As a child, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books.
I began them when I started third grade. When people ask about formative books, I think first of this series: of these books that I read when I walked around the house, that I carried to the dinner table, that I pored over during recess, and that I bugged my teacher to put on her curriculum even as the school year was ending. But I put off writing about them for a long time as it seems that I can’t bring myself to re-read them.
I still can’t.
I’m sorry.
Wilder’s semi-autobiographical children’s novels follow the pioneering Ingalls family as they move from Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods) to territory that was in reality an Osage Indian reservation in Kansas (Little House on the Prairie). The family then departs for Walnut Grove, Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek), where they live in a house made of sod, then to De Smet, South Dakota, the setting of By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years. One book, Farmer Boy, follows the childhood adventures of Almanzo, Wilder’s husband, as he tends to livestock, does chores, eats cake, and tries to get along with siblings in upstate New York. The Ingalls family (and the Wilders) sew their own clothes, endure blizzards, illness, and locusts, and still manage to find love, and joy, and adventure with family.
I say that the books are semi-autobiographical because despite the fact that the main character has Wilder’s name and the family travels roughly along the same paths that Wilder’s family did, the novels are very much fiction. Liberties were taken with Wilder’s real life story. And to a certain extent, this is acknowledged. Little House in the Big Woods, after all, opens like this:
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
The book has the opening for a fairy tale, with one solid fact thrown in—sixty years. Reception of the series—and certainly my feelings about it when I was young—concentrated on the harsh pioneer life, on details about playing ball with a pig’s bladder or making a doll out of a corn cob. I know I also identified with the setting of the story because I lived in the flat, cold middle of Canada (albeit in a city, in a house with indoor plumbing and heating). I know I also wanted to be resourceful and plucky, like the Ingalls family. I wanted to make my own bread, sew my own clothes, churn butter, and plant things.
(Basically, I wanted to do crafts and ride in horse-drawn buggies—but to have other modern conveniences.)
More recently, however, writers and scholars have turned their attention to the fictive-ness of the books—and to the mythmaking. Some memorable characters, the handsome Cap Garland, for example, are made up. More important, Pa Ingalls’s reasons for dragging his family across large swathes of Kansas and the Dakotas are elided. Pa Ingalls and his family weren’t benign settlers pitting their ingenuity against the dangerous wild; they were invading Native American territories. They had to do it on their own because they weren’t supposed to be there.
Indeed, Caroline’s Fraser’s 2017 book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, looks at the ways that Wilder’s books not only diverged from the realities of her life but made that life into one of the shaping narratives of American identity. The book also examines how Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a follower of Ayn Rand, extensively rewrote her mother’s books, often twisting facts to reflect Obectivist values.
But Fraser’s is only the latest in a series of sources that made me re-examine my feelings about the series. Among those:
Louis Erdrich’s books Birchbark House books, written from the perspective of Native Americans and set at around the same time as Wilder’s books;
Scholar Debbie Reese’s blog, “American Indians in Children’s Literature,” in which she talks about the depiction of Native Americans in the Little House series and in other books. This is just one example.
It was a conversation about Wilder’s books that Dr. Reese shared on Twitter that initially made me question what kinds of books from my childhood I wanted to give to my own child (which I talked about here) and, more important, why exactly I wanted to share them.
Does reading the Little House books lead to a greater understanding of history? Not on their own. Would it lead to my daughter understanding me or my life better?
Would it bring us closer?
If that were true, would this I want this particular story connecting us?
I am at a loss. I don’t know how to reconcile my memories, my newer knowledge, and my feelings about what is best to do right now. I have been told I should talk these issues out with kids, but so far I haven’t mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series to my daughter. I’m not actively hiding them. But I’ve chosen to put different books in front of her and to have her explore what she likes on her own. In any case, it’s likely that she’ll encounter them without my interference. She’ll be older.
By then, I hope I’ll be better prepared to talk about them.
