Afternoon Tea and Normalcy: Revisiting The View From Saturday in an Unusual Fall

        E.L. Konigsburg’s 1996 Newbery Medal-winning classic, The View from Saturday, is a perennial delight, but this year, as the approach of autumn weather has Zooming students longing for the simple pleasures of school bus rides and packed assemblies, it becomes a welcome escape to middle-class normalcy with its quaint scenes of back-to-school life in upstate New York and its eternally enchanting cast of unique middle school protagonists. 

        Readers still reeling from the pandemic can identify with the trauma of Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski, a middle school teacher returning to the classroom after a horrific car accident left her widowed and wheelchair-bound. Mrs. Olinski is unsure about a lot of things, including why or how she chose the four members of her sixth-grade Academic Bowl team. However, though Nadia, Ethan, Noah, and Julian seem to have little in common at first, they and Mrs. Olinski soon discover that kindred souls have a way of finding each other, no matter the distance. With origins as varied as the characters themselves, the journeys of a red-haired dog-lover, an aspiring set designer, an emergency best man, a dedicated teacher trying to get back on her figurative feet, and a newcomer who invites them all to tea converge in this delightfully quirky tale of serendipitous friendship. 

         The book invites profound classroom discussion, tenderly and wryly addressing subjects like divorce, bullying, paraplegia, loss, and feelings of inferiority. Despite several moments in which the book shows its age—for example, constantly comparing Julian’s east-Indian, turban-wearing father to a genie—the book overall preaches a message of accepting others’ differences. Outdated exoticization could be used to start a classroom dialogue on stereotyping, timely after this summer’s protests against racial injustice. Coupled with these teachable moments, the book’s scholastic setting makes it a perfect September classroom read, providing an opportunity for discussions about acceptance and unity in a world fractured by disease and prejudice. Educators might smile at former teacher Konigsburg’s well-drawn illustrations of the school system, particularly her depictions of inept superintendents and observations on sixth graders: “Sixth graders had stopped asking ‘Now what?’ and had started asking ‘So what?’” (59). 

        Noah, Nadia, Ethan, and Julian never ask “So what?” Like almost all of E.L. Konigsburg’s protagonists, Mrs. Olinski’s four sixth graders are charmingly refined and precocious. These are children who study calligraphy, rescue endangered loggerhead turtles, enjoy The Phantom of the Opera, and take tea at four o’clock. Not every young reader will be able to identify with their interests or their punctiliousness; unlike these children, most sixth graders use contractions. Regardless, these four are sure to win over readers with their endearing individuality and their fighting spirit, perfect qualities to emulate for a future generation of activists and leaders. 

        Enchanting from beginning to end, The View from Saturday is a modern-day classic, with timeless characters that would be as comfortable in Wonderland as they would be at Hogwarts. Heartfelt and inspirational, it provides the normalcy everyone has been craving this tumultuous fall. Four precocious underdogs are exactly the heroes we need these days.