Month: December 2024

The Children of Green Knowe, by L. M. Boston

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Seven-year-old Tolly’s father and stepmother are in Burma, so he usually spends holidays at his boarding school. However, this December he’s off to live with the great-grandmother he’s never met, traveling by train through flooded fields in East Anglia. An imaginative child, he wishes it were the Flood and his destination the Ark.

He’s not far wrong. After a perilous journey by taxi through the watery landscape, Tolly—his full name is Toseland—is saved from having to swim to the house by the arrival of Mr. Boggis in a rowboat. The house, originally known as Green Knowe, is now called Green Noah. Tolly’s family has lived there for over 300 years, and there has always been a Mr. Boggis who works there.

The room seemed to be the ground floor of a castle, much like the ruined castles that he had explored on school picnics, only this was not a ruin. It looked as if it never possibly could be. Its thick stone walls were strong, warm and lively. It was furnished with comfortable, polished old-fashioned things as though living in castles was quite ordinary. Toseland stood just inside the door and felt it must be a dream.

While his great-grandmother is immensely old, she hasn’t lost that sense of the mysterious world that flickers just behind our ordinary surroundings. She tells Tolly of three children who used to live there in the 17th century, teaches him to summon the birds, and inspires him to listen for the hoofbeats of the great horse Feste who belonged to one of the children.

Lucy Boston wrote this delightful middle-grade story for her own enjoyment after she bought a home in 1939 in Cambridgeshire. As she restored the house and gardens, they became the setting for this story and four others. Lucy’s daughter-in-law now lives at the Manor at Hemingford Grey, and opens the garden to visitors year-round, while tours of the house are available by appointment.

Encountering this tale for the first time is an enchantment of its own. Slowly, ever so slowly, the other world begins to manifest itself: a marble rolls across the floor of its own accord, voices seem to whisper in the garden, sugar lumps disappear from the ancient manger in Feste’s stall. Reading it, I felt like a child again, the child I once was, who believed it was just possible that maybe that shadow in the trees was actually . . .

After thoroughly enjoying the book, I came back to it as a writer, appreciating the way moments of magic creep up on the reader until the entire story seems perfectly plausible. Tolly’s adventures are punctuated by his great-grandmother’s tales of each of the children, the statue in the garden, the topiary creatures in the garden, and so much more.

Similarly, the author balances and metes out the scary side of magic, from Tolly’s anxiety at the very real flooding at the beginning, through the tingle of fear that edges each fleeting magical moment—how can this be real? And how to hang onto it?—to where terror begins to creep in.

I loved the way the house and stables and gardens are used, their realistic details enchanting in a more mundane sense. And Boston uses the natural world throughout in an unforced way to create mood and theme and adventure, not just the gardens, but floods and snow and birds. Remarkable.

I wish I’d read this as a child. First published in 1954, it is of a piece with others books I loved then, like The Secret Garden and The Diamond in the Window. Now I have to try to find the other four Green Knowe books.

The books we read in childhood often stay with us. What magical story from childhood do you remember in this season?    

Reprise: The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

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During the solstice season, I’m rereading this favorite series.  Here’s my earlier post about it:

This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

The Secret Library, by Kekla Magoon

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I like to read a mix of books, so this week’s review is of a middle-grade book. As the story opens, eleven-year-old Delilah “Dally” Peteharrington has lost her beloved grandfather, whose son—her father—died some years earlier. As a result, her mother is left to manage the family’s extremely wealthy businesses. Already uptight and business-oriented, she rises to the challenge, but is determined that Dally will be trained to take over. That means tutoring in business after school, and no time for other, more interesting activities.

Dally, however, takes after her father and grandfather: two adventurers who wanted to get out and explore what life has to offer. The mysterious letter that comes to her from her grandfather leads her to the Secret Library, which is not in itself secret but rather a repository of secrets. She eludes her mother’s control to delve into her family’s past and learn the secrets hidden there.

As is Octavia Butler’s Kindred, she is actually transported into the past, resulting in wonderful adventures but also creating some problems for the author. Dally is biracial—her father Black and her mother White—so she encounters the explicit racism that up to now she’s only heard about.

Pirate ships, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, slavery: there’s a lot here, brought to life through her adventures. The author goes further, having her encounter same-sex relationships, trans persons, Black persons passing as White, etc. While I enjoyed the story, and in most cases felt like it was a good introduction for 8-12 year-olds to some of this history, it began to seem like a lot.

Worse, as the story went on, my credulity was strained to the breaking point. For example, I had trouble believing Dally’s mother could be so entirely cold and controlling: the worst sort of businessperson stereotype. At times, the characters perform physically impossible feats. And, unlike in Kindred, there are no consequences when Dally acts like a modern person of color around White people in pre-Civil Rights eras. There are many more examples, but I don’t want to include too many spoilers.

I love the idea of a magical library. I enjoy stories about uncovering family secrets. I even like young people wanting adventures and experiences, though I’m not fond of the anti-education slant here. I respect and admire the challenge this author has set themselves: creating a coming-of-age story mixed with fantasy and historical fiction that is based on themes of identity, racism, LGBTQ+, friendship, inheritance, and family.

I found the story engrossing, and even stayed up late to finish it. It would be fine for a twelve-year-old, but any younger than that I think I’d want to read it with the child and be ready to do a lot of explaining.

Have you read a story about a magical library?

Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

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Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

Marcel Proust, half-Jewish, from a bourgeois background, first became infatuated with Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus through his friendship with her son. As the widow of composer Georges Bizet, Geneviève drew artists and musicians to her salon where she dressed in gauzy peignoirs in half-mourning colors.

Later he became obsessed with Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, who made much of her descent from Petrarch’s Laura and from the Marquis de Sade—think of that combination! She chose to make her name by being the wildest of the wild and cosying up to whoever held political power.

