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readallthenewberys2012-12-05 05:26 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-12-05 05:26 am
Newbery Honor: Gone-Away Lake (Elizabeth Enright), Chapter 1
So did I mention that Slacktiverse are going to be linking Read ALL The Newberys in their weekly round-up post of ongoing media deconstructions, from this weekend on? I don't think I did. But I am very excited. Maybe freaking out a little, even. People not actually on my flist are going to see my posts! *eep and also squee*
I mean, that's what the comm is for, but... getting linked someplace with an actual readership. (No offence meant,pedanther.) Eek. ;-)
So for that and other reasons - such as that these are just about the only books I have handy at the moment and I've been wanting to re-read them anyway - I am temporarily ditching the timeline in order to liveblog and review Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright and (if I get through the first book in reasonably short order) its sequel Return to Gone-Away.
* I love these books, but I haven't yet gotten the hang of liveblogging a book where I already know what's going to happen - it's a completely different style - and the news about getting linked has thrown me all galley-west anyway. I'm all in an "eep I might be getting new readers!" mode. So expect slightly nervous rambling. ;-)
* Gone-Away Lake is a 1958 Newbery Honor Book. I keep wanting to type "the 1958 Newbery Medal winner", because IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. (In my opinion.) After the 1958 award was made, the ALA changed the rule - which had been in place since 1939, thus effectively covering all of Elizabeth Enright's writing career after she won her first and sadly only Newbery Medal for Thimble Summer, imo the least good of her books - that said a Newbery Medalist could not win a second Newbery Medal except by unanimous agreement of the committee. And while I can't back this up, I remain convinced that this book and its lack of Newbery Medal had something to do with the change in that rule.
* It's really hard to write a good blurb for an Elizabeth Enright book, I note. The one on this edition's dust-jacket ends with this striking sentence: "But though the lake is long gone and the resort faded away, the houses still hold a secret life: two people who have never left Gone-Away... and who can tell the story of what happened there." Which sounds like some kind of '30s horror-pulp novel - "WHAT HAPPENED THERE has been all but FORGOTTEN!" :D (It's also slightly inaccurate on the "never left" count, but we'll get to that later.) Whereas in reality, this is just a very light fluffy vignette-string novel with the exact minimum of plot necessary to hold it together, like a good fluffy pastry. :D
* You will probably notice before we get very far that I really, really love this book. ^_^ (And, uh, also that I love emoticons and parentheticals. Writing for people who didn't come from my flist: always makes me feel awkward. ;P)
* Turning to the title page - illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush, a husband-and-wife art team who are TEH AWESOME. We'll encounter them again when I get to Miracles on Maple Hill, the 1957 Newbery, illustrated by Beth Krush; they may be better known for Mary Norton's Borrowers series, but that's British and therefore not on my list. ;-) For this particular book, I think they are the best possible artists and if I ever encountered an edition with anyone else doing the pictures, I don't think I'd be able to read it. They're pen-and-ink illustrators, with kind of a busy "messy" visual style - lots of little lines everywhere - but even in the pictures that are tricky to interpret at first, you'll always find that every little tiny line is in its absolutely proper place. THEY AMAZE ME. I'll probably go on some more about how awesomely they match this book once we get into the plot. :D
* The book is dedicated "To Oliver". Looking at the opposite page, I see that Oliver Gillham was one of Elizabeth Enright's three sons (Enright was her maiden name, which she used as a nom de plume when she started writing several years after her marriage). She also named a main character "Oliver" in her four "Melendy Family" books - The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two - all of which I plan to review eventually via the Mock Newberys Of The Past scheme. ;-)
* And we finally reach Chapter 1, "The Beginning of It All". Looking at that title, it strikes me that this is very exactly an American rendition of the British "summer holidays" genre - written by Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit, and with a fantasy twist by C.S. Lewis, just to name a few. I can't think of any other American kidlit writers who've pulled off the characteristic light "back in time for tea" style and countryside setting so perfectly while keeping their books so indubitably American and so grounded in the time of their writing. My hat is off to you, Ms Enright. :D
* Anyway. We have a story! Portia Blake, eleven years old, our POV character, and her six-year-old brother Foster Blake are going to the countryside alone on the train. They visit Uncle Jake and Aunt Hilda and their cousin Julian every year, but usually their mother goes with them; this year, both parents will be in Europe till August.
