Clever girls and loving mothers

Image: en.wikipedia.org

Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me is the story of sixth grader Miranda, growing up in 1979 in New York City. The story specifically mentions Amsterdam Avenue, which I believe is Upper East Side- in the 1970s this was a working class neighbourhood. She lives in a shabby apartment with her single parent working mother, and her best friend Sal lives in the same building.

One day while walking home from school, Sal is punched in the stomach without any forewarning by a boy who is a stranger. He runs away from Miranda and locks himself in his apartment. Then Miranda and her mother's spare key goes missing, and Miranda starts to receive mysterious letters from someone who seems to be wanting to warn her of something coming in the future.

This is a wonderful book, cleverly wrong-footing expectations from elements of a realist family story (Miranda's shifting friendships, the relationship between her mother and mother's boyfriend Richard, her mother's determination to appear on a game show) by the mystery and Science Fiction elements, which are foreshadowed by Miranda's refusal to read anything but Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I wrote about here. In fact, many expectations are wrong-footed: the troubled boy who punches Sal in the stomach is the one who understands the time travel in A Wrinkle in Time, but the girl Miranda perceives as a stuck up airhead, Julia, is the one who explains it, albeit by the use of her diamond-chip ring!

Image: mrbsemporium.com

David Almond's My Name Is Mina is the prequel and companion book to the award-winning Skellig, which I wrote about here. In Skellig, Mina is Michael's friend, who is able to see the wonder in Skellig and explain it to Michael. This novel starts:

My name is Mina and I love the night. Anything seems possible in the night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It's dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep  in her room next door.

12 year old Mina tells her own story (as does Miranda) but it is not a straightforward narrative. Miranda is addressing the person sending her the mysterious letters throughout When You Reach Me, but Mina is addressing herself through her diary, story writing and poetry. Mina is an intelligent and creative thinker and a gifted writer, through which Almond (a former teacher) makes some pointed comments about the rigidity of the school curriculum and the obsession with testing, targets and results in the English education system.

Like Miranda, Mina is growing up with a single mother, but unlike Miranda, remembers her father who has died. In a passage where Mina describes running out of school where she is being teased, she goes into a tunnel under a park, into the Underworld where she is planning to seek Hades and Persephone and ask for her father back. I am not ashamed to say that this passage (written in the third person as Mina seeks to distance herself from it) drove me to tears on a packed train to Brighton. However, five minutes later some word play made me laugh out loud. 

Throughout the novel Mina, from her vantage point in her favourite tree, notes the nesting, laying eggs and hatching of baby blackbirds, heralding the coming of spring after a long north of England winter. As Spring arrives, so does a boy and his family in a house opposite, and Mina feels ready to leave the safety of her tree and choose interaction with children of her own age. 

I read these wonderful novels one after the other, and noted in both a tender and loving relationship between the girls and their mothers. The relationships are not always perfect, and in both books there is a recognition that a strong relationship between mother and daughter is not enough for either mother or child. In both cases the girls recognise that their mothers need to be more than simply parents (important though this is) and both girls eventually seek out new friends, frightening though this is. In When You Reach Me, indeed, Miranda is beginning to think about boyfriends, although this is not a big part of the novel.

These are fantastic books. Although it would not be necessary to enjoy When You Reach Me to have read A Wrinkle in Time, or My Name is Mina to have read Skellig, I hope that readers will go on to seek out those marvellous books too. Both books are suitable for readers 10+ due to their complexity.

In My Name is Mina a teacher sings the Scottish miners' lullaby Corrie Doon, which I think is a beautiful expression of love of a father for a child and also linking the ideas of death, loss, underworld and rebirth. 

The Bronx is up, but the Battery's Down

Image: http://i230.photobucket.com/albums/ee50/kurtenblog/i_heart_ny.jpg

This post is inspired by Keris Stainton's new novel, Jessie Hearts NYC, and by Chicklish's New York Books Challenge. Now my interest is more older children's literature than Young Adult/ teen, but still, this got me thinking, so I came up with three New York-set books. (Another I loved recently is Unhooking The Moon, which I wrote about here).

