Historical Children’s Fiction, Hysterically

June 8, 2026June 4, 2026 / Susan O. / 1 Comment

Have you ever had that feeling of dismay when something you believe and love is crushed before your eyes?

Having finished our last communal reading book, my youngest brought me another book off her shelf to read together, Bread and Butter Journey, by Ann Colver. Printed in 1972, it’s my original Scholastic copy. I loved this book when I was eight, steeped in the hoopla of Little House on the Prairie, from which I sidestepped into B&BJ, Caddie Woodlawn, Let the Hurricane Roar, Anne of Green Gables, and more. The illustrations being done by Garth Williams, of Little House fame, only made it that much dearer. I hadn’t read it in 40+ years, but I hadn’t forgotten the details. I was happy to read it again.

Bread and Butter Journey follows the 1784 travel of young Barbara Blaum (age never given, but somewhere in the 8-10 range) from her home in Pennsylvania to Ohio, where her father and her father’s friend were buying up farmland on the frontier. As in all stories with children, she misses home, misses her father, hates her brother, and in the end learns to love life more than things. Wholesome pioneer reading for the 7-11 crowd, and it’s based on the journals of the real Barbara Baum, the author’s husband’s great-great grandmother. Should be good, right?

But I am not eight anymore, and I’ve studied a lot of college-level history, especially the settling of the west. And the more I read this time, the more horrified I became, crushing my cozy memories. This book was not just historically inaccurate; it barely fit under the term historical at all. I kept stopping cold and explaining the problems to my girls as we went.

My first question mark arose when they made way on the path for the Pony Express. Hold your horses! This is Pennsylvania, 1784. The Pony Express only ran for 18 months, and the furthest east it went was St. Louis, Missouri – in 1860, 80 years in the future! I burst out laughing when they mentioned hyenas howling in the night. Yes, hyenas. An African animal that I assure you with total faith was not in the wilds of western Pennsylvania in 1784, not even in a zoo, and no one out there had ever known of. Just what was that woman thinking! I will let the idea of putting up fruit preserves slide, even though berries would be out of season (October at least). Canning food wasn’t invented until 1795, and the common Mason jar until the 1860’s. But people had been preserving fruit in jellies by pouring the jelly into pots and “sealing” them with wax or waxed paper since at least the 1500’s, so I don’t believe it, but I’ll allow it as possible. They seem to make bean soup in the matter of an hour, when anyone who’s ever dealt with dried beans (including Laura Ingalls Wilder) knows they must be soaked overnight, and even then, it takes more than an hour to cook them. In addition, it wasn’t legal to settle in the Ohio area until 1787, with the first permanent settlement in 1788. Yes, American Indians (probably Shawnee) had every right to kill anyone encroaching on their land.

Argh. The only thing that was actually right was the state of Pennsylvania existed, and there actually was a Fort Hannahstown in Western Pennsylvania. I was crushed, to say the least. My daughter loved the book anyway, though after treasuring it for so many decades, I’m ready to get rid of it.

So what books are historically accurate for children? Okay, in 1970 we didn’t have an internet, and research had to be done in libraries or textbooks, by far a lot more time-consuming. There’s no excuse for any inaccuracies today. My favorites have always included My Brother Sam is Dead, by James and Christopher Collier, which won a Newberry in 1975 and takes place in Connecticut during the Revolutionary War. You can actually visit some of the places in the book, and if not the exact place, the towns still exist. Beware that the book is often banned in Southern schools, for including the words “hell,” “damn,” and “bastard.” Rough stuff. Spies on the Devil’s Belt is from the same era, and also takes place on the shoreline of Connecticut.

The entire American Girl series, whether or not you want to plop down $150 for each accompanying doll, is praised for its historical accuracy. Covering different cultures and eras, from Kaya, a Nez Perce girl from the mid 1700’s, through Julie, who celebrates Chinese New Year in San Francisco in the 1970’s, the stories will give a good glimpse into what it was like to live in that time period. They’re uncomplicated, and it’s their simplicity and focus that keeps them from falling apart.

The Little House on the Prairie series give an excellent view of 1870’s America, by someone who actually lived it. Same with Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perfectly accurate because Mark Twain lived them. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793 and Seeds of America trilogy are highly regarded, as well as Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, which won the 1990 Newberry Medal. Johnny Tremain, another oldie but goodie, still rings true today, despite its 1944 Newberry Medal. If you can find it, the book On to Oregon! by Honoré Willsie Morrow (and made into the movie Seven Alone) tells a mostly true tale of the seven Sager children who are orphaned on the trail from Ohio to Oregon. The children actually do make it all the way on their own (with a newborn) to Marcus Whitman, a real missionary who took in many orphaned children, but the movie (and tie-in novel) ends happily, ignoring the horrific end that awaited several of them during the Whitman massacre just three years later. Another book of their journey is For Ma and Pa: On the Oregon Trail, 1844 (go ahead, cue the game sound. You know you’re going to.).

