As you probably gathered from my last two posts, I’m totally enjoying Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet, in which this book is the third volume. The kids (Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver) are all satisfying characters (though I feel like Mona’s a bit less developed than the others, or maybe I’m just less interested in her), and their adventures, first in the city and then in the country, are fun to read about. But more than the adventures or the characters, what I think I love most about these books is the way that Enright captures the texture of the Melendy family’s daily life, and the daily life of the world in which they live. All of the books have beautiful descriptive passages, but I found the descriptions especially vivid in this book, or especially resonant—maybe because the book is so full of nature and summer, and I’m having a bit of nature and summer myself these days, though not as much as the Melendy kids are having. (Since late June, though, I’ve done some traveling: first a glorious vacation to Austin, where I experienced dry heat for the first time and spent my days, as the friend I was visiting joked, alternating between sweating and eating. We went kayaking and jogging/walking and hiking, and saw lizards and a muskrat and turtles, and went swimming in a cold natural spring and also in his backyard swimming pool, and I didn’t touch a computer for the whole time I was there. Then last week I was in Cambridge, England, from Monday through Friday: my days were spent in an office, but I did have some early-morning and early-evening explorations, including a really nice 6:00 am run along the Backs, with a cow grazing in the misty field and ducks and ducklings waddling across the grass. And then, most recently, I spent a glorious Saturday in Poughkeepsie, where Megan and I walked through Franny Reese State Park and saw a rabbit and chipmunks and ruined old buildings and ate wild raspberries and wild blackberries and marveled at how green everything was, how beautifully the light filtered through the leaves.)
But right, the book: it starts in summer, with the kids building a dam in the brook behind their house, and lingers in summer, moving to autumn only at the book’s end. With no school, and with their father often away in Washington for work and their housekeeper away for some time tending to a sick cousin, the Melendy kids have days and days to fill with plans of their own devising. There’s a Victory Garden, and a scrap metal drive that introduces the kids to some neighbors they didn’t know they had, and adventures in canning, and one new friend in particular, an orphaned thirteen-year-old boy named Mark, who becomes close to the whole family. There is much exploration in the woods, and lots about caterpillars (which Oliver collects) and moths (which Oliver loves) and mosses and flowers and how things look and smell. Everything’s deliciously summery: swimming in that dammed-up brook! Swimming in an old quarry! Watching the Perseid meteor shower! And as in the other books, there’s humor and sweetness: at one point the kids are talking about what they can do to help the war effort, and Oliver, who’s almost eight years old, says this: “Would they take any people as young as me in the army?” cried Oliver, his eyes shining. “I could clean out the insides of cannons, for instance. I’m a good size for it.” (18) Aw, Oliver. I also loved this, about how Oliver’s fascination with caterpillars started: “One day, impersonating a Sherman tank, he was bellowing and threshing his way among some of the shrubs near the summer house, when he came face to face with an extraordinary thing. It was something which looked like a tiny, elaborate trolley car.” (79) (Speaking of Oliver’s fascination with caterpillars—and moths—it got me looking up moth pictures myself: look how pretty they are! There’s the Virgin Tiger moth and the leopard moth and the luna moth and the sphinx moth …)
Leave a Reply