Image: http://media.us.macmillan.com/interiors/500H/9780312375980.IN01.jpg

The Saturdays written and illustrated by Elizabeth Enright (1941)
The four Melendy children, Mona, Rush, Miranda (Randy) and Oliver, live in a brownstone in Manhattan with their widower Economics professor father, Cuffy, their housekeeper and Willy Sloper, the maintenance man. One rainy Saturday the children are in their Office at the top of the house, bored and wishing they had enough money to do something interesting, when they come up with a plan to pool their pocket money once a month so that they each get the chance to do something fun, and the Independent Saturday Afternoon Adventure Club- I.S.A.A.C- is born. The Melendy children's afternoon ambitions are in keeping with their creative and intellectual family life. Randy has ambitions to become a dancer or a painter; her Saturday is spent at an art gallery on Fifth Avenue, where she sees French paintings (Impressionist?) where she also learns to appreciate Mrs Oliphant, an elderly family friend better. Rush, who wants to be a pianist or an engineer, goes to the opera to see Siegfried- maybe this production at the Met?- where he also finds a dog that the family names Isaac. Mona, who wants to become an actress, goes and gets her hair bobbed, but also learns that growing up does not just mean changing the way you look. Finally, little Oliver goes to Madison Square Gardens to the circus, but comes home on a police horse.

The Manhattan setting is evocative; mentions of Tiffany's, Central Park, Broadway, Lexington Avenue will instantly take anyone who has visited New York City right back there. This book is no longer in print in the UK, but can easily be obtained online, or your local bookshop can order it from US publisher Macmillan's.

Eloise by Kay Thompson illus. Hilary Knight (1955)

image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eloise_(1955_book)

This, more than any other, is my New York book. Six year old Eloise lives with her English nanny, Skipperdee her turtle and Weenie her dog on the top floor of the Plaza Hotel, just of 5th Avenue near Central Park. Told in Eloise's voice, she talks us through her busy life at the hotel where her friends are the staff, and her mother occasionally sends for her to "Europe and to Paris... if there is any sun". Kay Thompson was a nightclub performer and friend of Judy Garland; one theory about Eloise is that it was based on Liza Minelli, although Thompson always said she herself was Eloise.

Knight's pink, white and black illustrations remind me of Ronald Searle's; of course the St Trinian's books are contemporary (1948-1953) with Eloise. The voice of the book reminds me a little of Lauren Child's  Charlie and Lola books. I bought this book at the 5th Avenue Barnes and Noble store (the only place other than the gift shop in the Museum of Modern Art that I encountered any of the famous New York rudeness!) and it is a big part of my memories of that trip. With the strapline "A book for precocious grown-ups", it was originally written for adults (also like St Trinian's), although revisions were made when it was republished for children. However, you can still see the gin bottle in Eloise's bedroom on pages 20 and 21! Again, shades of St Trinian's!

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg (1967)

Image: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/From-Mixed-Up-Files-Mrs-Basil-E-Frankweiler-Konigsburg/9780689853548

If you were going to run away from home, the detail that you put into your planning and what you consider important will give away a lot about your character. My running away fantasies involve a cottage by the coast, a large pile of books and no phones, which probably tells you something about me! However, 11-year-old Claudia Kincaid  is a practical sort of person who doesn't like discomfort. She decides to take her 9-year-old brother Jamie, because he is a frugal boy who has not wasted his pocket money on baseball cards. Claudia is resentful and feels unappreciated at home. She decides after extensive research to run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a place of culture and beauty. At the museum the children sleep in a state bed (possibly like this one), wash in the fountains and eat in the museum cafe, using the money they have saved and later funds that they fish out of the fountains. During their stay the children become fascinated by the statue of an angel sold to the museum by Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler, of Farmington, Connecticut, and are determined to find out whether or not it was sculpted by Michaelangelo. Eventually they travel to Mrs Frankweiler's house and search the mixed-up files of the title for the answer. However, the story is also the story of Claudia's discovery that she has run away to find herself, as so many stories are.

Mrs Frankweiler serves an interesting role in the book, which opens with a letter to her lawyer (a similar device is used in Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), and she serves as (an unreliable) narrator, a facilitator and ultimately frames the novel with an address to her lawyer, who is unexpectedly also connected to the story.

So interested are many visitors to the museum in this Newbery Medal winning book that the museum's website has these frequently asked questions! And of course many museums do have sleepovers. It's a great New York book, featuring Grand Central Station, the (now closed) Donnell Branch Children's Public Library and the Grand Central Post Office. I adored the New York Public Library.

The book has been adapted twice: the 1973 film version had Ingrid Bergman as Mrs Frankweiler.

I would recommend The Saturdays to 8+, Eloise to be read to 4+ and to read alone 6+, and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler for 8+.

I'm eagerly awaiting a copy of Jessie Hearts NYC, and will be writing about it as soon as possible!
Two of my favourite New York songs:
Piazza New York Catcher by Belle and Sebastian (a very bookish band!)
Elegance from Hello Dolly! Any time Brits feel like laughing at Dick Van Dyke's London accent in Mary Poppins, check out Michael Crawford's Yonkers accent and blush.