Meet Molly, An American Girl

Meet Molly is the first book in a series about a nine-year-old American girl living in the 1940's. The series is presented as a wholesome alternative to some of the more controversial books written for young girls today. However, we might want to take a closer look and just see how wholesome it is. After all, being better than “definitely bad” is not necessarily acceptable in reading material for children, especially children in a Christian home.

Molly is not a Christian girl. This is a concept that, in and of itself, might not, under certain conditions, constitute reason for concern on the part of parents, if they have read the material and found everything contained therein to be morally forthright and acceptable. Yet, knowing this fact in the beginning, we think, raises warning flags to the Christian parent in evaluating food for the mental, and consequently, spiritual appetites of the child.

Molly is an American girl, but is she the girl that you want to rear? Let’s take a peek into her life to see. This first book in the series is set around the celebration of Halloween. On page three we find Molly, a nine-year-old, sitting at the dinner table for three hours stubbornly refusing to eat turnips, which she has, as yet, never in her life tasted. The mother finally comes home from work, reprepares the turnips, and gets Molly to eat them. She also tells Molly how, as a girl, she once hid her sardines in a napkin rather than eating them.

We are a little concerned, due to the tenor of these passages and others, that they will really tend to add legitimacy to undesirable behavior and attitudes in the mind of a child, however, rather than having you take our word for it, we will quote a few so that you can draw your conclusions.

Page 2:
Molly had smelled trouble as soon as she walked into the kitchen. It was a heavy, hot smell, kind of like the smell of dirty socks. She sat down and saw the odd orange heap on her plate. She made up her mind right away not to eat it. “What’s this orange stuff?” she asked.

Page 4:
"That rat Ricky," thought Molly. She looked over at her older sister Jill. Jill was putting ladylike bites of turnip in her mouth and washing them down with long, quiet sips of water. Almost all of the horrible orange stuff was gone from her plate.
Molly sighed. In the old days, before Jill turned fourteen and got stuck-up, Molly used to be able to count on her to make a big fuss about things like turnips. But lately, Molly had to do it all herself. Jill was acting superior.

Page 12:
“Ricky, you rat!” she said. “I’m going to get you!” She started to get up from the chair.
From behind the door Ricky chanted, “Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah nyah! You can’t leave the table. You haven’t finished your turnips!”


Page 21 (discussing Halloween costumes):
“Well,” replied Molly slowly, as if she had just thought of it for the very first time. “How about Cinderella and the two ug—I mean, the two stepsisters?”
“Oooooh,” said Susan. “Cinderella!”
“Who gets to be Cinderella?” Linda asked immediately.
“We don’t have to decide that right away,” said Molly. “Let’s . . . uh . . . let’s wait and see who has the best ball dress, and that’s the one who will be Cinderella. The other two will be stepsisters.”
. . . she was thinking that Susan’s dress sounded perfect for Cinderella. And it had two very big advantages over Molly’s floaty pink dress with the white angora top. Susan’s dress really existed, and Susan already had it. Being an ugly stepsister was not at all what Molly had in mind.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Maybe Linda is right. Maybe it’s not fair. Maybe we should all be exactly the same thing, like the Three Musketeers.”
“You’d be perfect as the Three Little Pigs,” said Ricky. “Or you could be the Three Bears. How about the Three Stooges? Or the Three Kings of Orient?” He began to sing in a loud, teasing voice:
“We three kings of Orient are,
Tried to smoke a rubber cigar,
It was loaded, it exploded . . .”
“STOP IT!” yelled Molly.
And suddenly, Ricky did stop. His face turned red. He bounced the basketball under his legs, then behind his back. He leaned casually against the garage and twirled the ball on the tip of one finger.
The girls turned around to see who he was showing off for. It wasn’t Mrs. Gilford or even Mrs. McIntire. Nobody was there except Jill and her new best friend Dolores. They were walking up the driveway, carrying their school books.
Dolores was wearing a bright blue sweater just the color of her eyes. She had a wide, white smile, like a movie star in a toothpaste ad. She stopped and flashed her smile at Ricky.
“Hi, Rich,” she said.
“Rich!” snorted Molly. Lately, Ricky had been telling everybody to call him Rich because it sounded more like a soldier’s name than Ricky did.
“Hi, Dolores,” he squeaked in a very odd voice. He turned quickly, jumped, and sent the basketball swishing thfough the basket just as Dolores went in the door.
Molly, Linda, and Susan looked at each other and dissolved into giggles. It was crystal to them what Ricky’s problem was. Ricky-Rich had a crush on Dolores!
The three girls started to chant:
“Ricky and Dolores up in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
First comes love,
Then comes marriage,
Then comes Ricky with a baby carriage!”
Ricky threw the basketball at the girls. But they hopped up and out of the way, making loud, slurpy kissing noises. “Ricky has a crush!” they chanted. “Ricky loves Dolores!”
“Hi-i-i Do-lor-ess,” Molly squeaked, imitating Ricky. She pretended to kiss the basketball.
“Eeeeeuuuuwwww!” Linda and Susan shrieked.
Ricky jumped on his bike. As he sped past the girls he called, “You’ll be sorry! You’ll pay for this!”

They decide to dress as three hula dancers in grass skirts made of newspaper and crepe paper and Ricky squirts them with a hose.

Page 32:
When the water finally stopped, Molly’s hair was stuck to her forehead, her hands were full of melting paper flowers, and most of her hula skirt lay in soggy ribbons in the driveway.
“Ruined! Wrecked! Completely wrecked!” sobbed Molly. “Who would play such a mean trick?”
Then the girls heard Ricky singing in a low, slow, steady voice:
“I see London,
I see France,
I can see your underpants!”
“Ricky,” yowled Molly, “I’ll get you for this! You ruined everything! You’ll be sorry—you wait! You’ll be really sorry.”

These books are very short and the quotes above fairly synopsize the entire story. It does go on to detail how the girls dump Ricky’s underwear out of his bedroom window on Dolores to embarrass him. Ricky and Molly, of course, make up and learn their lesson on the last page of the story, but our question is about what the average young reader will learn when he or she reads this book. Are these the familial relations that we want our families to have?

In this book the young reader will be introduced to a household in which the brother, Ricky, and sister, Molly, do not get along. We are forced to assume that the author’s motive for involving young readers in such illusions is to have them think that this is normal and acceptable behavior. Books like this one are dangerous philosophical voyages for young impressionable readers.

The offerings of the non-christian world to our young ones get a little scary when we should consider what so lightly and easily befell well-intentioned, unsuspecting Dinah in Genesis 34:1-2. “And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.”

Dinah only went out to see and meet the people of the world. She did not go to see the young men. She went to she the young women her own age. She did not go looking for trouble or sin. She was only following innocent curiosity. What she found was more than she bargained for and it forever changed her life. When we as parents are tempted to say casually, “I don’t see a problem with that,” we had better look again, and ask God’s help in seeing what He sees. When we read about the lives of other women or girls who are not Christian, we are looking at the daughters of the land. We need to carefully consider the consequences of where this might lead. We may think that we know where it will likely lead, but are we prepared to go where it might lead. Which straw will break the camel’s back? Which sight will be the one that we will forever regret that our children had gone to see?

We cannot say that we were able to find anything wholesome about this book. We had planned to evaluate several more books, as we generally do with a series, to get a balanced cross-section of the entire series. However, failing to find any ray of hope at all in this first offering (the first book usually being the best in the series), we decided to simply skim one more and found it no different. As we said, Molly may be an American girl, but is she the girl that you want to rear? This is something to consider, since children tend so often to emulate what they read.