BOOK TALK(& then some)

Image Courtesy of Dreamy Art for Pixabay

A favorite long before "Mowgli" went Hollywood, these tales thrilled and terrified, fed dreams and nightmares. The message of abandonment and fostering to the girl-cub "Dawnie" was absorbed unconsciously before her own abandonment. The personification of the jungle animals fascinated her as she listened to her mother read, but the playfulness and help of Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa the python to the man-cub didn't offset the stealth and danger of the dominant threatening Shere Khan the untrustworthiness of the Bander-Log, monkey people. Knowing she was having to go along to a wilder Burma underlined her apprehensions. This comes forward at the close of the memoir and travel tale (I) Jackals' Wedding, A Memoir of a Childhood in British India, and the beginning of (II)  Burma Banyan, A Daughter's Odyssey.

The Jungle Book may also have set the writer's love of each chapter containing a story, and poems as epigrams.

Read aloud with expression by her mother starting in Dehra Dun, India, before she learned to read, "Dawnie" enjoyed the charm of Stevenson's verses, the rhyming and rhythm that fed into her love of  hearing, reading and writing poems.

Wordplay and the wonderful flexibility of the English language were definitely seeded into her child's mind, as well as how everyday subjects could be examined closely, turned slowly with each detail brought to attention and appreciated as art objects, transformed into poignant or amusing poems. These same underlinings and accents bloom in Dawn's prose and poems--her love chants to Kaua`i island, for example: Behold Kaua`i, Modern Days ~ Ancient Ways.

. . . of more favorite childhood books  that formed a future reading and writing foundation for Dawn, including The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett), the Little House (on the Prairie) Series  (Laura Ingalls Wilder), and  Albert Schweitzer's African Notebook.