I greatly enjoyed this aptly entitled novel, which proceeds in linear fashion, not quite cradle to grave, but very close. It focuses on Dolly, who’s bI greatly enjoyed this aptly entitled novel, which proceeds in linear fashion, not quite cradle to grave, but very close. It focuses on Dolly, who’s born to a poor Australian farming family in 1880, telling her story into the 1950s. Dolly is a bright little girl and dreams of becoming a teacher. “Over my dead body” is her father’s harsh response. Educating children beyond the absolute basics is simply not part of the culture. After finishing at the one-room rural school, a girl is expected to stay on the farm and perform domestic duties until she’s married off. Dolly chafes against this fate, but recognizing that the lives of most spinsters are pitiable, she resigns herself to it.
Dolly does experience some romance as a young woman. She falls in love with one Catholic boy and then another, but such relationships can go nowhere: Dolly’s a “Proddy”, Church of England, and the denominations don’t mix. One of the poorest and grubbiest of Dolly’s schoolmates, Bert Russell, ends up becoming a hired hand on Dolly’s father’s farm. She has an aversion to him. Her mother, on the other hand, becomes fixated on the young man and determines he’ll be the one to save her restless, difficult daughter from spinsterhood. Mrs. Maunder keeps a terrible secret about Bert from Dolly, which the young woman discovers only after her marriage and the couple have settled on a farm. Although Dolly typically looks ahead, this secret, her mother’s betrayal, and her own feelings of humiliation haunt her through the years.
There is no love lost between this husband and wife, but neither is a stranger to difficult circumstances; they stay together, producing three children. Dolly has considerable drive. She’s the one who gets her family off a farm that is repeatedly battered by the weather—drought, wind, rain, and hail—and yields nothing for several years in a row.
Grenville tells of the family’s adventures moving to first to the outskirts of Sydney to run a shop and then to a series of small towns where they own and manage pubs, hotels, and a beach house. In spite of her ongoing problems with Bert, Dolly acknowledges that the two of them make good business partners, largely because her husband, for all his faults, respects her intelligence. Motherhood, however, is a tremendous challenge for her. She is not fulfilled by it and is often harsh towards her children. She wishes she could be different. She doesn’t lack self-awareness, but she cannot mend her ways. She’s quick to anger, dictatorial, and controlling. The kids are regularly uprooted, as Dolly’s restlessness inevitably kicks in every couple of years. She craves novelty, stimulation, and challenges. Everything changes, of course, with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the effects of which ripple across the world. Strangely, it is only when all the Russell family has worked for is lost that Dolly becomes most free.
We tend to forget how restricted women’s lives were not even a century ago. This simply told story provides valuable reminders. As I was reading, I was aware of echoes of Dolly’s problems in my grandmother’s, mother’s, and my own life. Some of the attitudes addressed here are with us yet. The world still isn’t as tolerant as it might be of women who choose even slightly unconventional paths.
While there’s a certain repetitiveness in reading about Dolly and Bert’s many relocations and ventures, I still enjoyed the book. Recommended....more
I’ve never encountered a work of fiction—or nonfiction, for that matter—that addresses the time, place, and issues Goldstone does in her young adult nI’ve never encountered a work of fiction—or nonfiction, for that matter—that addresses the time, place, and issues Goldstone does in her young adult novel. Set in the last half of 1937 and early 1938 on an estate/horse farm near Königsberg in Germany’s northeasternmost province of East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the story focuses on sixteen-year-old Katya, who works as a domestic for the wealthy Richter family.
Katya’s family history is turbulent and traumatic. (Goldstone appears to have written about their experiences in her earlier novels for young people, which I haven’t read; they’re now out of print and very hard to come by.) From what I can piece together from tidbits dropped throughout this book, though, the family were once members of the land-owning peasant class in the Soviet Union, the “kulaks” so reviled by Joseph Stalin. Enemies of socialism for resisting the collectivization of their farms, these people were the focus of a 1929 Soviet government “liquidation” campaign. Their land and that of other peasants opposed to Soviet objectives was confiscated, and the people were deported, arrested, or even executed. After time in Siberia, Katya and her orphaned siblings, who are ethnic Germans, have ended up in East Prussia. Her sisters live with an aunt, while Katya is employed as a maid along with another orphan, the beautiful, flirtatious, and partly Jewish Minna. The two work for Frau Richter, a generous and cultured woman of mixed Polish and German ancestry who treats them like family. Unlike her husband and her eldest son, the rakish Helmut, who have embraced the Führer’s ideas, the woman is worried about the direction in which Hitler is taking the country. She surreptitiously passes a banned novella by Thomas Mann to Katya (who hopes to one day become a writer herself) but suggests that the girl hide the slim book within the pages of Mein Kampf.
