I just realized I've been in love with this book for nineteen years. It's the story of the Swift family in the fall and early winter of 1932, as the claws of the Depression strike deep into their finances. Sam Swift, an accountant, works fewer hours every week, they've doubled up sleeping space to save heating rooms, and the family meals include more filler and less meat. Eleven-year-old Minerva "Minnie" and the rest of the family, mom Belle; older sisters Gwen, Clem, and Adelaide ("Lady"); and nine-year-old prodigy Ozzie are surprised when a telegram arrives telling them an orphaned cousin of theirs, Willie Faye Darling, will be coming to live with them. Willie Faye, a tiny girl Minnie's age, arrives with a cardboard suitcase, caked with dust bowl detritus from the tiny town of Heart's Bend, Texas, and a kitten named Tumbleweed, and she's never seen an indoor bathroom, heard of Minnie and Ozzie's favorite radio hero Buck Rogers, or eaten peaches (not to mention many other things). Willie Faye's life has been so isolated that Minnie figures they will have a lot to teach her—but in fact it will be the other way around.
One of the best things about this book is that Minnie is no plaster saint. She and Ozzie have invented a ratings system they call "the Vomitron" for things they don't like, like the endless meals of two hot dogs stretched with rice, cheese, and ground vegetables or aspics, or Rudy Vallee on the radio. Yet as they criticize the food, they reveal they also are so hungry they lick the cooking pots before washing them. Instead of being an angel, Minnie complains about all the standard kid things like snotty classmates and missing spelling words, brags some, forthrightly speaks her mind when society says she shouldn't, yet she is tender enough to show compassion to a classmate who suffers a terrible tragedy, the impoverished families she visits in a "Hooverville," and a young man who lost a hand in the previous war. Minnie's creative sister Lady, who can do anything with a needle and thread and old fabric, is a lot of fun to read about as well, as is Ozzie, the "boy genius" whose passion for science and building radios is equal with his passion for offbeat films and news of Al Capone. The family interactions are very real, perhaps because author Lasky based them on her mother, aunts, and uncle. But there's no whitewashing of the perilous financial situation the family is in: they've closed off rooms to save coal, pinch pennies, walk everywhere to hoard enough dimes for the occasional movie, come up with creative ideas for gifts, but most of all spend time worrying about Papa, who spends his time squirreled in the attic, working at something. And then the final crisis comes.
Throughout little Willie Faye becomes the family's bulwark. Her amazing creativity, her faith, her steadfastness in adversity are blessings as Minnie and her family cope with one shock after the other, yet the story is filled with optimism and even a few touches of humor.
The only thing that is off-putting about this lively Christmas tale is the obligatory "Dear America" format epilogue, in which the author reveals what happened to the family. As Barry Donenberg's "Dear America" epilogues are uniformly depressingly grim, this one takes a few a few fairy-tale-like leaps in which great wealth and fame and awards, plus every social cause of the 1940s-1960s, are addressed as the Swift family having been involved with. (I also think it's coincidentally weird that Minnie ends up marrying someone who has the same name as an item that was mentioned early in the book! Was he supposed to be a descendant of the creator?) If you discount that one little quibble, this is a magical tale, full of hope in the middle of grim reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment