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The Easter Cat by Meindert DeJong

Mar26

Mr. DeJong is fast becoming one of my favorite children’s authors of all time. His books are usually animal stories, often child-centered, with quite a lot of insight into the way a child thinks and acts. The books were written, set, and published in the 1950’s and 60’s, and the children in the stories are therefore much more free to roam, to play, to wonder, and yes, to get into trouble. These children that DeJong portrays are imperfect; they sometimes tell lies or disobey parents and other authorities. They wonder about things that they dare not ask adults. They make unwise decisions.

But these children are real, believable, and I daresay lovable. They don’t have special powers with which they can save the world. They don’t engage in community action in order to save the trees or the community center or whatever is threatened by the Big, Bad Developers. Millicent in The Easter Cat is just a little girl who wants a pet cat. However, her mother’s allergy to cats makes that wish impossible to fulfill. So Millicent plays with the stray cats in the alley, even feeds them, even though her mother has forbidden it.

Then, early on Easter Sunday morning, Millicent finds a cat, inside her house, next to her Easter basket. Could it be that mother has gotten over her allergy? Could this beautiful blue Siamese cat be the gift that Millicent has always longed for? And if he’s not an Easter surprise, can she somehow keep him anyway?

If you want the children in your books to be superheroes or obedient little automatons, The Easter Cat isn’t the book for you. Millicent certainly isn’t a bad child, but she is cat-obsessed. Her deep desire to love and care for a cat of her own can be identified with by many children, and any fellow cat lover will enjoy this story. The tale also includes a secret hide-out, a favorite story element of mine. So I recommend it to readers of Easter stories and animal stories and secret hiding place stories and family stories of all kinds.

Oh, it’s also short, a little over 100 pages. For those who like it short and sweet.

Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq by Bill Swan

Sep19

Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq, The Story of Donald Marshall Jr. by Bill Swan.

This Real Justice book is the second by author Bill Swan in a series of nonfiction stories about Canadian teens who were wrongfully convicted of serious crimes and only exonerated after many years of incarceration. Swan’s first book in the series was about the case of Stephen Truscott, a high-profile murder conviction in which the convicted fourteen year old, Truscott, was exonerated after forty plus years in prison.

Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted of killing his friend/acquaintance Sandy Seale in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison in Nova Scotia, Canada. Donald Marshall Jr. was of Native American (Mi’kmaq) extraction, and his alleged victim was black, or “African Canadian” or “racialized”, as the book calls him. The author takes a statement from the Royal Commission that studied the case and makes it the centerpiece of his story:

“Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted and sent to prison, in part at least, because he was a Native person.”

Mr. Swan effectively ignores the “in part” part of that statement, and tells the entire story of Sandy Seale’s murder as if Mr. Marshall were completely trustworthy and totally innocent, while acknowledging that Marshall was in trouble with the law and had an explosive temper and lied, both before and after the alleged crime took place. I’m not denying that a dreadful miscarriage of justice happened and that Donald Marshall Jr. was unjustly imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. However, the author’s attempts to make Marshall into an innocent victim of racial bias, and even a hero for his supposed “courage” and “integrity,” fall flat.

The book calls Donald Marshall’s story “deeply troubling” and says that “conviction for a crime he did not commit scarred him for life.” Maybe. But this book did not convince me that Marshall was a hero–just a sad victim in a sordid case. I never got a sense of who Donald Marshall was —just a sense that he wasn’t the one who murdered Sandy Seale.

I received a review copy of Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq from NetGalley.

There is an adult nonfiction book about the Donald Marshall case: Justice Denied The Law Versus Donald Marshall by Michael Harris, and the book inspired a movie, also called Justice Denied.

1971: Books and Literature

Mar1

The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

Newbery Medal for children’s literature goes to Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars.

Children’s/YA Published in 1971:
The Shrinking of Treehorn by Florence Parry Heide. Reviewed by Nicola at Back to Books.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien. Winner of the Newbery Medal in 1972.

