★★★★★ That a man can stand up

Johnny Tremain

Esther Forbes

** spoiler alert **

I was an elementary schoolkid when I read Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain for the first time. It quickly became one of my favorite books. It was one of many books I read about American Revolutionary War history, but this one was special. It was special because of Johnny's personal story. For most of the book, Johnny is not an admirable character. As the book begins Johnny is an apprentice silversmith. He is a skilled artist, the chief of Mr Lapham's apprentices. He is not generous to his inferiors -- this is surely how he thinks of the other, less skilled apprentices, and even perhaps Mr Lapham himself.

He falls from his lofty position -- an accident injures his hand. From being the lord of Lapham's apprentices he now falls to become the drudge, since his deformed hand allows him no finer work. The other apprentices, whom he treated with hauteur, are now not generous to him. Johnny reacts to his fall by going into what can only be described as an Epic Pout.

From this he is rescued by a friendship. His new friend, an older boy called Rab, tries to convince him that his injury is something he can live with. Rab is also involved with Sam Adams's Sons of Liberty, and thus Johnny becomes involved with the rebels. And the rest is history, literally.

One would like to imagine that the heroes of the Revolution fought not just "that a man can stand up", but that any person -- man, woman, black or white -- can stand up. One could say that, in the end, they did, though that was not the end they saw.

This 1998 edition has an Introduction by Gary D. Schmidt that I found quite interesting. Before she wrote Johnny Tremain, Forbes was not a novelist, but a historian. She had won a Pulitzer Prize for a nonfiction work, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. She was, Schmidt tells us, dyslexic. She couldn't spell, she couldn't punctuate. (I sort of wish I knew the names of the editors who managed to bring these extraordinary works to publication.) Johnny Tremain was published in 1943, when the world was in the middle of the second World War, and it was still far from clear who would win. It was an affirmation that the war was worth fighting.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★☆☆ Hit me with your best book

Hazard of Hearts Barbara Cartland I had read only 5% of Barbara Cartland 's Hazard of Hearts when I was moved to speak. Alexa, play " Hit me with your best shot "! You're a real tough cookie With a long history Of breaking little hearts like the one in me That's okay, lets see how you do it Put up your dukes, let's get down to it This is the tough cookie in question, Justin Lord Vulcan He has money, position and women, all the women he wants, including, although I should not mention this to you, that fabulously beautiful bit of muslin, La Flamme. But there have always been women at Vulcan’s heels. It’s rumoured that he treats them badly, but no one knows for sure as most of them are so blindly in love with him that they will not hear a word spoken against the cursed fellow. Here is the owner of the "little heart" in play, Serena Staverley, arrayed for battle She wore a simple gown of white muslin, her arms were bare and there were no jewels or orn

★★★★★ A good guy

The Sojourner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding. 1 CHRONICLES 29:15 When I was an undergraduate, I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings ' The Yearling . It was so good that I immediately grabbed everything by Rawlings in the Cornell Undergraduate Library. Unfortunately, that was easy, because Rawlings didn't publish a lot. Besides The Yearling (easily her most famous work), South Moon Under , a story collection When the Whippoorwill , a memoir Cross Creek , and this novel, The Sojourner , which became my favorite. It's the life story of a man Asahel Linden. Ase is a farmer somewhere in the USA. (I don't remember where, but I have a vague impression of one of the southeastern states.) And the simple thing to know about Ase is that he's a good person. He is overshadowed by his brother Ben, whom his mother loves and considers his clear

★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed Shades of Grey , the first novel in Jasper Fforde 's Shades of Grey series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what Red Side Story is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong. Red Side Story contains multitudes. Shades of Grey ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sent here to die. Eddie and Jane vowed

★★★★★ Hot stuff!

Spice: The History of a Temptation Jack Turner Columbus, when he set out on his journey west, was hoping to find, among other things, spices. At that time there were two routes by which spices could be brought from India and the Spice Islands to Europe: the older land route and the sea route around Africa pioneered by the Portuguese. In his Introduction to Spice: The History of a Temptation , Jack Turner writes The Asian empires of Portugal, England and the Netherlands might be said with only a little exaggeration to have sprouted from a quest for cinnamon, cloves, pepper, nutmeg and mace, and something similar was true of the Americas. Spice is a book in a nonfiction genre I call "History of Substances", which I find absolutely fascinating when well done. My three favorite examples are A Perfect Red , by Amy Butler Greenfield , which is about the red dye cochineal, The True History of Chocolate , by Sophie D. Coe , and this work. Unsurprisingly two of the three con

★★★★☆ An alternative history Roman empire

Sargassa Sophie Burnham Approximately 2000 years ago (no one knows for sure how long it's been), Augustus Caesar became the first princeps of Roma. The Empire grew, and Caesarian explorers crossed the Sargasso Sea to discover the continents on the other side. Some of them moved north to Sargassa, where they defeated the Ynglots and established the state of Roma Sargassa. But then 800 years after Augustus, Italia was decimated by plague. A few years later Roma was sacked, leading to a general breakdown of civilization, called The Great Quiet. No one knows how long the Quiet lasted -- historians estimate it was about 300 years. Much of the pre-Quiet historical record was lost. Eventually, Roma was re-established. Five years later Antal Iveroa was appointed the first Imperial Historian. The office of Historian passed from him to his descendants -- in 753 PQ (Post Quietam) Alexander Kleios became Imperial Historian. In 779 PQ Alexander Kleios was assassinated. Thus begins our story. Th

★★★☆☆ Mixed feelings

Something More Jackie Khalilieh Something More recounts Jessie Kassis' first year of high school. Jessie, our first-person narrator, is a fifteen-year old Palestinian-Canadian girl who has just been assessed as autistic. By a remarkable coincidence, author Jackie Khalilieh is an autistic Palestinian-Canadian woman. The publisher's blurb pretty much gives away the main plot, "Jessie gets more than she bargained for when two very different boys steal her heart". So, yes, it's a bad-boyfriend good-boyfriend triangle. It's OK that the publishers reveal this, because it will in fact be obvious to you almost immediately where the plot is heading. And that's fine! There's nothing wrong with a new author putting her own stamp on an old familiar story. Every story we read is to some extent a retelling. Jessie takes a long time to figure out the bad boyfriend/good boyfriend situation, and this leads to my only substantial criticism of the plot. Because what i

★★★☆☆ This what it feels like to do science

The Bone Wars Erin Evan Erin Evan is a gifted story-teller, but an inexperienced novelist. In The Bone Wars she has written a good book. It could be better, and I am confident that her future books will be. The Bone Wars is principally about four paleontologists, grad student Sarah Connell, her PhD advisor Sean Oliphant, her mentor Derek Farnsworth, and teenage intern Molly Wilder. The story is told in the first person by these four characters, but Molly is the central character. The first thing I loved about The Bone Wars was its feeling of authenticity. Evan is herself a fossil-hunter. Even if no one told you this, you would recognize it. I was captivated by Molly's account of a long day spent lying on her side, working patiently to free a fossil femur from the rock in which it is embedded. If you have ever done research, you will recognize the peculiar combination of tedium and excitement that accompanies most research. I would have called it indescribable, had not Evan

★★★★★ My Ántonia and the Titan

My Ántonia Willa Cather There are a very few books that impressed me so much on my first read that I can remember exactly where I was. Perhaps the strongest of these experiences was my first reading of Willa Cather 's My Antonia . I had just gotten it out of the Cornell Undergraduate Library and sat down in my room to read it. At the same time I put a new album my parents had given me on my turntable -- Gustav Mahler's Symphony #1 "Titan". I don't usually listen to music while I read -- I have not so capacious a mind as to be able to encompass two distinct works of art at the same time. But somehow, this time it worked. Despite its title "Langsam, schleppend, Immer sehr gemächlich" "slow, dragging, always very restrained", the first movement of Mahler's Titan symphony begins lively and cheerful. As I read about Jim and Ántonia playing together on the prairie it felt as if the music had been written for them. Titan remains one of my all-ti

★★★☆☆ Twice-told tales

The Innocent Sleep Seanan McGuire In Sleep No More Seanan McGuire tells the story of Toby's fight against Titania's attempt to rewrite all of faerie the way she wants it to be. In Sleep No More this story is told in the first person by Toby herself. The Innocent Sleep tells the same story from the first-person point of view of Toby's husband, Tybalt. (By the way, I assume you have read Sleep No More . If you haven't, this review will contain spoilers.) McGuire has made rather of habit of writing books in which the essence of the plot and the outcome have been given away prior to publication. For instance, several of the novellas in her Wayward Children series have plots that were thoroughly spoiled in Every Heart a Doorway , the first book of that series. And the most egregious example of this strategy occurs in the Newsflesh series (published under her Mira Grant nom de plume). Book four, Feedback , recounts the exact same events as the previous three

★★★☆☆ Picaresque with Hooloovoos

Ghostdrift Suzanne Palmer This review will be unfair to Suzanne Palmer 's Ghostdrift , and that is my fault. I wasn't paying attention when I requested it and thus failed to notice that it is the fourth and last book of the Finder Chronicles , none of which I had previously read. How big an issue is it to jump into a series in the middle, or even at the end? Usually people asked that question respond by discussing the plot. But of all the jump-in issues, the plot is the least important. More important are characters and, for speculative fiction, world-building. By the time you have finished three novels about Fergus Ferguson, the central character of the Finder Chronicles , you probably know him fairly well, and with any luck you like him and are happy to spend more time in his company. Furthermore, you know a great deal about the science-fictional galaxy he inhabits. Those were advantages I lacked. I didn't feel that I lost a great deal by not having known Fergus. Ferg

Search This Blog