A review by kmg365
Dear Enemy by Jean Webster

1.0

Bear with me. I'll get to this book, I promise, but first I have to tell a story.

When I was growing up, we never lacked for food, shelter, or clothing, but there wasn't a lot of money for extras. When a used bookstore opened up in a nearby town, I was thrilled to be able to take in a paper grocery sack full of paperbacks I'd already read, and trade them for something different for only a little bit of money, which I could earn by picking up pop bottles from roadside ditches, or collecting a couple of bushels of field corn that the combine had missed and selling it at the grain elevator.

On one Saturday bookstore visit, I picked up a worn copy of Daddy Long Legs. The cover illustration made it look like it was set in the fifties or sixties. I might not have chosen it if I'd known it was set circa 1910. I wish I could find an image of that cover to post here, but I can't find it online, and I've never seen another copy like it. I understand from reading recent reviews that modern readers find the premise of the book creepy, but it didn't strike me that way at all, because I was too busy marveling at the fact that orphan Jerusha (Judy)Abbott went off to college all by herself. I read the book over and over again. No one in my family had ever gone to college. Maybe I could?

Indeed I could, and did. The lion's share of the credit goes to my mom, but I always reserved a little sliver of gratitude for Jean Webster, who put the idea in my head.

Years later, I discovered there was a sequel of sorts to the book, involving Judy's college roommate Sallie MacBride. I downloaded a copy of it years ago, but never got around to reading it. After re-reading Daddy Long Legs over Memorial Day weekend, I decided the time was right to plunge on into Dear Enemy.

It started out fine, even though I found Sallie to be a less sympathetic heroine than Judy. Sallie came from money, and running the orphanage was something she intended to do on a very short term basis, so she could get back to her regular life of parties, shopping, and waiting for Mr. Right to show up. She liked to talk smack about the staff, and moan about their woefully old-fashioned ways. Then she casually revealed that her modern approach to running an orphanage included eugenics. Several times when an orphan is ill or injured, she laments the fact that the doctor insisted on treating them, even though society would better off if he just let them “slip away”, because their parents were alcoholics.

Evidently Jean Webster was a proponent of the scientific charity movement, which divides the needy into the “deserving” poor, and the “undeserving” poor. Children of alcoholics seem to be in the latter category. Have a bracing beverage nearby if you decide to google it.

I finished reading the book, took a deep breath, then swept up the shards of my shattered childhood illusions. If you want to read it as a product of its time, and marvel at the incongruity of a woman who talks about her 107 “wee bairns” one minute, then beats one of those bairns into submission the next (then writes a cheery letter to her friend about it), fine. Just understand what you're getting into.