oh my god The Daisy Chain

I have been ruining my eyesight over Charlotte Yonge's THE DAISY CHAIN for the last - not quite week. I started in earnest on Sunday, and just now (late thursday) finished. Oh my god - painful, painful reading.

Let's begin with the proliferation of Margarets. I understand why the name circulates, but it is BAD FORM to end up with five characters, several of them major characters, with the same name.

Then, we have Ethel and Norman, and Harry and Mary - I'm supposed to enjoy seeing these names? Yonge clearly lacked imagination because we also get a second Norman. crrrikey.

the prose reminds me of Oswald's attempts, in E. Nesbit's Bastable books, to write in flowery prose, of maidens and daisies and whatnot. it's not especially flowery, but something about it feel stilted and funny, like Oswald's take on it - this made me snicker. In my utter immaturity, and disgust at the book, I also enjoyed having a good snicker over the Mays' pet project, the village of Cocksmoor (heh heh - insert beavis & butthead laugh).

There is one nice bit about Tom and Mary - "it is a common saying that Tom and Mary made a mistake, that he is the girl and she the boy" (49). This bit of transgenderness crops up quite a lot - Tom ends up a very foppish Etonian, and Mary is a sweet but dullish roundfaced girl who dotes upon her seafaring brother (Harry). But throughout Mary yelps and plays and runs quite wild - very boylike - and Tom frets about the cut of his frock coats.

ugh. i deserve a real literary treat after this one - but what is next on the Reading List that fits the bill??? I wonder what i shall choose - stay tuned......

The cover of my edition refers to Yonge's "High Church Anglicanism" which is an understatement of the century. This book is manual to self-sacrificing religious zealotry, and it makes me ill. From the first pages when Ethel is not permitted to wear spectacles (because they'll weaken her eyes and are unbecoming), I hated this book. Ethel, extraordinarily poor-sighted, is then rebuked for squinting and holding texts and prints too near her face.

It's a book about erasing one's own needs and wants. Ethel makes the sacrifices so everyone else in her family can be happy. She swears never to let anyone or anything come between herself and her father (when she's like 18 years old - creepy, hi Freud!), and resigns herself, in conclusion, to a life of certain loneliness and solitude. She is happy to do this, though, because of her faith in god and afterlife.

in some ways, it's positively medieval - longing for, working towards and loving the thought of death, which will bring you to the glorious afterlife.

as a devout atheist, this was nauseating and depressing. it made me queasy and sad to think of dozens of girls renouncing their own happiness in sacrificing themselves for their families or husbands - with the weak claim that to do one's duty IS happiness.

bullshit.

my edition is 667 pages long, very, very small print. a tedious story, I'm glad it's over and I shudder to think of ever revisiting it. this book - its ideology - has made me very, very angry.

shiver me timbers!

That Robert Louis Stevenson is something else! I read TREASURE ISLAND for the first time way, way back at the start of my children's lit studies (fall term, 1998! my second year of undergrad!), and felt kind of alienated by it. I felt like I was a girlie-girl reading a Boy Book.

Nine years later, I think it's a fantastic awesome book and I'm loving it! I have about a chapter or two to go to fully finish it, but what a book! How piratey! The dead man-compass on Spyglass Hill! the Jolly Roger! Tipping the Black Spot! It's great. And having just read both Peter Pan and Swallows & Amazons, it's nice to refresh my frame of reference. Has there ever been a more peculiarly wonderful creepy character than the Sea-Cook?

Kidnapped kind of baffled me. I really enjoyed reading it - Stevenson sure knows how to tell a story. And I was curious to follow the plot - I was caught up in David's plight. But I felt that something much more significant was going on in the book, politically, than I could really keep up with. My Scottish history is truly abysmal - I have a very vague notion of bonny prince charlie and some connection to the French, but that's about it.
I wonder about Stevenson's decision to set his book during this time period, and what it means for his own times. Some kind of Scottish nationalism, I imagine, though truly, I don't know. I was expecting a much more ship-bound book; this tour of the heather was a surprise, but a pleasant one. I liked the feel the book had of being fog-bound in odd corners of a uncertain land - never knowing if friends or enemies were in the next village over. The Scots "dialect" Stevenson writes for his characters flummoxed me at times; my edition had only a very, very few notes to help the ignorant american reader with the terms and spellings. Despite that, I found it a thoroughly captivating book, and that is actually quite a compliment.

