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.
In fourth grade, I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden. I owned a mint-green Dell Yearling paperback copy that I must have bought with my allowance money. It was a book that likely inspired my childish love of the idea of England, of the idea of gardens and nature.
In The Secret Garden, ten-year-old Mary Crawford is sent to England after her parents die in a cholera epidemic in India. She finds herself at the Yorkshire estate of her uncle Archibald, a widower with a tragic past.
Mary is described as an unpleasant child: sallow, thin, spoiled, unsmiling. She is used to ordering people about and having no other children to play with. But once she’s in Yorkshire, the maid Martha begins telling her tales of her family, especially her mother and Martha’s animal-loving brother, Dickon. Mary soon finds herself shunted outside to play, where she befriends a robin and grumpy gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and learns about a secret enclosed flower garden on the estate. Being outdoors improves Mary’s physical stamina and mental outlook: she starts running around and jumping rope. And once she finds the key and the door to the secret garden, she begins poking around in the earth.
She also meets Dickon and, later, her ten-year-old cousin, Colin, an invalid whose cries echo through the manor. She soon gets Colin out of the house and into the garden. Being outdoors enacts a transformation of Colin’s health and gives him a channel for his autocratic tendencies. Soon the children are running around singing, chanting, and speaking odes to the healing magic—sorry, capital M Magic—of “plain” English food, English weather, and English gardens.
Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in England in 1849 but spent a large portion of her adult life in the United States—moving first with her family to Knoxville, Tennessee, then Washington, DC, and ending her days in Plandome Manor on Long Island in 1924.
In addition to The Secret Garden, she was best known for her children’s novels Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Burnett was also a prolific author of plays, serials, and novels for adults. Her work was successful enough that she was able to spend time in Paris, across Europe, and at a home in Bermuda where she wintered. She also became interested in Christian Science, Spiritualism, and Theosophy, and the effects of those beliefs can be seen especially in the last quarter of The Secret Garden.
As a kid, I remember skipping over those “spiritual” sections a lot, although I can’t say it affected my enjoyment of the book. Our Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, had similar feelings when showed us what I think was probably the 1975 BBC miniseries adaptation. She said she liked it, although she mentioned the magical-spiritual garden stuff being very hokey.
Hokey is perhaps not the word I’d use today.
I’d love to say that tiny Mindy read The Secret Garden and was able to identify the shitty colonial ideology of the book.
But no, the opposite happened: the book helped make me an Anglophile in my stupid, stupid youth. I loved this idealized version of England with chatty robins and wild animals tamely following Dickon around the moors. I tried to speak with a Yorkshire accent. I wanted to like things described in the book, such as good thick porridge (even though in reality I didn’t like porridge, unless it was Taiwanese rice porridge), currant buns (I disliked currants), the chilly outdoor air (we were in Canada and it was often more than chilly), and running around in it (no). I even wanted to like gardening, though in my personal experience my parents’ and grandparents’ suburban Canadian vegetable patch was pretty terrible and certainly didn’t involve sweet-smelling flowers or fresh healthy air. Clearly I was willing and able to endure a lot of cognitive dissonance around the realities of what I liked and wanted in life versus the ideals described in The Secret Garden.
One thing I could not love even as a child, however, was Colin. And on re-reading the book, well … if anything, he’s worse.
It is very clear to me as an adult how much love and attention the narrator lavishes on Colin. He is often described as “beautiful.” He has a “beautiful smile.” He’s “quite beautiful in spite of his thinness.” His eyes are “beautiful” and strange, and he has long, thick lashes.
Despite not being introduced until the second half of the story, he takes over most of it; Mary—remember Mary? The girl we start off following and the one who finds the whole damn secret garden?—has no more than a few lines of dialogue in the last quarter of the story. Colin, by contrast, talks for pages and pages.
“The Magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man,” Colin says at one point.
After spouting off in kind for a few more paragraphs, he has Ben Weatherstaff, Mary, and Dickon sitting cross-legged in a circle with him:
“Now we will begin,” he said. “Shall we sway backward and forward, Mary, as if we were dervishes?”
“I canna’ do no swayin’ back’ard and for’ard,” said Ben Weatherstaff. “I’ve got the ’rheumatics.”
“The Magic will take them away,” said Colin in a High Priest tone, “but we won’t sway until it has done it. We will only chant.”
Colin becomes the expert on Magic—even though he’s not the one who came up with the idea. But Dickon and Mary and Ben Weatherstaff accept his leadership. He’s a budding cult leader, complete with questionable medical ideas, “beautiful”/hypnotic eyes, and an imperious manner.
