Fantasy: Seven Tears Into the Sea

On August 31, 2019September 6, 2019 By nymithIn American writers, Fantasy Fiction, Mermaids, Selkies and Others, Romance, Set in California, U.S. States, Young Adult1 Comment

I was not originally planning to review very much young adult fantasy (or modern young adult in general) on the Castle, given how massively popular the speculative genres are right now, and given that a little over half of the readers of young adult books are adults themselves, who probably aren’t looking for a Parental Guide to Throne of Glass and the like. However, I have started to notice that almost all of the fantasy books being recommended to teens and getting discussed on YouTube are extremely modern, always post-Twilight, with the entirety of the post-Potter boom somehow forgotten about. This is strange, and a little disconcerting to be honest – I really thought writers of Patricia McKillip’s and Terry Pratchett’s caliber were sure to live on in YA memory. Guess not.

Meanwhile, the very conceit of this blog is that it’s for parents or planning-to-be-parents who want to construct a youth library at home, rather than trust modern libraries to do the job for them. As such, there’s no reason not to care about what’s in the books your eventual teenagers will be reading. So I will be reviewing books for teens in the same fashion as books for younger kids.

Thank you and on to the review…

Title: Seven Tears Into the Sea
Author: Terri Farley (1950-)
Original Publication Date: 2005
Edition: Simon Pulse (2005), 279 pages
Genre: Fantasy. Romance.
Ages: 15-17
First Sentence: This is what it’s like to be crazy.

Everyone knows which novel swept the young adult world in 2005 (Twilight) and every young adult fantasy fan who cares about good writing, creative plots and believable characters knows that this book essentially ruined the genre, both by turning romance into a prerequisite (and people act like it’s a surprise boys don’t read) and incidentally creating the “Bella Swan backlash” that led to YA being flooded with sexually active assassin chick role models to compensate. Sadly, a far worthier alternative with a better take on paranormal romance was published that same year, a short standalone novel whose supernatural love interest was not a literal predator, whose heroine did not treat her humanity like last year’s shoes and whose author actually knew the meaning of the term “star-crossed.” While not a masterpiece, Seven Tears Into the Sea quietly offers some surprisingly good themes and a very pleasant atmosphere.

At ten years old, Gwen Cooke sleepwalked into the ocean and was rescued by a strange boy who vanished after whispering a mysterious poem in her ear:

Beckon the sea,
I’ll come to thee…
Shed seven tears,
Perchance seven years…

The incident became the focal point of small town gossip and her parents soon decided to move away and start fresh. Now, seven years later, Gwen returns to Mirage Beach to see her grandmother and find out the truth of her supposed hallucination. The truth turns up soon enough in the form of a cute guy named Jesse and Gwen has to fight rationality when all the evidence indicates that Jesse is a selkie.

https://ak7.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/3846677/thumb/1.jpg — The stormy coastline of northern California.

It’s a little bit unusual to find the selkie legend transplanted to the Pacific but what could have been a disaster was rather cleverly utilized. Sea lions replace seals and the coast of northern California is suitably rocky and fog-bound, but what really makes it work is the clash of the old world and the new, ancient and modern ways of living. Gwen has the old country in her blood and in her red hair but like most modern people she’s been taught not to care. I wasn’t playing dress-up for the tourists, she thinks. Fantasy stories often have an initiation aspect, where the experience the main character has is impossible to share with the friends left behind and the same is true of this story, with tensions between Gwen and her city friends reaching a boil when the latter show up unexpectedly at the Summer Solstice celebrations.

Seven Tears is rather short on plot, compensating with leisurely charm. The second half of the book opens each chapter with an entry from a sea garden guide Gwen is creating, to wit:

Wild Western Thimbleberry
(Rubus parviflorus)
Velvety pink berries, dark green leaves, and cautioning spines mark this woodsy berry. Cousin to the blackberry, it may live at the shore, in red-wood forests, and on the High Sierra, but deprived of moisture it will sicken and die. Thimbleberry wine is nectar to fairies, and herbal lore praises the thimbleberry for shielding the virtuous. Running through a thimbleberry thicket is rumored to dispel illness, while a sip of thimbleberry tea returns evil to those who wish it on others.

The Sea Horse Inn, run by Gwen’s grandmother Nana, hosts a proper tea. “Be certain you have your caddy spoons, mote spoons, serving plates, sugar tongs, cream pitcher…” Nana keeps a scrying glass in her pocket and tells folk tales to the guests. One of the locals plays the bagpipe. Gwen brings her cat to the cottage and protects the swallows’ nest above her porch door. The book is full of nice things, culminating again with Midsummer Eve, and because of this the pacing is unexpectedly languid. It’s as close as paranormal romance can get to regular slice-of-life, almost a seamless merger of genres. I expect this would frustrate a lot of fantasy fans, as there is no real magic to be found until the very end of the book. However, for readers more willing to put aside expectations, they’ll find the lifestyle Gwen is introduced to on Mirage Beach as lovely as a Pinterest board. I think that still counts as escapism.

Then everyone hushed at the bagpipes’ skirl.
Red wore a tartan kilt and a plaid fastened at his left shoulder. It was easy to overlook his knobby old-man knees and everyday orneriness while he played. He cradled the leather bag as if it were a child, and though I doubt anyone knew the song, they watched, faces turned amber by firelight, falling under a spell.

https://i0.wp.com/elelur.com/data_images/mammals/california-sea-lion/california-sea-lion-04.jpg — A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus).

Jesse should really be at the center of this narrative but I find little to say about him because he’s rather thinly sketched. To begin with his attention is played for menace: His eyes darted past me, as if he’d block my escape. … He stood slowly, staying entirely too close. … He tossed out the words like a lure. He’s secretive about his life and he’s been seen with the wrong crowd but it’s all a red herring because this image of a dark, menacing lover from the ancient folktales turns out to be merely Gwen’s preconception. Being a selkie, Jesse is actually just a simple soul who likes to eat raw seafood and is bothered by enclosed spaces. And because Farley clearly loves animals he’s also a peaceful child of nature who wouldn’t hurt a living thing (although he’s a dab hand in a fistfight and, incidentally, a carnivore). This all makes for a neat subversion of the standard brooding hero with a dark past that crops up almost automatically in stories of this type but it ends up being less than satisfying because he doesn’t really have a past at all. It doesn’t help that the timeframe for this epic love story is one week. That was a hard sell even for Shakespeare.

Since Jesse is not dangerous and Gwen’s fear of inciting old gossip is revealed to be an empty worry, a villain is provided in the form of Zack McCracken, who looked like a young Brad Pitt who’d been living behind one of those dumpsters for a week and decided to crawl out for a joint. There is no love triangle here, nor hint of one. Zack belongs on a fishing boat but the fish are gone and as such he’s deteriorated into a full-time thug. As nice as the beachside appears, the scene isn’t fully set until Nana finally takes a reluctant Gwen to the local town of Siena Bay:

“Siena Bay has changed a lot, hasn’t it?” Nana asked, as if she’d noticed my head swinging around, taking it all in. “The Chamber of Commerce tries to keep the atmosphere of an old fishing village but-“
I followed Nana’s gesture and focused beyond the booths.
I remembered coming down to the docks at dawn with Mom. She’d buy me hot chocolate from Sal’s Fish and Chips, which was the only thing open that early. We’d watch sun-browned men shout and sling around nets before putting off into the turquoise water.
Now, though the nautical decorations remained, they draped a dozen places I could find in the Valencia mall.
“Someone must still fish,” I insisted.
“They try,” Nana allowed. “In fact, most of them still put out to sea every morning, but they have to supplement.”
Supplement? Was that a nice word for welfare? Or something shady? Nana had said the gang in town was made up of fishermen’s sons with nothing to do.
“They say it’s fished out and blame the sea lions and tourists,” Nana went on. “I blame it on pollution and the industrial fisheries, but not many listen to an old woman. I’m glad we’re up the coast a ways.”

With the setting so strongly emphasised throughout, the above passage must be seen as of key importance. The coastal way of life is dying, replaced by global tourism (guests at the inn are portrayed as a rather pointless bunch, with Tolkien enthusiasts and unhappily married couples) and this culture clash plays right into the Midsummer Eve celebration and the choices Gwen makes that directly impact the tragic ending, as Gwen sees the look on Jesse’s face. Anger wouldn’t have surprised me, or even sadness, but he looked as if I’d given up our very last night together.

https://www.bookpeople.com/sites/bookpeople.com/files/TerriFarleycrop%284%29.jpg — Terri Farley.

Seven Tears Into the Sea is a good example of young adult fantasy, written right before the Twilight boom solidified all the cliches it’s now hard to avoid in paranormal romance. The novel also feels very personal. Terri Farley has otherwise kept to the topic of horses in all of her works, specializing in romantic “girl and her horse” series for pre-teen girls, both in the Phantom Stallion series (I read 15 of those books back in the day) and its spin-off Wild Horse Island. Seven Tears Into the Sea stands out as a unique entry in her catalogue and, given that it came out right alongside Twilight, it can’t claim to be influenced by that runaway success. In other words, Farley must have felt a strong compulsion to break form and write this story.

The writing is simple but fairly solid, with a well-rendered atmosphere and an effective example of present tense usage in the opening flashback, with the rest of the novel conveyed in the traditional past tense. This lends immediacy to Gwen’s memory of nearly drowning and keeps the rest of the novel from feeling like a wannabe movie script. The biggest flaws are the rushed ending and lack of developed subplots, but it’s a good choice for those readers who enjoy a cozy seaside atmosphere alongside their doomed romance. If you’re planning to read it yourself, you should stop here. Otherwise, spoilers below.

https://media.mnn.com/assets/images/2016/06/midsummer-bonfire.jpg.990x0_q80_crop-smart.jpg — A Midsummer bonfire.

On the night of Midsummer’s Eve, there are bonfires to jump over, music and dancing, and games meant to single out the King and Queen of Summer. The locals takes pride in Gwen and Jesse’s accomplishment and there’s the sense of a growing bond not just between the two of them but also between them and the whole town. This is exactly what the ancient festivals were built to do: strengthen the bonds of family, friends, community and the new young couples that carry the future.

Then a voice sliced through the magic.

Gwen’s two city friends crash the festival, Mandi drunk and slutting around, Jill detached and critical of her surroundings, both demanding Gwen leave her Midsummer’s Eve coronation and return to the “real world” with them. Depressingly, her sense of obligation makes her do what they want – and Terri Farley portrays this as a horrible choice. At three thirty in the morning I was sprawled on my couch, eating pizza I didn’t want, with guests I didn’t welcome. Gwen washes the seawater from her hair and changes from her Midsummer dress into fresh jeans and a sweatshirt. Hungover Mandi tries to give her a bleach makeover and sarcastic Jill starts psychoanalyzing her new relationship. Her cat is victimized because the girls foolishly let Zack into the cottage in Gwen’s absence. Jesse then steps in to confront Zack – which leads to a mortal wound, sharks in the water, storms, magic and farewells. All this instead of watching the fires burn low and seeing the sun come up on Midsummer morn. For want of a nail… Gulls banked and cried, scolding me for not observing at least one Midsummer morn tradition. I was Queen, after all.

The resolution to the threat of Zack feels rushed and I believe Farley made a mistake by keeping Gwen away from the action, instead leaving readers with a fragmentary, secondhand account of violence on a boat and a shark attack. Without seeing any of it, this portion of the story lacks dramatic heft. Gwen heals Jesse via some mystical bond they have that was only briefly hinted at, finally acquiring proof that selkies are real just in time for the truth to hit her: Jesse can only return to the shore every seven years. Here we get what the story has been building to, and it’s a worthy payoff because Terri Farley won’t cheat her way to a happy ending. Gwen is stricken. “That would mean, after this summer, I’d be twenty-four before I saw you again. Then, thirty-one-” I kept counting on my fingers -“thirty-eight, forty-five, fifty-two! Jesse! Fifty-two. If we had kids, they’d be grown. I would have wrinkles around my eyes from staring out to sea, watching for you. I could die, and you wouldn’t hear of it for years.” This is the tragedy of Celtic legend updated for a modern setting. Gwen did give up her last night with him. There will be no Midsummer dancing next year, no crowning, no belonging – not with Jesse. This was a once in a lifetime experience that Gwen let herself be talked out of. That’s worth more than seven tears.

Parental Guide up next.

This is quite modest as modern teen romances go. There’s some passionate kissing and some underwater manhandling that would probably look sexy on film but isn’t graphic in print. It’s not aiming for the Printz longlist, in other words.

Violence: Zack gets eaten by a shark offscreen in what may be termed disproportionate retribution. Jesse’s fatal stabbing is described in the mildest possible terms – “blood” and “wound” are as graphic as the language gets. One fistfight which Gwen leaves in the middle of.

Values: Nature conservation is right up there among Terri Farley’s cardinal virtues. The loss of small-town economies, traditions and cohesion is also an obvious theme.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/image/Manannan-mac-Lir-sculpture.jpg — An Irish statue of Manannan Mac Lir, the Celtic sea god.

The book takes on a significant pagan holiday with great affection. Was this some Celtic deity’s way of convincing me he still ruled? Gwen wonders, which is as close as Farley gets to the religious aspect of all this.

Gwen’s parents vacate early on, leaving her to free-range for the summer in a cabin with no phone that’s just down the beach from her grandmother’s house. Convenient. Nana is the only parental figure around but she’s a very positive one.

Female friendship is not portrayed in a remotely positive light, as Gwen’s friends guilt-trip her hard for preferring Jesse to their drunken company. “You almost went off with him instead of us.” Jill retells Gwen’s childhood sleepwalking experience to Mandi (after Gwen told her in confidence) and the two of them also invite Zack into Gwen’s cabin, where he steals her cat – luckily he does return the cat alive. While in Gwen’s last scene with Mandi and Jill she thinks they’ll patch things up and continue on, that’s before she loses Jesse. It can only be hoped she finds some better friends after that.

Role Models: Gwen is a typical YA heroine – not too smart, not too quirky, somewhat insecure, easy to project on to – but she’s responsible, hard working and unselfish (to a fault, in fact), making for a decent heroine. Gwen later gives up her own happiness for Jesse’s when she refuses to steal his skin, knowing he would grow to hate her in time. This could be seen as a feminist commentary on the men in the old selkie legends who put any such scruples aside to keep their wives. On the other hand, it might also be seen as a girl putting her boyfriend’s needs before her own. No matter, as it’s quite poetic.

Jesse is masculine but non-threatening and socially rather awkward. He’s not an interesting character unless you’re a teenage girl, but (aside from the selkie problem) he’s not a walking warning label, which is a nice change.

Zack is clearly meant to be disliked (he’s both lewd and cruel to animals), while Mandi is incredibly annoying and infantile – not people to emulate or make excuses for.

Educational Properties: Unlikely, unless it inspires a teen to research the selkie legends.

End of Guide.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/41/4d/6b/414d6b7c82caed6b57203e6efeb48d4a.jpg — Someone else’s complete set. They are marvelously pretty books.

Terri Farley has not revisited the fantasy genre, and I’m left slightly non-plussed by the remainder of her bibliography. With twenty-four books in the Phantom Stallion series, it’s unlikely I’ll ever acquire the complete set, and my first thought was to simply discontinue her bibliography from time constraints. However, since I am planning to do the twenty Black Stallion books for this project (eventually), and since I remember Phantom Stallion as being higher than average quality compared with some of the other horse series I was reading as a child, I would like to do an overview of the series some day. Certainly all “easy read” franchises are not created equal, and the best ones deserve acknowledgement.

Up Next: Returning to Prince Edward Island for the continuing story of Anne Shirley…

Historical Fiction: Black Duck

On August 24, 2019August 24, 2019 By nymithIn American writers, Great Depression, Historical Fiction, Nautical Novels, Set in Rhode Island, U.S. StatesLeave a comment

All authors of historical fiction should make proper scholarly use of the Author’s Note – no matter what age group they’re writing for. Aside from that, this is an entertaining novel that only took me a day and a half to read.

Title: Black Duck
Author: Janet Taylor Lisle (1947-)
Original Publication Date: 2006
Edition: Philomel Books/Sleuth (2006), 252 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction. Mystery.
Ages: 10-12
First Sentence: Newport Daily Journal, December 30, 1929: COAST GUARDS KILL THREE SUSPECTED RUM RUNNERS.

It’s 1929, Rhode Island, and rum running is in full swing, with every local family forced to pick a side – easy money on the wrong side of the law, or ratting out the neighbours to what could be the crooked side of the law. Teenagers Ruben and Jeddy are best friends but Jeddy’s father is the local police chief while Ruben’s father is slowly getting ensnared in the bootlegging industry, despite his efforts to remain neutral. One day, Ruben and Jeddy find a dead man in an evening suit washed up on the beach, but by the time they’ve returned with a cop the body’s vanished. Ruben made the mistake of searching the body and soon finds himself plunged into the dangerous underworld of the rum runners, who think he’s taken something valuable from the corpse. Isolated from Jeddy as well as his own father, Ruben gains a new ally in the dashing captain of the Black Duck, the most elusive of the smugglers, but one whose tiny local outfit is threatened by the encroaching big-city operations. Ruben, in way over his head in a world of warring criminal factions and shifting loyalties, becomes the only witness to a terrible night on the water…

https://www.janettaylorlisle.com/images/photos/jtl_sunroom_300dpi_bw.jpg — Janet Taylor Lisle.

This middle-grade novel by Janet Taylor Lisle (who won a Newbery Honor in 1990 for Afternoon of the Elves) is based on the true story of the Black Duck, the fastest rum running vessel on the Rhode Island coast, which was caught by the Coast Guard on the 29th of December in a dense fog. The Coast Guard opened fire on the cabin and three of the four man crew died, while the captain lost a thumb and later insisted that no warning had been given before the authorities opened fire. Given they were ambushed in a fog right after a pick-up of liquor, it seems fairly likely that someone tipped off the authorities to the Black Duck’s whereabouts, but in the end nothing was ever proven and, despite local outrage, the Coast Guard was cleared of all wrongdoing in the incident. Lisle changed this story in a few significant ways, and there will be more information on that in the Parental Guide.

Obviously there is plenty here to hang a novel on, and Lisle makes use of an interview framing device to help propel the plot and its mystery, as a teenager interviews elderly Ruben about the events in his youth, interspersed with (fictional) newspaper clippings about the Black Duck, raising new questions as Ruben answers the old. Lisle knows how to use a hook of the old-fashioned kind when she ends her chapters: There were probably ten perfectly legal reasons why Police Chief Ralph McKenzie would be up late counting out stacks of money at his supper table. I just couldn’t right then think of what they might be. The plot thickens constantly and involves multiple factions beyond a simple cops vs. criminals outlook, with small local outfits, big time operators muscling in, crooked cops on the take, and civilians trying and often failing to stay clear of the whole mess. It’s a rich soup of conflicts, secrets and betrayals. The rum running world is shown in perfectly comprehensible detail – anything that won’t fit organically into Ruben’s story gets brought up in the interview sections – with the governing laws and nighttime operations easy to understand.

https://i0.wp.com/www.traveltourismblog.com/images/Rhode-Island-Mohegan-bluffs-coast.jpg — A rocky stretch of Rhode Island coast.

I’d never been on the beach at Brown’s, though I’d passed it going upriver on the Fall River boat a couple of times. It was a natural cove sheltered by a dip in the coast, a good place for a hidden landing. When I rode up, about twenty men were already there and a bunch of skiffs were pulled up on the beach, oars set and ready. The place was lit up bright as day with oil lanterns planted on the beach and car headlights shining across the sand. When I looked across the water, I was astonished to see a freighter looming like a gigantic cliff just outside the blaze of lights. It was in the process of dropping anchor. I soon found out that she was the Lucy M., a Canadian vessel that usually moored outside the twelve-mile U.S. territorial limit of the coast to avoid arrest.
The way the Prohibition law was written, the Coast Guard couldn’t touch an outside rig, since it was in international waters. So ships from Canada and the West Indies, Europe and Great Britain would lie off there, sell their liquor cargos and unload them onto rum-running speedboats like the Black Duck to carry into shore. Sometimes as many as ten or fifteen ocean-going vessels would be moored at sea, waiting to make contact with the right runner. “Rum row,” these groups of ships were called. You couldn’t see them from land, but you knew they were out there lying in wait over the horizon. It gave you an eerie feeling, as if some pirate ship from the last century was ghosting around our coast.
I couldn’t believe the Lucy M.‘s captain would be so bold as to bring her into Brown’s, where any Coast Guard cutter in the area could breeze up and put the pinch on her. Nobody at Brown’s seemed worried about it, though, and unloading operations soon commenced.

Lisle’s writing is very straightforward and plain, lacking the richer textures and colours of great historical fiction, but she’s good at telling an exciting story and she doesn’t pack Black Duck out with a load of extra gritty details – no foul language, graphic violence or nasty medical conditions – to artificially propel her middle grade story into the reach of the larger young adult market.

One drawback to the novel is a lack of emotional weight. By rights, the story should be perfect for it, with death and betrayal centered around the broken friendship of two boys. However, Jeddy retreats into the background halfway through the book and is barely glimpsed after that, mitigating the impact of subsequent events. It’s a pity, as their relationship is well-drawn, with a tense mixture of small lies and family loyalties pulling them apart. Once that happens, though, Ruben is left fairly isolated save for his visits to the local hermit, Tom, and his interactions with Jeddy’s older sister Marina, whom Ruben is besotted with.

Marina is referred to on the dust jacket as “strong willed,” but I found it refreshing that Lisle did not make use of her as a cynical back door invite to girl readers – you know, “look, there’s a girl helping the boy protagonist and she’s just as important to the story, so please buy this book because boys don’t read enough anymore…” Marina’s role in Black Duck is closer to that of the good girls in old noir films than to a modern “strong female character.” In other words, Marina is not dressing as a boy and moonlighting with the Black Duck crew.

Ruben’s own character development proceeds along the classic path – he starts the story naive, seeking excitement and resenting the steady job he has waiting in his future, feeling unappreciated by his father and jumping at the offer of twenty bucks no matter the source. However, following the fate of the Black Duck’s daredevil crew, well…
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.

https://englishromanticism.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-gustave-dorc3a9-jonnard-engraver-plate-2-the-wedding-guest.jpg?w=750 — The Ancient Mariner and the Wedding Guest, from the wood-engravings by French artist Gustave Dore.

My final thoughts on Black Duck could best be summed up by calling it decent. This sounds like a terribly low bar, but it’s an important one in these days of constant envelope-pushing. Lisle’s book is entirely suitable light reading, mixing an intriguing time period with a mystery format. It’s perfect for kids who enjoy the historical genre. However, it lacks staying power, and I would strongly recommend making it a buddy read with Farley Mowat’s The Black Joke, which looks at the rum running business from the Canadian side of things. Together the two books would offer a neat crash course in the coastal landscape of Prohibition for homeschooling families, and with that I offer a new category in my reviews:

See Also: The Black Joke by Farley Mowat, set in the early 30s off the coast of Newfoundland, considerably better written yet also far more boat-centric.

Onwards to the Parental Guide, packed with spoilers and historical links today.

Violence: The original corpse in the water is thusly described: Above it, swathed in a shawl of brown seaweed, a rubbery-looking shoulder peeked out, white as a girl’s. Above that, a bloated face the color of slate; two sightless eyes, open. And there in his neck, what was that? I saw a small dark-rimmed hole. … I went forward and felt around, trying not to brush up against the corpse’s skin. It had a cold, blubbery feel that turned my stomach. The murderers come back later, toting machine guns and killing Tom’s old dog because they tripped over her. The boys, hiding further down the beach and thinking that Tom’s been killed, come upon the scene after the gangsters leave.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/LuckyLucianoSmaller.jpeg/220px-LuckyLucianoSmaller.jpeg — Italian gangster Lucky Luciano has a brief cameo.

Ruben gets kidnapped by the villains later, and then re-abducted by a bigger New York crew, who toss him into the back of the getaway car so roughly that he strikes his head on something and spends a considerable amount of time bleeding all over the place. After being rescued, he becomes the fictional fifth member of the Black Duck, who shelters in the tarp-covered lifeboat while listening to the gunfire above.

Lastly, Marina is a pretty girl. Ruben’s crush is obvious but never vulgarly described. A crooked cop takes an interest in Marina, and gives her a ride in his car under false pretenses. When he pulls over, she exits the vehicle immediately and flags down another driver to get home. Marina keeps this a secret, with the takeaway being she doesn’t think anyone would believe her side of the story. This whole sequence feels somewhat shoehorned into the plot, but it’s nowhere near as disturbing as Julie of the Wolves.

Values: Lip service is paid to good cops, but every single one in this story is crooked in some way or other, including Jeddy and his dad.

There’s some family dysfunction on display, though it’s fairly mild for modern youth literature and Ruben actually gets over his resentment of his straight-laced father. In fact, there’s a parallel between Ruben and his young present-day interviewer David, as they both chafe against working in the family business. Ruben came to accept it, and it’s shown how the friendship that develops over the interviews appears to have a good influence on young David.

The Black Duck crew is heavily romanticized and fictionalized, becoming an outlaw crew with Robin Hood allure: They were local men from local families with a need to make ends meet during hard times, different altogether from the big-city syndicates that were beginning to bully their way into the business at that time. Many folks quietly cheered them on around their supper tables, proud that one of their own could outsmart both the government and the gangsters. Their status as good guys makes their fate more impactful, but it’s also a questionable interpretation of events. More on that under Ed. Properties.

Role Models: This whole novel is about murky ethical dilemmas that the young teens at the heart of the story aren’t sure how to navigate. This is apparently a recurring theme in Lisle’s fiction. In consequence, Ruben, Jeddy and Marina flail around and never really come up with any answers to their questions. Jeddy clings with absolute loyalty to his father, ignoring all evidence against him. Marina falls in love with the Black Duck’s captain and says “if you have to make a choice, you do what’s best for the people you love,” but finds out that isn’t really an applicable rule when those “people you love” are in conflict. Ruben decides to move on with a civilian life while trying to forgive everyone involved in the Black Duck incident. Ruben’s got some old-school pluck, but his naievety and trusting nature get pretty frustrating after a while, coming across as willful blindness (like Jeddy’s) that he really can’t afford. It’s actually quite realistic.

Educational Properties: Okay, Lisle changed all the names of the crew of the Black Duck. Her captain is a fellow named Billy Brady, a daring and enterprising young man with a grassroots operation. It’s no wonder Marina’s in love with him. The real Black Duck was owned by a guy called Charlie Travers. Interesting switch takes place here – Charlie was the sole survivor of the shooting, whereas Lisle’s Billy is killed and a minor character survives instead, doubtless to increase the emotional factor.

https://i0.wp.com/www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/solomon-solomon.jpg — Russian-Jewish gangster Charles Solomon.

Charlie Travers does appear to have started out as a hotshot kid, reworking the Black Duck’s engine to get up to 32 knots and proving nearly impossible to catch. However, he was a shady figure, becoming the partner of Max Fox, one of Charles ‘King’ Solomon’s lieutenants. Solomon was Boston’s answer to Lucky Luciano, being heavily involved in narcotics and bootlegging, gambling, prostitution and witness intimidation. When he died, Max Fox was one of the men who acquired his divvied-up territory. So if this Charlie Travers person was independent and local, he didn’t stay that way for long. Since Lisle changed all the names (except of the boat itself), this might not seem like important information, but I do feel that Lisle should have clarified her changes in the Author’s Note at the end, Ann Rinaldi style, given that this novel is inspired by real accounts. When Lisle has Marina say of the Black Duck’s crew “they kept clear of the syndicates and they didn’t carry guns,” she’s referring to the fictional Billy Brady, but what reader would know that without looking up the original newspaper clippings?

Therefore, in addition to Black Duck‘s excellent use in a study on Prohibition, I think it could also work as a demonstration of how stories can be retold and repackaged with opposing facts – historical references to machine guns and “King Solomon” become fictional references to unarmed men avoiding the syndicates. It’s kind of like Island of the Blue Dolphins (and oh, suddenly I can’t wait to unpack that “true story”).

End of Guide.

Lisle has a fair number of books out and I would be quite content to try a few more as I see them. I was surprised to find that Black Duck is her most popular work on GoodReads, but like I said, it’s both entertaining and decent, and post-millennium, decency is the first hurdle that any youth literature has to clear, at least on the Western Corner of the Castle…

Up Next: Teenage paranormal romance. Set on the west coast. Published in 2005. No, it’s not Twilight.

Adventure Novels: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

On August 17, 2019September 22, 2019 By nymithIn 1000 Good Books List, Adventure, American writers, Bizarre Children's Books, Classics, Poison Pills, Superfluous Sequels, Young Adult2 Comments

If you loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for its prose or its characters or even its brand of humour, then I have some bad news for you. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (whose loss of the definite article has always been a pet peeve of mine) is not a true sequel or even a companion volume to that first installment – rather, it is a wholly separate entity piggybacking on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to that novel’s and its own detriment. Bear with me as I wrestle my sprawling notes into form, as this will be almost twice as long as my regular reviews…

Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Author: Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Illustrator: Edward Winsor Kemble (1861-1933)
Original Publication Date: 1884
Edition: New Riverside Editions (2000), pages 69 to 320 of 392 pages.
Genre: Adventure. Humour. Historical Fiction.
Ages: 14-17
First Sentence: You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.

I owe a great deal of the following information to the contextual material included in the New Riverside Edition, specifically ‘The Composition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn‘ by Victor A. Doyno and ‘Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1958)’ by Henry Nash Smith. Smith incidentally cautions against what I am about to do when he says “a book so clearly great, yet with such evident defects, poses a difficult critical problem. There is little profit in making a mere checklist of faults and beauties. We must try to see the book integrally.” There are apparently rules to reading Huckleberry Finn. I didn’t know this and it is now considerably too late for me to start playing by them.

https://thewesterncornerofthecastle.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/057bb-mark-twain-.jpg — Mark Twain.

So to really understand the artistic debacle that is this novel, we have to start with a recap not of the plot, but of its very creation. Mark Twain began work on it in 1876, upon completing Tom Sawyer and got the plot well underway before losing steam and setting the manuscript aside for several years. In the meantime he went to Europe, got irritated at the aristocracy and wrote The Prince and the Pauper. Between 1879 and 1880 he returned to Huckleberry Finn and wrote the middle portion of the work, filled with feuds, charlatans and angry mobs. He also added a ‘Snicket Warning Label’ to the front of the book (more on that in a moment), presumably not willing to spend the extra time reworking part one to match up with his new interests and themes in part two. Then he lost interest and put the manuscript aside for another three years. Twain finally finished it up from 1883 to 1885, tagging on the ending – which is famously reviled even by those who in the same breath call Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Great American Novel. To be fair, he also went back into the early portion and added the eerie sequence set on the wreck of the Walter Scott, which provides a window into what the whole book could have been had he pursued further revisions. Instead, he sent it to print and made some quick cash.

Now, about that warning label. NOTICE: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. Does ironic self-criticism ward off or negate external criticism? It certainly seems to have worked for Twain, at least as far as the plot warning goes.

The plot I’m not supposed to look for begins in a very straightforward manner: Huck flees from his abusive father, runs into escaped slave Jim and they decide to drift down the Mississippi on a raft to the mouth of the Ohio River. Jim will then be able to make his way north to freedom, Huck will be safe from his father finding him and there’s just one problem: Mark Twain didn’t know about the Ohio, he knew about the lower Mississippi and that’s what he wanted to write about. His solution to this problem of plot versus intention was for Huck and Jim to travel in a fog, overshoot the Ohio and have to find a canoe to get back up the river. Fair enough, but Twain then ceased to care about his original story at all. For a large portion of the book they have acquired a canoe and yet they just keep drifting down the Mississippi against all logic because Twain was unwilling to go back and rework his early material to fit his new direction. He had also conceived an antipathy to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at some point in all this, which perhaps explains his slow work on the follow-up and certainly explains the new and improved Tom Sawyer we get in the finished product.

https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/images/52070/adventures-of-tom-sawyer-mark-twain-first-edition-signed-1876-rare.jpg — Tom Sawyer from the first edition frontispiece.