It is probably inevitable The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, a new book about a large family living in New York City, is about real estate.*
Karina Yan Glaser’s charming middle-grade contemporary opens about a week before Christmas when the Vanderbeekers learn that they are about to be kicked out of their beloved Harlem brownstone apartment. The Vanderbeekers are a biracial family—Asian and white—composed of two harried parents, a trio of eccentric pets, and five children. The eldest are twelve-year old twin girls—thoughtful violinist Isa and impulsive engineer Jessie—followed by nine-year-old basketball playing Oliver, shy six-year-old Hyacinth, maker of crafts, and four-year-old Laney.
The Vanderbeekers have deep roots on 141st Street. Père Vanderbeeker has always lived on the block, and the children have solidified the clan’s presence.
The Vanderbeekers’ home—a humble red brownstone with a weathervane that spun on windy days—sat in the exact middle of the street. The brownstone stood out not because of its architecture, but because of the constant hum of activity that burst out of it. Among the many people that visited the Vanderbeeker household there was quite a bit of disagreement about what it was like, but general agreement about what it was NOT:
Calm
Tidy
Boring
Predictable
The Vanderbeeker household is, in its way, a hub of community life. While the parents scramble to pack up and find housing, the children devise several strategems to convince their reclusive landlord, whom they call “the Biederman,” to allow them to stay. Each ploy, each scheme, makes use of a Vanderbeeker’s particular talent and character; it showcases their place in the world, but also provides a snapshot of life in their larger community.
I loved it. I was happy to find a realistic, warm book about a close-knit biracial clan living in a multiethnic New York City. I was delighted that the Vanderbeekers could reflect something of my daughter’s experiences growing up in Manhattan. And, well, I found the novel tremendously comforting. For the next few weeks, I started looking for children’s books about big families who live in rambling houses.
I was happy to find a realistic, warm book about a close-knit biracial clan living in a multiethnic New York City. I was delighted that the Vanderbeekers could reflect something of my daughter’s experiences growing up in Manhattan. And, well, I found the novel tremendously comforting.
The stories I wanted to read had a few things in common: The families in these novels were almost always made up of one responsible sister—usually the eldest—an artistic sibling, a scientific one, and a young sibling who didn’t understand everything that was going on but arrived at simple solutions for ongoing family problems. The books were all written in the third person, with each section closely following one child as they pursued their talents and were allowed to ramble about making music or constructing elaborate structures unheeded and unsupervised by adults.
I did not grow up in a knock-down house. I didn’t run wild. I never called secret meetings with my sisters and brothers to figure out how to manage my clueless parents or our problems. The feelings these books evoke could almost be mistaken for nostalgia—until I remind myself that I didn’t grow up this way at all.
I read the Vanderbeekers, I read Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks, I read Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays and The Four-Story Mistake, about the Melendy family. I just started Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats, and of course, I have on hand Sydney Taylor’s portrait of a turn-of-the-century New York Jewish household in All-of-a-Kind Family.
As I went through—go through—these books, I have tried to think about why they are so familiar and comforting. I did not grow up in a knock-down house. I didn’t run wild. I never called secret meetings with my sisters and brothers to figure out how to manage my clueless parents or our problems. The feelings these books evoke could almost be mistaken for nostalgia—until I remind myself that I didn’t grow up this way at all.
There is a magical quality to the spaces that the children in these books inhabit. The Vanderbeeker children, for instance, creep out of their windows to meet on the brownstone’s roof:
The tiles made the rooftop welcoming and soundproof. Nevertheless the kids knew to tread in the same manner they did when visiting one another’s bedrooms late at night without waking their parents. They were certain the Biederman could not hear them, because he would definitely have said something about it. And not in a nice way, either.
Jessie Vanderbeeker has also equipped the roof with a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that allows the children to pour water down through a series of seesaws, wind chimes, and spokes, to create a soft melody. It’s a nice touch, both beautiful and whimsical, and it reinforces the feeling of an old-fashioned kind of childhood.
One reason I find the Vanderbeekers and the Penderwicks and Melendys so compelling is because these books also show the ways that children have power in their environment.
When I try to pinpoint what I find reassuring about this book—all of these books—I consider that it is this image of the siblings meeting secretly in the spaces that they’ve created. Even if the kids struggle to find a place in the larger world, there is at least assurance of a place within a family—where the crushing fights get resolved, where adolescence shakes up certain assumptions but one’s birth order and the love of one’s brothers and sisters stays more or less constant. The structure of family is ballast.