I'm not sure what I'll read to follow up on the excitement of Stevenson. I have some poetry - Lear's nonsense, and Belloc's cautionary poems - but even though I know I'll like them, I have a hard time really sticking with poetry. one or two at a time is enough for me.

I need to read the Pooh books, though, for the syllabus I'm planning AND for my project, so maybe I'll hit them next.......

But Treasure Island for sure is in my list of Must Reads as well as Must Haves. I don't own a copy of it, and this must be rectified! When I decide I need to own a book I've read, that is how you know it's a good book.

Tom Brown's Body lies a-mouldering in the grave...

FINALLY finished Tom Brown's Schooldays. ugh - what a waste of ink! My question now is: who actually READ that book? What was it's real appeal to child readers? I suppose the play and comraderie of school has its place in the child-reader's heart but the tone of the book is so preachy and nostalgic.

There's a strange moment more than halfway through, when Tom is "given" young Arthur to oversee and chum with. The narrator tells us how Tom feels maternal toward Arthur, and how he is teased by his friends, especially East (who sounds like a real asshole, if you ask me) for nursemaiding the delicate boy. It's a strange twist on a book that otherwise wants to concentrate on Real Boys (ones who crib and screw up lessons, ones who fight and excel at sports, especially that glorious game of cricket, ones who tease anyone who is different, ones who disobey their masters and only receive benevolent and mild reprimands for their sins). East and his chum dedicate a fair part of their lives to torturing the birds belonging to Martin, causing the death of at least one baby bird. This is all reported as good clean fun and innocent high spirits, but murdering vulnerable animals is pretty damn sick if you ask me.

I'm on to KIDNAPPED! now, and despite the bumps in the road with the Scottish "dialect" and expressions, it's not too shabby. I've got Treasure Island on deck as well - it's Boys' Books Week at my house, evidently. But that Robert Louis Stevenson does know how to tell a story, so I have high hopes for expeditious reading.

This is good because: I must finish The Subtle Knife for Thursday night's book group discussion, as well as read the first 100 pages or so of The Perks of Being a Wallflower for my class (as well as grade midterms).

and with that alarming reminder, back to the midterms!

Toby Tyler and the Boys' School Story

This weekend I read James Otis's Toby Tyler, or 10 Weeks with the Circus. I found it rather boring but it moved along reasonably quickly. My mother informs me that Disney made a live-action adaptation of this, which baffles me, since the original novel is pretty lame. I mean, the circus is a totally unglamourous place, Toby is an object of pity (an abject of pity!) as well as beaten every time he turns around. The most intriguing element of the novel to me is his friendship with the monkey, Mr Stubbs. There's a definite nod to evolution in the novel - something about recognizing Mr Stubbs as an ancestor. It's BAD evolution, or misunderstood at any rate, but it's still there, which I found interesting. Toby's relationship with Mr Stubbs is the most developed and intense relationship that he (Toby) has, despite the lame gesture at heterosexual coupling (with Ella/Mlle Jeannette, the little girl who performs as an equestrienne). The moralizing of the book was lame, naturally, and really sporadic. Toby's dialogue felt very unrealistic to me - it just felt stagey and fakey and weird. But the monkey was interesting, for sure.

I've finally gotten young Tom Brown to school, thank god, so that the Schooldays can commence. He's at Rugby, just finishing his first day, right now. I read - all right, skimmed - about six pages of small print, describing a foot-ball match in detail. UGH. I also feel like I'm reading another language - here's a sentence fragment I cannot comprehend:

they... "administer toco to the wretched fags nearest at hand; they may well be angry, for it is all Lombard Street to a china-orange that the School-house kick a goal with the ball touched in such a good place" (97).

HUNH???


there's more, too, of course. I'm snickering a little as I read, recalling the recently read (for the first time!) Diana Wynne Jones novel The Crown of Dalemark, and the scenes at Hildy's school which are laden with bafflingly incomprehensible school slang. The slang marks Mitt's distance from Hildy, but it also - now especially - seems like Jones's poke at the school culture.

anyway, the boys at Rugby are now drinking beer and singing good British songs ("British Grenadiers"!!) in the hall, so I had better go rejoin them.

