The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
My rating: 5/5 cats
JUNE
as part of my personal reading challenges for 2017, once a month i will be revisiting a favorite book from when i was a little bitty karen and seeing if it holds up to my fond memories and determining if i can still enjoy it as an old and crotchety karen.
fingers crossed.
so: first things first. in answer to the question ‘does this book hold up?’ this time, i gotta say “no.” i’m keeping baby karen’s star rating, since there’s no way to preserve the two ratings, but adult-karen rates this lower. unless there is a sequel to this book (and there is NOT), baby-karen imagined a whole bunch more to this book than ms. roberts actually wrote.
baby-karen’s review:
this book is great because she has SILVER EYES and that’s so cool! also, she can throw rocks at people using her MIND, and i want to do that, too. also, i could set the dinner table while reading in my room and that would be rad. i like to read.
(it should be noted that baby-karen thought willo davis roberts was a man, probably because “david” and “robert” are typically names given to males, and baby-karen had some mild dyslexia when it came to names – for years, she introduced herself as “karen brissette tiffany.” what a dope.)
adult-review:
first, here is a detailed, medium-snarky synopsis – you decide if you wanna risk being spoiled on a 198-page book for kids written in 1980.
katie is a silver-eyed nine-year-old with magical powers that allow her to move things with her miiiiiind!!
she has been living with her grandmother for years because her parents split up and couldn’t afford to care for her, but then her grandmother died and now she’s living with her mom and they barely know each other and her mom’s bf smokes and doesn’t seem to like kids and both of the babysitters her mom hires are lame and katie has a tendency to freak people out because of her eyes and her flat affect and also because she recklessly uses her powers to harass her sitters and this one grumpy dude in her building and she doesn’t have any friends except for the paperboy and the elderly mrs. m. and her cat lobo and oh, yeah, she can talk to cats which is a much cooler power than telekinesis, if you ask me, but no one asks me, and then this man named mr. c moves into her building and starts asking everyone pretty specific questions about katie that no one seems to find suspicious at all and then katie finds out that her mom used to work at a pharmaceutical factory with four other ladies who all became pregnant at the same time and whose kids were all… unusual, so katie decides to track them down so she won’t feel like such an oddball and luckily they all live within a bus ride from her place and she finds them pretty easily and it turns out mr. c. is basically less-magical but more-ambulatory dr. xavier and runs a school for gifted youngsters and he wants them all to live on his campus but they say noooooo and decide to stick together and stay where they’re at and be magical homeschooled friends only occasionally poked at by mr. c.’s people. the end.
which is basically cutting the story off just when it becomes interesting, right? unless you like your sci-fi novels to be more about searching through mommy’s drawers for her friends’ birth announcements, cold-calling strangers, slumber parties as camouflage and riding the bus and not so much about what happens when a bunch of mischievous kids with powers get together.
i’m not sure why i liked this one so much when i was little, because not a whole lot happens. the sci-fi elements are basically just a metaphor for “being different;” katie is a lonely girl who wants friends and when she finds other kids like her, the implication is that now everything is going to be roses for her, but since the book cuts off before any of those roses blossom, we don’t know if having magical abilities is enough of a foundation upon which to build lasting friendships, and we don’t get to see them do anything cool.
but i do enjoy being unfair to these books and assessing them with modern-day sensibilities. and so:
the blurb from booklist on the back cover:
”An intriguing idea…Roberts’ smooth writing will lure [readers] right to the end.”
ah, the 80’s. when you could celebrate someone’s ability to “lure” children without some asshole like me coming along to laff about it. this idea of luring children extends to one of my major criticisms in the book – the lack of suspicion towards the character of mr. c. katie is suspicious of him, but for different reasons than “this rando adult male is showing a lot of interest in this little girl. should we perhaps be alarmed? nah. let’s just freely answer all of his questions and see what happens.”
katie’s mother sits companionably by the pool with mr. c, who is watching katie swim and asking lots of questions about her and she’s all “doodly-doo – what a nice, inquisitive man taking an interest in my nine-year-old daughter!”*
and this is after he’s approached katie on her own, asking for her help moving in. because this book predates the lessons we all learned from Silence of the Lambs about why you never help a stranger move furniture:
and because nine-year-olds are known for their abilities in the department of heavy lifting, particularly scrawny and bookish nine-year-old girls in glasses. true, katie has an advantage with her magical powers and all, but that’s not common knowledge, and his attention should probably cause some mild alarm – both his request and his eagerness to be katie’s swim-buddy:
”Listen, are you busy, young lady, or would you help me haul things in tomorrow morning? When I bring my stuff over? I’ll pay you.”
Katie shrugged. “Sure. Why not. Are you going to swim in the pool?”
“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Why, you need a swimming partner?”