If you really loved Tom in his book, there is pretty much nothing for you here. The clever and admirable boy is completely gone and his superstitions and make-believe have now transformed into an inability to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem is very obvious if you read the two novels close together: Tom explains quite cogently what “ransom” means at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, while in the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn he is suddenly clueless about the word, saying “per’aps if we keep them till they’re ransomed, it means that we keep them till they’re dead.” I read the scene carefully to see if maybe Tom was pranking his friends in some way, but no, it’s just a lengthy and not terribly funny joke on Twain’s part. Tom is now just as ignorant as his peers and can’t even comprehend the stories he so avidly devours. His pranks are cruel and actively dangerous. The boy who testified to save an innocent man from execution, delaying to the last moment from fear, now makes revelations for “dramatic effect.” His code, his better qualities, are all gone.

On the other hand, if you really thought Tom was just a brat in his book, but loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the writing, there is still little for you here. Twain trades in the larger-than-life narration that was a big part of Tom Sawyer‘s charm and turns to the first-person American vernacular. This is a historic moment in American literature and I’m certainly not saying it’s a bad decision or the wrong choice to make – it just further distances the two volumes from each other. Many people read Huckleberry Finn first, or never get around to Tom Sawyer because “it’s just a kid’s book,” and I suppose doing so would negate several of my criticisms. Huckleberry Finn breaks so thoroughly away from its predecessor in form, character and content that being a sequel actually does it a disservice. Here’s a taste of Twain’s excellent use of the vernacular, from Huck’s time spent abducted and living up in the woods with his father:

He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head, nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whiskey and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me. The widow she found out where I was, by-and-by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me, but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn’t long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it, all but the cowhide part.
It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn’t see how I’d ever got to like it so well at the widow’s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn’t want to go back no more. … It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/huck-solid-comfort.jpg — Huck having a good time, E.W. Kemble illustration.

After Huck escapes down the river with Jim he revels in his new freedom – a freedom that looks almost identical to the above passage, the ability to loll about and do nothing all day rather than build a new life for himself. Always moving but never going anywhere, and that’s before the raft gets hijacked by the so-called King and the Duke, a pair of charlatans that Huck and Jim put up with while they go from town to town playing a variety of con games. At this point in the novel, Huck and Jim have a canoe, they could easily give the charlatans the slip and make a getaway and they don’t because it’s too much trouble. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way. So they continue to clock in the miles down to Arkansas.

My opinion of this novel would actually be fairly high if I could believe that this was the point. After all, being worthlessly free on a raft and going south to go north have merit for satire, but none of this seems to have been Twain’s intention. I can’t find any critics taking up the idea that Huck and Jim are meant to be comic figures of incompetent fun. Twain doesn’t spend very much of his time mocking the two of them – they are the good guys in this story, society’s outcasts, and Twain clearly despises society. His Mississippi feels more like the River Styx a lot of the time. Twain’s disgust is very genuine – this is the man who expressed approval for both French and nascent Russian revolutions in the last years of his life – and this explains his treatment of Tom Sawyer as well. Tom can get along with society and succeed in it, which seemingly makes him part of the problem in Twain’s eyes.

The moral conviction of the book does have the desired effect at points. The Grangerford-Shepherdson feud is one of the best portions, with Huck arriving amongst the well-to-do Grangerford family and, with sincere admiration in his heart, accidentally ridiculing their lifestyle, including the Mortuary School of poetry, in the obituary verse and paintings left behind by a deceased daughter of the family. Huck pores over them and concludes: Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard. When the Grangerfords are wiped out in a day, Huck watching in horror from a nearby tree, it matters to the reader because it mattered to Huck. I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened–it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see such things. Emotional impact is similarly gained during the charlatans’ lengthy con of the Wilks’ daughters, because Huck cares for virtuous Mary Jane Wilks and hates to watch the game go down. This adds some tension to the tale, especially when he becomes proactive for her sake. There are things that are good about this book, but they are overshadowed more and more heavily by flaws as the plot progresses to its insane conclusion.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/twain-huck-finn-kemble-28a.jpg — Poor Mary Jane gets put through the wringer.

Regarding the King and the Duke, Twain’s wholehearted commitment to satire on this outing damages one of the most successful features of Tom Sawyer, namely a credible villain. Injun Joe was a terrifying psychopath and far scarier than anything Twain serves up in this technically darker work, because now every evil is dished up with a load of vaudeville humour alongside. Pap is one of the worst fathers in literature, and Huck’s situation with him is grim and alarming, but pap is not that frightening because Twain is clearly showing him up as a slack-jawed moron the whole time. The charlatans are even worse, one introducing himself as “the rightful Duke of Bridgewater” and the other following up with saying he’s the “rightful King of France” and then he said it often made him feel easier and better for a while if people treated him according to his rights, and got down on one knee to speak to him, and always called him “Your Majesty,” and waited on him first at meals, and didn’t set down in his presence till he asked them. So Jim and me set to majestying him, and doing this and that and t’other for him, and standing up till he told us we might set down. This done him heaps of good, and so he got cheerful and comfortable. Twain’s humour in the previous volume relied mostly on verbal wit which was sophisticated enough to sail over kids’ heads much of the time. Huckleberry Finn features far more broad comedy, both backwoods humour and slapstick. If you like that better, you’re in luck, but from my point of view it’s not an improvement.

https://a4.pbase.com/g9/09/268309/3/160638773.xDDv4MGd.jpg — Huck and Jim asleep after a hard night’s drifting.

There is one single element of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that works perfectly: the evolving friendship of Huck and Jim, and Huck’s changed attitude regarding Jim’s status as a slave. Yes, Huck’s battle with his conscience is riveting and tremendously realistic. His famous decision to “go to hell” and commit to the crime of stealing a slave is a great moment in American literature. It’s also only two pages long. Alas, alack, the Huck and Jim relationship is a subplot. Everyone talks about it and I was going to pitch in with my praise but since I’ve broken the other rules of reading Huck Finn I might as well break this one too.

However, at least reading the book has finally cleared up one mystery for me. It is now very clear why the ALA continues to defend Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with such energy, when no other old children’s book qualifies; no, I do not consider a negative defense a real one. The story of Huck Finn is a blueprint for many of the young adult (and now middle grade) themes the ALA loves to champion: Huck is from a broken home, he must make his own way and pointedly not learn from his elders who are all morally compromised and/or bankrupt. Instead, he joins forces with an outsider in society, who is a far better role model in every way. Huck’s most important character trait is compassion (I would have said lying, but if the Jim story is the most important part of the book, Huck’s lies are incidental to his changed view of Jim) and being caring is today’s cardinal virtue, rather than being courageous, strong, intelligent, honest, hard-working or decisive. Meanwhile, white society is a rotten structure with racism just the cherry on top – unlike Tom Sawyer or Little House or other old books the ALA mostly ignores these days, where an independently reading child might not even notice the racism and prefer to admire the good qualities being shown instead. This is indeed remarkably modern.

Last things last, we come to the artist’s solution to his problem of plot. Keep in mind it took him eight years to come up with this. Spoilers beyond.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/c34-293.jpg — The shed Jim gets stuck in for roughly a quarter of the novel.

Huck and Jim have drifted eleven hundred miles away from St. Petersburg, Missouri when the charlatans have a streak of bad luck and do the natural thing: hand over Jim for the “reward money” from an invented flybill. Huck has his final crisis of conscience and commits to saving Jim, tracking him to a little one-horse cotton plantation owned by one Silas Phelps. Then, in the most outrageous Dickensian twist I think I’ve ever read, this man turns out to be Tom Sawyer’s uncle and Huck gets mistaken for Tom, who just so happens to be expected down for a visit. Huck ropes in Tom to help free Jim and the infamously stupid jailbreak plot ensues – basically, to reenact the great escapes from The Count of Monte Cristo and the like. This is justly criticized; however, nobody ever gives Tom’s plan credit for at least being lightyears ahead of Huck’s proposal. The following paragraph is legitimately the funniest part of this whole book and I’ve bolded the important bits:

“My plan is this,” I says. “We can easy find out if it’s Jim in there. Then get up my canoe to-morrow night, and fetch my raft over from the island. Then the first dark night that comes, steal the key out of the old man’s britches, after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river on the raft, with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me and Jim used to do before. Wouldn’t that plan work?“

I almost laughed till I cried. To think I complained about Tom’s drop in intelligence when Huckleberry Finn now has the collective I.Q. of a ham sandwich and a jar of mayonnaise.

https://i0.wp.com/huckleberry.pbworks.com/f/thinking_it_over.jpg — Please stop.

