It Was a Pretty Good Year

by Jane Flory

Cameos of Philadelphia's Reed Street, in 1910 "a mixed bag of nationalities" in the process of assimilation, are loosely focused on ten-year-old Barnett Freedman and his non-observantly Jewish family. Barney's familiar activities--scrounging change from the grating with a gum-tipped stick, evading the Italian kids on Catherine Street, hanging around the stable or Kolb's bakery--are interspersed with the usual mischief on Halloween and the Fourth of July, pale encounters with a pretty female classmate, and fights with neighborhood bully Smelly Huggins.

122 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1977

About the author

After achieving her degree from the Philadelphia College of Art, she worked as a free-lance writer and illustrator of children’s books. Flory was also employed as the director of evening division at Philadelphia College of Art for 16 years. Over her lifetime, Flory wrote and illustrated over 35 books for children, several of which were nominated for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher award.

Reviews

[Michael Fitzgerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a pretty good book, but really just average. This is yet another of those kids-in-the-early-20th-century books. 1910-11 Philadelphia is the setting. At times it reminded me of The Great Brain (despite that book's setting in late 1890s Utah), probably because here again we have a family where the narrator brother feels he is in the shadow of his older siblings. There are lots of episodes that try to present what life at the time was like, with the expected pranks and predicaments.

We get a little flavor of the neighborhood, although the various immigrant ethnicities are kind of homogenized - I suppose in an attempt to show them as assimilated into their new home in America. But the near absence of any kind of distinctive differences just seems bland: for example, this is a non-observant Jewish family. Our narrator's little gang of friends seems to be (unrealistically?) quite diverse, including Germans and Irish. There is a passing reference to some Catholics (though I believe the word itself does not appear) who attend daily Mass and others who only go on Sundays. In this case, the family names seem to be the only thing that is supposed to trigger our associations with who the Irish are.

The 1977 writing style, unfortunately, seems too modern, and it doesn't contribute to the period feel. The fact that this is a second-hand account (based on the recollections of a friend of the author) might also be part of why this doesn't really connect. I don't find this to be an essential book for kids to include in their studies of that period. Although many of these kind of books are about the midwest or the west, there are good urban ones, like Roller Skates and All-of-a-Kind Family that do the job better than this one.