two hundred public words 27/30
Bah, I didn't manage yesterday. So I'll do two today. I keep promising 200 words only, and failing to keep that promise.
I'm done with historical YA fiction, I think. But now I think I need to look back at the earliest parts of this, well, series, I guess, to see which favored authors I covered and which I didn't. I haven't been doing them in order, exactly, and the original list itself (which has been augmented while I've been writing these, as names occurred to me) was pretty random.
Sydney Taylor
J. D. Fitzgerald
Ruth Sawyer
This is a group that is... sort of related to historical fiction and sort of related to 19th c. classics -- essentially because these authors wrote pretty much about the times they themselves lived through, which are now very clearly 'history'. I think all of them were children in the 1880s or 1890s... well, Taylor might be later. She may have written in the early fifties. But it was also about her own childhood in the 'teens. I'll do her first.
Sydney Taylor wrote a series of books -- the All of a Kind Family books -- telling stories about her own family growing up -- Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in the 1910s. I loved these books, growing up. The family is a stair-step family of girls, until the final child, the long-awaited son, is born. There is Ella, the oldest, then Henny (Henrietta), the tomboy with the incongruous blond curls, then Sarah, the bookworm, and finally Charlotte and Gertie. Their father is a rag and bottle and trash collector -- basically a recycler. The stories are full of details of Jewish home life in the first generation after immigration: Sabbath on Friday night, gefilte fish made from fresh carp kept in the bathtub until just before it's made, Passover Seders and Sukkoths, Yom Kippur and Charlie, the baby's boy's bris.
There are also the kinds of details that make an era come alive: New York's subway, pickle barrels and cracker barrels where you get a scoop for a penny. Penny candy. Public libraries and their importance to children. Settlement Houses. Pinafores and organdy dresses. When Henny 'borrows' Ella's only fancy white dress to wear to a party, and it gets stained, the mother at the party saves the day by dyeing the dress with tea. When the mother wants to encourage the girls to do their chores well, she hides buttons -- and once in a while an actual penny, which was almost untold wealth, to them -- in the weird, out of the way places they might forget to dust. I loved it all. I grew up in a town that had a healthy Jewish population, and these books made me feel less ignorant. Maybe even slightly envious and impressed and interested. I bet my niece will love them. I think I have them, or most of them, in paperback... I have to find out, when -- this week -- I sort out my classroom library for getting rid of. Or for transporting the books I don't want to own personally to school. One of those two options. Only the ones I am most passionate about are going to remain in my closets, that's all I can say. And the Taylor books would definitely fit.
The next author, J. D. Fitzgerald writes so engagingly and in such a believable kid's voice that it is somehow hard to believe that he is describing his own (suitably exaggerated and embellished) childhood, with his conniving older brother Tom D. Fitzgerald, known as The Great Brain, because he is so good at scheming and moneymaking and, basically, swindling other children and sometimes even adults. His series is set in Utah in the 1890s, possibly just as it is shifting from territory to state, but while some remnants of Old West still remain. A major theme in the book (aside from all of Tom's shenanigans) is the tension and balance of social power between the majority Mormons and the very small minority of 'Gentiles', meaning non LDS Christians, I guess. Adenville, Utah is a small town, and the Fitzgerald boys (there's also a sort of boring older brother named Sweyn) live with their parents -- their father, who is the editor of the town newspaper, and their mother, a housewife, and 'Aunt Bertha', an unrelated spinster who lives with them -- as the only Catholics in the town. Tom is incredibly intelligent and sly and sneaky and charismatic and arrogant. And J.D., his little brother, looks up to him and occasionally is incredibly angry with him. The books are fantastic, every one of them, although I will talk about my two favorites. There are eight books in the series, though one was posthumously assembled from notes. Unsurprisingly, it is the weakest.
The Great Brain, More Adventures of the Great Brain, Me and My Little Brain, The Great Brain at the Academy, The Great Brain Reforms, The Great Brain Does it Again, and The Great Brain is Back.
