Tag: Americana

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Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright

Set in the late 1930s, Thimble Summer captures the era’s atmosphere of farm life in  Wisconsin. Elizabeth Enright wrote this while people were just beginning to recover from the Dust Bowl further south, and the book gives an excellent sense of the Depression years through a child’s eyes.

Synopsis

Garnet Linden, ten years old, gets herself into a different scrape every chapter. The story starts with the silver thimble she finds half buried in the river bank, and Garnet decides it will bring her good luck. All her adventures through the rest of the summer “prove” it. Life isn’t always easy, and she knows her father worries about the bills, but as the season comes to a close, she can look back on adventures that brought so many treasures to hold close to her heart for a lifetime.

Pros

 

  1. Children who love a gentle, happy story with enough challenges to keep them interested will love the book.
  2. Enright provides wonderful details teaching today’s readers what farming was like in the twentieth century before World War II, such as how neighbors teamed up to get everyone’s harvest in and how farm machinery was relatively new.

Cons

 

Children who love action and adventure, or adults who deem no story is a good story without building toward a strong climax will not like Thimble Summer.

Discussion Questions

  1. What chores did Garnet help out with?
  2. Would you prefer to be Eric, who lived on his own for over a year, or would you prefer to be part of a family like Garnet’s? Why?
  3. How was it possible that no one missed Garnet when she ran away for the whole day?

Conclusion

I write reviews for Vintage Reads for the sole purpose of pointing readers to great books of yesteryear. This is the second book by Elizabeth Enright that I’ve reviewed. You can find my opinion of The Saturdays here. She has ten more books for children, and each one paints a beautiful picture of Americana.

 

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HITTY Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field

HITTY Her First Hundred Years was published before I was born, before my mother was born! I wanted to see if such books are still “readable” in the twenty-first century. My answer? It depends.

As soon as I opened the book, my heart sank. Long narrations and detailed descriptions filled page after page. White space was almost nonexistent. Our instant society can’t stand that, but I challenge those of you who are interested in sampling variety in your reading pleasure:

PLAN to take your time and savor the details that Rachel Field offers to you in this historical novel for children.

Synopsis

HITTY is a doll, carved by a backwoods peddler in the 1820s. Now, she’s an expensive antique watching the world from a shop window. And she decides to write her memoirs. From her beginnings in early America Maine to the South Seas and India, from New Orleans to New York, Boston, and eventually, her original home town, Hitty regales her readers, young and old, with historical details of events, cultures, and fashions. The further I progressed, the more enthralled I became with her story. No wonder Fields won the 1930 Newbery Medal.

Pros

1. Hitty’s voice is immediately distinctive. I love reading passages out loud just to hear her!
2. Field’s talent for description is amazing. Read the words and YOU ARE THERE.
3. The book is a wonderful history text, told in story form, and gives us a living sense of the times of each era.

Cons

1. Since Hitty has no ability to speak, dialog is minimal, and I do love dialog in fiction. The only conversations we can read are those where Hitty was a witness.
2. I found myself skimming some of the long descriptions. I’m sure they were just as good as the ones where I read every detail. I confess—while I’m a patient reader, I live in the twenty-first century, and I have my moments of “hurry up and get on with it.”

Discussion Questions

Pick a chapter, any chapter. Ask your child or students about the setting, about how things have changed since Hitty first started her adventures. What have they gleaned from her description of her current surroundings? Hitty maintains an 1830s worldview, so as the decades pass and society’s mores evolve, her values do not.

Conclusion

Take your time and enjoy this gentle voyage through history.