I took him with me.

As you know if you know me, I've been on a John Wayne kick for the past month and a half. I've really been enjoying his movies, and I was a little worried about going through withdrawal while traveling.

So what did I do? I ditched two of the books I'd planned to bring on the trip, and brought these two instead.


The Young Duke,
by Howard Kazanjian

Yes, that IS a smoking-hot 20 year old John Wayne on the cover. And yes, that very loud sound you heard about three weeks ago was my jaw crashing through the floor of Powells when I saw this picture of him. Hubba HUBBA.

In spite of the "young" in the title, it's not just a biography of John Wayne's early years. It covers almost his entire career, although the emphasis is on the his life up to his 50s. I found it nicely informative, although the author was definitely a huge admirer of Wayne's and tended to gloss over some of his more scandalous actions (the affairs, the chain smoking and drinking, his two divorces, etc).

But as an easy introduction to the life of one of my new favorite stars, it was a good read. I read it during our days at sea, sitting on our balcony with my feet up. It kept me from going into withdrawal. And whenever my eyes started to cross from the lack of good looking men on the ship, I just pulled the book out and stared at the cover.


Hondo,
by Louis L'Amour

Of the ten or so John Wayne movies I've seen now, Hondo is one of my favorites. I really loved his character in it, the eponymous Hondo Lane, so I was eager to give the book upon which the movie was based a try.

It was my second Louis L'Amour book. The first, Down the Long Hills was assigned reading in 6th or 7th grade and I liked it so much that I bought my own copy. This one......ehh. The movie and the book are almost EXACTLY alike, down to word-for-word lines. But the book just didn't have the charm for me that the movie did, and L'Amour had a few authorly quirks that annoyed me. He repeatedly called Hondo by his full name, even multiple times within a paragraph, and it came off like he was in love with his own name-choosing cleverness.

The right way to write a paragraph:
"John Wayne was a smoking hot actor who was primarily known for his Westerns and war movies. Although Wayne died several decades ago, he's still an immensely popular actor and his movies are still very much enjoyed by audiences today. Wayne is buried in an unmarked grave in southern California."

The wrong way to write a paragraph:
"Hondo Lane looked over the edge of the cliff to see a group of Apache riding through the canyon. Hondo Lane crept quietly backwards to his horse. There was no one in the territory who could walk as quietly as Hondo could. Hondo Lane had learned the hard way how to survive."

Am I right or is that just plain annoying? Okay, that's not a verbatim passage from the book---I don't have it on me and had to paraphrase. But that's almost exactly like how L'Amour writes.

Anyway, the plot is thus: Hondo is a messenger for the US Cavalry, based in the southwestern territories during the Apache uprising. He's part Apache himself, and spent a period of his life living with them; thus, he knows their ways and is able to use that to help save the lives of a number of white settlers.

During his rides, he meets a young woman and her young son and quickly falls in love with her. Inadvertantly, he ends up killing her never-do-well husband and this, of course, throws their perspective relationship into turmoil. This is complicated by the Apache uprising, the Apache chief's fondness for the little boy, and the Cavalry's decision to evacuate all settlers from the area.

I'm home now and will probably stick to John Wayne movies instead of books, but these two were for the most part enjoyable!

Two bad habits.

I have the bad habit, as a reader, of sometimes dismissing a book by its cover. Literally. And of making sweeping generalizations.

For instance: I don't like fantasy, because all fantasy is cheesy and has sworcerers and all the women in fantasy novels are dressed up in outfits like Princess Leia's slave girl bikini and sometimes there are magic crystals and all the made-up lands have weird languages and unpronounceable names. This particular sweeping generalization kept me from giving many decent, relevant fantasy novels a try for the longest time. I didn't read Lord of the Rings until I was in college, for Pete's sake!

During the five years in high school and college that I worked in a bookstore, these beliefs were both supported and eventually broken down. I was always fascinated, when shelving in the fantasy section, by how similar so many of the books looked and sounded, and by how truly terrible the cover art was on so many of them. One such book I always noticed and puzzled over was Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey.



Arrows was the first book in a trilogy set in a kingdom called Valdemar. I loved the idea of the heroine being a small, scared girl with curly brown hair and brown eyes. But my brows went up at the cover art (pastels, I noticed with horror), and they nearly reached my hairline when the back cover informed me there were sentient horses.

Now, I'm a horse-crazy girl. I was when I was six and I remain one today. But I've never gotten into talking, thinking horses as an entertainment source---no Mr. Ed, no Artax* or Fledge** or Shadowfax***. Even Black Beauty never resonated with me the way The Black**** did. So the idea of sentient horses had me pretty leery, and for the longest time, whenever I shelved a new copy of Arrows, I would give it a lingering glance and then put it away.

Once I realized my time in the bookstore was coming to an end, I went on a bit of a book-buying spree. I bought a tall stack of books using my precious, long-lamented employee discount, and one of those was Arrows of the Queen. I know, crazy, right? But I just couldn't dismiss it from my mind--something about it stuck with me, in spite of the pastels and talking horses. I sat down with it one night and pretty much did not move from the spot until I finished it.

Okay, it's a WONDERFUL series. I reread all three books (second is Arrow's Flight, third is Arrow's Fall) at least two to three times a year--there's something about the world Mercedes Lackey has created and the people she fills it with that really resonate with me. Additionally, she writes incredibly strong female characters and these are badly needed in fantasy literature (there are much more of them today than there were 25 years ago, when Arrows first came out). Talia, the heroine, becomes one of the most important people in the kingdom, which is ruled by a just, capable queen. No shrinking violets, they.

The plot is as thus: Talia is a 13 year old girl from one of Valdemar's remote, puritanical border sectors. Her people are strict, joyless, and think girls should be uneducated and restricted to marrying and birthing children. Talia dreams of a life beyond that, but can't see how it will ever happen. More than anything, she wants to be a Herald, a messenger of the Queen. Then, circumstances force her to run away from home, and while on the road, she's met by a Companion (the sentient horses). Companions are the mounts of Heralds--they are intelligent beings, and while they don't literally speak out loud, their bond with their riders is such that they can speak mentally to each other. Companions, in effect, choose their riders, and only people with a selfless sense of duty and desire to serve will be Chosen, because being a Herald is a thankless, dangerous job. In return, Heralds and their Companions share incredible bonds---to have a Companion is to have a lifelong, built-in best friend who loves and trusts you no matter what.

Talia is Chosen by Rolan, who bears her away to the capital city of Haven. There, Talia discovers that she is to become the Queen's Own Herald, the highest ranked Herald of all---one who will serve as the Queen's most trusted counselor. She spends the rest of the book in school and training, learning to grow into her responsibility and position, overcoming adversity, and learning for the first time what it's like to be a part of a community that loves and supports her. Truly, beyond the relative thinness of the plot in this first book, the characters are what keep me rereading it. I LOVE the community of Heralds, I miss them when I'm not reading it, and I wish I could be friends with them myself.

Another book that I'd rolled my eyes at numerous times and yet somehow ended up purchasing in that last, frenzied year of employment was Alanna: The First Adventure, by Tamora Pierce.



While Arrows was more geared towards adults, Alanna was solidly young-adult. I was kind of turned off by the book's mention of magic, by the implied inclusion of a talking cat (sigh), and by the staggering realization that there were (at the time) twelve books in the series. So I spent four years not giving it a chance and one month frantically reading the twelve books as quickly as I could. Humble Pie, table one.

The twelve books can actually be divided into three separate series. In chronological order, they follow the adventures of Alanna (The Song of the Lioness quartet, books 1-4), Daine (The Immortals quartet, books 5-8), and Keladry (The Protector of the Small quartet, books 9-12), three girls who live in the kingdom of Tortall. I actually read Alanna's first, then Keladry's, and Daine's last--and while it didn't confuse me to read them somewhat out of order, I'm sorry I did because it kind of spoiled a particular romance for me.

Alanna of Trebond is a young 11 year old girl being sent to learn magic, while her twin brother Thom is being sent to learn knighthood. The only thing is, Alanna would rather be a knight and Thom would rather be a mage. They switch places, and Alanna, disguised as a boy, travels to the capital. There, she spends three years as a page learning the art of warfare---everything from weapons, to history, to law, to equitation, to courtly graces. It's not until the end of her time as a page that it's discovered she's a girl, and chaos erupts. Girls can't be knights, naturally, it's unthinkable. She must prove that she has every right to be there, and that she's just as capable as a boy of protecting her kingdom. She must endure incredible hardship and prejudice to do so, but of course she's triumphant.

Daine's series is connected to Alanna's, but definitely separate. She's a young girl with the gift of communicating with animals, and her series follows her education in building and utilizing this gift, and how she uses it to serve the kingdom. The characters from Alanna's series show up periodically in it--Alanna is a full-blown knight by now, as well as married and with children--but the primary emphasis of the series is on Daine and her gift.

Kel's series is my favorite of the three. After Alanna's success in completing her training, and her near-mythological status as a fearsome warrior, the laws of the kingdom are changed so that girls can become knights as well. Keladry is the first girl to take advantage of it, but she finds out that in spite of Alanna's success, the feelings and prejudices of the kingdom are still against her, and she has to fight even harder than Alanna to prove herself. I found Kel to be the most personable of the three heroines (though all are enjoyable), but I think I liked her series the best of all because of the wonderful relationships she has with those around her---her family are supportive, the knight she serves as squire was one of my favorite characters from the Alanna series, and there's a heartwarming reversal of sentiment in one of the more virulently unfriendly characters (warning: have kleenex handy).

Anyway, this long-winded post is really just my way of saying: Don't judge a book by it's cover, or assume all fantasy novels are the same. Sometimes you just need to give them a chance.


*The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende
**The Magician's Nephew, by C. S. Lewis
***Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
****The Black Stallion, by Walter Farley

More favorite fairy tales....

I think I've posted a time or ten before on this blog that I'm a fan of fairy tales. Picture books, modern-day adaptations, young adult versions, I love them all.

I've also posted a few times about my favorite fairy tales: Beauty and the Beast; East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon; Tam Lin. All three are extremely popular right now and there are many adaptations of each currently available.

I'd like to mention three fairy tale-like books that aren't quite as well known. All are beloved favorites with me, and my copies are beginning to show wear and tear from having been reread so many times.

The Ordinary Princess
by M. M. Kaye



I first read this as a child. It was out of print at the time and my copy was a battered library book that looked like it had been run over by a tank. Still, I was enthralled. The heroine was a princess, the seventh daughter born to a king (said to be very lucky--a nice change from the usual attitude towards daughters in fairy tales) and given the fantastic name of Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne. All the fairies in the kingdom come to give Princess Amy their blessings. The last, fed up with the other fairies' extravagant gifts, says "You shall be ordinary!" And so she is. Princess Amy grows up plain, untalented, snub-nosed and freckled. Eventually she runs away from home and tries to live the life of an ordinary girl.

I won't give the ending away, but as a child I found it very satisfying and enjoyable, and that hasn't changed in adulthood. The book's been reprinted since and my copy is a handsome hardcover version with the author's original illustrations. M. M. Kaye is more famous for her novels for adults: specifically The Far Pavillions and Shadows of the Moon (one of my personal favorites), but this charming, sweet, old-fashioned story for children shouldn't be overlooked. It has a wonderful message in that the hero falls in love with the princess not because she's a princess, and not because she's beautiful (because she isn't, and there's no miraculous bestowing of beauty later on), but because she's a good, decent person. This is definitely something that will be read to my children someday.

Seven Daughters and Seven Sons
by Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy



I came across a small paperback of this title while working at the bookstore in high school. It's one of the rare Middle Eastern stories on the market right now and is based on an Iraqi folktale from the 11th century. The heroine is Buran, the middle of seven daughters. Her father is mocked for having no sons and no money to dower his daughters. His brother, on the other hand, has seven sons and a thriving business. When the brother refuses to help out, or to marry his sons off to their cousins, Buran makes a momentous decision. She will disguise herself as a boy and leave to seek her family's fortune.

Buran is a very appealing heroine. She is smart and courageous and doesn't let her status as an "inferior" girl keep her from helping her family. In the course of the story, she builds up a trading empire, amasses a fortune for her family, and even wins the heart of the prince of the land. She also manages to enact a satisfying and bloodless revenge on her heartless uncle and arrogant cousins. There's enough of a Middle-Eastern flavor to this story for it to feel like something out of The Thousand and One Nights, but it's still accessible and enjoyable for Western readers.

