Musing Mondays: Childhood Favorites

It's been quite a while since I participated in the Musing Mondays meme. Mainly because, quite frankly, Mondays are very frazzled around here and I usually have a hard enough time just waking up and wrapping my hands around a coffee cup. Any musing I do is along the lines of "whatever happened to the weekend?" and "why don't I just go back to bed?"

But today's question caught my eye and I thought I'd join in. This week, our host MizB (at Should Be Reading) asks: "Do you have a favorite children’s book? Either one that you loved as a child, or one that you discovered later, and still enjoy? Tell us about it!"

This is one of those questions I love because I did/do very definitely have childhood favorites. Vast numbers. Well, several anyway. But I'll only bore you with a couple.

Now, my absolute favorite children's book of all time is Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. I've read it many times since that first discovery back when I was six or seven, and I still love it just as much as I did then - maybe even more. But I've written about my Alice addiction many times on this blog, so today I'm going to tell about one of my other childhood lit loves.

Even before I discovered Alice and her wondrous adventures, I was a book lover. And the first book I remember really loving was The Real Mother Goose, published by Rand McNally and illustrated by the great Blanche Fisher Wright. I still have my childhood edition:


I was given my copy long before I learned to read, but I memorized the nursery rhymes as my parents and grandparents read them to me. And I spent long hours just gazing at those gorgeous illustrations.

Could this have been my earliest experience of male chauvinism?

And, as you can see (below), I even spent some time adorning the book with a few instances of my own artwork.

I believe I was trying to give the birdies a house here.

And while that jagged line may look like a shark about to gobble up an unsuspecting couple,
I think it's really supposed to be a staircase. Call Dr. Freud.

The Real Mother Goose is still in print today. It's had many different editions and several different covers over the years; it's even available for e-readers and there are several online versions (like this one). But it still has those magnificent Blanche Wright illustrations. And I still love reading my copy, more than fifty years later.

Bookworms Carnival, Edition 12

This month's Bookworms Carnival is up. It's Edition #12, with Fairy Tales as its theme. If you like fairy tales, the Carnival offers lots of great reading, and you could discover a new blog to fall in love with!

Many thanks to Nymeth for hosting, and for including one of my posts (Granny's Wonderful Fairy Tales).

Anyone interested in participating in an upcoming Carnival can find more information and guidelines by visiting Dewey's Information for Carnival Participants.

Review: Twig

Written and illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones
60th Anniversary Edition, published by Purple House Press, 2002, 152 pp.
Originally published by The Macmillan Company, 1942
Young Readers Challenge 2008

"Well, who ever heard of going to Fairyland with a plain ordinary old dress on? Just look at it, Your Majesty!" said Twig. "And just look at these old shoes!"

The Queen looked at them and smiled. "They're only on the outside of you, Twig," she said. "It doesn't matter how plain or how ordinary or how old the things on the outside are, you know. It's what is inside that matters."

This book was first recommended to me by my friend Carol Sue when we were in second grade together. She absolutely loved it, and talked about it almost incessantly for about a week. And I was very attracted to it at first – the pictures were wonderful and I loved the idea of being able to shrink down to the size of a sparrow and sit on a dandelion leaf. However, as soon as CS told me that one of the characters in the book was a cockroach, I said "No way, José!" (or the mid-1950s, second-grade equivalent of "No way, José"), and that was that.

But I remembered Twig over the years, and as I grew up and became more liberal about reading-matter taboos, I always intended to try to find and read the book that had made my little girlfriend so happy all those many years ago. And thanks to the Young Readers Challenge, now I have.

Twig is a little girl who lives with her Mama and Papa in an apartment on the fourth floor of a "high sort of house" in the city. She doesn't have other children around to play with, and her world is the back yard, "bounded by houses on three of its sides and by a high fence on its other. Outside the fence was an alley. Inside, was a garbage can."

In the midst of this rather bleak little world, where no grass grows, Twig has discovered a dandelion plant with long leaves "that were bent over like the branches of a tiny tree." And when she finds a discarded tomato can with a rip in its side that resembles a doorway, she washes it out and places it next to the dandelion plant, delighted to see that it looks just like a little house – "just the right size for a fairy."

And eventually a fairy does come along – not just any fairy, but the Queen of Fairyland. But before she shows up, we're introduced to a lot of other wonderful characters, along with Twig. There's the Sparrow family – Sparrow and Mrs. Sparrow and their four children (who are just eggs at the beginning of the story). And there's Old Boy, the ice-wagon horse. And Old Girl, the cat who gives concerts every night.