And that is further reinforced by the physical spaces of the kids’ covert meetings. One reason I find the Vanderbeekers and the Penderwicks and Melendys so compelling is because these books also show the ways that children have power in their environment. The four Penderwick sisters can, after all, help their friend James, who wants to go to a prestigious music school. The Vanderbeekers can lure their reclusive landlord back into the community. The Melendys even discover a secret room in their attic, in the children’s space.
“Look how it goes: up to here, and then across to there, and then down again. And look, there’s a kind of a bulge on that side. Like a hinge!”
“Like a hinge,” repeated Rush, light dawning. “Creepers, Ran! Do you suppose it could be a door?”
In dream interpretation, they say that discovering a hidden room in one’s home is a sign of untapped potential—it’s the subconscious’s signal there is more to find within oneself. In The Four-Story Mistake, that extra room is real; the Melendy kids keep news of the room from their father and their housekeeper, Cuffy. It is a place they can hide and plan fierce campaigns. Similar spots—in crawlspaces, in enormous garden urns, in attics and in trees—and covert meetings exist in the books I’ve been reading. From these locations, the siblings effect change, and their grown-ups have no idea that these childhood war rooms exist.
When people talk about having things go back to the way they were, I think sometimes they have in mind the portraits of family life found in these books. And yes, there is a charm in reading about “simpler times,” in kids playing in treehouses and adopting strange dogs from the street—charming, that is, for certain classes of white, straight, cis people.
But for me, I think that the appeal of these books lies in the fact that the children are allowed to be powerful, and where the books themselves serve as a childhood space; the pages are the secret room.
When people talk about having things go back to the way they were, I think sometimes they have in mind the portraits of family life found in these books. … But for me, I think that the appeal of these books lies in the fact that the children are allowed to be powerful, and where the books themselves serve as a childhood space; the pages are the secret room.
Because despite outward appearances, the larger setting of these novels isn’t all sweetness and charm. The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes, published in 1941, is essentially about the Great Depression and its effects on a widow’s children. Enright’s The Saturdays was published in 1939, and that book contains uneasy mentions of Hitler and strife in Europe. By The Four-Story Mistake (1941), Enright’s Melendys have moved to the country and are actively raising money for war bonds. So much for nostalgia.
I can’t think it a coincidence that both Estes and Enright first published these kinds of stories during these fraught years. And I find it interesting that The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, about a mixed-race family—a family whose existence could be considered political—who are not many steps from homelessness and economic ruin—is being released now. They are sunny books, but their optimism is tempered. They are hopeful books, but there are good reasons why these characters need hope. When there is a larger world of dark, adult issues, these novels remind readers that there are still problems that can be solved by the youngest, smallest, most overlooked people.
***
* I received an ARC of The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street via Netgalley.
I was halfway through Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking when I decided that I didn’t particularly want to re-read it anymore.
Pippi, first published in Swedish in 1945, is the story of an irrepressible redheaded girl. She lives in a house by herself with a pet horse, a monkey named Mr. Nilsson, and a suitcase full of gold coins. She’s also very, very strong, able to lift her horse with one hand and thwart robbers with the other. She doesn’t go to school, she drinks coffee, and she sleeps with her feet on her pillow. Her father is a former pirate and is the king of a South Pacific island—described as a cannibal island.
Pippi lives a child’s dream of disorder. The adults in the village she lives in despair of her. The one time she goes to school, she riles up the children, shows she can’t do math, and tells wild tales about her time abroad. In another chapter, the centerpiece is a tall tale she recounts about a man named Hai Shang from Shanghai. “His ears were so big he could use them for a cape. When it rained, he just crawled under his ears and was as warm and snug as you please.”
In another chapter, the centerpiece is a tall tale she recounts about a man named Hai Shang from Shanghai. “His ears were so big he could use them for a cape. When it rained, he just crawled under his ears and was as warm and snug as you please.”