I think this will be my new catchphrase: It's all Lombard Street to a china-orange!
(whatever that even means)

what katy did

I finished Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did yesterday. It was readable - unlike a certain Tom Brown's Schooldays - but what a dreadful message! Girls: become crippled invalids and Angels of the House! Yay! what a thing to aspire to. Pain is a great teacher! wow! I wish *I* could hurt my spine and not be able to leave my room for four years, just so I can be the Heart of the House!

yeeeeesh.

The most interesting thing to me about this book were Dorry - the effeminate little boy - and John, the butch little girl (Joanna). Coolidge actually write that it seems that Dorry was a girl put in boys' clothing, and Johnnie was a boy put in a dress. YAY for transkids! They grow out of it, alas. Also: Johnnie has a "doll" that is actually a small chair. It's named Pikery, and she nurses it and gives it medicine and dresses it.

I haven't a clue what to do with Pikery but I think it's awesome.

The Project Revue!

As part of my PhD program, I have to do this Project. It is a big ole project, in place of comprehensive exams. I have set an impossible reading list for myself (301 titles altogether, fiction and critical).

This past week - my spring break - I made it through four novels. Brief review of the four:

King Solomon's Mines (H. Rider Haggard). Somehow, I'd never read this before, though I've read so much critical work on it and other empire texts that I might as well have. Definitely terrible! but interestingly homoerotic - so much time spent describing the massive mighty bodies of the Kukuanas and Sir Henry, not to mention the beautiful white legs of Captain Good. I had quite a hard time reading about the slaughter of animals - elephants and sable antelope. 10,000 "savages" get killed off, too, after the white folk stir up a coup. Glad I read it, glad it's done.

Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome). I had high hopes for this one, not sure why. I enjoyed reading it, but didn't love it - the sailing talk just bored me. And I don't know a halyard from a belaying pin, so I was lost for a lot of the techincal passages (and golly, there were a lot of them. Moby-Dick for the early 20th century child reader!). I DID appreciate the lack of sentimentality and nostalgia in the book; the kids are presented on their own terms, no condescension, no nostalgia. Highly unlikely I'll read the whole series of Swallows and Amazons books anytime soon - I can wait - but I wouldn't mind checking them out during some summer vacation. Made me want to go to camping near a lake.

The House of Arden (E. Nesbit). One of the few Nesbit texts I HAVEN'T read, this one was pretty good and strange and wondrous. I didn't love it as much as I loved the Psammead books, but it was still quite good. The names of the children - Edred and Elfrida - were sort of off-putting, but this was still classic Nesbit, and therefore better than most books written for anyone.

The Scarlet Pimpernel (Baroness Orczy). I don't know why I put this on my reading list, except it seemed important. I wish someone had stopped me. DREADFUL! book!! Pro-aristocracy in a hideously snobby way, wildly anachronistic and historically off (how much duelling went on in 1790s England? I don't know, but swords don't come up much in Austen novels!). It was treacly and sentimental and i figured out very soon who the Pimpernel was. The characters were implausible - that Marguerite was intolerable! - and the anti-republican slurs remarkable. It was also just kind of a boring book.

Now I'm on to Tom Brown's Schooldays, and I wish old Thomas Hughes would quit babbling and get to the damn STORY already. Gad! I KNOW everything has gone to the dogs since he was a boy - let's move ON, already! But it is nice to have proof that everyone always thinks the younger generation are a bunch of good-for-nothings who have lost the true ways.

I'm also re-re-re-reading Peter Pan, which happily is on my reading list as well as being the book I'm teaching right now. Every line of that book is just loaded; it's hard to choose out what to focus on in class. Each re-read of Peter Pan makes me feel even more desperately sad for James Barrie. I wish I could give him a transhistorical hug.

ET

I just watched ET because I plan to show it to my class (I want to think about child-as-innocent, child-as-alien/alien-as-child). I cried.

