Looking for Hautman, Finding Henty

Family reunions often bring me into the middle of Wisconsin, and I like to check out the public library in the nearby towns. Often they're Carnegie buildings.

The one in Mauston (about 20 miles northwest of Wisconsin Dells) is not a Carnegie. It opened in 2000, and from the looks and location of the building, I would say it's on or near the site of the town's former passenger rail station. It's a beautiful building that's being well maintained.

While I was checking out the Young Adult collection to see which Pete Hautman books they had, I noticed a whole row of books by an author I had never heard of: G.A. Henty.

G.A. Henty? Clearly, they're older books from the look of the faded printing and the design, and historical fiction from the titles. Probably an English author. I read the descriptions on the back of a few and got a sense that the stories follow a teen character at some pivotal historic point (a battle or key change in royal or colonial history). 

There was also one book about American history... guess whose point of view it chose:

That was enough to tip me off that this was not a writer like Rosemary Sutcliff we were talking about. Henty's Wikipedia page filled me in.

He lived from about 1830 to 1900, and wrote scads of historical adventure novels for boys. One source on Wikipedia says he was the most popular boys' author of the time. 

Beyond being a supporter of the British empire, he was extremely anti-Black (as shown by extensive evidence in his quotes on his Wikipedia page). It's also seen in his choice to cover the American Civil War by writing about Robert E. Lee's greatness.

Check out the depiction of the Black man on the cover:

And at the book's end, the main character's family's former enslaved people return and continue working for their former owners! This is a quote: they discovered "freedom so suddenly given was a curse rather than a blessing to them." 

The book was originally published in 1890, just after the Dunning School of Civil War "Lost Cause" revisionism had taken hold.

I checked the St. Paul Public Libraries' online catalog and they don't hold any of Henty's books — possibly because of their content, or possibly because no one checked them out and the librarians deaccessioned the books based on lack of use, as they do many other (better!) books.

The scary thing about these out-of-date, racist books is that they are popular withh and overtly promoted to Christian home-schoolers (parents). 

From what I could see around Mauston, there are probably a lot of evangelical Christians. So the presence of the books in the library is most likely not a coincidence.

Pick the Lock

I think I would have loved A.S. King's novels as a teenager. I like them quite a lot now, though I'm not the intended audience.

Their consistent thread is that no one among the characters knows what others knows, and so your life is an unintended detective story. Children especially don't understand the larger world or their family dynamics/dysfunction and how it fits, especially when they have parents who withhold information from them or abuse them.

But I have learned, from reading her earlier books, that I can trust King to not hurt me in the end, and I value that.

Her recent book, Pick the Lock, is a post-covid, justifiably angry look at domestic violence and the patriarchy, mixed with magical realism. Like all of her books it's not worth explaining much more than that about it. The story has to unfold. 

I will say the book made me feel my age. It begins in fall 2024, the same time I was reading it, and extends into early 2025. Past dates, as the story moves through flashbacks, are clearly dated. The main character's mother's punk Riot Grrrl band launches in the mid-1990s — which still seems like recent history to me but is clearly the far past in this story. (Which it is to many people, I know!)

One final thing. King spends a lot of her time on author visits at high schools, talking to Gen Z students, so I trust her portrayal of them. She thinks the kids are all right, in a complex way. They're fluid and accepting, especially the girls. But too many of the boys are rigid.

While I was reading the book, I happened to read an article on Teen Vogue about young men who did and didn't manage to leave the sickening world of anti-woman radicalization called the manosphere. I don't know how widely known this problem is outside of people like me who are "extremely online." I've mentioned it to women with teenaged sons and they knew nothing about it. It's very disturbing. 

To close, here's one quote from the punk rocker mom character, after the main character finally gets to talk to her:

"Try to have compassion for your father. He was raised in the patriarchy and was never allowed to grow a heart or a warm place in his chest for himself."

"Fuck him."

"Fair. But the patriarchy harms men as much as it harms women. They live in a delusional world where they are in charge and sexual royalty, when in reality, they have little power and are often disinterested in sex," she said.... "Then they twist it all to be our fault, when it's the fault of the System they invented in the first place. This is why I like being in a band. No one is in charge. We're all in charge. And we change the rules as we need to. That's how life and government are supposed to work" (pp. 280–281)

___

Here's a list of King's books. I'll asterisk the ones I've read. Not sure how I missed the other ones.

• Switch (2021)
• Dig (2019)*
• The Dust of 100 Dogs (2017/2009)*
• Still Life with Tornado (2016)
• I Crawl Through It (2015)*
• Glory O'Brien's History of the Future (2014)
• Reality Boy (2013)
• Ask the Passengers (2012)*
• Everybody Sees the Ants (2011)*
• Please Ignore Vera Dietz (2010)

Avoiding Life with the Queen's Thief

When the going gets tough, the tough read fantasy novels. Or something like that.

I'm not that big a fan of fantasy writing these days, compared to some people. Once in a while I take a detour when I find a writer I like, such as Naomi Novik. 

In the past month or so, Daughter Number Three-Point-One told me about the Queen's Thief books by Megan Whalen Turner. They count as fantasy, though in a sense they're more imaginary world history and mythology. 

(That's four of the six books... there's also a collection of short stories that came out recently.)

DN3.1 told me several friends of hers had all read them when they were teens without knowing the other ones were reading them, and they were favorite books, reread multiple times. She had only recently started reading them, so I could borrow them.

I've passed her by now and am lending her my copies of the last books. She told me they were good because each book is from a different character's point of view, and they keep revealing new things you didn't expect. That sounded intriguing.

I saw this quote on a fan wiki, and I agree with it:

Try explaining to a friend why they should read this series without somehow spoiling them. You can't.

So that's my endorsement! Worth the week or so it would take to read them all, if you read fast.

But then you might want to reread at least a few of them to understand the interconnections better.

Tamsin

I just finished Peter S. Beagle's YA fantasy book Tamsin. It came out in the late 1990s, which is well past my youth. I've never read his best-known book, The Last Unicorn, and I can't remember how I heard about Tamsin, but it was recommended by someone I admire (maybe Jo Walton?), so I put it on a list of books to find, and it turned up in the used books at Uncle Hugo's recently.

