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readallthenewberys2012-07-14 09:56 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-07-14 09:56 am
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Newbery Honor: The Windy Hill (Cornelia Meigs)
So I'm just going to work my way straight up this list, then. (I do not think I would read Old Yeller again if I didn't have to finish it to get to Miracles on Maple Hill. *g*)
Standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, books are not, Newberys belong to the ALA. Feel free to disagree with or add to anything I say. Anon commenting is on, IP logging and CAPTCHA are on, anon comments screened for review. I'll try to keep the language all-ages-friendly; commenters, please do the same.
Up first: The Windy Hill by Cornelia Meigs, Newbery Honor 1922. This book is available from Project Gutenberg.
* Oh kidlit. Our young protagonist, being asked first by a "genial" farmer where he is going, refuses a ride only because he's running away and doesn't have a destination to give; but looking at the next person he meets, "and gauging his close-set, hard gray eyes and his narrow, dark face, conceived an instant dislike and distrust of the stranger". :P Two things: first, I really, really dislike the trick of introducing a villain as instantly sinister. People are more nuanced than that; a person who's going to come into conflict with you in the course of your story (assuming "you" to be the protagonist) isn't necessarily a bad person, and even if they are a bad person, it's not going to be instantly visible!
Second: we've met three people so far. The genial farmer is not further described. The kid has a "square, sunburned face". The sinister stranger - and I'd usually scold myself for assuming up front that this guy isn't going to turn out to be okay eventually, but based on Ms Meigs's other work, I'm pretty sure he'll need a change of heart first - has a "narrow, dark face". Racial stereotyping much? :P This guy has gray eyes, so he's probably actually Caucasian, but looking more Hispanic and less Nordic still makes you untrustworthy. o_O
* 'Kay, the kid is running away from his cousin's house to a train station. Kid's name is Oliver, btw. He's leaving his little sister Janet behind, and feels bad about it.
* He "will not be made to do what I hate". Oh kidlit. Oh coming-of-age books. Oh histrionic children. I've known kids who would talk to themselves exactly like that, but it's always hard to tell in a book ninety(!) years old whether the author is going for an accurate kid-impression or being stilted. Sometimes it's hard to tell anyway. ;-) But the authorial vagueness does stick out a bit right here.
* So far, the kid's discontent seems to be twofold: first, his Cousin Jasper, the head of the household, is worried and less pleasant than formerly. He used to be always smiling, but never smiles anymore. (Given that Cousin Jasper just finished having a house built, I call money troubles. The dark stranger holds the mortgage, y/n?) Second, it is a quiet house with a butler and a "poor Mr Peyton" who must not be disturbed - not the most pleasant place for a noisy little boy.
* Whoa, the kid is fifteen and his little sister is thirteen. He read to me as somewhere in the eight-to-eleven range! O_O I'm assuming part of it is the more old-fashioned style.
* Ah. Cousin Jasper, trying to provide a playmate for the two kids (who are getting bored), suggests visiting the teenage girl cousin who lives across the river on another big estate. This book is set in upper-class New England, by the way, in the 1920s; I'm not sure exactly where, it's on the Chesapeake, but it feels like Albert Payson Terhune's New Jersey, if anyone's familiar with his books. Anyway, the kid is being all "ew girls" and gone off in a flounce. Prediction: the kid will now befriend quite a nice girl and find out belatedly that she's the cousin of detested repute. Sorry, I'm being snarky, aren't I? :P
* The kid meets a pair of friendly strangers, a man and a girl, in a stone cottage on a hill (probably the titular hill) by a brook. He helps them move some bees from hive to hive, then they offer him supper and he accepts. The girl is "Polly", the man hasn't been named yet. Quote: "In the presence of these friendly, shabbily dressed strangers he felt, for the first time since leaving home, really happy and at ease." I'm interested to note that the "shabby people have more fun" trope definitely dates from before the Depression.
