Module 4: The Trumpeter of Krakow

Summary: Joseph Charnetski is bound to protect the Great Tarnov Crystal at all costs. When his family's house is destroyed by fire, his father Andrew takes the family to Krakow to give the crystal to the King of Poland. Unfortunately, the king is not in Krakow so the family must hide from the murderous Tartar's to protect the crystal and their lives. Joseph goes to live near the alchemist Kreutz and takes a job as the trumpeter of Krakow keeping watch on the city. During a scuffle with Tartars who are trying to steal the crystal, Kreutz find it and begins to use it in his experiments. During one of his trances, Kreutz's apprentice Tring conjures up some explosives that set the city of fire. Joseph warns the city while Kreutz wanders around with the crystal. The crystal is finally returned to the king who throws it in the river.

Citation: 

Kelly, E. P.,  & Domanska, J. (1992). The trumpeter of Krakow. New York, NY: Aladin Paperbacks.

Impressions: I tried to like this book. I really did but it was excruciating to read and even more excruciating to summarize. The writing is full of purple prose which may have gone over in the 1920's but seems dated and boring today.

Reviews:

Everyone seems to love The Trumpeter of Krakow, by Eric P. Kelly. Amazon.com has mostly four and five star reviews, and the few one and two star reviews on goodreads.com say non-specific things like "I couldn't finish it" or "really boring" - things that I think kids say about a lot of assigned books that they have no real interest in reading.

So I expected that I would like The Trumpeter of Krakow. I was looking forward to reading about medieval (or mid-evil, as one kid wrote in his review) Poland, as I like historical fiction, and have especially liked most of the other Newbery winners set in the Middle Ages.

Sadly, I really didn't enjoy The Trumpeter much. Maybe I'm becoming curmudgeonly, because the only medalist I've really liked out of the fourteen I've read in the last year is Criss Cross. Or maybe I picked all the best ones first, and now that I'm near the end of all of the Newbery winners, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. But I thought I was going like The Trumpeter of Krakow!

My problem with the story started right away in the first chapter - "The Man Who Wouldn't Sell His Pumpkins". The first sentence of the chapter states that "It was in late July of the year 1461 that the sun rose one morning red and fiery as if ushering in the midsummer's hottest day" (p. 7). Some interesting descriptions of wagons and people on the road to Krakow follow, and we meet the villain, whom you can tell is really bad because he's so ugly:

"It was the face, however, that betrayed the soul beneath. It was a dark, oval, wicked face - the eyes were greenish and narrow and the eyebrow line above them ran straight across the bridge of the nose, giving the effect of a monkey rather than a man. One cheek was marked with a buttonlike scar, the scar of the button plague that is so common in the lands east of the Volga, or even the Dnieper, and marks the bearer as a Tartar or a Cossack or a Mongol. The ears were low set and ugly. The mouth looked like the slit that boys make in the pumpkins they carry on the eve of Allhallows" (p. 12).

Now hold it right there. In 1461, boys in Poland did not make jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins. Squash and pumpkins were domesticated by the American Indians in prehistoric North America, and before 1492, there wasn't much of chance for Europeans to grow pumpkins (or tomatoes, chili peppers, kidney/pinto/Lima beans, tobacco, maize, potatoes, zinnias or petunias, either). Well, maybe this wasn't widely known in 1928, and anyway, it's only a descriptive passage.

But wait a minute. A few pages later, we learn that a man, a woman, and their son have a huge yellow pumpkin in their wagon - and the man (Pan Andrew, or Mr. Andrew) refuses to sell it to the villain, even for its weight in gold. Well, that's where the name of the chapter comes from, obviously, but this late-season pumpkin from the steppes just bothered me. It made me suspicious of all of the other historical descriptions in the book.

I never really felt close to any of the main characters - Joseph (Andrew's son), his mother, Andrew the trumpeter, the alchemist Kreutz, or Kreutz's niece, Elzbietka. The mystery and the suspense that others applaud felt mechanical and forced to me. Although I enjoyed the rather lengthy descriptions of medieval Krakow, with its pillories, university students, cloth traders, night watchmen, and priests, I suspect my 12 year old son wouldn't find it as interesting as I did, especially in the absence of more engaging characters.

I guess I'm glad that so many other people still enjoy this story, but (as with Shen of the Sea), I'm at a loss as to why I don't like it more when so many others do. The whole alchemy and hypnotism story line didn't do much for me, either. But maybe I would have liked it a lot more if not for the pumpkins.

D, S. (2009, September 27). The trumpeter of Krakow. Retrieved from http://newberryproject.blogspot.com/2009/09/trumpeter-of-krakow.html

Library Use: I really can't think of a good way to use this book except as an example of the way standards for good books change throughout the ages. Maybe some day eighty years from now, a teen will think The Hunger Games is overwrought and full of purple prose. Just thinking about this book makes me drowsy. It might make a good way to steady a shaky library table.