That sounds amazing. How did she do it? Did everybody just go along because they didn't want to hurt her feelings after she was run over by a bus?
LOL, I don't remember the details, although I think I may still have it somewhere. (It was a Sunday School prize, and also I consider it an important historical curiosity.) As I recall, she was run over by a bus and had to lie flat for a year so she could get well. She was angry about this for a while, but they put her downstairs and left the door open so everyone in the village could waltz in whenever they choose and she found she cheered them up/converted them over time, so it was all obviously worth while. I am pretty sure she converted the bus driver, who was very sorry about it all, as well as the village bad boy, Brian. (They only had one.) Possibly a lot of the village was already at least nominally Christian.
It is terrible on so many levels from a modern pov and I think I kind of knew that even when I was ten (but I first had it when I was seven). I don't think the adults read these books; I think it was just a matter of grabbing one from the tiny selection at the Christian bookshop that was aimed at the right age and being thankful. (Unlike the US, our Christian publishing industry is tiny, and is mostly either NF or imported with the odd thing down by Hodder or Scripture Union.)
I also had a truly terrible Narnia-esque fantasy one as well. Or at least, it was enjoyably duff (I used to take it as encouraging, because I felt sure at about ten that I could write as well as the author, if possibly not correctly, unlike all the other books I read). However, it was a series of four books, and I had 2 and 3, but when you put them together with 1 and 4, the religious analogy fell apart disastrously. (If you have a Jesus-figure, you don't marry him off to somebody later!) The fourth, however, did have an army of evil penguins, which almost made up for the fact that it seemed to have entirely forgotten everything in books 1-3.
(I should say, to be fair, that there were some quite nice and thoughtful ones, but it's the terrible ones that always stand out!)
Pollyanna is great, though. I loved it. I tried to play the Glad Game - but you can see the other literature I had access to... ;-)
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Date: 2017-09-07 05:19 pm (UTC)LOL, I don't remember the details, although I think I may still have it somewhere. (It was a Sunday School prize, and also I consider it an important historical curiosity.) As I recall, she was run over by a bus and had to lie flat for a year so she could get well. She was angry about this for a while, but they put her downstairs and left the door open so everyone in the village could waltz in whenever they choose and she found she cheered them up/converted them over time, so it was all obviously worth while. I am pretty sure she converted the bus driver, who was very sorry about it all, as well as the village bad boy, Brian. (They only had one.) Possibly a lot of the village was already at least nominally Christian.
It is terrible on so many levels from a modern pov and I think I kind of knew that even when I was ten (but I first had it when I was seven). I don't think the adults read these books; I think it was just a matter of grabbing one from the tiny selection at the Christian bookshop that was aimed at the right age and being thankful. (Unlike the US, our Christian publishing industry is tiny, and is mostly either NF or imported with the odd thing down by Hodder or Scripture Union.)
I also had a truly terrible Narnia-esque fantasy one as well. Or at least, it was enjoyably duff (I used to take it as encouraging, because I felt sure at about ten that I could write as well as the author, if possibly not correctly, unlike all the other books I read). However, it was a series of four books, and I had 2 and 3, but when you put them together with 1 and 4, the religious analogy fell apart disastrously. (If you have a Jesus-figure, you don't marry him off to somebody later!) The fourth, however, did have an army of evil penguins, which almost made up for the fact that it seemed to have entirely forgotten everything in books 1-3.
(I should say, to be fair, that there were some quite nice and thoughtful ones, but it's the terrible ones that always stand out!)
Pollyanna is great, though. I loved it. I tried to play the Glad Game - but you can see the other literature I had access to... ;-)