* Like many of Cornelia Meigs's books, this one has several short stories in the form of chapter-length digressions put in. She's rather good at short stories in general; I'm not sure why she does whole books.
* This first story is about a Native American boy, in the same place as the frame story - that's a common trope of hers, the timeshifted history stories giving background and tying into the main story - who's going to consult a "sorceror" on the titular hill, which is "magic forbidden ground". Apparently his tribe dislike and fear the sea, but he loves it, and his grandmother therefore worries about him and has sent him to get his head straightened out.
* I've been nitpicking a lot, I know, but the writing really is beautiful: the nature descriptions especially. "But today it was neither, being hot midsummer, with the wild grass thick and soft on the slope of the hill that he was climbing, and with the heavy foliage of the oak tree on the summit rustling in a hot, fitful breeze." Very vivid pictures; the paper editions of these books are usually illustrated, but the illustrations never live up to the word-pictures at all.
* Okay, so the eventual ending of the short-story is that the native boy - after becoming friends with the "medicine man", being the only member of the tribe to disbelieve in his magic, and inspiring him to reject his claims of power - winds up being ostracized by his tribe and rescued from a storm by white English sailors, who offer to take him to England because he wants to see what is beyond the sea. The author inserts a digression here claiming that multiple Native Americans of the eastern US seaboard travelled to the Old World of their own will and then returned to tell their people what they saw; I'd like to know how true that is, in what time period.
* It is kind of sweet how heavy on the "people like ourselves" trope that digression is, though. I tend to forget there have been good people pushing the "one human family" thing for a loooong time; you mostly hear about the faily racist ones, from long ago.
* "Deep dwelling in Nashola was that born leadership that makes real men see through the long-established doubts and terrors of their race, who can distinguish the false from the true, who can go forward through shadowy perils to the clear light of knowledge and success." ...oh my word. Oh wow. Wow. *facepalm* How very... James Russell Lowell. ("New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth, They must upward still and onward Who would keep abreast of truth.") Oh 1920s writers, it is good of you to be idealistic and optimistic. Preachiness about the necessity of rejecting traditional beliefs backed up with prescriptive gender-essentialism, not so much. :P
* I've got to say, though, the Native American boy in the short-story was way less of a whiny noodlehead than the modern kid. Ah well. Back to the frame story!
* Yup, "Polly" is definitely Oliver's Cousin Eleanor; the first thing he hears when he gets back to the house (having missed the train he was going to run away on, due to staying for the story) is that Eleanor was "delayed somewhere", her mother doesn't know quite where. ;P
* Oliver's sister Janet has also met the dark stranger, and also didn't like him. Yadda yadda. Sorry - I think all the (1950s edition) Hardy Boys books use that method of exposition, and I read all of them as a kid before I figured out that taking an instant dislike to someone, or them to you, is not actually a good method of identifying villains. o_O So I tend to point it out.
* "Why don't grown-up people tell us things? It is miserable to be old enough to notice when affairs go wrong but not to be old enough to have them explained." Heh. Soapboxing in dialogue: ur doin it. Rite or rong, I'm not sure. *g*
* The butler now informs the kids that the dark stranger claims to be a member of the family and has been coming round regularly, pestering Cousin Jasper and Mr Peyton. We also learn that the butler is not "of the regulation variety", in that he stops acting butlerish when he hasexposition to deliver advice to ask from the children, i.e. whether they know who the dark stranger is and "how we could get rid of him".
* Oh lol, I forgot it was before the advent of driver's licenses. It's the chauffeur's night off, but the protagonist knows how to drive the car, and thus gets asked to drive Cousin Jasper to a clandestine midnight meeting. AND before speed limits: "You may go as fast as you like, I am in a hurry". He doesn't learn anything more about the mystery at this point, but does receive permission to take the car out whenever because he's such a good driver.