For me, the best two are Me and My Little Brain and the one which follows it, The Great Brain at the Academy. In the first of these, J. D. is the hero, and he is indeed a hero. Also, it introduces an excellent character, the orphaned Frankie Pennyworth, described by J. D. at one point as "Frankenstein Dollarworth" because he is a monster and a dollar's worth of trouble. And the second one is both a boarding school story -- always something I liked as a kid -- and a story of fomenting rebellion against authority, in this case Catholic priests who teach at this Jesuit school. The plotline about Tom smuggling in candy to sell is ... well, great. Like his brain.
Finally, Ruth Sawyer was a children's author who grew up on the East Coast and wrote about New York in the 1890s, and also the coast of Maine, same era. She -- and her fictional protagonist for those two books, Lucinda Wyman -- was from a wealthy New York society family whose fortunes crashed around the Panic of 1893. They retrenched by selling everything in NYC and moving to their summer home in Maine. Lucinda's rebellion against the strictures and confining beliefs about girls, and especially upper class girls is the plot of Roller Skates, in which book the girl's parents go to Italy and leave her boarding with two of her teachers, who do not exercise anything like the traditional control over her. She has roller skates and uses them to roam the entire city, making friends with people she encounters from an Italian barrow boy to a journalist she calls Mr. Nightowl, to a poor violinist and his family in a tenement, to an abused Middle Eastern wife of some rich Bluebeard living in a hotel. There is sadness in the book, but it's also funny and lovely. The sequel, The Year of the Jubilo takes Lucinda and her returned mother and brothers to Maine. She's older and less able to inhabit a half-fantasy world in the second book, but it is still wonderful. Sawyer's Roller Skates won the 1937 Newbery Medal. And -- I love this bit of trivia -- speaking of Maine, her daughter, Peggy, who became a Children's Librarian (makes me think of our wonderful librarian-that-was, at my school, in my district, which has abolished librarians below the high school level... BRILLIANT) married Robert McCloskey of Make Way for Ducklings, One Morning in Maine, and Blueberries for Sal fame. Those are his East Coast books. His Midwestern books (equally wonderful) are Homer Price, Centerburg Tales, and Lentil. God, I love those books. What a great pedigree children of McCloskey's had... I can just see them, total little beatniks in the 1950s.
I'm done with historical YA fiction, I think. But now I think I need to look back at the earliest parts of this, well, series, I guess, to see which favored authors I covered and which I didn't. I haven't been doing them in order, exactly, and the original list itself (which has been augmented while I've been writing these, as names occurred to me) was pretty random.
Sydney Taylor
J. D. Fitzgerald
Ruth Sawyer
This is a group that is... sort of related to historical fiction and sort of related to 19th c. classics -- essentially because these authors wrote pretty much about the times they themselves lived through, which are now very clearly 'history'. I think all of them were children in the 1880s or 1890s... well, Taylor might be later. She may have written in the early fifties. But it was also about her own childhood in the 'teens. I'll do her first.
Sydney Taylor wrote a series of books -- the All of a Kind Family books -- telling stories about her own family growing up -- Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in the 1910s. I loved these books, growing up. The family is a stair-step family of girls, until the final child, the long-awaited son, is born. There is Ella, the oldest, then Henny (Henrietta), the tomboy with the incongruous blond curls, then Sarah, the bookworm, and finally Charlotte and Gertie. Their father is a rag and bottle and trash collector -- basically a recycler. The stories are full of details of Jewish home life in the first generation after immigration: Sabbath on Friday night, gefilte fish made from fresh carp kept in the bathtub until just before it's made, Passover Seders and Sukkoths, Yom Kippur and Charlie, the baby's boy's bris.
There are also the kinds of details that make an era come alive: New York's subway, pickle barrels and cracker barrels where you get a scoop for a penny. Penny candy. Public libraries and their importance to children. Settlement Houses. Pinafores and organdy dresses. When Henny 'borrows' Ella's only fancy white dress to wear to a party, and it gets stained, the mother at the party saves the day by dyeing the dress with tea. When the mother wants to encourage the girls to do their chores well, she hides buttons -- and once in a while an actual penny, which was almost untold wealth, to them -- in the weird, out of the way places they might forget to dust. I loved it all. I grew up in a town that had a healthy Jewish population, and these books made me feel less ignorant. Maybe even slightly envious and impressed and interested. I bet my niece will love them. I think I have them, or most of them, in paperback... I have to find out, when -- this week -- I sort out my classroom library for getting rid of. Or for transporting the books I don't want to own personally to school. One of those two options. Only the ones I am most passionate about are going to remain in my closets, that's all I can say. And the Taylor books would definitely fit.
