Review - Family Sabbatical

This is the second book by Carol Ryrie Brink about the fictional Ridgeway family.  Brink is best known for her novel Caddie Woodlawn, but unlike Caddie, the Ridgeways live in Midwest City, in America, sometime in the middle of the 20th century.  Mrs. Ridgeway is a mystery author, Mr. Ridgeway is a Professor of history at the local college, and the three Ridgeway children are spunky, interesting and very individual.  Family Sabbatical is very loosely arranged around the eldest daughter's diary, kept during a family year abroad in France, and focuses primarily on the storyline for the children.

In style, this novel reminded me of series such as The Moffats by Eleanor Estes or the Melendy Quartet by Elizabeth Enright, and is going to appeal most to readers who enjoy the family stories of gentle adventure, mystery, and sibling love.  

Some thoughts...

Family Sabbatical is not written as a Christian book, but it is very much a Christianity-filled book.  The family does not attend church, but they purchase and set up a Nativity scene under their Christmas tree, tell the Christmas story, visit Notre-Dame and talk about the altars and beauty of the place, and a small Catholic school-friend of theirs gets confirmed and goes shopping for a confirmation dress.  They also act in very Christian ways towards each other, their neighbours and friends, and animals.  That being said, the children mischieviously teach the innocent French governess phrases such as 'shut up', which she uses with delight and complete ignorance at inappropriate times.  If you're familiar with how religion is addressed North American mid-century children's literature then this is just like that.  Besides the occasional slang, the only possibly questionable content is that the myth of Santa Claus is revealed towards the end of the book, so if that is part of your family culture you will have a few sentences of editing to do.

All in all, we really loved it and it retained its appeal for a more modern audience very well.

Review - The Light Princess

George MacDonald was always on my list of authors I should read someday.  To begin with, he was a big influence on some of the great Christian fiction authors of the 20th century - men like Tolkien, Lewis, and L'engle for example.  He's highly regarded by many people whose opinions I respect, and he also seems to be a favourite of so many current fantasy authors for children.  With all of that going for him I still hadn't managed to press 'buy' on any of his stories, until I saw this beautiful edition from the Rabbit Room Press:

I read this book as a bedtime story for the 8yo and 6yo, and I have So. Many. Things. to say about it.  First, let's talk about the publisher and the book itself.

The Rabbit Room is a online Christian arts community headed up by singer/songwriter/author Andrew Peterson.  Amongst other ministries, they publish, republish, and distribute books that fall into their vision of building and supporting a positive creative Christian space.  This is one of the books they've republished with their press - Rabbit Room Press.  This reprint is beautifully done, an absolute legacy-library type book.  The paper quality is thick and luxurious, it has copious woodblock illustrations that are quite well done, and the hardcover is slightly padded.  My own preference would have been for a leather binding (or leather-like) over the board because I find the slightly puffy covering distracting, but it is a minor issue.  It's a beautiful deep blue and the title and decorations you see in the picture are deep embossing.

I find that beautiful books usually end up being a luxury I have trouble justifying, but in this case the cost was pretty comparable with a hardcover children's book, and I really think this is much better quality than most hardcovers.

Now, the story.

The Light Princess is a fairy tale written in the traditional style of Andrew Lang, which is to say that it is not a Disney story.  It is one of those tales that could be enjoyed by the adult reader as much as the children listening because it is full of little hidden puns, deeper meanings, and funny bits that only an adult would find funny.  For example, the king at the beginning is annoyed with his queen because 'all the other queens' he knows have children, and they have none.  "I feel ill-used", he complains, which will make every woman laugh right there.  

The story is easy to follow - a princess is born to the royal couple, and cursed to have no 'gravity' in life.  Not only does this means she cannot be serious no matter how hard she tries, but she also floats into the air.  This makes for some wonderful and silly scenes in the story, such as when she is 17 and leaps across the lawn to kiss her father on the cheek and ends up veering off to the side and kissing a page boy instead, and simultaneously attempting to push herself back and smacking him in the face with a large toad she had been carrying in the hopes that it would weigh her down.

In fact, the whole thing is delightful.  I loved the story, I thought it was hilarious and superbly written and stunningly bound and illustrated...there's just one problem.  I hate to even say this, because I don't believe it SHOULD be a problem, and in fact for many people it probably won't be, but...I have to say it.

The language is very archaic and challenging to follow.  Here's an excerpt:

"The consultation consisted chiefly in propounding and supporting, for the thousandth time, each his favourite theories,  For the condition of the princess afforded delightful scope for the discussion of every question arising from the division of thought..."

You can, perhaps, see what I mean.  The story makes sense, certainly, and for the adult reader there probably would be no issues at all, but for a small child who might otherwise find the tale beautiful and funny, the language may very well stand in the way of real comprehension.  Should you allow this to stop your reading of the story?  I don't think so, no.  But it is worth pointing out.

