This is a review of one of the books I’ve read for The Newbery Project. - LJM

When a writer reads a book, any flaws will stand out because we’re so used to editing our own work. Secret of the Andes, a Newbery Medal winning novel (1953) was fairly well edited - yet I found a few quirks to trip up my reading.

Let’s cover the good parts first.

Like many Newbery award winning books, Secret of the Andes provides children with a pleasant way to learn about a foreign culture. The author, Ann Nolan Clark, traveled through Peru and other Central and South American countries on a grant from 1945 to 1950. She’d already written and had published fifteen children’s novels about Native American culture. That was done during her twenty-five years of teaching at a New Mexico school for native children. From her travels, she was inspired to write a few more novels. Secret of the Andes was one of them.

In Secret of the Andes Ann Nolan Clark shared her extensive knowledge of Peruvian Inca culture. The protagonist in this unusual coming of age middle grade novel is a young Inca boy, Cusi, who has lived his entire life in a hidden valley on a mountain, high in the Andes. His guardian, Chuto, is a llama herder and breeder.

“The boy had seen no people in the eight years he had lived here. He had been too young to remember what had gone before.” - pg. 2

They shear the llamas annually and Chuto takes the wool to the city to barter for supplies. At the beginning of the novel Cusi has never been away from his flock of llamas in the hidden valley, but during the course of the book he meets other people for the first time in his life, and makes two trips down the mountain to visit the civilization below.

Throughout the novel Cusi yearns to know who his parents were and how he came to be living on a mountain with Chuto. He wants to live with a family, and when he sees that a family moved into a valley visible to him over the side of a cliff, he spends a lot of time looking at them to see what they do together.

To her credit, author Ann Nolan Clark pulls together all these feelings and provides answers for Cusi by the end of the novel. She does so, however, using some magical thinking techniques that made me cringe. For example, Cusi’s black llama and best friend, Misti, leads him on several excursions which include important plot points. I had a hard time believing that the llama was that perceptive and intelligent. I would have liked it better if Cusi stumbled upon these places himself, pulling the llama behind him. Clark also capitalized on the view that the Inca culture is mysterious by providing mysterious powers to the Incas. It seemed they knew things nobody else did, in ways nobody else could. What was otherwise a fairly believable novel took some leaps that were uncomfortable for me.

However the final chapter was very satisfying - enough so that I was able to forgive the rest. Ann Nolan Clark finished by showing Cusi the secret Chuto had kept from him for so many years. By that point in the novel I was able to believe that Cusi’s purpose for being on the mountain was worthwhile.

I enjoyed Ann Nolan Clark’s imagery and descriptions, for example:

“They lived in a hidden valley high up on the rock slope of a mountain. Mountain peak upon mountain peak, sheer and hard and glistening in frozen mantles of ice and snow, encircled them.” - pg. 2

What I didn’t enjoy was her occasional insertions of cultural notes that didn’t seem to fit the story line:

“Chuto brought the yarn he had carried down the mountain to barter. While they ate parched corn and dried meat, Chuto bargained. The other men examined the yarn, noting its quality and the evenness of its spinning. ‘The women of your village spin good yarn,’ one man told him. Chuto did not answer. He did not say there were no women in his village. He did not say that he had spun the yarn and under his patient teaching Cusi had spun some of it. Although spinning is chiefly women’s work, men and boys know how to spin. Occasionally they can be seen spinning yarn as they walk along the highland trails.” - pg. 46

This scene is fine until the last two sentences, which should have been consigned to the author’s notes. Having written novels, I can see why they were included in the first draft, but I think they should have been edited out in subsequent drafts. However Ann Nolan Clark was a teacher - something I sensed through reading Secret of the Andes, before I researched for biographical information. She was not just telling a good story; she had an ulterior motive, to bring an ancient native culture to life.

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Page numbers are from the contemporary Puffin Books paperback edition.

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I wrote a separate review of this book for The Newbery Project. Here’s a direct link to my review there: Newbery Project: Secret of the Andes (1953).