It All Started on Epiphany

Oliver Parker is a 12-year-old American boy who has spent three quarters of his life in Paris; his parents live there because his father is a journalist. He often feels lonely amongst his French classmates and a little out of place. There's also something bothering his parents, especially his father, who is covering the story of an old classmate, an electronics whiz who is coming to Paris to install some great new invention on the Eiffel Tower.

On the evening of Epiphany, his mother purchases the usual King's Cake that is eaten on that day, and makes certain, as she always does, that Oliver receives the little key token baked into the pastry. This means Oliver gets to wear the little gold paper crown that always comes with a galette des rois. Because he's had "one of those days" at school he leaves the crown on all night, and later in the evening after he finishes his homework and is practicing shadow figures on the wall, he looks into the kitchen window—and sees a boy wearing a doublet staring back at him.

So begins The King in the Window by Adam Gopnik, an old-fashioned, intense fantasy story that has Oliver embroiled with the ongoing war between the Window Wraiths (they reflect your image in windows and generally help you to look better) and the dark spirits of the mirrors, which steal your soul. Oliver has been recruited because the Window Wraiths, having seen him in the crown, think he is the King of the Window, who will deliver the world from the spirits of the mirrors, who are planning to break through to the real world and capture the soul of every human on earth. Next thing he knows, Oliver, a totally unremarkable young man, has stolen a glass sword from the Louvre, discovered allies in often-exasperated 13-year-old Neige, daughter of the caretaker of the Parkers' residence, and the exceedingly wealthy Mrs. Pearson, not to mention the clochards, the street dwellers of Paris, and his buddy from the United States, Charlie.

This is a complex fantasy, more suited to young adults than children, and adults who enjoy a flight of fancy. Oliver is no sterling genius and readers will sympathize with him as he tries to discover how he will defeat the mirror denizens. In addition, Gopnik paints the gloom and the glory of a Paris winter in words like watercolors until the city becomes a character as much as Oliver, Neige, and the rest.

Enchanting and enthralling and even a little melancholy.

Old-Time Curiosities from Books

Reading all the "Five Little Peppers" books over brings one back to a different age. Imagine being so poor that you've never received a letter or a parcel, like Mrs. Hansell in Ben Pepper. Or a wonderful game for children being "playing company," dressing up and pretending to call on your own brothers and sisters.

Some other aspects of Victorian America emerge. For instance, in the second story ever written about the Peppers, little Phronsie celebrates a great event: getting her first pair of brand-new shoes! But even then Mrs. Pepper must cut corners. She tells Polly and Ben to make sure that Mr. Beebe the shoe-store man gives them "evens" so the shoes will wear longer. If you're familiar with the history of shoes, you know that they were originally made the same for both feet. Once on, the shoes then conformed to the shape of your feet. If the shoes wore unevenly on one side—I always "turned on my heels" and rounded out the outsides of them, so my mother had the shoemaker put rubber "taps" on those corners—you could swap shoes and thus "evens" would wear longer. (As someone who has trouble with shoes, I can imagine how uncomfortable that would be!) Around 1822, American cobblers invented the first "left" and "right" side shoes made from specific lasts (molds) of each foot. Some slippers and light women's shoes continued to be made on straight lasts by the turn-shoe method until perhaps 1870. Apparently if Mrs. Pepper was still requesting "evens" in a story written in 1887, either they still made shoes like that for children, who were so hard on shoes, or Mr. Beebe was a very old-fashioned cobbler.

In several of the stories, Mrs. Pepper or another adult applies something called opodeldoc to cuts or bruises. This was a liniment made from, among other things, soap and camphor. Wikipedia tells a little more about opodeldoc, including the origin of the name. It's hard to imagine a day when a simple broken leg was a reason to panic, but blood poisoning or crippling might be the result of the injury.

There's also what sounds like a strange sounding remedy for the bruises that result when Dick Whitney falls down the stairs: brown paper is soaked in vinegar and put on the swellings that result. Again, this is a homeopathic remedy still recommended today:

Put five or six sheets of strong brown paper into a pan and cover with sage vinegar. Place a lid on the pan and steam over a very low heat for a few minutes. The time will depend on the type of paper used. It should soften and absorb some of the vinegar without breaking or disintegrating. Remove the paper and wrap it in overlapping layers around the affected part. Apply as hot as possible and build up several layers. Cover with plastic wrap and bandage in place. Leave for four hours and reapply twice a day until the swelling and bruising have subsided.

This is an effective remedy enshrined in the children's rhyme "Jack and Jill" (Jack "went to bed to mend his head with vinegar and brown paper"). It is very supportive and strengthening for bruises and swellings.

Books Read Since January 17

• A Hole in Juan, Gillian Roberts, the penultimate volume in her mystery series about Amanda Pepper, Philadelphia Prep teacher who gets involved in mysteries and her boyfriend-now-husband C.K. Mackenzie. This time a tough science instructor that the kids don't like is injured in a laboratory accident. Amanda is more upset than the rest of the instructors since before his accident the teacher confided to her that he was being harrassed by the students—and certain of her students are acting odd.

I was genuinely mystified by this one, but came out of it feeling depressed—are high-school kids today really that mean and petty? Did I just manage to avoid these poisonous creatures when I did the high school circuit?

• Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, Lee Goldberg, another original novel based on the television series. Union negotiations break down, the police walk off the job—and Monk is reinstated as a detective. First on his plate: a killer who offs women joggers and steals only their left shoe. If you think Monk is crazy, the other reinstated ex-police officers who make up his squad are even more daft: a Dirty Harry-attitude cop with "anger-management issues," an elderly man, and a paranoid woman officer who believes aliens are listening to our every word via our computers. Will Natalie survive this without going nuts?

I enjoyed reading this one because Goldberg has all the dialog down pat (well, he has written several episodes of the series, after all), especially between Stottlemeyer and Disher. I could pretty much hear the actors saying the dialog he'd written for them.

• The other four Five Little Peppers books I had never read. I got them through interlibrary loan. Most of them sell for $$$ online because the later books were not reprinted and so are rare. The Stories Polly Pepper Told occasionally shows up in bookstores inexpensively, but I've never wanted it because frankly I wasn't interested in the little fairy stories Polly told to keep the younger kids occupied. However, I realized when I finally read the book that it also had framing sequences and stories about the family itself, so if I ever see it cheap again, I'll probably grab it. There's one story where we actually hear something about the childrens' father, and another where they are snowbound.

Writers sometimes get themselves into traps when they create a popular character. They have other ideas for other characters and stories, but people clamor for more of the popular character. Louisa May Alcott finally wished that the March family would be blown up in some cataclysm so she could escape them and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of course "killed off" Sherlock Holmes, then later "resurrected" him because of the outcry.

"Margaret Sidney" (in real life Harriet Mulford Lothrop) intended to end the Pepper saga after four books, but her readers kept clamouring for more. Despite her professed affection for "the Little Brown House" folks, it must have bored her eventually to keep filling in these minute details of life with Ben, Polly, Joel, David, and Phronsie, because the later books are full of contrary timelines, character names transferred to other characters, and other signs that Mrs. Lothrop was just writing because they'd asked her to. The Adventures of Joel Pepper (which I own) and Our Davie Pepper and Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (which I borrowed) cram little details in between the events that take place in Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (Little Brown House does include the two original Pepper short stories written for Wide Awake!, a late 1800s children's magazine, which engendered the first book and eventually the series). Ben Pepper appears to take place between How They Grew and Midway—except that an event that happens in Midway has already taken place in Ben Pepper.

I wonder if Lothrop ever received letters from sharp-memoried fans who wondered why the Peppers' timeline was a bit warped the way people complain of inconsistencies on television series via the internet today?

Anyway, everything you ever wanted to know about the Five Little Peppers (and probably never wanted to ask) here.

"A Cracking Good Tale..."

The 7 Professors of the Far North by John Fardell.

Remember those cool kids' adventures of the 1950s and 1960s? Danny Dunn? Miss Pickerel and her junior sidekicks? The Three Investigators or the Hardy Boys or Rick Brandt or Nancy Drew when she wasn't waffling on about clothes like she does in the new books? Well, bring the format to the present, take three plucky kids (a brother and sister and a boy named Sam with an always useful Swiss Army knife), and get them involved with the kidnapping of six brilliant professors by an unbalanced and meglomaniac former colleague, then mix them with nonstop action, and you have this totally brill novel that you don't have to be a kid to enjoy.

Eleven-year-old Sam Carnabie is facing a boring vacation at his Aunt Roberta's house when his parents let him stay with their old instructor Professor Alexander Ampersand and his young wards, his orphaned niece and nephew Zara and Ben, in Edinburgh. Then one of Ampersand's colleagues shows up with the urgent message "Professor Murdo has returned to Nordbergen." Within a twinkling other colleagues arrive on the scene, then are kidnapped, leaving the kids on their own to mount a rescue.

Fast-paced action takes Sam, Ben and Zara across England, into Europe and then far to the north; meanwhile a mundane teenage girl named Marcia Slick is about to become a victim of her parents' obsessive need for perfection...

Incredible gadgets, adventures on a secret mode of transportation, despicable villains, travel in some of the most incredible vehicles ever, and engaging characters make this one not to miss.

