letters and sodas: booknotes

I vividly remember the cover of the 1989 Puffin paperback edition of this book, which I suspect I checked out of the library multiple times. I’m not sure what made me think of it recently, but I decided it might be fun to re-read, and it was: I remembered parts of the story but had forgotten others, and there are definitely some things in this book that I find funny now that I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid. (Like this exchange: “If Mr. Kunkel’s father worked so hard for the business, he should have owned part of it, too,” “Tony said. “Young man, you know nothing about business,” Mr. Banks said uneasily. “What do they teach you at that school, anyway? Socialism?”)

Anyway: this is a silly/bonkers mystery where you very much have to suspend disbelief (there are so many coincidences in the way the paths of characters cross!) but if you aren’t looking for realism, it’s a fun romp. When the book opens we meet Caroline Carillon, née Fish, and her next-door neighbor, Leon. Her parents are tomato farmers; his are potato farmers; together they hit on the idea of “pomato soup,” which ends up making them a fortune. Caroline and Leon’s parents make them get married when she’s 5 and he’s 7 (because it’s the only way they can think of to settle their argument about what their soup should be called), but then Leon is sent to boarding school because their parents have decided to keep them apart until Leon is 21. Leon writes to Caroline every year on their wedding anniversary, then tells her to meet him at a hotel, once he’s 21. Things happen, and the reunion doesn’t go as Caroline was thinking it would. At the end of it, she wakes up in a hospital after a boat accident, and Leon—or rather, Noel (he changed his name while he was at school) is nowhere to be found.

Caroline’s quest to find Noel becomes all-consuming and decade-spanning, though she doesn’t have very much to go on. She decides, for example, to eat only at Chinese restaurants, because one of his anniversary messages said that he liked wonton soup. Along the way, she ends up adopting two eleven-year-old twins named Tina and Tony, and all of them try to figure out the mystery of the “glub-blubs” – which is the last thing she heard in the midst of the boat accident. I definitely liked the word game/puzzle aspect of this when I was a kid, and I still do—and I probably appreciate the now-vintage NYC setting for a big chunk of the book more than I ever did back then.

I like the way that Lois Lowry’s middle-grade books about Anastasia Krupnik (who is in eighth grade in this final book in the series) keep the reader’s interest by combining multiple plot threads. In this one: 1) Anastasia has just gotten a dog 2) she’s taking a Values class at school 3) her dad has jury duty and 4) she makes a mistake that she’s worried might have actually been a crime. With the Values class, we see her answers to homework questions like what she would do if she saw a stranger shoplifting, or what she would do if she saw a close friend shoplifting; she and her three best friends also have spirited discussions about their very different responses to those questions. Anastasia worries that she is too “wishy-washy”—and in fact, that maybe her whole family is. (Her dad’s jury duty story involves how conflicted he felt, after hearing first from the prosecution and then from the defense.) But as her teacher points out, she’s actually “good at examining things, and seeing all the different options,” which she should see as a strength rather than a liability. Meanwhile: on her very first early morning walk with her new dog, she accidentally puts a bag of dog poop in a mailbox, rather than the package she meant to mail for her mom. She goes back later that day to see if she can somehow retrieve it, but the mailbox has been removed entirely, which she’s sure is because of her “crime.” As she wrestles with her feelings of guilt and whether/how to confess, she realizes she’s facing a real-life Values dilemma rather than a hypothetical one.

This isn’t my favorite of the Anastasia books, but it was nice to re-read it, though there are a few moments that feel very dated, like when Anastasia’s friend Daphne talks about reading about “transvestism” in the library, and when Anastasia’s teacher says “I hate to see a pretty girl like you looking so sad all the time” and it’s presented in the narrative as just a nice/concerned statement, rather than being in any way problematic.

But I love Anastasia’s dog, Sleuth, who is described/drawn as looking very much like the dog that appears with Lowry in her author photo. I love passages like this: “The dog, finally, after raising his head at each mention of his name, got up and came over to the table. He sniffed each person’s knees as if maybe they had turned edible overnight. Disappointed by the smell of denim, he yawned, went back to his corner, and resumed his disguise as a mop.” Or this: “he pranced by her side and surveyed the neighborhood to be sure it hadn’t undergone any changes in the night.” And I love how Anastasia’s mom tries to use Sleuth as a model for the illustrations she’s working on for a children’s book about a dog, but gets frustrated due to his shagginess, and finally decides she needs to get his hair out of his eyes with plastic barrettes—which Anastasia and her kid brother Sam both find extremely undignified.

Although Otto is published by Dial Books for Young Readers, I think this “palindromic graphic novel” would be fun for readers of all ages who like wordplay. As others have mentioned, most of the book is a kind of daydream/reverie/fantasy journey, which means the plot doesn’t have to make a ton of sense, but that didn’t bother me: I’m here for the text, which is totally made up of palindromes. At the start of the book we see Otto’s parents in the kitchen; his dad is making soup. When Otto is called to the table his dad tells him to eat (“Nosh, son”) but Otto is entranced by the steam rising from his bowl. We’re transported to a beach scene, where Otto’s dog, Pip, gets lost while chasing another beachgoer. The beach leads to a desert, which leads to a road, which leads to a city, which leads to a cemetery, which leads back to the ocean, which leads back to the dining table—none of which is the point, really. I like Agee’s art, but the palindromes are really the draw. When Otto catches a ride to the city of Grubsburg, all the license plates and signs on trucks and billboards are palindromes—from “Walsh’s Irish Slaw” to “Regal Lager” and “Octet Co” and more. There’s a bookstore where all the covers on display are palindromic, and Otto finds himself at one point in a “Mueseum” (yes, that is a bit of a cheat) that has a “Moore Room” and a “Koons Nook”, all of which I find totally charming.

I found out about this book thanks to Neil Pasricha’s post about the best books he read in 2022, and I’m really delighted to have read it!

I’d been meaning to read The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street since it came out in 2017, but somehow hadn’t gotten around to it, despite the fact that this style of middle-grade novel is totally my jam. If you like Elizabeth Enright’s books about the Melendy family, or Jeanne Birdsall’s books about the Penderwicks, you will probably like this book too—and this book is a great pre-Christmas read, if that’s something you’re currently looking for.

When the book opens, it’s December 20th and the Vanderbeekers are all “gathered in the living room for a family meeting”: their parents have some bad news to deliver, which is that their landlord, Mr. Beiderman (who lives on the top floor of the building where the Vanderbeekers have been living for the past several years) has declined to renew their lease, which means they need to move by the end of the month. The five kids (four girls and a boy, ranging in age from four-and-three-quarters to twelve years old) are dismayed: they love their home, and their Harlem neighborhood (which is where their dad grew up, too) and they definitely do not want to move. And so the plot is set in motion: Isa, who’s twelve, says it plainly: “I figure we have until Christmas to convince the Beiderman to let us stay.” But how can they convince a man who seems to dislike kids and noise (and who hasn’t left his apartment in six years) to keep their big (and sometimes raucous) family (complete with a Basset Hound, a cat, and a house rabbit) on as tenants?

Without saying much more about the plot, I will say this book is totally charming. It made me grin a lot, and also made me teary-eyed more than once. I love all the kids and their personalities. The oldest kids are twin sisters Isa and Jessie—one of whom loves playing the violin, the other of whom loves science. Then there’s Oliver, who’s nine: he likes basketball and reading. Hyacinth, who is six, loves animals and making things (whether that’s sewing or knitting or making things out of cardboard or paper or making peanut butter dog treats, with her mom’s help). And then there’s Laney, who loves people and also loves her pet rabbit. (I was not surprised to read a bio that described the author of this book as living “in Harlem with her husband, two daughters, dog, cat, and house rabbit”: from the way she describes Laney’s rabbit as “hopping in bizarre patterns around the living room carpet, periodically flinging himself into the air and spinning as if auditioning for a Broadway show” and then describes watching the rabbit “nibble on a stack of books,” I strongly suspected she was writing from personal experience of living with a bunny.)

I borrowed this book from my mother-in-law, who recently bought (and read) the whole series—I borrowed the rest of the books, too, and I’m excited to read them all.

I went into The Stolen Lake expecting something like Nightbirds on Nantucket: an alternate-history romp with some peril for our heroine Dido Twite, but with humor and an expectation of a happy ending. The Stolen Lake felt much darker, with Dido as resourceful as ever but also sadder and in what felt like greater danger. (I mean: there are some *moments* in Nightbirds on Nantucket, but in that book I never doubted that the villains would see their plot foiled or that everything would be OK for Dido and her companions.)

In this one: Dido’s on her way back to England, finally, but the ship she’s on is diverted to South America, which is Roman America in this world, because in Aiken’s alternate history some of the ancient Britons and Romans migrated there when the Saxons invaded Britain. The captain has received a message by carrier pigeon telling him to go to New Cumbria and assist its monarch. The message is vague but there’s been “some attack, some invasion”: “Something has been taken from the queen.” As you might guess from the title, that something turns out to be a lake, and Dido and her companions are enlisted to get it back. But there are frightening things going on in New Cumbria, and they’re not all related to the country’s dangerous wild animals (though there are things called aurochs, which are described as “huge hairy tusked birds, larger than horses, which can snatch up a grown man in their talons).

After some early humor (the captain says to Dido that she seems “to know nothing about anything except navigation and how to cut up whales”; we learn that the ship’s steward “had attended butlers’ school in London; part of the course consisted of half an hour’s poker-face work every morning) the book turns more serious. It’s not just the lake that has been stolen: a princess from a neighboring kingdom is missing, presumed kidnapped by the queen of New Cumbria. Who, by the way, says she’s waiting for her husband, King Arthur (yes, that one) to return. (Maybe I would have had more fun with this if I were more familiar with/into Arthurian legend.)

While this one isn’t my favorite book in this series, I do look forward to reading the rest, and there were some things I liked about this one—like the descriptions of the landscapes that Dido and her companions travel through, which feature volcanoes and an abandoned city and “fantastic snow-covered peaks, and pinnacles like spectral cities of ice.”

I recently acquired a copy of The Stolen Lake, which is the fourth book in Joan Aiken’s “Wolves Chronicles”, and it prompted me to check out this book, which is the third in the series, from the library. Nightbirds on Nantucket is totally bonkers, and totally excellent. It opens on a ship at sea in the Arctic; a girl is asleep on deck and we learn she’s “been asleep for more than ten months”. She wakes, and turns out to be Dido Twite from Blackhearts in Battersea: this ship, a whaling vessel out of Nantucket, picked her up from the water where she’d been clinging to the mast of a wrecked ship and she’s been along for the ride with them ever since. The ship Dido’s on belongs to Captain Casket, a Quaker whaler who is “funny in one way, awful peculiar”: he says he’s seen a pink whale, and, moreover, he “forever had this notion that one day he would see one—on account of summat as happened when he was a boy.”

Dido just wants to go home to London, but that’s not in the cards, at least not immediately: the boat isn’t heading to port anytime soon, and when it does go ashore it’ll be in America, not England. She has a project, at least: she learns that the captain’s wife died on board, and his young daughter, Dutiful Penitence, has shut herself up in her cabin: the captain wonders whether Dido might be able to persuade her to come out. Meanwhile, the first mate seems to be up to something shady, and the ship is still in pursuit of that elusive pink whale.

Dido’s approach to getting Dutiful Penitence (or Pen, as she comes to be known) to emerge from her self-imposed isolation is excellent, and I love the way Dido also tries to teach Pen to be more independent and resourceful and less of a scaredy-cat. (To wit: “By innumerable tales about her own life Dido was managing to suggest that all dogs do not bite, that occupations such as skating and swimming can be enjoyable, that people tend to be friendlier when you talk to them boldly and cheerfully than when you cower away as if you expect them to murder you.”) But plotwise, there’s a whole lot more going on: the world of this book is a world in which the House of Hanover has not taken the British monarchy, though Hanoverians are constantly scheming to overthrow the Stuart king James III. And some of those Hanoverians might have a plan that involves the island of Nantucket. When Dido and Pen are sent ashore to live with Pen’s Aunt Tribulation (whom Pen remembers being terrified of as a a child) they find themselves with more to worry about than the endless list of farm chores and house chores they’re told to do.

Dido is a whole lot of fun and it’s great to watch Pen learn to do things on her own; the supporting characters are also excellent: among other’s there’s a Nantucket boy named Nate (who likes to sing songs of his own devising: “I allus used to make up verses at home, about sheep and funerals, you know, and pickled tamarinds and so forth,” he explains), a bird that spouts pro-Stuart sayings, and a professor working on a project he thinks will produce a “magnifibang.”

At one point in this middle-grade novel one of the characters remarks on how it’s weird to be living in a “crazy maybe haunted, maybe spy-filled castle in Scotland,” and yeah, this book is quite the mix of things. It’s 1940 and Kat Bateson and her two siblings are sent to a castle somewhere north of Edinburgh so they won’t be in London in the midst of the Blitz: a relative of her great-aunt’s has a wife who’s started a school in their castle, for evacuee children. But it’s clear to Kat from the start that something is “off” about Lady Eleanor and the rest of the castle’s inhabitants. And it’s not particularly reassuring to be told things upon arrival like “The Lady insists we lock you in at night” and “If you hear any odd noises, it’s nothing. Castles as old as this are filled with odd noises.” The reader, meanwhile, is given the whole backstory, from 1746 onwards, which involves a magical chatelaine and the stealing of children’s souls. Meanwhile, the kids find “a secret hiding place” with “something—or someone—locked inside that makes terrible shrieky noises”: a prisoner? a ghost? or something more rational but maybe more dangerous … like the short-wave radio of a Nazi spy? I like how Kat, who likes to spend “time with facts and figures and puzzles” (and who’s initially convinced there’s a rational explanation for everything) ultimately finds herself having not only to believe in magic, but to use it. I probably would have been freaked out by this book as a kid—I found it pretty creepy even as an adult, while also finding the plot totally engrossing.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club was the 1950s sapphic coming of age story I didn’t know I needed, and was such an engrossing read for me. In the prologue we meet Lily, who’s 13 and with her family at a 4th of July celebration/Miss Chinatown pageant in San Francisco; Lily feels “as if she shouldn’t be caught looking at those girls in their swimsuits,” though she can’t articulate why. The narrative then jumps forward four years to a scene of Lily and her friend Shirley: Shirley is showing Lily an ad for her family’s restaurant in the newspaper, but what catches Lily’s eye is a different ad entirely, for “TOMMY ANDREWS, MALE IMPERSONATOR,” who does shows at a place called the Telegraph Club. Later, at school, Lily is mortified when that ad, which she’d torn out of the paper, falls out of her bookbag in the bathroom. But when another girl, Kath, picks it up, what she says isn’t what Lily expects: she says she’s been to the Telegraph Club, and has seen Tommy Andrews perform there. And so Lily and Kath, who have been in classes together but have never really been friends, start walking home together and talking. They become friends, then more than friends, and their relationship is definitely one of my favorite things about the book, though there is also lots of other good stuff. Lily is Chinese American, and her family is concerned (with good reason) about the Red Scare and the effects it might have on them; we also see the casual racism of various white people Lily interacts with and how that affects her. And we see Lily figuring out her sexuality, and dealing with how to come out or not to her family, and dealing with gender expectations too (her aunt works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so there is some familial acceptance of women in science, but at the same time, when Lily asked for a chemistry set for Christmas when she was a kid, her mom’s reply was “Don’t you want a doll instead?”). There are also flashback scenes that give more background about Lily’s family and their stories, and about their different experiences as Chinese Americans of a previous generation.

I love the San Francisco setting of this novel and the way the city feels like such a perfect backdrop to the story. I like the way Lo uses the city as a way to talk about Lily’s growing awareness of possibilities beyond the world she’s always known, like this, from right after Lily sees the Tommy Andrews ad in the paper: “she stood at the window over the sink, gazing at the city lights, each a glowing ember marking someone else’s life: bedroom and living room windows, headlights crawling up the steep streets.” Or this: “She’d always thought there was something magical about the city, with its steep stairways and sudden glimpses of the bay between tall, narrow buildings. It felt expansive and full of promise, each half-hidden opening a reminder that the city she had been born in still held mysteries to discover.” I love that Kath and Lily go to a gelato and sorbetto place in North Beach at one point, and then have ginger ice cream in Chinatown; I love that Lily’s aunt takes her to Musée Mécanique; I love that Lily and Shirley go to Sutro’s and Ocean Beach.

Heidi felt to me like one of those books I should have read in childhood but never did, and I was a little hesitant to read it as an adult because I was worried I would find it too sappy. In fact, I found it totally charming, despite its many references to God and despite the problematic/ableist ending.

