52 pages • 1 hour read
Polly HorvathEverything on a Waffle
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Geographical Context: Coal Harbour, British Columbia
Horvath has acknowledged that there is an existing community called Coal Harbour on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, that furnishes the geographical location of her narrative. However, the town in the story is a fictional creation, with no correlation between the actual community and her make-believe version. As the author portrays it, the Coal Harbour of the novel is a village supported primarily by fishing, whaling, and a Canadian naval base. Though published in 2001, the author does not specify the chronological setting of the story. There are few time references in the narrative that would allow a determination of when the story occurs. Uncle Jack remarks that whaling is in decline and the fishing industry by itself may not be able to support the economy of the community. In the area the author describes, whaling actually died out in the late 1960s. Coal Harbor, as Horvath describes it, is a community of a few hundred citizens in a western inlet of Vancouver Island on the Pacific Coast. Though north of Washington State, the climate of the area is fairly temperate year-round due to Pacific currents.
While Vancouver Island was quite populous in 2001, with an overall citizenry of 663,000 people, the village Horvath describes is small, as indicated by how everyone in the community knows every other person; the town council itself must decide how to support Primrose, their lone orphan; and Miss Honeycut must go to Nanaimo, on the eastern side of Vancouver Island, to find a foster home for Primrose. As Horvath depicts it, Coal Harbour is a long-standing fishing community that is set in its ways and resistant to someone like Uncle Jack, who wants to transform it into a tourist destination.
Authorial Context: Polly Horvath Literature
Polly Horvath is the author of more than 20 children’s, middle-grade, and young adult books, of which more than a dozen have received prestigious honors. Among the highly regarded titles, everything on a Waffle is one of the most honored novels. Horvath’s stories typically feature keen insights into human nature as seen from a child’s perspective. For example, when discussing their very intense neighbor, Lena, Primrose expresses curiosity about why she seems so stressed out when, as Lena keeps saying, she has a perfect life. Another common feature of Horvath’s books is quirky, unique individuals. Readers find this in the major characters, like Miss Bowzer, who continually smokes cigarettes while cooking wildly in the kitchen of her café, and minor characters like Spinky Caldwater, the Cambodian war orphan with one foot whom other kids felt sorry for because his adoptive mom always makes him wear a necktie. One might say of the author’s literature and Everything on a Waffle in particular that there are no clichéd characters. Even Miss Honeycut, the villain of the narrative, is distinct from other antagonists created by Horvath or other children’s authors.
Though she also uses settings in the U.S. and England, Horvath, a dual Canadian/U.S. citizen, frequently uses British Columbia and Vancouver Island as the setting for her stories. She incorporates the cultural milieu of the Canadian southwest in the narratives as integral aspects of the storyline. In this novel, Primrose’s father is a fisherman caught out in a Pacific typhoon. Horvath—who also pens sequels to her tales—follows this novel with a sequel, One Year in Coal Harbor, in which Primrose must deal with logging, the primary industry of Vancouver Island.
