A Certain Slant of Light

rachelmanija asked about the most peculiar Newberies. This list has a lot of overlap with my post about Nonsense in the Newberys, since nonsense books are by definition usually pretty peculiar, but also they’re peculiar on purpose which perhaps takes away some of the weirdness.

But the Newbery book that most sticks in my mind for sheer and possibly unintentional strangeness is Peggy Horvath’s Everything on a Waffle. I mentioned this book in the Nonsense post as perhaps nonsense-adjacent, but I’ve never made up my mind whether it’s meant to be or not.

It’s tonally very weird. Everything on a Waffle got a Newbery Honor in 2002, which was peak Grim Dead Relative era for the Newberys, and generally speaking these books are mired down with Grim Dead Relative Feelings. The protagonists grieve so hard that there’s no room for anything else in the story.

However, although Everything on a Waffle begins with our heroine losing her parents at sea, there is no Newbery Grieving Process. Our heroine is blithely convinced that her parents have merely been shipwrecked somewhere, and will return in good time, and meanwhile she’s enjoying life in her weird little town. There is, for instance, an award-winning restaurant where everything is served on a waffle, hence the title.

It’s been quite some time since I read the book, but what has stuck with me for years is the way that the heroine just keeps bopping along no matter what happens. It’s not that she’s Pollyanna-ish exactly. It’s more that she’s aware that she’s in some sort of picaresque tale and doesn’t take it too seriously when she comically loses appendages: a finger here, a toe there.

Eventually, social services decides that a competent guardian would do a better job keeping the child in one piece, and our heroine is removed from her kindly but inept relation and taken into care.

But then! Her parents reappear! Our heroine was right all along. They were alive, they have been rescued, and the family is whole again, minus of course a few of the heroine’s fingers and toes.

Simply a strange book! Very peculiar! It isn’t really a nonsense book, because unlike the true nonsense books there’s nothing technically impossible happening. But it all seems so improbable that it has something of that dream-like nonsense book feeling anyway.