Days of Sand by Aimee de Jongh

In 1937, twenty-two-year-old John Clark is rushing down the streets of Washington, D.C. to make an interview. He runs into a newsboy, scattering his newspapers on the sidewalk. But John can't stop to help - he needs to keep his appointment.

In the interview, John tells the man that he lives in New York City, working for a local newspaper as a photographer. The interviewer recognizes his name, which is the same as his father who was a well-known photographer. The man isn't sure John is the right person for the job when he sees that most of his portfolio is filled with photographs of the Black community. They are looking for a photographer to take photos in the south.

John pleads with him to give him a chance, that he can cover any subject. The interviewer then admits that his work is outstanding and he has the job. He learns that this government agency wants to send him to photograph farmers in "No man's land.", a phrase being used to describe the panhandle of Oklahoma. The interviewer explains that after the Wall Street crash in October, 1929, the country also crashed and farmers were hit especially hard.

Mary, the assistant in the office, tells John he will be in the area for a month and will send his film back by post to be developed in their lab. John worries that his photographs will not be good enough but Mary tells him that one way to get impactful photographs is to "help the truth a little" by staging the subjects. She also explains what the Dust Bowl is. Pulling out a dusty map, Mary explains that it covers parts of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and the panhandle of Oklahoma. The name comes from the dust storms that now blow through this area, blocking out the sun. Because of the drought and the storms, people are leaving to find a better life. Because of the drought and storms, people are leaving to find a better life. They want his photographs to show what life in the "Dust Bowl" is like. John is given a script - a list of subjects to photograph.

So in the middle of the Great Depression, John returns home, stunned that he has landed a job. As he is packing for the trip, his mother gives him a photograph of his father telling him that his father did love him but had trouble showing it. And so early the next morning, John sets off for Oklahoma in what turns out to be a life-changing experience.

Discussion

Days of Sand is a historical graphic novel about life during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, in 1937. This richly illustrated novel effectively portrays life during the Dust Bowl and how challenging it was for the people who lived in the southern plains during this economic and environmental catastrophe.

The Dust Bowl, as briefly explained in the novel, encompassed areas in Kansas, Colorado, the Texas panhandle, the Oklahoma panhandle, and parts of New Mexico. The problems began in the 1920's when land not suited for agriculture was planted and farmers began to abandon soil conservation practices. After the stock market crash in 1929, an economic depression began. This was followed in the 1930's by a series of droughts, each one worsened by the fact that the land did not recover fully from the previous one. In total there were four droughts: 1930-31, 1934, 1936 and the last in 1939-40. 

There were a number of factors that came together to create the dust bowl. The land had been quickly settled a century earlier without much understanding of the ecology and environment of the southern plains. The methods of farming used by these initial settlers were better suited to the Eastern United States with its regular rainfall. In the southern plains, there were periods of plentiful rain but also short droughts from which the region recovered. In the novel, Betty Harrison tells John Clark how when her grandparents settled in Oklahoma in 1910, it was a paradise of "green grass, blue skies, clean air..."

With the economic downturn of the Great Depression, farmers began to cultivate land that was not suited for farming and to abandon what few conservation practices they were already using. It was a matter of simple economics: they needed to farm as much land as possible to make enough money to live. Mary tells John Clark, that "they brought this on themselves" is only partly true, as outside pressures such as economics also played an important role.

Days of Sand portrays the personal journey of fictional photographer John Clark as he travels into the heart of the catastrophe, ostensibly to photograph conditions so the government can understand what's happening. His journey begins as a photography job but becomes personal when he experiences the realities of life in the dust bowl. As he changes his focus from trying to get photographs from the script he's been given to actually getting to know the people, he begins to see the human side of the tragedy. The loss of a young mother has such a profound effect on John, that he comes to understand that no photograph can capture the pain, the loss and the heartbreak her family experiences. It is his belief that a photograph cannot capture the complexities of an event like the Dust Bowl, that photographs can be deceiving and can fail to capture the emotions, "...colors, tastes, scents and sounds."

In a letter to the man who hired him, John writes, "If I had to describe my time in the Dust Bowl...I would talk about the stinging pain I felt when the flurries of dust hit my skin. I would talk about how dust could make you fell you're suffocating with every breath. I would talk about the slow decay of the human spirit after endless days of sand. None of that can be captured in a photograph." He resigns believing he became a photographer in an attempt to please his abusive father. He hopes that others will have the courage to photograph their lives.

Interestingly, in the back matter, De Jongh has included many interesting black and white photographs, and a brief write-up on the Farm Security Administration, the Photography Program, the impact of this program, and some of the iconic photographs that captured life during the Dust Bowl. Some of these photographs were inspirational in other ways - for example author John Steinbeck used the FSA archive in his research for his book, The Grapes of Wrath.

