A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

One more Newbery Honor book: Elizabeth Janet Gray’s Young Walter Scott, a novelized biography of the youth of Sir Walter Scott. Fascinating to get a glimpse of life in Edinburgh in the last decades of the 18th century - the ‘45 still cast a long shadow!

Also Vivien Alcock’s Stranger at the Window, which I would have LOVED if I had read it as a child, as it’s a book about a hidden child and I LOVED books about hidden children. (Why yes, I did obsess over Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden, in which families are required by law to stop at two children so third children have to be kept hidden. The rest of the series never lived up to the first book, IMO.)

In this book, young Leslie realizes that there is a child hiding in the attic of the house next door in London. Soon, she realizes that the neighbor children are hiding an illegal immigrant… whom they can no longer hide, as their mother has become suspicious, so Leslie has to hide him! Wonderful. A++. You know how in the sixth book of the Samantha series, Samantha hides her best friend Nellie and her two little sisters in the attic? This pushes all those buttons.

Given the premise, you might expect Stranger at the Window to delve into the whys and wherefores of illegal immigration more than it does. But goddammit, I’m not here to learn anything, I’m here for adventure.

Also Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Pink Motel. Just before Christmas, the Mellen family inherits a bright pink motel in Florida from Great-Uncle Hiram. They head down to put the place in order and sell it, only the children are instantly smitten and want to stay there forever on account of the quirky guests: an itinerant handyman who carved weather vanes for all the cottages at the motel, a gangster who cuts paper lace, and an artist from Greenwich Village who carries a possibly magical hamper (always full of whatever food you happen to need, including on one occasion Alligator Food).

Is Miss Ferris in fact magical? The book never commits to an answer on this question, but (a) that magical hamper, (b) she keeps saying things like “[shooting apples off people’s heads] is a nice trick that originated in Switzerland, I believe, a long time ago when I was just a girl,” and (c) she spins and weaves an entire theater curtain in less than a week.

The book sort of sits at the intersection of mid-century children’s fantasy and mid-century children’s books about family hijinks, so if you like either of those things you might like it. Carol Ryrie Brink is always a good time, in any case. (I bought this book cheap at a used bookstore and if anyone would like it, I would be happy to send it.)

What I’m Reading Now

Not much progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford this week. Having returned young Anne-Hilarion to his grandfather in London, the Chevalier de la Vireville has landed once again on the coast of Brittany… only to realize that his foot is more badly injured than he realized, and he may not be able to climb the rocky cliffs off the beach!

What I Plan to Read Next

The library has another autobiography by another mid-century woman children’s writer that I like (Carol Ryrie Brink). I’ve learned my lesson from the debacle after I put a hold on L. M. Boston’s autobiography last week: I’m going to Central Library in person to pick Carol Ryrie Brink’s A Chain of Hands up myself in my hot little hands!

Although it would be foolish to pick a favorite Anne of Green Gables book, I must admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for Anne’s House of Dreams. Montgomery writes wonderfully vivid characters, and this book in particular is full of delightful weirdos. I love Captain Jim, the lighthouse keeper who tells wonderful yarns of his adventurous life, and Miss Cornelia, Anne’s vociferous neighbor who hates men and Methodists.

And most of all I love Leslie Moore, Anne’s beautiful neighbor with the “splendid, resentful eyes.” On their wedding night, as Gilbert drives Anne to her new home by the sea, Anne notices a girl driving geese in the sunset. “Who is that beautiful girl?” Anne gasps, but her newly minted husband can’t answer: he saw no one, as he has eyes only for Anne.

So it is only a few weeks later that Anne learns Leslie’s story from Miss Cornelia. At sixteen, Leslie was forced by economic circumstances to marry the villainous Dick Moore, who soon after went off to sea, got into a brawl, and came back suffering from brain damage, including total amnesia. For the past dozen years, she’s looked after him, and she’ll probably grind the rest of her life away in poverty, looking after a man she never loved in the first place.

The rage and the pride of Leslie! Her lonely heart yearns toward Anne, but she’s held back by resentment, for Anne has everything Leslie ever wanted: a college education, a loving husband, and soon enough a baby on the way. “So you are to have that too,” she chokes out, and strides away in such a fury of resentment that there is nothing to do but stride along beside the crashing sea until the sound of the waves pounds it away.

