author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Oh, I get it. This week, Thursday doesn't exist. Well, drat.

Of course, I say that as though it just happened to me, rather than being a function of the choices I've made throughout the day... but sometimes it just happens that the right choices are harder to make. Ah well.

So since I don't have a lot of Actually Writing to talk about, I'll share a book report instead. One of the creators I follow on Patreon is author Billy Martin. Now, I'm reasonably fond of his writing, so when he posted that his favorite Halloween story is The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes, I hied me over to Barnes & Noble and picked up the ebook. (I have a rather large amount of gift card credit in my B&N account thanks to years of futzing around with Swagbucks and Rewarded Play, and I've got things set up to port their ebooks over to calibre with a minimum of fuss. So that's why B&N for spur-of-the-moment ebook purchases.)

All in all, it's been a rather delightful read. I'm not done yet, mind you; I'm having too much fun reading it aloud to myself, and that takes a bit longer than reading silently. So I'm only up to the end of the chapter that introduces Weeny Witch, which calibre tells me is just about at the halfway point. I cannot, therefore, give you my thoughts on whether it sticks the landing, but I can say that the journey has been overall a joy.

The plot, briefly, is this: After an afternoon of being regaled with stories about the wickedness of Old Witch, Amy resolves that Old Witch must for her sins be banished to the top of a bare and lonely glass mountain--but if Old Witch is very good, which is to say, good as real, right, regular little girls reckon it and not as wicked witches do, why then, Old Witch may come back for a hurly-burly on Halloween. And so Old Witch, under protest, attempts to be good, and her progress is strictly monitored by Amy, Amy's best friend Clarissa, and the stern spelling bee Malachi.

It probably sounds very twee, and it kind of is, but only in the way that a story by E. Nesbit is twee. Say, The Book of Dragons, or of course Five Children and It. The details of Amy and Clarissa's day-to-day are lavish and true, from the neighbor's linden tree with the rope swing hanging off it, to the rules about witches' hats, to the minutia of witches' rituals (the "backanally" dance, the wiggling, the correct position from which to recite one of the greater abracadabras), to the various lessons learned in Witch School. And all the while the narrator feels like another character herself, one who's sharing knowing glances with you over the heads of the characters and otherwise acknowlegding your expected reactions to the events that befall them.

One thing I didn't expect going in: it's metafiction, or partially so. Old Witch is a character in the stories Amy's mother has been telling her for a long time now, and when Amy and Clarissa perform their feat of "banquishment," it sounds like they're playing make-believe. Every event in the chapters featuring Old Witch appears to be caused by Amy's imagination. And yet... a real little red cardinal bird flies Amy's letters up to the bare glass mountain for Old Witch and the Little Witch Girl to read. When the Little Witch Girl gets lost on her way to Witch School, she winds up in front of Amy's house and spies the children through the window. And it's Little Witch Girl herself who causes Amy and Clarissa--by means of her greatest abracadabra thus far--to be magically transported to the house atop the glass mountain for her birthday party (for just because she stays six forever doesn't mean she can't have birthday parties!). The lines between fact and fiction get charmingly blurred, and that's where the magic happens.

On the downside, the book has a troubling tendency to equate "fair-haired" and "blond" with "pretty." Little Witch Girl is blond, which is "very unusual in a witch," and when she arrives, Old Witch is "weak with wonder at the dazzling spectacle of a beautiful fair-haired little witch girl." And of course when Amy and Clarissa show up at the birthday party, all the black-haired witches are fascinated with their fair hair and their colorful dresses. It doesn't come up often, but when it does, it feels downright colonial--like those bad old stories claiming that natives of the Americas, never having seen white people before, worshiped the Europeon explorers as gods. At one point, I double-checked the publication date and was surprised to find it as recent as 1960, and not contemporaneous with E. Nesbit's books (Five Children and It was originally published in 1902).

And no, I'm not going to wave it off as "of its time"--I take a very dim view of that excuse, as it not only gives racists the privilege of determining the norm for the era, it also erases the viewpoints of people of color. Like, every time someone says "Nobody knew that was a problem back then," they're ignoring that the people whom those words or behavior hurt damn well knew it was a problem.

Like I said, it doesn't come up often, and mostly I can tune it out. But I'm not going to sit here like an oblivious white woman and unilaterally declare it no big deal. I'm honestly not sure I'd feel comfortable reading it to young children who are already getting enough racist messages from our society without this book smuggling racist beauty standards into their ears under the guise of Halloween fun.

I bring this up not because it ruins the book for me but because I can't in good conscience just not mention it. Consider this a content note. Otherwise, this book is being a delight and a joy and I'm getting a kick out of it.

And that's my book report. Good night!