Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Runaway Scarecrow

Three Cousins Detective Club

#26 The Mystery of the Runaway Scarecrow by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1999.

Sarah-Jane astonishes her cousins when she tells them that Buster, the scarecrow her mother made, which has been sitting outside of a local restaurant, has gone “on vacation. Scarecrows don’t just get up and go on vacation, and when they say that, Sarah-Jane says that Buster left a note saying that he had gone on vacation. The boys don’t believe scarecrows can write notes any more than they can go on vacation. Sarah-Jane admits that scarecrows don’t write notes, but someone else wrote a note on Buster’s behalf and left it behind when Buster disappeared. The note says that Buster is going on vacation and will be back when someone figures out where he’s gone. That’s weird enough, but Sarah-Jane says that Mr. Wesley, who owns the restaurant where Buster was, has been receiving pictures of Buster on his trip in the mail since he disappeared.

It seems like someone is playing a bizarre prank or maybe setting up some kind of treasure hunt involving the scarecrow. The town mayor says that Buster’s “vacation” has created more publicity for the town’s upcoming Fall Festival, so it could even be a publicity stunt. However, it’s been a few days since the last pictures of Buster arrived, and Mr. Wesley is inviting Sarah-Jane and her cousins to investigate Buster’s disappearance and find him because he knows that they like to solve mysteries.

The kids study the pictures for clues to Buster’s whereabouts, but the pictures are pretty generic. They show him outside a motel, at a gift shop, and at a gas station, but the locations aren’t very distinctive and could be found in any number of cities. The postmarks on the envelopes that pictures came in are all still in the area, so it seems like Buster didn’t go very far. They need to hurry if they’re going to find Buster in time for the town’s parade because the parade is tomorrow!

Then, Sarah-Jane reveals that something else mysterious has happened in the area recently. Someone stole a rare coin from Mr. Clark. This is also an intriguing mystery, but they don’t have many clues to start. Mr. Clark isn’t exactly sure when the coin disappeared because he doesn’t get out his coin collection very often.

For some strange reason, an older boy in Sarah-Jane’s neighborhood, Billy, seems very concerned about whether Sarah-Jane and her cousins have made any progress in finding Buster. Could Buster’s disappearance also have something to do with the missing coin?

Theme of the Story:

“The land has produced its harvest; God, our God, has blessed us.”

Psalm 67:6

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I liked the way the person who took the scarecrow used the pictures to provide clues to their treasure hunt. Readers won’t be able to figure it out right away without explanation from the characters because the book doesn’t show all the pictures, but I liked the concept for how the culprit worked a series of clues into the pictures. There’s also a fun backstory behind the scheme. The prankster doesn’t have a sinister motive. The scarecrow caper is meant as a kind of prank/game/harmless publicity stunt.

I guessed pretty quickly who had taken the scarecrow, based on motive, but I liked the addition of Billy and the coin because it complicated the story and provided a second mystery on top of the first. There is a genuine crime in the story, but it’s not the one that the kids start out investigating.

The story takes place during October, but it’s not on Halloween. The town’s Fall Festival just seems to kick off the fall season in general.

Posted on by TracyC

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed by Virginia Hamilton, 1983.

It’s Halloween 1938, and Willie Bea’s relatives have gathered at the old family farm, near where she lives. Money is tight because of the Great Depression, but one of her aunts lives and works in the city, making more money than the others, and is willing to help fund family dinners and provide a little extra for her nieces and nephews when they need something, like new clothes. The aunt is a little scandalous in their family for her multiple marriages, but the others appreciate her generosity, and the nieces and nephews like getting some extra attention and a few treats from her.

The family gathering is a bit chaotic with children running around and getting into trouble. One of Willie Bea’s cousins gets into particular trouble with her mother for using his bow and arrow set to shoot a pumpkin off of Willie Bea’s younger brother’s head. Their mother panics when she catches them doing it because he could have missed and killed the little boy, but Willie Bea tries to calm her mother. Willie Bea was less worried because she knows her cousin’s archery skill and that he wasn’t going to miss, but she understands that adults think of the risks and aren’t fully aware of what the kids are capable of doing. (I’m siding with the mother on this one. Even people who are very good at something can miss now and then, and it’s a big risk to take with someone’s life.) Willie Bea also realizes that the decision to use her little brother for the William Tell act actually came from another cousin because the cousin doing the archery wouldn’t have thought of it himself, and it’s not fair that her mother doesn’t know to blame this other cousin.

Willie Bea talks to her father about the incident, hoping that he’ll understand how unfair it is. However, her father tells her that what her cousin did was dangerous, no matter why he did it. Even though he has a reputation for being good with archery, even people who are good can still miss, and accidents can happen. (See?) Her father lets Willie Bea know that he’s aware that she and her cousins do risky things sometimes when they’re playing with each other, but as an adult, he and the other adults have a responsibility to tell them when something they’re doing is too risky and to put a stop to it. No matter how many times they’ve done some of these things without having an accident, some things are just accidents waiting to happen. They should never assume that an arrow can’t go wrong just because it hasn’t yet or that they can’t fall from a high place just because they haven’t fallen yet.

Willie Bea is a little embarrassed by the talk and feels like her father still doesn’t understand. However, Willie Bea herself has been starting to understand a few things about her relatives this Halloween, things that she either hasn’t noticed before or only half noticed. She can see that one of her cousins is too manipulative, noting the little tricks she uses to get her way and the things she says and does when she wants to be spiteful. She can see that her other cousin has trouble asking up for himself and is particularly vulnerable to manipulation.

Willie Bea also begins to notice things about the adults in the family and their relationships with each other. Aunt Leah, the aunt who has more money than the others and has been married multiple times seems glamorous and fascinating to Willie Bea. Aunt Leah is into horoscopes and fortune telling, and when she reads Willie Bea’s palm, she predicts something special for her. Although Willie Bea loves her own mother, she is intrigued by the family gossip that her father was seeing Aunt Leah before falling in love with her mother, and Willie Bea fantasizes about what it would be like to live with Aunt Leah in the city. She imagines that it would be exciting, and she asks her father why he chose her mother instead of Aunt Leah. Her father knows that Willie Bea doesn’t entirely understand what it’s like to make that kind of choice and what living with a woman like Aunt Leah would really mean. (It occurred to me that the multiple divorces Leah has had might be a clue.) He just explains to Willie Bea that his choice became clear after he got to know her mother as well as her sister, Leah. He knew her mother was the right choice because she was the kind of steady woman who would always be there for him.

That evening, while Willie Bea is putting together her hobo costume and the ghost costumes for her younger siblings and her parents are listening to the radio, Aunt Leah suddenly bursts in and starts having hysterics about it being the end of the world! It takes Willie Bea’s parents a while to get a clear answer from Aunt Leah about why she’s so upset. When she recovers enough to explain things, she says that she was listening to the radio, and she heard that Martians have invaded New Jersey! She describes the horrible, terrifying reports that the radio announcer made about the Martians destroying army troops with their deadly heat ray. Aunt Leah was so terrified by what she heard that she not only turned off the radio but unplugged it, and she says that she’ll never plug it in again, which might be a moot point, if aliens really are here to destroy the world. (If you know what was infamously broadcast on Halloween 1938, you know what Leah heard and that it’s not what she thinks it is.)

While Willie Bea’s parents are trying to decide what to make of Aunt Leah’s story, Willie Bea’s Uncle Jimmy arrives. He says that the rest of the family has also heard what Aunt Leah heard and that they’re all gathering at the old family farm. Rumor has it that people have seen the terrible invaders over at the Kelly farm. Willie Bea’s mother gathers the children and heads to the family farm that Willie Bea’s grandparents own to be with the rest of the family, while Willie Bea’s father tries to see if he can find the station that Leah was listening to and hear the reports for himself. It occurs to him that it might not be an invasion of the Martians but could actually be Germans and German war machines because they’ve all heard about the Nazi takeover of Germany, and he remembers the horrible Hindenburg disaster. If Germans could make a blimp that explodes into a fiery terror like that, then he thinks maybe they could make something that resembles an alien invasion.

At her grandparents’ farm, Willie Bea watches as various relatives panic, cluster around the radio, trade rumors, and try to figure what’s going on. Rumor has it that there are Martians on the Kelly farm, so Willie Bea convinces young Toughy Clay to go over there and try to see them for themselves. At Willie Bea’s insistence, they use the stilts that the children like to walk on to give themselves longer legs, so they can get there faster. Nothing is as it seems this Halloween, and Willie Bea’s expedition to see the Martians definitely doesn’t go as planned.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including a short picture book version).

