Missing Mustang Sally

White Fang (1906)/Call of the Wild (1903) Jack London 

On day 8 of the childhood book challenge, I’m going to cheat and name two books because they are inextricably entwined in my memory. At some point, I acquired several paperbacks that were mostly, if not all about animals. They included these two books, as well as Big Red (1945), A Nose for Trouble (1949), and Outlaw Red (1953) (all by Kjelgaard), The Black Stallion (Farley) – maybe more, but I’m not sure. Anyway, I read White Fang first, probably in late elementary or the equivalent of middle school. Our parochial school didn’t have a middle school; it was K-8 and 9-12. Period. I was caught up in the first person of the wolf-dog hybrid and his many challenges. I imagine it might seem a bit cheesy were I to go back and try to read it again. 

But I enjoyed White Fang so much, I immediately read Call of the Wild after it, and was somewhat disappointed with Call of the Wild, perhaps because Buck returns to the wild, and I wanted to “keep” him. I did read Call of the Wild one or two more times and never re-read White Fang, so there’s that. I always had trouble picturing Buck in my head as part St. Bernard, probably because White Fang was stuck in my head, and I always wanted Buck to be a husky or a wolf cross. It did leave me with a desire to own big dogs. At the time, we may have still had our Chihuahua, Tiny, or we may already have had our Cherrier (Chihuahua-terrier cross), Tina – both small dogs. After I married for the first time, we got two black Labs and ever since, when I’ve had a dog, I’ve had a big dog. Anatolian Shepherd Madra was the biggest, weighing in at 110 pounds.

What 10 (or 5 or 15) books influenced you or that you loved as a child//preteen/teen?

Day 9 The Snow Queen – Hans Christian Andersen

I’ve been keeping a very messy list and notes in a Word document about the books I want to mention in this challenge. Yes, I have too much free time. I was reviewing it today, and it appears that if it wasn’t a book about animals, it was an “adult” book, or at least a young adult book. The truth is, once I found the city library, I didn’t read too many children’s books. I did a search on the “best” children’s books of the 60s, and most of them I’d either never heard of or I read them for the first time when I read them to my own kids (Dr. Seuss, The Giving Tree, Where the Wild Things Are, Where the Red Fern Grows, and so on). 

All I  could think of was one of my favorite books was an anthology of Hans Christian Andersen stories that I read and reread, and one of my favorites among those was "The Snow Queen." If you’ve never heard of it, it’s the story of close friends, children Kai and Gerda and how Kai turns against Gerda  and everyone and everything he ever loved (because he has a splinter of the troll’s mirror in his eye), how he is taken away to the Snow Queen’s palace, and how Gerda spends a year looking for her good friend It seems to have impressed me when I read it, sometime in elementary school because I can still recall the feelings of grief that Gerda must have felt in losing her friend and the cold (which was also in his heart) of her young friend, Kai. I’m amazed now because of the thread of religion that runs through it and the Grandmother’s final Scripture quotation.

Mind you, years in Catholic school would eventually turn me into a lifelong skeptic – but not when I read "The Snow Queen," apparently. I was enchanted with other Andersen stories, too: "The Little Match Girl," "The Princess and the Pea," "The Ugly Duckling," "Thumbelina," "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," and "The Emperor’s New Clothes" come to mind. They became like old friends to me as I reread them, often with a flashlight under the covers, long past my bedtime.