A Walk in the Rain by Ursel Scheffler

Apr10

Scheffler, Ursel. A Walk in the Rain. Illustrated by Ulises Wendell. Translated by Andrea Mernan. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986. A Picture Book Preschool book.

I don’t know how I discovered this under appreciated and mostly unknown German picture book, but I know I loved it at first sight, more than thirty years ago. Published in German in 1984, this one is simple, but it stands the test of time for me. It’s out of print, but at present multiple copies are available online, used for less than $10.00.

“Josh loved visiting his grandparents, especially on rainy days. Because Josh’s grandmother loved to walk in the rain.”

So begins our story. Josh appears to be four or five years old, and his grandmother is grey-haired but healthy enough to walk on logs and pretend to be a tightrope walker with Josh walking ahead. The narrative simply details the various things that Josh and his grandmother see and do as they walk in the (gentle) rain: a ladybug, birds sheltering from the rain, leaves collected near a drain in the street, the logs in the forest, mushrooms sprouting.

Josh’s grandmother answers his questions, feeding him a little bit of information about rain and its effects, in answer to his questions. “[T]he birds’ feathers are covered with oil, which helps keep them dry in the rain just like a raincoat.” Mushrooms “sprout everywhere when it rains.” But mostly Grandmother just lets Josh explore the rainy day and the various wonders that the two of them find on their walk.

Before the walk Josh’s grandparents give him a yellow raincoat and rain boots, and afterward the nature explorers dry off, and Grandfather reads a story to Josh as they look out the window at the rain. The illustrations are just as simple and delightful–and rainy–as the story. Artist Ulises Wendell used soft colors, mostly blues and greens and yellow, for the raincoats, and brown for the trees and the dog. Wendell, now deceased, was a prolific illustrator of more than fifty picture books and other children’s books in Europe, mostly published in Spain or Germany.

I like to walk in the rain myself, and I must like the theme of a walk with grandparents because two other books in Picture Book Preschool have this basic plot. In Rain by Sam Usher, a boy goes out to mail a letter with his grandfather after the rainstorm is over. In Gramma’s Walk by Anna Grossnickle Hines, Donnie and Gramma, who is in a wheelchair, take an imagined walk to the seashore and smell the salty breeze, walk barefoot on the warm sand, observe animals, and build a sand castle. Those are both lovely books, but A Walk in the Rain complements the other two rather than replacing them. Read Mr. Scheffler’s simple story specifically before a walk IN the rain, and then take that walk and see what you and your young child or grandchild discover on a rainy day nature walk.

Scotland’s Story by H.E. Marshall

Mar27

I would love to visit Scotland! I’ve been to England (London and Oxford) and to Ireland for a brief visit, and I’d love to go back to either or both of those countries for more. However, my more immediate travel goal is Scotland. Reading Scotland’s Story by H.E. Marshall only intensified my desire to go to the land of Burns and Bruce and heather on the hills.

I’ve been an Anglophile for most of my life, and I’ve read a lot of British history and historical fiction. I read and enjoyed Thomas Costain’s four volumes about the history of the Plantagenets and England. So good! I thought that in all that reading about kings and queens and commoners in England that I knew a fair amount about Scottish history, too. After all, weren’t the two, Scotland and England, unified as one nation after that regrettable incident concerning the death of Mary, Queen of Scots?

However, for hundreds of years Scotland and England were emphatically not unified, and the two countries were at war or near-war more frequently than not. Scotland’s Story is a collection of legends and true stories from history, written by the author of Our Island Story, as a supplement to that book, focusing on the stories and history of Scotland and the Scots people. The book begins in the ancient mists of once upon a time with “The Story of Prince Gathelus” and continues through ninety chapters of Saint Columba and Macbeth, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and various other kings and battles and lords and ladies all the way down to George III and Sir Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century.

I read this book over the course of about three months (January-March), one or more chapters or stories per day. Each chapter is about two or three pages long, the perfect length for morning time read aloud and for narration, and I found the stories so absorbing that I couldn’t always limit myself to one a day. Sometimes I just had to know what happened next. During my reading, I found out about many episodes and people that I knew very little or nothing about before: the Picts, the alliance between France and Scotland, the full stories of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, James I the Poet King and all the Jameses, the covenanters, Flodden Field, Killiecrankie, and Glencoe. I already knew about Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie and their unfortunate histories, but even about those two and others, I was reminded of stories I had forgotten and I learned new details and stories that I hadn’t read about before.

The book was written by Ms. Marshall for children to introduce them to the tales of Scotland’s history. And it turns out that Ms. Marshall had a special affinity for her subject in this particular book: she was actually a Scot herself and an ardent admirer of that most famous Scottish novelist, Sir Walter Scott! The history of Scotland, especially in pre-modern times, is rather violent and bloody, but Marshall glosses over the actual gore. Any child who is ready to read about actual battles and political intrigues and deaths of traitors and patriots is ready for this book. And anyone who is a Scotophile (just found that word) or interested in visiting Scotland someday should read Scotland’s Story first. You can check out a copy of Scotland’s Story from Meriadoc Homeschool Library, or you can purchase a copy of the book from Living Book Press.

(So, now I want to read A History of France or A History of Germany, both by Marshall also. Or maybe I’ll just read the entire Our Island Story, a book I’ve only dipped into but never read from cover to cover.)

Wormwood Abbey by Christina Baehr

Mar26

Baehr, Christina. Wormwood Abbey. (The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 1). Independently published, 2023.

I’m generally skeptical about self-published books by debut authors. Even though I believe the publishers are “gate-keeping” to keep out authors who write good books free of progressive social agendas, the publishing system with its editors and agents and extensively vetted authors does serve a purpose, or at least it should. These systems were put in place to make sure that only the best books got published, but it’s becoming the case that only the politically progressive books are accepted for publication.

At any rate, I kept seeing references here and there to Christina Baehr’s Secrets of Ormdale series about a family of dragon keepers in late Victorian (1899) England, and finally I took the bait and ordered the first book in the series. I have only read that first book, and I can’t vouch for the rest of the series. Nevertheless, I immediately ordered the other four books in the series after reading Wormwood Abbey. It’s a good book, and I expect it to be a good series.

Christina Baehr describes herself at her website as a “cozy Gothic novelist” and in her newsletter as a mother of ten who lives and works in Tasmania. However, The Secrets of Ormdale books are set in Yorkshire, not on the island of Tasmania in Australia. Edith Worms, a clergyman’s daughter and an author herself (of detective novels), travels from London with her parents and younger brother to Wormwood Abbey, the ancestral estate of her father’s estranged family. Father’s older brother has died suddenly, and the estate is now entailed on Father, an inheritance he and the Worms family have no wish to take up. However when the family arrive at Wormwood Abbey, they find that it’s not so easy to give up an inheritance or to ferret out its secrets.

Beginning on the first page, Ms. Baehr makes all sorts of literary and historical allusions and references, to everyone from Charlotte Mason to Jane Austen to the Bronte sisters to Chesterton to many other authors and poets and cultural icons. The references are not pretentious, but they are fun. “Mother also looked up from her new issue of The Parents’ Review (April, 1899).”

The vocabulary and speech patterns in the book could be considered a bit pretentious, but then again, maybe they really talked–and thought– like that in 1899, especially if the narrator had a Charlotte Mason education, as is implied in the story. And the ideas in the books are lovely and inspiring.

“Mother would say that every day is a miracle. That it is we who have grown so dull and stupid that we do not see it, expecting the miracles to go on and on, without recognizing them for what they are.”

When Edith and her brother are trying to find their way out of a cavern: “We sang the Doxology a few times, laughing a bit over the line ‘all creatures here below.’ Then we sang ‘Marlborough Has Gone to Battle.’ This did the trick nicely. I found it impossible to think of wolves leaping on me in the darkness when loudly singing a nursery song.”

“All of God’s creatures are beautiful and useful, though not all of them are pleasant.”

The story includes a touch of romance, with a tall, dark, and handsome neighbor thrown into the mix of characters. But the “romance” is very chaste and completely unrealized in this first book. There is also a plot element involving a child in being left to die and an illegitimate child in the household. So the book is for older teens and adults. I found a couple of typographical errors, but the writing itself is good, with rich language and lots of literary allusions, as I mentioned before.

