I was fortunate enough to read an ARC of Polly Horvath’s “My One Hundred Adventures” just before school started. It’s lovely and gentle, funny and quirky. like and unlike a dozen other books I cherished as a child.
In fact, since it was summer and time to indulge myself, I read the book through child eyes. It’s about a girl on the cusp of self-discovery, most of the mysteries around her the product of her own ingenuousness.
The adult in me found the adult characters most tantalizing. The mother in this book, seen through 12-year-old Jane’s eyes, comes across as an Earth Mother, or perhaps a sea goddess. She is an award-winning poet raising four children on the beach, feeding them on homegrown veggies and homemade jam and needing no one. Men strange to Jane appear to know her mother intimately, and one is even introduced as her father. The mom is both happy in her solitary romantic beachcomber life and perfectly willing to come to town and care for cranky, delusional old church ladies as the need arises. I mused about the possibilities of the story told from the mother’s point of view.
Jane’s adventures include dropping Bibles out of a hot-air balloon, going on a wild goose chase to find a transparent “poodle,” (portal?) into the future, and being guilted into babysitting a passel of trailer trash rugrats. There aren’t a hundred adventures, but by the end of the summer much of Jane’s longing has been resolved and she is ready to face the inner adventure of forging a new family unit. The ending is satisfying without being predictable.
This is the kind of book old people like me tend to love, but will it find its presumed audience among middle schoolers? A recent thread on the LM_NET listserv asks whether actual children are reading Jeanne Birdsall’s lovely, old-fashioned Penderwicks books, or whether these are just books we wish they would read while they’re busy pretending to be 18-year-old hotties on myspace.
I can’t answer that. I teach in an inner-city high school where Dave Pelzer’s memoirs and street lit are the big faves. My students actually believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that drugs and gangs are cool, they look good with their pants hanging below their buttocks, and it’s hard out there for a pimp.
Is there an audience for the gentle read? I hope so.