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

1971: Events and Inventions

Feb26

January 2, 1971. The United States bans radio and television ads for cigarettes. Here’s a montage of cigarette ads from the 1960’s:

January 15, 1971. The Aswan High Dam officially opens in Egypt.

February 13, 1971. Backed by American air and artillery support, South Vietnamese troops invade Laos in order to root out Vietcong fighters who have fled across the border.

February 20, 1971. Idi Amin, former boxing champion and army leader, declares himself president of Uganda. He bans all political activities and elections for the next five years.

April 17, 1971. Libya, Syria and Egypt sign an agreement to form a confederation.

April 21, 1971. Nineteen-year-old Jena-Claude “Baby-Doc” Duvalier succeeds his father “Papa Doc” as president of Haiti.

July, 1971. The first combined heart and lung transplant is performed in a South African hospital.

August, 1971. Internment without trial is introduced in Northern Ireland. Over 300 republicans are arrested secretly in pre-dawn raids. Some loyalists are later arrested. British troops begin clearing operations in Belfast following the worst rioting in years.

October 27, 1971. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire. General Mobutu becomes Mobutu Sésé Seko and forced all his citizens to adopt African names and many cities were also renamed.

December 16, 1971. Pakistan surrenders to India after a two-week war. East Pakistan becomes the independent nation of Bangladesh.

Joy to the World: A Different Take

Aug3

It seemed almost sacrilegious to post this blast from the past along with the hymn from which it borrows a line and a title, but on the other hand, I couldn’t resist. So I’m giving the Three Dog Night version of Joy to the World, lyrics and tune by Hoyt Axton, its own post. It’s not praise and worship, but I’ve always been a sucker for a catchy tune with some silly lyrics.

By the way, Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World was the top hit single of 1971.

Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins

Jan13

I had been saving the ARC I received of Mitali Perkins’ new YA novel Secret Keeper for a treat and because I thought that a review closer to the time of publication would be more helpful to readers. In December I succumbed, and read it.

Such a powerful story! It’s something of a romance, and I so wanted everything to turn out just like the fairy tales. And yet I felt as I read that it couldn’t really have a traditional happy ending and that it couldn’t have been written in any other way. Secret Keeper is a tale of love and loss, of traditional family and of new ways and mores creeping into and disrupting the old conventions. It’s a story that bridges cultures and creates understanding and makes even WASPs like me feel a twinge of identification with the characters and their very human situations.

The main character of the novel is sixteen year old Asha, the younger of two daughters in the Gupta family. As the story opens, Asha, her sister Reet, and their mother are on a train headed for a visit of indeterminate length with their Baba’s family in Calcutta. Baba (Father) himself is in America looking for work, having lost his job as a result of the economic difficulties in India in the early 1970’s, the time period for the book. Asha is not sure how the small family will manage to fit into her uncle’s household in Calcutta even for the short amount of time she expects them to stay before Baba send for them to join him in the U.S. Asha’s grandmother lives with Asha’s uncle’s very traditional family, and the three women will be three more mouths to feed, unable to make much, if any, contribution to the welfare of the family. As events unfold, Asha depends on her diary, nicknamed Secret Keeper, to hold her thoughts and dreams and to keep her sane in a tension-filled household.

Girls, especially those who are trying to balance responsibilities to family and to themselves, will find Asha to be a sympathetic character and a role model. When she is faced with a crisis, she makes the best decision she can both for herself and for her small family, and even though her solution to the family’s problems is imperfect and open to criticism, it is the difficulty of her decision that makes the family strong again and renews their bonds, bonds that have been stretched to the breaking point.

I really think that this book is Ms. Perkins’ best book to date, an exploration of cultural norms and changing roles, of responsibility to self and to family, and of flawed but loving answers to difficult issues. I highly recommend Secret Keeper, available in bookstores and from Amazon starting today. (Click on the book cover to order from Amazon.)

Other reviewers:

Book Embargo: “It was a beautiful book.. (haven’t I said that already?) But it really was. The family dynamics, with the father gone to America, the mother and two sisters left to live with relatives. The money problems, the Indian culture, it was all so beautifully written and described.”