Guest Post: The Witch Of Blackbird Pond

This is a good book that really gets you where it counts. The story is about Kit, who lost every thing she had back in Barbados, her home island. She finds it's hard to live in America. She wants to find someone like her who loves the sea; instead she gets a jealous cousin, a creepy boy, and an old friend who broke plenty of laws of the town. All she can hope for is a miracle. This book's time period was the Salem witch trials time.

(written by my 12-year-old daughter, Lily)

An Experiment

One of the biggest challenges I've noticed since getting my Kindle has been wading through the hundreds of thousands of books that are available through the Kindle store to find books that might actually interest me. At one point, I thought it would be useful to have some kind of sorting service that was a little more specific than Amazon's broad categories. Nan Hawthorne has such a service for books about the Middle Ages at Medieval Novels.com, and I thought it might be interesting and fun to create a similar listing for my favorite historical fiction. Mostly that will be stories about U.S. history, although I will also have categories for other time periods and cultures, as well.

I've started with one page, which you can see listed just below the banner for this site. This page focuses on historical fiction about the U.S. Revolutionary War (since Johnny Tremain holds such a cherished place in my heart, ha ha), as well as stories about the colonial period and the antebellum period. That's a wide-ranging time period, and I may later need to break it up, but Blogger only allows me 10 pages, so I must be sparing until I settle in on a format for this list. My plan is to list the books alphabetically and in sections for the different time periods. I hope that will make them easy enough to find.

One of the main things I've wished I had to help me sort through the many, many books available on Amazon was some sort of filtering device, so I've attempted to provide one of those in this list. Besides being grouped according to time period, I've included a brief summary of the history covered in the book, a synopsis of the story, and a reading level for each book. Then, because I'm a rhetorical critic and can't help myself, I've given my evaluation of the book (very briefly). I'm not rating the books, but if I think there is something I wish someone had told me going into this book, I'm going to include it as sort of a "warning label."

I will add books to the list as time permits. The semester is in full swing, so my time for pursuits like this is pretty limited. But I think it's going to be fun, and maybe it can help someone find some good historical fiction to read.

This Was Cool...

I'm slowly, slowly working my way through The Yearling. Last night, I read the chapter in which the Baxters face an eight-day deluge of rain. Shortly after I finished and turned out the light, a little thunderstorm came through in real life. It was sort of a surreal moment, with the description of the story still in my head and the sound of rain pouring down outside my window. It made me extra thankful for my soft pillow, fluffy comforter, and warm husband to snuggle to!

Mind Your Mother!

For years, my mother has been recommending that I read The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings. I don't really know why I've never done it; the book sounds like the kind of story I would like (except for the sad "pet animal dying" part, ha ha). It has just never seemed to happen.

Well, it's going to happen now. I finished The Year of Living Biblically last night, and today when I was in the library (trying to work up the nerve to ask one of the librarians to be on a HUGE committee I've been asked to chair), I took a little detour over to the juvenile section and pulled The Yearling off the shelf.

So now dishes are done, assignment sheet is made for first class tomorrow, Facebook is checked - time to go read.

If You're Going to Write Something Historical, Study Some History!

My family has been off at a day-long retreat today, so I had the television to myself. That means I hunted up movies with some sort of historical link. I ended up watching Brothers of the Frontier and part of Two Mules for Sister Sara. In each case, I found myself questioning some of the history in the movies and getting rather irritated.

I was actually not so much irritated as questioning when the French pulled out what appeared to be a Gatling gun in Two Mules for Sister Sara. I remembered from a trip to the Museum of Arkansas Heritage (where they had a firearms exhibit up) that the Gatling gun was invented during the American Civil War. A quick trip to the internet told me the French invaded Mexico during roughly that same time period, so at least the gun existed to lend at least a shred of truth to the story. However, further reading convinced me that there wouldn't have been a Gatling gun in that French stronghold in Mexico; the U.S. Army didn't actually adopt the gun until 1866, meaning it probably wouldn't have made it into the hands of foreign armies just yet by the time the French were defeated in Mexico. So while it's plausible, it's just not very likely. I don't care that a Gatling gun made for really dramatic battle scenes; it is historically inaccurate and shouldn't have been in the movie.

At least the Gatling gun in Two Mules for Sister Sara was plausible. There were so many things in the Brothers of the Frontier movie that were just plain wrong. In a nutshell, the story is about a family that is driven away from their home when a greedy, proud neighbor falsely accuses their oldest son of theft. The family leaves for the West and gets separated on the way, leaving the three sons alone in the wilderness. This story was supposed to have taken place in the Alleghenies of the 1700s. But let me tell you, whoever wrote this movie and whoever did props and costumes apparently made no effort whatsoever to find out what people wore in the 1700s. The mother had on the standard form-fitting "pioneer woman" costume with what looked like Battenburg lace on the collar. Battenburg lace???? Are you kidding me? The Alleghenies were still frontier territory during the 1700s - this woman would have been lucky to have a very simple linsey-woolsey dress.

I also caught them using the term "OK" throughout the movie. I know from research for my own writing project that "OK" didn't come into common usage until the 1820's. And their dog! It was one of those fluffy little white "Benji" types of dogs. No self-respecting pioneer family would have a cutesy dog like that! They would have a hound or some kind of terrier that could pull its weight, not just be a pet.

Well, I could go on, but the family just got home and it's bedtime. For my two cents, these movies are just wrong...if you're going to write historical stories, get the history right!

What Does It Take to Get a Young Reader's Attention?

My daughter and I went to a bookstore today, and we had it in our heads walking in that we were going to buy a book (or three, as it turned out). We had some disagreement, though, over what we should buy. I found Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson, and since I've been wanting to read one of Ibbotson's books, and since it would count as Lily's historical fiction requirement for this quarter at school, I decided it was my choice. Her choice? A copy of one of the books in the Warriors series by Erin Hunter.

Now, I don't have anything against the Warriors books (although I tried to read one once and couldn't keep up with all the different cat characters). The reason I didn't want her to get it was because she's read it multiple times. As I told her, variety helps your mind grow, just like variety in food helps your body grow.

In the end, I got the book for her (it was a bargain book) and I made a deal with her - she should read the first two pages of Ibbotson's book and see if it caught her curiosity. She read it aloud to me in the car. I thought it sounded pretty interesting - a young girl attends a boarding school, but her life is about to change, since her guardian pulled up in a car outside the school.

As soon as she had hit the end of the second page, though, Lily quit. I said, "Didn't it make you curious about how her life is going to change?" She said that it sorta did, which I guess means it sorta didn't. So I asked what would have made it more interesting to her.

The book starts off with a couple of paragraphs that establish the setting and background of the school the girl attends. I didn't think it lasted all that long. Lily, however, said it would have been more interesting to skip that part and start when the car drove up with her guardian. In other words, Lily wants to start right at a point of action.

I've read other articles that advocate the same thing. Start in the middle of the action, they say. Immerse the character in some sort of conflict from the first paragraph. I guess what Lily says confirms that advice.

I wonder why. Is it because kids are so immersed in a "vivid" culture? Video games and cartoons don't spend an extended time on world-building. I guess you sort of have to slip it in on young readers the way you have to hide a pill in a biscuit before a dog will take it. There has to be something - conflict, drama, characters - that appeals to them immediately, or they are going to dismiss the book as "boring" before they finish the first chapter.

I told Lily I have a three-chapter rule, that I promise myself to read three chapters of a book before deciding if it's worth finishing. She seemed to think that was a little extreme. I'm afraid we're raising a generation of impatient readers who want to get to the point. I know my own reading preferences have changed to be sort of impatient with books that take a circuitous route to get anywhere. But how much is Lily going to miss out on if she's not willing to invest some attention if the "good part" doesn't show up in the first words?

A Recommendation from My Son

My 15-year-old son has been a voracious reader since he first learned to read at the end of kindergarten. He went through a phase when he wouldn't read anything except fantasy (mainly Harry Potter), but lately he's been branching out in all kinds of directions. Recently he was talking about a book he had checked out from the public library, The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. He made it sound so intriguing that I decided to borrow it from him until it has to go back to the library.

The subtitle of the book is, "One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible." Jacobs starts as an agnostic, secular Jew who decides to experiment with living exactly by the rules of the Bible, 8 months by the Old Testament and 4 by the New Testament. I thought it would probably be a sort of cynical approach that would be finding the weirdest stuff possible in the Bible and exploiting it for laughs. There are plenty of laughs in what I've read so far, but far from being cynical, the book seems to be a genuine and respectful effort to learn more about the Bible.

A couple of nuggets I pulled out just last night:

"...coveting means that you are overly desirous of the Jaguar, you are distracted by material goods, you have veered from the path of being thankful for what God provides. You have, no doubt, fallen victim to advertising, the Tenth Commendment's arch-nemesis."

"...a lot of religion is about surrendering control and being open to radical change."

The book is definitely a radical change from my usual reading fare, but I suppose it's good for a person to read something different once in a while. Plus, it is a "Y" book, which gives me an idea - I'll go through the alphabet backward this year!