Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts, 1980.

Katie has recently moved from the country to an apartment in the city to live with her single mother. Katie’s parents divorced when she was young, and for years, she lived with her grandmother in the country. However, her grandmother has now died, so she has gone to live with her mother. Katie has mixed feelings about living with her mother again after years of living without her, and she somewhat blames her mother for not keeping Katie with her instead of leaving her with her grandmother. Katie can’t live with her father because he moves around too much, and she doesn’t even know where he is right now.

At first, Katie wonders if things are going to be different in the city, but Katie soon realizes that the same problems that plagued her in the country have followed her to the city because she still has the same abilities she has always had and can’t resist using them. Katie has always made people nervous, including her own parents and grandparents because she’s not like other children. For one thing, she has strange, silver eyes that surprise everyone who sees them because they seem unnatural. For another thing, Katie has the ability to make things move just by looking at them and concentrating on them. She tries to use this ability only when no one can see her doing it, but people can’t help but notice that odd things happen when Katie is around. Somehow, things move around Katie without Katie apparently moving herself. Sometimes, when things happen by ordinary accidents, people blame Katie for them just because she was around, and they’ve all come to think of Katie as somehow causing strange things to happen. Secretly, many people think that there’s something seriously wrong with Katie, like she might be a witch or something, and they try to avoid her.

Katie knows that she’s never met anyone else like herself, but she wishes that she did because she’s often lonely. It’s hard to make friends when people think you’re strange or dangerous, and even your own family is distant with you because you frighten them a little. Although Katie tries to pretend normality as much as possible, the urge to use her powers is too strong, particularly when someone has made her upset. She subtly uses her powers to spook her mother’s crass boyfriend, Nathan, and her mean babysitter in the hopes of driving them both away.

After Katie succeeds in spooking the babysitter, she overhears her mother talking to Nathan about her. From their conversation, Katie learns things about her mother’s history and herself that she never knew before. Her mother, Monica, had lost another baby before her after being in a car accident, and then she went to work at a pharmaceutical company. She liked the work there and the other women she worked with, and she has stayed in touch with some of them. However, she left the job when she got pregnant with Katie, and some of the other women there also got pregnant around the same time. Originally, Monica had hoped to return to the job after giving birth to Katie, but the company stopped making the product they were working with, and none of the other women who had children returned.

Ever since Katie was born, Monica knew that Katie was odd because she never cried, and she’s always had those silver eyes, yet her mother has trouble thinking that anything could be seriously wrong with Katie because she seems healthy and is very intelligent. Nathan asks Monica whether the drug she was working with could have had some effect on Katie, and whether that could be why Katie is the way she is. At first, Monica doesn’t think so because she says, if that was the case, her friends from that time would have had children who were similar to Katie, and she thinks they would have said. Nathan asks her whether she’s sure that her friends would admit that their children were strange and a little frightening, and whether Monica has ever seen any of these children for herself. Monica has to admit that she hasn’t. Nathan suggests to Monica that Katie’s condition and whatever the conditions of her friends’ children might be could be the reason why the company stopped production of that medicine.

Katie is stunned at this information. She has always assumed that she was a random freak of nature, and it never occurred to her that there might be scientific explanation for her strange abilities. Although she still doesn’t like Nathan, she has to admit that his questions and his theory are sensible. She also begins to wonder about the children of her mother’s old friends and whether they are also like her, with silver eyes and the ability to use telekinesis. She secretly goes through her mother’s belongings to figure out who her mother’s old friends were so she can track them down and meet their children.

When Katie makes friends with a nice older lady, Mrs. Michaelmas, who lives in the same apartment building and persuades her mother that she would make a better babysitter than the others that her mother has tried, Katie finds someone to confide in for the first time. She isn’t alarmed when she discovers that Katie can talk to and understand her cat, and Katie finds herself telling her all about herself and the other things she can do. The older lady takes it calmly, saying that, at her age, she’s seen may things before and doesn’t get too worried about things. They talk about why people get scared of people who are different, and the older lady says that people are often afraid of someone they think might be somehow more powerful than themselves. Katie has powers that other people don’t have, and people are afraid of what she’s able to do that they can’t.

When a new tenant, Adam Cooper, moves to the apartment building, he seems open and friendly with Katie. Unlike other people, he doesn’t seem concerned about her silver eyes, and she wonders whether he could be a confidant, like Mrs. Michaelmas. At first, she thinks Mr. Cooper might be interested in her mother and could make a better boyfriend for her than Nathan, but then, she overhears him talking to her mother and asking questions about her. Mr. C seems way too interested in Katie and why Katie’s babysitters haven’t gotten along with her. In fact, it sounds like he’s planning to call her old babysitters and ask more questions about her. Katie doesn’t know why Mr. C is so interested in her, but she no longer thinks his intentions are merely friendly. When she hears Mr. C asking Mrs. M about whether Katie’s ever done anything odd around here, Katie is sure that Mr. C knows that she has powers that other people don’t have. Then, he tells Mrs. M that he’s been making inquiries about Katie in the town where she used to live, and some people there really think she’s a witch and that she may have caused her grandmother’s death. Katie is horrified because, while she knows that she didn’t do anything to her grandmother, it would be hard to prove because he grandmother died from an accidental fall downstairs. Even having someone open an inquiry into her grandmother’s death and suggesting that she could have been at fault would reveal Katie’s secret powers to the world!

Katie doesn’t know who Mr. C really is or what he wants with her, but she fears that, if he convinces other people that she’s dangerous, she could be locked up for life! She decides that her only hope is to find the other children who are like her. They may be the only people who could understand her and be willing to help.

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

I didn’t read this book when I was a kid, although I saw it around. For some reason, I just put off reading it, although it’s similar to other books that I did read about kids who have mysterious powers. When Katie eventually meets the kids of the other women her mother used to work with, they admit that they all feel like misfits and have wondered for years why they’re so different from everyone else. One of them says he thought that he might secretly be an alien, given to a human family to raise, which reminds me of Escape to Witch Mountain, which was written before this book. However, Katie and the other kids are all human, just mutated by the pharmaceuticals their mothers worked with.

Sadly, there are real-life cases of children changed by their mothers taking dangerous medications while pregnant, but in real life, those children are born with birth defects rather than psychic or telekinetic powers. A famous case of that was the Thalidomide scandal of the 1950s and 1960s, when babies were born with severe deformities after their mothers used the tranquilizer Thalidomide. Most of these cases happened in Europe because the FDA refused to approve the drug in the US due to inadequate testing.

In some ways, this book also reminds me of Matilda by Roald Dahl, but The Girl with the Silver Eyes was published first, so it’s not an imitation of that book. Like Matilda, Katie has powers of telekinesis and pointedly doesn’t like to watch tv but she loves books. I enjoy children’s books that also mention other, real children’s books, and Katie mentions some that she’s read. Among the books that the story mentions her reading are The View from the Cherry Tree, Gentle Ben, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Boxcar Children, The Headless Cupid, and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Mentions in the story of the dangers of child molesters and her mother has books that are inappropriate for children and stops her daughter from reading them. Katie’s mother thought she might be “retarded” when she was a baby.

Some Spoilers

I had several theories about who Adam Cooper could be and what he might want with Katie. At first, I wondered if Adam Cooper could be the father of one of the other children who are like Katie, secretly investigating the children of other women who worked with his wife to see if they all have the same condition. Then, I thought maybe Adam Cooper worked for the pharmaceutical company and was checking up on the children of their employees for years to find out what happened to them. I was hoping that he wouldn’t be part of a secret government organization, like the one in Stranger Things because that’s been done a lot, and sometimes, I feel like it’s become kind of a conspiracy theory cliche. Actually, none of those are the real explanation.

It turns out that there is an organization that has an interest in children like Katie. They don’t mean them any harm, but they are interested in studying the reasons why children like her end up with special abilities and helping these children to develop their abilities. He confirms that Katie and the children of Monica’s old friends aren’t alone, that there are other children with varying conditions and abilities, some also the children of people who worked with pharmaceuticals and others with no known cause. At the end of the story, Adam asks the children and their families whether the children want to come to the school his organization runs, which sounds a little like Professor X’s school from X-Men or The Mysterious Benedict Society.

However, the children and their parents aren’t entirely sure whether that’s a good idea or not. Adam assures them that the children wouldn’t be prisoners at the school, that their education and development would be prioritized, that they wouldn’t have to hide their abilities from anyone while they were at the school because they would be among others like themselves, and that they wouldn’t be treated like creatures to be merely studied. Still, the children don’t want to be separated from their parents, and the parents are concerned about sending the children away to this unknown school. One of the children asks, since there are four of them living in this area, whether they could form their own day school as a kind of satellite school to the main one, so they can continue living at home and being part of the regular world, not isolated from it. They don’t reach a full decision by the end of the story, but the adults discuss the possibility. Katie and the other kids feel like their lives have already changed for the better, just having each other and realizing that they’re not alone.

The Silver Crown by Robert C. O’Brien, 1968.

