Invented Childhood Games in Novels

November 9, 2026October 31, 2026 / Adam / 3 Comments

Kids say the darndest things. They also play the darndest games! Even with scarce resources, children have no problem keeping themselves busy. Tag, hide and seek, charades, telephone, the floor is lava—these games provide hours of entertainment and require very little except imagination. If they’re feeling very imaginative, kids will even make up new games, creating their own worlds, rulesets, and objectives.

Made-up games that appear in books are interesting to me for a couple of reasons. On the surface, these games tend to be exciting and make for lively passages of fun and frenzy (and often disaster). But on a deeper level, they’re often constructed and presented in a way that conveys some hidden meaning about the characters, themes, or world. Take Calvinball, for instance:

Yes, Calvinball is silly and a joy to read, but it also allows us to learn about Calvin’s worldview: he prioritizes novelty and creativity over everything else. He gives up his (probably VERY valuable) “free passage to wicket five” in order to avoid anything habitual. Thinking about Calvin’s troublemaking with this in mind offers a more nuanced take on why he acts out. Perhaps his motivations for disrupting the status quo are less nefarious than they first seem. This subtext can be found in other Calvin and Hobbes comics, but it’s through Calvinball that we get a glimpse into the purest incarnation of his beliefs. I feel as though the same scrutiny can be applied to other invented games in novels and would like to share several in this blog post.

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (1950)

The first book of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Titus Groan, opens with the birth of the titular Titus, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. In keeping with Peake’s sense of humor, baby Titus has almost no role whatsoever in the book he lends his name to; the bulk of the drama surrounds his family and the servants who reside in Gormenghast Castle. In the second book, Gormenghast, he has his time in the sun:

Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child.
A ritual, more compelling than ever devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forebears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe’s childhood.

The gift of bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak ‘Rejoice!’ O little revolution in great shades!

Alluded to in the above quote, Gormenghast pits Titus’ youthful optimism and joie de vivre against the castle’s oppressive and ever-present “webs of ritual”. Each hour of each day is dictated by an ancient book of customs and procedure, and tradition is upheld simply for the sake of tradition. The children of Gormenghast are some of the only characters who are able to see through this farce and find ways to rebel against the system that holds them hostage.

In class, with the Professor sound asleep in a heap at his desk, the children spring into action. They carefully flip over a floorboard whose bottom has been waxed into a frictionless plane. They open the window (100 ft. above ground), launch themselves onto a tree, swing from a branch back into the classroom where they land with extraordinary momentum onto the polished board. They speed past a firestorm of hardened spitballs (courtesy of their classmates) until they make it to the opposite wall, and then the next student soars out the window, beginning another round…

It’s a particular brand of chaos only children are capable of, a mix of danger and whimsy that defies logic. It’s telling that their game ends very poorly for Headmaster Deadyawn, who is described as an “arch-symbol of delegated duties, of negation and apathy.” Several other emblems of authority and tradition are challenged throughout the novel, but the jubilant spirit of this childhood game serves as a perfect foil to Gormenghast’s bleak rituals.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (2006)

Unlike the “floorboard game” of Gormenghast, which defies order, childhood games are also effective ways to impose order, as is the case in Black Swan Green, a semi-autobiographical novel by David Mitchell. It follows Jason Taylor, a boy with a speech impediment growing up in dreary Thatcher era England. He savors the highs and suffers the lows of adolescence over a series of 13 vignettes, penned in Mitchell’s colorful prose. Black Swan Green touches upon family discord, the Falklands War, sexuality and shame, but a major theme both implicit (in discussions of Britain’s xenophobia towards the Romani) and explicit (in the bullying Jason endures every day at school) is hierarchy and predation. It seems Jason would do anything for the acceptance and safety bestowed to those at the top of the pecking order, and in the 6th chapter, titled Spooks, he’s given an opportunity.

He impresses the popular kids by pulling a prank on a neighborhood menace and is invited to join the Spooks (British slang for spies, not the racial slur). It’s unclear even to Jason the material benefits of being a member, but the idea of being part of the in-group is enough for him. First, he has to pass a test:

“So you knows the rules?” Grant Burch flobbed. “Yer gets a leggy over this wall, then yer’ve got fifteen minutes to get across the six back gardens. Once yer done, yer legs it to the green. Swinyard ’n’ Redmarley’ll be waitin’ under the oak. If yer in time, welcome to the Spooks. If yer late, or if yer don’t show, yer ain’t no Spook and yer never will be.”

