This is not strictly abuse-related, but you can win a chocolate monkey. And everything should be chocolate monkey-related, right? Everything good, anyway.

DeweyMonster is starting a new meme called Weekly Geeks. The most basic of the basics about it are that:

1. Every week there’ll be a different theme. One week might be “catch up on your library books” week and the next might be “redecorate your blog week” or “organize your challenges” week or “catch up on your reviews” week. It’ll be fairly bookblogcentric, but not exclusively.

2. Everyone who joins agrees that they will try to check each week to see what the theme is, although they DO NOT have to participate each week, only when they feel like it.

It’s a good way for bloggers to build community and get visibility, and everyone who participates can suggest themes or even host it. If you advertise it in your own blog you can be entered to win a chocolate monkey (there, you see my motivation here!) and if you don’t want to do that, you can go enter to participate, mention that you hear about it here, and I’ll get entered again to win the chocolate monkey

And there’s a nice segue into our usual subject matter in Dewey’s next post, too, about a little book called The Saturdays.

I read this, and most everything else Elizabeth Enright wrote that I could get my hands on, about a million times when I was a kid. And since then too. The Saturdays is part of a series about the Melendy family: a father, a sort of housekeeper who stands in as a mother figure for them, and four kids ranging from about seven (Oliver) to I think about fourteen (Mona) when the series starts. It’s set in the 1940s; they live in New York City and then in the rambling New York countryside and go on massive, gorgeous adventures.

The Saturdays is probably their most lavish and wide-ranging set of adventures. The children decide to pool their allowances and send one of them off each week with all the money to do whatever they like with it. And, as in most good children’s books – especially the old-timey ones – these are the kinds of children that things just seem to happen to. Dewey reminisced about Mona meeting rich old Mrs. Oliphant and eating petits-fours in what I think was her penthouse; I remember Oliver going off to the circus by himself, and going on the boats in maybe Central Park, and nearly drowning, and having a fabulous time everywhere nevertheless. I think this might even be the one where Mona auditions for and ends up starring in a very dramatic weekly radio show. Yeah, that’s how long ago this was.

They were very lucky kids in a lot of ways, even though their mother had died when they were very young. Dewey’s review says it the truest and the most sadly:

“In several other ways, when I compare my own childhood to these children’s lives, I realize why the book appealed to me so much. The children are mostly close in age and close in relationship; they’re given an incredible amount of freedom; they have their own entire fourth floor playroom; their creative pursuits are tolerated and sometimes even encouraged….”

That just kills me, thrown in there like that. And, of course, that’s one reason that books like Enright’s are so appealing to so many generations. A lot of children’s books – especially modern ones – are either openly about child abuse on some level (abandonment, neglect, screaming, insults, threats to the children’s lives) or else, more rarely perhaps, strike that jarring note where they are trying hard to prove that the protagonists are in a Very Happy Family Damn It even while the signs of abuse are, mysteriously and seemingly inexplicably, everywhere. Like parents who insist that they are fantastic parents who just happen to have Very Diffcult Children. But Elizabeth Enright’s books have real children, who struggle with real problems (barely remembering or not having known their mother, living in a nation at war, moving to a strange new place) and yet who aren’t being abused. They live in a very happy world, despite its challenges, because they are trusted and respected, loved and supported.

The books aren’t perfect; I am not sure that the children would be so unaffected when their father, for a while, is almost never home and usually working or drop-dead tired if he is. But Enright’s books seem meant to have a little air of fantasy about them, and that balances out her slips. There are other books in her repertoire that are almost more fantastic and really have, to my recollection, no trace of any trauma, like the wonderful Gone-Away Lake series; those always seem a little bit removed from reality to me. (Intentionally, I think, as they take place on a weird nearly-deserted island during summer vacation and the children end up with their own abandoned Victorian for a clubhouse – I mean, come on!)

The Melendys are more realistic; we get to see how they did deal with child abuse at the time when they meet Mark and his violently abusive alcoholic stepfather, and find that his father chases social workers and anyone else from “the county” away from their farm at gunpoint, unchallenged. And even that has a satisfying, if somewhat sad, ending. Enright’s books are not only gorgeously written, but a nice safe haven away from all our normal traumatic childhoods.

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