Ellen Carroll has always known, deep down, that she was a queen. Of course, everybody else sees this as a game of pretend, and it kind of is, but on her 10th birthday, her life changes forever, and there may be more behind Ellen’s feeling of being a queen than even she knows.

When Ellen wakes up on her 10th birthday, she finds a letter from her Aunt Sarah and a beautiful silver crown next to her on her pillow. Ellen loves the crown because Aunt Sarah is the only adult who seems to really believe Ellen when she says she’s a queen. Ellen takes the crown and goes for an early walk in the park, daydreaming about being a queen. When Ellen gets back to her house, she gets a real shock. In the brief period that she was gone, the house has completely burned down, and apparently no one else in her family survived!

Ellen, in shock, tries to talk to the firefighters and police about the fire and what happened to her family. She discovers that the fire was surprisingly sudden and fierce, there’s no indication that anyone survived, and they might only find bones when they finish their investigation. Ellen explains that this was her family’s house, but since her family hasn’t lived there very long. Nobody really knew her family, and nobody really knows her, and even the police seem to doubt her identity. However, a policeman says that he will take her to the station.

On the way to the police station, something else shocking happens. Ellen and the police officer witness a murder! A robber shoots a store manager, and when the policeman chases the robber, he is also shot. Alone and forgotten, Ellen watches more police come and investigate the situation, trying to figure out what to do. Ellen realizes that, with her family gone, what she really needs is a guardian or a next of kin. That would be Aunt Sarah. However, Aunt Sarah lives in Kentucky, and that’s hundreds of miles away. Ellen could write to Aunt Sarah, but it would take days for her to get the letter, and in the meantime, Ellen has nowhere else to stay. Then, Ellen decides that the thing to do is to go to Kentucky herself. She writes a letter to her aunt to tell her that she’s coming, and sets out to find a ride.

She accepts a ride from a nice man called Mr. Gates who says he’s a teacher and that he’s going to Kentucky, too. She considers it good luck until, during the ride, she begins to notice that there’s something weird about this man. He seems weirdly happy, all the time, and he sometimes repeats certain stock phrases at inappropriate moments. When Ellen gets a look inside in the glove compartment and sees something disturbing – a gun! Suddenly, something clicks in her mind, and she realizes that Mr. Gates was the man in the green hood who shot the store manager and the policeman! She escapes from Mr. Gates and runs into the woods.

While she hides from him in the dark woods, she hears Mr. Gates searching and calling for her. As she listens to him, he grows more disturbed and more disturbing. First, he tries to tell her that he’s going to take her straight to her Aunt Sarah, and Ellen realizes that she never told him her aunt’s name. Then, he begins raving, trying to command her to come out because “the king” has demanded that he bring her to him, and he will punish them if they don’t come. Ellen doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but in the woods that night, she has a strange vision where a man wearing a black crown that looks like hers seems to be commanding other people.

The next day, Ellen befriends a boy named Otto. Otto lives with his elderly mother in the woods, and they survive partly on things they salvage after trucks wreck on a dangerous section of road nearby. Otto and his mother invite Ellen to stay with them a little while to eat and get some sleep.

Ellen explains everything that’s happened to her to Otto’s mother, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. Mrs. Fitzpatrick is a wise woman, and she and Otto both sense that there’s something odd about Ellen’s crown. They sense that it has a power of some kind, but it’s the kind of power that only particular people can use. Whatever the crown does, Mrs. Fitzpatrick is sure that it will only work for Ellen. She questions Ellen about who gave her the crown, but she admits that she doesn’t really know. All she knows is that it was there when she woke up. Since it was her birthday, she just assumed that it was a birthday present. She talks her Mrs. Fitzpatrick about having this sense that she’s a queen and that her Aunt Sarah thinks so, too. Mrs. Fitzpatrick agrees, but she says the question, is what or where is Ellen the queen of? Ellen will need to figure that out before she can understand what the silver crown really is and what it does.

During the night, Mrs. Fitzpatrick shoots at someone who’s lurking outside their cabin, and they realize that someone is still hunting for Ellen. Ellen can’t stay there, and Mrs. Fitzpatrick points out a road that Ellen can take, and she insists that Otto go with her because he knows how to manage in the woods and can help Ellen. Mrs. Fitzpatrick admits that it’s also best for Otto to leave the area because he’s also in trouble.

At first, she’s vague about what trouble Otto is in, but gradually, Mrs. Fitzpatrick explains that Otto and his past aren’t what he believes or has chosen to believe. Mrs. Fitzpatrick found him as a very small child, abandoned on the nearby highway, and she has no idea who his birth parents are or what happened to them. Mrs. Fitzpatrick says she doesn’t really need the things that Otto has salvaged from the wrecked trucks, but for some reason, Otto believes that she does, so he’s been causing these accidents by using branches to hide the sign warning people of the dangerous curve ahead. It doesn’t seem to affect smaller cars, but bigger trucks can’t make it without warning. Ellen is horrified, but Mrs. Fitzpatrick says that she thinks that Otto needs to leave this place and the dangerous fantasies about himself and his life that he’s build, living alone in the woods.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick lets the children go with a warning to Ellen to keep the crown hidden and not to tell anybody about it. She also warns her to beware of any people or group who use the name Hieronymus. The first Hieronymus was a saint, but others have appropriated the name to study the occult and esoteric knowledge, and not for any holy purpose. Mrs. Fitzpatrick says that she has read about a crown like Ellen’s which is associated with these people, and she thinks this secret society is after Ellen now.

Ellen and Otto set out on a cross-country journey to reach Ellen’s Aunt Sarah, but they eventually find themselves trapped in a disturbing boarding school, run by the secret society they are trying to escape. The students in this school are controlled by the mysterious Hieronymus Machine, and they are being trained as soldiers in the service of “the king” to sow chaos in society. Ellen is close to learning the purpose of her crown, but she and Otto will need their wits to escape and put an end to this secret society’s evil plans!

Robert C. O’Brien is known for Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, but The Silver Crown was his first book.

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

I was intrigued by this story from the very beginning. Strange things start happening very quickly – the appearance of the silver crown on Ellen’s birthday, the destruction of her house, the murder she witnesses, Ellen setting out on her journey to her aunt, and the strange and disturbing Mr. Gates attempting to kidnap her – all of these events, while confusing for Ellen, are related and part of a much larger story.

The parts of the book where Ellen and Otto are traveling cross-country, meeting people who help them escape from the people chasing them and continue their journey, seem almost like part of a fantasy book or fairy tale. This story is both fantasy and science fiction. (Spoiler) The Hieronymus Machine is an invention more than a thousand years old that controls minds by broadcasting feelings like radio waves. The school run by the society uses the Hieronymus Machine to control the minds of the “students”, and the students are all part of a larger experiment to test the powers of the machine and the ability of the black crown to control it. There is a pseudo-scientific explanation of how the machine works, which is the science fiction element, but the black and silver crowns that control the machine and the roles of “king” and “queen” associated with the crowns add the fantasy element. When Ellen meets the king, he explains to her how he discovered the machine and that the people who built it, although they called themselves monks, were actually sorcerers. I enjoy stories that are cross-genre, and I thought that this combination of fantasy and science fiction worked well.

Actually, I was surprised when Ellen and Otto ended up at the boarding school and started learning what the Hieronymus Machine is and what it does because it struck me as very similar to the plot of The Mysterious Benedict Society. This book is 40 years older than The Mysterious Benedict Society, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired that later series. Both of them are based around the concept of mind control machines that work like radio waves and strange boarding schools that are used both for mind control experiments and for training/brain-washing people to serve a dark purpose. Both stories feature children who are orphans and/or separated from their parents and people whose identities are uncertain and whose memories are corrupted by the machine. (Spoiler) It turns out that Ellen’s family is still alive but being held captive by the secret society, but we never learn who Otto’s parents were or if they had any connection to the secret society themselves.

There are some differences between The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Silver Crown. Ellen discovers that the king, although seeming to be in control of everything initially, is also controlled by the machine. The machine controls everyone around it, to some extent. The king somewhat controls the machine through the black crown, but at the same time, he’s also carrying out the goals of the machine. Although he seems in command, he’s really just a tool of the machine itself and needs to be freed from it as badly as everyone else. This is a somewhat different scenario from The Mysterious Benedict Society, where there is one person who is definitely in control. Some people, like Ellen, have a natural resistance to the mind control effects because their minds work differently from other people’s, and that’s how Ellen is able to resist the mind control and use the silver crown. The silver crown is the one that actually controls the machine while the black crown allows the machine to control the wearer while giving him the illusion of control, which is why the king wants to control the silver crown and Ellen. On some level, the machine realizes that it needs Ellen and the silver crown to function. Ellen needs to learn how to use the crown and the knowledge it gives her about what to do to establish control over the machine and ensure that it can’t control anyone else again.