The Light Princess!  Amazing!  Fantastic!  Wonderful!

Some things the children have been occupying themselves with that aren't electronics.

The 8yo has been obsessed for weeks now with this book.  Each page contains instructions on something to do to it (scribble with wild abandon, take the book into the shower, tie it to a string and take it for a walk...) and after getting over the initial reluctance to 'destroy' a book, we have fully embraced the creative process!

In fact, the 8yo loved it so much I ended up picking up a newer edition for the 10yo - the new one is in colour.  Very similar types of instructions.

And here's another book by the same author that the 10yo has also been working through.  You're supposed to collect items from your walks that match the requirements on the pages.  For some reason this one hasn't appealed as much to the wild and crazy in my children.  It's still getting done, though.

The 6yo, meanwhile, is obsessed with learning how to sew.  This kit came into our house to further that desire and Mama is now the proud owner of a felt cat.  Hand sewn by her very favourite littlest person, of course.

Corn husk dolls, games that involve one person holding the hose while on the deck while the other people stand underneath and pretend it is raining, visiting the nearby creek where there are hundreds of tiny baby frogs, hatching out a monarch chrysalis, capturing a froglet and making a habitat for it, feeding it a cricket, and then letting it go the next day, helping to make gooseberry jam...

The 10yo is obsessed with The Mad Scientist's Club.  This is the complete collection, available through Purple House Press. 

Painting little wooden boxes, making origami yodas, learning how to crochet and making long crochet chains to leave all over the house, making bouquets of flowers for the vase in the bathroom, collecting seeds and planting them in pots...

 This odd, vintage racing game from France that the children are obsessed with playing right now.  

Filling a surprise care package for Grandma with candy and pictures, counting the money in their piggybanks and buying bubblegum with it, swimming in the lake, making a rock collection, practicing cartwheels, fishing off the bridge...

Reading my vintage Stephen Cosgrove collection, helping me finish an elaborate paint-by-numbers, lots of walks with the dog, picking raspberries, mowing the lawn, watering the garden, checkers and Chinese checkers and chess, making lemonade, walking to get ice cream...

There.  Doesn't that sound like a nice mid-summer?

A Whole Bunch Of Things I'm Currently A Little Obsessed With Thinking About Endlessly. As One Does.

Is it true that British children's books are better than American children's books?  Isn't that sentence itself such a huge class indicator?  As if those were your options - British/American.  Imaginative/Moralistic.  Gah.  That article frustrated me.  Golly, I wonder what's better - Peruvian fairy tales or Maori fairy tales.  Let's see if the Atlantic will print that.

I don't need to take this class - but I want to.  AND IT'S THREE POUNDS!!

Here is another class I don't need to take!  But oh...oh I do want to take this class.

Here are some things I do not need to buy...

One of these slow-stitching kits from Wattle and Loop.

Or this tapestry pillow kit.  Which is adorable and would go very well in my livingroom.

I don't need to buy any of these pots for houseplants...

I also do not need to follow this tutorial and attempt to make anything I own look like antique mercury glass.

I don't need this wool blanket.

I do not need everything from this pottery store.  Especially not the little clay stakes for garden herbs.  I def. should not buy those.

I do not need to buy new jigsaw puzzles showing pages from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.  Sob.  I don't.

Reading Notes, July 2020

I got onto a fantasy book kick this month, as you'll see.

Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy.  I love how much Christian symbolism is in this series, and how many difficult questions can be approached using a fantastical worldview.  Arguably, fantasy is a prime opportunity for exploring topics and ideas that are difficult to place in our current reality.

Morgan is The Prince of Hed - a small, rural island of no particular importance.  He was born with three unexplained stars on his forehead, and a skill for answering riddles.  Who is he, really?  Is he just the ruler, or something more?  Why won't The High One, a semi-mythical being who controls the fates of the world, tell him why his parents died?  Or even talk to him?  What do the stars of his face mean and how had someone a thousand years ago known he would have them?  Morgan's quest for the truth has a lot of twists, but the overall themes of the fight for truth and whether our destiny is preordained for us are beautiful.

Another series!  C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine Cycle is another of those fantasy series just filled with Christian symbolism.  

I love the themes in these books - Can sin be 'worked off', the weight of sin on a soul, who, or what, is evil, and so forth.

Nhi Vanye i Chya is the bastard son of the ruler of the Nhi Clan, and he kills one half brother and disfigures another after years and years of torture at their hands, and in return he is outcast, ilin, forced to become the indentured servant to the first lord, liyo, who gives him food and a hearth.  Unfortunately for Vanye, this turns out to be Morgaine, an ancient witch doomed to travel between worlds via a series of 'gates', closing them as she goes, in order to prevent evil from seeping into the world.

