Gwenda

Our local paper has a great story today about a rural Kentucky high school book club called the "Moo Moo Club" because they wear muumuus when they meet in honor of a photograph of their favorite teacher wearing one. A couple of excerpts, because this story makes me very happy:

By February, 53 students showed up for the club meeting, and it had to be moved to the school auditorium. The students, even some of the boys, wore nightgowns, housecoats and robes.

"It looked like a pajama party," says Mullins.

One student wore a real muumuu.

"I got one from my grandmother," says Olivia Skeens. "Actually, she still wears muumuus."

And, more importantly, they’re reading some good books too, for instance:

The most popular book read by the Moo Moo Club has been Lessons From a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles.

"The kids raved about it, and the first Friday night after it was assigned, the students were texting each other, saying they couldn’t put it down," Mullins says.

The book proved so ­popular that students who were not in Mullins’ classes or the club began checking it out of the library, and Mullins was able to arrange a conference call between her students and the author.

Go, Jo!

Welcome to all you guys visiting after hearing the NPR story about Anne of Green Gables. Recent posts of at least semi-substance include one about Shirley Jackson’s domestic writing in honor of another hundredth anniversary and some thoughts related to class in YA and middle grade fiction. And, of course, there’s the post about one of the dogs investigating a turtle, because this is a blog and thus cute animal pictures are a requirement.

You’ll also find some book recommendations over in the sidebar to the right, but I thought I’d make one specifically related to Anne. Laura Amy Schlitz is a children’s literature superstar now, after winning the Newbery, but I still don’t hear enough people talking about her first bookchildren’s novel, which came out in 2006. A Drowned Maiden’s Hair: A Melodrama is a mash-up of many things, and Anne is among them.

The story finds Maud*, a resident at the Barbary Asylum for Female Orphans, having the misfortune of being adopted by spiritualists who want to use her in their cons. Maud is a character very much in conversation with Anne Shirley, and I think the opening paragraph will be enough to convince you:

On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

*L.M. Montgomery reference, maybe? I prefer to think so, even if it isn’t.

Ooooh. An excellent piece by Ursula Dubosarsky published in the Australian Age awhile ago, looking at Vixen Sharp Ears (aka The Cunning Little Vixen), a novella written by Czech Rudolf Tesnohlidek in 1920, and published for the first time in English in 1985 with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. The book sounds fabulous, and I’m going to hunt it down.

She begins by talking about her experiences of darkness as a child:

My favourite memory of this kind of darkness is from my NSW state primary school in the 1960s. Once a week we girls were parted from the boys and made our way out to an old crumbling 19th century house at the back of the playground, known ominously as "Marshall House". There we huddled together in a shadowy room that smelt as green as a drain, straining to see the needles and threads and our little bits of useless sewing, while we told each other stories.

Unsurprisingly, these were largely ghost stories that revolved around sightings of the apparently doomed Marshalls who had lived in the house, and the various terrible ways they were said to have met their deaths. We were all very impressed, I remember, by the desperate scrawl in lead pencil that one of us discovered down near the skirting board on one of the peeling floral papered walls, "I was dead 100 years ago."

Don’t we all have those creepy half-manufactured, half-found moments as children?

Such a smart piece. Read the whole thing. (And read The Red Shoe already, if you haven’t. So wonderful.)