Since January 1 I have been listening to the audiobooks The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk’s immense 2-volume novel about World War II. I finally finished it last night, listening to the final passage twice because it’s so powerful. The books were blockbusters and turned into a hit television miniseries when I was a kid; because I was from a military/diplomatic family, perhaps, they seemed to be on every bookshelf. I don’t know that they have been standing the test of time, though Herman Wouk certainly is, having recently celebrated his 101st birthday (and published a new book at age 100!)

However, I’m a big fan of Wouk, especially City Boy, which I constantly recommend. I put off reading the Winds of War series forever both because I was daunted by its size and because I wasn’t much interested in war novels. This year I finally dived in.

One of the problems with audiobooks is you can’t highlight passages; there were quite a few that I wanted to note, for the portentous gloom on the present or for providing insights into World War II I never had previously.

For the first, there are several times where a passage seemed to be as appropriate to our own times: the easy dismissal of Hitler as a clown upon the national stage, the casual dismissal of concerns about genocide, the fear that refugees might be terrorists, even commentary on how new technologies are changing the world. If it was published in 2016, I might have find some of the analogs too obvious!

On the second: By the 1970s when Wouk completed the second book we must have already been steeped in the lore of World War II: that America selflessly saved the world once they realized Hitler was a monster. Wouk disabuses any reader of that notion, conveying the slow entry into the war, the ambivalence and distrust of intelligence about the Germans’ treatment of Jewish people and others, and the reluctance to take Jewish refugees (sound familiar?) One character in particular is a frustrated diplomat who eventually quits the foreign service because he sees so little response to the alarming information he’s uncovered; there is also a passing vignette about Jewish people escaping from Auschwitz and making their way all the way across Nazi-occupied Europe to bring evidence to the Allies and being met with indifference.

There are also protectionists at home, isolationists, people who don’t want to expend resources in Europe, and another major character (THE major character) is a Naval Officer with amazing insight and precognition laboring to get the U.S. military to even lend equipment to Allied Europe for the war. Wouk doesn’t even spare Jewish Americans, who can be as maddening as antisemites; he gives us this point of view through a Jewish American who eventually ends up at Terezin and Auschwitz and survives; she lives in Europe and sees the problems firsthand, but when she returns home early in the novel she is frustrated at the ambivalence of friends and family, even echoing the wariness of accepting Jewish refugees.

Wouk also presents a series of arguments against America and the Allies through a German military official; his point of view is presented as passages from a book purportedly translated after the war by the naval officer mentioned above. Through his words Wouk presents the German point of view, but also challenges the easy moral superiority of the allies: the English have conquered and colonized the world, the German reminds readers; America is built on genocide of Native Americans and slavery.  I don’t know if Wouk intends to mock liberal Academics by having a Nazi war criminal make the same arguments, or if he means merely to face the facts and force readers to do the same.

Because the thing is, despite all this — and as a devout Jewish writer — Wouk is clearly a patriot, and ultimately his masterpiece is a love letter to America. But his is not a jingoistic, uncritical patriotism: it is a patriotism steeped in true knowledge of his country. Among other revelations is that such a patriot used to exist.

Throughout the novel I felt like the book, despite many flaws, was authentic in a way World War II novels can no longer be, because it is written honestly and from living memory, and not with hindsight or imbued with current political and historical values. But in retrospect, it must be informed by the late 1960s and 1970s when Wouk wrote it, as much as it is the work of a World War II combat veteran. I suspect that Wouk’s purpose was at least partly to address the Vietnam-era anti-military mood, but without asserting a pro-Vietnam-war stance.

Yet, I think the historical importance of the books is that they capture the mood of the war so well, and Wouk incorporates many facts and real people in his book to also make the books a thorough debriefing on the war.

I would be remiss as a reviewer if I didn’t say that this is also fundamentally a statement by a man of faith, affirming his Jewish identity and religion. Early on in the book I wondered why the principal characters were Christians, even anti-Semites (when one of the Henry boys brings home a Jewish fiance, the talk behind is back is vicious). There is one lapsed Jew in Aaron Jastrow, a famous American writer who winds up “stateless” after living in Italy for many years, and is thus cast upon the tides and ends up in Nazi hands. Through his trials Jastrow comes back to his faith; perhaps ironically since it is the identity he tried to cast off that dooms him. Wouk’s writing is at its best here, and the work almost feels confessional. If not exactly against atheism, it is an argument at least for a such-thing as “intellectual man of faith.” That, too — like the unblinded patriot — might be an idea that has fallen on hard times.

Finally, on a personal note: As a fanatic of City Boy, I had to keep reminding myself that this was by the same author. Perhaps the only correspondence is honesty about how bowled over and weakened men/boys can be by love, but there is little similarity between the tall, beautiful, courageous military men who carry Winds of War and the plump, smitten, bookish Herbie Bookbinder. Herbie is deeply relatable; even as I cheered them on, I felt little affinity with the Henry men. Literary novels might fall into bins: the personal/local/autobiographic, and the epic/sweeping/historic. I like both but favor the former. I need to read City Boy yet again and write a fan letter to Mr. Wouk before he turns 102.

People share photos of their fathers for Father’s Day, and it’s hard to not feel like dads were different then: seeing the black-and-white photos of always handsome men, with wearier brows and more confident eyes than I’ve ever worn. Those old-time dads lived on scraps and fought in wars. When they brought home a refrigerator it was hard won; they saved for it instead of putting it on a credit card. They took nothing for granted. If they over-prized their immaculate lawns, it was because they knew that nobody is promised a square of grass to grow old tending.

Of course those men were more inclined to use the belt, to shut down a child with a stern word, to be uncompromising on expectations. They filled every room with cigarette smoke and called women girls. Maybe your dad was an exception.

The dads of my childhood were transitional dads. Some worked hard and saw war; some never tended a field or murdered strangers. Either one was called “man.” They formed a fast mythology about the old and the new; laughed at Archie Bunker’s malaprops and turned around to vote for Ronald Reagan. They lost their nervous energy and relaxed into the same overstuffed chairs. In the end it didn’t matter where you’d been, only where you were.

Now dads wear Star Wars T-shirts and try to be kind. We debate the existence of “men” on the Internet. We know our children are being sent into a future of acid oceans and over-carbonized air; we accommodate them with comforts and low expectations. Previous dads hoisted their children on their shoulders to watch the parade; now we hoist our children on our shoulder and become the parade. We Instagram ourselves into sepia, to see ourselves as unfailing as the men of the past.

Photo source

So I am going to do something ubernerdy and voice an opinion on a video game franchise.

The Legend of Zelda is — by far — my favorite video game series, and part of the appeal is its longevity; it is stunning to see how this game has evolved from the 2D bitmapped scroller that was introduced in 1987 to the breathtaking 3D world of Breath of the Wild, which people were recently able to see for the first time, but will have to wait until 2017 to play.