The wealthy Richters board and breed Trakehners, “noble, elegant” riding horses with “sculpted muscles.”(These horses were once popular with the military but are now used mostly for show jumping and dressage). At the time in which the book is set, however, when the Third Reich is busy restoring Germany to its former greatness, prominent Nazi officials interested in genetics and the entire breeding enterprise regularly visit the Richter estate. Imperfect animals are expected to be destroyed.
This, however, is not a book about horses per se. Rather, it concerns the human eugenics project of the regime, which officially began around 1935 when the “Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People” was passed. This law denied German citizens the right to marry people with hereditary or contagious diseases. Those with one of nine designated hereditary conditions began to be sterilized.
The story opens with Katya and Minna being given a summer afternoon off to visit the resort town of Rauschen on the Baltic Sea. Helmut and his younger brother, David, accompany them. Katya is disappointed; she’d been looking forward to reading her book in solitude while her friend swam. Minna, however, is delighted. She loves male attention, and Helmut makes his interest clear. The couple swim, then beach comb for the amber that the area is renowned for. When they return, a distressed Minna insists that group make its way back to the estate. Katya resists. She’s been enjoying David’s company—has even fallen a little in love with him—so Minna goes back alone. Not long after this day trip, she leaves the Richter home for Vienna, ostensibly to pursue an acting career. Though saddened, Katya thinks it’s probably for the best. Minna is considered a “Mischling”—a mongrel— by the Nazis, and the estate is now crawling with them. It’s basically the local Brownshirt hub.
The girls do correspond with each other, and Minna warns Katya against becoming too involved with David. It’s too late: the two have already grown close and often go off together. On one of their outings an accident occurs, and Katya learns that David suffers a hereditary condition. (view spoiler)[He has epilepsy. (hide spoiler)] This changes the lives of both. Katya will eventually also learn the real reason that Minna left the Richters’ estate. The secret of a locked desk drawer and the significance of the novel’s title will both be revealed.
Goldstone packs her book with a lot of details about German culture and pre-war, Third-Reich life in general. The youth organization for girls aged 10 to 18, the Bund Deutsche Mädel (BDM), in particular, is highlighted—as the maid hired to replace Minna is actively involved in the group and is working to establish a local chapter of the “Faith and Beauty Society” (Glaube und Schönheit) for young women aged 17 to 21. When Katya visits her younger sisters who reside with Aunt Hannelore in Königsberg, she discovers that they too are ardent members of the BDM and have absorbed a great deal of racist ideology. Not having encountered some of this information before, I have a hard time assessing if the average household in the Reich would have been as passionate about the “cause” as Herr Richter, his eldest son, and Gretchen the maid are shown to be. Would it have been typical, for example, for the pater familias and the mailman to greet the staff with a “Heil Hitler” instead of a “Good morning”? Did most families hang swastika flags outside their homes and portraits of the Führer within? I honestly don’t know. Goldstone doesn’t provide a “for further reading” page at the end of the book.
I have some reservations about the book. First, I was not entirely convinced that domestic staff, even in a liberal German home like the Richters’, would have the degree of freedom that these servants have. Gretchen, the maid who replaces Minna, appears to have more authority than Frau Richter herself! When there are Nazi girls’ league meetings that Gretchen is determined to attend, she directs Katya to take her shifts. Second, characterization (especially David’s) is occasionally inconsistent (and in ways that do not seem to be deliberate). And, finally, the writing struck me as forced at times: there are a tad too many lyrical “golden” and “amber” moments (autumn leaves and sunsets) in the early part of the book when Katya is falling in love with David. What is of interest, however, is the hereditary condition and its impact on two young people. Goldstone concludes in an open-ended way, but I believe a recently published novel will likely follow up on Katya’s story.
“When I think that you came to this country—a kind of golden dream before you—and this is what the dream turned into, it makes me ashamed.”
Huser’s nov“When I think that you came to this country—a kind of golden dream before you—and this is what the dream turned into, it makes me ashamed.”
