Book Review: The Saturdays

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Title: Title: The Saturdays


Author: Elizabeth Enright

Date: 1941

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: 0-03-035760-8

Length: 175 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: "Why don't we put all our allowances together once a week and let one of us spend them?"

In 1941, children who were ten, twelve, and thirteen were considered old enough to spend $1.60 all by themselves in New York City, doing "something really good...something we've always wanted to do." Although they later decide it might be even better fun to take these outings as a family, their father finds this "An excellent idea...I was going to suggest it myself but I much prefer having it come from you."

Mercy. Why does a book as old and quaint as this one even have an ISBN? Because it's a good book; because children liked it, and kept it in print up into the 1980s.

One of the kids goes to an art museum where she bonds, for the first time, with an old family acquaintance who grew up in France and once ran off with Gypsies. One goes to the opera and, on the way home, adopts a dog. (Both the dog and the old lady reappear in the three sequels to this book.) One gets her hair professionally "styled" and meets a woman who ran away from an abusive home at thirteen. Their younger brother goes to the circus, gets lost, and makes himself sick on junkfood. During one of their shared adventures they explore Central Park, where one of them falls out of a boat.

Then their Saturday adventures take a more alarming turn, with a furnace disaster and an unrelated fire. After that they really are "luckier than other people," as one of them observes in a sequel, because the old lady comes to their rescue and they'll never have to live in New York City again.

When I was eight, ten, twelve, I thought the four "Melendy Family" books were the best series ever written for children. I still do. (Tom Sawyer and its sequels have child characters, but the books were written for adults.)

One thing I enjoyed was that Enright refused to write down to the child reader. I first read her books, stretching my mind around the unfamiliar words, at age eight. My brother made me read them aloud to him when he was six. We thought a good story was worth learning to understand phrases like "rust-colored buds on the ailanthus trees" and "prickling of camphory fur" and "leaping and pirouetting." Actually, I thought that was a major part of the pleasure these books offered.

Enright did this even in Thimble Summer, the one of her books that won the Newbery Award--possibly because it was about normal children. The Melendys, and the children in Gone-Away Lake, are definitely gifted and talented. I think my brother and I enjoyed these books so much more than Thimble Summer because we appreciated the message that there were other talented freaks like us in the world. In The Saturdays the children are merely interested in the "classical" arts; in sequels one becomes a professional actress, one a church musician, one a dancer, and there's never any doubt that even the baby brother will eventually be a brilliant engineer. More refreshingly, there's never any hint that a talent for engineering rather than the arts makes him inferior to or different from his artsy siblings, either.

The Saturdays is recommended to all fans and collectors of this author, and to all gifted and talented children.