All of a Kind Family, by Sydney Taylor

[rachelmanija]

This book was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, but I don't think I realized there were sequels.

It's about a Jewish family in New York in 1914 with five little girls two years apart. The oldest is twelve, and the youngest is four. It's a sweet, gentle book, filled with period atmosphere and kindness and relatable kid issues, from losing a library book to inexplicably refusing to eat soup you normally love. Upon re-reading, it had been visited by the opposite of the Suck Fairy - it was, if anything, even better than I remembered. The publication date is 1951 but it feels timeless. The illustrations are great too.

As a kid, I loved it for being that rare book about Jewish girls that was not about the Holocaust. Apart from being crushingly depressing, those books were not very relatable for an American Jewish girl in Los Angeles in the 70s-80s, especially since I didn't have Holocaust survivors in my family. But I completely related to being obsessed with books and dolls, getting lost in a crowd, being poor, and fighting and bonding with friends.

Recommended for literally anyone who wants something sweet, cozy, and domestic, without being saccharine. It's pure comfort reading, and I can't wait to get to the sequels. And if you know any little Jewish girls who haven't already read it, it would make a nice gift.

Thanks to Rosefox for reminding me to re-read this!

All-of-a-Kind Family (All-of-a-Kind Family Classics)

Comments

[conuly]

No, but you can use them similarly. Hence, every time I see a misplaced potato I just pretend the author knew better and meant to put in a turnip instead.

Edit: It's almost always potatoes, btw. Sometimes it's tomatoes or peppers - all nightshades, incidentally. I don't have convenient head-translations for tomatoes or peppers. They just fester in the back of my mind instead.

[rachelmanija]

How do you feel about potatoes in Lord of the Rings?

[mildred_of_midgard]

*waves hand like that kid in class*

Potatoes in LOTR are legit! Or at least retconnable.

Tolkien specifically has the Numenoreans bring tobacco back to Middle-earth from the New World, so it's entirely possible they did the same for potatoes. The only counterevidence (that I'm aware of) is that there are what *appear* to be potatoes in the First Age, but since they're only named "earth-bread", those could be something else, or they could be potatoes that came from the New World by another means.

[conuly]

Pales in comparison to the tobacco in same - another nightshade, incidentally.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Prologue to Lord of the Rings, "Concerning Pipeweed":

"[Hobbits] imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed or leaf, a variety probably of Nicotiana...All the same, observations that I have made on my own many journeys south have convinced me that the weed itself is not native to our parts of the world, but came northward from the lower Anduin, whither it was, I suspect, originally brought over Sea by the Men of Westernesse."

See also my comment directly above yours and how I think this might apply to potatoes as well.

[conuly]

Obvious retcon, but even the esteemed Tolkein didn't know everything.

[mildred_of_midgard]

He didn't, but most of his retcons, this one almost certainly included, were meant to remedy, not gaps in his factual knowledge, but changes in the type of story he was telling. I don't know at what point in his life he learned that potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco came from the New World, but the reason they were introduced in his story and then had to be retconned was that the setting had evolved to need a retcon.

There were a lot of other retcons he said he wished he could introduce, but it was too late, and others he was still struggling with at the end of his life. E.g., the map of Middle-earth doesn't match the map of Europe 6,000 years ago, but by the time he decided it should, it was far, far too late.

I suppose you could say his biggest knowledge gap was that when he started a story, he didn't know where it was going to end up.

[kore]

Did DWJ mention potatoes in her famous stew section of Tough Guide to Fantasyland? I forget.