ALCHEMY AND MEGGY SWANN. By Karen Cushman. Clarion Books, 2010. 176 pages.
While reading Anne Scott MacLeod’s thought-provoking essay on historical fiction in the recent, and excellent, ‘A Family of Readers: The Book Lover’s Guide to Children’s and Young Adult Literature,’ I was a little distressed to learn that MacLeod faults Karen Cushman for copping out on her heroine’s fate in ‘Catherine, Called Birdy.’
At the end of that work, Birdy lucks out when her arranged medieval marriage to an ‘old, ugly, and illiterate’ lecher is cancelled when he dies. Instead, she will wed his young, handsome, and well-read son. Not a legitimate representation of the time, MacLeod insists. ‘In fairness,’ she admits, ‘I think Cushman knew this; she just flinched at consigning her likable character to her likely fate.’ (MacLeod’s piece is online at The Horn Book’s site.)
OK, sure. But I loved ‘Catherine, Called Birdy.’ I also believe that children have the wherewithal to distinguish fantasy from history, and to realize that writers of fiction have license to alter the documentary record. Readers of ‘Catherine’ learn a great deal about England in the late thirteenth century. As MacLeod has to acknowledge, ‘Birdy’s world is real enough---rough, dirty, and uncomfortable….’
I suppose ‘Alchemy and Meggy Swann’ could be criticized in the same way. Perhaps Meggy, a poor teenaged girl left orphaned in Elizabethan London, crippled by a congenital birth defect, should have ended up battered and hopeless. That would’ve been a different, and grimmer, tale.
A tale that could not have starred Cushman’s Meggy, a typically and satisfyingly feisty and sharp-tongued protagonist whose hard exterior covers the warmest of hearts. But Meggy’s life in exile is hardly anodynic, and Cushman’s London festers, filthy, stinking, noisy—and alive with color and flavor.
With the death of her beloved granny, Meggy has been ousted from country home and sent to her absent-minded and irresponsible father. He’s the one who practices alchemy. With the end of the period of servitude for the boy who assists the alchemist, he is forced to recognize his daughter and enlist her help.
The boy, Roger, turns out to be Meggy’s first friend in London, other than her pet goose. Unlike others, Roger does not ‘look to…demons’ to explain Meggy’s hip dysplasia. He’s more interested in her eyes than her limp.
Attempting to finance the search to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, worthless material into gold, Meggy’s father gets in too deep with the wrong sort. Meggy is, of course, the one who must try to subvert the nefarious plot that ensues.
As she does, she ‘wabbles’ through the crowded London streets and the reader learns about ballads and broadsides, sausage pies and ale, and that alchemy and natural philosophy were precursors of chemistry and the Scientific Revolution.
The reader is also treated to a marvelous story. In the same way that alchemy blurs the line between magic and reason, Cushman crafts a blend of energetic fiction with an authentic dose of the era’s language, customs, sights, sounds, and smells that earns ‘Alchemy and Meggy Swann’ a place among the best children’s historical fiction.
Highly recommended for fifth graders on up.
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Thanks for the nice review and the reasoned antidote to MacLeod's piece. I write stories, based in fact but fictional stories. Holy cow, as Francine Green would say, I do not wish to write tragedies for children.
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