I was sorry you were dead

[rushthatspeaks]

Zilpha Keatley Snyder has died.

The Witches of Worm is one of the great books about handling parental neglect and abuse and the subsequent depression and rage, but my favorite Snyders are her celebrations of childrens' imagination-- The Egypt Game, with its depiction of how story can bring together a community of people who would never have thought of speaking to one another otherwise; the Stanley family books; and most importantly to me, Libby on Wednesday, with its absolute delight in the minutiae of being an eccentric kid and its subtle-because-1990 yet undeniably present and wonderful gay parents. I never really reread the Green Sky trilogy, because of the depressing, but another thing for which I have Snyder to thank is the Commodore 64 video game adaptation of Below the Root, a game so engaging that playing it collaboratively was probably the most time my father and I spent together when I was a child, and so memorable that every computer I have had as an adult has had a C64 emulator on it so I could play it again. (Well, it and the Laurence Yep-penned adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by the same company, which I also heartily recommend.)

She was another of the threads which made up the universe of safety, company, and wisdom in the days when the library was that universe for me, and I thank her for the excellent education and regret that I never got to do so in person.

Also, I have always thought Zilpha was a really awesome name.

Rest in peace.

Comments

[em_h]

Wow. I loved her books so very much (and yeah, her name too). They were among the books I read over and over and over when I was a miserable young thing. But I actually never knew about Libby on Wednesday, because by that time I'd stopped reading YA, and had not yet had the adult-return-to-YA moment. I'll have to find myself a copy.

Thank you, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Lux perpetua.

[skygiants]

a.) Oh no, Zilpha Keatley Snyder! :( I reread Libby on Wednesday not long ago and was so excited to discover that it was one of those books that grows with you.

b.) ...Laurence Yep did a video game adaptation of Alice in Wonderland????

[rushthatspeaks]

Re: b.) Absolutely. It is gloriously snarky and all the NPCs hate you and ask you riddles you can't answer, including one which has literally been bothering me for the last twenty-five years because this was before the internet and no one has gotten around to putting that information on the net now. Which is to say, it's a good adaptation.

[akycha]

Oh gods. This just made me burst into tears. Her books were and are so important to me, although I didn't actually get to own or reread any of them until I was an adult. What a gifted writer.

[starlady]

I read The Egypt Game in fifth grade and we adapted it for our class play. I wish I had the script; I know I wrote a decent chunk of it personally. It was a really great book, and I shall have to read her other books, for sure.

[rosefox]

Oh oh oh her books are so amazing. I had no idea she was even still alive.

I thought I was the only one who played Below the Root on an emulator. :)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am so sorry for that.

And now I am even more glad that I got to meet her at Mythcon a few years back, at which time I told her how much pleasure I'd got from her books over the years, and how much my students had during my teaching years.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, how lovely. She was a unique writer and I too really loved some of her books.

[pameladean]

Oh, that is sad, though 87 is a fairly ripe age. I came to her books as an adult -- well, as a person in her twenties and thirties, anyway -- but I loved them deeply and still reread them with enormous pleasure. She wasn't like anybody else. The Witches of Worm is probably the most starkly amazing book she wrote, but I'm very fond of The Changeling as well.

P.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Happy to see The Changeling love ♥

[rosefox]

The Changeling is my most most most favorite, even more than The Egypt Game.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Stop you're going to make me cry. I sign my letters LOVE-LOVE-LOVE because of that book. I treated my little sister better because of that book, because of the way Ivy and Martha included Josie. And Ivy's last letter about being a changeling... oh aaaaahhhhhhh, just everything.

And imagination.

and friendship

and all the unspoken class and prejudice stuff, OH JUST EVERYTHING. ;_;

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I love The Changeling too. And The Velvet Room. And Black and Blue Magic (which I read more than any other -- it is one of the books that lived at my grandmother's lake cottage and I read over and over every summer).

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Black and Blue Magic too! And then I saw in the intro that her son had asked her to write a happy story with a boy protagonist because she had written sad stories with female protagonists, and then it mentioned Season of Ponies, and so I had to go out and read that, too.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I didn't care for Season of Ponies, but I remember very little about it otherwise.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I only remember that it involved rather ethereal ponies of colors like blue and purple, and training for bareback equestrienne circus performing? But none of the details.

