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The Swedish Nightingale: Jenny Lind by Elisabeth Kyle

Dec12

Published in 1964. Biographical novelist Elisabeth Kyle published two books in 1964: Girl With a Pen: Charlotte Brontë, which I read and reviewed earlier this year, and this novel about the life of nineteenth century singer and celebrity Jenny Lind. Kyle also wrote several other “biographical novels,” including works about Joan of Arc, Mary Stuart, Mary of Orange, Queen Victoria, Clara and Robert Schumann, Edvard and Nina Grieg, and Charles Dickens, as well as numerous regular novels for both adults and children. If anyone has read any of her other books, I’d love to hear your thoughts. These two that I read were quite engaging and would be well-suited for voracious teen readers looking for clean, absorbing stories about real people.

As for Jenny Lind, the movie The Greatest Showman did her a great disservice. If she were still alive, I would advise her to sue for defamation of character. The real Jenny Lind was a deeply devout Christian who would never have tried to seduce P.T. Barnum, as the film implied. She was known for her “golden voice” by all who heard her sing, and she was a celebrity in the modern sense—hounded by fans and people eager to exploit her talent, including Barnum himself. Over the course of her career, Jenny Lind made a significant amount of money, most of which she generously gave away to family and charity.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Kyle’s biography of Jenny Lind. In this portrayal, Jenny is depicted as strong-willed (her friends even use reverse psychology to guide her decisions), yet also kind and generous. Her childhood was tumultuous, with parents who were both neglectful and overbearing , yet after her career takes off, Jenny supports them by buying them a house. Though she initially resists leaving Sweden, she eventually travels to France for singing lessons, and later performs in England and America, including on the famous P.T. Barnum tour.

Jenny Lind herself was a fascinating mix of contradictions: talented yet shy, a child prodigy who almost lost her ability to sing in her early twenties, confident on stage but plagued by stage fright before every performance. She was plain in appearance but transformed by her voice into a beautiful star who attracted numerous admirers, including Hans Christian Andersen and Felix Mendelssohn. Over time, she reconciled all of these contradictions, eventually giving up her singing career to marry and settle in England with her husband and children.

Though Kyle only briefly mentions it, Jenny’s strong Christian faith seemed to be a key factor in preventing her from becoming a spoiled diva. It’s a shame the filmmakers behind The Greatest Showman either didn’t see—or chose to ignore—this aspect of Jenny Lind’s life and character. Jenny Bicks, one of the screenwriters for The Greatest Showman (and a writer for Sex and the City), was likely part of the reason the film’s portrayal of Jenny Lind strayed so far from reality.

In any case, Elisabeth Kyle does a much more faithful job of novelizing Jenny Lind’s story. I wonder how she would have portrayed P.T. Barnum if she had written a book about him?

Rosa By Starlight by Hilary McKay

Dec1

British author Hilary McKay has a history of writing odd and quirky characters in her middle grade fiction, and somehow for me they work. See my reviews of The Time of Green Magic, Binny in Secret, Wishing for Tomorrow, and the Casson family series.

New in 2024, Rosa By Starlight is a modern day fairy tale about an orphan girl, Rosa Mundi, and a magical cat, Balthazar, and couple of wicked villains, Rosa’s aunt and uncle who become her guardians. About 150 pages long, the book incudes a trip to Venice and a flight through the stars on the back of a winged lion. As it should be, the good are rewarded, and the evil characters get their just desserts as well.

The book reminded me of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess because poor little orphaned Rosa lives in a room at the back of the house in England while her aunt and uncle scheme to make a fortune selling fake grass. And later on in Venice Rosa is consigned to a garret room and left alone to fend for herself. But the Venetian part of the story becomes more and more magical as Rosa explores the sights and canals of Venice while trying to find refuge from her terrible, murderous guardians.

As with any good fairy tale, there are questions left unanswered in the story. What happened to Rosa’s apple seeds? Did they grow through the artificial turf to become trees? Are Rosa’s aunt and uncle really related to her? Why does the word “stop” become Rosa’s magic word? How is the cat Balthazar so wealthy with servants and gourmet cat menu of food and treats? How does the magic work, and what will make it stop and start when it needs to? And finally, the question at the heart of it all: how can one escape the evil schemes of men and come home at last? For Rosa, it’s a process and a journey, and she does indeed find a real home at last.

White Stallion of Lipizza by Marguerite Henry

Nov29

The magnificent white Lipizzan stallions, bred for hundreds of years to dance and delight emperors and kings, captivated Marguerite Henry when she saw them perform in the Spanish Court Riding School in Vienna.

