When your Book Pusher Blocks Your Review

Now I have no use for trolls, whether they live under the bridge or on-line.  My darling passive-aggressive mom taught me to be polite or silent, even if that meant biting my tongue.  So, I never thought I'd be blocked as a troll for telling the truth.  But then I reckoned without the World's Largest Book Pusher.

WLBP started mainlining me books back when the dot-com revolution was in force.  First I was a regular patron, then a "1-click" shopper and an early participant in their on-line review program. WLBP and I both were happy.  I got a lifeline of books and WLBP got my money.  Then Sandra Worth's Love & War had to appear.

Love and War is another historical novel based on the War of the Roses.  Now, I became a fan of the losing side of that war before I learned to drive so I tend to scoop up any book on the subject, non-fiction or otherwise.  This one promised to focus on John Neville, one of the supporting players.  Off I go through the pages, happy as a lark until I hit a passage where Neville is writing home to his wife.

"Tomorrow we give battle.  Lest I be unable to write you again, I send you this missive so you may know my thoughts when I am no more."

Wait a minute.  I knew those lines.  I had heard those rhythmic sentiments  before.  I glanced back at the text.  It was a moving testament of love; a soldier's realization of all that he would lose if he died in an upcoming battle.  Then Neville wished that he and his wife would both live to see their son grown "to honorable knighthood" and I recognized the real source of those words.

That moving passage actually was written by a soldier, but not one in the War of the Roses.  It was written by Major Sullivan Ballou of Rhode Island a week before he died at Bull Run. Ken Burns featured the letter in his Civil War series and I wept the first time I heard it. Now, here were his phrases, word for word, in some misbegotten, romance set in the Middle Ages!

I spent the next hour creating a reader's review on the book saying what I thought of Ms. Worth's plagiarism.  I cited sources and dates and prepared a comparison of the two letters with highlighted copied phrases. I admitted Ms. Worth hadn't broken the law; Major Ballou's letter was in the public domain and she could copy it whenever she liked. Still, it's lazy writing and dishonest to claim another's work as your own and it's despicable to steal the eloquent last words of a soldier. I thought potential customers should be aware of these flaws before they bought the book.  The computer servers in World's Largest Book Pusher disagreed.

I submitted my review but it failed to appear, the only time that has happened. After five minutes of waiting, I assumed the computer hit a glitch and started rewriting my essay, furious but sure I was right.  I submitted again, after saving the text of my essay. Again, my commentary disappeared. I rebooted, and checked everything worked before submitting the essay a third time. My other reviews were uploaded immediately but my Love and War review was apparently blocked. I started to get the message.

Now, if I submit a review to the World's Largest Book Pusher, I remember to be direct and bland. I don't want to be voted off the island.  If that happens, I'll have to move to the underside of some bridge and hang out with the other trolls. 

Finding A Room with a View

The idea of travel always seems attractive, doesn't it?  To leave behind our humdrum, everyday world and enjoy life as a tourist.  To picture ourselves in an exotic environment and perhaps, be transformed by our time in that place?  Fortunes have been made over the years in books on this subject: A Year in Provence; Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun are just three examples. But the fact is, wherever we go, we take ourselves with us and most travelers come back home.  Lucy Honeychurch would be the first person to tell you that.

Lucy is one of those Edwardian, English girls who will tell you real travel isn't the flight of fancy you'd imagine.  She's supposedly on this trip to Italy, to pick up some of the culture and sophistication of the continent but she hardly allowed within speaking distance of anyone truly Italian.  Her irritating, old-maid cousin is always at her side, the hotel's land-lady has a cockney accent and all the other guests there are English as well.  To make things worse, the reservations got mixed up and she didn't get A Room With a View.

That's the opening situation in E. M Forster's story of what travel can and can't do.  Lucy is a young woman at the edge of adulthood, about to make life-changing choices.  Her cousin and other guests sense it, potential reveals itself when she plays the piano.  And all of these good people want her to make the right choices so they try and limit her exposure to the bits of Italy they approve of.  But, fate and travel sometimes circumvent the very best-intentioned limits.

