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.
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?
Suspecting we might need a reason to feel good about our country, one of my book clubs selected this well-known novel. It turned out to be an inspired choice (thank you, Pamela!). Published in 1918, most of the story takes place in the 1880s in Black Hawk, Nebraska, based on the tiny town of Red Cloud where Cather grew up.
After a prologue, the story is narrated by Jim Burden, who—like Cather—moved from Virginia to Nebraska. Unlike the author, though, his parents have died, and 10-year-old Jim goes to live with his grandparents. On the train he meets the Shimerda family, newly arrived from Bohemia and planning to homestead outside Black Hawk. He and their oldest daughter Ántonia immediately become friends.
It is still the early days of pioneers on the vast plains. While some, such as Jim’s grandparents, are finally making a living from the land, others must start from scratch. The Shimerda’s land turns out to have only a rough cave in the earth for a home and land that is mostly unbroken prairie. Near neighbors and somewhat isolated from town, Jim and Ántonia’s friendship grows.
The time and place come alive through their adventures in this picaresque story—tragedies, successes, hard work, plenty of play—and through the characters of Jim, described as “romantic and ardent” by another character, and Ántonia who is near bursting with joy in being alive. She reminds me of Lucinda Matlock from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology: “It takes life to love life!”
Cather’s prose fills me with delight. Appropriately for the setting and characters, it is both clear and rich. It’s plain enough for young readers, yet there are layers of complexity for adults to appreciate. She sets the pace for the story right away, in the prologue. We are on a train. We will get there when we get there. You can’t hurry it along, so relax and look out the windows:
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
From this encounter between a middle-aged Jim and a former neighbor, we move into Jim’s account of his youth. Some of it strikes us, more than a hundred years on, as problematic: the treatment of the few Black characters, the sod-breaking that we now know will yield only a few good harvests before blowing away in Dust Bowl storms.
But what does come through, and became such a balm to us, are the virtues of these two characters: Ántonia’s life force and Jim’s passionate loyalty to friends, family and country. Even more, though, it is how the inevitable tensions and prejudices of people who have been thrown together are overwhelmed by the need to work together. Best of all is the way they, without hesitation, give unstintingly to neighbors when they need help.
As happens in the best novels, Cather signals these tensions on the first page.
Once when he [Jake, the farmhand who’d been sent to accompany Jim to Nebraska] sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from ‘across the water’ whose destination was the same as ours.
‘They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is “We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.” She’s not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!’
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to ‘Jesse James.’ Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.
Later in the story, we see divisions between the Catholics and Protestants, and between the “town girls” and the “country girls” who were often from immigrant families. But these distinctions were forgotten when an untimely death, a fire or a blizzard struck.
I was also impressed by Cather’s capsule descriptions of characters. Here is how she introduces Jim’s grandparents (in Jim’s voice):
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance . . .
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
We get a sense of how they look and of their distinct personalities. If you haven’t read this classic novel, or only long ago, try it out. You might find, as we did, a portrait of what is best about this country, what we can achieve when we remember that we are not just individuals, but members of a community.
What classic novel have you reread? How did it hold up?
I’ve been a fan of Yiyun Li’s writing ever since I picked up a copy of her first book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in Toronto shortly after it was released in 2006. In her latest novel we meet Agnès and Fabienne in 1950s rural France. Only 13, they have already seen a lot of death, not just the war but the death of Agnès’s brother after his return from a German prisoner of war camp and of Fabienne’s older sister in childbirth.
The two are inseparable, linked in one of those intense adolescent friendships—do boys have them too?—that ignore the rest of the world. Fabienne, the leader, boils over with mischievous, sometimes violent games that Agnès eagerly joins. She says, “I gave Fabienne what she wanted: her Agnès. I did not give this Agnès to others, but what they asked of me I did my best to accommodate.”
Agnès says of her friend, “Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart . . . That crystal in place of a heart—it makes things happen. To others.” Fabienne yearns for the excitement of the world outside their village while Agnès yearns merely to be with her friend, to live in the world Fabienne creates.
Then Fabienne comes up with a scheme for the two of them to write a book. She dictates her dark stories—an American GI is executed; a young woman suffocates her newborn and leaves it in a pig trough—for Agnès to record in her excellent handwriting. Fabienne decides to drag in the local postmaster, reasoning that as a widower with no friends, he must be lonely and bored.
