"By the Great Horn Spoon!" by Sid Fleischman

Way back when I was ten or so, By the Great Horn Spoon! was the first Sid Fleischman book I ever encountered.  My mom read it aloud to my brother and I, and we laughed and laughed and laughed over it.  (My brother and I also picked up using "Blast!" like an expletive, like a ship's captain does in this book, which our mom eventually got very tired of.  I still say it when something goes wrong, thirty-some years later.  Very handy word, really.)

A few years ago, I read this aloud to my own kids.  We also laughed a lot over it.  I reread it again this week because I'm using it in a literature class for 3rd-5th grades that I'm teaching at our homeschool-coop.  And I laughed again.  What a rollicking good adventure this is!

Twelve-year-old Jack and his family's butler, Praiseworthy, stow away on a ship headed for the California gold fields.  The Gold Rush of 1849 is on, and our heroes are anxious to make their fortunes in gold, not because they want to be rich, but so they can save Jack's Aunt Arabella from losing her home.  Aunt Arabella has raised Jack and his sisters, who are orphans, and Jack can't bear the thought of her losing the house that has sheltered them all for so long.  Praiseworthy would do anything to help Aunt Arabella too, so the plucky heroes are off to make a fortune for her.  

Along the way, they encounter an array of peculiar and hilarious characters, from an irascible and competitive ship's captain to a gold miner who mixes his coffee beans with ground up acorns.  It's a tall tale in the grand tradition of American storytelling, and I love it very much.  It not only made me laugh aloud while reading it over again this week, it even made me get tears in my eyes when I hit the very last three lines.  Wonderful stuff.

Particularly Good Bits:

The stagecoach climbed as if it were part mountain goat.  It lurched, it halted, it bucked, it leaped, and it clung (p. 110).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG.  There's no bad language, but there's a bit of violence involving a boxing match, a scene where a man is nearly lynched, a stagecoach robbery, and several times when the main characters are in great peril.  Nothing actually bad really happens to them, ever, but very young readers might worry a lot about them at times.

"The Trouble Begins at 8" by Sid Fleischman

Sid Fleischman has been one of my favorite authors since I was probably ten or so.  My mom read By the Great Horn Spoon! aloud to my brother and I, and she had to stop reading over and over because we were laughing so hard, we couldn't hear her.  I read every book of his I could get my hands on after that, and have a deep and abiding fondness for him.  I read his memoir, The Abracadabra Kid, a few years ago and loved that too.

So it comes as no surprise that, when I spotted this on the junior nonfiction shelves at the library last week, I snatched it up.  It's also not surprising that I read the first three chapters before we even left the library.  Or that I swallowed up the rest of it in no time at all.

Fleischman's own love of the absurd, the fanciful, and the ridiculous-yet-believable makes him the ideal biographer for Mark Twain.  Both Twain and Fleischman are able satirists, great at telling a funny story that you laugh and laugh over, only later to realize that they were teaching you something at the same time as they were tickling your funny bone.  The Trouble Begins at 8 focuses on Samuel Clemens' metamorphosis from human tumbleweed who acquired and abandoned jobs freely to a celebrated humorist, lecturer, and novelist.  Yes, this is written at a middle-grade level, and yes, adults will get a big kick out of it too.

If This Was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for mentions of drinking alcohol, smoking cigars, and western violence.

"The Abracadabra Kid" by Sid Fleischman

I can't remember which Sid Fleischman book I read first.  I think it was probably By the Great Horn Spoon.  But it might have been Humbug or Jingo Django.  Or even The Whipping Boy, which I didn't actually realize was written by the same guy until I started reading this book.  I associated his name with the off-kilter humor of his children's books set in the west, like the first two I mentioned.  A few months ago, I stumbled across SidFleischman.com, which features a page of tips for writers drawn from his autobiography, aka this book.

I knew at once that I wanted to read that autobiography, but my library didn't have it, so I put it on my Christmas list and, lucky me, my mom got it for me!  Of the five books I got for Christmas, this is the one I chose to read first, and I'm so glad I did, as it's loads of fun.  

Fleischman begins with his childhood, particularly his love of doing magic tricks.  He had quite some success as a magician, and the first book he ever published, Between Cocktails, was a collection of simple tricks for amazing your friends.  While detailing his youthful exploits, he points on what events, people, and places would later inspire some of his books.  He infuses his narrative with humor and snappy descriptions, as anyone familiar with his novels might expect.

I think the biggest surprise I got while reading this is that Sid Fleischman wrote a novel named Blood Alley, which he then turned into a screenplay at the behest of none other than my beloved John Wayne -- Wayne starred in the movie version, along with Lauren Bacall.  I actually have Blood Alley (1955) as part of a collection of John Wayne films, but I haven't seen it yet -- I plan to watch it very soon.  

If you're a fan of his novels, or are looking for a good book about what it's like to be a writer, you can't go wrong here!