Complicating the situation for Jason, his decidedly-uncool friend, Moran, is invited to join as well. After the race kicks off, Jason thrives and Moran is caught by a neighborhood menace (lots of neighborhood menaces in this book). Jason wants to go back for his friend, but doing so would ruin his chances with the popular kids. What to do?!

Childhood games lend themselves so easily to hierarchy. Rules are important so that all participants share a mutual understanding of the game, but oh, how convenient it is when the rules work in the victor’s favor. How many times does one hear, “Sorry, I don’t make the rules,” on the playground? Such is the case with Jason’s friend: He’s in danger? Why should I care? He’s not in our club. And now that you’re in our club, why should you care?

Jason’s urge to help his friend is a threat to the club’s entire existence. If the “losers” are extended the same privileges as the “cool kids” (namely: sympathy and assistance), then what becomes of the line that divides the two groups? How are the “cool kids” supposed to feel protected by their status if no one can tell where the in-group ends and the out-group begins?

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (1989)

(Mild spoilers ahead)

Another reason I find childhood games interesting is because they anticipate elements of adulthood. Kids will play-act scenes they observe in the lives of adults and find joy in navigating their pretend responsibilities. At the library, we have a restaurant play area where kids pretend to be customers, chefs, and cashiers. Funnily enough, sometimes they’ll pretend to be managers and get the valuable duty of bossing everyone else around. In games and play, moments like this are a bittersweet reminder that the adult world of order and authority is just around the corner, inescapable. The older kids get, the more complicated play becomes as they borrow the expectations and roles they pick up from adults in their life. You want to say, “Hey, you don’t have to worry about this adult stuff yet, just have fun!” But of course, there’s nothing you can do…

This is a tragedy you’ll find in A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Owen, though not the protagonist, is the heart of the novel: a tiny, serious boy who believes he’s God’s instrument. This belief both haunts and motivates him, subtly guiding his decisions and imparting his childhood with a creeping heaviness that affects even the games he plays with his friend (and our main character) Johnny:

“LET’S PRACTICE THE SHOT,” Owen would say; that was all we ever called it — “the shot.” We’d go over it again and again. He would grasp the ball in both hands and leap into my arms (but he never took his eyes from the rim of the basket); sometimes he would twist in the air and slam the ball into the hoop backward — sometimes he would dunk it with one hand. I would turn in time to see the ball in the net and Owen Meany descending — his hands still higher than the rim of the basket but his head already below the net, his feet kicking the air. He always landed gracefully.

Sometimes we could entice the old janitor to time us with the official scorer’s clock. “SET IT TO EIGHT SECONDS,” Owen would instruct him. Over the summer, we twice managed “the shot” in under five seconds. “SET IT TO FOUR,” Owen would say, and we’d keep practicing; under four seconds was tough. When I’d get bored, Owen would quote me a little Robert Frost. “ ’ONE COULD DO WORSE THAN BE A SWINGER OF BIRCHES.’ ”

“The shot” at first seems like a silly made-up game with no real origin or purpose. It’s not legal in an official basketball game and Johnny can think of no reason why Owen would be so dedicated to something so meaningless. He knows it has something to do with Owen’s self-described divine purpose, but his friend keeps him in the dark. Deprived of actual fun and boyish frivolity, Johnny makes his feelings known:

“It’s simply irresponsible,” I said — “for someone your age, and of your education, to go around thinking he’s God’s instrument!”

All Johnny wants is for them to play like normal kids but Owen is pushing fun to the side and prioritizing obscure, abstract duties. In other words, Owen is behaving like an adult. My biggest takeaway from “the shot,” however, is not that fun wanes as maturity waxes. That’s too reductive. I’m left thinking about how Johnny stands by his friend (and his friend’s dull game) even when he’s bored out of his mind. Isn’t that another mark of maturity: seeing the forest for the trees? He understands that friendship is worth so much more than a little gratification. Loyalty might not be as lofty an ideal as divinity, but it is something we can all achieve.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro (1995)

Whether by desire or necessity, kids often play games by themselves. Isolation has never stopped childhood creativity and whimsy from running amok. In fact, games created in isolation can provide meaningful insights into the game-maker’s psyche. Such is the case with one particular character in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. The novel follows Mr. Ryder, a renowned pianist who arrives in a nameless Central European country for a performance he doesn’t remember agreeing to. In a similarly hazy fashion, Ryder may or may not have a wife, Sophie, and child, Boris, who expect Ryder to perform fatherly duties as he runs around town preparing for the concert. Sometimes Ryder gives them the light of day, other times he acts as if he barely knows them and concentrates instead on the strangely demanding townsfolk. The nerve! Poor Boris exists in a constant state of partial fatherlessness, and one of the ways we learn about how this affects him is through games:

Boris’s mentions of ‘Number Nine’ had rung some distant bell for me. Now as I listened to his whispering, I recalled that ‘Number Nine’ was not in fact a real footballer, but one of Boris’s miniature players from his table-football game. The footballers, moulded in alabaster and each one weighted at the base, could be made with flicks of the finger to dribble, pass and shoot a tiny plastic ball. The game was intended for two people each controlling a team, but Boris only ever played on his own, spending hours lying on his front orchestrating matches full of dramatic reversals and nail-biting comebacks.

Number Nine is Boris’ favorite player, and it soon becomes clear that Number Nine acts as a stand-in for Ryder in the microcosm of his table-football game:

However, for all his immense skill, Number Nine was a highly moody personality. His position in the team was somewhere in midfield, but often, for long stretches of a match, he would sulk in some obscure part of the pitch, apparently oblivious of the fact that his team was losing badly. Sometimes, Number Nine would continue in this lethargic manner for over an hour, so that his team would go four, five, six goals down, and the commentator – for indeed there was a commentator – would say in a mystified voice: ‘Number Nine so far just hasn’t found his form. I don’t quite know what’s wrong.’

It would be an understatement to call Number Nine a bad footballer; his ineptitude goes so far as to suggest that he’s not even aware that he’s involved in a football match. Similarly, Ryder spends the novel bumbling around, ignorant of the expectations placed upon him. When he does attempt to satisfy the requests and demands of the townsfolk, he is clumsy and uninformed. He leaves people agitated and worse-for-wear. Boris experiences Ryder’s failures first-hand and wishes for nothing more than a father-figure who can rise to the occasion, a hero who knows exactly what to do. This is where Boris’ table-football game diverges from reality:

Then, perhaps with twenty minutes remaining, Number Nine would finally give a glimpse of his true ability, pulling back a goal for his side with some fine piece of skill. ‘That’s more like it!’ the commentator would exclaim. ‘At last, Number Nine shows what he can do!’ From that moment on, Number Nine’s form would grow steadily stronger, until before long he would be scoring one goal after another, and the opposing team would be concentrating entirely on preventing at virtually any cost Number Nine receiving the ball. But sooner or later he would, and then, no matter how many opponents stood between him and the goalmouth, he would manage to find a way through to score. Soon the inevitability of the outcome once he had received the ball was such that the commentator would say: ‘It’s a goal,’ in tones of resigned admiration, not when the ball actually went into the net, but at the moment Number Nine first gained possession – even if this occurred deep within his own half.

Here we glimpse Boris’ childish optimism, a redemption and salvation for the unlikeliest of characters: the sulking and oblivious Number Nine. His comeback is so hyperbolic and cartoonish that you have to feel sorry for Boris. Boris believes in Number Nine but the reader knows well that heroism is not a switch that can be flipped on and off. Even more-so, an absentee father cannot redeem himself overnight because fatherhood is not a game that can be won or lost. Every failure of Ryder to show up for Boris both physically and emotionally has its cost. Boris’ admission of Number Nine’s “moody personality” attests to this, but innocent soul he is, he wants to believe that all past transgressions can be forgiven with some courageous display by Ryder. You might be able to guess that Ryder’s redemption is not in the cards, but at least Boris is able to briefly live out this fantasy through his table-football game.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

Infinite Jest by Davis Foster Wallace is one of those novels whose reputation looms larger than the book itself. Only hearing horror stories of erudition and footnotes and pretentious super-fans, I was surprised by the amount humor I found, enough to add an unexpected levity to the reading experience. A book that features herds of feral hamsters stampeding across the Northeast should not be taken that seriously. Perhaps the most comic moment comes in Chapter 42, when the students of Enfield Tennis Academy play the fictional game of Eschaton.

Every year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids between maybe like twelve and fifteen — children in the very earliest stages of puberty and really abstract-capable thought, when one’s allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting to emerge as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew — maybe a dozen of these kids, mostly male, get fanatically devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton. Eschaton is the most complicated children’s game anybody around E.T.A.’d ever heard of.

Eschaton takes place on four tennis courts divided into sections that represent different countries and treaty groups, like a game of Risk. The main mechanic is straightfoward: tennis balls represent 5-mega-ton thermonuclear warheads and can be launched by teams representing various global alliances. That’s where the simplicity ends. The “Triggering Incident” that begins the game takes three whole pages to explain and is near indecipherable without a degree in international relations. You might expect tweens to be quickly fed up with the complexity, but instead, they embrace it:

For these devotees become, on court, almost parodically adult — staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities — responsibilities to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living and the unborn — not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this day — this dark day the leaders’ve prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent — not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people’s way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously, so earnest and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance.

Unlike in Owen Meany, where a child is thrust into adulthood by an external party (God), the children in Infinite Jest seem inwardly driven to seek out adult behavior. This is the age where you begin to understand how difficult and complicated the world is, and these kids’ mastery of Eschaton could be viewed as a way to cope with all the uncertainty and fear of adulthood rushing quickly to meet them. If you can shoulder the Atlas-esque burden of wartime leadership and keep a cool head, what else could there be to worry about? And for a while, it seems as though the kids are holding it together. But it doesn’t last. Unprecedented weather prompts an argument over whether snowfall is occurring within the game of Eschaton, or just on the real-life courts. Insults are lobbed, tempers flare, tension mounts until suddenly, one player launches a tennis ball directly at the back of an opponent’s head.

No Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant’s physical person with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon. No matter how frayed players’ nerves, it’s never made a lick of sense. A Combatant’s megatonnage is too precious to waste on personal attacks outside the map. It’s been like this unspoken but very basic rule.

At this, hell breaks loose and the facade of adulthood disappears. Punches, headlocks, and tennis balls no longer representing nuclear weapons, just painful projectiles. The game is forgotten and the scene devolves into a chaotic snowy brawl.

This is a very funny turn of events after pages and pages of dense geopolitical jargon, but it also works thematically. The first half of this chapter has a certain cynicism about it. It’s as though the world these kids have been raised in is so volatile and prone to violence that they can remain stone-faced as they obliterate entire cities with their tennis-ball warheads. It paints a scary picture of the future. When their game crumbles, it’s proof that these are not stone-faced murderers. They’re just stubborn and reckless children who still have plenty of room to grow.

Electing A Good Story

October 26, 2026October 16, 2026 / Susan O. / 1 Comment

Mid-term election day is November 3, and rare is the country where elections are free to all citizens. While I will not discuss a word of American politics, local or national, I do urge you to get out and vote. Your vote DOES matter, even though it doesn’t always seem it. A vote against the eventual winner is still a vote of dissent. Vote as an example for the countries where the general population is not allowed to vote, or there is only one candidate to vote for (North Korea, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Russia), even if you believe your vote won’t win. In Australia, it is mandatory to cast your vote in a national election, and you will be fined for not using your right to vote. They also hold elections on Sundays, when fewer people are working and thus able to vote in person. Most other countries hold weekend elections, and in places like India, voting goes on for several days. In other countries, election day is often a holiday, so everyone is free to get out and vote.

Not sure where to vote? Check out the map here: https://www.cheshirect.gov/DocumentCenter/View/255/Polling-Places-PDF

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, elections are stressful, even if it’s just having to listen to the endless campaign ads every three and a half minutes.

If you’re still vaguely interested in politics, but are feeling stressed over it, here’s a list of books about fictional elections of all sorts, no current politics included, and a couple of politically-oriented classical fiction stories that you should have read in school. If not, now is the perfect time, and no annoying ads included!

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Conclave by Robert Harris

A God in Ruins by Leon Uris

Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling

Reluctant Fundamentalist by Hamid Mohsin

1984 by George Orwell

Brave New World by Aldous Harding

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Unfolding by A. M. Homes

House Secrets by Michael Lawson

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Primary Colors by Anonymous

The Brethren by John Grisham

The Day Lincoln Lost by Charles Rosenberg

No time to read? Check out these movie adaptions!

Dragging Out the Details

September 28, 2026September 21, 2026 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Ever read a doorstop?

Big, thick books of more than 600 pages, such as Stephen King’s The Stand (823 pages originally, which he padded out to 1100 pages on rerelease), Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Silver Flames (757), Outlander (850), The Hour I First Believed (768), Shogun (1200), or even Les Misérables (1400 pages. I confess, I didn’t make it past 800. That’s a lot of griping about a loaf of bread) can be considered doorstops, sometimes too big to fit on shelves. Certainly, the bindings on these monsters are not destined for long-life. There are a lot of popular books whose weight will hurt your wrists holding them up.

