Carol Bird, the dying Christmas Swan
I really became a bookworm around the age of 8, and the books I read then lodged themselves in my brain forever. Primarily because I read them over and over and over again. Between the ages of around 8 and 10, I probably re-read the entire 9-book set of Little House on the Prairie books and the entire Trixie Belden canon of mysteries 10 times. I think it was seen as a sign of my budding eccentricity. I used to take to my room and read – with a bowl of candy ala Francie Nolan – these books in a vaguely seasonal rotation, over and over, in their entirety, like some pre-teen addict. I think it felt as if there were a finite number of books for me, and after exhausting everything in our small local library and ever smaller school library, I really had basically read everything there was to read. I would beg my mother to take us to the BIG LIBRARY – a marginally less small library than the one in our neighborhood. I read quickly and obsessively and it didn’t stop until I matured into the next level, and more vast of reading material. The supercharged imagery in the 8-year old books are seared in my brain forever.
It’s generally good policy to avoid revisiting the books we coveted as children. There’s nothing wrong with feeling deep nostalgia for those delightful tomes, as long as we know that what we are looking for from them is not exactly as we remember. Folks who grew up in the 1950s may wax nostalgic about hula hoops and Elvis Presley, leaving out the part about McCarthyism and women’s roles vacuuming for Jesus and popping out quiverfulls of babies like Michelle Duggar. I had an exceedingly privileged childhood. Good schools, plenty of food, summer camp.. But I often lived more through my books then through my own experiences, and literally (not literally), every heroine in every book I read had a life more desirable than my own.
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Little Sylvia is dirt poor, an orphan living with a decrepit old aunt. When her aunt gets too old to care for her, she is shipped off to live with her rich cousin Bonnie at Willoughby Chase.
During her train trip, she is attacked by starving packs of wolves who leap through the windows of the train.
Sylvia’s malevolent seat-mate grabs a shard of glass and stabs a wolf in the throat and then heaves its carcass out the window. In fact, the entire landscape is literally crawling with salivating wolves, made savage and reckless from hunger.
Once at Willoughby Hall, Sylvia and her Bonnie are immediately deserted into the care of a cruel governess named Miss Slighcarp who locks them in the attic and abuses them, before sending them to a prison-like orphan school for endless hours of drudgery and horror, subsisting on dry bread morsels and water. But, there is Simon the cute gooseboy who lives in an underground cave in the forest with his geese and a little donkey…once an exhausted and feverish Sylvia is tucked into Simon’s donkey cart with feather-filled mattress and quilts below and warm feathery geese on top. Lulled by the soft warmth, she slumbers. The book is crammed with other such sumptuous descriptions – of ice-skating in the frozen park cosy, fire-lit nurseries and violet cream pastries – that had me longing to be in Sylvia’s old shoes.