Huser’s novel for older children and young adults focuses on Canada’s World War I internment of enemy aliens from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, most of them Ukrainian Canadians. The author brings this shameful piece of Canadian history to life through the story of two orphaned brothers, Alex and Marco Kaminsky. His telling is enriched with Slavic and Ukrainian folksongs and tales, art and music. As the book opens, Alex, who’s about 14, is living with his uncle; his older brother, Marco, has gone off to work as a farmhand on the Granger farm in Vegreville, Alberta. He is expected to return in December.
Uncle Andrew is known to love his moonshine. Drinking heavily one early winter’s night, he knocks over a kerosene lamp and sets his farmhouse ablaze. Alex, awakened in the loft by the smoke, tries unsuccessfully to save his uncle, only to have his own hands and face badly burned. He’s rescued and taken to the home of a local rural nurse. Once sufficiently recovered, he is determined to find Marco, who mysteriously and uncharacteristically did not return to Uncle Andrew’s farm when he said he would.
Huser’s novel details Alex’s quest to find his brother. Young, penniless, and not yet entirely fluent in English, Alex is helped along the way by a postmaster/shopkeeper, another Ukrainian immigrant, and a Norwegian carpenter, as well as a sensitive schoolteacher and the moneyed aunt who raised him. It turns out that a confrontation with the farmer who cheated him of his wages was enough to have Marco arrested, detained, and used as slave labour in an internment camp in Banff, Alberta. Conditions are brutal for the imprisoned men. Many become ill and die. Some try to escape: a few are successful; others are tracked down or shot.
While Alex’s determination to find his brother is rewarded, the story is ultimately one of great sadness. (view spoiler)[In his debilitated state, Marco has contracted TB and isn’t long for this world. (hide spoiler)] A secondary plot strand focuses on Stella, a young Ukrainian-Canadian woman forced into marriage at 15 to a man over twice her age: Granger, the brutish farmer who held back Marco’s wages. During Marco’s time on her husband’s farm, Stella and the young man fell in love, which further fuelled Granger’s domestic abuse.
Huser manages to communicate a great deal about conditions in rural Alberta during the second decade of the twentieth century. Canada was then a rigidly WASPish place; bigotry towards Eastern Europeans was rampant and intense. Through Stella’s story, Huser also manages to give young readers a sense of immigrant women’s difficult lot—their lack of agency and access to education, poverty, and, once married, their endless pregnancies. (I know this fairly intimately, as my Ukrainian-Canadian grandmother was one of these women.)
I’ve read two other of Huser’s novels for young people and know him to be a sensitive and skillful writer. In this story, I believe he attempted to counterbalance the distrust and prejudice of many Anglo-Canadians towards immigrants by having his likeable main character assisted by people with great generosity of spirit, but I was not wholly convinced that this would really have been the way things were for a boy in Alex’s shoes. Given the sadness of the story, however, I understand that decision in a novel for young people....more
There is nothing particularly "bad" about this novel. The writing is competent enough, and the author has clearly done her research, providing the reaThere is nothing particularly "bad" about this novel. The writing is competent enough, and the author has clearly done her research, providing the reader with a sense of the 1941 Belfast Blitz. Having said that, I can't say I see anything particularly noteworthy or "good" about the book either. I stopped at precisely the halfway point due to complete boredom. Audrey and Emma, the twenty-something sisters at the heart of the story, failed to engage me in any way. Women's secrets and dissatisfactions have been done countless times before, though the same-sex relationship between Emma and her first-aid-post supervisor was, I suppose, a departure from typical WWII historical fare. Underwhelmed, I can't imagine bothering with Caldwell again....more
Giff’s 1997 Newbery Honor Book opens in June 1944 with ten-year-old Lily Mollahan and her grandmother packing for their annual summer stay at RockawayGiff’s 1997 Newbery Honor Book opens in June 1944 with ten-year-old Lily Mollahan and her grandmother packing for their annual summer stay at Rockaway Beach, a vast five-mile stretch on the Rockaway peninsula in the borough of Queens, New York. Lily’s father, “Poppy,” an engineer, is to join them for weekends. (Her mother died from a heart condition when Lily was an infant.)