Along the way The Legend of Zelda has had 20 installments, at least three of which were, well, game changers for their era: the original game, A Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time. Having played the games out of order, I’m fascinated by how well the earlier games anticipate the direction video games are going — the narratives, the open exploratory worlds, and the side-quests are there even in 1991’s A Link to the Past. The characters and settings I’ve come to know and expect are already imagined in a 16-bit format, ready to be reinvented and re-imagined for each generation of games.

OK, so I’m a fan.

The newest game had teaser images like the one above, suggesting that Link — the hero of every game — might be a girl in the next installment. Conversations and buzz and anxiety abounded among fans, so much that it was almost assumed that we would, indeed, see a lady Link. But Nintendo dispelled that rumor this week when they finally announced a release date and whetted our appetites with some sample footage from the game.

I’m disappointed and a bit annoyed with the official explanation that the triad of Link (hero), Zelda (damsel to be rescued), and Ganon (evil overlord) is unmutable. After all, mutability is one of the most constant elements of these games, both in how they have evolved over the decades and within each game. Link himself has been a wolf, a fish-man (aka Zora), a rock-man (aka Goron), and whatever the heck a deku is, among other incarnations. He has transformed into a giant and has transformed into a tiny little bug-sized creature. Moreover, alternative worlds that overlay with the “real” one is another constant: the darkworld, the twilight realm, etc. A realm of a Linka heroine saving Prince Zeld would fit just fine into the franchise formula, even if it meant switching back and forth between worlds where Link is a male and a world where players guide his female counterpart.

I mean, it wouldn’t kill a guy to play as a girl character for a while, and it would give girls (and longtime women fans) a chance to drive the game a little more.

Based on the earlier teaser material, I’m concerned that the brilliant team behind the franchise really did mean to give the world a female Link, but got scared off by the tiny but vocal slice of the gaming community that hate, hate, hates feminism, anything smacking of feminism, and would disparage the game at the outset as a feminist plot to corrupt the minds of boys and ruin everything because… you know… somehow it would. I dunno. I’ve tried following the logic of those guys and can’t.

It’s too bad. I’m still excited by the new game, but Nintendo obviously blew a big opportunity to be a game changer once again, and I suspect that fear had more to do with that than fealty to formula. But I hold out hope that they’re pulling a fast one to avoid spoilers.

Kid: I wish I had super powers.

Dad: Well, if you could have one, what would it be?

Kid: I would run really fast (mimes running) and have a super punch (mimes punching).

Dad: I think there are better super powers. Like, what if your super power was making people feel good about themselves?

Boy: Thoughtful look

Dad: What if your super power was teaching?

Boy: Nods.

Dad: If you think about it, the super powers most superheroes have any good. Batman has all those super powers, but the Joker never changes. Even when he gets caught he just breaks out of jail. So Batman’s powers don’t change anything. If he was a really good teacher, maybe he could change the Joker. Or if he his super power was healing he could heal the Joker’s inner wounds and make him be a better person.

Boy: Looks down reflectively. 

Dad: So do you think you’d want a super power like that?

Boy: No, I want to run really fast and have a SUPER PUNCH. Leaps forward and pummels imaginary enemy. 

I kicked off 2016 by starting The Winds of War and War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk, with the idea of finishing by today, his 101st birthday (which he is alive to celebrate). Alas, I’m only 80-odd hours into the 101 hour audiobook (the numerical coincidence wasn’t lost on me) the two-volume novel comprises. The books are thought provoking and revealing and I’ll have a lot to say about them later, when I’ve actually finished, but I wanted to wish Mr. Wouk a happy birthday.

I’ve been a Wouk fan since high school. My favorite is City Boy, a book I love beyond measure and include in my personal top five. That one and Youngblood Hawke show his bent for humor, but his legacy is his war novels, espcially The Caine Mutiny, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and the two books about the Henry family and World War II. Through Wouk’s novels I’ve gained a lot of appreciation for the men who fought World War II, while also having a much richer and nuanced view of America during the war, which Wouk faithfully records without the “greatest generation” mythmaking.

I’ll blog more about the novels later, but a curious coincidence of the books is a major character named Byron Henry. Our own Byron is named for Henry Byron Robinson, his grandfather, who — like Byron in the book — served in the Pacific theater in World War II yesterday. My father in law, like both of my grandparents, never regaled people with war stories, but he was haunted by memories of it for the rest of his life. That is, until yesterday, when he died at the age of 93, taking his secrets with him.

By didn’t define himself by his war experience. He liked reading, music, birdwatching. and big cuddly dogs. Most of all, my wife says, “he enjoyed being a dad.” But she also says “he thought about [the war] every day, even if he never talked about it. It was obvious.” We don’t need myth-making but we do need to respect, as Wouk does, the courage and sacrifice those men made.

As a child I was a big fan of the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, and must have read them three times through — the last time when I was fifteen or so. For some reason though I went back and re-read a lot of childhood favorites, I was reluctant to re-read these, partly because fantasy series were few and far between and felt novel when I was a kid; now there is so much of it that follows the same design as Prydain (the well-trodden hero’s journey) I thought I might be annoyed by it even though he did it first (or firstishly).

However, once I did dive in I was hooked. Lloyd Alexander has complex characters and a whimsical sense of humor that makes these book transcend most epic fantasy and subverts the usual expectations for chosen-hero-fulfills-destiny type tales. In fact, Alexander admits in one of the forewords that it wasn’t until halfway through the series that he brushed up his Joseph Campbell so he could bring it around to a satisfactory conclusion — and says so almost apologetically, since it means drifting from the impulsive plot turns that make the first three books so delightful.

This brings me to Taran Wanderer, which is the fourth in the series. There is a rather typical-for-Prydain beginning, with an evil wizard getting bested by Taran’s quick wits and good luck, but the book then turns into a longish, episodic, and mostly realistic series of experiences as Taran searches for himself: he seeks both knowledge of his parents (growing up as a foundling and presumably an orphan) and of his calling. In the latter ambition he takes up farming, pottery, weaving, and smithing with a series of mentors, becomes passably good at each but decides it is not for him, and then (after a somewhat unlimactic, or at least unresolved, battle with a minor villain), sets back for home with no more answers than he had before, but with fewer questions as testament to his new wisdom.

Sound boring? As a kid I dreaded the second half of the book and may have skipped it on one of my read-throughs. This time, as a grown reader whose put some thought into the interior lives of characters, I was absolutely in awe of the care Alexander takes in shaping Taran’s inner life and the man he is becoming.

I now see the peculiar design of the book as brilliant. The first, more comic and adventurous half of the book involves a series of encounters with powerful men like kings and wizards; the second half with laborers and craftsmen. I see how each of the characters in the first half represents a kind of superficial virtue like ambition, glory, the desire to be loved, or the desire to be feared. The second half exposes Taran to deeper virtues like resiliance and hard work, patience and discipline.

It’s not as preachy as it sounds, though the relatively quieter passages without the humor and adventure found earlier in the series might test immature readers (like it did my boy self). I’d now put it on a short-list with books like Hatchet and The Midnight Fox on my coming-of-age canon, and it’s the first fantasy book I’ve put there. Usually in such books the heroic calling substitutes for growing up.

As a child I was a big fan of the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, and must have read them three times through — the last time when I was fifteen or so. For some reason though I went back and re-read a lot of childhood favorites, I was reluctant to re-read these, partly because fantasy series were few and far between and felt novel when I was a kid; now there is so much of it that follows the same design as Prydain (the well-trodden hero’s journey) I thought I might be annoyed by it even though he did it first (or firstishly).

However, once I did dive in I was hooked. Lloyd Alexander has complex characters and a whimsical sense of humor that makes these book transcend most epic fantasy and subverts the usual expectations for chosen-hero-fulfills-destiny type tales. In fact, Alexander admits in one of the forewords that it wasn’t until halfway through the series that he brushed up his Joseph Campbell so he could bring it around to a satisfactory conclusion — and says so almost apologetically, since it means drifting from the impulsive plot turns that make the first three books so delightful.

This brings me to Taran Wanderer, which is the fourth in the series. There is a rather typical-for-Prydain beginning, with an evil wizard getting bested by Taran’s quick wits and good luck, but the book then turns into a longish, episodic, and mostly realistic series of experiences as Taran searches for himself: he seeks both knowledge of his parents (growing up as a foundling and presumably an orphan) and of his calling. In the latter ambition he takes up farming, pottery, weaving, and smithing with a series of mentors, becomes passably good at each but decides it is not for him, and then (after a somewhat unlimactic, or at least unresolved, battle with a minor villain), sets back for home with no more answers than he had before, but with fewer questions as testament to his new wisdom.

Sound boring? As a kid I dreaded the second half of the book and may have skipped it on one of my read-throughs. This time, as a grown reader who has put some thought into the interior lives of characters, I was absolutely in awe of the care Alexander takes in shaping Taran’s inner life and the man he is becoming.

I now see the peculiar design of the book as brilliant. The first, more comic and adventurous half of the book involves a series of encounters with powerful men like kings and wizards; the second half with laborers and craftsmen. I see how each of the characters in the first half represents a kind of superficial virtue like ambition, glory, the desire to be loved, or the desire to be feared. The second half exposes Taran to deeper virtues like resiliance and hard work, patience and discipline.

It’s not as preachy as it sounds, though the relatively quieter passages without the humor and adventure found earlier in the series might test immature readers (like it did my boy self). I’d now put it on a short-list with books like Hatchet and The Midnight Fox on my coming-of-age canon, and it’s the first fantasy book I’ve put there. Usually in such books the heroic calling substitutes for growing up.

Would anyone like to strike up a snail mail style correspondence? I miss writing and receiving letters in the mail, and feel like something’s been lost there that hasn’t been replaced by email or Facebook messenger. As a college student and shortly after graduating I wrote tons of letters and felt like I would develop a classic correspondence, the kind that Melville had with Hawthorne, with some of my witty pals. Of course I also that I would have a Melville/Hawthorne-style writing career and beard, but…  Well, adult life is filled with corrections to your expectations.

What I didn’t expect is for email to completely end letter-writing almost in a day. I got that bitnet email address in 1993 and it was all over for letters. Then Facebook mostly killed email and I guess in a few years we’ll be like ha ha, that person still uses Facebook, while we cyberface or whatever we’ll be doing by then.

Anyway, letters. Yeah. Send me one and I’ll send you one. Leave a message below to get my address. You must use a valid email address in your comment so I can tell you my home address. If we’ve ever met in person or kinda know each other, that’s great, but I also welcome readers and other friends I haven’t met.

Would anyone like to strike up a snail mail style correspondence? I miss writing and receiving letters in the mail, and feel like something’s been lost there that hasn’t been replaced by email or Facebook messenger. As a college student and shortly after graduating I wrote tons of letters and felt like I would develop a classic correspondence, the kind that Melville had with Hawthorne, with some of my witty pals. Of course I also that I would have a Melville/Hawthorne-style writing career and beard, but…  Well, adult life is filled with corrections to your expectations.

What I didn’t expect is for email to completely end letter-writing almost in a day. I got that bitnet email address in 1993 and it was all over for letters. Then Facebook mostly killed email and I guess in a few years we’ll be like ha ha, that person still uses Facebook, while we cyberface or whatever we’ll be doing by then.

Anyway, letters. Yeah. Send me one and I’ll send you one. Leave a message below to get my address. You must use a valid email address in your comment so I can tell you my home address. If we’ve ever met in person or kinda know each other, that’s great, but I also welcome readers and other friends I haven’t met.

A kid keeps asking me a question via this website and my replies get bounced back due to an invalid email address.

So, Trent, if you’re out there, I was born in November 1968. I won’t give the exact date because leaking too much personal info over time on the Internet is a bad idea. Hope that is enough!

Hope everyone else is having a good day!

A kid keeps asking me a question via this website and my replies get bounced back due to an invalid email address.

So, Trent, if you’re out there, I was born in November 1968. I won’t give the exact date because leaking too much personal info over time on the Internet is a bad idea. Hope that is enough!

Hope everyone else is having a good day!

Five years ago today, early in the morning, I got a phone call — I think it was my brother who called first, but there were a lot of calls that day and it blurs. My mother’s house was on fire and a neighbor had described the bedroom as “blazing.” I also can’t remember if the fire was still smoldering when we got the call. Since we hadn’t heard from my mother we assumed she was dead, but it would take all day to confirm it.

This was both an expected and unexpected event. In fact, we’d gotten many calls from neighbors, from police, and from hospitals, over the years. Any time I saw a 701 area code I had to brace myself before answering the phone, especially when the call came at a strange hour. They always informed us that our mother had been arrested for DWI and committed to 72 hours of rehab, or had fallen down the stairs and committed to 72 hours of rehab, or had somehow otherwise brought brief intervention into her long descent into alcoholism and dementia. The police and medical professionals gave us the info dutifully; they probably made such calls often enough. Sometimes neighbors would give the info with heart-breaking circumlocution… as if we were completely ignorant of the situation and they were telling us for the first time and needed to break it to us gently. At times I felt judged: how could a grown man let his poor mother totter drunkenly about the house by herself?

People without addicts in their lives probably have little understanding of the incredible difficulties of intervention. TV movies tend not to dwell on the legal and logistical hurdles, the high costs of trying to commit someone against their will to a rehab clinic even before you pay the clinic. They don’t show a situation where a woman would hurl plates at police officers and have to be physically subdued, dragged literally kicking and screaming into treatment, and then simply count days until it’s time to leave and drink again. Maybe I’m trying to let myself off the hook here because I did nothing. I wanted nothing but distance since the day I left the home. I made occasional phone calls, happy to find my mother merely incoherent and rambling instead of raging, and made excuses not to visit. We went through great pains to bring her to our wedding, five years before she died, and I only saw her once more on a trip I took to Grand Forks later that year for work.

On that last visit I met her at the door because I hated to see the inside of the house: too many messes and broken things which I didn’t have time or resources to tend to. She was pretty lucid that day. I took her to Hugo’s Grocery. By that time she had constant vertigo and used a walker, but on our trip through the store she left it behind and let me guide her through the aisles, clutching my arm with a trembling and claw-like hand. She was a weak woman but she had a strong grip: all those years of typing on a typewriter. I left her on the doorstep, and that was the last time I saw her. Unlike the way these stories generally go, I absolutely suspected it might be the last time, even though she hung on for another four years.

When people write about grieving for late parents or memories of moms they rarely consider the possibility that the reader is someone with a story like mine. They tend to write in broad, generous terms about what “our” mothers mean to “us,” or what “you” go through.

“We’re left to wander back into the world, where everything looks the same, but for us, every movement and every breath feels weighted down by this suffocating cloud of sadness,” David Ferguson writes in an essay I saw shared a dozen times on Facebook. “We,” is he and all the people who have uncomplicated relationships with their mothers; those who were not abused or neglected, who did not see their mothers succumb to addiction, who were never lashed at with a metal ruler, who never mopped their mother’s gray vomit off the bathroom floor, who were never humiliated by having mom stumble out of the bedroom at 3:00 in the afternoon, already lit, when we brought friends over, who were never roused from sleep at 2:00 in the morning with a rambling tirade. I certainly don’t begrudge Ferguson his grief or his fond memories of Mom, but I do wish the first person plural weren’t invoked with such authority. It’s one thing to assume your experience is normal, another to presume it is universal.

For me, “losing” my mother was gradual, an erosion over decades with a lot of ugliness, too ugly for a TV movie, too harrowing even for a Eugene O’Neill play. I did not feel suffocating clouds of sadness when she died, but liberated, released from guilt, relieved that it was finally over. People like my brothers and I don’t get to mark these anniversaries with warm sentiment. I wish I could say something like, “Mom died five years ago. I miss her every day.” But this wouldn’t be true, and this is all I’ve got. “Mom died five years ago. I’m glad her soul is at rest.”

Five years ago today, early in the morning, I got a phone call — I think it was my brother who called first, but there were a lot of calls that day and it blurs. My mother’s house was on fire and a neighbor had described the bedroom as “blazing.” I also can’t remember if the fire was still smoldering when we got the call. Since we hadn’t heard from my mother we assumed she was dead, but it would take all day to confirm it.

This was both an expected and unexpected event. In fact, we’d gotten many calls from neighbors, from police, and from hospitals, over the years. Any time I saw a 701 area code I had to brace myself before answering the phone, especially when the call came at a strange hour. They always informed us that our mother had been arrested for DWI and committed to 72 hours of rehab, or had fallen down the stairs and committed to 72 hours of rehab, or had somehow otherwise brought brief intervention into her long descent into alcoholism and dementia. The police and medical professionals gave us the info dutifully; they probably made such calls often enough. Sometimes neighbors would give the info with heart-breaking circumlocution… as if we were completely ignorant of the situation and they were telling us for the first time and needed to break it to us gently. At times I felt judged: how could a grown man let his poor mother totter drunkenly about the house by herself?

People without addicts in their lives probably have little understanding of the incredible difficulties of intervention. TV movies tend not to dwell on the legal and logistical hurdles, the high costs of trying to commit someone against their will to a rehab clinic even before you pay the clinic. They don’t show a situation where a woman would hurl plates at police officers and have to be physically subdued, dragged literally kicking and screaming into treatment, and then simply count days until it’s time to leave and drink again. Maybe I’m trying to let myself off the hook here because I did nothing. I wanted nothing but distance since the day I left the home. I made occasional phone calls, happy to find my mother merely incoherent and rambling instead of raging, and made excuses not to visit. We went through great pains to bring her to our wedding, five years before she died, and I only saw her once more on a trip I took to Grand Forks later that year for work.

On that last visit I met her at the door because I hated to see the inside of the house: too many messes and broken things which I didn’t have time or resources to tend to. She was pretty lucid that day. I took her to Hugo’s Grocery. By that time she had constant vertigo and used a walker, but on our trip through the store she left it behind and let me guide her through the aisles, clutching my arm with a trembling and claw-like hand. She was a weak woman but she had a strong grip: all those years of typing on a typewriter. I left her on the doorstep, and that was the last time I saw her. Unlike the way these stories generally go, I absolutely suspected it might be the last time, even though she hung on for another four years.

When people write about grieving for late parents or memories of moms they rarely consider the possibility that the reader is someone with a story like mine. They tend to write in broad, generous terms about what “our” mothers mean to “us,” or what “you” go through.

“We’re left to wander back into the world, where everything looks the same, but for us, every movement and every breath feels weighted down by this suffocating cloud of sadness,” David Ferguson writes in an essay I saw shared a dozen times on Facebook. “We,” is he and all the people who have uncomplicated relationships with their mothers; those who were not abused or neglected, who did not see their mothers succumb to addiction, who were never lashed at with a metal ruler, who never mopped their mother’s gray vomit off the bathroom floor, who were never humiliated by having mom stumble out of the bedroom at 3:00 in the afternoon, already lit, when we brought friends over, who were never roused from sleep at 2:00 in the morning with a rambling tirade. I certainly don’t begrudge Ferguson his grief or his fond memories of Mom, but I do wish the first person plural weren’t invoked with such authority. It’s one thing to assume your experience is normal, another to presume it is universal.

For me, “losing” my mother was gradual, an erosion over decades with a lot of ugliness, too ugly for a TV movie, too harrowing even for a Eugene O’Neill play. I did not feel suffocating clouds of sadness when she died, but liberated, released from guilt, relieved that it was finally over. People like my brothers and I don’t get to mark these anniversaries with warm sentiment. I wish I could say something like, “Mom died five years ago. I miss her every day.” But this wouldn’t be true, and this is all I’ve got. “Mom died five years ago. I’m glad her soul is at rest.”

Well, obviously you know that Prince the funky purple music icon passed away last week. As a Minneapolitan and a child of the 1980s I reeled a bit from his death and like many people went into an a long weekend of digging out the old CDs and listening to them weepily.

I credit that listening binge for a dream I had last night where Prince appeared while revising my book (this baseball/bee one). I’d been working on it all weekend, and was doing so in the dream. Prince read over my shoulder and asked “What do you want the reader to feel right here? What do you want the reader to feel right here?” He was both frustrated and encouraging.