The Blue Castle
by L. M. Montgomery



This title is a newer favorite. Back when I was in college but still living at home, I used to make a weekly circuit of all the thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul) for used books, often-times picking up paperbacks for ten cents each. One such book was The Blue Castle. I adore L. M. Montgomery's famous Anne books and decided to give The Blue Castle, one of her few titles for adults, a try. Naturally, the paperback sat on my bookshelf (or more probably, in a stack of "to be read" books on the floor) for years. It wasn't until I was packing for one of our many moves that I thought about the book again. I was sitting on the floor and putting books into boxes when I came across it. I was trying to decide to keep it or get rid of it, so I decided to give the first few pages a try.

Several hours later, long after I'd lost feeling in my legs, I finished the book. And packed it most decisively in the keeper box. It's the story of Valancy Stirling, a 29-year-old spinster living with her oppressive family in Edwardian-era Canada. Valancy is deeply unhappy with her life and spends her time daydreaming of a blue castle and the handsome man who will love her. When she hears from her doctor that she has less than a year to live, Valancy makes the momentous decision to leave home and try to find what happiness she can. She ends up living in a cabin in the woods with the reclusive Barney Snaith (yes, an awful name), and elements of Bluebeard's Chamber are woven into the story before it reaches a satisfying, fairy-tale-ish conclusion.

There are certainly many more fairy tales for children, young adults, and adults out there, and just because the genre is typically associated with children doesn't mean it should be overlooked by adults. All three of the books above are as entertaining and ultimately comforting to me now as they were when first I read them.

The Small Woman

Shortly before Christmas, I finished reading The Small Woman, by Alan Burgess. This is a novel based on the true life experiences of Gladys Aylward, an Englishwoman who traveled to China as a missionary in the 1930s. She fell in love with the country and the people, got swept up in the war between China and Japan, and spent the rest of her life serving the Chinese people.



The book was immensely popular, and a year after it was released it was turned into a film called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman and Curt Jurgens.



I actually saw the movie before I read the book. It's one of my mother's favorite movies, and she tried for years to get me to sit down and watch it with her. I'd seen a few scenes here and there throughout the years and had decided it wasn't an interesting movie, so I resisted her efforts rather strenuously. Finally, she played her trump card: if I liked the movie, she'd buy it for me (this also worked with The Naked Jungle).

I ADORED the movie. It was one of the most sweepingly romantic films I'd ever seen, and in spite of the questionable casting (Western actors playing Eastern characters, via dark hair dye and eyeliner) it made it onto my list of favorites, too. So I was rather eager to give the book a try, and picked up a cheap paperback copy at Powells for a few dollars.

Well. Hmmm. It was a good book, let me say that first, but I found it ultimately disappointing. The book and the movie are considerably different, and what I loved best about the movie (the romance) was lacking in the book. As well, the ultimate ending is left vague and open to interpretation in the movie, but is depressingly specific in the book. In the end, even though I could admire the book for its excellent rendition of wartime life in China, and one woman's sacrifices to fulfill her calling, it's not a book I'll probably reread. I just liked the movie, inaccurate though it was, so much better.

The Small Woman is worth reading at least once, if only for the historical value and a discussion about race and values, but my recommendation would be to pop some popcorn and watch the movie instead.

These Is My Words

Last night, I totally and completely ignored my rather lengthy "to do" list in favor of sitting on the couch and finishing this book. It's one of the most un-put-down-able books I've read in a long, long time.



These Is My Words
by Nancy Turner

A literary blogger I read religiously recommended this book. Normally, my feelings about the American Southwest run anywhere from "disinterest" to "active loathing"---I am not at all a fan of the region---but the blurb on the front of the book sold me. "Jack and Sarah are as delicious a couple as Rhett and Scarlett." (USA Today). Well, okay then, USA Today! Sold! I am a sucker for amazing couples.

The novel is written in the form of diary entries by the protagonist, 17 year old Sarah Agnes Prine. It begins in 1881 as her family's wagon train is traveling from the Arizona territories to Texas, and through Sarah's writing, we learn about the tragedies and joys of pioneer life in a dry, often hostile, yet somehow still beautiful part of the country.

Sarah is a plucky, flawed, and immensely likeable heroine and it's easy to root for her. Her tart common-sense and lack of pretension had me smiling almost every other page, and her immense thirst for learning and knowledge was easy for me to relate to. Her early entries are written in a slightly rougher, vernacular English to reflect her lack of formal education, and as she educates herself (after finding and claiming an abandoned wagon full of books), her entries are written in successively better English. I thought that might be annoying, at first, but I honestly did not even notice it.

