Just Plain Maggie, by Lorraine Beim

[sophia_sol]

I just have so many warm and fuzzy feelings about this book. Friendship between girls! Summer camp, including canoe tripping! Adults in a children's book who are actually good people! People being supportive of each other despite different backgrounds and life experiences!

The only unfortunate part is having to read past the appropriative stereotypes of Native Americans - at least it is mostly centred on half of one chapter so it's fairly easily skippable.

It's particularly interesting to me, though, that the book contains those stereotypes given that some googling of the author reveals (see: Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States) that she wrote some relatively radical works for her era? Like a picture book about friendship between a black boy and a white boy - apparently considered the very first interracial picture book! And a book about a young woman with ambitions that extend beyond just marriage and family! A reminder yet again that someone who is progressive in some areas can still be problematic in others.

I requested this book for one of my early yuletides but gave up on requesting it the very next year - it is SUCH a low likelihood that anyone else participating in Yuletide is familiar with this book, given it's a long-out-of-print children's book that isn't in the public domain. But it's sad, because I really would love to read fic for this book. Especially more about Beth after the end of the book!

Beth is one of the more complicated characters. She comes from a very wealthy family but her parents' approval of her is based solely on how successful she is at things - no unconditional love for her - which understandably kind of messes her up. And so she spends a lot of the book being an asshole.

But by the end of the book she's genuinely TRYING to be friends with the other girls instead of just dismissing them as not good enough and I'm just like AWWW BETHHHHH GO YOU. I want to read more about her growth as a person, and about her efforts towards friendship, and about her rather difficult relationship with her parents as she gets older, and possssibly once they're no longer only like 12 I want to read Beth/Maggie shipfic. YEAH.

(on another note, I was always vaguely surprised by the idea of a summer camp that you go to for the entirety of your summer vacation from school, as opposed to it just being a one-to-two-week experience. In the book the months-long camp is presented as a matter of course, as if that's the only way for summer camp to be. Do such camps still exist, or are they a product of a bygone era?)

Comments

[skygiants]

Ha, I've been having that summer camp discussion with various people over the past week (due to having been at a wedding with genarti that took place at a summer camp.) On the East Coast, at least, they're still very much a thing! Day camps and away camps both; I only went to a cabin-in-the-mountains kind of camp for a few years, and only for one-month stints at a time, but a lot of my friends were HUGE camp people and would spend their whole school year looking forward to their two months away at camp. It kind of surprised me to find out that away from the East Coast people don't consider that a usual thing.

[sophia_sol]

Gosh wow, good to know! I guess it makes sense that things are very regional in terms of what's considered normal for summer camp. But to me normal is DEFINITELy one week (sleepaway or otherwise), with two weeks being unusually long. I can't imagine two months of camp! I CAN'T IMAGINE TWO MONTHS AWAY FROM A STEADY SUPPLY OF NEW BOOKS. Also my friends and family and stuff but at least you can make new friends at camp.

[skygiants]

I REMEMBER PACKING A LOT OF BOOKS. And trading them around with the other kids, too. But you didn't really have very much time to read -- I remember summer camp as a super busy and scheduled environment. Current-me has a hard time envisioning past-me being OK being surrounded by people and constantly scheduled social requirements for a solid month, but I guess I must have been! I was never a Camp Person but I don't remember being super stressed or miserable.

[genarti]

The secret is: pack A LOT OF BOOKS and be a rereader. Also, your camp might have some kind of library room, and you can trade books with friends. But also what Becca said! There's a lot to do, much of it scheduled, and at least in my camp there wasn't any electric lighting or anything except flashlights, so your ability to read after sundown was limited. I was a book-a-day kind of kid, and all the same I only had a couple of hours' reading time on any given day at camp -- less if I took a nap -- and I don't remember being too stressed about it.

The thing that always baffled me was the kids who went to boarding school and also went to seven-week summer camp. Did their parents just... not want to see them ever?? (Yes, I guess. :-/ Several of them seemed cheerful and social and happy and all, but egad.)

[melannen]

I actually limited myself to four books for my two-week camp in order to force myself to socialize. But it was SECRET NSA SPY CAMP because I am a dork and one of the "rec" options was "go to the college library and read" so I knew I could survive. (I usually didn't even make it though the four books, because yeah, everything was very scheduled, and when it wasn't there was always a chess game to join or math puzzles to do. ^_^)

[melannen]

I think it's also a class/social group thing? I'm very east coast but, despite it being in all the books, nobody I knew went to all-summer camp - going to the six-week Scout camps or the six-week academic camp was the biggest thing anybody did, and very few kids even did that.

(There were more kids whose whole summer was patching together various three-week, two-week and one-week camps because both parents worked, but I don't think I knew anyone who did a whole summer at sleepaway.)

[skygiants]

Yeah, that's definitely a factor too. I wonder if city/suburbs plays in as well? I grew up in the suburbs, and sending your kids away to camp feels like a very suburban thing to me.

(My neighborhood was also very Jewish, and the JCC day camp played a LARGE role in my summers.)

[melannen]

I don't know if it's a city/suburbs thing exactly but it's definitely a "certain kinds of suburbs" things, I think?

And there were always the all-summer camps just for poor urban kids, too, like "Outward Bound" and "Upward Bound" and so on. So I guess for people in my sphere if you went to all-summer camp (that wasn't scout camp) you were either one of those snooty upper-class families or one of those super-poor urban families. And either way, it wasn't a Thing We Did.

[genarti]

I count "all summer" as a seven-week camp, but yeah, my summer camp was seven weeks of which one could go to the first half, the second half, or the whole thing. When I first heard about this from my cousins it boggled my mind! Camp to me meant, like, a week or so! But it was SO GREAT.

It was also a pretty upper-class camp, on the whole. Not everyone there was, but as a general demographic statement; I probably would not have gone, especially for multiple years, without a) scholarships and b) my parents' determination to make sure I got better social outlets than the school where I was not really fitting in. I agree with you about multi-week camp being a class/social group thing.

[melannen]

Yeah. IDK, in my social group (or maybe more accurately my parents') there was a perception that parents who sent their kids away for a whole summer must be BAD PARENTS, so even if they could afford it, they probably wouldn't have.

But I know kids (...via the two-week camp I went to) from the more stiff-upper-lip suburbs a few counties over - the ones where nobody had goats or dead model Ts in the backyard - where it was definitely more normal and they were the odd ones for not spending the whole summer away (and the year at boarding school).

[tei]

Wow, I just realized how rare adults in a children's book who are actually good people are. Jeez.

The longest amount of time I ever went to camp was a Christian camp that was two weeks, but there were a lot of kids there who were there for a whole two months! Which now I suppose is probably just a function of how much money their parents had, because paying to send your kid away overnight for the whole summer is only really worth it if you have elaborate vacation plans yourself. But yeah I honestly have no idea how those kids managed, like, psychologically, to be in the camp environment for that long. Because for me, camp was always exhausting even just for a week and unlike skygiants above, I do distinctly remember being super stressed and miserable and I kept going back to various camps (especially of the sports and music variety) basically out of some sort of macho pride that I was going to SURVIVE CAMP FOR ANOTHER YEAR, or something.