Tucson Book Haul, Part 2 and Depressing Children's Books of Yore

[rachelmanija]

I got some boxes in the mail today. Here’s what I bought at Bookman’s:

The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Winner of the 2017 Newbery Medal), by Kelly Barnhill. A fantasy that looks surprisingly non-depressing despite having won a Newbery medal.

The Private Worlds of Julia Redfern, by Eleanor Cameron. Sequel to A Room Made of Windows, which is itself in a four-book series – huh, I had no idea! It’s about a girl writer.

Big Red , Outlaw Red, and Haunt Fox, by Jim Kjelgaard, who cornered the rather specific niche of exciting kids’ fiction about Irish setters.

Forest, by Janet Taylor Lisle. The back cover promised a pastoral fantasy about a girl and a forest, but I just now realized that it’s by the author of Afternoon of the Elves, possibly my all-time least-favorite Newbery book. I thought it would be about elves. There are no elves. Elves are a delusion. The heroine’s friend who says there’s elves turns out to be living with a mentally ill, abusive mother. When the heroine tells her own mother in the hope of getting her help, her friend is taken away and she never sees her again or learns what happens to her.

Message: Elves aren’t real. If you ever tell anyone a friend is being abused, they will disappear and you will never know if you did the right thing or made it worse. Also, everything is terrible.

Message of almost every Newbery book before about 1990: Your pets will die. Your grandparents will die. Your parents will die. Your best friend will die. Mentally ill or abused or disabled people die, are institutionalized, or disappear. (You may learn later that they died.) Social workers lock up your mentally ill friends, take away your abused friends, and step on your kitten. Magic isn’t real. All attempts to do the right thing lead inevitably to misery. Everything is terrible.

Meanwhile, Layla bought a book at Bookman's that she thought would be a heartwarming story of kids making friends while rescuing stranded narwhals. No One Expects Surprise! WWI.

Comments

[forestofglory]

I think I have read Forest. If it is the book I'm remembering there is actually magic in it.

[kore]

//checks Amazon

Bellicose Barker leads most of his fellow mink-tailed squirrels into a war by showing that people are too dangerous to be ignored. Amber's father, an impossibly stupid man, does everything he can to show that Barker is right. People line up to shoot squirrels and squirrels rise in giant numbers to attack them. Only Amber, her younger brother, and a dreamy, curious squirrel named Woodbine, plus his sister and best friend, are clearheaded enough to seek a new understanding.

HFS

[snickfic]

I loved Kjelgaard as a kid and read all his books I could get my hands on, which, going by wikipedia, wasn't even half of his full output. Outlaw Red was my favorite of the Setter books, but I was also very fond of the ones about the malamute and his person (Snow Dog and Wild Trek). And my absolute favorite, long out of print, was Ulysses and His Woodland Zoo, about a hapless young man who ends up as the winter caretaker at a hunting lodge.

[rachelmanija]

I just found a sweet bio/remembrance of him: http://home.sprintmail.com/~charterbus/bigwoods.htm

Now I want to read more of his books. I only ever found a few.

[nocowardsoul]

Bookman's is a wonderful place.

[larryhammer]

Yes. Yes, it is.

[sholio]

No One Expects Surprise! WWI.

LOLLLL. Well, I sure didn't. Possibly if it had the Newbery Award medal on the cover instead of the cute little Apple Scholastic trade dress, I would have!

[pameladean]

My first experience of a Newbery winner was A Wrinkle in Time. I thought they would all be science fiction. OMG.

P.

[kore]

The ones I read were The High King, Wrinkle, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Witch of Blackbird Pond, Mrs Frisby...., The Westing Game....I don't know if there was some conscientious person at the Santa Fe library weeding out the really depressing ones or what.

[osprey_archer]

I was not terribly impressed with The Girl Who Drank the Moon but at this point I can't remember it very well so at least if it was full of death, it wasn't the kind of death that seers itself into your memory and leaves you with literary scars.

I too was most disappointed with Afternoon of the Elves. How can you have elves in the title and not a single elf in the entire book at all???

[sovay]

Sequel to A Room Made of Windows, which is itself in a four-book series – huh, I had no idea! It’s about a girl writer.

I do not remember the Julia Redfern novels as well as I remember the Mushroom Planet novels, but I do remember liking them.

(I also remember very little about Jim Kjelgaard, but I read all three of those novels. I read anything in a library that wasn't nailed down. I read some things that were.)

[snickfic]

Oh man, I think I only read one Mushroom Planet book, but I LOVED it. It hit that note of bizarre whimsy just right for me.

[maplemood]

Oh my gosh, Afternoon of the Elves! I read it right about when I was in the target age range, and I remember being SO confused by the ending, because no elves! Also, I was still too young to completely grasp the implications of what was really going on, which didn't help.

[havocthecat]

Yeah, this is why I didn't read Newberry books as a kid, and wallowed in comforting genre hopefulness. Mostly of the adult variety. There were a lot of kids books that really wanted to bring you down to earth back in the day and I didn't really care to deal with that kind of book.