The novel is well-plotted and ends in a satisfactory manner, but also leaves the reader with an appetite for more. Indeed, Wormwood Abbey is an excellent beginning to a promising fantasy series—with dragons! And as an added bonus, if you go to Christina Baehr’s website and sign up for her newsletter, she offers to send you the first few chapters of Wormwood Abbey so that you can test to see if the book is right for you before you buy. Who could ask for a better deal?

Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown

Mar25

Brown, Daniel James. Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II. Viking, 2021.

Daniel James Brown, author of The Boys in the Boat, has another (2021) book out, Facing the Mountain. Despite my wholehearted support for the idea of “never forget”, I have to admit that I am somewhat jaded and tired of reading about the World War 2 Holocaust, and the Japanese internment camps in the U.S., and really, World War 2 in general. The stories are important and even relevant to our own time, but they are starting to sound like old news.

Nevertheless, this one deserves a place in your reading line-up or stack or To-Be-Read list, wherever you keep those titles that you are planning to read soon. The book covers the internment of Japanese American citizens and legal residents, but the emphasis is on the service of the young men, Nisei–second generation Americans of Japanese descent–“who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible in often suicidal missions.”

Definitely not old news for me. I learned a lot. The story of these men is a lesson in courage and fortitude and persistence that went way beyond my small store of those virtues. There are even a couple of stories that feature peace-making in the midst of war.

One example, many of the soldiers of the 442nd were Hawaiian-born Japanese Americans; others were from the mainland, mostly the west coast. The two groups may have looked similar with the same ancestry, but their cultural heritage and general attitudes were not the same. The Hawaiians, who were called “Buddhaheads” by the mainlanders, were much too easy-going and rule-breaking for the “Kotonks” (nickname given the mainland Japanese Americans). And the Kotonks were too serious and legalistic, having come mostly from the internment camps, as far as the Buddhaheads were concerned. This difference in outlook led to arguments, even fights, while the guys of the 442nd were in training, and it took some time and some hard knocks for the 442nd to become a cohesive fighting unit.

Then, also, the author Brown tells the story of Gordon Hirabayashi who fought his own battle in prisons across the Southwestern United States as a conscientious objector and resistor not only to the war but also to the restrictions that were being placed on Japanese Americans as a result of their ethnicity. And the Japanese American chaplains who served the 442nd are also featured with quotations from letters that these men sent home.

Daniel James interviewed several of the men of the 442nd, “by most reckonings, . . . the most decorated military unit of its size and length of service in American history.” He also talked to their families and descendants and read and shared their letters and notes and memories. The result is a well-written narrative history of the wartime service of several Nisei soldiers as examples of the entire combat team. And readers get a picture of the chronology of all of the battles and assaults and rescues performed by the 442nd, including the rescue of the “Lost Battalion”, a group of mostly Texan soldiers who in late 1944 in Germany were sent into a trap and only saved at the expense of many lives by the 442nd Nisei.

If you’re a World War II buff, you must read this book. If you’re not particularly interested in WWII, but you do like inspiring stories of courage, like Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat, you should also pick up a copy of Facing the Mountain. Finally, if you have a relationship with anyone of Japanese heritage or if you are a Japanese American yourself, this book is a must read. I’m not Japanese at all, but it made me proud to be an American, even though our record as a country in regard to how we have treated people of color is mixed to say the least. Still, the stories of people overcoming obstacles of racial prejudice and mistreatment, and even becoming heroes, belong to us all.

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin

Mar18

The Danny Dunn books were a series of 15 science fiction adventure books, published in the late 1950’s and into the 60’s, about Danny, who’s a red-headed, adventurous, all-American boy who loves mathematics and science. Danny lives with his widowed mother, the live-in housekeeper for Professor Euclid Bullfinch, a researcher and inventor who works for Midston University. In Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, Danny is flanked by his two friends Irene and Joe as the trio experiment with getting Professor Bullfinch’s new mini-computer, Miniac aka Minny, to do their homework for them.

As dated as the science is in this book, I think this particular Danny Dunn adventure has a lot to say about present day technology and our relationship to it. Professor Bullfinch, in the story, has invented a computer that is much smaller and faster and more powerful than the actual computers (IBM) available in 1958. However, when Irene says to the professor that Miniac is “a kind of Superman”, the professor disagrees.