In Colin the most annoying parts of Burnett’s spiritual-colonial enterprise are personified. The boy is often also described as a “the young Rajah.” Mary says:
Once in India I saw a boy who was a Rajah. He had rubies and emeralds and diamonds stuck all over him. He spoke to his people just as you spoke to Martha. Everybody had to do everything he told them—in a minute. I think they would have been killed if they hadn’t.
The “Rajah” epithet sticks because Colin is bossy as fuck. He is the master of the house while his father is away—and never stops reminding people of the fact. But what does it mean that Colin is continually compared to a young, spoiled non-Englishtyrant, when in fact, being cooped up in England on his own estate has made him the dictator that he is?
In the characterization of Colin, we run up against the fact that so much of the book depends on comparing India unfavorably with England, even as the book exploits Indian things that it finds convenient. The children cobble together a spiritual practice by referring to animal charmers, “fakirs,” transplanting Mary’s childish colonial cultural observations and bits from Colin’s books, mixing in the idea of the pastoral, and trying to mash all of these things into a kind of magical—sorry, capital M Magical—English-ness.
I live in Manhattan now, in an apartment.
My upstairs neighbors are renovating, so all morning I’ve been trying to write some sort of conclusion to this piece between the whines of drilling and the thump of a sledgehammer being taken to the walls. My life is the opposite of bucolic, and at times like these, I find myself wanting to agree with Frances Hodgson Burnett—an Anglo-American, city-loving socialite writer—that there is no location more magical and desirable than a great, green garden in England.
But that place is largely a myth—a nation-building tale from another time—and I don’t think the the rulers of that place would particularly welcome me.
I used to think of Encyclopedia Brown mystery stories as logical, serious, and solveable. I probably also believed in a tidy universe. On re-reading, I realize that I was completely and utterly wrong. I missed the humor, I didn’t see the absurdity, and I completely mistook the tone. And, as it turns out, I was probably also wrong about the universe.
The long-running series by Donald J. Sobol followed a set formula: the reader would be introduced to an eccentric citizen of Idaville who would bring a case to our boy sleuth, Encyclopedia Brown. The victim would give a summary of what had happened, or confront a suspected villain who would protest and counter with a story of their own.
Encyclopedia Brown stories could always be solved; that was the promise.
Encyclopedia might ask a question or two, and then he’d announce that he had solved the case. The reader could try to logic it out or choose to flip to the back of the book and learn about the one telling detail that had tipped Encyclopedia off.
Encyclopedia Brown stories could always be solved; that was the promise.
In Sobol’s volume Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Treasure Hunt (1988), the young sleuth helps his dad, the chief of the Idaville police, determine whether a thief has made off with some antique screens. He helps a boy recover a pizza (or at least the money for it) from bully Bugs Meany. With the aid of his henchwoman, Sally Kimball, he finds a treasure hunt cheater, gets a stolen camera back, and helps a junior artist friend win a contest. He discovers a tree thief, a toilet paper thief, a tent saboteur, and a worm-wrangling huckster.
Instead of a presenting a capricious, dangerous universe where solving a case involved being in the right place at the right time, the world of Encyclopedia Brown seemed to posit some sort of order—an order that I could control.
What I liked about the books as a fifth grader was that they contained the possibility of solving the cases oneself. They were a refreshing change from the Nancy Drew books (which I now see are adventure/suspense stories that are insistently framed as mysteries).
Instead of a presenting a capricious, dangerous universe where solving a case involved being in the right place at the right time, the world of Encyclopedia Brown seemed to posit some sort of order—an order that I could control. I was a child (just like Encyclopedia!), and I could solve a mystery by reading carefully and critically! I even had a degree of power over the narrative itself. I could turn to the end of the book and find out the solution—I could choose to see the conclusion—or I could read the next story. Because of the physical act of flipping to the end for the solution and then shuffling back for another story, it was a little bit like a choose-your-own-adventure, a kind of book that was popular when I was young. But in spirit, Sobol’s stories were the complete opposite. In choose-your-own-adventure, the narrator often ended up dead. In Encyclopedia Brown, everything turned out fine:
In police stations across the United States, the same question was asked again and again.
Why did every grown-up or child who broke the law in Idaville get caught?
Every case in Idaville was solved. Encyclopedia Brown books were not perilous, they were not fraught. No one died. Encyclopedia didn’t even get a bloody nose, thanks to his muscled henchwoman, Sally. The universe of those books seemed orderly, and thus reassuring both in subject and in tone. For years, long after I’d stopped reading the Encyclopedia Brown books, I held them in my mind as straightforward, maybe even utilitarian. My young self wasn’t there for the prose; I was there to solve some problems.
Encyclopedia’s real name is Leroy, my husband likes to note. He enjoys imagining a world where Encyclopedia grows up to become Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.
