Gennifer Choldenko, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog
Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits
Elizabeth Coatsworth, The Cat Who Went to Heaven
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Ghosts of Rathburn Park
Monday I had RDC pick me up from the library instead of at work. I borrowed the Coatsworth and Mukerji because they are Newbery Medalists (and also for that reason the as-yet unread Invincible Louisa), the Snyder for author-loyalty, and this Choldenko because it's about a dog (though a puny one) plus an unread other, a Newbery Honor. Yesterday I went to Park Hill Books, a used and new cooperative bookstore, and bought an armload of books: Amos Fortune, Free Man; Miracles on Maple Hill; and Tales from Silver Lands, all Newbery Medals that I haven't read and that I will be good about sending on their Way if I don't like them, Martin Amis's The Information, Robertson Davies's Salterton Trilogy and The Cunning Man, a present for Haitch and another for CLH, and, because I paid with cash and it was used, a pulp copy of Shelters of Stone, for completeness's sake only, to stash with its siblings in the cache.
This morning I brought my first copy of that last in all its hardcover enormity (I do love English's portmanteaux) and left it on the bookswap shelf in the breakroom. It was gone in less than two hours.
In order of my reading them, then:
I liked this recent Snyder more than most of her later books. I always will read her for love of The Egypt Game and grateful adoration of The Changeling, but that's my weird loyalty thing. I began to read her again, to pay attention to latter titles, after I noticed The Gypsy Game in the downtown branch. That book didn't work in the slightest, and not just because it involved Egypt's characters. This was a little better.
Coatsworth: her author photograph makes her look like Nisou's mother, which is a fine thing, and if I had looked at the photograph before I read it I might have, for that reason, liked it more. It was about a cat, so eh, who had no tail for reasons never explained (and it wasn't a Manx), double eh; the sepia pen-and-ink drawings of various animals were sweet, but then it had cat mortality. I don't need that.
Mukerji: Dull. About a pigeon, of all tedious animals, which I knew going in, but I like raptors, and pigeons' only purpose is to feed raptors. Which reminds me, are the red-tailed hawks back at MIT this spring? I'm counting it even though I only skimmed two thirds of it, because I am a cheat.
Cleary: Dear Beverly Cleary. I began to read Otis Spofford once but stopped when I realized it came after Ellen Tebbits. Ellen and Otis both fell out of my head until recently. I proselytized at Kal about Cleary's teen non-romances, The Luckiest Girl, Jeannie and Johnny, and Fifteen, and she at me about Ellen and Otis. Then on her inaugural visit to Park Hill Books, she bought this for me (and remembered it today). I went to that story yesterday specifically because she thought the Snyder book she saw there might have been Until the Celebration, which I would like to have (it was The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case).
Choldenko: The dog was a six-pounder whom only the protagonist, and not the other four humans of her family, liked (unlike in my family, in which the dogs were the only ones everyone else always liked); and the situation wasn't as harsh as in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" but the ballerina sisters reminded me of it; and instead of Jesse's music teacher in Bridge to Terabithia, Ant's is an art teacher; and instead of Claudia's Duffy, Ant has a Harrison: and I loved it. Blame it on my listening to David Gray's White Ladder this morning and getting all delicately emotey, but I cried.
It's guilt-inducing, because if I would just let go of resenting my mother, this sort of book wouldn't affect me so strongly. I--this is progress--recently made a conscious decision to stop feeling guilty for being happy: being happy now is not disloyalty to my past selves. Similarly, I often have resolved to stop resenting my mother, and though I've improved yet I haven't stopped. And I don't resent her: my emotions toward her are not so clear cut and unyielding as adolescent resentment. But if I were all the way well, this book wouldn't've hurt. Maybe ached, for the past, but not hurt.