What happens with the book and how it affects the girls’ friendship follow. As shown in the quote above, the book is narrated by Agnès, but an adult Agnès, married and living in Pennsylvania where she raises geese.
In my writing community, we have been talking some about how to sustain momentum in a story when you have a passive protagonist. One way is to have a mesmerizing voice, which this story certainly has. I kept trying to put it down in order to tackle more of my to-do list, but was unable to stay away.
It’s an unusual voice and an odd story. What I saw in it, and treasured, were the kinds of friendships I remember from my youth, and also the shifting of power within those friendships over the years. I saw the yearning for freedom, and the question of how much freedom is enough.
As I was reading, it seemed a meandering story, but in retrospect it comes together as an astute psychological portrait, a fairy tale, a story of secrets and social pressures. It will not leave me alone.
In one of my writing classes, we were discussing Isak Dineson’s memoir Out of Africa with its haunting opening: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She goes on to describe the beauty of the landscape: “There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet.” She gives us the burnt colors like pottery, the spice-scented grass, and “the crooked bare old thorn-trees,” ending with “Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.”
Since we were talking about setting and how to describe it through the perceptions of your main character, we speculated as to how someone from one of the tribes displaced by the colonial powers would describe the same setting.
In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve, remembers:
. . . it was the season of drought, when every day was the same as the last. Unexpected flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light. The sun made distant trees tremble in the air and made the houses shudder and heave for breath. Clouds of dust puffed up at every tramping footfall and a hard-edged stillness lay over the daylight hours.
Told he’s going on a visit with the man he’s been taught to call Uncle Asiz, a wealthy trader, Yusuf later learns he has been given in payment for his father’s debts and that Asiz is his seyyid or master, not his uncle. The boy is put to work in the store under Kahlil, an older Indian, also collateral for his father’s debt, who introduces him to the complex society of precolonial urban East Africa.
Yusuf’s story unfolds gradually. He begins volunteering to help the elderly gardener in Asiz’s gorgeous walled garden. When he’s 17, Asiz takes him on a trading trip to the interior, leaving him for years with one of his trading partners in a small village, before returning to take him even deeper in the hills. It becomes an epic journey into the heart of a country on the verge of change. They encounter disease, raging rivers, and hostile tribes, as well as a gorgeous waterfall that is said to be the gates of Paradise. Later Yusuf is brought back to town and the garden he loves, yet which becomes his undoing.
The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with a bag of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag or righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.
Although Yusuf is a slave, this is not structured like a traditional slave narrative which is about escaping to freedom. Instead, it is a coming-of-age story in which Yusuf seems to make the best of each new adventure. Terrified at times, he doesn’t rebel against being a slave. He doesn’t complain about his exile from each of the homes he’s found or try to escape, even as the dangers grow and the risks more terrifying. Then, as the walled garden turns into a place of danger, the rumored encroachment of the German colonizers becomes a reality.
It appears to be a retelling of the story of Joseph in the Koran, at least in part. Published in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker prize, Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.
Szabó‘s novel The Door made a strong impression on me so I leaped at the chance to read this newly translated book, also set in Hungary. Originally published in 1970, it is the story of 15-year-old Gina who in 1943 is exiled from Budapest by her beloved father, sent to boarding school near Hungary’s eastern border.
Gina is bewildered and furious at being sent away from her father and her social life in the city, which ranges from her friends at school to the more sophisticated people she encounters at the home of her aunt, especially a young lieutenant. The General’s sister may be flighty, but she is Gina’s only other relative. Yet Auntie Mimó is not allowed to know where Gina is going. No one is.
Headstrong, a little spoiled, Gina rebels, finding creative ways to break the rules at the strict academy. When her clothing and few possessions are taken from her, she finds a way to secret a few. She mocks the games and traditions of her fifth year class and later leads them in a series of pranks.
She can only talk to her father by phone once a week in the presence of the humorless Director and the Deaconess; Gina’s forbidden to complain to him. Only later does she come to understand his motives in hiding her away. The war is not going well for the Axis countries and there are fears that Germany will occupy its supposed ally. Thus, this book complements my recent nonfiction reading about WWII.
While having many characteristics of a traditional coming-of-age story, and echoes of books like Jane Eyre, Gina’s story is unusually perceptive and complex. My book club read this, as we had The Door, and we discussed the significance of the title. Abigail is the name of a statue of a woman holding a vase in the school’s garden. The girls believe that the statue comes alive to help them, so when they are in trouble they leave a note in the vase. This legend lends a magical touch to the story.
