![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cattle, as Polly has learned, were inquisitive creatures. A truck, a tractor, a person entering their meadowland was almost sure to attract their attention and they would come, sometimes on the run, to investigate, first following and then, if not driven off or diverted, surrounding the intruder, vehicle or person. Polly didn't really like being followed by thirty or so heifers, calves, and cows. She liked even less having them all around her. They were nice-smelling, gentle creatures, but large. And some had horns. They did not use their small pretty horns aggressively. Polly wondered if they even knew they had any. But when one of them nudged you curiously, wondering what you were and if you happened to have an apple, their horns became very much part of the nudging.
I picked up Ferris Wheel, which I'd never previously heard of, at a pre-pandemic library book sale purely because of the author; I'd read exactly two books by Mary Stolz, Cat in the Mirror and Bartholomew Fair, and loved the first and liked the second a lot. I'd rank Ferris Wheel in between those two.
Sometimes it's easy to explain why a book is so good. All you have to is say, that the premise involves a small-scale apocalypse at an Anishinaabe reserve or a civilization of intelligent spiders creating radio with a computer made of ants, and that it does a good job of executing that premise. This is not the case with this book, whose blurb was about as boring as it gets: "Polly finds it hard to cope when her best friend moves to California." So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.
9-year-old Polly lives in Vermont in the late 70s with her professor father, teacher mother, retired teacher grandmother, and younger brother Rusty; she and Rusty fight so much that it's causing significant family stress, and that's before Polly's best friend moves away. Ferris Wheel's cast of characters are much more vivid than I expected, and the emotions are delineated with a delicate touch. It's a very short book but doesn't feel rushed or slight, and it's got a lovely, understated sense of humor.
Ferris Wheel doesn't reach the heights of Tove Janssen's Summer Book, but it's in the same subgenre and doing some similar things, meticulously chronicling the inexplicable, powerful passions of childhood, the adults with their wisdom and absurdities that you observe without fully understanding, the rhythms of the natural world, and the sense of everything changing with frightening speed, even if some of those changes turn out to be good ones.
Ferris Wheel
I picked up Ferris Wheel, which I'd never previously heard of, at a pre-pandemic library book sale purely because of the author; I'd read exactly two books by Mary Stolz, Cat in the Mirror and Bartholomew Fair, and loved the first and liked the second a lot. I'd rank Ferris Wheel in between those two.
Sometimes it's easy to explain why a book is so good. All you have to is say, that the premise involves a small-scale apocalypse at an Anishinaabe reserve or a civilization of intelligent spiders creating radio with a computer made of ants, and that it does a good job of executing that premise. This is not the case with this book, whose blurb was about as boring as it gets: "Polly finds it hard to cope when her best friend moves to California." So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.
9-year-old Polly lives in Vermont in the late 70s with her professor father, teacher mother, retired teacher grandmother, and younger brother Rusty; she and Rusty fight so much that it's causing significant family stress, and that's before Polly's best friend moves away. Ferris Wheel's cast of characters are much more vivid than I expected, and the emotions are delineated with a delicate touch. It's a very short book but doesn't feel rushed or slight, and it's got a lovely, understated sense of humor.
Ferris Wheel doesn't reach the heights of Tove Janssen's Summer Book, but it's in the same subgenre and doing some similar things, meticulously chronicling the inexplicable, powerful passions of childhood, the adults with their wisdom and absurdities that you observe without fully understanding, the rhythms of the natural world, and the sense of everything changing with frightening speed, even if some of those changes turn out to be good ones.
Ferris Wheel