And then there's Elf, a tiny little fellow dressed in a potato-skin suit, who shows up with a magic book and manages to shrink Twig down to his size – tiny enough to set up housekeeping in the upside-down tomato can. They use one of Twig's Mama's thimbles for a cook pot, and toothpaste tube caps for plates. And Twig sweeps the floor with an old feather from Mrs. Sparrow. And at one point Elf does come home with the aforementioned cockroach (called "Chummie"), but Twig shoos it away very quickly.

When they're not tidying up their tomato-can abode, Twig and Elf visit Mrs. Sparrow in her nest, and sit on her eggs while she goes in search of food and her wandering spouse. The two tiny playmates climb up Old Boy's tail and take a ride inside his ears. And Elf brings Twig a pair of butterfly wings that she attaches to her back and uses to take a little flight around the backyard – before the wings fly off on their own again.

Twig is a very appealing and resourceful little girl. And, of course, when she gets the chance to go live in Fairyland with Elf and the Fairy Queen, she decides she really would rather stay with her Mama and Papa. But during her adventures with Elf and all the other characters, she's learned that she doesn't need a magic book to perform magic – she can make magical things happen anytime she wants, just by using her imagination.

Twig would be a perfect book for reading aloud to preschoolers – most likely over a period of a few days. Since it's aimed at the 4-8 age group, it would probably also work for kids who've learned to read on their own, although I'm not sure how well such an old-fashioned tale would hold their attention. It was first published in 1942, and definitely has a pre-war feel to it.

Elizabeth Orton Jones, in addition to winning the Caldecott medal for Prayer for a Child, also did the illustrations for the 1948 Little Golden Book edition of Little Red Riding Hood, which is one of the best-loved versions of that tale (and one of my childhood favorites). In Twig, the illustrations are a delight: small drawings throughout the book, as well as a number of full-page color pictures.

It's a very cute story – it even has a bit of a "Wizard of Oz" twist at the end. I can see why Carol Sue liked it so much – cockroaches notwithstanding.

Review: Betsy-Tacy

Written by Maud Hart Lovelace
Illustrated by Lois Lenski
Published by Harper Collins
First published by Thomas Y. Crowell, 1940
Young Readers Challenge 2008

First there was just Betsy Ray, a four-year-old girl with plump legs and brown braids, living with her mother and father and her eight-year-old sister Julia in a small yellow cottage, "the last house on her side of Hill Street," in a town named Deep Valley. But even though there are plenty of other children on Hill Street, there are no other little girls just her age, so when a new family moves in across the street, Betsy is thrilled to find that one of the many children in the family is another little four-year-old girl, named Tacy (short for Anastacia).

Tacy is as thin as Betsy is plump, and her hair is red and curly. At first, the two girls don't hit it off – Tacy is painfully shy ("bashful," as Tacy's older sister Katie always tells people) and it takes a while for the two to get to know each other. But after they do, they become inseparable: "It was difficult, later, to think of a time when Betsy and Tacy had not been friends. Hill Street came to regard them almost as one person." So they became Betsy-Tacy.

Maud Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy is the story of the first year of friendship between the two little girls, with Betsy taking the lead in most of their adventures. Along the way, the girls start school, explore their village, and meet their neighbors. They play paper dolls and dress-up, and help their older sisters color Easter eggs. They climb trees, make snow angels, and turn a piano crate into a playhouse – one of my favorite episodes because I had a similar playhouse when I was about that age, made from a box that a refrigerator came in.

Lovelace combines the reality of their situation with a liberal sprinkling of fantasy, mostly in the form of really magical stories made up by Betsy. In one of their early meetings, the two ride through the sky on feathers and look down on their houses and neighbors below. Well, not really. But Betsy and Lovelace have a way of enveloping both Tacy and their readers in the magic.

Not all of the book is charming fantasy. There's a bit of real-life trauma thrown in. When Mrs. Ray has a baby, Betsy has a little trouble adjusting to not being the youngest member of the family anymore. And there's a death in one of the families, that's very surprising and sad.

Betsy-Tacy is the first of a series of books Maud Lovelace wrote about the two girls and their friend Tib, who makes her first appearance at the very end of this book. According to most histories of the books, Lovelace based the character of Betsy on herself and used incidents in her own life for story lines. The books are set in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries, and are appealingly slow-paced and nostalgic. For many years, it was hard to find the books outside libraries; but the huge cult following that's recently developed has led to new editions being issued.

