If J.K. Rowling
hadn't written Harry Potter, would I have read what I read these last
few months? Would “young adult” literature be the purview of
children? Would I be forced, through my own ignorance, to read adult
fiction? Jo created a new genre: good books that appeal to children
and adults. There were thousands of good chapter books before 1997,
but they were for children, and the only adults who read them were
teachers and librarians. But now we can have a teen book about
forced mass murder (Hunger Games)
or rape (Speak) or
more rape (Nicholas Dane)
or meth (Crank) and
it's okay because the majority of people who are going to read them
are grown-ups anyway. But maybe sometimes an adult, a person,
a reader, doesn't want the issues and the angst and the pain. Maybe
they want simple, every day problems. Maybe humor and character
development are all-important. Maybe good fiction has no age. Maybe
I'm reading books for second graders. With pictures. And big print.
Maybe Lulu and the Duck in the Park is
literature. Actually, I know it is:
“Getting
Class Three past the climbing wall without anyone climbing, and the
candy shop without anyone darting in, and the lake without anyone
getting wet, was the hardest part of Mrs. Holidy's week.
Getting them
back to school again, wet-haired, starving, and weighed down by soggy
swimming bags, was nearly impossible.
Mrs. Holiday
didn't even try”
Lulu is great. It does lack a little something, namely words of three or more syllables. That said, I managed to read it in an hour and a half, so someone who reads at normal speed could do it in forty-five minutes.
Lulu
and the Duck in the Park is the
first in a series, followed up by Lulu and the Dog by the
Sea, which I also have out from
the library. Hilary McKay, my favorite living author, has teen books
out as well and I love them dearly. Lulu
is fantastic for the reading level that it is. I would gladly
quickly read more of these. The titular duck lives in the park, you
see, and Lulu and the rest of Class Three go past the park every
Tuesday on their way to the town swimming pool (which may be heated
by dead people
),
and stop in the park afterwards to have a shivery bite. On this
particular Tuesday, a stupid man lets his dogs off leash in the park
and the dogs run amuck and terrorize the nesting ducks in front of
third graders. Miss Holiday is calming the children when Lulu sees
an egg rolling down the hill. She picks it up, puts it in her
sweater, and the rest is spoilers.
One
thing to mention is that Lulu is black. She is not, of course, an
African-American, but an Afro-British person. It's nice to note one
more character in the handful of books starring kids of African
descent that aren't about slavery or the Civil Rights Movement. (Not
that there's anything wrong with those, but would we white people
like to be represented exclusively in books about, say, the
Revolutionary War and the Roosevelt presidency?) I have a very short
running list in my head: Drita, My Homegirl; The Kane
Chronicles; Dear America: Color Me Dark; The True Meaning of Smekday,
and The Ear, The Eye,
and The Arm.
So
I am reading like a child, and the nice librarian let me into the
children's stacks downtown (actually, they probably let me in because
I'm not a child). I was there to pick up Call Me Heller,
That's My Name by Stella
Pevsner, more on that later, but, as I was in the Ps, I was
distracted by the Soup books.
Soup, Soup and Me and
the other eleven, presumably good, books in the series by Robert
Newton Peck (not to be confused with Richard Peck) are based on the
author's own Vermont childhood during the Depression. However, by
the fourteenth Soup
book, Robert Newton Peck had clearly run out of small town Vermont
memories to write about and Soup 1776
is set in a chaos. Soup 1776 rips
off plot from the previous books and haphazardly recombines it to
make a nonsensical mush. The main bent of Soup 1776
is that July 4th is approaching and Soup and Rob have volunteered to
write the pageant script. Learning, Vermont, we learn, was the site
of a Revolutionary War boondoggle led by Disability Learning, who is
meant to have cowarded out of a battle. However, Soup and Rob meet
an old recluse called Insanity Wacko, who tells them that he, Sanity
Wacko, had a grandfather who was one of Ability Learning's soldiers
and that Ability saved the lives of patriot soldiers by not getting
involved in a skirmish for which they were unmatched. And then there
are the local Indians, the Wahooligans: their leader Sitting Duck
with his daughter Wet Blanket. Yes, this was funny several decades
ago. In the pageant, the fat town nurse plays Bold Beaver and and
Soup plays Spreadeagle. Peck is using his children's novel as a
soapbox on which to complain about political correctness because, as
his Professor P. H. Dee puts it, “Like any academic, I ignore
factual trivia in order to be politically correct.” In 2013 I'm
reading a book set in the 1930's ripping on the political trends of
1994. Soup 1776 is
terrible, but it's the last in the series and Robert Newton Peck was
certainly having his brain addled by his hemorrhoids when he wrote
it. I will forget I ever read this, and keep my fond memories of my
brother and me rolling on the floor laughing while my dad read us the
Soup books when we
were kids. I know Soup 1776
is stand-alone bad because I also have fond memories of reading a few
of the earlier Soups when
they came into work last year.
