Deborah and Mary Grace discuss Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery’s beloved tale of a strong-willed and imaginative orphan who goes to live with a pair of middle-aged siblings on Prince Edward Island.
“The Lady of Shallot” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Mary Grace misquotes the poem, saying “The mirror crack’d from side to side/the DOOM has come upon me, cried/The Lady of Shallot,” instead of “the CURSE has come upon me,” repeating a misquotation by a character in Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d.
Mary Grace mentions the attractive Word Cloud Classics edition of Anne of Green Gables, which she read in 2018. Alas, the print was too small this time around, so she read it on her Kindle.
You can see the original illustrations by William and Mary Claus, which neither Deborah nor Mary Grace are a fan of, in this scanned copy on HathiTrust.
Mary Grace introduces Deborah to John Verney’s 1961 novel February’s Road. It’s the second volume in a series about the large and eccentric Callendar family. In this book, 13-year-old February Callendar unearths skullduggery involving plans to build a road through her family’s property.
Other books by John Verney mentioned on the episode:
Samson’s Hoard(1973), also narrated by Berry. This book doesn’t seem to have been published in the United States and Mary Grace didn’t read as a child.
Going to the Wars(1955), Verney’s well-regarded memoir about his experiences in World War II.
Mary Grace mentions The Arm of the Starfish(1965) by Madeleine L’Engle, which, like the Callendar family books, involves young people involved in international intrigue.
Mary Grace and Deborah talk about the word “zany,” used on the covers of our old copies of both February’s Road and (less accurately) Harriet the Spy, which we discussed on a previous episode.
You can check out Verney’s illustrations in an electronic copy of February’s Road on HathiTrust (it’s unclear why, since it’s still under copyright). The link goes to an illustration where February’s father is throwing the mail up in the air in disgust.
A post about February’s Road on the blog Clothes in Books, which includes a comment by Verney’s son Sebastian saying that the character Mike Spillergun’s name was a reference to the comedian Spike Milligan. (This post includes one of Mary Grace’s favorite passages, where February and her frenemy Helen are giving each other the once-over at a party.)
Several commentators have noted the similarity between Verney’s illustrations and those of Edward Ardizzone, a well-known British illustrations. The striking similarity can be seen in a self-portrait by Ardizzone.
Other art of Verney’s, along with a photograph of his family, can be found here.
Mary Grace mentions an obituary in The Independent that says that Verney could have been a significant artist if not for his experiences in World War II.
As Mary Grace mentions, Verney devoted much of his later life to work on historic preservation with the Farnham Trust. There is a post on the Farnham Trust’s website about a centenary lunch in honor of Verney. It includes a photograph of Verney’s wife, children, and grandchildren.
The writer Jojo Moyes said in a 2011 Daily Mail interview that Friday’s Tunnel was the book that first gave her the reading bug.
Mary Grace says that, after reading the Callendar family books as a child, she went on to be a fan of Margaret Drabble’s early novels. Her favorite was The Millstone, published in 1965.
Deborah mentions Ballet Shoes, the subject of a previous episode, as one of her favorite British books when she was a child.
Mary Grace recalls how much she enjoyed the British words and expressions in Verney’s books as a child and bemoans the practice of adapting British books, including the Harry Potter books, for an American audience. This website provides a list of words and phrases that were changed in the Harry Potter books—“sweets” to “candy,” etc.
Deborah recommends the Madeleine L’Engle books to fans of February’s Road, since they take place in a similar time period and involve government secrets.She and Mary Grace discussed L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time on a previous episode.
Mary Grace says that fans of February’s Road may enjoy Nancy Mitford’s novels The Pursuit of Loveand Love in a Climatewhen they are older, since both are about large, eccentric upper-class British families.
On this episode, Deborah and Mary Grace reread Stuart Little, E.B. White’s 1945 classic about the adventures of a New York boy who looks exactly like a mouse. They discuss their early memories of reading Stuart Little (or having it read to them), Garth Williams’ wonderful illustrations, and pioneering children’s librarian Annie Carroll Moore’s vehement opposition to the book.
The Rabbits’ Wedding, the children’s book by Stuart Little editor Garth Williams that was banned from Alabama libraries because a black and a white rabbit get married
On this episode, Mary Grace and Deborah discuss The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster’s 1961 classic about Milo, a boy who’s bored with life until a mysterious tollbooth takes him and his electric car to The Lands Beyond, where he meets the warring kings of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and many other memorable characters. Jules Feiffer’s numerous illustrations are as important a part of the story as the text.
This is the last episode of the season. We’ll be back in May.
(You can listen to this episode here. Please note that it is not suitable for children due to discussion of violent incidents that take place in the book.)
On this episode, Mary Grace and Deborah discuss The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s 1967 Newbery Honor Book about a group of children in a California university town who create an elaborate game based on ancient Egypt.
