1931 - The Cat Who Went to Heaven

A couple notes: The Cat Who Went to Heaven is short. I've read things that called themselves short stories that are longer than this. It was kind of a nice change.

Also, the first eight Newberys were written by men, and Hitty was the first by a woman. But then this and the following eight are also written by women. Weird patterns.

Like I said, this story was short - it took me well under an hour to read - but I thought it was very satisfying. It's essentially a frame story to tell the life of Buddha, about a poor painter, his housekeeper, and a cat. The painter gets a contract to paint Buddha and all the animals who came to pay their respects at his death. The cat was the one animal who didn't listen to Buddha's teaching, which disappoints the cat in the story. Also, there are poems interspersed throughout the book from the point of view of the housekeeper.

Short and simple. I don't really have a lot of comments about the book. If I believed the story at all, I might become a Buddhist; he's portrayed as incredibly wise and kind, in all of his lives. And I kind of want the cat in the story - she's written almost like another human character.

Waterless Mountain is next, another book exploring the religion of another culture.

1930 - Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

In my ranking of the books of the '20s, I mentioned that I didn't hate any of the books I've read so far. I think I might hate Hitty.

It's billed as an adventure book, and the doll narrator definitely sees much of the United States and even other parts of the world. But unlike a book like The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, her adventures are always against her will. In Dolittle, the main characters can't wait to take off for a strange island off of South America, meet new cultures and see new things. In Hitty, she's never happier than when she's in the possession of a quiet little girl.

Add to this some casual racism. She's stolen by some "savages", whose language is described as being just grunting, and who of course revere her as a god (those dumb heathens!). She is later found by a black family, whose dialogue is transcribed in dialect, with every dropped consonant - even those that proper English speakers would drop - marked off with an apostrophe. She's even pleased when she finds out that she's not being kept by an Irish family.

Granted, this sort of racism also shows up in Dolittle. But even with the natives of the island being portrayed as uncivilized, none of the main characters are ever repulsed by them, like Hitty is of Indian people. Bumpo is unintentionally the butt of some jokes when he uses big words incorrectly, but he also is a valuable member of the crew. There's the built-in racism of the times, but the characters seem to transcend it.

This story is essentially Hitty being passed from white girl to white girl, with her being terrified in between. No thanks.

Summary - The '20s

It's not a complete decade, but I figure 1929 is a good time to look back at what I've read so far. If I had to rank the books, I'd go:

1. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
2. The Trumpeter of Krakow
3. Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
4. The Dark Frigate
5. The Story of Mankind
6. Smoky the Cowhorse
7. Tales from Silver Lands
8. Shen of the Sea

Each book has its own writeup, with why I like or don't like the book.

After Dr. Dolittle and The Dark Frigate, I expected the language to sound really dated in all of the other books, but it was apparently due to the fact that both were period pieces. Granted, there are noticeable differences to modern books, but it wasn't distracting. (Except Smoky, which was written in a cowboy dialect.)

Out of all the books, I'd most like to re-read Gay-Neck; I feel like the themes of the book didn't become apparent until over halfway through the story, and a second pass might be even better than the first.

And it's funny that both folktale books took bottom spots at the list. I didn't hate them - I don't hate many books I read - but they just weren't very compelling. Shen of the Sea, especially, was a chore to get through. I like a solid, continuous narrative.

Well, on to Hitty, and the 1930s.

1929 - The Trumpeter of Krakow

In the introductory post of this blog, I said I had read "somewhere around 35" of the Newberys. Trumpeter of Krakow was one of those books that made that number a rough estimate; it sounded familiar, but I wasn't sure. It would have been at least a decade since I had read it last, so my memory's a little fuzzy. Now that I've read it, though, I'm almost positive I have read it before - the preface, where the author tells of a Krakow trumpeter from 1241, seems way too familiar.

With that aside, I liked this one. It's the most "can't-put-this-down" book since Dr. Dolittle. The myth books are collections of short stories, which tend to kill momentum, and Smoky and Gay-Neck had an episodic feel to them, as well. Trumpeter of Krakow has book-long storylines, with evil characters and unanswered questions. In short, it was a fun book.

The book is about a family smuggling a rare crystal out of the Ukraine, who try to present it to the King of Poland. They're followed by thieves to Warsaw, and go into hiding in the area around the city's university. It's medieval Poland, so there's an alchemist upstairs (who's being taken control of by a student). There's a minor romance that doesn't really develop between the son of the family and the daughter of the alchemist. There's a well-respected teacher who gets the father a job as trumpeter. And of course, the thieves manage to locate the family again.

My only criticism is that Eric P. Kelly sometimes dips into being a history teacher. Descriptions of medieval Krakow go overlong, and instead of being scene-setters, they can be a little boring. But this is a minor complaint for me.