It's a present-day ghost story that takes place on a farm in Dorset, England, with a teen-aged girl protagonist who can see and talk to a 300-year-old ghost named Tamsin. Tamsin lived on the farm just before England's Glorious Revolution. 

I recommend the book, which fits into what I think of as the "mysterious England" genre, which I was a fan of when it was more age-appropriate for me.

The thing I learned from Tamsin is the history of the Monmouth Rebellion. I've come across a lot of bits of English history (both in histories and through the lens of historical fiction) but I've never heard that particular bit. As usual, an off-brand royal was trying to overthrow the one on the throne, and in this case the pretender lost. 

Of particular note, the supporters of the traitor were tried and treated with particular cruelty by a bloody-minded judge, who figures prominently in Tamsin. He sounds like a terrible person, even for the time. The trials were called the Bloody Assizes (which is such a British name!), if that gives you an idea of what they were like. 

__

The setting of Tamsin is close to Tolpuddle, another location in English history.

Barbara Willard and Mantlemass

I just finished rereading all of the Mantlemass novels by Barbara Willard, plus the short stories she added in The Keys of Mantlemass. The novels take place from about 1479 to 1644, and one short story is set (I think) contemporaneously to when it was written around 1980.

The books were fairly well-known in the UK in their time, but I think less so now, and are close to unknown in the U.S. They take place in the Ashdown Forest of Sussex (the same location as the Hundred Acre Wood from the Winnie-the-Pooh books), and follow the lives of several families as they interweave through generations, usually focusing on young members for at least part of each book.

The forest setting is an ongoing character, including the way it changes over time through development and the foreshadowing of industrialization. Seasonality is another constant companion, with detailed description of harvesting, food preservation, effect on travel, fauna, and water variation in streams. The events of English political history are a backdrop: the end of the War of the Roses, ongoing religious upheaval, war with Spain, and the English Civil War. 

A bridle path in Ashdown Forest, present day. www.geograph.org.uk

Willard's characters are strong, memorable, and fairly gender-balanced, which was unusual even during the 1970s, considering she wrote about these particular time periods and this place. I always appreciated that about her work.

Her weakness for classism is less positive, though I think she was of two minds about that. As an American, it's hard for me to sympathize with the deference some British people have for royalty and their "betters" generally, which shows up here.

There are strains of belief in "good blood" behind some of Willard's characterization choices — genetic essentialism that is not borne out by science. The best example is the character Robin Medley, who in one book is a fine young man, and in the next — just six years later! — has become an unstable jerk, with only the explanation that his father (who had almost nothing to do with his upbringing) was a jerk. (Those books are The Iron Lily and A Flight of Swans.)

Conversely, though, in the prequel The Miller's Boy, the titular character is the hard-working grandson of a miller, whose friend is from the gentry, and Willard treats their relationships with great understanding of how that would feel for the working-class boy. In the short story "A Different Day," from The Keys of Mantlemass, the two characters meet again as middle-aged men, and that complexity goes even deeper. There are a number of other examples where the forest people are shown to be "just as good" as the gentry, but it always seems as though there's a tug toward valuing, or valorizing, the upper class characters a bit more.

Finally, rereading the last book, Harrow and Harvest, in combination with my recent read of Rosemary Sutcliff's Simon, made me think about why so many English people left their native land for the North American colonies in the mid-17th century, as more than half of my ancestors did. They were fleeing war and the aftermath of war, like other migrants since then and many today. And there was a continent just "waiting" for them to exploit it, with people to colonize or convert. Disease would run ahead of them, emptying the path. Opportunity (!). But even so, the thing they were leaving behind was terrible, or they wouldn't have taken the risk.

Coping

In case you haven't noticed my recent "Currently Reading" sidebar, I have been soothing my midterm election jitters by rereading Barbara Willard's Mantlemass Chronicles, after rereading a number of Rosemary Sutcliff books. Yes, I am revisiting my teen years and/or Great Britain somewhere between 100 and 1650 CE.

I'm also watching the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, which today featured an exhibition match between the three players from last season who each won a lot of money and entered the show's record books for number of games in a row. The youngest champion of the three, who had won the least money and the lowest number of games in the regular season, won the exhibition game, so I wonder if that was about having the quickest reflexes. We'll see if that holds up in the semifinals, which start airing tomorrow. 

I sure wish I lived in a functional democracy, where I didn't have to worry that people were intentionally trying to screw up voting for people they hate or want to control. 

Here's what David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) had to say about it an hour ago on Twitter.

you know, I kinda feel like an insurrection held in the open, on television, with months of open premeditation, might merit legal and political response within the timeframe before the next election. Kinda feels important.

I get why this hasn't happened, but anyway ...

this whole: We're gonna do it again by slowing down vote counts and then claiming we've won, which we're announcing on tee-vee ahead of time, and then will do, and then you'll have to take it seriously, and Trump Judges™ will rule for us ... is getting to me.

I always thought coups were, at least, organized in subtext if not covertly. And that open coups might merit extraordinary response. At least within a couple of years. Weird times.

Another person replied to Perry: "Democracy can also die in daylight."

The English Civil War and Simon

I read a good number of Rosemary Sutcliff's books when I was a young person, but I never heard of her book Simon until fairly recently. It's about a boy of that name, who becomes a young man in the years leading up to the English Civil War, then goes to fight for Parliament, while his best friend fights for the king.

Like all of Sutcliff's work, place is a major character in the book. Her love of southern England and ability to describe its beauty is one of my favorite parts of reading her work.

In contrast, parts of the book are too simplified in their military history, listing off place names and troop movements as if they are meaningful in themselves. I was constantly referring to maps of Devon, Essex, and Sussex, and even then it didn't mean a lot to an American who's never been in those parts of the country. To a Brit who grew up with at least some background in the history, I'm sure it would make more sense. It's also assumed that the reader knows who the major leaders of each side are, including their nicknames. The book was published in 1953, and that may have been true of young English readers at the time, but it's not true of an American now, and probably not then either.

