Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

This was shockingly racist?

I tried to view it as a product of its time but whew, multiple cultures are maligned and it's quite misogynistic as well. All for a Newbery winning title about the autbiography of a doll!

Copyright date: 1929...Odd to think that my mother might have run across this book as a little girl and read it....I remember reading it myself as a little girl. Like many of the older Newbery books, it is a vision into the past, a little trip into life for kids before TV and computers and IPods.

Hitty is a wooden doll made in the early 1800's. Her underpants are embroidered with her name and along the way she becomes the most literate of dolls. One girl after another owns her, though her painted features fade and her various dresses come and go. She has a series of exciting adventures: she lands in a tree, in a shipwrecked, on a deserted island worshipped as an idol (!), on a steamship, under the cushion of an old couch, in an exhibition, and, finally, in an antique store. She manages to survive all her adventures with her dignity intact, finding a way to take pleasure in even the least interesting of her situations.

Such a fun and exciting book! There are definitely lots of older racial language that opens the door for lots of discussions on racism in our society both past and present.