Today, I am pleased to welcome Meg Mitchell Moore, the fabulous author of The Arrivals. My review of The Arrivals is here. I love that she is reading with her daughter and will definitely be checking out the series for my own daughters.
Here’s Meg:
Last month my family took a trip to a resort in South Carolina. The plan was to spend a few days at the resort and make a day journey to Charleston. Before we left, my mother gave a book to my oldest daughter, who is eight. The book is called A Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter and it tells the story of Sylvia, a girl from Boston living with her family in Charleston in the months living up to the Civil War.
Our day in Charleston was the hottest day of our vacation, melt-your-bones sort of hot. We packed, sardine-like, into a horse-drawn carriage with a bunch of other tourists to learn a bit of the city’s history. The horses were bickering in front of us. (Did I mention it was hot?) Our tender Irish-American skin, fresh from a long New England winter, reproached us.
My daughter and I didn’t, as I’d hoped, finish reading A Yankee Girl before the trip. We barely started it. We’re reading it now, together. Well, I’m reading and my daughter is listening. Although she’s perfectly capable of reading this book on her own, doing it in tandem is a memorable experience. There’s real dramatic tension between the girl from the North and her Southern schoolmates, and there’s a lot to learn by watching Sylvia begin to comprehend the realities of slavery. One student in the prim-and-proper all-girls school Sylvia attends is a bully, providing a legitimate jumping-off point for discussions about female friendships. We’ve come across the names of streets we traversed on our 100-degree carriage ride, and when characters in the book look across the water to Fort Sumter we remember how we, too, looked across the water to Fort Sumter. We remember how the gardens outside the homes along King Street were in full bloom.
The author of this book, Alice Turner Curtis, remains a bit of a mystery; I’ve been able to find no biographical information on her, and emails to the publisher have gone unanswered, though she seems to have produced a slew of historical fiction for the young crowd. (The possibility has crossed my mind that more than one author is responsible for the books that bear her name: A Little Maid of Provincetown, A Little Maid of Virginia, little maids from the Mohawk Valley all the way to Maine.)
We haven’t reached the end of the book yet, but I have a feeling there might be a civil war on the horizon, and that will provide more fodder for dialogue. To be sure, I have to stop reading occasionally and reiterate the fact that the word darky is not part of the lexicon anymore (“You told me that,” my daughter says, rolling her eyes), that plantation owners no longer buy their workers, that the maids in the book bring the water up to the bedrooms in the mornings because there was no such thing as hot running water. But in a relentlessly fast-paced world it’s a pleasure to witness my daughter relish a story set so firmly in the past, and a privilege to go there with her.
What are you reading and where are you going?