Rascal, Raccoons and what books are about

The request for suggestions of books to read while breastfeeding led to a fascinating list of recommendations, ranging from Lonesome Dove to The Count of Monte Cristo to 1491. My Sister-in-Law decided that nature and tone were critical, and brought me two "sweet" books back in August. Both were hardback, which physically didn't work with my early nursing set-up, but after finding a way to read all of Harry Potter, with its hardback and awkwardly large volumes, I knew it was time to read Rascal and I Capture the Castle (link to future post goes here).

Sterling North's Rascal was the 1963 winner of the Dutton Animal Book Award. The cover, with its Animal Book Award logo and classy woodcuts of a boy and his raccoon, prompted the Mister to comment, "that was a different time" which made me laugh, as Rascal's subtitle is "A Memoir of a Better Era". To thirtysomethings in 2009, an age when sweet books about a boy and his raccoon could be published and win awards is about as nostalgically distant as the 1918 events in the book are to the author writing about them forty five years later.

Both the Mister and I think that we've been previously acquainted with Rascal. A quick internet search reveals this is almost certainly true. Whether we know it from the Newberry Honor list, from any number of paperback printings, or from the Disney Movie of the same name, I don't know, although I imagine we aren't remembering the 52 episode Japanese anime series. The work we recall is a sentimental story of a boy and his raccoon.
Rascal the book, is, of course, a sentimental story of a boy and a raccoon. It's an autobiographical account of 11 year-old Sterling's year living with an adopted raccoon in a small town in Wisconsin, and I can totally see how fourth grade me read the book as a raccoon story. While Rascal, the raccoon, does drive the "plot" of the book, the book is about so much more. It's about the end of the carriage era and the take-over of the automobile. It's about World War I. It's about a middle aged man coming to grips with his family: long-lived absent-minded father, mother who died when he was 7, hard-working aunt and uncle fulfilling traditional farm roles and relatively conventional siblings. It's about growing up (to the point that the wikipedia entry calls Rascal "a prose poem to adolescent angst"). The me of now at age thirty seven read it as a book about wildlife conservation*.

Rascal prompted a return to a long term contemplation as to how one describes what books are about. The issue becomes complicated quickly because a single good book is about many things and the plot may be the easiest to express but is often of lesser importance (yes, A Tale of Two Cities is about the French Revolution [or Paris and London] and Pride and Prejudice is about marriage, but no, that really doesn't capture the works at all). It doesn't take wild post-modern thought to notice that readers, can, and do, read books very differently** Then there is the issue that the same person can see a book very differently through time. My mother wouldn't let my brother (two years older than I) read Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear because it involved too much sex while strongly recommending it to me because I would find all of the plant healing fascinating. I recall reading a book in elementary school that involved fourteen year-olds starting a French restaurant. It was about the horrors of being a teenager including an abortion and large boobs. I didn't know what an abortion or a "c-cup" was at the time, I knew what vichyssoise was, and that's then, what the book was about to me.

So my blog questions to you are 1) have you read Rascal in any form and what did you think it was about? 2) what books, in your opinion, are about very different things than what other people think?

As for Rascal, it is enjoyable. I think my mother, still in Whistling Season nostalgia, would enjoy it, as would many other of my readers.

*In the middle of the summer of 1918, Sterling, his raccoon, and his father travel north to the shores of Lake Superior. On this journey, Sterling is very excited about seeing deer for the first time. Having seen 8 deer at once under the chestnuts the previous evening, this struck me as funny. and sparked the idea that the world is ripe for a book examining the history of humans and deer in North America.

**A colleague in Kansas hated Bernhard Schlink's The Reader because, "there's this whole book that's supposed to be so great about reading and then you get to the climax and the big secret is that SHE CAN'T R. . . but duh, that was obvious from the beginning." I think she literally said "duh". She looked stunned when I said that the book was not about reading, but was rather about the guilt complexes of post-WWII Germans.