Despite her guided tours and chaperone, Lucy witnesses chaos and romance while she's in Florence and she retreats to England, ready to marry the deeply pretentious Cecil Vyse.  (Great name for a silly man, right?) Fate and nature still have a few tricks up their sleeve and Lucy eventually will choose whether she wants the kind of life she's seen others live or a future that feels right for her.

This sweet tale has been adapted to film a few times, most memorably in 1986 (Have 30 years gone by that fast?) by the Merchant-Ivory company.  While I never recommend a film adaptation over a book, this is a beautiful accessory if you want a video version of the story.

Maybe we don't always have an opportunity to travel.  And travel may not always change our lives. But a good travel story can still open our eyes and give us a break from everyday life.  And in fiction, we always get A Room With A View.

An Intimidating English Teacher

He was in my very first high school class, a wiry, little guy behind a lectern, with gravity-defying hair and feverish-looking eyes. He wasn't much taller than the lectern and it probably weighed more than he did.  The stranger stared at us briefly before introducing himself as Mr. S___, taking the roll and passing out Literature text books.  "Another first-year teacher," I thought with dismay,"this class will eat him alive."  Then the little man barked out an order and half the class jumped. For a small man, this guy's voice was loud. "Mr. So-and-So" he boomed at one of the better-behaved boys in class, "What have you got there?  Bring it to me."  The poor kid named slunk his way toward the front of the class while I cowered in my seat and revised my opinion of the instructor. This guy would control the class but I didn't like him and doubted if I'd learn much from him either. Little did I know I was facing the greatest teacher I've ever meet.

Mr. S. taught my favorite subject, English, but I never would have told him something that personal. The man was far too intimidating.  We were in an era when teachers were supposed to relax a little and relate to the kids but Mr. S. didn't get the memo.  Instead he barked out remarks and questions in class and when he grinned at us from behind his lectern, he looked like a wolf eyeing his prey.  He admitted to having daily debates with the "fun" English instructor in school about which was the better teaching tool, trust or fear. Mr. S. held out for fear and it worked; he scared the spit out of me.

Sophomore collection of short stories.
Does my high school still want it back?

Funny thing was, this strange little guy taught an interesting class.  For one thing, he got us to think about what we read. Instead of focusing on terms like "protagonist" and "plot", Mr. S. forced us to identify the ideas in stories and then debate those with him in class. Some of those ideas had obvious answers, like, "What would you rather have, security or freedom?" Mr. S. always took the contrary side of an issue like this and, as I recall, he always won the debates. When we insisted Americans preferred freedom, he'd point out the ways our society had opted for security instead. Keeping up in his class meant using your wits and even the most disinterested students started getting involved.  Then, he taught us how to listen.

Sometime in my sophomore year, I began to get irritated over the "less-than-excellent" grades I earned in his class.  I wasn't interested in keeping a high GPA but it irked me to get "Bs" in one of the few subjects I usually aced. So, when written tests were given, I tried to write great essays, scouring meaning out of the text and paragraphs out of my soul.  Then I'd get another B and someone else's answer would be read out in class. I sweated blood over the next essay test... and my friend Mindy's answer was read aloud instead.  On the way home, I showed her my paper and asked her why he picked her essay answer over mine. "Mine answered his question." she said.

In my junior year but I started paying attention to Mr. S.'s lectures and I realized something; we might debate profound ideas in the text but the subject we studied was literature and he tested us on specific literary techniques and criteria we discussed during class. I started paying attention to what the man said he wanted in an answer. I  wrote responses to his questions.  I started getting As.

One of the last books in the lit. syllabus
I never forgot it or the teacher.

