks of Plum Creek
• By the Shores of Silver Lake
• The Long Winter
• Little Town on the Prairie
• These Happy Golden Years
• The First Four Years

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

Book Review: The Little Match Girl, adapted and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney

My favorite tale by Hans Christian Anderson has always been The Little Match Girl. The poignancy, the helplessness...it moved me deeply as a child, and still does. Naturally, then, it was a story I wanted in my own library, to share with my daughters, but with so many versions, which to choose? It was blind serendipitous luck that the version I ordered, because the cover drew me in, was adapted and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. I love it. And that seems like a feeble way to describe my emotional reaction to it.

It is an incredibly moving version, both the text and pictures. Set in a large turn-of-the-century American city, where horse-drawn carriages are sharing the road with automobiles, Pinkney's version highlights the poverty prevalent in such big cities. His match girl has a more homogeneous, easily overlooked face. But don't let that fool you into thinking this is a bland version. The pictures, to me, reflect the rough life of the poor. From the very first picture of the story that shows the fear and destitution and hopelessness on the children's faces as they work in the cold attic to make small bouquets of flowers to sell, to the hungry longing on the little girl's red-cheeked face as she stares at the food on a cart on another page, to her little hand cupped around the lit match as she sits on the snow covered sidewalk in her torn stockinged feet.... It a good thing you can't see me now; the emotion that his drawings evoke in me in really quite embarrassing.

And yes, my children love it, too.

Thank you, Jerry Pinkney, for making this hauntingly beautiful book.

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.

A Book Lover's Survey: Caution, Strong Passions Ahead!

Rachel Held Evans featured four intriguing questions on a blog post that I'm going to steal for my own post (Thanks, Rachel!), because as soon as I read them, I could immediately answer the questions. That doesn't happen to me very often.


Can you name...

1. A book you threw across the room in anger?
2. A book in which you underlined nearly every sentence?
3. A book you were surprised to love?
4. A book you're looking forward to reading?

1. A book I threw across the room in anger:
 On Becoming Baby Wise by Gary Ezzo

Not only did I throw this book across the room several times during the reading of it, when I was finished I threw it in the trash. I have only done that (the throwing and the throwing away) once in my life: with this book.

This book was recommended to me by another mother when my first daughter, Olivia, was a couple months old. I'd never heard of the book or the man before. I read the book, my mouth dropping open more and more in horror and disbelief.

I cannot say anything good about this vile book. It is the worst parenting book I have ever come across. And dangerous to the psychological and physical safety of children. Ezzo presents pseudo-scientific "facts" all throughout his book, (e.g. there is no such thing as a mother's intuition; wearing your baby in a sling puts you on a social scale with animals; don't demand-feed your newborn, make her know who's boss and stick strictly to a feeding schedule; infants should bend around your schedule not you around theirs; from the time they're born you babies and children should learn that your husband is your TOP priority, and your time together takes precedence over them, etc.) that fly in the face of commonsense and recommendations by the AAP. If you are a breastfeeding mother, and follow Ezzo's advice and schedule for feeding your baby, I guarantee you will very quickly lose your milk supply, and your baby will always be hungry. But the worst thing is his completely callous, completely detached parenting style he pushes. His attitude toward babies and young children is appalling. Following his advice could be dangerous, and could lead to a baby who suffers Attachment Disorder, resulting from emotional neglect.
The overall impression I got from reading this book -and yes, I read the vile thing all the way through- is that this man hates children and hates women. I can't believe this man has a following...well, yes I can, because he advocates parental selfishness, which obviously is very appealing to certain people. (If you don't want to take on the care of helpless little beings that depend on you for their every need, DON'T HAVE CHILDREN!!! 'Cause once you have them, it's not all about you anymore.)
Awful, awful book.

*Robert Bucknam's name is apparently just on there to throw his M.D. weight behind the claptrap that Ezzo espouses, giving the book "credibility." And shame on him for doing so.

2. A book in which I underlined nearly every sentence:

 A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle

First written in 1971, this book is the first of L'Engle's Crosswicks Journals (there are four). I read it the first time as a Junior at university. (On my own, not as a class required reading.) I am not an underliner of books, but I did take copious notes in my journal as I read it. In the pages of this book, L'Engle ponders deeply on many subjects: art, writing, good and evil, spirituality, the whole creative process, one's sense of self, etc. I loved the way she worded her thoughts. And it resonated with that youthful me in many ways. By turns sure and questioning, the philosophical and religious self-examination was appealing to the young woman trying-to-find-her-way-in-life that I was then. It made me think of my concept of "self" in a new way, something my philosophy classes had not succeeded in doing.

I have since left religion and religious belief behind me, and don't know if I'd feel the same way about this book today as I once did. But once upon a time it touched me deeply enough to overcome my scruples and write in the book.

3. A book I was surprised to love:
 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

I read this for the first time when I was 17 years old, at my mom's suggestion. It didn't sound like it would appeal to me at all AND it was freaking LONG, so I only started reading it out of respect for my mom, telling myself that I could stop if it was too boring. But I very quickly got swallowed up in the story of Edmond Dantes, a young man in love who is betrayed by his best friend and sent to the Chateau d'If, an impregnable island prison, for treason. Years later, he finally manages a daring escape and returns to France after amassing a fortune and travelling abroad, to meticulously exact his revenge on the man who was once his best friend and everyone responsible for sending him to prison.

I haven't read this book since then, and I need to, just to see if I'll feel the same way about it.


4. A book I can't wait to read:

Oh my, how do I choose? For right now, I'll say all the ones from my recent library trip. 
I also have an Excel spreadsheet with over 400 entries and growing everyday, of books waiting to be read.