Worlds of Difference
Island of the Blue Dolphins. By Scott O'Dell. (Puffin, 3s. 6d.) The Green Bronze Mirror. By Lynne Ellison. (Blackie, 12s. 6d.) Papa Pellerin's Daughter. By Maria Gripe. Translated by Kersti French. (Chatto and Windus, 12s. 6d.) Brady. By Jean Fritz. (Gollancz, 15s.)
Matt Tyler's Chronicle. By Christopher Webb. (Macdonald, 13s. 6d.)
Kit Baxter's War. By Frank Knight. (Macdonald, 13s. 6d.)
MORAI.ISING is out, but modern children's book writers have their own puritanism, being less in love with the world of childhood than, say, Lewis Carroll. Barrie or Robert Louis Stevenson. Nearly all the better novels for older children place a recurrent emphasis on growing up: the child matures when faced with a testing real-life situation, and his dream world is shown up for what it is. This offers infinitely varied possibilities and a chance for the author (cheating a little) to flirt entertainingly with the world of romance before stern reality breaks in.
Two of these books are none the worse for being without this theme—or, at least, in Island of the Blue Dolphins it is never stated. This former Newbery prizewinner, an impressive, sparely-written little book, has stayed in my mind since I reviewed it five years ago, and it makes a welcome reappearance as a paperback. It is a moving, imaginative reconstruction of the true story of the Lost Woman of San Nicolas. When her tribe were driven away from their island off California, the twelve-year-old girl bravely swam back to rescue •her small brother. He was killed by wild dogs and she lived alone on the island for eighteen years, her only companion a wild dog she had tamed.
The Green Bronze Mirror probably lacks the growing-up theme because the author wrote it when she was only fourteen. A girl looks into a magic bronze mirror found on the seashore and is taken back to the time of Nero. She is sold as a slave and after Nero's fire flees with her fellow Christians. Eventually she gets back to the twentieth century, bringing along her new boy-friend, an ex-slave. Lynne Ellison has not only done her homework, but also digested it, for she brines in essential data most cunningly. Her characterisation is still undeveloped, but she is already a lively, accomplished story-teller.
In the next two the familiar theme is attrac- tively developed against a northern setting, with emphasis on the rival claims of town and country life, and dreams centring around a falsely idealised father. In The Ilornstranders, Gisli and his grandfather, in a remote corner of Iceland, share the hard struggle for existence and the belief in trolls, both scorned by their girl visi- tor, town-bred Huldu from Reykjavik. An ex- citing cave rescue reconciles the two children, though readers who know the rules will guess that Gisli's world is doomed anyway. But this does not prevent Alan Boucher from writing of it most evocatively.
Papa Pellerin's Daughter, a girl's book from Sweden. is an odd, touching tale of a wild little girl. strikingly portrayed, who is left alone in a country cottage with her baby brothers. When she is sent to' an orphanage in town (albeit a kindly one), the conflict gives rise to daydreams about her unknown father. The happy ending engag- ingly has it both ways. It is admirably trans- lated. Brady is a story full of character sot in Pennsylvania just before the Civil War. Brady dis- covers that his father is an agent for the famous slaves' escape route, the Underground Railway. A crisis tests his courage and cures his besetting sin of blurting out secrets.
Two novels about Ireland show strong poetic feeling and have attractive tomboy heroines. In The Silver Fighting Cocks, set in the early nine- teenth century, Priscilla is involved in her father's smuggling escapade and becomes fascinated by an exquisite, contraband pair of silver fighting cocks. Her remarkable talent for painting in embroidery makes a charmingly original motif. The High King's Daughter is an imaginatively conceived tale of the ninth century. Melcha, the daughter of King Malachy and future bride of Athelstan, Alfred's cousin, helps her betrothed to outwit their Viking enemies.
The next two books share with the last the theme of high-spirited young people maturing in the school of war. Both are exciting boys' stories, written with a. fine historical sense and making no bones about the barbarities of the past or the harsh realities of war. In both, boys are drawn willy-nilly into wars of which they know little. In Matt Tyler's Chronicle it is the War of Independence. Matt serves in Washing- ton's 'Liberty Army,' is captured by the British and later almost involved in piracy. In Kit Baxter's War Kit finds himself serving aboard a Cromwellian privateer, and is later press- ganged into the navy.
STELLA RODWAY
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