If you're an American, how much did you learn about the English Civil War in school? Personally, I learned most of what I know about it from other historical fiction, like Barbara Willard's Harrow and Harvest. Now I know a lot more from Rosemary Sutcliff (and Google Maps).

Here are some other parts I particularly liked.

I recently read a post on Medievalists.net about how medieval literature never talked about what happened to the bodies left after battles. Well, Sutcliff did. After the battle of Naseby, which was won by Parliament,

Behind them, in the wide upland valley that had so lately been a battle-field, the prisoners were being rounded up... It was  not yet noon of a day that was still lovely, and the June sun shone warmly, gently, on the dead of two English armies, who lay tumbled uncouthly among the thyme and the little white honey-clover of the downland turf, here at the heart of England (page 80).

The story also included many mentions to how the armies were (or weren't) provisioned, and how they took what they needed from their fellow countrymen along the way, with or without payment. For instance, when Simon returns to his mother and sister at his family's farm, he finds that the king's troops had cut down the cider apple trees in their orchard for firewood, even though the trees were too green to burn except on the hottest fires. After Simon finds out about this and goes to put one of the apple logs onto their evening fire,

He looked at the log in his hand, with its delicate tracery of grey-green lichen; thinking of the autumn cider-making, and the beauty of white blossom in the springtime, that would not come again. It seemed so wanton, so stupid. He put the log gently on the fire, and watched it flower for the last time into petals of saffron flame that scented all the room with aromatic sweetness (page 155).

One thing I didn't like about the book was its cover. Simon was one of Sutcliff's earliest books, and to me the cover (by William Stobbs) seems like an afterthought, with its crudely rendered figures isolated on a solid background. It makes the book look like a bad early reader instead of a novel.

Connections in New York, 60 Years Ago?

My recent post about Polly Cameron, author/illustrator of I Can't Said the Ant, shared some things about Cameron's life that I found when looking her up for the post, including the fact that she spent most of her life in a relationship with another woman, which as far as I can tell is not widely known (though I don't think she's exactly a household name in the children's book world in general).

Star Tribune book editor Laurie Hertzel recently ran a brief review of a biography of Louise Fitzhugh, author (and illustrator) of the famous children's novel Harriet the Spy. The biography's title is Sometimes You Have to Lie, and it appears that part of Fitzhugh's lie related to her sexuality. Hertzel writes,

Fitzhugh was tiny, pixie-like and adorable, alluring to both men and women (but she preferred women). Her revolving door of lovers is dizzying, and while she settles down from time to time, no relationship lasts.

Fitzhugh [was] intensely private [...] she left behind few letters or journals from which to draw and only allowed two photographs of herself to be published during her lifetime....

All of which made me think of Fitzhugh's sequel to Harriet, which is called The Long Secret. That's not what the book's eponymous secret is, but still. As a reader, it makes me wonder if there wasn't a bit of signaling going on.

In her review, Hertzel mentions that Fitzhugh illustrated a book called Suzuki Beane with writer Sandra Scoppettone, another author for young people who later came out as a lesbian in the 1970s. I've had a copy of that book sitting in my home office, which I've been meaning to write about here for several years, though I've never gotten around to it. 

(It's a 1962 paperback that I found at the Montana Valley Book Store in Alberton, Montana, while taking Daughter Number Three-Point-One to college on the West Coast. What a place!)

It was first published in 1961, so I guess that means Suzuki would be about 65 years old now, if she were a real person. I wonder what happened after she and her friend Henry Martin hit the road, running away from the constraints of their square and/or beatnik parents?

I've been a fan of Scoppettone's teen theater novel Trying Hard to Hear You since I was a teenager myself. It may have been one of the first books I read that had a major gay character in it, and it also deals with racism in what seemed like a fairly sophisticated way (to me, at least) back in the mid-1970s. 

Thinking of these intersecting authors got me thinking of others who might also have known them.

Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon and many other well-known books, is another prominent mid-20th century children's book-world figure whose sexuality would have raised eyebrows during her time (or maybe it did, I'm not sure how well-known that aspect of her life was). There are several biographies written about her, so probably that answer exists. She also lived in Greenwich Village (like Fitzhugh and Scoppettone), in a little house that can still be seen.

Lorraine Hansberry, author of Raisin in the Sun, lived in Harlem for a time and then later in the Hudson Valley, somewhere north of where Polly Cameron and her partner lived. Hansberry's sexuality is covered pretty well in Imani Perry's Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. She, of course, was not writing for children or young adults, but I wondered if any of these women encountered each other in the closeted circles of the New York area during that time period of the 1950s and ’60s, given that they were all connected to the literary world in one way or another. 

Overall, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I felt a resonance in the coincidence of Hertzel's Fitzhugh write-up, running just after I was looking into Cameron. And then there was the connection to Scoppettone and Greenwich Village, which made me think of Wise Brown. And then I remembered Hansberry from having read Perry's book not long ago. 

It was one of those moments when your brain makes connections, whether they're real or not. 

Finally Appreciating Leo and Diane Dillon

At various times, I've written about the illustrators of children's and young adult or chapter book covers that I love (such as Trina Schart Hyman, Richard Cuffari, Emanuel Schongut, Alan Cober, Virginia Lee Burton, or Ellen Raskin). One influential pair of illustrators I've long known about but never loved quite as much was Leo and Diane Dillon.

It's not that I didn't like their work, but it was almost too ubiquitous from the 1970s on, and some of it I found a bit mushy, maybe too airbrushed for my taste. A lot of it is beautiful, though, and now (searching around as I started to write this post) I found that some of their work I didn't even realize was theirs.

I got started on this because Cory Doctorow tweeted this startling piece of theirs from 1970:

It was used on this cover:

Here are some other cover illustrations from that same early-1970s era, which are not very similar to the works they are mostly known for in the children's book world:

I mostly knew about them back in the 1970s because of their woodcut illustrations on these covers for books by Erik Christian Haugaard:

1963

1965

1968 (I may never forgive the designer of Rider for those typeface and color choices.) 