Anne is hurt, of course, but unswayed in her determination that Leslie will be her friend, someday. And, since friendship is Anne’s superpower, her steadfast love and affection eventually coax Leslie out of her shell. ( spoilers )

I also love the sense of place in this book. Anne’s house of dreams is a seaside home on a spit of land that ends in Captain Jim’s lighthouse, and the book is chock full of evocative shore walks, ships leaving the harbor, Captain Jim's sea stories: Lost Margaret drifting out to sea, asleep in her coracle... In some books I think Montgomery relies too heavily on stories-within-a-story, but here the stories enrich the sea-laden atmosphere like a sprinkle of salt over clam chowder. You can almost hear the lap of the waves as you read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, which was a wild ride from start to finish. (Collins is clearly having a great time, especially when he’s writing ( Spoilers )

Also Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Racketty-Packetty House, a book about a set of dolls who live in an early Victorian dollhouse, which has been pushed to the side of the nursery now that their owner has a brand spanking new up-to-the-minute dollhouse of 1906. Although the dolls live in fear that their dollhouse may be burned at any minute, they are essentially jolly souls, always joining hands and dancing around in circles. One of the dolls from the new dollhouse yearns to come over and join in the fun… particularly if it means she can meet Peter Piper, who is always turning somersaults. A tale as old as time!

What I’m Reading Now

Traipsing gently onward in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. Young Anne-Hilarion is paying a visit to two elderly ladies who are friends of his father… or are they? I have a suspicion that they may be SPIES, attempting to wrangle details of his father’s secret mission out of innocent young Anne-Hilarion, who of course has no idea what they’re doing.

What I Plan to Read Next

Pining for my Vivien Alcock novels to come in at the library. (The Red-eared Ghosts and Stranger at the Window.) Surely someday soon…

I first read Rebecca Fraimow’s The Iron Children just after it came out, and decided that I wanted to write a good, thorough, thoughtful review of an excellent and thoughtful book. Then, of course, as often happens when one decides that one must write a particularly good review, I wrote no review at all.

But recently I reread the book and decided, hey, a late review is better than none! So here we are.

Our heroes are a small band of soldiers who need to cross a snowy mountain range to join up with the main army. Their leader, Sor Elena, is a habited nun, “habited” in this case meaning “she has transmitted her soul to a suit of armor which can be damaged but not permanently killed.” She is assisted by Asher, a nun-in-training who still inhabits a human body. They are leading perhaps a dozen Dedicates, human soldiers who have been grafted into unremovable sets of armor, including a command chip at the base of the neck which connects to a command plate controlled by Sor Elena. She can send them commands telepathically, or move their bodies like puppets if necessary.

The book has three POVs. First we have Asher, a book-smart student who has thrived in her classes, but feels unsure of herself now that she’s out in the field. Soon, she finds herself in way over her head, after Sor Elena is damaged in an ambush, leaving Asher to lead a crew of Dedicates across the snowy mountains on her own.

Or not exactly on her own. Asher has the aid of Barghest, the world’s best sergeant. Barghest is simply trying to be the best Dedicate they can be, a Lawful Good character who is, perhaps, living up to a set of laws that don’t deserve that level of devotion.

(The Dedicates all use they pronouns. It appears that they give up gender as part of the Dedication process, alongside their own names and being able to feel the sun on their faces.)

And third, we have the traitor: a first-person narrator who has taken the place of one of the Dedicates killed in the ambush in order to betray them all to the enemy. (A serious security risk of having an enormous army of almost-identical soldiers!) The loss of Sor Elena ought to make the traitor’s task easier… but since it has forced the traitor to spend more time with the Dedicates and Asher, in fact it just makes it harder…

I know the author of this book, and when we talked about it, she commented that she was surprised to find that many readers didn’t like the traitor character, particularly in earlier drafts. After all, the traitor is the only one who thinks making children into cyborg soldiers is a bad idea! Surely this is the viewpoint that the audience will identify with?