* It is presented as a good thing that one man, Oliver's Cousin Jasper, should own the whole river valley - formerly a swamp - and keep it diked and drained, renting out the farmland to tenant farmers. How times have changed. (One section has "passed out of his hands lately", and is now unprosperous and inhabited by poorer people, while its dikes are no longer kept in repair. I can't help noticing all this... it's not exactly moralizing, it's a bit more show-don't-tell than that, but it's still kind of heavy-handed imo.)
* Okay, the dark stranger's name is Mr Anthony Crawford, and he is (as suspected) the person who now owns the unprosperous section of land and won't have any improvements made. He claims to have reason to resent Cousin Jasper - who, as far as I can tell, IS the "Mr Peyton" who must not be disturbed. We could use some more surname exposition in the early part of the book, I'm a wee bit confused now. Anyway, the next chapter involves looking behind the garden wall to find out "one of your Cousin Jasper's meanest secrets".
* All right, Anthony Crawford lives in a beat-up old saltbox house right behind Cousin Jasper's estate. Apparently he is a relative, has some right to the property - I'm guessing they're brothers or first cousins, some kind of equitable-division quarrel - but was known to have a crooked past that Jasper was involved in hushing up. Oliver has decided to ask Polly/Eleanor's father the beekeeper what Oliver can do about the matter, solely on the basis of the beekeeper's trustworthy face (Oliver doesn't yet know the beekeeper is a close relative of Jasper's and, I assume, of Anthony's), but first there is going to be another short-story.
* This one is War of 1812, with a contrived conflict between two business partners over a privateer. The author's obviously uncomfortable with the ethics of privateering at all, but the actual conflict is, that one partner wants to send the ship out again before she's seaworthy in case the war ends before they can make any more money, and the other partner doesn't want to send her out again at all because there are peace talks on and the war might end with no way to notify the ship to stop... privateering around. *headshake* I don't like this sort of writing: straw-man conflicts that don't address the actual ethical issues do nobody any good.
* So the ship is lost in a storm and then - for crying out loud - comes sailing up as a ghost right to the wharf on a sunny March noonday and re-enacts its sinking in front of half the town, proving to everyone that partner #2 was in the right. Why even. O_O That's not even spooky, let alone halfway credible. *sigh* Now back to modern times.
* Can I just say: things that affect the well-being of a whole community, like repairing dikes, really ought not to depend on the goodwill or good fortune of one person? There should be either a general communal effort or a government-administered oversight, not this feudal lord stunt that's setting up the book's climactic dike-breaking flood. (No, I haven't read it before; it's just THAT OBVIOUS.)
* I must say, I rather appreciate the use of words like "declivity" in a kids' book, though. *g* I do love me some vocabulary.
* Okay, and Anthony Crawford has a wife and two kids, of whom the elder is five. Oliver's sister Janet just met the older kid in the road and is taking him home (he was scared by a cow). Anthony's not at home; Janet is now helping the mother care for the baby, who has croup. She goes up to the attic to look for some flannel, and finds paintings that tell her the ship-story was at least partly true and the family are descended from some of the people in it. Then Anthony comes home and catches her in the attic, and she runs away, accidentally taking with her a miniature of a girl who looks like Polly/Eleanor, which Anthony apparently had a lot of trouble getting from Jasper in the first place.
* And now there is another story, Manifest Destiny and gold fever, and a runaway boy who leaves his miserly older brother's house to travel to California. Just now he's leaving the wagon train to take care of a sick horse, planning to catch up when the horse is better.
* He catches up, gets to California, moves from digging to digging, but eventually realizes "it isn't the gold that I'm wanting So much as just finding the gold" (Robert W. Service) and decides he'd rather go back home than keep chasing better strikes all his life. A lot of the '49ers did just that - made their pile, or made it and lost it, and then went back East - but pop culture pays more attention to the romantic ones who stayed. But that was a big part of the post-Civil-War rise in the upperclass standard of living back East, iirc, the goldfield millionaires raising the average.
* So after the story Oliver and Janet go to return the miniature to Anthony Crawford, and Oliver refuses to be manipulated, which annoys Anthony enough that the next day Anthony doesn't come to see Cousin Jasper but instead sends a snide letter. An "ultimatum", Jasper says; we don't learn what the letter says at this point.