We wondered why this statue, significant as it is in the story, should be the title. I believe it’s for the same reason the author includes several flash-forwards, brief messages from a future Gina telling us how a particular thread will turn out. At first I was surprised that the author would give away these endings; surely the goal should be to build suspense rather than deflate it. Then I realised that the author didn’t want these threads to run away with the story. She wants us to stay with Gina and how she learns to recognise and admit when she is wrong, not least about the Abigail legend which works as a symbol of Gina’s arc.
One of my book club friends asked if this book is for adults or young adults. Publishers and bookstores may categorise it as a Young Adult book simply because of the protagonist’s age, but I would say it is also for adults.
While it’s obviously a book that would appeal to young adults, there’s plenty to interest those of us who are no longer in that age group. There’s the vivid reminder of what it was like to be 15, so sure of things and so often wrong. There’s the vivid evocation of time and place: an ancient monastery turned boarding school in remote Árkod in the last years of WWII.
There’s also the experience of a mind gradually opening to new ideas, to seeing her own mistakes, adjusting her worldview, understanding people from their own point of view rather than what we think they must be feeling.
I can’t think of anything more relevant to this particular moment we find ourselves in. This book has made me recognise how my own outlook and opinions have hardened as I’ve aged. As a result, I’m trying to cultivate again the kind of mental resilience that Gina demonstrates—not an easy task!
There is much more to this book—the subtle use of symbols, the remarkable shifts in characterisation, the minimal yet effective evocation of setting—all of which I plan to examine more thoroughly in hopes of improving my own writing. Still, Abigail is a fun and poignant story for non-writers, adults and teens alike.
Have you read a story set in a boarding school that lingers in your mind?
As the story opens, five-year-old Rachel Cohen is worried that her hippie parents are not going to actually go through with their long-delayed wedding. Her mother keeps calling it off. For Rachel, its more than the much-fussed-over dress she’ll wear as the flower girl; it has to do with making her family seem less precarious.
Her conservative grandparents appear vividly in their humor, patience and bottomless love. Details such as Grandma’s raspberry rugelach and Grandpa’s jokes and stories bring them to life, as do their distinct voices.
But it is her Uncle Jake whom Rachel loves immoderately. A restless traveler, source of treasured gifts and postcards, Jake is a free spirit who seems to offer Rachel a different kind of stability. He really does, even though this may seem at odds with his move to San Francisco, which has given Grandma to an obsession with earthquake predictions. It is only as Rachel grows older—the story begins in 1969 and ends in 1986—that she begins to recognise his demons and the real dangers that threaten him.
One of the most enjoyable things for me in a well-written book is turning back to the first page and first chapter after I’ve finished. Batterman’s beginning holds the seeds of the story to come. I was delighted to find images and motifs that circled back at the end. These are techniques that make for a satisfying ending—so rare in novels these days.
Writers often discuss how much to bring the outside world into your novel. They can add resonance to a story or, if irrelevant, distract the reader. Setting this story in the turbulent mid-twentieth century: the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Batterman could hardly ignore the effect of outside events on this family, yet she goes further by incorporating them into the storyline.
She does a good job of integrating the counter-culture of the time, with its dizzying sense that an old order is actually coming to an end. She also captures the early days of the AIDS epidemic, with their panicked and irrational fears, using them to drive the story.
For me, the story vividly brought back those decades. And the sense of being there again cemented by the many little details and references that were familiar to me. The text is interspersed with Rachel’s diary entries and postcards written by Jake and Rachel, adding another dimension of authenticity and voice.
I want to mention the cover, too. If readers aren’t familiar with an author, then the cover design is the first thing they see and the first way to interest them in the book. This cover is brilliant. Delicate and lovely, yet troubled, it sets you up for a story that is all of these things.
The next thing readers notice is the title. Titles are a particular weakness of mine, so I wanted to shout from the rooftops when I finally understood how appropriate this title is. The mystery of it draws you in. It lingers in the back of your mind and, even when it’s later explained, it still takes on new layers of meaning.
Delicate and lovely, troubling and satisfying: this is a story to savor.
Where were you when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon? Now that a new film about that event is coming out, what do you think its significance is?
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
These days I’m on the lookout for positive stories. I can only bear an hour or two of news early in the day, leaving me time to bury my dismay and disgust with normal daily activities before darkness comes.
