Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I’m still scarred enough from a month’s worth of Dracula that even after reading Hidden, I picked another short book for my fourth book this time around.  Ellen Conford’s Dreams of Victory is 102 pages long, at least in the Apple Paperback version (which totally took me back to childhood, by the way).  I went into it figuring it’d be an okay read and I’d probably get rid of it when I was done.

I did not expect it to be quite so funny.

By the time I was halfway through, I’d resigned myself to keeping it around; I laughed out loud (literally!) multiple times.  Victory is a likable 11-year-old with a penchant for really big daydreams, living a fairly normal life in what was then the present (it was written in 1973).  I knew I’d lost the battle over whether it will continue to take up space on my shelves around the time of her school play.  Victory is cast as ‘Litter,’ to be swept off of the stage at the end, but what really got me was the overall performance:

Smog forgot almost all of his lines and most of the time just stood there and looked dirty.  He had a very strange costume made of some                  filmy gray kind of material, and half the kids thought he was Tinkerbelle.

I was entertained.

Which is why I find myself unable to get rid of this short, kid-friendly tale of a girl who spends the whole book imagining she is good at other things before realizing what her true talents are.  It’s out of print, which isn’t surprising, but it’s available used on Amazon for a song (sadly, it doesn’t appear to be in the Salt Lake County Library system).  I think it’s more than worth it.