The Professor shook his head. “No, my dear,” he said. “It is only a kind of supertool. Everything in this machine is inside the human head, in the much smaller space of the human brain. Just think of it–all the hundreds of thousands of switches, core memory planes, miles of wires, tubes–all that’s in that big case and in this console–are all huge an awkward compared to the delicate tiny cells of the human brain which is capable of doing as much as, or more than, the best of these machines. It’s the human brain which can produce a mechanical brain like this one.”

“The computer can reason,” he went on. “It can do sums and give information and draw logical conclusions, but it can’t create anything. It could give you all the words that rhyme with moon, for instance, but it couldn’t put them together into a poem. . . . It’s a wonderful, complex tool, but it has no mind. It doesn’t know it exists.”

Professor Bullfinch goes away to a conference and leaves Danny in charge of Miniac. That’s when Danny and his two friends impulsively decide that it would be a great idea to program Miniac to do their homework for them. They don’t think of it as cheating, just using a tool like a pencil or a typewriter, but better, to help them do their homework more effectively. Complications ensue.

So many ideas are embedded in this simple story, so many questions to discuss. Are computers just a learning tool? is it fair for some students to have access to a computer while others do not? What about AI (artificial intelligence)? AI can write poems and produce art and author stories and more. Is AI just another tool? Does ChatGPT “know it exists”? Will AI applications become self-aware in the future?

Some people, called trans-humanists believe that AI and humans will someday soon be able to emerge, creating trans-humans with super intelligence and abilities. Although discussion of this particular fallacy (and I do believe it’s a false and potentially evil goal) would not be appropriate for most of the students who would be reading Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, elementary school students should be introduced to the issues and questions surrounding the use of computers and AI. I don’t a better way to introduce these topics than a quick read of Danny Dunn—and much discussion.

This book is the first Danny Dunn story I remember reading. I was aware of these books as a child, but I wasn’t too interested in science at the time, so they didn’t really appeal to me. The science in these books was said to have been up to date and based on a solid science foundation at the time. The authors consulted with IBM and toured their facility while writing Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.

Content considerations: The book has some 1950’s language and behaviors that have become somewhat unacceptable in our “enlightened times.” Joe and Irene get into an argument when Joe blames Irene and women in general for some trouble that kids are having. Irene pushes Eddie “Snitcher” Phillips into a mud puddle in retaliation for his tattling on them and their homework machine. And it is implied that Irene has a mild crush on Danny, or vice-versa. The children are in eighth grade in this particular story.

The Adventure of Living by Paul Tournier

Mar17

Once upon a time when I was in high school, back in the dark ages, I had a friend and mentor who was a big fan of the work of Swiss physician and counselor Paul Tournier. Tournier, who lived and wrote during the 1960’s and 70’s, was a Christian author who advocated for what he called “medicine of the person”, treatment of the whole person, mind, body, and spirit or soul. His most famous and influential book was The Meaning of Persons, published in 1954.

I had not visited with Dr. Tournier since those high school days, but I remembered him as wise Christian counselor, even if his work was a bit over my head at the time I was introduced to it. So, when I saw The Adventure of Living on the used books sale shelf at my local library, I decided to give it a try. It was an especially appropriate read for me now since my word for the year is “venture” or “adventure.” I’ve been trying to live my days as adventures and to venture out beyond my self-imposed limits this year.

I found The Adventure of Living to be helpful and inspiring in my adventurous year. Modern author and psychologist Jordan Peterson has a lot to say about adventure and our need for adventure in our lives, and Tournier reminds me of Peterson at times, except that Tournier is more Christian and a little less esoteric than Jordan can be. In the first chapter of the book, called “An Instinct Peculiar to Man,” Tournier writes, “I should like to depict as I see it the great impulse toward adventure which is peculiar to man . . . ” and later, “Woe betide those, who no longer feel thrilled at anything, who have stopped looking for adventure.”

