Books like Ginger Pye

A few years after my parents bought their very first house together, an entire lot of low-income apartment buildings went up on the other side of the canal behind our house.These apartment buildings became known to the residents of my neighborhood as the red apartments, (very clever indeed, as they were painted red) and this expression was typically uttered in derision and infamy, especially by us kids. Yes, we were resentful, initially, that those apartments went up directly behind our house and cast their ugly shadows on our smaller homes, so the residents of that complex already had one strike against them, but the main problem was that a majority of the kids who lived there were often bad news.They were the kids who started fist fights at our bus stop, they were the kids we would find hovered down by the canal behind our house smoking joints, and they were the kids who held me at knife point, once, at the age of 12.The truth is, there were probably a lot of really normal people living in those buildings, but they were most likely the single, the newly married, or the retired ones, and we rarely encountered any of them. It was the teenagers we needed to look out for, and I would typically walk a wide arc around the entire complex on my way home, especially if I ever found myself walking alone.I had a good childhood, but almost everything bad that happened to me as a kid was connected in some way to the residents of those red apartments. I would often complain to my parents about the shifty characters who would step out of the shadows of those red buildings and the threats they posed to my person, but it was the 1970s, and my father was just shy of invisible, gone every day from 7am to 7 pm. My mother was visibly present, but always unavailable, whether she was washing dishes, cooking a casserole or reading Cosmo. Parents were rarely concerned with “Unsavory Characters” back in those days. You were on your own.So, imagine my surprise this week at meeting Jerry and Rachel Pye, a sibling pair in Connecticut who have an “Unsavory Character” of their very own, a person who has crept out of nowhere and is determined to stalk them, mentally torment them, and then steal something quite precious from them. These kids are not totally on their own; their mother does listen to their problem and at least offers to lock the doors (it's something), and a local police officer takes their stolen property at least seriously enough to file a report, but, for the most part, the lives of this brother-sister pair become altered when they are presented with this very real problem.There isn't any violence in this book, and it was perfectly appropriate for my 9 & 12 year-old readers, but this Newberry award winning story from 1952 took me quite by surprise. I can't recall a single book for middle aged readers tackling this particular problem.The threat here is very real, and I applaud Eleanor Estes for grappling with an issue that has probably plagued many young lives throughout the years. I felt validated by this story, and my daughters were completely engaged by it, despite it being almost 70 years old.As far as I could tell, it hasn't lost any of its appeal.