Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:
Next book on the shelf is The Story Girl
Okay – so now we’re moving out of the comfort of the Anne series – into the wilds of all her OTHER books. The Story Girl is first in a two-part series – and the lead girl is Sara Stanley, aka “The Story Girl”. However- unlike her Anne books (excerpt here) or her Emily books (excerpt here) – in this one The Story Girl is seen from the outside. The book is a first-person narration – rare in Lucy Maud’s work (except, actually, for her short stories – there’s a lot of first-person narration there – but The Story Girl and The Golden Road (excerpt here) are the only first-person books.) And the person telling the story is NOT The Story Girl – so we are seeing her from someone else’s eyes the whole time, which I think is really interesting.
I love these two books. Lucy Maud wrote them for a couple reasons – one because she didn’t JUST want to write about Anne. The Story Girl was published in 1910 – so Lucy Maud is in the first wave of her fame. She didn’t just want to repeat herself. Second of all, she wanted to reach out to the young BOY audience as well. These two books are her way of doing that. The first-person narrator is a boy – and the books are light on the nature descriptions – there’s next to no romance (the kids are all young – The Story Girl is the oldest one, and she is only 14) – and the books are FULL of hi-jinx. Lucy Maud has never been so mischievous as in these books. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong. The kids scheme, plan, make up games, decide to cook dinner for their elders and use sawdust instead of flour by accident, they get freaked out, they have serious problems, they get ill, they sit around on snowy nights and tell stories – but mainly, it is the story of all the MISCHIEF they get into, on purpose or not. This is a book about childhood, on the ground-level. She’s right there in it with them. BUT (and here is why I think she’s such a special writer): you also get the sense, somehow, that Bev (the narrator) is not telling us about these events NOW – but he is looking back on them, way back on them, from his own adulthood. There’s a certain nostalgia that keens through these pages – there’s also (at times) a shadow that falls over the narration here and there – a shadow from the future. Like with Cecily. You know, somehow – through things Bev says and hints at – that Cecily will die young. She doesn’t die within the course of the two books – but you know that she is not going to make it, and that … Oh. It’s going to be so so sad for those kids. It will be the moment they leave childhood behind. So these books are elevated somehow – by this sense of retrospect. I LOVE that aspect of them. It’s painful. It’s like the last paragraph of Stephen King’s It which … gives me a little pang inside every time I read it, or even right now, when I am just thinking about it (excerpt here). The nostalgia for the intensity of childhood. The pain of separating from your childhood friends, and also moving off “The Golden Road” of childhood. Nostalgia is great. But it doesn’t feel good, all the time. You miss those days gone by. You miss them so much that it aches. This is what I get from these two books.
Bev is our narrator. Bev is a boy. Bev and Felix are being sent to live with relatives because their father is being sent on business to Rio de Janiero. I believe their mother is dead. Bev and Felix have never been to see these relatives – so it is all new to them. It is also their father’s childhood home (on PEI, of course) – so they have heard all about it – the red roads, the cherry blossoms, all the little landmarks (trees and stones and walls, etc.) that their father had described to them so lovingly. So even though Bev and Felix miss their dad, they feel so close to him – seeing where he grew up.
They stay with Uncle Alec and Aunt Janet who have 3 kids – Felicity, Cecily and Dan. At the next farm over stays Sara Stanley with her Aunt Olivia (Sara’s mother is dead). The other kids who hang out in this gang are Peter, the “hired boy” (you just love him) – and Sara Ray – a small pale kind of annoying little worrywart. They all embrace Bev and Felix … and the adventures then begin.
The Story Girl is a born storyteller. The book is full of her stories – some of them are true, or legends from the town – how so-and-so proposed to his wife, etc. Some are hilarious, others are tragic. She tells stories about ancient Greece and Rome – but she also tells poetic stories, about how the Milky Way became the Milky Way, etc. Her voice holds everyone in thrall. She knows it, too. She knows she has a special voice. And whatever else her storytelling ability is – it is also a gift. There are times when it is even an uncanny gift – when she has the ability to transform herself into an ancient crone, back to a straight tall prince, back to the crone …. and those listening see the ENTIRE thing unfold in their mind’s eye. Sara Stanley is that good. All the kids love her stories, and say, “Oh, tell this one! Tell that one!”
The excerpt I chose is this: the kids are usually very stuck as to what they can “play” on Sundays. Their normal games would not do, because it’s the Sabbath, and so … usually the alternatives they come up with are almost worse than their normal games. Much trouble is caused on Sundays. Sara has an idea … why don’t the boys have a sermon-writing and sermon-saying contest? And the girls will be the judges. That sounds like a good Sunday game!
The boys are all stressed out … they sit and work on their sermons, they write them out, they murmur the words to themselves, they are in an agony of stress about having to PERFORM them … totally terrifying. Then comes the day of the contest. They all go into the orchard to what is known as The Pulpit Stone. The girls sit in a semi-circle, waiting, ready, agog. The boys start to do their sermons. Felix is terrified. Bev is proud of his writing. Blah blah … they all do okay.
