Elizabeth Crosgrove Ladd

My parents signed me up for the Calling All Girls Book Club while we were stationed in Honduras (1961-1963) so I would have a supply of books in English to read. One of those books was The Night of the Hurricane by Elizabeth Ladd. It was a sequel to her book, Enchanted Island, which I didn't get to read until years later, but you don't need to have read the first book to enjoy this one.

Judy is an orphan from New York who has been living with Aunt Kate and Uncle Walter Brown in Maine for some months now. When the book opens, there's a chance for a hurricane. Judy wishes for wind hard enough to blow down one of their maple trees. Her family and that of her nearest friend, David Young, hurry to get boats, lobster traps, etc. to safety.

Judy repents of her wish long before the hurricane is over. There was plenty of damage and some things were lost, but it could have been worse. Still, a game Aunt Kate played with Judy during the hurricane forms the main plot. They were looking at the new catalog and deciding what they would buy if they had the money. Aunt Kate lingers over the pages featuring china dishes. She's never really liked her wedding china, but doesn't see the sense of spending money on china for Thanksgiving and Christmas when she already has a set. Judy wants to get her aunt something special, something beautiful that she would never spend the money on for herself.

How Judy manages to find out which set her aunt likes best without raising her suspicions, and then how she earns the money takes up most of the book. Along the way Judy attends a cigarette smoke-filled town meeting. (The book is copyrighted 1956, so the Surgeon General's report on the dangers of smoking wouldn't come out for another eight years. Banning smoking inside buildings was decades away.) This leads to digging for clams and getting lost. There's also cutting down Christmas trees to sell for 25¢ a tree.

The big excitement comes when Uncle Walter gets sick. The power is out and the snowplow has stopped coming. The Browns have no car. Can Judy make it to the Youngs' house so they can call a doctor? She's worn her aunt's snowshoes before, but she's never had to walk so far in them. If she panics, she could go too quickly, cross the tails of her snow shoes and fall down.

I have loved this book since childhood. Today is the 3 November 2020 election, and I chose to reread Judy's adventures to calm my nerves. There's also a lesson about hunting that is not preachy.

Note: The story Uncle Walker tells in chapter 2 really happened. The Portland Gale that sank the Pattie Steamer Portland was on November 26-27, 1898, killing all of the estimated 193-245 persons aboard.

Cat lovers: There's a black cat named Nicodemus, 'Nick' for short.

Dog lovers: Sorry, there's only an unnamed hound dog during the town hall meeting scene.… (mehr)