Review: Ballet Shoes

Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes is one of those classic kids' books I failed to read as a child. I wish I had; I know I'd have loved it. But I've read it now, at any rate, and it's one of those kids' books that holds up well to adulthood.

Pauline, Petrova, and Posy Fossil are three orphans, brought home one by one by Great-Uncle Matthew (otherwise known as Gum) after he had filled up the house with real fossils. They are looked after by Gum's niece Sylvia (otherwise known as Garnie) and Nana. Gum goes away on one of his adventures, leaving the Fossils and their guardians provided for for five years. Five years pass, and Gum still has not returned. To earn money they must go to Madame Fidolia's Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training. It's not an ideal situation--Pauline loves acting and Posy cares only for dancing, but Petrova wants to drive cars and fly planes. Still, they get along well enough, though the money is slowly running dry.

It strikes me that no modern children's book would be so much about money worries. This, however, was written in 1937. Most of the story is about how the children must find a way to earn money. It's an interesting comparison.

So it's a lovely book, which I wish I'd read when I was younger but which was not spoiled by my being too old.

Sad news

I've just heard Eva Ibbotson died last week. She's one of my favourite children's books writers, author of Which Witch?, The Secret of Platform 13, Island of the Aunts, and Journey to the River Sea. Her books are magical and hopeful and colourful. She was 85, died in Newcastle, England, born, I was surprised to discover, in Vienna, Austria.

I can think of no better obituary than to say I loved her books as a child, would doubtless love them just as much if I read them now, and am feeling compelled to read everything else she ever wrote. If you've never read any of these lovely books, you really should, no matter your age.

You can read more about her life on Wikipedia and in the Guardian.

Review: Interworld

I've always loved fantasy novels, but my favourites are never the kind with dragons and castles. I like the slightly weird fantasy, the kind with interesting concepts and a little bit of sci fi, too. Interworld, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, is definitely this sort of fantasy.

Joey Harker is an ordinary sixteen year old boy with absolutely no sense of direction. When his tenth grade social studies teacher assigns a test that requires him to find his way to a certain place in town, he doesn't think he has much chance of passing the class--especially not when he walks through a cloud of fog into a world where the McDonald's sign is plaid and his mother doesn't know who he is. Joey soon finds that his Earth is part of the Altiverse, a collection of parallel Earths separated by the In-Between, a strange realm that owes a lot to M.C. Escher, Picasso, and a lava lamp. The Altiverse must be held in balance between those Earths governed by magic, and those governed by science, and it is up to all the Joey Harkers from all the Earths to do this.

I love stories that make use of parallel world theories, and this one is especially clever, with the idea of all the parallel versions of the same person having the power to Walk between worlds. I expect nothing less of Neil Gaiman than thoroughly imaginative storytelling and wonderfully bizarre visuals, and he has certainly delivered on this. It's a great book, meant for young adults but quite universally enjoyable.

A quick book meme

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - most of middle school was devoted to these, and I still have a whole shelf of Tolkien and related books.

2. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice - One of my very favourite books, which will probably always be able to remind me of high school.

3. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff - I've talked about this recently enough that I needn't say why it's on this list, but it is a lovely book.

4. Tam Lin by Pamela Dean - my favourite book of all.

5. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman - The whole trilogy, really, but I probably remember this one the best. They're thoroughly wonderful.

5. Sandry's Book by Tamora Pierce - All of Tamora Pierce's novels, especially the earlier ones, stick with me, but I always loved this one especially well.

6. Emma by Jane Austen - need I say more? I've spent enough time on this one lately.

7. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling - I'll always be glad I had the good timing to grow up with these books, and they really are wonderful stories.

8. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley - I need to reread this, but it did have a big effect on me when I read it, and I remember it extremely fondly.

9. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell - I don't even know why I love this one so much, but Elizabeth Gaskell has an indefinable quality that makes me love her.

10. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - I read this a little too late to have a childhood fondness for it, but I love it nonetheless.

11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - this used to have fights with Tam Lin over being my favourite book, and I still love it.

12. On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder - I had to include a favourite children's book, and this is the one I was always fondest of.

13. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransom - I loved these when I was a child, and they are some of the few books that I love in exactly the same way as an adult.

14. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - this just has some really rather magical qualities to it.

15. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt - it's enormous and vivid and lovely, is all.