* Because it's Portia's and Foster's first year traveling alone, the narrator gets to announce in the book's first sentence that "it was different from all the other summers" without pulling in any of those tired omniscient-POV devices like announcing that "They did not yet know that...!" etc. I'm really quite impressed to notice how cleverly she does that. Very good work, Ms Enright! :D
(I already mentioned I wasn't going to pretend to be unbiased, didn't I? XD I really love this writer and this book.)
* ..."looking out the window as happy and independent as two old people of thirty." I love, love, love how spot-on she gets the child narration voice. Forgive my capslock, but ELIZABETH ENRIGHT HAS ALL THE BEST TURNS OF PHRASE OKAY. :D
* A neatly handled page-and-a-half flashback introduces Portia's and Foster's twelve-year-old cousin, Julian Jarman, via the medium of Portia remembering telling a school-friend about him. (I note in passing that we're starting with a conversation between two girls about a boy, and make a note to keep an eye out for Bechdel-passing by the end of the book, but I'm pretty sure it has it. If nothing else, the summer cats have pretty well got to cover that. :D)
* Julian has orange hair and orange freckles, looks like a tall gangly klutz but is actually very athletic, wears glasses, has big front teeth like a beaver, and is "crazy about Nature". He blames the general orange-ness of his coloring on the fact that he ate a lot of carrots as a little kid. "That's what he says," Portia reports, "and then Uncle Jake always says: 'Good thing it was carrots and not spinach.'" :D
* I really wish there was an e-book version of this that I could link, because I really want to just shove it into all your hands and say "JUST READ IT", like I did withbookblather last summer. But there isn't. So I am reduced to stumbling through it, rephrasing things that Ms Enright said sooooo much better and analyzing odd bits of it and rambling about literary structure. :P At least it's a Newbery Honor Book, so it's still in print and relatively common at used-book shops and in libraries, in this country; I highly recommend hunting down a copy.
* ONWARD.
* A very clever bit of literary structure (speaking of which) brings us back to the present, on the train, and then properly introduces Foster, who is thinking about Outer Space. I think my favorite line about Foster, or at least the one I've quoted the most often - these are seriously the most quotable books ever, except the Melendy books which win slightly by virtue of having more total length - is coming up in a page or two, so I'll leave it till then, but really if you've known anybody who was a little boy in the 1950s and liked Outer Space and Davy Crockett and the Lone Ranger and stuff-like-that, you know Foster. Because Elizabeth Enright is THE BEST at creating real characters who are also very typical characters. I think she's the only writer I know who does that consistently without being on a TV show, where you have the casting and acting on your side to help flesh out any stereotypes you fall into.
* ' "Honestly," Portia sighed. "Julian knows the names of all the things in the world, and you know the names of all the things out of it. What do I know, I wonder?" Fortunately this depressing thought was interrupted by a waiter in a white coat'... I swear, I will try to quote a little bit less, but it's all so quotable! And I know it inside out and enjoy it all, which can't help. It's much easier to liveblog bad books, I think; I just have to say LOLWUT a lot. ;-)
* Yessss. "Julian always said that Foster's two main interests were Outer Space and inner pie." :D Oh Ms Enright. Sorry, I'm not being a terribly coherent liveblogger at all; but they have lunch on the train, and Foster eats three slices of pie because it's a special occasion and so Portia lets him. :-) And I just like that line, okay?
* Honestly I love all the lines. I can't quote them all! So, even though the rest of the train-trip is just as brilliantly well-written and I am just as fond of it (and it also takes advantage of the natural lull in the pacing while Portia is waiting for Foster to finish his pie, to describe both Portia and Foster from her POV), I'm going to have to skip ahead a page or so to where Uncle Jake and Julian meet Portia and Foster at the train station, somewhere in upstate New York. At least, I assume it's New York because the three latter Melendys books were set in upstate New York, but really it could be anywhere in New England or - with a few changes to the flora and fauna - points west as far as Ohio and Indiana. I'm probably going to refer back to this liveblog when I do Miracles on Maple Hill, in order to compare the descriptions of wildflowers, because that book is set in Vermont iirc; maple-sugar country anyway. And the plants and so forth are very similar.
* Katy, the Jarmans' boxer dog, has puppies, and Portia will have the naming of them. This is actually a (very minor) plot-point. ...I swear, this book does have a plot. I'm just only on page nine (of 256) because I love it to pieces and I'm kind of rolling around in it. :-) It's an extremely homey book.
* We have the first of the illustrations (besides the title page), and because - like a lot of the others - it's spread across the bottom of two pages while the text goes across the top, almost like a picture-book, I do rather wonder how one would go about converting this into an e-book. The one-page format of an e-reader is almost like a reversion to scrolls instead of the codex format, except that even scrolls were generally two or three times as wide (depending which way you hold it) as the screen of an e-reader.
* You know, I could color the drawings with my colored pencils. I've done it to other pen-and-ink-illustrated books, with varying results. (Eight Cousins turned out quite well, especially the bits where my knowledge of the Campbell or Black Watch tartan came into play, while I don't think anything could have un-horribilified the illustrations in that particular edition of The Wizard of Oz.) But I tried it on one picture in my last copy of Gone-Away Lake, and really I wasn't satisfied with the result. I think these drawings are all perfect just as they are. :D
* Anyway, they drive out to the Jarmans' "new old house", deep in the countryside outside of the town where Uncle Jake publishes the local newspaper. (The Jarmans have just moved out of the town proper.) I note that this is another clever bit of writing; the recent move gives Portia and Julian an all-new countryside to explore from scratch, with the best possible excuse for describing the entire thing in detail and also for discovering stuff they didn't know was there. :D
* Katy and Aunt Hilda and the puppies and the cat, Thistle, are introduced, in approximately that order, and then Aunt Hilda shows Portia and Foster around the new house.
* I still want to know how four-year-old!Portia could have been playing raft on top of the piano and have had a cough drop fall out of her mouth and into the piano underneath the strings. Unless the lid was open and she was technically playing inside the piano. I just don't follow this paragraph, logistically.
* There's a guest-room for Portia with a canopy bed, and one for Foster with a bunk-bed, which are both the kinds of beds they've always wanted. Because if there's one thing Elizabeth Enright's writing is about, more than another - she talks about this in the preface to The Melendy Family anthology edition, I think - it's childhood wish-fulfillment stories. Her characters "go on adventures and find caves and put on elaborate shows at the drop of a hat", and there are certain things (I'll make note of one later) that turn up in multiple series or at multiple times in the same series because they are JUST SO AWESOME. I'm halfway sad I am doing these out of order, because it really would be fun to start with Thimble Summer and watch the development of her writing skill; even within the Melendy series, I can recall some things like the treehouse and the swimming-hole that she threw in as one-line background in the first book, clearly never intending to expand upon them, and then by the second and third book she's devoting whole chapters to fleshing each one out, with slightly odd effects on the overall continuity but awesome effects on how fun the series is to read. :D
Like I say, there's a specific example of this coming up, but I'll talk about that when I get to it. There's no point in re-reading a book to liveblog it if I'm just going to talk about my recollections of it from last time. ;-)
* I'm kind of intrigued by the way she throws in some of these tiny minor subplots and then just wraps them up in parenthetical digressions right away. Here in the scene in Portia's guest-bedroom, she's got a mourning dove nest outside her window, and Julian quite accurately criticizes the mourning doves' haphazard pile-of-sticks nest-building method. So the rest of the paragraph is this multi-sentence parenthetical about how Portia worries about the nest for the rest of the month, until the baby birds finally hatch and fly away safely. And it's all wrapped up right there, instead of being spread out through the next couple of chapters to provide a sense of the passing of time or tie anything together... but it works. And being myself a rather inexpert writer, I'm now puzzling as to why. Is it that the point of the story isn't about the mourning doves but about adding a little more characterization to Portia, showing something about her character that she wouldn't be able to tell us as the POV character? I don't think I've known any other author post-WWII to do that kind of timey-wimey "it all worked out well" jumping around, certainly never an author in a mostly limited-third-person story, and make it work. Huh.
* "...and the bats began to zip through the dusk as if they were cutting out fancy patterns." :D And the whole day has gone by, and we are getting to the end of Chapter 1. And NOW we get a little bit of authorial joking - Portia is listening to the nighttime sounds while she falls asleep in her canopy bed (all Elizabeth Enright characters sleep with their windows open, I don't know why; was it a standard thing, pre-air-conditioning?), and the last sentence of the chapter is "Of course she did not dream that the next day was going to be so exciting." Which works both with "dream" as "think, believe, imagine" and "dream" as "fall asleep and dream", and yes I am reading into the word-choices in an obscure children's book from almost fifty years ago BECAUSE YAY. ;-) I love this book so much.
And even though that's only one chapter, I'm going to go ahead and post, because it took me long enough to write it and there's plenty of content in. IMO, anyway. Besides, I don't want to have to rewrite the whole beginning part in order to adjust the timing of the ANNOUNCEMENT. XD
I mean, that's what the comm is for, but... getting linked someplace with an actual readership. (No offence meant,
pedanther.) Eek. ;-)So for that and other reasons - such as that these are just about the only books I have handy at the moment and I've been wanting to re-read them anyway - I am temporarily ditching the timeline in order to liveblog and review Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright and (if I get through the first book in reasonably short order) its sequel Return to Gone-Away.
* I love these books, but I haven't yet gotten the hang of liveblogging a book where I already know what's going to happen - it's a completely different style - and the news about getting linked has thrown me all galley-west anyway. I'm all in an "eep I might be getting new readers!" mode. So expect slightly nervous rambling. ;-)
* Gone-Away Lake is a 1958 Newbery Honor Book. I keep wanting to type "the 1958 Newbery Medal winner", because IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. (In my opinion.) After the 1958 award was made, the ALA changed the rule - which had been in place since 1939, thus effectively covering all of Elizabeth Enright's writing career after she won her first and sadly only Newbery Medal for Thimble Summer, imo the least good of her books - that said a Newbery Medalist could not win a second Newbery Medal except by unanimous agreement of the committee. And while I can't back this up, I remain convinced that this book and its lack of Newbery Medal had something to do with the change in that rule.
* It's really hard to write a good blurb for an Elizabeth Enright book, I note. The one on this edition's dust-jacket ends with this striking sentence: "But though the lake is long gone and the resort faded away, the houses still hold a secret life: two people who have never left Gone-Away... and who can tell the story of what happened there." Which sounds like some kind of '30s horror-pulp novel - "WHAT HAPPENED THERE has been all but FORGOTTEN!" :D (It's also slightly inaccurate on the "never left" count, but we'll get to that later.) Whereas in reality, this is just a very light fluffy vignette-string novel with the exact minimum of plot necessary to hold it together, like a good fluffy pastry. :D
* You will probably notice before we get very far that I really, really love this book. ^_^ (And, uh, also that I love emoticons and parentheticals. Writing for people who didn't come from my flist: always makes me feel awkward. ;P)
* Turning to the title page - illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush, a husband-and-wife art team who are TEH AWESOME. We'll encounter them again when I get to Miracles on Maple Hill, the 1957 Newbery, illustrated by Beth Krush; they may be better known for Mary Norton's Borrowers series, but that's British and therefore not on my list. ;-) For this particular book, I think they are the best possible artists and if I ever encountered an edition with anyone else doing the pictures, I don't think I'd be able to read it. They're pen-and-ink illustrators, with kind of a busy "messy" visual style - lots of little lines everywhere - but even in the pictures that are tricky to interpret at first, you'll always find that every little tiny line is in its absolutely proper place. THEY AMAZE ME. I'll probably go on some more about how awesomely they match this book once we get into the plot. :D
* The book is dedicated "To Oliver". Looking at the opposite page, I see that Oliver Gillham was one of Elizabeth Enright's three sons (Enright was her maiden name, which she used as a nom de plume when she started writing several years after her marriage). She also named a main character "Oliver" in her four "Melendy Family" books - The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two - all of which I plan to review eventually via the Mock Newberys Of The Past scheme. ;-)
* And we finally reach Chapter 1, "The Beginning of It All". Looking at that title, it strikes me that this is very exactly an American rendition of the British "summer holidays" genre - written by Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit, and with a fantasy twist by C.S. Lewis, just to name a few. I can't think of any other American kidlit writers who've pulled off the characteristic light "back in time for tea" style and countryside setting so perfectly while keeping their books so indubitably American and so grounded in the time of their writing. My hat is off to you, Ms Enright. :D
* Anyway. We have a story! Portia Blake, eleven years old, our POV character, and her six-year-old brother Foster Blake are going to the countryside alone on the train. They visit Uncle Jake and Aunt Hilda and their cousin Julian every year, but usually their mother goes with them; this year, both parents will be in Europe till August.
* Because it's Portia's and Foster's first year traveling alone, the narrator gets to announce in the book's first sentence that "it was different from all the other summers" without pulling in any of those tired omniscient-POV devices like announcing that "They did not yet know that...!" etc. I'm really quite impressed to notice how cleverly she does that. Very good work, Ms Enright! :D
(I already mentioned I wasn't going to pretend to be unbiased, didn't I? XD I really love this writer and this book.)
* ..."looking out the window as happy and independent as two old people of thirty." I love, love, love how spot-on she gets the child narration voice. Forgive my capslock, but ELIZABETH ENRIGHT HAS ALL THE BEST TURNS OF PHRASE OKAY. :D
* A neatly handled page-and-a-half flashback introduces Portia's and Foster's twelve-year-old cousin, Julian Jarman, via the medium of Portia remembering telling a school-friend about him. (I note in passing that we're starting with a conversation between two girls about a boy, and make a note to keep an eye out for Bechdel-passing by the end of the book, but I'm pretty sure it has it. If nothing else, the summer cats have pretty well got to cover that. :D)
* Julian has orange hair and orange freckles, looks like a tall gangly klutz but is actually very athletic, wears glasses, has big front teeth like a beaver, and is "crazy about Nature". He blames the general orange-ness of his coloring on the fact that he ate a lot of carrots as a little kid. "That's what he says," Portia reports, "and then Uncle Jake always says: 'Good thing it was carrots and not spinach.'" :D
* I really wish there was an e-book version of this that I could link, because I really want to just shove it into all your hands and say "JUST READ IT", like I did with
bookblather last summer. But there isn't. So I am reduced to stumbling through it, rephrasing things that Ms Enright said sooooo much better and analyzing odd bits of it and rambling about literary structure. :P At least it's a Newbery Honor Book, so it's still in print and relatively common at used-book shops and in libraries, in this country; I highly recommend hunting down a copy.* ONWARD.
* A very clever bit of literary structure (speaking of which) brings us back to the present, on the train, and then properly introduces Foster, who is thinking about Outer Space. I think my favorite line about Foster, or at least the one I've quoted the most often - these are seriously the most quotable books ever, except the Melendy books which win slightly by virtue of having more total length - is coming up in a page or two, so I'll leave it till then, but really if you've known anybody who was a little boy in the 1950s and liked Outer Space and Davy Crockett and the Lone Ranger and stuff-like-that, you know Foster. Because Elizabeth Enright is THE BEST at creating real characters who are also very typical characters. I think she's the only writer I know who does that consistently without being on a TV show, where you have the casting and acting on your side to help flesh out any stereotypes you fall into.
* ' "Honestly," Portia sighed. "Julian knows the names of all the things in the world, and you know the names of all the things out of it. What do I know, I wonder?" Fortunately this depressing thought was interrupted by a waiter in a white coat'... I swear, I will try to quote a little bit less, but it's all so quotable! And I know it inside out and enjoy it all, which can't help. It's much easier to liveblog bad books, I think; I just have to say LOLWUT a lot. ;-)
* Yessss. "Julian always said that Foster's two main interests were Outer Space and inner pie." :D Oh Ms Enright. Sorry, I'm not being a terribly coherent liveblogger at all; but they have lunch on the train, and Foster eats three slices of pie because it's a special occasion and so Portia lets him. :-) And I just like that line, okay?
* Honestly I love all the lines. I can't quote them all! So, even though the rest of the train-trip is just as brilliantly well-written and I am just as fond of it (and it also takes advantage of the natural lull in the pacing while Portia is waiting for Foster to finish his pie, to describe both Portia and Foster from her POV), I'm going to have to skip ahead a page or so to where Uncle Jake and Julian meet Portia and Foster at the train station, somewhere in upstate New York. At least, I assume it's New York because the three latter Melendys books were set in upstate New York, but really it could be anywhere in New England or - with a few changes to the flora and fauna - points west as far as Ohio and Indiana. I'm probably going to refer back to this liveblog when I do Miracles on Maple Hill, in order to compare the descriptions of wildflowers, because that book is set in Vermont iirc; maple-sugar country anyway. And the plants and so forth are very similar.
* Katy, the Jarmans' boxer dog, has puppies, and Portia will have the naming of them. This is actually a (very minor) plot-point. ...I swear, this book does have a plot. I'm just only on page nine (of 256) because I love it to pieces and I'm kind of rolling around in it. :-) It's an extremely homey book.
* We have the first of the illustrations (besides the title page), and because - like a lot of the others - it's spread across the bottom of two pages while the text goes across the top, almost like a picture-book, I do rather wonder how one would go about converting this into an e-book. The one-page format of an e-reader is almost like a reversion to scrolls instead of the codex format, except that even scrolls were generally two or three times as wide (depending which way you hold it) as the screen of an e-reader.
* You know, I could color the drawings with my colored pencils. I've done it to other pen-and-ink-illustrated books, with varying results. (Eight Cousins turned out quite well, especially the bits where my knowledge of the Campbell or Black Watch tartan came into play, while I don't think anything could have un-horribilified the illustrations in that particular edition of The Wizard of Oz.) But I tried it on one picture in my last copy of Gone-Away Lake, and really I wasn't satisfied with the result. I think these drawings are all perfect just as they are. :D
* Anyway, they drive out to the Jarmans' "new old house", deep in the countryside outside of the town where Uncle Jake publishes the local newspaper. (The Jarmans have just moved out of the town proper.) I note that this is another clever bit of writing; the recent move gives Portia and Julian an all-new countryside to explore from scratch, with the best possible excuse for describing the entire thing in detail and also for discovering stuff they didn't know was there. :D
* Katy and Aunt Hilda and the puppies and the cat, Thistle, are introduced, in approximately that order, and then Aunt Hilda shows Portia and Foster around the new house.
* I still want to know how four-year-old!Portia could have been playing raft on top of the piano and have had a cough drop fall out of her mouth and into the piano underneath the strings. Unless the lid was open and she was technically playing inside the piano. I just don't follow this paragraph, logistically.
* There's a guest-room for Portia with a canopy bed, and one for Foster with a bunk-bed, which are both the kinds of beds they've always wanted. Because if there's one thing Elizabeth Enright's writing is about, more than another - she talks about this in the preface to The Melendy Family anthology edition, I think - it's childhood wish-fulfillment stories. Her characters "go on adventures and find caves and put on elaborate shows at the drop of a hat", and there are certain things (I'll make note of one later) that turn up in multiple series or at multiple times in the same series because they are JUST SO AWESOME. I'm halfway sad I am doing these out of order, because it really would be fun to start with Thimble Summer and watch the development of her writing skill; even within the Melendy series, I can recall some things like the treehouse and the swimming-hole that she threw in as one-line background in the first book, clearly never intending to expand upon them, and then by the second and third book she's devoting whole chapters to fleshing each one out, with slightly odd effects on the overall continuity but awesome effects on how fun the series is to read. :D
Like I say, there's a specific example of this coming up, but I'll talk about that when I get to it. There's no point in re-reading a book to liveblog it if I'm just going to talk about my recollections of it from last time. ;-)
* I'm kind of intrigued by the way she throws in some of these tiny minor subplots and then just wraps them up in parenthetical digressions right away. Here in the scene in Portia's guest-bedroom, she's got a mourning dove nest outside her window, and Julian quite accurately criticizes the mourning doves' haphazard pile-of-sticks nest-building method. So the rest of the paragraph is this multi-sentence parenthetical about how Portia worries about the nest for the rest of the month, until the baby birds finally hatch and fly away safely. And it's all wrapped up right there, instead of being spread out through the next couple of chapters to provide a sense of the passing of time or tie anything together... but it works. And being myself a rather inexpert writer, I'm now puzzling as to why. Is it that the point of the story isn't about the mourning doves but about adding a little more characterization to Portia, showing something about her character that she wouldn't be able to tell us as the POV character? I don't think I've known any other author post-WWII to do that kind of timey-wimey "it all worked out well" jumping around, certainly never an author in a mostly limited-third-person story, and make it work. Huh.
* "...and the bats began to zip through the dusk as if they were cutting out fancy patterns." :D And the whole day has gone by, and we are getting to the end of Chapter 1. And NOW we get a little bit of authorial joking - Portia is listening to the nighttime sounds while she falls asleep in her canopy bed (all Elizabeth Enright characters sleep with their windows open, I don't know why; was it a standard thing, pre-air-conditioning?), and the last sentence of the chapter is "Of course she did not dream that the next day was going to be so exciting." Which works both with "dream" as "think, believe, imagine" and "dream" as "fall asleep and dream", and yes I am reading into the word-choices in an obscure children's book from almost fifty years ago BECAUSE YAY. ;-) I love this book so much.
And even though that's only one chapter, I'm going to go ahead and post, because it took me long enough to write it and there's plenty of content in. IMO, anyway. Besides, I don't want to have to rewrite the whole beginning part in order to adjust the timing of the ANNOUNCEMENT. XD
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(Have I mentioned I love so much that you don't just take it for granted, though? BOUNDARIES YAAAAAAAY *ahem*)
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