Newbery Wayback Machine: Roller Skates, by Ruth Sawyer (1937)

At this point you might be wondering: Weren't there two other people on this blog? Yep. Here's what we've been up to the past couple months!

Rachael and I fell accidentally through a dimensional rift, into a magical land, where we've spent all our time drinking ales at the tavern there. And listening to a lot of podcasts. And reading non-classic-Newbery books, binge-watching television shows, and fighting off existential dread. I finally found my way back through the portal, but Rachael might still be there a while.

Anyway, I started reading Roller Skates three months ago, and I just finished it now, and I have a lot of mixed feels about it, so this is probably going to be a weird review. Bear with me. (Or don't! Just skip this and keep reading Sam's eloquent and insightful reviews! I won't blame you!)

Roller Skates is a book by Ruth Sawyer. It won the Newbery medal in 1937. It's about a ten year old girl named Lucinda. A sickness of Lucinda's mother's sends her parents on a year long trip from New York City to the milder climes of Europe some time in the 1890's. Lucinda's parents send her to live with one of the teachers at her school, and her sister, the Misses Peters, while they're gone, as I'm sure most parents would do?

For Lucinda, her year long "orphanage" is the best thing that could ever happen to her. She's a tomboy with a wild side, and has been repressed by her family who expect her to act like a proper young lady. Under a relative lack of supervision from the Misses, she's free to do what she wants, which is mainly roller skate all over the City and make friends of varying levels of appropriateness. Sawyer herself came from a wealthy family, and her parents traveled abroad leaving her in the care of a beloved nanny, so it's likely some of Lucinda's misadventures are based on the author's own eventful childhood. In her Newbery acceptance speech she said "A free child is a happy child; and there is nothing more lovely; even a disagreeable child ceases to be disagreeable and is liked."

Probably the most interesting thing about the book is the time capsule feel to it. It's kind of crazy to read about a New York City of the 1890's, where a little girl could just roller skate around, on her own, and ask everyone she meets what ethnicity they are. Because that was apparently a thing in the 1890's: just talking to everyone about their ethnicity. Oh you're Irish? Have you met a fairy? Oh you're Italian? How many bambinos do you have? Yeah, there is some real cringe-worthy stuff in there. But it's also kind of fascinating to see how far we've come, in some ways for better, and some for worse. 

I actually found most of the book enjoyable. As the once and future queen of my local roller rink, I know the power of roller skates. When you're skating full speed, you might as well be flying. And I found Lucinda's jubilant energy pretty authentic. But while most of things Lucinda gets up to are perfectly delightful, like the time she stops bullies from robbing her friend's fruit stand, some of the things she does during her year of freedom are strange, like the time she stages a one-woman adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest with puppets, and some of her activities are downright questionable, like the time she has a picnic with the man who regularly digs through trash and sells things he finds there.

And then there's about the last four chapters where the book gets suddenly very dark, like the time Lucinda finds a dead body. That's a thing that happens. When her parents finally return (Remember her mom was sick? I didn't.) it's actually kind of devastating. And in the final couple paragraphs is this line: "She'd never belong to herself again--not until she married and got herself a husband, and then she'd belong to him." MAJOR BUMMER.

Roller Skates was pretty revolutionary for its time. Not many books for children were addressing controversial topics such as Lucinda's rebellious behavior, and, ya know, death. But it earned a starred review from Kirkus, and obviously the Newbery committee thought it was the most distinguished of the year. My final thoughts: I think as a bildungsroman it's really dated, and I had difficulty staying fully engaged. Obviously. 

Sam reviewed this book a few years ago. I purposely didn't read his review until now, and I'm happy to report I agree with everything he had to say!

Onto the next decade! Or back to the tavern. We'll see...

Newbery Wayback Machine: It's Like This, Cat, by Emily Cheney Neville (1964)

On our About the Bloggers page, all three of us list our three favorite Newbery winners. Mine -- recognizing that I haven't read my way through all of the past winners yet -- are Island of the Blue Dolphins, When You Reach Me, and Criss Cross. I stand by those choices, but I feel like I should add that, in a very, very close fourth place, I'd put Emily Cheney Neville's 1964 winner, It's Like This, Cat.

The list of Newbery winners from the 1960s includes some of the greatest crowd-pleasers in the history of the award: in addition to Island (1961), there's A Wrinkle in Time (1963), From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1968), and The High King (1969). It's Like This, Cat, however, features no abandoned islands, no travel to dystopian planets, no squatting in museums, and no sword-and-sorcery quests. It's a low-key, episodic novel of a young man in a New York City that's now gone, but not quite forgotten. The book requires the reader to stop and absorb the details of its setting, the cadence of its language, and the sharpness of its small details -- but it amply rewards the effort.

It's Like This, Cat follows Dave Mitchell, whom we meet during the tail-end of his last year of junior high, and leave almost a year later. He acquires the titular Cat in the first chapter, and Cat serves to tie the various episodes together -- becoming the point of introduction between Dave and an older boy, Tom Ransom; giving Dave and a girl named Mary something to talk about when they first meet on Coney Island; serving as a connection between Dave and Aunt Kate, the eccentric neighbor who first gives Cat to Dave. Each of these episodes is as finely-finished as a cameo engraving, and although there's little in the way of a through plot, the episodes are all linked thematically, with themes of responsibility, choice, and the nature of friendship interweaving like a motet.

Few books like It's Like This, Cat are published today. At fourteen, Dave is older than almost all middle-grade protagonists, and the book's themes may have limited resonance for most middle-grade readers. And yet, even though some weighty themes (parental abandonment and family estrangement) and unsettling incidents (the violent, senseless death of one of Aunt Kate's kittens) raise their heads, the tone of the novel is decidedly more muted and less heightened than that of most recent YA literature. The best relatively modern point of comparison might in fact be something like Criss Cross, although that one is an almost cinematic ensemble story, and It's Like This, Cat is told by a single first-person narrator. 

Two Honor books were named in 1964, neither of which is particularly well-remembered: Rascal, by Sterling North, and The Loner, by Ester Weir. Most of the other American books from that publishing year that have lasted were either picture books (Where the Wild Things Are; The Gashlycrumb Tinies; Swimmy), or were in some other way unlikely to win a literary award (Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective; Happiness is a Warm Puppy). It's Like This, Cat may be a largely overlooked title today as well, but in my opinion at least, it's a more than worthy Newbery winner.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Secret of the Andes, by Ann Nolan Clark (1953)

Secret of the Andes is one of those Tales from Faraway Lands books, the kind brimming with descriptions of the Majestic Vistas and Proud, Noble People that fill Places You're Unlikely To Visit On Vacation. In the early days of the Newbery, this was a trope that drove winner after winner (see: Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze [1933]; Dobry [1934]; Call It Courage [1941]; etc., etc.). However, as time went on, this kind of writing fell out of favor. Indeed, Secret of the Andes was one of the last of its genre to win the Newbery -- books such as The Bronze Bow (1962) and Shadow of a Bull (1965) certainly contain similar elements, but also are starting to move, however haltingly, toward the more modern, less exoticizing style of later winners set in foreign countries, such as Number the Stars (1990) and A Single Shard (2002).

At any rate, the Faraway Land in question in Secret of the Andes is Peru. The protagonist, Cusi, is a contemporary Incan boy who lives in an isolated mountain valley with his elderly guardian, Chuto. There is a mystery surrounding Cusi's birth and destiny, and Cusi will need to visit the outside world in order to discover who he is and what he really wants.

I'll confess that I didn't find Secret of the Andes a compelling read. The mystery around Cusi's identity felt more like a shaggy dog story to me than an intriguing puzzle. I also found the plot underwhelming -- events come out of nowhere and proceed to the same location, and far too much of the second half of the book depends on impossible coincidences. (Seemingly every secondary character seems to have a copy of Cusi's detailed itinerary.) And Ann Nolan Clark's unorthodox prose style is clearly aiming for the poetic, but often felt maddeningly circular instead. Here's a sample, from chapter 13:

"Cusi and his llamas were climbing again. Mountain peaks piled upon mountain peaks. They rolled and swelled and piled higher and yet higher. They encircled the world. They towered above the world. They enclosed the world within itself. Only a brown ribbon of trail wound in and out and around them. Only a boy and his llamas moved along the winding trail."

It's possible that other readers may like that more than I did; it's certainly unlikely that they'll like it less. Especially since it's not, as far as I can tell, aiming to imitate the language or literature of Peru, it seemed mannered and artificial, and it repeatedly pulled me out of the story.