My Reaction

Almost of the characters in this book are African American. I don’t think it’s ever stated directly because there’s no need in the story to describe them, compared to anyone else, but I think it’s subtly implied. There is only one point in the story where race is mentioned at all, and that’s when Willie Bea is hurt, and the doctor comes to see her. Willie Bea describes the doctor as an old man who delivered most of the babies in her family and knows everybody in the community, and she says that he visits everyone, black or white, rich or poor. Willie Bea’s family is at the poorer end of the community because the doctor knows that people like them don’t normally call the doctor unless it’s something that they really can’t handle by themselves.

I found the family relationships in the story confusing at first. The kids are all referred to by nicknames, and when they are first introduced, it’s difficult to keep it straight who is whose sibling and who is a cousin, and who is older and who is younger. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. Relationships are explained gradually as the story continues, along with characters’ real names as well as nicknames, but it takes some time to get to the explanations.

The story has a slow start, and the real adventure doesn’t begin until about halfway through the book. In some ways, it’s a coming of age story for Willie Bea because she finds herself seeing her family in ways that she never has before, becoming more aware of different sides of their personalities and gaining more insights into their relationships with each other. She also comes to see firsthand what her father means about the stunts that she and her cousins pull and how she should never assume that they can’t get hurt just because they haven’t before. Much of this book is what I would call “slice of life”, a sort of glimpse into Halloweens of the past in a rural community, especially one particular Halloween that would have been memorable for anyone who was alive at the time in the United States.

The radio broadcast that has Willie Bea’s family and others in the community panicking over an alien invasion is The War of the Worlds, a play based on the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells. This type of panic over this particular radio performance was a real, historical incident because the radio play was presented in the format of news broadcasts at the time, and some people who tuned into the program late misunderstood what they were hearing and thought that it was a real news broadcast about an actual emergency. It wasn’t a widespread panic because, first, people who started listening to the broadcast from its beginning knew what they were listening to, and second, not everyone was listening to the broadcast at all. Still, there was enough panic over the radio performance that it became newsworthy and has become a piece of American history and lore.

I enjoyed the historical details in the story, particularly all the radio play references throughout the story. Willie Bea’s family likes to listen to radio shows, and I’m familiar with some of them because I also enjoy old radio plays. Her family likes to listen to The Shadow and Little Orphan Annie. Willie Bea likes to amuse her siblings by imitating people from the radio, singing theme songs and reciting jokes from Jack Benny, like the famous “your money or your life” joke.

Posted on by TracyC

The UFO Mystery

The UFO Mystery by Mary Blount Christian, illustrated by Joe Boddy, 1989.

This book is part of the Sherlock Street Detectives series.

Halloween is approaching, and the Sherlock Street Detectives are talking about their costumes. David is going to be a bear, and he made his costume out of an old rug. Pedro is going to be a clown. Walter and Ann, who are twins, refuse to tell anyone what their costumes are because they want it to be a surprise.

Then, David says that he has to go home because it’s dinnertime, and after dinner, he’s going to look for a comet with his telescope. Pedro says that he’s never used a telescope before and asks if he can look, too. David says he can, and Pedro says that he will come back to his house when it’s dark.

When David and Pedro meet to use the telescope, David shows Pedro how to use a star map to find the constellations. While Pedro is looking through the telescope, he thinks that he sees a UFO! At first, David doesn’t believe him. It’s too early to see the comet, so he thinks maybe Pedro saw a meteor. Pedro insists that it was a UFO, and David points out that UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. That means that anything that “unidentified” can be a UFO. Pedro can’t identify exactly what it was he saw, but that only means that he didn’t recognize the object. It doesn’t have to be an alien spacecraft, just some normal thing he didn’t recognize, like a meteor, a comet, or even just a firefly.

Since David’s dad works for NASA, Pedro says that they should ask him if it could have been a comet other than the one they were expecting to see. However, David’s dad confirms that there should only have been one comet that night and that the comet should have been in a different part of the sky. The boys talk about getting Walter and Ann to help them investigate, but then, they see some strange creatures in the bushes!

What did Pedro really see through the telescope, and could those weird creatures really be aliens?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

This is fun mystery picture book! Figuring out what/who the aliens are is the easiest part of the mystery, since this is before Halloween and the twins were being mysterious about what their costumes are, although it might seem harder to young children. The answer to what Pedro thought he saw through the telescope is revealed first, although I wasn’t entirely sure what to think of it myself. At first, I thought that the “aliens” might have been throwing around some glowing toy or something, but they would have to have thrown it really high to get it in front of the telescope because the boys were using the telescope on the roof. There’s a perfectly logical explanation behind the phenomenon, and David figures it out by noting where the object was and it was moving. David’s father confirms David’s guess with a call to NASA.

One of the nice things about this simple mystery story is that it introduces some real concepts for stargazers and amateur astronomers. There is a vocabulary list and glossary in the back of the book.

This series also offers good representations for racial diversity. Racial issues don’t enter into the story. The kids are just a bunch of kids who happen to live in the same neighborhood and are friends and like to solve mysteries, but they are a mixed racial group, and that’s nice to see. David is black, Pedro is Hispanic, and the twins are white. The children’s races are not referred to in the text of the story, but they are shown in the pictures.

Posted on by TracyC

The Halloween Play

The Halloween Play by Felicia Bond, 1983.

Halloween is coming, and the students in Roger’s class at school are preparing for their Halloween play. The class rehearses their play every day, and they make invitations to the play to send out to people in town.

On the night of the play, the school’s auditorium is full of people waiting to watch the play, and Roger waits backstage for his turn to go on stage. He doesn’t have a big role in the play, but his role is important.

The other students in Roger’s class go on stage, dressed as witches, ghosts, and skeletons. They perform the songs and dances they’ve rehearsed. The audience laughs at the funny parts, and everyone is enjoying the play.

All the time, Roger is backstage, listening and preparing for his part. He counts down the lines until the moment comes when Roger steps on stage for the play’s finale!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I remember reading this book when I was a little kid, and it was a Halloween favorite of mine! Felicia Bond is better known today as the illustrator (but not the author) of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, which was originally published two years after this particular picture book. The art style between the two books is noticeably similar, but the book about the Halloween play is different because this is about mice who live like people and do not interact with humans. I was also amused that one of the student mice in this book was dressed in an orange shirt with a black zig-zag and black shorts, like the cartoon character Charlie Brown, who wears a yellow shirt with a black zig-zag and black shorts. The tv special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was known for popularizing the concept of Halloween tv specials, and Roger the mouse plays a large pumpkin in his class’s Halloween play, although Roger isn’t the mouse wearing the Charlie Brown style clothes. Roger is the one in the sweater with an R on the front. I was just amused by this little detail in the pictures of his class.

This picture book is a sweet little story about a mouse boy and the Halloween play given by his class. School plays on a wide variety of themes are a common experience for human children attending both public and private schools, and they are often memorable points in children’s school experiences. They can also be very emotional experiences. Students can be nervous about plays and being on stage in front of an audience, and sometimes, there are conflicts about which students get the best parts. This cute little picture book doesn’t have any drama in it and doesn’t talk about stage fright, although there are other children’s books that address these issues.

Instead, the story is more about a magical evening and the small but important role played by one particular student. Much of the story shows the build-up to the play, and when the play begins, Roger only appears on stage at the end of the play. The rest of the time, he’s listening to the other students from back stage, waiting for his cue to step into the spotlight. We don’t know exactly what the play is about, but it’s not that important. Those quiet moments of anticipation backstage are magical, and Roger will never forget how exciting this evening has been!

Posted on by TracyC

Everyone Goes as a Pumpkin

Everyone Goes as a Pumpkin by Judith Vigna, 1977.

Emily thinks that she has the best costume for the upcoming Halloween party! It’s a beautiful dress that makes her feel elegant and magical.

Emily takes the costume on the bus to show her grandmother, but somehow, the box with the costume in it disappears during the ride. Emily is upset at losing the costume and doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to go to the party as something ordinary, like a pumpkin.

Then, her grandmother suggests that she just go as herself. As herself, Emily is truly unique!