Now she makes this unique spectacle the focal point in her story of Borina, one of the most famous stallions of this famous breed. It was Borina who, at the height of his career, took a fling in the Viennese grand opera. And it was Borina who, as a mature school stallion, helped train young apprentices riders, and thus became known as the Four-footed Professor.

What a delightful story that could lead to any number of delight-directed studies and pursuits! After reading about Hans, the baker’s boy, and his overwhelming desire to become a Riding Master, to ride the famous Lipizzaner stallions at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, Austria, I was impelled to look up and read more about the Lipizzaners and the school and the history of these horses who entertained the elite society of Vienna. I also became curious about Xenophon and his book The Art of Horsemanship, the earliest known work on the horse and his care. And I developed a bit of an urge to visit Vienna and see the castles and statues and maybe even the Lipizzaner stallions that still perform their acrobatics in Vienna and across the world in dressage shows and competitions.

I also discovered that Disney made a movie about the Lipizzaners called Miracle of the White Stallions. The movie is not based on Marguerite Henry’s book, but rather it tells the story of how during World War II the U.S. Army under General Patton rescued the Lipizzans and other valuable horses that the Nazis had moved to Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the war. Of course, that movie, as well as a 1940 film called Florian, also about Lipizzaners, is another rabbit trail for me to follow up on, soon.

Getting back to the book, the illustrations by Wesley Dennis are a treat in themselves, both the tiny black-and-white pictures that adorn the margins of each page of the book as well as the full color one and two page spreads the show up periodically. These beautiful drawings and paintings should speak to both horse lovers and artists and draw them into the story alongside the text.

Ms. Henry’s story takes place in the early 1900’s, about the time the horse and cart were giving way to the motorized vehicle. Hans has a horse named Rosy and a cart to make bakery deliveries, and he always stops to watch the Lipizzaners come out of their stable to walk to the riding school in the early morning. (Later in the story, Hans’ bakery gets a truck to make deliveries.) Hans is fascinated with beauty and skill of the Lipizzaner stallions, and his nearly impossible dream is to someday be rider who partners with these magnificent horses to bring that beauty to the people who come to watch the performance at the Imperial Palace. Hans’ journey toward that dream is a series of miracles and disappointments that require initiative and perseverance on his part until at last he succeeds in learning the lessons that Borina, the most famous of Lipizzaner stallions, has to teach.

The “moral” of the story is embedded in the text, as Colonel Podhajsky tells his apprentice riders:

“Here in the Spanish Reitschule . . . the great art of classical riding is brought to its highest perfection. This art is a two-thousand-year-old heritage which has come down to us from Greece, Spain, Italy, and of course, France. . . Our Reitschule is a tiny candle in the big world. Our duty, our privilege is to keep it burning. Surely, if we can send out one beam of splendor, of glory, of elegance into this torn and troubled world . . . that would be worth a man’s life, no?”

I am not a horsewoman or a performer, but that quote speaks to me. It reminds me of what I hope my library can be: a beam of splendor, of glory, of elegance in this torn and troubled world. What a lovely thought that can be applied to anything good, and true, and beautiful that God has called us to do, not matter how seemingly small and insignificant.

This book can be borrowed by patron families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Bletchley Park Books for Teens

Nov8

The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II by Candace Fleming.

The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin.

Bletchley Park and the code breakers who lived and worked there during World War II are hot topics these days. Maybe it’s because the whole episode is less “mined” because of all the secrecy that surrounded the work there. Maybe it’s just a fleeting trend. At any rate, there do seem to be a lot of books about Bletchley floating around, but not so many for the younger set. Until now.

These two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, were recently published (2024) and are appropriate for young people about 13 years of age and up. The Enigma Girls tells the story of several teenaged girls who were recruited to work at Bletchley either because of their math skills or their language proficiency. But these girls were not, for the most part, doing the high level code breaking that was the most intriguing and intellectually challenging work going on at Bletchley Park. Rather, they were keeping records on notecards of all of the code words and German double speak that had been decoded. Or they were servicing and keeping the huge “bombes” running. These were the machines that were created to infiltrate and determine the settings for the German Enigma coding machines. Machines (or primitive computers) were fighting machines, and teenagers were keeping the machines moving and computing.

