Recent reading

[regshoe]

Walking with Murder: On the Kidnapped Trail by Ian Nimmo (2005). Ian Nimmo is a serious Kidnapped fan who has traced out the entire route of David's wanderings across Scotland, walked it himself twice—once in 1960 and once forty years later—and done a lot of research besides into the history and geography of the novel; this book is the result. There's a lot of fascinating material in here, including much that brought parts of Kidnapped to life in new ways for me and some original investigations into the Appin murder, and it's highly recommended for all fans. I did think the book could have done with making clearer and more decisive choices about its subject matter: as it is it's a book about the geography of Kidnapped which turns in the middle into a book about the history of the Appin murder before turning back again, while making occasional digressions into general Scottish geography and changes to the country over time, and while all the material was interesting it could perhaps have been better organised. Also there are parts where Nimmo should have chosen between quoting verbatim from Kidnapped or broadly paraphrasing, because doing something that's not quite one or the other really doesn't work. Also I dislike his decision—having explained that RLS's one-L spelling of Alan Breck Stewart's name distinguishes the fictional character from the historical Allan—to continue using the two-L spelling throughout, even when clearly referring only to the fictional character. But I nitpick like this because the book was so interesting! I do recommend it. I was especially impressed by Nimmo's identification, independently corroborated by two other people, of a plausible specific spot on the hillside in Leitir Mhòr wood from where the murderer of Colin Campbell might have fired the shot.

Jane's Island by Marjorie Hill Allee (1931). This was one of osprey_archer's recommended Newbery Prize winners, which means it's a very good classic American children's book. I enjoyed it a lot! Zoological research and the power of cooperation and friendship across cultural and national boundaries are an excellent set of subjects for a children's book, and I loved all the scientific and natural-historical detail as well as the characters. Some observations:
1) The main character—Jane, the twelve-year-old daughter of a zoologist and keen naturalist herself—is the typical 'same age as or a little older than the target audience', but the story is told mostly from the point of view of a slightly older character, seventeen-year-old Elsie, who's looking after Jane for the summer (not quite a nanny or a governess; I would have described her role as 'au pair, but not foreign'; was that a thing?), and I thought that was an interesting choice.
2) A fairly important plot point involves rival researchers' teams of field workers gathering wild planarians (flatworms) from the seashore for their experiments; the characters worry that one team will gather too many and there won't be enough for the other, but no one ever appears to consider the planarian population itself a potential issue. The nature conservation movement definitely existed by 1931, but apparently it and scientific zoology hadn't met yet!
3) Yes, this book is both generally pro-tomboy and not quite entirely comfortable with gender non-conformity in girls and women in an also interesting way. It's admirable to encourage scientific careers like this, but all the same there are a couple of bits I'm glad I didn't read when I was Jane's age.
4) Why do all the American books I read from around this period go on about people from Boston spending their summers in the countryside/on the coast? Why is that such an important thing to keep coming up??

The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell (1989). After reading this book (the third of four) I like the series enough to have nominated it for Yuletide—and specifically Julia and Selena, because a) if Julia is going to keep getting mistaken for a lesbian the least she deserves is actually to get to be a lesbian and b) I'm sure Selena would treat her better than any of these men do—so I'll have to read book four by sign-up time and I hope there's no very major continuity for those two in there. This one is a murder mystery about tax dodging, and gets a lot of humour out of its subject matter but also some genuinely cool and evocative settings (second most notable book set in the Channel Islands, I reckon, after Sir Isumbras at the Ford). As with previous books it's partly narrated in first person by Hilary and partly epistolary—this time in the form of messages sent by telex, which was a new word for me, which just goes to show how technology progresses. I did think it was pretty badly let down by the (rather Arthurian) rape-by-deception played for comedy; the comedic treatment of sex in these books is a bit of a thing—sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it goes too far. I have bought book four and it's due to arrive tomorrow, so we shall see.

Comments

[sovay]

3) Yes, this book is both generally pro-tomboy and not quite entirely comfortable with gender non-conformity in girls and women in an also interesting way. It's admirable to encourage scientific careers like this, but all the same there are a couple of bits I'm glad I didn't read when I was Jane's age.

Since I haven't gotten around the book, what's the not entirely comfortable part? Is it one of the narratives that assumes it's time-limited—a stage?

4) Why do all the American books I read from around this period go on about people from Boston spending their summers in the countryside/on the coast? Why is that such an important thing to keep coming up??

I don't know about the countryside, but the coast is still a regionally common thing to do. My grandparents lived in Portland when I was growing up and a family friend now lives on Cape Cod and the phenomenon of the summer people is real.

[regshoe]

Since I haven't gotten around the book, what's the not entirely comfortable part? Is it one of the narratives that assumes it's time-limited—a stage?

Not exactly. Jane has to learn that, while it's fine to be really into zoology and go out on collecting expeditions in old shorts etc., it's also important to wear nice dresses and do feminine domestic and social things sometimes, each side of things in its proper place. One of the characters is a retired professor of biology who says of her career, "...I practiced domestic science at the same time. It was good for me and I liked it!"

It is really generous and progressive for its time, and most of the discussion is really pretty reasonable—but. You see?

My grandparents lived in Portland when I was growing up and a family friend now lives on Cape Cod and the phenomenon of the summer people is real.

Oh, that's cool! Yeah, 'summer people' is the exact phrase Jane uses (and clarifies that her family are not summer people because they're there for important non-frivolous science reasons).

[sovay]

It is really generous and progressive for its time, and most of the discussion is really pretty reasonable—but. You see?

Yes: it doesn't provide much room for the character—or the reader—who does not want to do the domestic science at all.

This conversation has reminded me of Gene Stratton-Porter's The Keeper of the Bees (1925), which you may already have read, in which case please feel free to ignore the rest of this paragraph. It's one of a number of the author's novels that I read as a child along with the more famous Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) and it contains a character known for most of the novel as "the little Scout," who is so assertive in their tough, affectionate androgyny that even after Jamie MacFarlane—the protagonist, the eponymous wounded veteran who heals by learning to take care of bees and other people—has seriously thought about it, "the only definite conclusion he arrived at was that sometimes he was a boy and sometimes she was a girl." When asked point-blank, the little Scout declares, "If you can't tell, it doesn't make a darn bit of difference, does it?" Even when he learns their given name, it clears up nothing because it's "Jean." Spoilers, in the last few chapters it turns out that the little Scout is a girl after all and the novel is fascinating about what this means for her going forward, because Jamie is adamantly insistent that she learn to think of herself as a girl and dress as a girl and spend time with other girls and generally "get on your own side of the line, where you belong," and at the same time stresses that she doesn't need to change her adventurous, independent character, only her presentation: "You needn't think you are the only girl in the world of your kind. You needn't think that there aren't a lot of others who don't like to stay in the house and do the things that girls are supposed to do." Which is again incredibly feminist and supportive and not the same thing as continuing to identify into adolescence if anything sort of ambiguously masc of center. I didn't know until 2020 that "Gene" was short for "Geneva." Knowing two male Genes in my childhood, I had always assumed the author was the same. From the same article I learned that she had to be wrestled into dresses at age eleven when she was first sent to school and as an adult could still be found in breeches; that when she married in 1886, she hyphenated rather than changed her name; that she maintained her own career and finances even after marriage, which she did apparently enjoy but thought was more beneficial for men than for women. I thought at the time that it was probably a little facile to identify the little Scout as a self-insert, but in re-reading since I have seen that the novel is dedicated "To Little Gene Who Gave Me the Little Scout." I still don't know entirely what to do with that information, except that it made me wonder if she authorially believed Jamie's arguments or had just made the best of them when applied to her own preadolescent self.

Yeah, 'summer people' is the exact phrase Jane uses (and clarifies that her family are not summer people because they're there for important non-frivolous science reasons).

That distinction still exists and makes sense to me! The Cape in the off-season is populated very differently from Memorial through Labor Day. I should just read this book.

[regshoe]

That sounds like a fascinating book (and life) and I'd never come across it or Stratton-Porter at all.

[sovay]

That sounds like a fascinating book (and life) and I'd never come across it or Stratton-Porter at all.

She was ferociously popular through about the first half of the twentieth century and then seems to have fallen almost entirely out of the popular culture except perhaps for A Girl of the Limberlost, which is occasionally reprinted, probably because of the connection with the historical and since partially restored wetlands. My grandparents owned about half a dozen of her novels, so I read them. It took me decades to look at the character of the little Scout and actually think about them.

[cyphomandra]

My favourite Channel Islands book is Mary Treadgold’s We Couldn’t Leave Dinah, but it is a fictional channel island! (it’s a WWII pony story, written by the author in air raid shelters)

I have but have not read the fourth Caudwell - I really liked the first three but it took me ages to track down the fourth, and I keep meaning to reread the earlier volumes.

The Kidnapped book sounds great!

[regshoe]

Luckily the fourth book wasn't particularly difficult to find for me (my local library, puzzlingly, has them all except the third, but I'd got to the point of wanting to buy copies by then). We'll see!

[hedgebird]

One of William Croft Dickinson's horror stories starts out with the main character on a Kidnapped-themed walking tour. I'm charmed to know that people IRL do it too.

[regshoe]

I didn't know that Kidnapped fandom could get you into a horror story! That's concerning XD Does this character get attacked by a kelpie or something?

[hedgebird]

Lost in darkest Scotland, he meets a senile immortal in a remote house. The story's called "The House of Balfother".

[osprey_archer]

I am corrupting people with my Newbery prize winners bwahaha... anyway yes the 1930s Newbery books that deal with the Problem of Tomboys do, to a greater or lesser degree, actually view it as a problem, with solutions that range from "You need to grow out of being a tomboy ENTIRELY" to "You can remain interested in zoology and continue getting dirty collecting specimens and in fact become a professional scientist, BUT you have to wear a nice dress sometimes too."

Allee wrote at least two other books about female scientists, which I keep meaning to read. One of them IIRC is about older characters (college-aged) so might be able to delve deeper into some aspects.

[regshoe]

I was reading bits of Allee's Wikipedia page while checking the publication date for this post, and thought that her other books sounded pretty interesting, especially The Great Tradition!

[osprey_archer]

Also, your postcard arrived! Thank you!!!

[regshoe]

Oh, yay! I was a bit nervous about the ones I sent to the US after sovay mentioned not getting another international postcard due to tariff nonsense. Good to know one of mine has got through.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Walking with Murder: On the Kidnapped Trail by Ian Nimmo (2005). Ian Nimmo is a serious Kidnapped fan who has traced out the entire route of David's wanderings across Scotland, walked it himself twice—once in 1960 and once forty years later—and done a lot of research besides into the history and geography of the novel; this book is the result.

Ohhh, this sounds awesome! :D

[regshoe]

It's good fun :D