Days of Sand is a beautiful graphic novel, with wonderful illustrations that complement this poignant story about life in the Dust Bowl of the 1930's. Highly recommended.

Book Details:

Days of Sand by Aimee de Jongh
London, UK:  Self MadeHero    2022
277 pp.

Small Things by Mel Tregonning

Small Things is a picture book without words about the timely topic of anxiety in children.

The book begins with a young boy in school gym class. He wants to fit in with his classmates, to be chosen to play but gets excluded. After class he grabs a basketball to bounce, trips and falls, causing the other children to laugh at him.

Lunch hour isn't much better as he tries to join a group of children sitting in a circle but no one welcomes him. He is waved over to a picnic table. Tiny creatures, his first feelings of anxiety begin to appear.

After lunch, the boy finds himself taking a math test. Word problems are horrible at the best of times and this test has word problems. The math test means even more anxiety. As the clock ticks on, his test is marked and a grade of C is the result. Upset, the boy goes to see the teacher who encourages him. But the boy knows his marks have been slipping over the past weeks. At first he had marks of A+ and A but now his grades have fallen to a C.

Walking home, the boy's anxiety is intense, manifested by the tiny demon-like creatures following him, taking chunks out of his arms and legs. Looking at his bedroom wall the boy sees many certificates of merit and student awards. This does not comfort him but only increases his anxiety.

That night while trying to do math problems, he struggles and is overwhelmed by his anxiety. He takes this out on his older sister who is practicing her violin. She tries to comfort him, to reassure him, but in bed that night he is overwhelmed by anxiety. The tiny demons representing his anxiety swirl around him and the bed.

The next day another math work sheet receives an even lower mark. The anxiety the boy feels eats away at his very self. Overwhelmed, the boy strikes out at his only friend, a girl who has invited him to eat lunch with her when others have turned away. She received a mark of a B on the test. At home, the boy's anxiety is so great that he feels as if huge chunks of his very self are being eaten away. He cannot sleep.

His big sister comes in to see him and at this point the boy shares his anxiety and his pain, showing her the huge chunk missing from his arm. His sister rolls up her sleeve, revealing the wound on her arm - she too suffers from anxiety. Her anxiety is related to her music and in fact her hand that holds the violin contains many cracks. His sister convinces him to tell their parents about the math test and his marks.

Their parents offer him comfort and sit down at the kitchen table to help him work out the problems. That night the boy goes to sleep with the anxiety demons still present but not near him or his bed. When the boy returns to school the next day, he sees that many of his classmates, including his new friend also carry anxieties with them.

Discussion

Small Things is a graphic picture book created by Mel Tregonning  a young Australian illustrator. It began as a comic strip about a boy struggling with his inner demons of anxiety but was never completed. Sadly Mel took her life in 2014. Her family realized that the comic strip reflected her own struggles with anxiety and depression.

Mel was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1983. When she was sixteen-years-old, Mel had a short comic, titled Night published in 2009 by Gestalt Comics. In this comic, a young girl struggles to cope with the demons of anxiety. Mel knew about anxiety and depression having struggled with both throughout her life. Unfortunately, her moment of crisis came in 2014, after having been recently released from hospital.

Although Mel died before she completed her book, her family decided to finish her work and have it published as a way to spread awareness about mental health issues. To complete the last three pages of the book, award-winning illustrator Shaun Tan was contacted. Tan had already been contacted by Mel so her family felt that he was the one to complete those last few pages. Her original illustrations had been done in soft graphite on medium weight paper. Tan carefully considered those drawings so that he could emulate them sufficiently.

The tiny demons that surround the young boy are his anxieties and worries. They are black, complex and fearful looking as only anxieties and worries can be. They are so consuming, they eat away at him, causing him tremendous physical and emotional pain. Each worry takes away a bit of his self, seeming to diminish him. But Tregonning's message seems to be that children with anxiety should be encouraged to talk to an adult, a parent and/or a friend. Her message is one of hope - the demons of anxiety can be held at bay, with help. One illustration near the end of the book, showing the boy sleeping, tucked safely in his bed while his anxiety demons hover in the distance, implies that reaching out will help, will keep those demons at bay. Reaching out also means we discover we are not alone.

Anyone suffering from anxiety, whether they be a child, teen or adult will find Small Things very relevant. Young children will learn from Small Things that they are not alone, that we all have our struggles and that there are people who care. My hope is that Mel Tregonning is at peace. Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord.

Book Details:

Small Things by Mel Tregonning
Toronto: Pajama Press Inc.   2018

My Heart and other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga

"I can't help but laugh. If I have a boyfriend, his name is Death. And I'm pretty sure Roman is in love with him, too. It's like a love triangle gone wrong. Or maybe it's a love triangle gone right: we both get the guy on April 7."

Sixteen year old Aysel Seran lives in Langston, Kentucky with her mom, stepdad Steve, and her half sister, Georgia and brother, Mike. Aysel is obsessed with killing herself. Her life is hell after her father was sent to prison for murder.

While working at Tucker's Marketing Concepts, Aysel joins an online suicide group, Smooth Passages which is dedicated to helping people kill themselves. Aysel sees a message on the Suicide Partners forum which pairs up people who help each other commit suicide, and decides to respond to it. The message is from a seventeen-year-old boy who lives in the adjacent town and who uses the handle FrozenRobot.

Aysel's life has been made intolerable by her father committing a crime which is only fully revealed to readers near the end of the novel. That crime involved the death of Langston's golden boy, Timothy Jackson, three years ago. Timothy was Langston's Olympic hopeful in track and field.

She's lost her friends who "scattered as fast as they could once the news of my dad's crime traveled through the halls of school".  As a result of her father's incarceration, Aysel has come to live with her mother and Steve full time and she feels she's never really fit into her family. "I've never fit, not really before my dad lost it, and certainly not after..." Aysel believes she is a constant reminder to her mother of her dad and her potential to become a criminal like him. For Aysel suicide is the means to prevent "myself from growing into the person I've terrified of becoming."

Aysel and FrozenRobot, whose name is Roman Franklin, meet at the root beer stand on Route 36 which is between their two towns of Langston and Willis. When Aysel sees Roman for the first time, he's not what she's expecting. He's tall, lanky with "buzzed chestnut-colored hair and deep-set hazel eyes." Roman doesn't look like someone who is intent on committing suicide because he looks like he cares about his appearance and he seems to be popular at the root beer stand where the waitresses flirt with him. However, to Roman, Aysel does fits the part of someone who wants to kill herself because she looks so terribly miserable. From their first meeting, Aysel learns that Roman is an exceptional basketball player, who used to work out with Brian Jackson, the younger brother of the boy her father killed. However, he no longer plays the sport he loves so much.

At school, Aysel's physics teacher, Mr. Scott, assigns a project to the class that involves taking pictures to illustrate the principles of the conservation of energy. Mr. Scott chooses the teams by picking names out of a hat resulting in Aysel being paired with Tyler Brown. Aysel doesn't care much about completing the project because it is due after April 7th, the date she and Roman have chosen to kill themselves.

The second time Aysel and Roman meet, Roman reveals why he wants to commit suicide. One day Roman was babysitting his nine year old sister, Madison, who suffered from seizures and couldn't be left alone. However, Roman had his girlfriend over and while he was making out with her, Madison had a seizure and drowned in the bathtub. He gets little sympathy from Aysel though, who believes that unlike her, the world does feel compassion for Roman and what happened to him.

Aysel and Roman drive up to Crestville Pointe which is a park overlooking the Ohio River to scout out a location to commit suicide. Aysel refuses to tell Roman why she wants to kill herself and he tells her that he wants to know because if her reason is stupid he will try to talk her out of it. Aysel begins to see how Madison's death has affected Roman. Although he is classically good looking, the type who is popular in school she realizes "...the more I stare at him, the more I see his grief wrapped around him like shackles he can never take off. I try to imagine him without the grief...but it's hard to see him as anything other than desperately sad." Roman wants to jump off the cliffs at Crestville Pointe and into the Ohio River because he feels that drowning like Madison did is the right way to die.

The next day when school is canceled due to snow, Aysel's half sister, Georgia calls Aysel out on her attitude. She tells Aysel that her dad has given Aysel a home, implying she should be grateful. She tells Aysel that she is not to blame for what her father did. "I'm tired of you spending every day feeling sorry for yourself just because of what your dad did. Newsflash: You aren't your dad. And you should stop blaming everyone else for what he did. Yourself included." Aysel is touched by the concern of her half sister who tells her "I just wish you weren't so sad all the time, Aysel" and the love of her half-brother, Mike who begs his mom to make sure she puts more chocolate chips in the pancake batter because "Aysel loves chocolate chips." Suddenly Aysel realizes that leaving them is going to be difficult.

Tyler and Aysel decide to take pictures at the zoo for their physics project and arrange to go to Louisville the following Saturday. At Roman's on Friday evening, Aysel agrees to allow him to tag along with her and Tyler. Dinner at Roman's home makes Aysel feel good because she's the center of attention which she surprisingly enjoys; Roman's mother cooked a Turkish meal for her, wants to know her opinion on everything, and she is friendly and kind towards Aysel. However, the fact that she mistakenly believes Roman's interest in Aysel is a sign he is recovering from his sister's death makes Aysel feel guilty.

