Miss Hickory (1947)

Miss Hickory was kind of an odd book about a doll made from an apple twig with a hickory nut head.  Miss Hickory, unlike Hittie, (another doll character from a Newbery book) is able to move and interact with animals and her environment, but she is never shown interacting with humans. 

Left behind (and outside in New Hampshire) when the family in the house moves to Boston for the winter, Miss Hickory despairs of ever surviving.  Her corncob house taken over by a chipmunk, she has no place to spend the winter.  Finally Crow takes pity on her and helps her find an abandoned robin's nest to live in for the winter.

Miss Hickory is quite resourceful.  When her clothes start to fall apart, she improvises with things she finds in the forest.  She discovers that she loves to skate on the frozen streams.  She finds berries frozen under the snow to eat.  She helps the pheasant hens start a ladies aid society. 

The one thing that characterizes Miss Hickory most is her hard head.  She says that it is because it is a hickory nut.  She doesn't take easily to change.  She has a hard time believing her animal friends or trusting them. 

Near the end of the book Spring has finally arrived.  Miss Hickory has to find a new home when the robins return to their nest, and decides to look into Squirrel's hole in the tree.  She hadn't seen him for some time and thought he had moved on.  To her great surprise, and dismay, she found him home.  I say to her dismay because Squirrel, having eaten all of his nuts, needed food and saw Miss Hickory's head as his salvation.  It was at this point that the head started realizing how hard it was and all of the things Miss Hickory had missed because of it.  So then the image the author gives is a bit funny.  The body of Miss Hickory wanders around and climbs the old, gnarled apple tree and sticks the neck part of the twig into a crack.

Good things come of this, however.  Miss Hickory becomes a scion, bringing new life to the old tree.  (dictionary.com defines scion as "a shoot or twig, especially one cut for grafting or planting; a cutting.")   

Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin.  Miss Hickory.  The Viking Press, 1946.

Strawberry Girl (1946)

In the Foreword of Strawberry Girl, Lois Lenski tells us her purpose in writing a "series of regional books for American children."  She writes, "We need to know our country better; to know and understand people different from ourselves; so that we can say: 'This then is the way these people lived.  Because I understand it, I admire and love them.'" (p. xi) Set in the early 1900's in the backwoods of Florida, this book is rich in regional dialect and character.

When the Boyers move from Marion County to the old Roddenberry house (I couldn't find a town name, only that they moved from northern Florida to somewhere more southern), they have more than just the land and weather to contend with.  They have the Slaters.  Despite all their efforts at being neighborly, the Slaters, just don't want to get along.  The Boyers, along with many families in the area, start strawberry farms, and the Slaters' hogs and cattle roaming unfenced wreak havoc on the plants.  But when Bihu Boyer decides to fence his land, that's when things get ugly.

Told from the perspective of 10-year-old Birdie, we experience with her the joy and sadness, faith and fear of a brave girl who wants to do good and who truly loves her neighbors despite their shortcomings.  The Boyer family is portrayed as hard-working, kind, forward-looking; in sharp contrast with the Slaters, who are depicted as lazy, selfish and backward. 

During the course of the story, Mrs. Boyer and Mrs. Slater and the children become friends and learn to appreciate and serve each other, but it takes a small miracle to bring Mr. Slater around.

I enjoyed reading this book very much.

Lenski, Lois. Strawberry Girl. HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1945.