Book Review: The Shoo-Fly Pie

Book Review: The Shoo-Fly Pie

Author: Mildred Jordan

Date: 1944

Publisher: Knopf

ISBN: none

Length: 118 pages

Illustrations: color drawings by Henry C. Pitz

Quote: “Here she was, eight years old already, and people were always telling her she was TOO YOUNG.”

Though not a Pennsylvania German like the characters in this book, Mildred Jordan was once a little girl who was told she was too young to do things. She gathered the nerve to write a child-sized novel by telling herself that people who wrote books weren’t more talented than those who wrote short stories, but merely “worked very, very hard.”

Hard work went into her book. Mildred Jordan learned 55 new words, some technical terms and some German words, to write about a little Pennsylvania German girl who learns how to make shoo-fly pie. It makes better sense than Jordan would have realized to describe all the other farm chores first. If you, the reader, do all the heavy labor this fictional family do, first, you will have revved up your metabolism to the point where eating shoo-fly pie probably won’t make you sick, or even fat. Otherwise it would.

As a one-time diversion for children ,The Shoo-Fly Pie is less annoying than television and video games, and can be recommended as a good, challenging read. Eight-year-olds are capable of learning what “slipware” and “sgraffito” are; some eight-year-olds get tired of being talked down to by writers who assume otherrwise.

Pitz’s drawings, some of which are full-page or two-page color plates, aren’t great art but they are appealing semi-realistic pictures. In some parts of Pennsylvania red squirrels, a separate species that don’t mingle with gray or black squirrels, were the most numerous kind, and yes, their coats really are almost as bright as Pitz painted them. The aqua-blue highlights on a chicken’s wing are a fault: green or blue gloss would be visible on black feathers at that angle, but Pitz forgot the black paint. Such faults sometimes make old books and pictures more valuable to collectors though.