On Saturday, Georgia invites herself to come with Tyler, Roman and Aysel to the zoo. At the zoo, Tyler tells Aysel that Georgia is trying to be friends with her and that she is concerned about her. Talking to Roman about Georgia leads Aysel to realize that she wants to see her father before she dies. Roman doesn't like this because he considers that Aysel is trying to find reasons to live, however, he decides he will go with her to see her dad.

After rummaging through papers in her mother's bedroom, Aysel learns that her father is at McGreavy Correction Facility. She calls the facility and then decides to visit the following Saturday. With eleven days before April 7, Aysel starts to become more involved in life. She finds that actually doing her work makes her shift at TMC go faster, and then she invites Roman to go with her to the Langston carnival, the one place she can remember being truly happy.

At the carnival, Aysel tells Roman more about going to see her dad and that he is in prison. When Roman seems unfazed by this, Aysel is grateful for his unconditional acceptance of her. However, Roman is more concerned with why she wants to see him and he is convinced that she is "flaking out" on him - not intending to go through with jumping off of Crestville Pointe.

Aysel and Roman plan to visit McGreavy Correctional Facility and then go camping for a night. Roman continues to be puzzled as to why Aysel wants to see her father. When things don't work out at the facility, Aysel and Roman spend the night at a muddy campground, eating hotdogs and drinking red wine. During their night together, Roman kisses her and holds her in his arms, making Aysel finally recognize that she no longer wants to die. Roman tells her that this shouldn't change anything, that he needs to remember Madison and she needs to remember her reasons for wanting to kill herself. It is her reasons that stop Aysel. She's afraid that if she tells Roman her reasons for wanting to commit suicide he will agree that she has to die.

Aysel now realizes that her relationship with Roman has changed her perspective. "He's no longer the person I want to die with; he's the person I want to be alive with." But can Aysel give Roman a reason to live, can she do for Roman what he did for her?

Discussion

My Heart and other Black Holes is a deeply moving novel that portrays teen depression and suicide in a way that is intensely realistic. The message is one of hope, that no matter how dark the depression may be, it is possible to overcome the sadness. My Heart and other Black Holes portrays that difficult, sinuous journey out of darkness and into hope.

Warga offers readers two teens who are contemplating suicide as a result of  life-changing events they have experienced. Both Roman and Aysel have withdrawn from life despite both having things in life that they deeply love. In Roman's case, his guilt doesn't allow him to pursue the things he enjoys; he has stopped playing basketball which he excelled at, stopped training with another athlete and abandoned his friends. Roman's guilt tells him he deserves to die.

For Aysel, her father's incarceration leaves her feeling unmoored and deeply depressed; she's now living with her mother whom she does not feel close to.  She's angry and jealous of her younger sister, Georgia who seems to fly though life. Aysel doesn't do her job at the call center and she avoids participating in class, even in physics which she loves. Her father's crime has changed Aysel's perception of herself and those around her. Aysel believes she will turn out like her father. Suicide is the preventative to that happening.  "Without me, my mom won't have to stay up at night, worrying that the criminal gene, the murderer gene, was passed to me and that any day now, I'm going to blow up the school or something awful like that... I want to say that I know for sure that I'm different from my dad...But I'm not sure. Maybe the sadness comes just before the insanity...All I know is that I'm not going to stick around and find out if I become a monster like my dad."

It is this theme of perception or as Aysel describes it, perspective, and how our perspective affects how we live our lives, that dominates the novel. Aysel's perception of herself and others is deeply distorted at the beginning of the novel but undergoes a significant change throughout the novel. Although in the beginning of the novel,  she acknowledges that her mother used to look at her "with a combination of love and longing" before her father's crime, she now believes her mother views her not with love but with suspicion. "She'd never say it, but I am an intruder in their happy home. An infestation. I've gone from being a bruise to an open festering wound." Aysel also believes those around her do not like her, that she inspires "the desire to wash their hands clean".  At school she states "...I can hear their whispered insults, but it all sounds like a mumble of hisses to me..." Aysel admits that although she lost most of her friends after what her father did, her best friend, Anna Stevens stuck by her but Aysel pushed her away because it was for Anna's own good.  She describes Mr. Palmer, her boss at TMC as speaking to her like she's "a stray mutt raiding his garbage can."

Roman begins to pull Aysel out of herself because she notices that despite his handsome, boy-next-door good looks, he is wrapped in grief. In physics class, Mr. Scott asks his students about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. After pressing Aysel she responds, "Doesn't it have to do with how our perception of things can't always be trusted?" - a foreshadowing of what Aysel will come to realize about her own life and Roman's life too. After giving a brief description of Einstein's theory, Aysel states that time isn't constant and that "it's all about the perception of the observer."  This causes Aysel to think about the last few weeks of her life since she met Roman and they made the decision to die together. "Ever since I met Roman and made the Crestville Pointe jump plan, time has flown by. I want to believe that the change has nothing to do with Roman. That maybe time just moves the quickest at the end...I know everything is close to being gone forever, so my desire to rush it is a little less."

