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The Mystery of the Book Fair

Three Cousins Detective Club

#24 The Mystery of the Book Fair by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1999.

Sarah-Jane is excited about the book fair being held in the public library. She helped to collect donations of books for the sale, and she wants to be first in line so that she can buy a set of old Winnie-the-Pooh books that she’s had her eye on.

But from the moment that she claims the books, people keep coming up to her and trying to get her to let them have them or buy them from her. Another volunteer at the sale, who is also a book dealer, looks over the books and tells Sarah-Jane that they are rare first editions that are worth a lot of money.

Even though Sarah-Jane bought the books in good faith from the library, she and her cousins feel that they ought to try to find the original owner to make sure that he really meant to donate them. The trouble is that Sarah-Jane remembers that the donor of the books behaved rather strangely and seemed very nervous. When he gave them the books, he even called them by the wrong name, “Winkie-the-Pooh.” What kind of book collector wouldn’t know the value of his own collection or even the correct name of the books? Did the books even really belong to him at all? Then, more than one person shows up at the library, claiming to own the books. Who is the original owner?

The theme of the story is Proverbs 3:3, “Don’t ever stop being kind and truthful. Let kindness and truth show in all you do. Write them down in your mind as if on a tablet.”

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Sarah-Jane wanted the books not only because she likes Winnie-the-Pooh but because she likes old things, and she found the old copies of the books charming. Although she did not originally collect old books, these particular books inspire her to start an old book collection. Many people have discovered their love of collecting old books thanks to the popularity of recent aesethics, like Cottagecore and Dark Academia.

However, as the book dealer in the story explains, most old books are not the rare collectors’ items that these first edition copies are. The dealer explains that the value of an old book depends on many factors, like the condition of the book, its rarity, and the number of people who would be interested in acquiring it. I’ve encountered this myself in collecting old children’s books. Many of the books that I cover on this site would be worth very little to other collectors because they are not rare, first edition classics, but they’re worth something to me because there are elements of the stories that I find interesting. I don’t have the funds to buy most of the really rare books, although I’ve occasionally managed to buy books that would ordinarily be out of my price range at used book sales or as library discards or as damaged books. I think the most expensive books I have are ones that would be worth perhaps $100 or $200 if they were in pristine condition, which none of my books are. I’ve never encountered anything that would be worth thousands of dollar, like the Winnie-the-Pooh books in the story. The Winnie-the-Pooh books are worth that much because they are not only first editions but they are in near mint condition and they are extremely popular classic books.

One of the adults who tries to pressure Sarah-Jane into selling the books to her is a woman who tries to make Sarah-Jane feel bad for buying books that are for younger kids. The woman says that she wants to buy them for a young child, but the nice dealer recognizes her as a fellow book dealer and knows that she’s trying to cheat Sarah-Jane because she has recognized the books for what they are and knows their value. The woman wasn’t being honest in anything she said. She wasn’t really interested in the books just for their own sake, as a book lover or as a present for a real child, but only for their monetary value. That makes her different from Sarah-Jane, who fell in love with the books for their own sake. I’m not the only one who collects old books, even old children’s books, just because I appreciate them for what they are. It’s a feeling that doesn’t know any particular age. The real owner of the bookss turns out to be an elderly man who was born the year that the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published and who has had the books since they were new. He loves them not just because they’re collectors’ items but because of their sentimental value.

The books were stolen from the house of the book collector along with some other things. One of the thieves donated the books to the library because he thought they were worthless. His partner in crime knew that they were worth a lot of money and came to the sale to try to get them back. He runs away when the real owner of the books shows up looking for them. Sarah-Jane calls the police and tells them what happened. The books are returned to their rightful owner, and as a reward, he buys another rare book of fairy tales that was donated to the sale (on purpose, by the owner) and gives it to Sarah-Jane.

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The Mystery of the Blue Ring

Polka Dot Private Eye

The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.

When Dawn Bosco first joined Ms. Rooney’s class at Polk Street School, she stole Emily Arrow’s toy unicorn. Now, that incident has come back to haunt her. When the book begins, her theft of Emily’s unicorn was just weeks ago. Now, she and Emily are starting to be friends, although their friendship is a bit shaky.

At school, the teachers are talking about vegetables because it’s Good Vegetable Day. Everything is geared around vegetables all day, and the art teacher has the children make sculptures of vegetables out of clay. Dawn is bored because she’s been reading a mystery book, and she’d rather be finding mysteries and learning to be a detective than making silly vegetables out of clay.

Dawn gets irritated with Emily when she says that she’ll make a cucumber, which is what Dawn was going to make because it’s easy. The teacher won’t let Dawn make a cucumber because Emily already claimed that idea, so Dawn has to make a carrot instead. (Not that much different in shape, really, except one end is more narrow.) However, she still resents Emily for using the cucumber idea first.