But then comes Peter. The ‘hired boy’. And the entire game changes. That’s the excerpt I’ll do – because it’s pretty damn funny. I love it.
Excerpt from The Story Girl
Peter made quite a handsome little minister, in his navy blue coat, white collar, and neatly bowed tie. His black eyes shone, and his black curls were brushed up in quite a ministerial pompadour, but threatened to tumble over at the top in graceless ringlets.
It was decided that there was no use in waiting for Sara Ray, who might or might not come, according to the humour in which her mother was. Therefore Peter proceeded with the service.
He read the cahpter and gave out the hymn with as much sang froid as if he had been doing it all his life. Mr. Marwood himself could n ot have bettered the way in which Peter said,
“We will sing the whole hymn, omitting the fourth stanza.”
That was a fine touch which I had not thought of. I began to think that, after all, Peter might be a foeman worthy of my steel.
When Peter was ready to begin he thrust his hands into his pockets – a totally unorthodox thing. Then he plunged in without further ado, speaking in his ordinary conversational tone – another unorthodox thing. There was no shorthand reporter present to take the sermon down; but, if necessary, I could preach it over verbatim, and so, I doubt not, could everyone that heard it. It was not a forgettable kind of sermon.
“Dearly beloved,” said Peter, “my sermon is about the bad place – in short, about hell.”
An electric shock seemed to run through the audience. Everybody looked suddenly alert. Peter had, in one sentence, done what my whole sermon had failed to do. He had made an impression.
“I shall divide my sermon into three heads,” pursued Peter. “The first head is, what you must not do if you don’t want to go to the bad place. The secon dhead is, what the bad place is like” — sensation in the audience — “and the third head is, how to escape going there.
“Now, there’s a great many things you must not do, and it’s very important to know what they are. You ought not to lose no time in finding out. In the first place you mustn’t ever forget to mind what grown-up people tell you – that is, good grown-up people.”
“But how are you going to tell who are the good grown-up people?” asked Felix suddenly, forgetting that he was in church.
“Oh, that is easy,” said Peter. “You can always just feel who is good and who isn’t. And you m ustn’t tell lies and you mustn’t murder any one. You must be specially careful not to murder any one. You might be forgiven for telling lies, if you was real sorry for them, but if you murdered any one it would be pretty hard to get forgiven, so you’d better be on the safe side. And you mustn’t commit suicide, because if you did that you wouldn’t have any chance of repenting it; and you mustn’t forget to say your prayers and you mustn’t quarrel with your sister.”
At this point Felicity gave Dan a significant poke with her elbow, and Dan was up in arms at once.
“Don’t you be preaching at me, Peter Craig,” he cried out. “I won’t stand it. I don’t quarrel with my sister any oftener than she quarrels with me. You can just leave me alone.”
“Who’s touching you?” demanded Peter. “I didn’t mention no names. A minister can say anything he likes in the pulpit, as long as he doesn’t mention any names, and nobody can answer back.”
“All right, but just you wait till to-morrow,” growled Dan, subsiding reluctantly into silence under the reproachful looks of the girls.
“You must not play any games on Sunday,” went on Peter, “that is, any week-day games — or whisper in church, or laugh in church — I did that once but I was awful sorry – and you mustn’t take any notice of Paddy – I mean of the family cat at family prayers, not even if he climbs up your back. And you mustn’t call names or make faces.”
“Amen,” cried Felix, who had suffered many things because Felicity so often made faces at him.
Peter stopped and glared at him over the edge of the Pulpit Stone.
“You haven’t any business to call out a thing like that right in the middle of a sermon,” he said.
“They do it in the Methodist church at Markdale,” protested Felix, somewhat abashed. “I’ve heard them.”
“I know they do. That’s the Methodist way and it is all right for them. I haven’t a word to say against Methodists. My Aunt Jane was one, and I might have been one myself if I hadn’t been so scared of the Judgment Day. But you ain’t a Methodist. You’re a Presbyterian, ain’t you?”
“Yes, of course. I was born that way.”
“Very well then, you’ve got to do things the Presbyterian way. Don’t let me hear any more of your amens or I’ll amen you.”
“Oh, don’t anybody interrupt again,” implored the Story Girl. “It isn’t fair. How can any one preach a good sermon if he is always being interrupted? Nobody interrupted Beverley.”
“Bev didn’t get up there and pitch into us like that,” muttered Dan.
“You mustn’t fight,” resumed Peter undauntedly. “That is, you mustn’t fight for the fun of fighting, nor out of bad temper. You must not say bad words or swear. You mustn’t get drunk – although of course you wouldn’t be likely to do that before you grow up, and the girls never. There’s prob’ly a good many other things you mustn’t do, but these I’ve named are the most important. Of course, I’m not saying you’ll go to the bad place for sure if you do them. I only say you’re running a risk. The devil is looking out for the people who do these things and he’ll be more likely to get after them than to waste time over the people who don’t do them. And that’s all about the first head of my sermon.”
