The City Under the Back Steps by Evelyn Sibley Lampman

Sep11

A friend on Facebook mentioned this book the other day, and I remembered that I owned a copy but hadn’t read it. So I set out to remedy that neglect.

Cousins Craig and Jill inadvertently offend the new Queen of the City Under the Back Steps, and it turns out that Queen has the power to shrink them down to ant size and keep them in the city of ants until she’s good and ready to make them back into Mashers (what the ants call humans) again. The laws of Ant City are simple and immutable: Eat without being eaten, and protect the babies. Everything the ants do is in obedience to one or both of these laws. And contrary to Craig’s ideas about boys being stronger and more useful than girls, the ants don’t have much use for males of any species. Male ants in this city are not worth much as workers, and they only live for a day or two at the most.

In this transformational fantasy tale, the children don’t actually become ants, but they do shrink to the size of ants. They find that their human characteristics–only two legs to walk on, a lack of antennae to sense direction, and their need for sleep and rest—make them unfit for life in the City Under the Back Steps. However, when the red ants attack the City and carry off the babies, Craig and Jill are able to think of a way to bring the babies back and restore the City to stability and law-keeping. Will it be enough to make the Queen return them to their proper size?

Craig learns that not all societies think girls are “dumb”, and Jill and Craig both learn to accept other cultural norms even though they don’t really understand them. The ants are very different in their values and actions from humans, and Jill and Craig find that their pride in being human might be a somewhat overweening. After all, they only have brute strength and size to be proud of while the ants, ever busy and always law abiding, have a society that withstands repeated calamity and builds again.

This book is out of print and quite expensive to purchase online. First published in 1960, the story and the characters hold up quite well. If you can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a used copy, maybe you can get it from your library —or if you live in Houston, you can borrow it from my library.

The City Under the Back Steps would be a great story to read aloud during a study of insects and bugs or a study of different cultures. Different isn’t always wrong, and sometimes it pays to just listen and try to understand another person’s (or ant’s) thoughts and values. I’m trying to think of other books like this one, where a child enters an animal world and learns from the somewhat anthropomorphized animals who still carry some of the characteristics of animals as well:

In The Tune Is in the Tree by Maud Hart Lovelace, Annie Jo spends the day with the birds who use magic to shrink her to bird size and give her a pair of wings so that they can take care of her while her parents are away.

In The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli, the man-cub, lives in the forest with the wolf pack, but he is still a human boy. He learns to obey the law of the jungle, but eventually he turns to the community of village life.

T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone has Merlin the Wizard turn young Arthur or Wart into a fish, an ant, a badger, and a wild goose, and each transformation is meant to teach him a lesson about the role he will play as king someday. So, although Wart still thinks more or less like a human when he is transformed into various animals, he has the body and skills of the animal he becomes.

I know I’m forgetting other books like these. What other books have children entering the world of animals, transformed into the size or body or community of a member of the animal world? And what does the child learn from the experience?

A Few Family Names for Your Consideration

Sep8

I would imagine that everyone has a few names on their family tree that are . . . unusual, maybe even peculiar or bizarre. But one of those old family names might just be the perfect fit for a twenty-first century baby who wants to distinguish himself or herself from the pack. So, here, presented for the consideration of my own family, and yours, if you’re looking for that special name for a special child, are a few names (first and middle) from my family tree:

  • Joseph Author. Not Arthur. This was my grandfather’s name.
  • Monger Stacy. This was my great-grandfather, whom I never met. He was born on New Year’s Day in 1885, so if you have a New Year’s baby . . .
  • Jimmie Quency. My grandfather, whom I also never met. If you use this name be sure to spell Quency with an “e”. I think it’s much more distinguished.
  • William Lafayette. They called him “Fate” for short. My great-great grandfather.
  • Newton Lafayette. My great grandfather. As far as I know he had no nickname. (Different family line) Why were these Southerners so fond of Lafayette?
  • Wilburn Scott. Another great-grandfather.
  • James Kemble. Yet another great-grandfather.
  • Larkin George. My third great-grandfather. I like the name Larkin. You could call him Lark as a nickname. There’s also a Joseph Larkin on the family tree.
  • Hampton Butler. Sounds southern. like something from Gone With the Wind.
  • Edom Robbinson. My husband’s great-great grandfather.
  • Robert Wallace Thomas. I have two Baptist preachers, father and son, on my family tree with this solid name.
  • Philemon Thomas. It would take a special boy to carry off the first name Philemon, but maybe you could switch the two and make it Thomas Philemon.
  • Carlisle Haines. My seventh great-grandfather.
  • Tristram Thomas. May be my original emigrant ancestor from Wales and also maybe my seventh great-grandfather.
  • Vespasian Kemble. My sixth great-grandfather. I’m not sure anyone could carry this name off, ever. I’m not even sure how to pronounce it.
  • Zuritha Chaney. Sometimes spelled Zooritha. My third great-grandmother.
  • Bonnie Leota. My grandmother, and a fine name she had, if I do say so myself.
  • Lorena Adair. My great-great grandmother.
  • Oleta Eudora. Engineer Husband’s mother. One of my children has the middle name Oleta.
  • Emily Alvira. Engineer Husband’s great-grandmother.
  • Icey Ann. My husband’s great-great grandmother.
  • Lula Perle. My husband’s grandmother.
  • Lula Mae. My great-grandmother.
  • Palmyra Jane. My husband’s great-great aunt.
  • Delana Faith. Called “Laney”. Husband’s great-great grandmother.
  • Narcissa Caroline. Another great-great grandmother.
  • Hattie Mae. My great-aunt.
  • Ida Mae. My great grandmother.
  • Ola Myrtle. Another great-aunt.

Feel free to borrow any of these. What are some beautiful or unusual names on your family tree?

The Peppermint Pig by Nina Bawden

Sep7

Old granny Greengrass had her finger chopped off in the butcher’s when she was buying half a leg of lamb.

The opening sentence of this British children’s novel, published in 1975, should be a warning to the squeamish or the tender-hearted: This is not the book for you. I looked at the reviews on Goodreads, and there are at least two polar opposite verdicts. Either the reviewer finds the story to be “sweet and touching, poignant and heart-breaking” or “traumatic, brutal, and cruel.” Well, actually some readers found all of those adjectives applicable and enjoyed the contrast.

The story is told in third person from the point of view of Poll, the youngest of four children in a middle class family in England. When Poll’s father leaves his family behind to go off to America to make his fortune (because of an unfortunate misunderstanding with his employer), Poll, her mother, and her siblings are left without funds and go to live with Mother’s sisters, Aunt Harriet and Aunt Sarah. Mother comes home one day with a tiny runt of a pig, called a “peppermint pig”, that the family adopt as a pet.

Lily said, “You can’t keep a pig indoors, Mother!

“Oh, we had all sorts of animals in the house when I was young,” Mother said. “Jackdaws, hedgehogs, newly hatched chicks. I remember times you couldn’t get near our fire.”

“But not pigs,” Lily said.

“I can’t see why not. You’d keep a dog, and a pig has more brains than a dog, let me tell you. If you mean pigs are dirty, that’s just a matter of giving a pig a bad name, to my mind. Why, our Johnnie was housebroken in a matter of days, and with a good deal less trouble than you gave me, my girl!”

As it turns out, Lily was right, and Mother was wrong. It’s not a good idea to keep a pig for a pet, especially if the family who owns the pig is poor and will eventually . . . well, no spoilers. However, I saw where this story was going long before the “cruel” and “traumatic” ending. And I was fascinated by the tone of the story which reveals the secret lives of children, lives of thought and action that can be very dark indeed. I think it would be comforting to some children to read that other children have violent thoughts and tell lies and become quite angry and still survive. Other children might find it quite horrifying.

But, I’m ambivalent about keeping this book in my library. I think some parents would be shocked by the language and the actions of both children and adults, while I just thought the story was realistic about the sin that overtakes us all and about the brokenness that is a part of our world. Nine year old Poll is a passionate child with ideas and questions and feelings that are overwhelming at times for such a small person. And some of the ideas and events and emotions in this book might be a bit too much for a nine or ten year old who is reading it. Some examples (and you can decide for yourself):

‘Poll said, ‘What do you mean about biting off puppies’ tails?’
‘That’s what the groom at the Manor House used to do. My mother was cook there, you know. I’ve seen that groom pick up a new litter one after the other, bite off the tail at the joint and spit it out, quick as a flash. The kindest way, he always said, no fuss and tarradiddle, and barely a squeak from the pup.’