My Reaction

I liked the grandmother’s unorthodox solution to the problem of the missing costume. I can understand a kid loving a particular costume so much that it seems like nothing else will do, but showing Emily that she’s just fine going to the party as herself is a good way to show her that she is just fine as she is, just being herself. Emily would have liked going with the costume she loved, but she doesn’t need any costume in particular because she is good enough by herself.

Posted on by TracyC

Spooky Sleepover

Eagle-Eye Ernie

The Spooky Sleepover by Susan Pearson, 1991.

A couple of weeks before Halloween, Ernie decides to have a sleepover party for her friends. The kids enjoy scaring each other with ghost stories, and a thunderstorm adds to the spooky atmosphere.

Michael, in particular, keeps insisting that an old witch called Mrs. Maloney used to live in Ernie’s house with a bunch of cats. When spooky things happen during the course of the evening, Michael says that Mrs. Maloney and her cats have returned to haunt Ernie’s house. The kids try to stay up until midnight because ghosts are supposed to appear at midnight, but there’s no telling what they might actually see.

The kids fall asleep, but they wake up around midnight when they hear a crashing sound from the basement. Although they are afraid, they take their flashlights and go down to see what it is. Will they find a ghost?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

This is one of those stories that has a pretty simple explanation, but the adventure seems bigger to the kids because their imaginations run away with them. I remember liking this series when I was a kid, and I think this is one of the books I read back then. I liked the creepy-cozy atmosphere of the story. Even though the kids have been scaring each other with ghost stories, they’re still just at a sleepover in an ordinary, safe house, and there’s nothing there that is harmful. It’s that kind of safe scariness that Halloween represents to young kids. They can enjoy the spookiness, knowing that there’s a logical explanation for everything. Adults and older kids will figure out pretty quickly what’s really going on.

Posted on by TracyC

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor cover

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor by Elizabeth Levy, illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein, 1979.

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor new neighbor

Sam lives with his brother and mother on the 19th floor of a large apartment building. One day, when he and his mother are going to meet his brother at a friend’s house, they try to take the elevator down to the ground floor, but it doesn’t seem to be working. With no other choice, they take the stairs, and when they reach the fourth floor, they discover the reason why the elevator isn’t working.

A new neighbor, Mr. Frank, is moving into the apartment building, and he’s stopped the elevator at his floor to unload all of his stuff. He has boxes and boxes of wires and other electronic components, and he gets really upset when anybody else touches them. He has refused all offers of help to unload the boxes, he’s kept the elevator tied up, and he’s been rude to his new neighbors about these things.

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor reading book

Sam thinks that Mr. Frank is frightening. He looks weird with those strange headphones with an antenna he keeps wearing. When he and his mother go to pick up his brother, Robert, Sam tells him about Mr. Frank and his theory that Mr. Frank is actually a monster. Sam thinks that Mr. Frank looks like Frankenstein. Both of the boys are into movie monsters, but Robert thinks at first that Sam is making it up. The boys have a debate about whether Mr. Frank would actually be Frankenstein the scientist or the monster that Frankenstein created in the book and movie because, although many people call the monster Frankenstein, that was actually the name of the monster’s creator. When the boys consult an abridged version of Frankenstein, Sam becomes convinced that the book’s description of Frankenstein the scientist sounds like Mr. Frank.

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor walking up stairs with candle

The next day, the boys go down to the apartment house’s basement, where tenants have storage rooms. Sam wants to see what Mr. Frank is storing in his storage room, but when the boys start talking about the possibility that he might keep bodies in there, they chicken out. In the meantime, Mr. Frank gets on everyone’s nerves at the apartment house. He’s always bringing in new boxes of stuff and leaving empty ones around. Neighbors hear weird noises coming from his apartment that sound like moans and groans. Mr. Frank claims that the noises are his music. Then, he overloads the electrical circuits in his apartment and causes the entire building to black out. Nobody knows what he’s doing with all that electrical equipment of his. Mr. Frank’s weird electrical experiments make Robert think maybe Sam was right about Mr. Frank being Frankenstein.

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor discovering the Dracula doll

The boys decide that it’s important for them to take a look in Mr. Frank’s storage room, but when Robert accidentally leaves his Dracula doll behind, they realize that Mr. Frank will find out that they’ve been snooping. They may have to face the wrath of Frankenstein!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is a sequel to this book called Dracula is a Pain in the Neck.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Frankenstein Moved In on the Fourth Floor confrontation

This story is a kind of mystery story because the boys are trying to figure out if Mr. Frank is actually Frankenstein and if he’s making monsters with his electrical experiments. However, it really reminds me of the The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids, a series about kids who suspect various people in their town of being different supernatural creators. This book is older than that series, and from the way the story goes, there are more logical explanations for Mr. Frank’s behavior. However, like with The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids, the kids don’t really get firm answers at the end. It looks like Mr. Frank is probably just some weird, temperamental musician who likes to experiment with electronics, but the story leaves it open to interpretation.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Stonestruck

Stonestruck by Helen Cresswell, 1995.

It’s WWII and Jessica knows that she will be evacuated from London soon, along with other children from her school. She doesn’t want to leave London and her mother, even though the bombings have gotten increasingly worse and frightening. Her father has already gone away to the front, and she has no idea if he will ever return. Then, one night, the unthinkable happens: their house is destroyed in a bombing. Jessica and her mother survive the bombing by sheltering in their basement, but Jessica’s pet cat is nowhere to be found. She doesn’t know if he survived the bombing and ran away somewhere or if he is buried somewhere in the rubble of their house. Jessica is traumatized, but with their home gone, her mother makes the decision to send Jessica away from London early. Jessica’s mother has decided that she will volunteer for service as an ambulance driver.

Jessica is terribly upset and worried about what will happen to her when her mother sends her away to Wales alone, but her mother assures her that she will be fine and that she will soon be joined by the other children from her school. They are being sent to a Welsh castle, where they will have classes together. Jessica’s mother tries to tell her that it will be fun and exciting, going to school in an old castle, but Jessica is too frightened and traumatized to think that this will be a fun adventure.

When Jessica’s train arrives at the station in Wales, she is met by Mr. and Mrs. Lockett, the gardener and housekeeper at the castle. They are friendly and welcoming to her, but on their arrival at the castle, Jessica hears a frightening scream. The Locketts don’t explain to her what the sound is and act like they haven’t heard a thing. When Jessica wakes up early the next day, she is relieved to see a peacock on the castle grounds, who gives the same strange cry that she heard the night before.

She is satisfied that the weird scream she heard has a logical explanation, but then, something else frightening happens. Although the morning is clear, there is one, strange, dense patch of mist on the castle grounds. Jessica thinks that it’s strange to see such a dense patch of mist in only one spot when there’s no mist anywhere else. Then, she hears a voice calling her name from the mist and the sound of children’s laughter. Jessica is confused because she’s only just arrived and hasn’t met anyone else there except the Locketts, and the rest of her classmates from her school in London aren’t there yet. It gives her an uneasy feeling, and when she sees a hand reach out of the mist and beckon to her, she becomes terrified and runs away.

At breakfast, Mrs. Lockett is cheerful and behaves in a perfectly ordinary manner. She expresses sympathy to Jessica over her ordeals during the bombings in London and the loss of her house and asks her what she plans to do before the other children arrive. She confides that she and her husband are not accustomed to children because they have none of their own, confirming that Jessica should be the only child in the castle right now. Jessica assures her that she can entertain herself. She asks Mrs. Lockett about the peacock that made the screaming sound, but Mrs. Lockett says that there are no peacocks on the ground and that she didn’t hear any scream. Mrs. Lockett is very disturbed by Jessica’s mention of a peacock. She says that the family that owns the castle won’t have peacocks on the grounds because they’re bad luck, and she sternly tells Jessica not to imagine things. Then, Mrs. Lockett gets a call that a train with 30 evacuees will be arriving, and she needs to help arrange accommodations for them. She leaves Jessica to entertain herself, but she warns her to stay out trouble and to stay away from the pond.

Jessica explores the grounds of the castle and meets Mr. Lockett again. Mr. Lockett, who prefers to be simply called Lockett, is kind to her, and she asks him about the peacock. Lockett seems to believe Jessica that she saw a peacock and finds it worrying. He says the same thing that Mrs. Lockett said, that peacocks are bad luck. He says that, for most people, a peacock’s cry means coming rain but that it means tears at the castle. He says that he knows that Jessica is sad right now, but he says that she should remember that she won’t always be sad. Some day, she will be happy again. He also cautions her to be careful what she wishes for.