Christmas books

Happy Christmas Eve! There are certain books I always read at Christmas time. All children's picture books, most of which I've been reading since before I can remember. Reading them every year adds to the festivity of the holiday; it gets me in the mood for Christmas just as much as the tree or the lights do. So I thought I'd take you through a tour of these books.Letters from Father Christmas, by J.R.R. Tolkien. This is actually the only one of these books that wasn't a part of my childhood. I got it for Christmas a couple of years ago, though I'd read it before, and it is a lovely thing to look through during the holiday.
This is my favourite of the two versions of The Nutcracker I have. It has beautiful illustrations and it tells the full story (everything about the quest for the hard nut). It very much achieves the compellingly sinister, which is what I like in retellings of this story.
This is my other version, which is much more toned down for kids than the other one. I've never liked it as well, but the story's good no matter what form it's in.
It's a Little Golden Book! I absolutely loved this one when I was very very small, and then forgot about it for several years and finally, last year, made my mother dig it out of the basement. The story is exactly what it says on the tin, and for some reason it always particularly appealed to me.I got this one for Christmas (from my grandmother, I think) when I was younger. All my family are cat people, so it's particularly appropriate.This one might be my favourite. It's written and illustrated by Jan Brett, and set (I believe) in Sweden, where two funny little trolls are envious of a family's Christmas and want it for themselves. I always loved it because I've got a good chunk of Swedish in me, and the girl in the book has the same orange Swedish carved wooden horse that I have. And the illustrations are wonderful. It's just good.

There are other Christmas books I have and read almost yearly, like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Night Before Christmas (which I could recite from memory at the age of three because I made my parents read it to me so many times), but this is a good cross section, and these books have always been really important to me.

This, by the way, is my 200th post.

Friday Ephemera #19

Did anyone ever read the children's books My Father's Dragon, Elmer and the Dragon, and The Dragons of Blueland, by Ruth Stiles Gannett? These were some of my favourite books when I was small, and I barely remember them now (must revisit) but for some reason they came to mind the other day and I looked them up on Wikipedia. This search provided the information that they made a Japanese anime out of the story. I was rather horrified at the thought, but judging by this image, it looks rather cute.

I'm turning in my term paper this morning! (Its writing explains my absence over the last week.)

Booking Through Thursday--Libraries

I found an interesting Booking Through Thursday from last August, and thought I'd do it this Thursday.

Whether you usually read off of your own book pile or from the library shelves NOW, chances are you started off with trips to the library. (There’s no way my parents could otherwise have kept up with my book habit when I was 10.) So … What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any funny/odd memories of the library?

There's a library about three blocks away from my parents house, and I went there almost daily as a child. Most of the librarians still recognize me and say hi. The library was remodeled when I was eleven or so (and boy was it a chore having to take the bus if I wanted to go to the library), so it doesn't look as it did when I was small. The children's book section was at the back of the library by the windows that look down the hill, and they always had the same stuffed animals. I have very specific memories of looking for a book on King Arthur, books on the planets, of refusing to check out Anne of Green Gables because I thought it was stupid (I've no idea where I got this notion, and I've since dispensed with it). I remember the old computers, green font on black before it was PCs, but I'm too young to have ever known card catalogs. It must have been after they remodeled that I graduated to looking in the teen section for reading material (and it was there that I first discovered Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy), and somewhere along the way I drifted out of that section and wandered into the general fiction.

The old library was red brick and very square, and downstairs they had a room where they did events like authors speaking, and I remember pretty vividly once for some reason they had a fellow who brought in pot-bellied pigs. Now the library's all modern, giant glass windows, light fixtures that look like chocolate fountains and fried eggs, but at least it's not a really annoying kind of modern. It's managed to stay cosy, especially in winter. I used to go after school (two blocks away) all the time with my mother, and on weekends with my father. I remember being very excited when I got old enough (or maybe it was just that I'd had the library card long enough) to check out as many books at a time as I wanted, instead of having a limit. It was also very exciting (many years later) when the library started being open on Sundays (which had always seemed like the best day to be there, except that it wasn't open). I always got annoyed at school when we went to the school library and they made us check things out, because I already had books from the "real" library and I didn't need more. I think I've been through two library cards, though I have a vague notion that I found the old card after I got the new one. Mine is still older than the current edition of cards, which are blue. Mine is red, but scuffed in places where it's gotten white.

For we're under orders for to sail to old England...

Somewhere along the line, the 1984 film Coot Club was on the shelf at the library. Some member of my family brought it home, and I remember watching it, on what was probably a summer afternoon, my mother outside mowing the lawn. I don't remember how old I was, but I would have been in elementary school.

That was how I discovered Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome's series about children and boats and adventures. I wanted to be an English child in the 1930s so bad, and I wanted a little sailboat and some siblings to play in it with. I remember reading Eyewitness books (weren't those great?) about boats and sailing, and the little rowboat we had at my grandparents house was never quite good enough. There are a dozen of the books, with some that stand out most to me such as Winter Holiday, where they built a sort of ice and snow house, I think, or Pigeon Post, when they had homing pigeons and went mining for gold, and especially, We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea, when the four Swallows were asleep in a boat in a river that slipped its moorings and took them to Holland. I spent a lot of time making maps of islands and rivers and things, drawing fancy little compass roses and whatnot. These books were an enormous part of my childhood.

I reread the first two, Swallows and Amazons and Swallowdale, a few years ago, and happily they very much bore up to my more critical eye to the writing. I'd love to reread the rest, and I'm tempted to ask for a box set for Christmas. Some I have only extremely vague memories of, and one or two I'm not at all positive I actually read. When I first read them I didn't know anyone else who had, but I've since acquired a couple of friends who did and loved them as much as I did, though wouldn't it have been lovely to have been children together and maybe had a better chance of enacting numerous plans for similar nautical adventures.

Some books I read as a child I love now just for sentimental reasons, such as Little House on the Prairie, which certainly played to my interests as a child but doesn't so much any more. Swallows and Amazons, though, I still love for its content, especially its very lovable characters and its setting. I never stopped wanting a little sailboat.

Ok, I lied, I do read mysteries

Having finished Bloodhound, I only now realize it's really a mystery novel, after saying I haven't read any in years. Yes, it's also young adult fantasy, and that's what Tamora Pierce is known for writing, so it doesn't immediately occur to you to look past that. But the characters are all police or criminals or ordinary people somewhere in between, and there is certainly a mystery to be solved. Of course, the mystery is not a classic murder mystery, it's not really concerned with the inner workings of the criminals, and it is very far reaching in terms of place and repercussions. It's a disguised mystery, but it is one.

Bloodhound is the sequel to Terrier, and I have to confess I barely remember what happened in that one, but this, I suspect, will be somewhat more memorable. Beka Cooper is now a first-year Dog (or member of the Provost's Guard), with many of the same friends she had in the last book, like Pounce the magical cat-sometimes-constellation (who will be a bit familiar to long-time Tamora Pierce fans), and a few new ones as well. She's grown up a bit, and I suspect the book has too. It's still written as Beka's diary, though I think I liked the style better this time. I definitely liked the detail of the police work.

I have to admit I think I may have finally gotten too old for Tamora Pierce's books. They're hardly children's books, these days, I don't recall that there used to be so much sex in them (not graphic, of course), but the standard of writing in my usual reading has gotten higher. I'm sure I'll go on reading them, though, as they're still really good stories, and one can always reading a good story without having to be too critical of it.

Summer theatre

Saturday night, surprise surprise, I went to a play. Or, rather, two plays.

Last summer I worked at Seattle Children's Theatre as a costume assistant, helping costume their Summer Season shows, which are all performed by children. It was a fabulous experience, and I had a lot of fun seeing the shows. I'm not working there this summer, but I figured I'd still go and see the shows. I missed the first two, which were Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but I made it to the second two (though it was rather a trial, with breaking down cars and very late two trucks and parades). These plays are all one-acts, two an evening, so I saw Sideways Stories from Wayside School and A Midsummer Night's Macbeth.

I loved Sideways Stories from Wayside School the book, by Louis Sachar, when I was little, and the play was equally hilarious. I found I remembered the book surprisingly well--I must have read it multiple times. I recognized several of the actors from shows last year, and goodness, can these kids act. The actors are usually between about 9 and 16 years old, and they're always great, and very funny.

A Midsummer Night's Macbeth had me laughing pretty much all the way through, though possibly not on its own steam--it was funny because it was all so familiar, and also through a funny coincidence. I was sitting there during intermission reading the program, and looked at the cast list for this show to realize that my boyfriend's stepsister was playing the main character. And then I looked around the audience and saw her mother. So that was funny to begin with. The show is the sequel (of sorts) to High School Hamlet, which was one of my two favourite plays last year, and it's about a high school drama program trying to put on a retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Macbeth rather intruding into the proceedings. It was mostly hilarious because a high school drama program with no money and lots of drama and the constant struggle to actually produce a play is where I've been the last four years, so I recognized all of it. Not to mention, there was a character who was the resident techie, and being a techie myself, I always like it when they're not left out of representations of theatre. The techie, of course, kept saying things like, "Wait, did that stage direction just say this character gets dismembered? Um, how are we going to do that?" and then being jealous of the rival school's fly system and floor mics and asking to see the booth and getting all excited about it. This character was pretty much an exact picture of my boyfriend. Really, exact. It was a well done play in general, but that was what made me love it.

