Tag: middle grade

Tordyveln flyger i skymningen

I once heard someone describe the experience of relocating to another country as “having a childhood that is now totally irrelevant.” The flip side of that coin is that you’re constantly playing catch-up with the childhood that most of the people around you share. Maria Gripe was part of that cultural catch-up for me. I’d never heard of her before I moved here, but weirdly enough no one mentioned her either. I only added her to my TBR list after a profile of her in a past issue of Historiskan, and when I brought home Tordyveln flyger i skymningen (“The Dor Beetle Flies at Dusk”) my partner was pleasantly surprised.

“I loved that one as a kid!”

Not enough to mention it to me, I guess?

Other books by Maria Gripe have come out in English but, as far as I can tell, this one hasn’t. Neither has the radio drama, and the new miniseries from SVT only has Swedish subtitles. Once again, I’m writing a book report in English about a book that’s not available to English readers.

One summer, three children in a fictional Småland village—siblings Annika and Jonas, and their friend David—discover a hidden cache of letters at the abandoned Selanderska house. With that a two-hundred-year-old history is uncovered that includes ancient Egyptian statues, curses, Carl Linneaus, unhappy love affairs, and psychic plants. There are discoveries and disappointments along the way, but in the end they come to a quiet but satisfying conclusion.

All of that would have been my jam as a tween, so it was a fantastic bit of escapism for me, a throwback to favorites like The Dark is Rising and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The only hiccup for me was the writing style: Gripe favors short, slightly choppy sentences with a profusion of exclamation marks, to the point where Child Me might have felt a bit condescended to. I felt the same way about books for children that didn’t use contractions, for example.

On a more positive note, much of the story is advanced through conversations and dialogue, and while that can get tiresome when poorly handled, in this instance it works. Tordyveln was originally conceived as a radio drama, after all, so that structure makes perfect sense. As an adult, and reading in a foreign language, I was also particularly interested in seeing how Swedish has changed over time. This wasn’t limited to specific words or slang, which of course cropped up—norms of etiquette were also different. Our protagonists soon enlist the help of the village priest*, and they always refer to him in the third person when speaking directly to him (“Vill farbror ha….?”). I don’t think that would be the case today, and I was a bit surprised to see it in something as recent as this.

And even if the language sometimes felt a bit oversimplified to me, an adult reading this middle grade fantasy novel, Gripe (and her co-creator, Kay Pollak) didn’t shy away from asking their readers to reflect on some pretty heady material. The book opens right away with a meditation on coincidences and chance and destiny; then, as more about Emilie and Andreas’s love story unfolds, Annika and David dig into surprisingly nuanced thoughts about feminism and gender roles in the 1700s. In a summary like this, I realize that sounds like it would come off as a bit precocious and moralizing, but in the story their commentary sounds like any conversation I could have had with a friend when I was sixteen. These are not the insufferable teenagers of a John Green novel.

Cute, cozy, but not at all cloying. A nice bit of new nostalgia for me.

Postscript: I pressganged my sambo into watching the new SVT miniseries with me. Later we found a statement from Gripe about how she was worried that a TV adaptation would strip the story of all of its more thoughtful, philosophical elements. Turns out she was right. I’ll close with a quote  from Pastor Lindroth near the end of the book that will sit in my head for a long time:

Och när jag nu tänker närmare på saken här, så tycker jag nog att ingen kan ta på sitt ansvar att döma sin egen tid. Det kallar jag högmod…Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

*Maybe pastor? I’m not sure which is the right title for clergy in the Swedish church.

The Josie Gambit

Back in the summer, forces beyond my understanding compelled me to look up The Josie Gambit, a book I read in fourth grade or so. I remembered it as unsettling, with an ending that I didn’t quite get but nonetheless felt a bit grim. Maybe it was the ending that made the book stick in my head better than a lot of things I was reading at that age, who knows. But I would think about it now and again over the years, wondering if I should read it again, and finally I got the idea to check on the Internet Archive.

A note from Future Katherine!

I first wrote this post sometime in July. Just a couple of weeks before I finally hit the “schedule” button, the Internet Archive suffered a massive DDOS attack and was offline for days to fix the issue. The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource, and will probably only become more important as we stumble into an era of deepfakes and unreality. Please consider donating to support their work!

Of course, the juvenile mystery/thriller of your childhood is much less unsettling when you read it again as an adult. And honestly the jury’s out on whether this post will ever see the light of day, because discussing middle grade nostalgia reads seems like filler content.

Another note from Future Katherine! The time for filler content has come.

Our protagonist is twelve-year-old Greg, who’s spending the school year with his grandmother out in Idaho while his single mom travels for work. He’s long been friendly with the neighbor family, the Nolans, whose patriarch taught him how to play chess. Now his friend Josie Nolan is having a rough patch with her friend Tory. Things get weird and dramatic, Greg joins the school chess club, and he finally cracks the case of why Tory is acting so weird.

Reading The Josie Gambit now as an adult in 2024, it is immensely Of The 80s. Single moms! Divorce! Scandal over implied drug use! I mean just look at that cover!

But what sets it apart is Mary Francis Shura’s pitch perfect narrative voice for Greg and also the seriousness with which the book takes chess. Greg’s thinking about chess and observations of chess games is what helps him figure out why Tory is acting the way she is, and the narration is peppered with the kind of insights into chess strategy that you would expect from a preteen who was pretty serious about the game. There’s even an appendix (still written from Greg’s perspective) to explain the basic rules and mechanics.

I get now why I thought it was unsettling, but as an adult it’s not really the stuff of nightmares. A fun read if you come across it somewhere!

En rackarunge

My hosts in Dalarna had a fantastic library of children’s literature spanning the interests of three generations. What a curious thing to see the Sweet Valley High paperbacks of my own childhood on the same shelf as authors like Ester Blenda Nordström!

Nordström’s series of children’s books, starting with En rackarunge, is purported to be an unacknowledged source of inspiration for Astrid Lindgren. The rackarunge in question—Ann-Mari—bears a resemblance to Pippi Longstocking in character as well as appearance, and predates the first Pippi book by some years. Admittedly, it’s hard to prove these things either way, so who’s to say for sure.

The Swedish half of the couple saw me paging through the book during my downtime and remarked on the differences between children’s literature now and then.

“I tried reading some of those older books to the kids when they were small, and it’s just a completely different experience. They’re so slow, nothing happens, there’s so much description. Books these days, there’s always something happening. It’s such a different energy.”

Indeed. En rackarunge is also more of a short story collection than a novel. Each chapter is a self-contained little adventure, although there are some recurring characters and situations throughout that (kind of) tie all of the adventures into one loose story. Not to mention it touches on pretty dark stuff for a children’s book of today: one of the red threads throughout the book is Ann-Mari’s friendship with a Josef, young man newly released from prison for murdering his physically and emotionally abusive uncle. He’s only scraping by at the margins of society when Ann-Mari first meets him, a total outcast from his hometown. Nordström’s reportage consistently highlighted the marginalized and the suffering, from her initial breakthrough as an undercover journalist investigating labor conditions for domestic help to her condemnation of the brutality of the bullfights she attended in Spain and her advocacy on behalf of destitute Finns starving near to death in a famine. Josef’s arc in the last third or so of the book is another culmination of Nordström’s concern for the downtrodden, and of course it’s Ann-Mari who decides to help him.

Why did Pippi become such a mainstay, while Ann-Mari vanished into obscurity?