The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall. The story of five non-conformist Minnipins who become unlikely heroes. The Periods, stodgy old conservatives with names such as Etc. and Geo., are wonderful parodies of those who are all caught up in the forms and have forgotten the meanings. And Muggles, Mingy, Gummy, Walter the Earl, and Curley Green, the Minnipins who don’t quite fit in and who paint their doors colors other than green, are wonderful examples of those pesky artistic/scientific types who live just outside the rules of polite society. The Gammage Cup was a Newbery Honor book in 1960.
The Whisper of Glocken by Carol Kendall. A sequel to The Gammage Cup, Whisper continues the story of the Minnipins and their isolated valley home. In this story which takes place among a new generation of Minnipins, the Minnipin valley is being flooded. Five new unlikely heroes—Crustabread, Scumble, Glocken, Gam Lutie, and Silky— set out on a quest to release the dammed river.
The Firelings by Carol Kendall is a third fantasy novel for middle grade readers and older, but it does not take place in the the world of the Minnipins. Instead, the Firelings are a group of people who live underneath a volcano and worship the fire god, Belcher. As the heretofore dormant volcano begins to erupt, a group of again “unlikely heroes” must find a way to save the Firelings.
Ms. Kendall also wrote a couple of children’s mysteries, a couple of adult mysteries, and two collections of folk tales, Chinese and Japanese. She liked to travel, but made her home in Lawrence, Kansas.
In a 1999 lawsuit, an author, Nancy Stouffer, accused J.K. Rowling of plagiarizing the name “Muggles” from her books. But Rowling’s lawyer pointed out that Carol Kendall used the name “Muggles” for one of her, very ordinary, characters many years previous to Rowling’s or Stouffer’s use of the term/name. Carol Kendall is said to have laughed at the brouhaha and said, “I’ve got no quarrel with them … There’s only so many ideas and if you have one then someone else out there probably has the same one, too.”
Quotes from Kendall’s books:
“No matter where There is, when you arrive it becomes Here.”
“When you say what you think, be sure to think what you say.”
“You never can tell
From a Minnipin’s hide
What color he is
Down deep inside.”“If you don’t look for Trouble, how can you know it’s there?”
“Where there’s fire, there’s smoke.”
“It was easy to be generous when you had a lot of anything. The pinch came when you had to divide not-enough.”
“No hurry about opening his eyes to see where he was. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be able to open them anyway; and if he was alive, he didn’t feel up to facing whatever had to be faced just now. After a while it occurred to him that he had no business being dead. You couldn’t just selfishly go off dead, leaving your friends to their fate, and still feel easy in your mind.”
“[I]t came to him—–the truth about heroes. You can’t see a hero because heroes are born in the heart and mind. A hero stands fast when the urge is to run, and runs when he would rather take root. A hero doesn’t give up, even when all is lost.”
All three of Kendall’s fantasy novels for children, but especially The Gammage Cup, are not as well known as they ought to be and also highly recommended—by me.