By limiting her story to the females who worked at Bletchley, gifted nonfiction author Candace Fleming risks over-emphasizing and even distorting the role that these women and girls played in the overall mission of breaking and intercepting the Nazi communications. But she doesn’t fall into that trap, and instead as I read I was moved to admire the persistence and hard work of these unsung heroines who toiled in harsh conditions doing work that they were unable to discuss or even understand completely. It wasn’t a romantic, spy-novel kind of job. The “bombes” were huge, oily, and loud, and the girls who tended them knew very little about how they worked or what significance their work might have. And after the war was over, the Enigma Girls were still left in the dark about how their work helped England win the war because they and everyone else who worked with them were bound to secrecy by the Official Secrets Acts that they all had to sign. They only knew that they were needed to “do their part” in defeating Hitler—and they did.

The Bletchley Riddle, although it is “based on the real history of Bletchley Park, Britain’s top-secret World War II codebreaking center,” makes the whole setting and story much more exciting and romantic. (Fiction can do that.) Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin, both well known in YA literature circles, wrote this spy novel together, and the joint authorship shows. It’s a bit disjointed at times, but the two authors do tie up most all of the loose ends by the end of the story. Fourteen year old Lizzie Novis has lost her mother, Willa, a single parent who works for the U.S. Embassy in London. Willa went to Poland to help evacuate tens of U.S. Embassy there in anticipation of the Nazi invasion of Warsaw. And she didn’t come back. Everyone says that Willa is dead, that she most likely died in the invasion. But Lizzie is sure that Willa is still alive, and she’s determined to find her mother no matter what it takes.

I’ll let you read to find out how Lizzie ends up in Bletchley, with several hurried trips back to London. I’ll let you read about Lizzie’s older brother Jakob, and how he becomes the other major character in the story. And finally in the pages of the book, you can meet Lizzie’s new friends, Marion and Colin, and read about a little harmless romance that springs up as they all try to keep up with the irrepressible Lizzie and her quest to find Willa. It’s a book about lying and spying and secret-keeping and persistence in a time and place where all of those qualities, even the dishonesty, are necessary for survival.

But the story never becomes too thoughtful or deep. It’s barely believable that Lizzie can get away with all of the shenanigans that she pulls. And Jakob seems too befuddled to be as intelligent as he’s supposed to be. Maybe he’s a bit of an absent-minded professor at the ripe age of nineteen. Anyway, it’s a lark, but not to be taken seriously. And the minor characters—Alan Turing, Dilly Knox, Gordon Welchman—as well as the setting provide a good introduction to Bletchley Park and its importance to the British war effort and eventual victory.

I recommend both books for those teens who are interested in World War II and Bletchley Park and codes and codebreaking. Oh, both books spend a fair amount time talking about codes and ciphers and Enigma and how it worked and how the Enigma code was broken? Or deciphered? I can never keep the difference straight in my head between codes and ciphers, much decode or decipher anything. But you may have better skills than I do.

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber

Nov4

I read this memoir conversion story on my Kindle back in 2011 when it first was published. I said then that I enjoyed the story, but it left me feeling . . . incomplete and sort of lacking in understanding. I don’t think I read well on an e-reader, and that may be why I was ambivalent about Surprised By Oxford when I read it back in the day. So, when I heard about the movie that recently came out, based on the book, I thought I’d watch that.

It was a good movie, not great, but solidly good. Now I had to re-read the book that I really didn’t remember much about, since I read it over ten years ago, and since I have a leaky brain. I didn’t review the book back in 2011 when I read it the first time, which is another reason I couldn’t remember much more than a vague impression of possible dissatisfaction or maybe appreciation from my first read through.

The story is deceptively simple: Agnostic Canadian feminist gets a scholarship to Oxford. She is dazzled by the Oxford experience, meets a group of “serious Christians” (and others who are not Christian at all), and eventually becomes a Christian herself. The hook is that Ms. Weber tells the story of her Oxford education and conversion to Christianity with a great deal of poetic language, wordplay, puns, Brit-speak, simile, metaphor, and philosophical thought processes. It’s not always easy to follow Caro, as she is called in the story, as she winds her way through Oxford and through literature to get to Jesus.

The influences in Caro Weber’s conversion are many and varied. There is surprisingly much less C.S. Lewis in the book than I thought there would be. Caro does attend a meeting of the C.S. Lewis Society at one point in the story, but the speaker there talks about joy and prayer rather than about Lewis specifically. Lewis sometimes enters the discussions, but not that often. Her influences seem to be more tilted toward the Romantic poets that she is studying, as well as John Milton, George Herbert, William Blake, and the other students and professors who engage with her in many conversations over the course of a year at Oxford. These conversations, sometimes adversarial, sometimes encouraging, make up most of the book, and they are indeed both surprising and challenging.

