Last of the Luck Books

Ojo the Unlucky becomes Ojo the Lucky because he learns to choose his own fortune as he travels through Oz on a great quest. This, largely, is the point of The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Thematically, it would work much better, if, after The Tin Woodman's rousing speech to Ojo, who has just listed reasons he is unlucky: "Every reason you have given is absurd. But I have noticed that those who continually dread ill luck and fear it will overtake them, have no time to take advantage of any good fortune that comes their way. Make up your mind to be Ojo the Lucky," the quest did not utterly fail and Ozma did not laugh at Ojo while her magicians set everything right without any effort on his part. However, the fact that a children's book with such a glaring plot and theme problem could be readable by an adult 96 years after its first publication speaks volumes about the crafting of the crazy set of characters (I want to know what a woozy is and how the glass cat will interact with the pink kitten, I care about Ojo's adventure even when I know they will all come to naught) or nostalgia (this is the first book I remember being given from my grandfather. As a second grader, at 342 pages is was far too long for me, but I struggled through because grandpa obviously thought I could read it).

Not the best children's fantasy book available by a long shot, but certainly not the worst, and lovers of fantasy all owe a great debt to L. Frank Baum for opening up fantasy lands to book length stories.

Like The Patchwork Girl of Oz , Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven wraps up a bit too neatly. Unlike Ojo, however, all of the characters in Pigs in Heaven must do their own transforming in order to reach any resolution. As with my recent re-reading of The Bean Trees, I was expecting Pigs in Heaven not to live up to my memory, and, as with The Bean Trees, was pleasantly surprised to find I still love the book. The Kentucky and Okie accents don't bother me the way they did when I first read it , probably because I've met more people who really do speak the ways the characters do-- maybe they aren't there just for cutesy "local color." The tension about what it takes to be a good mother matters all the more to me, and I've never been particularly bothered by plots that hang on unlikely coincidences (of course the character's lives are going to intersect, that's why we've been learning about them in the first place). In this reading I did pick up my SiL's issue with the rain in Seattle: Barbara, in Seattle it is wet but it does not rain hard all the time, it is not like living in a car wash. It's amazing how one detail wrong can really throw the experience of a whole book. In this reading I also didn't see any compelling explanation for why I had to move to Scotland without fully discussing it with my college boyfriend, which I somehow did in 1994, when I instructed said boyfriend to read both The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven in order to understand me. With those caveats being made, like my on-line kindred spirit Marieke, I'm happy to report that Kingsolver's novels feel different with age, but no worse for wear.

You can't think too much about luck, good or bad. Taylor has decided
this before, and at this moment renews her vow. Lucky Buster is lucky
to be alive and unlucky to have been born with the small wits that led him
to disaster in the first place. Or lucky, too, for small wits, that allow
him so little inspection of the big picture. In the ambulance on the way to
the hospital, he wanted to go to McDonald's. (pg. 32)