A Bluestocking Knits

The 1937 Club is the latest iteration of an online book club hosted by Simon of "Stuck in a Book" — the only requirement is that the book one reads is published in the year in the current club's title!

Not being able to produce off the top of my head a list of novels published in 1937, I went to Wikipedia's list thereof as a starting place.  I decided, with some regret, not to read books I have already read — and so out went The Hobbit, On the Banks of Plum Creek, Summer Moonshine, and The Broken Ear, although it would be interesting to re-read them in the light of having been published in 1937, and their respective reflections (or not …) of that year.  But when I saw Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, you could have knocked me over with a feather — 1937?! impossible!  Why, I bought a copy from the Scholastic classroom book orders service when I was in, what, fifth or sixth grade, and read it literally umpteen times, and it wasn't that old then!

But it was, of course.

It's not a little surprising — and luckily, amusing — to me now that I can still almost recite whole passages of Baby Island from memory, and yet some of it — I suppose the dated bits — simply went over my head at age ten.  I had completely forgotten that the ship on which the Wallace sisters sailed was bound for Australia to meet their missionary parents.  I do remember that in times of trouble the girls sing, loudly if possible, "Scots Wha Hae" — to stir themselves up, as it were, to give themselves courage.  (The song, like "The Star-Spangled Banner," has a now-rather-unpleasant martial aggressiveness to it, possibly as lost on the young Wallace girls as it was on me at the same age.)

But I deeply admired the sisters' resourcefulness, their situation — who hasn't dreamed of being shipwrecked on a desert island, especially when you've read both Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson?! — and the novelty of being shipwrecked with no less than four babies under toddling age.  The characters of both the two Wallace girls and the babies are distinctly drawn and while their predicament is pretty serious the overall tone of the book is humorous, and although the appearance of their own Man Friday and the outcome of the plot might be more than a bit predictable, it is a story for young readers, after all, and, impressively, perhaps apart from elder sister Mary's old-fashioned sense of decorum, it doesn't seem impossible that it could all be happening now.

(The cover art of the paperback edition has gone through at least three iterations since then, a similar assortment of girls and babies, though looking more au courant, as it were, each time.  It's interesting that the Aladdin paperback of 1983 is the only one that highlights the peril of the shipwreck.)

Links to other readers' reviews can be found here.