Unfortunately, when Lily arrives in Rockaway she promptly learns that her longtime summer friend, Margaret Dillon, is moving away to Michigan, at least for the time being. Her dad has taken a job on a bomber-plane assembly line there. Before leaving, Margaret gives Lily, a budding writer, the key to the Dillon summer place, so she can escape her sometimes bossy grandmother and work on her stories in its wonderful attic room. A worse announcement comes soon after: Poppy is leaving for Europe, not as a soldier, but because his engineering skills are needed. He promises he will write to his daughter and somehow let her know where he is. Lily’s grief is intense, and she angrily refuses to see him off, an act that will haunt her through a very eventful summer.
Most of the action of the novel is concerned with Lily’s growing friendship with a war refugee from Budapest, the nephew of the Mollahan’s neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Orban. Albert has been through a traumatic time. Two years earlier, his grandmother took charge of him and his little sister, Ruth, just before their parents were arrested for publishing a newspaper that was critical of Hitler, an act which cost them their lives. The children’s grandmother arranged to have them smuggled west across Europe to France and, hopefully, to America. Unfortunately, by the time the siblings reached France, Ruth was seriously ill with measles. She had to be left behind with an order of nuns. Now Albert is deeply distressed by the fact that he did not say goodbye to Ruth.(view spoiler)[He’s further tormented by the knowledge that he could have stayed in France with her. Instead, because he was so terrified of the Nazis, he'd chosen to leave for North America without her. (hide spoiler)]
The climax of the novel hinges on a lie that Lily tells Albert, which makes him believe he might be able to get himself aboard a troopship to Europe so that he can find Ruth. All of this may sound a little heavy going for young readers, but Giff has a delicate touch; lighter incidents, including the discovery of a marmalade kitten, counterbalance the serious ones.
The many warm and emotionally satisfying moments in the novel also compensate for a few events that might raise the eyebrows of adult readers. Giff’s child characters have a remarkable amount of freedom compared to most of today's kids. When I consider my own and my friends’ childhood experiences, I marvel at, and am grateful for, the benign neglect of our parents, which gave us the freedom to roam. Giff’s main characters have freedom to roam and then some. They glide off in rowboats, sometimes in the middle of the night, and they go swimming in rough water without any adult supervision—things even the relaxed parents I knew would never have permitted, even though their kids were capable swimmers. Some of today’s helicopter parents might be alarmed by the ideas this novel might give to young readers!
These quibbles aside, Giff’s book is generally a rewarding piece of historical fiction about the power of friendship and family love. Recommended.
Set in 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi, this is a well-written young-adult historical novel about one girl’s experience of the American civil rights moveSet in 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi, this is a well-written young-adult historical novel about one girl’s experience of the American civil rights movement. The story focuses on Samantha “Sam” Thomas, a high-school freshman whose Mississippi-born father died the previous year in Vietnam when his military helicopter was shot down. Sam has moved to the South from Pittsburgh with her unconventional and outspoken mother, who has just landed a job as an art history professor at a small all-white college. Mother and daughter remain in close contact with Sam’s dad’s family, who live in Franklin, not far from Jackson. They enjoy a particularly close relationship with Sam’s wise and supportive grandmother, Thelma Addy.
Initially, all Sam wants to do is fit in at her new school. This is hard to manage when you still wear your cousin’s hand-me-downs and when you’ve been raised with a set of values about race and women’s roles that don’t match those of your very conservative classmates and their parents. One route to acceptance is to cozy up to the pretty, popular, queen bee, Mary Alice McLemore, even if she’s a repugnant airhead. If she’s got a handsome and chivalrous older brother, Stone, who happens to like you, though, you might be motivated to put your distaste aside for a while.
Sam’s mother becomes romantically involved with an appealing young photography instructor, Perry Walker, who also works at the college and who has begun to make a name for himself. Some of his Korean War photography and his images highlighting racial injustice have made it into Life Magazine,and a publisher is interested in producing a book of his critically acclaimed photos. Even Sam, who’s initially wary of him, falls under Perry’s spell. He gives her one of his cameras, shows her how to use it, and teaches her how to develop the pictures she’s snapped. Sam produces what is probably the most unusual State-of-Mississippi project submission her small-minded teacher has ever seen.
Perry is an activist dedicated to voter registration of African Americans. His main role is to create a photographic record of demonstrations, which are regularly met with anger and violence from stick-and billy-club-carrying white men. Under Perry’s tutelage, Sam is soon taking her own photos of the racial injustice around her. After her mother dares to give a lecture to students at a local all-black college, making the front page of the local newspaper for doing so, the Thomases’ home is vandalized. Sam snaps pictures of the fallout. A trip downtown with their African-American housekeeper provides a further opportunity for Sam to create her own record of Jackson’s racial turbulence. It’s a real wake-up call for the girl to learn that while she might be able to buy a Coke for Willa Mae at the drugstore, the black woman won’t be allowed to drink it indoors. A lunch counter sit-in occurs that same day, and Sam takes multiple photos of the mob violence that ensues. The hatred she sees on the faces of the whites shocks her.
Stone and Mary Alice McLemore’s affluent parents extend gracious Southern hospitality to Sam and her mother. It’s hard for the girl to reconcile their seeming generosity and kindness with Mr. McLemore’s prominent role in a citizens’ group which is committed to maintaining the status quo and fiercely opposed to racial integration and basic human rights for blacks. As evidence surfaces that Mr. McLemore engages in violent acts against both black and white activists, Sam struggles even more with her feelings towards the McLemores' son. However, her greatest test comes when Perry is brutally attacked and hospitalized. (view spoiler)[He dies of his injuries, but Sam—in a coincidence I did not have to strain too much to accept—finds his camera in the place where he was savaged. Perry’s last act had been to create a visual record of the violence against him and those who perpetrated it. What Sam discovers when she develops Perry’s last roll of film leads to the arrest of Mr. McLemore. Stone himself is involved in turning his father in to police. (hide spoiler)]
Margaret McMullan has taken some liberties with the civil rights timeline. She’s included a few well-known events that actually occurred a full year after the time in which her novel is set. One of these events is the murder of a 13-year-old black boy, Virgil Ware, who was shot in the chest and face while riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle. His shooter was a 16-year-old white teenager. The other incident is Mayor Bull Connor’s infamous authorization of the use of force by local police (including fire hoses, clubs, and dogs) against young civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. Why the author has been loose with dates isn’t clear to me. It seems she wanted to have some key events of John F. Kennedy’s presidency—his commitment to space exploration and his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in particular—jostle against the South’s growing racial turmoil. I’m not convinced that the novel really demanded this sacrifice of historical accuracy. That criticism aside, Sources of Light is a fine book with a credible, relatable protagonist. It’s a novel that raises important issues that are still pertinent to young adults. I think McMullan, herself a native of Mississippi, was pretty brave to even write it.
Twelve-Year-Old Addy O’Donnell feels a mixture of pride and shame about being a member of “the meanest family on God’s green earth”. Hers has been a rTwelve-Year-Old Addy O’Donnell feels a mixture of pride and shame about being a member of “the meanest family on God’s green earth”. Hers has been a rough, hardscrabble existence on a tract of land belonging the lawless, violent O’Donnell clan of Smith County, Mississippi. Addy’s home territory is commonly known as “No-Bob”— so named after a freed black man made a fatal navigational error: he stepped onto O’Donnell land and never stepped off. A search party was sent to comb the O’Donnell woods for him. When those searching finally emerged from among the trees, they called out that there was “no Bob” to be found there. Bob had disappeared for good, but the words to mark his disappearance stuck.
This is McMullan’s second young-adult novel dealing with the American South’s Civil War experience. As it opens, Addy and her mother arrive at the wedding of a popular young couple. The O’Donnells are filthy but hungry enough to dare eating at a feast to which they haven’t been invited. Although it’s 1875, a full decade after the end of the war, the southern states remain in ruins. It’s not uncommon to stumble on bones of the war dead in the forest. Bandits regularly threaten travellers. Many people are still starving. Even the light is different now; the Yankees burned so much down that people are deprived of something as natural and basic as the shade from trees.
Confederate soldiers were supposed to turn in their weapons at war’s end, but most didn’t do so. Now many families are armed to the hilt at a time when resentments simmer, and it takes barely a spark of anger to produce a conflagration, especially among the volatile O’Donnells. (McMullen seems to suggest that the American South’s love affair with firearms was born during this period.) After the war, Addy’s father, Mark O’Donnell, returned to Smith County, but he apparently didn’t stay for long. As far as Addy and her mother know, he’s gone to Texas. He was supposed to send for them, but Addy is doubtful this will ever happen. At the Russells’ wedding, her mother meets a man with a mule who’s bound for Texas. She seizes the opportunity to go with him, hoping to locate the husband who deserted her. Addy is abandoned.