When Mrs. Lockett returns, she says that she’s made arrangements for the evacuated children who are coming. She is sympathetic to the evacuees. Arranging housing for them is a hassle, although she says it’s for their own good to be evacuated. Lockett says that it’s good up to a point. He doesn’t speak much, but he observes that, while it’s necessary for the children to be sent away from the bombings, it isn’t so good that they’re being separated from their parents. He says that he’s sure that Jessica would rather be with her mother. Jessica is surprised that he understands how she feels. She says that, while the castle is nice and definitely safer than London right now, she really misses her her mother. Mrs. Lockett doesn’t want to dwell on that. Instead, she encourages Jessica to come with her to meet the evacuees’ train. She says that these new children from London will be friends and company for her. Jessica isn’t so sure because these children are strangers to her, not friends from her school, but she does go to meet the train with Mrs. Lockett.

People from the village have gathered to meet the other evacuated children. Some of the women have prepared food for children’s arrival, and some are talking about how many children they’ve been told to accept into their homes and their fears that some of them will have lice. When the children get off the train, Jessica can see that they are all hesitant and scared. Among the crowd, Jessica sees a boy she recognizes from the night of the bombing, standing outside of a burning house. She doesn’t know his name, but she feels a kinship with him because he also lost his home. Unlike the other children, he has no bags with him. Then, suddenly, the boy vanishes in the steam from the train. No one else seems to notice that he was there or that he’s now missing. Jessica wonders if she just imagined him.

The children’s teacher is checking the children’s names off a list as they are assigned homes, but Mrs. Lockett stops her, saying that she’ll see to it herself. However, Jessica notices that Mrs. Lockett puts it off. Jessica asks Mrs. Lockett how many evacuees there are, and she vaguely says about 20 or so, when she had said 30 before. When Jessica asks her again exactly how many there are, Mrs. Lockett says that it’s an old superstition in their town, that no one should ever count children twice. Jessica asks her why that is, but she brushes off the question. Later, Jessica sees Mrs. Lockett burning the list of evacuees. With the list gone, no one will be able to count how many evacuees there are.

After her mother calls the castle to check on her and tries to pretend that things are fine when Jessica knows they’re not, Jessica feels the need to go for a walk by herself. Mrs. Lockett lets her go, warning her to be back before dark. As Jessica explores the castle grounds, she experiences more strange phenomena. She sees the peacock and the mist again and hears a voice calling her name. She sees a boy on a horse vanish into the mist. Then, a troop of phantom children charge past her, laughing and calling her name, and Jessica is shocked to see that one of them looks like her!

Jessica knows that she’s not just imagining the things that she’s been seeing, and she struggles to understand what’s happening and what it means. She realizes that, every time something strange happens, she either sees the peacock or hears its cry. She also remembers that, the first time she heard its cry, she had the strange feeling that, while she went into the castle, a part of herself stayed outside. Is that other part of her the phantom girl that she saw, being chased by the other phantom children? It looked like her, but it also felt alien, like it isn’t really her.

Jessica discovers that the boy who vanished at the train station ran away and has been hiding out on the castle grounds. He was afraid to let himself be sent to a strange home with the other evacuees because he’s heard that evacuees are treated horribly. Jessica tells him that she’s been treated kindly at the castle. Before she can learn the boy’s name, he runs away again, frightened by a strange old woman.

The old woman is frightening and seems to know who Jessica is. She says that she’s going about her rounds, leaving food out for the children. She knows about the phantom children, who run around in the mist with their hands linked. She refuses to tell Jessica her real name, just telling her to call her Priscilla, and she warns Jessica to keep repeating to herself that things aren’t always what they seem.

Jessica asks Mrs. Lockett if she ever played chain tag, the type of tag game where children join hands whenever they’re caught and then continue chasing other children. Mrs. Lockett says that the children around here call that game Fishes in a Net. When there are four or more children in a chain, they surround other children to trap them. She says that she played it in another place as a child, but not here because their mothers would never allow them to. Jessica asks why, and Mrs. Lockett hesitates to answer, but she makes a reference to a boy she knew when she was young, who apparently played the game too many times and disappeared. Before he disappeared, he talked about the peacocks, which was why they decided to get rid of the peacocks on the grounds. Mrs. Lockett says that the Green Lady wanted him for her own. When Jessica asks her about the Green Lady, Mrs. Lockett suddenly brushes it off as an old legend that doesn’t mean anything. Lockett the gardener says that some stories build power with the telling, and that’s why people don’t want to tell them.

However, Jessica realizes that there is truth to the legend that Mrs. Lockett doesn’t want to explain. Mrs. Lockett knows that there’s enough truth to it to destroy the list of evacuated children so it will be harder to keep track of who’s there and who isn’t. The people of this town don’t count children twice because something that lurks in the mist vanishes children away, and no one wants to notice it or admit it’s happening, that it’s been happening for generations. As long as they don’t count children twice, they can tell themselves that no one is missing and nothing is wrong, even when it is. Jessica begins writing about all of her strange experiences in the journal that her mother gave her, trying to solve the mysteries of the castle and the mist. Something in the mist is after her, beckoning her to come to it, and like the others before her, if she goes to it, she will never come back.

At Jessica’s urging, Lockett tells Jessica what he knows about the story of the Green Lady. The Green Lady isn’t human. She’s a shapeshifter with a heart of stone. Years ago, she kidnapped the young lord of the castle, Harry, because he was a beautiful boy, and she wanted him for her own son. However, Harry was desperately lonely, living only with someone who had a heart of stone. He refused to speak aloud again until he had a human playmate. So, the Green Lady began stealing playmates for him, but it was never enough. There is one playmate in particular that Harry is waiting for, the one whose name he calls in the mist. That’s Jessica. Because only Jessica, frightened and lonely in a strange land, has the ability to break the spell.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers:

Some reviewers on Goodreads have pointed out that this book is very similar in plot to an earlier book by the same author, Moondial. In Moondial, as in this book, there is a young girl who is sent away from home and encounters mysterious phenomena that involves children in past times who are suffering and need her help to free them. However, the two stories are not identical, and I like the way this particular book is framed around WWII child evacuees from London.

It is important to the plot that the child evacuees from London are scared because of the war and have been wishing that they can go home, but that they haven’t been raised in the atmosphere of fear and superstition that the children in Wales have been. They have worries, but they’re not the same worries as the Welsh people have. Jessica learns from Lockett that it is the wishing themselves away that splits the children’s spirits and leaves them vulnerable to being captured by the trapped spirit children. Lockett understands what is happening better than anyone and how the unhappy children from London feel because he was also once an unhappy child. He was abused at home when he was young, and he also wanted to get away. However, when confronted by the spectral children whose hearts have also turned to stone, he changed his mind and escaped their clutches. He explains to Jessica what she has to do to reclaim that part of her that split off from her when she wished that she could go home, and from there, Jessica realizes what she needs to do to end this ghostly game of tag and free the other trapped children. The first step is reconciling herself to her situation as it exists and no longer wishing herself away. In doing so, she is doing what all of the adults around her have been failing to do, both about the supernatural phenomena and about the current war – facing up to the situation and not trying to pretend like it is less serious than it really while no longer wishing it away. Then, she realizes that the only way to end the spectral children’s game is to beat them at it, and for that, she needs help from other children.

When one of the other child evacuees from London has been captured and spirited away, Jessica and the boy who has been hiding out convince the other child evacuees to help them get him back and free the other children who have been taken across the generations. They have some work convincing the other evacuees of what is happening, but when they do, they form their own team for chain tag or Fishes in a Net and face off against the team of spectral children. It has to be the evacuee children who end this curse because the Welsh children are too afraid to do it, and the Welsh children’s parents would never risk them in the attempt. The Welsh people aren’t as careful about the evacuee children, and some of them have been bullying and abusing some of the evacuees. There is some concern when they realize what the evacuee children are going to do, but no one stops them.

It isn’t entirely clear what happens when the evacuee children free children who were taken from previous generations because these older children simply vanish. Even Jessica isn’t entirely sure whether the children returned to their own times or if they’ve simply passed on. However, the people of the Welsh town realize that the children have finally been freed and that the spell is broken, and they are grateful.