The average book runs around 250-300 pages, or around 80,000 words. Romance and Mystery can run shorter, Science Fiction a bit longer, but Fantasy is the king of long novels, consistently running up tallies beyond James Michener, and usually for the same reasons. Michener researched his novels down to the history of the formation of the tectonic plates that formed the island where his story took place – and that was before the internet. You were going to know exactly what it was like to be in that location, no detail spared. And that is generally true of fantasy novels (and some science fiction. We’re not ignoring you, Dune, at up to 896 pages in some versions) such as the Game of Thrones series (674 pages in the hardcover) and A Memory of Light, of the Wheel of Time series, at 912 pages.

What often separates these novels apart is the need for world building. When an urban romance begins, you, as an inhabitant of the modern Earth world, already understand the location. You’ve seen cars and buses, trucks, trains, maybe a subway, even if only in a movie. You know a jet from a prop plane from a blimp. No one has to describe it for you. You know what a crowded street sounds like, the crush of people pushing past you, the colors of the traffic lights, the enticing smell of a food cart on a cold winter afternoon, the spooked raccoon leaping out of a dumpster. All it takes is a mention (“A rat the size of a pregnant chihuahua dragged a greasy box of KFC down the deserted back alley.”) and you get a picture in your head that is fairly accurate to what the author imagined.

If you’re inventing a strange new world, whether it’s an alien land with orange skies and eight-legged monsters and a generational spaceship besieged by radiation and a twenty-year old 404 error, or a land of wizards and dragons and three-headed talking sheep, and a castle that can only be seen at midnight when a full moon lands on a Tuesday and it’s being besieged by green-skinned gnomes, then the author has to spend an inordinate amount of time teaching you to imagine this place, and how to make sense of it.

Which brings me to my latest read, the fantasy novel Perdido Street Station, a 700-page monster by China Miéville. Miéville hasn’t met a 12-letter word he can’t use in a sentence, no matter how highbrow and obscure it may be to the average reader – I’m not talking words like unconditionally, but thaumaturgy and ululating and palimpsest. Now, ululating may be the exact word you need, that undulating whoop given to Native Americans and Arabic people in movies, but using a rare word six times in one book doesn’t feel right. Despite that, the novel is sublime: extremely imaginative, walking the line between fantasy, steam punk, and horror, with fantastical creatures at every turn of the page. The story is long and involved, with twists and turns that may take a while to play out, leaving you just intrigued enough to keep reading. I liked it far more than The Difference Engine by William Gibson, which came so highly recommended.

I repeat, it was an entertaining novel, with an unexpected and satisfying ending.

But it makes me think, when is enough enough? How much detail do we really need to be immersed in a setting? Miéville spares no detail in creating his world, right down to a map of his city, which the reader will reference often because he rattles off at least one neighborhood or train stop per page, as if the reader already knows the layout. Once or twice to give me a feel, fine, but do I really need to know the history of each neighborhood? Does the economic collapse of a neighborhood and the board by board building of the resultant slum really have a bearing on the story? I get it, it’s half human, half insect, but I’m losing track of head legs, human legs, and strange body parts. It’s nice to have details, but when do details begin to bog down a story, rather than elevate it? How much detail do we really need? The scattered Fremen words in Dune give the book flavor, and there’s enough of them that it comes with a dictionary in the back, but you can skip a lot of the words and still follow the story. Tolkien’s Elvish poetry in Lord of the Rings is beautiful, emphasizes the emotional depth of the ethereal elves, but you will lose no part of the story if you skip over them. Is it worth spending 200 pages of a book investing in a detailed character, only to have them die on page 300, but the story’s only half over? (Sit down, Game of Thrones. We learned not to invest after the first three characters died.)

An author’s world in their head is far more detailed than ever makes it to paper – sometimes. King’s The Stand is long, but there are several substories going on, and not one of them can be pulled out without affecting the story. Game of Thrones has so many stories going on that some characters are absent from entire volumes because there was no way to fit them in and keep it under 2,000 pages. Ayn Rand left no thought unspoken in Atlas Shrugged, at 1100 pages. Is that all you had to say, Ayn?

What’s the longest book you’ve read? Do you know a book that bogged down in so much detail you gave up? If you like imaginative steampunkish fantasy, give Perdido Street Station a try, but you’re going to need that renewal. Let us know what you think!

“Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man, very old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy. “The Lord help us!” he soliloquised in an undertone of peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no reference to my unexpected advent.” – Wuthering Heights (it’s not just fantasy novels)

Sunrise on the Reaping

August 17, 2026August 11, 2026 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

I love the Hunger Games series. I love a good action story, and Hunger Games delivers.

Like anything else, I did read the books before seeing the films, and I do feel the films have a slight advantage (except for Mockingjay – it’s nice you made it into two parts, but seriously, you didn’t need to). The films, being visual, cut any bloat that might have been lurking. I love them. I love the casting, I love the cinematography, I love the creative storyline. Any story that can make me love and hate a character at the same time is a pretty good story.

I can’t decide which is my favorite – there’s so much to love about all of them. It’s hard to make a sequel as good as an original – and we can all think of sequels that shouldn’t be spoken of in polite company (ahem, Highlander 2, Frozen 2, Caddyshack 2, Jaws 2, Godfather 3, Star Trek 5, etc) – and few franchises can pull it off – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Empire Strikes Back being two of them. Hunger Games does, driving home the horror and mental devastation with unrelenting drumbeats.

Prequels in general are easier to write (we won’t talk about Star Wars), because you generally know what came before and how it winds up. You’re just filling in the details between A and C. I’m sure Collins had a lot of the backstory written – or at least roughed out, before writing the Hunger Games prequel, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a title that works perfectly on many levels. This volume, too, I adored, drawing me into the characters. Even so, I felt this was the most bloated of the series, and I couldn’t always track the action in my head. The movie fixed that gloriously. As always, the original folk music is just the icing on the cake.

And, okay, I was a year late reading it, but we were gifted with a second prequel, twenty-five years later in the timeline, the 25th games where we first meet the alcoholic mentor Haymitch, Sunrise on the Reaping.

I love Haymitch. I love Woody Harrelson for playing him to perfection. Who the heck wouldn’t be an alcoholic after all that? And to find out you might have to do it again, late in life, when you don’t stand a chance against a 17 year old professional assassin? Yo! Fill my cup!

But for the first time in the series, this book on Haymitch left me wanting.

Sunrise suffers from what I’ve long-called “Muppet Baby Syndrome.” In the original Muppet Show, all the Muppets are adults from different backgrounds, just like people. When the Muppet Movie hit, it explored the origins of all the characters and how they all met and came together to work on The Muppet Show.

Good film. Funny and entertaining for adults, not just kids.

Then came the cartoon Muppet Babies, and suddenly all the Muppets are all together and in the same room as infants (grrr) and no one knows why or how. Many shows have fallen into this trap, where characters are thrown together years before they should be, have always known each other, and everyone who might possibly be a new character knows everyone already, even if the character lines were already set differently. Think of Scooby Doo, with 50 years of genre, and someone now starts a series where the characters were all adopted as newborns in the same family, all at the same time. Star Trek has done this with the Strange New Worlds series. Doesn’t make sense, does it. Sometimes, the stretch is so far, it’s painful.

And that’s what Sunrise on the Reaping does. Districts are districts, large geographic areas, not single towns. It’s like saying all of Appalachia – which spans 13 states – is the size of Bird-In-Hand, Pennsylvania (pop. 537). All of the entire District 12 assembles in one place for the reaping? How do all these poor people get there? Everyone in the village is related, knows everyone, has interbred for generations, even before the war? (Okay, that’s not too far-fetched, very small towns are very like that). Or is only that town lucky enough to be reaped? We really needed to drag in Effie Trinket, 25 years early (she never seemed that old)? Why? Why not someone else? She is the only one who can ever draw names for District 12? They don’t take turns with assignments? And Caesar? Plutarch? Beetee? Mags? It seems suddenly that every character in the last four books is here in this one, too, whether or not they need to belong there, and that hits that painful spot of disbelief. Muppet Baby Syndrome. Instead of introducing us to new characters, and new backgrounds, and new stories, it feels pieced together from all the other bits that we already know. And while I liked some of the new characters, even though you knew they were doomed, I just didn’t have enough feel for Haymitch and his girl to care.

Maybe because the story is tightly locked in by the formula, and “how many ways to kill 24/48 kids can we come up with and still make it fresh?” You can’t. It’s been done. Four times. We know what’s going to happen, and who’s going to live. That’s the way the story must play out. It can’t change, no matter what you try to make different.

Despite it all, I did enjoy it enough. Still love Haymitch. Still love the series. It’s just this book is my least favorite.

Watch for Sunrise on the Reaping in theaters this November 20. View the movie trailer here.

Signing off from District 13.

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).