It would have been so, so easy for Mark Twain to fix this if he even pretended to care. JUST GET RID OF THE CANOE. Seriously, this book is supposed to be loaded with metaphorical significance, and what better than for the one thing that should be common along the river, the key to the north and freedom, to be so elusive that they are forced to drift south, sustained by the hope that today there’ll be an unguarded or drifting canoe that will turn everything around for them. This is the laziest fix possible – I can see why he might not have wanted to overhaul the whole thing by having Jim part with Huck at the Ohio, or turn the whole book on its head by starting down at Phelps’s plantation and going up the river, but he could have done something. Why are you asking me to accept this plot as the work of a genius? Oh right, because I’m not supposed to talk about the plot, I’m supposed to talk about Jim.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/c42-355.jpg — Golly gee, the little sociopath sure knows how to enjoy himself.

Anyway, Twain wasn’t done with his masterpiece yet. After Tom’s ludicrous escape plan is ruined, he gets shot in the leg and Jim gets recaptured. Tom then reveals that Jim’s been freed this whole time – his owner had a crisis of conscience on her deathbed – and Tom set the whole escape plan up just to have some fun.

Well, at least someone is.

But why limit yourself to one twist, or even just two, when you could really knock em down with a third whole plot twist? On the last actual page of this lunatic book, Jim reveals to Huck that his evil pap is dead – the body they found in an early night on the river, which Jim didn’t let Huck get a look at, was pap all along, and Huck could have gone home anytime after that. Who cares if the likelihood of stumbling over Huck’s dead dad was fairly minute? I mean, does probability even matter after the convergence of Tom, Huck, Jim and Uncle Silas on a patch of land in Arkansas? Who cares if this reduces Huck’s entire journey and the traumas he’s endured to a shaggy dog story? Who cares if this turns Jim, previously a caring father-figure to Huck, into a selfish manipulator of a poor child? Or maybe this was just Twain’s way of saying that there truly is nothing good in American society after all? What a twist!

End Spoilers.

It’s possible I would have a more favorable opinion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if I hadn’t already read Pudd’nhead Wilson, another of his late works where he did the exact same thing – started one story, lost interest, switched focus (this time completely) and instead of going back and starting over, he rushed his comedy-turned-tragedy-turned-detective-story to print for fast revenue. I am well aware that Mark Twain had financial difficulties. So did a lot of great writers, yet they somehow stuck to their artistry – often at the expense of family and friends, though some of them even had day jobs. Twain’s talent and innovation are here placed at the service of rank commercialism, for why else would he persist in a sequel to a work he had lost interest in? Because The Adventures of Tom Sawyer had become a popular novel, so much that he later knocked out two more short sequels starring these beloved characters, sequels which everyone agrees were pure commercial product.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/17/93/19/17931907345bc34062dafffd88db9567--huckleberry-finn-classic-books.jpg — The iconic first edition.

My personal response to this novel was so strongly negative that I find it impossible to fairly judge it as part of the Castle Project. I do not know what kind of a reaction it would get from young readers, beyond pointing out that many, many people do love this book and seem to find it a gripping story. The only thing I can state for certain is that it is a superfluous sequel in that outside of Huck himself, the second book offers no real continuation of the material in the first and is not necessary to complete the experience. If you stick to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a stand-alone, it’s not going to hurt anything.

Parental Guide, which I will keep brief.

Violence: Drunken abuse from pap, a family feud ending in massacre, a ghost story about a dead baby, a man shot down in the street, a couple of angry mobs forming, an incident of tarring and feathering, gold being hidden with a corpse in a coffin, casual references made to animal cruelty, murder, drownings, cruel pranks and crueller cons, much talk of slavery and copious quantities of the word “nigger.” I might be forgetting something. All is told in a tone of mixed humour and disgust not generally associated with youth literature until fairly recently.

Values: Black people are human beings and should no more be slaves than anyone else. Society is a disease. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another, as Huck thinks late in the book.

Role Models: Huck lies, steals and passively watches the King and the Duke rip off town after town before becoming proactive for the sake of Mary Jane. Jim briefly becomes the best character in the book right after the charlatans sell him, when he quite logically pays them back by spreading word about their con game, leading to them finally getting the tar and feathering they so richly deserve. Given that they betrayed a guy who could squeal on them and didn’t even have sense to blow town afterward, it’s extra satisfying. And yes, Huck and Jim together on the raft in harmony is truly a lesson to us all – though given how things literally go south for them I’m not sure I want to unpack that metaphor.

Educational Properties: Most people use this to discuss race relations in America but I expect you know by now what I’d suggest: a structural autopsy.

End of Guide.

There are two more (thankfully short) books in the Tom Sawyer series and I do already own them. Since the third volume, Tom Sawyer Abroad, gives me some Jules Verne vibes, I’m scheduling Around the World in Eighty Days for next month. This will hopefully give me some time to recover myself and gain some at least morbid curiosity for the remainder. I am genuinely shocked by just how much I hated this book, given how rewarding I found Tom Sawyer.

Up Next: I’m leapfrogging right over the 20th Century and into the 21st at last, with a work of historical fiction by Janet Taylor Lisle.

Anthropomorphic Fantasy: Charlotte’s Web

On August 10, 2019March 16, 2020 By nymithIn 1000 Good Books List, American writers, Anthropomorphic Fantasy, Children's Classics, Newbery Honor Books, Pig Stories, Read Alouds2 Comments

I never read Charlotte’s Web growing up and have vague memories of disliking the animated movie, but having read it at last I must conclude that it is in fact worthy of all the praise it has received.

Title: Charlotte’s Web
Author: E.B. White (1899-1985)
Illustrator: Garth Williams (1912-1996)
Original Publication Date: 1952
Edition: Harper Trophy (1973), 184 pages
Genre: Anthropomorphic fantasy.
Ages: 5-8
First Sentence: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

Wilbur the pig is born a runt, saved from an untimely death by the intervention of eight-year-old Fern Arable, who raises him on a bottle until he’s big enough to sell. He’s bought by her uncle Mr. Zuckerman, which is awfully nice at first since Fern visits him almost every day, but it soon turns out Mr. Zuckerman intends Wilbur for future dinners. Only the clever spider Charlotte can save Wilbur from his fate.

Charlotte’s Web won a 1953 Newbery Honor; it’s often considered the most grievous oversight of the Newbery committee that it lost to Secret of the Andes. Based purely on the writing I have to suspect that it should have carried the Newbery Medal that year, but I withhold further judgement until I actually read Secret of the Andes. E.B. White here far outstrips what he was doing in Stuart Little, with distinct voices for every animal on the farm, from pig to spider to rat to geese. He achieves a truly perfect level of repetition, enough to feel sonorous without impeding the actual flow of the story. The structure is episodic enough for good bedtime material but the actual plot is very tight, with natural rises and falls in the drama, and a final bittersweet triumph. It introduces children to the nature of death but also to rebirth and the regenerative cycle of seasons and progeny. It is, in short, a perfect read-aloud. You could adapt whole chapters into picture books and almost every line would be capable of sustaining a new image. From Chapter IV, Loneliness:

The next day was rainy and dark. Rain fell on the roof of the barn and dripped steadily from the eaves. Rain fell in the barnyard and ran in crooked courses down into the lane where thistles and pigweed grew. Rain spattered against Mrs. Zuckerman’s kitchen windows and came gushing out of the downspouts. Rain fell on the backs of the sheep as they grazed in the meadow. When the sheep tired of standing in the rain, they walked slowly up the lane and into the fold.

https://i.pinimg.com/236x/80/05/58/80055881f97eb2c6875f8c7fce73a4c8--garth-williams-charlottes-web.jpg — A haughty lamb refuses to talk to Wilbur, from Garth Williams’ illustrations.

