Karen Sandler

Tag: Tom Sawyer

  • Road Trip Memories

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks the question, What’s the most dramatic road trip you’ve ever been on? What immediately pops into my mind might not have been a dramatic road trip, but it left wonderful, indelible memories. It was the summer my dad had to spend several weeks working on a satellite launch in Florida. He agreed to take us kids with us, so we drove from Los Angeles to Cocoa Beach in a 1957 Ford station wagon.

    NPS Photo by Peter Jones
    NPS Photo by Peter Jones

    I was ten years old, and had just finished fifth grade. In fact, I missed the last few days of fifth grade because my dad had to be in Florida by a certain date, so I left school early. We departed on a Tuesday in early June, me, Dad, and my older sister, Debbie. The plan was that my oldest sister, Linda, and a friend named Cathy would fly out later and join us.

    But the three of us drove. We started in Hawthorne, California and headed east. In those days, no one wore seat belts (the old Ford probably didn’t have any), so sometimes my sister and I would travel in the “way back” behind the middle seat. We also would sleep back there while my dad drove.

    We made stops along the way. The first was at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. We arrived at the caverns Wednesday evening, just in time to watch the resident bats leave for their nightly flight. The next day, we descended into the cave on a tour, which ended in an enormous cavern set up as a cafeteria. They gave us box lunches and I still remember the taste of that cheese sandwich, and eating it hundreds of feet underground.

    Years later, I wrote a romantic suspense novel based in a similar cavern underneath the Arizona desert (Dark Whispers). In the book I’m working on now, Revolution, the third book in the Tankborn trilogy, several important scenes also take place underground.

    Tom Sawyer Cover1We left New Mexico on Thursday after the tour and headed into Texas. Because we were driving through the “fat” part of Texas, it seemed to take forever to get through the state (on our way home, my mom drove through the Texas panhandle in one night). At some point in Texas, we stopped at a truck stop and my dad bought me a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. (I might be giving away my age here, but if you take a close look at the cover, you’ll see the book cost 65 cents.)

    I devoured Tom Sawyer as we passed through the South, crossing through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Tom Sawyer takes place in Missouri, but the flavor of the book’s setting fit the countryside we drove through, adding to the experience of reading the book.

    We made it to Florida on Saturday of that week, five days of driving to cross the country. My dad had often driven through the night, only pulling over to sleep in the car when he got too tired. Not long after crossing the border into Florida, we stopped at a restaurant for breakfast where I had grits for the first time. To my Southern California eyes and palate, they looked and tasted pretty strange, but it certainly told me I was a long way from home. We spent that night in a hotel and the next day, moved into the apartment we stayed in for the summer.

    There was more to the trip. I got to see three satellites launched from the beach outside our apartment. We spent every day in the pool or on the beach, or walking down to the Howard Johnson’s in the rain for ice cream. When my dad’s job was done, we all drove from Florida to Brooklyn (now it was Dad, Mom, me and my two older sisters and Cathy). Mom and Dad took turns driving so it was a fast trip. Then we visited our Brooklyn relatives a few days (which included a trip to the World’s Fair). Finally, we drove from New York back to Los Angeles, finishing the big triangle-shaped road trip.

    We rode through or visited 25 of the 50 states that summer. It was a fabulous trip, one I’ll always remember.

  • RTW – Most Memorable Book

    Today for Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway asks, What book brings back memories? There are probably many I could name if I gave it some thought, but the first book that popped into my mind was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

    The cover at left I pulled from Goodreads. I searched for my old tattered copy that I read in 1965 but couldn’t find it. Sad to think I might have lost it.

    It isn’t the fact that Tom Sawyer is such a fantastic book that makes it memorable to me. It’s the circumstances under which I read it. In the summer of 1965, my dad’s company, TRW, was sending him to Cocoa Beach, Florida for a satellite launch. As an electronic technician, he’d made that trip a number of times, spending a month or so near Cape Kennedy (or it could have been Cape Canaveral back then) helping to ready whatever satellite he was working on for launch into orbit.

    That particular year, the summer of ’65, he decided to take his daughters with him. My 12-year-old sister, Debbie, and I (I was 10), got out of school a week early and drove with Dad in his 1955 Ford station wagon. Our 13-year-old sister, Linda, would come later by plane with a friend.

    The drive to Florida took five days, with my Dad driving as long as he could until we either stopped at a motel or slept in the car. Along the way, I think in Texas, we stopped at a truck stop where they had books for sale. I’m not sure what it was about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that caught my eye, but I asked my dad to buy it for me. I then read the book as we drove through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama on our way to Florida.

    As I read Tom Sawyer, I was literally in the world of the book. It seemed like the descriptions took on a new vividness because it felt like I was there with Tom. Later when I read Huckleberry Finn, it was the same (although by then I’d returned home to Southern California). I remembered what it felt like to be in the South and that book, as Tom Sawyer did, became a part of me.

    I’ve re-read both books several times (most recently as a Kindle version). Tom Sawyer has never lost its charm. It always pulls me back to our own adventures on the road and that hot, humid summer in Florida.

  • Gender Bias in Children’s Books?

    There’s been some discussion on Twitter (and I imagine elsewhere) about a recently released study revealing gender inequality in children’s literature. The study looked at nearly 6000 children’s books published from 1900 to 2000. They discovered that even in children’s books featuring animals, a significant majority of the central characters are male. At most a third of the books contain female characters at all while 100% include male characters. Take a look at the article for more statistics.

    Assuming there’s no funny business in the counting of characters’ genders, it seems indisputable that there are more male characters than female in children’s literature. Where I think the study gets mushy is in the conclusions the authors say that the data led them to. For instance, they point out that mothers and children read gender into even gender neutral animal characters. The article mentions “research on reader interpretations” to support readers’ gender assignment of gender-neutral characters, but nothing is cited. So I do wonder about that.

    The other issue that raised a red flag for me was the conclusion drawn by the authors as to the impact of this gender inequality in children’s books. They state that this will lead to a presumption that “women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys” and that it amounts to the “symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery.” That second statement in particular sounds like an overly dramatic leap too far to me. In any case, I’d like to see other studies that support their contention.

    I’m no scientist (although I like to write about them). I didn’t do the study, haven’t read it in its entirety. I know often what appears in a short article such as the one I’ve linked to includes material taken out of context and the issues I have with the conclusions may be explored in greater depth in the original study.

    And although I can’t speak for every little girl out there, I can speak for myself. As a kid in the ’60s and ’70s, I probably read some very gender biased books. Did I feel that women had a less important role in society as a consequence? Did I feel symbolically annihilated? Hell, no.

    If I read a book that featured a boy as the main character, that omitted female characters entirely even, I don’t know that I ever even noticed. I became that main character anyway, lived his adventure, imagined myself as him. I was Tom Sawyer, not Becky Thatcher. I was Black Beauty, not poor doomed Ginger.

    Later, in my late teens when I started noticing women’s minuscule roles in books (mainly science fiction by that point), I was irritated and ticked off that the author either omitted or limited their female characters. I certainly wasn’t traumatized by it. It’s one reason I have almost entirely stopped reading adult SF written by men. Because the women authors know how to create worlds with as many interesting powerful women as men.

    I know there are certainly girls/women out there who felt different than I did growing up. Who read those male-dominated books and felt smaller. But I bet there are others like me who don’t give a damn if the author wrote the character as male. They see themselves in that story, doing all those fun and exciting things that boy/male character is doing. They’re strong girls, they’re smart girls, they’re adventurous girls. And if the character doesn’t look like them, they will damn well just re-write the story so they do.