Frank and Irene Russell take Addy in. Frank is reluctant, having had his own troubles with the O’Donnells, but his tenderhearted wife prevails. Addy proceeds to make herself indispensable to the pair. Rough as her Pappy may have been, he taught Addy a lot. She can manage chores as well as any man, and she knows how to survive. In time, Frank, a teacher, is won over by the girl, and he arranges for her to attend school. She becomes fast friends with Frank’s younger sister. These are Addy’s first steps in crossing from lawless No-Bob with its primitive codes of honour and loyalty to a kinder, more civilized life. Additional hard steps will be demanded of her.
Soon a geography project has Addy and her friend mapping an unfamiliar patch of land where a dual-purpose church/school house for coloured folks stands. One evening the two girls witness an attack on the building during a church service. Hooded men arrive on horseback while members of the congregation sing hymns inside. A flaming cross falls on the schoolhouse, setting it ablaze. Addy rushes inside in an attempt to save her young friend, a little black boy, Jess Still. He dies, and Addy knows who is responsible.
McMullan’s book explores Addy’s struggle to do the right thing, muster the courage to inform on her own people. The girl finds herself back in No-Bob for a time, after her father comes to collect her.(view spoiler)[ It turns out that he was not in Texas at all, only hiding in the woods. He’s been instrumental in the formation of the local Ku Klux Klan, which he views as a tool for “cleaning up” the county. (hide spoiler)] Later, Addy wanders in the wilderness for several weeks, witnessing even more terrible things, and then spends some interesting time with the displaced Choctaw Indians, whose culture and mythology McMullan deftly and economically weaves into the story. (I was surprised to learn that “Little People”, tiny mythical beings who may trick or assist humans, figure in Choctaw lore, just as they do in the stories of Canada’s Inuit people.)
I was impressed with McMullan’s first novel, and I am impressed yet again with her second—especially with her ability to communicate about southern culture and history. Once again, too, her narrative hinges on a protagonist’s intense moral dilemma. However, this time around, the author has trouble bringing her novel to a satisfying conclusion. In its last third, she expects her reader to swallow a few too many good things. The Russells’ fondness for Addy is convincing enough, but Frank’s restored relationship with another member of the O’Donnell clan is a bridge too far. More significantly, by the end, Addy no longer sounds or acts much like the girl the reader has come to know. There really is such a thing as a character becoming too much of a heroine for her own good—and the good of the novel....more
Margaret McMullan packs a remarkable amount of incident and information into her brief, powerful, and sometimes graphic children’s novel about the AmeMargaret McMullan packs a remarkable amount of incident and information into her brief, powerful, and sometimes graphic children’s novel about the American Civil War. As the book opens, Frank “Shanks” Russell’s fourteen-year-old brother, Henry, and their father, Jack, are preparing to leave the Russell farm to fight alongside the other Confederate soldiers of Smith County, Mississippi. In the days that lead up to their departure, they sit on the porch, cleaning their rifles and discussing strategy. Mr. Lincoln has just declared war, and the understanding of the county’s men is that this war isn’t about slavery so much as the Yankees’ desire to destroy the South’s way of life, take over its ports, and rob people of their honour and independence.
Frank laments the fact that at ten, he’s two years too young to be even an army drummer. He’s also fair haired and skinny, taking after his mother’s people, and he feels Pa doesn’t respect or love him because of this. Left behind, Frank and the family’s young slave, Buck, who is around Henry’s age, take on the heavy labour of the farm. They run errands, including one to deliver bandages to a makeshift field hospital in a schoolhouse. This is a gruesome outing in which the boys witness the horrible injuries of war—soldiers with viscera exposed, their wounds seething with maggots; many handless, armless, and legless. The stench is overpowering.
