Okay so many times here I have extolled the virtues of Heidi, one of my favourite books as a child purely because the description of mealtime with the fresh goat milk and crusty bread with toasted cheese sent me over a carbohydrate edge that is sharp as fuck. It's stuck with me my whole life and I love to have cheese bread for breakfast, despite being ridiculously lactose intolerant.
I threw the book in my bag on one of my quick visits home to grab stuff. I've had so much time to sit in a hard chair and do nothing. Play games on my phone. Draw on my ipad. I watched two whole really good series on Netflix (Outer Banks and Unsolved Mysteries) and I prayed. I facetimed with Daniel so many times I have PTSD just looking at his face and I texted with Lock and with PJ by the minute.
But sometimes I would make tea and read. They let me use this little kitchenette and tea was the only thing that kept me from cracking like a brittle ice shelf from how cold they keep the floors.
And I picked up Heidi, thinking it might be comfort-reading. An old favourite book I haven't read since childhood. I look at the author's name and wonder if she wrote anything else. Johanna Spyri. I didn't realize the book was so old (1880) or that she wrote so much, but that's neither here nor there.
This book is fucking insane. Not only is Heidi passed around like an unwanted puppy but no one actually cares for her safety and she's five years old. There's a long human-trafficking segment where she is taken from the mountain and sent to Frankfort to be held prisoner in a city home as a companion for a disabled girl before the girl's father takes pity on her and has her sent back to the Alm Uncle on the side of the mountain, in care of his butler, who abandons her halfway there to a random guy with a cart who promises to take her the rest of the way.
She is taught about God while in the city too and decides that God is her personal wish-genie. No one ever questions this simplified, bizarre new life-plan of hers.
Oh, and dinner rolls are worth more than gold in this story.
Magically she learned to read in the year and a half she was there because Heidi is all about self-preservation.
I have one chapter left and I'm gobsmacked by how bad this is in comparison to how vivid and delicious the descriptions are of her first few days on the mountain. I'm so embarrassed now. And stunned at how poorly this has aged compared books of fifty years later, like the Little House on the Prairie series but wow, now I know.