I'm not sure how this book would go over with youngsters today – it's very old-fashioned and, I suppose, quaint. I've been meaning to read it for years. And now that I have, I'm very happy I finally met Betsy and Tacy, and I'm looking forward to getting to know Tib. But I certainly wish I'd discovered their books as a child – I would have loved them.

You can learn more about Maud Hart Lovelace, and Betsy and Tacy and the books by visiting the Betsy-Tacy Society Home Page.

Review: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Written and Illustrated by E. L. Konigsburg
Simon & Schuster / Aladdin Paperbacks, 2002, 172 pp.
Young Readers Challenge 2008

Winner of the Newbery Medal in 1968, E. (for Elaine) L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is the story of Claudia Kincaid and her younger brother Jamie, and their adventures in New York City when they decide to run away from their Greenwich, Connecticut home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well, actually it's 12-year-old Claudia who decides to run away – she takes 9-year-old brother Jamie along because "he was good for a laugh" and because he has the amazing sum of twenty-four dollars and forty-three cents saved up, mostly his winnings from gambling on card games.

The two escapees pack their clean undies in their violin and trumpet cases, take the train to New York City, and spend a week living in the Met. They hide from museum guards and workmen, bathe in a museum fountain, sleep in antique beds complete with antique bedding and antique dust. They also manage to solve a mystery involving a statue of an angel that may or may not have been sculpted by Michelangelo.

Their story is narrated by the wealthy and aged Mrs. Frankweiler of the title, and she's part of the mystery. She was also my favorite character. Well, how could I not like a woman who keeps a lifetime of newspaper clippings and personal items in "rows and rows of filing cabinets that line the walls" of her private office? She has the soul of a librarian.

She also hates beauty parlors and has her butler cut her hair. Now who couldn't fall in love with that?

I'm not going to give away much more of the plot, except to say that Claudia and Jamie eventually go home, and the ending has a couple of very neat surprise twists. And along the way, Claudia learns something very valuable about what you can and can't run away from.

This book is very definitely a modern children's classic. It's been around for over 35 years now, and it still delights new readers every year – children and adults alike. There have been two film versions, and it's referenced in several other films and TV shows. So it's stood the test of time and taken a firm place in popular culture.

I enjoyed the book and would recommend it whole-heartedly to readers of all ages, but I think I missed a lot of the charm it would have held for me if I'd first read it as a child. As an adult, I kept having trouble suspending my disbelief – even in the Olden Days of 1967, two children hiding out in the Metropolitan Museum for a week would have been far-fetched stuff. And I also kept wondering about the poor parents of the runaways: What must they have been going through back in Greenwich while Claudia and Jamie were harvesting coins from the fountain, and eating breakfast every morning at the automat? OK, I know it's fantasy and not to be taken too seriously. But a lot of it felt very real, too, and I think it was that mixture of the real and the decidedly non-real that kept tripping me up.

I also couldn't help noticing how dated a lot of the book seemed. Things have really changed since 1967. How many kids today will know what an automat is? Or a transistor radio? Or an Olivetti typewriter?

But in the edition I read, the author herself addresses this problem in an afterword. And she rightly points out that "the events of September 11, 2001, that have changed forever both the conscience and configuration of New York would not have changed Claudia and Jamie. The skyline that they would have seen when they arrived in Manhattan would not have been very different from that which we now (sadly) see."

And though she admits that many things have changed since 1967 (including the author herself), one thing Konigsburg says is still true: "the greatest adventure lies not in running away but in looking inside, and the greatest discovery is not in finding out who made a statue but in finding out what makes you."

The Young Readers Challenge

Like I need another challenge.

Well, I've heard that this reading challenge business can be addictive, and I guess I believe it now. But this one looks so inviting!

The Young Readers Challenge "is for those interested in reading more children's literature" (that sounds like me all right) and runs from January to December 2008. And the only rules seem to be to read 12 or more books "written for the 12 and under crowd" during that time period. "A theme is NOT required. A list is not required. Choose what you like. Choose as you go. Or plan it all out now. Whatever you want."

How attractive is that?

Haven't put my final list together yet, but it will include:

Gone-Away Lake (Elizabeth Enright)
Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (Rachel Field)
Many Moons (James Thurber)
Something by Marguerite de Angeli
Something by Edward Eager
Twig (Elizabeth Orton Jones)

What a great opportunity to read a bunch of the books I should have read as a kid. So if I'm not too late, I'll definitely be joining up for this one.

First Snow

We had our first snowfall of the season yesterday. The weather gurus had been predicting it for days, so we knew it was coming; but it ended up being a little more formidable than they'd expected. We got about four inches, a bit more than the "trace" they warned us about. Not a huge weather event, as weather events go, but enough to make us all realize winter is coming on fast. Kind of a shock after the nice long, mild (albeit somewhat colorless) autumn we've had this year.

I've never learned to love snow. It's gorgeous on Christmas cards and in old movies, but in reality it's just hell to deal with. The wife of one of M's colleagues back in Louisiana used to say "How many beans make a mess?" – a little Southern whimsy. Well, that's a question that could be applied to snow – and it doesn't take much snow to make a mess around here. With the appearance of the first snowflake, the Washington DC area goes completely to pieces. You'd think they'd never seen this nasty white stuff before. And yet it snows here every winter.

We lived in Chicago during one of the worst winters they experienced in the last century: ten feet of snow covered the ground for months. But the city kept going. Roads were cleared, people got to work on time, businesses and schools remained open. Humanity soldiered on.

But just the hint of snow is enough to bring the DC area to a complete standstill. Traffic snarls. And so do the commuters. The metro system becomes hopelessly backed up and bogged down. Electrical systems fail. Tempers flare. And everyone rushes out to stock up on – you guessed it – water, milk and toilet paper. Something else I've never understood – why is it that so many people don't buy toilet paper unless there's snow on the ground? What are they using when it's not snowing?

Of course, when I was growing up in Central Texas, snow was a rarity and a real treat when it showed up, every ten years or so. As a kid, I loved reading books with snowy landscapes in them – the Bobbsey Twins and the Happy Hollisters were always having snowball fights and building snow forts and going ice skating on frozen ponds. I never went ice skating – but I watched a lot of Sonja Henie movies and always coveted those outfits she wore with the short skirts and cute little coordinating caps.

The matching hat and mittens I'm wearing in the photo are the closest I ever came to Sonja's sartorial splendor. They coordinated with the red boots, too. This was during the Big Snow of 1950-51, and the really amazing thing about the photo is that my one-year-old cousin is wearing what appears to be a snowsuit. And why anybody possessed a snowsuit deep in the heart of Texas in 1950, or where they got it, I could not possibly guess. Well, our mothers had obviously been reading those Bobbsey Twins books, too.

Scary Stuff about Halloween

Well, Halloween has come and gone and I've definitely learned my lesson this year. No more trick-or-treating at our place, I'm afraid.

This year we had exactly 11 trick-or-treaters, down from about 17 last year and a whopping 24 the year before. I always enjoy handing out the treats and getting to see all the kiddoes in their costumes, but an abundance of leftover candy is not something I want to deal with. The M&Ms are OK – they won't go to waste. But I just can't say the same thing about all those gummie treats.

And speaking of Halloween costumes, there was an interesting article in the Washington Post the other day ("Preteens Trading Fairy Wands for Fishnets"). Apparently the new trend in Halloween attire, for girls anyway, involves miniskirts, bare midriffs, and fishnet stockings. And not just for pre-teens – sexy costumes are being made in sizes to fit 5- and 6-year-olds. The costumes have names like "Sexy Super Girl," "Playboy Racy Referee," "Funky Punk Pirate," and "Fairy-Licious Purrfect Kitty."

OK, I have to say it: What's the world coming to? I feel like I fell off the sled back there, about 500 years ago. Whatever happened to clowns and ghosts and hobos?

Well, almost all our trick-or-treaters this year were girls. But none of them looked particularly racy, thank goodness. Even the vampire craze of the last few years seems to have waned. This year they were mostly princesses of one sort or another. And the only short skirt was a pink tutu on a four-year-old ballerina.

I think the closest I ever came to a sexy costume when I was a kid was when I was about eleven or twelve and dressed up as a gypsy. I wore one of my aunt's old peasant skirts and a lot of her costume jewelry. I tied a scarf around my head and wore lipstick, too – possibly for the first time. I thought I looked tremendously exotic.

Of course, the whole effect was completely spoiled when the weather that year turned cool and damp, and my mother insisted I cover everything up with a very un-exotic wool cardigan. So even if I had been sporting a bare belly button or leather bustier, no one would have known it.


Generally, my Halloween costumes were less elaborate, store-bought (probably flammable) outfits like those in the photo here, circa 1956 or so. The one in the clown mask is my cousin. I'm in the cat costume, sharpening my claws on her 6-year-old body.