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Apple Lock / Abaloc #6
The Watchers
The Watchers
- GenresFantasy
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
Jane Louise Curry
42 books30 followersJane Louise Curry was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, on September 24, 1932. She is the daughter of William Jack Curry Jr. and Helen Margaret Curry. Curry grew up in Pennsylvania (Kittanning and Johnstown), but upon her graduation from college she moved to Los Angeles, California, and London, England.
Curry attended the Pennsylvania State University in 1950, and she studied there until 1951 when she left for the Indiana State College (now known as Indiana University of Pennsylvania). In 1954, after graduation, Curry moved to California and worked as both an art teacher for the Los Angeles Public School District and a freelance artist. In 1957, Curry entered the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in order to study English literature, but in 1959 she left Los Angeles and became a teaching assistant at Stanford University. Curry was awarded the Fulbright grant in 1961 and the Stanford-Leverhulme fellowship in 1965, allowing her to pursue her graduate studies at the University of London. She earned her M.A. in 1962 and her Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Stanford University in 1969. From 1967-1968 and, again, from 1983-1984, Curry was an instructor of English literature at the college level. She became a lecturer in 1987. Besides her writings, Curry’s artworks are also considered among her achievements. She has had several paintings exhibited in London, and her works have even earned her a spot in the prestigious Royal Society of British Artists group exhibition. Among the many groups that Curry belongs to are the International Arthurian Society, the Authors Guild, the Children’s Literature Association, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers.
Curry illustrated and published her first book Down from the Lonely Mountain in 1965. This juvenile fiction based on Californian Native American folklore has paved the way for Curry’s expansive literary career. She has penned more than 30 novels, which are mostly based on child characters dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Many of Curry’s writings deal with folklore, such as the Native American folklore that she explores in her novels Turtle Island: Tales of Algonquian Nations and The Wonderful Sky Boat: And Other Native American Tales of the Southeast, and the retellings of famous European folk stories, such as Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Robin Hood in the Greenwood, and The Christmas Knight. Yet she also delves into the genres of fantasy, such as in her novels Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Time and Me, Myself, and I; historical fiction, such as in her novels What the Dickens and Stolen Life; and mystery, such as in her novels The Bassumtyte Treasure and Moon Window.
Curry has been honored with many awards throughout her writing career. In 1970, her novel The Daybreakers earned Curry the Honor Book award from the Book World Spring Children’s Book Festival and the Outstanding Book by a Southern California Author Award from the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People. The Mystery Writers of America honored Curry two years in a row by awarding her the Edgar Allan Poe Award, or the Edgar, for Poor Tom’s Ghost in 1978 and The Bassumtyte Treasure in 1979. Also in 1979, for her complete body of work at that time, the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People presented Curry with the Distingushed Contribution to the Field of Children’s Literature Award.
Curry resides in Palo Alto, California, and London, England.
Curry attended the Pennsylvania State University in 1950, and she studied there until 1951 when she left for the Indiana State College (now known as Indiana University of Pennsylvania). In 1954, after graduation, Curry moved to California and worked as both an art teacher for the Los Angeles Public School District and a freelance artist. In 1957, Curry entered the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in order to study English literature, but in 1959 she left Los Angeles and became a teaching assistant at Stanford University. Curry was awarded the Fulbright grant in 1961 and the Stanford-Leverhulme fellowship in 1965, allowing her to pursue her graduate studies at the University of London. She earned her M.A. in 1962 and her Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Stanford University in 1969. From 1967-1968 and, again, from 1983-1984, Curry was an instructor of English literature at the college level. She became a lecturer in 1987. Besides her writings, Curry’s artworks are also considered among her achievements. She has had several paintings exhibited in London, and her works have even earned her a spot in the prestigious Royal Society of British Artists group exhibition. Among the many groups that Curry belongs to are the International Arthurian Society, the Authors Guild, the Children’s Literature Association, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers.
Curry illustrated and published her first book Down from the Lonely Mountain in 1965. This juvenile fiction based on Californian Native American folklore has paved the way for Curry’s expansive literary career. She has penned more than 30 novels, which are mostly based on child characters dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Many of Curry’s writings deal with folklore, such as the Native American folklore that she explores in her novels Turtle Island: Tales of Algonquian Nations and The Wonderful Sky Boat: And Other Native American Tales of the Southeast, and the retellings of famous European folk stories, such as Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Robin Hood in the Greenwood, and The Christmas Knight. Yet she also delves into the genres of fantasy, such as in her novels Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Time and Me, Myself, and I; historical fiction, such as in her novels What the Dickens and Stolen Life; and mystery, such as in her novels The Bassumtyte Treasure and Moon Window.
Curry has been honored with many awards throughout her writing career. In 1970, her novel The Daybreakers earned Curry the Honor Book award from the Book World Spring Children’s Book Festival and the Outstanding Book by a Southern California Author Award from the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People. The Mystery Writers of America honored Curry two years in a row by awarding her the Edgar Allan Poe Award, or the Edgar, for Poor Tom’s Ghost in 1978 and The Bassumtyte Treasure in 1979. Also in 1979, for her complete body of work at that time, the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People presented Curry with the Distingushed Contribution to the Field of Children’s Literature Award.
Curry resides in Palo Alto, California, and London, England.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 21, 2020
Curry displays in this book a great depth and power in the realisation of character and the dramatic tension of events. The fantastic events are thoroughly bound up with the hero's psychological state and his growth in awareness; there is a need for a willed commitment on his part to the cause of Good that increases the functional validity of the fantasy element. The cut-off world of the Virginia mountain hollows, is fascinating in itself and skilfully handled in order to express the writer's concern about many aspects of contemporary life. And that concern is effectively expressed through the fantasy as well as on the realistic level. This is a classic example of how well fantasy can work, at its best.
Ray Siler is not wanted by his stepmother, and is sent to live with his mother's 'kin' in Twilly's Green, an isolated mountain hollow. Ray feels rejected and resentful; all is not well in the Hollow, although there is a warm and loving welcome for him there. Almost all the large extended family is living on 'Welfare', one young man has been killed and another emotionally damaged by the Vietnam War, one of the younger girls, Bonnie, longs to leave the Hollow and seek fame and the comforts of the modern world as a singer. The children are unhealthy. Modern culture is cutting off the old ways at the roots and putting nothing in their place. As the plot evolves on the 'real' level, we learn that these simple, unworldly folk have been cheated out of the ownership of part of their land and that the whole community may be destroyed by Arbie Moar's greed for the coal that underlies the mountain.
The idea of dark forces underlying surface appearances is expressed in the image of the mining that undercuts the green and daylit Earth. The mine is also the location of Katoa, the Ancient Serpent, who embodies all spiritual evil and violence and destructiveness.
Three people are aware of this supernatural dimension to the problem and of those, two have some chance of doing something about it. Mary-Mary, Ray's learning-disabled little cousin; Ray himself, vulnerable through his misery and the sheer fact of being adolescent; Delly, damaged by his war experience in Vietnam; these three are able to see something of a past drama centred on the Shrine of Katoa, which is called up to be re-enacted around them because of the disturbances of the current situation. This gives them the clue to the inner story they are involved in, and Ray and Delly are able to fight the battle on that level even while their uncles stand up to the forces of modern bureaucracy with shotguns and a road barrier.
Ray is pulled back into the past because his unhappy and violent emotions link him with the boy Ruan, who in 330 AD betrayed the secret of the Shrine , and whose remorse and misery echo Ray's. Ray is in danger of being used by Arbie Moar to reveal the location of the Shrine, so that Moar can unbind the Serpent, who has taken him over as an instrument to bring about his release. Delly can see into the past because he is the Watcher. Although the lore and knowledge of the folk of Twilly's Green is diminished almost to nothing, it becomes clear as the story develops that in the days when it was called Tul Isgrun, they were a proud race, of mingled Elvish, Indian and Welsh blood. In the past they possessed power enough to bind the serpent in Tul Isgrun, and to keep watch over him there. Today, Delly can only contrive to blow up the mine, so destroying the double threat of destruction by mining and destruction by the release of Katoa. Yet he has fulfilled his duty, and Ray learns to respect the quiet-spoken cousin he had always thought a little odd. Ray learns some other things a well; and these are the things that make this so much a novel about identity.
When Ray arrives in Twilly's Green his resentment against his father for sending him there predisposes him to resist the spontaneous love his family offers: 'It tempted you to stretch and yawn and sprawl your legs out on the broken-backed sofa, and Ray set his mind against it like a wary half-wild dog.' Determined to resist assimilation into the new environment and to get back to the old one, Ray at first sees Moar - although he cannot like or trust him - as a potential ally, simply because he is willing to pay Ray for any interesting fragments, relics of Katoa, that he can pick up in the Hollow. And Ray is desperate to acquire enough money to buy a bus ticket for home. So, like Ruan, he lines up on the wrong side at first. It is in spite of himself that he begins to respond positively, on the outer level to the love of the family and on the inner to the secrets of his inheritance that he finds in the old books at the Gare, on the gravestones, and in his relatives' fading memories. It is uncharacteristic for Ray to be interested in such matters. It is the craving for identity and belonging that motivates him. A sense of beauty and history is awakened in him, and the old motivation begins to die, when he first comes to the Gare.
This is a special place, the right place and time for Ray to begin to look at and to reassess himself. What he is experiencing is a sense of possession and of belonging 'This is my place'. From this moment on he begins to function naturally as a member of the community in the Hollow, and to forget about going home. When his father sends him a ticket for home, he decides not to use it. His allegiance is shifting. By the time the crisis comes and the older men are lined up against the forces of the law on the road up to the Hollow, Ray is aware enough to perceive the strength of what is happening in other dimensions:
“Whatever was going on, it had been trying to play itself out from the day he had first climbed the long hill into Twilly's Green: the past pressing into the present; some old defeat seeking to complete itself. And something - Ray was frightened what it might be - was expected of him.”
Gradually, Ray works out what has been happening and how his own negative attitudes to himself and to everything around him have helped to precipitate events. He realises that he has changed and that change is bound up with events in Twilly's Green:
“...his universe had shifted underfoot and overhead. It was changed and so was he, and it was not just the sense, so unexpected and so deep, of belonging; ... It was as if he had something to do here. Or undo.”
All this; the personal struggle for identity, the legal battle for the land, and the spiritual struggle against Katoa, comes to a head when Bonnie, Delly and Ray, preparing to blow up the mine, are assaulted by temptation in the form of promises from Katoa, promises of all their wishes fulfilled. Ray breaks out of his struggle against this insidious attack '. . . to the bewildering knowledge that none of the old aches hurt anymore.' His story ends with an image of planting and growing, as Ray and his Uncle plan a garden on the land that has been saved from destruction.
”He could not have been happier if he had been Ruan, come home at last after twice eight hundred years.”
[Condensed from my article THE SENSE OF BELONGING: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS OF JANE LOUISE CURRY, Published in the International Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, 3, No. 3, Winter 1988, p176ff]
Ray Siler is not wanted by his stepmother, and is sent to live with his mother's 'kin' in Twilly's Green, an isolated mountain hollow. Ray feels rejected and resentful; all is not well in the Hollow, although there is a warm and loving welcome for him there. Almost all the large extended family is living on 'Welfare', one young man has been killed and another emotionally damaged by the Vietnam War, one of the younger girls, Bonnie, longs to leave the Hollow and seek fame and the comforts of the modern world as a singer. The children are unhealthy. Modern culture is cutting off the old ways at the roots and putting nothing in their place. As the plot evolves on the 'real' level, we learn that these simple, unworldly folk have been cheated out of the ownership of part of their land and that the whole community may be destroyed by Arbie Moar's greed for the coal that underlies the mountain.
The idea of dark forces underlying surface appearances is expressed in the image of the mining that undercuts the green and daylit Earth. The mine is also the location of Katoa, the Ancient Serpent, who embodies all spiritual evil and violence and destructiveness.
Three people are aware of this supernatural dimension to the problem and of those, two have some chance of doing something about it. Mary-Mary, Ray's learning-disabled little cousin; Ray himself, vulnerable through his misery and the sheer fact of being adolescent; Delly, damaged by his war experience in Vietnam; these three are able to see something of a past drama centred on the Shrine of Katoa, which is called up to be re-enacted around them because of the disturbances of the current situation. This gives them the clue to the inner story they are involved in, and Ray and Delly are able to fight the battle on that level even while their uncles stand up to the forces of modern bureaucracy with shotguns and a road barrier.
Ray is pulled back into the past because his unhappy and violent emotions link him with the boy Ruan, who in 330 AD betrayed the secret of the Shrine , and whose remorse and misery echo Ray's. Ray is in danger of being used by Arbie Moar to reveal the location of the Shrine, so that Moar can unbind the Serpent, who has taken him over as an instrument to bring about his release. Delly can see into the past because he is the Watcher. Although the lore and knowledge of the folk of Twilly's Green is diminished almost to nothing, it becomes clear as the story develops that in the days when it was called Tul Isgrun, they were a proud race, of mingled Elvish, Indian and Welsh blood. In the past they possessed power enough to bind the serpent in Tul Isgrun, and to keep watch over him there. Today, Delly can only contrive to blow up the mine, so destroying the double threat of destruction by mining and destruction by the release of Katoa. Yet he has fulfilled his duty, and Ray learns to respect the quiet-spoken cousin he had always thought a little odd. Ray learns some other things a well; and these are the things that make this so much a novel about identity.