…
“Tell you what, after we get my junk carried in tomorrow, we’ll go swimming. OK?”
he asks her to carry his JUNK? gross. but hilarious wordplay aside, bribing a little girl into your apartment alone with the promise of slappy-happy bathing suit time is just red flags all over town.
katie’s grandmother raised her right, and katie knows to avoid certain situations, even if she’s unclear of the reasons why:
…a man had stopped and asked her if she wanted a ride. He was a perfectly nice man, Katie knew he was, and she hadn’t gotten into the car, and the man had simply smiled and driven away. Katie had tried to explain that it was only that he thought she was a long way from home, and it was cold and raining, and he was kind. But Grandma Welker was convinced he was a child molester.
Katie was a little vague about what child molesters actually did. But she knew it was something unpleasant, and she had sense enough not to get into a car or walk away with a stranger, for heaven’s sake. Grownups told you and told you things, and then they acted as if you didn’t have any brains at all, even when they admitted you were bright.
katie does use her bright brain, briefly, to ponder whether mr. c has interference on his mind, or whether her mother will think he does, at any rate:
…she wondered uneasily if her mother would agree to that or if the new tenant fell into the category of “strange men” and was therefore to be treated warily.
and her mother, who hasn’t been an active mother for years, still knows all about stranger-danger, which is clear from an argument they have where katie is scoffing at the very idea of a nine-year-old needing a sitter:
”…you’re used to living in the country, and it’s different, in the city. All kinds of things can happen-”
“I know about child molesters and all that,” Katie said with dignity. “And keeping the doors locked and not admitting on the telephone that I’m alone. I’m not stupid.”
so how does katie’s mother not equate a man’s interrogations and intense interest in her daughter with the dangers of city living and not register his behavior as ‘off?’ is mr. c’s casual assertion that he’s totes not a kiddy-diddler enough to set her mind at ease?
”…I’d asked the little girl to help me haul things in, in the morning, And then it occurred to me that maybe I’d better talk to her folks, first. Make sure it was all right with them. People get ideas, these days, about strange men and little girls.
maybe don’t say “little girls” so much. it comes across as creep city.
at least mrs. m. has some sense:
”What do you want with a little girl who isn’t even ten years old yet?” Mrs. M. asked. “She isn’t much more than a baby.”
as it happens, he is not a perv, so all of my affronted bluster is unnecessary, but still, people! STILL! it’s carelessness like this that leads to lotion being put in baskets.
more proof that this was written in the wayback comes in the laxity of punishment for prepubescent students carrying weapons into the classroom.
katie tells a story about what happened to her at her old school with a bully named DERWARD, and the pocketknife he regularly carried to school.
She’d tried to ignore Derward, but after a few minutes of feeling the point of his pocketknife jabbing more and more painfully between her shoulder blades, Katie had used all the force she could muster and turned the thing back away from herself.
The next thing she knew, Derward was yelling, and there was blood all over his hand and his desk, and when Miss Cottrell came to the back of the room, she was very angry.
wow, she should be angry! a little boy stabbing a little girl with a knife? what a bully! expel that weaponized bully!!
but it doesn’t really play out that way:
Katie remembered standing in front of the principal’s desk, her legs quivering, and being asked for her version of the story.
What could she say? That she’d used some mental force that nobody else seemed to have to twist the knife against the boy who was jabbing her with it?
“It was his knife,” Katie said. “He was fooling around with it, poking me.”
“And so you twisted around and cut him with it?” the principal asked.
“I jerked away,” Katie said, “and somehow he cut himself. I can still feel where he poked me.”
The principal looked at the back of her blouse, but he said there was no cut in it. “Do you want the nurse to look at your back and see if there is a mark on your skin?”
“No,” Katie said. If there was no tear in her shirt, it was unlikely that there’d be a mark on her skin.
“But it was his own fault.”
In the end, nothing happened to either of them, Katie or Derward. They were sent back to class, where spelling was all over and the kids were doing arithmetic. But all the kids looked at Katie out of the corners of their eyes.
Katie still remembered the way the principal and the teacher had looked at her. Not at Derward, but at her.
wow. what an excellent message that sends. katie’s mom had the safety of country living all wrong. but in case you think there’s no justice, it should be known that one time, this knife-wielding child was in fact punished:
Once he’d locked some girls in an outhouse when they were on a class picnic at a park, and it had been over an hour before anyone heard them yelling and let them out. Derward had been suspended for three days because of that. Not that Derward minded; he had returned to school boasting that his father had taken him fishing for three days.
so – locking some girls in an outhouse (and while we’re at it, how did he shepherd multiple girls into that outhouse to begin with, and how big was this outhouse?) is a suspendable offense, but carrying a weapon is all good, so long as the victim is not well-liked.
that’s all i got in me for this reread. not nearly as good as i remember, but i hope i didn’t tarnish any of your childhood memories of it.
* not an actual quote
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sigh, another book without a bookplate or other adorable baby-karen scrawls. it does have my handy-dandy “books i read” notations, but that’s only a little bit fun. i will be going to my dad’s place soon, and i hope some of my kids’ books will be accessible and will be FULL of bookplates and doodles.
JANUARY: wait till helen comes
FEBRUARY: the little gymnast
MARCH: zucchini
APRIL: something queer at the library
MAY: good-bye pink pig
JULY: the phantom tollbooth