1971

This cover for a John Christopher novel published in 1963, which I don't think I've ever heard of before, looks like a cross between these two styles: 

It's not a woodcut, though you can see elements of woodcut style in the rendering, but it also shows the beginnings of the expressionist psychedelia so clearly shown in the 1970ish science fiction covers.

Something else I learned today (or had forgotten) was that the Dillons did this original hardcover illustration for Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and also did illustrations for reissues of A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door that were published at the same time. (Illustrator trivia: Richard Cuffari did the original cover of Wind, and Ellen Raskin did the original Wrinkle cover.)

I also learned that the Dillons did an Ace paperback cover for Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea that I've never seen before:

Pretty cool.

No Time Like Tomorrow, Today

If Google is any indication, it appears the world has largely forgotten about Ted White's 1969 teen science fiction novel No Time Like Tomorrow. There's a smattering of used for-sale or bibliography-type listings, but no one discussing a book that looked a few centuries into the future and saw extreme wealth inequality, corporate control of everything rather than national or international governments, and liberty for almost no one.

I first read NTLT when I was about 12 years old and it affected my world view, particularly my mistrust of national IDs and surveillance. I just reread it this week because it kept popping into my head when I was trying to figure out what end game the .01% could be after: they seem hell-bent on making as much money as possible without regard to a livable biosphere, so what's their plan for themselves and their descendants?

In NTLT, their descendants are called "the Heirs" and they live in remote places, like a high-tech castle built into the Himalayas, one of the few places left with clean air. They don't even feed themselves, and are called titles like "My Lord." The poor live on the filthy lowest levels of the stacked megalopolises that fill the the world's continents, getting by through invisible means in a world of 40 billion.

White is weak on economics and sociological detail, though there are mentions of algae as a major food source and better public transit in his future than in our present. All that is to say it's not a perfect bit of world-building (he's got nothing on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, for instance), but for 12-year-old me, it was startling and the main outlines of the world hold up and have something to offer to readers today.

--

Well, I take it back... at least one person discussed NTLT and didn't like it much. I agree with this writer's critique of White's odd libertarian-lite, hands-off-capitalism worldview in that particular passage, but disagree on whether the characters are compelling. The cover, of course, is a thing of its time, as is the sexism. Big surprise.

Connecting to The Outsiders Through a Poem

The other day a friend and I were having a morning meeting in east sunlight and I commented on the light yellow green leaves just unfurling on the trees outside the window. She replied, "Nature's first green is gold."

To which I replied, "Her hardest hue to hold."

And then we recited the rest of the poem, sometimes taking turns on every other line:

Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Which, of course, is Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

This friend and I are almost exactly the same age, and I asked, "Do you know that poem from S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders or just because you know the poem?" And it turned out she had never read The Outsiders, which was published when we were about 12 years old. She just loved the poem and memorized it.

But she picked up the book yesterday and read it, and I've been thinking about what that would be like as an adult vs. rereading it as an adult, having loved it as a young teen. I know I didn't see it the same way the last time I reread it a decade or so ago, but I did still like it (unlike, say, A Separate Peace, ugh). It was path-breaking in the young adult genre when it came out. I'm almost afraid to talk to her about what she thought of it.

But I will.


Some of the book's covers: The first edition, the 1970s paperback I bought as a teenager, and two that seem to be student designs. (Google image search reveals it's a popular book to use in design class assignments.) Most of the other real paperback covers are boring movie tie-ins.

Tiger Burning Bright

I picked up the book Tiger Burning Bright by Theodora DuBois at a used book sale recently. I succumbed partly because of the charming three-color cover illustration and partly because I remembered seeing it during my 1970s library days, even though I was pretty sure I had never read it.

Well, now I have read it and I'm certain it was the first time. Published in 1964 by an author who was then 74 years old, it's set in 1857 India and tells the fictional first-person story of an American teen-aged girl swept up in the violent Sepoy Rebellion. I had never heard of this revolt before (thank you, U.S. education system), but it's easy to analogize it to China's "Boxer Rebellion," which I did learn about in school from a Western perspective. As with Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel Boxers, this story of India could use a telling from an Indian point of view.

I knew going into my reading that the book was unlikely to be from the point of view of the colonized Indian people, and I was right. The author, I think, thought she was a progressive, but she carries her Western bias throughout. Before the book opens, for instance, she explains in a section called "A Few Facts about India" that the East India Company was in control of the country, backed up by the British military. However, it

by no means used [its powers] only for the enrichment of the English. Roads, aqueducts and irrigation systems were constructed throughout the country. Famine suffering was alleviated. Hospitals and schools were built.... Education was encouraged and missionaries came and began to spread Christianity.

Unhappily, many men of India misunderstood and resented the laws and innovations of the English (page x).

So...missionaries came to spread Christianity in a country with several other religions already in dominance, but the people "misunderstood" what the English were up to? Right.

The thing I was less ready for was the casual sexism from a woman author. Every one of the English adult women in the book is useless and horrible. They are the ones who express the worst anti-Indian racism; somehow, British men are all much more open-minded. The women all end up getting killed off one way or another, leaving our plucky American teen and another young Irish servant girl as the only non-child females in the story.

The book is especially hard on a woman called Mrs. Thompson, the mother of four young children, including a nursing infant. Her husband is murdered in front of her and the rest of the family (as well as the narrator and me, the reader). Mrs. T. can't snap out of it, though, and pitch in toward the survival of the group, darn her! As a reader, I was irritated with her, as the author intended me to be, of course. DuBois lays it on even thicker, making Mrs. T. irrational about maintaining English cultural mores in the midst of a life-or-death crisis and whining about needing more water. But stepping back, where is the allowance that this woman has recently given birth, could be in postpartum depression, and is, of course, nursing — which means she needs more water than everyone else? There isn't any, of course, from our teen-aged narrator. Mrs. T. finally dies of something after going mad. Her baby is left with no food source at that point.

Mrs. T's loss as a milk cow leads to an interesting combination of sexism and racism as the story nears its end, when the refugee party is saved from dying by the people of a Jat village, deep in the desert between Delhi and Multan. The Jat people are described as "very primitive and low caste, but kind." The narrator has enough presence of mind to acknowledge that "It's strange to think of oneself being the object of charity from a group of such half-naked, almost destitute" people.