* Oh, and now we're going to have a tornado: "the sun was still shining but with a touch of greenish, unreal light". Or maybe just a horrible storm. Anyway, I'm 3/4 of the way through the book, it's about time the flood showed up.st_crispins says the climax of a movie almost always comes near the 80% mark, and I think a well-structured book is similar.
* The entire household staff is now stranded at a fairground, quite safe but unable to get home because of fallen trees. (Heh, that sounds familiar.) So we get an annoying scene of gender essentialism where Oliver, trying to be helpful, finds the kitchen and attempts to make tea, all the while muttering about how "this is no place for a boy" and he wishes "any woman, any girl" would show up to help. Probably it's true to the times, but people ought not to be helpless at taking care of themselves. :P
* So then of course Polly and her dad show up and are revealed to be Cousin Eleanor and her dad. And Polly/Eleanor promptly cooks supper. The beekeeper turns out to also be a lawyer, who will now clear up the matter of Anthony Crawford's claims on the property. Goodness knows why he didn't do it earlier.
* Yeah, yeah, your ancestors bought the land "fairly" from the Native Americans "for what it was worth". WHATEVER. *eyeroll* I am glad you are concerned with ethics, author, but that kind of pastede on yey "oh yeah WE were nice people always" does nobody any favors in actually dealing with past injustices.
* All right, so Polly's dad and Jasper and Anthony are all cousins, and their uncle was responsible for the marsh reclamation policy - which of course, back when this was written ninety years ago, was the very most up-and-coming environmental responsibility thing. o_O Anthony is a more distant cousin than the other two; he was adopted by the uncle.
* All three boys became lawyers, and partners in practicing law. Anthony turned out dishonest and compulsively greedy, got himself involved with a law-bending moneymaking scheme, couldn't get the other two to cover for him, and forged his uncle's name to a check in order to pay whatever back. He was sent off West and the matter hushed up.
* Eventually he came back to make a legal claim to the upper half of the valley and to his uncle's house (the little stone cottage behind the back garden). Polly's dad admits Anthony had an actual basis for the claim, but brushes this off with "He would accept no compromise or offer of purchase, so in the end Jasper gave in to him", and then Jasper pretty much apologizes for letting Anthony have the land. It seems to me that Anthony's getting pretty much the short end of the stick throughout, on nothing better than people's testimony about his one-dimensionally selfish character and a single youthful mistake.
* And then they're saying, oh, his right was only "a legal technicality that Anthony was clever enough to find and make the most of", yadda YADDA, as if it's a priori evident that Anthony should not have any of the land or anything that he's claiming. LAWYERS dismissing legal technicalities as having nothing to do with people's actual rights. o_O Not credible. I am glad Cornelia Meigs became a better author later.
* Then the dike starts to leak, the kids see it happen and get help, and Anthony comes in to apologize and ask Jasper to help him. I've stopped being interested in this book, but I'm going to finish it. (And the 387 after it. *g*)
* So Anthony says, oh, he had no right to any of the whatsit, he's going back out West to serve his self-imposed punishment (instead of going to jail for the forgery, because *snarkyface* he's still part of a rich eminent family and it's not Right for him to actually go to jail and serve a time imposed by the actual proper legal system. He just has to keep atoning until he doesn't feel bad anymore, or something.)
* Ooooh, and now Anthony's getting out of the car to walk because they're all trying to bring people to help with the flood and nobody wants to ride in a car with Anthony. Place your bets on him drowning, if you please. ;P Although he might get away alive; there's no obstacle left in place that would be most easily solved by killing him off.
* Okay, Anthony just saved the life of a wagon-driver caught in the flood when the dike burst, and did not die in so doing. He's probably safe.
* Of course the women are all out of danger cooking coffee and bacon and such things.