My first viewing of ET was as a barely-three-year old, when it was released in the theatre. This was roughly a month or so after my grandfather passed away. From the moment ET falls ill all the way through the credits and beyond, I sat on my dad's lap and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It turned into dry heaving sobs. Everyone in the theatre was concerned about me. People stopped on their way out to make sure I was okay.

My mom thinks this film triggered emotions around my grandfather's death, and that was my way of dealing with his death.
She could be right.

All I know is NOW I have my grandfather's death firmly linked with ET. And so tonight as I screened the film I cried my fool eyes out.

This may be one of the best films about death I have ever seen.

How's that for a college class: Death!
proposed texts:
ET
Big Fish (Tim Burton)
The Lovely Bones
The Amber Spyglass
"The Body" by Stephen King
Corpse Bride
(okay, almost anything from the Tim Burton oeuvre)
something by Edgar Allan Poe

wow, what a great class that would be.

boys in tights in tutus....

Friday night I went to see the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's performance of PETER PAN. Despite having written my master's thesis on Pan, along with a number of smaller papers - I have never seen any kind of live production of the story. So despite not feeling overly enthused about a Pan ballet, I went.
(The Benedum center where the ballet is performed is EXQUISITE, incidentally, and was almost the highlight of my night).

I was encouraged when I opened my program to see that the choreographer is Septime Webre, the man who brought me this year's Washington Ballet version of The Nutcracker (which I saw, and LOVED).

But the ballet was uncompelling, and I'm not sure this is Septime Webre's fault. What makes Barrie's play/novel interesting to me - and so interesting, moving, dark and funny - is NOT the plot; it's the stage directions, the narrator's asides. The ballet, of course, being wordless, strips out all of this oddness and leaves us with only the bare bones of the story which - to tell you the truth - is not too compelling.

The ballet opens on a tediously long scene in the Darlings' nursery, with unspectacular choreography for the whole family - including one clever/creepy bit in which Wendy and her mother mirror each other's steps around Mr Darling. Nana is played by a dancer in a dog costume. John needed a shave, and Michael looked creepy in large-sized sleeper pajamas.
Eventually, Tinkerbell, in the form of a spotlight, turns up and flits around to what sounds like a cellphone ring tone. I sighed. The music for this was swoopy and treacly and canned - no live orchestra - and made me want to vomit. Imagine a cross between a Disney soundtrack, a bad John Williams score with a little hoked-up Gershwinian freneticness thrown in, and you've almost got it.

Peter flies up into the window, hurrah for theatrical technology. A long strange sequence of Peter and his black sheer fabric shadow. Eventually, after much awkward and ill-disguised rigging (the dancers backed into the curtains at the nursery window to be hitched into their flying apparatus) the children fly off to neverland.

which is represented by a series of filmstrip-like rudimentary cartoons of a receding view of London.

sigh again.

Neverland. blah blah Lost Boys including three lost girls (which irked me badly). Wendy is shot and dangles to the stage, looking frighteningly like she's been hanged, and is twisting at the end of a rope, rather than simply falling from the sky.
Instead of causing Wendy to be shot, Tink (now a full-fledged ballerina) twinkles around preciously and revives her. Three cheers.

Various divertissement from Lost Kids and Pirates. Hook was quite dashing and made me think of Jack Sparrow. Hook, textually, has always been a bit of a dandy, a bit queer, to my mind - seeing the Sparrowesque treatment made me think perhaps Johnny Depp wasn't being quite so original in his vision of Jack Sparrow afterall.

The showstealer - the Crocodile - appears. A dancer in quite an awesome croc suit, the Crocodile slithers on stage to a vaguely disco beat (plus the ticking clock). eventually, he becomes bipedal and rocks out some great little hip-hop/disco dance steps. Everyone laughed and applauded uproariously.

The second showstealer - the Indian maids (dressed weirdly in red with what looked like waitress aprons) did a GORGEOUS piece with good music. Tiger Lily, performed by one of the principal dancers, was wonderful. I was pleased as well because, other than being marked in the program as "Indian maids" there was virtually NOTHING about their costume or dance that was "indian." This is good because the Indian sequence of Pan is often a big fat offensive mass of nasty stereotypes. But Tiger Lily's choreography was beautiful, beautiful - and also repeated a wonderful combination that Webre used in the "arabian" divertissement of his Nutcracker (which, incidentally, also used native americans instead of 'arabians').