There are actually two different endings to this book, depending on whether you read the British version or the American version, and if you listen to Kent Kently’s reading on Youtube, he reads both of them at the end of the book. In the original British version, Ellen’s Aunt Sarah says that she sent Ellen the crown after finding it in a curio shop in Spain, where the shop owner seemed to think it was an old theatrical prop. This ending isn’t very detailed and leaves some things to the imagination. The American version has far more detail, and in that version, they conclude that the secret society had someone break into Ellen’s house and leave the crown for her because they were actively searching for someone who could use it. If you read other reviews of this story, some of them will differ from each other, depending on which version the reviewer read. Personally, I like the American version with its more detailed explanations better, but Kent Kently prefers the shorter, original version.

The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong, pictures by Maurice Sendak, 1954.

The story takes place in a small fishing village in Holland called Shora. Because the town is small, the local school is also very small, with only six children in the village old enough to attend. Five of them are boys: Jella, Eelka, Auka, and Pier and Dirk (a set of twins). The sixth student is Lina, the only girl. Lina is the one who gets the other students thinking about storks because she writes a story/essay about them. It wasn’t a school assignment. Lina just wrote it because she thinks that storks are interesting. It’s supposed to be good luck if a stork nests on your roof. Lina also notes that, while storks nest in other towns around them, like the one where her aunt lives, they never nest in Shora, for some reason. This starts a class discussion about storks, and the students generally agree that they know very little about storks because storks don’t live in their little village. The teacher says that, even when people don’t know much about a subject, they can still wonder about it, and he challenges the students to wonder about storks and why they don’t nest in their village. He is sure that, if the students wonder about it and think about it, they will learn the reason why the storks don’t come to their village. In fact, he lets the students out of school early so they can spend some time thinking about it. He mysteriously says that their wondering may cause things to happen.

The children are thrilled at being let out of school early, but they feel bound now to wonder about storks and why storks don’t nest in their village. They’re not sure exactly how to begin thinking about this subject or how to figure out the answer, but they take a good look around their village. They find themselves looking at familiar places like they’ve never seen them before, but after a while, some of them become restless. Eventually, the boys all run off to play, leaving Lina to wonder by herself, to her annoyance. However, while wondering by herself, Lina notices something important: that all of the roofs in town are steep and that the school has the steepest roof of all. She realizes that the steep roofs are the reason why the storks can’t nest in Shora. When she realizes that, she also realizes that she knows what to do about it. Her aunt has a wagon wheel on top of her roof, and the storks nest there. Lina realizes that, if they put a wagon wheel on top of the roof of the school, the storks would have a place to nest.

Lina is thrilled that she’s managed to figure out the answer all by herself, but since all the boys ran off, she has nobody to tell about it. Then, an elderly lady who everyone in the village calls Grandmother Sibble sees Lina and asks her what she’s doing. Lina is a little shy about talking to Grandmother Sibble, but she finds herself talking to Grandmother Sibble about the storks and what she’s realized. Grandmother Sibble says that what Lina has realized is true, but she also points out that houses in other towns have trees around them, too. That’s important because Shora doesn’t have trees. Grandmother Sibble says that, if Lina wants to really understand what storks want and need, she has to imagine what it’s like to be stork and consider how a stork would think. Lina likes that idea and starts thinking about what storks would want.

Grandmother Sibble says that, when she was Lina’s age, she was the only girl in Shora, just like Lina is now. Back then, they used to have trees in Shora, and they also had storks there. What changed Shora was that there was a terrible storm that destroyed the trees. Grandmother Sibble says that the storks haven’t returned to Shora since. Lina is surprised about Grandmother Sibble’s story, but it helps explain more about why their village is the way it is. Grandmother Sibble says it’s important to consider the whole picture of the village and everything that’s there and look at it from a stork’s point of view. Grandmother Sibble says that she’s missed the storks ever since they stopped coming to Shora, so she will think about it with Lina and consider what to do. Lina is pleased that Grandmother Sibble is as interested in the storks as she is, and she also realizes that this project has changed the way she looks at Grandmother Sibble. She now sees Grandmother Sibble, not as an unapproachable old lady but as a friend, as someone who used to be a girl very much like herself and who understands how she thinks and what she cares about.

The next day, the teacher asks the students who spent time wondering about storks and what they learned from it. Lina is irritated that the boys say that they thought about storks, too, when they all ran off to play, but the boys tell her and the teacher that they did do some thinking. Jella says that he asked his mother about storks, and his mother says that there were never storks in Shora and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Lina contradicts him, telling the class what Grandmother Sybil said. Jella is forced to admit that his mother was wrong. She probably didn’t know storks had ever been in Shora because she isn’t as old as Grandmother Sibble and wouldn’t remember when they were there. Eelka says that he also thought about trees, partly because he got wet when he was playing with the other boys and wished that there was a tree to hang his clothes on. It made him think that maybe the storks wish there were trees, too. The teacher asks them if that’s their firm conclusion that the lack of trees is the main reason why storks don’t come to Shora, but Lina says that she still thinks that the lack of wheels on the roofs is important because storks nest on the roofs, not in the trees. She thinks that, when the trees in the town died, everyone just assumed that the storks were gone for good and stopped trying to put wheels on their roofs like they used to and like people in other towns do.

As the students argue and debate about the importance of trees and wheels on the roofs, the teacher asks them what they can do to test their theories. The students realize that growing trees would take a long time, and some of them think it might be impossible because their village has too much wind and salt in the air and soil from the sea, which is why the trees they used to have died. Someone points out that one person in town has a cherry tree, but it’s small, and he won’t let anybody near it. He has a fence around it to keep people and animals away, and he scares away birds who try to take the cherries. The teacher says that the cherry tree is evidence that at least some trees can survive in Shora, if they are cared for and protected. He also tells the children that making changes and making dreams come true does take time and work, so they can’t expect results from the theories they test immediately. Still, by trying different approaches, he believes that they will learn more and that they can get storks to nest in Shora again. If they can get even one pair of storks to build a nest in Shora, they will know that they’re on the right track.

Since the idea of putting a wagon wheel on a roof is one that they can do more quickly than growing new trees, they decide to start by testing that theory. The nesting season for storks has already started, so they want to get started right away, or they’ll miss the season. Their teacher agrees to give the students time away from school to work on the project, as long as they’re willing to make up the study time later, and they agree. The teacher helps them to coordinate their search for a wagon wheel they can use. The children are sometimes distracted or tempted to go play instead of working on their project, but they quickly realize that, if they don’t focus on their task, they’ll miss their opportunity.

In the children’s quest to find a wagon wheel they can use, they learn a little more about some of the people in their little community and come to a new understanding and appreciation of them. When a big storm comes, the children worry that all of the storks will be killed and that their efforts have been for nothing, but reassurance and help comes from an unexpected source.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

The author of the book, Meindert DeJong, was born in the Netherlands, and the tradition of putting wheels on roofs for nesting storks is real. If you Google it now, it’s difficult to find a mention of it that isn’t also about this book. I have found some pictures of stork nests on wheels (including some in Alsace, where they apparently have a similar practice) and some up on special poles. It’s a fascinating tradition that, admittedly, I wouldn’t have known about or thought to look up if the book hadn’t described it. There is also another children’s book, Wheel on the Chimney by Margaret Wise Brown, that also describes this type of nest for storks.

What I really enjoyed about this book was how the teacher encouraged the students to work through the issue of why there were no storks in their town in their heads, collect observations, brainstorm different possible explanations, and test their theories. Basically, he was teaching them a simple version of the scientific method, although he never calls it that. When Lina raises the question of why there are no storks in Shora when other towns around them have storks, the teacher encourages the students to put their minds to the question, collect some observations about their town, conduct research (like asking the adults what they know about storks in their town), develop a working hypothesis (the storks need a place to nest), and conduct an experiment to test their theory (provide storks with a place to nest and see if they can get a pair of storks to build a nest there).

The teacher provides some guidance as the children go through these steps, but then, he allows the children to approach the project by themselves, only stepping in when they run into problems. In some cases, the children do run into serious problems, even putting themselves in physical danger, which shows the dangers of not drawing some limits ahead of time or providing more direct supervision, but the children do manage to work out their problems, and fortunately, nobody is seriously hurt. By the end of the book, the children have also drawn many other adults in the community into their project, often in ways that help the adults as well and bring the community closer together. In the process, the children also learn a few things about themselves and their own abilities. In some ways, it reminded me of the Christmas story Starlight in Tourrone, where a community comes together to re-create an old ritual that people in a small village have otherwise abandoned.

I appreciated how the children develop some better understanding for the adults in their community by bringing them into the project or approaching them for help, and parts of the story actively encourage the children to be empathetic and look at different situations from someone else’s point of view.