* And done. Anthony survived, went back out West, and promised to telegraph for his wife and kids to follow. The author says "there was something in his face that could never be quite like" his honest relatives, and he claims it will be better for everyone if he leaves, which is not contradicted. So the message is that he's unsalvageable, but everyone else lives happily ever after. o_O
Standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, books are not, Newberys belong to the ALA. Feel free to disagree with or add to anything I say. Anon commenting is on, IP logging and CAPTCHA are on, anon comments screened for review. I'll try to keep the language all-ages-friendly; commenters, please do the same.
Up first: The Windy Hill by Cornelia Meigs, Newbery Honor 1922. This book is available from Project Gutenberg.
* Oh kidlit. Our young protagonist, being asked first by a "genial" farmer where he is going, refuses a ride only because he's running away and doesn't have a destination to give; but looking at the next person he meets, "and gauging his close-set, hard gray eyes and his narrow, dark face, conceived an instant dislike and distrust of the stranger". :P Two things: first, I really, really dislike the trick of introducing a villain as instantly sinister. People are more nuanced than that; a person who's going to come into conflict with you in the course of your story (assuming "you" to be the protagonist) isn't necessarily a bad person, and even if they are a bad person, it's not going to be instantly visible!
Second: we've met three people so far. The genial farmer is not further described. The kid has a "square, sunburned face". The sinister stranger - and I'd usually scold myself for assuming up front that this guy isn't going to turn out to be okay eventually, but based on Ms Meigs's other work, I'm pretty sure he'll need a change of heart first - has a "narrow, dark face". Racial stereotyping much? :P This guy has gray eyes, so he's probably actually Caucasian, but looking more Hispanic and less Nordic still makes you untrustworthy. o_O
* 'Kay, the kid is running away from his cousin's house to a train station. Kid's name is Oliver, btw. He's leaving his little sister Janet behind, and feels bad about it.
* He "will not be made to do what I hate". Oh kidlit. Oh coming-of-age books. Oh histrionic children. I've known kids who would talk to themselves exactly like that, but it's always hard to tell in a book ninety(!) years old whether the author is going for an accurate kid-impression or being stilted. Sometimes it's hard to tell anyway. ;-) But the authorial vagueness does stick out a bit right here.
* So far, the kid's discontent seems to be twofold: first, his Cousin Jasper, the head of the household, is worried and less pleasant than formerly. He used to be always smiling, but never smiles anymore. (Given that Cousin Jasper just finished having a house built, I call money troubles. The dark stranger holds the mortgage, y/n?) Second, it is a quiet house with a butler and a "poor Mr Peyton" who must not be disturbed - not the most pleasant place for a noisy little boy.
* Whoa, the kid is fifteen and his little sister is thirteen. He read to me as somewhere in the eight-to-eleven range! O_O I'm assuming part of it is the more old-fashioned style.
* Ah. Cousin Jasper, trying to provide a playmate for the two kids (who are getting bored), suggests visiting the teenage girl cousin who lives across the river on another big estate. This book is set in upper-class New England, by the way, in the 1920s; I'm not sure exactly where, it's on the Chesapeake, but it feels like Albert Payson Terhune's New Jersey, if anyone's familiar with his books. Anyway, the kid is being all "ew girls" and gone off in a flounce. Prediction: the kid will now befriend quite a nice girl and find out belatedly that she's the cousin of detested repute. Sorry, I'm being snarky, aren't I? :P
* The kid meets a pair of friendly strangers, a man and a girl, in a stone cottage on a hill (probably the titular hill) by a brook. He helps them move some bees from hive to hive, then they offer him supper and he accepts. The girl is "Polly", the man hasn't been named yet. Quote: "In the presence of these friendly, shabbily dressed strangers he felt, for the first time since leaving home, really happy and at ease." I'm interested to note that the "shabby people have more fun" trope definitely dates from before the Depression.
* Like many of Cornelia Meigs's books, this one has several short stories in the form of chapter-length digressions put in. She's rather good at short stories in general; I'm not sure why she does whole books.
