SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
SLJ Blog Network +
  • 100 Scope Notes
  • A Fuse #8 Production
  • Good Comics for Kids
  • Heavy Medal: A Mock Newbery Blog
  • Teen Librarian Toolbox
  • The Classroom Bookshelf
  • The Yarn
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • About/Contact
  • Fusenews
  • Reviews
  • Librarian Previews
  • Best Books
    • Top 100
    • Best Books of 2022
    • Best Books of 2021
    • Best Books of 2020
    • Best Books of 2019
    • Best Books of 2018
    • Best Books of 2017
    • Best Books of 2016
    • Best Books of 2015
    • Best Books of 2014
    • Best Books of 2013
  • Fuse 8 n’ Kate
  • Videos
  • Press Release Fun

January 6, 2010 by Betsy Bird

Designated Reviews: Honey Bunch: Her First Little Circus (1936) by Helen Louise Thorndyke

January 6, 2010 by Betsy Bird   4 comments

honeybunch01Time was when I could read and review a slew of older children’s books in a given year since I had no access to the newest titles on the bookshelves.  Now I can see all the new titles I like, but my reading of older titles has fallen by the wayside.  So it was with relief that I read this interesting take by Christine Bird, me mother-in-law, on a girls book series that, until now, I was unfamiliar with.  Between 1923 and 1955 the Honey Bunch books were produced once or twice a year with varying adventures.  Christine considers Honey Bunch: Her First Little Circus (1936) by Helen Louise Thorndyke and what she found when she rediscovered it again.

__________________________________

In an antique store on Christmas Eve I found an original edition of a Honey Bunch book from 1936.  Now aged 62, I last read Honey Bunch when I was seven.

The first shock was the quality of the paper.  The pages were so thick that I had to keep checking page numbers to be sure I was not turning several at once.  The book also featured high-end illustrations.  In every one of them Honey Bunch Morton looked just like Shirley Temple.

At age seven I was the second of five children in a fairly prosperous family.  At the time, I always imagined that the life of luxury led by Honey Bunch was due to her being an only child.  If only that were me, I too would get the back seat of the car all to myself.  My mother would buy me everything I asked for.  Looking pretty and having fun would be the only things that would ever be required of me.  I would be richly praised for my success in these areas.

Fifty-five years later I can see what a fantasy world Honey Bunch was living in.  Like Shirley Temple’s characters, she lived in the midst of the Great Depression, yet money was no object, ever.  When she goes to stay with her cousin Stub on her uncle’s farm, the household includes a maid and a hired man-of-all-work,  plus a crew of laborers to work in the fields.  The family has its own horse and wagon, plus a car for longer journeys.  The cousin has her own pony and her own dog.  The girls are served three fine meals a day.  Candy, cake, pies, and cookies are frequent treats.  The farm family is the benefactor of the local Home for Crippled Children.

Adults are available whenever the girls need or want them.  The rest of the time they are free to roam, having all kinds of interesting adventures.  Honey Bunch has no hesitation about speaking to strangers she meets along the side of the road — all of them adult males.  (Each time she does this, I felt exactly the way I do when Dorothy hops into the trailer with Professor Marvel in The Wizard of Oz. I want to scream "Didn’t anybody tell you not to do that?!!!")

When Honey Bunch decides she wants to stage "her first little circus," she gets 100% co-operation from the adults in putting on an elaborate show.  When she decides she needs a neighbor boy from back home to be a clown in her show, his mother promptly  makes him a costume and dispatches him to the farm, where he is welcomed for an indefinite stay.  In the meantime, her aunt is sewing costumes for the little girls and the maid is making some more candy to be put up in fancy boxes  and passed out among the crippled children at the Home.  The uncle drives his horse into town to buy a big crate filled to the brim with packages of popcorn and peanuts.

The girls wear nicely ironed dresses through all their adventures.  The dresses are always getting dirty.  The girls simply change into new ones.

Other than getting her dresses dirty, Honey Bunch never does anything naughty, so there is never any question of her being punished.  When Stub does something she has been ordered not to — feeding candy to the trained seals who are temporarily residing in her father’s barn — her only punishment is to eat dinner alone for one night as her father worries that her willful mistake will cost him a lot of money if he has to pay for the damage she has done. I can only imagine how much more severely an actual child would have been punished back in 1936.

I kept wondering "What is that Uncle Rand grows on his farm?  How could a single crop per year provide the luxurious standard of living depicted in the book?"

There is no such crop, of course.  The book’s job is to transport its readers out of the Great Depression and into a land of endless bounty.  This it does well.  The only poor person in the book is the maid’s brother, who arrives at the farm jobless, homeless, and hungry.  All these problems are solved once Honey Bunch recommends him to Mr. Downey, the owner of the trained seals.  Although Downey is himself relying on the kindness of the Mortons to stay afloat,  he is only too happy to hire this hungry stranger, who remains curiously nameless.

Honey Bunch’s lifestyle remains enviable to me all these years later.  Only now I know that the writer was telling little girls like me exactly what we wanted to hear. 