I'm afraid my reviewing of these plays does you no good if now you want to see them, but I figure I'll plug the next two weekends of shows, as they're sure to be pretty good. Next weekend is Rent: School Edition (I know, I'm skeptical too, but we'll see), and the weekend after that is Once on this Island, Jr. and Romeo and Juliet. The week after that there's also the Young Actor Institute Showcase, which I saw the dress rehearsal of last year and am rather excited about seeing this year.

So many books

New books to read! Oh, it's so exciting.

I went to the library yesterday and came back with two books I've very much been looking forward to--The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, first book of The Cazalet Chronicle, and Bloodhound, by Tamora Pierce. I watched the miniseries The Cazalets quite some time ago, and have been meaning to read the books since. It's one of those "sprawling family dramas" and starts in 1937 and goes, I think, through the war. I quite liked the miniseries, though it was occasionally a tad melodramatic (I don't know whether because of the story, which would be still true of the book, or something about the production). Anyway, it's always nice to have another World War II novel to read, especially after reading The Mitfords, which of course spanned the entire 20th century but World War II does always seem to be a focal point. Some day I suppose I ought to read one that's actually about the war, and not just the people at home during it.

Bloodhound is the sequel to Terrier (and second in a supposed trilogy), and written in journal format with, says a blurb on the back, "homage to the police procedural genre." It's set in Tamora Pierce's by now very well-developed world of Tortall, and like 200 years before the first books she ever wrote about that world. It's always kind of interesting to compare those books with these, because her writing has improved vastly. It is still, of course, young adult fiction (and fantasy to boot), which is certainly not great literature but inevitably very satisfying.

I would be tempted to put off The Dud Avocado again and start in one of these (oh no, more choices as to which one), but I am determined not to, and so now I have motivation to whizz through that and get it finished so I can read these. Nothing against The Dud Avocado, mind you, I'm actually really liking it and might have made the great push to finish it anyway.

It's been such a long time since I checked out any books from the library. Before these I didn't have anything checked out at all, even movies or cds. I really quite missed it; I used to love the library, I still do though I don't make it there quite so often.

Into the Hundred Acre Wood

I always think it's a bit funny how everyone has books that were absolutely crucial parts of their childhoods, and they are always completely horrified when they realize that other people never read them at all. I feel this way about all the Little House on the Prairie books most of all, because those were an absolutely enormous part of my childhood, and I would feel this way about Swallows and Amazons had I not always been aware that very few people I knew read them. I've recently acquired a friend who did read them (and even got to learn to sail, too, which I'm vastly envious of), and I was completely gleeful when I happened to make a reference to them (to Swallowdale in particular) and he happened to be around to get the reference.

Hand in hand with this, there are various children's books that I never read as a child, that even I am somewhat shocked I never read. I was, for example, rather surprised to realize that I had never read Winnie-the-Pooh. Whenever I go through those list of 100 best books, or books to read before you die, or whatever, I always hesitate over marking Winnie-the-Pooh, because I'm sure I must have read it, hasn't everyone?, but I don't actually remember reading it. I even own the book. But I was ferreting for something to read the other day, and I pulled out Winnie-the-Pooh and realized, no, actually, I haven't read this.

I read one of A.A. Milne's plays a while ago, Mr. Pim Passes By, which I liked very much, and talked about here. After reading Winnie-the-Pooh, I rather wonder why no one ever remembers his plays but everyone assumes they read Winnie-the-Pooh at some point. I think I've probably lost out by not reading it as a child, as it's definitely a children's book, rather than a book just about children. It succumbs to that occasional plague of children's books of being just a little bit patronizing, although it's not too bad here. I found Pooh stupider than I expected, and Eeyore far more depressing, and really I don't think I'd want to live with any of the animals. Despite all this, it's still rather a pleasant book, and even if I never actually read it as a child, I definitely watched all the films, so it's still got a firm place in my list of books crucial to childhood.

Another foray into children's literature.

My first book of the year--Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew by Ursula Vernon. The author is someone whose art I've followed for years. I've even got a tshirt with one of her paintings on it. She specializes in weird animals, or not so weird animals in weird landscapes. You can find her website here, I definitely suggest you look at it.

As for the book, I really quite loved it. Nurk was entirely adorable, the dragonflies were quite nifty, and all the obstacles to his efforts were wonderfully bizarre, like the living salmon tree, the wall of enormous mushrooms, and the Grizzlemole. I loved the fact that Nurk had to rescue a prince rather than a princess, and the writing was always humorous and pleasing.