_Pollyanna Grows Up_
by Eleanor H. Porter
Two years after Pollyanna Whittier was hit by a car and was unable to walk until
admitted to Dr. Ames's clinic, she is fully recovered and back home with Aunt
Polly, who has married Dr. Chilton, in the old Harrington house in
Beldingsville, Vermont. Or, at least she's back home until Aunt Polly and the
good doctor decide what to do while the two of them head off to Germany for a
year of specialized medical study. Shall they put Pollyanna into a private
boarding school, or shall they accept the rather odd invitation for the girl to
spend the coming school year with Mrs. Carew in Boston? It is the belief of
nurse Della Wetherby that it is a good dose of Pollyanna that her sister, the
widowed Ruth Carew, needs to recover from the permanent depression suffered
since the disappearance of their nephew Jamie, only four years old when his
father John Kent spirited him away after his wife Doris died.
So it is that the Glad Game comes to be practiced on the exclusive Commonwealth
Avenue of Boston, and a most irrepressible Pollyanna manages to change the lives
of Mrs. Carew, a crippled boy, a miserable shop girl, and untold others. But
life brings sorrows as well as joys. As Pollyanna grows up, can she manage to
guarantee her own future happiness when loss seems capable of bringing her down
to misery? And just who loves whom, we find ourselves wondering along with the
former Jimmy Dean, now the adopted son of the once cantankerous John Pendleton?
I last read this book when I was in elementary school. It is the second of the
so-called "Glad Books" written by Mrs. Porter back early in the nineteen
hundreds, books that have become children's classics. Other than the fact that
at thirteen Pollyanna is far younger in personality than most such girls we find
of that age a century later, it is still very relevant, or so I've found it. A
most interesting look at life at the beginning of the mechanized age, when
horse-drawn vehicles and motorcars coexisted on the roads of our nation.
Available commercially in print and in e-text format; most likely available via
BARD as well.
Bonnie L. Sherrell
Teacher at Large
"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very
wise cannot see all ends." LOTR
"Don't go where I can't follow."
We gave the Goblin King control of our nation!
