The Search for Delicious

I love re-reading the books that Madeleine and Henry loved to Charlotte.  This is one.  Unfortunately somewhere along the lines we lost the dust jacket which was decorated with drawings by Natalie Babbitt herself. 

 

The Search for Delicious

Natalie Babbitt 1969

This story is quite clever and has a bit of everything.  A boy, Galen, goes on a quest for his kingdom.  The prime minister is compiling a dictionary, but when he gets to the word "delicious" everyone seems to have a different opinion of what it means.  The queen contends that "delicious" is Christmas pudding.  The king insists it to be apples.  To avoid a fight, Galen is sent around the kingdom to record every one's definition of "delicious". 

Meanwhile the queen's brother, Hemlock, has been out stirring up trouble and soon the kingdom is on the brink of a civil war all because of a word.  Underneath it all is the story of a mermaid who has lost her doll and ancient dwarfs and a woldweller (keeper of the forest) high in the trees.  They all intersect is an exciting, beautiful way.

It took a couple weeks of reading every night (and a couple times after lunch) but Charlotte loved it.

 

 "That's right," crowed the woldweller.  "It is small.  And flimsy.  You've got nothing that lasts, you know.  That's not the first town that ever stood there.  There was one before that and one before that one, on back for nine hundred years.  I've seen it all," he said quietly and his eyes went vague and cloudy.  "Around and around.  Coming and going like the spokes of a wheel for hundreds of years.  It's nothing to me."

Galen sat in the moonlight beside the lake and thought about all that had happened since the day the pole began.  Past his mind's eye streamed all the faces he had seen, all the kind, angry, laughing, anxious faces that had peopled the days of his great adventure.  And he remembered, too, those others:  the woldweller's gray cheeks fixed into furrows like the bark of a tree;  the dwarfs, impassive and calm as the mountains themselves;  the wind that spoke through a hundred wayward, invisible mouths;  and Ardis with her eyes wet and unfathomable as the lake that glimmered before him.  He leaned over and studied the dim reflection of his own face in the water.  Young and skinny, he decided, and tired and worried, too.  A transient, changeable, ageable face.  A people face.  "And that's where I belong," he said to himself at last. 

Other books by Natalie Babbitt:

The Eyes of the Amaryllis

Elsie Times Eight

All the Small Poems and Fourteen More

All the Small Poems and Fourteen More

Valerie Worth

illustrated by Natalie Babbitt 1996

A sweet little treasure of poetry!  I didn't realize that Natalie Babbitt was also just an illustrator (we love the books she's written like these.)

These are the kinds of poems perfect for slipping into lunch boxes or mailing off to little friends.

(I made a copy for Charlotte's lunch).

 

Elsie Times Eight

I didn’t realize that Natalie Babbitt (of Tuck Everlasting and Eyes of the Amaryllis fame) wrote picture books. But here is one she also illustrated. I’m fond of the name “Elsie” and that’s how I first spotted this.

Elsie Times Eight

Natalie Babbitt 2001

In a case of miscommunication, Elsie’s parents end up with 8 of her. They’re noisy and rowdy and causing quite a pain so they have to track down her silly fairy godmother (who caused the problem in the first place) to set things right.

The Eyes of the Amaryllis

We are still breathing sea air and watching unrelenting waves sweep up the sand. Here is a wonderful chapter book by Natalie Babbitt. She’s probably most famous for writing “Tuck Everlasting” (another fantastic book) but this was the first of her books that we read and loved. (Madeleine used it for a book report in 4th grade).

 The Eyes of the Amaryllis
Natalie Babbitt 1977


Jenny comes to stay with her grandmother along the ocean. Years ago her grandfather’s ship the Amaryllis was lost in a hurricane and everyday her grandmother scours the shoreline looking for a remnant of him. But as the figurehead sculptor says “what the sea gives, the sea takes”. A beautiful, mysterious story about the sea.


The journey that takes a traveler from inland places to the sea will follow roads that stay, in themselves, exactly the same, but they seem to change entirely. Carefree and busy, now leaf-shadowed, now blank and blinding in the summer sunshine, they stretch ahead importantly between green fields , and the air lies lightly on them. But by the time they have come within three miles, then two, then one, of their destination, they have turned submissive. The trees stand back and stand thin, and scrub pines appear, ragged as molting birds. The edges of the roads are lost now in drifts of sand, and the grass, thinner, like the trees, is rough and tall, rising, kneeling, rising, kneeling, as the breeze combs by.

There seems to be more sky here, a great deal more, so that the traveler is made aware, perhaps for the first time, that he moves along quite unprotected on the crust of the earth and might do well to move with caution, lest all at once he fall off, fall up, endlessly, and disappear. So he holds his gaze to the ground and finds that the air has grown heavy with new, wet smells, and the roads and everything around them look uncared for. But this is not the case. They are cared for with the closest attention- by the sea.

Tuck Everlasting

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest  seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.  The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot.  It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.   Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone.  There is no thunder, no relieving rain.  These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

Tuck Everlasting

Natalie Babbitt 1999

Tuck Everlasting is one of my very favorite books and I love to read the beginning of it at the start of August.  The story is so beautiful and sweet, part coming of age, part a little love story, with just enough mystery and magic and melancholy to make it haunting.  The movie version is wonderful too.  It ages up the characters to make it more of a love story but much of the dialog is right from the book and the costumes and scenery are so pretty.   

One summer ten year old Winnie, meets a curious family, a family who has the mystical distinction of possessing eternal life.  As she spends more time with them, she learns what it means to grow up, to be part of a community, to be part of the larger circle of life.  The patriarch Tuck imparts his wisdom, 

"Know what happens then?" said Tuck.  "To the water?  The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again.  It's a wheel, Winnie.  Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping.  The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too.  And people.  But never the same ones.  Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on.  That's the way it's supposed to be.  That's the way it is."

It might seem like heavy stuff for a young adult/children's book, but Babbitt writes so beautifully and profoundly that it's hard not to love it.

Winnie blinked, and all at once her mind was drowned with understanding of what he was saying.  For she- yes, even she- would go out of the world willy-nilly someday.  Just go out, like the flame of a candle, and no use protesting.  It was a certainty.  She would try very hard not to think of it, but sometimes, as now, it would be forced upon her.  She raged against it, helpless and insulted, and blurted at last, "I don't want to die."

"No," said Tuck calmly.  "Not now.  Your time's not now.  But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born.  You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest.  Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing."