Up until this point, the Freddy books have been — what is the word I’m looking for? — fluffy. Oh, certainly, author Walter Brooks had not hesitated to satirize various features of American culture: political speeches, courtroom trials, and capitalism, casting gentle zingers at venerable institutions. But for the most part, the books remained lighthearted romps.

In Freddy the Politician (1939; originally published as Wiggins for President) however, Brooks took his satire to new levels, using his animals to create a thinly veiled allegory on the fall of the Weimar Republic, the rise of fascism, and the takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia, as well as aiming some zingers at American politics and Washington DC. It’s almost as if Brooks had developed a certain, how shall I put it, cynicism regarding American politics, and outright fear about the world stage.

[Don’t let any Wall Street bankers near this book. They might get ideas.]

Well, this did surprise Dr. Murdock, for he had never found a rooster in any of his patients before.

Few doctors indeed have the privilege of finding roosters in their patients. But this, of course, is Freddy and the Clockwork Twin, a Freddy the Pig book, where roosters can be found nearly everywhere, and the patient in question is not exactly your typical human patient, but rather a figure created from metal and clockwork — so clever, it can and is mistaken for a human by other humans, finding it almost a twin — a clockwork twin — to a young human orphan.

[When you give your newly created mechanical figure into the control of a rooster.]

Temporarily at a loss for more adventures that could feature a talking pig on an upstate New York farm, for his next novel, author Walter Brooks turned to a different sort of story — the tale of traveling circus animals, where Freddy the Pig only makes an appearance in the final chapters. Originally titled The Story of Freginald, it has been reissued under the somewhat misleading title of Freddy and Freginald.

The main character is Freginald, a small bear initially inflicted (in his view) with the name Louise (thanks to a bit of mistaken gender identification). Other bears make fun of him. The bear comforts himself by writing bad poetry (perhaps echoing a certain poetic British bear, although more likely serving as an excuse for Brooks to write silly poems). This seeming timewaster later allows him to get a job with the circus, as the owner, Mr. Boomschimdt, soon realizes that a bear that can hop like a rabbit while reciting his own poems is a sure fire moneymaker.

[Off to the circus!]

All is, I’m sorry to say, not quite right on the Bean Farm, that home of the loveable animals Freddy the Pig, Jinx the Cat, Charles and Henrietta the chickens, and some rather less loveable rats. (Rats.) A toy train has disappeared. Grain is vanishing. And two Terrible Robbers have arrived in the area, leaving the human sheriff and detective quite at a loss.

Fortunately, the Bean Farm has a pig named Freddy, who has carefully studied the life of that most famous of detectives: Sherlock Holmes.

[Solving crimes when your friends WILL keep interfering with you.]

As it turns out, the problem with spending a delightful winter in Florida and finding a sack of gold in the bargain is that you get terribly bored afterwards. At least, you do if you are a clever pig, a cat, a good tempered cow, a rather less good tempered crow, a talkative rooster, or any of a number of other farm animals at Bean’s Farm in upstate New York, desperate for something to do.

Like any other nice industrious American animals, they initially choose commerce, offering various tours of the local areas and Florida for equally bored animals, a process that goes well enough if you ignore some of the belly aches gained by the mice thanks to overconsumption of cheese. But this, alas, provides only limited scope for their talents. Eventually, Freddy is seized by a new idea: he should take an expedition to the North Pole. After all, as diehard upstate New Yorkers, they are accustomed to the cold.

[Badly planned rescue expeditions — and needing to free Santa from poorly implemented efficiency plans]

Psst. The goblins are calling.

And they’re offering fruit. Well, poems—but that’s fruit for the soul, right?

Since 2006, Goblin Fruit, edited by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Wick, has been offering a delectable selection of fantasy and folklore poems—every quarter. (Full disclosure: I’ve been published in Goblin Fruit in the past and will be appearing there in the future, mostly because I love the zine so much I desperately wanted to be in it.) The poems offer little snippets of beauty and fantasy, magic and fairy tale, anguish and joy, love and hate. Nearly all of them are very very good, and those that aren’t are better.