Speaking
of memories, remember when Laura Ingalls Wilder was running around
the sod house barefoot and a plague of locusts descended on her and
ate all Pa's wheat fields and he had to walk east looking for work?
It wasn't just her. Rocky Mountain Locusts destroyed fields in
Minnesota, Iowa, Dakota Territory, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and
Manitoba, and there's a book about it: Harvest of Grief:
Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance in Minnesota 1873-78
by Annette Atkins. The hoppers descended, some farms were ruined,
while others were randomly untouched. Harvest of Grief
focuses on public policy response to the plagues in Minnesota,
Minnesota being a very important state. Initially, most aid to
farmers and others came from private donations locally and
nationally. Governor Cushman K. Davis did allocate some, little precedented,
state relief in 1874. In 1875 John S. Pillsbury was elected governor
and his response to the grasshopper plague perfectly exemplifies
ideas about the undeserving versus the deserving poor. Distributing
aid to those begging for it would lead to “The demoralization of a
class fully capable of self-support...” To quote Ms. Atkins, “Too
often state help did not reach those he called 'the most worthy
recipients' whom he defined as unwilling to ask for help.” Anyone
requesting state aid was thus undeserving of assistance, while the
deserving poor were to proud to request any help and thus went on
with undetected dignity. Seizing his contradiction by the horns,
Governor Pillsbury went on a winter fact-finding mission around the
state and was humbled by the desperate and uncomplaining farmers.
Pillsbury gave his own coat to a man who had none and walked back to
town uncoated. Opinions confirmed, Governor Pillsbury signed a bill
offering a loan of up to $25 in seed wheat and a postponement of
property taxes to affected counties. Aid did get to some farmers;
some, like the Wilders, packed up and left; others suffered through
in hunger and cold until the grasshoppers mysteriously stopped.
Honestly, the only comprehensive and lasting legislation of any
particular help to anyone during the grasshopper plagues was an
overhaul of the US Department of Entomology, which went from pure
cataloging to studying the effects of insects. The Rocky Mountain
Locust is extinct now and I don't regret that.
I
said in a previous blog that A Fair Barbarian
is my second favorite Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, and it continues
to be, because A Lady of Quality...
What the hell was that all about? Let me tell you. Spoilers ahead:
Sir
Geoffrey's wife is dying giving birth to the third surviving child of
ten while Sir Geoffrey is out hunting like the terrible husband he is
and the useless midwife is off getting rags and the mother, in her
last breath attempts to smother the infant, but she lives and becomes
a lusty howling child named Clorinda, who grows up getting her own
way with the coarse servants and stable boys and can sit astride a
horse by the time she's six, when she toddles boldly outside and her
favorite horse is gone from the stable and the grooms tell her “the
big man took it,” meaning her father, who has never seen her, and
little Clorinda tracks him down and horsewhips him and he is
delighted by his strong little daughter and raises her as an uncouth
boy, until she decides to start being a lady on her fifteenth
birthday at which point Sir John Oxen, a rake, falls in lust with her
and they have a scandalous affair, with letters and not touching,
that could still ruin her if it was brought to light, but then she
marries a kind old duke who dies within the year, leaving her money,
so that she is rich and beautiful and lives in mourning with her
subservient sister Ann, until His Lord of Osmonde proposes to her and
they are to be married, until Sir John Oxen follows her home and
starts making trouble in her parlor and Clorinda goes into a rage and
accidentally hits him on the temple with a weighted horsewhip and he
falls down dead, so she drags him into the deepest cellar and has it
walled up “for the damp,” and she marries His Lord of Osmonde and
seeks out, for charity, all the naïve country girls whom Sir John
Oxen ruined, and Ann dies, revealing that she knew about the
accidental murder, and everyone else lives long and begets lusty
children who do not, thankfully, get their own sequels, although His
Lord of Osmonde has a self-titled book about his side of the
courtship.
When
subservient sister Ann was watching her sister from behind a curtain
at a party and His Lord of Osmonde struck up a conversation with her,
and then the manslaughter happened, I thought that A Lady
of Quality was going to go all
of Tess of the D'Ubervilles
and Ann would marry His Lord of Osmonde after Clorinda's execution.
But, no, nothing happened. The book just went on, describing
Clorinda and her imperious manner and proud carriage and eventual
happy death by old age. FHB may have been short on money when she wrote this.
Next
on blog: The Magician's Elephant
and The Fifth Elephant.
