My television blew up in the huge blackout back in January, so this weekend when my brother came to visit, he was talking about reading aloud to various people and I suggested he read aloud to me. I brought him one of my favourite books from Younger Days, “The Children of Green Knowe”, and he got so interested in it that he nearly read the whole thing over the weekend and went home and bought all four books. Lucy Boston bought an old Norman-era castle keep/home near Cambridge, England and fixed it up, and she wrote four or five books about the people she imagined might have lived there, with herself as Great-Grandmother Oldknowe appearing in all the books in various centuries. The first book concerns a little boy whose parents send him from Burma to go to boarding school in England and spend the holidays with his Great-Grandmother, and about the children from the era of Charles II he meets … or does he … through the stories his Granny tells.
There are also a series of books called The Melendy Family about four children growing up in the 1940s in New York (and later New York State), and Elizabeth Enright’s “Gone-Away Lake” stories about an era when a ten-year-old girl and her six-year-old brother can be sent by train from New York City to upstate New York for a summer with their cousins, and about the old lost lakeside bungalow colony still inhabited by an elderly brother and sister who tell them stories of the days when it was a wonderful place called Tarrigo and they spent their summers there.
Finally there are Sydney Taylor’s “All-of-a-Kind Family” books about a large family of Orthodox Jews growing up in New York City at the turn of the 20th century.
Most of the “modern” young peoples’ books I have come across lately seem to be about divorce, anorexia and alternate universes. I like the books of my own childhood better.