My One Hundred Adventures by Polly Horvath
Reviewed by EllenRatings
Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content
LANGUAGE
VIOLENCE
SEXUAL CONTENT
ADULT THEMES
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year; a Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner
Ratings Explanation
Language: Two instances of “Oh, my God” and one “Praise Jesus!”
Violence: Mr. Gourd yells at his wife and kids and throws things. He tries to abduct Jane and grabs her around the neck, nearly choking her to death.
Sexual Content: There is none in this book, however, there is the premise that Jane and her three siblings were likely all fathered by different men, and as her mother has never married and none of the children know their fathers, young readers may question the whys and hows. (Then again, they might not.)
Adult Themes: Mr. Gourd is a violent alcoholic. Ned smokes. Jane’s mother and Ned drink wine. A fortune teller drinks from a bottle of gin. The fortune teller takes Nellie Phipps’ (the church pastor’s) purse filled with church donations. When asking an old man about his family life, he tells Jane he’s had several children with different women. Mrs. Parks, an elderly woman from church, dies choking on a piece of horehound candy. Jane is the oldest of four children, and she sometimes ponders the paternity of her siblings and herself.
Synopsis
As 12-year-old Jane lies in the sand one July day near the Massachusetts beach house where she lives with her family, she yearns for a summer filled with adventure. She is hardly a child any longer, and cannot be contented with the simple pleasures she used to enjoy of predictable summer days spent making jam with her poet mother and building sand castles with her little brothers and sister. No, this is the summer she will find adventure: one hundred of them, she determines. And they come to her (though not all one hundred of them, as she hoped), in unexpected ways and means. She takes a solo ride on a hot-air balloon and drops Bibles down below. She meets a fortune teller who predicts something dark and dismal in her future. She gets tricked into babysitting the five unkempt, unruly Gourd children for weeks on end. She rescues her little brothers when their raft drifts out to sea. And she meets a slew of older men who start hanging around her mother again–could any of them be her long-lost father? Along the way, what Jane discovers is you never really know how you will react to a situation until you are in it, and that sometimes your reactions just may surprise you.
This is a perfectly charming book. Ms. Horvath’s storytelling borders on the lyrical, and I found myself underlining several passages I wanted to remember later. In one passage, Jane comments on the sleepy sounds of life everywhere around her, the frogs, flies, dragonflies: “It is funny to think they live next to me, busy busy, and I am so taken up with my own life most of the time, I am not conscious of theirs going on parallel to mine. And they are not conscious of me either or all the important things I think I must do every day.” I love that thought. And this one: “All our lives are mundane but all our lives are also poetry.” How true!
The recommended age group is grades 4-7. I would agree with that. The book is written from the viewpoint of a 12-year-old. However, I know my daughter might read it and ask, “How can a little girl not know who her father is? How can all the children in one family have different fathers?” and then I might have some explaining to do. That being said, this is not a dominant theme in the book.