The novel is gorgeously agrarian in focus without being sentimental. White understood farming and, aside from a strange bias against lambs in this book, is more than willing to address mother nature fairly. Charlotte may be the sweetest spider in all of literature, but she’s a bloodsucking predator and that’s not glossed over. While no direct parallel is ever made between her nature and that of humans, it’s definitely something I picked up on. Charlotte anaesthetizes her victims so they don’t feel pain; farm animals (until the advent of factory farming) would generally lead very comfortable lives and then be quickly killed. Charlotte’s nature brings death to other beings, but she has the gifts of intellect, artistry and compassion, and chooses to exercise them, saying “perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.”

Charlotte also becomes a mother figure for Wilbur, protecting and comforting him while also instilling some education on subjects big and small. She has a lovely vocabulary and is often explaining words to Wilbur; unlike Lemony Snicket, this never comes across as patronizing on the part of the author.

Wilbur walked into his yard just at that moment.
“What are you thinking about, Charlotte?” he asked.
“I was just thinking,” said the spider, “that people are very gullible.”
“What does ‘gullible’ mean?”
“Easy to fool,” said Charlotte.
“That’s a mercy,” replied Wilbur, and he lay down in the shade of his fence and went fast asleep.

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/images/e-b-white-4.jpg — E.B. White.

White takes every opportunity that he can to layer language and give his young audience as much raw material as he can without interrupting his story. He morphs into a thesaurus: The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything. He adds a touch of math: Mr. Arable gave Fern two quarters and two dimes. He gave Avery five dimes and four nickels. Yes, they did name their son Avery Arable. He even introduces a little Latin to the small fry, as Charlotte says: “It is my egg sac, my magnum opus.” And in what I thought was the funniest part of the whole book, White transforms a verbal tic (his geese repeat words when they talk) into a spelling joke, with a bonus obscure medical condition of history thrown in:

Charlotte: “Does anybody here know how to spell ‘terrific’?”
“I think,” said the gander, “it’s tee double ee double rr double rr double eye double ff double eye double see see see see see.”
“What kind of an acrobat do you think I am?” said Charlotte in disgust. “I would have to have St. Vitus’s Dance to weave a word like that into my web.”

The language jokes work much better than the occasional slapstick sequence, but then I’m not a fan of slapstick. Aside from this minor flaw, Charlotte’s Web is quite perfect, in both writing and story. After my recent revisit with Stuart Little, I am pleased to find this book such a rich, well-rounded experience that fixes every problem that first novel contained. The characters are more memorable, the world-building is comparatively sane and White really threads the needle with his brand new addition of an actual ending: Wilbur and Charlotte earn thematically rich conclusions to their tale, but the final message of Stuart Little – that life is not tidy – is revisited rather than directly contradicted. For all Templeton’s importance to the rescue of Wilbur, White is scrupulously honest with his small readers about the nature of some people in the world and the rat never repents or has any change of heart, remaining exactly what he was introduced as – a bastion of greed, malice and self-interest – to the end.

https://spaceintext.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/templetons-egg-charlottes-web-page-46-illustration-1952-gm-williams.jpg — Templeton under the disapproving eyes of the local animals and Fern.

It should be obvious that this gets a very high recommendation from me and I’m very happy to see that this is one vintage children’s book that remains on everyone’s radar, secure from either focused attack or general amnesia at present.

Parental Guide. Spoilers ahoy for anyone who doesn’t know the ending.

Violence: Charlotte dies in the end, and it’s plainly telegraphed for several chapters beforehand. Kids who haven’t had any prior exposure to the subject of death in fiction might be as shocked as Wilbur is, but I think most could figure out what’s inevitable. It is still very moving at any age though. No one was with her when she died.

On a more cheerful note, I was impressed with the subtle comeuppance for Templeton’s selfishness. He refuses to help save Charlotte’s children until Wilbur bribes him with the promise of first go at the pig trough… forever. Wilbur keeps his promise and we last see Templeton eating his way to an early grave. Forever won’t be lasting too long in this case and Sun Tzu would be proud of this pig.

Values: Charlotte saves Wilbur through cleverness, the power of words – and knowing who to bribe to get things done around the farm.

https://i0.wp.com/api.ning.com/files/kV4MbYiv7oSxHFJWLwFCPCf6i9ZYGHMph46ms1kDgjKFn-an-4w%2AkvBeJWpLJY-Gpnz%2At2SgWFfx1sbjkUcp1VLT%2A-mX81Hx/1082054003.jpeg — Wilbur at the fair, humble to the last.

White chooses to focus on the unsung animals of the farmyard – pigs, spiders and rats – while the cute and cuddly lambs are proud and ill-mannered. Humans are by and large gullible and capricious. Fern saves Wilbur yet loses interest in him by the end of the book while her brother Avery, indifferent to animal welfare theretofore, takes over her vacated role during Wilbur’s hour of triumph at the fair.

Role Models: Readers tend to focus on Charlotte, and I’ve already covered her finer attributes. I would like to focus on Wilbur here. He’s a passive figure for much of the novel, friendly and happy to be directed by other characters. He remains humble despite being a figure of great interest but he’s easy to overlook and seemingly incapable of ever repaying Charlotte for saving his life – until the end, where he does actually save her, by saving her egg sac. They’re leaving the fair and the grounds will be deserted through the winter, making it crucial for Wilbur to think on his feet, and he does find a way to return her children to the farm. Once spring arrives, most of the baby spiders depart but three remain and carry on Charlotte’s lineage, and the generations continue to live comfortably in Zuckerman’s barn, hearing stories of their great ancestress – all owing to the humble pig Wilbur.

Educational Properties: Aside from the lingual elements, this category is not really applicable or necessary. Read it aloud and talk it over. Save the homework for other books.

End of Guide.

One more of E.B. White’s books to go, due in September and earnestly anticipated.

Up Next: Back to Tom Sawyer’s world with Huckleberry Finn and my first impressions of this towering giant of American literature are going to be a whole lot less favorable. Stay tuned.

Adventure Novels: Shane

On August 3, 2019March 16, 2020 By nymithIn Adventure, American Frontier, American writers, Historical Fiction, Set in Wyoming, Westerns, Young AdultLeave a comment

A great introduction to the western, although if you don’t like westerns this will not do much to convince you otherwise.

Title: Shane
Author: Jack Schaefer (1907-1991)
Original Publication Date: 1949
Edition: Bantam Pathfinder Editions (1966), 119 pages
Genre: Western. Adventure. Historical Fiction. Coming-of-Age.
Ages: 12-15
First Line: He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89.

In the year of 1889 young Bob Starrett’s parents, Joe and Marian, take on a well-dressed drifter as a farmhand. Shane’s past is unknown but he quickly becomes a loyal friend to the Starretts and they need his help when local cattleman Luke Fletcher decides he’s had enough of all the new homesteaders crowding “his” range. Joe refuses to sell out and encourages his neighbours to stand strong, at which point Fletcher decides to intimidate the Starretts into leaving town, taking more and more violent steps to acquire the homesteaders’ land. The settlement is so small they don’t even have a sheriff to defend them and suddenly Shane’s hidden talent for violence is the only thing protecting the Starretts from losing everything they’ve worked so hard to build.

https://i0.wp.com/d.gr-assets.com/authors/1342979492p5/150701.jpg — Jack Schaefer.

Shane is a classic western of the old unreformed school. Published originally in slightly shortened form in Argosy magazine in 1946, it appeared in book form in 1949 and was an instant hit, securing its place in the “western” canon and (although far less known today) it has remained in print ever since. Jack Schaefer had never been out west at this point in his life, but he had been to Oberlin College and could write reasonably well. All westerns are myth, Shane is just more appreciative of that fact. Everything from the gunslinger to the family to the land – and the hulking stump disfiguring it – is a part of Schaefer’s grandiose myth of the west.

