Code Name Rette

Title: A Girl Can Dream
Author: Betty Cavanna
Publisher: Scholastic reprint, 1961 (original publication date, 1948)
Setting: Avondale, a small town in Pennsylvania
Fun: Stalls, Spins, reading Seventeenth Summer
Quote: "Reluctant as Rette was to admit it, she recognized that Elise was looking at flying through more mature eyes than she was.  Rette had to accord her a certain admiration.  Elise was learning to handle a plane as smoothly as she handled boys, and without undue fuss."

"Everyone at school wondered who was going to win the free flying lessons," is as nice a tagline as I've read for a book in a long time.  A Girl Can Dream is set in 1948.  Loretta (Rette) Larkin idolizes her older brother, Tony, who flew for the 82nd Airborne.  Meanwhile, some farmland has been converted to a new airport, and the owner of the airport shows up at the high school and announces an essay contest, with the prize to be 10 free flying lessons.  There's some question as to whether girls should enter at all, but in the end Lorette (Rette) Larkin and popular girl Elise Wynn, do, and Rette wins.

This sets the stage for a rivalry between the girls, though it never grows very heated.  Elise's wealthy father pays for her to have lessons, and the girls share an instructor, also a woman (Mrs. Larkin notes that the instructor flew for the WASPs.)  In a climatic scene, Elise's plane disappears from view, and Rette and the other rescuers find her worried about a bull in the field where she has nonchalantly landed her Cessna.  Some of Elise's sophistication rubs off on Rette, too, although the narrative never strays far from flying.

One of the more interesting aspects of A Girl Can Dream is that it contains a tribute to Maureen Daly's Seventeenth Summer.  The book is recommended to Rette by a salesgirl in a bookstore and she's gets totally caught up in it:  "The amazing part of it was that Angie Morrow and Jack Duluth didn't seem like book characters at all.  They were just like any girl and boy that Rette might be going to school with, except that she knew more about them, about the way they thought and felt, than she did any of her friends."

A Girl Can Dream is one of Cavanna's earlier books and not one of her more sparkling, but it stands as something of a rebuke to anyone who thinks that girls' books of this era were not very adventurous.

Summer on Nantucket

Title: Six on Easy Street
Author: Betty Cavanna
Publisher: Westminster Press, 1954
Setting: Nantucket
Provenance: formerly the property of Chillicothe High School, Chillicothe, Missouri
Fun: running a boarding house, a French exchange student; finding an old diary
Quote: The house on Easy Street was square, and its shingles were weathered to a soft, dove-colored gray. The door was not in the middle, being flanked by a single window on one side and two on the other. The chimney too was a little off center, but the widow's walk, overlooking the harbor, was planted midway on the backbone of the steep-pitched roof.

Unlike some of Cavanna's other books, Six on Easy Street focuses on an entire family. The Sanfords, academics, have inherited a house in Nantucket and intend to open it to boarders for the summer, hoping to increase the family income. What follows is an exploration, by the entire family, of Nantucket: the whaling museum, bicycle rides, beach parties. There are guests to serve, including penny-pinching old ladies who don't tip, and boys, including a homely French exchange student and a cute grocery delivery boy.

The main female character, 16 year old Deborah, resents Nantucket, since it keeps her from Craig, her hometown boyfriend, who has invited her to visit him at his summer place. Deborah does have Carol, her best friend, on Nantucket with her, however. Carol's parents are divorced, and (as divorced parents always are in this era) wealthy and inattentive. The girls have contrasting views of their own families, and what they want out of life: Deborah thinks Carol's father's friends are grand and exciting, and Carol thinks that Deborah's parents have interesting dinner conversations.

Six on Easy Street is mostly fun. All the kids have adventures, including Johnny, the show-off younger brother, who runs away to find his cat. The history of Nantucket -- including the fate of the Essex -- is mixed in easily with the plot. In the end, Deborah, who has saved all summer to be able to go to Craig, gives the money to her family to pay the medical bills after her brother has a sailing accident, and is rewarded when Craig makes a surprise. Good thing she didn't fall in love with the homely French exchange student.

The Trouble with Angels

Title: Angel on Skis
Author: Betty Cavanna

Publisher: William Morrow, 1957
Setting: the locals' side of a Vermont ski town
Provenance: Hazelton Library, Chillicothe, Missouri
Fun: Dartmouth boys, the Snow Carnival, making your own ski boots
Quote: "Let's forget what I said about the Franconia races," he suggested. "As a matter of fact I think you'd better quit racing for the rest of the year, Angie. You're trying too hard. You've lost the fun of skiing, somehow or other. And you're the sort of person who can't ski really well unless you're having fun."

Unlike some of Cavanna's other heroines, who come from middle-class intellectual families, Angela Dodge is a local in Peru, a small Vermont ski town. Her father has recently died and her mother is running a kind of bed and breakfast for the crowds who invade during the winter. Most of the local kids don't care much for skiing -- it's something outsiders do -- but Angela develops a passionate interest in it, in spite of the fact that the even the basic equipment is well beyond her means.

Angela's drive is the core of Angel on Skis. It carries Angela through financial setbacks, broken limbs, losing races and romantic disappointment, and it makes for a fascinating story, for Angel on Skis

turns out to be not so much about skiing, or love, but about the unstable nature of ambition. Angela loves skiing, but she also hates it. She gives up on it and she goes back to it. She dreams of it, especially after being told she has Olympic-caliber talent, but she abandons skiing after her first loss. And she learns, ultimately, that she won't ever do well unless she loves what she's doing, in spite of all the difficulties.

This is not one of those starry-eyed novels in which the heroine magically has enormous talent and wins all her races with ease. Cavanna puts Angela through real difficulties and real disappointments, and her message is clear: if you want to do anything, you have to work hard. But all your hard work won't avail if you don't love what you're doing.

At times I wondered if Cavanna was not writing about skiing, but about writing itself.

Summer of Machu Picchu

Title: Fancy Free
Author: Betty Cavanna
Publisher: William Morrow, 1961
Setting: Peru
Provenance: formerly the property of Hazelton Public School Library, Chillicothe, Missouri
Fun: raising a baby llama, smuggling, Machu Picchu
Quote: "Nine o'clock?" Fancy asked, startled. "Isn't that awfully late?"
Sophistication and nonchalance practically poured from Tom's reply. "It's on the early side for the Lima dinner hour, actually. The only reason they feed us here at eight is that archeologists -- particularly archeologists norteamericanos -- get hungrier earlier."

You have to admire a teen author who sets her novel in a country that in 1961 was probably exotic to her readers. As I mentioned in my bio post, Cavanna travelled a lot, and I can only assume Fancy Free is the result of a visit to Peru and a climb to Machu Picchu.

Cavanna's heroines are often situated in academic families, and this is the case for Francesca (Fancy) Jones, who is brought to Peru by her archeologist father. The downside of an isolated archeological dig, from Fancy's point of view, is no interesting boys. Cavanna's female protagonists come in many varieties, but in Fancy Free she deliberately makes Fancy a pretty girl who, while not stupid, is mainly interested in having fun. She also creates a foil for Fancy in Silence Crawford, a Harvard student who wears slacks and doesn't own a single tube of lipstick. The girls become friends, naturally, and influence each other a little (Silence consents to having her hair done in a Lima beauty parlor, Fancy becomes fascinated by Peru and the Incas) -- but only a little.

As for the uninteresting boys, Fancy Free boasts three -- glamorous Tom Kimball, dull Jack McMahon, and juvenile Chris Barlow. Alas, Tom Kimball, after starring as the hero through three-quarters of the book, turns out to be an smuggler of Inca artifacts. This leaves the field open for Chris Barlow, who helps Fancy get revenge on Tom. But the real pleasure of Fancy Free is in its setting. It appreciates Peru, you might say -- without condescension and without turning it into merely an exotic background. A large section of it is set in a remote area, and the Quecha-speaking natives emerge as secondary characters, while Lima is presented as a sophisticated, modern city. I've never been to Peru, but if I do ever go I hope it will still have something of the untouristed country of Fancy Free.

Welcome to America

Title: Jenny Kimura
Publisher: William Morrow, 1964
Setting: Country-club Kansas City, Cape Cod
Provenance: formerly the property of Hazelton Library, Chillicothe, MO
Fun: strange American customs, beach parties, water-skiing
Quote: "Oh, he is," agreed [Alan's] mother confidently, "I have such high hopes for him!" She turned off the faucet under which she had been rinsing dinner plates and said confidentially, "I just hope he makes a good marriage -- to a girl of his own background and his own class....That's always wisest, don't you think?"

By 1964, most YA authors were aware of the younger generation's interest in the Civil Rights movement, and while the allusions to it in most novels of the era are minimal, the fact that Betty Cavanna chose to tackle racial prejudice in Jenny Kimura must have been something of a landmark, since Cavanna's novels, strong as they are, rarely stray from the mainstream.