On this episode, Deborah and Mary Grace discuss Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint, published in 1956. In the first book of the popular series, Danny discovers a secret rocket project and, oops, accidentally launches the rocket into space.
As Deborah mentions, Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint was illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats, who wrote and illustrated the Caldecott Award-winning picture book The Snowy Day.
For fans of Danny Dunn, Mary Grace recommends the Henry Reed series. We discussed Henry Reed, Inc., the first book in the series, on our third episode. Deborah recommends the Encyclopedia Brown books. The first book in the series, Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective, was discussed on our eighth episode.
Mary Grace and Deborah ring in 2024 with a special episode where they count down their five favorite books from 50 years ago, defined as published between 1972 and 1974. They (mostly) didn’t reread these books for the episode, so their choices are based on their childhood memories.
As Mary Grace mentions, the format was inspired by the Book Riot podcast, which has done a number of similar countdowns, including a fun episode on the top bookish phenomena of the past 25 years.
Here are Deborah’s and Mary Grace’s favorites–but we suggest that you listen to the episode before looking at the list!
Hi, Mary Grace here! Rereading Our Childhoodis taking a break this week and will be back in January with a special episode. In the meantime, we’re looking back on some high points and not-so-high points of the year—or, rather, the half year, since we started in May—and counting down our top 10 episodes.
High Points
Revisiting our childhood favorites. Some of our rereads, like Harriet the Spy, lived up to our childhood memories. Others, like Pippi Longstocking, not so much. All of them, though, gave us a lot to think and talk about.
Learning about children’s writers. It’s been fascinating to learn about the lives of the writers of the books we’ve revisited. Who knew that a satirical article by Pippi Longstocking author Astrid Lindgren is credited with contributing to the defeat of the political party that had been in power in Sweden for 40 years? Or that Mary Rodgers, who wrote Freaky Friday, was in love with Stephen Sondheim and came fairly close to marrying him? Well, a lot of people, probably, but we didn’t.
Connecting with each other. Deborah and I live in different parts of the world for most of the year—she’s in Washington, D.C., and I’m in Cape Town—and it’s been fun to have a project that keeps us connected when we’re thousands of miles apart.
Connecting with other children’s book lovers. One of the best things about doing the podcast has been hearing from people on Facebook, Twitter, and BlueSky*—both friends and people we’ve never met—who loved the same books as children that we did.
Not-So-High Points
Technology. The learning curve on starting a podcast turned out to be steeper than I expected—way harder, for example, than starting a blog, which Deborah and I have both also done. As the vastly underqualified technical half of the team, I had to learn all about microphones, podcast platforms, recording software, etc.…and then figure out how to make it all work. I won’t bore you with the details, but there were definitely some bumps along the way. It’s gotten much smoother over time, though, and our editor, Adam Linder at Bespoken Podcasting, has been a lifesaver.
Harmful, outdated ideas. It wasn’t a surprise to find racism, sexism, colonialism, and other outdated ideas in books from half a century ago, but it hasn’t been pleasant to see so much of this type of content in the books that we loved as children. As you’d expect, there was more in older books, like the stereotypical depiction of Native Americans in Carol Ryrie Brink’s 1935 Caddie Woodlawn, than in more recent books like Mary Rodgers’ Freaky Friday(1971), which has a character saying racist things that the author portrays negatively but that, even so, wouldn’t make it into a book today.
Lack of diversity. Almost all of the characters in the books we read were white (one exception was E.L. Konigsburg’s Jennifer in Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, who is African American), as were all of the authors. This situation has changed for the better since the 1970s, although authors and characters of color are still underrepresented.
Book banning. We first dealt with this issue on our first episode, about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. Blume had five books, including this one, on the American Library Association’s list of the top 100 most challenged books of the 1990s. For Banned Book Week in October, we discussed Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 science fiction classic A Wrinkle in Time, which was also on the list. And, unlike with stereotyping and lack of representation, this situation has gotten worse in recent years. A few unsuccessful attempts to get a book removed from a school library could get it onto the 1990s list. Today, large numbers of books are being removed following challenges, sometimes from just a single parent, or new legislation. Fortunately, opponents of book banning have had some recent successes as well.**
The Top 10
On a cheerier note, here are our 10 most downloaded episodes of the year:
We discussed Astrid Lindgren’s 1945 book about a young girl who lives on her own and causes havoc wherever she goes on our most recent episode. It was one of our weirder rereads—we were taken aback, for example, when Pippi shot off a gun—but I had recently visited Sweden and was fascinated to learn about Lindgren’s prominence there (she’s even on the money).
Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 classic A Wrinkle in Time is about…well, it’s hard to describe what it’s about. A troubled girl. A missing father. A genius brother. Three mysterious women. Interplanetary adventure. An evil, throbbing brain. None of this does justice to a book that, as science fiction-hating girls, we ended up loving, and, as grown-ups, we had a wonderful time returning to.
