Blue Willow by Doris Gates – for the #1940Club

Title: Blue Willow (a Newbery Honor Book)
Author: Doris Gates (1901-1987)
Illustrator: Paul Lantz
Publication: Viking, hardcover, 1940
Genre: Juvenile fiction
Setting: Depression-era California

This week, Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting the 1940 Club in which we read and write about books published in the same year.

Description: For the last five years, since Janey’s father lost their ranch in Texas, the family has traveled from place to place while he worked temporary jobs. Now they have reached Fresno and moved into an abandoned one-room hut while Mr. Larkin seeks work that will last at least a month and her stepmother tries to make do with their meager possessions. Janey desperately hopes they can stay in one place so she can make friends and go to school – in bad times, her only education is reading two pages of the Bible, and she yearns for permanence. Janey’s one valuable possession is a china plate in the famous Blue Willow pattern which belonged to her great-great grandmother and is too precious to be unpacked until there is a secure place for it.

Only to Janey did the willow plate seem perfect. Only for her did it have the power to make drab things beautiful and to a life of dreary emptiness bring a feeling of wonder and delight.

Bending over it now, she could feel the cool shade of willows, she could hear the tinkling of the little stream as it passed under the arched bridge, and all the quiet beauty of a Chinese garden was hers to enjoy. It was as if she had stepped inside the plate’s blue borders into another world as real as her own and much more desirable.

When Janey is forced to give up her plate to save her family, her sacrifice and courage set in motion events that will enable the Larkin family to finally put down roots again.

How Blue Willow Got Me a Job: Nowadays I would have Googled Blue Willow to know what Janey’s plate actually looked like but maybe it was more fun as a child to imagine it (at some point, it was identified to me).  Halfway through law school, I was in an interview when the person interviewing me excused herself to take a phone call. I politely tried not to listen and looked around the office where I saw a Blue Willow plate displayed on a bookcase. When the woman hung up and apologized, I said I admired the plate and told her I had read a book called Blue Willow as a child. “That’s one of my favorite books!” she exclaimed (she really was a kindred spirit – she was going on vacation to Prince Edward Island the next week). Later in the day, she collected me from a long-winded colleague’s office and said, “Your last interview of the day is with my friend and I want her to tell you her favorite author to see if you’ve heard of her!” Well, that lawyer’s favorite author was Georgette Heyer so I got the job! I might still be at that law firm if it hadn’t been in New Jersey, a two-hour commute each way from my Manhattan home, but much nicer people than at most of my former law firms.  

Doris Gates was a native Californian who was the head of the children’s department at the Fresno County Free Library (the room was later named for her) and encountered many children in Janey’s situation at camps for migrant workers. In addition to the memorable plate, what stuck in my mind was that Janey slept at night on the back seat cushion of the family car, which was removed and placed on the floor of the shack. Librarians may have liked this book because of the vivid depiction of a hard-working but unlucky migrant family but children identified with Janey’s yearning for a home and the cherished Blue Willow plate that symbolizes the home her family lost.

So you wonder who beat out this book for the Newbery Award? I’ve read a lot of Newbery winners and honor books, although I wish my school or neighborhood library had shelved them together then the way my favorite library does now, but Call It Courage never appealed to me (a Polynesian boy tries to overcome his fear of the sea by going off in his canoe, alone except for his little dog and pet albatross) to do more than pick it up. Nor did I read the biography of Norwegian explorer, Nansen. But I found Blue Willow in my school library along with Young Mac of Fort Vancouver (which was illustrated by Richard Holberg, whose name I knew from other books) and, of course, I read The Long Winter many times and did a project on it in fourth grade. For my British friends, Blue Willow was also published as a Puffin although I don’t know if this story of the Dust Bowl and displacement hit a chord there the way it did here.

1941 Newbery Winner: Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry

Honor Books: Blue Willow by Doris Gates

Young Mac of Fort Vancouver by Mary Jane Carr

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Nansen by Anna Gertrude Hall

There is a well-known independent bookstore in Houston called Blue Willow which they say is named after the china, not the book. I am sorry to report they do not have the book on hand although can special order it.

Source: I could not find my paperback so had to get this from the library. Another of my 1940 books is also missing. Are they hiding out in the attic together?