He goes on to write about what adventures actually are, how they begin, and how they die, creating the need for a new adventure. And using examples from his own counseling and pastoral care practice, Tournier illustrates the risks of taking the adventures that life places before us, the choices we make about how to react to both success and failure, when to follow a new adventure, and how to know which adventure to choose. He writes with wisdom and balance about prayer and meditation and how to experience and know God’s guidance in our small adventures and in the Big Adventure of Life itself.

I suppose The Adventure of Living could be classified as a “self help” or “Christian living” book, but I think it delves deeper than most such books tend to go. It was written before the advent of the 21st century tendency that we have to label and medicate every problem, spiritual or mental. And the advice and exposition of the subject come from a European Christian perspective, but the book speaks to anyone with a Western cultural background, even secular nonbelievers and those of a different religion. I don’t tend to enjoy the self-help or Christian living genres, but I did find this sixty year old book to be absorbing and useful. Mr. Tournier still has a lot to say to our somewhat jaded and over-psychologized age.

I’ll leave you with a couple of quotes that I copied into my commonplace journal just for a sample and a bit of adventurous inspiration:

“What matters is to listen to Him, to let ourselves be guided, to face up to the adventure to which He calls us, with all its risks. Life is an adventure, directed by God.”

“[T]he excitement of adventure rescues us from the sea of introspection that drowns many of those who hesitate. The more they examine themselves the less they act. The less they act, the less clearly do they see what to do. In vain do they interrogate even God on what they ought to do; rarely do they receive any reply. God guides us when we are on the way, not when we are standing still, just as one cannot steer a car unless it is moving.”

The O’Donnells by Peggy Sullivan

Mar11

I knew this book reminded me of the beloved All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor when I first opened it up. And sure enough, this story does for Irish Catholic families what Ms. Taylor’s books did for Jewish families —and for those who are interested in seeing how families of all different faiths live and grow and work together over the course of a year.

The O’Donnell family consists of Papa, an Irish American police sergeant, Mama, a homemaker and former maid, and five girls: Grace, Ella, Margaret, Rose, and Cis. They live in Kansas City in a small two-story house not far from Saint Aloysius (Catholic) School where the girls attend school. The story begins in the spring and relates the family’s fortunes until Easter Sunday of the following year.

The adventures chronicled in the story are mostly simple, but sometimes dramatic, too. Ella, age eleven, is Papa’s best helper who learns how to lay bricks for a sidewalk and drive a horse and buggy from Papa as well as how to cook and do housework with Mama. Margaret, age twelve is the quieter, more thoughtful, sister, and she and Ella are in the same class at school and are best friends. “Ella liked doing things much more when Margaret was there to share them.”

Sensitive readers will want to know that a neighbor’s dog dies suddenly and tragically near the beginning of the story, and a friend of the family is shot and killed near the end of the book. And one chapter in the book tells about how one of the sisters gets typhoid and comes near death, but recovers. None of these events felt too traumatic for children to read about and take in, but your mileage may vary.

I loved the way work and worship and holidays and feast days were all woven into the story and into the rhythm of the O’Donnell family’s lives. Neighbors and friends and relatives are all a part of the story, too, demonstrating how life was lived in community back in the “good old days” of the early twentieth century–even in the city.

So, yes, this book came from Follett Publishing, published in 1956, in the wake of the success of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family series. And the illustrations are by the same illustrator, Mary Stevens, who did the All-of-a-Kind Family books. Unfortunately, this book about the O’Donnells is the only one Ms. Sullivan published, and it was formerly out of print. Fortunately, a new print edition is now available from Bethlehem Books. So, you can purchase a brand-spanking new copy from Bethlehem, or you can check out an ugly-on-the-outside, but beautiful on the inside copy from Meriadoc Homeschool Library. I recommend it for your reading pleasure.

Jella Lepman and Her Library of Dreams by Katherine Paterson and Sally Deng.

Mar8

Paterson, Katherine. Jella Lepman and Her Library of Dreams: The Woman Who Rescued a Generation of Children and Founded the World’s Largest Children’s Library. Illustrated by Sally Deng. Chronicle Books, 2025.

I’ve never heard of Jella Lepman, and even though I’ve been in the children’s library world for a long time, I am only cursorily familiar with IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, and the International Youth Library in Munich, the world’s largest library for children’s literature. Nevertheless, since I love children’s books and own a library full of them, of course I was drawn to this true story of a German Jewish woman who fled Germany before World War II and came back to bring “nourishment for the soul” to the German children after the war.

“It was obvious that the children of Germany whom Jella had come home to help were in desperate of food, of clothing, of safe shelter. Elly Heuss-Knapp, whose husband later became president of West Germany, told Jella that while soup kitchens and care packages were all good and necessary, ‘nourishment for the soul’ was even more important.”

So, Jella Lepman, who was under contract to work with the U.S. army of occupation in Germany with the title of Advisor for WOmen’s and Youth Affairs, became the originator and spokesperson for gathering, translating, publishing, and providing books for the impoverished German children who, after all, weren’t responsible for the war and for Naziism. She began with an International Exhibition of Children’s Books, an affair for which she had to obtain all of the books free of charge from libraries and donors and publishers all over the world. There was no funding for such an exhibition.

Then, Jella had to find a suitable place to hold the exhibition and get volunteers to help clean and ready the building for a book show. The books came form all over the world–from countries that had been enemies of Germany until recently, and the exhibition opened on July 5, 1946. German publishers, authors, parents, and children were welcomed into the exhibition, and Jella soon began her next project of finding a permanent place to house a library for the many books she had collected.

The remainder of the book tells about the library that Jella Lepman began with the help of such luminaries as German children’s author Erich Kastner, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as many volunteers and donors from all over the world, but especially the United States. The library was and is located in a castle, and it made me a bit jealous. All of that room! They even had an art studio where children could paint and draw, inspired by stories read aloud.

Katherine Paterson is a distinguished author in her own right, winner of two Newbery Medals, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. The Andersen Award is administered by IBBY, the international organization that Jella Lepman helped start. This biography of Jella Lepman at first glance looks like a picture book. It’s picture book size, and illustrated with lovely charcoal(?), chalk (?), and watercolor drawings interspersed with photos of Lepman and her colleagues and the places where she lived and worked. So, sort of a picture book, but the text is written for middle grades and older. And the entire book is 105 pages long. So, it’s not a picture book for preschool and primary audiences.

I enjoyed reading about Ms. Lepman and her work with the library and IBBy in post-war Germany. The biography would give children and adults quite a bit of insight into the time period as well as reminding us all of the importance of books as food for the soul. It reminded me of me of the work that the 21st Century Packhorse Librarians are doing in South Carolina and neighboring states and of the work that private living books lending libraries and librarians continue to do daily.

The Three Brothers of Ur by J.G. Fyson

Mar8
Version 1.0.0

Published in 1964 in England and honored as runner-up for the British Carnegie Medal, The Three Brothers of Ur is set in ancient Ur, a city that is mentioned three times in the book of Genesis as the city of origin for the patriarch Abraham. Abraham’s two brothers, also named in Genesis, were Nahor and Haran. This is important because the three brothers of the title are Haran, the youngest, Naychor, the middle son, and Shamashazir, the eldest, heir to his father Teresh the Stern, a wealthy merchant of Ur. Despite the differences in the names, it is obvious to anyone who knows the Bible that these three brothers of Ur in the book are meant to be the three Biblical brothers who play an important part in Biblical history.

As far as I can tell, Ms. Fyson (an author about whom not much is known), seems to have done her research in regards to life in ancient Sumer/Mesopotamia. The city is made up of Sumerians and Akkadians who manage to get along with only occasional tensions between the two groups. Their religion centers on the worship of the Dingir of the Moon, Nannar, who is the patron god of the city of Ur, worshipped on the ziggurat (pyramid temple), but also the associated worship of family gods called “Teraphim” who speak to the family, give guidance, and ward off the evil dingirs (spirits) that also inhabit the city. The economy of the city is based upon craftsmanship and trade. Slavery is also practiced and portrayed in the book in the person of Uz, an enslaved donkey boy who wishes to become an artisan and sculptor of images.