There’s also a lot of Caro’s family history in the book. The author has, or had, “daddy issues”, rightly so since her father sounds like a very broken and abusive man. (As far as I can tell, she has since reconciled with her father, who has shown some signs of repentance and change.) Of course the father issues translate to God issues, and a large part of her conversion is due to her coming to understand that God is not like her father.

The book is better than the movie, but also harder to digest. Caro sees metaphors and signs everywhere and in everything, and sometimes the language she uses to describe her thought processes is obscure and difficult to follow, at least to me. If you are more well read than I am, you may understand more clearly. I did enjoy the book more this second time than I did the first time, and I do recommend it to Anglophiles and seekers and lovers of poetry who want to read a Romantic (in the literary sense) memoir.

I would like to read Carolyn Weber’s second book, Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present. And maybe her most recent one, Sex and the City of God: A Memoir of Love and Longing?

This book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Across So Many Seas by Ruth Behar

Oct17

Across So Many Seas, the story of four twelve year old Sephardic Jewish girls from different time periods, felt very . . . educational. I didn’t mind the didactic tone of the story, and I was somewhat fascinated by the saga of the Sephardic Jewish experience from Spain to Turkey to Cuba to the United States (Miami). We tend to know and read more about Ashkenazi, Eastern European Jews and Judaism than we do about the Sephardic Jewish people, who came from Spain after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (yes, Columbus’s sponsors). These Sephardic Jews spoke a Spanish-derived language called Ladino and either became conversos (converts to Catholicism) under threat of death, or left Spain as refugees, going to Italy and Turkey and other places to find freedom to practice their Jewish faith.

The first story in Across So Many Seas features Benvenida, a Jewish girl living in Toledo, Spain in 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews. Benvenida’s family is forced to leave Spain, and they end up living in Turkey where the sultan has promised them freedom of religion. Again the story feels as if the author has a lesson to teach: “Here’s a story, children, to teach you about your history and heritage. Listen, while I make it into a tale for your edification.” Benvenida, who speaks and thinks like a miniature adult, never seems like a real person, only a vehicle for the teaching of history. But still, I was interested enough in the history to keep reading.

The other three girls in the story are Reina (Turkey, 1921), Alegra (Cuba, 1961), and Paloma (Miami, FL, 2003). These three are grandmother, mother, and daughter, and their tales are full of more displacement and emigration, as each girl experiences her own story of travel across the seas. Only Paloma seems to have a stable home where she can make free choices for herself without having to labor under the prejudice of others and the expectations that her family has for proper Jewish girls.

The author, Ruth Behar, comes from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. The book is based in part on the story of Ms. Behar’s Abuela, her paternal grandmother, who came to the United States via Turkey and Cuba and who was of Sephardic heritage. It’s a lovely tribute to Ms. Behar’s heritage and to her grandmother, and I enjoyed learning more about this stream of history. But be warned that the book is heavy on the history and light on believable characterization, dialogue, and plot.

The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett

Oct15

It’s easy, almost inescapable, to find children’s books set before, during and after World War II–fiction, adventure stories, Holocaust stories, biography, memoir, nonfiction about battles and about the home front. I have about three shelves full of World War II books. But when I am asked to recommend books about or set during World War I, the task is harder. There are some good books about World War I, fiction and nonfiction, even picture books, but that war just doesn’t live in our collective imaginations in the same way that World War II does.

Someone recommended The Silver Donkey to me, and I thought, what with the comparative dearth of books set during that war in comparison to the Second World War, I’d add it to my library. Sonya Hartnett, the author, is an Australian writer. Her books, mostly written for children and young adults, have won numerous awards and prizes, including for the author the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2008, a sort of lifetime achievement award in children’s literature. Knowing all of this, I was primed to enjoy The Silver Donkey.

And enjoy it I did. However, I must say that it’s an odd sort of book. Two sisters who live on coast of the English Channel (do the French call it the French Channel?) in France, find a man lying in the forest who appears to be dead. The sisters, Marcelle, age 10, and Coco, age 8, are deliciously thrilled with their discovery, brimming with “anticipation and glee.” Their response feels very French, and somewhat true to the nature of children. As they approach the man, they find that he is not dead, but merely sleeping. He also tells them that he cannot see.

Marcelle and Coco have found a British deserter who wants nothing more than to go home across the Channel, to see his family, especially his younger brother who the soldier believes is calling to him to come home. Marcelle and Coco, and later their brother Pascal, find a way in their childish simplicity to help the soldier by bringing him food and eventually by discovering means for him to cross the Channel to England. In return for their help, and to pass the time, the soldier tells the children stories–stories about donkeys.

These are not perfect children, nor are they role models. They take food from the family larder and lie to their parents about what has happened to the food. They keep secrets. They aid and abet an army deserter, and they squabble with one another. They are somewhat ghoulish; Pascal in particular wants stories about war and battles and violence and heroism. The donkeys in the stories are more admirable. The first story the soldier tells is about a faithful old donkey who takes the expectant Mary to Bethlehem for the census and brings her and her baby home safely. The second story is about a humble donkey whose humility saves the world from a terrible drought. And the war story that Pascal begs for ends up being about a donkey who carries the wounded to safety in the midst of battle–at the cost of his own life.

The whole book is bittersweet. The heroes are all fictional donkeys. The children are funny and very human; somehow they feel as if they could only be French children with a sort of French attitude toward life. The soldier is a hero who calls himself a coward, and he is both brave and tired, tired of war. He is so tired that he decides one day, after having fought courageously in the war for a year or more, to leave the battlefront and walk home. His blindness seems to be a psychosomatic response to the horrors of war.

I wouldn’t recommend this book for younger readers, but for children thirteen and older it might be a good introduction to the controversies surrounding the entirety of World War I. Was it a wasteful stalemate of a war, initiated and perpetuated by old men who sent young men to die for no reason? Is honor worth fighting for? Should a soldier be like the donkey, brave and humble and faithful, or are humans called to be more discerning and wise than donkeys can be? What is the proper response to a war or to a soldier who has abdicated his responsibility in a war? These are certainly questions for older children and adults to think about, and The Silver Donkey gives rise to thought and discussion about questions of this sort.

The donkey stories are the best parts of the book, though.

This book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

Sep30

Definitely not for everybody. Robert Galbraith’s (J.K. Rowling’s) first book in her crime series about private detective Cormoran Strike is gritty and contains quite a bit of bad language, mostly F-bombs. (By the way, I really like that name, Cormoran Strike. It feels quirky and detective-like and memorable.) I wish Rowling could have toned down the language, but I must admit that in the world of celebrities and super-models where this particular mystery takes place, the dialog probably accurately reflects the characters and their common everyday use of language.

Cormoran Strike is a tortured soul, as most detectives usually are these days. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were rather ordinary and well-adjusted, except for their exceptional detecting abilities. Lord Peter Wimsey had a somewhat complicated background and some psychological issues, but nothing like what modern detectives of stage, screen, and literature have to deal with. Cormoran Strike has a dysfunctional childhood and a vengeful ex-girlfriend, and he’s lost one leg to a land mine in Afghanistan. And he’s practically homeless with his detective business about to go bankrupt due to a lack of clients.

So, when the wealthy brother of legendary super-model Lula Landry asks Cormoran to investigate the death, apparent suicide, of his sister, the detective is willing even though he doubts the police could have missed anything in the case, considering all the publicity surrounding Lula’s death. The case itself is a look into the lives of the rich and famous, a world that is not completely foreign to Cormoran Strike, whose mother was a “super-groupie” following his rock star father around for a while back in the 70’s.

The novel is well plotted, and I didn’t figure out whodunnit or how until the very end. There is also a lot of good character development as the story slowly introduces Cormoran Strike, his background, and his personality as well as his detecting methods and habits, learned through his time in the army as an army investigator. We also meet another character who will show up in subsequent novels, I’m sure: Robin Ellacott, the temp secretary and office manager that Cormoran can’t afford to keep on but finds invaluable in ferreting out clues and information for him to use in his investigation. The story is told in third person, but mostly from the viewpoint of either Cormoran Strike or Robin Ellacott, so we get to be privy to some of Strike’s thoughts as well as Robin’s, understanding how they react to one another and to the suspects and witnesses to Lula Landry’s suicide–or murder. The duo work together well, but frequently misunderstand one another in small ways that make the story intriguing and keep the reader guessing as to what will happen next.

I liked it well enough to request the next book in the series from the library, and if the language and grit don’t get any worse, I’ll probably continue to read the entire series. The other books in the series so far are:

  • The Silkworm
  • Career of Evil
  • Lethal White
  • Troubled Blood
  • The Ink Black Heart
  • The Running Grave
  • The Hallmarked Man? (not yet published)

Again, the content is dark, including foul language, drug use, sexual immorality (not described explicitly in this book), and violence (somewhat gritty, but not too much detail). This is a book for adults, not children or teens. But the characters are engaging, and the mystery was satisfying in its conclusion. J.K. Rowling is a good writer with a talent for more than fantasy writing.