This leads to Aysel beginning to try to savour moments that she won't experience again, like eating her granola bars slowly so she can taste the chocolate chips, tasting the citrus in her orange juice, or doing extra practice problems in physics because she loves it so much.  However, this begins to have the opposite effect in that it slowly awakens in Aysel the desire to live.

What ultimately changes Aysel's perspective on life is her trip with Roman to see her father. On the drive to McGreavy, Roman does a sketch of Aysel using charcoal pencil. After visiting the correctional facility, while camping, Roman admits that he cares about the things that Aysel cares about and he knows he's made her happy. But Roman insists that this perception isn't real, because (their) "happiness is fake, it's fleeting." and they need to remember their reasons (for wanting to die).

But Aysel knows that their changing perceptions are important and have made a difference - at least to her. Meeting Roman has changed her.

"But maybe meeting Roman has helped me to understand myself better. Yes, I'm broken. And yes, he's broken. But the more we talk about it, the more we share our sadness, the more I start to believe that there could be a chance to fix us, a chance that we could save each other."

"Everything used to seem so final, inevitable, predestined.But now I'm starting to believe that life may have more surprises in store than I ever realized. Maybe it's all relative, not just light and time like Einstein theorized, but everything. Like life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable."

When Aysel looks at the drawing Roman did of her, she is astonished because the drawing shows her as she could be. "The girl I'm staring at is not me, but she is me. Her large eyes are focused away from the viewer, but there's something in them I don't immediately recognize: hope. Her posture looks straighter than mine, like she's stronger, more resilient."

Roman's drawing gives Aysel the hope she needs to grasp on to and so she takes the drawing as a keepsake. "I need it to remind myself that I can be this girl, that this girl is inside of me. This hopeful, strong person."Aysel becomes that strong person, the person that Roman sees and she repays him by saving his life. Later, Roman admits that he drew the picture "To try and show you the person I see when I look at you, not the person you seemed to think you were."

Aysel's change in perspective is also demonstrated by her relationship with her mother and sister.  Her distorted view of how her mother views her undergoes a transformation by the end of the novel. When Aysel tells her mother that she's not going to turn out like her father despite the fact that she is sad all the time, her mother admits that she did not know how to talk to her about what happened. That she was afraid to say and do the wrong thing. Aysel's mother asks her to open up and talk to her about her sadness, demonstrating that she does not share Aysel's earlier perception that she would become like her father.

Aysel's perspective about Georgia, the stepsister who by Aysel's reckoning she hasn't "had a real conversation with in about two years" is also distorted. At the beginning of the novel she describes her sister as "not having the time to worship anyone other than herself" and as someone who "loves the sound of her own voice."  She describes her stepsister as being like the sun while she is "like the bumpy, brooding moon." But on the morning of the snow day, Aysel realizes that perhaps her mother, Georgia and Mike actually do care about her when she overhears their conversation at breakfast. Later on Tyler tries to convince Aysel that her step-sister really does care about her.

One of the strengths of this novel is how Warga describes what it feels like to be depressed. Aysel's depression is personified by a black slug - an image that is both ugly and scary. Aysel describes what she's feeling as though something is wrong inside her. "I bet if you cut open my stomach, the black slug of depression would slide out."  The black slug is something that "devours any happy thoughts I allow myself".  She claims she hasn't cried since she was ten. "I think it's because the black slug sucks up any of my potential tears." But as her perspective on living changes, Aysel wishes that the black slug in her didn't exist.

One unique strength of this novel is how the author has incorporated her knowledge of science and specifically Einstein's Theory of Relativity into the story line. It is an interesting facet to this novel because it helps develop the theme of perception and time.

My Heart and Other Black Holes is an outstanding piece of realistic fiction that is deeply emotional in its portrayal of depression and suicide. Warga's writing will resonate with teens and adult readers alike. We all know someone who has contemplated suicide, maybe someone who has committed suicide, someone who is depressed or deeply sad. We can change the conversation about mental health issues especially when it comes to young people, by reaching out to one another when we see someone struggling. Aysel and Roman's families recognized that they were struggling but were unable to move forward and help them.

Jasmine Warga writes that she wrote My Heart and Other Black Holes because of the death of a friend and the writing allowed her to process what she was feeling. Warga writes in her Author's Note at the back that, "My Heart and Other Black Holes has always been a story about the people who understand you, all of you, even the scariest and weirdest parts of you. It is about those people who come into your life when you least expect it, in the strangest of ways, and change everything -- it is about the importance of letting those people in, of opening up to them. It is about the people in your life who help you to see yourself differently and the true power of human connection."