As the girls push against each other by the sink, cleaning up from using the clay, Dawn spots a ring next to the sink. Later, Emily says that her ring is missing. It’s a special ring with a blue stone that she got for her birthday. Dawn is pleased that she’s found a mystery to solve. Remembering that she saw a ring next to the sink in the art room, Dawn proudly goes back to the art room to see if she can find the ring and return victorious. However, the ring isn’t there when she checks.

Then, suspicion turns to Dawn herself. After all, everyone knows that Dawn stole Emily’s unicorn before. Instead of being the hero detective, Dawn is turning into the main suspect in this crime. Now, she really needs to find the ring to clear her name!

Dawn’s grandmother, Noni, gave her a special detective kit for her birthday. Dawn uses it to turn into The Polka Dot Private Eye to hunt down Emily’s ring.

The book is available to borrow online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I liked the way the series returned to the subject of Dawn’s theft and used it to spark a spin-off mystery series. This is the first of the Polka Dot Private Eye books. In this series, Dawn becomes a more likeable character than she was when she first appeared in Fish Face, and she gets a little comeuppance for her earlier, unpunished theft of Emily’s toy unicorn in the form of her classmates’ suspicion of her. When I read this book for the first time when I was a kid, I hadn’t read the book where Dawn was first introduced, Fish Face, so I didn’t really understand the relationship between Dawn and Emily and how Dawn took Emily’s toy unicorn. We never really find out in either book exactly why Dawn took the unicorn, although in this book, she thinks of herself as having “borrowed” it instead of having stolen it.

Reading Fish Face isn’t necessary to understand the basic story in this book, but after having read it, I appreciate Dawn’s position in this book a little better. By now, everyone knows what Dawn did, and although Dawn thinks of “weeks ago” as a long time ago, it’s not really that long, and it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. Dawn is still a relatively new kid in class, and one of the few things everyone knows about her is that she has a history of taking things that don’t belong to her. It is a logical conclusion that Dawn might have helped herself to another of Emily’s belongings when everyone knows that she’s done it before. As my grandfather used to say, it’s easier to keep a good reputation than to redeem a bad one, but Dawn works at it and learns that she likes being a detective and that she has a talent for figuring things out. After Dawn figures out where Emily’s ring is, the two of them become better friends. Solving the mystery also makes Dawn a class hero and begins to establish Dawn’s reputation as a person who likes to solve mysteries and crimes rather than commit them.

This book gets bonus points from me for mentioning jelly sandals. Jelly shoes were a regular part of my childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s, and I’ve seen some of them return again in the early 2000s, probably partly because people my age now have children, and they’re nostalgic for some of the things from their childhoods. Jelly shoes (or “jellies,” as we called them) are sandals and sandal-like shoes made from flexible plastic in different colors, some clear or with sparkles inside. They were cheap when I was a kid, and I used to get a new pair or two when the weather turned warm. Eventually, they wear out, and the plastic bits snap. I’d wear them around my backyard with my toes sticking out the front as they started breaking, and I started growing out of them. By the time they were too broken to use anymore, my toes were usually beyond the bottom of the shoes, and I was always kind of proud of that because it was a sign that I’d grown over the summer. It wasn’t much of a loss when the shoes wore out because they’d be too small for me at that point anyway, so we’d throw them away, and I’d wear more solid shoes when the weather turned cold. Jellies, flip-flops, and cheap canvas shoes were a major part of what I wore when I was young and growing out of shoes fairly quickly. They were all inexpensive, and while they didn’t last very long, they lasted about as long as they needed to before I needed the next size and weren’t much to lose when I was rough on them.

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The Weird Science Mystery

The Bobbsey Twins

#20 The Weird Science Mystery by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1990.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!

The Bobbsey Twins are all getting ready for their school’s science fair. Bert’s project is about dog behavior with the family’s dog as his subject. His twin, Nan, is also studying animal behavior, but with a chicken named Zelda. Because the science fair is open to both middle school and elementary school kids, the younger twins, Freddie and Flossie, can also enter. Freddie is entering with a large baking soda volcano.

When the kids arrive to drop off their projects, Nan and Bert notice another boy from their class, Martin Crane. Martin is a science whiz, but he isn’t very nice. He’s not really a bully, like Danny Rugg, but he makes fun of the Bobbseys’ science projects. They don’t know what Martin’s project is because he’s bringing it in boxes labeled “Top Secret”, but he swears that it’s going to win first prize.

When Freddie sees the other students’ projects, he starts to doubt that he has any chance of winning a prize himself. There’s a boy who has an impressive star chart display, and Danny Rugg has a display of spiders. There’s a girl named Ellen with an exhibit showing how pearls are made, including real pearls! Ellen says that her uncle is in the jewelry business and loaned her the pearls. Ellen’s younger sister, Melissa, says that Ellen’s project is unfair, although she doesn’t say why she thinks so. Melissa says that she didn’t do a project herself because she thinks the science fair is dumb.

