The Vine: October 2, 2009
In honor of the contest: Bookfest!
Dear Sars,
This book identification had been bothering me since 8th grade, which I just realized was 20 years ago. Yikes. I’ve tried searching online, but I haven’t had any luck. I figured you and your readers would be my best chance.
Before I give the details, I have to apologize for how sketchy they will be. This was a book described to my class by my 8th-grade math teacher. And the more that I think about it, the less sure I am that it’s even a book. It could be a short story or novella.
It’s set in a school. Every year (semester? week?) there is a lottery at the school. One of the students with the lowest grades is chosen to be executed. Then there is another lottery and one of the A students is chosen to be the executioner. Often the A student would be so upset at having to kill a classmate that he or she would try to offer to trade places. Apparently, the school was trying to push all of the students to be average. If you were a middle-of-the-road B student you didn’t have to worry about killing or being killed.
The only other detail I can tell you is that it was released before 1988 since that’s when I heard about it. Any help in resolving this mystery would be greatly appreciated. If you guys can’t figure it out, I’m going to have to resign myself to it being one of the great unsolved mysteries of my life.
Puzzled in Maine
*****
Hiya Sars:
Okay. I’ve been trying to remember this name of this book for YEARS, and I just can’t. So I’m turning to you and your ever-faithful readers in the hopes that they can help.
So I read this book probably about…fifteen years ago. It was a YA book, so far as I can remember. And here is my (unfortunately) short recollection of it. The main character was a girl, probably about seventeen or eighteen. She lived in this time period, but was able to travel back and forth in time to what I think was Victorian England. She met a prince, or a duke, or some other English nobility type (or maybe he was just rich…I’m not sure), and they fell in love. Obviously.
I want to say that the time-traveling was via mirror, but I could be mixing that up with another book. I also want to say that at one point the prince/duke/man of nobility/or maybe just rich guy traveled to this time period, but I could be mixing that up with the
movie Kate and Leopold. I think there was a pivotal scene towards the end that took place in a garden, with a fountain, in ye-olde-English time.
It’s possible that the girl was miserable where she was living, and was seriously considering permanently “moving” to the time period the prince/duke/what-have-you was from. But I could be making that up, too.
I found it in the YA section, but it also seemed to fit well in the Romance category, and now that I’m thinking about it am wondering if perhaps it was misfiled…there were some seriously steamy passages that definitely were a bit too mature for YA.
Obviously, I don’t remember much of this book, but every time I read your Ask the Readers columns, I feel compelled to write you. I’m finally doing it because I’m trying to reconnect to books of my childhood, and this is the only one that I can’t actually remember/find.
Help me, Sars, you’re my only hope!
*****
Dear Sars —
I am hoping that the collective Tomato Nation brain trust can help me unearth the title of a book I remember loving as a wee lass, but have only the barest recollection of.
The book would have been first published no later than the mid-1980s, probably by at least 1983 or so. It was an elementary-level chapter book of the “adventures of a girl settling the American frontier” type that I recall being pretty popular around that time. There may have been discussions of red gingham and covered wagons. I’m pretty sure there were the stereotypically tense interactions between the white settlers and the benevolent Indians. For some reason Kentucky springs to mind.
The main character was a little girl between 8 and 12, probably. There were rolling green hills, a friend of some sort, tension between her and her family (she may have been traveling west with an aunt and uncle, or father and stepmother?). Seriously, I remember only the barest bits and pieces.
What is absolutely seared in my memory, however, is the butter and sugar sandwich. The main character’s favorite treat was bread with butter and sugar. Usually the sugar was brown sugar, but as a very very special treat, she would be allowed this delicacy made from white sugar. I have no idea why this made such an impression on me, but I would make myself these “sandwiches” on a regular basis for weeks after reading and rereading this book (although I preferred brown sugar).
I still sneak the occasional butter-and-sugar sammy
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
I don’t know any of those books but a butter ‘n’ sugar sammy sounds yummy!
I think the time travel book is Both Sides of Time or one of its sequels by Caroline B. Cooney.
The last one is “Bread and Butter Journey” I’m pretty sure. We read it in school in first or second grade and my Mother made bread and sugar snack for weeks!
Woo Hoo I knew one!
Could the butter one be “Bread and Butter Journey” by Anne Colver? I read that one as a child and it more or less fits the description.
Here’s a link that contains the cover.
http://tinyurl.com/ycdo78v
Awe, I remember those 3 girls.
Unfortunately none of these ring bells for me… the only book I can ever recall featuring butter-and-sugar sandwiches was one of the Great Brain series. My parents got to reminiscing about that one night when I was a teenager – they both toasted them like in the GB books. I could never get it right… it either burned outright or tasted like cinnamon-free cinnamon toast.
Good luck with the book searches, I need to go fire up the toaster oven right now.
@ Puzzled: I have no idea what book that is, but (1) what a depressing idea and (2) the fact that your teacher described it to you is downright disturbing.
and I second the yumminess of bread with butter and brown sugar. a frequent snack when I was a kid
I read the book with the butter-and-sugar frontier sandwiches too, but I thought it was one in of the “Little House” books. I read a bunch of books in that genre as a kid, so maybe the details from all of them have blended over time.