In the words of Aysel, "I want you to live for you because I know there's so much more waiting for you. There's so much more for you to discover and experience. And you deserve it, you might not think you do, but you do. I'm here to tell you that you deserve it." 

Amen.

Book Details:
My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga
New York: Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers     2015
302 pp. 

The Listening Tree by Celia Barker Lottridge

Nine-year-old Ellen Jackson lives on a farm in Saskatchewan with her mother, Martha, and father, Mike. It is November 1933, and Ellen and her mother are waiting at the train station in Moose Jaw as her father prepares to jump onto the freight train heading west. After a summer without rain, and now no snow this winter, Ellen's father along with other farmers are heading west to find jobs.

Ellen worries about her father as she's heard all kinds of rumours about the men who have left to find jobs: some are in jail, others doing hard work on the railroad or in the mountains. 

Finally a letter arrives from her father letting them know he has work in a logging camp in British Columbia. He has included two dollars for Ellen and money for them. Two months pass and no letter.

School closes with the arrival of summer break. Another hot, dry and dusty summer without rain. Their cattle and the horses are gone and the garden has dried up due to lack of rain. Mr. Carson buys their last horse Chief. He advises Ellen's mom to consider moving back east where she has family. 

One morning Ellen learns that they will be moving from the farm. Ellen's mom tells her that they won't lose the farm as they didn't borrow money, and Jack Carson knows where they have gone so he can forward her tather's letters. She tells Ellen she has just enough money to buy them two train tickets to Toronto. Martha tells Ellen that she is going to accept her sister Gladys's offer to come live with her in Toronto. Gladys owns a boarding house and she can give them a room, and Ellen's mom can work helping her prepare meals. It also means they will be eating breakfast and dinner with others in the boarding house - complete strangers, something Ellen doesn't like.

Ellen tells her mother she does remembers when the farm had green fields and a cow that gave milk. Her mother is happy that she has this memory because the last time it rained was 1930 when Ellen was only four or five years old. Over the next two days they sort through their possessions and each pack a suitcase. Jack Carson drives Ellen and her mom to the train station but they stop on the way so that Ellen can say goodbye to her best friend Sarah Murray. Ellen and Sarah were the only two girls in their class at North Star School. Sarah asks if Ellen will be back in September, but Ellen doesn't know.

The train trip to Toronto takes three days. They are met by a very excited Gladys who notes how skinny both Ellen and her mother are. Outside Union Station Ellen sees streets filled with streetcar, cars honking their horns and many people. They take a taxi to Gladys's boarding house which she has named Saskatchewan House. The street it is situated on has many brick houses, each with a porch. Aunt Gladys tells Ellen there are many children on the street, so she will soon have some friends. And in fact the house next to Saskatchewan House has six children on its porch, all staring at Ellen. Aunt Gladys  takes them to their room, located on the second floor at the front of the house with a large bay window and huge tree in front of it. While her mother has the large room with the bay window, Ellen has a smaller room separated from her mother's room by green velvet curtains, with a bed, desk and a tall window that also looks out onto the tree, a large Elm tree.

At dinner that night, Ellen and her mother are introduced to the other boarders: Miss Sprucedale who works in the millinery department at the Eatons store, three young women students: Addy, Bertha and Caroline who attend university, The girls are not in class during the summer but are working cleaning houses. Mr. Martineau who was a lawyer but is currently working as a streetcar driver. There are two brothers who are not at dinner but who work at the waterfront and who are helping their parents on the family farm. They pay their rent in fruit and vegetables and eggs, which is why the boarding house has plenty of food.

Ellen feels overwhelmed about meeting so many new children at once. After dinner upstairs in her room she discovers that she can open the tall window, climb out onto the flat roof of the front porch and be completely hidden from anyone on the street by the leaves of the Elm tree. She can hear the children on the street playing hide and seek.

Ellen's mother feels that she needs to get a job as helping her sister Gladys just won't be enough. She quickly finds a job as a housecleaner to an older lady, Mrs. Bartholomew who lives near the abandoned Casa Loma. Her house is huge and while there is plenty of work to be done, Martha also believes the woman is lonely. And so her mother gets up a six o'clock and after breakfast is gone to work by eight in the morning. Ellen helps clear off breakfast and has free time in the morning. For the first three days she doesn't go outside but on the fourth day, bored, Ellen decides to go out onto the porch roof and manages to climb into the tree next to their house. From this point she can hear the children next door, Joey and his older sister Charlene and their sister Gracie.

Ellen and her mother receive a letter from Mike telling them he is working on a farm in Peace River, Alberta where there hasn't been crop failures. He sends along two dollars to help them out. Ellen takes the two dollars and hides them in her desk along with the two dollars her father has already sent her. The other good news is that Mrs. Bartholomew has given Ellen's mother dresses her granddaughter has outgrown. While some are too big, Ellen ends up with four new dresses. 

