Title: The Insiders Club
Author: Shirley Day
Date: 2023
Quote: "Girl Friday wanted to look after a widower's young child on a paradise island."
That's the ad Hannah's sister encourages Hannah to answer when Hannah's fiance turned tail and fled right outside the church, before their wedding Hannah has taken time off from her job in London already, for the honeymoon, so she's glad to go to Bermuda even if the job is a step down from her sub-editorial position.
Hannah is indeed too tough and stubborn for the wimp she was about to marry, which turns out to be just what Ed's problem child needs When she not only delivers the lunch little Boo forgot to one of those very expensive, exclusive schools organized around the idea that all children need a positively miserable childhood to motivate them to grow up, but then leaps a fence to stop another child giving Boo a hard time, Boo is expelled--and Hannah starts homeschooling, spots Hannah's vision problem, and has the five-year-old reading in no time.
Feel free to skip this rant if you've read it before--I was an early reader. I was reading picture books about horses at four. At the time American children were expected "normally" to start reading at six, so I was a genius, right? (Wrong!) And so a majority of little boys, and quite a few little girls, were being told they were "slow" or otherwise inferior learners because they started reading later than age six. If there was a genius in my family my brother was it--but although he'd started spelling out short words with magnetic letters on the refrigerator at age three, just as I had, he read only picture books or the first few pages of a normally printed book until he was eight years old. In primary school he'd pick out a middle-school or adult-oriented biography out at the library, read the beginning for himself, then bring the book to some adult or to me and ask us to read the rest of it to him. I read several biographies and classic novels that way. I had, for example, read Tom Sawyer at seven, all by myself, but I didn't understand the whole story until I read it with my brother at ten. He was seven. He understood the whole story. But he wouldn't sit down and read a book of the size of Tom Sawyer for another year and a half. He was lagging through school, close to the end of the spring term of grade three, when he became a real, serious reader and never looked back.
Because he was a slower learner? Ridiculous. He was probably a faster learner. I kept ahead of him, growing up, but it wasn't easy; the kid was always nipping at my heels in everything we did, always looking for fields n which he could pull ahead. He took longer to learn to read because some children's eyes are able to focus on printed words at an earlier age than others. It has no connection with intelligence. A child who starts reading books at four usually will do well in school, because children who are exposed to books at four usually will do well in school. Whether they grow up to do any serious or original thinking is anybody's guess. A child who starts reading at ten is not less likely to distinguish perself as a thinker than one who starts reading at four. Some of the world's great thinkers were slow readers and, if boys, they may also have been late talkers as well. According to the Bible, Moses still considered imself "slow of speech" at eighty.
Normally, if a five-year-oild isn't reading, I'd say don't think about glasses, don't imagine the non-reading to be any kind of "problem," and don't let the child go to a school where anyone tries to make a "problem" out of it...but in this novel Hannah notices one of the things that do indicate that a five-year-old may have eye problems beyond simply growingu up at per own pace. Boo consistently misjudges directions in the same way. Boo's eyes really are developing abnormally, not just at a normal leisurely pace. Boo does need glasses. A few children do.
End of rant. Boo likes Hannah better than other baby-sitters she's known. Ed likes Hannah better than any of them, too, in a different way. Everyone else on Bermuda, Hannah learns, still believes in a rigid class system. The housekeeper, Diwata, doesn't talk to her; neither does Ed's mother, nor do Ed's friends. Tara, the other single woman Ed known, is a subordinate employee at his office but that doesn't stop her offering to move in and supervise Hannah. Tara gravels Hannah's democratic soul throughout the novel but, doing credit to the British West Indian tradition of sportsmanship, when Hannah demonstrates an ability to do Tara's job better than Tara does, Tara shows respect...Hannah will, of course, end up working with Ed. As a sub-editor, not a housekeeper or "Girl Friday."
This is a full-length romance with all the backing-and-forthing, misunderstandings and making-up, appertaining thereutnto. Shorter than Jane Eyre or Gone with the Wind, it's more substantial and more interesting than the typical paperback romance sold on a rack in the supermarket. Hannah does behave foolishly with Ed before the wedding, which may turn some "sweet romance" readers against her and certainly makes her a bad example to teenagers. If you can forgive her for that, you'll like The Insiders Club.
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