YA fiction

Have been reading children’s literature lately, two books about very different childhoods. First I finished The Great Gilly Hopkins, the story of the flower child’s daughter who is dropped into foster care. Gilly is passed around from family to family and learns to be tough and heartless to survive the heartbreak of being unwanted. Her final foster home is with 3 other “rejects” of society, who actually learn to love her, so that when her grandmother discovers her existence and comes to get her, Gilly doesn’t want to leave. Her grandmother is a lonely, fussy old woman, but because of her loneliness, she is in a way just as needy as Gilly. So even though Gilly’s mother continues to reject her, the book ends on a hopeful note with Gilly finding a settled place and a purpose.

Written in the 70’s, this is one of those realistic Generation X chapter books so popular then. I went through a Katherine Patterson phase in grade school, along with a Judy Blume phase, a Lois Lowry phase, and a S. E. Hinton phase – all edgy, naturalistic (ok, maybe the paranormal stuff in Lowry was fantastic, but it was realistically portrayed), issue oriented books. (I also went through a Narnia phase, an L. M. Montgomery phase,an Alcott phase, a horse book phase, etc.,so I had balance. My own boys prefer fantasy and Brian Jacques type books, which is just fine with me, although I know there can be hidden ideologies there, too.) I had forgotten about the racial tension in this book, and I think I was oblivious to the pathos of the foster mother’s affection for the mentally disabled foster boy. I certainly did not tear up when I read this book as a kid – the only book I remember crying over was Gone With the Wind. (And for a long time I didn’t cry during movies, preferring to remain stoic and impartial, as a rejection of my mother’s pitiful sobbing. Then the floodgates were opened one day when I was pregnant, nursing a yearling, and holding a toddler while watching Farmer Hoggett dance when Babe is accepted into the sheep herding competition – a triumphant moment in film!) But Gilly’s encounter with Wordsworth through the blind African American neighbor, Mr. Randolph, was beautiful, if a bit contrived, as was the honesty of her 6th grade teacher in reaction to Gilly’s insult and the final goodbye of Trotter; all had me choked up. Although Gilly was not an admirably behaved child, she was smart and brave and recognized her worth when she finally believed she was needed.

In complete contrast is Linnets and Valerians, written by Elizabeth Goudge only about 15 years earlier, but set 60 years earlier. I’ve barely begun this story of 4 British siblings, left by their India-going father with a fussy grandmother, not too unlike Gilly’s grandmother, perhaps: a don’t touch/be quiet grandmother. The book begins with them escaping from their grandmother’s, “borrowing” a horse and cart, and tearing off across the English countryside, until, providentially, they are brought by the pony to their elderly uncle’s vicarage, a dusty, castlelike house with a kindly, dwarfish caretaker who talks to bees and other animals. The uncle doesn’t like children, but he likes to classically educate them, so the four are allowed to stay. They aren’t punished for their flight from their grandmother, their theft, or their snooping around the village, as long as they come to their lessons.

With the tone of a fairy tale, this book is a child’s fantasy of a perfect childhood: freedom to ramble interesting places, no meddling adults, no unbearable consequences for poor behavior. Gilly watches Sesame Street with her foster brother in the afternoons; the Linnets run around quaint villages and have tea. I wanted that latter kind of childhood, although reading about people like Gilly maybe made me appreciate what I did have: freedom to ride a bike around country roads, a mother who let us leave blanket tents up for days, lots of art supplies and pets, a vacant lot and a pond next door, horses to pat in the field behind our yard. Although I’ve tried not to overschedule my own kids, I know they lack many of those freedoms. And when they do have free time, they want to play Wii or watch a movie. Will they feel their lack or will they remember fondly what freedoms they do have?

Off the shelf

We finished Saving Private Ryan last night, and although perhaps the stoic in me wants to say that it pulls the heartstrings a little too hard, I did love the ending. And in a year or two, I'll let the boys watch it and hope that they remember to "earn it." We all owe our existence to the sacrifices of others. Only sometimes that is hard to remember when we're making our own.

So today the kids are watching a more age appropriate but probably time wasting film: G Force. Dad's on duty, and I'm reading blogs. I meant this to be something of a book review blog, so here are some quotes from what I'm reading lately:

From Katherine Paterson's The Invisible Child:
In "In Search of Wonder" she talks about books providing children a source to wonder at nature - human and the natural world, at language, and at the mystery of meaning. She writes: "If knowledge without a sense of reverence is dangerous, morality divorced from wonder leads either to chilling legalism or priggish sentimentality . . . When I write a book I am not setting out to teach virture I am trying to tell a story, I am trying to draw my reader into the mystery of human life in this world. I am trying to share my own sense of wonder that although I have not always been in this world and will not continue in it for too many more years, I am here now, sharing in the mystery of the universe, thinking, feeling, tasting, smelling,seeing, hearing, shouting, singing, speaking, laughing, crying, living, and dying."

She goes on to say we need to share with children the wonder of death as well as the wonder of birth. So someday we'll let the boys watch this movie, but now maybe The Fighting Sullivans is what we should look for.

I liked this too: "Meaning in a story reflects our belief that there is meaning in the universe, that no matter the disorder that frames our lives, in the center -- in the place that reveals who we are -- there is order."

I remember loving Paterson's books as a preteen. After rereading Bridge to Terabithia as an adult, I hesitated to recommend it to my kids, but after reading this collection of essays, I agree with what she is about. She says in "The Invisible Child" that people criticize her work for being hopeless or having unlovable characters, which hurts her because she loves her characters. "It is my hope, of course, that children will find these characters to be real children like themselves -- that they will be able to see themselves in them and then as they come to love and forgive these people on the page to be able to forgive and love their own deepest selves. . . . We do well to be suspicious of love that comes too easily."

Likewise, Flannery O'Connor rails against writing uplifting, moral stories, that reflect the prosperity of America and the joy of life in "The Fiction Writer and His Country" in Mystery and Manners. (I'm going to try to revisit Southern lit while I'm here, although O'C also rejects labelling regional writers. "Most readers these days must be sufficiently sick of hearing about Southern writers and Southern writing and what so many reviewers insist upon calling the 'Southern school'. . . . The writers of the editorial in question suggest that our anguish is a result of our isolation from the rest of the country. ... The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough . . . The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them." Even more, I imagine, would she cringe at being included with the ya-ya sisterhoods and sweet potato pie queens and all their knock-offs that lack even the sense of being "Christ-haunted.")



Back to the comparison with Paterson: "My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. . . Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, adn for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause."

And like Paterson, O'C refuses to write the uplifting fiction the "tired reader" wants. "There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration."

Which brings me back to last night's film and reminds me of the tragedy described by Pentimento. Real darkness is out there. But still we hope for light. And keep trying to earn it despite recurring failures.

Getting Started

Perhaps if I start my own blog, I won't spend so much time reading other people's postings and feeling small for not accomplishing more with my time. And I'm hoping to centralize a place to note thoughts on what I've read, what we've done, what's going on, so that as my memory declines, I'll have a place to come and jog it, instead of trying to remember where I jotted something. The thought of starting a blog has been intimidating because there are so many good ones out there - what's the point of adding more mediocrity to the pool? But a note in a book I was browsing the other night encouraged me to get started. From Katherine Patterson's The Invisible Child: "When I protested to [her mentor] that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all."

So this is the answer to a dare.

And I finally settled on a title that wasn't taken.