Every morning is the same at the boarding house: once breakfast is done and cleaned up, Aunt Gladys spends time in her rooms downstairs in the basement. Ellen tidies her room and then climbs out to sit in the elm tree. From her eavesdropping she knows that Charlotte is in charge of looking after her younger brother Joey and her sister Gracie who is four-years-old. Charlie often plays up at the "castle", Casa Loma which is abandoned with a group of boys. Charlotte, who has to mind Gracie plays with two other girls on their street, Pearl and Jeanette. Ellen calls the elm tree her "listening tree".

The boys from the third floor, Tony and Al return to living at the boarding house, and bring with them not only vegetables but six hens. The hens are placed in the garage and Ellen is assigned to look after them. They are Plymouth Rocks and not the Rhode Island Reds that Ellen was familiar with.  It is the hens that instigate Ellen's first encounter with one of the children next door, when the dominant hen whom Ellen calls the Queen Hen, escapes. Queen Hen runs down the laneway behind the house and when Joey comes out of the garage next door he helps Ellen catch the chicken. 

Then one night while her mother is at Mrs. Bartholomew's helping with a supper, Ellen decides to climb into the Elm tree to see what it is like at night. It is dark, with the yellow glow of the street lamp barely showing. Then Ellen overhears two men talking below about the house next door, the one where Charlene, Joey and Gracie live. Their mother owes forty dollars in rent and has recently gotten a job. She has promised to pay the money owed but can only do it in payments of five dollars as she has to feed her children. But the two men have a devious plan. The one man states that he will tell the elderly lady who owns the home that the tenant won't pay and that he will get an eviction order. The police will then serve the eviction order later in the week and that leaves Charlene's mother one month to pay the rest of the money. But their plans go even further: they plan to trick the old lady into selling her house by claiming they can't get tenants and then push her to sell the house to his companion. These men plan to cheat an elderly lady out of the home she owns, and force a family out on to the street. 

After hearing this Ellen goes inside but the word eviction troubles her. She knows she has to tell Charlene in the morning what she's heard. The next morning Ellen goes out on the front step to wait until someone comes out of the house next door. Charlene comes out and is surprised to see Ellen.  Ellen tells Charlene what she heard and learns that her mother was without work for two months and fell behind on the rent. Like Ellen, her father isn't around but it is because he did something wrong and the police were after him. Although Ellen's father is also not around, she knows that some day he will be able to return home. Ellen realizes that Charlene was not surprised when she told her about the plan to evict them and Charlene reveals that one of the men is Mr. Braggs who collects their rent and that he bullies her mother. As Ellen and Charlene talk more about what is happening Ellen begins to suspect just who the old lady is that owns their house - an old lady who lives up near the castle. She decides to talk to Aunt Gladys to learn if her suspicions are correct. Together, with help from Gladys, Mrs. Bartholomew, and Mr. Martineau, Ellen and the three Kennedy children come up with a plan that just might save them from "flitting".

Discussion

The Listening Tree is an short novel set in Toronto, Canada during the height of the Great Depression.  The novel begins on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan where the author is able to portray just how difficult life had become for families there. The prairie drought that led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930's had its origins in the immigration and land policies in the early 20th century in North America. In Canada large numbers of immigrants settled in the western provinces on prairie land building farms to grow wheat and other grain crops. These farmers removed millions of acres of native grasses and shrubs, destroying the delicate prairie ecosystems. In the 1910s and 1920s good growing conditions and increasing demand for wheat led to more prairie land being converted to farming. With the beginning of the Depression in 1929 and 1930, wheat prices fell, resulting in farmers attempting to recover their losses by planting even more acreage. Then in 1931 there was a drought. The result was disastrous. Without the native grasses to anchor the soil and the lack of rain in the summer and snow in the winter, vast dust storms developed. Southeastern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan were most severely affected. Farms were repossessed and other abandoned. Almost 750,000 farms were lost in Canada between 1930 and 1935. Many of these farmers moved to northern parts of the affected provinces, to urban areas like Edmonton and Regina, and to Southern Ontario as in the case of Ellen and her mother in the novel.

The effect of the drought is well portrayed in the first two chapters of The Listening Tree. Ellen's mother asks her if she can remember the green fields of their farm. Ellen remembers shelling peas in the front yard and planting her own flower garden. Four years later and the farm is now barren, without cattle or horses, with Ellen and her mother close to starving. In 1934, the garden that Ellen and her mother plant in the spring has dried up. They are eating only oats and the occasional egg. Because he can no longer farm, Ellen's father has left to find work so he can feed his family, hitching a ride on a train. And Ellen and her mother leave their farm to move to Toronto where they hope to wait out the drought and the Depression.

