skygiants

Anne Lindbergh is one of those children's authors that nobody but me seems to remember, but her Three Lives to Live was wildly formative on me and seems to be quite rare these days, so I've picked up the habit of looking for her books any time I go into a used bookstore to see if I can build up a collection.

So far this has yielded me: one! The Worry Week, which I did not in fact read as a child but was quite pleased to experience for the first time last month -- it's a low-stakes survival story about a kid who convinces her siblings to go in on an elaborate plan to stay on at their summer cabin in Maine when their parents are called home for an emergency instead of getting sent to stay with their mean aunt.

It's quite a reasonable plan until the kids get back to the cabin and discover that their parents already told their neighbors to take all the perishable food out of the house, so instead of spending the week relaxing they instead spend it foraging, bickering, and hiding from the neighbors. There is also a little bit of a buried-treasure hunt, but the treasure is really not a driver and the main action is still mostly around the kids making sure that they actually have something to eat every day. It's not nearly as weird as most of the Lindberghs that imprinted themselves on my brain when I was small, but it's a very pleasant little read for people who enjoy Kids Living Off the Land and/or Atmospheric Maine Cottages.

So last night I came home at 11:30 PM . . . and realized that I had left my apartment keys in my desk at work! :D! (:/)

Three calls to my roommate got absolutely no response, and lurking sketchily in the Dunkin' Donuts for an hour in hopes of seeing someone enter the building also yielded no results, so eventually I gave up and called my mom (Beccamom: mffzzwhatyessureyoucancomesleephe...*SNORE*) and then fought my way back through the subway system to her apartment. Fun self-awareness fact: normally I do not think of myself as particularly irritable, but apparently I am HAIR-TRIGGER when locked out of my apartment, as proven by all the times I passed by groups of cheerful girls letting out high-pitched shrieks of giggling at regular intervals and had to fight down the urge to DESTROY DESTROY. This is especially hypocritical considering all the times I have been that shrieking girl on the subway, as any of you who have had occasion to take a subway with me know. Anyway, now I am at work, in my mother's clothing, trying valiantly to feel human and like a productive member of society and actually do work instead of glaring across the city at my roommate, who forwarded a cheery e-mail to me this morning about swing-dancing in the park and made no mention of the messages I left on her phone last night going "WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU." Because it is not really her fault that I am an idiot. (The most frustrating part was that I had actually been doing quite well at getting back into the groove of making myself write a page a day this whole week! And now my streak is broken.)


But you know what helps with feeling human and cheery and non-rageful (if not necessarily productive?) Canonical fanfic! I have been rereading some of the kid's books I have fond memories of when I was small, and they are both hilarious examples of self-insert fanfiction in the most literal sense.

Edward Eager's Knight's Castle is most blatant, and most awesome. It involves four cousins who find that their playset is magic and transports them to knight-fantasy-land in the middle of the night to have ADVENTURES. Moreover, they have just seen Ivanhoe, they have set up their playset with an Ivanhoe theme, and that means the whole book basically becomes hilarious Ivanhoe fanfic. (Fun fact: the only reason I know the plot of Ivanhoe at all is because of this book.) ( Seriously, you can run down a checklist of fanfic tropes. Also there's a Dark is Rising crossover. )

Anne Lindbergh's Travel Far, Pay No Fare is less hilariously fanfiction-y, but even more wish-fulfillment-y - the premise is that two soon-to-be-stepsiblings find a magic bookmark that lets them go into books! This was my childhood DREAM, guys. Awesomely, mostly they use it to go into YA books featuring Prominently Dead Pets and rescue them from being dead. (Including the canary in Little Women, which our teenaged-boy narrator protests loudly at having to visit until he gets a crush on Amy.) Also hilarious is the fact that the protagonist's mother is basically a Lurlene McDaniels Lite who writes books like "I Didn't Ask For Asthma."

SO BASICALLY, these books give me hope that really all you have to do to be a beloved YA author is write cracked-out self-insert fic about other books. In which case, I have totally found my career calling!