The story focuses on Haran, the youngest son of Teresh, who is full of mischief and audacity. As Haran gets into one scrape after another, we get to see many aspects of what can be imagined about life in a Mesopotamian city in pre-2000 B.C. Ten year old Haran is a sometimes truant school boy who finds it difficult to learn all of the Sumerian characters for writing. His father, Teresh, is an autocratic ruler of the household whose word is law. The place of women in the society of those ancient times is limited, and yet the girls in the story–Haran’s sisters, Sarah and Dinah, in particular–are bright and interesting in their own right. The protagonist of the book is Haran, but Shamashazir, Haran’s fourteen year old brother, is the one who is beginning to grope his way toward the idea of a transcendent God, more powerful and relatable than the dingirs and the teraphim that his people and his family worship.

Children who read this story, or have it read aloud to them, will enjoy the exploits and misfortunes of Haran, who is a typical rascal of a boy, but with a good heart. Adults will be more aware of the religious journey that Shamashazir and his family embark upon in this book, and which is carried further, I am told, in the sequel called The Journey of the Eldest Son.

The Three Brothers of Ur was somewhat difficult to find in an affordable hard cover edition, and the sequel is even more rare and expensive. Nevertheless, I hope to find and read a copy of The Journey of the Eldest Son soon so that I can experience “the rest of the story.” You may be able to find a copy of either or both of these in a library near you, and Meriadoc Homeschool Library now has a beautiful copy of The Three Brothers of Ur available for check out.

The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly

Feb24

Kelly, Erin Entrada. The First State of Being. Greenwillow Books, 2024.

Newbery Medal winner for 2024 and National Book Award finalist. Erin Entrada Kelly’s science fiction story, set in the final days of the twentieth century (1999), tells about Michael, who’s worried about the future, meeting with Ridge, who comes from the future (2199) via time travel. Theories of how time travel works and what consequences it might have swirl and intersect, enough to make the reader’s swim. But time travel itself isn’t the focus of the novel. Instead it’s a book about learning to live in the present rather than being anxious about the future or trying to change the past.

“Michael smiled and joined her on the couch. ‘How was work?’ he asked.

She smelled like the restaurant, but Michael didn’t mind. If his mother was home, he was happy, even if she smelled like chimichangas.

‘I took every breath,’ she said. It was what she always said. I took every breath. In other words: if she was still here, still breathing, it was a good day, and she was thankful for it.”

The love and wisdom embodied in that quote from the beginning of the book are the best parts of the story. Thirteen year old Michael and his mother have a close and loving relationship. They take care of one another. Michael is a good kid, somewhat anxious and over-concerned about the future, Y2K in particular. His only friends at the beginning of the story are his sixteen year old babysitter, Gibby, on whom he has an innocent crush, and his apartment building janitor and handyman, Mr. Mosely, a kind old soul who takes a special interest in Michael.

I wanted to like Michael, and I did. I even forgave him for stealing canned goods from the local supermarket to add to his Y2K stash in the opening scenes of the novel. Michael is just trying to take care of himself and his mother–in case Y2K really is the disaster that many are predicting. But I wanted him to realize by the end of the novel that theft is wrong, no matter how good your intentions are. And he doesn’t, really. He decides that he has become a thief, and that he is much too anxious about a future he can’t control, but his “repentance” takes the form of surrepticiously donating his stash to the local food bank.

I don’t want to be picky, but this scenario of repentance without confession and restitution reinforces the common and fallacious idea that stealing from a store or large business isn’t really like stealing from a person. The store will be O.K. They won’t miss whatever you took. Michael feels guilty because he hasn’t been the best person he can be, not because he’s taken something that belongs to someone else. I want someone in this story to tell him that he owes the owner of the grocery store an apology and restitution.

Ridge, the boy from the future, has made a mistake, too, and although he regrets his action of using his mother’s untested “time machine”, he never really experiences guilt or asks for forgiveness. Maybe it’s all a part of the theme of living in the present and not worrying about the future or spending time time regretting past actions.

Anyway, it’s a good story with fun cultural references to the late twentieth century (Red Hot Chili Peppers, hanging out at the mall, KB Toys, etc.), but the ethics are somewhat mixed. I like the idea of living in the present and not worrying about the future, but stealing is an offense against an individual and needs to be resolved by repentance and restitution to the wronged party, if possible. If you read this one with a child, these are topics ripe for discussion.