Let's keep going with the symbolism, shall we?  This one is Margaret Mahy's Carnegie Medal winning YA novel.  I read this book decades ago, and could not remember the name of it.  Then a FB group of fellow bibliophiles came up with this title for me, and they were correct!  I read it in a night!  

Laura's younger brother is attacked by a demon and is slowly dying, and Laura must save him.  Wrapped up in this sacrifice are many, many little healings throughout the book.  The male protagonist, Sorensen, forgiving his birth mother for her abandonment.  Laura forgiving her father for his leaving the family and marrying again, and then forgiving her mother for seeking solace in a new romance.  Sometimes the greatest sacrifice is letting go of our right to be offended and hurt.

Diane Duane's first book in her Wizard series (I think she's up to #10 now!)  I cannot tell you how much I love this series for tweens/teens and up.  Duane's characters remind me very much of L'Engle's style of writing - in fact if the character of Meg was a wizard, she would be Nita.  Absolutely.  There's a sort of science/fantasy/growing up theme running through these deeply symbolic books.

In this much less well known book of L'engle's, we have two short fictional stories based on the author's imagining of what went on in Egypt when the Holy Family lived there waiting for Herod's death.  In one of the stories, the Christ Child befriends a camel and a thieving boy at the same time, and in the second he matches wits with the Sphinx herself, who is ancient and hungry for human flesh.  Both are wonderfully evocative of the gospels.

It's not a decent reading month without some non-fiction, and I read a few good ones this month!

Some very good points for writers in this book.  I think more established writers might already know a lot of what the authors mention, but that's to be expected since the book is subtitled "How to Build a Life as a Christian Writer".  It was a pretty quick read.

Another book by the same author, and this one is her most recent title.  Also a fairly quick read, and it resonated with me, of course, seeing as Stiller and I find ourselves in similar situations as the spouses of ministers.  Here's my Goodreads review.

Now, lest you think all I do is read books you can really sink your teeth into, let me help dispel that myth!  Kyra sent me the first three books in the Harry Dresden files, and it takes about a day to finish one of these!  

These are the first three in the Dresden Files series, which must be up to 16 at least.  Wizardly crime fighting in the gritty Chicago streets, written in that film noir detective style.  Entertaining, not thought-provoking at all, and if you are wondering if you'll be offended...you will be.  I mean, you'll laugh, but you will also probably be offended.  They aren't nearly so creepy as they look.  They're like...did you ever read the Callahan's books by Spider Robinson?

A pre-read for school, which I've decided is not what we need.  But Doyle writes so realistically about Ottawa that I feel I'm there, and this hard-working, mystery-solving, environmentalist Indigenous protagonist is busting open stereotypes left, right and centre.  I'm sure it would be perfect for someone, even it that isn't us.

Still continuing slowly and steadily in this one.  Written in email format, hilarious, nonfiction, a couple travelling to all of the national parks in the United States.  What's not to love?

My first Lord Peter Whimsy mystery, if you can believe it.  It is very much Wooster and Jeeves meets Agatha Christie.  So far, I like it!

The Films of Covid

I've reached a new level of book insanity.  Now I see a book and I think "Do I already own this book?  Wait, is it that this book is on order somewhere for me?  I feel like I know this book.  I really want it.  Is it that I've bought it for someone else?"

But it's okay because today I discovered that there is a four year long forum on Ravelry dedicated exclusively to pictures of cats sitting on knitting.  I always feel a guilty sense of satisfaction when I find these sorts of oddities; it's like the world is murmuring in my ear "shhhhh.  It's okay.  It could be worse.  It could be heroin!  It could be...I mean...you could take pictures of your cat sitting on a scarf for four consecutive years!"

Right.  I'm not crazy, you're crazy.

In other news, what are we calling this time now?  I've heard quarantine, crisis, lockdown, pandemic, etc., but then I've heard people say those are inaccurate.  I don't know.  I don't know anything anymore.  How about pre-armageddon?  That seems level-headed.  Anyway, during This Time, my husband and I have been watching allllll the movies we've recorded (I almost dated myself and said 'taped') with the plan to watch them sometime in the future. The future is now!  Here's a look at a few we've seen.

Is this by Disney?  I have to look but I have a pretty big suspicion that this is by Disney.  Oh!  It's by Universal!  Well, anyway, this is just like A Dolphin's Tale or Free Willy or any other of those animals plus a kid plus environmentalism = Only People Can Save The Day And We Must Band Together type movies.  Seriously, Barrymore?  You just happened to have a wet suit handy on the ice?  Well thank goodness for that, eh?  Honestly.  What nonsense.

Amazing!  We'd been reading Kipling when we came across this film but, sob, I hadn't finished the book yet!  Do you want it spoiled for you?  I'm going to spoil it.  It's my blog, anyway.  So the guy dies!!  Oh my land I ugly cried and the children asked worriedly if I was okay.  Despite that this is a fantastic family film with lots of adventure and some important lessons learned in interesting and non-preachy ways.

This has got to be one of the all time weirdest film versions of Austen's gothic novel that I've ever come across.  Honestly, the only people I liked in the whole thing were the elderly couple who brought whatsername to Bath.  As one does.  And the music was out of Labyrinth.  Which is really where it should have stayed.

I could not remember for the life of me if I'd seen this movie before.  I thought I had, but I think I was mixing up Nineteen-Eighty-Four and the one with the people living in tunnels with this one.  Anyway, it was a first for me!  Not maybe the best choice of film for my tastes, which tend towards the obscure or artsy, but I could see the social commentary would appeal to people.  I mean, it would kind of have to appeal to someone because you literally get the stuffing kicked out of you by the social commentary each and every minute of the film.  Lotta commentary.  Much commentary.  Don't really want to eat while you watch this one.  Also, is it just me or could Charleton Heston totally play a cannibal?

Prayers For Those Who Bring Fear

I recently had a minor medical procedure done.  Very minor, really, and nothing worth commenting on, except that it hurt.  And in the human mind, pain is a memory maker, which is right and good because otherwise a whole lot of us would be touching the still-hot stovetop even more than we already do.

I had spoken to another woman before the procedure, who had had it done as well in the past, and she had warned me about the pain.  I'm sure she meant well in telling me.  And I had laughed a bit in a nervous way and made the comment I always make, which essentially goes something like "I've had three children.  I'll be fine."

And I was.  I was fine.  And I knew I would be fine.  I knew it would hurt and then it would hurt a bit more, and then it would hurt less and eventually it wouldn't hurt at all anymore and everything would go back to normal.  I knew this, because I am an adult and I've had many medical indignities done to me in the *mumble mumble* years I've been on the Earth.  And unlike a child, the thought of pain is an okay thought for me; not a pleasant thought, by any means, but sort of a resigned, okay thought.

When I was very little the thought of having a needle could cause me to panic.  I didn't have the vocabulary to express that, but I knew that if I thought about the upcoming needle, I would get this sick 'run away' feeling and start to feel my thoughts spin out of control and my body break out in a sweat.  None of the things anyone would say to me about not being afraid would help.  None of the techniques, none of the reassurance would make me want to walk into that room, would make me not feel a flushed, dizzy feeling come over me.

I remember when I was newly married, and pregnant, and I had to go to a clinic for one of the innumerable blood draws a pregnant woman is subjected to.  My husband was working, and I was as afraid of that needle as I had ever been of any needle, perhaps more so because this was a needle from a complete stranger, in a strange clinic, for a strange, new reason, and I was by myself; as I sat in the chair I felt lightheaded and like crying.  I want very much to tell you that I did not collapse, all *mumble mumble* pounds of Scots-Canadian pregnant lass that I was, on the tiny Asian nurse...but that would be a lie.  I went down like a tonne of bricks.

That remains the only time I've ever fainted, and I have no desire to repeat the experience, thank you very much.  Maybe it was the heat, or the build up of tension, or my blood pressure or any number of other reasonable factors - but in my memory it is burned in as The Time Fear Won.

I assure you, that was not the last time fear of pain won with me.  The difference between the me of that first pregnancy and the me who dealt with the recent pain and fear was as simple as exposure - I have felt a lot of pain, and I have not died.  This most recent little pain can't scare me like it could before because I've met its cousin, Big Pain, and I have won.

When the tunnel vision recedes, there is an unexpected benefit - suddenly the pain makers swim into focus.  With the overwhelmed and fearful, they blur into 'the person to avoid', but with the eventual submission of a more fearful part of yourself, the people behind the needles appear once more.

Dr. T was slender, with tired eyes and greying hair, and after our unpleasant time together (I'm sure she's lovely at parties)  we talked for a few minutes about follow-up sorts of things, as one does.  And I asked her if I could pray for her - for her work, which must contribute to those eyes, for her patients, and whatever other unspoken sorts of things weigh on all of us.  There was a time I would never have been so bold as to ask that, and it is still a very infrequent offer of mine, but this...was the right time.  When we got home, the pastor and I did pray for her, but I will continue to remember her in my own prayers, and here is what I will say:

Thank you, Lord, for bravely allowing your children to feel pain and fear, so that we may one day not be ruled by those things.  Thank you for clearing our minds and steadying our steps and hands.  Thank you, Lord, for those who cause pain for good purpose, and give them the strength to bear their work, as you give us the strength to endure it. 

World without end.
Amen.