• Grandmother Sibble, the first adult Lina talks to, tells Lina that, to think what would attract a stork, she has to think about the village from a stork’s perspective and consider what a stork would want and need. Lina is fascinated at the idea of thinking like a bird would, but she also comes to think a little like Grandmother Sibble when Grandmother Sibble recounts her memories of how the village used to be when she was a little girl and the great storm that destroyed their trees. Lina comes to realizes that Grandmother Sibble wasn’t much different from herself when she was a girl and that the two of them understand each other better than she thought.
• Jella angers a nearby farmer by taking a wagon wheel without his permission, and the teacher helps to soothe the farmer’s feelings by getting him to remember something he did as a boy Jella’s age, so he can understand why Jella did what he did. It’s a bit eye-opening for Jella as well, to see that adults around him were once very much like himself. The teacher also persuades Jella to give the farmer some help to make up for the inconvenience he caused the farmer, and Jella and the farmer bond over a shared love of archery.
• Later in the story, when the children consider approaching Legless Janus, an intimidating man in a wheelchair who has lost both of his legs and who has a reputation for having a nasty temper, Pier pauses to consider what it must be like to be Janus, how hard it would be to be confined to a wheelchair, and how that might make a person angry and temperamental. When Pier and his twin try to sneak into Janus’s garden to see if has any wagon wheels, there’s a confrontation between them and Janus, and Pier reveals to Janus some of the thoughts he had. Janus is surprised at how the children see him and the stories that they tell about him. He tells them the truth about how he lost his legs and reveals a shared interest in the children’s project that turns them from mutual antagonists into friends.

Besides the children in the story learning to think about situations from other people’s perspectives and getting to know other people better, the children also learn a few things about themselves that give them some different perspectives on their own futures. Lina often feels a little left out of things because she’s the only girl among the children old enough to go to school in their village. The boys don’t always include her with things they do because they say that girls don’t like to get their clothes wet and messy and that they cry or giggle too much. Even Lina at times wishes that, like a boy, she had less of an impulse to cry at times, and modern readers may roll their eyes at some of the story’s old-fashioned attitudes about boys and girls. With the exceptions of Lina and Grandmother Sibble, women in the story often play subordinate roles in the story, and the story refers to a male stork as being his mate’s “lord and master.” However, there are also parts of the story that prove some of those assumptions wrong. Lina does some daring things in her pursuit of the wagon wheel, and isn’t afraid to get wet or dirty while doing it. The women urge their husbands to help the children in their efforts, even in bad weather, and their support proves important and is appreciated, even when they’re not the ones leading the project. There are also times when the boys get a bit emotional or on the verge of tears, showing that the boys also have emotions, even when they try to fight them or hide them. The roles of boys and girls and men and women in the story aren’t what we typical want or expect in 21st century America, but I liked it that all of the characters are shown as being capable and that their contributions are appreciated.

Grandmother Sibble also helps Lina to see herself and her future from a new perspective. She reveals that, like Lina, Sibble was also the only girl in the village at her age. As the eldest girl of her generation in the village, Grandmother Sibble eventually became the eldest woman in the village, the “grandmother” of everyone, and eventually, Lina herself will someday be Grandmother Lina, the eldest woman in the village, telling stories about what used to be and how things have changed to younger generations. Lina isn’t just a girl but a kind of future village wise woman in the making, actively bringing about some of the changes that will later become part of village lore.

Some of the boys learn a few things about themselves, too. Eelka is a big boy who is often slow and clumsy, which is why some of the other boys, like Jella, are reluctant to let him join in games. Part of his difficulty is that he doesn’t always think things through all the way before he does them, which is how he gets into trouble in the story. Another issue is that, as the youngest of all of his brothers, he’s used to the idea that other people can do things that he can’t do. When Eelka rescues Jella from a dangerous situation, partly brought about by Eelka’s impulsiveness and the need he feels to try to tackle big jobs by himself to prove himself and partly caused by Jella’s own impulsiveness, Eelka comes to fully appreciate that he’s a lot stronger than even he knew. When he and Jella talk about it, Eelka says that his family is in the habit of thinking of him as the “baby” of the family who doesn’t know anything and can’t do things, but the truth is that people grow. Eelka isn’t a baby anymore, and he has developed strengths he didn’t know he had until he is forced to use them. He just needs to learn how to use them wisely.

The village’s shared participation in the project and the quest for a wagon wheel also brings out sides of the adults that some of them haven’t shown for years, giving them new confidence in themselves as well as greater appreciation from the village children. 93-year-old Douwa shows Lina that elderly people are sharper and can do more than she thinks they can and gets the opportunity to relive one of the most heroic escapades of his own youth. Legless Janus enjoys the most exciting adventure he’s had in years and shows that, even though he is now disabled, he has nerves of steel and an ability to take charge in an emergency. He also knows carpentry, so he creates the mount for the wheel on the school and later, he begins making new wheels for other roofs, finding a new trade to practice. He is also the one who reassures the children that reports of storks killed by the storm are exaggerated or made up because he has spent years watching birds and knows their behavior. He says that the storm probably scattered them over land, but they have instincts that would have prevented most of them from being over water when the storm was coming and that they will come resume their journey as the weather clears.

A few other concepts in the story are consideration for the environment, problem-solving, and time management. All through the story, the children are confronted with problems of various kinds, and they have to figure out how to solve them, using their own wits and whatever they have to work with. They also learn the importance of time management because they know that they don’t have long before the storks’ nesting season will be over, so they must use their time wisely, putting aside playing or other distractions to accomplish their mission. I was particularly interested in Grandmother Sibble’s description of how Lina needs to look at the whole picture of the village, what it has, and how it has changed over the years in considering why storks no longer nest there. Essentially, what’s she’s describing is the ecosystem of the village, how all of the different elements work together to either make it a hospital place for the storks or an inhospitable one. The wheel on the roof is one of the factors, but the trees (or lack of them) are also a factor, and the windy and salty conditions are further factors in the growth of trees and how friendly the environment is too wildlife. The story doesn’t use the term “ecosystem”, but that’s what this interplay of different environmental factors is. Changes to one part of the ecosystem will bring about other changes, just as the terrible storm that happened when Grandmother Sibble was young radically changed the character of the village.

There are a couple of things that readers might want to be aware of. First, there is some corporal punishment of children in the story. Janus spanks Jella badly when he tries to steal cherries from his tree, and the farmer hurts Jella’s ear when he takes his wagon wheel without permission. In 21st century America, we don’t generally encourage physical punishment, although Jella does get over these incidents and doesn’t hold it against either of them in the end. Admittedly, Jella was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing both times, and they don’t abuse him beyond the immediate incident either time. Each of them also admits after the fact that each of them might have gone a little too far in their punishment, and both Janus and the farmer do Jella favors, helping him with the wheel on the school project and teaching him how to make arrows for his bow, so the negative experiences are balanced with positive ones. Sometimes, adults in the story also use harsh insults to rebuke children, like “idiot” and “lunkhead”, which we also don’t encourage.

The presence of Janus in the story also leads both the children and readers to consider the feelings of people with disabilities and how people with disabilities would like to be treated. The children are afraid of Janus at first because he has a temper and can be pretty fierce in defending his cherry tree, but they later learn that he actually does care more about the children than his defense of his property makes them think. What Janus really wants the most is to feel useful and to show that he is still smart, strong, and capable, in spite of his disability. Later in the story, when the other men in the village get tired of Janus barking orders at them while they’re putting the wheel on the school, and one of them calls Janus a “slave-driver”, saying that he just needs a whip. Janus retorts that he doesn’t need a whip when he has a sharp tongue. He’s only slightly embarrassed at being called a “slave-driver.” It would be a very negative thing to say about someone in the 21st century US, but in some ways, it actually makes Janus feel a little better that the other men see him as being tough and not someone to be coddled or treated too carefully because of his disability. They even feel comfortable enough to joke with him about it. There is a moment when he’s a little unsure how to take a man’s comment that maybe the “shark” that got his legs should have taken his tongue instead, but when Janus sees that the man isn’t serious about it, he responds in the same bantering way, bragging that his tongue was too intimidating for the “shark”. (His legs weren’t really lost to a shark. That’s a kind of joke/village rumor.) Janus is also thrilled when one of the men makes a thoughtless comment that, if Janus isn’t satisfied with the way they’re working, he should come up on the roof and do it himself. It was a thoughtless thing for the man to say, and there’s an awkward moment when everyone remembers that Janus can’t climb up on the roof without legs. However, Janus tells the children that he’s actually pleased because the way the man made that comment shows that, for a moment, he completely forgot that Janus has no legs. Janus thinks that’s a good sign because it means that people are no longer thinking of him only in terms of his disability. He doesn’t want his disability to define him.

Toward the end of the story, the children do find some drowned storks, showing that an article the children saw in the newspaper about storks being killed in the storm wasn’t all “fake news” as Janus made it sound. At least some storks were killed in the storm. The adults in the story aren’t always right about everything. However, Janus is correct that the storks weren’t all killed. He helps the children to stage a daring rescue of a couple of exhausted storks off a sandbar before the tide comes in, saving them from drowning.

Overall, I though it was a very positive story that provides many things for young readers to think about. Sadly, as of this writing (March 2026), it is out of print. Used copies are still available, although some are a bit expensive, and libraries still have it. There is also an unofficial reading of the story on YouTube.

