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Ken was proud of the scene. He was proud of his compatriots who brought their electric gadgets with them, their refrigerators, sanitary wire screening, and washing machines; who bought and planned for comfort. "They live right!" he silently told the crates. "They're what makes America good. And even if it costs a lot to get the stuff over here, Uncle Sam wants them to have it. He wants them to stay used to good living."
(Janet Lambert, Little Miss Atlas 48)
There are many comments that one might make about this passage, not the least of which is the way my jaw dropped when rereading it fifty years after it was written. But the most important thing to know about Ken, who is here speaking in Little Miss Atlas (1949) about the arrival of U.S. military families in post-World War II Germany, is that two books later he dies. After all the years since I first read about Ken his death remains, for me, a deeply shocking memory. Ken is first the boyfriend, later the fiancé (sort of) of Tippy Parrish, who is the heroine of this Janet Lambert series. He is killed fighting in Korea. The romance develops during the course of four books as Ken competes with Tippy's long-term suitor, Peter. I could not understand when I first read the series at age thirteen or fourteen, why lovely, romantic older Ken had to die, to be replaced, eventually, in Tippy's affections by boring hometown sameage Peter. This kind of thing was not supposed to happen in this kind of book, and though, of course, I would not have put it in this way at the time, I felt that Lambert's contract with the reader, that is, me, had been betrayed. Rereading the books I'm still angry about Ken dying, but my reactions today have another more complicated dimension. Why, I wonder now, did I feel so passionately about the characters in the first place? Why did I love these books so much when their weaknesses are now so readily apparent to me? It's not as if I wasn't reading many other "better" books at the same time; I was a glutton for all forms of the printed word. But romantic novels by Lambert...