Adventures in the West: Stories for Young Readers ed. by Susanne George Bloomfield, Eric Melvin Reed

Abstract

BO O K REVIEW S Adventures in the West: Stories for Young Readers. Edited by Susanne George Bloomfield and Eric Melvin Reed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 280 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Richard D. Jensen Foley, Alabama Adventures in the West: Stories for Young Readers is a compilation of short sto­ ries from a bygone era, a time when youth magazines existed in profusion and young people read for entertainment. Editors Susanne George Bloomfield, an English professor, and Eric Melvin Reed, a graduate student, deserve high praise for assembling stories that were originally published between 1890 and 1917. These tales are well written and entertaining and provide a window into the values and culture of the times. These stories served many purposes when first printed. They were entertainment, examples of fine writing, encourage­ ment for, and a reflection of, the expansiveness of youthful imagination, and reinforcers of the unique values that made America great. The stories in this volume are by writers whose names have, sadly, drifted away on the winds of time. Only The Wizard ofOz (1900) author L. Frank Baum, whose Aunt ’Phroney’s Boy (1912) is featured here, is known widely today. Each story is well crafted, and the prose is simply terrific. For example, May Roberts Clark, in Her Neighbor’s Claim (1897), writes, “The wagon trail of hot July dust bent to the harmony of nature, and wavered to and fro like a river. A bird rising from the sear buffalo grass wheeled a wide orbit up and up, and out of sight. In one vast curve God had drawn the mighty sweep of the far-reaching horizon, and had arched above it in the limitless vault of azure” (48). Some of the stories feature young girls as heroines, providing girls of that time (and now today) with protagonists to whom they could relate. The female reader will especially enjoy Sister Anne and the Cowboy (1904), Her Neighbor’s Claim, and Kit (1914), which feature heroines of considerable pluck and re­ sourcefulness. As the reader enjoys each tale, a sense of nostalgia for that bygone era takes hold. One can’t help but notice how degraded the English language has become and how children dreamed big dreams in a time when the world was free of today’s electronic marvels and pervasive cynicism. Adventures in the West: Stories for Young Readers is laudable for its restora­ tion of these literary gems and for the scholarship of its editors, who bring to us stories that both entertain us and remind us of a time when American children were taught the resourcefulness and self-reliance of the American spirit. ...