It's the first Wednesday in January (sort of), so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group!
The awesome co-hosts for the January 8 posting of the IWSG are Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles!
And here's this month's question:
Describe someone you admired when you were a child. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?
I've been struggling to answer this one. I'm sure there were people I admired as a child, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. What does come to mind when I read this question is some of the books and authors I loved as a kid that I have gone back and re-read as an adult either to read to my own kids or just out of curiosity. Some of those books I thought were so magnificent, books I obsessed over for months or years and read until they were rags... well, they're actually pretty dreadful.
I was huge fan of Rosemary Sutcliffe as a child, especially her book The Eagle of the Ninth. I read two copies of that book to rags because I re-read it so many times. And a few years back, I stumbled across it at the library when I was looking for something that might interest my son and took it out. And I could not figure out what the heck I'd liked about it so much that I re-read it over and over again. The book was boring as all hell. The characters were flat and the writing wasn't even that good.
The other books I obsessed over as a kid were the Adventure series by Willard Price. In these books a pair of brothers, Hal and Roger, were sent all over the world by their father to have wild adventures with animals in South America, Africa, the South Pacific and the Arctic. I think to collect animals for their zoo - I can't quite remember that part. There were 14 of these books all together and I had the entire set which I re-read over and over. I found a couple of them in the library when my kids were around the right age for them and picked them up. Again, what a bitter disappointment.
Apart from the colonialism and very un-environmentalist behavior in these books, they are wholly unbelievable in terms of the characters. Hal is supposed to be 19 and Roger 13. What parents let their teenage sons risk their lives with lions and panthers and tigers and rogue elephants and even living in an underwater village? Not just once, but over and over again? Even after one or the other of them almost dies in every book? I can maybe accept Hal getting to go once or twice, with his more experienced father perhaps, but doesn't Roger have school? And given how terrifying and perilous these adventures are, these brothers don't ever cry or need a hug or even touch one another to give comfort when one or the other is hurt. It's very unrealistic. Especially how strong they both are and how they know all about how to deal with these wild animals despite being children.
On the plus side, I did learn a lot from reading these books. I'm always surprised how much I know about Roman legionnaires from Rosemary Sutcliffe and all the random things I learned from Willard Price. In fact, Volcano Adventure saved my entire family's life once... We were staying somewhere where they'd lit a coal fire to keep the room warm for us and in the night, my father got up to go to the bathroom and promptly fell over on the floor, waking me up. I used my Willard Price knowledge and figured out that the room was filled with carbon monoxide and managed to wake my mother and sister and get everyone outside before we all died in our sleep. I think I was 10 or 11.
So thank you Mr. Price!
Do you have someone you admired greatly as a child? How do you feel about them now?