[recessional]

Then all the kids who HATED THOSE EFFING NEWBERRIES grew up and started writing books and also sitting on the ALA juries that chose Newberries. (Not even kidding, literally from the mouth of someone who's been sitting on the juries since about 1990 and started "because I was tired of hating every single Newberry book" XD.)


I WAS SO MAD AT THAT BOOK. I'M STILL MAD AT THAT BOOK. (Afternoon). SOMEWHERE IN ME IS ACTUALLY PROBABLY A VERY MAGICAL REALIST BOOK THAT IS LITERALLY JUST A WAY OF SAYING "FUCK YOU" TO AFTERNOON OF THE ELVES WHERE THE NEIGHBOUR GIRL ENDS UP LIVING WITH HER FRIEND'S FAMILY BECAUSE THEY ARE GOOD FOSTER FAMILY MATERIAL AND ALSO PROBABLY THE MOTHER GETS PROPER TREATMENT AND AMONG OTHER THINGS IS ALSO A LOVE-NOTE TO THOSE PARTS OF THE SYSTEM THAT WORK REALLY HARD NOT TO BE LIKE THAT BECAUSE IT'S VERY HARD.

Because fuck that book.

(Also I will refuse in all author interviews forever to tell anyone whether or not the elves are real.)

[wendylove]

(I realize we are complete strangers, but I just want to say that I would read the hell out of that book and then unsubtly leave it around the house for my children.)

[wendylove]

My childhood views of Newbery were apparently shaped by some combination of _A Wrinkle in Time_, _The Hero and the Crown_, whichever of the Taran Wanderer books it was that won, whichever of the Dark is Rising books ditto, and of course _Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH_. Looking back at a list now, I realize that I was... um, very specific in my reading tastes, and also that I blocked out the Newbery-ness of some things I didn't like (OMG KATHERINE PATERSON). Also, apparently medieval Europe and the United States are more interesting than everywhere else, which I am kind of distressed about despite being a historian of medieval Europe.

[kore]

OMG, SAME (see my comment above). I think I realized there were some Very Depressing entries (Bridge to Terabithia, Sounder) but I apparently avoided most of them (and aged out of the target audience I guess). There seems to've been a shift in the late eighties or mid nineties, looking at the lists of winners?

http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/newberymedal/newberyhonors/newberymedal

[larryhammer]

I started The Girl Who Drank the Moon but didn't get very far before it was due at the library. I was liking it so far, but remember little else. (My memories of 2-4 years ago are very spotty.)

[evelyn_b]

**GASP** I read Afternoon of the Elves! (I didn't recognize it from the title, but I did from the description). I haven't thought about that book in YEARS. I loved it, though. I was the Newberry target audience - I LOVED sad kids wearing terrible clothes and magic that might be real but probably isn't.

the rather specific niche of exciting kids’ fiction about Irish setters

. . . sounds more like the kind of book I would like as an adult.

[kore]

To be fair, Afternoon of the Elves was a Newbery Honor book (those were "runners-up" until 1971 according to the award website) in 1991, along with Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind and The Winter Room. The medal winner was Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.

[kore]

Also, I remember finding Room Made of Windows in the library and LOVING it, and never being able to find the other books in the series anywhere (this was the early eighties), and that drove me nuts. For some reason I missed the Mushroom Planet series entirely.

[inky_magpie]

"Message of almost every Newbery book before about 1990: Your pets will die. Your grandparents will die. Your parents will die. Your best friend will die. Mentally ill or abused or disabled people die, are institutionalized, or disappear. (You may learn later that they died.) Social workers lock up your mentally ill friends, take away your abused friends, and step on your kitten. Magic isn’t real. All attempts to do the right thing lead inevitably to misery. Everything is terrible."

May I share on metaquotes ?

[rachelmanija]

Sure!

[naomikritzer]

I had a bunch of Newbery Medal winning books I loved as a kid, and not just genre: I was also quite fond of "The 21 Balloons," "The Witch of Blackbird Pond," "Caddie Woodlawn," and "The Westing Game" (that's a mystery, so maybe counts as genre). Looking through the list I'm struck by the fact that I had a pretty good radar for books that were going to be grim and mostly just did not pick them up. With the exception of Katherine Paterson -- I went through a phase where I had a higher tolerance for the sort of melodramatic tearjerking stuff she wrote and read everything of hers I could get my hands one, despite having HATED Bridge to Terabithia when I first read it.

I wasn't a huge fan of realistic contemporary fiction anyway and would refuse to pick up anything that telegraphed a lot of death (especially pet death) was coming (I got suckered into reading "The Yearling" and "Old Yeller" and something else with a tragically dead pet and said NOPE NOPE DONE WITH ALL THIS NEVER AGAIN. "Sounder," "Where the Red Fern Grows" and "Rascal" all looked like books where the pet was going to die, and FYI I should've read "Rascal" because apparently the adorable troublemaking raccoon does NOT die and I'd have loved it, probably.)

