As I emerge from my cocooned and cozy holiday weekend to head out into the hard, cruel world, I am feeling nostalgic for the many books I loved in my bookish childhood. As I was falling asleep last night, I tried to determine what my top five favorite books when I was growing up. Disturbingly, they all seem very white and kind of upper-crusty. Was I snobbish child or were these the only books available? Who knows -- but I do love these books, so here's my list (in no particular order of preference).
1) The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. I read this book sixteen times I loved it so much. The theme in this historic novel for children was the clash of world views, to me one of the most fascinating topics even today. In this case the clash was between the Puritans of 17th century Connecticut and an aristocratic English girl from Barbados who was orphaned and sent to live with her Puritan cousins.
2) The Secret of the Amulet by E. Nesbit. After reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond, I became enamored of historical fiction and time travel books. Time travel books in particular seemed to have that element of conflicting values which seemed so interesting to me. This novel by the wildly popular Victorian children's author is not one of her more famous ones (she also wrote The Railway Children and The Phoenix and the Carpet) but I loved the fact that it featured Roman Britain and Babylon.
3) The Time Garden by Edward Eager. How I adored this book-- another time travel book! In this one, the children visit Queen Elizabeth I, folks in the Underground Railroad, and Louisa May Alcott and her sisters. Edward Eager was unabashedly influenced by E. Nesbit, but he put his own stamp on the genre of magical adventure books for children. As one of the few book enthusiasts among my peers growing up, I loved the fact that the children in Eager's books loved to read and to refer to books in their everyday conversation. I also loved the children's droll irreverence. When the children in The Time Garden are sent off to stay with an elderly woman who writes children's books, Eliza says, "It'll be ghastly . . . She'll keep wanting to draw us out. She'll keep wanting to get at the content of the child mind!"
4) The Ghost of Blackwood Hall by Carolyn Keene. This was the first Nancy Drew book I discovered, and in my opinion, one of the best. In this one, Nancy travels to New Orleans to expose a group of people who use seances and spiritualism to defraud credulous victims. I went through a period after I outgrew my Nancy Drews of scorning them for their simplistic writing and characterization (although I probably wouldn't have put it quite that way at the time). But in my adulthood, I have rediscovered Nancy and have read several books about the series. I now appreciate how my brief but intense Nancy Drew obsession influenced me in the best way, in light of Nancy's unfailing heroism, competence and can-do attitude. There are, however, disturbing class issues in the series (even in the updated series with the yellow binders, which I read in the '70s), all of which went right over my head when I was a kid -- for example, the criminals are invariably swarthy and use bad grammar. Check out this interesting site on Nancy here.
5) Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. This is the story of a little girl who spies on the adults on her New York City neighborhood, wearing her spy uniform of jeans and red-hooded sweatshirt, and carrying her spy tools, including a flashlight and a spiral notebook, in which she writes all of her observations in block letters. Like virtually every other little girl who read this book, I began carrying a spiral notebook. I got into terrible trouble as I wrote in my notebook in the lunch line at school. Over my shoulder, a teacher was reading my journalistic account of an incident that had occurred earlier in the day in which two classmates had traded insults ("Dodo Bird!" "Peabrain!"). The teacher suddenly whirled me around, yanked the notebook out of my hand and screamed at me in front of the entire class, saying that she had never seen a child write anything so hateful and horrible in her entire life. I tried to explain that I was just writing down what happened -- but to no avail. But it made me love Harriet even more-- I was just as misunderstood as she was (sniffle).
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Detectives in Togas by Henry Winterfeld
Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Query -- what were some of your favorites?
