Not being either a school teacher, mother or grandmother, my familiarity with children’s books written after the 1960’s is sketchy at best, although I did read the entire Harry Potter series. I was inspired to do a little catching up when author Sheila O’Connor stayed with us this past summer, and, later in the summer, The [Greenfield] Recorder ran a story about a new children’s book involving a Civil War vet buried in Greenfield.
Sheila O’Connor, Sparrow Road
Like O’Connor’s award-winning adult novel, Where No Gods Came, Sparrow Road is a meditation on absent or delinquent parents and a child’s inner strength and ability to cope in the face of such loss. Sparrow Road, named for the novel’s erstwhile orphanage-turned-artist-colony, is also a celebration of the arts as a means of both communication and healing, a joy comparable to the lovely nature that surrounds the residents of Sparrow Road. Everyone at Sparrow Road has an art, even the long-departed orphan Lyman, whom the book’s protagonist Raine reconstructs in her heart. Like the author, Raine discovers her art to be writing, as she delves into Lyman’s story. Through Raine and her artist friends, Josie and Diego, O’Connor suggests that we all have some art within us that can help to heal our hearts if we spend enough quiet time listening and opening up to it.
Sheila O’Connor, Keeping Safe the Stars
In her second novel for children, O’Connor takes greater risks than in Sparrow Road, creating an eccentric trio of orphans who attempt to live on their own when their grandfather guardian, Old Finn, suddenly succumbs to a serious illness. Unlike her other bookish, intelligent, scribbling heroines, O’Connor creates a Willa-Cather-esque character in her sturdy, independent narrator Kathleen Star (“Pride”), who prefers handiwork to academics. The book explores in poignant detail the gap between a child’s limited understanding of the world and adult reality. As in O'Connor's other novels, Keeping Safe the Stars deals with children who strive to keep family intact against a current of adults who are, in some combination, absent, ill, dysfunctional, or irresponsible.
While children’s literature is littered with orphans, the better to create an unfettered, independent young person who can have adventures, O’Connor’s work seizes on the real agony and desperation of children cut off from the adults who should love and care for them. The strong meat of Where No Gods Came, an adult novel, is tempered in the children’s books, but O’Connor pushes the envelope further in Keeping Safe the Stars than in Sparrow Road, provoking real discomfort in the reader as the children’s plight worsens until they finally hatch a plot to find the one adult who can help them.
Nancy Bestuhl, The Mystery of the Lost Canteen
This story is based on a wooden Confederate canteen, recovered and decorated by one Charles Ulrich, who served first with the 25th Connecticut Volunteers and later became one of the white officers who led all-black regiments (like the Massachusetts 54th, subject of the film Glory). Beginning in 1864, Ulrich led the 31st USCI (United States Colored Infantry). Ulrich’s family moved to Greenfield when he was a teen, and his body was returned to Greenfield when he died in 1902.
Nancy Bestuhl’s husband found the canteen in his house in Virginia in 1950. No one knows how it got there, but it obviously intrigued the author, a former school teacher, and her husband, so she wrote a story in which the canteen is found by a boy, Jimmy, in 2009. The canteen serves as a kind of portal, and Jimmy travels in time back to the Battle of Port Huron on the Mississippi River, the place Ulrich apparently found the canteen. Jimmy meets Charles Ulrich and learns first hand the horrors of war, particularly as fought in 1863.
The story seems, in many ways, superficial and simplistic, although the details of the battles are quite realistic, and, at the end, Jimmy meets a descendant of one of Ulrich’s black infantrymen. The book’s high point comes when, halfway through, Jimmy helps Ulrich blow up a Confederate ammo dump and take several enemy soldiers prisoner.