At the start of the book we meet Heidi, an orphan who’s being taken to live with her grandfather, who we’re told “drank and gambled away” his big farm and supposedly “killed somebody in a quarrel” in Italy. Heidi’s grandfather has a pair of goats and lives in a mountain hut; he regularly sees Peter, the kid who’s the village goatherd, but is otherwise cut off from society, and people imagine he won’t be thrilled to be taking care of Heidi. But Heidi, who is five, is all sweetness, and quickly wins her grandfather over: she’s excited to be in the mountains, and happy to see him, and delighted by his hut and his goats. Heidi’s idyllic mountain existence is interrupted, though, when her aunt arrives to take her to Frankfurt, where she’s to be a companion to a young girl who can’t walk/uses a wheelchair. The girl, Klara, turns out to be smart and kind, and Heidi has some adventures in the city, but she misses her grandfather and the countryside terribly. She starts sleepwalking, and when Klara’s dad has her talk to his friend the doctor, the doctor says Heidi needs to go home. So back to the mountain she goes. Eventually the city folks come to visit—first the doctor, then Klara and her grandmother—and the mountains help cure everyone of their ills and sorrows.

Heidi’s caring and kindness and generosity could be grating, but somehow weren’t: she’s just so happy to be running around with the goats and listening to the sound of the wind in the trees, and she’s equally happy reading hymns to Peter the goatherd’s blind grandmother, or watching her grandfather make things out of wood, or talking with Klara or the doctor. She’s not particularly well-developed as a character, but her sweetness is winning enough that I didn’t mind.

I also love the descriptions of places in this book—Heidi’s grandfather’s mountain hut with its table and cupboard and the hayloft where Heidi sleeps; the pasture where the goats graze, with all its herbs and wildflowers; the snow in winter piling up to the windows; the half-ruined house in the village where Heidi and her grandfather start spending the winters. I like the descriptions of summer, like this: “The sky was a deep blue, and the sun shone on the green mountain. Everywhere there were flowers: delicate primroses and great patches of blue gentians and golden rock-roses nodding in the sunshine.” And I like the descriptions of winter, like this: “In the evening, the moon shone over the vast snow fields, and the next day the whole mountain glittered like a crystal.”

One night recently I was looking at New York Public Library’s ebook app and noticed a section for books in French. I read a Tintin book in French years ago but had been intimidated to try anything without pictures, despite my 1000-day Duolingo streak … until I saw that one of the French ebooks available to borrow was a French translation of the first Baby-Sitters Club book, Kristy’s Great Idea (or, en français, L’idée géniale de Kristy). This seemed like the perfect thing for me to read in French: since it’s a middle-grade novel, the language/sentence structure wouldn’t be too complicated, and also, hi, I definitely read a lot of BSC books in English in my childhood, so maybe I’d remember some of the plot and characters. (I did.) I had a lot of fun revisiting the adventures of Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey (who is Lucy in the French version, but anyway), a quartet of seventh-graders in Stoneybrook, Connecticut.

As you may know/remember, Kristy’s great idea is to start the Baby-Sitters Club with her best friend Mary Anne, their other friend Claudia, and a new girl at school named Stacey/Lucy. As you may also know/remember, Kristy’s other great idea is that they should keep a shared journal about their baby-sitting jobs, so that they can pool their knowledge and share the high points and misadventures. So, yeah: one mom fails to tell Claudia that she’ll be watching not just her son but also his three cousins, Mary Anne has to deal with a disobedient cat and a grumpy neighbor as well as the two kids she’s watching, and another woman fails to make it clear to Kristy that her two darling three-year-olds are, in fact, ginormous dogs. I remembered some plot elements but not all of them: I remembered the dog thing, for example, but didn’t remember much about Kristy’s mom’s boyfriend and his two kids, and how Kristy’s having a really hard time with the idea of her mom maybe getting remarried. I didn’t remember the drama of the postponed pizza party, but I sure remembered Claudia’s outfits—which are changed/updated quite a bit in the French version, though she does still have skeleton earrings. (If you want the full glory of the 1986 original version, go see this blog post that includes visual representations of several of Claudia’s outfits from this book.)

As for the experience of reading this in French, it was excellent. A lot of the prose was straightforward enough for me to understand easily, like when Kristy describes herself thus: “J’ai envie de dire quelque chose, je le dis. J’ai envie de faire quelque chose, je le fais. Maman dit que je suis impulsive.” There was definitely a lot of vocabulary I needed to look up (words I didn’t learn from Duolingo include: barking, hairy, suspicious) … I probably should have written down all the words I looked up in a notebook as I went along, but I guess I’ll have to save that for my next French read. I also had to look up a bunch of cultural references—most of the candy, books, and board games mentioned are Frenchified, so I learned about things like petits-chevaux. I think I may see how many of these books the library has in French, because yeah, this is such a good combo for me of nostalgia and language practice!