{"id":11121,"date":"2008-04-22T16:18:36","date_gmt":"2008-04-22T20:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/22\/11121.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:16","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:16","slug":"book-report-the-boxcar-childre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/22\/book-report-the-boxcar-childre\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Boxcar Children"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We read The Boxcar Children<\/a> to our Perfect Non-Reader (who has since read five different Boxcar Children books on her own) as a bedtime book. I think I had never read it; if I had, it was not one of the memorable books of my youth. I think of the series as a sort of hacky Hardy Boys, but the first book doesn’t read as an introduction to a series of mystery books at all. Mostly, it’s a nice little story about four siblings who, when their parents die, run away to live rough rather than go to their gruff grandfather. There are a bunch of sweet details about their life on the streets, both before they find the boxcar and as they set up house in it.
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As we were reading it, though, I was horrified by the glamorization of homelessness. The kids are improbably cheerful and hardworking, and the adults who they come in contact with range from superwonderfulbenevolent to mildly helpful. No-one tries to harm the children, or steal from them, or lead them astray. Even the threat of separation comes from somebody who would put the younger children in an orphanage. One of the children gets sick, and a doctor helps them out of the goodness of his heart, although the rich grandfather does eventually reward him.
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There’s no indication that they are this<\/i> close, every minute they are on the street, to death, injury, abuse or a life of drug addiction, hard labor or prostitution. And I’m reading this to my child, who thinks that eating wild berries out of half-cracked dishes found in a garbage dump is hilarious. And yeah, it is, but then, not.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger returns to a simpler time, when we didn’t have records of how many homeless kids were abused, killed and dumped in the woods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18337,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11121\/revisions\/18337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}