The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren, 1947.

The story is told from the point-of-view of nine-year-old Lisa, a Swedish girl who has two older brothers, Karl and Bill. She and her family live on a farm that people call Middle Farm because it’s between two other farms, North Farm and South Farm. The three farms together are called “Noisy Village” because there are so many children around. The children who live on South Farm are Ulaf and his little sister Kirsten, who is only a year-and-a-half old, and North Farm has two girls, Britta and Anna, who are Lisa’s friends. Ulaf is friends with Karl and Bill. Sometimes, Lisa tries to play with her brothers, but they often tell her that she’s too little, and she sometimes thinks of the boys as a nuisance. Ulaf will sometimes play with girls, although Karl and Bill sometimes tease him about it, but there are also a limited number of children in the area to play with, so being willing to play with whoever is around is a good thing. Through the story, Lisa tells little stories and talks about the things that all of the children of Noisy Village do together.

When Lisa was younger, she used to share a room with her brothers before getting a room of her own. At night, Karl used to tell ghost stories, while Bill likes to talk about adventures. Lisa tells a story about how her brothers scared her one night with a ghost story and how they rigged up a trick to make it look like their room was haunted. Although Lisa sometimes misses the stories that her brothers used to tell her at night, she’s also relieved that she has a space of her own so she doesn’t have to put up with their pranks or them bossing her around all the time. Bill and Karl like their room because their window is close to Ulaf’s window, and the boys like to use the tree between their houses to go back and forth between the two rooms. The room that Lisa has now used to belong to her grandmother, before her grandmother moved in with an aunt. Lisa’s family remade the room for her as a present for her seventh birthday. Lisa’s room faces North Farm and Britta and Anna’s room, so the girls can send each other notes or signal to each other through their windows.

Some of the children at Noisy Village have pets, and Lisa explains how Ulaf got his dog, Skip, from the mean shoemaker, who was mistreating him. Britta and Anna don’t have any pets, but their grandfather lives with them, and the other children at Noisy Village like to visit him. Britta and Anna’s grandfather tells the children stories. One of his stories is about how he ran away from home as a boy. Inspired by the story, Lisa and Anna decide that they should have their own adventure, running away from home temporarily. However, they think that they have to run away during the night, and they both miss their opportunity because they fall asleep.

The children like to play games of pretend on their way home from school, which makes their mothers wonder what they’re doing and sometimes get them into trouble. Anna and Lisa accidentally get on people’s nerves one time, when they try too hard to follow their teacher’s advice about doing things to make people happy. They often end up doing the wrong things because they don’t know what other people really want or what people say they want doesn’t seem like enough. They finally succeed in making someone happy when they share some of their things with a girl from school who is sick.

The children’s adventures continue through the year. The people of Noisy Village have a charming, old-fashioned Christmas. At a Christmas party at a relative’s house, they play old-fashioned party games and tell stories. Lisa also describes a Swedish tradition of finding an almond in porridge, which is supposed to be a sign of marriage in the coming year. The children are allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. The boys scare the girls with some firecrackers, and Britta and Anna’s grandfather teaches the children the tradition of pouring melted lead into water to see what shapes it will form to predict what will happen in the new year. On Easter, the children paint eggs and make egg nog.

Eventually, school lets out for summer vacation. The children go swimming and catch crayfish during the summer. When they go fishing for crayfish, they camp out in the forest, near the lake, with Lisa’s father and the other men. The children make little huts to camp in. The boys try to scare the girls with stories about goblins. The children appreciate their idyllic lives in Noisy Village!

My Reaction

This book is a series of pleasant, gentle, slice-of-life stories about the children who live on a collection of small farms outside of a Swedish town, probably some time in the mid-20th century. Because there is little mention of any form of technology in countryside, it could set almost be any time in history from the 19th century to the time when it was written in the 1940s. The one thing that identified it as the 20th century for me is when they mentioned “turning on lights” in the house rather than lighting lamps. Even into the mid-20th century, not all farm houses had electricity, but it seems that these do. Other than that, these children seem to be living an idyllic, “unplugged” life in the countryside that people who are into cottagecore would aspire to! I think it would be a nice book to read children at bedtime because it’s very gentle.

I enjoyed reading about the games that the children play with each other and with their families. The children like playing games of pretend that seem to be inspired by books they’ve read. The girls play at being princesses, while the boys play at being Indians, probably American Indians (Native Americans) because one of young Bill’s ambitions is to be an Indian Chief when he grows up. We don’t really encourage playing at being “Indians” today in 21st century America because that can devolve into caricatures of someone else’s racial group (cowboys are still fair game because that’s a profession, not an ethnicity), but that sort of thing was pretty common in the mid-20th century, even outside of the United States. I’ve read British books from around the same time period that also refer to children playing at being American Indians, so it was something that seems to have captured children’s imaginations, even internationally. The children also pretend that they’re marooned or shipwrecked on a rock at one point, something else that often appears in children’s literature and is based on older books.

I particularly enjoyed some of the descriptions of Swedish holiday traditions through the year. Some of them are very similar to traditions in the United States and Britain around this time and even earlier, like in the 19th century. They have a charming Christmas with friends and family and a party with old-fashioned parlor games. I’ve heard of the tradition of finding an almond in porridge or pudding before, but I think that’s more common in Scandinavian countries than in the United States. In Britain, there are traditions associated with finding things (like a coin or a bean) in porridge or pudding, but it’s not really common in the US. Another thing that stood out to me was that Lisa said they made egg nog at Easter. In the US, people typically have egg nog at Christmas, but when I thought about it, it does make sense for Easter because of the association with eggs.

One other thing that stood out to me in the book was the little huts that the children make when they’re camping out by the lake. It reminded me of the huts that children in The Secret Summer (Baked Beans for Breakfast) made.

The Curious Garden by Peter Brown, 2009.

A boy named Liam lives in a dreary city where there aren’t any gardens or green spaces. Most people in the city spend most of their time inside. However, Liam likes to explore outside.

One day, while exploring some disused train tracks, he finds a few plants struggling to survive. Liam doesn’t know much about plants, but he decides to help them by giving them water. Gradually, he begins to learn more about what will help the plants, and they begin to grow and spread into a small garden.

As Liam helps the plants, they begin to spread all along the old railroad tracks. During the winter, the plants are covered in snow, and many of them are killed or have suffered badly from the cold. However, because Liam spent the winter studying about plants and gathering some gardening tools, he is able to restart the garden.

As the garden spreads through the city, other people begin to notice, and they start joining Liam in tending the garden. Greenery begins taking over places and things that are disuses and abandoned, and people encourage the plants to grow where they can enjoy them. Because of their efforts, the city is transformed!

There is an author’s note in the back of the book about the inspiration for the story. There was an elevated train in Manhattan that was shut down in 1980, and plants took over the abandoned tracks. The author, Peter Brown, considered what it would be like if the phenomenon took over an entire city.

My Reaction

The pictures in the book are great, and some pages are full pictures with no text, just showing how the garden grows and spreads through abandoned places in the city. I love how this story was inspired by the way plants take over abandoned places in real life. Plants can grow in some unlikely places, when nothing interferes with them, and in the story, the boy discovers that they can spread further with a little help.

By the end of the story, his entire city is completely transformed into a greener, more eco-friendly place. It’s not just that there are more plants and green spaces in his city, but the factories that we see in early scenes are no longer putting out all that smoke by the end, and we see windmills in the pictures as alternative forms of energy production. We aren’t told exactly why some things are changed about this city, but it seems like the increasing presence of the green spaces has caused people to change aspects of their lives and businesses to accommodate and preserve them. It’s an idyllic solution that doesn’t show a lot of the conflict that occurs in real life, when some people are ready for a change and others just don’t want to change. Still, I like this mage of a hopeful future because it comes as an antidote to the dystopian quality that we see in many forms of modern entertainment.

In the Garden with Dr. Carver by Susan Grigsby, 2010.

This picture book is about George Washington Carver, as told by a young girl named Sally.

The first time Sally sees him is when he’s traveling with his wagon, pulled by a mule. Sally knows that Dr. Carver is a famous plant scientist from Tuskagee and that he uses his wagon as a kind of mobile school. It contains seeds, plants, and gardening tools, and people come to Dr. Carver for advice about growing plants. The nutrients in the soil of this area have been depleted by growing cotton, and Dr. Carver has been advising them about how to restore the soil. He also advises them about new ways to use common crops.

Dr. Carver visits Sally’s school to help the children with their garden. He teaches them how to use observation to notice the conditions that benefits plants and figure out how to help plants that aren’t doing well. When a boy is about to kill a spider, Dr. Carver stops him, pointing out that the spider helps their garden by eating bugs that are pests for the plants. He teaches the children that everything is part of an ecosystem (although he doesn’t use that word) and that they need to observe and understand the roles each plant and creature has in the ecosystem before deciding to eliminate or change anything. The reason why they remove weeds like dandelions is that their presence doesn’t help the other plants, and they take resources the other plants need. Although, he also shows them that dandelions are edible, so they are not wasted.

