Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A DOLL'S MEMORY IS FOREVER, 26 April 1998
By A Customer
Hitty is a very small wooden doll carved out of mountain-ash (for good luck) in Maine by a kindly pedlar, in gratitude for winter hospitality, then given to the young daughter of the New England sea captain. This charming story is told in the first person by a modest and pleasantly-philosophical doll with a perpetual smile. During her first century as a toy she survives an incredible catalog of dangers, countless owners (not all little girls, either) and numerous narrow escapes. Hitty is privileged to travel the world from bombay to New Orleans, although in her heart she years for her native Maine. She also meets many famous personalities of the 19th century: the opera singer Adellina Patti, novelist Charles Dickens, and poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Her fortunes range from being worshipped as a goddess by pagan islanders, to posing as doll of fashion. She endures trials by water, fire, and plain neglect. Poor patient Hitty is lost, stolen, borrowed, displayed, auctioned, abused, and hidden. But she endures her fate with gentle stocisim and ends by writing a journal about her adventures. The only pride she allows herself is for the fact that her name, HITTY, is still visible on the hem of her petticoat, in red cross stitches. We follow each detail of her story and keep hoping: yes, now she will have a good owner, the last one who will care for her properly and give her the love and respect which she deserves. But no one can write the final chapter on an antique--especially who charms by her stature and smile. This is a delightful book with many historical details which will touch the reader.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hitty is still loved by many, 20 Nov 1997
By A Customer
Hitty Her First Hundred Years was inspired by a real doll. This doll is currently displayed in the Stockbridge Mass. Library Museum. Many readers have wished they could have their own special doll like Hitty. From 1830 til today doll artists have attempted to make their version of this doll. Some of the most famous names in doll making have attempted to capture her spirit. I have a photo of this orinial Hitty doll posted on my wood doll web page:
If you compare the original doll with the illustrations in the book, you must note how well Dorothy Lathrop captured the sweet, Mona Lisa type smile of this doll.
|
|
|
3.0 out of 5 stars
1929 Newbery Winner will find it difficult to appeal to today's children, 1 Mar 2007
Hitty - Her First Hundred Years is a first person narrative told from the perspective of a wooden doll. It won the Newbery Medal in 1929.
The fact that Hitty is an inanimate object provides physical limits to what she can do, but at the same time it allows her a longevity which opens up to the authoress, Rachel Field, other possibilities denied to a human character.
Having said that, Field never really successfully deals with the paradoxes of an inanimate object's boundaries. We are informed that she can wriggle and even kick her legs (how?) to make a knocking noise and draw attention to herself, yet at other times we are expected to accept that being a wooden doll she was helpless to move or do anything about the dire predicaments she lands in. The longevity allows Field certain liberties that enliven the episodic structure she has set herself, but she tires of this once or twice too, and Hitty is consigned to prolonged periods of time trapped somewhere (in one case for at least fourteen years!) with no notion of what is going on in the wider world.
Because we know in the very first chapter that Hitty is writing her memoirs, there is little suspense in the danger she is exposed to. We know she cannot be burned in the shipwreck. We know she will not be crunched up by a whale. We know she will eventually be rescued from the back of the sofa and from the dead letter office. Although the episodes are all interesting enough in their own light, the book compares badly to modern children's literature because it is episodic - and what loose ends are tied together are done so at the expense of credulity.
One applauds Field's attempt to break a mold but it is ultimately an unsuccessful one. For centuries, writers have recognised that writing biographical personal narratives (both fictional and non-fiction forms) involves being tied to what quickly becomes a tired format. There are a few possibilities for exploration. One can, for example, adopt Horace's in medias res format so that the narrative begins mid-way through the story being told and makes up the gaps in the form of flashbacks. Sterne probably took this time-travel experiment to its apotheosis over two centuries ago when in Tristram Shandy he begin the narrative four years before the birth of the central protagonist and finished it even further back!
Experimentation like this alters perspective and reduces predictability. It allows authors to avoid the David Copperfield-like linear narrative so despised by Salinger's Holden Caulfield, but at the end of the day the story still has to be told and the approaches open to the author are necessarily limited. Hitty - Her First Hundred Years illustrates this only too well. I have a feeling, that this 1929 Newbery Winner will find it difficult to appeal to today's children. Adults who read it as a child, however - now that's an entirely different market!
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Meindert DeJong
by Ted Hughes
by Neil Gaiman
by Robert O'Brien
by Eric Linklater