Jane and the Year Without a Summer by Stephanie Barron

Aug31

I was looking for new mystery detective fiction, having read all of the Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, and Erle Stanley Gardner that I could find, as well as many more in the genre. A friend suggested the Jane Austen Mysteries by Stephanie Barron. I looked for the first book in the series, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, but my library didn’t have it on the shelf. So I just picked one that sounded interesting and thus read Jane and the Year Without a Summer, set in the summer of 1816 when “the eruption of Mount Tambora in the South Pacific caused a volcanic winter that shrouded the entire planet for sixteen months.” (Climate change, indeed!)

The real Jane Austen died in 1817 at the age of 41, so this book portrays a fictional Jane well toward the end of her short life. Jane is feeling unwell with chronic fatigue and stomach upset, and she and her sister Cassandra decide to sample the waters at Cheltenham Spa in Gloucestershire. These books are said to be “based on the author’s examination of Austen’s letters and writings along with extensive biographical information.” But of course, a mystery is inserted into the biographical story to spice things up a bit.

In this particular book, the mystery involves a several of the Misses Austen’s fellow boarders at the lodging house in Cheltenham where they are staying. The actual murder (or unexplained death) doesn’t happen until about three quarters of the way through the book, but the atmosphere and setting that the author creates makes up for the lack of action in the first half of the book. The characters, aside from Jane herself, are somewhat one-dimensional, and the mystery and resolution there of require some suspension of disbelief. Why and how the murderer does the deed is a bit unlikely. Nevertheless, the Regency setting with period details and information about the real Jane Austen’s life and times is, as Jane might say, quite enjoyable.

I liked it well enough to seek out another book in the series, preferably the first, and maybe I’ll read them them all. Stephanie Barron has written fifteen of these books with Jane as the sleuth and protagonist, and the fifteenth one is called Jane and the Final Mystery. So I assume the series is complete. It might be a nice adventure to travel through all fifteen.

The Hidden Treasure of Glaston by Eleanore M. Jewett

Aug21

In twelfth century England the feud between Archbishop Thomas Becket and King Henry has ended in the murder of Becket, forcing the boy Hugh’s noble father, an ally of the king, into exile in France. Young Hugh, crippled by a childhood disease, is left behind in the care of the Abbot of Glastonbury. Glaston soon becomes Hugh’s sanctuary and his beloved home as he finds both mentors and friends as well as a quest to find remnants and reminders of King Arthur’s and perhaps even Joseph of Arimathea’s presence, centuries prior, in that part of the country.

Hugh’s first friendship formed at Glaston is with Dickon, a young oblate at the monastery of Glaston. (oblate: a person dedicated to a religious life, but typically having not taken full monastic vows.) Dickon’s peasant family has signed him over to the monks of Glaston, but Dickon aspires to become a knight, or at least to serve knight. Hugh wishes he could be a knight and make his father proud, but his crippled legs make this dream an impossibility. The two boys become friends, with very different personalities, but also with a common goal of finding or at least seeing a vision of the legendary Holy Grai

Hugh’s mentors and adult friends are Brother John, the monastery’s librarian (armarian), and Bleheris, a seemingly mad hermit who shares Hugh’s and Dickon’s interest in the vision of the Holy Grail. The story moves rather slowly, but the picture of Hugh’s growth and healing and of the friendships he makes is compelling. I kept reading, not to see whether Hugh and his friends would find the Grail, but rather to see whether and how Hugh would find healing for his physical and spiritual wounds.

Honestly, although I enjoyed this Newbery honor-winning novel, I’m not sure what group of children or young people would be the audience for it. Perhaps those who are deeply interested in the whole Arthurian legend would enjoy this Arthur-adjacent story, or maybe fans of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical fiction. The plot and characters remind me of the Newbery Award book, The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli; however, The Hidden Treasure of Glaston is a much more intricate and involved look at life in a medieval monastery and the difficulties facing a young boy with a disability in that society–at a much higher reading level. If The Door in the Wall was a favorite for an eight to eleven year old reader, this book might be a good follow-up for ages twelve and up.

I read this book as a part of the 1964 Project. A reprint edition of The Hidden Treasure of Glaston is available from Bethlehem Books.

This book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.