It’s some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. I spend all this time worrying about plot structure, moving characters from point A to point B, the three-act play, the drops and rises in action (which needs special work on this draft). I had never thought purely about feeling in a book, scene by scene and passage by passage. Charting emotional goals like plot points: I want the reader to laugh here, to cry here, to feel nervous here, to be angry here.

My books have culminated in emotional moments, but they are slow-building, and come as a natural consequence of the story. But leave it to Prince, whose music was always a tapestry of intense feeling, to focus my attention on those emotional goals for the reader throughout.

I’m taking this with me as I continue. Thank you, dream Prince. I hope to see you again.

Well, obviously you know that Prince the funky purple music icon passed away last week. As a Minneapolitan and a child of the 1980s I reeled a bit from his death and like many people went into an a long weekend of digging out the old CDs and listening to them weepily.

I credit that listening binge for a dream I had last night where Prince appeared while revising my book (this baseball/bee one). I’d been working on it all weekend, and was doing so in the dream. Prince read over my shoulder and asked “What do you want the reader to feel right here? What do you want the reader to feel right here?” He was both frustrated and encouraging.

It’s some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. I spend all this time worrying about plot structure, moving characters from point A to point B, the three-act play, the drops and rises in action (which needs special work on this draft). I had never thought purely about feeling in a book, scene by scene and passage by passage. Charting emotional goals like plot points: I want the reader to laugh here, to cry here, to feel nervous here, to be angry here.

My books have culminated in emotional moments, but they are slow-building, and come as a natural consequence of the story. But leave it to Prince, whose music was always a tapestry of intense feeling, to focus my attention on those emotional goals for the reader throughout.

I’m taking this with me as I continue. Thank you, dream Prince. I hope to see you again.

Middle-grade author Mike Jung was recently on an AWP panel about diversity in children’s book publishing and said:

[C]raft is about more than just pure mechanics… Craft is inextricably linked to socio-political belief, self-understanding, cultural understanding, and the historical scaffolding upon which our society has been built.

I admit I didn’t know what to make of this the first time I saw it because I was trying to sort out how overuse of adverbs (for example) had anything to do with a sociopolitical belief. But after thinking it through, I can see how any aspect of craft from word choice to point of view (first person? third person?) can be mapped to conscious or subconscious sociopolitical beliefs. E.g., first person became popular at a time when self-hood was more in vogue. The purple prose of the late 19th Century conveyed the erudition of the literary elite. The development of “believable” or “relatable” characters comprises a host of sociopolitical assumptions.

One of the more transparent connections is  the interrelation of character and theme. When a writer has a message, it’s all too easy to create flat characters to make the point. Good guys fight for the good thing against bad guys who fight for the bad thing. The good guys are charismatic and varied and the bad guys are ugly and indistinct. The consequences are explicitly sociopolitical and for me represent one of the worst artistic failings.

For me the best representation of this habit is Ayn Rand, who wrote political arguments in the shape of novels with tall, smart, beautiful characters espousing her ideology and a slew of badly-complected, shamelessly corrupt, stupid characters opposing them. You rarely see a scene with such a character without passing description of the puffiness of his neck or spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. Forget her politics. It’s lousy writing. It’s bad fiction. Her character development is utterly lazy and incompetent!

Remember the Seinfeld episode where his dentist (played by Walter White!) converts to Judaism so he can tell anti-Semitic jokes? “This offends you as a Jewish person?” a priest asks Jerry. “No, it offends me as a comedian!” he retorts. While Rand’s politics are simplistic and self serving, she doesn’t offend me as a human, she offends me as a writer.

The most compelling characters to me are morally ambiguous. I like Han Solo (he killed a guy to avoid a debt, remember?), Gollum, and Snape. Reading The Black Cauldron with Byron, I’m utterly taken with Prince Ellidyr, who is brash and offensive and keeps saving people’s lives then reminding them that the life he saved has little value to him. Byron, being five, is less comfortable with such ambiguity. “How come a bad guy is riding with the good guys?” He wonders. “Because it’s a good book,” I tell him. (So yes, I believe in good books and bad books with more certainty than good guys and bad guys.)

And ultimately that is both an ideological and aesthetic value, to see things as complicated and nuanced and wanting books (even fantastic ones) to convey the uncertainties and moral struggles that come with life. To own that even this comes from a sociopolitical and historic context, call it the abject confusion of early 21st Century straight white male, knowing all the ways one can go wrong, and seeing nothing manifestly evil to rail against that isn’t encoded in his own DNA.

I recently read an article (old, pre-Harry-Potter) about the tendency for “weightier” children’s books to win awards and critical favor, whether epic fantasy or the then-popular “problem novel.” The critic, Deborah Stevenson, unites books across genres with the dichotomy of “heroic” vs. “everyday,” using Ramona as representative of the later set (why do you think someone sent it to me?) It teases out an idea I’d had that books were trending away from Ramonaism and toward Harryism and gives a vocabulary to that distinction. Both realistic and fantastic books can be certain in a way I don’t care for, and heroic feels like a value-neutral way of describing them. Everyday represents another idea: that one’s struggles are interior and exist within a non-epic backdrop of people who are all plodding along with the same struggles. It’s a spectrum, not a dichotomy, but I think heroism can give way to Randism. Chronicling the everyday represents another strategy: this is not universal truth, a writer says, but it is true for this character. There are dangers there too, of relativism, of navel-gazing, of being boring. But I think being mindful of it, to challenge oneself to see others (and portray them) as complex and multifaceted, to accept yourself as your own antagonist, leads to richer books and wiser writers. 

Middle-grade author Mike Jung was recently on an AWP panel about diversity in children’s book publishing and said:

[C]raft is about more than just pure mechanics… Craft is inextricably linked to socio-political belief, self-understanding, cultural understanding, and the historical scaffolding upon which our society has been built.

I admit I didn’t know what to make of this the first time I saw it because I was trying to sort out how overuse of adverbs (for example) had anything to do with a sociopolitical belief. But after thinking it through, I can see how any aspect of craft from word choice to point of view (first person? third person?) can be mapped to conscious or subconscious sociopolitical beliefs. E.g., first person became popular at a time when self-hood was more in vogue. The purple prose of the late 19th Century conveyed the erudition of the literary elite. The development of “believable” or “relatable” characters comprises a host of sociopolitical assumptions.

One of the more transparent connections is  the interrelation of character and theme. When a writer has a message, it’s all too easy to create flat characters to make the point. Good guys fight for the good thing against bad guys who fight for the bad thing. The good guys are charismatic and varied and the bad guys are ugly and indistinct. The consequences are explicitly sociopolitical and for me represent one of the worst artistic failings.

For me the best representation of this habit is Ayn Rand, who wrote political arguments in the shape of novels with tall, smart, beautiful characters espousing her ideology and a slew of badly-complected, shamelessly corrupt, stupid characters opposing them. You rarely see a scene with such a character without passing description of the puffiness of his neck or spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. Forget her politics. It’s lousy writing. It’s bad fiction. Her character development is utterly lazy and incompetent!

