REVIEW: Adventure in the West
Jul. 18th, 2007 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllAdventure in the West: Alice Ross Colver. The Children's Press, first published in this edition 1955.
'A Modern Ranch Story for Girls' is how it's subtitled, in bright red joined-up handwriting on the cover of my copy. In one sense, that's true, we follow Judy Stewart, the fifteen year old heroine, over a summer at the ranch where she's grown up. It's also a coming of age story, as the son of a friend of her mother's, Jack Colver* asks if he can come and work for his board at the Stewarts ranch over the summer. A year older than Judy, he's a little further along in his growing up than she is - when a character asks her what she intends to do when she grows up, it sends her into a tailspin, because she's never considered the question, having assumed that her life would carry on much the way that it has, even though at the beginning of the book, she finds herself lonely because childhood companions have grown up and away from her. The story is also an almost romance, with Judy minding very much what this new companion thinks of her.
Jack's main concern is what he should train to do and proving himself - that he's up to the work that the real men do. At first, he's the chore boy who needs to be taught how to do things by 'little girl' Judy, but by the end of the book, he's volunteering to fight a forest fire. His concerns are tied into patriotism - I'm presuming that the British company bought this in and that it was first published in the US because Washington gets name-checked - and helping in the war effort (I'm not sure from the references to popular music whether this is set in the forties or fifties).
I'm minded to say fifties, because of Judy. She's the one who has lessons to learn, about growing up and controlling herself - she's impulsive, a little spoiled, and very much a teenager. She talks in italics, she creates drama, but the writer exposits that she's a little woman, and her decision is that she wants to make a career of being a 'backer-upper', i.e. a homemaker like her mother, for whom 'home' covers a large ranch. Very fifties.
Hence the decisions that Jack makes about his future are very important to her, although it the romance isn’t stated outright, we just get a lot of Montana born and bred Judy obsessing over what Jack from the East thinks of the West. However, it seemed to me that Jack was the one to talk with a drawl rather than the genuine cowboys and gals.
Anyway, to go back to the strap-line of 'A Modern Ranch Story for Girls', yes, it lives up to that, giving a picture of ranch life - sort of, Jack's first morning is related in some detail and then we zoom ahead to an unspecified amount of time later when he's picked up his chores. There are episodes, but there's the framework of the summer timeline, and the story's main focus is on Judy learning some truths about herself and her relationship with Jack's and his with the West/ie her substitute. We get the local colour - a visit to the rodeo and a country dance, not to mention cowboy songs - and the Adventure promised in the title - the kids take on cattle rustlers and the aforementioned fire. Thinking about it, I'm not sure whether that's evidence for it being written as a piece of exotic adventures abroad for British girls, or not - I remember Cherry Ames-Dude Ranch Nurse, you see. And as the book mentions, this life would be strange and exotic to most American girls too.
Either way, it's a generous tale (would a rival girl be as lovely as Bettina if it was a YA novel written today, when the romance would be less sublimated? I don't think so) and was a way of whiling away an hour and a half.
* Yes, he shares the same surname as the author. Yes, I think that that is weird too. Is it an attempt to make the reader think that they're reading a true life story, and wonder whether the Scottish surname Ross could be exchanged with the heroine's surname Stewart? Weird.
'A Modern Ranch Story for Girls' is how it's subtitled, in bright red joined-up handwriting on the cover of my copy. In one sense, that's true, we follow Judy Stewart, the fifteen year old heroine, over a summer at the ranch where she's grown up. It's also a coming of age story, as the son of a friend of her mother's, Jack Colver* asks if he can come and work for his board at the Stewarts ranch over the summer. A year older than Judy, he's a little further along in his growing up than she is - when a character asks her what she intends to do when she grows up, it sends her into a tailspin, because she's never considered the question, having assumed that her life would carry on much the way that it has, even though at the beginning of the book, she finds herself lonely because childhood companions have grown up and away from her. The story is also an almost romance, with Judy minding very much what this new companion thinks of her.
Jack's main concern is what he should train to do and proving himself - that he's up to the work that the real men do. At first, he's the chore boy who needs to be taught how to do things by 'little girl' Judy, but by the end of the book, he's volunteering to fight a forest fire. His concerns are tied into patriotism - I'm presuming that the British company bought this in and that it was first published in the US because Washington gets name-checked - and helping in the war effort (I'm not sure from the references to popular music whether this is set in the forties or fifties).
I'm minded to say fifties, because of Judy. She's the one who has lessons to learn, about growing up and controlling herself - she's impulsive, a little spoiled, and very much a teenager. She talks in italics, she creates drama, but the writer exposits that she's a little woman, and her decision is that she wants to make a career of being a 'backer-upper', i.e. a homemaker like her mother, for whom 'home' covers a large ranch. Very fifties.
Hence the decisions that Jack makes about his future are very important to her, although it the romance isn’t stated outright, we just get a lot of Montana born and bred Judy obsessing over what Jack from the East thinks of the West. However, it seemed to me that Jack was the one to talk with a drawl rather than the genuine cowboys and gals.
Anyway, to go back to the strap-line of 'A Modern Ranch Story for Girls', yes, it lives up to that, giving a picture of ranch life - sort of, Jack's first morning is related in some detail and then we zoom ahead to an unspecified amount of time later when he's picked up his chores. There are episodes, but there's the framework of the summer timeline, and the story's main focus is on Judy learning some truths about herself and her relationship with Jack's and his with the West/ie her substitute. We get the local colour - a visit to the rodeo and a country dance, not to mention cowboy songs - and the Adventure promised in the title - the kids take on cattle rustlers and the aforementioned fire. Thinking about it, I'm not sure whether that's evidence for it being written as a piece of exotic adventures abroad for British girls, or not - I remember Cherry Ames-Dude Ranch Nurse, you see. And as the book mentions, this life would be strange and exotic to most American girls too.
Either way, it's a generous tale (would a rival girl be as lovely as Bettina if it was a YA novel written today, when the romance would be less sublimated? I don't think so) and was a way of whiling away an hour and a half.
* Yes, he shares the same surname as the author. Yes, I think that that is weird too. Is it an attempt to make the reader think that they're reading a true life story, and wonder whether the Scottish surname Ross could be exchanged with the heroine's surname Stewart? Weird.