Tanya, Marnie – I think you’re right! I totally remember that book cover even. Digging a little further, I think it might actually have been the previous book, “Bread and Butter Indian”. Both of which are, of course, out of print. I shall hie me to the library.
Thank you!
(And now I really want a butter & sugar sandwich to celebrate. :)
The second one is the Out of Time books (there were 3 or 4 I think) by Caroline B Cooney. Annie and Strat! I loved those books.
Also this is my first time knowing the answer to one of these and I feel like I’ve truly arrived as a member of Tomato Nation.
Annie, I’m pretty sure they did eat butter and sugar sandwiches in the “Little House” books too.
Or wait…maybe I’m thinking of Booky? Who knew so many literary heroines were eating sugar sandwiches.
@Puzzled
The story sounds pretty similar to the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. There, every year the entire town stones to death one citizen chosen by lottery. It’s not set in a school, though a young girl wins (loses?) the lottery over the course of the story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery
Thanks, Adrienne and Katie! The second vine is mine, and I’m gonna run to Borders after work today to see if I they have it! I really, really hope you guys are right. I read a lot of Caroline B Cooneys work as a kid, so this may actually be it!
The butter and sugar sandwiches are ringing a bell for me, faint though it is. The writer might be looking for the Caddie Woodlawn books — the tension in Caddie’s family and the interactions with the Indians sound about right, and those books had an amazing way of describing food. But “Bread and Butter Journey” sounds really promising!
Little House on the Prairie is NOT the answer to the butter-and-sugar sandwich one, but I’m speaking up because I know why people are recalling it: there’s a scene in one of the books (don’t recall which one) where the girls are given a taste of white sugar (instead of the everyday brown sugar) as a treat. That particular reversal captured my imagination as a kid, too. :-)
Man, Caddie Woodlawn. The image of Obadiah, previously considered brutish and worthless in the narrative, saving the town from fire by digging a big ditch around a burning house…I still remember that, years later.
@Alex: It isn’t The Lottery although I remember being disturbed by that story as a child.
@sherrylynn: I didn’t really think about it at the time, but looking back on it, it is pretty disturbing that this was brought up in a middle school class. On the other hand, middle school is probably the age kids are most enthralled by really disturbing stories. I
Oooh, Sars! The kicker was that Obadiah was saving the SCHOOLHOUSE!!!
Yay, Obadiah! No, he didn’t fit well into the seats, but he sure saved their behinds ….
And it’s probably been even LONGER for me. Loved that book – my copy had been my MOM’s. Heh. I asked HER what it had been like, traveling in a covered wagon.
(Hey, I was a really little kid. There was no difference to me then between “old” and “REALLY old”. )
(Now there is. I’M “really old”. Oy.)
Also, in a strange coincidence, I just had brown sugar, butter and bread for dessert a couple of nights ago.
It can’t have been the Little House books because we read those over and over when I was a kid and I had never heard of a butter and sugar sandwich until this Vine.
No, it’s definitely not the Little House books or Caddie Woodlawn – as the original flailing reader, I am almost certain it’s one of the Bread and Butter books. I remember the covers of both clearly now that I’ve seen them.
I *heart* the TN brain trust!
@Puzzled – This is a long shot and I don’t have a title but the story you described kind of has vibes of some of Stephen King’s earlier short story work, possibly even back to when he wrote as Richard Bachman. It’s not the exact same plot but it sounds like it has the same creepy overtones of shorts like The Running Man, Rage and The Long Walk. As noted, I don’t have a title nor do I think it’s any of those specifically. But I immediately thought of his early writing when I read your description and the time period they would have been authored certainly fits.
Also @Sherrylynn – agreed about the oddness factor that a teacher would think this appropriate to tell to a middle school class. When I was in high school my physics teacher used a real-life example of a horrible fatal motorcycle crash he had witnessed (complete with stick figure diagrams and lots of arrows) to demonstrate some of the rules of physics. Some people should be turned away from the doors of teachers’ college on day one, methinks ;-)
Yeah, OK, maybe not the FIRST thing middle schoolers should hear about – but who knows how that conversation came up? In my sophomore history class, the teacher would have a time every week (or day, or something) in which we could ask ANYTHING we wanted. The most memorable question asked was, “Is it true that an orgasm feels like a sneeze, only…bigger?”
Ahh, school.
The second one sounds so much like “The Mirror of her Dreams” by Stephen R. Donaldson. I really enjoyed that book…but it may be more “adult” than the one you’re thinking of. There is a sequel also called “A Man Rides Through”.
I do agree that the second book sounds like the Caroline B. Cooney Time series, but there are also elements that sound like a Jude Deveraux romance novel called A Knight In Shining Armour (especially the fountain scene) – you should check it out!
Bread/Butter/Sugar anecdote: A True Story
I had a very elderly next-door neighbor whose Irish immigrant father worked construction, and he had two bread-and-butter sandwiches, with sugar, for lunch every day.
A girlfriend’s (now elderly) Irish mom used to make bread-and-butter, with sugar, for her kids when she didn’t have anything else she could afford.
Philadelphia Immigrant Factoids.
@ Krissa – Good point, it’s hard to say how the conversation that led to the story being told might have come up to begin with. I do admire middle and high school teachers who handle their jobs with grace, since that has to be the hardest age group to teach. You’re right that given the opportunity (or even if not…) they’ll ask just about anything. I have to ask, how did the teacher handle that most memorable question?
@rayvyn2k: I thought of Donaldson’s Mirror of Her Dreams / Man Rides Through too; it does have the traveling to other worlds through mirrors, and some of the other elements described.
But like you, I feel that it is much more adult than the one described (though HelpMe did propose that maybe it had been miscategorized) — some of it is VERY explicit. Also (I would put it this way, as opposed to having a sequel) it is really one very long novel divided into two books for publication, and if our inquirer reached the end of the story (as is implied), surely the 2-volume format would have been one of the main things remembered. There’s really no resolution at the end of the first book.
Still, I wonder….
@rayvyn2K @rinaldo It’s definitely not Mirror of her Dreams – I read through a brief plotline, and it’s not ringing any bells.
Oh, btw, I’m the inquirer. I appreciate the help though! I think it may very well be the Cooney book. Hopefully I’ll find out this weekend!
@Rinaldo: You’re right, of course. It’s been ages since I read them but now I’m remembering that I had to wait ages for the second one to come out…and how upset I was that the first one did not really stand by itself. Still, a rollicking read. I bought Donaldson’s latest addition to the “Thomas Covenant” saga but haven’t read it yet because I want to re-read the others and they are, unfortunately, packed. ARGH.
@JH – I don’t remember the answer nearly as well as the question, but I think it boiled down to something like, “it’s different for everyone; don’t worry about it too much, you’ll experience it when you’re ready and then you won’t have to depend on someone else’s description.”
The time-travelling one sounds a lot like a TV show that was made by a New Zealand-Australian partnership.
Girl finds mirror in antique store, mirror is placed in exactly the same place as it was 100-odd years ago and becomes a portal. The family in the past had kids the same age and she would pop back and forth. I think the old-time family were Russian having escaped teh Bolsheviks or whoever was doing the killing at the time. A summary is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(TV_series)
I agree with Victoria, above; the second novel sounds like it could be Deveraux’s Knight in Shining Armor.
A quick caveat, though – the book was originally published in 1989, and became one of Deveraux’s best sellers. She revisited the novel in the early 2000s and added quite a bit of new content which, I feel, served to weaken the characterizations. So for everyone out there who might want to read Knight, I strongly suggest you find a used copy of the original printing. It’s one of my favorite romance novels!
@Puzzled – do you think it’s possible your teacher just made that story up? Maybe he/she was a frustrated writer, or just liked telling stories?
@La BellaDonna:
Philadelphia Immigrant Factoids.
Funnily enough, the last time I visited my mother, she was recalling (bemoaning, really) that HER mother had given me bread-and-butter-and-sugar sandwiches when I was little. And yes, her mother was from a Very Irish family in Philadelphia. (I’m not sure whether my great-grandparents were immigrants themselves, or if in fact THEIR parents had been the immigrants.)
(The context was my mother suggesting that I take my coffee with sugar and cream because of this early sugar-loving conditioning from my grandmother. *rolls eyes* This had faint moral overtones due to the fact that my brother takes his coffee black, and also because my brother and his wife, who were at the meal with us, have just recently decided to go on diets, so I am sure this was my mothers unsubtle hinting that I should, too. BACK OFF, MOM.)
The time travel book sounds similar to _Charlotte Sometimes_, although I’m sure that’s not it because that one didn’t have the romance thing happening. A girl (12 yr old, maybe) in boarding school falls asleep one night only to wake up the next morning in the same room 100 years before. She has kind of a double life, flipping back and forth between times and befriending a girl in the past. I had to mention it because it was one of my FAVorite books as a kid/preteen. Then when I got a little older and started to get really (I mean ridiculously) into The Cure, I was so excited to discover they had a song by the same name, inspired by the book.
I don’t have any IDs for you, but if no one here is able to identify the first book for you, try the community whatwasthatbook on Livejournal: http://community.livejournal.com/whatwasthatbook/profile?mode=full. They’ve been able to ID books for me in the past.
Another one for number two is A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley, which is about a girl who travels back to (I think) Elizabethan England and falls in love with a young lord type person.
I don’t know any of the books but when I was little we used to eat bread butter brown sugar sandwiches. We’d just butter one slice of bread, sprinkle on some brown sugar then fold that slice over onto itself. Yummy indeed! Wonder if Mom got the idea from the book?
rayvyn2k: I thought it was SRD also until the two book thing came to mind. However, just wondered if you knew about kevinswatch.com, where they discuss all of SRD’s works. Check it out.
It sounds a little like the Grounding of Group Six, but if I remember that story correctly, the parents sent the kids to school to have them killed.