Equally appealing is the novel's romantic interest, Captain Jack Elliot of the U.S. Cavalry. I won't say too much about him, since it's such a joy discovering him for yourself in the book, but I think he made it onto my list of top ten literary heroes. There's a passage (fairly PG) wherein he quotes the Song of Solomon to Sarah, and I just about needed a fainting couch to swoon back against.

I won't mince words, this book broke my heart and put it back together more than once, but it's so incredible that it's definitely going on the keeper shelf, and maybe even onto the "run into a burning house for" shelf. And! There are sequels! Now go read it so that we can squeal about it discuss it intelligently.

Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1

While I was at the University of Hawaii for a semester, I was incredibly homesick. I felt so far away and disconnected from my back in the Midwest. Isolated. I spent as much time as I could with my sister and her family, without whom I might have gone insane, but of course I couldn't be with them every minute. One of the ways I coped was by religiously reading the paper every day.

That semester was a particularly newsworthy one. My dorm got about 30 copies of The Honolulu Advertiser every day, which were available for free to the residents on a first-come, first-serve basis. Since I was one of those rare students who actually WENT to my early morning classes, I always got a paper. I would read it from cover to cover, excepting the business pages, and thus my memories of that semester are marked by what was happening in the world at the time.

Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne hit Florida.

Yasser Arafat, Christopher Reeve, Janet Leigh, and Howard Keel died.

The Boston Red Sox finally beat the Curse of the Bambino and won the World Series.

The Summer Olympics in Athens were held.

Bush and Kerry went head to head in the 2004 Presidential elections.

And in Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, Russia, Chechen rebels stormed a school and held roughly 1300 men, women, and children captive.



The Beslan School Massacre is what I remember the most about the Autumn of 2004. I was absolutely transfixed and horrified by the news accounts, and after every class would rush back to my dorm and catch up on the news accounts. I didn't understand the politics and history behind the Chechen rebels' decision to commit such a universally atrocious act---all I could see were bad guys doing bad things to innocent people.

Fast-forward to 2009. To mark the five-year anniversary of the massacre, I requested Timothy Phillips' Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 from my local library. I wanted to revisit the events from a less emotional perspective. That sounds a little cold, I think, but you get considerably more involved and emotional watching something develop on live TV than you do reading about it half a decade later.

It was still emotional, as anything is wont to be when it involves hundreds of dead children and adults and twice as many injured. But it was also incredibly fascinating. Philips would alternate chapters. First, a chapter would delve into the background of Russia's economic, social, and imperial history, with special emphasis on the conflict between the North Ossetian, Ingushetian, and Chechen tribes. The next chapter would cover the events of the siege in chronological order, made more clear and meaningful by the explanation in the previous chapter. And so on throughout the book.

Now, the words "economic history" alone are just about enough to put me to sleep. So I was surprised by how interesting I found the book's explantion for Russia's situation. It really threw a lot of light on what the people in Russia are going through--things that, to a large extent, we in the West know nothing about. The book also made clear why the Chechen rebels felt driven to do what they did, and while it also makes no excuses for them and emphasizes that it was a horrific, unthinkable act, it also states plainly that things in Chechnya and Ingushetia have to change.

Obviously, this isn't a book for everyone. There were times, mostly during the chapters about the siege itself, where I had to put the book down and take a long walk to clear my head. It's brutally straight-forward, and the interviews with the survivors, most of whom saw their children and loved ones blown to pieces in front of them, were heartbreaking. But I'm glad I made myself read it, both because of how it deepened my understanding about events so otherwise beyond my comprehension, and because of how grateful it made me for my own boring, relatively uncomplicated life.

A Strange Enchantment

It is a particular weakness of mine that I'll read a fictional book which will suddenly send me off on a nonfiction spending spree. Case in point: while reading Laurie R. King's O Jerusalem, a mystery novel starring the crimefighting duo of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell and set in post-WWI Israel, I was so fascinated by the political backdrop of the setting that I hightailed it to Powells and came home with a handful of books about British Palestine and the Balfour Agreement.

While researching fictional children's books set in boarding schools (a favorite genre of mine), I came across an author named Mabel Esther Allan. She was an incredibly prolific writer of children's stories in England, though relatively unknown in America, and out of curiousity, I requested a few of her books through the library. Last night, I picked up one of them, thinking I'd give it a halfhearted try. Before I knew it, it was four hours later (and half an hour past my bedtime). I had finished the book and was itching with the desire to jump in my car and drive to Powells for some nonfiction to satisfy my sudden, blinding curiosity. The only thing stopping me was that it was 11:30 pm and Powells had been closed for half an hour.

A Strange Enchantment
by Mabel Esther Allan



This fictional book for young adults (and ever-young adults) is set during WWII in England. The heroine, a 16 year old girl named Primrose (Prim, for short), is a city girl who longs to live in the countryside. As patriotic fervor sweeps the country just after the declaration of war, Prim decides to leave school, lie about her age, and join the Women's Land Army. The novel follows her experience with the organization, as well as what it teaches her about life and herself.

I was only peripherally aware of the Women's Land Army (WLA) before reading this book, and that awareness was thanks to another Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell book. In a nutshell, when the men of England went to Europe to fight during WWI and WWII, the women of England left their homes to work in the factories and on the farms. The WLA educated them in agricultural fields and placed them with farms around the kingdom, giving them work in a time of need and keeping the land from suffering a food shortage.

I was fascinated by Prim's story and by her thirst for adventure and for the peace of the countryside. Her love of the land and of her job, difficult and occasionally tedious as it was, was imbued in every sentence of the book. I was sorry when it ended, and am now eager to learn more about the WLA.

Unfortunately, there is somewhat of a dearth of information on the topic. Powells boasts several titles, the most interesting-sounding one being:



Unfortunately, NONE of the books on the WLA that it has in stock are under $40. That's about $25 more than I'm willing to spend on a book. At the moment, I'm at an impasse, unable to quickly and cheaply satisfy my curiosity on this topic. Financially, it's probably just as well. Mentally, it's frustrating as heck.

What fictional books have fired your intellectual curiosity on a topic?

Catching Up

Here are the picture books for the four days I missed.

The Serpent Slayer, and Other Stories of Strong Women,
by Trina Schart Hyman and Katrin Tchana



Here's another Trina Schart Hyman book that I just adore. Here, she collaborates with her daughter, Katrin Tchana, who collected a variety of world folktales that feature women in strong, capable roles. The illustrations are, of course, gorgeous, and very respectful of the different cultures and races portrayed. I have a copy of this set aside to read to my children one day.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
by Judi and Ron Barrett



I remember just loving the whimsy of this book as a small child. What's more fun than food raining from the sky? I loved poring over the illustrations as a child, and frankly, I wouldn't mind a shower of cupcakes every once in awhile.

Chester's Way
by Kevin Henkes



Kevin Henkes' picture books about anthropomorphic mice are just plain adorable. He captures the spirits of children very well and makes his mice both appealing and realistic. This particular book is about two boys learning to be friends with the new mouse in the neighborhood, a girl.

Katy and the Big Snow
by Virginia Lee Burton



This is another early favorite of mine, at first because I had the same name. But the story of the little Snowplow that could still warms my heart every time I read it, and this is my favorite of Virginia Lee Burton's many incredible books for children.

Tikki Tikki Tembo

Today's Picture Book of the Day is:

Tikki Tikki Tembo,
by Arlene Mosel and Blair Lent



I don't remember if this was a book my parents ever read me, or if I was already old enough to read it to myself when I discovered it. At any rate, this would be a fun book to read to children.

Tikki Tikki Tembo is a fable-like story (no idea if there's any basis in reality) that tries to explain why Chinese names are very short compared to Western names. As the story goes, two young brothers, the elder of whom is named Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Buchi Pi Peri Pembo (I just typed that from memory, aren't you impressed?), are out for a walk. The elder brother falls into a well, and the younger boy, whose name is probably Ping (all Western books about Chinese boys seem to have a Ping in them), goes running for help. He meets a variety of people, and to each one he has to say "Help! My brother, Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Buchi Pi Peri Pembo, has fallen into a well!" By the time the poor boy has reached his mother, he's so out of breath that he can't speak.

There are definitely imperialist overtones to this book, so that's worth taking into consideration when reading it to your children. But all in all it's just a fun story, and it's so memorable that 20 years later I still remember Tikki Tikki Tembo's name.