A Fine Long Book and the Benefits of Short Books

I'm still working on my trip report. It's going to be long. Last proper blog, I reviewed books that were boring or about boring. This time, I blog great books, like The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The "shuttle" is a weaving metaphor. I'd forgotten entirely about that kind of shuttle until FHB described it clicking and clacking figuratively back and forth across the loom like a steamship or a telegraph wire between England and America, bringing saucy Americans and the staid British closer together as a recurring theme in a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, along with gardens, a crippled child, rags to riches, twists of fortune, and obvious villains. I loved it, and everything there is to love about FHB is stuck in this one, fairly long, story of two sisters; but, alas, poor Rosalie! Rosalie and Bettina Vanderpoel, heirs to the Vanderpoel fortune, are both beauties, but Rosalie inherited all the stupid; or, Bettina is smart as a whip, and even at the tender age of eight, when her nineteen-year-old sister is about to marry the dastardly Sir Nigel Anstruthers, Bettina can see past his accent to the dissipated creeper inside. But poor, stupid, pretty Rosalie is in love with a titled gentleman and goes off in a boat to Sir Nigel's dilapitated country estate, where he keeps her isolated and breaks her spirit and, it's implied, beats her, when he's not drinking and carousing on the continent for months at a time, living off Rosalie's allowance while she languishes and her babies die. By the time Bettina is old enough to visit Rosie on her own, no one in the Vanderpoel family has seen Rosalie for a decade or so. Mrs. Vanderpoel thinks Rosie is too busy having a jolly good time in Europe and has forgotten them. Mr. Vanderpoel has his doubts about Sir Nigel, but he's too busy being a steel baron and establishing Carnegie libraries and doing whatever the fictional rich do to investigate it properly. Bettina needs to see for herself how Rosie is and takes a steamer over, a trip of a week or so that FHB herself made many times. On the boat, there's a bit of an engine fail and Bettina and a red-haired second-class passenger of muscular build and well-groomed mustache turn out to be the only sensible people on the boat.

You'll notice that Rosie's Anglo-American marriage sounds a little Downton. FHB's biographess, Ann Thwaite, says "The Shuttle was very much a story of its time. In 1909, it was to be estimated that more than five hundred American women had married titled foreigners and some two hundred and twenty million dollars had gone with them to Europe." So this contemporary imagination of Edwardian issues can be something to entertain you while you're waiting to see if Lord Grantham makes out with Daisy. The figurative shuttle is the steamships and the telegraph, and the power of the telegraph here is staggering. When Bettina arrives at Sir Nigel's country estate and finds Rosalie a prematurely aged grey lump of a woman with her crippled son at her side, trembling and weeping because she'd thought her family had forgotten her, Bettina says, "It's noon. We could go to the telegraph office in the village post office and telegraph father and have an answer and tickets to New York by three," that's reality. It's not Snapchat, but the telegraph enabled instantaneous communication. New York and rural Britain were a wire away. No waiting for a mailboat sailboat.

Rosalie is too damaged to countenance a return to New York and, if she ran, sexist English law might lose her custody of her crippled son Ughtred. Sir Nigel struck Rosalie while she was pregnant, and Ughtred came out a hunchback. FHB never explains why the boy's name is Ughtred, but naming a child "Ughtred" is like kicking that fetus in the shoulder all over again. Sir Nigel's estate is entailed, otherwise Sir Nigel would have traded it for booze, so everyone realizes that if they can wait out Sir Nigel's death, Ughtred will inherit the manor and so it's worth sticking around there and preventing Sir Nigel from selling the last remaining candlestick. Fortunately, Sir Nigel left some months ago and didn't mention when he'd be back, so Bettina is free to repair her sister and repair the manor house as well, and improve the village by hiring the underemployed denizens in the building project. Bettina manages the remodel admirably, having unlimited funds and the business savvy of the first Reuben Vanderpoel. She also bumps into the red-haired man from the boat, who turns out to be another penniless noble, and they get acquainted over the sickbed of a slangy American typewriter salesman who's suffered a bicycle accident. Bettina and the red-haired Lord Mount Dunstan are both vehemently opposed to international marriages, Bettina because of her sister, and Lord Mount Dunstan because he's probably read about Consuelo Vanderbilt in the papers, so, of course, the only obstacle to their immediate and overwhelming attraction is themselves.

When Sir Nigel stumbles out of his carriage at the manor and finds the gates repaired and the gardens tidy, he pretends to be pleased while developing a creepy attraction to his young sister-in-law, who looks like a more striking version of who Rosalie was before he ruined her. Bettina is trapped between a rock and a hard place: she can't leave Rosalie to Sir Nigel's abuses, and she can't stay indefinitely because he's a crazy person. They all pretend to get along through the hops harvest, when Bettina needs to take a ride to work out some Lord Mount Dunstan issues. She rides farther than she should, wears out her horse, sprains her ankle, and Sir Nigel finds her waiting out the night in an abandoned cottage on the moor and threatens to rape her because she's inflamed his passions, and, just when you think Lord Mount Dunstan is about to ride up and rescue Bettina in the storm, she self-rescues. Go Bettina!

Frances Hodgson Burnett has outdone herself on this one, although it might not be what you'd call literary fiction, as literary fiction must be unpleasant and full of sad people and uncomfortable ideas. Nick Hornby reads quite a bit of it, unfortunately, in Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, yet another collection of Believer magazine columns on what he's been reading. He's in a literary fiction rut, Atonement, Housekeeping, things like that, and he questions why, on the eve of the death of the modern novel, there are so many literary novels about novelists. How can the public be expected to tolerate such self-involved navel-gazing, while the authors bemoan that Joe Lunchbox doesn't read their books. Then he reads All the King's Men and, to quote,

"The edition I read is the new 'restored' edition of this novel, containing a whole bunch of stuff– a hundred pages, apparently, –that were omitted from the version originally published. A hundred pages! Oh, dear God. Those of us still prepared to pick up a sixty-year-old Pullitzer Prize winner should be rewarded, not horribly and unfairly punished."