Remember the Seinfeld episode where his dentist (played by Walter White!) converts to Judaism so he can tell anti-Semitic jokes? “This offends you as a Jewish person?” a priest asks Jerry. “No, it offends me as a comedian!” he retorts. While Rand’s politics are simplistic and self serving, she doesn’t offend me as a human, she offends me as a writer.

The most compelling characters to me are morally ambiguous. I like Han Solo (he killed a guy to avoid a debt, remember?), Gollum, and Snape. Reading The Black Cauldron with Byron, I’m utterly taken with Prince Ellidyr, who is brash and offensive and keeps saving people’s lives then reminding them that the life he saved has little value to him. Byron, being five, is less comfortable with such ambiguity. “How come a bad guy is riding with the good guys?” He wonders. “Because it’s a good book,” I tell him. (So yes, I believe in good books and bad books with more certainty than good guys and bad guys.)

And ultimately that is both an ideological and aesthetic value, to see things as complicated and nuanced and wanting books (even fantastic ones) to convey the uncertainties and moral struggles that come with life. To own that even this comes from a sociopolitical and historic context, call it the abject confusion of early 21st Century straight white male, knowing all the ways one can go wrong, and seeing nothing manifestly evil to rail against that isn’t encoded in his own DNA.

I recently read an article (old, pre-Harry-Potter) about the tendency for “weightier” children’s books to win awards and critical favor, whether epic fantasy or the then-popular “problem novel.” The critic, Deborah Stevenson, unites books across genres with the dichotomy of “heroic” vs. “everyday,” using Ramona as representative of the later set (why do you think someone sent it to me?) It teases out an idea I’d had that books were trending away from Ramonaism and toward Harryism and gives a vocabulary to that distinction. Both realistic and fantastic books can be certain in a way I don’t care for, and heroic feels like a value-neutral way of describing them. Everyday represents another idea: that one’s struggles are interior and exist within a non-epic backdrop of people who are all plodding along with the same struggles. It’s a spectrum, not a dichotomy, but I think heroism can give way to Randism. Chronicling the everyday represents another strategy: this is not universal truth, a writer says, but it is true for this character. There are dangers there too, of relativism, of navel-gazing, of being boring. But I think being mindful of it, to challenge oneself to see others (and portray them) as complex and multifaceted, to accept yourself as your own antagonist, leads to richer books and wiser writers. 

Every day since he’s started preschool, my son has demanded that I see him all the way to the classroom.  About once a week I’ve suggested I let him off at the front door to the school, in the foyer, or at the first or second turn in the hallway. He shot down those suggestions with a “no,” and a shake of his head, every time. I would see him to the classroom door and set a symbolic toe across the threshold. He would say “Sib ntsib dua,” (“Sisidua,” out of his mouth),  which means goodbye in Hmong. I would say it back.

Yesterday as we strolled in he looked at the wet sidewalk and wondered why there weren’t any worms, remembering a time last fall when the path was littered with them after a rain. I shrug and say I don’t know. Then he stopped.

“Dad, I think we can start saying sib ntsib dua at the door.”

“You mean right here?”

“Yeah.”

So we stood just outside the door and he said “Sib ntsib dua” and I said it back. He said “I love you” and I said “I love you.” He said “Have a fun day at work,” and I said “Have a fun day at school.” As I walk back up the path he’s still standing and holding the door open. I don’t look back because that’s a huge part of parenting.

Every day since he’s started preschool, my son has demanded that I see him all the way to the classroom.  About once a week I’ve suggested I let him off at the front door to the school, in the foyer, or at the first or second turn in the hallway. He shot down those suggestions with a “no,” and a shake of his head, every time. I would see him to the classroom door and set a symbolic toe across the threshold. He would say “Sib ntsib dua,” (“Sisidua,” out of his mouth),  which means goodbye in Hmong. I would say it back.

Yesterday as we strolled in he looked at the wet sidewalk and wondered why there weren’t any worms, remembering a time last fall when the path was littered with them after a rain. I shrugged and said I didn’t know. Then he stopped.

“Dad, I think we can start saying sib ntsib dua at the door.”

“You mean right here?”

“Yeah.”

So we stood just outside the door and he said “Sib ntsib dua” and I said it back. He said “I love you” and I said “I love you.” He said “Have a fun day at work,” and I said “Have a fun day at school.” As I walk back up the path he’s still standing and holding the door open. I don’t look back because that’s a huge part of parenting.

Add to Beverly Cleary’s awards and accomplishments: reaching the century mark. She says she “didn’t plan on it,” in typical dry humor. It’s nice to see the revival of appreciation for her contributions to children’s literature over the past few weeks. I was going to collect them all and present them here, but holy cow, there’s a lot of them.  I’ll settle for a few.

Here’s a great interview in the Washington Post, and another great article and interview by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times.

My buddy Kurt in Portland (where most of Cleary’s books take place) sent me this lovely appreciation by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

NPR’s All Thing Considered did a story, and The New Yorker, and a bunch of others. I’ve especially enjoyed the entire series of articles at Horn Book, and have been saving mine for today. Here’s my favorite line (but please read the whole thing).

[H]ere is the great truth that courses through Beverly Cleary’s books: even a happy childhood is not an easy one.

I celebrated by teaching my son how to turn Qs into cats, and we’ll have pancakes and carrot salad for dinner.

Add to Beverly Cleary’s awards and accomplishments: reaching the century mark. She says she “didn’t plan on it,” in typical dry humor. It’s nice to see the revival of appreciation for her contributions to children’s literature over the past few weeks. I was going to collect them all and present them here, but holy cow, there’s a lot of them.  I’ll settle for a few.

Here’s a great interview in the Washington Post, and another great article and interview by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times.

My buddy Kurt in Portland (where most of Cleary’s books take place) sent me this lovely appreciation by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

NPR’s All Thing Considered did a story, and The New Yorker, and a bunch of others. I’ve especially enjoyed the entire series of articles at Horn Book, and have been saving mine for today. Here’s my favorite line (but please read the whole thing).

[H]ere is the great truth that courses through Beverly Cleary’s books: even a happy childhood is not an easy one.

I celebrated by teaching my son how to turn Qs into cats, and we’ll have pancakes and carrot salad for dinner.

When I was a kid my brothers and I lived in constant fear of our father’s rages. Something like a little spilled ketchup on the counter would set him off and he’d yell at one of us or all of us for an hour or more. No exaggeration: we would time his rants and kept records. He didn’t spank us that often but we would go off on ceaseless torrents of verbal abuse.

Even though I suffered through approximately one of these rages a week for my entire childhood, I can remember almost nothing of what he actually said. That we were careless? Probably. That we were useless and ingrateful? Possibly. All you really can hear when someone is yelling is: ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

Forget to walk the dog? ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

Bad grade at school? ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

Do nothing at all? ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

That was all a long time ago, but I deal with it daily. Parenting, holding down two or three jobs at a time, and the other challenges of adulthood are picnics compared to managing the recurring sadness, anxiety, and (yes) anger over being treated so shabbily as a child. I have forgiven my father, but that doesn’t make it any easier to function as an adult and especially as a father.

The toughest challenge has been, ironically or inevitably, wrestling with my own rage. I know my brothers have the same struggles. It’s like we grew up on the outskirts of a frequently-erupting volcano, and now all tend to our own respective pools of bubbling magma. We rarely get together because it’s too volatile.

I am thus compelled to see anger as a singularly destructive force that ruined my childhood and must be watched vigilantly lest it destroy my adult life, so it goes that I’m wary of a recent trend to romanticize anger.

Donald Trump says people are angry; Bernie Sanders says people are angry, and where they agree is that the anger itself is a force that must be reckoned with. It’s not questioned that angry people have a right to be angry, or even why they are angry. We’re supposed to ask what the rest of us can all do to make them feel better. That’s how anger works. It is selfish and manipulative. As a child I cried and promised to try harder and be better; it was years before I realized my dad’s anger was unreasonable.

I don’t think people decide to get angry, as a strategy, but it certainly serves their own ends to be so. Angry customers get special treatment. If you tell a friend you’re angry, their immediate reaction will be to apologize and try to make it up to you. Get angry as an electorate, and politicians rally around you, you get stories written about you and your rage and what the country can do to make it better.

Anger is also stupefying. It heightens your own feelings and makes you less considerate of the feelings of others. Anger literally gives you tunnel vision: your field of vision narrows as you get angry, sharpening and highlighting the focus of your rage while blinding you to objects on the periphery. Evolutionarily this was a survival strategy; now it allows the angry to see perceived injustice with special clarity while blurring background noise like: the thoughts, feelings, and basic humanity of those people who have allegedly wronged them.

When I think on how my father, who is a good man, could have treated three children so terribly for so long, I can only think: the anger made him do it. His rants shaped a narrative of unruly, ungrateful kids, and his anger kept his brain focused on the points that proved it and blind to other evidence or concerns.

I don’t think anger serves functional political dialogue any more than it serves functional family life. It encourages us-and-them, black-and-white, style thinking. Of course certain politicians reap the benefits: the kind that want people to be angry, and stay angry, because they are easier to manipulate.

Obviously (I hope) the alternative to anger is not acquiescence; it is calm and decisive action. There are healthy, constructive ways to be dissatisfied, to air a grievance, to identify problems and brainstorm solutions. In my experience anger doesn’t lend itself to solutions; it creates problems and is a problem. In fact, I’m inclined to say it’s the biggest problem facing us…

Nah, that’s still (by far) global warming. But if I think too much about that I’ll get angry

When I was a kid my brothers and I lived in constant fear of our father’s rages. Something like a little spilled ketchup on the counter would set him off and he’d yell at one of us or all of us for an hour or more. No exaggeration: we would time his rants and kept records. He didn’t spank us that often but we would go off on ceaseless torrents of verbal abuse.

Even though I suffered through approximately one of these rages a week for my entire childhood, I can remember almost nothing of what he actually said. That we were careless? Probably. That we were useless and ingrateful? Possibly. All you really can hear when someone is yelling is: ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

Forget to walk the dog? ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

Bad grade at school? ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

Do nothing at all? ANGRY I’M ANGRY YOU MADE ME ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY

That was all a long time ago, but I deal with it daily. Parenting, holding down two or three jobs at a time, and the other challenges of adulthood are picnics compared to managing the recurring sadness, anxiety, and (yes) anger over being treated so shabbily as a child. I have forgiven my father, but that doesn’t make it any easier to function as an adult and especially as a father.

The toughest challenge has been, ironically or inevitably, wrestling with my own rage. I know my brothers have the same struggles. It’s like we grew up on the outskirts of a frequently-erupting volcano, and now all tend to our own respective pools of bubbling magma. We rarely get together because it’s too volatile.

I am thus compelled to see anger as a singularly destructive force that ruined my childhood and must be watched vigilantly lest it destroy my adult life, so it goes that I’m wary of a recent trend to romanticize anger.

Donald Trump says people are angry; Bernie Sanders says people are angry, and where they agree is that the anger itself is a force that must be reckoned with. It’s not questioned that angry people have a right to be angry, or even why they are angry. We’re supposed to ask what the rest of us can all do to make them feel better. That’s how anger works. It is selfish and manipulative. As a child I cried and promised to try harder and be better; it was years before I realized my dad’s anger was unreasonable.

I don’t think people decide to get angry, as a strategy, but it certainly serves their own ends to be so. Angry customers get special treatment. If you tell a friend you’re angry, their immediate reaction will be to apologize and try to make it up to you. Get angry as an electorate, and politicians rally around you, you get stories written about you and your rage and what the country can do to make it better.

Anger is also stupefying. It heightens your own feelings and makes you less considerate of the feelings of others. Anger literally gives you tunnel vision: your field of vision narrows as you get angry, sharpening and highlighting the focus of your rage while blinding you to objects on the periphery. Evolutionarily this was a survival strategy; now it allows the angry to see perceived injustice with special clarity while blurring background noise like: the thoughts, feelings, and basic humanity of those people who have allegedly wronged them.

When I think on how my father, who is a good man, could have treated three children so terribly for so long, I can only think: the anger made him do it. His rants shaped a narrative of unruly, ungrateful kids, and his anger kept his brain focused on the points that proved it and blind to other evidence or concerns.

I don’t think anger serves functional political dialogue any more than it serves functional family life. It encourages us-and-them, black-and-white, style thinking. Of course certain politicians reap the benefits: the kind that want people to be angry, and stay angry, because they are easier to manipulate.

Obviously (I hope) the alternative to anger is not acquiescence; it is calm and decisive action. There are healthy, constructive ways to be dissatisfied, to air a grievance, to identify problems and brainstorm solutions. In my experience anger doesn’t lend itself to solutions; it creates problems and is a problem. In fact, I’m inclined to say it’s the biggest problem facing us…

Nah, that’s still (by far) global warming. But if I think too much about that I’ll get angry

Byron and I are on volume 52 of the Magic Tree House series. He’s pretty much refused any other nighttime reading material since we first ventured out with Jack and Annie and met some dinosaurs in book #1. We’ve since been to every continent and several eras of history, met Mozart and Lincoln and numerous other historical figures, and saved at least a dozen different animals from fire, earthquake, and landslide.