Happily sighing over this bit of beauty - the score here was lovely as well - I was vastly disappointed with everything else except the crocodile. Peter puts on a fluffy tutu and veil and dances in drag with Hook to get Tiger Lily free. This was great because it got at some of the utter queerness and unfathomableness of Barrie's original, but it was also sort of overdetermined and creepy to see (I found the ballet's Peter quite disturbing to look at, regardless of costume).

Intermission. Many children in the audience rush to the lobby to have stuffed animals bought for them.

Resume ballet. Extraordinarily drawn out and uninteresting Pirate Dancing on the ship. Undercutting the earlier queerness of the first Pirate dance number, we now have Pirate Wenches boozing it up. boring.
the kids are kidnapped.
Michael is forced to walk the plank, and reappears moments later riding the back of the Crocodile, doing the john travolta "eyes" move from Pulp Fiction. the two boogie across stage, discoing off into the sunset.
Peter shows up in time to rescue wendy. flitting around. Fight sequence. Peter does a few flips in midair (thanks, harness!) which get a lot of applause. Hook is eventually vanquished. This is represented with the final awesome bit -

Hook and the Crocodile dance together. Not just any dance - they do a modified TANGO. it was great - really brilliant.

but it's time for the little Darlings to fly away home, so Peter sends them on their way. Now we get another tediously long and boring sequence in the Darling home. Peter sways back and forth outside the window, clearly unable to control his flying apparatus. he looks very peculiar and pendulumic as he ticks back and forth.
All the Darlings but Wendy exit, I'm not sure why, because Wendy only does a few lame steps before also vanishing offstage after clasping her hands to her bosom and gazing halfway toward the window (through which Peter Pendulum is ticking).

Show's over.

The Crocodile got the most applause. Tiger Lily got the second most. I gave her a standing ovation, because her dance was truly exquisite.

Lesson learned: the story of Peter Pan is not very interesting, and makes for poor ballet theatre.

The Pgh Ballet announced though, that next spring, they will have the North American premiere of ALICE IN WONDERLAND. I will attend. I think Alice should translate significantly better to a wordless stage, provided the choreography and sets are done right.

the first world war

An absence I have only recently (as in, the last 48 hours) started thinking about: WHERE or WHAT are the children's books about or written during the first world war??? I can think of, off the top of my head, quite a number of children's texts of the holocaust/second world war, but the first world war?????

Since I'm in the middle of putting together the bibliography for my PhD Project (material culture of childhood), I've been going through my Oxford Companion to Children's Lit, page by page, looking out significant texts. I've started keeping an eye out for books of the first world war, and I haven't really come up with much. Sir Hugh Walpole wrote a series of books (Jeremy is the first) in the late teens and early 20s (I checked Jeremy out of the library today - it was published in 1917), but other than that I'm coming up empty.

There's Barrie's novelization of Peter Pan in 1911; there's Milne's Pooh books in 1926. what came in between?

a quick, superficial google search of children's literature and world war one turned about very, very little; though I found one woman's blog that suggests she is working on a Lion & the Unicorn on children's lit & WWI. i should really get a subscription to lion & the unicorn....

anyway, i've gotten extremely curious about the first world war, and I have a number of histories out from the library. but i'm even MORE curious about this absence of children's texts - it needs looking into!

ouch!

I'm trawling through the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, trying to assemble a comprehensive bibliography for my PhD project, and I came across an entry that sums up the writer's work: "Her books are sentimental and poorly written."

ouch!

what a way to be remembered.....

a tidal wave of new books!

this fall has been a good time for me with new books - new releases, that is. The three of MAJOR significance:

Hilary McKay's Caddy Ever After
Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg
Lemony Snicket's final Unfortunate Events book, THE END.


I was delirious to see The Pinhoe Egg in the bookstore when I went in search of the McKay book. Somehow, I missed the news that a new DWJ book was coming out - it was a total surprise. Though I rarely buy new or hardback books, I snapped this one up in an instant. I felt SO decadent bringing the Jones and Mckay books to the register, along with three other first-in-series that I was buying for a friend's birthday (The first Bartimaeus, the first Stravaganza and the first Charlie Bone).

The Pinhoe Egg is another Chrestomanci book, but this one picks up where Charmed Life ended (well, roughly a year later). Cat is, once again, a primary character, along with Marianne Pinhoe, a girl from a neighboring village with enchantress-level magical gifts, and a very odd, secretive and nasty family, all of whom work with "the craft."

I think I will need several re-reads before I love this book; it's got some wonderful moments, and Cat is an outstanding character (and really true to his original character in Charmed Life). I've come to love Conrad's Fate, though the first time or two through I was skeptical. So though right now I am not especially raving about The Pinhoe Egg, I feel fairly sure I will come to like it more. And ANYthing by Diana Wynne Jones is about 10 times better than most every other book.

I found myself recognizing bits of magic from other DWJ books - there's a griffin (Dark Lord of Derkholm and Year of the Griffin - I'd love another book about those characters, incidentally); there are "hidden folk" of the land, and a number of earth or land-magics (dwimmer seems to be the term here), as well as some ancient magical history that reminded me VERY strongly of The Merlin Conspiracy. It doesn't feel at all like Jones is ripping herself off, or even recycling in a lazy or sloppy way; let's face it, griffins are pretty compelling characters to work with. I still can't clearly picture griffins in my imagination, but that's no fault of Jones's; I just cannot SEE a talking "human" bird/lion mix. It's the beak, I think, that perplexes me.

One slight quibble with Jones's books: her main characters always turn out to have insanely enormous amounts of magical talent. enchanter standard, all around. I do wonder what it would be like to have a main character who had only moderate quantities of magic.

There are some deliriously good touches in The Pinhoe Egg - Nutcase the cat (Jones does animals like no one I've ever read), the transformation of Woods House (those blue and green and white tiles....), the househobs, Jane James, and Irene - are all marvellous. Jason Yeldham, the herbalist, is also a great character, and makes me wonder if perhaps another book about Jason will appear - his travels around the Related Worlds gathering plants would make an AWESOME magical travelogue.

And Gammer's madness is hysterical. "Utterly dolphined" may be my new favorite sentence in any book.

As with any Diana Wynne Jones book: HIGHLY, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

R.A.B, yeah yeah

It's not much of a revelation to "speculate" that R.A.B. (the Horcrux-thief of book six) is Regulus Black, Sirius's brother (who was murdered by Voldemort 15 years before, aka the year Harry was born).

but i'm re-re-reading Order of the Phoenix, since HP is my comfort reading, and most of my other books are packed away for the move, and when the Gang cleans out the drawing room in Grimmauld Place, they remove (and presumably, throw out) a "heavy locket that none of them could open."

Merope is described as wearing a "heavy gold locket" that we know is Slytherin's.

So did HP and friends throw out the Horcrux? or maybe Kreacher nicked it from the rubbish sack??


More importantly, why do I spend so much time speculating about such things? I don't care nearly as much about what happens in the final book of The Series of Unfortunate Events (although i DO care quite a lot, and I'm eager for October 13 to roll around!), or what happens next in the Charlie Bone books (which I thought were sort of mediocre).

spells, spells, everywhere!

I'm waiting....

to get over my latest Harry Potter phase. I always get thoroughly Pottered when major disruptions, like moving, occur. I don't know why this is.

I'm mildly obsessed with Slughorn, and I'm quite eager to see what Rowling does with him in the final book. I've chosen Luna Lovegood as my in-book counterpart (well, I did that ages ago - she's the character I most identify with).

I've re-read Half-Blood Prince twice in a week, and I - like every other person on earth - am wondering about Snape. What strikes me on these read-throughs is Snape's insistence - repeated insistence - that Harry not call him a coward. To me, this gives me a smidge of evidence that Snape is really on "our" side after all, that perhaps he is doing something desperately brave but must be misread as cowardly by everyone.

*** Aside from Pottering, I've been giving loads of brain-time to my Lilo & Stitch paper (unwritten, but in mind for years now). I'm seriously contemplating writing up a proposal and sending it off to the modern critical approaches conference (Middle Tennessee State, sponsor). UC Knoepflmacher is keynote speaker, and it would be fantastic to see him. I'd REALLY like to get another conference paper under my belt (so to speak) in the next year or so. and I'd like to hit the ChLA conference next summer as well, even if I don't present. Perhaps I'll be able to wrangle a bit of cash to get to that...Norfolk isn't THAT far from Pittsburgh, especially since I have friends in the DC area with whom I could stay to break it up.