Dr. Carver teaches the children about restoring the nutrients in depleted soil using fertilizer and compost made from decaying plant matter and organic materials that most people simply throw away. Dr. Carver teaches them not to waste anything, helping them to make a scarecrow and markers for their plants from scraps of wood and other things people have thrown away.

Eventually, Dr. Carver has to return to Tuskagee, but the lessons he teaches the children stay with them.

There is a section at the back of the book that explains that Sally and her school are fictional, but George Washington Carver was a real person and the story is based around his life and writings. He was born as a slave in Missouri about a year before the abolition of slavery, so he grew up as a free person. He began learning about agriculture and botany from an early age, and as he grew older, he sought out schools that would help him further his knowledge and share it with others. He taught at Iowa State College before Booker T. Washington (see More Than Anything Else for a picture book about his youth) recruited him to be the head of Tuskagee‘s Department of Agriculture in 1896. He also believed in bringing education to people who couldn’t come to a college to learn by sending out bulletins about farming techniques and booklets for teachers in lower grades to use in their classrooms. His mobile school in a wagon was another form of outreach that has been imitated in other places.

My Reaction

I enjoy books about historical figures, and I found this story about George Washington Carver gentle and fascinating. There are some parts that I think I appreciate more as an adult than I would have as a child, making this a book that I think would appeal to readers across different ages and something that parents and teachers would enjoy sharing with children.

Although Sally wasn’t a real person, the lessons she and her classmates receive from George Washington Carver help to illustrate Carver’s real-life work and the lessons that he shared with people of his own time. I appreciated the level of detail the story provided about how people can use observational skills to diagnose and fix possible issues with ailing plants, the importance of understanding that plants exist as part of an ecosystem and that gardeners and farmers need to understand how all parts of the ecosystem interact, and how nutrients can be restored to depleted soil. I can’t remember whether I had heard before about how cotton farming depleted soil nutrients, but I appreciated how that explanation helped explain a real problem facing farmers of Carver’s time and how Carver was helping them to solve it.

I think this book would appeal to fans of cottagecore as well as people interested in American history. The illustrations are beautiful, and even the inner covers are lovely, with small, labeled pictures of plants and creatures. As the book explains, George Washington Carver himself used drawings of plants and creatures in his work, and in the story, he teaches the children to make their own drawings to help themselves study details of the natural world.

Emma’s Afternoon by Pamela Sykes, 1970.

Six-year-old Emma has to stay home from school during the summer term because she has measles. By the time her quarantine period is over, Emma is feeling better but is bored and restless, eager to get back to school. However, the doctor thinks she should take an extra week off school to recover further.

As Emma continues to sit at home, she knows the other children are back at school, and she can’t help but think about all the things she’s probably missing and wonder if anybody there misses her. Her mother urges her to find something to do so she’ll be happier and the time will pass faster, but Emma is in a disappointed mood and doesn’t feel like trying to make herself happy. She resists all of her mother’s efforts to cheer her up or get her involved in some activity.

Finally, her mother suggests that she could go to Streamcross, a little area with stepping stones across a stream, where Emma has been with her father before. Emma loves the spot, but she’s never been there alone before. Now, her mother thinks she’s old enough to go alone. Emma takes along her doll, Annabel, and some biscuits (cookies, because this is a British book).

Along the way, Emma has adventures. She has to rescue Annabel from a farm dog. She picks wildflowers. She falls when trying to get a look at a bird’s nest, and she gets stung by nettles. When she tries to clean her doll and the doll’s dress in the stream, she ruins the dress and almost loses Annabel in the stream!

Then, Emma meets up with, Billy, a boy from school. She hides from him because of the state she and Annabel are in, but he spots her because she’s left a few things behind, and Billy plays detective, following the clues. Fortunately, Billy doesn’t laugh at her or her doll. The two of them discover that they share a love for this special spot in the stream, and they trade secrets about it. Emma shows Billy a bird nest she found, and he shows her a hidden spring. Then, he helps Emma to get home, past the farm dog, and stays to tea at Emma’s house.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The American title for this book was Betsy’s Afternoon. The only part of the story that was really changed for the American version was the name of the little girl.

My Reaction

At the end of the story, Emma looks back on the afternoon as being lovely. Not all of it was lovely, like her frightening encounter with the dog or ruining Annabel’s dress and almost losing her completely. During the course of the afternoon, Emma falls down, gets muddy, and is stung by nettles. Still, even when things go wrong, Emma enjoys having an independent adventure, and when she has a friend to share it with her, it gets even better. She also learns that people did miss her at school.

Emma’s adventures are relatively low-key, slice-of-life adventures, but they’re the kind of small adventures that are meaningful, especially to a young child. None of the problems she encounters are very serious, and Emma doesn’t really have any lasting consequences from them, except for ruining her doll’s dress. The dog part was a little scary at first, but Emma isn’t bitten, and Billy later explains that he knows the dog, and it never leaves its farm, so they’re in no danger. Billy is a nice friend, and the two of them appreciate the natural beauties of their favorite spot. In the end, Emma’s adventures and her meeting with a friend who feels the way she does about Streamcross are just what she needs to cheer herself up!

I enjoyed the way the author connected with Emma’s feelings and thought processes. Readers really see through the eyes of a young child – her thoughts, her frustrations, the way she solves problems, and her joy at small discoveries and accomplishments. This is a short chapter book that would be appropriate for children in early elementary school but can still be pleasing to adults.

The Flash Children by Mabel Esther Allan, 1975.

The Briggs family moves to a new house in July, and the three Briggs children are upset about leaving their old home and friends. Their father tries to reassure them that they’ll make new friends in their new home, but ten-year-old Dilys isn’t so sure. She knows that her mother is also not happy about the move, but it can’t be helped. Her father used to be a cowman on an estate in their old town, but the estate has been sold to be turned into an army training camp, so he has to go somewhere else for a new job.

Their new home will be a cottage near a “flash”, which is a kind of salt lake. Flash Cottage, as their new house is called, turns out to be an ugly modern brick house, not at all like the charming old cottage where they used to live. Their old cottage had a beautiful garden, but this little house doesn’t have much at all. Most of the views from the house are also ugly. The embankment behind the house, where the train tracks are, makes parts of the house dark and blocks the view, and there’s a chemical plant a couple of miles away. There isn’t much else in the area to see. The bright spots of their new home are the lake and the train tracks that run near the house. The fast-moving trains make Dilys a little nervous and they also make the house kind of loud, but eleven-year-old Arthur finds them fascinating. Arthur takes a yellow bedroom at the back of the house, where he can see the trains. Dilys shares a blue bedroom with their little sister, Megan, with a view of the chemical plant in the distance. All three of the children find the house strange and ugly and wonder how they’re ever going to feel at home there.

Dilys doesn’t think she’ll ever like the new house, although she thinks it might be nice if they could go rowing on the lake. Their mother worries about the children falling in the flash because they have to travel across an unfenced causeway when coming to or leaving the house. The children will have to catch a school bus to go to the local school, and Arthur wonders what the other children in the area are like. The children hope to find some friends because, if they don’t, they don’t really know what they’ll do with themselves. There doesn’t seem to be much in the area to do for fun.

The Briggs children meet a boy and girl about their age on their first day at the new house, but the meeting doesn’t go well at first. Arthur stops the other boy and girl from throwing rocks at some ducks. Dilys warns him about making enemies of people because they need some friends in their new home, but Arthur can’t stand to see people being cruel to animals. The other boy and girl already know who the Briggs children are because they were told they would be coming, but Arthur surprises them with a Welsh phrase. The Briggs children’s mother is Welsh, and they grew up near Wales. The boy, whose name is Dan Brown, thinks at first that Arthur was speaking French, but his sister, Edith, recognizes the phrase as Welsh because someone told her that the family was part Welsh. Dan and Edith argue about it, and Arthur asks them if they often argue with each other. The Brown kids admit that they do because there just isn’t that much else to do in the area. Boredom is also the reason why they tease animals, and because they tease animals, they’ve been banned from Colonel Melling’s farm, where Mr. Briggs will now be working with the cows. Sometimes, when they have money, they can take a bus to town to find other things to do, but they don’t always have the money to do that.

Mr. Briggs tells the children that the Brown children are the nearest children in the area. Their mother is dead, and they have an aunt looking after them. Their father also works at Colonel Melling’s farm. The Briggs children aren’t sure that they like the Brown children or want to be friends with them, but they might be their best or only option for friends at all. Their father persuades them to give the Brown children a chance, but Dilys wonders if, before long, they’ll all be so bored that they’ll start throwing rocks at ducks, too.