‘She hit him in the stomach, he grunted and fell and she fell on top of him. He tried to get up but she grabbed his hair with both hands and thumped his head up and down.
She couldn’t move but Noah’s laughing face was above her so she spat into it as hard as she could and said, ‘Damn you, you rotten bug, damn and blast you to hell…’

‘She made a best friend called Annie Dowsett who was older than she was and who told her how babies were born. ‘The butcher comes and cuts you up the stomach with his carving knife,’ Annie said.’ 

Theo was clever but he wasn’t sensible the way ordinary people were. He saw things differently and this set him apart. Poll thought, Theo will always be lonely, and it made her proud and sad to know this, and very responsible.

It’s a stark and realistic picture of the inner life and growth of a child during one hard year of near-poverty and perceived abandonment. Tender-hearted animal lovers and idealizers of children should beware.

Show Me a Sign by Ann Clare LeZotte

Sep4

Author and librarian Ann Clare LeZotte is deaf, so this story of a deaf girl living in community that is half deaf and half hearing on Martha’s Vineyard is born out of the author’s own experiences, for what that is worth. I do think it’s always enlightening to read “own voices” stories when they are available and well written.

The story takes place in the early 1900’s when there actually was such a community of mixed hearing and non-hearing persons living together on Martha’s Vineyard. This community used their own version of sign language (MVSL) to communicate, and that sign language formed part of the basis for ASL (American Sign Language) years later in the mid-nineteenth century.

Mary Lambert, the protagonist of the story, is a deaf girl who has grown up up safe and protected in little island community. Nevertheless, before the story opens, Mary’s family has experienced a devastating tragedy: Mary’s brother George died in accident. And no one else knows that the accident was Mary’s fault. George saved her life at the expense of his own.

Mary’s mother particularly doted on George, and Mary is unsure about whether her mother truly loves and cares for her, now that George is gone. At this point the story veers off into the coming of a stranger to the community, a stranger who wants to study the deaf people on the island and find out “what’s wrong with them.” The problem is the stranger’s prejudices; the islanders, hearing or not, don’t think anything is wrong with being deaf.

This novel definitely gives new perspectives on both deafness and Native American attitudes and culture. (Some of the minor characters in the book are Wampanoag, and the author goes to great lengths to write about the Wampanoag respectfully and accurately.) About halfway through Something Bad happens, and the story gets exciting. I really did enjoy and learn from reading this book about a place and time in history that was previously unknown to me.

However, there are some weaknesses in the book. It starts off slow and veers off onto various rabbit trails that ultimately go nowhere. What is the point of the Wampanoag servant characters, father and daughter, who work for Mary’s father and Mary’s best friend’s family? In fact, what is the point of pages and pages about Mary and her best friend, Nancy and their escapades? Why do the two friends apologize to each other at the end of the book? (Maybe I missed something?) The ending itself went on way too long, several chapters of getting home and tearful reunion. And yes, the setting and characters were unique and interesting, but the friendships in the story were odd and unfocused.

We Could Be Heroes by Margaret Finnegan

Sep3

Hank Hudson can’t stand one more day of listening to his teacher read aloud the horrible, sad book about a boy who is hiding in the forest from the Nazis. He’s already protested and asked to be excused, to no avail. So he does the only thing left to do: burn the book.

With this scene of attempted book burning (no one is harmed and even the book survives the attempt), we are introduced to Hank who loves rocks, and perceptive readers will understand that ten year old Hank is “on the spectrum” even though the label of autism is not introduced until later in the story. Hank’s unsuccessful book burning catches the attention of a girl in his class, Maisie, who is looking for an accomplice and a friend to help her rescue a dog named Booler, and off we go with Maisie and Hank on a series of madcap, slightly dangerous, highly illegal adventures.

