Dawn's Reading Blog

I used to have a step-father who was addicted to those Time Life book series. You know, like “The Wild West” where a new book comes every month (return within 30 days for a complete refund). The first books would be OK: Heroes of the Wild West, Villains of the Wild West. But eventually they’d start getting desperate: Stage Coaches of the Wild West, Schoolhouses of the Wild West. I guess when you’ve got a captive audience, you keep pushing the crap out.

All of which is a long way of saying that Water Babies, which is one of the books in my Juvenile Classics series, is a piece of crap. I never read that one as a kid and I’m glad I didn’t waste my time. It’s not funny, not interesting, has much too moral a tone that’s not at all well hidden, and is just generally stupid and pointless. Sure, it’s for kids but kids have brains too. Plus it’s written in such a smug “dear little reader” tone that any self-respecting kid would puke. Save yourself the trouble of reading it and if you subscribe to any kids-book-of-the-month plans, “cancel at any time” before this one shows up in your mailbox.

You’d think I’d have read Heidi at some point. I knew the story highlight anyway (Klara walking) but as I continued along it became more clear that I’d never read this book. It’s very pure, very sweet. Heidi is the dearest, purest thing but her love for nature and the people around her keeps it from being sickeningly sweet and her rejection of the “better” life must have been novel at the time. Seems like it would entertain children.

Some kids books are only interesting to kids. The best ones speak to all of us. Little Lord Fauntleroy speaks to no one. How does this become a classic? It’s too bad the word Pollyanna is already taken by another book. His Lordship is the bestest, brightest, cutest, most wuvable awww-isn’t-he-precious thing in the world and no one can help but love him and want to be good for the sake of his goodness. Puke. Some books stand the test of time. Maybe this one didn’t. But I have a hard time believing that little boys ever wanted a paragon of virtue shoved down their throats. I bet their mommies made them read it.

The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes takes place in Scotland, not so surprisingly. Nancy and her pals sure did get to do a lot of travelling. What did these girls do for a living? I mean, weren’t they in school or anything? I can’t believe I used to enjoy these books so much. Some kids’ books really hold up but the Nancy Drew series is formulaic to the point of predictability and the mysteries are always solved on the basis of a series of improbable coincidences. Must every piece of paper she finds hold a sinister plot, treasure map, or secret code? Maybe someday a possible clue could turn out to be just a bit of litter. And if the criminals would only leave Nancy alone and stop trying to run her car off the road, she’d never catch them.

The strangest part of the formula is the way the local authorities are always so quick to believe everything Nancy tells them and hop right to arresting people on her command. Most fictional private detectives have a contentious relationship with the police. Well, I suppose our good little Nancy, who can barely manage to give her boyfriend of umpteen years a kiss on the cheek when they say goodbye, couldn’t possibly have a contentious relationship with anyone.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was a good one. I didn’t like the last one so much but I raced through this one, trying to limit myself to a hundred pages a day but failing in a final scramble to the end. The ending was disappointing. I guess it’s getting hard for Rowling to find a satisfying place to stop, but this one ended on a particularly strong down note. Well, I’m sure she can count on a big audience for the last one. When it comes out I’m going to go back and read all of them one after another to see how well they hang together as a continuous story. I read them so far apart that I sort of lose track of the story from one to the next.

I was such a huge Nancy Drew fan when I was a kid. I have all my old books and a friend of mine picks up ones I’m missing when she runs into them at book sales. She recently gave me The Clue of the Black Keys which I hadn’t read as a kid. Of course, all Nancy Drew’s are essentially the same (I hear she’s been modernized in more recent times but these are the old ones). The plots are so full of happy coincidences. No set of criminals ever managed to drop more clues than her advesaries. But I can see why I enjoyed them so much. They just keep moving on and in such a comfortingly predictable way. Nancy and her friends never change.

Nate the Great by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat was hysterical. Intended for the early reader and told in a delightfully terse Sam Spade style, the book made me laugh out loud. The mystery isn’t scary or violent (or even high stakes) and the solution is simple but clever and teaches a very small lesson. Although my book is intended for an older audience, Nate the Great reminded me that the best children’s literature is enjoyable for all ages.

Then I read one of the Kinetic City Super Crew series by Chuck Harwood. These seem to be very popular but I found Bowled Over; The Case of the Gravity Goof-Up to be disappointingly uninteresting. The books try to teach science as part of the story but it’s very obvious that there’s teaching going on. The plot should have been interesting, but since it just seemed like a vehicle for science instruction and wasn’t character driven, it wasn’t interesting at all. I thought this would be approximately the length of my story, but it’s not. The last pages are explanation, puzzles, and other filler. There’s less story than you’re expecting by about 25%. I wouldn’t read another of these and I’m surprised that children like them.