Field, Rachel (1929). Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. New York: MacMillan.
#2 Summary
Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, written by Rachel Field and illustrated by Dorothy Lathrop, is the story of Hitty, a wooden doll, and her adventures through the world in the hands of her various owners. Hitty's story begins with her creation in Maine in the year 1830. Made of ashwood (a very strong and powerful wood) by a peddler, she first belongs to little Phoebe Preble. She has a wonderful life with Phoebe, until, traveling with the Prebles on a whaling expedition that goes terribly awry, she is cast into the ocean, and found soon after by Phoebe's brother, Andy. Sadly, she is taken by natives of the island on which they land, and treated as an idol. Miraculously, Andy saves her again just in time for them to escape the island, and she is once again safe. The Preble's travel takes them to India, however, where a drowsy Phoebe in the arms of her father, drops Hitty, were she is found by a snake charmer. From there, Hitty is owned by a missionary's daughter, a little Quaker girl, a rich girl, a farmer's daughter, an artist and two middle-aged sisters, who make a fine dress for her and display her at the New Orleans cotton exposition. There, she is stolen by river boatman's daughter, who throws Hitty into the river out of a sense of guilt. Two boys find her, and give her to their little sister, but their mother finds out that she is a stolen doll, and sends her back to New Orleans. Hitty remains for some time, unclaimed in her shipping box. Finally, after several more years, owners and experiences, Hitty makes it back to the old Preble house, in the hands of an old woman (not part of the Preble family). After the woman's death, Hitty is auctioned off, and a man buys her for an antique shop. Hitty writes her memoirs at this antique shop, and muses over what her next 100 years will bring.
#3 Reactions
I chose this book because I thought that a doll's journey through the generations would make a creative story. I can't say that I particularly enjoyed the book, however. After a time, the stories seemed to run together, and I found myself yearning for more character development of Hitty's various owners. For example, I wish I could have gotten to know more about the daughter of the riverboat captain, and what happened to her original owner, Phoebe. In other words, I thought the stories of Hitty's owners were more interesting than Hitty's. Still, thinking about myself as a little girl, I can see really enjoying this book. I used to always imagine that my own dolls could really understand me, and I think I really would have found this book a feast for my imagination. Also, I know that there is some controversy with Hitty because of the description of the natives and other stereotypes. However, I don't think that such content should be a deciding factor against letting children read the book. There may need to be some parental explanation for that content, but the instances are not so pronounced that it needs to be censored. In sum, as an adult, I did not enjoy the book, but I can certainly see how it would attract young, imaginative readers.
#4 Reviews for Hitty
Review #1
First published in 1929, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years won the Newbery Award in 1930. Narrated in the first person by Mehitabel, or Hitty, herself, she tells how she went from a sturdy piece of Mountain Ash Wood in Maine in the early 1800s to a carved doll and playmate to Phoebe Preble. Hitty's adventure begins when she and Phoebe join Captain Preble aboard his whaling ship. From there, she finds her way from a tropical island, to India, to Philadelphia then to New York. She travels with a snake charmer, attends the opera, meets Charles Dickens, has her daguerreotype taken, becomes a doll of fashion and sits as an artist's model. Sometimes she is a child's plaything. Sometimes she is loved, sometimes she is ignored and sometimes she is treated badly. And, for long periods of time, she is lost to the world whether it is underwater or in a hayloft. As children's book author and illustrator Rosemary Wells says of Hitty, a childhood favorite of hers, she loved Hitty's "indomitable spirit and the time carried her from owner to owner like a river. Hitty didn't mind being stuck in a hayloft for twenty years. Hitty also made American history come alive for me."
Hitty's perspective as a doll, the sweep of history that she travels through and the Newbery award have ensured that this book has stayed on the shelf for over eighty years. However, there is some dated language and attitudes that may rub parents the wrong way, although probably go right over most children's heads. Sadly, because children, girls especially, mature at such a young age these days, they are not interested in reading Hitty by the time they are able to read it. For this reason, I highly recommend it as a read out loud for younger children or as a great book for an advanced reader.
--Retrieved from: http://www.books4yourkids.com/2008/08/hitty-her-first-hunudred-years-by.html
Review #2
From 1966 to 1968 I had the world's worst fifth and sixth grade teacher. Her name was Miss Wilda Johnson, and out of a classroom full of students she seemed to select me for special punishment. Nearly every day I had to stay after class to discuss my "citizenship problems" with this dreary wretch. My problems usually consisted of something like "Wouldn't let neighbor see eraser" or "Staring at Diane," or "talking." (I have a composition book full of such affronts.) While it is true I was the class clown, it is also true that I certainly wasn't the eleven-year-old ogre she thought I was. I noticed that the girls in the class always seemed to escape punishment and reprimand, and years later I learned the woman was a lesbian; her anti-boy agenda was certainly clear to me. (Once, after I got into a fistfight for calling another boy a "brontosaurus," she told me that the next time this happened she "hoped that he would beat me to a bloody pulp." I have never forgotten the unexpected and undeserved venom that accompanied those words, and the most fitting revenge I can imagine is to simply repeat those words on a global resource like the Internet, in this article.)
Anyway, thirty-plus years later it occurs to me that the only good thing the woman ever did for me was to introduce our class to the John Newbury medal books for children. Awarded annually since 1922 by the American Library Association, this medal is given to the book that represents "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" for that year. Each of us had to select one to read, and to later give a major book report upon. Looking over the display in the library, I selected The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting, which was the 1923 winner. I loved that book, and later went on to read and own all of the books in the series. Many of these were over 300 pages long, so this represented a major effort on my part. The 1967 movie starring Rex Harrison was a significant disappointment to me; my Doctor Dolittle books now sit unread by the Begone family children, which is also a disappointment.
Casting about for another good Newbury book to read, I was intrigued by Hitty: Her first hundred years, by Rachel Field, despite the fact that this was clearly a book about a doll intended for girls. (I was always intellectually fearless and unfettered.) So, defying the opinions of the other boys in my class, I read it.
Hitty is a delightful book and highly recommended. The account - supposedly a memoir of the doll's own making - describes her creation out of charmed mountain-ash wood in the State of Maine sometime around 1830, and of her first owners, the Preble family. Mehitabel - called "Hitty" for short - has many adventures aboard ship, in India and other faraway places. She is later returned to America and spends time during the Civil War with a little Quaker girl in Philadelphia, where she hears war news from a Northern perspective. After the war, she is purchased by two spinsters in New Orleans, where she hears the Southern side of the story - a nice touch. Wearing bridal finery, Hitty is displayed at a Cotton Exposition, is stolen by an impulsive little girl and is flung away in a display of guilt and religious fear during a violent thunderstorm. She floats down the Mississippi in a grass basket, and is taken in by a poor black family. ("Dat mah chile," says the little girl, spotting her. There is no political correctness in this book, or in Doctor Dolittle, for that matter.)
Eventually, she is introduced to the word "antique," and realizes it applies to her. (We all get this realization sometime in our lives, if we are lucky) Hitty closes her memoirs with a Scarlett O'Hara-like note of expectant and hopeful finality: "I feel that many more adventures are awaiting me. After all, what is a mere hundred years to a well-seasoned mountain-ash wood?" Indeed. May we all age as gracefully.
What has this book to do with reenacting? Well, it was the first time I got the idea that old things can have value and interest. Interestingly, there's a part in the book that describes how Americans' interest in old things have become a craze - I imagine this takes place sometime in the Twenties, which more or less corresponds with the rise of the preservation movement in this country. Certainly, it was well underway in the mid-Sixties when I read this book; my Mom and I used to enjoy rummaging around in antique stores on Saturdays. Anyway, the interest in old things awakened in me by Hitty led to an interest in genealogy and history, which eventually led to an interest in preservation and reenacting. This, of course, led to the articles I have written for the Camp Chase Gazette since 1987 and this web site and book review. So, Dear Reader, in a sense you have Miss Hitty to thank for Jonah Begone!
But don't hold that against her. If you have a daughter, introduce her to this charming book. If you have an intellectually fearless son, leave it around in view. And if there's still a part of you that can take joy in childish things, read it yourself.
--Begone, Jonah. Hitty: her first hundred years, a book review. Retrieved from: http://wesclark.com/jw/hitty.html
#5 Suggestions for Library Use
Because Hitty is such a great time-travel book, perhaps it would be fun to map her quests against world events. For example, posting a large chart that lists important events in her life, such as her creation, or loss in India, and then compare other things that were happening in the world at the time--what else was happening in the world in 1830? What was happening in 1930? That could give readers a broad, realistic perspective of just how long Hitty's life is.
#1 Bibliographic Information
Paterson, Katherine (2007). Bridge to Terabithia. New York: Harper Entertainment.
