Jun 18, 2013 00:03
More Newbery medal books! In case you don’t want to wade through it all, this entry contains: Marguerite De Angeli’s The Door in the Wall, medieval historical fiction novel about a youth who loses the use of his legs, Kate Seredy’s Hun epic The White Stag, and Eleanor Estes’s family adventure with dog, Ginger Pye (with bonus discussion of Estes’s The Hundred Dresses).
Marguerite De Angeli’s medieval historical fiction novel The Door in the Wall features Robin, who awakens one morning mysteriously unable to walk. Robin learns to lope around on crutches, to swim, to play the harp and write and whittle wonderful things; the door in the wall is a metaphor for finding another way forward when one’s original plans, like Robin’s plan to be a knight, are blocked by unexpected barriers. He can’t be a knight if he can’t walk; but he finds other talents he can use.
I am almost positive that long ago I read, or had read to me, the first chapter or two. I suspect we stopped reading because I was terrified by the idea that you could go to bed one night, just as usual, and wake up unable to walk. (We also stopped reading Susan Fletcher’s Dragon’s Milk because I found Lyf’s plague too upsetting - though I did get back to that series while I was still a child. I am not a fan of books about sudden and terrible diseases.)
Second, Kate Seredy’s The White Stag, which is not a novel. Oh, it has many of the accoutrements of a novel, chapters and illustrations (and lovely illustrations they are, too); but it is in fact an epic.
It spans generations, larger-than-life hero succeeding larger-than-life hero, all of them referred to not by name but by epithet: Nimrod, Mighty Hunter before the Lord; Magyar and Hunor, Twin Eagles of Hadur; Bendeguz, White Eagle of the Moon; ending, at last, with Attila the Conqueror. And the narration sustains the elevated, mythic tone set up in these names.
Personally I find mythic diction - indeed, epics in general - airless and dull. So I didn’t enjoy the book very much, but it’s well-done for what it is, and I suspect children who have a taste for the epic find this a soul-stirring introduction to the genre.
And finally, Eleanor Estes’ Ginger Pye, an engaging comfort read about featuring Rachel and Jerry Pye, who adopt a dog (Ginger Pye, naturally), only to have their dog stolen. The stolen dog storyline provides a light framework for the book, which is mostly a digression-laden meander through their small town and Pye family stories. It reminds me of a much lighter and more New England To Kill a Mockingbird.
I think this is a case where the right author won, but for the wrong book. I enjoyed Ginger Pye, but Estes clearly should have gotten the medal for The Hundred Dresses, a gentle and sensitive story about bullying. Maddie disapproves but does not try to stop her friends’ teasing of a classmate named Wanda, only to realize too late just how badly that teasing hurt Wanda.
What I like particularly like about this book is that Maddie’s realization comes only after Wanda has moved away, when it’s too late to make amends. Realizing that you have done wrong and can’t right it except by doing better towards others in the future is an uncommon literary theme: it’s melancholy (because the harm is irrevocable) without being hopeless (because Maddie will try to do better). It’s a difficult mood to capture.
children's lit,
newbery books,
books,
book review