Harriet the Spy

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh was quite different to me than the past two novels that we have had to read for children’s literature. The books The Birchbark House and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry both have protagonists that have to deal with rather serious problems in their lives. Omakays from BBH helps her family with their daily life and eventually helps most of her family survive a smallpox epidemic. In her daily routine Omakayas’ chores are not just busy work but provide essential things such as hides for clothing or food for the family. Cassie must learn the harsh lessons of racial bigotry and struggles to reconcile with the status quo in RoT.  Although her family is landowners they are still very poor and struggle to pay bills, which is a crucial part of the plot. Harriet on the other hand does not really have any serious issues to deal within her life. Her family appears to be at least upper middle class and everything she needs is provided for. She has a nursemaid and the household has a family cook who begrudgingly makes Harriet her favorite sandwich for lunch everyday.

In the BBH and RoT neither Omakayas nor Cassie create their own problems. Both of their concerns are come from external forces that they could never had control over in the first place. Omakays and Cassie did not create disease, colonialism or racism. Abd those are some pretty issues to deal with as children. Harriet on the other hand created her own problem and the problem is not even that serious. As I was reading HtS I had no empathy for her situation whatsoever as I did with Cassie and Logan. I felt that she was just a spoiled brat who got herself into trouble by writing mean things about the people around her. I’m not going to feel bad for a gossip getting caught. The ending somewhat surprised me in that the big lesson for her to learn was empathy but it was too anti-climactic.

One thing I did like about Harriet the Spy was the character of Ole Golly. My toes hurt with joy from her quote dropping. 

Roll of Thunder

Man, things just got real in children’s literature. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor was for me the most realistic reading that I have had so far in class. The setting for this book is more familiar to me than the settings in Little House on the Prairie and The Birchbark House. I found it interesting that even though those two novels took place over half a century before Roll of Thunder. A running theme of all of the novels I have read for class so far seems to be the education of the children characters in the books. In Kim, the reader is taken along with Kim in his education in Imperial India. This would not have been interesting except that Kim is culturally more Indian than he is Irish. In The Birchbark House Omakayas goes through some very emotional tests and finds her calling as a medicine women.

In Rolling Thunder, which is told from the point of view of 9 year old Cassie Logan, the importance of education runs through on a couple of levels. The novel starts out with the Logan children walking to their first day off school. Mrs. Logan is a teacher and the Logan children all have the importance of education instilled upon them all the time. This theme is also reinforced in the small story about how Mrs. Logan’s father scrimped and saved every penny to make sure his daughter could get an education and pass along knowledge to others.  But there were many more lessons to be learned in this book than just to go to school.

I found it very interesting that Taylor did not gloss over the harsh realities of race relations that African Americans had to deal with at the time. This was the most realistic part of the novel for me. The scenes with Jeremy were probably the most painful for me to read. He seemed like just a good, kindhearted sweet boy but could only be so close to the Logan children just because of ‘the way things are’. The instances of what should have been and fairness and the realities that existed were very harsh for children to deal with let alone adults. Cassie’s incident in town is an example of this. Sometimes I think that we as a country have come very far from the way things were in the setting 

The Birchbark House again.

   After taking another look at The Birchbark House and the Elizabeth Gargano article about the cyclical nature of the book I began to think about how most oks that we read are n of this nature. The traditional form of the novel, as we know, it tends to have a linear timeline. It has a beginning middle and an end.  This form is very tidy and what we have come to expect as readers. Erdrich’s novel has some of the same elements as the traditional novel but she interjects some Native American formatting to it. It is basically the story of a young girls experience over a one-year period. I see this book as a Bildungsroman. Omakayas is the girl who the novel revolves around. Erdrich uses the four seasons to create four parts to the book and each part contains traditional chapters. The four seasons approach, although I see it as somewhat cliché, is leaning toward the Ojibwa culture. The chapters are a more traditional western written style. The traditional chapters probably make the book more navigable for the audience who Erdrich is trying to reach. I have not seen or read any of her adult material but I think she would able to incorporate a more true representation of Ojibwa culture and their story telling techniques. I thought how she worked all of the cycles into The Birchbark Tree was a good introduction to how Native Americans told stories. If I hadn’t read the article by Gargano I don’t think that I would have picked up on the importance of all the different story circles that take place in the novel.  There are circles within circles within circles.  I am not an author myself but I wonder how much of a struggle it is for a writer like Erdrich to try to write a novel that keeps the integrity of the culture she is trying to represent using a form that was/is foreign to that culture.

The Birchbark House

            The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich brings me back to what should seem like more familiar surroundings than Kipling’s Kim. I should feel much more acquainted with the setting because a great deal closer to where I have grown up and lived than India. But Erdrich’s novel was about a subject that is unfamiliar to me. I am not knowledgeable about anything Native American. It seems to have been pretty much glossed over in my education so far. I found it interesting the way the author weaved elements of a culture that is strange to me with what seems like universal things that young girls of any culture may go through.  This is much different from the traditional stories that I heard as a child such as Pocahontas. I learned about the day-to-day life of a young Indian girl. She had her chores just as we all did as children but her chores were very different than the ones I did as a child. While I may have hated cleaning my room she hates to clean the hides that her father brings home for hunts.

Just as in Kim, The Birchbark House has its own unique language. Just by reading these last two books I was given the chance to expand my vocabulary by probably over a hundred words. I have a feeling that my brain may only absorb a couple of them though. When I started to read Erdrich’s book I was excited because it takes place so close to home compared to Kipling’s. I thought that it would feel closer to home but I was wrong. The small world of The Birchbark House is just as unfamiliar to me as Kipling’s portrayal of India. It is quite amazing to me that something that is set in a place so close to me ends up feeling like a place as strange as India. 

Kipling's Kim

            My first thoughts as I started reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling were what a strange and fantastical land of India that Kipling paints for his readers. As you may have figured out by now I like to try to put myself in the shoes of the reader at the time of publishing. Published in 1900 knowledge of India and the eastern world would not be completely strange to some readers. So if I put my turn of the century schoolboy shoes on my imagination would take me to this strange yet familiar place that I most likely have never been too. India has been glossed over in my texts but I am fascinated by the details of the world that Kipling is describing. I have a hard time adding all of these new and strange words to my vocabulary. This new language makes the story all the more strange and exotic. I am also learning much more about the relations between the different religions and social cultures of India that my schoolbooks have never mentioned. It makes me dream of being on my own in a strange land and outwitting adults and making my way in life.

            When I first started reading this novel I couldn’t help but to start making comparisons to Huck Finn. They are both two boys on their own. Both of them use their wit to continue their respective journeys. Their journeys are both so much more than just an adolescent boy on his own. Huck and Kim are both on spiritual journeys of sorts dealing with real world moral dilemmas. These aren’t the only two books that I have read that have this theme of a boy on his own trying to survive. When I was young I remember reading other coming of age books such as My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.