Parts of the story were stressful to read. First, I found the loss of Jessica’s cat upsetting. They never learn exactly what happened to the cat during the story. Then, Jessica finds out that the other boy who lost his home also lost his mother and siblings in the bombing, showing her that her own losses, while serious, aren’t the worst ones. There are also instances where the local children bully the London children, and the Welsh parents blame the London children for it. Some of the Welsh people are kind to the evacuees, but some also bully and abuse them, seeing them as only rough, poor children who are troublemakers and an inconvenience to them.

Even Mrs. Lockett says that she feels lucky that she got Jessica as an evacuee because she is gentle and well-behaved, not like the other London children. Jessica realizes that this is an unfair prejudice. Although she does not consider herself a brave person, she finds her courage when she begins to confront some of the adults around her about the way they look at the London children and how they treat them. She asks the adults directly if they realize that the London children also don’t want to be there and that no one asked them if they wanted to be sent away from their parents. The adults, confronted with the reality of the the children’s feelings and the reasons for their being there, entrusted to their care, are embarrassed. They don’t have real reasons for their prejudices against the evacuees, only their unfair feelings and bad behavior, and they realize that when they are confronted directly with the realities of the situation and their own behavior. Really, I think that facing up to realities, even ones that are strange and scary, is one of the major themes of the book. It is Jessica’s realization that she can do that, when even the adults around her can’t or won’t, that gives her the courage to do what she needs to do to end the spell and save herself and other children.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Moondial

Moondial by Helen Cresswell, 1987.

Araminta Kane, called Minty, has always had the ability to sense things that others can’t. For as long as she can remember, she has had the ability to sense and even see spirits. She doesn’t talk about it much because this happens to her routinely. When she does mention it, her mother assumes that it’s imagination or a trick of the light. Minty becomes more aware of her ability after her father dies, and she is still able to hear his voice from time to time.

She has been learning to cope with her father’s death and the changes to her life since it happened. She and her mother have been getting along pretty well, but her mother has to work long hours. It’s bad enough that Minty has to be alone so much on weekends, but her mother wonders what she will do during her school holidays. Minty’s mother decides to send Minty to stay with her godmother, Mrs. Bowyer, in the village of Belton, for the summer. Mrs. Bowyer is an elderly lady who lives in an old, stone cottage, which is near the old manor known as Belton House. Belton House once belonged to Lord Brownlow, but it is now owned by the National Trust (UK organization that focuses on preservation and protection of historic sites) and operates as a tourist attraction, open to the public. Mrs. Bowyer used to work for the Brownlow family as a domestic servant, and now, she sometimes helps out in the gift shop at Belton House.

Minty is happy about spending the summer with Mrs. Bowyer, who they call Aunt Mary, because she has heard about Belton House, and she would like to see it. She knows that there is a hidden tunnel on the property, and the idea of exploring it sounds intriguing. However, she wonders if that will be enough to keep her occupied all summer, and she does worry about whether her mother will be all right without her. She knows that her mother is still mourning her father and that she sometimes cries at night. Minty’s mother reassures her that she will be fine and that they’ll be too busy working to be sad and lonely. She also reassures Minty that she won’t be bored while she’s in Belton. When she stayed with Aunt Mary as a child, she always had the feeling that Belton was unusual somehow, that unseen things were happening beneath the surface. Minty asks her if she means ghosts, that the village is haunted. Her mother isn’t quite sure because she never actually saw any ghosts or anything of the kind.

Aunt Mary is happy to have Minty stay with her, and she says that Minty can help her in the shop at Belton House. She says that things at Belton House aren’t like they were in the old days, when the Brownlows lived there, and she remarks that they would turn over in their graves if they saw all the tourists and school groups tramping through their house and grounds. Before her mother leaves Belton, they explore the nearby churchyard together. Even though it’s July, Minty feels a strange gust of cold air. She senses that there is something strange about it, she plans to return later and examine the area more closely.

Minty has a strange sense that time doesn’t work in quite the same way in Aunt Mary’s village that it does elsewhere. She thinks it makes sense that time would stand still in the old graveyard because everyone there is dead, but Aunt Mary herself seems to move as if she’s in a different time as well. Aunt Mary is puzzled even about basic pieces of modern technology, not understanding even what Minty’s headphones are for.

While Minty is with Aunt Mary, she gets word that her mother has been in a car accident and is in the hospital. Minty is terrified of losing her mother as well as her father. A nice man named John Benson from her mother’s office is helping to arrange things, and Aunt Mary urges Minty to try not to think about it or worry too much, but Minty can’t help it. When Minty feels like she needs to get out of the house and go for a walk, Aunt Mary suggests that she go explore Belton House and meet Mr. World, the groundskeeper, who likes children.

When Minty meets World, he asks her if she’s there to meet the children. At first, Minty doesn’t know who he’s talking about, since she just saw a tour group of other children leaving the grounds. She asks if there are any children currently living in the old house, but World isn’t talking about living children. World tells her that there are children who haunt the place. He says that they’re trapped and need someone to free them, and he thinks that Minty will be “the one to turn the key” and set them free. This isn’t exactly reassuring talk for Minty’s current situation, but she has the feeling that what World says is true and that she’s just been given a kind of invitation that she can’t refuse.

In the gardens of the manor, Minty finds a mysterious sundial that has the power to take her back in time. The very first time she encounters it, it gives her a strange feeling, and for some reason, she keeps thinking of it as a “moondial” instead of sundial. Suddenly, Minty finds herself back in the Victorian era with a boy named Tom. Tom is an orphan from London who works at the manor house, and the adults there abuse him. Minty tries to intervene, but none of the adults can see or hear her, and she suddenly finds herself back in her own time, uncertain of what made her travel through time and what brought her back to the present.

Later, when Minty visits the old house again, she has another encounter with the sundial/moondial and finds herself visiting the grounds of the manor at night. This time, she meets a girl from the past called Sarah. Sarah sings little rhymes (old, traditional ones – Poor Mary (sometimes called Poor Jenny or Poor Sally, and sometimes she’s weeping for a lost sweetheart and sometimes for a playmate) and Girls and Boys Come Out to Play (listen on YouTube). Minty watches as a frightening adult dressed in black hurries her back into the house, calling her a “little devil.”

When Minty visits Tom’s time again, she learns that Tom has also seen Sarah. He seems to also have the ability to travel through time, and when he sees Sarah, it’s also at night. Tom still thinks that both Minty and Sarah are ghosts. Minty doesn’t know why this is happening, but she senses that she needs to help Tom and Sarah.

When Minty visits the hospital, she isn’t sure what to say to her mother, who is still in a coma, so she decides that she will make recorded tapes about her time-traveling adventures that she can play for her mother, along with some music. The doctor approves of Minty make tapes for her mother to listen to, but Minty tells him that what she has to say is private, and she makes him promise that he and the nurses won’t listen to them while they’re playing. The doctor promises that there won’t be anyone in the room, and they won’t listen to the tapes themselves.

Then, Aunt Mary has a visit from a strange woman called Miss Raven, who says that she’s an author investigating the ghosts at the manor house. Aunt Mary even accepts Miss Raven as a lodger at her house. However, Minty has a strange feeling that Miss Raven is not to be trusted. Miss Raven tries to get Minty to admit that she has seen ghosts. She watches Minty closely and tries to get Aunt Mary to limit Minty’s freedom to go places by herself. World also shares Minty’s suspicions of Miss Raven. He tells her that Miss Raven is probably after the children, and it’s up to Minty to save them. She doesn’t know how to do that, but she’s determined to try.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is also a BBC miniseries based on the book. It’s available on DVD through Amazon, and you can sometimes see it or clips of it on YouTube. There is also a similar (although not identical) story by the same author called Stonestruck, which involves child evacuees from London during WWII.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I read Stonestruck first, and I read Moondial specifically because another reviewer mentioned the similarities between the two stories. It seems like the author wanted to revisit the themes of Moondial in a somewhat different setting and with some twists when she wrote Stonestruck. The two stories aren’t identical, but there are similar themes of captive children or children’s spirits trapped across time. The time travel in this book centers around the mysterious sundial/moondial, while Stonestruck has ghostly children playing a game, and capturing other children.

There are features of both books that I like, so it’s difficult to choose a favorite between the two of them. I like the features of the child evacuee and the ghostly game from Stonestruck. This one has a truly haunting ending with a frightening scene on a Halloween night in the past. The ending of Stonestruck is a little more open-ended than the ending of Moondial. You can read my review of Stonestruck for more about how that ends, but it’s less definite what happens to the captive children or captive children’s spirits in that book. In this one, we do find out what happens to them. There are hints of Tom’s fate all the way through the story, but Minty doesn’t recognize it immediately, partly because “Tom” is actually a nickname rather than his real name. He later explains to her that kitchen boys are always called “Tom” no matter what their real names are.

