More Magic

Dear Annie,

I wanted to react to a couple of things that have dashed by in recent weeks.  I suspect you've finished Half Magic by now -- I'm so glad you all enjoyed it.  There are six more books in Edward Eager's Tales of Magic, written from 1954 to 1962, and in all he acknowledges his reverence for/debt to the writing of E. Nesbit (yes, yes - we have to write about her!).

I loved your quote from the talking cat chapter, but I still haven't figured out what "Idlwidl bixbax. Grompaw.  Fooz!" mean.  There's one more book about Martha, Jane, Mark, and Katharine,
Magic by the Lake. In one scene, the children are lost in a sort of magic fog on a desert island and are rescued by another group of children who seem to be in the same magic. Two of the other books -- Knight's Castle and The Time Garden -- are about Martha and Katharine's children.  There's a lovely scene in one of them where the cousins go into a sort of magical fog on a desert island and find and rescue another group of children there.  They all go on their separate ways.

Then there's your entry on editing out too-disturbing stuff as one is reading aloud.  It's true, we keep coming back to this.  In an ideal world, we'd all have time to vet books before reading them to kids, but after the picture book stage, that's next to impossible.  And it's so hard to predict what will just go right by a child, and what will be traumatic. 

You talked about your friend Cyd reading one of the All-of-a-Kind Family books with Rebekah, and her sister writes about the books wonderfully in Even in Australia.  This is not the first time I've felt I should re-visit that series.  A lot of people have a special spot in their hearts for them.  I read the first book once with our girls.  The turn of the last century Lower East Side is very well portrayed.  I remember liking some of it, but recoiling at some of the heavier gender stereotypes.  There was a chapter in which the excitement had to do with a contest among the sisters about who could dust the best/fastest.  And for me the strongest image of the book was of the father crying at the end because he was so thankful he finally had a son.  Heaven knows I've spent plenty of time saying that attitudes about women have changed, but it still was a hard scene to explain to my daughters.  Cyd and/or Rachel, I'll go back and re-read, but feel free to jump in here...

Love,

Deborah

Selective editing

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Seeing those images from Fireboat of the planes heading toward the towers, I'm not sure if I'M ready to read it with Eleanor yet. Both of the books you write about in depth, though, do seem like good possibilities in the near future.

A propos of this topic, I was talking to my friend Cyd a few days ago about the selective editing we are sometimes tempted to do as parents when reading to our children books which are mostly fabulous but contain one or two highly disturbing moments.  I've written about reading Betsy-Tacy to Eleanor for the first time and eliding the death of Tacy's baby sister (on second reading, we talked about it ahead of time and read it with the full text, and Eleanor seemed totally capable of handling it).

Cyd, mother of three girls, is currently reading the All-of-a-Kind Family series to her eldest, Rebekah.  I remember the series dimly from my own childhood -- it's about a family of five girls living on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century -- but I don't think it made as much of an impression on me as it did on Cyd's family.  (Here's her sister, writing about it on one of our favorite blogs, Even in Australia.)

When the mother of a boy in one of the later books gets sick and is in the hospital, Rebekah got terribly worried about her, and asked about her welfare every night when Cyd sat down again with the book: "Is she going to be okay?  Will she get well?"  In Sydney Taylor's text, the mother dies, and the family goes to live with their social worker.  Cyd felt that this would crush Rebekah, talked it over with her husband, and had the mom get well and go to live with the social worker with the rest of the family.

As we talked, Cyd and I both felt mixed about this -- when is it time to reveal the harsh truths  that are part of life, and when is it still time to protect your child from what she will inevitably learn later?

I feel like this is a question we keep coming back to, and that there's no one good answer.

Love, Annie