Luckily, there is a young Jat mother with an infant of her own who can serve as a wet nurse to the orphaned baby, Peter. She herself is described as "a young ebony girl" who the protagonist actually thinks of as "dinner for our Peter."

This child-mother and her husband (who is described as a "not-very-bright but devoted individual") join the traveling party and are referred to for the rest of the book as "the Jats" — they are never given names, though one member of the refugee group can speak a common tongue with them, so they could easily have exchanged names.

In the end, after the English/Irish/American refugees reach Multan and the "safety" of English society once again, the Jat couple leaves for their village, taking the infant Peter with them. The English ladies of Multan decry this action ("he's been stolen by that dreadful wet-nurse, that Jat woman") and assume the couple will harm him or at least hold him for ransom. Our heroine knows better, saying the Jat mother is "not dreadful. She saved his life. She's kind and devoted. She took him because she was afraid he would die without her and she couldn't bear to give him up." But still, she makes sure the child is retrieved nonetheless. The retrieval is described this way by the character who brings the baby back:

We soon overtook them plodding along, the woman with both babies. I will say that she didn't want to give up ours. She screamed and kicked when I tried to take him from her and he howled and held onto her hair.... [laughs]... But an English officer had driven us and he gave the Jat man a gold piece. I saw the transaction. Even the woman was impressed and she finally relinquished the baby to Katie without too many tears.

That the Jat couple were okay with exchanging the baby for a gold piece may or may not be realistic, but it's written as if there could be no question that it was more than fair.

One final aspect of the book that left me shaking my head: our main character is 14 years old in the opening pages before she leaves for India with her parents, then 17 during the main action. There is a young man from her home town who was "at least 23" at the beginning and 26 for the main action as they struggle to reach safety. Our girl has had a crush on him for years, of course, but assumed he was not interested. At the end of the book, though, he suddenly declares his love for her and asks her to marry him, saying "I've had my eye on you since you were an infant!".

Well, ick, man. DuBois's husband was 10 years older than she, but they didn't meet until she was 27. The characters' age difference is a minor point in the book but it also seems to exist for no particular reason (why couldn't the narrator have been 20 or 22?), except to allow DuBois to sell the book as a juvenile instead of an adult novel, I suppose.

It was a final twist of distastefulness on top of all that had come before it.

Young Malcolm

Today is the 52nd anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. I was five at the time and I assume I didn't hear about it, or if I did, I wouldn't have known who he was until that moment.

For years I had a paperback copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (written with Alex Haley), but I never got around to reading it. It may still be here somewhere, but I suspect not. I'm not sure why I never read it.

I think my interest in his life shifted when I visited Omaha several years ago and learned it was his birthplace, yet lacks any significant commemoration of that fact. It was around the same time I learned that, when he was a kid, Malcolm told his (white) teacher that he wanted to be an attorney when he grew up and the teacher scorned his ambition.

For all of these reasons — twinges of guilt for not reading his autobiography, knowing that he came from the Midwest, and empathy for the kid he was in this racist county — I recently read the book X: A Novel, written by his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz with young adult novelist Kekla Magoon.

The book covers his life from childhood to the time when he went to prison in his 20s, ending just around the time he became part of the Nation of Islam. From the book I learned:

• While he was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, his family moved to Lansing, Michigan, when he was pretty young.
• His father and mother were organizers for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and the back-to-Africa effort.
• His father was killed by a street car, possibly murdered for his political work.
• After his father died, his family sometimes went hungry.
• His mother was harassed by social service workers and finally committed to a mental institution, with the kids placed into foster care.
• Malcolm went to Boston to live with an older half-sister when he was only about 15. There, he worked several jobs and became part of the zootsuit scene. His nickname was Red.
• When he moved to Harlem a few years later, he was a numbers runner and his nickname shifted to Detroit Red to differentiate him from other guys called Red. (Detroit, Lansing, they're both in Michigan... close enough.)

The book does a good job of exploring Malcolm's relationships with his brothers and sisters, how people grow apart, and what it's like to move to big cities. As a reader, I feel like I know him and understand why he did what he did, and how it led him to the part of his life that's better known.

The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou

Last week's killings of black men by police made me go back to reread a juvenile novel I read many times in the 1970s. The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou was published in 1968, probably written in 1967, after the Watts and Detroit riots, after the assassination of Malcolm X but before the killing of Martin Luther King.

I don't know where it takes place and it doesn't really matter, but I'd guess Philadelphia, since that's where the author is from. Fourteen-year-old Louretta Hawkins has always been a good girl who struggles with how light her skin is, compared to the rest of her family and peers. She doesn't feel accepted, but she finds her way in a world where the police harass young black people for absolutely no reason, and one of her friends is killed as a result.

The book handles many topics in a deft way. For instance, Louretta's mother, raised in the South, wants her children to lower their goals and be safe:

That was the essence of Momma's philosophy, Louretta thought: Be safe, hold on to what you have, don't reach out for anything bigger or better, or the world, the white world, will punish you. Stay in your place, even if it's a miserable corner, and hang on to what you have. Something must have frightened Momma terribly when she was growing up down South to make her so scared, Louretta thought. (pp. 24-25)

The reference to something very frightening happening in her mother's past in the South never comes up again, and none of her mother's history is revealed. As a teenager I probably didn't think much of it, but now, having read more history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, I can imagine.

When the police have arrested one boy for no reason, a white teacher visits Louretta and her friends at their impromptu youth center and hears about it:

"Now, why did they take Calvin away? What happened?"

"Nothing," Louretta said. The others shrugged and were silent.

"Come on now," Mr. Lucitanno said with a perplexed look on his handsome, boyish face. "The police don't just walk into places and arrest people without a reason."

But that was exactly what they did all the time in Southside. Louretta despaired of ever being able to explain this to Mr. Lucitanno, though; he had not grown up in Southside. He would not believe her or understand.

"But they don't do that in America. This is a free country!" the teacher shouted. He must be close to thirty, yet he seemed, somehow, younger than any of the group around the piano. (pp. 98-99)

This scenario is very much in line with James Baldwin's words from 1966 in The Nation: “…the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.”

