This post brought to you by: Books I listened to while playing a ninja video game and prepped my bathroom for painting!
A Little Princess
I am certain I have read this one before, and if I haven’t I have certainly seen the movie. The author’s bio for this one is kind of funny to me because it makes the claim that Little Lord Fauntleroy is her most famous book, and I imagine that might have been true at various points, but clearly The Secret Garden is now for sure, probably quickly followed up by this one.
But this book is funny and oddly good. It has a kind of really screwed up message, and probably provided some weird false hope out there for little girls hoping for the best in really terrible circumstances. But that’s also kind of where this book is pretty messed up. The tragedy of this book is not that this little girl is suffering from loss and poverty, but that she, a rich girl! should never be suffering from loss and poverty. On the one hand, Sarah does understand this, so she’s not a self-pitying wretch or anything who would gladly trade her lot for someone better off’s. She’s kind and thoughtful and strong-willed. But instead, this is one hundred per cent the failure of the society’s to rectify the fallen station of a rich girl! Poor girls, like that servant girl can stay right where they are and that’s ok.
Also, let’s not spend too much time worrying about the fact that her lost wealth comes from a diamond mine, but man, her lost wealth comes from a diamond mine!
And then I read a whole bunch of Judy Blume books. This weekend is given over to some long-needed chores, namely, prepping the bathroom to be painted — which I will update you on what books I listen to while painting, but also mowing the yard for the first time of the season. So while doing these things, I listened to a bunch of short kids books to help pass the time.
Blubber
I hadn’t read this one before and it puts us right in the mindset of a bully! Lucky us to get to see a bully in action and be the sympathetic narrator of the novel. She’s got her loving and loved parents and her smart aleck and smart little brother. And also she and her friends absolutely terrorize a girl in school whom they call “Blubber”. It’s so bad during all this that as I reread the summary on the back of the book and it mentions something about a surprising conclusion I was fully expecting the girl or the narrator and her friends to die as a consequence. But it’s Judy Blume and not Lois Duncan, and luckily she more or less learns her lesson, or more specifically has a good enough turn of events to count for a reversal.
What would be interesting would be, what if like we just have to deal with having the bully (but not the worst bully in the book) be the narrator and that’s that. No underlying lesson, no prevailing ideas about getting better, no hint that the bully is acting out of her own trauma. Just a bully. I would feel bullied! But we don’t get that. That’s for adult books.
Frecklejuice
I DID read this one when I was a kid and I recall the cover and the feel of the book very clearly. It had little pictures and because it was my older sisters’ book, it had been worn down from repeated readings. In this book we have a boy who is jealous of a classmate who has freckles. I can related because I have some freckles, but I don’t have FRECKLES. But more so, I remember being super jealous of a) glasses and b) any markers whatsoever of puberty kicking in. I recall watching a classmate wear a tanktop on field day in fifth grade and he had armpit hair, which was probably 100% the reason he wore the shirt. Anyway, super jealous. I also faked having trouble seeing, at least telling my mom, and using my waning batting average in baseball as my proof. I lied to the eye doctor too hoping that would get me some glasses. But once I was strapped into the eye doctor machine I lost my nerve and indicated accurately which picture looked better and I didn’t get glasses. Still don’t wear them almost 30 years later.
Anyway, this kid wants freckles and shitty girl in his class gives him a recipe for freckle juice, which is just a bunch of gross ingredients from his parents’ cabinet, which he mixes, drinks, and gets sick off of. He
gets back at her” by drawing freckles on his face with a blue marker.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Not a good title for what this book actually is, which is an older kid (in fourth grade, as you can imagine) coping with having a younger, toddler bother who gets all the attention, while also being bad.
But I guess it wasn’t clear going in that would become a series, so having a big old epic title that doesn’t really match the scope of the book works.
Anyway, this one is read by Judy Blume herself, which is interesting because she decides to give random characters speech impediments which I bet aren’t part of the actual main story.
This book has some of the classic tropes: dad’s boss (kind of) coming to stay with the family, younger brother destroys school project, younger brother getting picked to star in a tv commercial just being cute and getting discovered, a true horror not because our narrator wants to be in the commercial but because it’s a further insult to his existence. And the piece du resistance of the whole thing is Fudge eating the pet turtle and needing to go to the hospital. True horror and insult, and the stuff of legend in my household, as this scene was a personal favorite of the whole family.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Princess-Puffin-Bloom/dp/0147513995/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=a+little+princess&qid=1555791244&s=gateway&sr=8-4)