The next author, J. D. Fitzgerald writes so engagingly and in such a believable kid's voice that it is somehow hard to believe that he is describing his own (suitably exaggerated and embellished) childhood, with his conniving older brother Tom D. Fitzgerald, known as The Great Brain, because he is so good at scheming and moneymaking and, basically, swindling other children and sometimes even adults. His series is set in Utah in the 1890s, possibly just as it is shifting from territory to state, but while some remnants of Old West still remain. A major theme in the book (aside from all of Tom's shenanigans) is the tension and balance of social power between the majority Mormons and the very small minority of 'Gentiles', meaning non LDS Christians, I guess. Adenville, Utah is a small town, and the Fitzgerald boys (there's also a sort of boring older brother named Sweyn) live with their parents -- their father, who is the editor of the town newspaper, and their mother, a housewife, and 'Aunt Bertha', an unrelated spinster who lives with them -- as the only Catholics in the town. Tom is incredibly intelligent and sly and sneaky and charismatic and arrogant. And J.D., his little brother, looks up to him and occasionally is incredibly angry with him. The books are fantastic, every one of them, although I will talk about my two favorites. There are eight books in the series, though one was posthumously assembled from notes. Unsurprisingly, it is the weakest.
The Great Brain, More Adventures of the Great Brain, Me and My Little Brain, The Great Brain at the Academy, The Great Brain Reforms, The Great Brain Does it Again, and The Great Brain is Back.
For me, the best two are Me and My Little Brain and the one which follows it, The Great Brain at the Academy. In the first of these, J. D. is the hero, and he is indeed a hero. Also, it introduces an excellent character, the orphaned Frankie Pennyworth, described by J. D. at one point as "Frankenstein Dollarworth" because he is a monster and a dollar's worth of trouble. And the second one is both a boarding school story -- always something I liked as a kid -- and a story of fomenting rebellion against authority, in this case Catholic priests who teach at this Jesuit school. The plotline about Tom smuggling in candy to sell is ... well, great. Like his brain.
Finally, Ruth Sawyer was a children's author who grew up on the East Coast and wrote about New York in the 1890s, and also the coast of Maine, same era. She -- and her fictional protagonist for those two books, Lucinda Wyman -- was from a wealthy New York society family whose fortunes crashed around the Panic of 1893. They retrenched by selling everything in NYC and moving to their summer home in Maine. Lucinda's rebellion against the strictures and confining beliefs about girls, and especially upper class girls is the plot of Roller Skates, in which book the girl's parents go to Italy and leave her boarding with two of her teachers, who do not exercise anything like the traditional control over her. She has roller skates and uses them to roam the entire city, making friends with people she encounters from an Italian barrow boy to a journalist she calls Mr. Nightowl, to a poor violinist and his family in a tenement, to an abused Middle Eastern wife of some rich Bluebeard living in a hotel. There is sadness in the book, but it's also funny and lovely. The sequel, The Year of the Jubilo takes Lucinda and her returned mother and brothers to Maine. She's older and less able to inhabit a half-fantasy world in the second book, but it is still wonderful. Sawyer's Roller Skates won the 1937 Newbery Medal. And -- I love this bit of trivia -- speaking of Maine, her daughter, Peggy, who became a Children's Librarian (makes me think of our wonderful librarian-that-was, at my school, in my district, which has abolished librarians below the high school level... BRILLIANT) married Robert McCloskey of Make Way for Ducklings, One Morning in Maine, and Blueberries for Sal fame. Those are his East Coast books. His Midwestern books (equally wonderful) are Homer Price, Centerburg Tales, and Lentil. God, I love those books. What a great pedigree children of McCloskey's had... I can just see them, total little beatniks in the 1950s.