{"id":4868,"date":"2006-05-22T07:42:01","date_gmt":"2006-05-22T11:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4868"},"modified":"2015-05-10T09:05:34","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T13:05:34","slug":"the-books-louly-carol-ryrie-brink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4868","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Louly<\/i> (Carol Ryrie Brink)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Children’s\/YA fiction shelf:<\/p>\n

Next book on the shelf is one that I loved without measure when I was a kid- Louly<\/a>\"\"<\/i> by Carol Ryrie Brink. Brink’s more famous book was Caddie Woodlawn<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – which she basically wrote because her grandmother had been a child of pioneer parents – and she had all of these amazing stories about life on the frontier (in Wisconsin) back then. You can still find that book in Barnes & Noble. But Louly<\/i> was always my favorite of her books – and that one is VERY hard to find. I found my copy online and when it arrived – it was not a hip modern paperback – it was an old library book, and the exact book that I remembered: hardcover, with a plastic covering over the cover – and a beautiful watercolor on the front cover, of a girl in a middy blouse, standing on some platform with red white and blue bunting – and her hand is in the air – she is making a speech. She’s a young girl. This is Louly, the wonderful heroine of this book.<\/p>\n

Louly<\/i> is about a group of friends in 1908 – Louly is a couple of years older than the main group of friends, and they all really look up to her. Not only that – but they want to be like her. Louly is a great character. She’s 13 years old – and she doesn’t really fit in. She’s not domestic, she doesn’t care about domestic things – she doesn’t have a good friend her own age – she’s an independent spirit – and she wants to be an actress. She has a gift for storytelling and rhetoric. She makes up these elaborate make-believe games for her friends (but it’s telling that Louly is pretty much hanging around with kids who are 10 years old … she’s on the cusp of becoming a young woman, and a part of her seems to resist it). She’s a magical creature. All of the 10 year old crowd SO look up to her.<\/p>\n

I just LOVED this book when I was 10, 11 years old … and it was so so cool to have the little package arrive recently, with this book from my childhood inside. I had forgotten so much. I couldn’t stop looking through it – all the illustrations came back to me, certain sections: Louly’s triumph at the speech contest, sleeping outside in the tent, two of the kids in the story are named after characters in The Mikado<\/i> … It was amazing how much of it I remembered.<\/p>\n

I’m so glad to have it again!!<\/p>\n

Here’s a section I remember vividly – all of the kids sleeping in the backyard in a tent. It seems to capture the thrill of such childhood moments perfectly.<\/p>\n


\nFrom Louly<\/a>\"\"<\/i> by Carol Ryrie Brink. <\/b><\/p>\n

So they had a banquet, and after the supper dishes were done, Louly played the piano and they sang “Down by the Old Mill Stream” and “Oh, Susannah!” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”<\/p>\n

“Suffering cats!” exclaimed Ko-Ko on his way upstairs to bed. “I hope this doesn’t go on all night.”<\/p>\n

“It won’t,” said Louly. “We’re just waiting for the fall of darkness.” It was one of the longest days of summer, but when it finally grew dark the girls undressed in Louly’s room and put on their robes and slippers. Louly lighted the kerosene lantern that was part of the camping equipment, and led the way downstairs and out the back door.<\/p>\n

The tent gleamed large and pale in the starlight. A cool breeze had come up to blow away the heat of the afternoon. Nobody said a word – it was almost scary. The three younger girls followed Louly’s bobbing lantern in a ghostly procession across the grass to the entrance of the tent. They had already spread their blankets and comforters on the canvas floor and each camper knew which quarter of the space belonged to her. There was a fresh, dewy smell of crushed grass. When Louly took the lantern into the tent, the walls suddenly glowed a warm orange color, and the shadows of the girls inside the tent loomed large and queerly shaped, like moving figures in a magic-lantern show.<\/p>\n

Chrys was the last one in the procession and before she ducked under the tent flap, she stood for a moment looking up at the sky. There seemed to be more stars in the sky than she had ever noticed before, and the Milky Way was like a far, mysterious river. Even her little sleeping porch had never seemed so much outdoors as this.<\/p>\n

Cordy stuck her head out of the tent flap. “Hurry up, Chrys, if we don’t put out the lantern, we’ll have a flock of mosquitoes.”<\/p>\n

Chrys shivered a little and came in to creep silently into her blankets.<\/p>\n

“Tell us a story, Louly,” Cordy said when the lantern was extinguished.<\/p>\n

“Not really a story,” Louly said, “but listen! Imagine we’re really out in the forest in the mountains. What do you hear?”<\/p>\n

“I hear mosquitoes singing,” said Cordy.<\/p>\n

“Something more,” said Louly in her play-like voice.<\/p>\n

“I hear a cricket,” said Poo-Bah.<\/p>\n

“No, no,” Louly said. “Listen harder! Don’t you hear it? It’s the mountain stream, falling over the cliff and rushing down the gorge.”<\/p>\n

“That’s the breeze in the box-elder tree,” said Cordy.<\/p>\n

“Listen harder!” Louly said. “Use your imaginations. The stream is rushing down beside our tent. Can’t you hear it? Can’t you feel the cool, fresh spray?”<\/p>\n

Chrys lay quite still, and goose flesh came out all over her. She felt the spray of the imaginary stream like tiny prickles of ice all up and down her spine. It was even colder and fresher than the spray from the lawn sprinkler.<\/p>\n

“Are there bears?” asked Poo-Bah.<\/p>\n

“Certainly not,” said Louly. “Billy is just outside the tent and this is a magic forest where nothing will hurt us. But sometimes, over the sound of the river, you can hear a hoot owl saying, ‘Who? Who?’ He is the sentinel of the forest and he and Billy are guarding us. And in the morning we’ll drop our lines in the river and catch a trout for breakfast.”<\/p>\n

“I’d rather have Shredded Wheat, Louly.”<\/p>\n

“All right,” Louly said. “Go to sleep now, everybody. Last one asleep is a tardy turtle.”<\/p>\n

“Louly, do you<\/i> know when you go to sleep? I don’t.”<\/p>\n

“Nobody does,” said Louly. “How could you?”<\/p>\n

Silence descended on the tent in the magic forest.<\/p>\n

Chrys lay awake thinking: “In the dark woods, the mountain stream is falling. It rushes down, down, down, among the forest trees. The spray is like white horses leaping and bounding. Their manes and tails are gleaming in the starlight. They are going to join the river of the Milky Way.”<\/p>\n

She said it over to herself several times. It felt like a poem. “But it hasn’t any rhymes or moral, so it can’t be a poem,” she thought. “Maybe tomorrow I can put it into rhymes.” But sometimes getting a good thought into the strait jacket of rhyme seemed to spoil the good thought and nothing worthwhile was left. She sighed and then she said her good thought about the river over again to herself. She was the last one in the tent to go to sleep, and she did not know when it happened.<\/p>\n