Keith Robertson’s 1958 novel about a boy who starts a research business while spending the summer with his aunt and uncle in a small town near Princeton, New Jersey, was a favorite of both of ours as children and a fun reread. This is the first in a five-book series about the adventures of Henry and his friend Midge.
Oops! I made a mockery of the show title by picking a book that it turns out I probably didn’t read as a child. What I actually did read (and Deborah did too) was one of its sequels, The RIVER at Green Knowe. Nevertheless, we had a great time discussing the first book in the series, which is about a boy named Tolly who goes to live with his great-grandmother in a mansion haunted by seventeenth-century children. It was well written but kind of plotless. As we know from having been in a book group together for decades, though, not-so-good books often make for the best discussions, and that was the case this time.
Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 classic tells the story of a trio of adopted sisters, Pauline, Petrova, and Posy, who attend a school for professional children in the performing arts in London. It’s light on plot and heavy on details about being a child performer, but the details were so interesting that we didn’t mind. Ballet Shoes is the first in what became a series about children working in the theater, the circus, etc.
E.L. Konigsburg’s first novel, the story of two friends who study witchcraft, was one of the few novels of the 1960s to feature an African-American character. It was a Newbery Honor Book the same year that Konigsburg’s second novel, From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, won the Newbery Medal. Konigsburg is a favorite of both of ours, and we had fun returning to her debut.
Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 classic about a troubled 11-year-old would-be writer and her interactions with her nanny, her classmates, and her parents is wonderfully written and psychologically complex. Of all of our rereads, this one holds up best as a work of literature.
Published in 1963, this is the first of Donald J. Sobol’s 29-book series featuring Encyclopedia, the boy detective who always gets his man (or boy, or girl). On this episode, Deborah and I matched wits with Encyclopedia—and with each other—in identifying the culprits.
Alan Garner’s Carnegie Medal-winning 1967 novel The Owl Service tells the story of three teenagers who find themselves reliving a Welsh legend of love and betrayal that plays out over the generations. I remembered being haunted by this book as a child (Deborah hadn’t read it), and I chose it thinking, “No one’s going to listen to this episode, but I really want to talk about this book.” Its popularity was a mystery until I discovered that someone had posted a link on an Alan Garner Facebook fan site.
For our first episode, we revisited Blume’s classic 1970 story of an adolescent girl who is preoccupied with periods, bras, friendship, and religion. It remains by far our most popular episode, probably thanks to the movie. Blume herself is awesome (she owns a Florida bookshop! She’s an activist against book banning!), but I don’t, and didn’t as a child, find Margaret’s enthusiasm about adolescent rites of passage very relatable.
Happy holidays, everyone, and thanks so much to all of you for being part of our rereading adventures!
On this episode, Mary Grace and Deborah discuss Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren’s 1945 classic (published in English in 1950) about an anarchic Swedish girl. They discuss their love for the book as children, their mixed feelings on rereading it, and Pippi as a feminist icon. Mary Grace, who spent a month in Sweden earlier this year, talks about Lindgren’s legendary status in Sweden, where she’s literally on the money.
Mary Grace couldn’t find the interview with Lindgren’s daughter Karin, who one night when she was ill asked her mother to tell her a story about Pippi Longstocking, but Karin discussed it in this 2016 Guardian article.
In this episode, Mary Grace and Deborah discuss Edward Eager’s Half Magic, the first of Eager’s seven books of magical adventures. Four bored siblings living in a Midwestern city in the 1920s find a magic amulet…except it only grants half of what you wish for. We talk about what has and hasn’t held up in the seven decades since Half Magic was published, about Eager’s life, and about the obscure jokes Eager threw in to entertain himself.
The Half Magic children go to see Sandra, a 1924 silent movie (now lost) starring Barbara La Marr. As Mary Grace discusses on the podcast, this movie is not at all appropriate for children. Here’s a still, and you can read the review from Moving Picture World, which didn’t like the move any more than the children did, here.
Barbara La Marr and Bert Lytell in “Sandra”
As Mary Grace mentions, Edward Eager had a career in show business as well as being a children’s writer. You can listen to this YouTube recording of Peggy Lee singing “Good-Bye, John,” lyrics by Eager, and decide whether you agree with her that he was more talented as a writer than as a lyricist.
The original cover of Half Magic appears at the top of the post. Mary Grace and Debby were a bit alarmed by the illustration chosen for the current paperback edition (not by original illustrator N.M. Bodecker), which features two knights who have been chopped into pieces. (Don’t worry, they don’t remain in this state for long.)
Here are links to other books Debby and Mary Grace recommend for fans of Half Magic.
Rereading Our Childhood 