When Ray arrives in Twilly's Green his resentment against his father for sending him there predisposes him to resist the spontaneous love his family offers: 'It tempted you to stretch and yawn and sprawl your legs out on the broken-backed sofa, and Ray set his mind against it like a wary half-wild dog.' Determined to resist assimilation into the new environment and to get back to the old one, Ray at first sees Moar - although he cannot like or trust him - as a potential ally, simply because he is willing to pay Ray for any interesting fragments, relics of Katoa, that he can pick up in the Hollow. And Ray is desperate to acquire enough money to buy a bus ticket for home. So, like Ruan, he lines up on the wrong side at first. It is in spite of himself that he begins to respond positively, on the outer level to the love of the family and on the inner to the secrets of his inheritance that he finds in the old books at the Gare, on the gravestones, and in his relatives' fading memories. It is uncharacteristic for Ray to be interested in such matters. It is the craving for identity and belonging that motivates him. A sense of beauty and history is awakened in him, and the old motivation begins to die, when he first comes to the Gare.
This is a special place, the right place and time for Ray to begin to look at and to reassess himself. What he is experiencing is a sense of possession and of belonging 'This is my place'. From this moment on he begins to function naturally as a member of the community in the Hollow, and to forget about going home. When his father sends him a ticket for home, he decides not to use it. His allegiance is shifting. By the time the crisis comes and the older men are lined up against the forces of the law on the road up to the Hollow, Ray is aware enough to perceive the strength of what is happening in other dimensions:
“Whatever was going on, it had been trying to play itself out from the day he had first climbed the long hill into Twilly's Green: the past pressing into the present; some old defeat seeking to complete itself. And something - Ray was frightened what it might be - was expected of him.”
Gradually, Ray works out what has been happening and how his own negative attitudes to himself and to everything around him have helped to precipitate events. He realises that he has changed and that change is bound up with events in Twilly's Green:
“...his universe had shifted underfoot and overhead. It was changed and so was he, and it was not just the sense, so unexpected and so deep, of belonging; ... It was as if he had something to do here. Or undo.”
All this; the personal struggle for identity, the legal battle for the land, and the spiritual struggle against Katoa, comes to a head when Bonnie, Delly and Ray, preparing to blow up the mine, are assaulted by temptation in the form of promises from Katoa, promises of all their wishes fulfilled. Ray breaks out of his struggle against this insidious attack '. . . to the bewildering knowledge that none of the old aches hurt anymore.' His story ends with an image of planting and growing, as Ray and his Uncle plan a garden on the land that has been saved from destruction.
”He could not have been happier if he had been Ruan, come home at last after twice eight hundred years.”
[Condensed from my article THE SENSE OF BELONGING: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS OF JANE LOUISE CURRY, Published in the International Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, 3, No. 3, Winter 1988, p176ff]
January 31, 2020
Review of The Watchers by Jane Louise Curry
Having read some of the Abaloc series (though Jane Louise Curry has said she did not at first intend a series) during their original publication, I was thrilled to see that they are back in print with beautiful new covers as well. This is such an intriguing series of books that a new generation deserves to enjoy.
In The Watchers, thirteen-year-old Ray who has lost his mother and is not getting along with his new stepmother is sent to live with relatives in the West Virginia mountains and hollows. There, as is a recurring theme in the Abaloc books, he finds that the ancient past underlies the present. Curry’s genius is the way she combines the current conflicts of a character with those of a mythical civilization based on Welsh and Native American lore. As in this book, the main child or teen character is helped to realize his or her own growth as a person, and at the same time, save both the past and present from a disaster.
Though the books were published in seventies, I found the teen character and his family still very contemporary. Mining, environment, family—these are what Ray must deal with in The Watchers.
For readers (really both kids and adults) that love mythology and time travel books, these are a must.
Geraldine Ann Marshall, author and program specialist at Wickliffe Mounds State Historic Site
Having read some of the Abaloc series (though Jane Louise Curry has said she did not at first intend a series) during their original publication, I was thrilled to see that they are back in print with beautiful new covers as well. This is such an intriguing series of books that a new generation deserves to enjoy.
In The Watchers, thirteen-year-old Ray who has lost his mother and is not getting along with his new stepmother is sent to live with relatives in the West Virginia mountains and hollows. There, as is a recurring theme in the Abaloc books, he finds that the ancient past underlies the present. Curry’s genius is the way she combines the current conflicts of a character with those of a mythical civilization based on Welsh and Native American lore. As in this book, the main child or teen character is helped to realize his or her own growth as a person, and at the same time, save both the past and present from a disaster.
Though the books were published in seventies, I found the teen character and his family still very contemporary. Mining, environment, family—these are what Ray must deal with in The Watchers.
For readers (really both kids and adults) that love mythology and time travel books, these are a must.
Geraldine Ann Marshall, author and program specialist at Wickliffe Mounds State Historic Site
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews