Mountains are Free

I genuinely thought this story was 100% fiction until the final four chapters. Admittedly, it still might be  complete fiction since William Tell is sort of just a legend, right? Maybe based on an actual man, but we're talking 1300s so who knows? I generally don't love stories set in the middle ages - they're always so bleak and hopeless and make me feel cold and dirty. I maybe appreciated this one more only because it told an actual story of the Swiss people fighting for their freedom. And Bruno, the main character, is pretty likeable.

Brief summary of Mountains are Free. I have decided it is actually two different books.

Book 1: Chapters 1-7. A mountain-born Swiss boy named Bruno lives with his neighbor, William Tell (who I didn't connect to THE William Tell until the end, as mentioned above), after he is orphaned. He decides to go work for an Austrian lord when they meet in the mountains which he and I realize almost immediately is a horrible idea. The Lord - Rupprecht - is cruel and lives in the feudal system like most of Europe (?) which is completely foreign to Bruno who has always lived as a freeman and goat herder in the Swiss mountains. Bruno travels with him to the Duke of Valberg's castle in Austria and befriends Kyo, a court minstrel, and Zelina, a young ward of the Duke. He witnesses poverty and cruelty from the lords to the peasants and even tries to run away back to the mountains once and is only saved from the dungeon (donjon) by his friend, Kyo. Then, finally, on the night of Zelina's hasty marriage to Rupprecht, the three friends manage to escape the castle in the bustle of an impending war and return to Bruno's home in the mountains of Switzerland.

Book 2: Chapters 8-10. William Tell and other freemen in Switzerland get tired of Austrian vassals trying to take away their freedom. The author tells the famous story of bailiff Gessler forcing William Tell to shoot an arrow off his son's head (as punishment for not bowing to Gessler's hat in the marketplace) and then Tell's admission that he pulled two arrows because he would have shot Gessler with the second if he missed the apple. The Swiss farmers and freemen then fight the bailiffs and Austrian lords placed in their mountains and win! And then a decade later an Austrian army comes to fight them and they win again! Then they are left alone for the next century.

Can you tell why it felt like two different books? Admittedly, Bruno does fight in one of the battles in the latter chapters, but it doesn't even feel like it's about him anymore. His story essentially ends when he returns to the mountains.

Conclusion: 
I'm so glad I don't live in the middle ages.

Children of the Soil

This is the first 1930s Newbery I have read in a long while that I actually had a hard time putting down. And I'm not sure why. The story follows a very poor mom and her two kids during one year in Sweden. There is never any real peril or conflict, though a few of the kids' classmates are punks. I just loved that through the kids' resourcefulness and incredible hard work, they are able to improve their family's situation considerably in just a year. At the start of the novel, they are too poor to even afford an egg for Christmas and by the next winter they own TWO cows. In fact, upon completing the book, I immediately felt the desire to start earning more money for my family. The urge only lasted one morning, but still!

Additional notes:

- The boy's name is Guldklumpen, which may be the most unique name I have ever read in a book ever. And he never uses a nickname! He is Guldklumpen the whole book through.

- Guldklumpen and Nikolina refer to their mom as "the mother" which was weird every time they said it.

- I would much rather my kids grow up poor than rich. So far, so good.

Jane's Island

I would argue there is more explanation of the scientific method and very specific science research in this 100 year old Newbery than in any other I have read. Ellen, a Chicago college student, goes to Massachusetts to be a "nanny" to a 12-year-old aspiring scientist and adventurer named Jane for the summer. Jane's dad is a scientist and does research on planaria (flat worms?) at a nearby laboratory. Ellen and Jane go on all sorts of sciencey, marine-lifey adventures. The characters were interesting. The setting was cool. I had to read it very quickly over Thanksgiving in Texas so I could hand it off to my dad before he went home to return it to his university library in Utah. But he brought me two more!

Out of the Flame

Another biographical fiction! And now that I know it's a legitimate genre, I wasn't as bothered by all the made up stories about real people. EXCEPT for this minor detail: I can't find any internet evidence that the main character actually existed?? 

The story follows Pierre de Bayard, an orphan page who serves King Francois I during the early 1500s, and his life at court with the children of the King (Prince Francois, Prince Henri - future king of France, Prince Charles and Princess Magdaleine and Princess Marguerite). He is nephew of the famous knight Pierre de Bayard, student to the scholar and philosopher Master Fabri and he "owns" a little hunchback dwarf named Jac who is his dearest friend. They go on adventures, he butts heads with Prince Henri, he aspires to be a great knight but also longs to be a scholar like Fabri, he idolizes his Aunt Marguerite, he learns about humanism from Sir Thomas More, he almost gets kidnapped with Henri, then he actually gets kidnapped and gets freed by Native Americans that Cartier brings back from the New World. And the author writes a postscript about what happened with all the characters, including Pierre (who apparently became a famous scholar and mathematician). So I of course looked them all up to read their stories and everyone in the book is totally real - the king, the princes, the king's sister, Cartier the explorer, Thomas More, Pierre's famous uncle who he's named after - but I can't find anything about HIM. 

So was the main character made up? 

Boy of the South Seas

After a somewhat reluctant start, my dad now seems fully committed to helping me achieve my Newbery goal. Completely self-motivated, he consulted my list of remaining Newberys, double-checked with me, and then checked three out from his university library and brought them all the way to Georgia when he came to visit last weekend! Really, he's come a long way. 

Boy of the South Seas was not as bad as some other 30's Newberys. It helped that it was an easy less-than-200-page read. It was really sad, though. The main character is a boy who lives on a sparsely-inhabited island in the South Pacific (100 years ago) and in the first chapter, a merchant ship arrives on the island, he climbs aboard to explore, falls asleep, and wakes up after the boat has set sail and they won't return him to his home. The first chapter ends with the author commenting about how the boy would not lay eyes on his own island again until he was an adult! Tragic!

He jumps ship a little while later and gets adopted by a nice woman at the new island that he swims to, so the story mellows considerably. And it sort of resolves nicely in the end with opportunities for Teiki to share his culture and language with the world so they're not lost forever.

Young Walter Scott

I would classify Young Walter Scott as a historical fictional biography.  Hang on a second . . . I just looked it up and there's a genre called biographical fiction. And here I thought Elizabeth Janet Gray was taking liberties by making up a childhood for Walter Scott when it's actually an entire genre and authors do it all the time! There's apparently an art to making up stories about actual people's lives! 

I've never read any of Walter Scott's books. This made-up story about his childhood may have been more interesting if I had. He was lame (that part is true) and the author uses that to frame basically everything that happens to him ever. And he was Scottish (also true), which made the book fairly difficult to understand because the author had everyone speak in Scottish accents. For example, here's a snippet that I just literally didn't understand.

Wattie turned. "I'm no that lame. I'm off to climb Arthur's Seat."

"Havers," she said admiringly.

"By the Gutted Haddie," he added.

"Havers."

Wha?

I wouldn't recommend Young Walter Scott, unless of course you're a super fan of Ivanhoe or Rob Roy and want a glimpse into what one woman thinks Scott's childhood may have been like.

Swords of Steel

Swords of Steel was another quick read while visiting my dad over the summer and I don't remember much of it. The novel followed a boy who lived in Gettysburg before and during the Civil War. The book itself was fairly episodic and really just jumped from one major event to another major event which didn't make for a very smooth story. The Battle of Gettysburg ended up being fought right in this boy's yard (and house) which was pretty shocking. There was a budding romance I was slightly interested in the whole book, but it had a very anticlimactic peak right at the end.  And that concludes the sum of what I remember. G'night.