By my senior year, I had relaxed enough to appreciate Mr. S.'s teaching methods and he seemed to unbend just a bit. His grins weren't just a demanding instructor's delight in catching students unprepared, he loved seeing us use our brains. Although some of his formality remained, we began to glimpse his sense of humor and we learned he loved when we'd "forget" to return our text books at the end of term.  He said he measured a book's popularity by how few copies came back to the school.  (Mr. S., if you see this, I still have two of my short-story collections as well as my copy of Candide.  I still love them and read them; I just have to be careful because the pages are brittle and some of the covers are gone.)  Then, Mr. S. left our school system the same spring that our class graduated. I never found the chance or nerve to thank him for the impact he had on me.  But I've felt his influence ever since.

Over the years, I've attended more than a dozen schools and probably studied under a hundred different teachers.  Most were bright, some were kind and I even made friends with a few.  But the greatest teacher I ever met taught me to fall in love with a subject.  He changed me from someone who enjoyed reading as entertainment to one who reveres prose as an art.

Who is your Greatest Teacher Ever???

Families are such funny things

Families are such funny things.  Find a man in his late thirties or early forties surrounded by his kids. Around them, he is the paterfamilias.  The Father.  The Ultimate Authority (besides Mom).  Now transfer him to his family of origin and watch him interact with them.  There he's not recognized as a dad but as a brother or child and the definition has an effect on his personality.  His air of authority is gone.  Maybe an old squabble is raked up with a sibling.  If his children are watching, they have a rare glimpse of their Dad as a boy, momentarily spinning like an electron from their immediate family into the family of their grandparents. Around the molecules of generations, Dad becomes a covelant bond.

As a writer, Anne Tyler knows this better than most and the idea stands out in her novel, A Spool of Blue Thread.  This is the story of the Whitshanks, another eccentric Baltimore family (Anne is the literary patron saint of both the city and eccentric families) with an recurring, dynamic.  Each generation has one member with the drive to attain a goal above their expectations even though success will not make them happy.  Every generation also has at least one "sympathizer" member who negotiates their way through family frictions and the rest have their own coping skills.  Whenever holidays or family emergencies pull the grown siblings back together we see how much or little they've learned about being adults while they were apart.

This story also throws in something extra.  After chapters of seeing Red and Abby function as the heads of the Whitshank clan, coping with their children and grandchildren, a flashback takes us to their adolescence and we see the young people they once were dominated by their patriarch, Junior.  We even see the events that influence Junior.

In many ways, A Spool of Blue Thread is also the story of the family home, a house in an affluent neighborhood that Junior Whitshank built and coveted.  The house goes from Junior's talisman of success to the legacy Red and Abby will care for and the symbol of favoritism their sons will crave. As the house witnesses each successive generation's secrets, resentments and hopes, we learn what drives this family and what they need to let go of in the end.

Since the prospect of Thanksgiving is looming, with the chance we'll spend time with extended family, take a second for the Whitshanks clan.  Remember we are all covelant bonds in the family of Mankind and we all have a role to play.  May your next family gathering be like the beautiful spool of blue thread, that appears just when it's needed.

Making Sense of the Universe: the Writer-Reader contract

The relationship between writers and readers is an odd one. The writer sits in a garret (or on the top of Mount Parnassus, depending on your point of view) and labors to create a work of lasting value.  If it's good enough and all the stars align, the readers let the work of an author's imagination into their own and reward the author with praise, treasure and enough allegiance to read writer's next story, as long as the author keeps the the writer-reader contract.