The 1953 Newbery is widely considered the biggest mistake in the history of the award; indeed, if most readers have even heard of Secret of the Andes, it's because it's the book that kept Charlotte's Web from winning. It's difficult from this distance for me to figure out what that year's Newbery committee was thinking; indeed, one of the more plausible possible explanations I've heard is that the result had to do with the fact that Ann Carroll Moore, the former head children's librarian for New York Public Library, and one of the most toweringly influential figures in children's librarianship at the time, was involved in a bitter feud with E.B. White's editor, Ursula Nordstrom. Whatever the reason, Secret of the Andes is no Charlotte's Web, and no matter how creative I get, I can't find a good way to defend this particular win.

It's okay. Mistakes happen.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, by Jean Lee Latham (1956)

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is one of those books that occupy the nebulous space between fiction and nonfiction -- the "lightly fictionalized biography" or "documentary novel." It's a genre that I don't think about all that often, but it has a long and bright history, from books such as Amos Fortune, Free Man (the 1951 Newbery winner), on to more recent titles, like No Crystal Stair (2012) and Africa Is My Home (2013).

Our hero in Jean Lee Latham's 1956 Newbery winner is Nathaniel Bowditch, a Massachusetts polymath whose book The New American Practical Navigator (1802) revolutionized the science of navigation. We meet Bowditch when he is only six years old, and follow his life through to his return from his last sailing voyage in 1803. This choice of time frame allows Latham to focus on Bowditch's navigation and nautical exploits; the second act of his life, in which Bowditch published a number of scientific articles, and worked as a noted actuary and investment manager, goes unremarked upon. I've complained before about biographical works that only cover part of their subjects' life (looking at you here, You Never Heard of Willie Mays?!), but I think Latham made the right choice; the narrative arc comes to a logical conclusion at the point where Latham elects to end the story.

I didn't really know what to expect from Carry On, Mr. Bowditch -- it's one of those more obscure Newbery titles, and I knew almost nothing about it except for the title. It started a bit slowly, but I ended up very much enjoying this one. Bowditch is a strong, interesting protagonist, and although most of the secondary characters don't get much screen time, they come across effectively enough. The setting also works well; I felt the excitement of Salem and Boston in the early days of the United States as I read. I was sorry to see Carry On, Mr. Bowditch end.

I will confess that I cringed during the descriptions of Bowditch's interactions with the Malay people in Sumatra; I have no doubt that it's an accurate depiction of how the American sailors thought about their trading partners, but given that nowadays, we'd call that "racist," it's a bit awkward to read. I've read much worse from the time period, however; even if those passages in the book would be frowned upon now, I certainly wouldn't call Latham a bigot in the context of her era.

Three Honor books were named in 1956, the best known of which is probably The Secret River, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The most famous eligible book that was shut out of that year's awards is almost certainly Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson. Harold is a classic, but I don't think it works at all without the illustrations, and I wouldn't have supported it for the Newbery over Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry (1941)

I believe that I read Call It Courage, Armstrong Sperry's novel that took the 1941 Newbery Medal, when I was a child. However, I remembered almost nothing about it, and so when I went to read the book again for this review, I came at it with, at least for the most part, fresh eyes.

What I found within the pages was not, I don't believe, what Sperry intended to put there. In his acceptance speech for the Newbery (in and around the cringeworthy exoticism of the Polynesian Other), Sperry spoke about "that courage which, in one form or another, I have tried to communicate to the readers of my books." As far as I can tell, Sperry intended his tale to be interpreted straightforwardly: a boy is afraid, courageously confronts his fears, and through the process of overcoming them, becomes a man.

And yet that's not the way that Call It Courage comes across to me at all. It strikes me as a picture of a rigid, dysfunctional society, one that is largely unwilling to accept differences. Our hero, Mafatu, is a Polynesian boy with a deep fear of the sea. Really, he's probably a kid with PTSD -- when he was three years old, he was caught in a hurricane while out in a canoe with his mother. The storm destroyed the canoe, and Mafatu held onto his mother's neck for an entire night, surrounded by sharks and dark water, before the waves threw the pair of them up onto a nearby reef, whereupon Mafatu's mother promptly died. After all that, it strikes me as perfectly reasonable for Mafatu to be frightened of the ocean!

However, his people don't see it that way. Mafatu's father, the chief, treats his son with disappointed indifference. His peers openly mock and scorn him. Mafatu is still a perfectly useful member of society -- he becomes a skilled spear-maker and net-weaver -- but in a nifty piece of sexism, this is discounted as "woman's work." Eventually, the social pressure becomes so intense that Mafatu can no longer abide it; he takes a canoe and sails away with a half-formed plan to "win his way to a distant island." (Spoilers follow!)

What actually happens is that Mafatu runs into another storm, and is then wrecked on a quasi-deserted island. Here, he makes himself a home and another canoe, gets really good at killing things (a shark, a wild boar, a giant octopus), and, I suppose, conquers his fears. However, the sense of self-improvement seems secondary to me; Mafatu states over and over that what he really wants is the respect of his peers, and even more to the point, his father's love.

None of the larger issues that seem to me like they ought to be visible from space -- why nearly kill yourself for the love of someone who demonstrates no love for you? why is there no place within a society to work through one's problems, or to make a life for oneself that isn't within an extraordinarily narrow range of the acceptable? -- are ever addressed. No, Mafatu is able to wrench himself into being exactly what other people want out of him, which is presented to us as a triumphant victory.

My deep complaints about Call It Courage shouldn't be construed as a condemnation of actual Polynesian culture. Indeed, although Sperry actually spent a year in French Polynesia, I have a lot of questions about how well he actually understood the place on anything but a superficial level. I'm not a Polynesian studies expert in any way, shape, or form, but as far as I understand it, the actual attitude towards things like gender roles would have been much different than the way in which Sperry presents it. Frankly, the whole novel feels more like a Pacific-ized version of a snobby prep school than anything else.

Also, I haven't even mentioned the "eaters-of-men," the cannibals who threaten Mafatu (mostly through his utterly inexplicable decision not to just sail away in his fully prepared and stocked canoe when he realizes they're on the island, and instead try to sneak a peek at their ritual in progress). Suffice it to say that the "cannibal" parts of the book weren't what you'd call respectfully handled.

I should try to be fair here. The "island adventure" story dates back at least to Robinson Crusoe (1719), but most of the books in this vein haven't aged all that well; they tend to look too colonialist and imperial for a modern reader to enjoy them. Sperry's defenders, such as critic Joan McGrath, caution that "it is all too easy to lose the historical perspective that would credit him with enlightenment and objectivity, given [his books'] date of publication." I've made similar arguments myself on behalf of Laura Adams Armer and Hendrik van Loon. However, I'm not entirely convinced in Sperry's case, although maybe it's just that all of the attitudes espoused in Call It Courage rub me the wrong way, and so I'm unable to be entirely objective.

I don't know what would win the 1941 Newbery if we were to re-award it today. Four Honor books were named, the best-known of which is The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (which has its own issues around race and culture). Call It Courage might still take the award -- and it's certainly easier to read than some of the other early Newbery winners that I've read -- but it's a book that really doesn't appeal to me.

2017 Contenders: The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin, by Elinor Teele

Illustration by Ben Whitehouse

 

As our regular readers know, we at For Those About To Mock have dedicated this year to reviews of past Newbery winners. However, the good folks at Walden Pond Press sent me a copy of The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin, and asked if we'd be willing to be part of the blog tour for the book's release. Now, WPP just happens to be one of my very favorite imprints; not only have they published a number of books we've loved over the past few years (Neversink, The Real Boy, The Fellowship for Alien Detection), but they're also responsible for printing my personal favorite children's book of all time, full stop (Breadcrumbs). As such, there wasn't really any question as to whether or not we'd agree to contribute to the blog tour!

Mechanical Mind opens in the dreary, miserable city of Pludgett, where eleven-year-old John Coggin crafts caskets for Coggin Family Coffins, under the overbearing watch of his Great-Aunt Beauregard. John is a talented coffin-maker, but he hates the work; he would much prefer to spend his time turning his ideas for inventions into reality. When Great-Aunt Beauregard attempts to force John to sign a contract that would not only bind him to the business for the next two decades, but also compel his younger sister Page to work as an undertaker, John finally reaches his breaking point. With the help of Boz, a circus performer of sesquipedalian speech patterns and questionable reliability, John and Page run away -- although Great-Aunt Beauregard is hot on the trio's trail.

