Perfect Little Protagonists - Introduction

It’s almost always the case that the protagonist of a story is a “good guy.” That’s why the word “protagonist” is often used interchangeably with “hero.” Strictly speaking, though, a protagonist can be a “bad” person, as long as the reader still roots for him or her. Crime and Punishment features a murderer as its protagonist, yet Raskolnikov is more sympathetic as a murderer than the dogged and manipulative Petrovich who is the policeman investigating the crime.

Subversion and inversion of this concept of “protagonist = good” may be more common in novels aimed at an adult audience. But for children, this concept is sometimes taken to the extreme: the protagonists are perfect to the point of being annoying. This is especially true for older juvenile fiction (pre-1960s), where the “moral of the story” is so heavy-handed that the story itself is sometimes unreadable. 

Feudin’ in Floridy: Lois Lenski’s "Strawberry Girl"

When I was about ten my family moved into a duplex with my grandma. One of its best features was that it had a big backyard. One of the downsides to this feature was that the yard was not fenced in, and therefore was combined with half a dozen other backyards to form a sort of vast green space.

Due to some logistical issues my family ended up living in my grandma’s basement for about seven months while we waited for the previous occupants to vacate our side of the house. Perhaps because of the cramped quarters, or perhaps because there was nowhere to store it, my Dad set up our swing-set before we were even properly moved in.

The other neighbor kids had started to think that we had built the “playground” for them. They would come and use it all the time without asking. Some lady even brought her grandkids to push on the swings. Not that we begrudged them using it (being new in the neighborhood, I was desperate for new friends and was all too willing to share my swingset with them), but my parents became concerned that someone was going to get hurt—fall off the swing, for instance—and then because it was on our property we’d be sued.

So, a fence went up. Actually, the main reason for the fence was because we had dogs who were used to being left outside in the summer. But the neighbors did not take it well, feeling that we were “hogging the playground” to ourselves!

All of this reminded me of a book I had read not too long before the move: Strawberry Girl. This novel by Lois Lenski was fairly well-known when I was a girl, but recently I decided to reread it to see what my younger self found so appealing.

When in Doubt, Try JFIC

It’s been somewhat of a dry spell in my reading life lately. (Granted, my “reading life” is rather redundant, as reading is inextricable from my “regular” life.) I fell seven books behind in my Goodreads Annual Challenge. SEVEN! Unheard of! Perish the thought!

Not helping was the fact that I accidentally left Henry VIII as the last of the Shakespeare plays for me to read--and it was SO boring! This would have struck me as impossible, considering the rather colorful life of Henry VIII, except I remembered that Shakespeare was writing during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I…and therefore probably cut out the juicy drama in order to preserve her patronage and his head. I will say that it was somewhat amusing, Shakespeare trying to please everyone by making all the characters (Queen Katherine, King Henry, Anne Boleyn AKA “Bullen”) over-the-top noble and innocent rather than crafty and power-hungry politicians. And the end of the play is basically “Hey look Elizabeth I has been born and is now blessed with awesomeness forevermore!”

That said, I was glad to have finished off that most recent, and ultimately disappointing, stack of books next to my bed, and so excited to pull some other books off the shelf that showed more promise.

Along with Manxmouse that my mom read aloud to me, there have been a few books from my childhood I’ve been thinking about recently. These were books I read just as I began to read independently, and I remember reading them over and over…except I couldn’t remember the name of one of them. I knew it had a little girl in it who was excited about going to school…it was set in “olden times” (viz., 1900 or older).

With a little more digging in my memory (“I think the cover was green…), and with an open search browser, I was able to hunt down the title of the book: Schoolhouse in the Woods by Rebecca Caudill.  

Those Magnificent Women and Their Flying Machines: A Review of "Sky Girls"

Writing history is difficult. All events and people tie to other events and people, so the historian/author needs to decide where to “cut off” in order to focus their writing into some semblance of a narrative. There’s a fine line between including so much extraneous information that it confuses the reader and makes them lose track of the book’s central topic, and not including enough details and causing the reader to feel ignorant for not being able to read between the lines.

In theory, Gene Nora Jessen’s book Sky Girls: The True Story of the First Women’s Cross-Country Air Race is the sort of nonfiction, historical book I look forward to reading. There’s something about the era about the Roaring Twenties that inherently ignites the imagination, as technology was just entering modernity, yet very little had been done with it. Everything was open to “firsts.”