Time is important to the story, and Minty realizes that the key to the time travel is that the supposed “sundial” is actually a “moondial.” Sarah refers to it as a “moondial” when they see her because Sarah typically only comes out at night because her face is disfigured by a birthmark and people think it’s a sign of the devil. Since Sarah almost never sees the sundial when the sun is out, it’s a “moondial” to her. The superstition about birthmarks is historical. However, I though that what the characters say about measuring time was interesting.

At one point, World gives Minty a book about sundials to study, and he explains that “clock time is mean time. Sundial time is what they call apparent time …” and the only exact time is star time. Minty takes that to mean that the moondial measures true time. You can measure time by the stars, using Polaris and the Big Dipper, and measuring time that way is based on a 24-hour clock rather than standard 12-hour clocks. Measuring time based on the Earth’s rotation, relative to fixed stars, is called sidereal time. What World says about clocks being based on “mean time”, meaning the “the sun’s average (mean) rate for the year” is true. Sundials measure “how the sun travels across the sky“, but the movement isn’t completely regular, which is why our clocks use the average movement rate. Because of the variations in the sun’s movement from the average or mean calculations, you can’t accurately set a clock or watch by a sundial, unless you know how to calculate for the variations. That’s what World means about sundials showing apparent time. Measuring time by the positions of the stars in the sky creates a “day” that is just slightly shorter than the standard 24-hour day that we measure on clocks. However, star time isn’t the only true way of measuring time. Stars appear to move with the rotation of the Earth, which is pretty accurate, but we now also have the concept of atomic clocks. Even those aren’t 100% accurate, though. There doesn’t seem to be a 100% infallible accurate way of measuring time, but atomic clocks are only off by about 1 second every 100 million years. They’re about as close to full accuracy as we are able to get. The book doesn’t go into all of the scientific details of measuring time because it’s a fantasy story, but I thought that working some real concepts of measuring time into the story was fascinating.

The book also works in the concept of the mottos that are traditionally carved on sundials, like the ones that say they only count the sunny hours. However, some sundials have deeper inscriptions, and the concept of inscriptions on sundials explaining time travel appears in some other fantasy books, like The Time Garden. In this book, Minty considers inscriptions like, “For the Night Cometh – cutting off all Power of Passing of Time” and “Light and Shadow by turns, but always Love.” Both of these inscriptions give her clues to how the moondial works and what she needs to do to help the distressed spirits of the past children, who are trapped in time. Tom and Sarah are both lonely and unloved children where and when they are. When Minty reunites them with the spirit of Tom’s sister, Dorrie, who he is separated from in life, the three spirits are able to be the love and company they each need. There are two carved figures on the sundial, Chronos and Eros – Chronos representing time and Eros representing love. Love transcends time.

Miss Raven is the villain of the story, even though we don’t really meet her until later in the book. Miss Raven may possibly be a witch, and she uses cats to spy on Minty. The details about how and why Miss Raven became a witch are never clarified. She also seems to have originated from Sarah’s time and was once her governess, although that isn’t really clarified, either. Did she turn evil because of her resentment of Sarah, or was she always like that? We also don’t really know why she’s after the children or the children’s souls. At the end, she seems to have vanished, perhaps banished by something Minty did on a fateful Halloween of the past in her final travel through time, although Aunt Mary thinks that she has departed in a normal way. There are things that aren’t fully explained by the end of the story, although we do learn what happened to Tom, and Minty knows that Tom’s spirit is now free and happy with the spirit of his sister and another lonely girl who badly needed friends.

The Halloween scene in the final time travel is really chilling, and it’s especially spooky in the miniseries version of the book.

Posted on by TracyC

Moon Window

Moon Window by Jane Louise Curry, 1996.

Joanna Ellen Briggs (usually called JoEllen or Jo) lost her father five years ago, when he died in a car accident. Since then, it’s just been her and her mother. Jo has adjusted to the loss, and she and her mother have been happy together. At least, that’s what Jo keeps telling herself. Now, her mother is getting remarried, and Jo feels like her life has been completely turned upside down. Her new stepfather, George, is a nice man, but Jo can’t stand the idea of her life changing. George is a law professor, and Jo’s other relatives like him, but Jo is afraid of what this marriage will mean for her. She and her mother will be moving to George’s house in Boston, and she is afraid that nothing will ever be the same again.

At the heart of her worries is the fear of losing her mother, just as she lost her father. The truth is that Jo has never fully adjusted to her father’s death. She participates in a wide range of classes and activities, but it’s not because she really loves any of these subjects or activities. Her gymnastics, choir practice, piano lessons, and the host of other classes and hobbies that she pursues with so much energy and perfectionism are to keep her mind occupied so she won’t have to think about her father or her worries about what might happen to her if something happens to her mother. Ever since her father died, there has always been the lingering fear of something happening to her mother, and that’s why Jo fears change in her life. She has settled into a routine that makes her feel relatively safe and keeps her from thinking too much about what might happen in the future. George’s entry into their lives has broken the routine, will bring even more changes, and has caused Jo’s tightly-controlled feelings to creep to the surface.

Even during the wedding, Jo privately hopes something will happen that will stop the ceremony and keep all of these frightening changes from happening, but nothing does. However, Jo’s grandmother has noticed how upset Jo is, even though Jo tries to keep a blank face and hide her feelings. Her grandmother realizes that Jo is bottling up her emotions, and she sees the moment when Jo finally lets loose, just as her mother and George leave on their honeymoon. Instead of throwing birdseed after the car, like everyone else, she turns and throws her little bag of birdseed at one of George’s young nephews, hitting him in the eye.

Originally, the plan had been for Jo to stay with George’s brother and his family while her mother and George are on their honeymoon. However, because of her bad behavior toward George’s nephews, the boys’ mother refuses to have her as a guest. Jo’s grandparents hurriedly consider other arrangements for Jo. They would take her themselves, but they will soon be traveling to a conference they are attending. Jo’s grandmother laments about Jo’s behavior and moods, and that reminds her of Witch Ellen, an ancestor in an old painting at Winterbloom, the old house where her frail great-aunt lives. Granty Nell, as they call her, is actually a distant cousin and is over 100 years old, but she loves children. Jo’s grandmother remembers that one of Jo’s cousins recently visited Granty Nell at Winterbloom and had a wonderful time. Winterbloom is a strange old house near Walpole, New Hampshire, but Jo’s grandmother has fond memories of the place, and Granty Nell has live-in help, so she won’t be dealing with Jo alone.

Granty Nell accepts Jo as a visitor, but Jo is stunned that she has so suddenly been dumped with a relative she doesn’t even know, in an old stone house in the middle of the woods. At first, Jo plans to run away and go back to the apartment where she and her mother have been living and stay there until her mother comes to get her so her mother will regret leaving her and think twice about ever leaving her again. However, Winterbloom is no ordinary place, and leaving is much more difficult than Jo realizes.

Granty is unexpectedly sharp in spite of her age, and she can read Jo like a book, noting her thinness and chewed fingernails. She speaks openly to Jo about her feelings about her new stepfather on her first day at Winterbloom. Granty lets her speak and doesn’t criticize her feelings. Instead, she tells Jo a little about the house and their ancestors, and she offers to let her explore the house and choose one of the guest bedrooms for herself. When she decides which room she wants, she can tell the housekeeper, Mrs. Craig. Mrs. Craig’s husband Thomas and son Tom take care of the grounds and garden of Winterbloom. The three of them live in a little cottage nearby, so only Granty and Jo will be living in the big house.

As Jo explores the old house alone, she notices that the furnishings are rich but old and shabby. She wonders why Granty hasn’t replaced them because she is supposedly wealthy. Each of the bedrooms has a fireplace that has an iron Franklin stove fitted inside and wardrobes instead of closets. The furnishings are all old-fashioned and a little shabby, but there is something in every room that catches Jo’s attention, like an interesting painting or an embroidered stool. In spite of herself, Jo finds herself liking things or becoming intrigued by them, although she is still determined to run away. Then, while exploring the attic, she finds an old turret room with a round window, the kind that her mother likes to call a “moon window.” Jo tries to open the window, but she discovers that someone has painted it shut. She manages to pry it open anyway, using a knife that she finds in Granty’s desk drawer. Outside the window, there is a large tree, good for climbing. Jo realizes that, with her gymnastics skills, it would be easy for her to climb down the tree and escape when it’s time for her to run away.

