bluecastle | 28 Book -- Day 17

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner (1942)

"One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from..."

My history with these books is the story of how much of a chicken I am. I would say was, but I don't know that I'm any braver now than I was when I was ten. Probably at least a little. When I was ten and all the other kids were reading Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys ... I was too scared by things that go bump in the night. Mysteries were, to my mind, very scary things. I remember holding The Boxcar Children in my hands in the school library and wondering if it would be scary to read. It seems ludicrous now, but I have always been timid. There was also a record of someone reading the story The Red Shoes the creeped me the fuck out. I think I still have it, but have never gotten up the nerve to listen to it over the last 30+ years. Timid is my middle name.

But I someone got brave enough to give The Boxcar Children a try. And Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny running away from home ... but ending up being taken in by their grandfather was a lovely fairy tale ending. Orphans always figured big in my reading choices. There's probably a psychologist somewhere who'd like to delve into that one.

Oddly, when I think back it's the colors I remember ... the cracked pink cup from the garbage dump, the colors of the kids rooms, the yellow house ...

So the next time I feel like running away from home, all I have to do is pick up this book (or one of it's MANY sequels) and have a fine adventure. Maybe I should start looking for a cracked pink cup...

for a list of the bazillion books in this series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boxcar_Children_novels