Yes, I've been reading children's lit again. Well, I know why kids don't read Kidnapped anymore. Great story but the language is impenetrable. All the Scottish dialect is exhausting to read. With dialect you can't read it in a normal way, you have to manufacture a little "reading aloud" voice inside your head and sound it out loud. But with this I sat on the beach whispering out "Ah, but I'll begowk ye there! cried the gentleman" in my best Scottish burr....and still had no idea what it meant.
From kidnapping children to runaway children....on a recent drive Olivia and I listened to the audio version of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler which I adored when I was young. Claudia and her younger brother run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum for a couple of weeks and solve a mystery of an unattributed statue. When I was young I loved the book and Olivia loved it too the other day. But this time I had a different reaction, while Claudia and her brother were taking baths in the fountain and sleeping in the antique beds I was sick to my stomach thinking of their parents worried to death about them. This had never occurred to me when I was young, all the adventure had gone out of it for me. Just the horror left!
Someone on the Nancy Pearl book podcast, which I am fond of, mentioned Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotsen as being a book she often re-read, Nancy Pearl raved about it too (she raves about most books actually, she just loves them all in their own little way). Anyway it seemed to be out of print and classified as a Young Adult novel by the library system. I duly ordered it and duly received my gravy stained copy from the library. Not sure what the young adults are up to these days but perhaps the story of a turn of the century Viennese dressmaker who is quite happily a mistress to some sort of Field Marshall will inspire them. It is actually a cozy little book and quite innocuous.
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