After re-reading as an adult, I find it increasingly plausible that Encyclopedia would hie off to Chicago and become a surly brawler. Because, contrary to my impression, Encyclopedia Brown books are not completely logical or straightforward. Law, order, and logic do not reign at the end of the day. They never did. Here are some of the citizens we encounter in Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Treasure Hunt:
“The last customer Monday was Farnsworth Grant. Farnsworth, who was ten, had founded the Idaville Flat Earth Association”
“Orson Merriweather had always wanted to be a tree…he put out The Social Directory of Big Trees.”
“Wilford Wiggins was a high-school dropout and too lazy to walk in his sleep.”
“When he felt up to it Encyclopedia dropped in on Lathrop McPhee. Lathrop had the largest collection of toilet paper in Idaville.”
That last quotation in particular highlights Encyclopedia’s subtle-but-insistent exasperation with his eccentric fellow citizens—“When he felt up to it”—and shows some of the absurdity that the young sleuth is dealing with. (Idaville is said to be in Florida, and this set of characters reminds me of Florida Man joke headlines.)
In another story, Encyclopedia barely keeps it together around the person he’s helping, Pablo Pizzaro, “Idaville’s greatest child artist.” Pablo’s work Bumps on a Log aapparently took fifth grade by storm:
Encyclopedia thought Bumps on a Log was small potatoes. He dared not say so, however, in front of Sally. She became fluttery whenever she was near Pablo.
While watching Pablo’s rival paint, Encyclopedia thinks, “Sailboat in Motion might be instant art, but it was the worst picture he had ever seen.” And later, “His eyes hurt from watching Sailboat in Motion take shape. He staggered off in search of relief.”
The title for this volume could have been Encyclopedia Brown and Life’s Rich Tapestry, or possibly, Encyclopedia Brown Is Somewhat Tired of This Shit.
In this re-reading Encyclopedia is less kid genius, more a person striving to be levelheaded while being surrounded by illogical, somewhat ridiculous (but often lovable) people; judging by the way he behaves in Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Treasure Hunt, the pressure is starting to get to him. The title for this volume could have been Encyclopedia Brown and Life’s Rich Tapestry, or possibly, Encyclopedia Brown Is Somewhat Tired of This Shit.
I mean, he is a child solving the cases that his dad, the friggin’ Chief of Police, can’t crack. If that isn’t topsy-turvy, I don’t know what is.
Then again, remembering back to how I felt about Encyclopedia when I was myself a kid, I know that I forgave this lapse in plausibility. The idea of a young person solving mysteries was delightful.
So I go back and forth. When I was a child, I needed Encyclopedia Brown to be comforting, solid. I wanted to think that problems could be solved—and that’s what I got. As an adult, I don’t have that certainty; I’ve become someone else. But it seems on re-reading that the books have been something else all along.
This summer, I spent some time re-reading Anne of Green Gables, a book that I turned to frequently in my childhood. It was easy to fall into it, but it also made me think of the lessons we learn—the habits we form—when we are young readers.
In Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved classic, middle-aged siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert decide to adopt a boy to help them with their Prince Edward Island farm. But as the result of a miscommunication, instead of a sturdy boy the Cuthberts end up with red-headed Anne Shirley, whose unself-conscious chatter and vivid imagination soon win over shy Matthew and uptight Marilla.
The novel follows Anne as she befriends “kindred spirits,” including her bosom friend the neighbor girl Diana Barry, attends classes at Avonlea village’s one-room schoolhouse (and breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head for calling her carrots), accidentally puts salt in a cake instead of sugar, dyes her hair green, dreams of dresses with puffed sleeves, and excels when she attends teacher’s college.
Anne is a daydreamer, but intelligent and hard working. Throughout, Anne learns and matures, but the book also charts her progress from mistrusted stranger in town—an orphan—to being a member of the community of Avonlea.
Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, was Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery’s debut. It met with instant success, and Montgomery went on to write nineteen more novels, including five more in the Anne series, a few books that focus on Anne’s friends and children, and the Emily books.
In many ways, Anne of Green Gables is about the commonplace—village life and growing up. But it is also about the power of imagination and storytelling. Anne’s parents die when she is a baby and she is taken in by a Mrs. Thomas, who, according to Anne, is “poor and ha[s] a drunken husband.” Young Anne helps raise the Thomases’ four children, and when the husband dies after falling under a train, she goes to Mrs. Hammond, who has eight children. Of Mrs. Hammond’s family, Anne says, “I’m sure I could never have lived there if I hadn’t had an imagination.”
Anne takes refuge from the real danger of her early life in stories, and it is through making stories that she gains friends in Avonlea. After an absence from school, for instance, Montgomery writes:
Anne was welcomed back to school with open arms. Her imagination had been sorely missed in games, her voice in the singing and her dramatic ability in the perusal aloud of books at dinner time.