Mr. Newman, Nan and Bert’s science teacher from an earlier book in the series, is one of the judges of the science fair. He’s going around the fair, taking pictures of the projects, but Martin refuses to unpack his project, saying that he will reveal it tomorrow. Then, Melissa screams that Danny’s poisonous spiders have escaped, and people start panicking and running! Mr. Newman says that Danny’s spiders are definitely not the poisonous kind, and he makes Danny apologize for telling people they were. The Bobbseys wonder if Danny could have let the spiders loose on purpose as one of his pranks. Then, suddenly, Ellen screams that her pearls are gone!

While the teachers are looking for the pearls and trying to encourage the thief to come forward, other accidents happen to other science fair projects. Freddie’s volcano suddenly erupts even though he didn’t set it up to do that yet. Someone cuts the leash on their dog, so he gets loose, and release’s Nan’s chicken from her cage. Ellen said that the pearls in her collection were valuable, so the teachers call the police. But, were the pearls stolen because they were valuable or because someone wants to sabotage the science fair? Was the theft of the pearls related to the sabotage of the other projects, or are these two separate acts? Also, what does Martin have in those boxes labeled “Top Secret”?

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

My Reaction

Sean and I were talking earlier about how later books in the New Bobbsey Twins series focused more on the younger set of twins, Freddie and Flossie, and seemed to involve lower stakes in the mysteries. I reviewed this book shortly after The Clue in the Classroom, so I could compare two science-based mysteries that took place at the kids’ school, one earlier in the series and one later.

The other science-based mystery in the series involved an invention and industrial espionage, while this one involves the school science fair. However, I thought the mystery was well-done. When the Bobbseys arrive at the science fair, the story establishes multiples suspects. Danny Rugg is a repeat suspect because he’s the school bully and general nemesis, and he could have set his spiders loose as a distraction while he took the pearls and set up other things to go wrong. Then again, Melissa seemed upset about her sister’s project, so she might have had a reason to sabotage it. Martin is being mysterious about his science fair project, but what if he doesn’t actually have one in those boxes of his? Maybe he couldn’t think of anything or ran out of time to do his project, so he’s sabotaging everyone else’s project to provide a reason for why his project will suddenly disappear or turn out not to work. I even had a theory that each of those people might have done something since multiple disasters happened at the same time or almost at the same time. From the beginning, there are multiple possibilities that seem about equally likely, which is good for making readers wonder, and the kids are active investigators in the story, investigating suspects individually, not just waiting for chance to give them the answers. Those are the ingredients for a good mystery.

Although the story takes place at a kids’ science fair, there are a couple of factors involved that add some excitement and higher stakes to the story. The value of the pearls has the adults worried about getting them back. (Personally, I wondered about just how valuable the pearls were. Since they didn’t seem to have any form of security to protect them, like a locked display case, and since Danny Rugg lied to everyone about his spiders being poisonous, it occurred to me that Ellen might have lied to everyone about the value of the pearls to make her project seem more exciting, although that is never clarified during the story.) I also appreciated the thief’s motive for stealing the pearls because it wasn’t just about the pearls’ value. It was one of the ideas that I can for a possible motive, but I’ll leave it a secret about which of my theories was right.

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The Clue in the Classroom

The Bobbsey Twins

#9 The Clue in the Classroom by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1988.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!

Nan and Bert are walking to school when Bert starts trying to follow Nan, practicing shadowing someone, like his favorite comic book detective, Rex Sleuther. Nan thinks that Bert’s attempts at following her are ridiculous, especially since she already knows he’s there. Then, she spots a tall man who is really being shadowed.

The tall man keeps looking over his shoulder and ducking into doorways, like someone is after them. It doesn’t take the kids long to realize who is following him because a man in a trenchcoat, who is walking behind the tall man, keeps pausing and pretending to tie his shoe or look in store windows every time the tall man glances back. It’s not very subtle. When the man in the trenchcoat sees Nan and Bert watching him, he gives them a menacing look and seems like he’s about to confront them, but then, he leaves. They lose sight of the tall man. It’s a bizarre experience, and it ends when the kids’ mother drives up with their younger siblings and gives them a ride.

At school, Nan meets her new science teacher, and she realizes that he is the tall man who was being followed by the man in the trenchcoat. He introduces himself as Mr. Newman (ha, ha), and he seems much more relaxed than he was before. That is, until they all see the message written on the blackboard in the classroom: “Newman, give up your plans. We’re watching you.” Mr. Newman exclaims, “Oh, no! They’ve found out! They know!” (I seriously wish that at least one of my old teachers had started their first day in class by saying that exact thing.) Mr. Newman doesn’t explain what it’s about. He just quickly erases the message on the board and begins talking about the science project he’s assigning.