Hunter repeatedly deals with the sexism of black activist men, particularly through the character Fess, who says things like "our women always side with the white man, and blame us for the conditions he causes" and "The women in this movement respect us. And they belong to us." (Reminiscent of Stokely Carmichael's famous statement, "The only position for women in SNCC is prone.") 

A bit later in the story, the boys at the youth center are anxious to raise money and they plan a robbery. The girls talk them out of it by suggesting they hold a dance instead:

"If we don't steal, how are we gonna get the money..., Lou?" David asked reasonably.

"I don't know. But if you have to steal, you're better off without them."

"Aaaah," Fess muttered in disgust, "law and order never did nothin' for them old Toms, and they won't do nothing for you either. The only way to get what you want is to take it."

The evil advocated by this boy was beginning to tempt Louretta, which made her more determined than ever to defeat it. She had an inspiration born of desperation. "We could have a dance," she said.

"A dance! Awww!" Jethro's loud expression of disgust seemed to speak for most of the boys. But the girls immediately showed interest in the dance as an alternative to Fess's plan. Perhaps it was because it would include them, while gang-fighting and robbery would not. (pp. 103-104)

This is particularly perceptive, I think, because it recognizes the fact that nonviolent methods involve more people than violent ones, and in social movements, that larger base leads to more frequent success. (This could have been true of the American Revolution, too, if it had gone a different direction.)

Even Lou's older brother William, who is described as a stereotypical straight-arrow, comes to see that the police have it in for black people. After the boy Jethro is shot by an inexperienced officer because he (Jethro) didn't move when ordered during a police raid of the youth club's dance, William helps Lou cover up a weapons cache the boys had hidden in the youth club. She isn't sure why he did it:

"...I was afraid you would tell the cops.... I was afraid because of the way you used to say the kids were hoodlums."

"What's that got to do with with tonight?" he asked.

"Well, the guns were really there. So that proves you were right, doesn't it? They are hoodlums."

"Lou," William said seriously, "I learned something tonight. Those cops can't tell the difference between a respectable Negro and an outlaw. They treated me just as rough as everybody else. So that makes us all outlaws, at least in their eyes.... And if they can't tell the difference," he concluded, ..."who am I to judge?" (pp. 139-140)

When the teacher, Mr. Lucitanno, tells Louretta that he plans to donate blood to Jethro after the shooting, she finds her heart hardened against him and his good intentions, telling him that the blood Jethro needs is "Any type but white":

The teacher blushed deeply under his olive skin, but he did not give up. "I'll go to the hospital as soon as I leave school," he said quietly. "You're not doing your friend any favor with your attitude, Louretta. Blood is just blood. It's all red, and if you were as sick as he is, you'd know it. I think Jethro will welcome my blood as much as anyone else's."

"Suit yourself," she said with a shrug, and walked out coolly, leaving Mr. Lucitanno frowning at his desk. If he were a woman, she was sure, he would be crying. It served him right. Why did white people always think they deserved extra gratitude when they offered to help you? Let him get along without it, and see if he would still be so friendly and helpful. She doubted it. (pp. 148-149)

That passage touches on one of the topics in anti-racism work that white people don't usually recognize until they've worked on it for a while: that you don't get thanked (and shouldn't expect to be thanked) for exhibiting basic decency and treating other people as human. At least, I didn't realize it for a long time. Kristin Hunter, in 1968, was fully aware of it, though.

The book ends in a more complicated way than the typical juvenile novel. In many ways Louretta and her family are better off by then, because the songs she's been singing with the boys get discovered by a record company, but she realizes that being a celebrity of a sort doesn't make for happiness:

Louretta didn't know what she had gained... There was the money, of course, but she couldn't touch that — and even when she could, what would she spend it on? Momma and William had investigated the possibility of a new house, but had found nothing available for colored families as large as theirs in better neighborhoods. After many refusals and bitter disappointments, they had decided to stay where they were. (p. 247)

Racism permeates Louretta's existence, but the word is never used in the text. Kristin Hunter showed instead of told.

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Here are some other covers that have been used on the book over the years:

Exploring the Kerlan Collection: Ellen Raskin

I've written many times about my love of the writer/designer/illustrator Ellen Raskin (see the list at the end of this post), but recently I got serious about my near-obsession: I went to see the collection of her original work held at the Kerlan Collection of children's literature at the University of Minnesota.

I know, I know, I live not too far from the campus, and I've been aware of these holdings for years. But somehow I never quite got there to see them.

Then I happened to meet the past director of the collection at a party and told her about my interest. She said I should do it as soon as possible because, well, you just never know what will happen in life. So I finally got off the dime and made an appointment to see some of the collection.

Anyone can use the Kerlan's archives, but you need to make an appointment and go during business hours. You tell them in advance which boxes you want to see (selecting from this list) and a pile of large, gray, flat boxes will be waiting for you on a cart.

You have to take out one item at a time and keep them all in order. Each piece is wrapped in acid-free paper, so there's a lot of material moving around. Lots of standing over tables, too, stooping slightly, so it's a bit hard on the back.

But so worth it. Over the next week, I'll post five times with photos of what I saw, covering these topics:

• Book covers and miscellaneous art (including a series of black-and-white illustrations Raskin did for the New York Times )
• Material from her picture book Freak Show
• Artwork from The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)
• Cover materials for The Tattooed Potato
• Artwork from Figgs & Phantoms

The Kerlan Collection doesn't have anything from The Westing Game (that material is held at the University of Wisconsin), but they have just about everything else.

More to come tomorrow!

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This is the cover artwork for Moe Q. McGlutch, He Smoked Too Much, published in 1973. I had never seen this book before my visit to the Kerlan Collection. Among all the work of Raskin's I saw in the collection, this is the book that has the most complete material. The box contained everything Raskin used to create the book and it shows her process from beginning to end. And let me tell you, it looks exhausting.

