When I first set my sights on becoming a writer, I absorbed everything I could from a variety of writers to get a feeling for styles and genres. One writer I found of particular interest during my research was Patricia Reilly Giff, a prolific writer of children's books, who died of cancer at her home in Trumbull, Connecticut on June 22 at the age of 86.
The first book I read by her was actually the first one published, The Beast In Ms. Rooney's Room, the 1984 book that launched her series "The Kids of the Polk Street School" and I was hooked - oddly enough - on her works, which, according to Library of Congress, contain 155 books. She may seem like an odd inspiration, since I was an adult when her first book was published, but there was something about her works that touched my muse.
When she was a girl - roughly the age of the millions of children who would one day devour her books - she spent recess under a cherry tree with an open book in her hands. She later said that she had wanted to write from the first time she had ever picked up a book and started to read. But, only in her early 40s, when she was established in her career as a reading teacher and when her children had reached school age, did she act on her abiding ambition. As she carved out the necessary time in her day to write, her husband carved out the necessary space in their home, combining two adjacent closets into a tiny studio.
“I dragged myself out of bed in the early-morning darkness to spend an hour or two at my typewriter before I had to leave for school,” she recalled. “Slowly and painfully, I began to write.”
Giff went on, over nearly half a century, to write 155 books for young readers. She delighted younger ones with the adventures, misadventures and high jinks of "Kids of the Polk Street School", one of several popular series she penned.
Writing for older readers, Giff animated historical events in volumes such as the 1997, Lily’s Crossing, a novel set on the home front during World War II. That book, like the subsequent 2002 Pictures of Hollis Woods, about a foster child in search of belonging, received Newbery Honor, one of the highest awards in children’s literature.
She began writing with the desire to brighten the lives of children such as her students. As a teacher for 20 years in the public schools of New York City and the Long Island community of Elmont, she taught children who had been set back in their learning by substance abuse and delinquency. Others, recent immigrants to the United States, struggled to read in English.
“I had worked with so many children who had terrible problems that I wanted to say things that would make them laugh. I wanted to tell them they were special,” she once said during an interview. "I wish I had started sooner.”
Many of her early books fell in the humor genre. Notable among them were the many installments in the Polk Street series, which opened in 1984 with the aforementioned The Beast in Ms. Rooney’s Room. “Beast” - a boy whose proper name is Richard Best - is humiliated to have been held back a year but, with the help of his reading teacher, Mrs. Paris, begins to find his way in second grade and in life.
“The Polk Street series became double-edged,” Giff once told New York Times. “Teachers would use it with older kids as humor, to teach remedial reading, whereas the younger ones would read about these little kids and were very serious about it. You know, it’s their lives.”
Her other series included “Polka Dot Private Eye,” “Lincoln Lions Band,” “Ballet Slippers” and “Friends and Amigos.” In the last, she incorporated elements of Spanish.
According to an obituary in Publishers Weekly, she credited an editor with encouraging her to confront heavier topics in her fiction. Lily’s Crossing, her first venture into deeper territory, centers on a girl who is whiling away a summer in Queens, missing her widowed father during his wartime service in Europe, when she befriends a Hungarian refugee.
“For today’s children, to whom World War II must seem as remote as the Civil War, Lily’s story places history in real time,” Jane Langton, a children’s author, wrote in The New York Times. “With Giff’s usual easygoing language and swift, short paragraphs, the impact of the war on an American child is brilliantly told.”
As in many of her works, she incorporated her own life and memories into the story.
“When I sat down to write the book,” she told Publishers Weekly, “I wanted to see what I remembered. I made a list of everything I could think of - posters I had seen, the banner in our church with names of who was missing and who was dead.”
She hastened to note that although she shared some attributes and experiences with Lily, she did not base the character on herself.
Her later works of historical fiction included Nory Ryan’s Song (2000), set during the Irish potato famine, and A House of Tailors (2004), about a teenage seamstress who immigrates to Brooklyn from Germany in the 1870s. Storyteller (2010) led a contemporary American girl into an ancestor’s experience during the Revolutionary War, and All the Way Home (2001) touched on the polio epidemic. Genevieve’s War (2017), a companion to Lily’s Cross, took readers across the ocean and into the French resistance during World War II.
Commenting on Lily’s Crossing, she said she could not bring herself to think of it as historical fiction, as it in many ways reflected the events of her own life.
“I wanted to tell my readers that even though the times are different now, people have always worried about the same things,” she once told Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York, “loss and separation, the future, and sometimes war.”
Patricia Jeanne Reilly was born in Brooklyn on April 26, 1935. Her father was a New York City police officer, and her mother was a homemaker.
Although she loved reading, Giff said she was cowed by the classic works she was assigned to read as an English major at Marymount Manhattan College, where she eventually settled on a history major and graduated in 1956. Two years later, she received a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University in Queens.
Her early books included Fourth-Grade Celebrity, about a fourth-grader desperate to distinguish herself from an older sister. It remains in print more than four decades after its publication in 1979.
Mrs. Giff continued writing until shortly before her death. Her most recent titles included A Slip of a Girl (2019), a novel written in verse and set during the Irish Land War, and the animal-on-the-loose adventure Zebra at the Zoo (2021).
For many years, her family operated a children’s bookstore in Fairfield, Connecticut. Its name, the Dinosaur’s Paw, was drawn from the title of an installment in the Polk Street School series.
Her husband, James, died in 2017 after 58 years of marriage. Their son, James, died in 2016.
Although she stopped teaching in 1984 to pursue writing full-time, her students and their challenges remained ever-present in her books. She said that her book Wild Girl (2009), about a young Brazilian immigrant to the United States, was inspired by her work with new speakers of English. She was haunted, she said, by the shame of a student who had an accident at school because she did not speak English and could not tell her teacher that she needed to use the restroom. That was an incident she remembered for the rest of her career as a teacher, she told Publishers Weekly.
“I felt it was my fault that she had had such a terrible embarrassment. In the novel, the same thing happens to Lidie. I put that incident in as a little, gentle reminder to teachers. Sometimes I put things in my stories for more than one reason.”
With her death, I feel a part of my inspiration died as well.
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