When Nan tells her siblings about Mr. Newman and what happened in class, Freddie says that Mr. Newman will also be teaching the afternoon science club that he joined. Mr. Newman will be teaching them about robots, and they’re going to have a meeting at his house, where Mr. Newman will show the club his inventions. Bert says that Freddie can help them figure out what Mr. Newman is doing and what and who he’s afraid of after he’s seen the projects that Mr. Newman is working on.

Bert decides to take a walk past Mr. Newman’s house to get a look at it before Freddie goes there. While he’s doing his reconnaissance, Bert sees what looks like people fighting in one of the windows. When he knocks on the door to see if Mr. Newman is all right, Mr. Newman says that he is and insists that there’s no one else there. Then, a strange woman shows up and starts asking Bert questions about Mr. Newman. She says that she’s his former boss at a computer company and wants to know if Bert saw anything in his house. She seems very interested in what he might be working on, but Bert just says that Mr. Newman was too busy for visitors.

Is this woman really Mr. Newman’s former boss, and does she have anything to do with the mysterious man in the trenchcoat? Someone breaks into the school and trashes Mr. Newman’s classroom. What is this secret invention of Mr. Newman’s that everyone seems so interested in, and why would someone threaten him over it or try to put a stop to his work?

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

My Reaction

The kids’ first thoughts about the mysterious people who are after Mr. Newman is that they might be spies, and they’re partly right. This is a matter of industrial espionage. People are after Mr. Newman’s invention because they can make a lot of money from it.

The robot Mr. Newman is building is really impressive, even by modern 21st century standards. Back in the 1980s, when this was written, a robot that large and sophisticated would have seemed almost like science fiction, although increasing developments in robotics technology would have made it seem more possible. Companies were working on developing robots during the 1980s, and Honda was working on a humanoid robot that could walk on two feet. Kids had toy robots. (I wanted one but never got one.) I don’t remember any classes for building robots for kids, but there may have been some that I didn’t know about at the time because I was still pretty young in the 1980s. In the 21st century, there are modern robotics classes for kids, and they sometimes show off their robots at competitions.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery by Moonlight

Mystery by Moonlight by Mary C. Jane, 1963.

One moonlit evening, as Gail Foster walks home from the movies with her brothers, a pair of twins named Ted and Tim, and their friend, they pass the old house called Morgan’s Green. The old house was ruined by fire years before. The house hasn’t been repaired since the fire, but the owner, Miss Morgan, pays someone to maintain the grounds and to keep trespassers away. The old ruin bothers people in the neighborhood because Miss Morgan seems to have no intention of ever repairing it so anybody can live there again. For some reason, she seems to want it to just stand there, a ruined and empty eyesore.

As the children pass the house, Gail suddenly hears a knocking or rapping sound. She stops the boys and gets them to listen, but by the time they do, the sound has stopped. The children debate about what the sound could have been. One of her brothers worries that maybe someone has wandered into the old house and gotten hurt, but the other one thinks that maybe Gail just imagined the sound because she likes to write stories and recently wrote a scary one about a ghost. The brothers’ friend, a boy named Conan, has a job helping the groundskeeper at Morgan’s Green, and he says that he’ll check everything over when he goes to work there the next morning.

Gail feels uneasy about the idea of some unknown person being at the old house because the truth is that she has been secretly trespassing on the grounds herself. She went there one day when she was chasing her brothers’ dog, and she found an old, disused tool shed with a workbench inside. This forgotten shed struck her as a good place to go and write in secret. Her brothers have been teasing her about the stories she writes, so she could use a little privacy. Actually, she could use any privacy. Her brothers routinely sneak into her room, read her stories and her private diary, and even deface the diary and tell their friends what she wrote. Their father always tells Gail that the boys’ teasing and bullying is her fault because she makes it too easy and fun for them by showing her emotions, and her parents refuse for punish the boys for any of it or allow Gail to have a lock on her bedroom door to keep them out. It’s no wonder Gail feels the need to escape. Now, Gail worries that maybe someone (or some thing?) knows about her trespassing and that the knocking sound was some kind of warning for her to stop.

The next day, she reconsiders that idea, remembering that she has heard about thefts in the area lately. Maybe what she heard was actually thieves! Miss Morgan still has some furniture stored in part of the old house that might tempt a thief. Conan’s father is the local sheriff, and he hasn’t had leads on the robberies yet.

The next time that Gail goes to write in the old shed, Conan comes to talk to her. At first, she is worried that her secret hiding place has been discovered, but Conan tells her that he’s known about it for a while because he’s seen her going there before. Gail tells him how badly she needs a place with some privacy. He hasn’t told Gail’s brothers about it, and he says that he doesn’t care if Gail wants to continue using the shed.