While the novel doesn't portray many of the problems common to the Great Depression, such soup kitchens, homeless and unemployed young men, the author does portray how precarious life was for some families. Ellen's neighbours, the Kennedy family owe a significant amount of money in back rent after their father abandons them. They are being threatened with eviction by an unscrupulous man.  Families unable to pay their rent due to unemployment often "flitted", that is they quickly abandoned their rental homes, usually at night. In the novel, Charlene explains to Ellen they will "flit" before being evicted so they can save their furniture. Once they are served with an eviction, their furniture is thrown out onto the street and destroyed.  Families like the Kennedys who are struggling to pay rent, often had little to eat. Ellen realizes this when Joey helps her capture the runaway Queen Hen with a scrap of toast he was likely saving from his meager breakfast and she gives him two cookies.

The Listening Tree also sets part of the story at Casa Loma, at one time the largest home ever built in Canada. Unfortunately Lottridge doesn't give much background information in her note at the end of the book. It was built between 1911 and 1914 by Sir Henry Pellatt, founder of the Toronto Electric Light Company. Pellatt was a renowned philanthropist who loved the British royalty and all the attendant pageantry and pomp associated with the aristocracy. The castle was designed by one of the most prominent architects of the early 20th century, E.J. Lennox. Due to high debt, Pellatt was forced to abandon his royal castle in 1924. He passed away in 1939. Casa Loma operated as a hotel from 1926 to 1929 and also a night club. With the Depression in 1929 until 1933, Casa Loma was vacant and was repossessed by the City of Toronto for back taxes of more than $27,000. Although various projects were proposed for the estate, it remained vacant until 1937. In 1937 it began operating as a tourist attraction under the guidance of the Kiwanis Club of Western Toronto. In the novel, The Listening Tree, Casa Loma is abandoned but under surveillance by a watchman. For Joey Kennedy it is a place to explore during the trying times of the Depression.

The story is told by nine-year-old Ellen Jackson, who has moved from her family's farm in Saskatchewan to the big city of Toronto. It is 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression. Ellen, who is an only child, is shy and is struggling to adapt to life in a big city. Lacking in confidence to meet the children on her street, she takes to climbing into the Elm tree outside her bedroom window and eavesdropping, listening to the children playing. This tree becomes her "listening tree". "She looked up into the branches of the tree. They made a world where she was safe and alone, listening in on the world of the street. It's my listening tree, she thought. Up here, I can only listen. By listening I can get to know the kids down there, just a little, but they can't know me at all. "  This however, makes Ellen feel lonely. Gradually Ellen comes to realize that she doesn't belong in the Elm tree. One day after watching a squirrel jump from branch to branch Ellen undestands that although it's very beautiful in the tree she doesn't belong there like the squirrel does. 

After overhearing the plans of two men to evict the family next door and Ellen's determination to help the family, the place of the listening tree in Ellen's life comes into perspective. As she searches for ways to help the family make up the rent money owed, Ellen retreats to the tree. But now her view of the listening tree is different. She still loves sitting in the beautiful tree with its green leaves, but she knows it's only for a short time. " 'I'll come back when I can,' she promised the listening tree. 'I'll come back because I like it here. But I don't need to listen anymore.' "  Ellen's mother discovers her climbing into the listening tree and she understands when Ellen tells her that the tree helped her adjust because it was something only she had.

Author Celia Barker Lottridge ties up her story in a heartwarming way: Charlene's family is helped, Ellen finds her place in Toronto, making a new friend in Charlene Kennedy and helping Charlene's family to pay off their debt. She's a responsible, caring young girl who recognizes and understands hardship because she has experienced it first-hand. She understands how Charlene feels about the loss of her father.

Canadian author, Celia Barker Lottridge is an excellent author who lives in Seaton Village, a part of the Annex in Toronto, Ontario. Lottridge decided it might be interesting to explore what life was like in her neighbourhood during another era, in this case, the 1930's Depression. The author wanted children to learn about this era and what life was like in Canada during the difficult times of the Depression. “I saw it as a time when life was full of practical problems—the majority of people were having to cope with the day-to-day of getting money … the Depression had a huge impact here in Canada, but I don’t think a lot of children or adults have any idea of how extremely hard it was. We like to forget about hard times,”
(taken from http://gleanernews.ca/index.php/2011/01/19/a-seaton-story/#.UHSj1K542qg )

Several caveats: a map showing Saskatchewan and Ontario and the route Ellen and her mother travelled as, well as a map of Toronto and Casa Loma would have been helpful. The novel deserved a more engaging cover that would appeal to the 9 to 12 age group it is written for. And why does Ellen's mother refer to Ellen's father as "Mike' and not "dad" of "your father"???

Book Details:
The Listening Tree by Celia Baker Lottridge
Markham: Fitzhenry & Whiteside 2011
168pp.