Nothing but madcap
hijinks here, like the things Ruthie gets up to because she's the
only girl out of five brothers, and the only kid in third grade.
Ruthie's Gift, by our beloved
national treasure Kimberley Brubaker Bradley, is her first book and
reads like it, but it's good solid kids' history for third graders.
Ruthie's family is adequately prosperous for rural Indiana a century
ago but there's still not enough cash in the household to buy Ruthie
the doll she longs for from the Sears catalogue. Ruthie's mother
wants her to have the doll; she wasn't prepared for five boys either.
New people move in down the road and Ruthie is now not only in a
third grade of three people!, but Mallie and Hallie are her new best
friends. Hijinks ahoy! Falling off a gravestone, kittens,
pneumonia, being the angel in the Christmas play. Hallie and
Mallie's socks are so worn they're DIY chunky knit tubes from the
ankle down. When the school nurse comes to measure all the
schoolchildren, Ruthie wears her boots sockless and distracts her
classmates from noticing Hallie and Mallie's poor-people foot
coverings. When the US enters World War I, the thing the adults have
been worried about all book, the oldest brother goes away to do war
work in a munitions factory, and presumably earning more cash than
Ruthie's parents have ever seen in their lives, he buys Ruthie the
catalogue doll. It's Ruthie's Gift,
but so are selflessness and tenacity. This would be a fab book for
third graders but I won't go around thrusting it on people as I do
with KBB's other works.
Now
we turn to the queen of wholesome hijinks, Enid Blyton. I found
myself fudging a recommendation of one of Mrs. Blyton's the other day
and decided to remedy that by audiobook, as I was in need of a short
listen after three months with Lyndon Johnson's early life (more on
that later). In Look Out, Secret Seven!
the Secret Seven dedicates themselves to solving two mysteries: who
has been destroying birds' nests in the wood and who stole the old
general's medals? Colin visits the old general to investigate and
learns that the thief broke a pane of glass so small that Colin
himself can't get his hand through the hole to spring the general's
door latch. Meanwhile, other Secret Seven-ers run off some boys who
are harassing birds and meet a changeable fellow who tells them of a
dark night where he saw a man sneakily put a box in a hole in a tree
trunk, which our man, with his abnormally large hands, was unable to
retrieve. I thought the culprit was a monkey because: hands smaller
than a child's + nest destruction + stealing shiny objects + 1950s
British children = monkey. But the Secret Seven stakes out the wood
at night and finds their man arguing with a sinister, tiny-handed
man. A monkey would have been stupid, but better than children
defeating criminals with abnormally variant hand sizes. Mrs. Blyton
also squishes a surprising amount of blatant sexism into a
female-authored book less than two hours long. The only fun thing is
Mrs. Blyton's habit of exhorting the Secret Seven in the present
tense at the cliffhangers. I'm disappointed in you, Mrs. Blyton!
In
grown-up hijinks, Kiss and Tell: A Romantic Resume Age 0-22
by MariNaomi is a graphic novel
that's hampered by its own format. MariNaomi profiles every boy she
ever liked, held hands with, smooched, blew, or boinked until her
first long term relationship with all its threesomes, and then she
profiles all her special guest stars. It probably seemed like a good
idea and a clever format; but the "one boyfriend at a time"
structure ruins the story. All seven guys she's sleeping with show
up to her seventeenth birthday party at the same time and instead of
telling the hilarious story, it gets a casual mention eight times,
because she hides out in the kitchen with a new gentleman friend.
There's also a period where her main squeeze is in jail but she's
sleeping with other people and it's hard to get a handle on who
overlapped with whom. An unpolished style of illustration adds
nothing. You'd think that if you slept with everybody all
through high school, high school would have been more interesting,
but Kiss and Tell proves
that's not the case.
And
if you're fed up with hijinks, may I recommend In the
Closed Room by Frances Hodgson
Burnett? The children here get up to no hijinks and no shenanigans.
Do you know what these children do? THEY DIE. Maybe banging
everyone isn't the best choice for ninth graders, but FHB certainly
makes the case that dying beautifully is a good choice for third
graders. I'm reading Good Girl Messages,
where the author, obviously unitiated to the FHB planet, freaks out
because of the amount of beautifully dead children In the
Closed Room. She compares it to
Kate Douglas Wiggins' The Birds' Christmas Carol and
Beth in Little Women, which
are all problematic if you don't want little girls to think that the
most charming thing they can do is die charmingly, but they at least
pony up only one dead girl apiece, while FHB gives us three. Written
in 1904, a decade after her son Lionel died of consumption, FHB was
still trying to reconcile his passing, and her grief lucratively
dovetailed with the Victorian death obsession. That said, it's
problematically good and hella FHBtacular. Her usual tropes: birds,
gardens, falling awake, working class people who don't understand
their sainted betters, and children's wholesome play are there. In
the Closed Rooms amazingly
captures the spontaneous joy of childhood play 'tho it would be more
heartening if Judith's playmate wasn't a DEAD GIRL. Basically,
Judith's earthy, working-class parents are flabbergasted by their
otherworldly daughter, who resembles Aunt Hester who died
spontaneously and beautifully at fifteen. They become caretakers of
a house that was abandoned quickly by a family grieving the sudden,
beautiful death of their child, whom Judith meets in the closed room
and plays with joyously and constantly until she dies beautifully and
skips through the garden hand in hand with her friend to meet Aunt
Hester.
Next
up, absolutely no epic heroes at all whatsoever.
