In the early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution gave way to the Progressive Era, and with it emerged a new middle class. As job conditions and wages improved, many Americans decamped from cities to the suburbs, where their children had much more space—and much more time. Americans became less worried about their children’s utility and more attentive to their development and happiness. By 1918, every state had passed laws mandating that children attend school. This meant the emergence of summer vacation, and as children began to seek both pocket change and entertainment, the lemonade stand—offering the chance to play at business, and for a cash reward, no less—presented itself as an apt activity.
But the Cadbury Creme Egg is also a candy anomaly. “There’s not another thing out there like the Cadbury Creme Egg, it’s both terrifying and delectable,” says candy historian Jason Liebig. “If you get the Cadbury Mini Eggs, for example, those aren’t dissimilar to other treats you can get throughout the year. Jelly beans are a lot like Mike & Ike’s. But a Cadbury Creme Egg? You’re not getting anything like that at any other time of the year.” And for many Americans, Easter is also the only time of year that we’re eating Cadbury-branded chocolate at all.
Why is it so dark, I ask. How can we continue our session? While all of this is happening, the folders get mixed up. And to my horror, my much-needed payment (a thousand-dollar bill, one fifty, and the rest mostly singles) has hit the floor and spread across the room. Even in the dark, the students notice my panic, and slide closer, hoping to catch at least a few dollars. If it’s a game, it’s certainly not one I enjoy.
Decisively, though her voice retains its sweetness, my host orders a stop to the chaos. She has become the good witch! She finds her way through the dark and whispers in my ears: Relax, my darling, you are sleeping and all you must do is open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes…
This is a sucker-punch of a novel, a viscerally vivid portrait of desperation, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty, but there is little hope in it. Angry as it was, Rebanks’s book was a love letter to Cumbria. The connection to the land goes just as deep here, but, bound to a place that demands so much in return for so little, it is a more dysfunctional relationship.
Reading James, I remembered when a working director once explained to me that the goal of the theatre-artist (her goal, at least) was to create a performance where the audience could sink so deeply into the material, they might forget for a moment they are watching a play. It saddened me: the limits of working with text on a page, the understanding that novelists might not be able to do the same. The good news is that while James may only be a novel about performance, it is a novel where the reader can sink in so deeply, they might forget it’s a reimagining.
The story is rich in satire, but also full of empathy. At its core is the residents’ struggle to cope with the inexplicable happenings, blaming interlopers, robbers, the mental decline of old age or dishonest tradesmen.
This book is an alarming mirroring of the present, as alarming as it is instructive, especially the attention given to the best way to effect change. Violence that attracts attention, or incremental legal progress?
Not all cookbooks take three years of development and three generations of input to develop recipes, but these extra steps taken by Taiwanese-Canadian home chef Tiffy Chen have paid off.