Books Read

Finished Erik Larson's Thunderstruck. Not quite as compelling as Devil in the White City because poor abused Dr. Crippen isn't quite as fiendish as creepy homicidal Dr. Holmes. I find the Marconi parts absorbing, but then I have an interest in the creation of radio. I wish there had been more photos to show the radio apparatus, the English, U.S., and Canadian locations at that time, and the people involved.

Presently reading: 7 Professors of the Far North, which I bought and started on vacation but never finished, and Jill Churchill's Who's Sorry Now?, another in her "Grace and Favor" mysteries about brother and sister Robert and Lily Brewster, two formerly rich young people whose near starvation existance after the Depression wiped out their money is brought to an end by a bequest from their late uncle, who has promised them millions, but in the meantime they have to live at "Grace and Favor" cottage and learn how to work while uncle's financial advisor manages their money.

I've been reading these since the first because I've always had an interest in the Depression-era due to my parents having lived through it, but my favor in their grace [sorry, I went far for that one] diminishes with each new book. I've kept the others but I actually got rid of the one that had to do with the Bonus Marchers because the Bonus March took about half the book but had nothing to do with the story that was begun in the first chapter. It was as if Churchill said "Look at this disgraceful event in U.S. history; here, I'm going to describe it in detail!" just because it took place in the same era as her story.

Churchill's vocabulary and sentence structure seem to grow more simplistic with each successful volume as well. Who's Sorry Now? is full of short, choppy sentences and repeated explanations (how many times did we have to hear that Lily's dog Agatha rolled in something dead in the space of four pages?). I feel like I'm reading something meant for a reading-challenged teenager rather than an adult mystery novel.

Books Read Since December 30

• The Trouble With Magic
• A Charmed Death
both by Madelyn Alt
If you are a police procedural mystery lover, you will probably avoid; these are "cozies" that take place in the Midwest, where our heroine Maggie O'Neill finds a new direction (and new job) in life when she steps into Enchantments, a gift store that belongs to Felicity Dow, a down-to-earth practicing witch. In the course of the books Maggie helps solve the murder of Felicity's sister and then the murder of a popular high-school student, while she discovers her own esoteric powers.

• Walt Disney by Neal Gabler. Middle line, 600 page (the other 200 pages are appendix and index) bio of Disney: doesn't gloss his bad points like Bob Thomas, doesn't go overboard like Marc Eliot. Gabler's subtext is Disney's need for control.

• Christmas Remembered by Tomie dePaola, the children's book illustrator. Warm stories about memorable Christmases in his life; nothing remarkable, but a couple very humorous, especially the story of "Nana-Fall River."

Library books finished over the holiday: The Story of Santa Klaus [sic], William Walsh's 1909 effort to explain how tall austere St. Nicholas and other Christmas gift-givers became the American Santa Claus; The Book of Christmas Folklore, Tristam P. Coffin, a wry retelling of Christmas customs; Celebrating Christmas Around the World, short to long tales of Christmas in different countries edited by Herbert Wernecke (not sure what this book is supposed to be—it was published by a religious press and about half the stories are about missionaries celebrating in different lands, but there are some different pieces as well, including a humorous Reader's Digest-like offering about Danish husbands at Christmas, and the chapter from Hans Brinker; or the Silver Skates about St. Nicholas); and Christmas the World Over by Daniel J. Foley, again, chapters about Christmas celebrations in different locations, including Japan and China.

Presently in the middle of Thunderstruck by Eric Larson (Devil in the White City, Isaac's Storm).

Callahans at Christmas...

... in Holiday Harbour.

Babies and Bathwater

While surfing around for Christmas books, I came upon this website for librarians about culling out older holiday books. I found it rather sad, because I love old books.

Certainly I understand where the school may be coming from. As much as I like reading these old books, there are times when the blatant racism makes me pause. I remember how it bothered me to read old books where the villians were evil Italian organ grinders (like in The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew) or "dirty, smelly" Italians were featured; it was a big jolt to think that everyone didn't like my ethnic group. And I wince when I read the old series books with "typical Negro dialect" and lazy, shiftless "darkies" (like "Eradicate" in the Tom Swift books) and the "greasers" typically portrayed in books set out West. It baffles me after reading books, especially those for children, that used strong vocabularies, daring settings, and sturdy characters suddenly descending into portrayals of stereotypical ethnic and racial characters, how intelligent people could have ever believed these things.

But there they are. It's, for better or worse, what we were, what children had ingrained into them at a young age and then passed on to their children. Thankfully no one except some equally baffling extremists who rail on about "racial purity" believes that rot any longer.

Must the ideas in the books be tossed out, too? Perhaps, as long as they are in good shape, might the books be put into a special section for historical purposes, to be read by older people who understand "this is how it was" and discard the hurtful chaff for a portrait of the times? One of the collecting shows on the Treasure HD channel featured a young African-American man who collects cookie jars, statues, tools, etc. featuring blackface characters, mammys, Pullman porters, etc. He says they make him sad to know that people believed in the stereotypes portrayed by these sculptures, but that it happened and that thankfully we were past producing such things, that they were now tools in which to show people that times have changed for the better. Cannot the old books do the same?

The Last Volume

There was no way I could miss knowing about St. Nicholas magazine, given that I had read so many old children's books, especially those from the last century. Its name tended to be sprinkled here and there in various texts and biographies. Therefore when I found a nearly pristine May 1917 issue in a local bookstore many years back, I had to grab it, if nothing else just because the issue was published three months after my mother's birth. It was interesting to see what type of stories the children liked in those faraway days of World War I and suffragettes, and the advertisements for the latest things and also for private schools and camps, not to mention the news of the day in "The Watch Tower" column.

Later I found Henry Steele Commanger's St. Nicholas Anthology (mixed up with the Christmas books, of course; even the booksellers never seemed to "get" that this was not a Christmas magazine despite the title) and reveled in the old stories.

But it's when I found an 1888-1889 bound volume in Boston's Brattle Bookstore that my mania really began. After reading the volume I wanted more of the series.

Thanks to e-Bay and bookfinder.com (sadly, I never found another affordable volume in a bookstore), I started to collect the bound volumes one by one, most of them at very reasonable prices. I paid my limit (under $30) for one volume that was hard to find, one of the two volumes that featured color Arthur Rackham prints to fairy tales. It horrified me that people were buying these volumes just for the artwork—in fact, the one I paid the limit for actually had the Rackham illos torn out, but since I wasn't buying them for the color plates I didn't really care—and bidders were cheerfully advised by several sellers that you could "cut out the artwork and toss the rest of the volume away"!

One thing I discovered about halfway through collecting, by dint of purchasing a single 1935 issue, was that I actually did not want to collect the entire series. Somewhere in the very early 1930s, St. Nicholas' publisher fell victim to the Depression and sold the magazine to another company. The stories, as I discovered, although still more adult in tone than things marketed to children now, suffered such a decrease in quality that it was depressing. The illustrations were equally simplistic and the magazine was even advertising things like girls' fashions from expensive stores like Bonwit Teller as part of the content of the magazine. So I decided that I would stop with early 1930 and be done with it although I was probably safe ordering the remainder of the year (I think the sale was in 1931).

Eventually, except for five single issues and one six month volume (May through October of 1928), I had collected all the volumes I wanted. And what a reading feast, from children dressed in "roundabouts" and "trowsers" (yes, that's how it was spelled in 1873 and that big rock was spelled "bowlder") riding horse cars and carriages—of much interest are accounts of the western movement by people who were actually along the trail, like "The Boy Emigrants," a tale of hardship and travel that bely the scrubbed Ingalls on the television series—and reading of the latest experiments with electricity, all the way through to boys in caps and sneakers and girls in Mary Janes and party dresses traveling in automobiles and reading about the latest exploits of aviators. From the bucolic owners of Tinkham's tide mill to the independent "careless Kincaid" girls, from quaint natural histories through instructions for putting together your own radio. Rose Campbell, Cedric Errol, Sara Crewe, Fisher's Elizabeth Ann/Betsy, Jack Hazard, and Queen Ixix of Ix, not to mention Barbour's Tom, Dick and Harriet and other sports figures and Seaman's clever heroines all drew their first breaths in those pages. Stories, poems, puzzles, travelogues, history, humor, biography...the best reading feast ever.

It was actually Rosemary and Delight Kincaid who finally brought me that final 1928 volume a couple of weeks ago, when I realized that I wouldn't be able to finish reading "Those Careless Kincaids" if I didn't purchase it. Luckily a volume turned up on e-Bay just after I read the penultimate installment in the previous bound volume and I was able to snag it.

And I don't even like Rosemary and Delight all that much...but I do love St. Nicholas.

Try a little bit: you may, too!

A Tribute to St. Nicholas Magazine

(By the way, I was quite "chuffed" to notice that someone had used that web page as a source for a research paper on the magazine!)

Voices from the Past

Here's a great site about series books (mostly for girls, but there are a couple of boys' series, too), which includes photos of the books, plot synopses, etc. I'd give my eyeteeth to read some of these!

Series Books for Girls

One of the more interesting pages is about the Whitman Authorized Series which featured actresses like Jane Withers, Dorothy Lamour, Betty Grable, etc. in mysteries.

I Want My "Fix" Back

Granted, I still have many books in waiting, but I'm beginning to get worried about Blackmask.com. (For those who don't know, Blackmask.com's webmaster is being sued by Conde Nast. He has been publishing pulp novels that he said were in public domain on the site, but it turns out Conde Nast owns the rights to a bunch of them, especially Street and Smith's most famous creation, the Shadow. I don't have the whole story, just what I read on various Usenet groups, but apparently he was told to take them down and refused, so now the whole site's down.) Combined with the disappearance of Mary's series book site, this is pretty disappointing.

