Re-reading old favorite children's books provides an interesting opportunity to revisit childhood experiences and evaluate them from an older perspective. This can sometimes backfire; I may have loved something as a child, but as an adult, the allure is replaced by an underwhelming sense as all its flaws are now more evident. However, I would say the majority of the time it's pleasant to re-read books from Way Back When, especially when it turns out that these books are "Actually pretty good."
(Past-tense Me, being able to hear this approval from Present-tense Me, can't help but feel vindicated in her choice of literature when this happens.)
But I will be honest here: I re-read the books mentioned below, not solely because I hadn't read them in forever and for nostalgia purposes, but because after reading The Brothers Karamazov at the outset of the year I was way, way behind in my annual goal of reading 100 books. Since these books generally took me mere hours to consume, it was an efficient way to catch up.
The Hattie Collection seems to have been marketed as a Christian alternative to the American Girl books from Pleasant Company, right down to the titles:
- Meet Hattie
- Hattie’s Faraway Family
- Hattie’s Holidays
- Hattie’s Adventures
Besides the obvious difference that there are fewer books
(traditionally, most American Girl series had six) another difference is that these books
are apparently semi-autobiographical (a la Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little
House series).
This makes the contents of these books rather horrifying.
Because, no offense to the author Marie Frost, Hattie is a pretty unlikeable
person. She’s deceitful, vain, and foolish. Her adventures—mostly
misadventures—are used to illustrate fine lessons about humility, wisdom, thinking
before acting or speaking, and telling the truth. Unfortunately, by the next
chapter, Hattie seems to have forgotten what she learned just pages before.
Hattie, while being a protagonist, is not necessarily
presented as a heroine. Her deeds have consequences; she gets hurt, and so do
other people. And, happily, Frost does a good job of presenting Hattie as a
character you can laugh with and—when she’s been especially silly—sometimes
laugh at.
(P.S. In the first book, Hattie's best friend is kidnapped and stays
kidnapped through several chapters. If Frost is relating actual experiences,
that is something that went over my head when I originally read it, but now is
blood-chilling when I re-read it as an adult. Past-tense Me seems to have been much more desensitized to this sort of drama than Present-tense Me, as I didn't remember this being that big of a deal at all!)
The Grandma’s Attic Series by Arleta Richardson is written with a similar audience and intent in mind but manages to be much more lighthearted in its final execution. For those who have read Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn and its companion book Magical Melons, this series is for you!
Like the Hattie books, there are four installments to the Grandma’s Attic series.
- In Grandma’s Attic
- More Stories from Grandma’s Attic
- Still More Stories from Grandma’s Attic
- Treasures from Grandma
They’re not the most colorful of titles, to look at
them, but at least they're not copying American Girl. Neither are they exactly accurate descriptions of the books' content, either, as I don’t think most of the “story” items
are found in the attic anyway. There IS a Grandma, though...in most of them, anyway.
In this series, the narrator (I assume Richardson) relates a childhood memory of when she stayed with her grandma, and how every item, from buttons to quilts to old hoop-skirts, contained a story from Grandma’s childhood, almost all with a strong, but not overly-preachy, moral to them. The last book departs not only from the title pattern but also from the storytelling formula of the previous installments, instead, the narration switches to the third person and dispenses with the framing device of having Grandma tell her granddaughter a memory triggered by an item.
If the Hattie books prompted a "What was I thinking?" reaction, the Grandma's Attic re-read fell firmly into the category of "Hey, these are hilarious!" (On this both Past-tense and Present-tense Me agree. And I'm sure we'll both convince Future-tense Me when she finally shows up.)
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