His publisher sends him a cute new edition of Candide, tipping in at ninety pages, and he reads it for its modest length contrasted to its classic rank. I like Nick Hornby's appreciation for books shorter than those termed as tomes, as I read through fiction for the less-than-middle grades, like Shelter Pet Squad: Jelly Bean by Cynthia Lord, who won a Newberry for that book with the goldfish on the cover. I grabbed a stack of ARCs from work to put in a Little Free Library and started reading SPS: JB while walking up the stairs and finished it while making supper. I wish I could read all books in slightly over an hour, but somehow I can only manage it with the ones that are written for second graders. SPS:Jelly Bean has plenty of pictures and delightful, big type, and is plausible. Suzannah can't have pets because she lives in an apartment building, so her mom signs her up for Shelter Pet Squad at the animal shelter. There are five kids in Shelter Pet Squad on Saturday, and no character development, so that must come later in the series. The main point is that, while Suzannah's dad is late picking her up, a family walks into the shelter, complete with sobbing little girl, and the parents surrender her guinea pig, because they're shit. Suzannah promises the girl that she will find Jelly Bean a home, but how? Children's lives are such a panopticon these days that darting away from the SPS organized activivty and into the small animal room seems transgressive, but Suzannah lets the other kids know how important rehoming Jelly Bean is to her, and a shelter employee helps them compose a letter to local teachers offering Jelly Bean as a classroom pet. I'm reticent about classroom pets myself (http://rabbit.org/faq-classroom-rabbits/), but Cynthia Lord was a teacher before she was a guinea pig owner and teachers can be responsible pet owners too. Maybe I should have read a random Animal Ark or a Rainbow Fairies: Pet Fairies, as they're ubiquitous examples of the pet rescue series genre, but Shelter Pet Squad: Jelly Bean is a fine book by a woman who loves her cavie.

I was packing for a two-night camping trip last week and decided I didn't have to worry too much because I could survive two nights in the wilderness without pants: Don Fendler survived nine days in the wilderness pantsless. Lost Trail: Nine Days Alone in the Wilderness is a graphic novel of the time twelve-year-old Don was lost on Mount Katahdin. He was hiking up an easy path with his dad and brothers and he and his friend wanted to run ahead. His dad told them to wait at the summit, but a storm broke and Don ran down the mountain to find his dad, lost the trail, circled repeatedly, panicked and went down the wrong way. It took him about a day to get his head together and remember his Boy Scout training, but he was considerably weakened by then and his shoes were torn up enough that he took them off and lost them. He took off his 1930s canvas dungarees because they were too stiff, and lost them in a stream, and survived alone another seven days until he found a couple's hunting lodge. Meanwhile, most of Maine was out looking for him. Stephen King blurbed Lost Trail, and he'll blurb anything as long as it's incredibly good.

Boring

In Sarah Mlynowski's new Don't Even Think About It, almost all the sophomores in Ms. Velasquez's homeroom get a tainted flu shot and develop telepathy. That's it. They can all read each others' minds, but they're in high school, so Mackenzie cheated on Cooper, Olivia has a low self-esteem, someone's parents had sex (gross), everyone's worried about homework: that's it. Don't Even Think About It makes you appreciate the thousands of books that trick you into thinking that high school was an interesting place. I liked the other Mlynowski book I've read, Gimme a Call, so I was disappointed here, but Sarah Mlynowski's cranked out twenty high school paranormal cozies over a decade and they can't all be winners.

The incredible thing about Witold Rybczynski's Last Harvest:How a Cornfield Became New Daleville: Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-First Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway is that it's not boring. Most of the action takes place in county planning meetings, where board members and property developers disagree on points of the proposed development plan— solutions to the items in question are submitted and will be discussed at subsequent meetings; Mr. Rybczynski deserves a medal for keeping it interesting. He follows the developers as they change a farm field into a traditional neighborhood-style real estate development with sidewalks, public spaces, parks, and alleys, which is why Mr. Rybczynski chose to follow New Daleville. He's a fan of garden suburbs. Most of the exurban homes in the county are situated on acre or half-acre lots and the developer petitions the county board for rezoning: Drama?

The development project trundles along, narrated by frequent conversation with various men and women who are reticent about the proposed sewage treatment system, for example. Mr. Rybczynski goes into the history of housing development in America and the preference for single-family homes worldwide, but he can't go too far because he already wrote the definitive history of domestic architecture in 1986. I really do recommend this book, although either Home or A Clearing in the Distance, that Frederick Law Olmsted book, might be better first picks from Witold's oeuvre.

Terry Pratchett books are difficult to blog about; I read Soul Music. Buddy, nee Imp y Celyn, buys a guitar at a mysterious olde shoppe and the music he plays at the Mended Drum, to quote, "...made you want to kick down walls and ascend the sky on steps of fire. It made you want to pull all the switches and throw all the levers and stick your fingers in the electric socket of the Universe to see what happened next. It made you want to paint your bedroom wall black and cover it with posters." Susan of Sto Helit and the wizards from Unseen University also appear here and I haven't read a lot with them in yet. On our theme, Soul Music did run a bit long. It's 371 pages and it would have been fine at 280.

More boring by far, but not such a snoozer that I was falling asleep in my headphones (audiobook), was Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians by Mrs. Fanny Kelly. Whenever I read a true account of heading westward by covered wagon, I'm always struck by how closely it resembles Oregon Trail on the Apple II. Good times. Mrs. Fanny Kelly and her party were about to ford the Platte River with dysentery when they were set upon by a band of Oglala Sioux. Some killing later, she, her daughter, and another woman and child stare wretchedly as all their worldly possessions are pillaged or burned, and then they're bundled up on the backs of two horses and hurried away. (Her husband made it back to a fort and raised the alarm.) During the first night, Fanny contrives to drop Mary from her saddle so she can wait until the Indians have passed and run to the road and fort. The next ten days are on horseback as the Indians take her back to their village. There are harrowing incidents, being a captive narrative. She is made to carry a six-foot long ceremonial pipe in her arms, gets fed up and drops it, and is nearly punished with burning to death.

Fanny Kelly was taken in 1864. For those who don't remember recent sesquicentennials, the Dakota rose up in Southern Minnesota, were interned on Pike Island at Fort Snelling (currently under water, go check it out) and banished from our state. The Oglala Lakota lived mainly west of Minnesota already, but they were full aware of what happened and absorbed some of the displaced Dakota people.