Thinking that she’ll probably only stay for one night before running away, Jo chooses the yellow bedroom, the one with a high bed with yellow brocade curtains that has a step stool for climbing into it. Granty tells her that is the room where her grandmother stayed when she came to visit Winterbloom when she was young. Winterbloom is undeniably charming, in spite of its shabbiness, and Jo can’t help but think that the dining room, with its tapestries and long, candlelit table looks like it’s set for a fairy tale feast.

To Jo’s surprise, Granty tells her a little of her own history at dinner. Like many of the women in their family, Granty’s first name is Ellen, although the younger generations think of her as Granty Nell. Jo had assumed that Granty had grown up at Winterbloom, but actually, she originally lived in New York. Like other young girls in the family, she also came to visit Winterbloom as a child when the woman that she once called Granty lived there. When Granty Nell was 17 years old and having one of her visits to Winterboom, both of her parents died in a flu epidemic. (I thought at first that she was referring to the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic, but later events in the story show that the dates don’t line up. Her parents must have died earlier.) As an orphan, she continued living at Winterbloom with her Granty until the following September, when she went away to college. She was a schoolteacher for a time until her Granty died, leaving her Winterbloom and all of her money, on the condition that she change her last name to Macallan, which is the family’s maternal surname. Granty Nell wasn’t originally happy about having to change her name, but she did it anyway because she loved Winterbloom. Jo wishes that someone would give her a house to live in so she wouldn’t have to live with George. George’s house in Boston is very modern and definitely not charming. Granty Nell tells her to be careful about what she wishes for because, since she returned to Winterbloom, she hasn’t traveled very far from it, and there are many interesting places she has never seen. Clinging too much to one particular place can keep a person from moving on to other, more exciting places.

Although someone (possibly Mrs. Craig or Granty) has tried to make the yellow room more cozy for Jo by moving all the things that she admired in the other rooms into that room, Jo is still determined to run away. She almost resents how comfortable Winterbloom is for her, making it difficult for her to leave. Early in the morning, Jo slips out through the moon window in the attic and climbs down the tree from the house. She originally planned to ride her bike the two miles from Winterbloom into town because her grandparents left her bike there for her to use, but she can’t find the bike when she reaches the ground. She assumes that the Craigs must have moved it and that she’ll have to walk to town to catch the bus.

However, during her early morning walk to town, it slowly begins to dawn on her that something isn’t right. She overhears some children talking about a cannon, which is strange. Then, she has an encounter with a man on horseback, who talks like he’s a local doctor who’s been out to see patients. Since when do doctors ride around on horses to see their patients? Jo becomes more uneasy, and when she reaches the town, she realizes why. The town doesn’t look the way it did when she passed through it with her grandparents. Suddenly, there is no Interstate highway, and there is a covered wooden bridge that isn’t there anymore in Jo’s time. Somehow, it looks like going through the window has sent Jo back in time, although she’s not sure when or if that’s really what is happening. Disoriented and terrified, Jo returns to Winterbloom and climbs back up to the moon window, leaving her knapsack hidden in some bushes to retrieve later.

The next day, Jo tries to tell herself that what happened early that morning was only a dream, but there are hints that it wasn’t. Not only is her bike exactly where she left it, like it never moved, but the bush where she left her knapsack isn’t there anymore, and there’s no sign of the knapsack. Jo searches the area to check if she was just mistaken about where she left the knapsack, but it really isn’t there. When Granty suggests that they go into town for lunch, Jo sees that the gate to Winterbloom isn’t the same in the present as it was in the past, and the road to town is paved while the road she walked along in the early morning wasn’t. Yet, there are aspects of the countryside that are eerily familiar, which indicates that what she experienced wasn’t just a dream. She might have been able to dream about the road and town as they were in the past, but she shouldn’t have been able to accurately dream about features of the area that she hadn’t seen before and that have been there for a long time.

Their trip to town is cut short because Granty becomes ill. Young Tom, who is driving them, says that Granty suffers from agoraphobia, which is why she gets ill or panics when she gets too far from Winterbloom. This is part of the reason why she has not traveled very far since she inherited the house. Granty later says that this isn’t entirely the case, but through many years of living at Winterbloom, it has become more and more difficult for her to leave it.

Jo still plans to run away, and she realizes that she left her flashlight in her knapsack, wherever that is now. She decides to search the attic for something she can use instead. In spite of herself, she finds the old clothes in the trunks in the attic charming and decides to try wearing some of them. Then, at the bottom of one of the trunks, she finds her knapsack! The knapsack isn’t the way it was when she last saw it, though. It has clearly aged, and so have the things inside. The flashlight no longer works, the clothes are yellowed with age, and the leather and rubber on her hiking boots has hardened and cracked. It’s like they’ve been stored in the attic for more than 100 years! The boots are wrapped in a newspaper, now deteriorated, but when Jo examines it, she finds the date of July 1809 and references to some of the people and things she encountered during her early morning excursion. Now, Jo is really scared.

Jo races to the turret room and looks out the moon window, but what she sees frightens her more. Although it’s afternoon in Winterbloom, it’s dark outside the moon window. More than that, there’s no tree outside the window, and the countryside that she sees isn’t the woods that surround Winterbloom. Jo recognizes what she sees as the same scene in a painting in her room at Winterbloom. The moon window is no ordinary window. It looks out on different times and places.

Once she gets over her fear, Jo is intrigued at this “window of time” and wants to know more about how it works. She even thinks that, if she can learn to control it, she might be able to go back in time to just the right moment to keep her mother from getting married again, which she thinks will solve all of her problems. However, the next time she tries the window, she finds herself meeting a young Granty Nell in 1897, when she was just a girl about her age called Nell, which is short for Ellen. Nell catches her sneaking around in a dress that looks very much like her dress. (Really, it’s the same dress, just aged about 90 years because Jo found it stored in the attic and tried it on.) Jo attempts to explain to her who she is and how she got there, taking Nell to the turret room in the attic and showing her the moon window. Jo is curious where the moon window will lead if they go through it in the past, wondering if it will take them to the future, but it ends up leading them further into the past. Jo and Nell end up in 1764, when the house was first being built. They are both caught sneaking around by a young Indian (Native American) and the stonemason who is building the house for Ellen Hawke. Ellen is a common name for women in their family, and this Ellen was the one who created Winterbloom and the one for whom all the other Ellens were named, including JoEllen. She is also considered a “wise woman”, and she is the Witch Ellen who appears in a painting at Winterbloom. Jo recognizes the stonemason’s last name as her grandmother’s maiden name, making her wonder if they are also somehow related. She wonders if maybe the stonemason will marry Ellen Hawke, making him her distant ancestor.

As Jo begins to consider people’s complex relationships across time, it occurs to her that, if she and Nell aren’t careful, they might accidentally change something in the past that will endanger their own existence. For the first time, she also begins to wonder what might happen if she successfully changes things so her mother never meets or marries George. Is it possible that she would be preventing the potential birth of a half-sibling, and if so, is that what she really wants to do?

Back in the present day, Granty Nell begins remembering an incident from her youth that she always thought of as a dream with a girl named Joanna and a trip back in time, and she begins connecting it with some strange questions Jo has been asking her. Years ago, Granty Nell had removed the furnishings from the turret room (the ones which Jo had delighted in and are now her the Yellow Bedroom that she is using) and scattered them through the house. She had the moon window painted shut and kept the door to the turret room locked, sensing that the moon window was magical and dangerous. Now, in spite of Nell’s precautions, things are coming full circle, and Jo is doing what Nell realizes she has done before.

