have you got in your mouth"
"Tooth braces, "
"Holy cat! When you smile, it looks just like the front of a Buick!"
Now probably if a brother had said that, she would have been mad, Portia thought.
But he didn't say it the way a brother would have he said it politely and she agreed with him, '
I can't say enough about this book! This is one of Enright's best, Cute, witty, hilarious, and some good ol' fashioned kids, This story consists of everything found in a child's summer vacation dream, It's a readagain, for sure!
Ages
Cleanliness:
Children's Bad Words
Mild Obscenities amp SubstitutionsIncidents: shut up, heck, doggone, Great Scott, what the deuce, oh nuts, by George, By Jupiter, by Jove used several times throughout the book.
Name CallingIncidents: chicken, rascals
Religious ProfanitiesIncidents: my goodness, holy cat, Pete's sake, gosh, my heavens, goodness, gee, golly, for heaven's sake, my soul, blessed if I know, my word, saints above, gracious
Religious amp SupernaturalIncidents: A girl recalls playing pretend and being an enchanted princess and almost believing in magic.
Two girls find out their birthdays are a week apart, “That means that we have the same sign of the zodiac Libra, . and the same birthstone Opal, ” A few kids think a house might be haunted with ghosts, There are none.
Romance RelatedIncidents: A husband kisses his wife, Mentions corsets. Mentions the “feeble sex. ”
IllustrationsIncident: a nude female statue has a cloth wrapped around her but can see buttocks,
Attitudes/DisobedienceIncidents: Two boys get excluded/picked on and a father helps them play a trick to teach them a lesson, The boys makeup and are friends again, A girl is given a doll and is ungrateful, A younger brother asks where his sister and cousin are always running off too, They dont really want him tagging along so try to brush him off, Later, they feel really guilty and let him join in, Mentions a girl swearing not a main character,
Conversation TopicsIncidents: Mentions a witch in the lyrics of a rhyme, Mentions beer money.
Mentions prehistoric days. An old man smokes a pipe, Mentions his tobacco. Mentions snuff. A boy sees somebody and thinks “that Santa Claus, or maybe even God, had come to rescue him in person, ” Mentions champagne and wine. People take off boards barring a
door and enter an abandoned home, The question about trespassing is brought up, Mentions Mme. Vavasours GypsyWitch Fortune Teller.
Parent Takeaway
A delightful story that holds old time charm, While the children might not always do things right the first time, they repent and learn by them,
Like my reviews Then you should follow me! Because I have hundreds more just like this one, With each review, I provide a Cleanliness Report, mentioning any objectionable content I come across so that parents and/or conscientious readers like me can determine beforehand whether they want to read a book or not.
Content surprises are super annoying, especially when yourepages in, so heres my attempt to help you avoid that!
So Follow or Friend me here on GoodReads! Youll see my updates as Im reading and know which books Im liking and what Im not finishing and why.
Youll also be able to utilize my library for looking up titles to see whether the book youre thinking about reading next has any objectionable content or not.
From swear words, to romance, to bad attitudes in childrens books, I cover it all!
amp/hearts, When I first began this book I was a little disappointed, for it didnt start out quite as good as the Melendy Series, But I quickly learned to love it, Enright still includes amazing, understanding parents/gardians many shrewd, realistic remarks on life and certain things like old furniture wonderful friendships/relationships and excellent humour, The whole story of GoneAway Lake is just so cool, and I love Mr, Pindar and Mrs. Chester! The only thing I disliked was some mild language euphemisms and a negative attitude towards dresses, The characters were all very vivid and living, and the whole storyline was sweet and whimsical and unusualEnrights lovable style, I am quite excited to read the sequel!
A Favourite Quote: “If you could just hold onto it, said Portia, “Onto what The weather
“The weather, partly, but mostly the time, June like this, and everything starting to be, Summer starting to be. Everything is just exactly RIGHT,
“But if it were this way every day, all the time, wed get used to it too, Wed TOUGHEN to it, said Aunt Hilda, People do. Its just because it doesnt and cant last that a day like this is so wonderful, ”
A Favourite Beautiful Quote: “Each piece of furniture in the living room was as familiar to Portia as a member of the family, ”
A Favourite Humorous Quote: ”Ladies and gentlemen, he began, Also goats, dog, cat, duck, chickens, crickets, hornets, frogs, snakes, birds of the air, and anybody else within earshot
“You forgot mosquitoes, Foster said,
”Yes. Thank you. Also mosquitoes, caterpillars, turtles, sleeping bats, and the skunk that lives under the Humboldt house, and anybody ELSE within earshot, it is now my solemn duty to christen this bridge He lowered the bottle.
Julian, what are we naming this bridge
“Nobody had thought of that, There was a pause.
Why dont you just call it the Gulper Bridge suggested Foster logically, ” It probably says volumes about my childhood that this book, with the secret Victorian ghost town on a boggedup lake, is one of my most treasured memories.
A secret clubhouse in a fallingdown mansion License to forage among the other houses Trunk after trunk of treasures, everything from clothes to seashells to a moosehead Oh, yeah, I was so right there with Portia and her family.
I'm so happy they've reissued this, and kept all the original illustrations, Enchanting and delightful! I was totally caught up in these youngsters adventures at GoneAway Lake, The older couple, Pindar and his sister Minnehaha, were a wonder for their age and how they lived so independently, almost reclusive, As a child who hasn't imagined living in an abandoned house, gathering your own furnishings, and playing unsupervised! The relationships between siblings and cousins, young folks and old folks, city versus country in a simpler time made the book an absolute pleasure to read! In this book, published in, Portia and her cousin Julian, exploring the woods near Julian's new house, discover GoneAway Lake, which is actually a vast swamp.
They learn it used to be a lake called Tarrigo and a summer resort community in thes, When the lake drained away, the row of Victorian houses fell derelict, Portia and Julian meet an elderly brother and sister who spent their childhood summers by the lake, and in old age have moved back to lead simple reclusive lives in the falling apart houses.
The tone of the book is a curious and beguiling mixture of enjoyment of the present and wistful remembrance of the past,
I can tell that it's been a long time since I last read it, because as I did so, all kinds of questions came into my mind that never had before: could a lake drain as Tarrigo did, without anyone ever really knowing why Did Enright base it on a real place Would it be possible, even in, for two people to live off the grid as comfortably as Aunt Minniehaha and Uncle Pin do Isn't Aunt Minniehaha awfully nice and chatty and sociable for a recluse who hasn't seen anyone except her brother for, how long,years How likely is it that one of the houses, deeper in the woods, was so securely boarded up that vandals and scavengers were completely thwarted foryears Wouldn't Portia and Julian's parents, on meeting and taking to the GoneAway residents, have been full of concerns for the health and safety of two elderly people living in such secluded haphazard circumstances In terms of this last question, perhaps the lack of the raising of such issues is something that distinguishes a children's book fromfrom what would be published today.
There is a brief, very brief, hint of this worry once, when in quiet moment Julian voices to Portia the wish that Aunt Minniehaha and Uncle Pin were not so old.
Anyway, to my mind, none of these questions really detract from the book possibly because I accepted it all as given as a child, possibly because they gave my adult mind something to chew on as I read it aloud.
Another reason I know I haven't read the book in a while is because for most of my life, I have thought of September as a season of spiderwebs, and indeed, have always noticed more of them in that month because I was watching for them, or because it's true, and never consciously connected that with this book, but here there was a whole long passage about spiders and September.
Aha. Enright does nature so well, As a child I read the book for the story, now I love it for how all the sights and sounds of the swamp are so real and vivid the mosquitoes too I don't think I would have been able to cope with them.
I would give the bookstars, but I can't quite because the author's Melendy books are actually a little better, so I have to leave a margin.
My only real issue with this book is that Julian and Portia are not quite threedimensional and alive in the way that the Melendys are, I think the real main character of the book is GoneAway itself, The pictures, by Joe and Beth Krush, play a big part in this, The carefully detailed houses are so amazingly elaborate and so utterly ramshackle, Beautiful and sad at the same time, but if you're a kid, just "neat, "
Another thought that came to my mind on this reading is that what if the same scenario played out in the present day, If some kids were exploring a house that had been completely untouched and undisturbed since, sayperhaps some ranchstyle house, would it seem as magical and wonderful as exploring the Villa Caprice does to the children in this book I rather doubt it.
Probably that says something about the firstyears of theth century I suspect that there was more change in those years than in any comparably short a space of time in history.
Here's the short version of my review:
A childhood favorite a good long time since I last reread it reading it aloud to my son who loved it just plain gorgeous writing reading Gold.
.