By the time they reach the Lakota camp, Mrs. Kelly is happy to see other women, race notwithstanding. Mrs. Kelly is put to work as a servant in the household of a chief named Ottawa, but the US Army is in pursuit and the entire thousand-plus person encampment flees days and miles into the Badlands, where, of course, there is no food. Fanny chides the Indians for dumping their supplies while fleeing, because of the subsequent starving weeks; she was throwing things out of her covered wagon as fast as possible to gain speed while fleeing the Indians three weeks ago, but that's different. Her racist double standards are so earnest. When every Indian in a village, man, woman, and child, is slaughtered, it's punishment; when every white person is slaughtered, it's an atrocity. When the Indians use deception, it's because they're sneaky, amoral devils; when she deceives the Indians, she's clever. The Lakota women are modest like Victorians and that's a confusing aberration. Why would they be modest? They're savages.

Ottawa was kind to Mrs. Kelly, and his wives were all decent to her, save the head wife, who was kind of jerk. Ottawa gave her a little girl companion to compensate for her dead daughter Mary. The Oglala Lakota evidently maintained a policy of killing hostages. Highlights of her captivity include Ottawa's kind sisters, writing a coded letter to General Sully, and running into a few white people around camp. One was a girl kidnapped from New Ulm during the war, utterly miserable, another was a woman who had been taken as a girl as she was the sole survivor of a frontier family succumbed to smallpox. Ottawa told them that white women often had tea together, so they had an unusual tea party. Mrs. Kelly also noted many fair-skinned half-white children from fort marriages, usually ended when the soldier's wife turned up from Back East. Before winter, Mrs. Kelly was ransomed back to the closest fort and her husband. One of the last chapters is a general index of Indian atrocities in the West, because nothing shocking enough happened to Mrs. Kelly herself. Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians is readable and somewhat interesting if you accept that it's racist as hell. It's so racist. If you can stomach "savage" and "Indian" used interchangeably, it's not great, but of historical value.

The final book on our theme of boring is The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure. It should have been good. It's amazing that someone can bollocks up a book about Laura Ingalls Wilder. There's no need to read The Wilder Life, despite your immediate reaction. I had it too: "Oooh! There's a memoir about Laura Ingalls Wilder?!" Well, yes and no. This is a book of that style best typified by Sarah Vowell and Michael Pollan, where the writer travels across America looking for the perfect tomato/joy/Zachary Taylor's footprints/the history of the qwerty keyboard and there's more editorializing and self-insertion than a standard history. Sadly, Wendy McClure can't reconcile her Little House fangirling and the details of her own life and that's the ruin of this book. There's a whole chapter in the beginning about her family and growing up in Chicago, her parents' snowbirding in New Mexico, meeting her boyfriend. At the end of the book, when she decides that her Little House road trip was about the death of her mother, it came off as a bizarre shoehorning of her personal life into some Laura Ingalls Wilder tourism. Wendy mentions her nine-year-old self imaginary best friend Laura often enough that it was creepy. The best parts of the book were when she stopped talking about herself and did actual research. The discussion of girl types represented in the Little House books was interesting and it would be worth reading that chapter alone; they used to be referred to as the Laura and Mary books, but with our predilection for pluck in the last decades, Mary's been relegated to minor character status.

I've been to most of the Laura Ingalls Wilder sites and it would have been more interesting to hear Ms. McClure's take on them if her take had been more interesting. It seems like, writing a book, the least she could have done would be set up interviews with the museum curators, instead of chronicling her chats with whomever happened to be at the front desk. The cabin near Pepin, Wisconsin is a let down for Wendy, too. The first time I went there, I was so intimidated because some big girls, like, eleven-year-olds, were playing Laura in the attic. I don't remember Plum Creek although I know we went there, and DeSmet was great and I got a visiting card just like Laura had, but Wendy McClure found herself weeping in the parking lot due to disillusionment with her Laura avatar.

In conclusion:

Don't Even Thing About It: Boring, especially while driving across North Dakota.

Last Harvest: Not boring, but it is of boring things.

Soul Music: Not boring, but a little slow.

Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians: Pretty boring.

The Wilder Life: Boring.

Next up: I held back some interesting books to not ruin my boring theme.

A Variety of Quick Reads

 I've been going slowly through a few grown-up-style non-fiction books lately, so my book reading completion rate has slowed down drastically. However, in this time of long, jaunty books, I have also managed to whip through one novel, one memoir and three audiobooks:

Let me first encourage you to have your socks knocked off by Janice Earlbaum's Girlbomb. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before. It's unputdownable and brilliant in that slightly-voyeuristic-account-of-a-fucked-up-but-really-cool-scenester adolescence way; it's basically Basketball Diaries for women, although Janice keeps far enough above water that her teenage depravity is not awkwardly unbearable, unlike in the Jim Caroll. Janice is a teenager in New York in the eighties and she has all the drugs (except heroin, meaning that the book ends on a hopeful tone and not, as in the Jim Caroll, with the autobiographist shivering in an alley). Janice also has all the freedom, after she runs away from home. Her mom's series of bad boyfriends culminates in a creeper named Dave, and Janice gets out before anything horrible happens and goes straight to a crazy shelter, from where she's transferred to a middle-class group home. All the money she can steal from her snack bar job goes to drugs that she can share with her girly best friends, who aren't that great. There's one passage where her two best friends are sobbing and telling her about the subway ride back from Coney Island with their guy friends and one of them stuck his head out the train window and hit a pole and he fell back into the train, bleeding, with his fractured skull mashed in, and he's in a coma and Janice is thinking, "What the hell? They went to Coney Island without me?" When cocaine comes to New York, Janice is living with a bartender who can get it easy and she rockets up the popularity ladder because she's the high school girl with the coke, and then plummets because her friends are sick of her high all the time and cutting their coke with talcum powder. She nearly dies, cheats on the bartender with the guy she had a crush on last year, moves back in with her mom, and goes off to college.

The second Tiffany Aching novel, Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett, is just as good as the first. Tiffany goes away to learn witching from Miss Level in the mountains, being followed by a hiver, a pre-temporal blob of energy set to suck the meaning out of the most powerful person it can get into, and it's on Tiffany's trail. Witching turns out to be mostly looking after not-that-grateful townsfolk, but there's big magic, and power, as well as the flashy kind of witchcraft that wears a billowing cape and a bunch of dangly, silver jewelry, as in the neighborhood teen girl coven. The main thing is that Hat Full of Sky is pure genius and I have two more Tiffany Aching books and thirty more Discworlds to read, so hurray.

