Book Review: The Singing Tree

Title: The Singing Tree

(What I have is the first edition acquired and discarded by the same library from which I got my copy of The Good Master. Amazon doesn't even show a page for the first edition of this one.)

Author: Kate Seredy

Date: 1939

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: none

Length: 247 pages

Quote: “But this is 1914, brother. Two generations have grown up in peace...What would anybody start a war for?”

Any nice story about Europe, such as The Good Master was, has its reverse side: Official unity as “Christendom,” as a “Holy Roman Empire,” or as a “European Union” has never kept Europeans out of their tribal wars for very long. The world now remembers 1914 as the year the biggest, deadliest war in Europe’s history broke out. Ironically, though Europe had already had some massive wars and the 1914 war was their worst up to that time, 1939...

There were reasons why this story wasn’t as popular as The Good Master. Those reasons do not include any lack of the ethnic charm Seredy portrayed so well, of the children’s pranks and scrapes and Kate’s triumphs over boys who thought girls couldn’t do things. Those things are in this volume too, but in The Singing Tree Kate and Jancsi are no longer typical, only more fortunate than most, children in an idyllic turn-of-the-century Hungarian village. Jancsi is fifteen, and though at first he’s thrilled to be called “the Young Master” and given official permission to act in his father’s place, he soon realizes that he’s been promoted because the Good Master has joined the army.

Additionally, Seredy chose to portray the kind of Europeans Americans were most likely not to like in 1939. To the lovable Hungarian Nagy family this story adds a chorus of six amusing Russian prisoners of war, selected for clownishness and love of children as much as height and muscle, six pitiful German orphans, six cats (one stray and her five kittens), and a terribly nice Jewish family for good measure. In 1939 Americans (of other than Irish descent) were willing to like English people, or French, Swedish, or maybe Swiss people, but other Europeans...not so much.

Well...as this memory-based cozy novel reminds us, there are Europeans and Europeans. I find it hard to believe that six identically lovable clowns, not related to each other, could be picked out of one load of prisoners. On the other hand, I find it easy to believe that a writer could choose to blur the stories of six prisoners and of six orphans in such a way as to make them seem like chorus lines. Kate and her aunt are too busy running the farm to get to know them as individuals.

And then...although Kate is a teenager in this book, and she even goes to a neighbor’s wedding, war knocks all the Teen Romance right out of her head. Rather than wasting her adolescent energy on clothes, “popularity,” and infatuations, she uses it to do the work of a grown woman and occasionally a grown man. Some actual teenagers, who get bored by editors’ assumption that all stories about teenagers need to feature Teen Romance, will appreciate a romance-free story about a teenager just working with her aunt and cousin on a farm. In the 1950s that was not the kind of story teenagers were supposed to like.

And also, as with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, with Little House on the Prairie and Little Town onthe Prairie, more recently with Harry Potter...in a series of stories about children that have any realistic quality at all, the sequel to a story about children is likely to be a story about young adults. The Good Master was an idyllic story in which a grieving little girl found her “happy place.” In The Singing Tree, grief reappears even in that happy place.

So some people who liked The Good Master didn’t care for The Singing Tree. Now that you know why they didn’t, perhaps you might actually prefer The Singing Tree.

Reprints are available in abundance and will cost $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment; add $10 if you want to throw in a doll dressed like Kate. Amazon isn't even giving me any indication what to charge for first editions if they become available. I'm tempted to say that, as the reprints seem to be paperbacks, eight books of this size would fit into a package, but only six books of the size I physically own will ship for $5.