Finally, Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Vicomtesse Greffulhe embodied his “dream of patrician elegance and grace.” Dominated and all but imprisoned by her husband, she made herself famous for the beautiful clothes she designed or had designed for her. Trivial, yes, but her way of pushing back against a society where, as she wrote, “ ‘women are meant to be trophies, pretty possessions . . . Smiling, placid, charming.’ ”

The book is less about Proust than it is about Geneviève, Laure, and Élisabeth, providing a vivid portrait of the restricted lives of even these most privileged women. However, his journey—he himself pursuing a place in society—is our journey; he is our guide into this world.

He is not without his own conflicts. Especially towards the end, we learn a bit more about how he claimed to be studying the “monde” or “gratin,” the highest circles of society, in order to gain material for his writing. True enough, but he seems also to have simply been as fascinated by it as any of us obsessively watching Downton Abbey these days. Weber says:

Proust concedes that a man of letters might just as fruitfully write about the impoverished as about the privileged. He goes on to explain, however, that when authors pursue ‘opulence,’ what really motivates them is a longing for the unattainable . . . The gratin intrigues them as artists because it is not readily accessible to them (whereas poverty presumably is).

Yet his pursuit of each woman ends in disillusion. “He would spend the next three decades writing and rewriting variations on this theme: the unreachable muse whose charm evaporates upon contact.” He is shocked to find that high social status is no guarantee of virtue. “[T]he juxtaposition of surface elegance and hidden corruption would become a defining feature of his portrayal of the monde.”

The end of the 19th century saw France’s Third Republic becoming more stable, as the hopes for restoring the monarchy dissipated, leaving the aristocracy with no political power. As some would say of today’s Western societies, they took refuge in entertaining themselves to death.

I seem to have read a number of Gilded Age books recently, perhaps looking for ways to understand and push back against our own age of extreme inequality, when the richest 1% own more of the world’s wealth than the bottom 95% put together. If nothing else, my readings of the robber barons of late 19th century U.S. tell me that they stored up trouble for their next generations. Look at all the mansions and luxury “cottages” of that time which had to be abandoned by the following generation.

Instituting an income tax system in 1913 after the ratification of the 16th amendment had something to do with that, of course, but I also remember my own time at an exclusive prep school. So many of those entitled young people simply coasted through, drinking and drugging too much, confident that Daddy’s money guaranteed them a free ride through life, without any effort on their part. Not all, of course. There were those who worked hard and deployed their intelligence to good effect. Still, we see it today in the Nepo-in-chief, who failed at every business he undertook, bailed out by bluster, fraud, and—yes—Daddy’s money.

There are a lot of names to keep track  of in Weber’s book, some famous today—Bizet, de Maupassant—some forgotten. I debated whether the book could have been streamlined a bit, but in truth I am just as guilty as Proust: I enjoyed all the details of salons and balls and intrigues. They do give me a better understanding of the context for his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, but that is not what kept me glued to the pages of this book. No, I reveled in experiencing a world far off in time and place, yet having much to say about the one I inhabit today.

What biography have you read that introduced you to a different world?

Swift River, by Essie Chambers

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In the summer of 1987, sixteen-year-old Diamond Newberry and her mother know life is about to change for them. As if weighing over 300 pounds isn’t enough to set her apart, Diamond is the only person of color in their New England mill town. She and her mother, who has a drug habit, have been living in poverty ever since her father Rob disappeared, apparently committing suicide, leaving his shoes and wallet behind at the river’s edge.

Now it’s been seven years, so they can have him declared dead and finally receive his life insurance. An easy, if annoying, task for most people, Chambers shows us just how difficult it is for poor people to collect and submit the necessary paperwork. In a vivid scene, Diamond and Anna, who is White, have to decide whether to hitchhike or walk into town when their promised ride doesn’t show up. Anna decides they will walk, even though Diamond’s weight makes such a trek almost impossible, and they might miss their appointment.

Another complication is that some people say they have seen Rob in nearby towns, but Diamond attributes that to White people not being able to distinguish one Black man from another. Lonely and bullied, she faces both structural and personal racism.

Yet, for all that, she’s making plans. Not the wild plans Annabelle comes up for spending the life insurance money—buying ten of everything that takes her fancy—but more practical plans for a different life: leveraging her intelligence to work towards a college scholarship, and saving the money she earns cleaning rooms at the Tee Pee motel to use for Driver’s Ed classes.

Then Diamond receives a letter from her father’s Aunt Lena, and she is astonished to find that she—who yearns to see other people who look like her—has a Black family elsewhere.  Through Lena’s letters she learns about her father’s childhood. Lena forwards her a cache of even older letters that go back to 1915, from her great-aunt Clara who was the only Black person in Swift River after the “Leaving,” when the Black mill workers and their families departed en masse.

The timeline moves fluidly from present to past and back again. The events and emotions of Diamond’s teenaged summer gain resonance from being held against the events of her childhood, her father’s past, Lena’s life, and Clara’s. Diamond becomes aware of the history that she carries and how that history helps her see her own place in the world.

Chambers brilliantly brings her to life, avoiding worn-out tropes about teenagers, obesity, and prejudice. In Diamond, we see what is extraordinary in a seemingly ordinary person. Her lack of self-pity, yearning for life, and eagerness for experience give us a person to cheer for.

A coming-of-age story, Swift River powerfully embodies themes of family, discrimination, and resilience. This is literary fiction, not a standard mystery. Some threads aren’t resolved. In some books that bothers me, but here it seemed appropriate. The past isn’t always tied up in a neat package with a bow on top.

What coming-of-age novel have you read that brings the past into the present?