I came to this memoir by the Supreme Court justice—the first Hispanic and only the third woman—with some hesitation. I knew it would be a story of success, but feared it would might be saccharine and superficial.
I needn’t have worried. Sotomayor is an excellent writer. Her prose is clear and flows well, developing scenes and narrative that a reader can easily follow. I think this skill must have been honed in her written arguments, where logic and emotion must both be consistently deployed.
It can be hard to find the right tone in a memoir. You have to describe your successes in a way that doesn’t come across as bragging, not even a “humble brag”. You have to talk about the obstacles in your way without whining or succumbing to a woe-is-me mentality. You have to be open about your failures.
Sotomayor starts by describing a scene soon after her diabetes diagnosis when both of her parents argue about giving her the insulin injection she needs. Burdened by their sadness, seven-year-old Sonia decides to learn to prepare the injection and give it to herself. The scene is a good introduction, not only to the challenges facing her—illness, financial hardship, cultural difference—but also to what she calls “the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with.”
I understand. I often say that I am lucky to have been born with the happy gene. I’m less good at perseverance, but Sotomayor shows in situation after situation how extra effort can compensate for other gifts.
What keeps this memoir of her successful rise in the legal world is two-fold. For one thing, there are plenty of stories of failures mixed in with the successes, misery among the happy times. The other is the credit she repeatedly gives to others who have helped her along the way. On the first page of the first chapter, right after her remark about optimism and perseverance, she says:
At the same time, I would never claim to be self-made—quite the contrary: at every stage of my life, I have always felt that the support I’ve drawn from those closest to me has made the decisive difference between success and failure.
It is this generous spirit, shown also towards her parents where her love for them shines through even when she describes their failures, that makes me want to cheer her on and give her more credit than she gives herself.
Another challenge of writing a memoir is deciding what time frame to choose. I think she made a wise choice to start with her independent approach to her diabetes and end with her first becoming a judge. Since becoming a judge was her dream from the beginning, it ties up the story neatly.
If you’re feeling low, I recommend this book. As she says in the preface, “People who live in difficult circumstances need to know that happy endings are possible.” Although our circumstances are dissimilar and our ideas of what makes an ending happy differ, her story lifted my own spirits.
Another Middle Grade coming-of-age story told in verse—pure coincidence that this was next up on my TBR (to be read) pile when I stopped to read Brown Girl Dreaming. Hesse’s story is also a Newbery winner but is fiction rather than memoir. Thirteen-year-old Billie Jo loves playing the piano when she isn’t busy helping her father and pregnant mother try to keep body and soul together in Dust Bowl Oklahoma.
She is good enough to be asked to play in shows, often with handsome Mad Dog. If she gets well enough known with her music, she can leave the failing farm and the ubiquitous dust behind and go to California. Then a terrible accident throws all her plans into disarray.
Spanning a two-year period from January 1934 to December 1935, these poems paint a vivid picture of what life was like during that terrible time. She describes having to turn the glasses and plates upside down on the table until the last second before serving the meal, and still the food is saturated with dust. There is the heartbreak of a field of wheat, already decimated by drought and wind, be flattened by hail or devoured by grasshoppers.
In some aspects, Billie Jo’s life is similar to many teens: wanting more independence than her mother is willing to give her, feeling as though she’s stuck in the middle of nowhere. When her teacher is in a production of Madame Butterfly, and Mad Dog says that “most everyone’s” heard of that opera, Billie Jo is miffed.
How does that
singing plowboy know something I don’t?
And how much more is out there
most everyone else has heard of
except me?
And she has a best friend. But when Livie leaves for California with her family, Billie Jo says, “I couldn’t get the muscles in my throat relaxed enough / to tell her how much I’d miss her.”
Poetry works well as a form for this novel. The fractured narrative adds to the feeling that you are reading a diary. Also, the necessary compression distills each scene into its essence while retaining the emotional impact. Hesse makes effective use of symbols as well, such as the mother’s special cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. Here is one complete poem, called “Broken Promise”:
It rained
a little
everywhere
but here.
Other poems are longer and tell a more complete narrative, such as “Blankets of Black” about going to Texhoma for Grandma Lucas’s funeral. Billie Jo’s detailed description of the ordeal is riveting.
While written for ages 11-14, Billie Jo’s story will certainly appeal to adults as well. For younger readers, it’s a good introduction to the terrible tragedy of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Depression.
Have you read a Young Adult or Middle Grade novel that brought an historical period to life for you?
This 1855 novel has much to say about our own times. It is the story of eighteen-year-old Margaret Hale who moves with her parents from a rural hamlet in the south of England to the fictional Milton in the industrial north. There is a bit of misdirection at the beginning of the story, which starts in London where Margaret has been living with her aunt, uncle and cousin Eliza for half of her lifetime.
The story then moves to Margaret’s beloved Helstone, where she has returned to live with her parents after Eliza’s wedding. She says Helstone is “‘only a hamlet; I don’t think I could call it a village at all. There is the church and a few houses near it on the green—cottages, rather—with roses growing all over them.’” While there, she awkwardly receives a proposal from the brother of Eliza’s new husband.
So far it seems like a romance, a novel of manners. But then Margaret’s father suffers a crisis of conscience, gives up the church, and moves the family north where he will become a private tutor.
Similar to the U.S., with its tensions between red and blue states, coasts and midlands, the U.K. has traditionally been divided between the industrial north and the agricultural south. These tensions drive the story. Set in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Gaskell uses Margaret’s mistakes and misunderstandings to explore issues related to the first-generation cotton mills and those who own or work in them.
When the Hales first arrive in Milton, they detest the noise and hurry and dirt. Margaret takes a dislike to her first acquaintance, John Thornton, brusque owner of Marlborough Mill and her father’s first pupil. She looks down on him as a tradesman, “sagacious, and strong” but “not quite a gentleman”. She criticises him, too, for not caring for his workers outside of work hours, saying he should be giving them moral instruction and making sure they have enough food and a decent place to live. But that is not how things are done in the north, where workers are free to make their own choices once they leave work.
Margaret quickly befriends a young woman, Bessy Higgins, whose father John works in another mill. Horrified by their poverty and Bessy’s “cotton consumption”, a disease caused by the air quality in the mills, Margaret invites herself to their home to bring a basket of food, as she used to do in the south for her father’s poorer parishioners. To her surprise, the Higginses are offended. As she learns to respect their independence, they become friends.
Margaret’s mistakes and missteps in what to her is an entirely new culture mirror our own easy assumptions from the beginning of the story: that a London wedding and an awkward proposal in a pastoral rose garden signalled a familiar story of romance. Gaskell’s clever misdirection resulted in my feeling great sympathy for Margaret as she struggles to to look past her preconceptions and recognise what is really there.
Margaret’s coming-of-age story alone is sturdy enough to carry the reader’s attention, but what I found intriguing were the even-handed discussions about the rights and responsibilities of “masters” and “men”. These organically arise in the story as Margaret’s reactions, conversations between her father and Thornton, Thornton and his fellow mill owners, and—most interestingly—between Thornton and Higgins, whom Margaret brings together.
Thornton complains that workers don’t understand the market forces that prevent him from raising their wage, while the workers believe he is just living in luxury while they suffer.
As Thornton and Higgins begin a strange sort of friendship, their mistrust and misunderstanding of each other fade and their respect grows. Thornton has already installed a wheel to draw out the cotton fluff that fills the air and destroys lungs, over the objections of some workers who believe all the fluff they swallow inadvertently helps prevent hunger. Thornton works with Higgins to provide a hot midday meal for the workers, so they at least get one good meal a day.
As workers, our concerns today are less about food and more about health care and other benefits, but the same mitigation holds true. In companies where owners and workers communicate, such as the one where I was lucky enough to work, benefits and the occasional necessary belt-tightening are out in the open.
The novel takes place during a time of great social upheaval. Industrialisation was changing the job market—Margaret’s mother can’t find a maid willing to work for a Helstone wage when young women could be earning more in a factory—at the same time that railroads were revolutionising movement. And everything was speeding up.
We are at a similar crossroads. Globalisation and automation are changing the face of work. Without unions—whose pros and cons are explored here too—workers are at the mercy of the bosses. With so many companies being publicly traded rather than owned by one person or one family, there is no Thornton to appeal to. Income inequality is even worse than during Gaskell’s time. And, yes, things seem to be speeding up even more.
One way to gain a more balanced view of the issues which divide us today is to look at how they played out in the past. This novel, sweetened as it is by Margaret’s story, is an excellent start.
Have you read a novel that’s helped you understand one of today’s issues?