Conan is also the only one who’s really taken the rapping that Gail heard seriously. Conan tells Gail that he’s looked around Morgan’s Green, but he hasn’t found any sign of whatever made the noise. However, he has some worse news. The groundskeeper at Morgan’s Green, Mr. Hopkins, has fired Conan, and he won’t even give Conan a reason. They’ve always gotten along well enough before, and Mr. Hopkins has never had any complaint about Conan’s work. Conan feels badly about getting fired, but all he can think of that’s changed lately is the rapping sound and the way he looked over the old house to see if he could find a source. It makes Conan wonder if Mr. Hopkins knows something about what caused the noise and wanted to keep him from finding out about it.

Gail wonders if Miss Morgan could be involved with the local thieves and told Mr. Hopkins to get rid of Conan to keep him from finding their secret hideout or something. The kids pause to consider what they really know about Miss Morgan. She does seem to have odd feelings about the old, burned house. It used to belong to her aunt and uncle, who didn’t used to socialize with the people in town much. After they died, Miss Morgan only lived in the house for a few years before it burned. Now, she doesn’t seem to want to either fix it up or sell it, and no one knows why or what she plans to do with it. However, the kids conclude that she has too much money of her own to get involved with thieves. Still, Conan wants to investigate the situation more because he’s sure something strange is going on at Morgan’s Green, and he wants to find out what it is and if it has something to do with him getting fired.

Gail volunteers to help him investigate, and Conan says that he wants to investigate with just her and not the twins. The twins don’t take things seriously and would be less likely to keep quiet about the whole operation. Conan and Gail do involve Gail’s friend, Lianne, because visiting her gives Gail a reason to walk past Morgan’s Green, both on her way to Lianne’s house and on her way back.

The kids see a strange young man hanging around Morgan’s Green with a sketch pad, and Gail learns that his name is Steve Craig. He’s an art student who makes custom Christmas cards to fund his education at design school. Even Gail’s parents have hired him to make a set of Christmas cards for them with a drawing of their own house on them. When Steve comes to talk to Gail’s parents about the sketches he’s made of their house, Gail mentions that she saw him at Morgan’s Green earlier and asks him why he was there. He says that he was fascinated by the house, but he doesn’t think it will do for his paintings. Gail asks Steve if he has a studio, and he says yes, that he has a room in the attic at his house where he had do his work and that it’s important to have a private place to work. Tim and Ted take this opportunity to jump in and publicly tease their sister about her writing again, the reason why she wants and needs some privacy (from them, specifically). Fortunately, Steve isn’t having any of that, and he makes it clear. The dinner guest speaks to the boys more severely than their father ever did, telling them the plain truth, for once, “You two boys don’t sound very understanding. I can see why your sister would need a place of her own for her writing. But then, you’re rather young. Gail will have to be patient with you.” (Oh, thank God! I hope those useless, idiot parents listened, too. I hated them by this point in the story.) The twins are stunned and embarrassed by this response because no one has ever said anything like this to them in their entire lives. (They would have if the parents weren’t useless twits with obvious favorites among their children. I enjoyed seeing someone tell the twins what they’re really like.) The parents say absolutely nothing. (Again, useless.)

Later that evening, Conan walks Gail home from Lianne’s house, and as they pass Morgan’s Green, they hear voices. They can’t catch everything the voices say, but they do hear one talking about “a few more days.” Who was it, and what’s happening for “a few more days”? When Gail tells Lianne what they heard, Lianne is afraid that maybe the place is haunted.

From Lianne’s parents, they learn that Mr. Hopkins has been moving furniture at the old house. Lianne’s parents think that Miss Morgan might have decided to sell the place after all. However, when Conan mentions that to his father, he talks to Miss Morgan, and Miss Morgan says that she didn’t know Mr. Hopkins was moving anything around at Morgan’s Green. She also doesn’t know anything about Conan being fired.

Mr. Hopkins looks kind of sinister when they hear this, but there are still other suspects and an interesting twist that reveals a secret that Miss Morgan herself has been trying to keep for years. There is a reason why she hasn’t wanted to sell Morgan’s Green, and the revelation of one mystery also reveals the other.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). This book is also still in print and available on Kindle through Amazon.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The Mysteries

I liked the layers of mystery in the story and range of possible suspects. First, there is the mystery of why Miss Morgan doesn’t want to fix up and sell the house, why she’s left it empty and ruined for years. There is a reason that is revealed toward the end of the book. I liked the reason, which opens up some intriguing elements in the story and a device that the kids themselves use, although I felt like there could have been a little more priming for the reason if people had talked a little more about the aunt and uncle’s history. They were involved in something that Miss Morgan didn’t want to reveal, but surely at least some people in the area should have known about their interests in spiritualism and seances. A good book along some similar lines is The Talking Table Mystery.

