Twig (Hardcover)

_Twig_ was the only book that kept my daughter happy when she was ill over Christmas. She smiled though her fever was high. She slept with the book beside her so she could read it when she awoke. The simple chapters reminded her of the joy and fun there is in the world.

This is a wonderful classic children's book that never should have been allowed to go out of print! I read this each year to the delight of my fourth grade students from my old worn copies. The books I have belonged to my late great aunt Betty Holden, an elementary teacher in Palo Alto. She read it to me in the `60s, since then it has been one of my favorite children's' books; (I am 47 now) She wrote a note in one that says the book would always remind her of a teacher of her own. This is real children's literature of rare and classic quality.

Set in the early part of the century in the bare dirt back yard of a rundown inner city tenement, the happy, imaginative optimism of a little girl alone at play creates a world that is anything but dreary. We are introduced to the reality of Twig's little world through her point of view while she walks four flights down the back porch stairways of the building past each occupant and an active bird nest. The reader sees that this is where Twig collects the fodder of reality that she soon projects into her fantasy dreamland when she arrives on the ground to play. We can tell she idolizes the beauty of a young wife, shows respect and bemusement at the old spectacled landlord who gives her gum, etc.

In the dirt of the back yard, she transforms a ripped tomato can, a dandelion, a gum wrapper, toothpaste tops, bottle caps, a trickle of water, the sparrow family, "Old Girl" the cat and "Old Boy" the ice-wagon horse into a marvelous imaginary realm of a setting in which to invite an elf named 'Elf' and a Fairy Queen. During the enchanted tale, Twig magically transforms to become one in size and spirit with her newfound imaginary friends, which of course, seem quite plausibly palpable by this point in the story. The writing is wonderful and so are the gorgeous, rich, sweet and tender illustrations that so seamlessly guide and enrich ones imagination in enhancing context to the story.

This is an easy story for children to become absorbed with. It is written with a genuine childlike perspective. But there are also subtle and amusing social commentaries and some neat literary devices as well. Twig projects woes into Sparrows' life based upon marital difficulty she sees in the apartment, for instance. The book is sophisticated enough that one is aware of being able to read nuance into it on a number of levels. One inventive chapter goes off on a discouraging tangent, as one's imagination may, and so is repeated anew with the proper optimistic twists and ending that keep the story alive. I particularly like the stories' closure when; at the last possible moment she declines the opportunity to fly off with the fairies. It is here that we see, as the fairies flutter off quietly on the Royal Magical Cobb-Webb Kerchief, that Twig comes to terms with the fact that, after all, she is just a plain, ordinary little girl, who hears her mother calling. She was changed back.

Readers return from the wonderland as Twig slowly climbs up the zigzag back porch apartment steps from the back yard. We are just as slowly reintroduced to her reality with short visitations at each floor with its occupants and their situations that the reader can now relate to the echoed personalities and behaviors projected into the fairy characters in the fantasy. The way the story brings the reader home in a satisfying circle as the reader is deposited home off the last page, is a 'perfectly lovely end'. "It is like waiting for the story to begin all over again!" Which it is sure to do many times if you read this book but once.
This new edition has a lovely new introduction to it written in the style of the story by the author in April 2001. She is now in her 90's!

Also recommended: Stuart Little, The BFG, The Wind in the Willows. A Childs's Prayer, particularly for its illustrations by Elizabeth Orton Jones.