The story is so clearly unrealistic that the little girl and Pippi’s friends doubt its veracity. Pippi continues to elaborate and weave her tale. And just when the children start being convinced, Pippi says of her story, “You must know that’s a lie. You mustn’t let people fool you so easily.”
Pippi is a fabulist within her own unrealistic story. The grown-ups in the novel are the ones who are confused and stick to seemingly useless rules. It’s supposed to be fun and absurd, and yet I find that I can’t like it. Because even topsy-turvy worlds have rules, and within the universe of Pippi, some of the tall tales about the cultures Pippi has supposedly encountered turn out to be true—Pippi’s father is the white king of an island of darker-skinned people, for instance. There’s a whole sequel about it called Pippi in the South Seas. The people whom Pippi has encountered on her travels end up as merely props to the chaos she insists on. Within the gleeful disorder of Pippi Longstocking lurks a very familiar order.
In a way, Pippi was the book that enforced my decision to not shove the stories I’d read in childhood at my own kid.
Many of my friends are passionate about books and understandably want to share with their children the joy of reading by giving them these classics.
It’s supposed to be fun and absurd, and yet I find that I can’t like it. Because even topsy-turvy worlds have rules, and … within the gleeful disorder of Pippi Longstocking lurks a very familiar order.
I am happy to pass that love and joy onto my child. It’s the rest that gives me pause.
For the record, my daughter has read Pippi Longstocking. (Pippi in the South Seas is difficult to spot on library or bookstore shelves these days.) But I’ve talked with her about realism and tall tales, and how Pippi’s descriptions of the cultures and people she has supposedly encountered are inaccurate—and the fact that some of the cultures described are part of hers and my background.
And yes, I understand the book was written long ago. I understand that it was written by a mother who started out just telling her kids stories to entertain them, and that she was reflecting the concerns of her time and age and viewpoint. She clearly never imagined that someone who looked like me—or my kid—would be reading them. That’s fine.
But I am also a parent of a time and an age and a particular viewpoint—and I have other choices now. So does my child.
In March, shortly after its release, I bought my daughter a copy of Susan Tan’s contemporary middle-grade novel, Cilla Lee-Jenkins, Future Author Extraordinaire.
Like Pippi, Cilla Lee-Jenkins is a story about a girl who makes up stories and is disenchanted with the grown-up world.
Cilla sometimes annoys and shocks the adults in her life … But in Cilla is a recognition that the world is more complicated than simple binaries of order and chaos, adulthood and childhood.
Unlike Pippi, Cilla Lee-Jenkins is set in a realistic, recognizable universe. The protagonist is a plucky mixed Asian and white second-grader living in Boston with her parents and near her two sets of grandparents. Cilla—short for Priscilla—is getting a new baby sister. This has her alarmed, and as a result, she decides to become a famous writer so that she won’t be forgotten after the baby is born.
Cilla sometimes annoys and shocks the adults in her life. To her parents’ dismay, she calls her unwanted soon-to-be-sibling “the Blob.” In one episode, she pours glue over her head. But in Cilla is a recognition that the world is more complicated than simple binaries of order and chaos, adulthood and childhood. At one point, Cilla notes:
No one minds if you slurp your soup in Chinatown (which I can’t do at home) and no one cares if your elbows are on the table (my Grandma Jenkins is VERY concerned about this).
Cilla knows that manners—one of the things that Pippi lacks, to the horror of the adults—can be different in different contexts. The “other” culture with different etiquette is treated matter-of-factly—and it is Cilla’s culture, too. So-called disorder and reversal of adult norms—let’s face it, Western adult norms—is not the business of the day. Rather, in this book there is an acknowledgment that the world contains many kinds of order, many ways to be.
So-called disorder and reversal of adult norms—let’s face it, Western adult norms—is not the business of the day. Rather, in this book there is an acknowledgment that the world contains many kinds of order, many ways to be.
It’s not really a fair comparison: two books from different times that are trying to do different things.
One is an enduring classic. One of brand new—it’s too early to tell what it will be. But readers’—people’s—lives and perspectives are never exactly equal. And the work that these stories do, especially in the lives of the children who read them, are not necessarily measured in endurance or popularity or cultural reception. Sometimes books and characters do the best work by simply being put in the right hands at the right time.