At this point Sara Ray arrived, somewhat out of breath. Peter looked at her reproachfully.
“You’ve missed my whole first head, Sara,” he said. “That isn’t fair, when you’re to be one of the judges. I think I ought to preach it over again for you.”
“That was really done once. I know a story about it,” said the Story Girl.
“Who’s interrupting now?” said Dan slyly.
“Never mind, tell us the story,” said the preacher himself, eagerly leaning over the pulpit.
“It was Mr. Scott who did it,” said the Story Girl. “He was preaching somewhere in Nova Scotia, and when he was more than half way through his sermon – and you know sermons were very long in those days — a man walked in. Mr. Scott stopped until he had taken his seat. Then he said, ‘My friend, you are very late for this service. I hope you won’t be late for heaven. The congregation will excuse me if I recapitulate the sermon for our friend’s benefit.’ And then he just preached the sermon over again from the beginning. It is said that that particular man was never known to be late for church again.”
“It served him right,” said Dan, “but it was pretty hard lines on the rest of the congregation.”
“Now, let’s be quiet so Peter can go on with his sermon,” said Cecily.
Peter squared his shoulders and took hold of the edge of the pulpit. Never a thump had he thumped, but I realized that his way of leaning forward and fixing this one or that one of his hearers with his eye was much more effective.
“I’ve come now to the second head of my sermon — what the bad place is like.”
He proceeded to describe the bad place. Later on we discovered that he had found his material in an illustrated translation of Dante’s Inferno which had once been given to his Aunt Jane as a school prize. But at the time we supposed he must be drawing from Biblical sources. Peter had been reading the Bible steadily ever since what we always referred to as “the Judgment Sunday”, and he was by now almost through it. None of the rest of us had ever read the Bible completely through, and we thought Peter must have found his description of the world of the lost in some portion with which we were not acquainted. Therefore, his utterances carried all the weight of inspiration, and we sat appalled before his lurid phrases. He used his own words to clothe the ideas he had found, and the result was a force and simplicity that struck home to our imaginations.
Suddenly Sara Ray sprang to her feet with a scream — a scream that changed into strange laughter. We all, preacher included, looked at her aghast. Cecily and Felicity sprang up and caught hold of her. Sara Ray was really in a bad fit of hysterics, but we knew nothing of such a thing in our experience, and we thought she had gone mad. She shrieked, cried, laughed, and flung herself about.
“She’s gone clean crazy,” said Peter, coming down out of his pulpit with a very pale face.
“You’ve frightened her crazy with your dreadful sermon,” said Felicity indignantly.
She and Cecily each took Sara by an arm and, half leading, half carrying, got her out of the orchard and up to the house. The rest of us looked at each other in terrified questioning.
“You’ve made rather too much of an impression, Peter,” said the Story Girl miserably.
“She needn’t have got so scared. If she’d only waited for the third head I’d have showed her how easy it was to get clear of going to the bad place and go to heaven instead. But you girls are always in such a hurry,” said Peter bitterly.
“Do you s’pose they’ll have to take her to the asylum?” said Dan in a whisper.
“Hush, here’s your father,” said Felix.
Uncle Alec came striding down the orchard. We had never before seen Uncle Alec angry. But there was no doubt that he was very angry. His blue eyes fairly blazed at us as he said,
“What have you been doing to frighten Sara Ray into such a condition?”
“We — were just having a sermon contest,” explained the Story Girl tremulously. “And Peter preached about the bad place, and it frightened Sara. That is all, Uncle Alec.”
“All! I don’t know what the result will be to that nervous, delicate child. She is shrieking in there and nothing will quiet her. What do you mean by playing such a game on Sunday, and making a jest of sacred things? No, not a word –” for the Story Girl had attempted to speak. “You and Peter march off home. And the next time I find you up to such doings on Sunday or any other day I’ll give you cause to remember it to your latest hour.”
The Story Girl and Peter went humbly home and we went with them.
“I can’t understand grown-up people,” said Felix despairingly. “When Uncle Edward preached sermons it was all right, but when we do it it is ‘making a jest of sacred things.’ And I heard Uncle Alec tell a story once about being nearly frightened to death when he was a little boy, by a minister preaching on the end of the world; and he said, ‘That was something like a sermon. You don’t hear such sermons nowadays.’ But when Peter preaches just such a sermon, it’s a very different story.”
“It’s no wonder we can’t understand the grown-ups,” said the Story Girl indignantly, “because we’ve never been grown-up ourselves. But they have been children, and I don’t see why they can’t understand us. Of course, perhaps we shouldn’t have had the contest on Sundays. But all the same I think it’s mean of Uncle Alec to be so cross. Oh, I do hope poor Sara won’t have to be taken to the asylum.”