What, you thought what I just described was the writer-reader contract?  Au contrair, mes amis! That is merely the description.  The writer-reader contract is an old and long one that is modified only as literature evolves.  One of the basic tenets of this implied agreement is that, however complex the plot or intricate the fictional universe in the story is, the author knows everything that is going on in the story and can explain how this imaginary world makes sense.  For example:

Like most of the reading planet, I adored J. K. Rowling's fantastic Harry Potter series.  It's a mammoth accomplishment and a brilliantly planned series. Elements of the entire saga start appearing immediately although their importance is played down. (Spoilers abound here so if you spent the last quarter century living under a rock to avoiding the Potter phenomenon, read a different one of my posts). In the first chapter, we get the primary premise that magic-is-real set out and we learn a baby Harry somehow defeated an evil, magically powerful being named Voldemort. The soul souvenir of Voldemort's attack, a scar on Harry's forehead, is mentioned in passing on the first chapter but Potter fans don't learn the full significance of scar until the end of the series, seven years and a million words later. Still, virtually every bit of information JKR drops in the early part of the series forms part of the bigger picture later on, from Hagrid's motorbike to Dumbledore's evasive answers to personal questions. ("What do you see in the mirror, Professor?")  JKR doesn't tell the audience everything immediately, she can't, but she tells us what we need to know when we need to know it.  She honors the contract.

Another splendid example of an author knowing everything is Louis Sachar's Holes.  This is a case of non-linear storytelling at its best since most of the narrative is about perpetually unlucky Stanley Yelnats IV, a good kid in a bad situation.  Stanley can't know that his fate was tied to Camp Green Lake and a kid named Hector Zeroni generations before he was born but that's because there are "holes" in his family history.  The reader's fun comes from finding the information filling those holes at different parts of the story.  It's a masterful fulfillment of the Writer-Reader Contract.

Now compare these to Lemony Snicket's books, A Series of Unfortunate Events.  As usual we have an unfortunate child (well, 3 of them: Violet, Klaus and Sunny); a wicked, overarching villain who pursues them through the series (Count Olaf) and a bunch of mysterious clues and circumstances the kids encounter along the way. But, contrary to the implied contract, many of the mysteries in the story are never solved!  Readers never find out what was in that blasted sugar bowl or details about the schism that split the V. F. D. into fire-starters and fire-fighters! (Speaking of which, there are so many entities in the series with the initials V. F. D. it's hard to keep them straight.) Instead of resolving key mysteries that have been building through the series, the author states in the last book that not every question can or will be answered.  That is true of real life, but it's a weak excuse to readers who waded through 170 chapters of alliterative names and silly puns to find out what really happened to all of the Baudelaire family. It is a break in the writer-reader contract.

So, if you know someone struggling to write a novel this month, be kind to them.  Bring them encouragement and hot drinks as needed and assure them that they can always get through one more revision.  But remind them of the writer-reader contract and how they need to know everything in their fictional universe.  It's a part of the contract.

The Executioner's Daughter

There's a moment in Alan Bennett's play, The History Boys when an exasperated (female) teacher declares:

"History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men.  What is history?  History is women following behind...with a bucket."

The Cover 

I can't help but wonder if Jane Hardstaff had this quote in mind when she wrote her excellent children's novel, The Executioner's Daughter. It may be fiction, but our heroine is forced to trudge through the disasters of history and scoop up the mess left behind with her basket.

Meet Moss, an eleven-year-old girl and permanent resident of The Tower of London. On good days, her father is the blacksmith in the tower, creating and repairing any piece of metal needed for Henry VIII's court and government and Moss stays in the forge.  On bad days, execution days, her father wields the ax.  If judicial murder and the blood lust of the crowd aren't bad enough, Moss has be present at each death.  Her job is to stand below the executioner's block and catch the prisoner's head in her basket once her father cuts it off. One execution would be enough to traumatize a child but because of the King's battle with the Catholic Church (aka The English Reformation) Moss has to witness this horror again and again  and each execution makes her want to rebel.

