REVIEW: The Battle of Wednesday Week
May. 15th, 2011 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Battle of Wednesday Week: Barbara Willard Puffin 1968
I might well have a different reaction to this book if I weren’t reading it for the first time as an adult in the second decade of the twenty-first century. I get that children’s books need to remove parents out of the picture, so that the characters can sort out their own problems and grow, but when a widowed adult woman pulls her teenage children out of boarding school to tell them she’s getting married in a week to a man they won’t be able to meet until the wedding, unless if they really hate the idea, when a widowed man tells his children, living in the US, that the next time he’ll be writing to them, he will have got married to a woman in London, whom they will meet after the honeymoon, and when both lots of children are told they will then spend the summer together at a cottage in remote Argyllshire and they can like it or lump it, is it totally surprising that those children aren’t going to take it well? So when they do act out, resenting each other – two on one side, four on the other and a new step-parent each – what do the adult parents do? Oh, they abdicate responsibility for a mess of their creation and tell the children that they will go up north, leaving the children at home to sort themselves out! And the author sees nothing irresponsible or even cruel in this. The parents are hardly ever criticised, indeed the children miss them, the previously fatherless or motherless children missing what they’ve only had for a few days, and after a few times when the youngest has been in peril, have grown to be a clan, ready for the Laird and his lady, as they’ve dubbed them, to return.
Forgive me if I don’t think this is in any way a manual for a blended family.
Things aren’t quite at the call the social services level, as the eldest five range between sixteen and thirteen years of age, but the youngest, Lucy is nine, and having been too young to remember her mother, grows quickly attached to her stepmother Sarah. Who then abandons her after a tantrum (the tantrum is Lucy’s in the midst of very bad behaviour and some unfortunate accidents all round). Two grown up neighbours, a married couple, do keep an eye on the children and nudge them right, but they can’t be there all the time.
So, I sat reading this feeling quite resistant. Yes, at various points the Latymers – Nicholas and Charlotte, and the Grahams – Nan, Roderick and Alan, and Lucy behave like hoodlums, but they are put in a situation of great strain and expected to magically bond without any resentment. The expectation is that they should trust their parents’ taste without getting time to get used to each other while living in a cottage without enough beds for them all – two of the boys are put in a tent outside.
!!!
It seemed to me as if this book fell between the two stools of idealistic writing for children and realistic writing for children. The writing, too, was variable, with flashes of psychological insight, but a blindness about the situation. I generally liked the way the author wrote about the children’s sense of rightness and groupthink, although she overused it perhaps. She also had a habit of missing out chunks of time, giving the book an episodic feel at the beginning, although the gaps lessened as time went on.
Nicky who puts on poses to hide his real feelings and impetuous Charlotte, the English children who sometimes feel like they’re mothering their mother and who love this Scottish cottage fiercely were the most strongly drawn. Lucy is what you’d call a character, although she didn’t follow the arc you might predict when first introduced to her, while Nan the eldest Graham girl was also well drawn, but the only thing that stood out about Alan and Roderick was that they were as close as twins although there was a year between them.
There’s some interesting stuff about ‘Home’ – Lucy feels that Kilmorah is home automatically and it has long been a place of refuge for the Latymers, and nationality. The Latymers inherited the cottage from an aunt, but have no Scottish blood, to their chagrin, as the locals, however nice, point out. The Grahams may be American, but have always had a mania for their Scottish descent, however long ago it was when their forefather left, which adds to the awkwardness of the situation. Still, I kept putting this down and huffing ‘Oh, come off it.’
I might well have a different reaction to this book if I weren’t reading it for the first time as an adult in the second decade of the twenty-first century. I get that children’s books need to remove parents out of the picture, so that the characters can sort out their own problems and grow, but when a widowed adult woman pulls her teenage children out of boarding school to tell them she’s getting married in a week to a man they won’t be able to meet until the wedding, unless if they really hate the idea, when a widowed man tells his children, living in the US, that the next time he’ll be writing to them, he will have got married to a woman in London, whom they will meet after the honeymoon, and when both lots of children are told they will then spend the summer together at a cottage in remote Argyllshire and they can like it or lump it, is it totally surprising that those children aren’t going to take it well? So when they do act out, resenting each other – two on one side, four on the other and a new step-parent each – what do the adult parents do? Oh, they abdicate responsibility for a mess of their creation and tell the children that they will go up north, leaving the children at home to sort themselves out! And the author sees nothing irresponsible or even cruel in this. The parents are hardly ever criticised, indeed the children miss them, the previously fatherless or motherless children missing what they’ve only had for a few days, and after a few times when the youngest has been in peril, have grown to be a clan, ready for the Laird and his lady, as they’ve dubbed them, to return.
Forgive me if I don’t think this is in any way a manual for a blended family.
Things aren’t quite at the call the social services level, as the eldest five range between sixteen and thirteen years of age, but the youngest, Lucy is nine, and having been too young to remember her mother, grows quickly attached to her stepmother Sarah. Who then abandons her after a tantrum (the tantrum is Lucy’s in the midst of very bad behaviour and some unfortunate accidents all round). Two grown up neighbours, a married couple, do keep an eye on the children and nudge them right, but they can’t be there all the time.
So, I sat reading this feeling quite resistant. Yes, at various points the Latymers – Nicholas and Charlotte, and the Grahams – Nan, Roderick and Alan, and Lucy behave like hoodlums, but they are put in a situation of great strain and expected to magically bond without any resentment. The expectation is that they should trust their parents’ taste without getting time to get used to each other while living in a cottage without enough beds for them all – two of the boys are put in a tent outside.
!!!
It seemed to me as if this book fell between the two stools of idealistic writing for children and realistic writing for children. The writing, too, was variable, with flashes of psychological insight, but a blindness about the situation. I generally liked the way the author wrote about the children’s sense of rightness and groupthink, although she overused it perhaps. She also had a habit of missing out chunks of time, giving the book an episodic feel at the beginning, although the gaps lessened as time went on.
Nicky who puts on poses to hide his real feelings and impetuous Charlotte, the English children who sometimes feel like they’re mothering their mother and who love this Scottish cottage fiercely were the most strongly drawn. Lucy is what you’d call a character, although she didn’t follow the arc you might predict when first introduced to her, while Nan the eldest Graham girl was also well drawn, but the only thing that stood out about Alan and Roderick was that they were as close as twins although there was a year between them.
There’s some interesting stuff about ‘Home’ – Lucy feels that Kilmorah is home automatically and it has long been a place of refuge for the Latymers, and nationality. The Latymers inherited the cottage from an aunt, but have no Scottish blood, to their chagrin, as the locals, however nice, point out. The Grahams may be American, but have always had a mania for their Scottish descent, however long ago it was when their forefather left, which adds to the awkwardness of the situation. Still, I kept putting this down and huffing ‘Oh, come off it.’