So Shane arrives, riding a lone trail out of a closed and guarded past, and immediately takes over the entire novel. He’s a marvelous creation: courteous, fastidious, tense, always alert. His first action after going from guest to hired hand is to commandeer father Joe Starrett’s place at the table. Joe lets it pass without comment but Bob is puzzled at first. I could not see any reason for the shift until the first time one of our homestead neighbors knocked on the door while we were eating and came straight on in as most of them usually did. Then I suddenly realized that Shane was sitting opposite the door where he could directly confront anyone coming through it.

https://cdn0.wideopencountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shane.jpg — Shane from the 1953 movie does not appear to dress in black, wrecking the novel’s fundamental image. Hollywood….

Shane is calm and controlled and he knows a lot about guns but never carries one. His background is murky but it’s also not really the driving mystery of the novel – this is not a soap opera where Shane’s dark past literally blows into town as an outlaw with a grudge or a lost love from back east, and indeed the one person in town who recognises Shane packs and leaves immediately, with no explanation ever given. Shane’s past is never brought to light and it doesn’t have to be because it’s fairly obvious that he’s marked as different – everyone can sense he’s a dangerous man, one with a talent for violence. He might have good manners and make a good farmhand but he’s outside of civilization and can’t just cozy his way back in; indeed the very thing that separates him from the farmers and shopkeepers of civilization is imperative to its defense. This cements Shane as a tragic figure, even if Bob is too young to really understand why.

To Bob, Shane’s simply a child’s hero, who knew what would please a boy, including letting Bob sneak into town with him when there could be trouble lying in wait:

I was afraid father would stop me, so I waited till Shane was driving out of the lane. I ducked behind the barn, around the end of the corral, and hopped into the wagon going past. As I did, I saw the cowboy across the river spin his horse and ride rapidly off in the direction of the ranch-house.
Shane saw it, too, and it seemed to give him a grim amusement. He reached backwards and hauled me over the seat and set me beside him.
“You Starretts like to mix into things.” For a moment I thought he might send me back. Instead he grinned at me. “I’ll buy you a jackknife when we hit town.”

The story isn’t about Bob or his coming-of-age, and as such it wouldn’t be considered a YA novel by modern standards, but since the market didn’t “exist” back then, I imagine a lot of kids in the 50s would have read this bestseller without any problem. Even though Bob’s role is limited to observer, he is quite important to the novel’s tone. I’ve read westerns by some of the bigger names of this time period – Zane Grey, Max Brand – and they could have done with a humble narrator to connect their taciturn wanderers with the common run of humanity. The boy’s innocence turns Shane from a mere action novel into one of men and the nature of violence – the need for steel in a civilized world.

https://thewesterncornerofthecastle.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/e9778-shane-1.jpg — Frankly, this is more how I pictured Shane. Jack Palance for the win.

Speaking of action, this is definitely a slow burn, with no violence at all until chapter 7, page 60, and with a major portion of the first chapters devoted to an epic of stump-removal that is really not as interesting as Schaefer seems to think it is. However, the back half of Shane is filled with brawls and gunfire, and Schaefer is a dab hand at concise, easy-to-picture action. I counted only two paragraphs that fell back on the cliched vagary of a blur of movement. The rest is very clear and unmistakable in what exactly is happening when. For example, Joe Starrett’s transformation into a furious Hercules when Fletcher’s men gang up on Shane and have him pinned:

I never thought he could move so fast. He was on them before they even knew he was in the room. He hurtled into Morgan with ruthless force, sending that huge man reeling across the room. He reached out one broad hand and grabbed Curly by the shoulder and you could see the fingers sink into the flesh. He took hold of Curly’s belt with the other hand and ripped him loose from Shane and his own shirt shredded down the back and the great muscles there knotted and bulged as he lifted Curly right up over his head and hurled the threshing body from him. Curly spun through the air, his limbs waving wildly, and crashed on the top of a table way over by the wall. It cracked under him, collapsing in splintered pieces, and the man and the wreckage smacked against the wall. Curly tried to rise, pushing himself with hands on the floor, and fell back and was still.

See the source image — Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912.

Now, this is definitely glamorized violence and some parents don’t want their kids exposed to that kind of thing, so you probably already know whether Shane is something you want in the family library. I’d put it in the same category with Tarzan of the Apes or even the original Conan the Barbarian stories, as portraits of an idealized masculinity, fiercesome yet just. Given the times we live in, current culture is far more interested in deconstructing or parodying masculine traits, or saying that these traits only look good on girls. Shane, at a certain age, is perfect light reading for boys, providing a piece of the needed counterweight to the culture they are now steeped in 24/7. Shane is not a billionaire playboy or similar juvenile power trip fantasy. He doesn’t degrade women and he retains his personal dignity in all situations. Nor does he preach pacifism only to hypocritically embrace violence at the last second; instead, he is committed to his purpose of saving the Starretts from the beginning, retaliating as soon as the cattlemen cross the line from verbal intimidation to physical harm. The traits Shane exhibits are those of classic heroes and they are shown in a healthy light that is increasingly hard to find in modern representations, where masculinity is all about ego, brute force and cluelessness. In consequence, I give it high marks and advise its inclusion on a young man’s reading list.

Parental Guide square ahead, with spoilers.

Shane and Mrs. Starrett fall in love over the course of the story, but they are unwilling to even speak on the subject until the night of Shane’s departure. Joe isn’t an idiot and is more aware of the situation than Bob is, even seeming to accept the idea that if he gets killed Shane would probably do a better job of protecting the family than he could. His comment to this effect is seemingly what spurs Shane to pack his things and take up his gun-slinging ways again. This subplot exists seemingly to drive home the loneliness of Shane’s life, as his continued presence on the farm would only harm those he cares for and risks his life defending.

Violence: Two fistfights, of which my earlier quote should help provide the tenor. Two gunfights which, in a nod to reality, involve simply drawing faster, Leone-style, rather than High Noon duck-and-dodge shootouts. And the room rocked in the sudden blur of action indistinct in its incredible swiftness and the roar of their guns was a single sustained blast. And Shane stood, solid on his feet as a rooted oak, and Wilson swayed, his right arm hanging useless, blood beginning to show in a small stream from under the sleeve over the hand, the gun slipping from the numbing fingers. These scenes are short, but they are what the entire book is building towards.

The villains might say “hell” occasionally, but Joe Starrett speaks only in a steady stream of “by Godfrey’s.” One line of bad movie innuendo spoken by soon-to-be-dead Wilson: “You wouldn’t like someone else to be enjoying this place of yours–and that woman there in the window,” regarding Mrs. Starrett.

Values: If you uphold the Second Amendment, this is your kind of book, as Shane tells Bob that “a gun is just a tool. No better and no worse than any other tool, a shovel–or an axe or a saddle or a stove or anything. Think of it always that way. A gun is as good–and as bad–as the man who carries it.”

Land is identity, to be prized, not given away without a fight. This is not a deconstructed western. Man’s capacity to conquer the elements is given its ode through the Epic of the Stump. A worthy cause justifies violence and the show of power. A beating can improve a man’s character – young Chris (one of Fletcher’s boys) gets his arm broken by Shane and goes straight as a result. There’s poetry in the violence and a joy of being alive and released from long discipline and answering the urge in mind and body.

Role Models: I think I’ve covered that aspect thoroughly enough already. A boy’s hero and an unbreakable family unit.

Educational Properties: The clash of cattleman and farmer – life, business and economic reality in the old west. Towns, how they sprang up, thrived and sometimes perished overnight. There’s a lot of real history mixed up with the western and that’s well worth exploring.

End of Guide.

Jack Schaefer did move out west eventually, settling in Santa Fe and writing material that he had more experience with. He stuck to westerns for all the Shane fans, and I don’t plan on pursuing any of them as I expect they fall well outside the purview of this blog. However, he also won a 1961 Newbery Honor for a book called Old Ramon, and I’ll be keeping my eyes out for that one.

Up Next: No coy clues this time. It’s Charlotte’s Web, everyone.

The Western Corner of the Castle

Month: August 2019

Fantasy: Seven Tears Into the Sea

Historical Fiction: Black Duck

Adventure Novels: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Anthropomorphic Fantasy: Charlotte’s Web

Adventure Novels: Shane