Maisie is not autistic, but she is quite immature and fixated on Booler, a dog with a seizure disorder. Maisie sympathizes with the next door neighbor’s dog to an excessive degree. Hank, on the other hand, just wants a friend, and he finds one in Maisie, even though the two fifth graders both have some things to learn about true friendship.

This middle grade fiction book is a funny, easy read with a good message–“different is not less”–and a good heart. The story is a sensitive yet entertaining portrayal of autism and other differences and of good intentions gone awry.

Pippa Park Raises Her Game by Erin Yun

Sep2

Korean American seventh grader Pippa Park gets a scholarship to a rich private school where she tries to ingratiate herself with the popular clique while covering up her working class, public school background. She’s also busy with trying to understand algebra, play winning basketball, and take care of her chores and responsibilities at home. The popular girls get mean; Pippa gets exhausted, enmeshed in lies and half-truths; and the good-looking math tutor that Pippa’s sister hired for her barely acknowledges Pippa’s existence.

It’s a fairly cliche plot with a standard cast of characters. However, the thing that made this book fun for me is that it’s a “reimagining” of the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. Pippa is Pip, of course. Her rich math tutor, Eliot Haverford, who lives in a mansion and deals with unreasonable family expectations, is a take-off on Estella. Pippa lives with her older sister, Mina, who also has high expectations for Mina’s academic achievements, and with Mina’s husband, Jung-hwa, who is a warm and fuzzy Joe Gargery. And so on.

If reading this book would cause some middle school readers to take on Great Expectations, I’m all for it. I think Great Expectations is one of Dickens’ most accessible novels. I read it aloud to three of my children the they were about ten, eight and six years old. I’m not sure the six year old followed all of the plot and action, but she listened with the other two who did demonstrate an understanding of the basic outline and ideas of the novel. And we all enjoyed the read aloud, so I’m sure an average middle schooler could handle Dickens’ rags to riches story.

Pippa Park Raises her Game has a lot of crushing on boys, mean girls being mean, and Pippa herself being somewhat deceitful and ashamed of her family and background. If you would rather not read about any or all of these subjects, then caveat emptor. Never fear, however, good does triumph, and Pippa, like Pip, learns her lessons after much drama and turmoil brought on mostly by her own actions.

Oh, I liked the fact that Pippa listens to K-pop and watches K-dramas. These are good details in a good, solid book that reads a little bit like a K-drama.

Village of Scoundrels by Margi Preus

Sep1

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loiredepartment in south-central France. Residents have been primarily Huguenot or Protestant since the 17th century. During World War II these Huguenot residents made the commune a haven for Jews fleeing from the Nazis. They hid them both within the town and countryside, and helped them flee to neutral Switzerland. In 1990 the town was one of two collectively honored as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel for saving Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

~Wikipedia

Village of Scoundrels is a fictional depiction of the activities of the villagers of Le Chambon during World War 2, especially the teens and children who were either refugees or resistors or both. The book doesn’t really have a clearly defined protagonist, but some of the heroes and villains in the books are listed in the opening pages, and these characters are mostly based on the lives and actions of real, living people:

  • Celeste is a high school student who becomes a courier for the Resistance.
  • Jean-Paul is a Jewish teen who wants to become a doctor, but who find that his talent for forgery is in demand.
  • Jules the Scoundrel is a ten year old goatherd who plays dangerous games with the French policeman who is collaborating with the Nazis to uncover the secrets of Le Chambon.
  • Henni and Max are German Jews, boyfriend and girlfriend, who take refuge in Le Chambon.
  • Philippe, a high school student from Normandy, hides refugees and smuggles them to Switzerland.

This book is gaining lots of accolades this year, and indeed the subject matter cries out for a good novelization or narrative nonfiction telling (maybe there is a good nonfiction book about this WWII event?). However, the mix of fiction and nonfiction in this one was not that well done. It should have either been more fictionalized to make the story flow with a clear protagonist and plot or just straight nonfiction with chapters telling the stories of each of the various children and young adults who were active in the French Resistance in Le Chambon. I found it interesting, but hard to follow.

