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Tucker Twins #5
A House Party With the Tucker Twins
Page Allison, the Tucker Twins, and their various friends spend two weeks enjoying a house party at the home of General Price.
301 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1921
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November 6, 2016
Speed seems to alternate good reads with meh-reads in the Tucker series. This one was much better than most, as Page and the twins visit a school friend for...well, a couple of weeks. Published in 1921, it is set at the very beginning of WW1--so much at the beginning that while Page speaks of it as something afar off that has nothing to do with the US, she also thinks it might go on long enough for a baby born during the story to grow up and fight in it!
Page is less sententious than usual in this installment, though the twins get less page-time as she is fixated on the fortunes of "little" Annie Pore--from her sighing swains to her irascible father's selfishness. While she can't resist the songs, they do at least fit in the text, and there are none of her own devising. Oddly enough for 1921 (set 1914-15), in the midst of Speed's stock "lets make fun of these ignorant darkies" scene (p. 52), we meet the enigmatic Lady John, who speaks in "a voice as soft and feminine as one could hear in the whole south"--until angered enough to use "a deep bass voice." Speed tells us, "It seems the old man lost his reason many years before and was now obsessed with the desire to be considered a woman." To this end, he speaks of "himanherself", and wears trousers and topboots combined with a green cloth basque, coarse lace fichu, long gingham apron and a flower trimmed straw hat. Hmmmm!
I couldn't help guffawing when toward the end in the obligatory near-disaster, Annie writes to Page of one of the young men involved, "He says it is football training that helped him to know what to do and how to do it." If he'd been a Boy Scout, it might have made more sense.
For the time, I guess you can call this "social realism" of a sort.
Page is less sententious than usual in this installment, though the twins get less page-time as she is fixated on the fortunes of "little" Annie Pore--from her sighing swains to her irascible father's selfishness. While she can't resist the songs, they do at least fit in the text, and there are none of her own devising. Oddly enough for 1921 (set 1914-15), in the midst of Speed's stock "lets make fun of these ignorant darkies" scene (p. 52), we meet the enigmatic Lady John, who speaks in "a voice as soft and feminine as one could hear in the whole south"--until angered enough to use "a deep bass voice." Speed tells us, "It seems the old man lost his reason many years before and was now obsessed with the desire to be considered a woman." To this end, he speaks of "himanherself", and wears trousers and topboots combined with a green cloth basque, coarse lace fichu, long gingham apron and a flower trimmed straw hat. Hmmmm!
I couldn't help guffawing when toward the end in the obligatory near-disaster, Annie writes to Page of one of the young men involved, "He says it is football training that helped him to know what to do and how to do it." If he'd been a Boy Scout, it might have made more sense.
For the time, I guess you can call this "social realism" of a sort.
Displaying 1 of 1 review