As a parent I’m excited to see my kid excited about books, and the truth is that he’s learned quite a bit about history and geography by chasing Jack and Annie around the globe. I keep finding myself referencing this book or that one when Byron learns about something new. Somebody offers him a fig, which he says he never heard of, so I remind him of Jack and Annie’s trip to ancient Baghdad. Other times he suddenly reminds me of one of their excursions — he walks on snow like the polar bear in that one that took place in the arctic. He knows about typhoons because of their adventure in Hawaii.

As a writer, I am envious of the niche Mary Pope Osborne has carved for herself. I would love to have even a series that promises such a reliable work plan every year, and such a reliable paycheck: a strategy that lets me write full time even if well shy of the Magic Treehouse dynsasty. They must be fun to research and write.

As a reader, I have come to accept that these are not literary books and shouldn’t be read as such. Jack and Annie are not exactly flat characters, but they are pretty much “anykids” who serve no purpose other than guiding readers through various history and geography lessons. The magic part of the story wavers in importance — sometimes the only magic to a story is that Jack and Annie are whisked off somewhere; other times it provides a deux ex machina to solve a problem; yet other times it is a plot device. (Really, the number of times Merlin requires a couple of muggles to get into deathly danger to acquire a rock or something is remarkable!)

I kid because I love. There’s just enough plot to engage readers, and I’ve found by talking to Byron later that he remembers the factual content better. He asks which parts are real, almost like he wants to know if he should file it away for future reference or toss it in the trash.

But I have been thinking about the cumulative effect of the series. In all 54 books there are only two black characters important to their respective books — Louis Armstrong and Pele. The Louis Armstrong book is the only one that gives a glimpse into the African American experience. The Civil War is twice represented as a horrible tragedy because it pitted white people against other white people; the substance of what the war was about is minimized. Trips to South America and Subsarahan Africa always feature animals instead of people, as do about half of their trips to Asia. I love animal stories, but the overall message is that white people are interesting and worth learning about, but once you venture beyond North America and Europe the wildlife is more compelling.

I don’t mean this as a criticism, just an observation. It’s a natural emergence from Mary Pope Osborne’s own experience and viewpoint. They reflect the mainstream white world: not aggressively racist, but benignly self-centered. It is internationalist, interested in other cultures in the Kipling tradition, but keeps them on the margins. I’d rather see a complimentary series by a different author, or multiple authors, than have her write against her own grain and do it clumsily.

There’s also a cumulative effect to how… lightly… human history is treated. I understand that she is keeping the books safe for kids by taking the serious stuff in stride, but almost can’t do it without downplaying the horrors of history. Adult characters, whether peasants or kings, seem to accept their fate and the state of the world as it is. Moreover, so do Jack and Annie, though sometimes they process events later as “sad,” and are glad things are better now. They encounter child laborers several times, and never seem to wonder at the fact that other children work instead of going to school and playing in a tree house. I was particularly off balance in the book where Jack and Annie help rescue Jewish children from occupied France. The book has more gravity than most in the series, but still felt too neat for the subject matter.

We’ve got three more books. I’m glad to be done with it and move on to other things — battling frogs or boxcar children — but I guess I’m a little bit sad too, that such a reliable routine has to end. Whatever their faults, Jack and Annie saw this kid to sleep for half a year, and are a huge part of his emergence as a reader and book lover, and have stoked his curiosity about the world.

Byron and I are on volume 52 of the Magic Tree House series. He’s pretty much refused any other nighttime reading material since we first ventured out with Jack and Annie and met some dinosaurs in book #1. We’ve since been to every continent and several eras of history, met Mozart and Lincoln and numerous other historical figures, and saved at least a dozen different animals from fire, earthquake, and landslide.

As a parent I’m excited to see my kid excited about books, and the truth is that he’s learned quite a bit about history and geography by chasing Jack and Annie around the globe. I keep finding myself referencing this book or that one when Byron learns about something new. Somebody offers him a fig, which he says he never heard of, so I remind him of Jack and Annie’s trip to ancient Baghdad. Other times he suddenly reminds me of one of their excursions — he walks on snow like the polar bear in that one that took place in the arctic. He knows about typhoons because of their adventure in Hawaii.

As a writer, I am envious of the niche Mary Pope Osborne has carved for herself. I would love to have even a series that promises such a reliable work plan every year, and such a reliable paycheck: a strategy that lets me write full time even if well shy of the Magic Treehouse dynsasty. They must be fun to research and write.

As a reader, I have come to accept that these are not literary books and shouldn’t be read as such. Jack and Annie are not exactly flat characters, but they are pretty much “anykids” who serve no purpose other than guiding readers through various history and geography lessons. The magic part of the story wavers in importance — sometimes the only magic to a story is that Jack and Annie are whisked off somewhere; other times it provides a deux ex machina to solve a problem; yet other times it is a plot device. (Really, the number of times Merlin requires a couple of muggles to get into deathly danger to acquire a rock or something is remarkable!)

I kid because I love. There’s just enough plot to engage readers, and I’ve found by talking to Byron later that he remembers the factual content better. He asks which parts are real, almost like he wants to know if he should file it away for future reference or toss it in the trash.

But I have been thinking about the cumulative effect of the series. In all 54 books there are only two black characters important to their respective books — Louis Armstrong and Pele. The Louis Armstrong book is the only one that gives a glimpse into the African American experience. The Civil War is twice represented as a horrible tragedy because it pitted white people against other white people; the substance of what the war was about is minimized. Trips to South America and Subsarahan Africa always feature animals instead of people, as do about half of their trips to Asia. I love animal stories, but the overall message is that white people are interesting and worth learning about, but once you venture beyond North America and Europe the wildlife is more compelling.

I don’t mean this as a criticism, just an observation. It’s a natural emergence from Mary Pope Osborne’s own experience and viewpoint. They reflect the mainstream white world: not aggressively racist, but benignly self-centered. It is internationalist, interested in other cultures in the Kipling tradition, but keeps them on the margins. I’d rather see a complimentary series by a different author, or multiple authors, than have her write against her own grain and do it clumsily.

There’s also a cumulative effect to how… lightly… human history is treated. I understand that she is keeping the books safe for kids by taking the serious stuff in stride, but almost can’t do it without downplaying the horrors of history. Adult characters, whether peasants or kings, seem to accept their fate and the state of the world as it is. Moreover, so do Jack and Annie, though sometimes they process events later as “sad,” and are glad things are better now. They encounter child laborers several times, and never seem to wonder at the fact that other children work instead of going to school and playing in a tree house. I was particularly off balance in the book where Jack and Annie help rescue Jewish children from occupied France. The book has more gravity than most in the series, but still felt too neat for the subject matter.

We’ve got three more books. I’m glad to be done with it and move on to other things — battling frogs or boxcar children — but I guess I’m a little bit sad too, that such a reliable routine has to end. Whatever their faults, Jack and Annie saw this kid to sleep for half a year, and are a huge part of his emergence as a reader and book lover, and have stoked his curiosity about the world.