A very sweet
friend gave me a copy of From Little
Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood by Nancy McCabe
(University of Missouri Press, 2014) for Christmas. It was high on my wish
list, so I’m pleased as punch at receiving it. It is a more serious, thought-provoking look back to childhood favorites, and I would certainly recommend it.
McCabe explains
in the Prologue that, as happens with so many of us, during her teenage years, she
no longer experienced books the same way she had as a child. She lost the magic
(my word, not hers) - that feeling of complete immersion and being the heroine, and the impression of
possibilities that go along with such heroic identification (i.e., “I can do
anything! I can be anything! I can be strong/smart/pretty! Etc.).
Then one day
in adulthood, events conspired to make McCabe realize that her decision to adopt
her daughter could be traced back to a book she had read as a girl. Intrigued
by this, she wondered how all the books she read back then led her to be the
person she is with the life she has now. From
Little Houses to Little Women is her account of her journey to find out.
Most, if not
all, of the books McCabe discusses will be familiar to former child readers
(and if you weren’t a reader with favorite books as a child, you probably
wouldn’t pick up this book in the first place), but she brings out details we
might not recall if we haven’t re-read them as adults ourselves. Don’t expect a
joyful romp through the land of used-to-be, however. McCabe’s perspective was
colored by the long illness and painful death of a close aunt - an aunt who was
influential in her reading and her life - so a cloud of confusion, pain, and
sadness hovers over many of her reminisces This makes the book less comforting
than one might expect revisiting favorite characters would be, but more
interesting with a unique perspective.
The journey
is external as well as internal: in addition to rereading the books to see what
she brought forward with her, McCabe traveled to several of the authors’ homes,
seeking to find how their lives informed their work - and ultimately her life.
McCabe seems
to have been disappointed in many of her home site visits. This is partly due
to either the commercialization some sites have embraced in their bid for
tourist dollars or the converse problem of not having enough money to keep the
site up properly, but more greatly due to the afore-mentioned aunt, who took
McCabe on a similar trip shortly before her death. This previous trip’s
influence caused McCabe to have an outlook much different than most people do on
such expeditions (based on many conversations I’ve had with numerous other literary
travelers). If her viewpoint is uncommon, it is all the more compelling.
Even though
this is a memoir, it does not have an intimate feel. It’s much more analytical
- which was the author’s purpose, after all. McCabe lets us figure it out with
her along the journey, instead of filling us in after she does so herself, so readers
become privy to her thoughts in what seems like real time.
In the end,
McCabe draws some interesting conclusions regarding how childhood books shape a
person’s character - or, at least, how her favorite books as a girl impacted
her own choices and values through life. The most interesting part to me was what
she thought, as a young reader, the various authors were saying, versus what
she now believes they were saying - and, related to that, the nuances she
missed completely back then that now stand out. Some of these are similar to
what I have experienced in re-reading childhood favorites, but many others are
completely different. So, while McCabe reaches personal closure on her own
quest, her book also raises some unwritten questions:
Do young
readers pick up adult authors’ agendas, or does each child only see what they
need or want at the time? Given such differences in viewpoint, how can we
determine which books will have a more positive effect on a young person, or
should we even try to do that? How does this affect the way authors of books
for young readers approach their work (i.e., how can they make the point they
want to make without “preaching”)?
What do you
think?