But back in the unhappy: Everybody Sees the Ants by A.S. King who wrote Ask the Passengers is so much more than a book on the Issue of Bullying. It's funny, painful, sweet and raw. It hurts a lot to read this book, but not unrewardingly. Every line is good, and the audiobook reader has a great voice. Lucky Linderman is not okay to begin with, but he gets sorted mostly, with a good ending leaning towards a future where he doesn't have to deal with Nader McMillan, who's been harassing him since he was seven. Lucky is a likeable kid himself, but he hasn't been able to grow much without being knocked down by Nader and the fear of Nader; he was palling around with him a bit in ninth grade but some stuff happened that brought them both to the attention of the school authorities and Lucky is on Nader's shit list again: Nader holds Lucky down and rubs his face on a cement sidewalk to a wound the shape of Ohio and Lucky's mom finally takes him out of the situation and flies him to Arizona to visit his aunt and uncle, who are both a bit off in their 'specially American ways, Jody being a Dr. Phil-loving pill addict and chubby person and Uncle Dave a cool guy who turns out to have his own dark side, although nothing terribly untoward, just things are revealed that make Lucky think less of him. Between the trip to Arizona, a series of flashbacks to the just-completed ninth grade, and dream rescues of his MIA in Vietnam grandfather, Lucky becomes more better than he was, although in life there are no easy resolutions. I mean, imagine if he'd gotten pregnant by some rakish scoundrel. How would that resolve itself? He would have to find redemption in his own death. Charlotte Temple (formerly subtitled A Tale of Truth) is the Go Ask Alice of the early nineteenth century, being a "true" story of a "real" person who, despite her good bearing was reduced to infamy, and then, of course, died. Like you do, if you listen to the silver-tongued badgerings of a man who's walking the tightrope of ill repute. Charlotte Temple herself is a naive schoolgirl with a good family and not a blemish on her except her blinding stupidity. Her school's French teacher, a lady of bad character, sneaks Charlotte out with her to meet some soldiers who are stationed nearby. Charlotte is overwhelmed by the lovemaking (old meaning) of the man whose father warned him that he must marry a girl with a good inheritance. He is confused, because he likes Charlotte, who has little inheritance, but she assumes he will marry her, so he acts as if he has good intentions, and Charlotte never presses the issue. The cunning French teacher, tired of teaching French, plans to travel with the soldiers to America, where they are soon embarking to... fight us. (Charlotte Temple is set in the 1770s and was published in 1794. It's a linguistic archeopteryx, as the book is perfectly readable but everyone says "prithee" often and without irony.) Charlotte prepares to meet the French teacher and the soldier boys as they are embarking and tell them a meek and comely "no," but she faints and is bundled into a carriage. At this point her honor is irreparably lost, and her pregnancy and death will come as no surprise. (Her parents raise the baby.) Despite being a meh book, Charlotte Temple was the bestsellingest novel in America until Harriet Beecher Stowe blew it out of the water with Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sold like firecrackers, unlike Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, languishing on the shelf at the bookshop and not on the abolitionist's bedside table, until it was rediscovered in the 1980s. Our Nig is the first novel written by an African-American woman, Harriet Wilson, whose harrowing early life provides the backbone for the story of a little girl called Frado who is abandoned by her desperately poor mother and stepfather. They conspire to leave her with a family in the neighborhood too crazy to keep a servant, who therefore could use an unofficially indentured six-year-old to function as housemaid. And so Frado spends her childhood working her fingers to the bone and sleeping is a drafty attic. Frado prays for a summons to live with the family's oldest son and his wife in a different town, but he falls ill and dies, and she is comforted by her Christian faith, which her mistress tries to prevent her from partaking in, because the woman, while on the fence about the souls of black folks, doesn't believe attending meetings one evening a week can be more edifying than washing the dishes and tending cows. Beatings, hardship, Christianity, a pet dog, and wishing she could run away fill the years until Frado turns eighteen and can take a job as a domestic for saner people. Her health ruined from the years of hard labor, she cannot work regularly and moves about, lives on charity, takes in sewing, marries, and is abandoned. One reviewer made the point that, although Our Nig is written to the conventions of the sentimental novel of the day, marriage does not resolve Frado's situation, instead the control of her own labor is Frado's goal and redemption, and the real life Ms. Wilson's novel based on her life story is another attempt to her make her own way financially in the world where most Black Americans were still enslaved, which is, it's argued, why Our Nig did not receive the attention of, say, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which is easier for the abolitionist to stomach than a narrative of oppression in the free North. Our Nig is an excellent historical document, although its merits as a novel are not of particular note. On the other hand, it's quite short.

Next time: A very special blog about my five days alone in the Canadian outback.

Am I Kissing Wrong?

 Lips touching. Teeth pressing. Tongues inserting. Tongues moving. Tongues tonguing. Tongues darting in and out. Tongues bumping. Fact: Anna and the French Kiss should be interpreted as Anna and the FRENCH KISS, not Anna and the Clever Entendre Where Anna is Kissed in Paris After She is Sent There by Her Father, Nicholas Sparks. AatFK by Stephanie Perkins looked like a throwaway teen novel, but I saw it well-reviewed in several places so I decided to give it a go and it turned out to be a throwaway teen novel. There's nothing wrong with it if you're sixteen and credulous, but it didn't transcend the genre, it wasn't even a particularly notable exemplar of the genre. Firstly, it was burdened by clunky writing. For example, Anna's new friends at expensive Parisian boarding school are telling her a funny story about the time Rashmi snogged the tour guide at Versailles for six hours and when she came back her neck was covered with teeth marks. Teeth marks! Hickeys have been known to happen in the world, but the only time I've seen teeth marks on an adult was the time a customer bit my colleague. Rashmi's boyfriend Josh doesn't like this story and he stabs his pasta. The narrative is clunky and riddled with these unlikely anecdotes and weird reactions that aren't quite human. The story: Anna falls in love with the handsome British/French/American boy Etienne St. Clair and they spend the year being best friends. Conflict: she loves him but won't touch him because he has a girlfriend and he loves her but is keeping his girlfriend as a safety, in case Anna doesn't love him. Through the whole book, which is nine unnecessary discs long on audio, I had a line from Not Another Teen Movie, for heaven's sake, floating around in my head: The girl is deciding between the boy she loves and Art School and the boy tells her something like, "We'll only have the summer, and then I'll go off to college and cheat on you with a girl from my dorm and you'll find her thong in my room." Anna is from Georgia and St. Clair grew up in London, holds French and American passports, and won't tell anyone where he's going to college. Stephanie Perkins finds a work-around to that problem, so good for her. Because in some doomed relationships, there is no work-around, geographic or otherwise, and the separation is inevitable, like if you're high school lesbians in Iran. That relationship isn't going anywhere. If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, which I heard about on MPR and then forgot until Missie gave me a clearance copy, is more about the situation than the writing. It's choppy and sometimes redundant. Sahar looks sadly at the name on her mother's grave written in Farsi. Isn't everything in Iran written in Farsi? Are graves normally marked in Koranic Arabic and her mom's is different? Sahar is an Iranian girl written by an Iranian-American and it's hard to pick out what's being translated by idiom, what by word, and what's just clunky. Not to say If You Could Be Mine isn't heartbreaking. Sahar and Nasrin have been best friends since childhood and now they're secret make-out friends until Nasrin becomes engaged to a man. Sahar swears to find a way to stop the wedding and learns that gender reassignment surgery is legal in Iran. She pursues it a bit, going so far as to talk to a doctor about it, but it's like a teenagers deciding to run away to France. They might apply for passports, but you know they're never even going to make it to the airport. This is a solidly good story and one hopes Sara Farizan will keep writing and polish it up a bit next time.

I promised FHB last blog. Sara Crewe, or What Happened atMiss Minchin's, the original version of The Little Princess. Sara Crewe was written in 1888 and FHB didn't revise it into A Little Princess until 1905. All those years and people only had this small novella about a girl whose fortunes are double-reversed. It's an interesting read and an astute reader with a love of A Little Princess would pick up thousands more little tweaks than I did. An angry Sara knocks Emily to the ground. In ALP, Sara is so dedicated to her pretendings that she maintains her steadfastness through the deepest privations. An angry Sara is a more human Sara, although she can be less appealing as the friends who sustain her in isolation are not there. No Becky, no Lottie. Ermengarde has a chapter, but her only characteristic is "stupid," and I'm not just saying that. FHB calls her stupid eight or nine times. The bakery episode is almost untouched; characters keep mentioning the French Revolution; and FHB coasts through the end, where all the best parts are. An interesting insight into a work in its middle state.

Another of Sarah Vowell's, The Wordy Shipmates, is of course as good as she is in her historical reportage, and in this one she picks up one of the threads of American history that know one knows or minds except, maybe, residents of Massachusetts. Maybe on Patriot's Day, which we all found out last year they've been secretly celebrating this whole time, maybe they go around reading the speech that John Cotton made to the non-separatist Puritans before they sailed to the New World in 1630. They certainly established Boston, along with Providence, RI and other places. Salem, Plymouth, New Amsterdam, and Indians who survived the epidemics that decimated their numbers were already there. Vowell loves her pilgrims, and you can see why. They're dogmatic, schismatic, and bland, but they're all starry-eyed dreamers of an erudite cast that can be seen as she amply quotes from their letters to each other, all the piles of them. The main conflict of the book is between John Williams and Roger Winthrop, two devout Puritans whose tiny differences in doctrine lead to Winthrop's exile and Rhode Island's founding.

Veronica Mars is back in book form and the book doesn't suck. Veronica Mars:The Thousand Dollar Tan Line picks up where the movie left off, which picked up nine years after the TV show was cancelled. It's nice how well a noir potboiler of a TV show translates into a noir potboiler of a novel. Veronica is her cool-headed self, all the main characters are there for plausible reasons, and Veronica bumps into a few minor characters while solving the mystery of the two girls who disappeared a week apart from a house on the beach during spring break.

I've never read anything that could be so aptly described as a comedy of manners as The Semi-Detached House by Emily Eden. It's great but for one major flaw. Lady Chester and her twin sister moving to a semi-detached house in Dulham while Lord Chester is away on an assignment to Germany, and she complains to her Aunt Sarah that she can't be semi-detached, she will feel as if the house is not quite her own, and there is sure to be a fat lady in mittens next door with two daughters who are always at the pianoforte. She arrives in Dulham to meet plump Mrs. Hopkinson and her daughters Janet and Barbara. It's a comedy, so the book plays on widely held assumptions. The young men are dashing, the widower is dour, the curate is poor, the child is darling, the Jewish neighbors... I've never read anything so anti-Semitic in my life. The Jewish neighbors are avaricious money-grubbers. I felt guilty listening to this, and then the action would move to the Hopkinsons' and Mrs. Hopkinson would dowdy around being so jolly and helpful. When Lady Chester is taken ill (she's been in a "delicate condition"), Mrs. Hopkinson is so delighted to be woken in the middle of the night in the rain, it's so neighborly. Miss Hopkinson suffers a shock and "she would have fainted if she knew how." So fun, so funny, so anti-Semitic. Emily Eden wrote this around 1830, if that helps any.

I've never heard a person rhapsodize about their love of Mary Poppins the book before. People love the pants off that movie, but the book itself is unknown or unread or if they have read it they don't talk about it. Now I know why. It's terrible. I had no idea it could be this bad considering the beloved movie. Very young children might be amused by, say, the backwards zoo where animals walk around and watch the humans being fed; or the very small woman with the edible, regenerating fingers and her two psychologically-abused, fat daughters who run a bakery. It's Edwardians tripping. "A tea party on the ceiling. Ha ha! How droll." After every episode of lame magick, Mary sniffs and harrumphs and acts as though nothing of the sort had ever happened and Jane and Michael were experiencing a joint hallucination. Mary Poppins herself has magic powers, is quick to temper, incredibly vain, and no sense of perspective, probably a Griffindor. Burt/Dick Van Dyke is absent in all but one chapter, which is too bad because he balances her rigidity. She does leave at the end, but she comes back for seven sequels.

