Category Archives: YA fiction

Author Guest Blog: Dear Miss Schneider, Please Excuse Walter

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The Little Bookstore receives requests from authors to showcase their work. As a bookstore we enjoy supporting writers, creativity, and spunk, so we offer guest blogs when possible. Today’s is from Linda Schilling Mitchell, author of:

“DEAR MISS SCHNEIDER, PLEASE EXCUSE WALTER…”

Times were tough during the Great Depression. It impacted every facet of family life. Fathers lost their jobs and Mothers had to go to work, often for the first time in their lives. But what about the children?

“Dear Miss Schneider, Please Excuse Walter…” takes you back to Miss Victoria Schneider’s classroom from 1937-1940. “She is 19 years old and stands a mere 5’2″ and weighs in at 78 pounds soaking wet. She is hardly bigger than some of her third grade students. But she is prepared….she thinks.”

“Thirty one faces gaze back at her. Boys and girls grouped together from various backgrounds and circumstances. Little girls dressed in their best first day of school dresses, hair ribbons neatly tied and pig tails perfectly platted. Little boys with fresh haircuts, shirts attempting to stay tucked into their pants.”

But what was life really like for these children during those difficult years? We find out through a collection of notes Miss Schneider compiled in a special scrapbook. Notes from parents explaining why their children were absent from school. Humble, heartfelt and often humorous notes, giving us a key hole peek inside the lives of these families.

“Walter has no shoes only Tennis Shoes and it snow Monday an was wet and He has a Cold any way and I could not send him,” reads one note.

Parenting methods of the day are also noted: “Miss Schneider, take you a stick and give Clarence a good beating and he will mind you. That’s all it takes to make him mind.”

In addition to the collection of notes, “Dear Miss Schneider, Please Excuse Walter…” contains photographs and memorabilia from Miss Schneider’s childhood and schooling in the northern Kentucky town of Newport.

Author Linda Schilling Mitchell is Miss Schneider’s daughter who now shares her family keepsake with people everywhere. It makes a wonderful book for all teachers, anyone interested in history, or those who remember those times.

It was a lifetime ago. Their story has been waiting to be told.

The Monday Book: INSTEAD OF THREE WISHES by Megan Whalen Turner

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MEGAN WHALEN TURNER_0I read this book years ago as one of the judges for a storytelling magazine contest. Loved it then, loved it now, when it recently came through our shop.

Megan Whalen Turner wrote seven “fractured” fairy tales. I love twice-told tales, and slightly sarcastic senses of humor, so I ate this book with a spoon. In the title story,  a poor old elf in the modern world gets helped across the street by a girl he has to reward, but she is suspicious of his three-wishes offer. Things go from absurd to funny to sweet in this send-up of that age-old fairy tale motif.

My other favorite is “A Plague of Leprechauns,” when leprechaun-hunting turned tourism threatens the peace of an English village, until the pub owner and the guy who found the little green man in the first place get smart–and cynical. I love this one.

“Leroy Roachbane” is about the wonders of Borax in the ancient world. Time travel, local boy makes good; it’s fun.

My other favorite was “Factory” a rather amusing treatise on the practicality of being a ghost in an industrial society gone wrong. The humor Turner displays in this is wonderful. You have to realize, ghosts stay as they were when they died for eternity. The mom who’s plotting the death of her family is very worried about the fact that her two-year-old granddaughter has a cold. Which would be worse, she muses, to miss the moment and get evicted from their house before crossing over, or to spend eternity with a sick two-year-old? That kind of thing.

“Aunt Charlotte” is about a silkie with a seductive plan. “The Nightmare” will delight every child who’s ever been picked on by a bully (be advised one should not threaten little old ladies in the streets, boys). And “The Baker King” is a fun send-up of youthquests to become rulers.

I liked the stories for their simple, clear language and humor, and also because they exude warmth and compassion. Things work out right for the nice people. The supernatural characters are hysterical in their over-the-topness. The airhead tree nymph from Instead of Three Wishes is wonderful. And the humans are sweet, silly, charming, scary–real. This is intended to be a young adult read, but I’d recommend it for anyone who just wants an hour of escapism and a little faith in humanity restored. Leprechauns and elves can do that for you.