Although Granty Nell loves having Jo at Winterbloom, she begins to realize that she must get Jo away from the place as soon as possible, before Jo becomes trapped in the same web that has kept Nell herself tied so tightly to Winterbloom all these years. Solving the mysteries of Winterbloom and the spell it has on the other Ellens in the family means exploring the past of the first Ellen, Witch Ellen.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed this story and its atmosphere! I think fans of Cottagecore would enjoy Winterbloom, with its old-fashioned, comfortable shabbiness and rooms with quaint, magical touches. This is also one of those books that mentions what the characters eat. I’m not much of a foodie, but there were a couple of things that interested me about their meals at Winterbloom. I find it interesting when books mention unusual dishes or foods that they call by unfamiliar names. At one point, they have what Granty calls “Indian cake” for lunch. It’s described as a type of corn bread, so I think it’s named for Native Americans rather than Indians from India. (I ask that question almost every time I see “Indian” in writing, unless it’s specified.) I’d never heard of that before, so I tried looking it up, and from the description, I think it might be similar to this recipe for a corn bread pound cake from 1827. I’m not 100% sure it’s the same thing, but it seems reasonable because it’s described as both a corn bread and a cake. As charming as Winterbloom is, though, it also has a dark side that Jo must confront.

Themes

Jo’s immediate problem is obvious from the beginning of the story. There have been many other children’s books about children adjusting to changes in their lives, including the remarriage of a parent. It’s understandable that children who are accustomed to having only one parent might cling to that parent and be afraid of changes that might cause them to lose that parent or experience less of that parent’s attention and affection. Although adults might say that coming to love someone else doesn’t mean loving other people less, but Jo already knows that, when her mother spends more time with George, she spends less time with Jo. Her mother still loves her, but Jo feels neglected and forgotten, fearful of what this will mean for her future and her relationship with the only parent she has left. Even before her mother married George, there were times when her mother was so preoccupied, thinking about George, that she forgot to get breakfast for Jo or buy groceries, as she normally did, making Jo nervous about her mother still providing for her through this relationship with George. I’m sure that her mother doesn’t mean to give Jo this feeling. It’s just part of the awkwardness of making a major change in their lives and adjusting to a new normal. I’ve reviewed others on this theme before, including The Haunting at Cliff House, which also features time travel.

There are a couple of things that make this story different from others that I’ve read. One that surprised me at first is that Granty Nell knows about the magic of the window. In many books for kids that involve magic and time travel, the adults don’t know what’s going on and never learn. The magic or time travel is meant to give the children in the stories perspective on their lives and problems and teach them lessons, not to do anything for the adults. Typically, the adults either don’t know what’s going on, while the children learn about the magic or face their problems on their own, or the adults don’t find out what’s been happening until after the child has resolved the situation, like Rose in The Root Cellar, which is about an orphan adjusting to a new life with her relatives. In this story, Granty Nell has known about the magic of the moon window since she was young, when she first met Jo on one of her time travel excursions. At first, Nell thought that Jo was a dream, but through her years with the house, she came to understand the dangers of the window and the hold that the house can have on people, particularly on young girls named Ellen, who are coping with the loss of a home or a parent.

It isn’t obvious right away, but this is also a story about generational trauma, but with a magical/supernatural twist. Like other Ellens in the family, the first Ellen, Ellen Hawke (maiden name Ellen MacAlpin, also called Ellen MacAllan or Witch Ellen) also suffered the lost of her father and home early in life. The family’s ancestral home, Castle MacAlpin in Scotland, was destroyed by fire, and her father died in the fire. Ellen wanted to save him, but she couldn’t. The MacAlpins were unusual people, who possessed real magic, and Nell thinks that they might actually be descended from elves. After her father died, Ellen married, and later in life, after her husband died, she went to New Hamsphire to start over. People were always nervous about her and her magical abilities, so whenever it looked like people might be about to put her on trail for being a witch, she would move and start over.

Like Granty Nell, Witch Ellen has also lived an unnaturally long life, and (spoiler) she is still living secretly in Winterbloom. At least some of the other Ellens in the family were also her, pretending to be one of her own descendants. When she came to New Hampshire, she built a new version of the home that she had lost, which is Winterbloom. The shabby, old-fashioned belongings in the house are actually a clue to the house’s true problem. Granty can’t change things too much, even when she wants to, because Witch Ellen won’t let her. The house is a monument to her old life, and she can’t let go of it. However, Ellen eventually discovered that Winterbloom was a poor substitute for her lost home. It’s undeniably a charming house, but it’s not the original castle, so it just couldn’t be the same and would never feel the same to Ellen.

When Jo finally speaks to Witch Ellen directly, she admits that, rather than bringing her solace, Winterbloom haunts her because it can’t be what she wants it to be. Witch Ellen tells Jo that, for a long time, she has been waiting for a descendant of hers to undo a terrible mistake that she made years before, which has kept her bound to the house. That is, assuming that Witch Ellen is telling the truth.

For most of the book, readers don’t know what’s behind the magic of the house or if the witch in the family is in control of what’s happening. I expected at first that Witch Ellen would be a sympathetic character who would help Jo to understand the magic and maybe teach her something to help her cope with her situation, but that isn’t the case. Jo must confront the question of whether the mission that Ellen gives her would really break the spell of Winterbloom or if the curse of Winterbloom was always Ellen’s inability to accept life as it came and to try to control the outcomes. Ellen was always a controlling person, and her own children left her and Winterbloom years ago because she frightened them. Witch Ellen was never satisfied with her life, even the parts that were really good, because she couldn’t let go of the old home that she lost. Her new home, the men she married, and even her own children were never good enough for her because she was clinging to her memories of her old life and her plan to get it back. It was an obsession with her, and it has guided everything she has done. When Ellen became Nell’s guardian as her “Granty”, she began controlling her, keeping her bound to Winterbloom all these years to accomplish what she wanted. When Nell wouldn’t do it, Ellen began searching for another descendant who would, which is why she keeps inviting other young descendants to visit Winterbloom.

Jo is capable of doing what Ellen asks, but she has begun to see Ellen’s selfishness for what it really is. Ellen is prepared to sacrifice the lives and futures of her descendants to change the past, without regard for what that would mean for anyone else. Jo is different because she can see the bigger picture, and she does care about other people. She worries about her future, and that’s why she is afraid of the changes brought by her mother’s remarriage, but she has come to see that there are limits to what she’s prepared to do about that because of her concern for the welfare of other people. Jo realizes that she doesn’t want to be trapped at Winterbloom forever or to endanger her very existence and the existence of other people in her family to accomplish Ellen’s mission.

In many books about children coming to accept stepparents, the children come to suddenly love the stepparents at the end of the book, or at least find something about them to appreciate or an ability to see things as the adults around them do. That isn’t the case with this book. Maybe Jo will come to appreciate George once she becomes more accustomed to him and her new life, but for now, she has come to see that trying to control other people’s lives can be truly damaging, not just to them but also to other people around them and even to herself, and that it isn’t healthy to remain stuck in the past. Although accepting change can be difficult and can sometimes mean accepting bad outcomes along the way, Jo comes to see that she would rather keep moving forward in life and letting others move forward.

If something bad hadn’t happened in their family centuries before, maybe none of them would even exist now. Maybe accepting her mother’s marriage to George will one day mean accepting a younger half-sibling and having to share her mother with George and that sibling, but Jo recognizes that this half-sibling has the right to exist as much as she does. The half-sibling is only a potential idea at this point, not a firm reality, but the knowledge that there could potentially be one someday causes Jo to think about the effect that her decisions can have on people, including possible future generations. Letting her mother, George, and the potential half-sibling have their lives will mean having to make some changes to her own life, but Jo sees that it also allow her room to consider new possibilities for her own life in the future and to keep moving forward. The contrast between having the ability to move forward and being stuck in the past is enough to convince Jo to stop fighting her mother’s marriage and to focus on moving forward and seeing what life holds.

Children’s Literature References

This is one of those children’s books that also references other children’s books. Because generations of children have visited Winterbloom, Jo finds old children’s books on the shelves there, like The Five Children and It by E. Nesbit and a Nancy Drew book from the 1930s. When Jo reads The Five Children and It, she reads a part about how people can make themselves wake up at a particular time without an alarm clock by really focusing on the time they want to wake up before they go to bed. I haven’t read this book yet, but I have done that before, made myself wake up at a particular time because I had it in my mind that was when I wanted to get up. It does seem to work at least sometimes, although The Five Children and It says that it only works if you really, really want to wake up at that particular time. If you don’t really want to get up, it won’t work. When Jo reads the Nancy Drew book, she tells Granty that she’s surprised that Nancy Drew is that old, and Granty tells her how the Nancy Drew books are periodically rewritten to update them with the current time and habits, changing language and technology to be current. This is true, and I’ve talked about that on this site before. As this story notes, in the original books, people were driving roadsters and using typewriters, and in the updated versions, they have sports cars and computers.