Four Stories of the Outdoors and One Cautionary Tale About Staying Inside

I don't read books about the outdoors very often. There are trees outside my house right now; I could go look at them if I wanted to. Going outside is a thing to do, not read about. One can even read outside, and if one is reading about the outdoors outside, isn't that redundant? With all the trees and lakes and urban deer around here, why would I spend time reading about somebody else's trees? That said, I've just read read four outdoors books roughly back to back and they've all been good ones, which is amazing, as it's hard to make, "I spent several days walking around" sound interesting.  It's beastly hard to find an author who's up to describing time in the woods without being boring, and it's hard to say anything about even a good author's time in the woods other than, "I laughed a lot while I was reading this." Take Kevin Callan's reasonably new book, Dazed but Not Confused. I liked it a lot, but I've got nothing in particular to say about it. Kevin tells stories about the outdoors and canoeing. Some of them are reprinted from his last book, Wilderness Pleasures, and all were first published in Canadian canoeing magazines. Dazed but Not Confused is divided into three sections: Playing in the Woods, Wilderness Philosophy, and Life as a Wilderness Pornographer. Some Canadians have been calling Kevin a "wilderness pornographer" because he keeps writing books about backwoods canoe routes they considered their exclusive domain.

There are good stories in here, although the tone is more pensive than in Wilderness Pleasures. Kevin tells the full story of breaking a foot on his trip with his friend Ashley, who considers wearing a Speedo while camping acceptable. (Note: Wearing a Speedo is never acceptable). He goes on a Scottish canoeing trip with his wife and daughter. He goes winter camping.  He meets the camp girls from hell; vis: Pro-tip: If you are in the backwoods and you see a rescue helicopter flying by, don't everybody in your group start waving "hi" to it, because the helicopter pilot will think you are waving at him, and he will land, and he will not have enough fuel to effect the rescue of the injured person who is somewhere else in the forest, and he will need to go back to town to refuel, and you will be charged for the helicopter fuel. The only problem with Dazed but Not Confused is the price. It's $24.99 for a paperback, and we all know those are Canadian dollars, but is a Canadian publisher going to lower the price of a book for an American because American publishers always raise the price for Canadians?  No.

I had a veggie burger at the Gunflint Lodge last summer and it was delightful, so it's nice to know how that came about. Justine Kerfoot's mother bought the lodge and store in 1928 and Woman of the Boundary Waters is about the early days before the now-BWCAW was a designated Wilderness Area, back when there were a few Indian and trapper families living on Gunflint Lake. Some later chapters are organized into vignettes: disasters, the war, animals. Mrs. Kerfoot remembers when everyone in the area got their first snowmobile, and the dog team that the snowmobile replaced. She raised three children at Gunflint Lodge, and recalls when they got electricity and phones and indoor plumbing. She snowshoed around for miles, and hunted, and nursed fawns back to health in the kitchen, and watched the seasons change for fifty years. Essential reading for Minnesotans.

Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men takes place outdoors. It does. I didn't say this blog post was all about the North Woods. It's a bloody brilliant book and I'd been needing to read a Pratchett for a while. Basically, Tiffany Aching is a young girl who's just decided to become a witch when the fairy world pops through the doors of the Discworld and kidnaps her brother. There's a lot of action, brawls and battles and monsters and nightmares. She rescues her brother with the help of the Wee Free Men who are, in Pratchett's wonderful way of appropriating lore and mythology to his purposes while leaving the archetypes unchallenged, Scots. I'm glad that there are four Tiffany Aching books, so I've three yet to read.

The Secret Garden also takes place outdoors. In a garden. This is the first time I've reread it since I became an FHB afficianado. The Secret Garden kills me. Last time I read it, it was all about redemption. The garden saves Mary, who saves Colin, who saves his father. This time I read it more for FHB herself, her robin, the IRL garden she loved, her only seeing the kindness in people. That got her in trouble towards the end of her life; she expected the best of people (good people, not archetypal baddies like Miss Minchin), and people aren't always at their best when someone with stacks of money is being kind to them. I felt like Mary was a richer character this time around reading, and FHB goes wild describing children's play. Mary and Colin keep each other amused so well, even though Mary does plateau in her personal development towards the middle, which is fine. If a person is not outwardly churlish but still contrary by nature, do they need to stop all their grumps forever to be whole?

In the thoroughly mediocre movie Return to the Secret Garden, it's implied that Dickon dies in the Great War. Fiddlesticks to that. I'd also say that Hilary McKay cribbed some of Martha to make Alice, although Alice is much more shocking.

Nature can bring us boatloads of stories, skills, and redemption. But what if you don't get out enough? You will die wondering if it is better not to have lived at all, that's what. Nobody could live a duller life than Harriet Frean of The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair. Sinclair was a suffragist and Harriet Frean is the opposite, a woman who is raised to be "nothing but beautifully behaved." Harriet never tries to be anything but beautifully behaved and chugs along dutifully and self-sacrificingly until, at the end of her life, she's gained an inkling that maybe her parents didn't want her to be beautifully behaved so that they could admire her across the breakfast table when she was forty. She does fall in love with her best friend's fiancee, but nobly refuses him as an act of self-abnegation, which makes all three of them utterly miserable for decades, but when her niece says, "Would you do it again?" Harriet insists she would. How could she act selfishly, even if the consequences would save her best friend's life? The Life and Death of Harriet Frean is an apropos manifesto for the elevation of women to the rank of humans. I was reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening before I started Harriet Frean and HF is way better. The Awakening reads like a smoking gun forgery by English teachers, or a long form Jeopardy question: "What is dissatisfaction?" Harriet Frean nails the limited lack of expectations predicated by Victorian mores; the only trouble is that May Sinclair did it a bit too well. Every generation has its slow-witted children who live at home for decades. Nowadays Harriet would have the opportunity to drop out of community college before she moved back to her parents' couch, but she never would be Interim Department Manager Harriet Frean.

In conclusion, stop sitting around on your internets and go outside.

Next up, more FHB.

A Futile Attempt at Comparative Literature

In a later Simpsons episode, Lisa says, "My interests include music, science, justice, animals, shapes, feelings," and the teacher who wants her to choose a passion and specialize says, "You see yourself more as a buffet-style intellectual. Picking and nibbling until one day you're 38 and managing a Barnes & Noble." Since this is clearly what I've done wrong with my life, today is about consolidating four seemingly different books into a useful whole: Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door by Hilary McKay, Medieval Children by Nicholas Orme, The Lovells of Arden by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care by John McWhorter.

How are these books similar? Which one is the longest? Why doesn't The Lovells of Arden have pictures like the rest of them? Which book is sexiest? Clearly, Doing Our Own Thing by John McWhorter is because I have an academic crush on him. The only other contender is The Lovells of Arden. Is The Lovells of Arden sexy? No, it's as unsexy as Fifty Shades of Chicken. Issues of consent mar its whisper of romance.