* This first story is about a Native American boy, in the same place as the frame story - that's a common trope of hers, the timeshifted history stories giving background and tying into the main story - who's going to consult a "sorceror" on the titular hill, which is "magic forbidden ground". Apparently his tribe dislike and fear the sea, but he loves it, and his grandmother therefore worries about him and has sent him to get his head straightened out.
* I've been nitpicking a lot, I know, but the writing really is beautiful: the nature descriptions especially. "But today it was neither, being hot midsummer, with the wild grass thick and soft on the slope of the hill that he was climbing, and with the heavy foliage of the oak tree on the summit rustling in a hot, fitful breeze." Very vivid pictures; the paper editions of these books are usually illustrated, but the illustrations never live up to the word-pictures at all.
* Okay, so the eventual ending of the short-story is that the native boy - after becoming friends with the "medicine man", being the only member of the tribe to disbelieve in his magic, and inspiring him to reject his claims of power - winds up being ostracized by his tribe and rescued from a storm by white English sailors, who offer to take him to England because he wants to see what is beyond the sea. The author inserts a digression here claiming that multiple Native Americans of the eastern US seaboard travelled to the Old World of their own will and then returned to tell their people what they saw; I'd like to know how true that is, in what time period.
* It is kind of sweet how heavy on the "people like ourselves" trope that digression is, though. I tend to forget there have been good people pushing the "one human family" thing for a loooong time; you mostly hear about the faily racist ones, from long ago.
* "Deep dwelling in Nashola was that born leadership that makes real men see through the long-established doubts and terrors of their race, who can distinguish the false from the true, who can go forward through shadowy perils to the clear light of knowledge and success." ...oh my word. Oh wow. Wow. *facepalm* How very... James Russell Lowell. ("New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth, They must upward still and onward Who would keep abreast of truth.") Oh 1920s writers, it is good of you to be idealistic and optimistic. Preachiness about the necessity of rejecting traditional beliefs backed up with prescriptive gender-essentialism, not so much. :P
* I've got to say, though, the Native American boy in the short-story was way less of a whiny noodlehead than the modern kid. Ah well. Back to the frame story!
* Yup, "Polly" is definitely Oliver's Cousin Eleanor; the first thing he hears when he gets back to the house (having missed the train he was going to run away on, due to staying for the story) is that Eleanor was "delayed somewhere", her mother doesn't know quite where. ;P
* Oliver's sister Janet has also met the dark stranger, and also didn't like him. Yadda yadda. Sorry - I think all the (1950s edition) Hardy Boys books use that method of exposition, and I read all of them as a kid before I figured out that taking an instant dislike to someone, or them to you, is not actually a good method of identifying villains. o_O So I tend to point it out.
* "Why don't grown-up people tell us things? It is miserable to be old enough to notice when affairs go wrong but not to be old enough to have them explained." Heh. Soapboxing in dialogue: ur doin it. Rite or rong, I'm not sure. *g*
* The butler now informs the kids that the dark stranger claims to be a member of the family and has been coming round regularly, pestering Cousin Jasper and Mr Peyton. We also learn that the butler is not "of the regulation variety", in that he stops acting butlerish when he has
* Oh lol, I forgot it was before the advent of driver's licenses. It's the chauffeur's night off, but the protagonist knows how to drive the car, and thus gets asked to drive Cousin Jasper to a clandestine midnight meeting. AND before speed limits: "You may go as fast as you like, I am in a hurry". He doesn't learn anything more about the mystery at this point, but does receive permission to take the car out whenever because he's such a good driver.
* It is presented as a good thing that one man, Oliver's Cousin Jasper, should own the whole river valley - formerly a swamp - and keep it diked and drained, renting out the farmland to tenant farmers. How times have changed. (One section has "passed out of his hands lately", and is now unprosperous and inhabited by poorer people, while its dikes are no longer kept in repair. I can't help noticing all this... it's not exactly moralizing, it's a bit more show-don't-tell than that, but it's still kind of heavy-handed imo.)