Goblin Fruit was not, of course, the first or last zine to focus exclusively on speculative poetry—but in an industry more renowned for short lived zines, its record of producing six years of issue after issue of undiminished quality is more than impressive. Please forgive me while I gush a bit more.

[Even if you hate poetry, or think you hate poetry....]

During and shortly after the great Oz reread, a call came up from the comments asking me to do a Freddy the Pig reread.

I must admit: my response was Freddy the what?

As I have hinted here and there and on this blog, I spent a significant amount of my childhood in Italy, where we had access to British books and those occasional American books Penguin condescended to reprint. Oz, yes. Enid Blyton, absolutely. Paddington Bear, absolutely absolutely. The Wombles of Wimbledon? Complete with the song.

Freddy the Pig?

Per nulla.

[And oh, did I miss out. The Freddy the Pig reread begins below]

So a few days ago The Atlantic printed their list of the Greatest Girl Characters of Young Adult Literature. And, well, apart from the factual errors here and there on the list, as you might be guessing, I have one or two problems with the list. And the essay, now that you mention it.

No, not that the list doesn’t include a single Oz book (although that’s sad, too.) But primarily something that was mentioned by other commentators on the article: most of the books listed here do not fit the category of “young adult,” or “teenage.”

[A more detailed discussion of the list, and a request for suggestions below]

In 2008, after the death of Madeleine L’Engle, her granddaughters agreed to publish The Joys of Love, an early novel that had been rejected by several publishers. For whatever reason, L’Engle never made use of her status as a published author to print it later in her life. It’s a pity. The Joys of Love, written in the late 1940s, may not rank among L’Engle’s best, or offer the profound statements of her later books, but it is a happy, light and enjoyable read.

[Infighting and love in the summer theatre.]

A Winter’s Love, a serious study of marriage, love and family, is one of Madeleine L’Engle’s early adult novels, published in 1957 before she began writing any of the young adult novels that would make her famous. A commentator on an earlier post had suggested I include it in this reread, and I couldn’t think why not. Now that I’ve read it, I can answer that: it’s kinda depressing. But interesting, and definitely worth a look for L’Engle fans. Just keep some chocolate on hand.

[Infidelity, anti-Semitism, tuberculosis, gossip, and glorious romantic walks in the Alps.]

In 1994, Madeleine L’Engle turned to Vicky Austin again to write the last book in her Austin series, Troubling a Star. The last in the Austin series, it is an odd coda, featuring a Vicky somehow younger and more naïve than in her last appearance, involved in an international adventure of espionage that threatens the most remote continent on Earth – Antarctica. And although it is ostensibly a sequel to A Ring of Endless Light, it is also a sequel to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which creates many of its problems.

[Major spoilers for this book, A Ring of Endless Light, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.]

An Acceptable Time joins two of L’Engle’s young adult series together, as Polly O’Keefe from the O’Keefe novels travels to Connecticut and the house where Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, Sandy and Dennys began their adventures through time and space. Something must be up with that house, for beyond all of the other weird things that have happened nearby, shortly after Polly arrives she finds herself stepping through 3000 years of time.

Unfortunately, she also brings Zachary Grey along with her.

[When time travelling creates linguistic issues.]

After years of relegating them to mere supporting characters, L’Engle finally gave Sandy and Dennys, the Murry twins their own adventure in Many Waters. The book turned out, however, to be quite different than any of the other works in the Murry/O’Keefe books. If L’Engle pushed the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy before, here she tried something else entirely: Biblical fantasy, if you like, complete with unicorns. Drawing from her own earlier work with time travel and a few verses from Genesis, it tries to retell the story of Noah and the flood. I say tries, because to be honest, I really don’t think it works at all.

The odd thing is that I think it might work just fine if Sandy and Dennys weren’t in it.

[I’m assuming everyone knows what happened with Noah and the flood, right? But some spoilers for the story of Sandy and Dennys.]

Before I go on to discuss this week’s book, A House Like a Lotus, a quick point about the Madeleine L’Engle reread in regards to racism, homophobia and other issues.