Over on child_lit, a conversation about child prodigies has erupted, with some attention going to a person called Adora. Because I am largely out of the mainstream-media loop, I hadn't heard of her before, and after viewing this website, I feel both ill and angered.

I HATE trick children. Hate them. Not them, so much as the adults around them who put them on display. I haven't read any of this girl's writing, but I'm willing to accept that she has some talent, maybe even a lot of it. But her website is written in the third-person "Precocious and curious Adora!" who loves to help. Contact her for free editing! for advice on how to teach (THIS i have real issues with, for a variety of reasons). It sounds more like a product is being shilled, than a girl is being praised.

Her name is alarming, too; even a totally uninspiring, mediocre child named Adora would bring on my gag reflexes, but a child meant to be admired and - yes - adored for her precocity being named Adora? Ugh.

Okay. I just listened/watched a snippet of some morning show reading Adora's work, and I'm unimpressed. all her characters "said" their dialogue, but the presenters were just as awful and patronizing.

Adora's main skill seems to be typing fast - 60 words a minute!- and we "watch her go" on national tv.

exploited kid....I wonder what the scoop on her parents is?

horace slughorn, and who is harry potter?

I'm moving soon - a Real Moving Castle around these parts - and somehow, the stress and insecurity of moving always triggers my Harry Potter reflex. I re-read Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince in the last few days, acquiring some new appreciation for both texts.

I still think HBP is a bit of a scam; so much backstory, in dragged-out detail; do we really need to revisit all of Dumbledore's memories along with Harry? The "point" of those memories could have easily been narrated in abou six pages, instead of 100. It felt at first reading, and still feels, a bit of a cop-out.

I've become interested in places where Rowling gives us a bit of complexity - Snape being the obvious locus of this. But Horace Slughorn is becoming a much, much more interesting character to me, and I am very curious to see what, if anything, will become of him in the final volume.

The most interesting thing about Slughorn is that we finally get a decent Slytherin, instead of the unqualified evil, nasty and cruel Slytherin students. Ambition is one of the defining characteristics of Slytherin, and Slughorn has ambition in spades, though it is that power-string-pulling, backseat ambition (this description makes Slughorn sound like a much more benevolent Karl Rove, actually). But Slughorn's ambition is not for evil, or even bad; it's self-serving, but it's obvious to me, anyway, that Slughorn isn't entirely selfish. He wins students over, handpicking those he likes, but in a way, doesn't Dumbledore do something similar? or even Hagrid? Slughorn's vain in a very stereotypically insecure way; he boasts about his connections to make himself look special and strong. But he only uses those connections to help other handpicked students, or to get pretty small-time perks for himself. a hamper from honeydukes? tickets to Quidditch? candied pineapple? these are hardly criminal activities. There's a thread of anti-fat prejudice in Slughorn's characterization, really.

Even his "preference" for pure-bloods isn't quite real; it seems more a generalization based on experience (limited or narrow-minded experience, but not really prejudiced or nasty). He has a real horror of the practice of Dark Arts, it seems; he acknowledges, in giving the sluggish memory to Harry, that he fears he did something very very bad in discussing Horcruxes with Tom Riddle. Slughorn has conscience, which seems to be utterly lacking in the Slytherin camp at large. And I think he does have general goodwill towards most people. He isn't interested in collecting less impressive students, but neither does he wish them ill.

And I feel like there is real friendship between him and Dumbledore; somehow, the first chapter in which we meet him ( "Horace Slughorn") makes me feel like he and Dumbledore used to sit around the fire in comfy armchairs, shooting the shit and taking the piss out of each other over fine oak-matured mead.

