Saffy's Angel

As a child, I read a lot of those children's books in which the parents have to be dead or missing in order to allow the children to have adventures. Reading Saffy's Angel, by Hilary McKay, made me think of those, especially the one (The Happy Hollisters, perhaps?) in which a girl says of another family's children that they weren't really BROUGHT up, they just struggled up any old how! Saffy's parents, who are abstracted because they're artists, made me think especially of the father in The Penderwicks, who is a professor, the mother in Half Magic, who is a journalist, and the mother in The Railway Children, who is a writer.

Saffron, called "Saffy," is unusual in having two parental figures, and the father is the subject of gentle ridicule for feeling entitled to leave the children with their mother, an artist who is revealed to be as good or better than he is but who nonetheless is the custodial parent for an active "pack" of four children.

Saffy's Angel is very British, and largely the story of how Saffy and her sister Caddy each learn to make a friend outside the family and thus define their roles as people, more than just sisters:
"She had never had a proper friend. There had been girls she got along with at school, but outside school they had never bothered about her much. Saffron had managed without being too lonely because at home she always had Caddy, who was friends with all the world, and Indigo, who cared for no one but his pack."
When they begin to see themselves just a little bit as others see them, they realize that the way they live is a bit unusual:
"Perhaps you would like to have supper with us?" Mrs. Warbeck was asking Saffron now. "After Sarah has finished her homework? You could telephone your mother from here, if you like. Or pop back home. Would she mind?"
Saffron shook her head. "We get our own supper," she said. "And anyway, it's no good telephoning. She'll be in the shed."
"In the shed?"
The face of Sarah's mother said as plainly as if she had spoken that Eve should not be in the shed. She should be cooking. This was the hour of the day when respectable mothers cooked for their respectable families, while supervising homework.
Saffron, feeling hopelessly unrespectable, looked around for a way of escape. Astonishingly, she found one. It was on the wall. A picture by her mother. Town Bridge on a Bright Evening. She said "My mother painted that!"
"Did she?" asked Mrs. Warbeck. "Did she really? Why, of course! It's an Eve Casson! How silly of me not to realize!" And she looked at Saffron in quite a different, much more friendly kind of way.
But gentle ridicule of the parents, as always, saves this kind of second-hand characterization from staying as simple and saccharine as earlier examples in fiction:
"You are working too hard," remarked Eve...."I never did any work at all when I was your age!"
"What did you do?" inquired Rose.
"I had a lovely time! I was a hippie!"
"I bet Dad wasn't!" said Rose.

The culmination of the story is a family road trip to Wales. Because the youngest sister, Rose, has no idea about how others see her and her family, she holds up hilarious signs to the drivers behind them on the road, the first of which says "BE NICE. DO NOT HONK." When the drivers oblige, she puts up another sign saying "THANK YOU." The signs get even more conversational and funnier, including a long one telling the story of a roadkill fox and one promising "WE'LL LET YOU PASS AT THE NEXT WIDE BIT."
Rose has her own blog at the author's website, in case you find you can't get enough of her.

Like everyone else who's enjoyed and recommended this book (Nymeth and Jenny were the ones who got me interested), I'm glad to see that there are sequels about other members of the Casson family. My kids, at almost 14 and 16-1/2, are a little older than the target audience, but I'm going to leave them around my house anyway, because it's always good to seed the place with easy-to-read paperbacks this time of year, when everyone has the end-of-winter doldrums. Do you leave books out, hoping to get your children to pick them up? It often works, around here. I've told my two that these books have guinea pigs, as an additional enticement.

New Pleasures

Last month we took off over the weekend of the kids' spring break and had a fancy dinner and stayed in a hotel. Walker wanted oysters. Ron had to point out the steamed shellfish on the menu and we all had to agree to share the raw oysters as an appetizer before he could be dissuaded from ordering raw oysters as his dinner. A good thing, as it turned out. Although he said he liked the flavor of the one raw oyster he put in his mouth, Walker didn't swallow it. (He did eat all the steamed shellfish happily, as usual.) Ron and Eleanor each tried a raw oyster. Ron ate several. I thought I could just sit there and not be noticed, but it was decided that I needed to try a raw oyster. I sat there thinking of the poem by Roy Blount, Jr.:

I like to eat an uncooked oyster.
Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.
Nothing's easier on your gorge
Or, when the time comes, to disgorge.
But not to let it too long rest
Within your mouth is always best.
For if your mind dwells on an oyster...
Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.
I prefer my oyster fried.
Then I'm sure my oyster's died.

Anyway, I put the thing in my mouth and swallowed it. It wasn't too bad. And I'd tried something new.

Just as potent as the pleasure of traveling to a new place and trying a new food is the pleasure of an entirely new book by an author you already like, especially when the author is also fond of the same kind of books you are. With her first book, The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall set out consciously to imitate the pleasures of books by E. Nesbit and Edward Eager. In her new book, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, she also mentions Eva Ibbotson, Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series (a BIG favorite at our house*), and a character from Narnia. In addition, she has one of those odd pleasures in store for parents--the pleasure of hearing the words of a story you've read to your child a hundred million times...I couldn't believe how readily the "Scuppers the Sailor Dog" song came back to me when I heard Mr. Penderwick read it to Batty.

Mr. Penderwick's Latin phrases will not be a mystery to any child who's read the Harry Potter series (we have a new game with books--try reversing initial letters to see if you can make words and phrases that make sense, like A Wrinkle in Time becomes A Tinkle in Wrime, Where the Wild Things Are becomes Where the Tiled Wings Are, and any Harry Potter book becomes Perry Hotter and the...). Mr. Penderwick's date with Marianne Dashwood probably will be a mystery for most child readers, at least until the mystery is revealed towards the end of the book. Just a little Toy Story-like pleasure for older readers.

One of my favorite parts of The Penderwicks on Gardam Street is how you can tell that a particular woman would be a bad match for Mr. Penderwick--she not only wears a rabbit coat, but she also has "rabbit fur around the tops of her boots." Shades of Cruella DeVille!

Another favorite part for me is when you see the kitchen of the woman who turn out to be a good match for Mr. Penderwick:

Jane entertained herself by looking around the kitchen. It was nothing like the kitchen at home. It was warm and cozy like home, true, but it was also messy--delightfully so, thought Jane--and it didn't look as though lots of cooking went on there. There was a laptop computer on the counter with duck stickers on it, the spice cabinet was full of Ben's toy trucks, and Jane couldn't spot a cookbook anywhere. This is the kitchen of a Thinker, she decided, and promised herself that she'd never bother with cooking, either.

I have several quite intellectual friends who are good cooks and who enjoy cooking, but I'm not one of them. From now on, I'm going to think of my kitchen as "the kitchen of a Thinker." I can make some good tea sandwiches, and I have a caviar dish with room for ice, so probably I can use it to serve up oysters raw and properly chilled.

*If you want to read the Swallows and Amazons books in order, check out this link:
http://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Ransomes-Swallows-Amazons-order