December Meme: Beloved childhood book
What a great prompt from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
boxofdelights: "Tell me about a book that you loved when you were a child, that you would still recommend today."
This was in many ways a tough choice, because I read a lot as a kid, and a lot of my reading material was formative for me in some way! I ended up including both my choice and a runner-up.
Runner-up: Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. I ploughed through a very large pile of "survival fiction" during a certain point in my childhood, and this was one of my favourites. Julie's courage and intelligence were such a great match for little me, who was wild about wilderness and loved camping and animals and wanted to know how everything worked. I was the kid who could name all of the plants in my neighbourhood and tell you if they were edible or poisonous or useful in some other way; I knew how to get water from cacti, which animals to watch when foraging, and all that sort of thing. On camping trips I'd work hanks of tree moss into mats to put outside the tent for catching mud, and get my dad to explain constellations and how to tell direction from natural cues. With the perspective of more than a decade, I can also surmise that this book resonated with some of my weird gender issues/asexual tendencies. Julie's near-rape by her arranged husband was probably one of my first encounters with the fact that puberty/getting married wasn't some kind of happily-ever-after affair, which turned out to be very much my opinion on such matters, in the long run.
Not quite a runner-up, but close, is another of George's novels: My Side of the Mountain. I wanted to have a falcon and live in a treehouse in the Catskills, even though I didn't know where the Catskills were (or whether to pronounce them Cat-skills or Cats-kills)!
The Winner: The Fledgling by Jane Langton. Way before I'd ever heard of fantasy novels, much less read one, I read a novel about a girl who learned to fly and befriended a majestic Canada goose and was mistaken for a faery changeling by her neighbours. There's something magical in the most ineffable sense about this book; it so neatly blends childhood imagination and the challenges of growing up as the balance of gains and losses that it feels like while you're living it. The protagonist is aware of how her age factors into the magic of what she experiences, and is delighted and saddened with the various results, though the ending is hopeful. Read this book, guys, if you were ever a kid who wanted to fly, or who suspected there was far more going on than adults knew about, or who wanted to have a magical secret all your own!
To this day I still regard Canada geese with fondness, primarily because of The Fledgling.
boxofdelights: "Tell me about a book that you loved when you were a child, that you would still recommend today."This was in many ways a tough choice, because I read a lot as a kid, and a lot of my reading material was formative for me in some way! I ended up including both my choice and a runner-up.
Runner-up: Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. I ploughed through a very large pile of "survival fiction" during a certain point in my childhood, and this was one of my favourites. Julie's courage and intelligence were such a great match for little me, who was wild about wilderness and loved camping and animals and wanted to know how everything worked. I was the kid who could name all of the plants in my neighbourhood and tell you if they were edible or poisonous or useful in some other way; I knew how to get water from cacti, which animals to watch when foraging, and all that sort of thing. On camping trips I'd work hanks of tree moss into mats to put outside the tent for catching mud, and get my dad to explain constellations and how to tell direction from natural cues. With the perspective of more than a decade, I can also surmise that this book resonated with some of my weird gender issues/asexual tendencies. Julie's near-rape by her arranged husband was probably one of my first encounters with the fact that puberty/getting married wasn't some kind of happily-ever-after affair, which turned out to be very much my opinion on such matters, in the long run.
Not quite a runner-up, but close, is another of George's novels: My Side of the Mountain. I wanted to have a falcon and live in a treehouse in the Catskills, even though I didn't know where the Catskills were (or whether to pronounce them Cat-skills or Cats-kills)!
The Winner: The Fledgling by Jane Langton. Way before I'd ever heard of fantasy novels, much less read one, I read a novel about a girl who learned to fly and befriended a majestic Canada goose and was mistaken for a faery changeling by her neighbours. There's something magical in the most ineffable sense about this book; it so neatly blends childhood imagination and the challenges of growing up as the balance of gains and losses that it feels like while you're living it. The protagonist is aware of how her age factors into the magic of what she experiences, and is delighted and saddened with the various results, though the ending is hopeful. Read this book, guys, if you were ever a kid who wanted to fly, or who suspected there was far more going on than adults knew about, or who wanted to have a magical secret all your own!
To this day I still regard Canada geese with fondness, primarily because of The Fledgling.