And if you put the question to the audience in the abstract, no doubt it would be. But by the time we get our first traitor POV, we’ve already spent significant time with Asher and Barghest, and have therefore identified the Dedicates as Our Guys (gender-neutral). How can we root for anyone who threatens to harm Our Guys, no matter how powerful their moral arguments ought to be?

Both rachelmanija and asakiyume recently wrote rave reviews of Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday, so of course I had to read it, and they are quite right! This book is fantastic.

One of Cooney’s great strengths is her ability to create a vivid sense of setting, and this is perhaps never more prominent than in this book set in the Greek islands just before the Trojan War. Our heroine, Anaxandra, grew up on an island so small that she has never seen stairs until she is taken as a hostage to Siphnos. When she sees her first statue, she believes it is a child turned to stone by Medusa.

(Medusa is an ongoing motif in this story. There is an absolutely fantastic scene where Anaxadra scares off some pirates - too late to save anyone else, alas! - by putting an octopus on her head and rising out of the water to curse them.)

The book does an incredible job evoking a sense of sheer alienness. It’s not just that Anaxandra has never seen glass, or horseback riding, or writing. It suffuses her entire worldview: her sense of how one tries to bargain with the cruel gods, or the way that she simply accepts that war captives become slaves, even while striving to avoid that fate herself. The inexorableness of fate. The fact that this inexorableness spurs her not to passive fatalism but to feats of heroism.

Goddess of Yesterday is also simply an exciting, fast-paced story, with a delightful heroine. Anaxandra is brave, curious, strong-willed, a survivor who prides herself on her toughness - but tough without being callous. And Cooney does an excellent job giving not only her heroine but many other women in the story something to do. They are constrained, but they are not passive: they try to influence their lives in whatever small way they can.

An incredible book. Highly recommended if you like Mary Renault (but always wanted more focus on the women) or Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking, a cookbook/food memoir about Lewis’s childhood during the Great Depression in Freetown, Virginia, a small agricultural hamlet founded by freedmen after the Civil War. A classic, full of succulent descriptions of food as it changed with the rhythms of the seasons. I read this on Thanksgiving and it is indeed a perfect Thanksgiving book.

Also Mary Stolz’s To Tell Your Love, another one of her young adult novels. (I briefly described it as a YA novel, but mid-century young adult is so different from modern that it feels misleading to use the acronym.) In this summer story, the POV drifts between 23-year-old Theo, a hospital nurse; her 14-year-old brother Johnny; and the middle sister, 19-year-old Anne, broken-hearted over a boyfriend who has just ghosted her.

But Anne begins to wonder if it might be just as well to lose the boyfriend when she meets up with her friend Nora, who gave up college last year to make a glorious romantic marriage at the age of seventeen… and now feels trapped in her new life, which she can’t admit to Anne but which Anne nonetheless can see. (At one point Nora leaves the baby with a sitter and feels “like a prisoner released from jail.”)

There is a tag scene where Nora calls her husband at his job at the garage (he had to quit college to support the growing family) and he’s happy to talk to her and Nora feels a warm glow, suggesting the marriage might work out after all, but the overall effect is to warn the young reader that perhaps getting married so very young is not so romantic after all.

What I’m Reading Now

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White! Marian Halcombe sure is the kind of girl who bonds with men by chattering about how silly women are, huh. (And Wilkie Collins sure is the kind of writer who can write great individual female characters without having any very high opinion of women as a whole.)

I've also just begun D. K. Broster's Sir Isumbras at the Ford! Truly JUST begun it: our hero is still a little boy, who has just been put to bed.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday! Simply ambushed by Laura Amy Schlitz earlier this week… not my fault.

Mary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up starts out with about four chapters that might be summarized as “Can we really know anything about laughter in ancient Rome?”, and, like, okay, The Ultimate Unknowability of the Past and all that - indeed, the ultimate unknowability of the present! As Beard comments, it can be hard to tell the difference between witty repartee and vicious personal invective even in one’s own culture. Do these two MPs hate each other’s guts, or are they going to be laughing over drinks at the Commons Bar in an hour? Truly who can say.

But also we are sitting here holding a whole entire book about Laughter in Ancient Rome, so can we just get on with it?