The Author

The Executioner's Daughter works on many levels, not the least of which is how it points out that the Tower of London functioned a separate, often self-sufficient, entity.  Yes, the castle was a prison but it was also a strong-hold, a Royal Residence and the large, full-time staff that maintained it also lived within those walls.  The Tower had few exits and Moss's father limits her freedom to its outer walls, making his daughter, in effect, another prisoner.  Preteen readers can identify with Moss's feelings of resentment and her need to expand her horizons beyond her father's world.  Parents will appreciate her loving father, a man forced to make terrible choices in order to keep his daughter safe. And everyone will like Salter, the Artful Dodger like trickster that shows Moss there are harder destinies than being the executioner's daughter and how to outwit fate.

Fascinating, adventurous and full of historical insight, The Executioner's Daughter is a delight for junior-high readers and up and it can make someone glad they're just a cleaning-woman in the annals of history.

The Politicization of Leslie

We're coming to the end of another election season and, like almost everyone on the planet, I'm glad this miserable contest is almost over.  The mud-slinging, innuendo, and overall nastiness of political rhetoric have made this a loathsome campaign year and the parade of contradictory polls is exhausting me.  But I will vote on Tuesday, as I have in every election.  I can't help it.  I was politicized long before I could read and my parents deserve the credit/blame.  That's what happens when you're kissed at a young age by presidents.

My mom had a button like this in her
jewelry box for decades

See, my mom was a big fan of John F. Kennedy in 1960.  YUGE fan, another candidate might say.  Well, what wasn't there to like?  He was young, attractive, and charismatic, enough to charm any woman in her early twenties.  And my mother was never tepid about politics.  She paid fierce attention to the news and loved or hated most people in public service.  So when she heard JFK and his running mate were arriving at the Wichita Falls, Texas airport, she had to be there to greet him, along with me and Dad.

Now my Dad was always interested in current events, although he never got drawn into fandom, like my mom.  I think he would have preferred to stay away from candidates and the crowds that followed them.  But Mom insisted, saying it would be a memorable experience for all three of us.   

That's me, a Presidential Pin-Up Girl!

Sorry to say, it wasn't memorable to me; I was less than 18 months old at the time and nothing of that day hangs in my recollection.  But Dad said he held me on his shoulders at that windy airport and Mom said that no one could tell from Mr. Kennedy's speech that he and Lyndon were ever political rivals.  After the speech, the candidates worked their way through the crowd and Mom said both JKF and LBJ kissed my cheek, the way they probably kissed a million kids along the campaign trail. Knowing how she felt about JFK, I'm surprised she washed my face afterward.

After that, national politics was always personal in my family. Mom wept uncontrollably when President Kennedy was assassinated but I went on to Kindergarten, secure in the belief that Lyndon's tenure in the White House meant the eyes of Texas really were upon me. (Hey, what does a 5-year-old know!) Mom preached civil rights from her kitchen and, during Watergate, called President Nixon and his staff everything but a Child of God for their actions. Dad didn't say as much but always knew the background on every issue and was willing to discuss them rationally.  Rational political discussions, there's something I miss almost as much as I miss my parents.

So I will go to the polls on Tuesday, same as I have for every election for more than 30 years. It's part of my role as a citizen, like my jury and military service were.  Even if I don't like who is running, I can't help participating in the process.  Like Girl Scouts and Sand Hill Plum Jelly, democracy is in my DNA.

To Believe in Yourself

Self-esteem is a tough nut to crack for most people. Very few people think they are perfect and those that do can't see what the rest of us know.  So we all have weak spots in our self-confidence.  But, if you are overweight, as about two-thirds of American are, or even obese (which is a third of the American population right now), being self-confident borders on the impossible.  Despite these numbers, anyone carrying extra pounds is continually subjected to the suggestion that skinny people are the only ones who really count.  Size is always a factor in the entertainment industry; marketing and fashion campaigns use skinny models and the rest of us chase endless ideas on how to modify the bodies we have right now.  With all of this subliminal propaganda, do you wonder why folks get depressed?