The story of John and Page's resulting adventures reminded me of Roald Dahl, Daniel Pinkwater, and even the Mr. Toad portions of The Wind in the Willows. (Let's just say that John doesn't have much more luck with motorcars than that estimable amphibian.) The supporting cast is made up of highly-entertaining characters; my favorite was Miss Doyle, a sort of middle-aged, reptilian-looking version of Lara Croft. However, holding the whole thing together are John and Page, two children who come across as eminently authentic and believable. I appreciated the fact that John isn't some kind of Matilda-level prodigy, but rather a smart kid who still has a lot to learn, and who shows real growth over the course of the book. And I loved the relationship between the siblings -- sometimes strained, sometimes frustrated, but always full of genuine affection and loyalty.

Given that the only solid prediction I made last year was that no picture book would win the Newbery, I'm not even going to try and prognosticate this year's winner. I will, however, say that Mechanical Mind excels in setting and characterization (particularly of John and Page), and that I'd love to be a fly on the wall if the Newbery committee chooses to discuss it. I'd certainly recommend the novel for anyone who likes a fast-paced, humorous adventure story with heart.


Published in April by Walden Pond Press / HarperCollins


If you're interested in knowing what other folks are saying about The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin, check out the other stops on the blog tour!

Illustration by Ben Whitehouse

April 11 - Bluestocking Thinking

April 12 - Novel Novice

April 13 – This Kid Reviews Books

April 14 - Maria's Melange

April 15 - Unleashing Readers

April 18 - Next Best Book 

April 19 - Foodie Bibliophile

April 20 - For Those About to Mock

April 21 - Walden Media Tumblr

April 22 - Charlotte's Library

April 25 – Flashlight Reader

April 26 - Teach Mentor Texts

April 27 - Librarian's Quest

April 28 - Kid Lit Frenzy

April 29 - Novel Novice

Newbery Wayback Machine: Waterless Mountain, by Laura Adams Armer (1932)

I'm a day late in posting my review of Waterless Mountain. However, this one was laborious enough to get through that I don't really feel bad about my tardiness.

Waterless Mountain is, on its face, a sort of coming-of-age tale about Younger Brother, a Navajo boy who will eventually become a medicine man. The episodes, though, are loosely linked and largely uncompelling -- there's little real conflict, and Younger Brother's through line doesn't serve to create much of a plot. He discovers his destiny very early in the book, and there's never any chance that it won't come true; he's also a flat, uninteresting character, who learns new things but exhibits almost no change or development during the novel. The supporting cast isn't much better. Only Elder Brother's wife hints at any hidden depths, and she appears for only a few pages over the course of the book.

Very nearly the only times that Waterless Mountain comes alive are during the retellings of Navajo legends and the descriptions of the various ceremonies. Indeed, those sections are so much more compelling than any of the rest of the book, that the flimsy plot seems more like an excuse to include this cultural material than anything else. This being a children's book published in the '30s, there aren't any source notes for the stories or rituals, but I did a bit of research on some of them, and the ones I checked seemed to be more or less accurate. Laura Adams Armer spent a great deal of time on the Arizona Navajo Reservation, and she does appear to have done some homework.

This, nevertheless, brings us to another aspect of Waterless Mountain. At the time of its publication, the book was hailed for its sensitivity towards the people it portrays. A representative quote from the book's jacket, from a Dr. A.L. Kroeber who headed the University of California's Anthropology Department, claims that the novel "shows that we have entered a time when the Indian is no longer a dummy to hang our own romanticism on, but an interest and appeal in himself as he really is." Eighty-odd years later, however, what struck me was the uncomfortably paternalistic relationship between the Big Man (the white man who runs the nearby trading post) and the Navajos. Armer, who was ahead of her own time when it came to ideas of equality and race relations, reads as noticeably backward now. It would be churlish to blame her for that, but it does make for an awkward reading experience in the present time.

Famously, Armer had never even heard of the Newbery Award before winning it. She was primarily an artist and photographer -- Waterless Mountain, her first book, was published when she was 57 years old. She would write only six more books, and all of her work except Waterless Mountain and Farthest West (1938) is now out of print (including The Forest Pool, which she wrote and illustrated, for which she won a Caldecott Honor in 1939).

Six Honor Books were named in 1932. None of them are particularly well known now, although Rachel Field's Calico Bush is at least still in print. I will confess that I haven't read that one, and so don't know whether I'd argue that it would have been a better Newbery choice. I will say that I have a hard time categorizing most of the winners from the first decade or two of the Newbery -- even the rather dreadful ones -- as mistakes, given that American children's literature was very much a work in progress.

Now, on to the 1940s!