Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Horn Book Magazine

Sibling revelry. (Recommended Reissues).

Article Excerpt
Growing up as the middle child of five siblings, I spent a good part of my life wishing that I belonged to another family. Surely no one else had to deal with older brothers who teased unmercifully, a younger sister who couldn't seem to grasp the concept that a diary is private, or a baby brother who always seemed to become my responsibility whenever I had something else I desperately wanted to do. As a bookish, easily persecuted child, I spent an inordinate amount of time locked in the bathroom, the only place in the house where I was safe from my brothers' tormenting, my sister's prying, and my little brother's sticky affection. Early on, I learned to always have a novel hidden in the clothes hamper, so that I could hole up at a moment's notice for an extended stay. This enforced solitude was the ideal time to shop around for a more satisfactory family. I yearned to join the Moffats, the Malones, or the Austins--fictional families who were so much more appealing than the sorry lot I'd been saddled with.

The family I most wanted to belong to was the Melendy family. Elizabeth Enright wrote a quartet of novels featuring this enviable group: The Saturdays (1941), The Four-Story Mistake (1942), Then There Were Five (1944), and Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze (1951). For years, only The Saturdays was available, but now Holt has reissued all four books in hardcover editions with cheerful new cover art by Tricia Tusa. Enright herself did the interior illustrations, which thankfully have all been retained. I'm thrilled to see these old friends reappear, and breathed a sigh of relief to discover that they are just as fresh and funny as I remembered. I still want the Melendys to take me in.

The Saturdays is set in New York City, where Mona, Rush, Miranda (known as Randy), and Oliver Melendy live in a five-story brownstone with their distinguished (and often conveniently absent) father and their devoted housekeeper, fondly known as Cuffy. The Melendys are intelligent, opinionated, imaginative, and endlessly curious about the world around them. From my midwestern vantage point they appeared to be the ultimate in sophistication as they blithely negotiated Manhattan, having experiences I could only dream about. I envied them their certainty about their future careers: at thirteen, Mona drifts around spouting lines from Shakespeare in preparation for what she knows will be a glorious stage career; twelve-year-old Rush pounds the life out of their old piano as he composes music for their various theatricals; budding dancer Randy leaps in and out of rooms, more often than not crashing into someone or something in the process; and stolid, steady Oliver knows even at six that he wants to be an engineer.

In The Saturdays Randy, fed up with never having enough money to have a proper day out, comes up with the idea of pooling their allowances so that they can take turns having solitary, memorable Saturday afternoons. Thus is born I.S.A.A.C., the Independent Saturday Afternoon Adventure Club. Randy uses her Saturday to visit an art museum and becomes reacquainted with Mrs. Oliphant, an old family friend who becomes very important in the Melendy children's lives. Rush goes off to an opera and ends up coming home with a stray dog, who is promptly christened Isaac. Mona screws up her courage and visits an expensive hair salon to have her braids replaced with a fashionable bob. And Oliver, who of course isn't old enough to be out on his own, nevertheless slips away to see the circus at Madison Square Garden, and has to be returned home by a mounted policeman, unrepentant and miserably sick from all the hot dogs and cotton candy he's consumed.

The family moves to an eccentric old house in the country in The Four-Story Mistake. Enright's descriptive powers are so keen that as a child I knew every corner of that house and the neighborhood beyond. The...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!