Enter Jennifer Dome King, the blogger behind Stellar Fashion and Fitness and the author of Fat Girl Power: How I Built Confidence through Body Positivity, Fashion and Fitness.  After chasing the Holy Grail of everyone else's approval, Jennifer went after a more difficult but rewarding goal.  She learned to love and believe in herself, just as she is, and debunk society's myths about weight-limitations.  You've got to admit, that takes guts.

Let's look at one of the myths Jennifer battles: that overweight people must be inactive. Yes, carrying extra pounds can sap a person's natural energy but, in Jennifer's view, that  only increases the importance of regular exercise.  Physical activity helps keep people healthy and happy, no matter what size they wear. And she doesn't just talk the talk.  Last year Jennifer created, "The Makeshift 5K" for everyone who wants to take a step toward health for themselves.  There are no stopwatches, no ribbons and no criteria for entering.  Just participating is enough to get you accepted.

Acceptance, particularly self-acceptance is a big part of body-positivity because it is a problem that people of all body types have.   After spending more than fifty-seven years on this earth, I've met people with different sizes, shapes and skin tones, but I've rarely met one who accepted his or her body, just as it existed. Instead, I've seen people starve, neglect, overwhelm and torture themselves to meet some arbitrary, impossible standard. Body-positivity doesn't mean that we shouldn't take care of the blood/bones/skin and tissue packages we spend our lives encased in.  Rather, it means we recognize the strong relationship between our physical and emotional selves and quit using one to beat up the other.

Jennifer says that the philosophy of Body Positivity can be reduced to the phrase "Love Yourself". Yes, and her essays remind me of another loving teacher: Charlie Smalls, lyricist of The Wiz.

Believe in yourself, right from the start

You'll have brains, You'll have a heart

You'll have Courage, to last your whole life through.

If you believe in yourself

as I believe in You.

Jennifer believes in the entire world. I hope the world returns the compliment.

The Old, Family Porch Rocking Chair

Great Uncles and Nephews
(The only record of my family on the porch)
The bare edge of the rocker is at the left

My dad's family lived in a house with a front porch they never used. I mean they never used it during my lifetime.  When we visited, we always parked in the side yard and used the kitchen door for our exits and entrances. (Some farm families do that; the kitchen is the heart of the house and everyone's go-to spot before and after the fields.)  All the indoor rooms were lived in but the front porch, with its wrought iron supports and cement floor was just not a comfortable place. The only decorations I remember seeing on the porch were some Elephant Ears growing out of coffee cans and the only seats were some wooden rocking chairs that could put splinters in your thighs if you sat in them. These chairs were hard and unfinished and the antithesis of comfort. Alone, they were enough to turn me into someone who hated porches.

Luckily that didn't work because my adult home came equipped with a porch that I wouldn't change for the world.  Running the length of the house it feels like acres of space and from the first, I wanted to equip it with rockers; big, beautiful, polished, wide rockers like they sell in Cracker Barrel stores.  Of course when we moved in, we couldn't afford Cracker Barrel's furniture but I was willing to wait.  Someday those generous machines for sitting would surely grace my porch.

The porch rocker in its natural state:
distressed but not depressed.

In June my husband claimed he had found me the perfect birthday present.  No, it wasn't what I asked for (he said) but it was exactly what I wanted.  He was sure of it.  Then, he presented it with all of the pride of a little boy showing something he'd made in Scouts.  It was a wooden rocking chair,  narrow, unpainted and splintery, just like the ones on the old front porch.

So how do you tell a husband you hate his present?  How do you point out the differences between your dream chair and what he found for you?  I've got to tell you, I couldn't.  Instead, I coated it with spray paint, stuck it on the front porch and mentally declared I'd never sit in it.

Then Hurricane Ivan hit.  

You may not believe it, but when a Grade 3 storm hits the coast, we feel it 280 miles north.  The wind and rain took out the power and the only place to wait out the storm with enough light was on the porch.  I sank my rear end into the depths of an Adirondack chair and stared at the world now over my knees. Hubby sat down in the chair he gave me and began to rock. For hours I tried to converse with a spouse whose head was three feet above mine. I was miserable but he was obviously comfortable. And, because he was wearing blue jeans, he seemed immune to splinters.  Was I wrong about the old porch rocker?

