Poetry and Iron

Title: Always Anne
Author: Holly Wilson
Publisher: Julian Messner, 1957
Jacket: Georgeann Helms
Setting: Henry's Bend, on the shores of Lake Superior
Provenance: Formerly owned by Sue Greane, 11th grader
Fun: fashion design contest; poetry contest; an accidental dip in the lake; plagiarism; grand larceny
Quote: "Honey Bunny!" warbled an excited voice at her elbow, and there was Glory Hoffman beside her...

Holly Wilson also wrote The Hundred Steps, and like that book, Always Anne is set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in a town dominated by the Great Lakes shipping trade. While The Hundred Steps focused on class divisions (literally), Always Anne is a more conventional high school story, with a best friend, a sneaky girl rival, and a nice-looking boyfriend caught in between.

Always Anne is also an I-want-to-be-a-writer book, with a difference, for Anne is the first heroine of this period I've run across whose secret wish is to be a poet:

That night she went home inspired, and before she went to bed she wrote a poem which she thought was the best she had ever done...the thing that pleased her about it was that, at last, she had managed to convey the feeling she had been searching for -- the change in the middle of the sonnet that had eluded her for so long. Now she understood it. In the first eight lines you said something important, then, in the last six line you came to a conclusion about it. That was the way to do it.

Always Anne moves along quickly and the plot provides a fair amount of drama in the person Glory Hoffman "the femme fatale of Henry's Bend High School," who eventually departs the story in a trail of bad debts and dropped charges. Anne heads off to the University of Michigan -- probably to have her notions about sonnets changed forever -- and Tom, her boyfriend, takes a job on an ore carrier for the summer. As with The Hundred Steps, this is a book to make you fall in love with the Great Lakes.