[pameladean]

Yes, The Egypt Game is lovely, but The Changeling is so very intricate and deep, all the while just moving along at a brisk pace and not using any undue emphasis.

P.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yup, me, too.

[pameladean]

I think it may be time for me to reread it.

P.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

The Witches of Worm never really grabbed me, not sure why. I am going to try it again (our library still has it, which is a good sign).

I think it is one of those books where I expected it to be either more clearly supernatural or more clearly not. But I could be misremembering.

I need to find Eyes in the Fishbowl again, too. I remember the central conceit and nothing else.

Apparently the hardback version of Black and Blue Magic had such awful illustrations (NOT by Raible) that it got bad reviews and didn't get into libraries much. One of the things I like most about it now is the evocation of San Francisco, which I don't think I appreciated properly as a kid.

[pameladean]

I think you have characterized TWoW quite well; it's one of those ambiguous, inward-turning stories. The supernatural spirals in more and more tightly and then kind of disappears.

I have not read Black and Blue Magic, and I too would appreciate any San Francisco elements much better now than fifteen years ago, so I'll seek it out as a memorial gesture.

P.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I hope you will like it. The worst thing I can remember about it is that the hero is rather apt to exclaim "For Pete Squeaks!"

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I've now reread TWoW, and I think what I had problems with as a kid was the unreliable (or at any rate biased -- unreliable isn't quite the right term) narrator. I think to the extent that I'd been exposed to such techniques it had been in first person, and when faced with stuff like a bald statement in third person that of course it hadn't been because X that A got mad at B, but because A was jealous of B's good idea, I got lost. Also I had expected Jessica to be sympathetic in the same way that, say, Robin in The Velvet Room is, and it's an entirely different kind of story.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I got paid to write an encyclopedia article about her, which means I got paid to reread her. Sadly they only wanted 150 words, so I couldn't justify reading/rereading everything. Still. It was so great, "You will give me money to reread The Egypt Game? Yes, I will sign right there and initial there, certainly."

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I never knew the Below the Root video game, but I did love the Greensky books--I tried to live them, inventing rituals for greeting the morning and a song of peace, whose melody I can't remember but that I can still recite, because I actually did use it. And then I discovered The Changeling which is a *wonderful* story, and one that contains the seed that grew into the Greensky books.

She was one of the writers I wrote to as an adolescent.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Ohh. The year I had to keep a reading log to get my Girl Guides reader's badge, I read or re-read lots of her work. That was when I was still doing a traditional cursive uppercase Z, and I had such fun writing Zilpha. I especially loved The Egypt Game and I have also bought it for various young people in my life. (I liked the sequel too but not so much.) I discovered Libby on Wednesday as a poly adult. I don't really remember Witches of Worm or Changeling, but yes all those others. ZKS had a near-unique way of taking children's imagination seriously but also treating supernatural possibilities seriously. Now I feel like I need to re-read all of them. Was Black and Blue Magic the one with a boy named Harry in a high-rise building who had wings?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

taking children's imagination seriously but also treating supernatural possibilities seriously.

YES--what a great observation.

And yeah, that's Black and Blue Magic

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

And how about a word for Alton Raible, the illustrator? I can remember so many of his illustrations SO CLEARLY.

... And you're right--Zilpha is an excellent name.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh, man! Thanks for bringing this to my attention, but yeah: right in the feels. I too loved The Egypt Game, The Changeling, and also A Witch in the Family/The Headless Cupid, which introduced me to the concept of the Dumb Supper. I never knew she wrote so many books!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. So very sad to hear this--but hers was a life to celebrate.

When asked why she wrote, Ms. Snyder once said that writing fiction is “a lot like being in love.”

“The similarity lies in the tendency of people truly in love to see everything not only through their own eyes, but also through the eyes of the person they love,” she wrote. “As in, ‘What would he think of that?’ or “How would she feel about that?’”

There was a copy of The Egypt Game on the table on Brattle this afternoon. I bought it in her memory.

Nine

[sovay]

Zilpha Keatley Snyder has died.

I hadn't heard. Her memory and her books for a blessing.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I didn't read enough of her books as a kid, but I love love loved The Velvet Room.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

One of my friends remarked today, apropos of something unrelated, that when she was a child she had loved a book called The Velvet Room. I told her the news, and she was amazed. She'd had no idea. Nor had she ever mentioned any Snyder book to me before.

It was one of those not inexplicable, yet odd moments that so often cropped up in her books.