Read ALL the Newberys!

*deep sigh* Sometimes it's hard to believe there will ever be a good Newbery again, you know? ;P Further up and further in...

( I could be watching Stargate right now )

Okay, let us continue through this unholy mess of a book. Perhaps I will get really overwhelmed and stop; perhaps I won't.

When last we left our heroine, she had married the middle-aged and sickly Monsieur Roland and they had a daughter, Eudora. Their circle of friends was ramping up to become, presumably, the Girondin faction of the French Revolution -- not that I know any of the names that are being introduced. It is 1784.

( two-thirds of the book to go )

*flops* I didn't think maligning goddamn Robespierre was gonna be what did me in, but holy Hannah, people. The constant twisting of history to support her own sympathies was just so blatant. You can't tell me fucking Robespierre was a bad speaker and anti-republican, not without some damn solid evidence, and keep me reading. WHAT THE SHIT JUST HAPPENED.

Summary: A young man in 1830s Minnesota becomes a logger and pioneers the technique of felling trees during winter so that the spring thaw will carry them to market.

Reaction: The distressing thing about Cornelia Meigs is that I always remember her other books I haven't reviewed yet as being better than the one I'm reading. :P Like The Windy Hill and Clearing Weather, this one suffers from a human villain whose actions don't come across as remotely realistic, either psychologically or (sometimes) in the realm of physical possibility. Our plucky young hero and his teammates on the side of Good have the same problem, actually -- physics and human psychology bend to their convenience, while twisting to hinder the villain's purposes. I mean, not just in normal storytelling ways, but in noticeable, "what the fuck does anybody here think they're doing" ways. :-(

Rating: One star. Because she did have the fools' gold identified as such from the start, which I don't think I've seen done in any other story that referenced fools' gold, and she described it accurately enough that my geologist's instincts twigged it straight off (though I didn't trust her enough to believe I was right).

Well! Roller Skates really knocked me off kilter. It's only been a week, but it feels like more.

This is the last Cornelia Meigs I'll be tackling for a while, as for some inexplicable reason the library hasn't got her Newbery-winning Invincible Louisa, nor The Covered Bridge (which I recall as being excellent), and my interlibrary loans are still stuck in 1930-1931. :S I know I like her "girls'" books better than her "boys'" books, and this is one of the latter, so I've no very high hopes for it, but let's dive in.

( here goes! )

Oh look, one of my interlibrary loans has arrived! Let's see what it's like. :D

( social studies fiction ahoy! )

Jesus motherfucking Christ, what WAS that? O_O

It's harder to liveblog rereads, because I have Opinions about them. Also, I've owned and loved this book since I was three. (I was a precocious child.) So, yeah, I might be cutting this one some slack. ^_^ Still and all, it's a legitimate scholarly biography that includes tall tales entertaining enough to hold a toddler's attention, how often does that happen? :-)

( I haven't read this in a few years, let us hope the Suck Fairy has not visited )

This book has influenced me more than any other single book I've ever read, and I think I would even include Lord of the Rings in that assessment. It's absolutely worth reading if you can get ahold of it, especially if you have any interest in folklore.

As far as I'm aware, this is another author-illustrator's picture book, shoehorned into the Newberys because the Caldecott wasn't yet a thing. (The Caldecott will start up in 1938 and take most of these off our hands.) At least it's available online, so you can follow along and form your own opinions about the pictures. ;-)

( here we go then )

Summary: A sadly disjointed collection of Irish folktales that can't decide whether it has a frame story or not. Spans a lot more eras than just the standard Fianna and Tain Bó retellings that generally fall under the head of "Irish folktales", though, and in a couple of stories explicitly references the Catholic/Protestant political split that's so much a part of Irish culture for the last 400 years, which honestly impressed me -- children's books don't usually go there at all if they don't have to.

Reaction: I wanted to love this book, I really did. I love and admire Padraic Colum and what he did for Irish literature, and "Stories from My Own Countryside" sounds like a topic he should be brilliant on, but this just falls flat. :-(

Rating: Two stars. I couldn't bring myself to go lower, and even as good as the prose truly is, it doesn't deserve higher. :-(

Another collection of retold folktales, this one by Padraic Colum, who's usually pretty good. Judging by the frontispiece, this purports to be a collection of tales told under a particular tree outside a small Irish village. Let's see, then.

( here we go )

* I don't know. That's not a very satisfactory book. It's kind of all over the place, for all that it tries to tie the stories together with a cohesive framing narrative. :S

[Written right before posting:] So I finally gave up on this... miserable object... (I tell you, I'm really regretting right now that I didn't make this blog R-rated) and decided to post what I had. In hopes that people will wail back at me and share my pain. O_O

In other notes, I've finally realized that putting the warnings in the actual post body as well as in the cut would be useful for anyone who ever gets linked here from anywhere. I'll do that from now on, and at some point go back and edit them into all the old liveblog posts. :D

**************

[Earlier:] ...I have no idea whether "New Finland" here means a place that is not Finland, like New York or New Zealand, or whether it means "contemporary Finland" as opposed to "traditional Finland with Lapps and reindeer and that".

LET'S FIND OUT. (Since I only have this book on interlibrary loan till October 7. ;P)

( WARNINGS: normative arranged marriage, suicide, misogyny, classism, wildly skewed Finnish history... I may have missed something there because after 'suicide' the problems started coming so thick and fast I forgot to warn at the time )

* You know what? I'm done. This book is SO BIASED, and every bad sort of -ist possible [except maybe racist, which it made up for by being AS CLASSIST AS POSSIBLE, like the Dynne in The Phantom Tollbooth whose middle initial "A." stood for "AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE", only with classism]. I have no more interest in it whatsover. Blaaaaaaah. Done.

ETA: I found and fixed my own overflowing link. Aren't you proud of me? ;P Yes, this book has addled my brain. Addled, I say.