Betsy Byars: The Queen of Details
In her Newbury winning novel Summer of the Swans,Betsy Byars told the story about a girl named Sara whose brother Charlie had special needs. It was one of the first books addressing a family member with special needs.
And yet when I think of the book, I remember its first scene: Sara dying her tennis shoes orange in her kitchen sink.
That’s because Betsy Byars was the queen of details. She often noticed things that went unnoticed and wrote about them. She did the same with her characters as well. She wrote about the quiet kids, the ones that usually sat in the back of the room. Kids with single parents. Middle children that never shone like their oldest or youngest siblings. Kids who ended up in foster homes. The kids that slipped through the cracks until there were no more cracks left.
Byars grew up in the South then married Edward Byars in June 1950. When he went back to school in the late fifties, she started writing for magazines. She published several children’s novels but it wasn’t until the seventies that she hit her stride, starting with Summer of the Swans. It won the Newbury award in 1971.
Yet when I remember Byars, I remember the details she put in her novels. Proust had his madeleines, I have the beautiful details Byars put in her books. In her novel The TV Kid, the main character Lenny is dealing with being the new kid again in his school. He escaped his loneliness by watching reruns and game shows on TV. The big lesson of the book was Kids, don’t binge on television! It’s not real! Yet when I think of the book I think of the motel he and his mother ran and lived in called The Fairy Land Motel. The motel used to have fairy tale sculptures but when Lenny and his mom inherited the place, only an elf, Hansel, Humpty Dumpty and a wishing well are left. Yet, like Lenny at the end (after a scary snake bite), they’re still standing.
Byars tackled the foster care system with The Pinballs with three children finding their way to a foster family one summer. Again, all I remember of the children are the details that make each one different. There was Harvey who gets run over by his drunk father in his father’s new Grand Am while they were fighting. Thomas J had been abandoned as a toddler but found by the Benson twins, the oldest living twins in the state who “looked like salt and pepper shakers” and didn’t report him to the authorities because “he was a good help in the garden.” When they both break their hips, Thomas J is taken away from them. Carlie had a fondness for saying what was on her mind no matter what. Her stepfather gave her a concussion when she talked back to him. When she arrives at the foster home, she immediately turns on the TV set, telling her foster mother Mrs. Mason to talk to her during the commercial. Such different characters, but they find out the same thing: they know they have to be in charge of their own destinies and not be victims in their own lives.
In The Night Swimmers, young Rhetta finds herself raising her young brothers Johnny and Roy while their father Shorty is trying to revive his country music career. His biggest hit was “My Angel Went to Heaven in a DC-3.” written after his wife (and his children’s mother) died in a plane crash. To escape the heat at nights, they sneak into a neighbor’s pool and swim. Yet it becomes very clear Rhetta is over her head. In comes Shorty’s girlfriend Brendelle. Brendelle claims she’s not used to being a mother, yet becomes an important figure in the children’s lives. Be it how a new cart boy accidentally slams the door on her ankle in Foodland or when she ruined her prom dress while jumping into a pool and her date’s tuxedo turns the water purple, Brendelle stands out with details making it clear she is new to the thought of mothering, she is up to the job. Again, what sets Brendelle apart is the details of making sure she isn’t perfect, but she isn’t the stereotypical evil stepmother in fairy tales. Rather she is a warm woman who will make sure the children will be taken care of while Shorty promotes his new song “You’re Fifty Pounds Too Much Woman for Me.” In 1980, The Night Swimmer won the National Book Award for Children’s/Young Adult fiction.
When I found out Byars died at the age of 91, all I could think of was details. Dyed orange shoes. The Humpty Dumpty statue at the Fairy Land Motel. The Grand Am that ran over Harvey. The swimming pool that turned purple. All those details that made these characters so alive.