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Past posts about Ellen Raskin:

Ellen Raskin

Ellen Raskin Speaks About The Westing Game

The Westing Game in Person

Clues About Ellen Raskin in The Tattooed Potato

Ellen Raskin's Legacy at the Milwaukee Public Library

The Last of the Raskin Signatures

A Reminder of Ellen Raskin

How to Make a Book Look Like Something Teens Wouldn't Want to Read

I don't pay much attention to young adult book covers these days. I know what I like (such as the covers of Rainbow Rowell's books), and on average, my sense is that covers are more engaging than they used to be, with a higher average level of aesthetics.

These are a few recent covers discussed on a blog about 2015 covers:




Clearly, there are a lot of hand-drawn letters, bright colors, and strong graphic shapes. This is just a small sample, and they don't all have these elements, but I think we can agree they don't look anything like this cover from a new Avi book that I saw yesterday on the shelf at Common Good Books in St. Paul:


The art style could maybe be okay for a contemporary cover, but the white Brush Script type and the heavy sans serif with its dark to light orange gradation both scream their allegiance to another decade, or maybe a designer who's not paying attention. Is it supposed to look retro? If so, is it an era that appeals to young people? I don't think so.

I know I am over-sensitive to type, but I think you don't have to know the names of the fonts to realize this type is completely wrong on a cover meant for young people.

Goodbye and Thanks to Zilpha Keatley Snyder

I somehow overlooked the news that children's author Zilpha Keatley Snyder died in October 2014. It's one of the many times when I've missed the late Peter Sieruta and his blog, Collecting Children's Books. I'm sure he would have let me know in a more timely manner.

She was 87, and published her last book in  2011. I confess I lost track of her books some time around the Green Sky trilogy in the mid-1970s, but her earlier work was a key part of my childhood reading. (The obituary in the New York Times says the trilogy explores "ideas involving utopian culture, social engineering and the control of violence," though, so maybe it's time I read it.)

I think I read The Velvet Room (1965) first, but didn't know that it was by the same author when I later picked up The Egypt Game (1967). Others from that era that I love are The Eyes in the Fishbowl (1968) and Season of Ponies (1964). The strangeness and refusal to say what was real and what wasn't in the latter two books was probably my introduction to magical realism.

My favorite among her books, though, has to be The Changeling (1970). I identified so much with the main character and so wished for a friend like Ivy that it almost hurt to read. At the same time, it examines issues of class and bullying without being heavy-handed.

For some reason, Keatley Snyder's most award-winning books, like The Witches of Worm and The Headless Cupid, didn't grab me. (I do like the Newbery-winning Egypt Game almost as well as my favorites, though the sequels leave me cold.)

But I could reread The Changeling or The Velvet Room any week. The Velvet Room creates a particularly resonant version of a Depression-era California migrant worker story, set near the part of California where Keatley Snyder grew up, and again touches on class differences, all wrapped around a mystery.

Here's one thing I learned about Keatley Snyder from her obituary:

"Disney wanted to option [The Egypt Game] for a film but wouldn't guarantee a multiracial cast," her longtime editor Karen Wojytla said in an interview. "She was very forward-thinking, and wouldn't sell them the rights."

Go, Zilpha. You are a model for writers to this day.

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I would be remiss if I didn't mention illustrator Alton Raible, whose work accompanied the editions published back in my day. There's just about no information on his life within this thing called the interweb... just a brief mention on the Green Sky wiki that says he was born in 1918 and implies that he's still alive.... if so, live long and prosper, Mr. Raible.

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Apologies to Pete Hautman for categorizing Snyder under my Reading YA tag, but since I'm not writing for a specialized audience of YA readers -- and because my favorite Snyder books predate that category, and probably helped create it with their edgier topics like lurking child molesters and teens vandalizing high schools -- it seemed okay.

The Wilmington Massacre

There was a funeral today for Michael Brown, 18, killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. By coincidence, I picked up a book called Crow a few days ago, and so was reading it today as the funeral took place.

Crow tells the story of the 1898 Wilmington (N.C.) Massacre through the eyes of 12-year-old Moses Thomas. Like the vast majority of white Americans, particularly northerners, I've never heard of the massacre. But because of it, 22 black residents were killed, many more were injured, and dozens of the city's most prominent black men were forced to leave town for good. It's also the only recognized coup d'état in American history, where the local elected representatives (both black and white) were forced out of office at gunpoint.

The book deals with the role of the black press, which I appreciated, and reminds the reader that even as late as 1898, there were places in the South that were close to integrated, with a healthy black middle class. All of that was destroyed by angry whites who strong-armed the black residents until they were cowering in their homes.

The use of guns and militias by white supremacists -- patrolling the city streets, setting up checkpoints -- is eerily familiar in this day of Second Amendment advocates over-arming themselves and patrolling around the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, for instance. It also reminded me of the articles I've read explaining that the Second Amendment was a compromise to placate Southern slave-owners, who needed arms to keep their slaves down. In Crow, and in the factual record of what happened in Wilmington, white citizens used arms to intimidate black men into not voting. But that was just a prelude to the killings that followed.

Crow brought tears to my eyes. If there was ever a time when black citizens needed support from the federal government, this was it. But the feds was nowhere to be seen, either at the time of the violence or later to restore the city's elected officials.

The only fault I found with the book is its title. I guess it's a reference to the birds that Moses discusses with his grandmother, Nanny Boo. But in the text, she more often talks about buzzards than crows, and so I don't know quite what to make of the use of the one-syllable word, other than to think it's a combination of the current youth-publishing fad for one-syllable titles combined with an unexplained reference to Jim Crow. Since the book is meant for middle-grade readers, that lack of explanation is kind of glaring.

As a reviewer named Amy Rae put it on Good Reads,

Today, we think of Jim Crow in the context of segregationist Jim Crow laws, but Jim Crow was originally an archetypal character from minstrelsy, and "crow" on its own was derogatory well before Jim Crow's debut in the 1820s--and keep in mind that this book is set in 1898, when Jim Crow would have been an established stock character. Minstrelsy was easily one of, if not the most popular form of live entertainments in the 19th-century, and while minstrelsy as a whole is mentioned off-handedly in the text, I don't recall acknowledgment of the more fraught aspects of the term "crow."

For these reasons, I didn't think it was appropriate to present a black people = crows metaphor as a neutral idea. Beyond that, the title just doesn't say much of anything about what actually happens in the story; it's inspecific in addition to having a history of controversy attached to it.

Most reviewers on Good Reads saw value in the book, some giving it five stars and a few mentioning Newbery Medal contention, but there were a couple who felt it was unclear on its audience or that it was overly didactic. I disagree with that. Unlike Walter Dean Myers's book Riot, Crow's narrator and his family felt real to me and were a good vehicle for relating what happened in Wilmington.

Given my age and knowledge of the general history of race relations in this country, I found the story filled in lots of gaps. I'm not sure if I would have known what to make of it, had I read it at age 10 or 11, but I think it would have made me want to find out more.

I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how white people have terrorized black people in this country for more than a century, often while blaming black people for it.

It seems like a fitting read for today.

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Another excellent way to get a glimpse of how white supremacy was enforced after the Civil War is to watch the PBS documentary Slavery by Another Name. It covers 1865 to 1945, "revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled neoslavery to begin and persist." It uses archival photographs and re-enactments filmed in Alabama and Georgia to tell these important, overlooked stories.

Rainbow Rowell: Wish Fulfillment

It's no secret that superheroes are popular because they provide wish fulfillment for young (and not so young) males. Overly muscled men in tights with physics-defying powers have never appealed to me, and I occasionally wondered what form my wish fulfillment could take, if it even existed.

I found it last week in Rainbow Rowell's YA novel Fangirl.

Having just finished reading her debut YA novel, Eleanor & Park -- which is funny and stupendous even as it treats difficult topics like bullying, growing up in poverty, and being biracial -- I was a bit doubtful of the premise of Fangirl. Its main character, Cather, writes fan fiction, for god's sake, clearly setting the story in the present, so I was afraid the book would be full of the kitschily formatted texts, IMs, and other padding that occupies the pages of too many YA books these days.

But no. The fan fiction provides a well-integrated backdrop for the story. The reimagined Harry Potter stories (transformed into an alliterative doppelgänger named Simon Snow) are deftly written, as is the fan fiction based on them.

The wish fulfillment began for me almost from the first page. The book is about an anxious, intellectual, creative-writing girl starting college with a worldly stranger for a roommate. Gee, that sounds familiar. But in Rowell's capable hands, what could have been mundane becomes a believable one-year transformation of the ugly duckling into a swan. Without removing her glasses.

It takes longer than that in real life, of course -- but that's why it's wish fulfillment.

Cather has been writing slash stories about Simon Snow and his nemesis Baz (a vampire cognate of Draco Malfoy). If that's not the 21st century equivalent of a small-town girl like me writing stories about boys in gangs, I don't know what is. But Cather has found success on the interweb, to the tune of 20,000 readers waiting anxiously for her next installment. (Wish fulfillment yet again.)

Cather's experience in the world of academic creative writing is also familiar and yet different. Like me, she comes to the class writing something that's considered inappropriate for that world. The difference is that her teacher loves her work, despite one bad grade when Cather turns in a slash story. The teacher, whose own writing is described as being "about decline and desolation in rural America," is open to any type of writing as long as it's original and not derivative of another writer's characters. My teachers discouraged anything that wasn't realistic fiction. So having a teacher who was open to fantasy or science fiction would have been a dream to me.

I've always said I lost my ability to write fiction as I aged from 17 to 22 because I stopped observing life and began to participate in it. Best and wish-fulfillingest of all, Fangirl's Cather gets to do both.

Rainbow Rowell clearly has made that work, too.

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More about Rainbow Rowell:

Interview with Rowell on xojane.com. My favorite quote:

I think anything that predominantly women like is discounted, and anything that teenage girls like is absolutely reviled. It’s the lowest of the low. If teenage girls like something, everyone feels like they can -- and maybe should -- hate it, even the girls themselves.

The thing that really enrages me is when women and girls are demeaned for wanting romance. Like there’s something weak and dumb about wanting characters to fall in love, or wanting love for yourself. THIS IS SO WRONG. Love is the finest thing. It’s the thing everyone wants and needs and searches for.

Omaha World-Herald column about Rowell's cancelled appearance in Minnesota. The upshot is that librarians in the Anoka County library were forced to rescind an invitation by a book-banning parents' group in the school district, but she was rescheduled to appear at the St. Paul Public Library (talking about censorship during Banned Books Week) and at Avalon School, a St. Paul charter school.

Red Balloon's New Logo

I'm known to grouse from time to time about bad designs, particularly logos. So it's nice to have something nice to say for once.

My favorite children's bookstore, Red Balloon book shop on St. Paul's Grand Avenue, recently changed hands and the new owners must have thought it was time to update the logo, which was designed by illustrator Warren Hansen around 1980.

It's a classic logo, referring to a style made popular by early 20th century publishers, but the type, particularly, wasn't aging well.


The new logo is definitely fresh and, particularly in the application of the shop's new bookmark where I first saw it, I was wowed.


I love the simplicity of the front, with the address info set sideways to serve as a string, and I just as much love the repeating pattern on the back. It's probably the best free bookmark I've ever gotten from a bookstore. Fun, clean, zippy -- it makes me want to go buy some books!

But I can't be 100 percent positive, can I?

The longer I looked at it, the more I wished that the Red Balloon name, reversed out of the large balloon on the front, had been set in a somewhat heavier weight of type, so that it wouldn't disappear into the red. It's even more obvious on the back, where the balloons have been scaled down substantially and the type is tiny.


And when I went to check out the store's website to see how they're using the logo there, I found this:


Which is okay, but not as elegant as the single balloon with the type on it. I understand the need to get the name larger, of course, but I'm not sure this solution was the best way around that. The clouds feel tacked on, and using the "l" as a string seems a bit forced. Having the two "l"s at different heights makes them hard to read at a glance.

And then there's the version they're using as a Twitter icon:


This is clearly misbegotten. The clouds don't belong on the balloon, and the balloon doesn't need a balloon on it, either -- why can't the icon be the same as the usage on the bookmark (with slightly heavier type)?

So, I guess that's a B+ for the Red Balloon redesign. But I do love that bookmark.