* Okay, the dark stranger's name is Mr Anthony Crawford, and he is (as suspected) the person who now owns the unprosperous section of land and won't have any improvements made. He claims to have reason to resent Cousin Jasper - who, as far as I can tell, IS the "Mr Peyton" who must not be disturbed. We could use some more surname exposition in the early part of the book, I'm a wee bit confused now. Anyway, the next chapter involves looking behind the garden wall to find out "one of your Cousin Jasper's meanest secrets".
* All right, Anthony Crawford lives in a beat-up old saltbox house right behind Cousin Jasper's estate. Apparently he is a relative, has some right to the property - I'm guessing they're brothers or first cousins, some kind of equitable-division quarrel - but was known to have a crooked past that Jasper was involved in hushing up. Oliver has decided to ask Polly/Eleanor's father the beekeeper what Oliver can do about the matter, solely on the basis of the beekeeper's trustworthy face (Oliver doesn't yet know the beekeeper is a close relative of Jasper's and, I assume, of Anthony's), but first there is going to be another short-story.
* This one is War of 1812, with a contrived conflict between two business partners over a privateer. The author's obviously uncomfortable with the ethics of privateering at all, but the actual conflict is, that one partner wants to send the ship out again before she's seaworthy in case the war ends before they can make any more money, and the other partner doesn't want to send her out again at all because there are peace talks on and the war might end with no way to notify the ship to stop... privateering around. *headshake* I don't like this sort of writing: straw-man conflicts that don't address the actual ethical issues do nobody any good.
* So the ship is lost in a storm and then - for crying out loud - comes sailing up as a ghost right to the wharf on a sunny March noonday and re-enacts its sinking in front of half the town, proving to everyone that partner #2 was in the right. Why even. O_O That's not even spooky, let alone halfway credible. *sigh* Now back to modern times.
* Can I just say: things that affect the well-being of a whole community, like repairing dikes, really ought not to depend on the goodwill or good fortune of one person? There should be either a general communal effort or a government-administered oversight, not this feudal lord stunt that's setting up the book's climactic dike-breaking flood. (No, I haven't read it before; it's just THAT OBVIOUS.)
* I must say, I rather appreciate the use of words like "declivity" in a kids' book, though. *g* I do love me some vocabulary.
* Okay, and Anthony Crawford has a wife and two kids, of whom the elder is five. Oliver's sister Janet just met the older kid in the road and is taking him home (he was scared by a cow). Anthony's not at home; Janet is now helping the mother care for the baby, who has croup. She goes up to the attic to look for some flannel, and finds paintings that tell her the ship-story was at least partly true and the family are descended from some of the people in it. Then Anthony comes home and catches her in the attic, and she runs away, accidentally taking with her a miniature of a girl who looks like Polly/Eleanor, which Anthony apparently had a lot of trouble getting from Jasper in the first place.
* And now there is another story, Manifest Destiny and gold fever, and a runaway boy who leaves his miserly older brother's house to travel to California. Just now he's leaving the wagon train to take care of a sick horse, planning to catch up when the horse is better.
* He catches up, gets to California, moves from digging to digging, but eventually realizes "it isn't the gold that I'm wanting So much as just finding the gold" (Robert W. Service) and decides he'd rather go back home than keep chasing better strikes all his life. A lot of the '49ers did just that - made their pile, or made it and lost it, and then went back East - but pop culture pays more attention to the romantic ones who stayed. But that was a big part of the post-Civil-War rise in the upperclass standard of living back East, iirc, the goldfield millionaires raising the average.
* So after the story Oliver and Janet go to return the miniature to Anthony Crawford, and Oliver refuses to be manipulated, which annoys Anthony enough that the next day Anthony doesn't come to see Cousin Jasper but instead sends a snide letter. An "ultimatum", Jasper says; we don't learn what the letter says at this point.
