(Updated because, on reflection, I think this old children's book ties into a thread this web site has discussed.)
Title: Family Grandstand
Title: Family Grandstand
(This reprint is not what I have. I have the original hardcover book, library-bound, no picture on the cover, and goofy but lifelike drawings inside. I wouldn't recommend the reprint in which "Nancy Pearl," whoever she is, demands co-author status on Amazon and signature credits above the author's name on the front cover for adding pictures that aren't as well drawn as the original...but that's what Amazon and/or "Nancy Pearl" is pushing, hard, by listing the original book with "no copies available.")
Author: Carol Ryrie Brink
Date: 1952
Publisher: Viking
ISBN: none
Length: 208 pages
Illustrations: drawings by Jean Macdonald Porter, who probably earned better grades in drawing class than this pushy "Nancy Pearl" person
Quote: “Dorothy...was not used to living with people who sang at the table.”
The Ridgeways, for whom Dorothy works, sing at the table. Professor Ridgeway teaches at Midwest University; his house overlooks the stadium and has a tower, where his wife is writing a novel. They have three children, ages twelve, ten, and six, and a couple of university students who help out around the house. This children’s novel is written from the children’s point of view, with the focus on the fun the children have baby-sitting, adopting a dog, and helping yardman/quarterback Tommy and housekeeper/A-student Dorothy have a wholesome, family-friendly romance.
As a child I remember finding this hybrid between children’s story and teen romance awkward, and preferring the sequel, Family Sabbatical, which is about the Ridgeway children. Nevertheless the Ridgeways are a delightful fictional family, almost as delightful as the Woodlawns (Caddie Woodlawn, Magical Melons), and my preference for the second volume of their adventures did not keep me from rereading the first volume several times.
The children’s relationships with animals are probably more interesting to child readers. The Ridgeway household includes small caged animals who aren’t even introduced individually to readers, a set of turtles who really do “want to get out,” a canary who seems to “want to get out” but stays near his cage when he does get out, and the dog. While Family Grandstand is not a pet care manual, it does open the question of whether animals really want to live with humans for further discussion.
What may interest some readers and correspondents is the characterization of six-year-old Irene "Dumpling" Ridgeway. I suspect the Ridgeway children of being based on Brink's own children, so it's possible that Dumpling's peculiar version of precocity is being exaggerated by a doting mother in the way my brother's and mine used to be. At least Dumpling is spared the burden of being a "child prodigy" in the sense of reading before age six or doing advanced math before age ten. Her I.Q., we're told, is in the high normal range. Yet she's not exactly a normal six-year-old. She worries about whether animals really "want to get out"; at her brother's birthday party she not only seems to be the only one whose present is what her brother wants, but even worries, afterward, about having chosen that present (the turtles) out of empathy for the turtles rather than the brother.
Six-year-olds are not normally capable of thinking on that level. Reasonably bright six-year-olds are capable of being trained to say things and make gestures that sound as if they were starting to imagine others' feelings when, in fact, they're learning to repeat behavior adults reward. We don't (I remember this well) actually sympathize or empathize in the way we'll start doing after puberty, but we respond to conditioning. To adults it can look as if a "prodigiously" precocious level of empathy was developing in flashes. One minute a six-year-old pleases its parents with "I want this toy for my baby sister," and another minute it's still saying "Can't we send that baby back for a refund?"
Dumpling is a soul sister to Charles Wallace Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, whom Madeleine L'Engle shamelessly based on a son she believed to be a prodigy of empathy as well as intelligence. It's possible that adults' hopes and disillusionments with children like these provided the plot twist, in Wrinkle, that Charles Wallace helps rescue his father from IT but then falls into IT's power himself.
Then again, it's also possible that children who respond to patient, gentle conditioning and learn to act as if they felt empathy, before they really do, really are "Highly Sensitive" enough to become more empathetic than average adults. Dumpling's being a self-conscious "prodigy" might not really be "very, very good," but Dumpling really is a very intelligent, very lovable child. Adults might be interested in reading about Dumpling (and Charles Wallace), recognizing them as heavily biased portraits of real children, but studying the kind of social behavior it's possible to instill into moderately gifted-and-talented children.
What may interest some readers and correspondents is the characterization of six-year-old Irene "Dumpling" Ridgeway. I suspect the Ridgeway children of being based on Brink's own children, so it's possible that Dumpling's peculiar version of precocity is being exaggerated by a doting mother in the way my brother's and mine used to be. At least Dumpling is spared the burden of being a "child prodigy" in the sense of reading before age six or doing advanced math before age ten. Her I.Q., we're told, is in the high normal range. Yet she's not exactly a normal six-year-old. She worries about whether animals really "want to get out"; at her brother's birthday party she not only seems to be the only one whose present is what her brother wants, but even worries, afterward, about having chosen that present (the turtles) out of empathy for the turtles rather than the brother.
Six-year-olds are not normally capable of thinking on that level. Reasonably bright six-year-olds are capable of being trained to say things and make gestures that sound as if they were starting to imagine others' feelings when, in fact, they're learning to repeat behavior adults reward. We don't (I remember this well) actually sympathize or empathize in the way we'll start doing after puberty, but we respond to conditioning. To adults it can look as if a "prodigiously" precocious level of empathy was developing in flashes. One minute a six-year-old pleases its parents with "I want this toy for my baby sister," and another minute it's still saying "Can't we send that baby back for a refund?"
Dumpling is a soul sister to Charles Wallace Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, whom Madeleine L'Engle shamelessly based on a son she believed to be a prodigy of empathy as well as intelligence. It's possible that adults' hopes and disillusionments with children like these provided the plot twist, in Wrinkle, that Charles Wallace helps rescue his father from IT but then falls into IT's power himself.
Then again, it's also possible that children who respond to patient, gentle conditioning and learn to act as if they felt empathy, before they really do, really are "Highly Sensitive" enough to become more empathetic than average adults. Dumpling's being a self-conscious "prodigy" might not really be "very, very good," but Dumpling really is a very intelligent, very lovable child. Adults might be interested in reading about Dumpling (and Charles Wallace), recognizing them as heavily biased portraits of real children, but studying the kind of social behavior it's possible to instill into moderately gifted-and-talented children.
It appears to me that prices for this book are being artificially inflated, possibly by the same vulture-like "Nancy Pearl"; what I have in real life is the collectible edition (albeit a library discard), but what you'll get will probably be the new edition with the cover I find comparatively ugly, and the best this web site can do will still be $10 per book, plus the usual $5 per package and $1 per online payment. And Carol Ryrie Brink doesn't even have any use for $1.50 from the sale of this book...and if "Nancy Pearl" imagines that billing herself as a co-author is going to bring her into the Fair Trade Program, she's seriously delusional. This web site exists to encourage writers, not vultures.
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