I'm also really having trouble figuring out the money in this book. I'm used to things in old books seeming absurdly cheap, but the amounts that people are paying for things here seem like just as much as we'd pay now, if not more.

Some foods that were once very expensive eventually became cheaper, and then rose in price with normal inflation.

What kinds of items caught your attention?

Actually, it was the allowances that first caught my attention. The kids -- eight-year-old kids, who live in a semi-rural area where going into town, where the stores are, is a special treat -- are getting ten dollars a month. Elsie spent close to a hundred dollars on Christmas presents.

Again, it sounds pornarrific.

"'A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!' little Elsie," he said, kissing her on both cheeks. "Now I have caught you figuratively and literally, my little lady, so what are you going to give me, eh?"

come on!

Huh? I got to the end of the book, and it totally ends in the middle of the story! Elsie is worried that her father doesn't love Jesus yet, and she's worried that he might be marrying a woman she really doesn't like. The Jesus thing isn't resolved. The reader knows that her father isn't going to marry that woman, but for Elsie, the book ends with her crying herself to sleep.

It looks like the second book starts the next morning. I'm not sure I have the strength to go through another one of these.

According to one source on the Internet, Elsie Dinsmore was written by the author to support herself after an accident.

In 1867 it was the second best selling juvenile, behind Little Women.

In 1867 it was the second best selling juvenile, behind Little Women.

Which is also a book about girls, with something of a religious message, and light years ahead of Elsie in terms of any sort of measure of quality, or even propriety. Little Women? Not creepy. The March girls were self-sufficient, they helped other people, and they had actual personalities. (By the third sequel, Jo's Boys, the moralizing had gotten to be a bit much, but still nowhere near this.)

I feel like I need to go read Anne of Green Gables or The Secret Garden to cleanse my brain.

...that really is the creepiest book ever, Hil.

Honestly, the whole thing just sounds like it's trying to groom little girls for unsavoury goings on.

Honestly, the whole thing just sounds like it's trying to groom little girls for unsavoury goings on.

Very much yes.

I just started reading the second book. (My shoulder is throbbing with pain. There is no way I'm getting to sleep any time soon, and I don't have the concentration to enjoy any of the non-creepy books I'm currently reading.) Elsie was invited to a party. She asks her father if she can go. He gives a list of reasons why it wouldn't be a good idea, but says she can make up her own mind. She says,

"Dear papa, you are very kind," she said, "but if you please, I would much rather have you decide for me, because I am only a silly little girl, and you are so much older and wiser."

She decides to stay home. "And she knew, by her father's gratified look, that she had decided as he would have had her."