Then the book does get on with it, and the chapters about Roman wit and political repartee are fascinating. I was delighted to learn that Cicero had a reputation as the funniest man in Rome, an orator so addicted to getting a laugh that his enemies complained he was little better than a clown. Beard notes that modern commentators often portray Cicero as viciously attacking a fellow politician named Vatinius, but in some of the sources, it seems like Cicero and Vatinius had a Gladstone-and-Disraeli kind of repartee going on.

In the final chapter, Beard tosses caution to the wind and advances a bold thesis: did ancient Romans invent the templates that still shape many modern jokes? She carefully notes that she doesn’t mean ancient Romans invented joking, but rather, the scripted joke as what you might call a genre: we have ancient Roman joke books, and they’re chock full of “man from Abdera” jokes (in which a man from Abdera misunderstands something in an Amelia-Bedelia-ish way; the city has changed, but the punchline hasn’t) and even an early version of “three men walk into a bar” jokes.

I found this fascinating, and I’d love to see some sort of cross-cultural comparison study of the thesis. Did Romans invent Amelia Bedelia jokes, or do they show up independently in lots of different cultures?

This is, as Beard intended, a book that raises as many questions as it answers: good material for thinking with. You’ll be disappointed if you were hoping for much information about tickling, though. Although the subtitle seems to promise plenty of tickling tidbits, we learn that the Romans thought the lips were a particularly ticklish part of the body, and little more.

I don’t read many short stories, but I loved Mary Stolz’s The Beautiful Friend and Other Stories, a collection of tales about young girls on the cusp of adulthood: taking their first steps toward independence from their parents, navigating the difficulties of heartbreak and successful love (which can be just as difficult, in a different way), figuring out how to get along with their sorority sisters.

This last is explored in “Though I Know She Lies,” about a sorority girl who has gotten into the habit of trying to compensate herself for a socially unsuccessful college career by telling lies: at home she raves about her popularity at college, at college she attempts to cultivate an aloof and mysterious mystique by name-dropping famous people she doesn’t know as well as she pretends. After she’s nearly caught out in a lie (only for good fortune to send her a date even cuter than the cousin she had roped in for dinner-dance), it occurs to her that, perhaps, if you present yourself as aloof and superior and indifferent to everyone else in your sorority… they may not unnaturally return indifference with indifference?

One of those epiphanies that sounds stupidly obvious when you write it out - lots of epiphanies do, I find. (There are very few truly new things to realize in this world.) But in a story, as in life, an obvious epiphany can have the force of genuine revelation, and Mary Stolz is very good at coming at the epiphany just obliquely enough to make it a surprise to the reader as well as the character.

I also very much enjoyed the contrast of a story of epiphany refused: in “The Flirt,” Joan realizes that it is, perhaps, not very nice to set out to win a boy she really barely knows or cares about when she knows that he’s another girl’s only beau… and then shrugs her shoulders. Well, she might not like herself very much, but who cares when there are Seths to be conquered!

However, my favorite stories were the title story and the final story in the collection, “A Very Continental Weekend,” in which the character’s heartbreak opens into a more general realization that she doesn’t know who she is except in relationship to other people, and a determination to break free of her herd instinct and find out more about herself. Plus, this observation made me laugh: “A genuine nonconformist (not the ubiquitous sort you found nowadays who got together with a huge band of his fellows and followed a rigid pattern of nonconformity) was rare.”

All in all, a carefully observed set of stories, each just the right length to carry its observations.

J. B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be is about the human relationship with the natural world, a vastly complicated subject which I will attempt to tackle in list form. (As usual, I will probably manage to miss some key point that is absolutely in the book but slipped my mind in the gap between reading and writing.) MacKinnon’s points include, but are not limited to:

1. Humans are a part of the natural world.

2. Humans, like a number of other species (elephants, whales, beavers), tend to play a large role in shaping their natural environment. (Elephants’ voracious eating habits tend to create the kind of open savannah country that humans find particularly pleasing, for instance.)

3. Unlike elephants, whales, and beavers, humans tend to shape the environment in ways that decrease rather than increase biodiversity.

4. Humans have been doing this for a long time, starting back at the end of the Ice Age when we spread out across the globe to the exciting new continents of Europe, Australia, and the Americas, and proceeded to drive the megafauna to extinction. (Megafauna = mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, etc.) MacKinnon notes that scientists often hedge by asserting that both climate and people drove the megafauna to extinction, but when we say this, “we really mean we did it.” (Compare the habit of saying that certain animals are endangered because of “habitat loss,” when really we mean “human destruction of habitat.”)

5. In recent years, each human generation tends to hand on a world with less biodiversity - fewer types of animals and also fewer animals of most types. (Obviously there are individual exceptions. We’ve been great for rats!) Generation by generation, we adjust to this new normal so thoroughly that we often refuse to believe that there truly were more animals in the past. A micro-example: Grandpa talks about the big fish he used to catch on the Gulf, and we roll our eyes and say “Sure, Grandpa” - but if you compare fishing photographs from the Gulf of Mexico between now and Hemingway’s day, people were catching more and bigger fish.

6. This is my thought, not the book’s, but I think this is part of a more general pattern where we dismiss the inconvenient observations of elders with “Oh, old people always think it was better in the past,” often even when we have ample proof that what they are saying is true. Winters really did used to be colder!

7. To tie this back in with the book, MacKinnon notes that many more species than we previously realized rely on the guidance of their elders. Cod migration, for instance, apparently depends not on mysterious cod instinct, but on elders who know the way acting as guides. We know this in part by observing the behavior of schools of migrating cod, and in part because after the cod fisheries collapsed, leaving basically no cod elders (because humans like to catch the biggest fish), the migration stopped.

8. In general, the human preference to catch the oldest, largest, most impressively-antlered (wisest and best suited to lead the herd) animals has probably had catastrophic effects on animal populations, particularly in social species like elephants.

9. (This one is once again my extrapolation.) Everything we think we know about elephant social dynamics probably needs to be filtered through the knowledge that elephants as we know them are the refugee population of a human war against elephants that is still ongoing. Elephant societies almost certainly used to be much richer and more complicated, because, well, societies just are when they haven’t been shot to pieces. Ditto whales and other intelligent and social species that humans have hunted near the brink of extinction.

10. It appears that fully stocked ecosystems just plain work differently than ecosystems as we know them, which are generally depleted by our handiwork. MacKinnon describes an isolated coral reef in the middle of the Pacific, as close to untouched by humans as you’re going to find on this earth, where the biomass was 85% sharks and other predators. This flies in the face of everything biologists thought they knew about how ecosystems work. The biologists who first described the reef couldn’t get their paper published until they included photographic evidence that, no, really, there are that many sharks.

11. Does this mean that undoing our handiwork would mean coming to terms with a world that is 85% sharks? All evidence suggests that human beings don’t want to live in a world that is 85% sharks (or bears, or wolves, or insert your favorite large predator here.) Many people like the idea of bears existing… somewhere… far enough away that we don’t have to take bear spray on every walk to the supermarket.

(The specific 85% thing is probably a moot point, but “Do we actually want predators around?” is, in fact, an issue with reestablishing predator populations at basically any level. If there is a bear population there will, occasionally, be people mauled to death by bears. Not many! Certainly not as many people as die in car accidents! But for some people any risk of death by bear feels too high.)

Not long after the 2023 Newbery list first came out, I chatted with our former children’s librarian about the medal winner, Amina Luqman-Dawson’s Freewater. She commented, “When I first saw that the winner was yet another book about slavery, I thought, ‘Do we really need another book about Black suffering? Why can’t we have more books about Black joy?’ But then I read it, and it’s a good egg.”

As you can imagine, this description made me curious. The book starts with young Homer and Ada losing their way as they escape a plantation. Instead of heading north, they find themselves stumbling deeper into a swamp… where they meet a mysterious bow-and-arrow-wielding guide who leads them to a secret swamp village called Freewater, which has treetop platforms attached to each other by rope pathways called sky bridges. Oh my God.

So, yes, absolutely this book is engaging with the legacy of slavery, but it’s also going to push a lot of your Robin Hood buttons, including a mysterious Robin Hoodish figure (Suleman) who robs the rich (plantations) to feed the poor (Freewater residents). It’s not really a retelling - there’s a Robin Hood figure but no Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Sheriff of Nottingham etc - but it has vibes. Lots of fun.