Filed under: Uncategorized

SHARE:

Read or Leave Comments

About Betsy Bird

Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Posts

January 2023

The Top Ten Most Disappointing Edibles and Potables of Children's Literature

by Betsy Bird

January 2023

Announcing the 2023 Newbery/Caldecott/YMA Pre-Game Show!

by Betsy Bird

January 2023

2023 Arrived and a Blog Is Still Here: What Does the Future Hold?

by Betsy Bird

November 2022

A Lost Hero: The Rediscovery of Mildred Batchelder

by Betsy Bird

November 2022

The Yellow Áo Dài : A Talk with Hanh Bui and Minnie Phan

by Betsy Bird

ADVERTISEMENT

SLJ Blog Network

100 Scope Notes

One Star Review, Guess Who? (#181)

by Travis Jonker

A Fuse #8 Production

Review of the Day: The Tree and the River by Aaron Becker

by Betsy Bird

Good Comics for Kids

Monkey Prince Vol. 1: Enter the Monkey | Review

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

Heavy Medal

Heavy Medal Mock Newbery Readers’ Poll Results

by Steven Engelfried

Teen Librarian Toolbox

The Value of Innocence for BIPOC Students, a guest post by David Mura

by Amanda MacGregor

The Classroom Bookshelf

The Classroom Bookshelf is Moving

by Erika Thulin Dawes

The Yarn

Looking Ahead: Our 2023 Preview

by Travis Jonker

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Articles on SLJ

2022 Notable Books: NCTE's 21 Best Poetry and Verse Novels for Kids

Bank Street Announces 2020 Cook Prize and Irma Black Award Winner

SLJ Reviews of the 2021 Youth Media Awards

Underdog Titles That Could Take the Prize | Pondering Printz

SLJ’s Reviews of the 2022 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Finalists

About Betsy Bird

Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jen Dutton says

    January 6, 2010 at 7:01 am

    Wow–fascinating post. Thanks.

  2. JoAnn Early Macken says

    January 8, 2010 at 4:39 pm

    My sisters and I inherited several Honey Bunch books from an older cousin when we were kids & practically wore the covers off. I kept them for their sentimental value, but they are awfully saccharine. Thanks for the reminder!

  3. Madigan Reads says

    January 10, 2010 at 6:27 pm

    Gosh, I loved Honey Bunch when I was a kid.
    My mother had a collection of them (that, and Trixie Belden) from her childhood, that I devoured as a kid.
    I wonder how I’d feel, re-reading them now. Sometimes it’s best to let these sort of things remain a hazy, pleasant memory, I think.

  4. Ann Nichols says

    May 7, 2012 at 12:28 am

    I’m 57 and I’ve just reread HONEY BUNCH: HER FIRST LITTLE CIRCUS for the first time in 18 years. I grew up on old books, partially because my folks couldn’t afford new books except for birthdays and Christmas and the old books could be bought very cheaply then. (Aunts and uncles who considered me a handy excuse to get old books out of the house didn’t hurt.)

    Although the Honey Bunch books can be a tad repetitious (storms, lost items, Lady Clare the cat is frightened into running away, etc.), I find them charming. I like the glimpses of what the comfortably well-off could afford back then. I also like some of the entertainments the parents come up with, such as making a book garden with a blank book, library paste, and old seed catalogs and the Jack Horner pie (a pine tin filled with party favors that has a paper cover. The toys are each tied to a string the child pulls to see what s/he gets.

    Did you know that you could use a wristwatch as a compass? (Obviously not a digital watch). Point the hour hand toward the sun and whatever is between the hour hand and the 7 is South.

    In fairness to the ghostwriter of this entry, Mr. Downey is depending on Mr. Morton’s kindness only until the part he’s ordered to repair his truck comes in. Mr. Downey seems to have no trouble paying for his seals’ fish.

    I agree about Stub’s very mild punishment. I’d expect a whipping or a spanking at the very least. The stunts that kid pulls in the books would drive me nuts!

    As for Norman Clark, judging by his behavior in earlier books, his mother was probably thrilled to get him away for a day or two.

    Honey Bunch is always safe talking to strange adults — in the books I’ve reread so far. It’s other children who can be a problem.

    They’re pleasant reads overall.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

  • External Links

    • A Fuse #8 Production Reviews
  • Follow This Blog

    Enter your email address below to receive notifications of new blog posts by email.

    This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

    This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

    Primary Sidebar

    • News & Features
    • Reviews+
    • Technology
    • School Libraries
    • Public Libraries
    • Age Level
    • Ideas
    • Blogs
    • Classroom
    • Diversity
    • People
    • Job Zone

    Reviews+

    • Book Lists
    • Best Books
    • Media
    • Reference
    • Series Made Simple
    • Tech
    • Review for SLJ
    • Review Submissions

    SLJ Blog Network

    • 100 Scope Notes
    • A Fuse #8 Production
    • Good Comics for Kids
    • Heavy Medal
    • Neverending Search
    • Teen Librarian Toolbox
    • The Classroom Bookshelf
    • The Yarn

    Resources

    • 2022 Youth Media Awards
    • The Newbery at 100: SLJ Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the Award
    • Special Report | School Libraries 2021
    • Summer Reading 2021
    • Series Made Simple Spring 2021
    • SLJ Diverse Books Survey
    • Summer Programming Survey
    • Research
    • White Papers / Case Studies
    • School Librarian of the Year
    • Mathical Book Prize Collection Development Awards
    • Librarian/Teacher Collaboration Award

    Events & PD

    • In-Person Events
    • Online Courses
    • Virtual Events
    • Webcasts
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise
    • Subscribe
    • Media Inquiries
    • Newsletter Sign Up
    • Content Submissions
    • Data Privacy
    • Terms of Use
    • Terms of Sale
    • FAQs
    • Diversity Policy
    • Careers at MSI


    COPYRIGHT © 2023


    COPYRIGHT © 2023