Better Nate Than Ever: voyage of discovery

Dear Annie,

My literary travelers left the Lake District this morning, very satisfied with a week of exploring, hiking, reading scenes from Rosemary Sutcliff's The Shield Ring aloud on location, and adjusting to driving on the left.  I am so impressed with Lizzie and Bob's joy in that special book.

I'm preparing to hit the road to join those two in Spain, but in the meantime I've been listening to a wonderful middle-grade book involving a pilgrimage of a different sort, to your home town.  

Better Nate Than Ever by Tim Federle is the story of a small town boy who sneaks off to New York to audition for a lead role in E.T.: The Musical.  The book has all the elements of a Broadway plot: boy flees disapproving family, is overwhelmed and wowed by The Big Apple, suffers insult and disappointment at auditions, meets sympathetic friends, and ultimately (in his own way) triumphs.  It's also the story of a theater-loving boy who's on his way to figuring out that he's gay but hasn't quite gotten there yet.  In the meantime, he has become experienced at handling constant anti-gay harassment from his classmates.

(My sexuality, by the way, is off-topic and unrelated.  I am undecided.  I am a freshman at the College of Sexuality and I have undecided my major and frankly don't want to declare anything other than "Hey, jerks, I'm thirteen, leave me alone.  Macaroni and cheese is still my favorite food -- how would I know who I want to hook up with?")

Nate has spent his life using humor to get through the tough times, but discovering there's a world where kids like him aren't automatically beaten up, and where men express affection to each other in public clearly has a big emotional impact.  The publisher described the book at being for a 9 to 13 year-old audience, although I would like to think that the string of anti-gay slurs in the book (homo, faggot, fairy etc) might be a surprise to a third-grader.

His personality is effervescent.  I listened to the audio book, read by Tim Federle, the author.  He has a list of theater and bartending credits that qualify him as having been a serious contender in the Broadway world.  The tone of the audio book was perfect for his character.  I know that should be obvious, because after all he wrote it, but I've listened to a lot of author-read books that were pretty deadly.  The recording won an Odyssey Honor from the American Library Association this year: that's the award for children's audio books.

Better Nate Than Ever also won an honor from ALA's Stonewall Book Award -- recognizing books writing about GLBT issues.  That reminder made me go back and look at our flurry of entries on gay-themed books for younger children.  That was back in the summer of 2012 -- almost two years ago!  And while we're on the topic of time flying, we passed entry # 600 a few weeks back without even so much as a celebratory glass of champagne.  Onward!

Love,

Deborah

Sutcliff on girls' books, boys' books and a great book

Dear Annie,

Matthew Swanson's review of Crabtree was delightful.   You posted it just a day or two after I'd unpacked Crabtree from a box of new titles, so it was especially exciting for me.  Thank you, Matthew -- come back and talk books again soon.

We're still immersed in Rosemary Sutcliff in this household.  Bob recently re-read her memoir, Blue Remembered Hills. 
She had a rare form of juvenile arthritis which stunted her growth, kept her in pain for a good deal of her life, and led to long hospital stays and operations.   And of course in those days (she was born in 1920), parents were only occasionally permitted to visit their hospitalized children.

Hospital policies weren't the only attitude toward children that was different then.  There was the issue of books:

The rigid segregation of the sexes applied even to our reading matter.  We did not have a hospital library: we had two ward libraries, ours housed in a cupboard, the boys' piled on a large table in the corridor just outside their ward door.  When I was Up, and going to the physio department under my own steam, I used to pass it on my daily journeys to and fro; and how I envied the boys their library!  There was of course no money to buy books; we depended entirely upon the kind hearts of the general public, who unloaded onto us the unwanted books they found in their attics during spring-cleaning.  So, to start with, our books were those which somebody else didn't want; and as soon as they reached the hospital they were rigidly divided up; Boys' Library, Girls' Library, with anything that remotely resembled an adventure story going to the Boys'.  Unfortunately most of the books with any quality about them seemed to fall under this heading.  Passing the Boys' Library I used to eye with longing battered copies of Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines or Tom Brown's Schooldays.  Our own library cupboard seemed to be entirely stocked with Victorian stories about little girls of great virtue who died young, generally of consumption, surrounded by grieving friends; or the American version of the same theme, which was even worse.  There was one about a little girl whose brutal father beat her for preaching total abstinence to the clientele of his public house.  She died of consumption, too.  It wasn't really much of an incentive to virtue.  There were a few books by Mrs. Ewing and Louisa M. Alcott, but they were very definitely the aristocracy of our bookshelves; and myself, I have never been an Alcott fan.

And then one day I found a book.

It was a book called
Emily of New Moon, about a little girl whose father died of consumption -- that made a change, to start with -- after which she was brought up by strict aunts in an old farmhouse somewhere in Canada.  A Canadian story, not an American one; but I barely registered that at the time.  What made it so different from other books of its kind I did not know, and I do not really know even now.  But for me it was magic.  I carried it off and kept it under my pillow or clutched to my bosom at bed-making time, and it seems as though I read it all that summer long, which can scarcely have been the fact; but I think I must have read it through, at first voraciously and then with slow and lingering delight, at least three times on the trot.  And it was summer. On fine summer nights the beds remained out on the concrete strip all night, and I used to read, half under the bedclothes to evade Night Nurse's eagle eye, until the last dregs of the light had drained away, and the first stars pricked out in a sky of witchball green; and from the barracks half a mile away, the bugles sounding Last Post had a magic in them, too, that turned them into the horns of Elfland, faintly blowing.

The Evening Star, and the bugles sounding across the misty fields in the summer dusk, and the book hidden under the bedclothes somehow entered into each other and became part of the same enchantment, while I followed spellbound Emily's adventures and misadventures, her fantasies and her budding relationships, and her first attempts to be a writer.  Was that the secret of the book's attraction?  No, I do not think so, my own first quickening in that direction was still around eight years away.  It was just magic, and magic is always an unaccountable thing.

Emily of New Moon is the first of a trilogy by L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables.  I remember reading it with my girls, and liking Emily even better than Anne.  For your future-reading list with Eleanor!

Love,

Deborah

On the road with Rosemary Sutcliff

Dear Annie,

I'm so glad The Moorchild was a favorite.  Moql is a great character.  You talk about looking forward to reading the book again with Isabel.  Do you and Eleanor ever re-read your read-alouds?  I remember reading Tolkien over and over again with Lizzie, revisiting the Ramona books with Mona, and occasional other favorites.

I'm currently re-reading a multi-generational favorite because it's come back to play a big role in our family.  Bob wrote about his love of Rosemary Sutcliff's books for us here.  When we started reading them to Lizzie, she also connected closely with them.  The one which became very special to her -- as it is to her father -- is the one with the strongest female character: The Shield Ring.  It takes place in the Lake District in northwestern England in the years after the Norman conquest of 1066.  It tells the story of fierce resistance to Norman rule on the part of Norsemen (descendants of Vikings) who had settled in the area. The two central characters are young people orphaned by the hostilities.  Frytha, the girl, is smart, perceptive, but very much a part of the society she lives in.  She learns archery when the women are called on to help defend the settlement, but her strength and attraction are in Sutcliffe's nuanced portrait of a great character. 

Lizzie was Frytha for Book Character Day back in third grade, and she continues to re-read the book now.  Her high school senior paper, in which she had to compare two books, was on The Shield Ring and To Kill a Mockingbird: the connection between the two had to do with the nature of courage.

Next month, Bob and Lizzie are immersing themselves in The Shield Ring in a new and wonderful way.  They're heading to the Lake District to spend a week finding the places where the action of the book takes place.  Sutcliff describes in detail the landscapes where battles happened, warriors were buried, characters found emotional escape.  Many of these are places Bob has located -- along with the trails or precarious winding roads that will get them there.  One of the towns they'll visit is called Buttermere, possibly derived from the name of a Norse leader, Jarl Buthar, who is a character in the book.  The land the Norsemen were defending is beautiful, and the characters have strong connection to it.  Here's Sutcliff's description of a spot high on a ridge, a few miles from Buttermere, that appears twice at important parts of the story:

Frytha lay silent a while, gazing down.  Up here on the ridge one seemed in some strange way to be riding out, far out, over the dale below; it was like being in the prow of a gigantic long-ship, she thought, though she had never seen a ship.  On either side of her the deep glens, and between them the slender long-ship thrust of the ridge, tapering down into the marshes where the Normans were hurriedly throwing up bank and stockade about their camp.  Marshes that glowed tawny green below the grey and blue, russet and purple of the fells.  Save for the distant swarm of figures about the Norman camp, there seemed not a living soul in all the sweep of country; nothing to tell of the fighting that had gone on all the sweating, blistering day.

That spot on the ridge appears on 21st century maps as Aikin Knott; one can imagine Frytha looking out over the countryside:

View toward Aikin Knott

Both Bob and Lizzie have loved The Shield Ring since childhood.  Now, with Lizzie an adult and the two of them armed with maps, rain gear, and a drive-on-the-left rental car, they're going to immerse themselves in Britain of a thousand years ago.  And it all started with a wonderfully written children's book.

Love,

Deborah

Guys read...

Dear Annie,

Mona went through a Paula Danziger phase during the Domestic Fiction years.  I myself haven't read much of her, although one of my favorite book titles of all time is  Everyone Else's Parents Said Yes . Her Amber Brown books have always sold better for me than the older chapter books you talk about. I sometimes wonder if books talking about real-life situations age a little faster than some others. Most of the books you talk about were written late 70s/early 80s. Do the assumptions and language still speak to people born at the turn of the century?

I've been thinking about taking a brief break from Chick Lit.  I wanted to toss a question at you about your spouse.  What was he reading in middle school?  Does he have a L'Engle equivalent?  For Bob it was Rosemary Sutcliff, a wonderful British historical novelist.  She wrote an excellent trilogy about the Roman occupation of Britain, which starts with
The Eagle of the Ninth (recently turned into a not-so-good movie, I think).  Her books cover British history from the Bronze Age on up to at least the 18th century.  I'll do a longer entry on her at some point (or will ask Bob to do a guest blog).  The combination of good writing and immersion in historical settings were what attracted Bob to her books.  Any guys out there who had/have seriously favorite books from middle school on up?  Or women who want to talk about their spouses' favorites?

All of this was on my mind tonight when a friend came to dinner with his quite remarkable 14 year-old twins.  We kicked around the names of a lot of books and authors.  It turned out that the book that the brother was totally in love with was Grapes of Wrath. 

Love,
Deborah