School isn’t too bad once it starts. Dilys meets another girl she likes, but unfortunately, the other girl lives too far away to see easily when they’re not in school. Some other kids at school tease another new boy named Brian because he’s partially blind. Dan and Edith turn out to be among the worst bullies, and Arthur and Dilys get so angry with them that they get into a fight. Dilys tells Edith that she’s ashamed of how she acts, she thinks it’s disgusting, and she wishes Edith would turn deaf so she can see what it’s like to live with a disability. The other kids back down rather than fight Arthur, and surprisingly, Edith is actually a little embarrassed when she sees how angry and disgusted Dilys is with her. It seems like the behavior of the local kids is as rough and ugly as the area where they live, but Dilys finds herself interested in Brian because he seems to be a different type of person.

Mrs. Briggs is as homesick as the kids for where they used to live, but she starts to make friends with Miss Brown, the aunt looking after Dan and Edith. Mrs. Briggs says that Miss Brown is a nice lady, but she doesn’t entirely know how to cope with the children, and Dan and Edith often misbehave and make trouble. She’s only been living with her brother and the children since their mother died last year.

One day, Dilys and Arthur go exploring, and they find an unexpected green area down a road that makes them feel more like home. They get caught in a sudden storm, so they take shelter under a railway bridge, where they meet Dan and Edith, also taking shelter. They start talking more about the area and places to explore, and Dan and Edith say that they can’t go down by Mr. Lowe’s farm anymore. Arthur asks them why, and they admit that they stole some plums from him and left his gate open, so the livestock got out. Arthur and Dilys can see why Mr. Lowe would be angry, but Dan and Edith defensively add that they didn’t leave the gate open on purpose. They just forgot to close it because Edith got stung by a wasp and was upset, but Mr. Lowe won’t believe them. They say it’s a pity because the area is much more interesting over there. There’s an old manor house, a stream, and a ruined mill over that way.

Things change for the children when Dilys, Arthur, and Megan befriend an artist who lives in a cottage nearby, John Zachary Laurie, and he’s a friend of Colonel Melling. He takes them out rowing on the flash and talks to them about how they like their new home. The Briggs children confide in him how unhappy they’ve been since they moved to the area because everything is so ugly, but the artist points out that it’s not really an ugly place. He says he finds it fascinating to paint because it has certain “dramatic effects.” When he shows them his pictures, they’re very different from the kind of pictures that the children are accustomed to seeing. Rather than conventional flowers and pretty landscapes, they are filled with angles and a lot of grays and browns, but with unexpected dashes of color. They’re unmistakably pictures of the area, but not in a way the children usually see it. The landscape in the paintings is familiar but strange, ugly but also oddly enchanting. John Laurie even gives them one of his paintings, the one he did of their new house, Flash Cottage. He says he knows the children hate the house now, but he thinks it has interesting angles, and if they learn how to look at things a little deeper, they’ll see more than they do now.

Although Dilys isn’t quite sure that she understands it, she begins to feel what the artist is talking about. Things that are strange start to feel familiar, and even in the ugliness of the landscape and the picture of their house, she begins to feel a sense of fascination and attraction. It’s not exactly pretty, but it is compelling.

When school lets out for the summer, the Briggs children once again find themselves bored and lonely. The few other children they like don’t live close to them, like Dan and Edith, and the Briggs children still think Dan and Edith are pains and troublemakers. Looking for something to do, Arthur, Dilys, and Megan decide to explore the old manor house that Dan and Edith mentioned.

It turns out to be a beautiful place, although it’s old and deserted. To their surprise, they discover that the property actually belongs to Brian’s family, the Pelverdens. They live in a little cottage behind the old manor house. Brian has a little sister, Mellie (short for Melinda), who would be a good friend for Megan, but Brian seems less than pleased that Arthur and Dilys have discovered where he lives. Brian’s father explains that they haven’t been living here long. The manor house has been in the family for generations, but it’s fallen into ruin because they haven’t had the money to maintain it for a long time. They only recently inherited the place themselves when Brian’s grandfather died. The Pelverdens don’t expect to ever live in the manor house themselves, but their hope is that, if they get it sufficiently repaired, they might have it registered and preserved as a historic building and get a grant to maintain it. The Briggs children eagerly volunteer their services to help with the project over the summer. They have nothing else to do, and they still miss the garden from their old cottage, so helping to replant the manor garden would be fun for them. The Pelverdens’ cottage and the crumbling old manor house are more beautiful to them than anything else they’ve seen since they moved, and they feel more like home.

Mellie is immediately happy to have found a friend in Megan, but Arthur and Dilys find it harder to make friends with Brian. Brian has known all of his life that he’s different from other kids because of his vision problems, and he’s used to people treating him differently or making fun of him. He tries very hard to be as “normal” as he can and prove to everyone that he can do things other kids can do. Because he feels like he has something to prove to everyone, he’s often less friendly than he could be, but Dilys is determined to earn his trust.

However, Dan and Edith are still problems. The Briggs children fight them off one day when they catch them teasing the Briggs’s cat. Edith is offended that the other kids keep telling them everything they do is wrong. Then, another day, they show up at the old manor house and break a window by throwing rocks. When the Briggs children and Mr. Pelverden confront Dan and Edith about what they’ve done, Dilys come up with a plan that might solve the Dan and Edith problem and prevent them from making further trouble.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is a sequel to this book called The Flash Children in Winter, which is about the children experiencing their new home in autumn and the lead up to their first Christmas there.

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

I thought this book was interesting because it has aspects of a cottagecore style story, but there are parts of it that contrast with the typical cottagecore aesthetic. The main characters in the story, the Briggs children, have come from an environment that would be like a cottagecore dream: an actual old cottage with a beautiful garden attached to an old manor house, where they were allowed to help out. Then, they have to move to a far more plain and conventional house in an ugly area with a view of a chemical plant. It’s understandable that they would feel badly about the move. Moving and starting over again would be difficult for anybody, but most people would find their new environment downright depressing, especially after hearing what their old home was like.

When they find out that Brian’s family lives in a cottage and is renovating their old manor house to turn it into a historic site, the story goes back to the charming sort of environment the children come from. However, it’s not just about the children finding a way back to the kind of environment that has the beauty and charm they crave but also learning to see what makes different types of environments fascinating, even enchanting. The Flash Cottage isn’t a real cottage, and it’s not as pretty as their old home, but after talking to the artist and looking at things from an artist’s viewpoint, taking into account the features of a place that make it unique, Dilys comes to see how a shift in perspective can make many different environments more attractive, in their own way.

Learning to get along with Dan and Edith also involves finding a different perspective and a different way of dealing with them. It’s not just about seeing the good side of Dan and Edith as they are. Frankly, the two of them are pain-in-the-butts. Dilys realizes that their problem is that they are thoughtless. They don’t think about other people, how the things they do affect anyone else or make them feel. Their thoughts begin and end with themselves. They’re bored and feel unwanted at home since their mother’s death, so they cause trouble because they just can’t seem to think anything else to do. Personally, I don’t think either Dan or Edith is very intelligent or imaginative because intelligence could be used to reason out why people react to them the way they do and a little imagination would help them put themselves in other people’s position or help them think of different things to do or ways to approach other people. However, Dan and Edith don’t do any of those things on their own. It never even seems to occur to them that they could. They only get upset when other people are unhappy with them and seem totally unable to understand why.

Even though Dan and Edith don’t seem either very bright or very considerate, it does occur to Dilys that they could learn to be helpful if someone actually set them tasks to do to keep them busy. At her persuasion, Mr. Pelverden and the other children allow Dan and Edith to join their efforts to clean up the manor. Dan and Edith are actually eager to accept the opportunity to help out with the others because they are incredibly bored and seriously need something to do and people to be with. When the others are dubious about whether they’ll actually do any helping or if they even know how to help, they try to prove that they can do things that are useful for a change. It also proves educational for Dan and Edith because, in helping to clean up the manor, they’re also forced to face damage they have caused themselves and begin to realize how things they’ve been doing have caused trouble and made extra work for other people. They’re not used to seeing themselves as other people see them or dealing with the consequences of their actions, and it’s an eye-opening experience for them. Later, they all have to face off against a motorcycle gang that comes to vandalize the manor, and Dan and Edith have come to see where their loyalties really lie and what menaces people can be when they act like they used to.

The story ends happily for the children and for the manor, which is going to be preserved. The Briggs children feel more at home in their new home, Dan and Edith have greatly reformed, and Brian has learned to be more open with people about his disability, so other people come to understand him better and treat him more kindly. Some of the people who made fun of him before admit that they didn’t understand just how bad his vision was, so they didn’t know why he seemed to struggle so much. Dilys still tells off those kids for not having figured it out, but at the same time, she is the one who tells Brian that he has to make things clear to people and not try to pretend that his condition doesn’t exist or that he doesn’t need some help when he actually does.

The author, Mabel Esther Allan is also a very interesting person. During her life, she wrote more than 100 books for children, under different pen names. She struggled with vision problems of her own when she was young, which was part of the inspiration for Brian in the story. During WWII, she worked was part of the British Women’s Land Army, and she also worked as a teacher.

Jam: A True Story by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Helen Craig, 1985.

Mr. and Mrs. Castle have three children and live in a house with a plum tree in the backyard. When Mrs. Castle gets a new job, Mr. Castle is proud of her and decides that he will stay home and look after the children. Mr. Castle likes being home with the children, and he does all sorts of useful things around the house.

One day, he realizes that he’s been so efficient at getting things done around the house that he’s run out of things to do. While he’s thinking about what to do next, he hears an odd sound. It turns out that the sound is ripe plums from their plum tree, hitting the roof as they fall off the tree.

Mr. Castle gathers up the ripe plums and makes plum jam. His family loves it, so the next day, when many more plums have fallen, he gathers those up and makes even more plum jam. As more and more ripe plums fall from the tree, Mr. Castle can’t stand to see them go to waste, so before long, the family has far more plum jam than they have jam jars.

Then, comes the real challenge: eating all the jam. As the weeks go by, the family eats jam with everything, and Mr. Castle makes many recipes involving jam, but there’s still plenty of jam left. They try everything they can think of to use up all the jam, including using it to re-tile the bathroom, but there’s just too much jam! It gets to the point that family members are starting to have jam-related nightmares!

Will they finish all of their plum jam before the plums are ripe again? Will they ever be able to eat anything without jam ever again?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The book also includes a simple recipe for plum jam.

My Reaction

This story is funny, especially because it’s supposed to be “a true story.” I have the feeling that the author’s family had a similar incident where an experiment in jam-making went too far and became overwhelming. The family in the story eats jam in various ways to use it up, and Mr. Castle even uses it for handyman projects, like fixing a leaky roof or gluing down bathroom tiles. They never mention the idea of selling the extra jam or giving it away as gifts, probably because those ideas would make too much sense and would help solve the problem, and the story is meant to be silly.

Besides how overwhelmed the family feels about the amount of jam they have to eat, there are plenty of other funny things happening in the story. Mrs. Castle’s new job is with some scientists who are “developing an electronic medicine to cure sunspots.” It doesn’t make any sense, but the story emphasizes how proud Mr. Castle is that his wife is so clever, and the topic of sunspots appears throughout the rest of the story as a running gag. I also thought it was cute how Mr. and Mrs. Castle refer to their children, the little Castles, as being “Cottages.”

There is minor mention of alcohol in the story. There are a couple of points in the story where the parents are mentioned as drinking sherry, which isn’t very common the US. I checked, and the author, Margaret Mahy, was from New Zealand.

The Mother Goose Cookbook by Frances Sheridan Goulart, 1970.

I remember reading this book from my local library when I was a kid, and I had to look it up again because there were a couple of things that stuck in my mind about it. First, the recipes in this book are also based on songs and fairy tales, not just nursery rhymes, and second, while there are other cookbooks that use nursery rhymes and fairy tales as themes, this one chooses some of the more unusual ones. There are some common rhymes and references in the book, like using Humpty Dumpty for an egg recipe and referencing Little Miss Muffet for Curds and Whey, but there also less common ones, like Aiken Drum. Overall, I liked the variety of nursery rhyme and fairy tale references in the book, and I think the recipes generally fit the references well.

Second, some of the recipes sound a bit fancy for a child’s cookbook, but as a kid, I found them intriguing because they had a kind of old-fashioned quality that I thought made them seem more like nursery rhyme and fairy tale foods. Because, as a kid, I rarely ever had the patience to read the introductions to books before plunging right in, I missed some of the historical information behind some of these recipes and rhymes that the book explains in its introduction. Rereading this as an adult, though, I really appreciated the thought that the author put into the history of food in nursery rhymes.

The introduction begins by posing the question that many children have asked when hearing or reading nursery rhymes, “What are curds and whey, anyway?” I certainly wondered that when I was a kid, and the book notes that many parents also don’t know the answer. It goes on to explains that the “Mother Goose Era” (not really defined but probably the era when the rhymes were first composed) spans roughly from 1600 to 1800, and the foods mentioned in the rhymes is a mixture of real foods and imaginary ones. The author researched real, historical recipes and adapted them for modern use, while trying to remain as faithful as possible to the original nature of the dishes. In the cases where the author couldn’t find information about the dishes or where the foods mentioned seem to be imaginary, she created original recipes to represent them.

Although the author intends this book for children, I personally thought that the nature of some of the recipes and the difficulty of some of them make them more suitable to nostalgic adults.

The recipes in the book are sorted in alphabetical order, skipping a few letters of the alphabet that they didn’t have recipes to match. Each of the recipes is accompanied by a pen-and-ink picture of the nursery rhymes or fairy tale connected to the recipe, and the pictures are on backgrounds of varying shades of purple and light green.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

The recipes in the book are:

A is for:

Aiken Drum’s Glum Gallimaufry – This is a kind of stew made with mutton and vegetables, one of the dishes that I would think more suitable to an adult than a child. Stews in general aren’t too hard if you start with pre-chopped meat and veggies, but I don’t think many modern children are accustomed to eating mutton or would be interested in doing so. At least, in the United States, mutton isn’t a very common food.

B is for:

Betty Pringle’s Pastry Pigs

Bubble and Squeak, a la Bo-Peep – This is a dish made with lamb and cabbage.

C is for:

Cock Robin en Cocotte – I never liked this rhyme, and the recipe is for cooking small poultry.

Curds and Whey, One Way – It doesn’t precisely define what “Curds and Whey” are, but it’s a dairy dish made with soured milk and oatmeal.

Curds and Whey, Another Way – There’s a second method for making it.

D is for:

Daffy-Down-Dilly’s Jolly Jelly

Dappled Grey’s Farthing-a-Mare Gingerbread

E is for:

Elsie Marley’s Nine O’Clock Barley

F is for:

The Fatted Figs from Budleigh Fair – This one asks you to fry figs in fritter batter, but it doesn’t give you the recipe for the batter.

Four-and-Twenty Blackbird Pye – This is another recipe that I think only an adult might try. The “blackbirds” are made from beef liver.

G is for:

Good Pulled Bread for Tommy Tucker

H is for:

Hickory Dickory Flummery – A flummery is a type of old-fashioned dessert.

I is for:

Intery Mintery Cutery Corn

J is for:

Jack-a-Dandy Kissing Candy – This is a very old-fashioned candy – candied rose petals and violets. I think I have had candied flowers at a living history museum, but I’m not sure where to get the rose petals and violets to make any myself.

Jack and Jill Johnnycakes – This recipe is accompanied by a vinegar pudding sauce.

K is for:

King Arthur’s Bag Pudding en Croute

King Boggen’s Three-Farthing Turnips

L is for:

Little Betty Botter’s Better Butter Batter – This is a shortbread recipe

L’Orangerie St. Clemens

M is for:

Margery Daw, Petit Pois – This is a dish of peas, but there’s a little game as a twist. You add either a corn kernel or a small onion to the peas, and whoever gets the corn or onion on their plate has good luck.

O is for:

Oeufs a la Humpty Dumpty – “Oeufs” is the French word for eggs. This recipe wants you to serve it with Bechamel sauce, but there’s no recipe for the sauce.

P is for:

Pease Porridge Chaud-Froid – This porridge is made with oatmeal instead of peas.

Peter’s Pickled Peppers

Pippin Hill Ladyfingers – This is a dessert made with apples.

Punch and Judy Rolling Pin Pie – This is an apple pie recipe.

Q is for:

Queen of Heart’s Purloined Tarts – These are heart-shaped cherry tarts.

R is for:

Rowly Powly’s Roly-Poly – The name of this rhyme is unfamiliar to me, but I know a variation of it under the name Georgie Porgie.

S is for:

A Salamagundi for Solomon Grundy – This is a dish with potatoes, carrots, and onions.

St. Dunstan’s Belfry Bacon

St. Swithin’s Rainwater Tea – This is a recipe for an herbal tea made with actual rain water. I’m not sure that I would recommend people actually gathering and drinking rain water, but the herbal tea sounds nice, and this section does explain a little about St. Swithin and the tradition behind the rhyme that goes with it.

Simple Simon’s Ha’Penny Buns

Slitherum Slatherum Soul Cakes – I was fascinated by the recipe for Soul Cakes, an old tradition from Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. The book says that they should be made on the eve before All Souls Day (evening of November 1) rather than Halloween. However, from my earlier Halloween research, I know that different countries and regions had their own traditions and their own recipes for Soul Cakes. There is no single, universal recipe for Soul Cakes.

T is for:

Three Men in a Tub Pommes de Terre – This is basically a recipe for french fries, using three potatoes soaked in a tub of ice water before being fried in hot fat. (The book doesn’t explain why, but I know that doing that makes them crispier.)

Tuppeny Rice – This is a sweet rice dish made with cinnamon and sugar and marmalade.

Tweedle Dee’s Dumplings a Deux – These dumplings include cow’s liver.

W is for:

Willy Wood’s Wondrous Pennyloaves

Y is for:

Yankee Doodle’s Pepperbox Noodles

Z is for:

“sleeping after all this good eating!”