It's a pity because I am enjoying those wonderful old Stratemeyer Syndicate and other series novels for kids. Not only are they a wonderful window on the mores of kids as they were (and probably a lot of what adults wanted them to be!), but they're now unintentionally funny. How can you not laugh at boys calling each other "old bean" or spouting funny epithets like "great horny toads!" in place of profanity? Right now I am concurrently reading H. Irving Hancock's saga of Dick Prescott (and Greg Holmes) at West Point and Dave Darrin (and Dan Dalzell) at Annapolis (the other members of the "Dick & Co. sextette" as they are referred to in the ubiquitous summation, formerly "the High School Boys," Tom Reade and Harry Hazelton, are off being civil engineers all over the US).

Having made it through plebe year with Dick, Greg, Dave, and Dan, I have to admit the stories haven't changed much: each pits the boys against some physical and often moral challenge, and there's always some idiot classmate with a chip on his shoulder against Our Heroes who keeps trying to get them expelled/in trouble. Over at West Point, after two years of ragging on Prescott and Holmes, fellow Gridley High School classmate Bert Dodge finally was exposed and sent packing. I'm sure some fellow Dodge-supporter is primed to take his place. In Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis; or Two Midshipmen As Naval Academy Youngsters, classmate Pennington is aiming his big guns at Dave for getting him in trouble, although Dave actually saved him from getting booted from the Naval Academy by covering up the fact that Pennington stupidly smoked opium as a toothache remedy. The ethnic stereotypes are, as always, mildly distasteful—the whole opening opium den scene with its "velly evil" Chinese proprietor was pretty bad—but I find it interesting reading about the behind-the-scenes life of Army and Navy cadets: the system of hazing that is forbidden, but still exists; the grind of studies, "Flirtation Walk" along the Hudson and battleship cruises with the "middies."

Presumably everyone makes it through unscathed because Dave Darrin goes off to Vera Cruz in one book and then is mentioned as serving on a destroyer escort (along with Dan) when Dick Prescott goes off to fight the Boches in World War I. But getting there has been fun...

Callahans Revisited

Warning, spoilers ahoy!

This one, Keeping Cool, is a little more like it.

When we left our story, I was utterly disgusted after the second book in the series, Home Sweet Home wandered into girly-girly territory with a plot that could have been solved had Neeve (the outgoing, wildly creative one of the four cousins) simply talked to her "supergranny," Gee; quarrels over painting the girls' room, which eventually turns out a typical pink; and a haggle over, of all things, a makeup bag. ::snore:: This was a complete turnaround from the opening Callahan Cousins book, Summer Begins, in which the four 12-year old Callahan girl cousins—Neeve, Hilary (the athletic one), Phoebe (the bookworm), and Kate (the quiet, craft-oriented one) come to stay with Gee in her big house on Gull Island, learn to sail, and compete in a contest once practiced by their fathers and the children of a neighboring (and slightly snobby) family, the Bickets. Sloan Bicket, who is their age, becomes the girls' bete noire.

The third book is about Kate. Although Phoebe is the bookworm, she's also coolly blonde, a little patronizing, and dresses like a hippie. Of the four girls, Kate is the one I feel the most kinship to. She likes crafts and knitting, is afraid to talk to strangers and when she does often stammers (unless she shares a common interest with the person and then she is chatty and curious), carries things with her to feel secure, fusses over her cousins, cries easily, and keeps a to-do list. In this story, Kate gets tired of being teased about the things she does and is determined to change her image so she will be "cool." Of course she's only twelve and ends up going overboard on many things, annoying the other three several times, and, of course, in the end discovers that while there are some things she could improve in herself (eating better, not being afraid of strangers), she is at her best when she is herself. [Insert violin music here.]

In the course of the story, the girls also collect donations for a fundraiser at the Island's clinic and get into a rivalry with Sloan Bicket about who will collect the most donations. During Kate's self-improvement craze, she manages to get close to Sloan and discovers that like most snobs, Sloan is actually deeply insecure and also wishes her mother, a doctor at the very clinic they're seeking donations for, would pay more attention to her. She is also jealous of the Callahan girls' closeness to each other and actually is rather lonely. Yet Kate discovers that Mrs. Bicket is not the dragon she seems to be from Sloan's comments, but a very personable woman who takes her job very seriously.

Kate's eventual revelation works without being too sappy.

As always, my reservations on these books are the same ongoing complaints: Gee seems perfect (everyone loves her, she has a gorgeous house, she has the world's best housekeeper and cook, her generosity is never-ending). The girls aren't wastrels, but they want for nothing. They all wear designer clothing. The town is idyllic, a picture-perfect resort with everything freshly painted and wonderfully scented (even low tide doesn't smell bad on Gull Island). As much as I dislike "problem" books for children that contain nothing but endless despair, the Callahans' world is almost too much in the opposite direction. It's like living in a candy-perfect world and occasionally the sugar just gets to be a bit much.

The final book comes out in October, and is about Phoebe, the only one left. The girls are apparently staying overnight in a nearby whaling museum, which may prove interesting. Maybe the realities of whaling can add a little grit to the fairy tale.

On Paper

Here's a multi-part piece of fanfiction that's quite good: Hogan's Heroes: "Dear Diary"

Classics Continued

I have finished Volumes 1 and 2, Fairy Tales and Fables, and Folk Tales and Stories of Wonder. The familiar old fairy tales (well, most were familiar anyway) were easy reading, but I discovered small details in the tales that I'd forgotten over the years (there's a lot more to the Three Little Pigs, for instance, than shows up in the tales abbreviated for small children or in the Disney cartoon version). The second volume was more difficult to slog through—it includes Charles Dickens' "The Magic Fishbone," which is pretty dull (the king's interminable whining is annoying as well) and so many versions of the younger son or the dullard son who goes off to make his fortune and wins the the princess that they blur together. It did have the long versions of Aladdin and Ali Baba; those who have only seen the Disney version of Aladdin would probably be perturbed by the original. Aladdin is thoroughly unlikeable; he doesn't do a lick of work in the entire story and still gets rewarded for his "cleverness." Cleverness my foot; the genie does all the dirty work. The volume also includes some Asian folk tales that I had not heard before, including a magical one about a starved artist's dogsbody who longs to paint and receives instructions from a master's painting.

I have now started the third volume, with the familiar Greek and Roman myths: Phaeton, Prometheus, etc. I haven't read these since late elementary school/junior high and am interested in how the stories were adapted for the Collier printing.

Classics Revisited

Wow! I received my Junior Classics set yesterday—five days from purchase to shipment arrival! I hadn't bought anything on eBay since fall of 2004, partially because of Mom being sick and all the other things that happened in 2005, and partially because, on my penultimate purchase of 2004, I never received my merchandise and the seller never responded to my e-mails. (After I posted feedback stating this, at least four other people contacted me saying this same seller had never sent their merchandise either and had not responded to their e-mails. I discovered just this morning that the seller actually left me a negative feedback, saying I was a "pain in the ass" for inquiring about my order!) Anyway, it had put me off ordering from eBay for a while.

The books are not mint, but in excellent shape. When I used to go upstairs at Linda's house and sneak a look at the copies her brother had (I still think of these volumes as "Armand's books" <g>), I mostly concentrated on Volume 9, "The Animal Book," but am planning to read them all, even the Greek and Roman myths, which I consider rather boring, and have started from the beginning with the fairy and folk tales. I'm discovering stories I recall reading so long ago, not just the standards like "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," but the entire story of "The Three Little Pigs," "The Goose Girl," etc. (I need to let James read "The Bremen Town Musicians" so he'll know what the statue of the animals at Lenox Mall is all about.)

Refreshingly, none of these books are in BIG PRINT or contain paragraphs interrupted with BIG COLORED WORDS in simplified vocabulary (dialect from other countries is even used); even the youngest child is considered to have some intelligence (and a friendly person to read it to them if necessary).

I did page through all of them, including "The Animal Book" and discovered that it contains John Muir's "Stickeen," which I originally read in an elementary school reader, and Eric Knight's original short story of "Lassie Come-Home," which contains several differences from the book, including Joe being named after his father and Priscilla being named Philippa and being older in the story (she can drive a car). Lassie's travels actually take up only two or three pages in the short story; it is mostly about the people around her and how they react to her faithfulness rather than actually about Lassie.

It is interesting to realize that much of what we think of as "children's stories" were not originally written just for children. Rather today their subject matter pegs them as "children's stories." "Lassie Come-Home" was not written for children and did not appear originally in a children's magazine, but rather in The Saturday Evening Post. "My Friend Flicka" is another—it was originally published in Story magazine, not a children's publication. People who see the novel version of Flicka as a sweet story about a boy and his horse have never read the book: Rob and Nell's marriage is chronicled in an adult manner, and topics of adult responsibility, the harsh reality of Western range life, and keeping body and soul together financially are all explored...not your usual topics for children. Years ago, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and others were all written as adult books.

Got A Set!

Won a set of Collier's Junior Classics on eBay last night. Supposedly mint, from 1956. Too cool.

Speaking of Series Books...

...here's a new fan-written Dana Girls mystery, "The Clue in the Rainbow." It's okay; the "Ice Castle" story is head and shoulders superior.

Sadly, No Mystery at All

I've always been an American history junkie, as well as collecting children's books, especially those I read in my childhood. When the Pleasant Company started publishing their American Girls books, I was frankly in "hog heaven" (except for the price—talk about overpriced books!—and then Sam's Club started stocking the collections, which removed the fiscal obstacle). The original stories were about Felicity, a colonial girl; Kirsten, an immigrant pioneer girl; Samantha, a wealthy Victorian girl; and Molly, a girl growing up during World War II. Naturally my first purchase would be Molly's stories, since my parents were teenagers and then adults during the Depression and World War II and I felt close to their history.

Gradually, and through a buyout of Pleasant Company by Mattel, the series grew to include Kaya, a pre-Revolutionary War Nez Perce girl; Josefina, an early 19th-century New Mexican girl; Addy, a girl who escaped slavery near the end of the Civil War; and Kit, a girl growing up during the Depression. Accompanying the books were dolls and accessories for each girl and then other special volumes (short story books, cookbooks, "how to draw" books, etc., the finest of these being the volumes "Welcome to _________'s World," which used photographs and drawings of the time to illustrate the era of each girl in the series—just the sort of thing I doted on).

The best development to emerge from the American Girls franchise, however, was a stand-alone series of books called the "History Mysteries." These did not involve the series characters and moved in a random manner from a mystery taking place in one era of American history to another. One book might take place in War of 1812 Louisiana, while another would involve a mystery while collecting scrap metal in World War II. The "mystery girls" weren't cookie-cutter versions of any of the series book leads and some of the various mysteries involved history eras not much talked about today, such as the participants of the Alaskan gold rush, the world of the War of 1812, the fascinating lives of the lighthouse keeper's children, and even the plight of the Loyalists during the American Revolution. One of the "History Mysteries," The Night Flyers, about homing pigeons and World War I, won a Juvenile Edgar Award (mystery writer's trophy) and another was nominated.

But since girls and mysteries have gone together since the days of August Huiell Seaman and the Stratmeyer Syndicate books, including the immortal Nancy Drew, the Mattel folks have recently released a new line of mysteries starring the American Girls series book protagonists themselves. The books are fairly interesting in working the mystery format into the series milieu (some of the series stories already having involved minor mysteries), but sadly it seems to have spelled the end of the "History Mystery" stand-alone stories (not one has been released since volume 22, which was at least two years ago). It means the mystery stories are now stuck completely in the era of the series stories and we won't see any other eras represented—so many stories and periods were still waiting to be told: how about a mystery set during the cattle drive days? during the Spanish-American war? in a CCC camp? in a post-war (WWII) housing shortage area? in Florida during its "wild west" pioneer days? at a Northwest logging camp? an early California fruit farm or at one of the Spanish missions or during the "Okies" flight west during the Dust Bowl? or a Northwest Native American mystery (or perhaps a Pilgrim era version)? or one set in the early New England textile mills? Hundreds of wonderful ideas here yet to go!

Maybe Mattel is just taking a breather...but I fear it's the last gasp instead. Apparently, like the television networks, they would rather rake in the bucks while sticking to a formula than continue to branch out into other interesting directions to challenge the minds of their readers. And that, especially for history and mystery lovers of all ages, is a great shame.

"Why Do You Want a Book? You Already Have One..."

... and other Bookworm Droppings.

Absurd remarks made by patrons of used bookstores. Very funny (including the typos).

Reading Online

One of my two favorite short stories, online: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

Here's the other: "The Most Dangerous Game"

Tom, Dick and...Sam?

Here are some of the e-books I've whiled my way through during spare moments:

The Rover Boys at School

You've probably heard joking references to the Rover Boys all your life—but do you know who they actually were? Penned by "Arthur Whitfield," they were actually the very first series book creation of Edward Stratemeyer, whose syndicate series books for children and young adults later included The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, and a whole stable of others. The Rover Boys are the sons of a famous archaeologist who is lost as the series opens, and the boys drive their uncle so wild they are sent to a military boarding school, very fashionable in that day, and to which they are wild to go. Dick is the levelheaded oldest, Tom is the prank-playing middle boy, and Sam is the youngest. Today they sound ridiculously old-fashioned—in several instances the boys even call someone "old top" and use British expressions—and Tom's pranks would probably get him sent to a psychiatrist, and of course ethnic humor and racial stereotypes abound. Still they are an amusing curiosity.

Miss Elliot's Girls

Cross Louisa May Alcott (children learning to be more patient and kind) with a naturalist story and a bit of humane teaching alá Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe and you have this curious story about a "lame young woman" who teaches the children in her care (mostly girls in a sewing circle, but also two boys) about the joys of insect life and being kind to animals. Pretty dull but a good example of a 19th century instructive tale.

The High School Boys' Canoe Club

H. Irving Hancock's sextet of clean-living American boys (their later adventures chatted about here) purchase a damaged "war canoe" from a show, have it repaired, and then participate in boat races at a nearby lake. Since it would be totally boring if they did nothing but, a vindictive bully from school keeps trying to sabotage their summer. Today the boys' parents would have the bully jailed or sent for counseling; back then the boys just solved their own problems until the bully's father figures out what his kid's been up to and ships him home in disgrace.

The Puritan Twins

I've read negative reviews of this Lucy Fitch Perkins "Twin book" and I must agree with them; pretty dull. The story is mostly about the male half of the twin contingent, Daniel, who gets to do all the interesting stuff, while his sister Nancy has to stay behind and be ladylike, or is always being berated for daydreaming and thinking for herself. So realistic of Puritan attitudes to women that it's boring.

The Motor Boys on the Pacific

Another in one of those series stories in which the boys are lucky enough to have some wonderful machine for themselves. In this case, the boys' wonderful speedboat is actually wrecked before the story even opens and several dull opening chapters are reserved for the filing of the insurance claim on it. Then the boys visit California and (how coincidental!) a boy leaving lets them use his big powerful motorboat for the summer! The rest of the story involves looking for a ship full of valuables. The lead characters are so forgettable that...darn...I've forgotten them.

Keineth

Nine-year-old Keineth lives a sheltered life on New York's Washington Square with her widower Dad and a Belgian nursemaid. But as World War I encroaches on the United States, "Tante" returns to Belgium to help her people and Dad, who's a diplomat, sends Keineth to live with friends while he goes to Europe to help make peace. Shy Keineth blossoms under the friendship of the family's children and learns many things before her Dad is safely returned. That's it. Think Understood Betsy with a parent and you have the story, if not the enthralling text.

The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone

Some of the series' books involved ordinary kids; then there were the pseudo-science fictiony Tom Swiftian series that involved fantastic inventions and the boys who worked with them. In this case, one of the boys has a famous inventor dad who comes up with things like a fabulous electric car that goes miles without a charge, a fabulous airship which his sons and his friends get to travel on, and his newest invention, a radio telephone (which is more like a cell phone many years before its invention). Naturally the boys run afoul of bad guys. Despite the cool inventions, yet another set of youngsters so forgettable that I don't even remember their names.

Penrod and Sam

Booth Tarkington's sequel to Penrod is slightly less funny, but still amusing. Way back then the hi-jinks of Penrod and his buddy Sam were just taken as boys' pranks; they'd probably be arrested now.

The Secret of the Tower

A mystery by Anthony Hope that does not involve Ruritanian swordplay, involving a house with a mysterious tower room and the death of an old man. Main item of interest here, in this early 20th century novel, is that one of the protagonists is a woman doctor who neither faints, simpers, or acts like a fragile flower of Edwardian womanhood.

The Red House Mystery

The visit of a wealthy man's Australian brother provides the beginning of the mystery, which deepens after the wealthy man is murdered. Who did it? How did the murderer escape without being seen? Our sleuth is one Antony Gillingham, a friend of one of the people staying at the home of the murdered man, an amateur who slowly discovers all the clues. Most notable thing about this story: it was written by A.A. Milne of Winnie-the-Pooh fame.

A Name from the Past

I remember reading selections from Mary Antin's The Promised Land in school, but had not thought about her in years. Antin was a Russian Jew whose father moved the family to Boston in the late 1800s. Land is an absorbing autobiography about being an immigrant to the United States.

Mass Moments has a little newsclip, Mass Moments: Crowd Gathers to Hear Writer Mary Antin, that you can listen to and also more information.

You can read Promised Land online here, or read it online or download it in various e-book formats at Blackmask.com.

E-Books Redux

Ah, I've been absent here for a bit while I celebrated over in Holiday Harbour. Tend to read Christmas books over Christmas, but have been digging into the e-books lately.

Last read were two of Edith Van Dyne's "Aunt Jane's Nieces" books. In Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation, the girls and Uncle John spend their vacation in the quaint country town of Millville and start and run a newspaper. The colorful country characters from Aunt Jane's Nieces in Millville reappear while we also meet the mysterious "Thursday Smith," a clever but dissipated artist named Hetty Hewitt, and the usual (for the early 1900s) foreign rabble-rousing and drunken workmen, this time workers at a nearby mill. Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad takes place chiefly in Italy, where Uncle John runs afoul of a family of brigands who kidnap rich Americans and then demand they purchase some "antique" in order to be freed. Additionally, Louise is pursued by young Count Ferranti, who has a mysterious pass. The Italians in the story are all pretty stereotypical, but are also presented as having an odd sense of honor, which I find amusing rather than offensive. Young Tato, especially, is full of surprises.

The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas is the first in a series about a group of four teenage girls and their older chaperone, a teacher, who travel about having adventures. Miss Elting is their guiding force, and the girls are Jane McCarthy ("Crazy Jane," the one with the car, whose widowed father has allowed her to run wild), Harriet Burrell (the pretty, talented, intelligent one), Grace Thompson (the childish and rich one who, hilariously—well, according to the book she's hilarious, anyway—lisps), Hazel Holland (pretty much of a cipher) and Margery Brown (nicknamed "Buster" because she is fat). In the initial offering, the girls attend camp with the "Camp Girls" who more than vaguely sound like Campfire Girls and must cope with two unfriendly campers who take a dislike to them. Of the girls, Grace "Tommy" Thompson is the most odd; I'm with Mary Crosson's "Plain Jane" Series List, on which Mary comments "When the reader first meets this series, one burning question leaps to mind: what the heck is wrong with Grace 'Tommy' Thompson? She is short schoolbus material if I've ever seen it—she makes Bobby Belden or Betty from Roy's 'Girl Scouts' series look normal. At 14, she lisps, babbles, frequently needs to 'cuddle,' hallucinates pink elephants when she eats too late at night, wants to sleep in her tentmate's cot because she's 'thcaired of bearth,' etc." The lisping thing gets old really fast, but the girls can be vaguely interesting.

The Meadow Brook girls also go hiking, strike out on a houseboat, visit the White Mountains and the ocean, and play tennis.

Annie Fellows Johnston is most famous for her "Little Colonel" series of books, but she wrote other novels about friends of Lloyd Sherman, "the little Colonel" (if you've only seen the Shirley Temple movie, you don't know the entire story of Lloyd Sherman, who grows up, finds love, and gets married in a series of novels). The Gate of the Giant Scissors is one such book, about Joyce Ware, an American girl who has been sent to France with an aunt to continue her education. She is homesick for her active family and country home and befriends the little nephew of the owner of the estate on which "the gate of the giant scissors" opens; the little boy is perpetually abused and starved by the cruel caretaker of the estate. The "giant scissors" really existed. My favorite Annie Johnston is still Georgina of the Rainbows, but I haven't read that many of them yet.

Books from the Past

I'm toying with buying (which means I'm nosing around E-bay) a set of the Collier's Junior Classics again.

According to this site, Collier Targets Children with Junior Classics, Collier's intended this set of ten books as a child's counterpart to the Harvard Classics (a.k.a. "The Five Foot Shelf," which figured in an early episode of The Waltons). The set I would be looking for would be 1960 or earlier, as after that, Collier redid the volumes and arranged the stories under different categories. I have a single volume from that later set, the holiday volume, which I do enjoy, but the older set has a nostalgic interest as well.

In my early elementary school years, my best friend was a girl who was also named Linda. She lived one street down and several houses further on. Her older sister was already married, but her older brother's room was upstairs across the hall from her. One of the fascinating things in his room was a set of these Collier's Junior Classics.

As I got into fifth grade, Linda's and my interests started to diverge, plus she made two friends I really didn't like all that much. When these two girls were around all they wanted to talk about were clothes and boys. I thought boys, at least in the fashion they were talking about them, were boring, and clothes even more so. I confess that more often than I should I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom, sneak upstairs, and filch a copy of one of her brother's Junior Classics volumes to read for a while to get away from the ordeal of frills and fashion.

It was in "The Animal Book" that I first read one of my favorite dog stories, Albert Payson Terhune's "One Minute Longer."

Changing Tastes

If there's one thing interesting about reading old books, it's about how times and customs and even mealtimes have changed. Some of the changes are refreshing—it's nice to know we don't treat minority groups, immigrants, foreigners, or poor people the way we did back then. Other things just sound funny: girls wear kimonos, not bathrobes, folks go to "sleeping porches" in the summer to get away from the heat of the house, kids climb into "the tonneau" of the car, etc.

In Kit of Greenacre Farm (published 1919), our heroine Kit Bobbins, nearly sixteen, goes to live with her elderly reclusive uncle and his sister while the family house is being reconstructed (the oil stove caught fire and burned them out). Her scholarly uncle was expecting a boy (shades of Anne Shirley; Kit even has red hair), but Kit settles down much more quickly than Anne and is sent to a preparatory school for college-bound young ladies. She immediately befriends a French-Canadian "half breed" family, the Beaubiens, and sticks up for their daughter Marcelle when the other girls turn up their noses at this poor young woman coming into their school.

Kit and her friend Anne give a Founder's Day tea to see if they can get Marcelle properly introduced into the school's girlish society, and they will be serving six kinds of sandwiches. The menu is straight out of a 1920s cookbook: cheese with pimento sandwiches, cheese with chopped walnuts, lettuce and egg, chopped raisins with beaten white of egg, raspberry jam and cream cheese, and sardine on lettuce with maynonnaise and deviled ham. Macaroons, those cookies so loved in that era, are the sweet.

Can you imagine teenage girls eating anything like that today? The sardines would be enough to send most people running off posthaste, but they were extremely popular back then. Even worse, "chopped raisins with beaten white of egg"—basically a meringue sandwich! We would never serve anything like that today for fear of food poisoning.

(Does it strike anyone as odd that 85 years ago fresh eggs were okay to eat while today with all our health precautions we are afraid to each such things?)

The Magazine Files, Part 2: Regular Reading

I mentioned in “Yet Another Journal” that I was cleaning out my three-year collection of Period Living and Traditional Homes. They’re from England, beautifully printed, and although fun to read about the old house restorations, were becoming too expensive for my budget and not really useful. I’ll keep the Christmas and New Year’s issues, though; they’re full of bright baubles and old-fashioned trees—heavens, some folks still use candles, which I imagine are gorgeous, but I’m too afraid of fire to ever do so.

This is actually when I do most of my magazine buying: in the fall and winter. I end up bringing home Country and Vermont Life and Yankee and even Midwestern Living and, this year, even Arizona Highways for the vivid and colorful fall photo shots. They are so beautiful I wish I could drink in the vibrant colors: the juicy reds and oranges and golds that look as if they taste of cranberry and orange and cherry. They remind me there is a civilized season behind the depression and energy-sucking heat of summer.

In the fall and winter I also purchase decorating magazines like Country Almanac and Country Decorating Ideas and Country Sampler because they have become warm and cozy instead of stuffed with a plethora of pinks and other pastels of the summer and spring issues. Each summer issue also manages to include an almost totally white room with filmy mosquito-net-like curtains dragging on the floor. If the curtains dragging on the floor isn’t bad enough, the monochrome white makes me want to run screaming from the house (who came up with this absurd notion of curtains getting all dusty on the floor anyway?). This is even worse than the spring explosion of cutesy flower patterns and ruffles everywhere—eeek! The only setup in the summer magazines that ever attracts me is the beach cottage look, with the beadboard and pale blues and nautical decorations.

I also pick up the October, November, and December Country Living each year half price with a Michael's coupon. They have some good articles but aren't worth full price. I actually prefer the British edition which I can't get half price but is often worth it at Christmastime: the British still remember the 12 Days of Christmas and while the American edition covers furnishings, plants, pets, and decorating in a country style, the British edition actually talks about really living in the country as well, with a regular article by a man who gave up a posh job to run a farm and other articles about real country living.

Once a year at Christmas I purchase Victorian Decorating because they’ll usually do an interesting article on scraps decorating and vintage ornaments, and look at one or two old homes decorated for the holidays. (Some of them are over-decorated, even for Victorian homes!) One year they showed the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which we have visited and I can imagine how it would be to live in the beautiful place with sumptious holiday decorations. (This is supposing, of course, I had someone else to clean the sprawling footage! <g>) Any other time of the year the lace frou-frous in VD drive me wild. I have the same problem with magazines like Romantic Country or Cottage Style; just too many bows and ruffles and furbelows for my taste. I don’t like the cute or feminine country styles, but nice plain, sturdy ginghams and wood in Shaker or Mission fashion. (I’m also apparently the only woman in the country who despises teddy bears, whether dressed in cute little dresses or overalls or baby clothing, or even au natural. I had a teddy I loved as a child but the moment I outgrew him I never went back; even then I always preferred my stuffed dogs.)

At Christmastime I also like to pick up Early American Life, which just had its life restored by a new publisher. Apparently the old management was running this fine magazine into the ground. In fact, the last few issues have been so interesting I’ve occasionally bought one when it isn’t winter time. They’ve had some absorbing historical articles, including a couple about textiles that I didn’t think I’d be interested in.

Each month I purchase Quick & Easy, a British cross-stitch magazine, from the one Barnes & Noble in the area that stocks it. I started buying it almost from when it came out because it has small, simple but attractive designs. Well, it still has some small designs, but also too many these days which are neither quick nor easy and I wonder why they’re in the magazine when the slack can be taken up by a number of sister magazines: Cross Stitcher, Cross Stitch Crazy, The World of Cross-Stitching. I miss the little Jo Verso-like sampler-type patterns that used to prevail (Jo unfortunately died in a car accident some time ago). Another monthly treat used to be the British nostalgia magazine, Best of British, but no one here in Atlanta seems to stock it any longer. I got my last issue while in Rhode Island; dozens of articles in small print with lots of color pictures of old market towns, bygone British brands and vehicles, and stories from readers about growing up or joining the armed services or surviving the Blitz and rationing. I finally broke down and got Reiman’s Reminisce by subscription bimonthly (and of course now I find it here and there where I didn’t before) because I enjoy this nostalgia magazine so much: personal stories here, as well, plus old slide photos, old cars, and the monthly column “I Know…I Was There.”

