Book Review: A Wonderful Terrible Time

Title: A Wonderful Terrible Time

Author: Mary Stolz

Date: 1967

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 182 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white drawings by Louis S. Glanzman

Quote: “‘Well, I’ve had enough of this,’ said Sally. ‘I want to do something too’...‘Let’s go on a freedom march,’ said Daniel. All the dolls got up, gathered into their owners’ arms, and they stamped around the living room on their owners’ feet, singing, We shall overcome...”

Stolz was telling her middle school audience that 1967 was a wonderful, terrible time to be a kid. I’d agree, though I’d also ask: Aren’t “the tween years,” age 10-12, just naturally a wonderful, terrible time of life, in any period of history?

Anyway, Mady and Sue Ellen are latchkey kids who live in the city and have gone to “a new school,” one of those brand-new, big, consolidated school buildings of the mid-twentieth century, for two years now. The text doesn’t specify which grade they’ll be entering in the fall, but my guess would be grade six. Mady and Sue Ellen are not yet trying to act like older teenagers. They still act out dolls’ adventures and play hopscotch.

They live in a multiethnic neighborhood and don’t say a great deal about being Black (Stolz wasn’t), apart from admiring Martin Luther King and seeing only one other Black kid at summer camp. In their blue-collar neighborhood, kids usually don’t go to camp. Mady and Sue Ellen get that opportunity because Sue Ellen’s father, a cab driver, may have saved the life of a rich customer, who is grateful.

And they’re too young to be told exactly why they’re kept indoors at night, although they have, as all girls their age had, a vague idea that it had something to do with vicious, violent, hateful boys. For girls who aren’t close to brothers they resent the oppressor sex less than they probably will do in the 1970s. Reading that “Sue Ellen had said something about the boys and how she and Mady wished they would all go away” and her mother said, “You must try to understand...The boys around here, they’re angry lots of the time—the way poor people get angry when they see all the things they can’t have or do,” I think, Yes, that’s how people talked in 1967, and then I wonder, “But how could we have thought that way? Why weren’t we teaching boys that girls get angry when they’re told that freedom to walk through their own neighborhoods is a ‘thing they can’t have’? What was, and still is, wrong with females who don’t demand that public space be either safe or male-free?”

But this is still 1967. The boys are still hogging the stickball space on the city streets. Mady and Sue Ellen are blessed with a few days to enjoy male-free (and green!) outdoor space in the country. Mady likes camp so much she almost doesn’t want to come home. Sue Ellen gets homesick. The girls deal with their feelings in a friendship-affirming, adult-approved way and feel happier by the end of the book.

Lots of women walking around today grew up like Mady and Sue Ellen, narrowing their range of vision in order to feel better about being crushed into tiny corners of congested space rather than claiming the amount of space they fit. And some of them, thanks to opportunities to live in less densely populated places and/or the 1970s feminist movement with its positive encouragement of “women’s rage,” don’t even have clinical depression today.

If images of some of those “radical [left-wing] feminist” demonstrations disgust you...you must try to understand the way people get angry when they see all the things they can’t have or do.

A Wonderful Terrible Time is not an authentic story from inside the Black American experience. It's an authentic story about what real kids were doing in the 1960s, and a well written one; this web site sees no particular reason why fictional characters need to be the same color as their authors, any more than they need to be the same age--duh, historical fiction is a genre--but better stories about being a Black kid in the 1960s were being written and are now available. This one may seem less relevant to today’s middle school readers that some of Stolz's other books, but it should be required reading for those “conservatives” who frown on the displays of hostility they associate with left-wing feminism.

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