My final question, or issue, is that I feel like Harry is weirdly undeveloped. I feel like I don't know anything about him, who he is. This could simply be from re-reading so many times, but he feels weirdly flat, somehow. Or rather, he lacks interiority. I guess because of the third-person narration, I don't feel along with Harry; his emotional and interior life is reported upon, but not really engaged and made visible, made palpable, to the reader. He likes treacle tart, and going to the Burrow, and Ginny, Ron and Hermione. He cares about Quidditch (but why?). One thing that has always troubled me is the way he put all his emotional stock in Sirius, leaving Lupin utterly aside, even after book three, in which Lupin (I think, anyway) formed more of a connection with him than Sirius did.

so i feel like, though I can predict Harry's behaviors, I don't really know him. It's a weird phenomenon for me, not having a sense of who he is outside of his actions. He's an extrovert, I suppose, or at least i experience him as such.

Anyway: Books five and six are good, getting better with re-readings, and I especially like Book Five, I've discovered, because so much of it takes place in the Wizarding world outside of Hogwarts, which has to me always been the place where Rowling really shines imaginatively.

Montmorency (spoilers, sorry)

Prowling the wonderful Carnegie library in oakland, I stumbled across Eleanor Updale's Montmorency series .

Since the books seemed to combine two of my favorite things - children's books and Victoriana - I figured I should give them a try.

I've read the first three - Montmorency, Montmorency on the Rocks and Montmorency and the Assassins now, and I have to admit I am not sure how to feel. Updale is a better storyteller than she is writer, but even her storytelling is a bit rocky. The Montmorency books are peculiar in that they are children's books with no major young characters. This is not a flaw, incidentally.

The first book is fairly straightforward - Montmorency is a released thief who uses knowledge of the newly-constructed london sewers to steal a fortune, then give up a life of crime for a life of high society living. Along the way he is caught up in schemes, plots and international affairs with some prominent and titled friends. He develops a love of opera and amazing acting and impersonation skills; he is especially noted for his ability to transform himself from a gentleman to a poor man.

Then it gets weird (SPOILERS). In Montmorency on the Rocks, Our Hero has acquired an opium habit, and much of the book is spent trying to kick the habit. weird enough, but we also get Vi Evans as a more central character. Vi is the daughter of Montmorency's old slum landlady, and, like the landlady herself, quite clearly a prostitute. Why three gentlemen, one a lord, would be seen freely in public with a prostitute is a bit unclear (and strikes me as unlikely). But the real stumper comes in the last page or two of the book, when Vi announces that she's pregnant. perhaps needless to say, she is unmarried. This is scandalous for the 1880s, though not uncommon.

Book Three jumps us ahead about 13 years, which is also strange. Vi's son is 12 or so, and does not know who his father is. But all three central male characters (Montmorency, Lord George Fox-Selwyn and Doctor Farcett) believes himself to be the father. This means old Vi's been going at it with all three, which is rather racy in a book shelved in the children's room. More importantly to me, liaisons between Vi and any of the men were not hinted at in the slightest in the preceeding book. This is shoddy storytelling.

I also object to Updale's free hand with historical accuracy. For sure, she has a good grip on some aspects - the installation of the London sewers, various historical and political events, but the dialogue and, more significantly, relationships between characters seem wholly anachronistic. Everything to do with Vi Evans, even her name (which is Violet - the men call her Vi from the beginning, which is simply poor manners, even with a prostitute - she should be called Miss Evans) - reeks of the twentieth century.

The writing is tiresome at times; Updale is not a master of her craft. But I've found myself wanting to know what will happen next (and I see at amazon that the fourth book has already been published), and so I suppose I'll see this series through. I'm curious about reception by a child audience; the vaguely Sherlock Holmes/Victorian quality of the books could be equally repelling and attractive. The content - the opium addiction, this peculiar Vi, the political intrigue, which comes off as a stuffy, conservative Rule Britannia nationalism - may or may not be engaging for a kid, although that is always a secondary concern for me.

It's a shame, because in a lot of ways the original premise of the first book had a lot of potential. In more skillful hands, it could have been quite an astonishing series.

new home!

This is the new home of my children's lit blogging.....it was time for a change for a number of reasons. I'm also hoping to use this space more effectively and more frequently, especially as I really begin working on my PhD project. for now, this is where my moving castle has drifted.


(the title of the blog should be obvious to children's lit readers - after my favorite book, Diana Wynne Jones's amazing, amazing Howl's Moving Castle )