A vintage time travel book this week--
Fair Bay, by Eleanor Frances Lattimore (1958). All her life Trudy's grandmother has told her stories of Fair Bay, the South Carolina island where she spent her summers. When Trudy goes to stay with her great aunt Gertrude at the family plantation house, she asks about the island, hoping to visit, but is told that it was washed away in a storm, leaving only a strip of sand with a few palmetto trees. Her grandmother had told her of the storm, but wanted to talk more about happier times. Millicent, the cook, who was also a little girl on the island when the storm came, tells her how her great aunt Christina was almost lost to the storm when she went back to the house to look for her precious music box, but won't tell her much else about it, and Aunt Gertrude doesn't want to talk about it either.
Though Fair Bay is still much in her mind, Trudy spends her days happily exploring on horseback (this is pleasant reading in a not very exciting way). Then one day she wakes up early and decides to go riding before breakfast, and her horse gets a mind of her own and her down an old road she'd never seen before.
The road leads to the old causeway to Fair Bay, and the tide is low....so Trudy succumbs to temptation and crosses over. Wandering the strip of beach, she finds the old music box, and slips through time. The island is whole, with all its houses and its church, and the children are playing on the beach. And Trudy watches the day unfold, seeing her aunts and other children playing on the beach (rather horrible, a group of them are digging up a turtle's nest) knowing what's going to happen to them in a few hours.
Though Trudy feels perfectly corporeally present, she can't be seen or heard. This inability to interact with anyone back in the past dims the emotional intensity of the experience. She's just a passive on looker, and though it's not uninteresting, it's also not nearly as interesting as it could have been. I felt from the way the survivors won't talk much about the horror of the storm that there must have been some tragedy involved, but Trudy discovered nothing new, and I felt a bit cheated. In fairness, it's only 123 pages of generous font, written for younger children than me, but still.
I wish the date of the hurricane was made clear; I think it might well have been inspired by the Great Storm of 1893 which hit the islands of South Carolina coast hard, but it doesn't match exactly--that storm hit at night, and the coastal islands hit hardest were homes mostly to black families, not rich white ones....And reading about the Great Storm and its horrors, I'm even more disappointed about the cop out on Lattimore's part that no one in Trudy's time wants to talk about it. It could have been a much more powerful book than it was. Oh well.
In short, though I didn't mind reading it at all, and quite possibly would have loved it when I was a seven or eight year old horse loving Charlotte, it didn't hit hard for me reading it today.
Eleanor Frances Lattimore is best known for her Little Pear books, about a Chinese boy, written for younger children, which don't really seem like something I'd love. That beings said, and although this one didn't quite make me desperately want to read others of her books, I will certainly pick up any that come my way. She is very good at describing, which I like, and I may well revisit Fairy Bay in memory (especially whenever I read about sea turtle conservation efforts....to their credit, the girls involved wanted to rebury the eggs so they could hatch, but the boys wanted to take them home, and of course these particular eggs were doomed anyway, but still).
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