The seasons pass; the family becomes more destitute. The land is laid to waste. Livestock are stolen, and there’s drought. Women, children, and the slaves who remain work together to scratch what they can from the land. Not much. Hunger is a constant companion. Frank’s relationship with Buck strengthens. He finds himself wondering increasingly about the young slave’s life and thoughts. (view spoiler)[Bucks’s mother drowned in a storm on the Mississippi when the two were being transported by boat from Mobile, Alabama, and it’s evident that he’s been permanently altered by the trauma. (hide spoiler)] For a time, Frank bothers his grandfather with questions about slavery and the war. Not quite a pacifist, Grandpa has been clear from the beginning that he’s not one for fighting, and this war in particular is not his war. Soon enough, the old man leaves for Texas, attracted by rumours of a freer life there. (view spoiler)[His wife, Frank’s cranky, corncob-pipe-smoking grandmother dies soon after. (hide spoiler)]
Before the war’s end, Frank’s father returns without Henry. Now white-haired and missing an arm, he limps onto the farm, a broken man. It is clear that the Union is winning. When the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves, the vast majority of those in Smith County fled north to Chicago. With Mississippi now mostly under federal control, enraged local men scapegoat the few coloured folks who remain. Buck is targeted. This is when Frank faces the ultimate test in moral courage. (view spoiler)[He and his father accompany Buck through dangerous territory, where there are still active skirmishes, to the Strong River. Pa gives Buck his freedom papers and instructions about travelling north. (hide spoiler)]
In an afterward, the author explains that Frank Russell was a real person, her paternal grandmother’s great uncle. Before he died, someone interviewed him and recorded his memories. The real Frank had been notably silent about his experiences on the family farm during the war. McMullan has capably filled them in, creating a credible protagonist and a convincing depiction of the devastation of war and the moral quandaries of a boy becoming a man. She ends her novel on a hopeful note, having Frank observe: “Our country fell apart, and for a time, so did we. But some of us are still left, and we are strong enough to put ourselves and our world back together.”...more
In this entertaining piece of historical fiction for older children/younger teenagers, Gaetz tells the story of 13-year-old Emma Curtis. It is 18623.5
In this entertaining piece of historical fiction for older children/younger teenagers, Gaetz tells the story of 13-year-old Emma Curtis. It is 1862, and the young girl and her seriously ill mother, Jenny, have been laid off from a Manchester spinning mill. With the American Civil War raging, there’s no cotton being shipped to England from the American South. The factory has had to be temporarily shuttered. The mother and daughter are in dire straits. With no money coming in, they can barely manage to purchase the stale bread a kindly baker offers at a much-reduced price, never mind pay the rent for their squalid lodgings. Before she dies, Jenny makes Emma promise she will never go into a workhouse (a crucial key to survival) and that she will always make an effort to speak proper English (a route to upward mobility). Emma receives the ring her father gave her mother as well as some notes her mother recorded in cursive, which tell something of the family history. Unfortunately, Emma’s schooling has been very limited. She is essentially illiterate.
After wandering out of Manchester, the frightened, cold, and starving girl is taken in by a warm-hearted woman, a parson’s wife. Eventually, though, the woman and her clergyman husband arrange for Emma to travel on a “bride ship” to one of the newest British Colonies: British Columbia. It’s all part of a charitable enterprise funded by the (real-life) Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, an English woman who used her considerable inheritance to keep impoverished young girls out of prostitution and provide them with other opportunities. The British colonies are in need of young women like Emma to become wives of the many adventuring men already living there. The women are expected to exert a peaceable, Christian influence on settlements.
After a three-month ocean journey, Emma arrives in Victoria, BC, and is lucky enough to be selected by Governor Douglas’s wife, Amelia, a woman of Cree ancestry, to work in the Douglas household as a servant. Now safe, Emma begins to have dreams of her own—dreams involving adventure and a free and independent life. However, a series of coincidences cause the girl to make some surprising discoveries about her mother’s and her own history. They will prove to be life-changing
Gaetz effectively interweaves a lot of 19th-century British Columbian history and some interesting real-life figures into Emma’s story. She provides more information about these people in an appendix. Gaetz also (less effectively) incorporates some Victorian vocabulary into her book and a glossary that can be consulted to understand the unfamiliar words. Frankly, I don’t know why she bothered with this in a book intended for children. The words are, for the most part, no longer in use and therefore of little value to a middle-school student. They don’t even add much flavour. The annoyance of looking up the terms outweighs any added authenticity.
As an adult, I noticed echoes of Bronte’s Jane Eyre in the book; Emma can be as fierce and outspoken as Jane, whose story is, in fact, read aloud to her at one point in the story. There are also Dickensian elements. Yes, the book is slightly predictable, even a little formulaic, for an adult, and there are a few too many parsons in the pudding. However, I still think that certain girls I know would enjoy the story. It shines a light on a bit of BC history that I wasn’t familiar with....more
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