[naomikritzer]

Also, according to a number of friends, the single grimmest Newbery medalist is "Out of the Dust," where the ACCIDENTALLY SETS HER MOTHER ON FIRE, killing both her mother and her unborn sibling.

That was in 1998! It didn't end in 1990!

[mrissa]

OH **I** EXPECT SURPRISE WWI. I EXPECT IT ALL THE TIME.

Do you want to know why? Because Lucy Maud Montgomery WARPED MY MIND or at least, y'know, shaped my childhood. Same deal, right?

[rachelmanija]

I genuinely learned a valuable lesson from that book. It was the first book I'd read that made me really understand the concept of "of its time" and "the past was a different place." Because I read it only after reading one zillion other books that either had the point "WWI was a hideous, pointless waste of life" or took that as a given.

[sheliak]

Afternoon of the Elves annoyed me so much as a kid! The way I remember it, the kids/YA section at the local library was divided into sci fi/fantasy and mundane problem novels (with a random smattering of comics later on). I loved the fantastic stuff, and hated the problem novels (... I may still be a tad suspicious of "realistic" literature as a result), so a problem novel masquerading as something I was interested in was basically made to frustrate me.

[toastykitten]

I remember my classmates begging the teacher, after books like Where The Red Fern Grows, for a happier book to read, instead. The next book, which I can't remember the name of, was about a family during wartime and nothing really happens, until the end, when you learn from inference that the older brother died in the war. And the mom just looks bravely on...

Our teacher must not have remembered the ending, because she was just like, "Oh well, at least it wasn't that sad."

[duskpeterson]

In other words, Newbery favors lit fic over genre fic. :/

"A Room Made of Windows" is wonderful! I read it a zillion times as a kid. Didn't like the others in the series as much, but I've been meaning to go back and reread them, in case I enjoy them more as an adult.

[conuly]

Oh, Afternoon of the Elves - she doesn't tell her mother. Her mother comes over one day to fetch her for dinner, shoves her way into the kitchen, sees that there is no furniture in there but the stove (carefully pushed into the middle of the room to provide warmth) and proceeds to, very efficiently, freak the hell out.

And then after everything is straightened and friend is shipped off to some other relatives, away from her mother (who is either physically or mentally ill, or both, and also shipped away) the whole world piles upon the protagonist to explain that her friend was really just using her the whole time.

[carbonel]

A few years ago I read all of the Julia Redfern books while doing a major Eleanor Cameron reread. I found them enjoyable albeit somewhat melancholy.

I *didn't* find the book that I thought was by Eleanor Cameron but turns out (probably) not to have been: a book told in diary form with drawn pictures of some artifacts. The major thing I remember is that she had a baby brother who died either very young or as a stillbirth, and during the course of the book, her mother has a baby and uses the same name, which upsets her somewhat.

[marjorie1170]

Oh my god, I loved Big Red, Irish, Red, and Outlaw Red. I feel like real Irish Setters I met were a little more hyper than those solid dog characters in his books. But I loved them. I remember (and god knows if this is right) that I found it quite profound that in two of the books, the Irish Setters were one-man dogs but in the third, the Irish Setter loved two men.

I associate the Red books with Jack London's Call of the Wild and White Fang, as well as some long-forgotten book by a long-forgotten author about a beloved (real life?) Newfoundland dog named Belle.

I also associate them with horse books like Green Grass of Wyoming and Thunderhead.

I am pretty sure (though not absolutely confident, as my memory of these books is pretty fuzzy at this point) that in none of them did the animals die, a la The Yearling or Old Yeller.

[sholio]

I am pretty sure (though not absolutely confident, as my memory of these books is pretty fuzzy at this point) that in none of them did the animals die, a la The Yearling or Old Yeller.

Agreed! I don't think I would have loved his books as much as I did if the animals tended to die, especially considering how clearly I remember the endings of books like Where the Red Fern Grows.

[full_metal_ox]

It wasn't a Newbery winner, but I've never forgiven Kit Reed's The Ballad of T.Rantula (1979): it's the story of three troubled teens who invent an imaginary friend-cum-patronus--a superpowered Alice Cooperesque glam-rocker called T.Rantula--and bond over this bandom of their own invention, gleefully composing T. Rantula's songs, designing his wardrobe, crafting his legend, and convincing their classmates of his existence (this is such a pre-Google story.)

Silly genre-blind me: I was hoping the kids were going to grow up to turn this concept into a real band. Here's how things actually went down, according to Kirkus Reviews:

--and (T.Rantula) first gets inside Futch's head when the kid has to cope with his parents' dopey and scary doings. (His weepy Mom has split for a ""creative"" commune to find herself.) But the one who really needs T. Rantula is Tig, who bears a horrible secret: his father is a homosexual who harasses students. So Tig evades his friends and spends all his time pounding around the school's running track, while Futch--and T. Rantula--lay traps to expose Tig's dad, that ""flashy cardboard bastard."" T. Rantula can't work miracles, however, and Tig dies with complications of anorexia; and Futch, grieving, at last brings his parents back to him in a fragile reunion.

Thanks for the sour persimmon, cousin.