James gets the bimonthly Cooks Illustrated and the new Cooks Country magazines, but although I like reading the recipes and tips my favorite part of the former is always editor Christopher Kimball’s column about his hometown. I wish they’d collect them in a book!

The magazine I bought the longest (and subscribed to) I no longer receive or read, which is Starlog. I had the complete set for the longest time, with the original issue one, which was printed long before it was a regular magazine, devoted to Star Trek (this was even before the films came out). (It was so long ago, in fact, that the lead character in George Lucas’ new space epic, Star Wars, was still named “Luke Starkiller.”) I loved reading each issue. Then I loaned out an issue and didn’t get it back so didn’t have a complete set any longer, then I noticed I wasn’t reading them right away and in fact finding them unread months later. Regretfully but not regretfully, if that makes any sense, that’s when I let the subscription lapse. I was tempted by one the other day with Harry Potter stories in it, but decided against it. No sense letting that get going again.

The Magazine Files, Part 1: Farewell to the Real TV Guide

I was in love with TV Guide from the start, but the first magazine “I remember liking that liked me back,” as Rhoda Morgenstern would say, was Jack and Jill. I saw very few of these as a kid because we didn’t have a lot of money, but I had the odd issue of J&J and also a couple of Humpty Dumpty that I treasured and read until tattered. There were certain J&J issues that had Lassie articles in them, but I never was lucky enough to get one.

TV Guide came into our house once or twice yearly. When we cleaned out the basement for my father to fix it up, we found a 1961 Fall Preview in a pile of newspapers that I had long-ago scribbled on in black crayon. It’s now in my small collection: small because Mom knew I’d keep every one of the darn things and forbade me to do so. Even when I subscribed I had to promise her not to keep all the issues.

Of course TVG was “a better place” back then. There were not only listings and a little gossip and some picture-stories, but solid reviews and thoughtful profiles of actors and hit series and even serious pieces about the effects of television on children, on politics, on newsmaking, etc. I still have their all-news issue that followed television’s coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination. But then Walter Annenberg aimed for a serious product in general. TVG only got really frivolous at Christmas-time, when folk song artist Allen Sherman wrote an annual tongue-in-cheek poem placing all the network series in rhyme (42 years later I can still recall “Let the kindly candle kindle with warm and mellow thoughts of Grindl...").

Well, all hail Annenberg, for TVG has finally gone down with a whimper: the magazine became bad enough when media bimbo-guy Rupert Murdoch took it over and filled it full of upcoming movie trash, big print, and fashion elements, but now it’s magazine-sized and the listings are gone. Hellooooo! What good is a guide to TV without listings?

A moment of silence for what was once a great magazine...

It's Raining Estrogen

A few posts ago, I gave a glowing review to the first in a new set of girls' books called The Callahan Cousins. In The Summer Begins, 12-year-old cousins Hillary (the athletic one), Neeve (the well-traveled one), Kate (the friendly, rather ordinary one), and Phoebe (the bookish one) all gather at Grandmother Gee's sumptious summer home on Gull Island off the coast of New England, a privilege granted to all 12-year-old female cousins. I fell in love with the old-fashioned cover and found a good combo of old-fashioned girls' adventure and modern sentiments in the volume and was awaiting the next installment.

Boy, was I disappointed.

Home Sweet Home turns into an unbearable estrogen-fest which gets more annoying as the book proceeds.

Girls my age used to complain about the old books where the boys got to have all the adventures and the girls had to stay behind or do domestic things. Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden and their ilk were some exceptions, but the majority of adventure stories were testosterone-fests. The men and boys in The Summer Begins were clearly supporting characters, but had various roles that kept them well-rounded. In Home Sweet Home the boys are mostly relegated to being boyfriends and are barely heard from. So much for the author trying to be well-balanced.

The story's main mystery is Neeve discovering a wedding photo of her dad with a woman who is not her mother. This unnerving plot device is like those aggravating romance books (and movies) where the heroine discovers something bad about the hero and, instead of confronting him about it, just stews and ignores him until the situation is cleared up. All Neeve had to do was ask Grandma Gee about the photo. Nope, Miss Independence sits and worries about it throughout the book, snapping at her cousins before finally confiding in them (and none of them advise asking their grandmother, either) and even falling under the influence of snobby Sloan Bicket, the bete noire of this tale, in an effort to get information. In one absolutely astonishing chapter, Neeve finds out that the relationship between her dad and this woman "ended badly" and jumps to the conclusion that her dad killed the woman. Huh? Her dad whom she loves despite the fact that he makes the family move so often? I watched a lot of crime TV as a kid and would have never, ever suspected my dad of murder in such a situation. What goes on in this kid's head?

The rest of the book is a long tedious argument between Neve and Kate about their summer project: redecorating the Dorm where the girls will have the privelege of living for the rest of the time. Even with Neeve's supposed "creative input," the room turns into a confection of mostly pink. Note to author: not all of us girls like pink, particularly when we had another favorite color and got stuck in pink endlessly as small children. The room turns out as predictably as some fluffy little girl's decorating book spec. Neeve also has a long running conflict with Sloan about some photos which she has traded...her makeup bag for. She spends at least a third of the book trying to get her makeup back. Oh, please.

Gee continues to act more like a friendly older sister than a real grandmother (and I don't mean that she ought to sit around and knit and bake cookies—heck, she has a housekeeper for that). At one point in the book she teaches all four girls to drive. Yes, they are twelve years old. She wants them to know in case of emergencies. Wow. Talk about your dream grandmother. She already has a bottomless budget, a big house, a pool, a boathouse, the Dorm, and even a housekeeper so these kids don't have to do a lick of work if they don't want to, and she teaches them to drive, too. I wasn't aware this was going to be a fantasy series.

The next book isn't out until May 2006. In it Kate is on a campaign to become "cool." Groan. Maybe by next year I'll have the bad taste out of my mouth, but right now, I'll pass.

Potty Over Potter

In preparation for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I have been rereading all the other five books of the series. I do this about once or twice a year anyway. It's hard to believe that back a few years ago I wasn't really interested in the series; I did like, it, but I was much too wrapped up in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy to pay it much attention. I purchased the books when they came out in paperback, which, any Harry Potter fan can tell you, was a long, long wait because the Potter paperbacks did not come out the usual year after the hardback novel as other books did. Scholastic was really milking the hardback Potter mania to the full.

I realized I had become hooked on Potter when Goblet of Fire came out. At that time Michael's craft stores were selling the Potter novels as well as little Potter geegaws like the Bertie Botts' jellybeans and the Lego Harry Potter pen. On holiday weekends Michael's always has 50 percent off coupons, and one holiday weekend (I can't remember which) I just gave up and bought Goblet. Later on, after James had read the first four books, I went back and replaced my paperback copies of the first three books with hardbacks.

We had a grand time when Order of the Phoenix came out, as the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company got together and did readings from the first four novels at the Barnes & Noble store at Perimeter Mall on the evening before the official release. At midnight, when the book was officially "out," they had been given permission to read from the first chapter. It was great fun: the cast dressed up in costume and there were prizes and games.

They are doing the same thing this year, but we won't be able to go. Oh, well, maybe for the seventh book. But if you're in the Atlanta area on the evening of July 15 and you're a Harry Potter fan, do make the trip to Barnes & Noble. You'll enjoy it.

By the way, I'm having my usual hard time getting through Order of the Phoenix. It's not, as some people have complained, because Harry is so angry all the time in the story (heck, if I were Harry, I'd be angry, too). It's a superb story—but so many dark things happen. It's like rewatching the "Who's Scott Sherwood" episode of Remember WENN.

Meet the Callahan Cousins

I picked up this hardback children's novel, The Callahan Cousins #1: the Summer Begins in Borders yesterday. I've never had any reluctance to pick up children's or young adults' books if they looked interesting enough, and initially, I fell in love with the cover of this book! It wasn't just the shore scene with the white-steepled church in the midst of it (which reminded me of Newport), but because it looked just like the books I grew up with, the inexpensive hardback Whitman books that were only 29¢ when my mom started buying them for me in the early 1960s.

To my surprise, I really enjoyed the story, although there were a few times that, to me, that the four girls didn't sound like they were only twelve years old, and Gee, their grandmother, seems just too good to be true! (As in all these books, everyone has plenty of money so there are always swell things in the house. Gee's "beach house" is huge, has terraces, a boathouse, a huge pool, etc.) And the girls' nemesis, a spoilt girl named Sloan Bicket, reminds me a lot of Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter books. But these are very minor quibbles; it's very easy to like the characters and situations.

Hillary Callahan and her three girl cousins Phoebe, Neve, and Kate, are all spending the summer at Grandma Gee's house on Gull Island, a privilege granted to all female Callahan cousins when they turn twelve. Hillary's parents have just divorced and she is desperate to prove that she is still a Callahan cousin. So when she finds out her uncles had an old tradition of planting a flag on a small nearby island, she is determined that she and her cousins will do the same thing. As the girls learn about sailing, tides, boats, and navigation, they also learn about friendship and old rivalries. The girls are all very "today," but the book is very nostalgic, harking back to those great old series like the Timber Trail Riders, Trixie Belden, and others. The next one is due out in September and I'm looking forward to it.