Culled for musical theater anecdotes, Doing Our Own Thing could be a sizable essay on one heterosexual man's love of show tunes. In intention and result, it's a discussion of American English's transition from a written to an oral language, a change that's been happening gradually from the early part of the last century. It's an upsetting book, actually. John (we've left off formal titles) quotes a sixth grade textbook dating up to the 1920s, "When I am in a serious humor, I often walk by myself in WestminsterAbbey," from 1960, "I decided, after my first voyage, to spend the rest of my days at Bagdad," and 1996, "Tachawin had packed the parfleche cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a travois." John says, "We read it thankful that we are too old to bother with a text so dingdong dull," and then he translates the passage without the vocabulary words, "Justin had packed the leather cases with clothing and food and strapped them to two trailing poles with a skin stretched between them." Dingdong dull is an awesome and apt description of a passive construction written for diversity not content. That is the thesis of Doing Our Own Thing, that American English (and British) is being written in less elegant, less complex ways; that people no longer care for (or acknowledge) rhetoric; that they do not use formal English in, for example, letters (which they don't write anymore) or books (which would never sell) or schools (where English is suspect as a tool of oppression); that adults today (including me) have never known a world where a command of English was explicitly valued (blame the Baby Boomers); and that formal, written English will continue to be replaced by an informal, oral idiom. And English will not be valued for its own beauty and craft. Terrible, right? In a long chapter on the death of poetry, John points out that no culture has ever had less national poetry than the US today, and that people eat up, say, Annie Proulx's prose poetics because they are so starved of poetry in its own terms; poetry today has thrown off its suspectly artful language to become that arrhythmic, clunky, difficult to digest prose we all make fun of. Reading to the end, I felt like I was standing at Fort Snelling looking over the Minnesota River, with the man dressed as Josiah Snelling saying, "Everything from here west to the Rockies was prairie," and you look out past the freeway and know that no matter what happens, that prairie will never come back. Doing Our Own Thing, bleak as it can be, is fun. John's a polyglot, and the area he covers is vast and comic. Read this book.

But you're asking, "Why isn't The Lovells of Arden sexy? It's a romantic Victorian novel, isn't it?" Well, yes, but when were the Victorians sexy? In brothels and back alleys and India, for the men, and never for the women. So a Victorian romance is as a sexy as Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door, except Lulu ends with genuine love between a boy and his rabbit, and Clarissa Lovell just Gets Used to It. Poor young girl. She thinks she has a choice, and she double regrets choosing wrong. Clarissa's profligate father, Lord Lovell, sold the ancient family estate of Arden to Mr. Granger, a wealthy, fifty-year-old industrialist and Hermione's great-great grandfather. Lord Lovell says something to Clarissa like, "I won't pressure you to marry Mr. Granger, I'll just die penniless somewhere unfashionable in Belgium to avoid disgracing our ancient name," which causes Mr. Granger, comfortably ensconced in Arden, to say to his daughter, "Surprise! Your step-mother will be two years younger than you! Won't that be fun?" Clarissa, meanwhile, is beating herself up for the love of George Fairfax, the only man who's ever paid attention to her. When George Fairfax helps Clarissa find her disinherited brother, can she be forgiven for talking to Mr. Fairfax occasionally in well-supervised social situations? Um... yes, but barely, and she almost dies. It's good to know there's a floor on death by indiscretion. As we know, the consequence of adultery is death. The consequence of fornication is death. The consequence of light socializing is six weeks of hysteria and brain fever. The internet says The Lovells of Arden is like East Lynne, but East Lynne has higher drama and funny bits. Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote thirty-some novels, so The Lovells might be one of her also-rans.

In a broader definition of sexy, one that awkwardly squashes in two books about children, which is sexier, Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door or Medieval Children? Well, Medieval Children. Beautiful reproductions of illustrations, paintings and manuscripts make Medieval Children a treasure of a reference book, which is why I shouldn't have read it straight through. Generally interesting, but looooong and so carefully chronicled that Mr. Orme needs to explain that medieval mothers probably used baby talk when speaking to their medieval infants, as it's a general human trait, but he cannot prove this due to lack of documentation. More interesting is the chapter on baptism and the benefits of nominal kinship between children and their three godparents, or the discussion of literacy explaining that, while most people could not read, all communities had literate members and relied on writing for religious and legal reasons. I picked up Medieval Children because I read Growing Up in Medieval London by Barbara Hanawalt several years ago and remember it fondly.

So we've established that comparatively, Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door, is the least sexy book I've read lately, but is it the best? Yes. And does it have the most rabbits? Yes. Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door wins the rabbit-having competition, which, at the end of the day, is more important in a book than sexy. I've been really excited about Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door for a long time, and could've ordered it from the UK last year, but that's expensive for a book one can read in forty five minutes. As we all know, Lulu has five rabbits of her own (like me, almost), and one of them doesn't get along with the other four, because rabbits can be jerks. Lulu houses her rabbits outdoors and feeds them sweet potato, so she's not a champ on following House Rabbit Association recommendations, but she does what British rabbit owners do and we can't all be perfect.

A little boy, Arthur, moves in next door to Lulu and he has a rabbit in a hutch. Arthur feeds George the rabbit and waters him everyday, but never gives him any fun or exercise and when Lulu comes over to talk bunny rabbits, Arthur says he's only keeping the rabbit because it was a gift from his grandpa, but he's boring. Lulu's says of course George is boring if you leave him in a rabbit cage that's like jail all the time, but Arthur ignores her until he goes on holiday and has to ask Lulu to mind George. Lulu introduces George to her loner bun, Thumper, and they hit it off, which is not unrealistic in the world of bunny rabbits, and frolic and play and do mutual grooming all week until Arthur comes back from holiday and puts George back in bunny jail. Then Lulu hits on an idea: she and Mellie will write fake letters from Thumper to George and send activity presents. They send a crinkly paper package and a carrot mobile and pile of dandelions and Arthur sees George playing with these things and getting excited and learns that George is not boring when he isn't forced to stare at a wall all day. Then Lulu holds a rabbit party, but not the kind of party where you don't bring presents. Flapping fantastic.

To conclude my foray into comparative literature: synthesizing these books in terms of sexy and rabbit value does not lead me to a honing of interests suitable for reemployment.  Pity.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Other Symbols of Power

Thank you, Adrian Wilson, thank you. This historian of early modern England and New England Patriots linebacker has written a book just for me. Because I have always wondered, "How did male obstetric practice eclipse female midwifery?" and then, there, on the (clearance) shelf, I saw it: The Making of Man-midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770. "Why did women desert the traditional midwife? How was it that a domain of female control became instead a region of male medical practice? Why did a torrent of criticisms directed against 'men-midwives- fall upon deaf ears?" Why? Spoiler: Adrian Wilson posits that the move towards women employing man-midwives came from a split in the collective female culture. As women's literacy doubled and doubled again between 1680 and 1750, and England, London especially became richer and labor more specialized, the new, educated gentlewoman had time for leisure and keeping up the Joneses. Previously, midwives had been the educated leaders in the female community, but with the change in the female upper-class, hiring a man-midwife held a certain cache.

The other part of the story, the one that takes up ninety percent of The Making of Man-midwifery is that professional men of a physic or surgical persuasion became skilled enough at midwifery to attend normal births. Before about 1720, midwives attended nearly all births, and male surgeons were summoned only to emergencies, usually after labor had progressed for four days or so, and craniotomy was needed to save the mother. So men were only called in the direst of emergencies and only delivered a dead child.

This changed with four generations of a family called Chamberlen who possessed secret instruments to effect the delivery of a live child in a difficult birth. Hugh Chamberlen II, the last of his line, sold one of the rumored Chamberlen instruments, the forceps, to a few Tory colleagues. Meanwhile, Dutch physician Hendrik van Deventer developed a theory of midwifery involving pressure on the coccyx and uterine obliquity. In England, Deventerian man-midwives were mostly associated with the Court Whigs. The early man-midwives William Giffard, Sir Richard Manningham, William Smellie, William Hunter: their careers have been plucked out of obscurity and will return there. In three hundred years, if someone mentions in a book that Dr. Hinck practiced at the Minneapolis location of the Bloomington-Lake Clinic until it burned down and he transferred to Edina, will that be interesting? No. The only interesting thing is that two major buildings burned down within a block of each other in slightly over a year. What's going on with that? The Making of Man-Midwifery has filled my head with yet more obscure ideas and useless facts. I can only imagine they might come in handy if I were ever to win free tickets to a Vikings v. Patriots game at the new fucking stadium. I might wait at the exit where the Patriots load onto the team bus until I see Adrian Wilson, and I might say, "Adrian Wilson! Adrian Wilson! Do you think that the late publication of the vectis and its association with Country Whigs might have led to its relative obscurity in obstetric practice?" and Adrian Wilson might be so surprised that someone else was on his wavelength that he would look at me like he had no idea what I was talking about.

A vectis is a shoehorn for baby heads.

In books that you might read, I strongly recommend A Mad,Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller because it is so flipping good. The audiobook performance is fantastic, and the book is deliciously good, even though the back cover makes it look preposterous. Vicky does pose nude for her art class, but it's because all her classmates already had their turn. A girl from her finishing school is sneaking and spying, however, and Vicky is sent back to England in disgrace. Her parents give her the choice between reputation repair or a lonely spinsterhood with Aunt Maud. Vicky's parents are nouveau riche, slightly gauche and insecure. Agreeing to as many tea parties and charitable works as needs be to undo her shame, while secretly working on an application to the Royal College of Arts, Vicky takes her sketchbook to Parliament to get in some life-drawing of the Suffragists protesting outside. She manages to sketch a bit while a young woman chained to the railings chides her for not being a Suffragist full stop, and not scarpering because the police are coming right now, seriously, right now! Go! Vicky is a naive, impetuous girl with a talent for drawing and a willingness to suffer for her art, but not much else at first. All the characters in A Mad, Wicked Folly are deeply drawn, even her rich fiancee Edmund; a lesser author would have made him Cal from Titanic, but he's presented as an interesting jock. All the Pankhursts make appearances, and I cried a little because of what the Suffragists endured in prison so that we could have rights. A Mad, Wicked Folly is like a grown-up version of my favorite book Wishing for Tomorrow, a sequel to The Little Princess. There's a part where Lavinia, the top pupil, tells Miss Minchin, the cruel schoolmistress, that the gentleman next door is very interested in the education of young women and Miss Minchin puts her hand to her temple and privately remembers growing up in a time when no one she knew was interested in the education of young women whatsoever.

I read I Am Half-Sick of Shadows because of the title, which it did not live up to. Alan Bradley is The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie guy, and I do talk smack about mystery novels, and cozies particularly, all the time, and I will continue to do so. Flavia de Luce is a precocious eleven-year-old with a flare for chemistry who lives in a crumbling manor house with her bratty sisters and her stamp-collecting father, very I Capture the Castle. It would all be well and good if Flavia got into some age-appropriate japes or pestered her siblings, but, no, there has to be a murder.

A feature film is to be shot at Buckshaw, and a film crew arrives, one of whom will be the murderer and one the murderee. Flavia finds the body and nearly solves the mystery by consulting a general-interest reference book and questioning her spinster aunt, who happened to be a spy during the war and knew the victim from spy club or whatever. Flavia puts the murder aside to work on her other project, trapping Father Christmas in sticky goo, but the murderer(s) solve the mystery for her by attacking her on an icy rooftop. Eh. The murdering characters were so inconsequential that I'd forgotten who they were when they turned up on that roof with some convoluted motive about whose lover got to star in which pre-war movie. Are they really murderers, or was it the little girl who pushed them off a roof? The one who's found four bodies in her recent past? The one who left a thimbleful of arsenic in the butter dish at the beginning of the book? Which is the more likely story?

In conclusion, The Kids of the Polk Street School: In the Dinosaur's Paw was a lovely break in the long history book I've been slogging through at work. Drake Evans, former classmate of the held-back-a-grade Richard Best (Beast), runs after Beast yelling, "I'm going to get you!" when they're walking to school, and ruins his snow fort. Before Christmas break, Ms. Rooney told everyone to bring rulers because they're "doing dinosaurs on the first day back," and Beast, whose study habits are such as to repeat second grade, forgets and marvels when a ruler appears in his desk, after which circumstances lead him to believe that he is in possession of a magic dinosaur ruler, which he uses to wish harm on Drake Evans. Another book from the fantastic series by Patricia Reilly Giff that reminds you of all the angst and pathos of childhood.