If I have seemed harsh on L’Engle on these matters — and I may well have been — it’s because I am talking about Madeleine L’Engle, a writer who in her earlier books was arguing for inclusivity, tolerance and the careful use of language to describe minority groups, and an author who, as others have mentioned, was renowned for expanding the horizons of young readers. I am not particularly surprised when an Edith Nesbit, who was completely unconcerned with racial equality, drops a stereotypical image or uses the n-word in her books.

[Expectations of L’Engle, and A House Like a Lotus reread.]

“I don’t wish to be defined by gender or genitals. I am a pianist.”

— Katherine Vigneras

Having written novels focused on the emotional angst of young and middle aged adults, in the 1980s Madeleine L’Engle set off to write something a little different: A Severed Wasp, the novel of an elderly woman coming to terms with her life. Set mostly in New York City, but with multiple flashbacks to Europe, the novel also functions as a little mini reunion of L’Engle characters, featuring Suzy Austin from the Austin novels; Dave Davidson from The Young Unicorns, and Mimi Oppenheimer from A Winter’s Love. (Philippa Hunter from And Both Were Young also gets a mention.) It is a novel of human pain, and our reactions to it, and how we might be able to survive.

And, despite its focus on a Manhattan cathedral, it does not quite provide the answer you might expect from L’Engle.

[Nazis, castration, and gay sex in Manhattan. This is what happens when you marry someone working in soap operas, guys. Very spoilery post]

A Ring of Endless Light, the fourth novel in Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin famly series, opens, appropriately enough, with a funeral. I say appropriately, because this is a novel of death, and our responses to it. And also, telepathic dolphins. It is one of her best books.

[And also, one of her best romances. Spoilers for the end.]

Perhaps dissatisfied with the novels she had written about the children of Meg and Calvin O’Keefe, in 1978 L’Engle again turned to the Murry family for another novel featuring dazzling trips through time and space, this time on the back of a unicorn. A Swiftly Tilting Planet is simultaneously one of L’Engle’s most beautiful and poetic novels, filled with joy and despair, and also one of her most frustrating, a book that both celebrates her earlier books while completely contradicting some of their most important and fiercely argued ethical points. I find myself dazzled and irritated.

[Warning: one of my longer and more ranty posts ahead, with major spoilers for the entire book.]

Dragons in the Waters, the second book in the O’Keefe family series, is, like its predecessor, a tale of suspense, intrigue and murder mingled with a touch of fantasy and science fiction, as Poly and Charles O’Keefe meet the 13-year-old Simon Renier on a freighter trip down to Venezuela and a lake there, named for dragons. Poly and Charles are travelling with their father who plans to examine potential environmental issues with drilling oil in the lake. Simon is travelling with Forsyth Phair, a considerably older cousin he has known for precisely one month, because his elderly aunt Leonis believes that Simon needs some culture and exposure to the world beyond their little North Carolina house. Forsyth is returning a portrait of Simon Bolivar to the Venezuelan government, in the first and last kindly thing he will do in the entire novel.

[When murder becomes an almost forgotten sideplot.  Also, no dragons.]

Some years after writing The Arm of the Starfish, Madeleine L’Engle decided to write a more direct sequel to her visionary novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Set about a year after the previous adventure, A Wind in the Door is both a larger and smaller book than its predecessor. Larger, because among its themes is the destruction of stars and galaxies, vanished with a terrifying scream; smaller, because a significant part of its storyline focuses on and takes place within a mitochondrion within a human cell. It begins with a quiet conversation about something that might, or might not be, dragons, and ends with a dazzling poetic sequence, a sign of L’Engle’s confidence in her writing powers.

As in the first book, the main protagonist is Meg Murry, still angry and impatient, still inclined to do more than her share of “Why do I have to do this?” but otherwise, thankfully less whiny and better adjusted than in the last book. This is partly thanks to her stronger relationship with Calvin O’Keefe, which has made life easier for her in school and in other ways, and partly, I’d like to think, because of the events of the last book. I have to imagine that, since, oddly enough, aside from two offhand mentions, nobody makes any reference to the previous book at all.

[Which is probably ok because they have dying shrieking stars and dragons to worry about anyway.]