Cilla Lee-Jenkins was written by someone—Tan herself is mixed—who can acknowledge someone with my heritage, my kid’s, as a reader. And it is one book that shows that my child the possibility that she can be the story—she can shape it—rather than exist an oddity in another person’s narrative. This and novels like this one are the ones I’m urgent to share.
Cilla says:
I’m going to write my first-ever book right here in this journal, and I’m going to become a famous bestselling author (with an EXCELLENT new name) before the baby is born. Then no one can forget about me.
Cilla Lee-Jenkins, Future Author Extraordinaire is about a kid growing up and wanting to make sure that she’s seen and heard. And by encountering this character, maybe one kid out there will also know that she hasn’t been forgotten.
top photo: “Villa Kakelbont / Villa Villekulla,” flickr / Rob Oo
When I was in (maybe) first grade, children’s book writer Robert Munsch came to my school and performed The Mud Puddle.
In the story, Jule Ann puts on clean clothes—pants, shirt, socks, shoes—and goes outside on a sunny day, only to be jumped by a seemingly sentient mud puddle. She returns to her house, sopping and dirty. Her mother washes her until she’s squeaky clean. She puts on new clothing. But the mud puddle is waiting for her.
Munsch performed it without consulting a script, using a huge paper doll and paper clothes, to illustrate the story to a crowd of elementary school kids. He was exuberant and rubber faced. By the middle of his performance—I remember so clearly the giddiness, the joy—all of us were rolling around on the library floor, helpless with laughter.
It is maybe one of my favorite memories.
He was exuberant and rubber faced. By the middle of his performance—I remember so clearly the giddiness, the joy—all of us were rolling around on the library floor, helpless with laughter.It is maybe one of my favorite memories.
Munsch is probably best known for books such as The Paperbag Princess, the story of an unglamorous royal who, using her wits and determination, saves herself in more than one way, and Love You Forever, a divisive—usually deemed either heartbreaking or obsessive—story that follows a mother and her boy until the son is a grown man and the mother is frail and old.
Munsch is not as well-known in the United States as he is in Canada. Nevertheless, Love You Forever is one of the bestselling picture books in North America of all time.
When he came to our school, he probably would have been early in his career as a children’s writer. The Mud Puddle was his first book. He performed a couple of other stories—we were a delighted audience. I don’t remember what they were.
There is a lot I don’t remember clearly or accurately. That troubles me, because this column is about, among other things, the impact of my childhood recollections. I say I was maybe in first grade when I saw Munsch perform. I say it is one of my favorite memories. But the truth is that my recall of it is piecemeal. I didn’t know it was Robert Munsch who read to us at the time. I had no idea who he was. I don’t remember being told that we’d get a special treat that morning or afternoon. If my parents asked how my day was, I probably forgot to tell them.
I say I was maybe in first grade when I saw Munsch perform. I say it is one of my favorite memories. But the truth is that my recall of it is piecemeal. I didn’t know it was Robert Munsch who read to us at the time. I had no idea who he was.
But even as I write this, I’m trying to put it back together, trying to figure out when I remembered—when I knew, when this story grew to greater personal significance. I pulled up pictures of my first elementary school, Betrun E. Glavin, on Google maps and learned from an architecture site that it still stands, that its “design avoids ornamentation beyond the beauty of its limestone facing.” That it was built “to express the learning philosophy of open spaces and individual progress without need for external distractions.”
I can remember the outside of the building with its tetherball poles and climbing structures—now replaced. The sunken library in the middle where Munsch read to us. I found a picture from 2014 of my third-grade teacher, Ms. Copp—she looks very much the same. She was interviewed on the closing of her parents’ garden center and convenience store, a store my friends and I biked to buy candy and Wacky Packs. I can’t find my first-grade teacher, though. Although now I realize that she was probably very young when she started teaching us.
There are later, more defined memories of my fifth-grade teacher, Monsieur Campbell, reading us The Paperbag Princess in French. (By then I was at a different school.) There is one picture where Princess Elizabeth flatters the dragon—and M. Campbell pointed out how the dragon was checking his nails, preening. By then I think that Robert Munsch was a household name in Canada, but I don’t think I made the connection that he was the person who’d come to perform for us long ago.
