Thursday, September 29, 2011

Book Review: A Spell Is Cast

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: A Spell Is Cast


Author: Eleanor Cameron

Date: 1964

Publisher: Little Brown & Company

ISBN: none

Length: 271 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Beth and Joe Krush

Quote: "Cory felt her heart lighten. She felt it quicken with excitement at sight of the gulls wheeling high up, being blown in the wind and then planing down on still wings."

Cory has always lived with her mother, mostly in New York City. During the time frame of this family romance, a spell is cast over Cory by the new pleasures she discovers at her grandmother's house on the northern California coast. Not only does she discover cliffs, caves, seabirds, boats, and beaches; she also meets interesting people her own age (unspecified, but apparently between twelve and fifteen) and bonds with the woman her uncle ought to have married.

Of course, Fergie and Andrew, the elderly hired couple whose names started to sound newly ironic around the time this book went out of print, claim that a spell was cast on Cory from the very beginning. She's enchanted because she happens to be lefthanded, and her name sounds like the word they used for this quirk in Scotland, "cawry-fisted."

Then there's the vague sense of pleasant wonder that Eleanor Cameron had such a way of weaving into her novels. Cory's uncle and his girlfriend would probably have been reconciled in any case. In 1964 anybody who played a musical instrument would probably have played the old tune "Greensleeves." Because this is an Eleanor Cameron novel, the adult romance has to be restarted when Cory hears each half of the former couple playing "Greensleeves" and thinks people who know such a lovely tune just have to be meant...Female readers seem to have forgiven Cameron's heroines, especially Julia Redfern, for this kind of self-dramatization.

The Krushes add their own kind of enchantment with their lavishly detailed drawings of old houses, cars, and costumes. Their line drawings were sketchy, almost cartoonlike, and for shading they simply scribbled with the side of the pencil, yet you could pick out any object the Krushes drew from a group of possible real-life models. This team had such a unique talent that even fellow illustrator Elizabeth Enright contributed two books (about a 1960s family who discover and restore a well preserved 1890s neighborhood) to the list of Krush-illustrated books. A Spell Is Cast sold well in the 1960s and 1970s and is probably one of the easier Krush-illustrated books to find...but it's not cheap.

This book is recommended to anyone who wants to recapture the spell this book cast over girl readers in middle school. As an adult romance, its plot may be a bit thin...or it may re-enchant romantic types' inner children enough that they'll forgive this book for having more scenes of childish wonder at beaches than scenes of grown-up passion. The passion is there all right; it's just family-filtered.

Real-world readers may be shocked at the price if they click on the button below. As regular readers know, this e-book store is growing out of the inventory of a real-world display of secondhand books, and the copy you can buy there is a cleaned, but still roughly used, discarded library copy. Clean copies of this book, which are what I'll mail out when you click on the button, have become collectors' items.

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