Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books
Emily Climbs (Emily Novels)
This is the second book in the Emily series. There were times when this one was my favorite one out of the three – it’s so rich, and funny – with so many of my favorite episodes that Lucy Maud has ever written (Emily going to interview the author – with the crazy dog running wild, Perry kissing Emily, the incident when Emily gets locked in the church, Emily walking the 7 miles home from Shrewsbury …)
Again, I think that Lucy Maud was just at the top of her game, consistently, with the Emily series. She KNEW this character, this character is completely an individual, a living human being – and there isn’t one false note in the whole thing.
I love, too, how a lot of this book – maybe half of it – is made up of Emily’s actual diary entries. We get to hear Emily’s voice in a really private way. We hear her thoughts, hear how she writes. It’s a wonderful device and I think Lucy Maud really carries it off.
I’ll do a bunch of excerpts from this one, too. Because it pleases me.
The first chapter shows Emily, in her room, a snowstorm outside – writing in her diary. Then we hear the entire diary entry – which is parts inspirational, part hysterical, part thoughtful. Emily is 13 years old.
Oh, and listen to the first sentence of the book. There’s a melancholy in it. Lucy Maud the narrator inserts herself. She knows the future:
Emily Byrd Starr was alone in her room, in the old New Moon farmhouse at Blair Water, one stormy night in a February of the olden years before the world turned upside down.
“before the world turned upside down”. World War I. There’s a chill in those words, you know? The chill that lies over the stillness and peace of the early 20th century, in looking back on it.
The excerpt below is the last couple paragraphs of the last chapter. I love it – because Lucy Maud comes right out and tells us what she, the author, is doing.
Excerpt from Emily Climbs (Emily Novels)
Emily looked at her candle – it,. too, was almost burned out. She knew she could not have another that night – Aunt Elizabeth’s rules were as those of Mede and Persian: she put away her diary in the little right-hand cupboard above the mantel, covered her dying fire, undressed and blew out her candle. The room slowly filled with the faint, ghostly snow-light of a night when a full moon is behind the driving storm-clouds. And just as Emily was ready to slip into her high black bedstead a sudden inspiration came – a splendid new idea for a story. For a minute she shivered reluctantly: the room was getting cold. But the idea would not be denied. Emily slipped her hand between the feather tick of her bed and the chaff mattress and produced a half-burned candle, secreted there for just such an emergency.
It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor ever will pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.
She lighted her candle, put on her stockings and a heavy coat, got out another half-filled Jimmy-book, and began to write by the single, uncertain candle which made a pale oasis of light in the shadows of the room. In that oasis Emily wrote, her black head bent over her book, as the hours of night crept away and the other occupants of New Moon slumbered soundly; she grew chill and cramped, but she was quite unconscious of it. Her eyes burned – her cheeks glowed – words came like troops of obedient genii to the call of her pen. When at last her candle went out with a sputter and a hiss in its little pool of melted tallow, she cane back to reality with a sigh and a shiver. It was two, by the clock, and she was very tired and very cold; but she had finished her story and it was the best thing she had ever written. She crept into her cold nest with a sense of completion and victory, born of the working out of her creative impulse, and fell asleep to the lullaby of the waning storm.
