BOOKS

Local author writes book of 'talking stories'

Reviewed by Andrew Junker | March 19, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

One great pleasure of being a child is having someone read to you. Whether it was a new story or one performed so often that you had memorized every word in the book before you could read, the bedtime story ritual was both comforting and exciting.

Some more creative parents would take the ritual a little further than their peers and invent their own stories to tell. I can remember my little sister insisting that my mother make up her own stories.

She created a nightly serial about a talking bird that was her friend when she grew up years ago in New England. And while I know my little sister would love to know all the forgotten plot lines these nearly 20 years later, the nature of the made-up bedtime story is its impermanence.

Local author Sandra Anne Shaw has recently fought against the bedtime story’s ephemeral nature by codifying in book form a story she told to her daughter 30 years ago.

She explains in the preface to “Flowers in God’s Garden: The Grand Plan”:

“In 1977, our 5-year-old daughter, now a college professor, asked me at her bedtime for a ‘talking story.’ When I asked her what that was, she replied, ‘It’s a story you tell, not from a book!’ With about 10 seconds to think, I launched into what we then called, Rich Girl, Poor Girl. Each night from then on for many nights there was a new episode,” most of which are in this book.

Finally, there’s one more interesting coda to Shaw’s story behind the stories. She had help cataloguing, editing and naming the characters from her granddaughter, Sarah Shaw.

With the book’s creation being such a family affair, it’s no surprise that its stories tackle topics of the home.

Basically, the episodes center around two little girls growing up during the Second World War. Daffy’s father, recently widowed, owns a bank and is very wealthy. Their stately home — we should probably call it a manse — is staffed by servants and an especially doting chauffeur named Harry.

Daffy, though she could easily luxuriate in her material advantages, cares little for her wealth and is distressed by the easy cruelty her rich peers exhibit at private school.

She’s looking for something more than to engage in catty backstabbing with underage fashionistas. (And this is the 1940s. Imagine how tough a girl like Daffy would have it today.)

Enter Lilly, a poor girl from (literally) the other side of town. Daffy encounters Lilly when her driver, Harry, takes a shortcut on their way to the zoo.

There, on the fringes of an intense game of neighborhood Stick Rock — the boys were too poor to own a ball — sits a little girl tending to her even littler brother while their sickly mother naps in a filthy tenement building.

What follows is a mutually enriching friendship filled with dolls, schemes and even ponies. It all sort of sounds like a fairy tale, which is what it’s supposed to be. The brief episodes each have a little moral to them. The children being read to are invited to grow in virtue just as Daffy and Lilly do.

And watching over the girls is a full cast of characters: Daffy’s father and Lilly’s mother; Lilly’s younger brother Dan; Harry, the driver; Lucy, a 19-year-old servant at the mansion, and others.

They come in and out of the stories and lend to their episodic feel. The chapters are all very short as well, perfect for a quick story before bed.

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Media critic Andrew Junker is a staff writer for The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcome. Send e-mail to letters@catholicsun.org.