reading: The Headless Cupid

[asakiyume]

Our internet is being dreadful. I can't *quite* pin the blame for my being a half-hour after Wednesday on that, but it did contribute!

I read many Zilpha Keatley Snyder stories in my youth. The Greensky books were life-changing for me, but I also really loved The Changeling. I never did read The Headless Cupid, however—until now. (Thank you, osprey_archer!)

The pacing is very leisurely. We meet good-hearted David and his three younger siblings, who are all distinct, charming personalities. We learn that David’s mother died some time ago, that his dad remarried and now they’ve moved to a huge old house out in the country, and that his stepmother’s daughter Amanda is coming to live with them.

She arrives, and she’s an angry mess, but David and younger kids don’t really care, because she’s into the supernatural, has a pet crow, and is training to be a witch, and they’re intrigued. She’s high handed and obnoxious with them, and it just kind of rolls right off them. She tries to lord it over them, and they … just enjoy it.

I don’t know how I would have felt about Amanda if I had been reading the story as a kid. As an adult, I didn’t like her very much. I was offended on behalf of David and the others, and as a parent, I could only think what a trial she’d be.

But she *is* imaginative (even if her first game with the others, slaves and slave driver, just would NOT fly in the present world). And you end up feeling a little sorry for her—though she’d hate that--because she’s always being shown up in small ways by the others (they get along better with her pets than she does, they know more about reptiles and herbs than she does). Furthermore David and his siblings have each other, and David has a good relationship with both his own father and Amanda’s mother. Given those facts, it’s pretty amazing that Amanda is as friendly as she is, and I guess we can intuit from that how much she craves exactly what the other four are offering, even if she can’t admit that fact to herself. And ZKS manages to convey all that without being heavy-handed. It’s all there, but lightly.

I did kind of want more actual supernatural stuff. There was a lot of “is it or isn’t it?” much of which gets placed firmly in the “it isn’t” category, but there was some stuff that remained ambiguous, and I wanted more of that. David’s little brother Jamie has a kind of Charles Wallace vibe going on, and I wanted to see him do more communing with crows—or ghosts.

But for all that, it was a satisfying story—perceptive about human nature, and engaging in its small details.

Comments

[pameladean]

There are several other books about that family, though I am blanking on the names at the moment. I don't find myself compulsively rereading them as I do the darker weirder Snyder like The Witches of Worm or The Changeling or even The Egypt Game, but I tend to get them out when I'm not feeling well.

P.

[skygiants]

The Great Stanley Kidnapping Case! Notable for the dramatic genre shift from "a family's children deal with stepsibling incorporation and adolescent angst" to "a family's children get kidnapped and held for ransom in Italy".

[asakiyume]

Haha, wow! Is that one a comedy, or is it serious? It sounds like it's a bit of a comedy--maybe a "Ransom of Red Chief" type thing?

[skygiants]

It's sort of on a fascinating dividing line, to be honest -- there's definitely some wacky hijinks involved in both the kidnapping and their attempts to get out of it, but the sense of danger for the kids and stress for the parents is definitely real.

[asakiyume]

Fascinating!

[pameladean]

That's right, I'd forgotten! I read that book right next to a much ghimmer Ruth Rendell one about the same topic. It must have been very much in the news at one time.

P.

[skygiants]

For whatever reason I think that one stayed with me even more than The Headless Cupid, probably because 'siblings in peril who must collaborate to escape' was my jam.

[asakiyume]

I often think about The Changeling, for so many reasons--but most recently in the context of privilege. There's a scene near the end when Ivy's brother is arrested, and Martha tries--feeling kind of false even while she's doing it--to cheer Ivy up saying, "Well, but it doesn't matter, because you're a changeling, right??" And Ivy just gets furious with her. They do reconcile afterward, but it was such a great and accurate portrait of how *different* life is for people depending on circumstances, and it doesn't mean you're not friends, but it does mean you can fail to understand and support people ... I mean I guess that's true even without the tension of differing circumstances, but I just really admire how ZKS showed that, so powerfully but without being in the least heavy handed. It goes to show that people have been understanding these things through the years, even if society as a whole hasn't learned.

The Witches of Worm actively scared me; I couldn't read it cover to cover. (That was when I was a kid. The illustrations didn't help!)

[wayfaringwordhack]

I know what you mean about reading something as an adult versus as a kid. I am that way with movies, too, now that I am a parent (not talking about quality or tech advances, but charaters and content, etc.)

[asakiyume]

It's like having a weird stereo vision, seeing with your current eyes and your child eyes (or at least, your impression of how child-you would have viewed/understood something).

[amaebi]

It's been so long since I read ZKS, though I keep meaning to have another look. But I remember that kind of magic-or-not teetering as characteristic of her, as of so much fiction of her period. Some ind of postwar SCIENCE thing, perhaps, and writers straining against it.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, maybe so: maybe it was a way people could have the magical without actually standing on a stage and announcing, THIS IS MAGIC.

[sartorias]

I remember pouncing on that when it came out, after a few years of not finding any new ones in the library. I think I even bought it without looking at it--my memory is Vroman's bookstore in Pasadena (where I was a governess) and not the library. And my profound disappointment. It seemed so lackluster compared to her others.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, it seems kind of thin? I enjoyed it well enough, but I'd been hoping for something slightly more committed to the mysterious. As it was, I was able to see very clearly that we were going to get Troubled Child of Divorce Makes Problems--though I did appreciate the non-moralizing tone of the story and the fact that the kids reacted as kids and not as mere authorial puppets.

I do like how clearly ZKS enjoys children--children of all ages.

[sbrackett]

I really enjoyed that book when I was 9 but now I remember very little about it except a sort of cool spooky feeling and an interior illustration of, from what I've read in your post, must be Amanda being a witch.

[asakiyume]

The illustrations are great! Alton Raible illustrated most (all?) of her books, and I love his pictures. They really capture the mood.