#2 Summary
Jess Aarons is a fifth grader in a small Virginia town, and at the beginning of the school year is determined to beat all the boys in the school in a foot race. He does beat the boys, but one new girl, Leslie Burke, is the winner. Despite their competitive meeting, Leslie's decidedly odd clothes and demeanor, and her reputation as a school weirdo, Jess, inspired by his young music teacher, makes a decision to be her friend. Soon, each discover that their imaginations are compatible--Jess, a covert artist, and Leslie, a writer--and together they create an imaginary land they name Terabithia--a space in the woods between their homes. To reach their kingdom, however, they must swing over a creek by a rope from a tree--the only way to cross. One day, when Jess's music teacher invites him to Washington D.C. to see the art museum, Leslie, by herself in the woods, tragically attempts to swing over the creek
#3 Reaction
When I chose to read Bridge to Terabithia, I knew absolutely nothing about it. First of all, I knew that a movie version had come out recently, and I figured that it was because the book had been written recently—which was false. I also figured that it was a charming children’s book that probably had something to do with fantasy and how great kids’ imaginations are. I did NOT expect this very deep and emotional story, which though its characters were children, did not seem to me to read like a children’s story at all—or at least not one that I had ever read, and certainly not like that other Newbery winner from 50 years earlier, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. Granted, Hitty is for a younger age group, yet it’s certain that the subjects of children’s literature have changed over the years. To be truthful, I struggled with this book for a little while, because I found it so terribly sad and dramatic myself that I wondered if it would be traumatic for a child. But then I remembered how in 5th 6th grade, I yearned for more emotional books with characters around my age, but was usually stuck with Lurlene McDaniel and her books about young women, who invariably find out they have some fatal disease, just as they meet the most wonderful boy in the world. I knew these were cheesy plots, but I think what drew me to them was that the characters had these life and death problems, and faced emotions that are generally found in adult novels. Therefore, even though Bridge to Terabithia may be a very stark, realistic account of grief (Paterson’s own child went through a death of a friend at a young age) it is also a sophisticated representation of childhood—the connections of friendship, problems at school, life questions that children are trying to grasp (Leslie and Jess’s conversation about religion, for instance) and the problems that sometimes even children can’t escape. It took me awhile to love this book, but now I think of it as one of the best children’s books I’ve ever read.
#4 Reviews for Bridge to Terabithia
Review #1
Gr 4-6—Jess’ ambition is to be “the fastest runner in the fifth grade,” and he is well on his way, when Leslie arrives on the scene (she’s moved to rural Virginia with her parents, both writers) and beats him in race. The two quickly find they have much in common—and each has something to give the other. Leslie opens Jess to a whole new world of myth and fantasy while he gives her an empathy for the underdog, even when the underdog is a big, ugly seventh grade girl bully. The two friends build a secret hideout and invent an imaginary kingdom they call Terabithia, but soon torrential rains make it risky for them to get there. When Jess gets back from a day trip to nearby Washington D.C., with a teacher he learns that Leslie drowned trying to reach their meeting place and reacts first with shock, then selfishness, and finally grief. Though he gets support from most of his large, usually bickering family and from his teacher, Jess alone has to work through his shattering loss, and it is he who decides how to best memorialize Leslie and what she meant to him. Not only is the story (by the author of the Master Puppeteer, Crowel, 1976) unusual because it portrays a believable relationship between a boy and a girl at an age when same-sex friendships are the norm but it also presents an unromantic, realistic, and moving reaction to personal tragedy. Jess and Leslie are so effectively developed as characters that young readers might well feel that they were their classmates.
--Forman, J. (1977). Bridge to Terabithia (book review). School Library Journal (24)3, 61.
Review #2
This review is really a joint review of book and movie, but I thought it was well-written and thorough, so I’m including it here.
Katherine Paterson wrote the 1977 children's classic Bridge to Terabithia after her son David's best friend, Lisa Hill, died at age 8 after being struck by lightning. "I was trying to make sense of a tragedy that made no sense," Paterson says in this interview with Christianity Today. In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where "someone long forgotten had hung a rope." They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic. Until the day the rope snaps and she falls to her death. When I read the book at 10 or 11, it was frightening and absorbing precisely because Leslie's accident felt unexpected, random, senseless.
But when I saw the new movie of Terabithia—co-written and produced by David Paterson—I watched it through the eyes of a parent. This time, Leslie's death seemed senseless, but not random. This is a story in which the adventurous child dies and the cautious child lives. Yet somehow the lesson is not that Jess and Leslie should never have swung on the rope to their enchanted spot. Rather, the story suggests how "death is always at the back of risk and beauty," as the friend I saw the movie with put it. That message, of life's indelible tragic contours, helps explain the power of Paterson's story 30 years after it was written and its relevance for our addled child-rearing times.
In the movie, Leslie's death is in the air, and in the musical score, the minute she spots the rope and rushes for it. She sees it hanging from a branch high above the creek bed, climbs onto a stump for a better perch to swing from, and soars out over the water. Jess tries to keep Leslie off the rope at first, warning her that it could be dangerous. (Send me an e-mail if you know exactly what he says.) (Update: Thanks to readers. Jess' line is, "It's been there forever, I wouldn't trust it.") Leslie ignores him, and the film shows each of them in their exhilarating moment of flight, faces tilted toward the sky. The rope becomes part of their afternoon ritual. Leslie's fall from it months later happens off-camera.
The foreshadowing in the book comes much later in the story. Leslie and Jess go to the crossing and find the creek in the gully roaring, swelled by rainfall. Jess looks at the rope, and Katherine Paterson writes that "his stomach felt cold." "Maybe we ought to forget it today," he says. But Leslie answers, "'C'mon, Jess. We can make it." They do. The water continues to rise, and Jess begins to dread their return visit. "It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid." The next morning, a Saturday, Jess' adored music teacher offers to take him on his first trip to an art museum. Jess is an artist who draws "the way some people drink whiskey," and he leaps at the invitation. He could ask if Leslie can come along, but he doesn't (he wants the teacher to himself). Leslie tries to cross to Terabithia on her own, and the old rope breaks.
The novel Bridge to Terabithia has a strong and real boy-girl friendship at its center, a well-handled class divide (Jess's hardscrabble farm and Leslie's comfortable home), and the revelation that bullies and monster-mouth teachers can be sympathetic, too. But the book is a Newbery Medal-winner and a staple of fifth and sixth grade English because of its unsparing rendering of Jess' grief: "Leslie—dead—girl friend—rope—broke—fell—you—you—you." And denial: The next morning, he eats two stacks of pancakes that "tasted marvelous." We feel both Jess' guilt for his absence and his anger at Leslie. "She went swinging on that rope just to show him that she was no coward. So there, Jess Aarons."
When people tell Katherine Paterson that they've given the book to a child whose friend has died, she worries it's too late, because the book works better as "emotional practice." But it's easy to understand the impulse, because one piece or another of Jess' grief will resonate. The book's death focus goes too far for some people. Terabithia is ninth on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books. In an essay for the New York Times Book Review, she defends it by arguing that children need not only the happily-ever-after of fairy tales, but also "proper endings" in which "hope is a yearning, rooted in reality."
But forget the kids for a minute. What about parents, Leslie's parents, in particular?
For much of the book, they come off as dilettante-ish and neglectful in a benign way, as Paterson depicts them. But when they lose their daughter, they become their best selves. "She loved you, you know," Leslie's father says to Jess, this local boy who might have been relied on to keep his daughter away from an old unreliable rope. "Thank you for being such a wonderful friend to her." That's it. No questions. Of course, Jess is asking himself why he wasn't with Leslie that morning and why he didn't insist that they find another way to cross the gully. Given that, it is an act of enormous generosity that Leslie's parents don't suggest blame, don't even ask the basic wheres and hows.
Would most of us be so generous? And would we accept a risk-taking child's death without pulling all the other children indoors? If Leslie's death isn't random, then it could have been prevented—couldn't it?
Experts increasingly caution that in shielding our kids from danger, we end up putting them at more serious risk by standing between them and the skills they need to become self-reliant. It's a crucial principle, especially as children's lives and play become more constricted. (How many 10-year-olds do you know who get to roam in the woods?) But the idea of letting kids wander freely is awfully hard to hold onto when you contemplate even the remote possibility of your child's death.
Bridge to Terabithia doesn't address any of these fears directly. Instead, in the last scene, Jess nails boards across the gully. Then he leads the younger sister who worships him "across the bridge—the great bridge to Terabithia." The movie nearly wrecks this moment by bursting into Disney fantasy. The screen goes technicolor as a friendly giant troll and hordes of wood fairies and creatures show up to greet the king and new princess. But no matter. The point is that the kids know how to keep on growing. And the parents leave them to it. Paterson's proper ending is for all of us.
--Bazelon, Emily (2007). Sudden Death: what A bridge to Terabithia still teaches us. Slate.com. Retrieved from: http://www.slate.com/id/2160370/pagenum/all/#p2
#5 Suggestions for Library Use
In addition to a large book display, a library might promote this book by having a movie showing of Bridge to Terabithia, and encouraging kids to read the book before they come, or have copies on hand to read after the movie. Because the story is such a sad tale, there could be a discussion after the movie about what Jess and Leslie learned from each other, and why Jess reacted the way he did (his denial, anger and grief) etc. The best thing about this book is how it prepares children for the grieving process, and that should be emphasized and thought through somehow.