What we live today is tomorrow’s history. Children may not see or understand the significance of what they live through today, but twenty years from now they will (I’m still not over the Watergate trials preempting my 8 year old TV watching, but I do get the point now). Spark an interest in the past with any of these or other amazing books, but remember, there are – and never were – no wild hyenas roaming Pennsylvania.

Ever.

For hands-on experiences for children, check out Old Sturbridge Village, just over the line in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, or Mystic Seaport, in Mystic, Connecticut (which is somehow farther away than Sturbridge) (discount pass here).

The Mill on the Brook

April 13, 2026April 11, 2026 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

*Huckins Road, circa 1983, when it was passable until it rained.*

While Cheshire is currently known as the Bedding Plant capital of Connecticut, did you know we were once a powerhouse of apples?

Way back when, in another century, when I was quite young, I can remember there being two apple trees far in the back of our yard. They were ancient, barely alive, and looked like something out of the Wizard of Oz, black and gnarled like a corpse’s hand. If they put out ten apples a year, it was a record. In fact, the entire neighborhood – the triangle of streets just past Darcey School – had these apple trees. It’s not surprising, since the old farmhouse at the top was built in 1780, the same year Cheshire was incorporated. Farms grew apples not so much for pies, but for animal feed, cider, and vinegar, which was used in pickling and preserving foods, as well as a cleaning agent and for curing hides. Apples were important.

Some fifty-five years ago, when the lower half of Huckins Road was nothing more than a dirt path, impassable to anything short of a jacked-up four wheel drive truck or tank, and the first house was being built, my father would take us for walks there, down this exotic uninhabited Brigadoon, most importantly teaching us to avoid the poison ivy that grew thick on the sides. There were two paths through the forest, and both led to beautiful waterfalls. The near one, across from our property (and loaded with poison ivy), was small, no more than 2-3 feet high, and narrow enough that if you put your feet on the right stones, you could hop across. But further down the road, past Darcey, was a high one, with a pond above it (since badly silted in by the flood of 1982). And by the pond, above the waterfall, were two stone pillars. My father, who not only had two degrees in history but whose babysitter so many eons ago had been the Prospect Town Historian, who could possibly have been born in the 1600’s, told me back then that the pillars had belonged to a mill, to hold a mill wheel driven by the waterfall. The fact there could have been industry nearby made sense to me, since the land and trees between our house and Darcey suggested an old road, and we had come across old coal deposits and odd bits of rusty tools buried in the dirt, waiting for child archeologists to treasure them.

They were fond memories, but that was all. No information seemed to exist about it. Most old maps of Cheshire stopped at the Notch, since that was where trolley and train stops were (check out the old track humps on Pamela Lane, or the bridge by Mixville Park). The Historical Society had never heard of it.

But the pillars remained. They knew they existed, and they remembered the history better than I did. Although in my teen years we played in that stream, walked up it to the big waterfall, the thick brush, briars, and mud discouraged us from further exploration (as well as the man who owned the property, who liked to fire his gun if he saw anyone so much walk down the road. And I was his papergirl.).

*This view of Cuff Brook became a bookcover*

But I am a determined researcher, and after decades of waiting for an internet to be built and the right information to be loaded onto it, I hit paydirt. I came across an old map of Cheshire, from 1868, that not only showed a cider mill, but two cider mills on what is actually known as Cuff Brook (no one ever knew it had a name, it was just The Brook). The T. H. Barnes Homestead still stands, built in 1817 (we knew it as the Bear’s House, because the Bears lived in it at the time, but the Barnes family took it back, and I know this because one of the Barnes was my babysitter), and these pillars may very well have been part of their old property (they have a small pond by the house, but no waterfall to turn a wheel). I believe the house marked Jos. Barnes is the one on the corner of Huckins and Hickory Lane, which dates from 1742, and has an entire tree as a crossbeam (because I used to babysit the kids in that house. Maybe we need a book called The History of Cheshire Through Babysitting). I find it amusing that the same streets are already there, including the unpaved Moneta Lane across from Winslow, and that across the street from the newly built Barnum School at Marion and Jarvis is a label of “School No. 5.” (The Hotchkiss house across from it dates from 1805, and still stands). The more things change, the more they remain the same.

So plant some apple trees this year, and bring back a piece of Cheshire history (I had two at my old house on Marion, and one was certainly old enough to date back to at least 1920). It’s good for the bees, and heirloom apples are a treat (there are more than 7500 varieties!). Cheshire is ripe with orchards, the oldest being the now-closed Norton Brothers Farm (1757), followed by Bishop Farms (circa 1780, where, in that other century, before houses seized the land, I worked picking apples, peaches, and cherries). If you need help, check out these books on apples and Cheshire!

Grow a Little Fruit Tree

How to Grow Food

Encyclopedia of Gardening Techniques

Gardening for Dummies

Home Grown Pantry

Apples of Uncommon Character

Legendary CT

New England Orchard Cookbook

Apples are from Kazakhstan

Fire cider! : 101 zesty recipes for health-boosting remedies made with apple cider vinegar

Cheshire

Landmarks of Old Cheshire

Witch Book to Read

March 30, 2026March 26, 2026 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Twilight set off a whole graveyard of vampire romances, and then came werewolf romances. For a while paranormal romance was the genre of the day, with people falling in love with ghosts or people in past lives – no doubt fueled by time-travel stories like Outlander. When the person you love died 200 years previous, it makes that guy at the coffee shop seem rather dull in comparison. Monsters are a thing, especially in cozy fantasy – even dragons can be a thing (let’s not forget Donkey and his Dragon mate in Shrek!). Zombies picked up the slack, but are now fading away as a genre – you can only kill them twice.

So what’s currently “trendy” in genre fiction? What have we circled back to? Cozy fantasy is all the rage, little stories with a slice of life that ends happily, whether you’re an ogre or gnome or pixie. Horror is making a comeback, including something called Fem-gore, which is written by women for women, and includes a lot of bloody-warrior revenge themes. LGBTQ stories and stories of people of color are on the rise, giving a long-overdue boost to underrepresented segments of the population. But the largest rising genre? Witches and wizards.

She made a child do her dirty work – good or evil?

No, we’re not talking Lord of the Rings or Dragonlance (though you can read Dragonlance for either the action sequences or the burning romance of Raistlin and Crysania), but the Earthly plane stories that encompass every facet of storytelling. Magic stories. And magic is the realm of witches and wizards. Witches aren’t usually evil, even if, thanks to Wicked, we’re not sure Glinda is completely a good witch.

Technically, a male witch is called a … witch. Wizard is also acceptable, the difference being a wizard is usually academically oriented [think Gandalf] while a witch is more self-taught [Granny Weatherwax from the Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books]. Mage is also appropriate, but warlock is a slur. Witchy stories have been around forever – the Biblical Witch of Endor (10th century BCE), Circe of Homer’s Odyssey (8th century BCE), Hecate of the Greek pantheon (Hesiod’s Theogony, 7th century BCE), Merlin the Wizard and Morgan le Fay of Camelot (minimum, the 1100’s, possibly as early as the 400’s), and the witches of Macbeth (1606). Let’s not forget the witches of The Wizard of Oz, or the terrifying Dust Witch of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, the marvelous Eglantine Price of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Samantha Stephens of Bewitched, the Halliwell sisters of the TV show Charmed, or The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The image of witches was improved by the popularity of Harry Potter and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Children’s stories aside, the rise of New-age witchcraft has no doubt helped the rise of witch stories as well.

“Witch” or “wizard” is appropriate for men

How did witches come to have such a bad rap? Throughout history, and amplified through Dark Ages ignorance, learned men and intelligent women, women who could read, women who were opinionated, or women who had some sort of good or bad fortune that couldn’t be explained by simple means, were suspected of using dark magic to gain their knowledge, even when it benefited the community itself. Magic, voodoo, and good or bad spirits were all people had to explain what was to them unexplainable any other way. Maybe your sheep all had twin lambs, but neighbor Geoff, who took poor care of his sheep, had 5 die in birthing – surely you must have worked dark magic on his sheep! All your 15 children survived the plague? You must be a witch! While New-Age witches study nature in all its forms, in reality, no study anywhere has proven that magic – not the magician kind – has any basis in fact.

Modern stories of magic run the full gamut, from cozy mysteries (such as those by Bailey Cates), humorous fantasy (Terry Pratchett’s Color of Magic series), Courtly intrigue without the morbid gore of Game of Thrones (The Chronicles of Amber series by Roger Zelazny), to the wildly popular Discovery of Witches series by Deborah Harkness, and the book and TV series of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. If you don’t like the idea of reading a fantasy book, try a more mainstream author like Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic series, or The Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks, or A Secret History of Witches, by Louisa Morgan. Harry Potter they are not.

My favorite witches of literature? Gandalf, of course, from Lord of the Rings, along with Molly Weasley and Minerva McGonagall from Harry Potter, Ole Meg from Clifford D. Simak’s A Heritage of Stars, Raistlin Majere of Dragonlance, and perhaps Lady Jessica Atreides in Dune (yes, the Bene Gesserit are witches).

If you’re looking to put a little magic in your life, or just escape the pressures of our Earthly plane, check out some of these trending books!

The Reclusive Era

March 2, 2026February 27, 2026 / Susan O. / 1 Comment

Despite having numerous streaming channels, I was yet again faced with the dilemma of watching something dull but background noise (stand-up comedians, or weather disaster documentaries), watching something I loved for the 15th time, or something new that I would have to pay attention to, most of which I didn’t have time to finish. I wound up watching the documentary Grey Gardens, something that was on the far end of my to-be- watched list.

Grey Gardens is the story of Edith Beale, and her daughter, “Edie” Beale, who are, to be polite, a little bit batty. Hard recluses, they live in a 28-room, 100-year old mansion on Long Island, which is decrepit and at one point had been condemned by the town as being unlivable. Enter Jackie Kennedy Onassis – yes, that one – and her sister Lee, close relatives of the Beales, who throw money into the house and keep it from being torn down. Yet, when we meet the Beales, they basically live in one nasty room, Edith cooks from a burner next to her stained mattress, cats are seen pooping on the furniture, and they complain about the fleas.

Much of the documentary is spent with mother and daughter reminiscing about could have beens and should have beens –I could have been a singer … I could have been a dancer if you hadn’t … Sometimes they dream about what they should do – cut down the overgrown trees and make a garden. They don’t leave the house except to step onto the porch, where they can see to the gate and let people in, but only people with prior approval, like the handyman. They are both immature, lost in fantasy, and living in squalor without ever realizing it. Some people condemn the film as exploitive, while others consider it documentary of the purest form. The film made me think of of other, similar stories, that took place in the same era (Grey Gardens was filmed in 1975, with the mother born in 1895 and daughter born in 1917). This is not the only story with controlling mothers living in recluse with their daughters…

At the time, I was also reading the book Empty Mansions, a biography of heiress Huguette Clark, and the similarities were striking. Clark – heir to her father’s immense copper fortune – was an extreme recluse, not even attending her mother’s few social gatherings in their 5th-Avenue apartment where she herself lived. She had expensive homes she’d never been to, but that were still maintained and kept for tens of thousands of dollars a month, just in case. She didn’t set foot outside her apartment for fifty years, until she was forced into a hospital due to cancer, where she liked the room so much she stayed in it for 20 years (she lived to 105) – at cost, of course. While she was said to be sweet and generous over the phone or in letters, she saw no one face to face but certain doctors or nurses, and her personal aide. Those family members or schoolmates who had known her remembered a shy girl who didn’t speak much, but even into her 30’s carried dolls with matching outfits to high-society events with her mother (she owned more than 1200 dolls). There was something off in Huguette, but no one knew her well enough to understand exactly what. Huguette was born in 1906 and lived her whole life with her mother, who was shy but functioning, though she would throw social gatherings for friends’ children, but not the friends. Strange.

One of the saddest biographies I’ve ever read, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll, is that of Dare Wright, the photographer who produced The Lonely Doll children’s book series. Wright was a highly talented artist, model, and photographer but was tightly controlled by her domineering mother. She frequently crossed familial boundaries – sleeping in her daughter’s bed, breaking up her engagement, not allowing her a separate life, until all Wright had was her dolls and her camera. It’s a difficult book to find, and you might not find it in a local library, but I urge you to read it if you can. Was Wright actually that loyal to her mother, or was she mentally reduced to submission by a controlling parent? Dare Wright was born in 1914 and lived much of her life in New York City. You can check out her famous Lonely Doll series here.

I think back to someone I knew who was born in that same era, 1905-1912, who lived on Long Island. Like many women of that era, in that location, she was concerned with appearances, society, never learned to drive, never wrote a check, never did anything but keep house, which was all a woman of that era was expected to do. Her only child, a daughter, was more than a little batty. Although they lived together for much of their lives, they did not become recluses until late in life, when poor health left the mother unable to walk well, or to deal with the daughter who had physical and mental issues of her own.

Is it just a coincidence that these women all lived in the same geographic area, were born in a 10-year window, led isolated lives, lived with their mother their entire life, and if not actually penniless (the Beales ran through their trust fund years before), lived in a single room and acted that way? Was there something in that era that created issues (and yes, societal and family expectations and lack of choices are acceptable answers)? Did clusters happen in other major cities, too? Are these just isolated examples that happened to come to the world’s attention because they were such outliers, or did things like this happen in tenement families, too? Or is three-four examples just too small a data pool to say anything? It certainly cries for more investigation, but unless you like the dry statistics of Jacob Riis and his studies of New York tenements, there isn’t a lot of information out there.

Watch Grey Gardens. Give Empty Mansions a read (it has a major twist at the end!). If you can, track down The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll. See what you think.

Can you think of any similar biographies?

Survival of the Fittest

February 2, 2026January 31, 2026 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

I finished reading my last book of the year on December 27 (Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Michael Moss, which was very good), and figured that was it for the year. I had too much going on to rush another book but I just couldn’t go without reading something, so I grabbed one off my To Be Read shelf – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which has so many recommendations the cover should be 14-carat gold.

Every review was correct. I read the book in a day and a half – I probably could have finished it in five hours, if I’d had uninterrupted time. I just could not put this book down. It’s a sparse novel about a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world – you don’t even find out what happened – as they try to survive travel on foot an unknown distance to the south shore to get out of the freezing winter weather. I’m guessing by the fact they crossed over high mountains they were heading to California, but no clues are given (in the movie, the map shows Florida). This book was beyond compelling, certainly worthy of every accolade. But I didn’t feel like writing an entire blog post about it. Nothing is worse than a review that gives a play by play recap of a book.

So I went and looked up books like The Road, because I’ve read enough post-apocalyptic fiction to have covered all the basics. What is it compared to? For decades (and arguably still) my favorite novel of all time, by number of rereads, is Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, a post-nuclear war novel from 1959. A little dated, but not much. In the chaos of 9/11, I sent my oldest friend a two-word text: Alas, Babylon, and he knew exactly what I meant.

But a couple of similar-to lists had the nerve to list Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. My father was always after me to read this one, the Alas, Babylon of his youth, before the Cold War. Eventually I did, and honestly, it’s one of the worst apocalyptic books I’ve ever read. Okay, maybe they didn’t realize in 1949 that you should never dust pregnant women with DDT. The chemical world was still pretty much in denial that some things were deadly. But these “survivors,” instead of focusing on long-term survival, worry only about immediate needs and then go hungry when canned food runs out. They have no concept of gardening, let along farming and food storage. They think nothing about education, don’t teach their children even basic reading skills, and so that, although they have public libraries to learn survival skills from, in just one generation, no one can read the books. It’s difficult to root for their survival… After learning what to do and how to do it from Alas, Babylon, I truly hated this book.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other really good books (and movies!) out there. And post-apocalyptic doesn’t necessarily mean science-fiction. Stephen King’s The Stand can be drama, horror, alternative history, Christian fiction, speculative fiction, or loosely science fiction, depending on how you want to interpret it. Same with The Road: It’s a story about father-son relationships, survival during hardship, and climate destruction.

Post-apocalyptic fiction simply means that some calamity has befallen society, tearing apart what used to be normal. If a country – China, Turkey, Peru, Afghanistan, etc. – was utterly destroyed by earthquake and subsequent famine and plague, you could call their recovery post-apocalyptic, even though the rest of the world continued. How we formed trade networks and moved to online commerce during the Covid epidemic can be seen as apocalyptic in a way; we are in a post-apocalyptic society from Covid, as many of our bedrock companies folded, telehealth and working from home became a thing, and society as a whole changed. There are many, many excellent “post-apocalyptic” stories out there, some focusing on disease ( The Andromeda Strain), on climate (Day After Tomorrow), natural disasters (asteroids, etc.) (Solar), nuclear holocaust (Planet of the Apes), the death of oil (Road Warrior), electromagnetic pulse (One Second After), and more. How do people adapt? Can mankind survive? What determination does it take? How can you stay hopeful in the face of annihilation? What can we learn from these stories to avoid such scenarios, or how to survive them? Apocalyptic fiction can be quite imaginative (Hunger Games), and appeal to a wide range of readers (and viewers). Sometimes the book is meh, but the film is far better (Planet of the Apes, for one), sometimes the book is excellent but the movie is okay (Girl With All the Gifts), and sometimes there is more than one film version of the book, with differences between them (The Stand, Planet of the Apes, Day of the Triffids, War of the Worlds). All of them will question your morality and make you wonder about your ability to survive a serious disaster.

(Fun fact: the final battle in War of the Worlds was filmed at the old Uniroyal plant in Naugatuck, CT)