A Fair Trade Book
Title: Daphne’s Book
Author: Mary Downing Hahn
Date: 1983
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin / Avon
ISBN: 0-380-72355-7
Length: 166 pages
Quote: “Have you found Sir Benjamin in real life? Well,
then, I don’t think Princess Heatherfern should find him in the story.”
Apart from having a name like “Daphne,” good for an endless
series of cheap shots in middle school, Daphne is different from the other kids in her class.Daphne has skipped
over the boys-and-clothes-and-popularity obsession; Jessica, the narrator,
hasn’t reached it yet. Jessica’s best friend, Tracy, is drawn to the class mean
girls, Michelle and Sherry, as the three of them reach that stage of
adolescence. Jessica’s English teacher has ordered Jessica to work with Daphne
on a writing project. Jessica thinks this is going to cost her Tracy’s
friendship and bring her a lot of snide remarks from Michelle and Sherry…but
that’s only the tip of the iceberg; this first novel meant a lot to Mary Downing
Hahn, who put a lot of life experience into it.
The assignment is to write a picture book for younger
children. Daphne’s assets—the extra maturity she’s gained from life and loss
and having a younger child to test her story on—immediately reveal themselves.
Jessica has the idea of writing about collectible dressed-up toy mice, which
were a feature attraction at Lowens’ toy store in Bethesda at the time; the
mice came with all sorts of doll-sized furniture and lived in pre-Barbie,
one-inch-to-one-foot dollhouses. One of Jessica’s mice has been lost, possibly
destroyed by her cat, so for the story they draw pictures of the other mice
searching for him in the Adelphi Mills Park. (Yes, although identifying details
have been airbrushed and Lowens’ went out of business, it was possible for a
long time to organize a tour of suburban Maryland around Daphne’s Book.) Jessica thinks the missing mouse should be found at
the end of the story. Daphne persuades her that it’s a stronger story if he’s
not.
It turns out that Daphne knows the importance of recognizing
that someone is lost forever because her parents are dead, and her increasingly
senile grandmother, with whom she and her mouthy little sister Hope live,
refuses to accept that the girls’ father isn’t coming back to fix their shabby
house and eke out the grandmother’s inadequate pension money.
Deep down, Hahn knew how this story would end if Jessica’s
family were really good neighbors, rather than merely nice: Jessica’s family
would adopt Daphne’s family. They all like each other; they’d be less affluent,
but not destitute, if they shared their resources; the grandmother might not
have to go into a nursing home before her time, and the girls could stay in the
same school at least until they get to know the cousins who might have more to
offer them. Good neighbors are willing to adapt to the short-term discomfort
that sort of thing entails. Merely nice neighbors, however, are not, and
although Jessica might be a good neighbor at heart, her mother, older brother,
and prospective stepfather are determined to bring her up to be a merely nice
neighbor like them.
Daphne and Hope and their grandmother go into separate “homes”
as wards of the state. There’s a lot of blather about how this is the way
things “have to” be. Deep down, you know that Hahn knew it wasn’t, really. No
one-size-fails-to-fit-all program managed by social workers can ever be an
adequate substitute for what individual neighbors can and should do for one
another.
However, for the sake of readers who are still on Jessica’s
level of maturity rather than Daphne’s, the story gets a halfway happy ending.
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