Gladys Taber Redux

I have written elsewhere in this blog about my love of Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books.

They are helping me during a bad patch right now; I've had to fly up to my mother's house suddenly after she collapsed. She is terminally ill with cancer and up until now had been able to take care of herself.

I had to take a few St. Nicholas bound volumes with me; they are thick and "meaty" and would last me a while. But I needed some spiritual comfort and could either take a few of Madeleine L'Engle's nonfiction books or something else. I chose my three paperback copies (lightest) of Gladys Taber instead. There is something very comforting about her writing about her country house, her dogs (cocker spaniels and an Irish setter), cats, garden, and friends. Her prose is like poetry. It makes me feel as if I am wrapped in love.

A Literary Treat

     "Mally...took down two sticks of dark gold paper.
     "Crunchie?" said Velvet, her face lighting...
     In the gold paper was a chocolate stick. Beneath the chocolate was a sort of honeycomb, crisp and friable, something between biscuit and burnt sugar. Fry's chocolate crunchie...It was their year's choice."

Enid Bagnold wrote this back in 1935, in National Velvet. I read it in the mid-1960s, in a brown-covered paperback with a drawing of blond Velvet and her piebald horse on the cover (a far cry from both Elizabeth Taylor in the movie and Lori Martin in the television series). The Brown girls' life next to the slaughterhouse was so different from mine that I was instantly fascinated, and I loved the differences in language and vocabulary. No effort was made to "Americanize" the descriptions or dialog, which I always appreciated. What then was "kedgeree" and "spawn" and what were "capers"? I was fascinated by their life by the sea and Mrs. Brown having swum the English Channel, by the racing information and the descriptions of the Grand National, and, especially since I had had budgies since I was a small child, Meredith and her canaries. (Those Grand National jumps have stuck in my head for years. When I go over speed bumps I think to myself, "Well, here's Becher's, and next is the Canal Turn...")

This description of the candy bar stayed with me for years, too. It sounded delicious. So when James and I went into the little Norcross shop "A Taste of Britain" today—this is a lovely store that stocks china teacups and little cottages, some British CDs, little things like statuettes and bumper stickers, and British foods (even some frozen ones like bangers and meat pasties).—and looked over their stock of British candies, my eyes alighted with recognition on a gold papered stick labeled "Crunchie" (although it is now made by Cadbury). I had to try it, even if the import prices are a bit high.

James took a bit and pronounced it too sweet. It was a bit sweet; it would probably cure a sugar craving for about a week. But I enjoyed the heck out of it anyway. It tasted just as wonderful as it did back when I "sampled" it virtually 40 years ago reading National Velvet.

War is Swell?

I finished reading Thomas Fleming’s very absorbing Illusions of Victory: Americans in World War I a week or so ago. This is a no-holds-barred look at the politics behind and during America’s entry into the war in April 1917, including censorship of any anti-war sentiments (if you’re one of the folks at odds with the Patriot Act, this book might provide an eye-opener of how extremely restrictive the American government really can be).

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a completely unbiased look at this entire situation, be forewarned: this ain’t it. Fleming expends a lot of vitriol on personages on either side, but reserves his harshest criticisms for Woodrow Wilson. This is the flip-side to writings where Wilson comes off almost able to be recommended for sainthood.

I thought the portions of the book concerning how Americans against our entry into “the Great War” (including fiery Senator Robert LaFollette and Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin) were treated even more interesting because of my reading the old children’s/young adults’ series books from the early 20th century. I speak in several paragraphs on my St. Nicholas web page about how this one magazine threw itself into promoting the war effort to children. However, St. Nicholas was not a lone anamoly; in almost all the series books written between 1917-1920 (the Bobbsey Twins were a notable exception), the series’ protagonists, from the hiking and motoring Outdoor Girls and the close-knit Camp Fire Girls of Hildegarde Frey to the various series of Boy Scout books and other boys’ series books, all became involved in the war effort. The girls, of course, were relegated to serving tea and cookies at the precursors to USO halls or knitting for victory, but the older boys quit the Scouts, or whatever their organization, to join the Army or Navy or even the neophyte Air Corps to "join General Pershing’s forces in France and fight for Uncle Sam."

Ninety years ago these books were unabashedly patriotic and thus considered good reading for children. Today they are often absurd propaganda with plotlines full of violence and racial and ethnic stereotypes that make even students of history, who know this existed and aren’t shocked, laugh or cringe.

The latest of these epics I recently finished was H. Irving Hancock’s Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops, or Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche. Hancock’s hero Dick Prescott goes back many years to "The High School Boys" series, with "Dick & Co." as they are called in the descriptions, including Dave Darrin, Dan Dalzell, Tom Reade, Harry Hazelton, and Greg Holmes. Hancock then did a series portraying the boys in grammar school while also portraying their post-school lives: Dick and Greg go to West Point, Dave and Dan to Annapolis, and Tom and Harry become young engineers in three different book series. All or most of the boys (not sure what happened to Harry) then serve during World War I: Dick and Greg of course in the Army, Dave and Dan in command of escort ships, and Tom in the Air Corps.

With Pershing’s Troops actually opens in "Camp Berry, Georgia" where Dick and Greg, now young, manly, outstanding—all our heroes being manly and outstanding, of course—officers train with other "doughboys" for embarcation to France. While there they run afoul of not one, but two, German spies and a member of the Army who they suspect also is a spy.

In one absolutely jaw-dropping scene, Dick has to speak to three conscientious objectors. He pretty much views them as and then calls them cowards, and in persuasive arguments, actually convinces two of them that they can kill if their loved ones are threatened by German imperialism. The third he determines really is against killing, even in self-defense and finds a non-combatent role for him. But before this latter man leaves, Dick asks him to take his hat off and notes that it "has a pointed shape" and that he will remember what the head of a conscientious objector looks like!

Finally Dick and Greg are off on troopships and are fired upon by “the Hun.” Of all the ships in the Navy, guess who are captaining two small escort ships of their transport—yep, you guessed it, Dave and Dan!

Once in France they go directly to the front, met by fawning Frenchmen who thank God for Pershing and Uncle Sam’s boys. Although the French have been in these trenches for months, it is Our Hero Dick, during his first tour, who is the first one to notice one of the French privates is signalling the German line with little electric bulbs whenever an officer puts his head up! (Of course we readers should have suspected the French private was a bit "off"—he has a German name, Berger!) Through the private they find out one of the respected French officers is really a German and also a spy; when caught the scornful man makes a rich melodramatic speech about how he is proud of his German heritage and how German superiority will wipe out the French and the British and even the Americans…yadda, yadda, yadda.

Dick isn’t at the front for 24 hours before he’s captured by "the Boche," marched to a cattle car and taken away to a prison—and of course being Our Hero he is the only one with brains to escape when the train stops. He makes his way to a road where he is saved by a French farmer, who takes him to hide in a barn with another American soldier— guess what, it’s Tom Reade!

I don’t think I have to tell you Our Heroes get back to the Allied side eventually; these stories all end the same. The combination of adulation, coincidence, and jingoism is simply breathtaking.

But as counterpoint to Illusions of Victory, like Dick Prescott it can’t be beat as an illustration of how even the youngest citizens of the U.S. were shown the "right" side of the war in Europe.

Ahhh, Linguistics!

I'm having a great time reading The Adventure of English, although I'd previously read a lot of the facts in my Mario Pei and other linguistics books. Melvin Bragg's writing style reminds me occasionally of James Burke: after a paragraph of talking about how pronounciations change, for instance from "coo" (still used in parts of Scotland) to "cow," and about the Great Vowel Shift, Bragg adds, "...but {linguists] can't say why the great shift happened; or whether it really was one large shift or two or more small ones; or why it happened less in the north (and, as we have seen, not at all to some Scottish cows)." A very Burke-ian quip indeed!

Who is Edith Van Dyne?

Quiet Elizabeth "Beth" DeGraf is fifteen. She lives with her indifferent parents, a music teacher and an embroiderer, in a small town.

Glamorous Louise Merrick is seventeen. She and her mother, impoverished by her father's death, are living high in a nice apartment on the remainder of his life insurance payment rather than eking out a bare existence on the interest, in the hopes that Louise will make a good marriage to support them both.

Freckled redhead Patricia "Patsy" Doyle is sixteen. She and her Irish father, "the Major," live a poor but happy life with her as a ladies' hairdresser and him as a bookkeeper in a tenement house in the city.

At first glance the trio are a disparate lot, but what they have in common is Jane Merrick, a sickly, discontent, rude old lady who is their aunt. When Jane Merrick realizes she is dying, she sends invitations to each of the girls to come live with her for a month. She is planning to decide which of the three is the best heir for the sizeable fortune she inherited from her fiancé, who died on the eve of their wedding and left all his money to her. Dismissive Miss Merrick doesn't even consider it a possibility that the other heir to the estate might be Kenneth Forbes, her intended's nephew, whom she promised her fiancé she would care for if something happened to his mother. Ken is shy, rude, and mostly untutored, and he loathes his "almost aunt" as much as she loathes him.

These wildly divergent personalities come together in the 1906 book Aunt Jane's Nieces written by Edith Van Dyne, and appears typical in writing to the girls' series of the times, although Louise at first seems an atypical heroine for one of them as her character is closer to that of the inevitable opponents the "nice" girls have in other series stories. It will not be much of a spoiler to tell you that, despite the girls' wariness of each other at first meeting, they all are friends by the end of the book, since nine sequels were spawned, including the inevitable World War I era volume that had the three joining the Red Cross. (Almost all children's series fiction had a point where they halted between 1918-1920 and became obsessed with helping out the cause in the Great War, and many more series books were spawned by the adventures of boys who joined the Army and girls who became nurses or who deterred saboteurs.) Into the mix is also tossed the girls' Uncle John, who returns from "the West" rolling in dough from good investments he apparently makes accidentally, and who bankrolls the girls in all of their schemes in the later volumes.

Some of these volumes, however, didn't follow the traditional plots of most girls' novels of the times. Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work, for example, follows the girls as they help Kenneth–who has, under the influence of his now favorite "cousins," become a bit more agreeable–run for office. Politics was a strange bedfellow for three lively girls in that era when women still did not have suffrage, and indeed the pages were full of diatribes about evil grafting politicians and Democratic principals against Republican ones and vice versa. Indeed, several of the Nieces books not only seem to contain a small mystery, but rail against corruption in industry and politics, hardly the usual subjects in girls' books where clothing, society, and parties were the norm.

But then Edith Van Dyne's other books weren't on typical girlish subjects, either. The two volumes about "the Flying Girl," for instance, followed the adventure of a courageous young woman who learned to fly aircraft in the canvas-and-wire era. And the Mary Louise books follow the adventures of a girl who, in her first story, is pitted against detectives and the United States Secret Service (whose agents are portrayed as double-crossing and in competition with each other in an age where Government representatives were usually shown as solid, honest characters) looking for Mary Louise's beloved "Gran'pa Jim" to arrest him for treason! Strong stuff in those days for girls, but they sold well, showing that the young ladies of that day were eager for more than frills and furbelows in their literature. Indeed, Edith Van Dyne must have been a most progressive woman.

Not to fear, the mystery of Edith Van Dyne has long been solved: "she" was a he, in the person of Lyman Frank Baum–yes, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. If you are interested in old girls' series books and would like something a little different from the norm, Aunt Jane's trio would probably suit you, not to mention the intrepid Mary Louise. Gutenberg.org has several of the titles, as does Blackmask.com.

A nice article/biography of Baum.

Words That Sing

I can't remember not loving books, from the inexpensive little volumes my mom would buy at Woolworth's to the books of my own and books from the library. I love a good solid story in a smart narrative, but when I was small I didn't realize that good prose could have the voice of poetry as well. Then in a school reader we had an excerpt from Laurie Lee's memoir, Cider With Rosie (published here in the States as The Edge of Day). It was an astounding revelation. Lee's prose told a story, but wound in delightful metaphor that was poetry to read. I still cannot pick up the book without remembering that discovery of those joyful words.

Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books are similar. Between the narratives of country living and recipes and the antics of the cocker spaniels and Irish setters that populate the landscape came turns of phrase that painted the countryside and its inhabitants in vivid language fit to be verse. (A travel book, Journey Through New England, has this turn of phrase in its descriptions as well and reminds me of Taber.)

I am reading yet another book with a similar blessing. Those of you who are fans of Mary O'Hara's Ken McLaughlin trilogy, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, and Green Grass of Wyoming already know of her well-crafted stories and of the description of countryside and characters that makes them special. You may not know about what I consider my favorite book of hers, Wyoming Summer. This is an adaptation of the journal O'Hara kept of one summer at the ranch that was the prototype for the Goose Bar Ranch in those books, and of some events that became inspiration for them, but as an additional joy it also contains that type of prose that sings like poetry. Her descriptions of ranch life, of music, of musings about God and life, are a delight to read not just for the story but for the language. It never fails to send me soaring. This is a worthwhile book to find and to keep forever.

Annettevolution

One of the things I picked up last weekend was a bargain-priced "Disney Press" set of "Walt Disney's Annette Mysteries," containing four of the five books formerly published by Whitman in the early 1960s. (I have no idea why Annette: Mystery at Medicine Wheel isn't included in the set, but I could hazard a guess: it has a Western setting and possibly may no longer present an acceptable view of Native Americans or perhaps Hispanics—although the Hispanic characters in Mystery of Smuggler's Cove are presented respectfully.)

Annette McLeod, the orphan niece of brother and sister Archibald and Lila McLeod, was adopted by them when her father (Archie and Lila's brother) and mother died. The McLeods live in southern California and Annette owns every girl's motorized dream, a trim little white sports car she has nicknamed "the Monster." She and her friends attend high school, but we're never really certain what age they are (aside from the fact they can drive). The waters are further muddied by the fact that although on the book endpapers the Annette silhouette is that of the curly-haired girl as she appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club in the mid to late 1950s, the cover drawings are always of an older Annette with longer hair and a much more mature expression, the Annette of the "Beach Party" movies.

The Whitman book character, derived from a Mouse Club serial called...surprise!..."Annette," had a much longer and more curious bloodline than one might expect.

In 1950, Janette Sebring Lowrey wrote the novel Margaret, which opens in 1906 Texas and concerns teenage Maggie McLeod, who has lived all her life in the small town of Nichols Station with the family that raised her—Bonnie, a practical country woman, her footloose husband "Prince Albert" who spends most of his life away from home riding the rails, and Bonnie and "P.A.'s" cute but rather spoilt little girl, Lois—and her best friend, Michel.

Then Maggie receives a letter from her Aunt Lila McLeod in Ashford, Texas (the town is named after an ancestor of hers). Lila and her brother Archibald, a college professor, would like Maggie to live with them and become a part of the society that is her birthright. Bonnie thinks Maggie should get to know her father's family and insists the girl make the trip.

Ashford is a revelation for the small town girl. She is now called Margaret and welcomed by most of the boys and girls her age, including a country girl from outside town, Jet Maypen, and those in her social circle—but manages to make an enemy of the queen bee of the younger set, a snooty girl named Laura Rogan who sees Margaret as a hayseed. When Margaret becomes popular, Laura accuses her of stealing a diamond necklace that the wealthier girl removed at a party.

Disney reworked Margaret as a vehicle for Annette Funicello. Now entitled "Annette," the storyline is very simplified—entire subplots and characters vanish—but kept the same main plot for the television serial, although Ashford is now some middle American suburb and the time has been modernized to the 1950s. Annette meets the same characters (with their old-fashioned 1906 names intact), including Laura (played in delightfully bitchy style by Jymme Shore—Shore, as Roberta Shore, also played the girl in distress in Disney's The Shaggy Dog) and Jet (portrayed by TV's 1950s tomboy actress Judy Nugent), with Mouse Club regulars (and serial regulars) like Sharon Baird, Doreen Tracey, Tommy Cole, Cheryl Holdridge, Tim Considine, and David Stollery as the others. Richard Deacon, in his pre-buffoon Mel Cooley days, is Uncle Archie, and Sylvia Field, also Mrs. Wilson on Dennis the Menace, was Aunt Lila. The stigma of the stolen necklace hangs (pun intended) around Annette's head until the piece is found and everything ends happily ever after.

(Annette mentions Bonnie, but the character is never seen and she is only a shadowy influence in the girl's life as opposed to her major role in Lowrey's novel. Oddly, although the "Annette" timeframe had been advanced to the present day, Annette arrives in Ashford wearing a countrified outfit that Margaret would have felt more comfortable in. Even the updated Jet Maypen, also from "the country," didn't look that out of synch with time.)

The Whitman (now Disney Press) books dispose of everything except Annette, Aunt Lila, and Uncle Archie. Ashford is given lip service in the first paragraph of the first book of the series, Sierra Summer, in which it is revealed the McLeods have moved permanently to a house Uncle Archie owned in southern California to be closer to "his business." (????) Thus the books had the 1960s All-American sun-and-surf California setting and Ashford friends were forgotten. They are also set a few years later than the serial, since Annette suddenly drives and has a car. (Also, in the simple line illustrations of the day, although Annette looks like...well, Annette, her aunt and uncle no longer resemble the actors who portrayed them; Uncle Archie, in particular, is no longer bald and much younger.)

Today the stories are exercises in nostalgia. Annette's school life is cheery and fun except for tests: not a sign of violence, rapes, rebels, drugs, or drunkenness to be seen. A young character in one book has a father in prison, but of course it was all a mistake and one of the things Annette helps to do is clear the man's name. The mysteries themselves are about at the level of your typical Nancy Drew, or perhaps a little under—my main quibble is they build up and build up the suspense and then in the last chapter in about six paragraphs everything is wrapped up (the bad guy captured by the police, the misunderstanding resolved, etc.), and Annette is back in the Monster, tooling her way back to her aunt and uncle. Still, if you are of the era, they're a fun read and a great way to turn back the clock for a few hours to when everything seemed simpler.

Lowrey's Margaret is also recommended, especially if you've ever seen the "Annette" serial and want to see the derivation. The story stands on its own and the period feel is well done. BTW, if Janette Sebring Lowrey's name seems to stir some visceral memory, you're probably remembering her most famous work, the perennial Little Golden Book favorite, The Poky Little Puppy. Yes, Lowrey wrote this enduring kids' classic. Interestingly, both Poky Little Puppy participants had ties to Disney: Lowrey's Margaret turning into a Disney serial, and illustrator Gustaf Tenggren working for several years as a Disney animator.