* Oh, and now we're going to have a tornado: "the sun was still shining but with a touch of greenish, unreal light". Or maybe just a horrible storm. Anyway, I'm 3/4 of the way through the book, it's about time the flood showed up.
st_crispins says the climax of a movie almost always comes near the 80% mark, and I think a well-structured book is similar.* The entire household staff is now stranded at a fairground, quite safe but unable to get home because of fallen trees. (Heh, that sounds familiar.) So we get an annoying scene of gender essentialism where Oliver, trying to be helpful, finds the kitchen and attempts to make tea, all the while muttering about how "this is no place for a boy" and he wishes "any woman, any girl" would show up to help. Probably it's true to the times, but people ought not to be helpless at taking care of themselves. :P
* So then of course Polly and her dad show up and are revealed to be Cousin Eleanor and her dad. And Polly/Eleanor promptly cooks supper. The beekeeper turns out to also be a lawyer, who will now clear up the matter of Anthony Crawford's claims on the property. Goodness knows why he didn't do it earlier.
* Yeah, yeah, your ancestors bought the land "fairly" from the Native Americans "for what it was worth". WHATEVER. *eyeroll* I am glad you are concerned with ethics, author, but that kind of pastede on yey "oh yeah WE were nice people always" does nobody any favors in actually dealing with past injustices.
* All right, so Polly's dad and Jasper and Anthony are all cousins, and their uncle was responsible for the marsh reclamation policy - which of course, back when this was written ninety years ago, was the very most up-and-coming environmental responsibility thing. o_O Anthony is a more distant cousin than the other two; he was adopted by the uncle.
* All three boys became lawyers, and partners in practicing law. Anthony turned out dishonest and compulsively greedy, got himself involved with a law-bending moneymaking scheme, couldn't get the other two to cover for him, and forged his uncle's name to a check in order to pay whatever back. He was sent off West and the matter hushed up.
* Eventually he came back to make a legal claim to the upper half of the valley and to his uncle's house (the little stone cottage behind the back garden). Polly's dad admits Anthony had an actual basis for the claim, but brushes this off with "He would accept no compromise or offer of purchase, so in the end Jasper gave in to him", and then Jasper pretty much apologizes for letting Anthony have the land. It seems to me that Anthony's getting pretty much the short end of the stick throughout, on nothing better than people's testimony about his one-dimensionally selfish character and a single youthful mistake.
* And then they're saying, oh, his right was only "a legal technicality that Anthony was clever enough to find and make the most of", yadda YADDA, as if it's a priori evident that Anthony should not have any of the land or anything that he's claiming. LAWYERS dismissing legal technicalities as having nothing to do with people's actual rights. o_O Not credible. I am glad Cornelia Meigs became a better author later.
* Then the dike starts to leak, the kids see it happen and get help, and Anthony comes in to apologize and ask Jasper to help him. I've stopped being interested in this book, but I'm going to finish it. (And the 387 after it. *g*)
* So Anthony says, oh, he had no right to any of the whatsit, he's going back out West to serve his self-imposed punishment (instead of going to jail for the forgery, because *snarkyface* he's still part of a rich eminent family and it's not Right for him to actually go to jail and serve a time imposed by the actual proper legal system. He just has to keep atoning until he doesn't feel bad anymore, or something.)
* Ooooh, and now Anthony's getting out of the car to walk because they're all trying to bring people to help with the flood and nobody wants to ride in a car with Anthony. Place your bets on him drowning, if you please. ;P Although he might get away alive; there's no obstacle left in place that would be most easily solved by killing him off.
* Okay, Anthony just saved the life of a wagon-driver caught in the flood when the dike burst, and did not die in so doing. He's probably safe.
* Of course the women are all out of danger cooking coffee and bacon and such things.
* And done. Anthony survived, went back out West, and promised to telegraph for his wife and kids to follow. The author says "there was something in his face that could never be quite like" his honest relatives, and he claims it will be better for everyone if he leaves, which is not contradicted. So the message is that he's unsalvageable, but everyone else lives happily ever after. o_O