Expanding on my theme from yesterday, I continued trying to identify more books from my kidhood. I also tried identifying the ones Nancy and Heather mentioned in their comments, but I wasn’t successful with theirs. I was sure Heather’s girl in a swamp with a possum was singular enough to be identified. At any rate, I had a lot of luck at this site: loganberrybooks.com. A large section of the site is devoted to precisely this exercise, describe the plot or characters and they’ll try to identify the book for you. Check “book stumper” and “stumper solution” sections. Also helpful was alibris.com which sells out-of-print books and has a great search engine. I was certain that at some point I’d landed on Alibris’s message board at a “help me name this book” thread but I couldn’t find their message board this morning so perhaps I’m mistaken.
First on my Name That Book list was a story about two sisters who owned a dollhouse populated by dolls who came alive, either out of the sight of adults or out of the sight of all humans. The ‘mother’ doll was named Birdie, had flyaway hair and was made of celluloid. Then a glamorous but evil doll named Marchpane comes to live in the house and hates everybody. Marchpane manages to get the mother doll burned up (charming fare for children, no?). This was The Doll’s House by Rumer Godden.
Funny side note: I never forgot this one line in that book, explaining how Birdie “had come to Charlotte [one of the sisters] on a cracker”. That concept puzzled me as I’d not seen Christmas crackers at that point in my life. Then, as now, I hated admitting my ignorance and having to ask someone; I prefer to nod, smile, go along with things and look up the answers later. For whatever reason, I equate that with embarrassment even if it’s nothing I’d have any way of knowing. Ms. Godden and her characters were British, that was obvious; I’d realized in the course of my reading that the British ate rather differently than we did, lots of tea, scones, elevenses, kedgeree - so I assumed it was some weird English practice at parties. I imagined large, plate-sized soda crackers at the table, with trucks or fire engines on them for the boys and Barbie-type dolls for the girls, and lots of polite English children removing the toys before putting cheese or spreads on their crackers.
A more preteen-type book I remembered was about two sisters who go to summer camp. One girl, from whose perspective the book is told, is normal but her sister Emmy is one of those perfect girls that all the adults point out as a shining example to the other children, who of course hate Emmy for it. Emmy isn’t a smug goody-two-shoes type, though; she’s truly nice and doesn’t understand why nobody likes her when she’s only doing as she’s told. I recall that Emmy has very curly hair and burns it when trying to iron it straight. Her sister saves a fat lady, possibly the camp nurse, from drowning and is named a Brave, the highest honor at camp. I was pretty sure the camp was Camp Winnemah but the multiple possibilities for spelling the pseudo-Indian name (Winnamah, Winnemaw, etc.) made it a bit harder to track down. ‘Tis The Winnemah Spirit, by Carolyn Lane. Success!
My final success story concerns two girls - British again - Pansy ?Mallory? and Atalanta Robertson-Fortescue who get involved in the women’s suffrage movement in England. Atalanta’s mother is on the stage, and at one point helps them dress in costumes, wigs and makeup so they’ll pass as adults. They get arrested as adults, as I recall. Another puzzling moment occurred in the very beginning of the book, when Pansy is following Atalanta upstairs and tells her, “You have a potato in your heel.” What the heck? The next bit concerned how at school Atalanta would generally paint her heels with ink but didn’t seem inclined to bother at home. What was UP with that girl’s feet? The ink and potatoes wasn’t the worst of it, in my opinion. Think of the dirt required to GROW the potato! Eeeeuw. Very strange ideas, those English. This book is Miss Rivers and Miss Bridges by Geraldine Symons, who apparently meant Atalanta’s dark stockings had holes in the feet.
MONTOYA DELENDA EST!
First on my Name That Book list was a story about two sisters who owned a dollhouse populated by dolls who came alive, either out of the sight of adults or out of the sight of all humans. The ‘mother’ doll was named Birdie, had flyaway hair and was made of celluloid. Then a glamorous but evil doll named Marchpane comes to live in the house and hates everybody. Marchpane manages to get the mother doll burned up (charming fare for children, no?). This was The Doll’s House by Rumer Godden.
Funny side note: I never forgot this one line in that book, explaining how Birdie “had come to Charlotte [one of the sisters] on a cracker”. That concept puzzled me as I’d not seen Christmas crackers at that point in my life. Then, as now, I hated admitting my ignorance and having to ask someone; I prefer to nod, smile, go along with things and look up the answers later. For whatever reason, I equate that with embarrassment even if it’s nothing I’d have any way of knowing. Ms. Godden and her characters were British, that was obvious; I’d realized in the course of my reading that the British ate rather differently than we did, lots of tea, scones, elevenses, kedgeree - so I assumed it was some weird English practice at parties. I imagined large, plate-sized soda crackers at the table, with trucks or fire engines on them for the boys and Barbie-type dolls for the girls, and lots of polite English children removing the toys before putting cheese or spreads on their crackers.
A more preteen-type book I remembered was about two sisters who go to summer camp. One girl, from whose perspective the book is told, is normal but her sister Emmy is one of those perfect girls that all the adults point out as a shining example to the other children, who of course hate Emmy for it. Emmy isn’t a smug goody-two-shoes type, though; she’s truly nice and doesn’t understand why nobody likes her when she’s only doing as she’s told. I recall that Emmy has very curly hair and burns it when trying to iron it straight. Her sister saves a fat lady, possibly the camp nurse, from drowning and is named a Brave, the highest honor at camp. I was pretty sure the camp was Camp Winnemah but the multiple possibilities for spelling the pseudo-Indian name (Winnamah, Winnemaw, etc.) made it a bit harder to track down. ‘Tis The Winnemah Spirit, by Carolyn Lane. Success!
My final success story concerns two girls - British again - Pansy ?Mallory? and Atalanta Robertson-Fortescue who get involved in the women’s suffrage movement in England. Atalanta’s mother is on the stage, and at one point helps them dress in costumes, wigs and makeup so they’ll pass as adults. They get arrested as adults, as I recall. Another puzzling moment occurred in the very beginning of the book, when Pansy is following Atalanta upstairs and tells her, “You have a potato in your heel.” What the heck? The next bit concerned how at school Atalanta would generally paint her heels with ink but didn’t seem inclined to bother at home. What was UP with that girl’s feet? The ink and potatoes wasn’t the worst of it, in my opinion. Think of the dirt required to GROW the potato! Eeeeuw. Very strange ideas, those English. This book is Miss Rivers and Miss Bridges by Geraldine Symons, who apparently meant Atalanta’s dark stockings had holes in the feet.
MONTOYA DELENDA EST!
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