How astounding that one person’s stories permeate the texture of so much that I do and don’t remember.
I suspect that it wasn’t until Munsch began to appear regularly on a children’s television program that I figured out the truth. By then, I knew his name, and even though I was supposed to be a cynical teen, I made time to watch it. He wasn’t even the headliner. The host was a clown named Piccadilly Circus. I can’t recall her whole schtick, but I think there was some mime involved. I don’t remember the name of the show. I’ve tried Googling variations of “CTV,” “children’s program,” “Piccadilly Circus,” and “Munsch” to see if I can find clips on YouTube.
This morning, I wiled away an hour on Musipedia trying to place the theme—a fairly well-known classical piece for piano. I can play back the tune on the keyboard, but the title remains elusive.
Chasing down every thread leads to another thought, another flash of recollection, another small part of my life. These fragments seem like loose ends. But as I gather the memories of this one person—one storyteller—together, I see how all these bits appear at so many stages of my youth, how they are woven into all aspects of my childhood. How astounding that one person’s stories permeate the texture of so much that I do and don’t remember.
A more recent memory: last year, my daughter brought home a copy of Moira’s Birthday. The book, first published in 1987, was in her class’s library. She thought it was very funny, and she asked me to read it out loud to her—she knew that it was a book that should be read out loud.
My husband tells me that I read Moira’s Birthday differently. That become more animated. I yell. I exaggerate. I tell him that when I read them, I guess I’m performing them the way they’re supposed to sound—I’m reading them like Robert Munsch.
“For my birthday, I would like to invite Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, and Kindergarten,” Moira tells her mother.
When her mother balks at the number of children involved, Moira goes to her father. “For my birthday, I would like to invite Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, and Kindergarten.”
Her father tells her she can have six children over. But when the day of the party comes around, who shows up? Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, aaaaand Kindergarten. The joy in the book—in most of Munsch’s books—is in establishing the rhythm of storytelling and humor, then changing it up. It’s in the repetition of elements (Grade 1, Grade 2, etc. etc.), followed by absurd variation.
Afterward, we had a good time looking up people reading Munsch’s other stories on YouTube. My daughter still sometimes brings that book home.
My husband tells me that I read Moira’s Birthday differently. That become more animated. I yell. I exaggerate. I tell him that when I read them, I guess I’m performing them the way they’re supposed to sound—I’m reading them like Robert Munsch.
But it’s funny, because I think I still sound very much like me.
At the beginning of Robin McKinley’s 1982 young adult fantasy novel The Blue Sword, Harry Crewes has been living in a colonial desert outpost after the death of her parents. The Homeland, where Harry is from, is a thinly disguised Victorian England. The lone Homeland city of Istan shares uneasily a border with Damar, a mysterious, magical Afghanistan concealed in the mountains.
War is brewing between Damar and the North, and when King Corlath of Damar comes to negotiate with the Homelanders, his magic—the kelar—demands that he kidnap the young woman to aid his people.
Harry, it turns out, has plenty of kelar in her blood, too. As a result, she has visions of legendary Damarian queen Aerin, she learns the language at a prodigious rate, and she adapts quickly to bridleless horsemanship and battle training. After a brutal six weeks of swashbuckler boot camp, she wins the laprun trials (the Damarian cavalry Olympics), becomes one of the king’s elite Riders, and rides out to war against the demonic Northern army.
While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
But Harry clashes with Corlath on a major point: she wants to warn the Homelanders—or as the Damarians call them, the Outlanders—about the Northern army and to ask them to defend a narrow gap in the mountains through which the Northerners could overrun Harry’s old home and ambush Corlath’s army. Corlath has exhausted his diplomacy with the pseudo-Victorians. “Let them take the Outlander city,” he says of the Northerners. “[I]t will keep them amused.”
Despite the fact that Harry loves Damar—and is falling for Corlath—she cares about the Outlander station: her brother still lives there, she has friends there. It was her world not long ago. She defies the king and risks betraying Damar—and Corlath—in order to go and warn her old countrymen and to guard the pass herself.
The Blue Sword won a Newbery Honor and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. It was followed by The Hero and the Crown—a prequel, which tells the story of Lady Aerin. While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
That does not mean it’s without problems:
Harry is a white savior. The Damarians are dark haired and dark skinned, and Harry is a towering blonde. Yes, it’s revealed eventually that she has a quarter Damarian blood, so maybe Emma Stone can play her in the movie.
It can be seen as colonial apologia. The authorities and military stationed at Istan seem to love the desert and respect the people. The colonizers are excised of brutality; they are bumbling and well-intentioned.
Then, there is also the fact that Corlath kidnaps Harry—or rather, his kelar forces him to do it. The abduction of women is a charged act—sexually and politically—and the characters know it. But the way McKinley rewrites kidnapping is interesting. First of all, Corlath feels pretty terrible about it:
She was smiling a little in her sleep, but it was a sad smile, and it made him unhappy… He knew only too well that by stealing her from her people he had done a thing to be ashamed of, even if he had no alternative.
McKinley takes pains to make sure that Corlath’s intention isn’t rape. Indeed, out of Corlath’s sympathy for her grows respect, and love.
On Harry’s end, instead of the abduction being an instrument of a sexual awakening that leaves her in thrall to love, she is bestowed with power. Corlath gives her swords, a horse—a means to leave. Her magic asserts itself. She has the kind of freedom she didn’t enjoy while trying to be a lady at the colonial outpost—and more. An early signal of her autonomy is her clarity and humor about the situation:
Corlath didn’t look at her the way a man looks at a woman he plans to share his bed… He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.
Throughout the episode, Harry retains her ability to think. The book is full of these dry asides—the characters are aware that the situation is epic, but their reactions are not grandiose. They’re very funny and human, and I found that—still find it—appealing.
The Blue Sword combines feminist power and magic—and that is and was seductive. But the book’s flipping of one script does not make it perfect on all other issues—although the seductiveness remains in place.
Another thing I loved about the book when I was younger was the idea of a foreigner coming into another culture and, despite many struggles, thriving in it.
She was a figure in some story other than her own—an embroidered shape in a Hill tapestry, a representation of something that did not exist in her Homeland.
Harry feels that she has no history in the place she is living—but it is making history out of her. At another point, Harry tells the Oracle, Luthe:
Oh, I know—one never sees ahead of behind. But I see even less. It is like being blindfolded when everyone else in the room is not. No one can see outside the room—but everyone else can see the room. I would like to take my blindfold off.
It explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
In a way, the book captures the helplessness and the vitality of adolescence—the feeling of being perched on the cusp of something huge, but of not knowing what that will be. But more important to me when I first read it, it explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
As I said, it’s very seductive.
The Blue Sword informs who I am. I can see its fingerprints all over me. Here is where I learned what “bohemian” meant and that swords and sorcery could be interspersed with wit. Here is where I learned to mine a book for offpage sex. Here is where I learned about bridges.
Luthe, the mage whom Corlath consults before battle, tells Harry:
Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel…It is not an enviable position, being a bridge, especially a bridge with visions.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling. No—it meant I would always see myself as struggling and that that struggle was for a noble and perhaps magical cause.
But the truth is that I was never in a foreign land. I have always lived here in North America. And it isn’t always struggle. The idea of being this bridge has lost its luster. I think of my daughter who is biracial—a classic born of two worlds child—and I think that she should not have to follow that template unless she wants it. She was born here, too, and the dominant narrative of her life doesn’t have to be one of never feeling quite at home.
It is okay to feel out of place or foreign. But it doesn’t have to be the only way she can see herself in books.
I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully.
I love The Blue Sword. It is a part of who I am. But I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully. When she’s older, I can give her Zen Cho’s Sorceror to the Crown, or Saladin Ahmed’s stories. If she likes The Blue Sword, great—we’ll have plenty to talk about.
But my daughter doesn’t have to see herself as a bridge in order to reconcile her place. Because the thing about bridges is that people walk all over them to get to other, more fantastical lands.
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