(By the way, one of the pleasures of re-reading Anne of Green Gables comes from appreciating the things that the girls do to entertain themselves in the early 1900s.)
But there is clearly tension between the everyday and the imaginative. Marilla constantly disapproves of Anne’s “heathenish” thoughts, and when Anne and Diana dream up a Haunted Wood including a ghostly child who lays its cold fingers on people, both Marilla and Diana’s mother object.
Indeed, what Montgomery calls a sign of Anne’s maturity involves favoring more realistic literature—a movement encouraged and endorsed by Anne’s beloved teacher, Miss Stacy. Anne tells Marilla:
She found me reading a book one day called The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall. It was one Ruby Gillis had lent me, and, oh, Marilla, it was so fascinating and creepy. It just curdled the blood in my veins. But Miss Stacy said it was a very silly, unwholesome book, and she asked me not to read any more of it or any like it.
As for her own writing, Anne says, “[Miss Stacy] won’t let us write anything but what might happen in Avonlea in our own lives, and she criticizes it very sharply and makes us criticize our own, too.”
Anne is told again and again to turn her imagination to less sensational channels: to favor realism over the gothic or fanciful—that there is a moral superiority to the more realistic even when it comes to imaginative play.
Within these classic, realistic novels about young women by Western, Christian women writers, the idea that realism is somehow fitter—somehow morally and aesthetically superior—is a refrain.
I read Anne when I was maybe in fourth or fifth grade, and distracted by the other delights of the book, I didn’t give a lot of thought to Miss Stacy’s edicts on literature.
But I probably absorbed them, because they were aimed at me—at young women readers. Later in life, Miss Stacy’s message was reinforced by similar sentiments in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In Alcott’s classic, it is Professor Bhaer who is horrified by the “blood and thunder” tales that Jo March writes, causing her to change the direction of her work. And in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (a book that I love and on which I wrote my undergraduate thesis), Henry Tilney lectures avid novel-reader Catherine Morland after she imagines his father (and her holiday host) to be guilty of all manner of gothic horrors.
Within these classic, realistic novels about young women by Western, Christian women writers, the idea that realism is somehow fitter—somehow morally and aesthetically superior—is a refrain. And sure, part of this is to defend the work that these women are already doing; it is in the lady novelist’s interests to claim that her own works can be harmless—even beneficial to her readers. Fiction is, after all, a “pack of lies,” and creating a world inside a book is tantamount to challenging God. And accepting money for these labors sure doesn’t help the woman writer’s cause.
Realism, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to build a world—it seems less like an untruth. Realism, then, looks to the unschooled eye more genteel, less subversive, less deceptive, more ladylike, more socially acceptable.
It’s Anne! But with dark hair and violet eyes! And, as it turns out, psychic visions.
But it is also interesting how drawn both Anne and her author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, are to the “fascinating and creepy”—which itself hints to the reading habits that Montgomery formed as a young reader. Montgomery’s most famous books after Anne, the Emily series, contain light supernatural elements. (For that matter, Louisa May Alcott also wrote sensational stories under her pen name A. M. Barnard.)The title of the first Emily book likely intentionally follows the naming scheme of the Anne books: Emily of New Moon. Like Anne, Emily is also an orphan raised by dour, older people. It’s Anne! But with dark hair and violet eyes! And, as it turns out, psychic visions.
For young me, reading about Emily after Anne—to read a similar narrative about a similar character by the same author only to have the book veer into the supernatural made me uneasy. And that was both because, well, ghosts and seances and any hint of the unknown, and also because it put my relationship with Montgomery’s “wholesome,” realistic books on unstable ground.
I wonder what would happen if women weren’t told so often what to write; if they weren’t faulted for imagining the fantastic and the supernatural.
But it didn’t disturb enough for me to stop reading the rest of the trilogy or Montgomery’s other (sometimes disturbing) books. Because even though I was unsettled by Emily, I found it fascinating. The capacity was in me to enjoy these books—and in Montgomery to pen them.
I wonder what would happen if women weren’t told so often what to write; if they weren’t faulted for imagining the fantastic and the supernatural.
Now, I think about what would have happened to my outlook—to my reading habits—had I read Emily before Anne, if my expectations for Montgomery’s work had been different. Would it have made me more open to reading more frightening, more sensational, more “thrilling” books? Or maybe I am seduced by the idea of another me who is somehow braver because she can enjoy things that frighten her; a me who enjoys fewer limits on her reading on her imagination who lets her mind go farther, if even in a small way.
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.
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* I received an ARC of The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street via Netgalley.
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