The last part of the novel, where the story coalesces around the French policeman, Perdant, and Jules the Soundrel, is pure fiction and better reading than the rest of the book. Then, the afterword attempts to help the reader sort fact from fiction, but I found it just as confusing as the preceding chapters. Again, can anyone recommend a well written nonfiction book on this subject? Preus provides a bibliography of twenty or more titles at the end of the book, but which one is the best?

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Aug30

Our family–me, some of my adult children and their spouses–are participating in a book club together this year. We’re taking turns choosing a book a month. The July book was The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. It was a novel about a Ponzi scheme and the people who become enmeshed in it, both before and after the scheme goes bust. In August we read a book of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who also wrote the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah. She is a good writer, and although I always enjoy full length novels more than I do short stories, these stories were well worth the read.

I started a couple of weeks ago and read one story each night before bedtime. It was a good way to digest a book of seemingly unrelated short stories that are at least somewhat tied together by theme if not characters or plot. Reading only one story at a time gave me an opportunity to reflect and learn from each one.

The stories are about cultural encounter and clash between men and women, parents and children, Christian and Muslim, younger and older generations, modern and ancient, Nigeria and the United States. For the most part the tone and the outlook of each story are rather bleak. With one exception, the cultural and generational encounters in each of the stories are fraught with misunderstanding and even tragedy. In the first story “Cell One” a young man learns a lesson when he is imprisoned for a few days. In the second, “Imitation”, a properly submissive young wife confronts her husband’s blatant adultery. Another story is about a black woman from Nigeria who becomes the girlfriend and lover of a white man in Hartford, Connecticut. As in the other stories, the romance/story ends sadly, not with bang but rather a whimper.

The one story that shows two people coming to some sort of bridge of cultures is called “A Private Experience.” Two women are trapped together in a small store by violence and riots in the streets of a small market village in Nigeria. One is a Hausa Muslim woman, a mother; the other is a young Christian college student from the city. They are different is so many ways: economic status, religion, age, experience. And yet as they are thrown together, the two learn to trust and help each other, and they survive. This tale, too, does not have a happy ending, and yet there is a spark of hope in the patient endurance of the Muslim woman and the awakening understanding and empathy of the young Christian student.

And on it goes. A Nigerian nanny misunderstands the actions of her artist employer. A young wife whose son has died is applying for asylum in the United States, but she is unable to explain the complexities of her situation to the customs official who is taking her application. There’s a Cain and Abel story featuring a girl and her older, favored brother. Two Africans in college housing become friends and bond over their grievances about past lovers in spite of their differing religious perspectives. An arranged marriage sours very quickly.

Then, the last and culminating story , “The Headstrong Historian”, tells of a grandmother and the granddaughter who carries on her strength and cultural awareness even though the interceding generation has been Christianized and diminished by white colonization. In all of these stories, when it appears, Christianity is dour and powerless, never a fulfillment of African destiny and understanding, but rather a threat to the deep roots of African greatness or an empty husk to be discarded in the wake of modern twentieth century wisdom. This story begins when the grandmother is young in the late nineteenth century, immersed in African thought patterns and African religion and African community life. The next generation, the son and his wife, accept Christianity, Catholicism, and are made weak and pitiful and rigid by the tenets of the new religion. Then, finally comes the granddaughter, a new, educated, strong woman who learns her true history and goes back to her roots “reimagining the lives and smells of her grandmother’s world.” She writes a book, subtitled A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. But nothing in the story indicates that the granddaughter understands the darker elements of attempted murder and revenge and slavery and mistreatment of women that form part of her history just as much as the depredations of colonialism. The granddaughter changes her name from Grace to Afamefuna, “My Name Will Not Be Lost”, but I wonder if she really knows the meaning and background of her new-old name.

Picture Book States: Vermont

Aug24

I’m going to try to make this post a weekly ritual. Vermont is the state for this week, with lots of snow in the book forecast. And farms, lots of farms. With fifty states to travel to, by way of the best picture books I can find, this journey should take about a year.

Vermont

  • Motto: Freedom and Unity
  • Nickname: Green Mountain State
  • State Flower: Red Clover
  • State Bird: Hermit Thrush
  1. Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. Illustrated by Mary Azarian. HMH Books, 2009. This Caldecott Award-winning books tells the story of Wilson Bentley, a man who fell in love with snowflakes and their delicate and varied shapes and patterns as a boy in Vermont and grew up to spend his life photographing them.
  2. Sugaring by Jessie Haas. Illustrated by Jos. A Smith.  Greenwillow, 1996. This picture book is the third in a series of books about Nora and her grandparents’ lives and work on a Vermont farm.
  3. Nora’s Ark by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. Illustrated by Emily Arnold McCullly. HarperCollins, 2005. Nora’s Ark is based on a real event: the Vermont flood of 1927. In the story, Nora and her family take refuge in Grandma’s house, up on a hilltop.
  4. Snow Comes to the Farm by Nathaniel Tripp. Illustrated by Kate Kiesler.  Candlewick, 2001.
  5. Aaron and His Green Mountain Boys by Patricia Lee Gauch.  Illustrated by Margot Tomes.  Calkins Creek, 2005. 64 pages. This easy reader is set during the Revolutionary War in Bennington, Vermont.
  6. The Canada Geese Quilt by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock.  Illustrated by Leslie Bowman.  Dutton, 1989. 60 pages. Another easy reader/early chapter book in which Ariel and her grandmother work together to piece a quilt.
  7. Fanny in the Kitchen by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter.  Atheneum,  2001. Subtitled The Whole Story from Soup to Nuts of How Fannie Farmer Invented Recipes with Precise Measurements. Who knew that Fanny Farmer, of cookbook fame, was from Vermont?
  8. Kitty and Mr. Kipling: Neighbors in Vermont by Lenore Blegvad. Illustrated by Erik Blegvad. Margaret K. McElderry, 2005. And who knew that Rudyard Kipling ever lived in Vermont? This historical fiction tale shares the story Kipling and a neighbor girl named Kitty.
  9. Champ and Me by the Maple Tree: A Vermont Tale by Ed Shankman. Illustrated by Dave O’Neill. Commonwealth, 2010. Champ the Monster of Champlain Lake is best friends with the narrator of this rhyming tour through the Vermont countryside.
  10. Sleep Tight Farm: A Farm Prepares for Winter by Eugenie Doyle. Illustrated by Becca Stadtlander. Chronicle Books, 2016. A farm family gets ready for a Vermont winter.

So, what did I leave out? Any Vermonters out there know of a great Vermont picture book not to be missed?

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Companion by Annette Whipple

Aug22

Subtitled A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide, this book is a curriculum or family reading guide to the eight books in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, plus the extra book, The First Four Years. I have a curriculum book called The Prairie Primer by Margie Gray that does much the same thing this book sets out to do, but I like Ms. Whipple’s book even better. This newer guide, published this year (2020), addresses the concerns that many have recently expressed about racism and stereotypes in the Little House books. And Whipple addresses these problems in a gentle way by asking questions about how the settlers and the Native Americans and others would have seen their lives and interactions and how we see these things today. Questions and discussion are so much better than either reading and ignoring the issues completely or alternatively, trashing the books because of the outdated and sometimes unjust opinions expressed.

Examples of discussion questions:

  • Laura confronted Ma about her dislike of the American Indians. It took a lot of courage. What would you have said to Ma or a grown-up you know?
  • How would you feel if you had to move unexpectedly but didn’t know where you were going to live?
  • Ma didn’t like Laura helping Pa with field work. What do you think of Ma’s thoughts on women working in the field? Why did she think like that?
  • Why did Mary and Laura enjoy their days at the creek so much?
  • Why was the family so happy without presents or candy at Christmas?

The book also includes more than 75 activities, everything from recipes for old-fashioned doughnuts and dried apples to craft instructions to science and nature study experiments and observations. And there is chapter-by-chapter commentary that tells readers some of the inside story and background details that make the novels understandable and give more food for thought. The book guides children to think about living in a sod house or surviving a long winter and what that might be like without telling them what to think or feel.

The Prairie Primer is no longer in print, and used copies are quite expensive. As I said, I like this book better anyway, although it’s not quite as long as Prairie Primer. It’s also not as expensive, and it would be more than adequate for a family study of the Little House books. Read more about the book at Ms. Whipple’s website, www.WilderCompanion.com.