Ready for another 10 years of weather

Of course I was, on so many levels.  Not only was I ungrateful brat when my husband was trying to please me, I was ignoring the heritage on both sides of our marriage.  Both of our families grubbed a life from the land, his in Alabama and mine in Oklahoma and neither one had money for polished, front-porch rockers. When the long days were finished and they needed a breeze, our grandparents rested in rough wooden porch rockers like this, at least until they got air-conditioning. They hoped we'd find an easier life and we have, but at base, we are still country people and my husband's chair was the perfect choice for the porch. It's a part of our lives.

My birthday rocker still graces the front porch and today he got a fresh coat of paint. Nothing too fancy because he is what he is, a chair designed to withstand rough weather.  He's actually quite comfortable and sturdier than he looks.  And now that I've lost some weight, it turns out he's not  narrow at all.  In the decades he's spent with us he's held cats, friends, guests, tools and groceries and I expect he'll hold us for the rest of our days.  It turns out, I didn't need to get the porch rocker I valued.  I just needed to grow up enough to value the porch rocker I have.

A Thoroughly, Old-Fashioned, Kid's Book

Now that Halloween and it's cornucopia of scary stories is past, it's time to look at the final part of the year, when the shadows lengthen early and the evenings run cold.  These are the evenings when it's good to snuggle up with a few, warm comforts as we step into the long nights of the year.  So, pick up a warm drink, a good companion and a nice, old-fashioned kid's book, like The Railway Children.

It makes sense that the Industrial Age created "the Cult of the Child" and Children's Literature. Before then time, working and middle-class kids went with their parents to the fields and shops and started helping as soon as they could stand.  Children weren't read aloud to at night because many of their Georgian-era parents lacked the energy, or ability to read at the end of the day and they had no money for books.  Then came the era of machines and their descendants started working indoors. The money was better but these Victorian parents were often absent from their children's lives and they missed the little ones they labored for.  It's no surprise Victorian children were read aloud to in the evenings and that their stories often dealt with children learning to function without their parents.  Enter Peter, Roberta (Bobbie) and Phyllis: the Railway Children.

As the famous first line says, they weren't railway children to begin with.  At first they were just a brother and two sisters, tolerably decent as children but not the examples of perfection the Victorian age wanted.  They squabbled at times, their morals weren't perfect and they were used to a standard of comfort.  Then, their father is taken away and everything changes.  The servants are dismissed, the house and fine furniture are sold and Mama says they have to "play at being poor" in the country.  Mama changes from their supervisor and playmate to a woman who stays shut up for hours, writing stories to keep up with the bills.  And the children, left to themselves, become fascinated by the trains that run through the valley below their ramshackle house in the country.  The adventures trainwatching leads them to paved the way for Jane and Michael Banks, the Pevensie children and other heroes of British kid-lit.

The story must have had a ring of familiarity to it for its author, Edith Nesbit. As a child, she lost her father as a child and endured several family moves.  Later, she became one of the era's few working moms, writing fiction to support her own brood of children and her unsuccessful, philandering husband.  Chained to her desk by necessity, it would have been easy to Edith to remember the free if lonely days of her own childhood or imagine what her own unsupervised kids were getting into.

It's what my grandmother would have called, "a thoroughly English book" and I suspect The Railway Children was one of the stories she grew up with.  There's an editorializing narration, plenty of strange and wonderful coincidences and (I'm sorry to say) characters painfully distrustful of anyone not English.  Still, Peter, Bobbie and Phyllis carry the philosophy that everyone deserves kindness (at least until proven otherwise) and, as the heroes, their beliefs carry the day.  It's a lovely belief to hold onto at night or share with children, even if it is thoroughly old-fashioned.