Author: Virginia Hamilton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Symeon Shimin
Zeely, believe it or not. is a story about Elizabeth Perry and her brother John who go to the country to spend the summer with their uncle, Ross. On the train there, they change their names to Geeder (soft 'G') and Toeboy for the summer for reasons unexplained.
This is a short novel, only a hundred pages or so, and an easy read - not just because of the comfortable writing and leisurely pace of the novel, but also because the story is very entertaining. But don't make the mistake of thinking it's too leisurely. The story moves.
Geeder and Toeboy decide to "camp out" at night, and they sleep in a field near the house which has a view of the road through the bushes. One night they see a tall white shape go silently past, and Geeder tells her brother that it's a Night Traveler and he must never talk to it or let it see him.
It turns out that the night traveler is really Zeely, the daughter of a guy who rents part of Uncle Ross's farmland to raise "hogs", because naming them pigs is just too real. There has to be a distance between the adorable animal out in the field and the dead meat which we wolf-down from our plates, doesn't there - otherwise it gets personal? So Sheep become mutton, cow becomes steak, pig becomes hog in the field because that sounds more horrible, and it becomes pork on the plate, because hog isn't edible. Pork is. Trust the French to make it palatable.
But that's not what this story is about. It's about the relationship which develops between Elizabeth and Zeely. Zeely is a Tutsi, referred to in this novel as a Watutsi, which is a group of people who colonized what is now Rwanda in Africa. Along with the Dinka people, the Tutsi are considered the tallest of all peoples in the world, averaging around six feet in height. By comparison in the US, men average five feet ten, women five feet five, so at this time of year, a tipsy Tutsi would be rather noticeable!
Elizabeth, aka Geeder, gets to know Zeely, whom at first, she thinks is an African queen due to an article she espies in a National Geographic magazine. It turns out that Zeely is actually from Canada, and not a queen, but the relationship between them, Geeder's activities, and the chat she has with Zeely about her life, are really well written and fascinating to read. I recommend this novel.
