Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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" 'How can we have opinions if we have no idea what you're talking about?' asked Penpen gently.
" 'You gals ought to keep abreast of things,' said Mr. Feebles.
" 'Why?' asked Tilly grumpily. 'What good does it do you? It seems to me, from what you've been telling us, that everyone these days knows everything about everyone and the split second it happens, too. What do they do with all this information? What does it get them? It just clutters up their peaceful quiet time. It seems to me from what you've been describing, nobody has peaceful quiet time anymore. Television, bah! Radio, bah! Newspapers, magazines, bah, bah! Sounds like the world is running off half-cocked, people getting zapped with their little hits of information. Needing it every day. Zap, zap, zap. Well, deliver me. Contagious. Like hoof-and-mouth disease. I hope you're not contaminated. Don't go trekking it all over our property.'
" 'Very funny,' said Mr. Feebles. 'You're a queer couple of ladies, is what you are.'
" 'Yes, yes,' said Tilly, 'those queer Menuto women. I know all about it. Now, you drive gently on those rutted roads and don't go breaking those blueberry jars.' "

We've just ended a two-and-a-half week stay in the Sierra Mountains at Norm's vacation house. Norm is my father-in-law. We'll get to see him again in a couple of weeks when we help him celebrate his eightieth birthday.

I read THE CANNING SEASON aloud to friends and family in the evenings during our first week at Norm's, following relatively peaceful and quiet days of hiking and swimming above 6,000 feet. On the trails we had sometimes run across piles of fresh berry-laden bear scat--a most appropriate happenstance in light of this story. (I got some digital photos of the scat, but never did get to see the bears.)

I also spent some time getting to sit down and hear Norm's stories. Norm's Southern California childhood included silent movies and the iceman with his horse-drawn cart. Norm was a teenager attending UCLA during W.W.II when the Navy came looking for quality math and science majors and trained him to be a meteorologist working with military air traffic in the Pacific theater. After the war, he made a career of that training, working for a series of airlines that swallowed each other up over the years. He talked about the inauguration of commercial jet flights in the 1950s and his use of computers in his work, beginning in the mid-1960s, as the pivotal technological breakthroughs during the course of his career. The other night I was reminiscing with Norm about such things as trolley cars on the Peninsula and those lines of spherical kerosene lanterns that I recall marking road construction sites when I was a little kid. Before we left for home, Norm and I did some birthday shopping online--investigating the latest compact disk editions of swing band recordings that he listened to at 78 rpms as a teenager.

Changes just keep creeping up on us.

"And Penpen's eyes welled up as she realized that Tilly was no longer a young girl, as if seeing her white kinked hair and wrinkles and suddenly realizing what they meant. That old age had come and what had seemed like an interesting diversion--the first few gray hairs, the stooping body--wasn't just a pleasant novelty. They weren't going back; they weren't ever going back. Their youth, their youth, was gone. It was as if, unwitnessed, out here, safe in the woods, they should have been out of time as well. If no one had seen their passing, they shouldn't have passed. She wondered if Tilly, lying upstairs alone, was suddenly as aware of it as she was."

THE CANNING SEASON is a complex dichotomy of age and youth, of selfish and nurturing adults, of world-shrinking technology and isolation, and of two teenage girls, Rachet and Harper, who are fortunate enough to land on the doorstep of "those queer Menuto women." What is so fascinating is seeing how Penpen and Tilly--twin nonagenarians--share a renaissance, despite their failing health, while the two teenage girls come of age in the unusual household, the old mansion on an isolated coast in Maine where Tilly and Penpen have spent their entire lives. Aside from the story's motherhood theme, the book is nonjudgmental in its approach to human existence and different lifestyles.

"Penpen said that living things were all critical mass, the definition of critical mass being the amount of fissionable material required to sustain a chain reaction. She tossed some weeds on the compost and said that people didn't like to see things rotting in the garden but there had to be all things to be growth. She told Rachet this over and over, and the things that someone repeats to you over and over you tend to remember."

Rachet, the first adolescent character we meet in the story, is a rather passive girl who has been long neglected by the mother who ships her off to Maine for the summer. She needs to grow. One of Rachet's catalysts for growth is the blunt, computer-saavy Harper, who also shows up at the end of that rutted, bear-plagued road. Harper, who has been rejected--first by her mother and then by a mother-figure--is a real piece of work:

" 'I can't eat these raspberries, they're moldy,' Harper said loudly, picking them off and putting them on the tablecloth.
" 'Please use a saucer,' said Penpen. 'You'll stain dear Mother's tablecloth.'
" 'I thought dear Mother stained her own tablecloth,' said Harper sourly, because Tilly had told her part of the story.
" 'Not this one,' said Penpen.
"Rachet breathed a sigh of relief and began to pick off her own moldy ones. She had been worrying quite a bit that they might make her sick. She didn't think they would kill her unless she was allergic to penicillin, which as far as she knew she was not, but she didn't like the idea of them whizzing around her system, and although in the end she had suffered no ill effects, she was glad she no longer had to shovel them down. This was the good thing about Harper. She did things which at first seemed unbelievably rude and obnoxious but which you secretly wished you could do yourself. Her remarks were less offensive once they realized that she was simply determined to speak the truth and be done with it. There didn't seem to be any hidden corners in Harper's soul, and she wasn't interested in allowing other people theirs. Often, as in the case of the raspberries, this alleviated delicate problems."

It is wonderful how the elderly characters act in a manner that young adults can totally relate to: Penpen trying on Zen philosophy and having a schoolgirl crush on Dr. Richardson; Tilly's self-absorption that often leaves everyone waiting all day for a meal. As a forty-eight year-old who identifies with being part of the younger generation, I can similarly identify with that shock of Penpen's in discovering that old age has arrived.

THE CANNING SEASON moves back and forth freely between Tilly and Penpen's younger years and the present. It hosts a series of hilarious, bizarre and horrific incidents and circumstances that keep readers (heads) rolling and wondering what will happen next. But for me, the multigenerational aspects to the story are what make this a uniquely exceptional tale with so much to ponder and discuss.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com