letters and sodas: booknotes

I was a kid who took riding lessons, went to horse-centric summer camps, and spent recess in 5th and 6th grades pretending to be a horse with my similarly horse-obsessed friends. Not surprisingly, I read a bunch of horse books, including some by Marguerite Henry—but I don’t think I ever read King of the Wind, though I definitely remember seeing it on the shelf at the library. I’m not sure if I picked it up but wasn’t into it (historical fiction was not particularly my thing, with the exception of All-of-a-Kind Family) or if I never actually tried to read it.

Anyway: it’s the (fictionalized) story of the (real) Godolphin Arabian, whose famous racehorse descendants include Man o’ War and Seabiscuit. The book actually begins with the story of Man o’ War’s last race, which I didn’t know about, and then jumps back in time to Morocco in the 1700s, where a mute stableboy named Agba is caring for a pregnant mare, who has a foal who Agba calls Sham (who grows up to be the Godolphin Arabian). Sham and Agba endure various trials (and are separated and reunited more than once) as they go from Morocco to France (where Sham is a gift to Louis XV) to England; the connection between the horse and the boy is at the center of the story (and made me teary-eyed a few times as I read).

Marguerite Henry’s prose in this book isn’t always lyrical, but I like it when it is, like when she describes the scents Sham notices around him in Morocco: “The delicious fragrance of clover, the biting smell of smoke from the burning stubble of cornfields, the perfume from orange and lime groves, the spicy aroma of pine woods from beyond the city wall, the musky smell of the wild boar, the cool, moisture-laden scent of the clouds that blew over the snow-topped mountains.”

I wish someone had recommended this book to me when I was a kid, but ah well, better late than never. I had high expectations going into Dealing with Dragons because I’d heard rave reviews from multiple people, and because I love the Sorcery and Cecelia books that Patricia C. Wrede co-wrote with Caroline Stevermer. I’m pleased to say this book did not disappoint: Wrede is clearly having a lot of fun playing with fairy tale tropes, and the protagonist is a princess who’s bored with etiquette and dancing and isn’t interested in an arranged marriage, and therefore runs away and ends up living with dragons/becoming domestic help for a dragon named Kazul. The princess, Cimorene, is great: before running away, she learns various fun and useful things on the sly until her parents find out and forbid her from her unprincess-like pursuits: she’s had lessons in fencing, magic, Latin, cooking, economics, and juggling, all of which are a lot more interesting to her than embroidery or drawing or anything else that princesses are supposed to do.

The setting of the book is great, too: there are dragon-caves, complete with hoards of treasure, and there’s an enchanted forest, and there’s a series of interconnected caves called the Caves of Fire and Night, which are described as containing “caverns full of blue and green fire, pools of black liquid that would cast a cloud of darkness for twenty miles around if you poured three drops on the ground, walls made of crystal that multiplied every sound a thousandfold, rocks that spurted fire when they were broken” (87). Someone has a sign over the door of her house that just says “NONE OF THIS NONSENSE, PLEASE,” which made me laugh because it’s like a mysterious fairytale version of signs you see on Park Slope brownstones that say “No flyers/menus.” And the plot, with its trouble-causing wizards and a helpful witch and politics/intrigue/scheming, is lots of fun: it’s the kind of book where you see how things are going to fit together before the characters do, in a way that’s really satisfying. Now I’m looking forward to the rest of the books in the series!

Greenglass House is a really charming middle-grade mystery that I’m glad to have read in winter: there are so many mentions of snow and ice and wind, and also of hot chocolate and indoor coziness, and it was satisfying to read all that wintry prose while curled up on the couch with my own mug of hot chocolate. At the start of the book, it’s just before Christmas, and Milo, who’s twelve, is ready for his usual winter break from school. His parents run a “smugglers’ hotel” called Greenglass House that’s usually empty at Christmastime. But the year in which the story takes place turns out to be anything but usual, and while Milo is initially annoyed to have his winter routines interrupted, he ends up making friends and solving mysteries and enjoying himself more than he would have thought possible.

I like Milford’s writing a lot, and I like her world-building. The world of this story isn’t ours, not exactly, but the differences are revealed gradually, in a way that I think works. Greenglass House, which is described as “a huge, ramshackle manor house that looked as if it had been cobbled together from discarded pieces of a dozen mismatched mansions collected from a dozen different cities,” sits high above Nagspeake, which has evocatively-named neighborhoods like the “Printer’s Quarter” and the “Quayside Harbors”, and bodies of water like the “Skidwrack River” and “Magothy Bay.” Nagspeake also, apparently, has a mail-order company that “would practically have a monopoly on goods coming into the city,” if it weren’t for those smugglers. Greenglass House is described as having a historic connection to smuggling, as well as a current one: its previous owner was a famed smuggler known as Doc Holystone, who’s still something of a folk hero even three decades after his death.

I also like the way that Milford works stories and storytelling into her narrative. Partly this is done through stories within the story: Milo ends up reading a book of folklore where the framing device is that people trapped in an inn due to floods tell stories to pass the time, and when Greenglass House’s guests are similarly trapped by snow and ice, he suggests they do some story-telling of their own. So we get bits of the stories Milo is reading, and we get the stories told by the guests. And we also get some storytelling-adjacent stuff in the form of a role-playing game that one of Milo’s new friends suggests they try as a way to solve the various mysteries that pop up: Milo’s never played any RPGs before, but as his new friend explains how he can develop a character and make choices about that character, he gets into it and starts to see how seeing things through the lens of the game (and the character he’s created) can change what he notices/pays attention to. The book also features family stories and family histories, which take on a particularly poignant feeling for Milo, who’s adopted and doesn’t know anything about his birth parents.

If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in this book, that’s because there is: I didn’t even mention the stained glass, or the pair of rival thieves, or the mystery of the word “Lansdegown”. But to me, all the things going on felt interesting and balanced, not like too much. And now I’m looking forward to reading Milford’s other books set in this world!

Lois Lowry’s “Anastasia” books are always solidly fun for me to read (or re-read): humorous realistic middle-grade fiction with some moments of nostalgia for late-twentieth-century New England. (In this one, Anastasia and her friends drink milkshakes at Friendly’s, and Anastasia gets her ears pierced at Jordan Marsh.) Anyway: this is also the one where Anastasia (who is 13) answers a personals ad in the New York Review of Books placed by a “SWM, 28” who has “boyish charm” and “inherited wealth” and is ” looking for tall young woman, nonsmoker, to share Caribbean vacations, reruns of Casablanca, and romance.” All of this sounds pretty good to Anastasia, though clearly she isn’t entirely thinking things through. As you can imagine, her (repeated) letters to this guy are quite funny, and have humorous/awkward consequences.

Meanwhile, Anastasia and her best friends have all decided to give up the “pursuit of boys” because surely there are better things they could be doing with their time. Anastasia feels guilty for not telling her friends that she is still pursuing a man, but she doesn’t have too long to feel bad: they’re all soon caught up in preparations for her friend Meredith’s sister’s wedding, at which Meredith, Anastasia, and their friends Daphne and Sonya are all going to be “junior bridesmaids”.

The two plot lines come together in a way that Anastasia definitely does not anticipate, and the whole thing is quite an entertaining romp. And it’s always fun to read about the interactions between Anastasia and her parents and her little brother Sam: at one point in this one Anastasia is dismayed at seeing her dad, an accomplished literature professor, “helping a three-year-old dig a tunnel through a potato as if it were the most important enterprise in the world.” (Another funny moment of dismay: Anastasia’s dad is appalled when her mom says this about War and Peace: “I only read the peace parts. I jumped from one peace part to the next. I never read the war parts.”)

When King of Shadows opens, it’s 1999 and we’re introduced to Nat Field, who’s in a company of all-male actors, ages 11-18, who are preparing to travel from the US to the UK to perform two Shakespeare plays in the newly-rebuilt Globe theatre. “We were going into a kind of time warp,” Nat thinks (6). Since this is a time-slip book, that turns out to be 100% true, though Nat doesn’t know it yet. Nat, whose parents are both dead, is a good actor, and theater is an escape for him: the company is a family, and he thinks of backstage as “our space, my space, a kind of home” (12). I like Nat’s first glimpse of 20th-century London: “Looking down from the airplane, you saw a sprawling city of red roofs and grey stone, scattered with green trees, with the River Thames winding through the middle crisscrossed by bridge after bridge.” (14). But en route to the Globe, things start to get weird: Nat has a “giddy feeling,” like the buildings are “moving, circling”; he hears “a snatch of bright music” and smells “the sweet scent of lilies” and then something else, something “that was not sweet at all but awful, disgusting, like a sewer” (21).

Later that night, Nat feels sick and falls into a feverish sleep; when he wakes the next morning he finds himself on a straw mattress in “another London, a London hundreds of years ago” (34). As it turns out, Nat is in 1599 in the place of another Nat Field—a boy who, like him, is to play Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe. (In this production, Nat soon learns, the part of Oberon will be played by Shakespeare himself!)

I found the scene-setting/Nat’s adjustments to his new situation to be alternately fun and clunky: it was fun to read about Nat getting a tumbling lesson and a fencing lesson in 1599, but some of the descriptions of Elizabethan London felt heavy-handed. Nat’s interactions with Shakespeare, though, are great: Nat is still reeling with grief from his father’s death, and Shakespeare comforts him, and it’s just the sweetest dynamic/I nearly cried several times. I also enjoyed the description of the 1599 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the costumes, the audience, and even the presence (unknown to most of the crowd) of the Queen herself.

Nat’s eventual return to the 20th century is hard for him, but I like that he’s consoled by poetry and by place—by reading a Shakespeare sonnet and by looking at “the River Thames, which flowed on fast and grey-green and unchanging, just as it had last week, just as it had four or forty centuries ago” (163).

24 Hours follows Ellis, who’s 17 and just back from boarding school, over the course of a day-long period that turns out to have a lot more adventure and drama in it than expected. When Ellis runs into a former classmate (Jackie, who’s a little older, but isn’t a university student and doesn’t have a steady job) he figures they’ll just have a beer and go their separate ways. But Jackie talks Ellis into driving him to a party, where conflict ensues, which leads to a much bigger and more dramatic conflict that Ellis finds himself involved in as well. Meanwhile, Ellis (who wants to be an actor) finds himself thinking about Shakespeare and mortality (his best friend, Simon, killed himself a few months before) as the book’s events unfold.

For a pretty short book, there’s a lot going on in this one, plot-wise. After going to the party with Jackie, Ellis also meets three sisters (Ursa, Leona, and Fox) who all live in a rundown former motel with their former guardian; Jackie hangs out at the motel (which is called the Land of Smiles) too, and Ellis ends up at another party there, moving in adult social circles that are very different from the ones he knows from his financially-comfortable family. At the same time, it feels like for a lot of the book, we don’t know any of the characters that well: we’re thrust with Ellis from one odd situation to another, and I found the book’s pacing slightly strange.

That said, by the final portion of the book, I was cheering Ellis and Jackie and Leona and Ursa on, and eager to see how the ending of the book would unfold. And there are some satisfying moments and passages earlier in the book, too. I like how at the first party, there are musicians playing Vivaldi, and Ellis recognizes the tune from a car commercial while Jackie knows the composer and moans about how the music is “so beautiful” but is so over-played that it’s “become its own sort of joke” (25). And I like various descriptions: I like how Ellis takes in the neighborhood around the Land of Smiles like this: “All around him lay a country of rust and graffitied fences” (90). Later, Ellis finds himself on top of a building, “looking down on an expanse of roofs, a geography of corrugated iron” (168). And I like how Jackie describes a large portrait painted on a wall as being by an art student who “thought art should be out and about—everyone living with it whenever they walked to the shop to buy bread” (96).

Also pleasing: I learned that Margaret Mahy got a tattoo when she was 62 because a character in this book gets a tattoo and she wanted to write about it convincingly.

At the start of this book, which is set in the summer of 1968, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern Gaither (who are eleven, nine, and seven) are on their first airplane ride: they’re en route to visit their mother in California. Their mom, Cecile, left them when Delphine was only four and Fern was only a baby; she lives in Oakland now and the kids are going to spend four weeks with her. They have visions of an exciting summer vacation: trips to the beach, or to Disneyland. The reality of their trip is different: Cecile (who now goes by Nzila) is no more interested in motherhood now than she was before; she’s prickly and private and hardly wants to see her daughters. She initially won’t even let them in her kitchen (where she has a printing press); they eat take-out food off paper plates until Delphine insists on cooking proper meals. The day after the kids arrive, Nzila sends them to the People’s Center for breakfast, after which they stick around for the Black Panthers summer camp so they won’t be in her way. “We didn’t come for the revolution. We came for breakfast,” Vonetta says, that first day, but the girls keep going back, and they learn about Huey Newton and Bobby Hutton, about their “rights as citizens and how to protect those rights when dealing with the police,” about the Delano grape strike and solidarity with farm workers, and more.

Though Delphine initially feels like there’s “nothing and no one in all of Oakland to like,” the girls do end up making friends at the People’s Center, and they end up liking Oakland, too. After a day trip to San Francisco involving fun stuff (dumplings in Chinatown! a fortune cookie factory! a cable car ride!) and less fun stuff (being stared at by European tourists and glared at by a wary shopkeeper), Delphine thinks about how it feels good to be back in Oakland, where “no one stared, unless they were staring because they didn’t like your shoes or your hairstyle. Not because you were black or they thought you were stealing.”

The book is narrated by Delphine, and her voice and perspective carry the story: she’s the oldest sister and is used to keeping her sisters in line and everything in order: she knows how to make a chicken dinner from scratch and when and how to break up Vonetta and Fern’s squabbles. “I anchored myself and my sisters as best as I could to brace us for whatever came next,” she says, about the bumpy plane ride at the book’s beginning, but that’s her general approach to life. She’s so busy watching out for her sisters that she doesn’t much think about her own wants and needs—and part of the arc of the book is her realizing she actually has wants of her own, her starting to notice her needs and pay attention to her feelings.

Gone-Away Lake is such a great summer read, with the same kind of vacation-delight feeling as books like Jeanne Birdsall’s “Penderwicks” series, though Gone-Away Lake predates those by several decades. Portia and her younger brother Foster always go to visit their cousin Julian and their Aunt Hilda and Uncle Jake in the summertime, but the summer in which this book takes place is different: Hilda and Jake and Julian have moved from a rented house in a small town to their own place that’s deeper in the countryside. This is exciting for everyone, especially for Julian, who loves catching caterpillars and butterflies and exploring in the woods. One day while Portia and Julian are exploring together, they find a swamp that used to be a lake, lined with falling-down houses that used to be vacation homes. But not all of the houses are totally in disrepair, and two of them, it turns out, actually have people living in them: Portia and Julian meet Minnehaha (Min) and Pindar (Pin), a pair of elderly siblings whose family used to summer there back when it was a lake called Tarrigo, before the building of a dam in 1903 started turning it into a swamp. The book is about the everyday summer experiences of the kids and their new friends, with some stories of summers past (from when Min and Pin were children) thrown in for good measure; there isn’t a ton of conflict or excitement, though there are a few moments of adventure/danger, but it’s all beautifully described. I love how Elizabeth Enright describes the natural world—flowers and birds and summer light, and also how she describes the details of the houses and their contents (old rugs and old dolls, a moth-eaten stuffed moose head, and more): I love sentences and phrases like this:

The hedges are tree-high by now and all bound up with honeysuckle and poison ivy and wild grape. (46)

Or this:

So the month moved slowly in all its gold toward September. (213)

Or this:

The trees and thickets whistled with starlings, and swallows arranged themselves on telegraph wires like the notes in a stave of difficult music. (222)

I also love Beth and Joe Krush’s illustrations, whether they’re of an overstuffed living room or the lush plant-life of the swamp.

Until recently I’d never heard of Johnny Gruelle (who created Raggedy Ann) or The Magical Land of Noom, but this kids’ book from 1922 was a cute/fun read. At the start, we meet Johnny and his sister Janey, who decide to use the boards left over from the chicken coop their grandfather just built to make themselves a Flying Machine so they can pretend to fly to the Moon. Except the machine somehow actually takes flight, and they somehow actually land on the Moon, which turns out to be a magical place with lemonade springs and giant mushrooms that taste like cake. The kids soon cross paths with a magician, though, and find themselves in a (literal) bind. Luckily their grandparents, having seen them fly off, decide to make a Flying Machine of their own to come after them, so they’re able to help the kids out. Except now they’re all on the Moon and the magician’s threatening to turn them all into animals. They proceed from one adventure/scrape to the next, meeting various characters as they try to make their way to the city of Nite, where they’ve heard there’s someone who can help them get home.

While the characters feel more slight to me than those in other kids’ books I like more, I did have fun reading this: the episodic nature of the story kept me interested in what was coming next. There are pleasing little details, like when the characters are attacked by flying boxing gloves, or when they catch fish that end up tasting like other foods entirely when they’re cooked, or when a storm turns out to be a rain of ink. And I like Gruelle’s illustrations a whole lot. (Here are four of my favorites: 1, 2, 3, 4)

I definitely read The Secret Garden when I was a kid, but I’m not sure if I read A Little Princess or not: reading it now, for what may or may not have been the first time, the very beginning seemed very familiar to me, so I wonder if I started it but didn’t finish, or if I read the whole thing but I just don’t remember the experience vividly. In any case, apparently kid-lit from the 1800s onward is my go-to comfort-reading genre at the moment, and as such, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I like the descriptions of the main character’s surroundings and her rich inner life enough that I’m willing to overlook the unlikely coincidences of the plot. I mean, when the first sentence of a book is this, I’m into it:

Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.

The little girl is Sara Crewe, who’s seven; her mother died giving birth to her and she and her father have lived in India her whole life, but now she’s going to be educated in London. Sara is imaginative, someone who “was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to,” and while she’s not so sure about this whole going-away-to-school thing, she’s sure that “if she had plenty of books she could console herself,” since she “liked books more than anything else.”

So this is partly a school story, but once Sara’s been at school for four years, things change, and Sara has to deal with circumstances that are suddenly very different. Her imagination, kindness, and nobility of spirit turn out to serve her very well, and she manages to see beauty even where there isn’t much. I love this, where Sara is talking about what you can see from an attic:

Chimneys—quite close to us—with smoke curling up in wreaths and clouds and going up into the sky—and sparrows hopping about and talking to each other just as if they were people—and other attic windows where heads may pop out any minute and you can wonder who they belong to.

In a different mood, I might find this book sappy, but right now, it felt just right: once I got into the story, I didn’t want to put it down. If I never read this before, I’m glad I finally did, or if I read it but didn’t really remember it, I’m glad to have revisited it.