Book Review: Blue Willow
One of my many (many, many) favorite books as a child was Doris Gates' Blue Willow. The title refers to the only beautiful object that our heroine Janey's family owns: a blue willow plate, which Janey loves with an almost religious fervor. The plate, to her, is a feast for the imagination and an escape from her family's sometimes desperate poverty.
The plate is their last memento of more prosperous times. Ever since losing their farm in the Dust Bowl, the family has followed farm work around the country. They hover on the brink of disaster.
That's the basic set-up. What do I love about this book? Well - JANEY. She's such a treat of a character, real enough to pop off the page: proud and prickly, curious and imaginative, and wistful. She wants more than anything to stay in one place long enough to make real friends and go to a real school with bright new books.
She can't have most of that quite yet, but she's got a new best friend: Lupe, the little Mexican girl from across the road. Gates is so very excited about the fact that she writing a Mexican girl that she describes Lupe as "the Mexican girl" every time she shows up, which gets irritating. But otherwise Lupe is darling: kind and, more importantly and more unusually, tactful.
There's a great scene: Lupe's family, more prosperous than Janey's, has taken Janey to the carnival. Lupe thinks Janey doesn't have money to ride the carousel, and concocts a little story to convince Janey to accept a free ride (which Janey would never, never do if it were offered outright). The dialogue is just right. And the description of the carnival is just wonderful - Janey feels like she's in a sort of fairyland, and the wonder of the experience flows off the page.
Gates' descriptions are beautifully evocative. The book starts with a description so rich that you can see Janey's shadow on the sun-baked boards, the heat shimmer hovering in the air... The rich description and occasional flashes of beauty (the carnival; the wonderful scene where Janey's family goes fishing beneath the willows on a nearby stream) soften the grimier aspects of Janey's life without occluding them.
And this balance is the thing that makes the book great: it's so beautifully crafted. Flashes of wonderful soften the painful, grimy backdrop of everyday life. Janey is a delicate blend of virtues and flaws, realistic and sympathetic and wonderful. The plot flows like a stream, always moving but never jolting.
(And - minor spoilers! though nothing you probably hadn't guessed - the happy ending is so well-earned and beautiful and beautifully constructed: radiant, yet realistic, with a starring role for Janey. It's hard to make a little girl the heroine of a realistic and rather grim story without breaking the realism; the only other book I can think of that manages it so well is Number the Stars.)
Blue Willow is such a wonderful book. I loved it when I first read it, at nine or ten, and loved it again when I reread it this fall, and I hope this review convinces someone else to read it and fall in love with it too.
The plate is their last memento of more prosperous times. Ever since losing their farm in the Dust Bowl, the family has followed farm work around the country. They hover on the brink of disaster.
That's the basic set-up. What do I love about this book? Well - JANEY. She's such a treat of a character, real enough to pop off the page: proud and prickly, curious and imaginative, and wistful. She wants more than anything to stay in one place long enough to make real friends and go to a real school with bright new books.
She can't have most of that quite yet, but she's got a new best friend: Lupe, the little Mexican girl from across the road. Gates is so very excited about the fact that she writing a Mexican girl that she describes Lupe as "the Mexican girl" every time she shows up, which gets irritating. But otherwise Lupe is darling: kind and, more importantly and more unusually, tactful.
There's a great scene: Lupe's family, more prosperous than Janey's, has taken Janey to the carnival. Lupe thinks Janey doesn't have money to ride the carousel, and concocts a little story to convince Janey to accept a free ride (which Janey would never, never do if it were offered outright). The dialogue is just right. And the description of the carnival is just wonderful - Janey feels like she's in a sort of fairyland, and the wonder of the experience flows off the page.
Gates' descriptions are beautifully evocative. The book starts with a description so rich that you can see Janey's shadow on the sun-baked boards, the heat shimmer hovering in the air... The rich description and occasional flashes of beauty (the carnival; the wonderful scene where Janey's family goes fishing beneath the willows on a nearby stream) soften the grimier aspects of Janey's life without occluding them.
And this balance is the thing that makes the book great: it's so beautifully crafted. Flashes of wonderful soften the painful, grimy backdrop of everyday life. Janey is a delicate blend of virtues and flaws, realistic and sympathetic and wonderful. The plot flows like a stream, always moving but never jolting.
(And - minor spoilers! though nothing you probably hadn't guessed - the happy ending is so well-earned and beautiful and beautifully constructed: radiant, yet realistic, with a starring role for Janey. It's hard to make a little girl the heroine of a realistic and rather grim story without breaking the realism; the only other book I can think of that manages it so well is Number the Stars.)
Blue Willow is such a wonderful book. I loved it when I first read it, at nine or ten, and loved it again when I reread it this fall, and I hope this review convinces someone else to read it and fall in love with it too.