Jenny Kimura Smith, the daughter of an American father and a Japanese mother, has grown up in Japan. Cavanna points out that her parents' marriage keeps her from full acceptance in Japan as well, and that her mother's parents have cut off their daughter for marrying an American. But the focus of the book is not Jenny in Japan, but Jenny in America, more specifically, Jenny in the Midwest, with her widowed paternal grandmother, who still mourns the death of a son in World War II. The reader is swept, as if a stranger, into suburban Kansas City, with its large houses, backyard pools, barbeques, informal clothes (Grandmother wears Bermuda shorts!) and easygoing manners (boys and girls date!) Although Jenny makes friends her own age she feels shut out by Mrs. Smith, who has difficulty accepting the Japanese appearance of her granddaughter. When Jenny is invited to a wedding, she decides to wear -- lacking a formal dress -- her best kimono. She is widely, if somewhat patronizingly, complimented by the other guests and the bride, but her grandmother is mortified:

"Gordon should have told you there would be a certain amount of intolerance. He knows perfectly well what a storm he raised." Still Jenny waited, and her grandmother continued, "An interracial marriage is very unusual, Jenny, very unusual in Kansas City. In fact, unheard of among my friends. Our fathers and husbands worked hard to establish not only a business, but social position. It isn't easy to see the next generation tear it to shreds."

Cavanna skims the surface here -- it's not clear if the grandmother's embarrassment is because she thinks Jenny made a display of herself, or because Japanese culture itself, only twenty years after the end of World War II, is still a painful subject. But she allows the hint, like the pictures of Mrs. Smith's dead son, to linger in the background.

Jenny Kimura makes a major shift about half-way through the book, after Jenny is snubbed by the mother of the boy she has been dating. Grandmother takes Jenny off to Cape Cod for the rest of the summer, and Jenny Kimura begins to focus on more on boys and water-skiing. Jenny meets her cousin Dick, as well as George Yamada, an American boy of Japanese descent, and still pines for Alan, who is summering only a few miles away. Jenny Kimura ends without any real resolution of these relationships, but with a definite feeling, on Jenny's part, that prejudice and fear are held by the older generation, not the Dicks, Alans and Georges she knows.

The world was so vast and wonderful, so unexpected and inviting. She wanted to spread her arms and embrace all the people she had grown to love.

Betty Cavanna

The next four or so posts are going to look at books by Betty Cavanna, one of the more prolific and popular teen girl writers of her era, and someone who sort of put YA girls writing on the map. Cavanna's first YA, The Black Spaniel Mystery, was published in 1945, her last in the 1980s, and the Library of Congress lists 84 books for her, all told (some of them picture book collaborations with her second husband, George Russell Harrison,) including several mysteries written under the name Betsy Allen.

Betty Cavanna was born in Haddonfield, New Jersey in 1909. As a child she had polio and, like many sickly children, turned to reading as compensation for the long hours in bed. She went to what was then the New Jersey College for Women and later became part of Rutgers, and following graduation got a job with the Westminster Press in Philadelphia, in those days a major publisher of children's books. She eventually became art director there. From what I can discover about her personal life, Cavanna was married twice, but her first husband died young. I also can't find any record of her having children. But at some point, upon either her first or second marriage, she quit her job at the Westminster Press and turning to writing full time.

From the 1940s on, Cavanna's books were basically mainstream teen novels (Scarlet Sail, Paintbox Summer) with the occasional mystery. Cavanna traveled widely and many of her non-fiction books are about getting to know children from other countries (e.g. Demetrios of Greece.) She also believed in doing what her characters were doing: for A Girl Can Dream (1948), she took flying lessons. By the late 60s, however, Cavanna not suprisingly felt "out of touch" with the current generation of teens, and turned to writing mysteries exclusively. She continued to publish, though at a slower pace, through the early 1980s, when some of her earlier books were reissued. She died in 2001, in Paris.

Cavanna was not a terribly daring writer, but there is nothing fluffy about her books, either. Her travels were put to good use in creating far-flung settings for many of her novels. In spite of fairly conventional plots, her protagonists have an inner toughness and often make difficult decisions on their own. They are also typical teenagers in their resentment of family obligations and their interest in -- and confusion about -- boys. It's hard not to root for them and I imagine they must have appealed to thousands of girls who lived more ordinary lives in the 1940s and 50s.

The four books I read by Cavanna all come from a ten-year period between 1954 and 1964. Jenny Kimura (1964), which brushes up against the topic of racism, is probably one of her most memorable novels. Fancy Free (1961) is set on an archeological expedition to Peru. Angel on Skis (1957) has one of the toughest and most dynamic of Cavanna's heroines, while Six on Easy Street (1954) is a more charming large-family-runs-a-boardinghouse novel. The variety of settings and protagonists -- and the fact that Cavanna pulls them off so effortlessly -- is part of the fascination of her work.