{"id":797,"date":"2008-10-08T00:21:46","date_gmt":"2008-10-08T04:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/?p=797"},"modified":"2008-10-08T00:22:38","modified_gmt":"2008-10-08T04:22:38","slug":"a-gathering-of-days-a-new-england-girls-journal-1830-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2008\/10\/08\/a-gathering-of-days-a-new-england-girls-journal-1830-32\/","title":{"rendered":"A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal 1830-32"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 1980 Newbery Winner is in diary format. I assume the title is to make it more accessible to the audience by mentioning a larger location; the main character is from New Hampshire and has never travelled out of the state.<\/p>\n\nThe Plot<\/b>
\nA Gathering of Days purports to be the diary of one Catherine Hall, written from October 1830 through March 1832. Catherine, the 13 year old daughter of a widowed farmer, lives in Meredith, NH<\/a> with her father and younger sister. The role of woman of the house has fallen upon her since the death of her mother and she combines that with her role as a child going to school and trying to maintain friendships with her peers. Later, her father remarries a woman from Boston and the whole family must adjust to the new situation.<\/p>\n

My Thoughts<\/b>
\nBeing from NH, I was naturally interested to discover that this book didn’t just take place in New England (generally code for Massachusetts), but New Hampshire. The family live up in the lakes region, near Lake Winnepesaukee. In spite of having lived in the state itself for about 20 years, I must admit that I’ve only been up to that region a handful of times, and never for very long. But as far as I could tell, the depiction of the setting was more or less historically accurate.<\/p>\n

The sequence of events was not bad, but several things occurred which were terribly far fetched or poorly plotted.<\/p>\n

First, the runaway slave business. Early in the book, Catherine finds a note left in her composition book by a mysterious writer. She and her friends speculate about the possible identity of the note writer and eventually assist this person by giving him a quilt. Later, she receives a package in the mail from the mystery man containing some nice lace as a thank you for helping him in his flight to Canada. Leaving alone the artificiality of having the runaway slave be able to read, write, and hang around town for several weeks so he can be given the quilt, the receipt of the package is completely unreasonable. Mail was an event in those days, and a 14 year old girl would not be able to get a package without considerably more comment than Catherine got (which was precisely none.) <\/p>\n

Then there were a number of events which seemed influenced by Laura Wilder’s Little House books. The extended Fourth of July sequence was very reminiscent of scenes from her books, as were the teacher issues and the story of the stump in the woods.<\/p>\n

The author also was determined to pack in as many 1830s pop-culture references as she could. Perhaps a few too many, even if she was just trying to ground the story more firmly in the time period. Things which stuck in my head include the Nat Turner slave rebellion, Daniel Webster, Sarah Josepha Hale and the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument.<\/p>\n

Those complaints aside, it wasn’t a bad book. It wasn’t a particularly introspective or deep thinking book, but it was a pleasant, quick read and not actively offensive. Catherine was not annoying, and was quite able to think for herself and not fret overmuch about decisions and actions. The marriage of her father was handled quite well for a book of this sort, and though there was friction between herself and her new step-mother, the amount was not overblown and everyone seemed interested in working toward a harmonious co-existence. Even with the random character death in the last third of the book, it was all refreshingly drama free.\n<\/pracut>\n

In Short<\/b>
\nThis is a slice of life novel along the same vein as Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, but in diary format. The only real plot is the passage of time, though there are incidents and events which occur during the course of the book. That said, many slice of life novels are quite good (see the aforementioned) — the main requirement is that they correctly capture the life they are slicing. I think the author has done that here. Unfortunately, she must be penalized for throwing in a random character death on top of the initial pre-novel parental and sibling death. While I understand the setting allows easily for people to die of trifling little colds (to paraphrase someone from another novel) it was oddly done here. 5.5\/10 after the penalty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1980 Newbery Winner is in diary format. I assume the title is to make it more accessible to the audience by mentioning a larger location; the main character is from New Hampshire and has never travelled out of the state. The Plot A Gathering of Days purports to be the diary of one Catherine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}