Then, there is the question of who, aside from Gail, has been sneaking around Morgan’s Green and why. There are some thieves active in the area, which provide logical suspects, and there are some valuable pieces of art in the possession of the Morgan family that could make targets for thieves. However, Mr. Hopkins has also been acting strangely, and Steve Craig, as an art student, would have a special interest in art. Even though Mr. Hopkins and Steve are usually nice, they behave suspiciously enough to give readers more suspects to consider, and each of them turns out to know more about the Morgan family than they initially let on. Overall, I really liked the setting and mysteries in the story.

Gail’s Family and Teasing

I have very strong feelings on the subject of teasing, and I was appalled at the way Gail’s parents allowed her brothers to treat her and her personal belongings. It wasn’t just that the boys were ribbing her a little about liking to write stories. They kept going into her room and not only reading her stories and making fun of what she says in them, but they also read her diary, actively deface her diary, and tell all of their friends about things in her private diary to invite public teasing. This is a serious privacy violation, and when she asks if she can have a lock on her door to keep them out, not only do the parents not punish the boys for any of this, her father says, “They only do it because you get so excited about it. You’re just too teasable, Gail.”

Oh, I see. It’s all Gail’s fault for having emotions and caring about her privacy and the fact that her parents are refusing either to help her or punish the boys for what they’ve done. Her parents always promise her that they’ll punish the boys “next time”, but each time “next time” arrives, they don’t! They’ve repeatedly broken promises, refused to actively parent their children, and enabled the twins’ bad behavior and abuse of their sister. They’re also gaslighting Gail, trying to make her think she is in the wrong for being a human. The father’s basically saying that it’s right for people to victimize others in any way they want as long as it’s easy and fun to do, and that the way bullies act is 100% the fault of the victim and 0% the responsibility of the bullies themselves. That’s the level of personal responsibility he teaches his sons. It’s the level of parental responsibility he shows for teaching his sons how to act and treat other people.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think that the father would probably be the first to holler if someone just walked into his room and started going through his drawers and finding those embarrassing things that adults often have hidden away from kids, and I can just imagine his response if that person told him they did it because he made it “too easy”, so it was all his own fault. I don’t know what things he might have hidden away specifically, although as an adult, I think I could make some decent guesses. (Just for starters, a search of the parents’ room would probably reveal what kind of birth control they use, if any, and whether or not they have any private reading material that would be unfit for kids and not safe for work. Should we also count the number of pairs of underwear the father has that have stains or holes?) I just know that everyone has something that they wouldn’t want the general public to see, whether it’s a private diary or clothes that we just can’t get rid of even if they might be embarrassing to wear or something that indicates much more personal habits that might change the way other people might see us if they were made public. The parents are either unable or unwilling to see how they would feel in Gail’s place and take an active role in teaching their sons how to act, imposing consequences for bad behavior.

Gail’s parents say that they worry that she spends too much time alone writing as it is to let her have privacy or a lock on her door, but privacy is also about trust. The fact is that Gail can’t really trust either her brothers or her parents, not with her private belonging and not even with her personal feelings. They repeatedly and deliberately disrespect and violate both and try to gaslight her like it’s her fault, and that’s deeply damaging to personal relationships. They say that they’re worried about her, but how can they be if they’re not in tune with her feelings and continually allow and support the boys in making her feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, disrespected, violated, and abused? The fact that they can’t figure that out or maybe do know it and just don’t care just makes me angry with them.

I don’t think the twins are bad for doing this kind of thing to their sister once, but I do think that they’re bad for doing it repeatedly, knowing that it causes her distress, because they enjoy her distress. Kids do act up and tease siblings, but it’s the parents’ job to lay down the house rules and enforce them and teach the children standards of behavior that they will carry out into the rest of the world with them. These parents are very deliberately not doing that and dodging every opportunity to do it, giving the twins the impression that what they’re doing it fine and fun and there’s no reason to ever stop. This father makes me sick because I can tell that he’s not stopping the boys from teasing their sister and violating her privacy because he identifies with them and is secretly enjoying his daughter’s distress himself.

Pain-in-the-butt people raise pain-in-the-butt kids, and if those boys don’t somehow get some personal awareness or get someone else to make them shape up, they’d be hashtag material in their later years and deeply offended that anyone sees a problem with their behavior because they’ve never had anybody give them consequences for their behavior in their entire spoiled lives. At every single misbehavior, they’ve experienced only excuses, justifications, and free passes from their parents. I’ve always hated this kind of attitude from people and every single person who does this because it does not get better with age alone. Without something to make them realize that there are reasons to restrain themselves, it just escalates until someone finally hits them with a consequence, and then, they’re stunned because it’s never happened to them before, just like the twins are stunned when Steve points out at dinner that they’re behaving badly and that they should think of their sister’s feelings. You can tell that nobody, certainly not the parents, has ever mentioned it to them before, ever. Just imagine them at age 50, explaining to a police officer, a set of angry parents, and a distraught teenager, that the 14-year-old girl they up-skirted made it “too easy”, they were “just having fun”, it was all her fault for being pretty and wearing the wrong clothes, and phones wouldn’t be equipped with cameras if there were any restrictions on how they could use them, no clue why everyone’s mad at them, because that’s the level of morality and personal responsibility, they were raised with. It’s good for people to get feedback on their behavior when they’re young and learning how to be around other human beings. If they don’t get any rules for behavioral standards or an emphasis on considering other people’s feelings during their formative years, they won’t have any basis for understanding behavioral standards, consequences, or human empathy later in life. The older they are when someone finally gives them a consequence for inappropriate behavior of any type, the angrier they typically get because they think they know what they’re entitled to as adults, and they just want the free passes and apparent tacit approval they always get.

The key is confrontation, facing behavior and the consequences of misbehavior directly and honestly. Maybe Gail’s parents are afraid to punish the boys because they think that punishing them would be a reaction to them and the volatile boys will just act up more, but that’s not really the case. The boys take their nonreaction as approval for what they’re doing and, in the father’s case, I think that might really be it. He strikes me as one of those awful people who thinks that nothing should matter when the boys are having fun, and it’s everyone else’s responsibility to deal with the situation because the people having fun shouldn’t be bothered. The mother at least says once that they shouldn’t be messing with Gail’s things, even though she does absolutely nothing at all about it, but I noticed that the father never says that even once and didn’t say anything to agree with his wife that the boys were doing something they shouldn’t.

The twins are shocked and embarrassed whenever anybody says something negative about the way they’ve behaved or even just calls it into question. They don’t know what to do when that happens because, apparently, nobody has ever said anything negative to them about their behavior or questioned them about it … certainly not their own parents. Even when Lianne is careful not to react much to one of the boys repeatedly taking her hat and throwing it in the gutter and in the street, the boy keeps on doing it three times in a row. The nonreaction doesn’t stop him. What finally stops him is Lianne asking him calmly what he’s trying to do. The boy is again shocked and embarrassed. It’s like he’s never had to think about his own actions before in his life. He probably hasn’t because his parents have never taught the twins that they should think about their actions, the consequences, and other people’s feelings before. It’s not just when people don’t react to them (like “Don’t feed the trolls”), it’s when someone actually says something to them that makes them take a hard look at what they’re doing that makes them realize that they’re just being mean and stupid and how that looks to everyone who sees them, and then, they get embarrassed. These are things that they need to hear from somebody, and they’re sure as heck not going to hear them from the people who are supposed to be raising them and teaching them how to function in life. The twins’ parents never say anything about how they should behave, never make them stop and think, and never talk to the twins about thinking of other people or thinking before they act. They let near strangers and other kids do that important piece of parenting for them, and at no point do they present any follow-up to these comments from other people to support the idea.

I found the twins and their parents to be the most stressful parts of the book. It’s partly by design because they represent obstacles for Gail to overcome and reasons for Gail to look for privacy and support outside of the family home. Her need to get away from them helps to move the action forward, but I still found them stressful because of how awful mean people and irresponsible parents are in real life. Like I said, they’re the kind of people who end up getting called out in hashtagged social media messages later and getting angry about it, like people haven’t been trying to deal with them for years, even decades, leading up to it.

The twins never become really great people by the end of the book, either. People are giving them direct messages and hints about their behavior, and there are brief moments when they show some effort to understand why peoples’ reactions to their bad behavior are embarrassing to them, but they never fully get the message, probably because the parents are still enabling them. They’re still kind of mean little twits at the end of the book. They also almost poison their dog by feeding her 21 pieces of chocolate, and they don’t seem very concerned about that, either. Apparently, that’s another thing that their parents never talked to them about. Gail is the one who is concerned about the dog and looks after it, not the boys or the parents. I get the feeling that even the twins’ friends are getting fed up with their babyish meanness, partly because Conan starts preferring to hang out with their more serious sister instead.

Fortunately, at least some of the other adults in the story are starting to get the idea that maybe Gail needs a little privacy, even though the parents aren’t caring enough and are deliberately ignoring Gail’s direct requests and other adults’ comments. Gail’s grandparents give her a diary with a lock on it, so they seem to know how much she likes to write and how much she needs a little privacy and protection from her brothers. She also finds a way to get a desk with a lock, so she can at least lock her work in her desk so the twins can’t get in the desk, even though they can still get in her room.

Posted on by TracyC

Danger After Dark

Danger After Dark Creative Girls Club cover

Danger After Dark by Ellie McDonald, 2005.

A group of friends in Summary, Indiana has had a club together for years, and they’ve always thought that their club would last forever. They call themselves the Silly Stuff Club because they collect all kinds of weird and silly things that they find at sales. However, when one of the girls, Sarah, finds out that her family is planning to move to another state, it looks like their club might come to an end. The club meets in the old carriage house on Sarah’s family’s property. If their family moves, where will the club go, and where will they store their collection of silly stuff? The other girls in the club aren’t just losing a friend but also losing their club’s home and maybe even the club itself.

Then, Lily gets an idea. Down the road, there is an old mansion that’s been abandoned for years. The Winston estate is the property of Melva Winston, who is something of a legend in their town. According to the story, the Winston heiress rode out of town on her motorcycle about 50 years earlier, and she hasn’t been seen since. Lily reasons that the Winston estate is huge and has outbuildings, and somewhere on the estate property, there is probably a place that they can claim for the club. Since nobody lives there or goes there anymore, who is to know or care if they move in?

Some of the other girls in the club don’t like that idea because they’ve been warned to stay away from the old Winston estate. An empty old house can be dangerous, and they might get in trouble for trespassing. Still, nobody has any better ideas, so they decide to sneak onto the property and have a look around.

When they do, they discover that the house isn’t quite as empty as they thought. After all these years, Melva Winston has returned to town. She now calls herself Annie, after one of her middle names, Anastasia. The girls’ sudden arrival startles her, but when she overhears them talking about needing space for their club, she becomes sympathetic. She also realizes that she could use their help. There’s plenty of space in her big house, and she agrees to give them some space in the attic for their club, and in exchange, she asks them to look after her cat while she goes out of town for a few days. She’s hired a local woman, Ms. O’Leary, to do some cleaning for her, but the woman is allergic to cats. The girls are eager to accept because the old mansion would be a fantastic place to have their club, and it would solve their problems … except missing Sarah when her family moves.

Then, one night, a couple of the girls see someone sneaking around the old mansion when no one is supposed to be there. Ms. O’Leary tells them that there were rumors that one of Annie’s ancestors, who made the family fortune in veterinary pharmaceuticals, became an eccentric toward the end of his life, and rumor has it that he hid a great deal of money somewhere on the property. Are the rumors true, and is someone looking for the hidden money?

My Reaction

This book is something of a mystery to me, even after reading it. It is clearly intended to be park of a series because it’s marked as being part of the Creative Girls Club Mystery Book Series, but when I looked up this series, there was only one other book in it. From the descriptions I’ve seen online, it might not even really be that there are two books in the series so much as one book with two different titles because the plots given for the two books sound alike. I’ve only ever seen one of the books, so I can’t be sure.

The book is clearly set up to introduce the set of six girls in the club and establish a basis for the rest of the series. Each of the girls in the club has her own section at the beginning of the book, providing her backstory. So, what happened?

The series had a web page that was given on the inside cover, so I looked it up. It still exists, after a fashion, but the Creative Girls Club is now a subscription box service with craft kits for girls ages 7 to 12. I think what probably happened is that the book series was meant to be a vehicle for marketing the craft kits, but they changed their minds and decided to just move forward with the craft kits in a subscription service without the associated books and characters. There are no actual crafts included in this book for readers to do, although that might have been planned for later books.

The craft kits are by Annie’s Attic, and Annie’s Attic published this book. The book incorporates Annie’s Attic by having the girls move their club to the attic of Annie’s mansion. Ha, ha. At the end of the book, Annie decides to open a craft store and studio in the old mansion, and the girls decide to reinvent their club as a crafting club in Annie’s attic, calling it the Creative Girls Club, and thus setting up the premise for the subscription box service.

Overall, I thought that it was a pretty nice mystery for kids. It kind of worked its way around to Annie’s Attic and the Creative Girls Club in a somewhat contrived way, but still, there are plenty of things in the stories for kids to like, from the club in the attic of an old mansion to a secret room and hidden treasure.

Posted on by TracyC · 8 Comments

The Dinosaur Mystery

Boxcar Children

The Dinosaur Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1995.

The Alden children and their cousin Soo Lee are visiting the Pickering Natural History Museum to help Mr. and Mrs Diggs, who are on the museum’s board of directors, to set up a new dinosaur exhibit. They will be staying in the Diggs’s apartment, which is connected to the museum by a tunnel. The children love the rooms where they will be staying because they’re decorated with spare exhibits from the museum!

However, very quickly, they notice that strange things are happening at the museum. The alarms seem to go off sometimes for no reason. The night watchman, Pete, is new at the museum and acts oddly. He seems to like having fun with the exhibits more than paying attention to security. On their first night there, Jessie sees a light in the museum windows, in the dinosaur room, where nobody is supposed to be, and she thinks that she sees the shadow of the dinosaur skeleton moving.

The next day, the Aldens meet the other staff at the museum. Dr. Eve Skyler operates the planetarium, and she’s very protective of it. She’s been upset because renovations at the museum have messed up the planetarium. When the Diggs tell her that the Alden children are there to help clean up, Dr. Skyler is dubious and worries that the children will damage the equipment, but the Diggs tell them that the children have worked in museums before.

After the children clear the planetarium and take a lunch break, they catch Dr. Sklyer moving some things that they had thrown out back into the planetarium! When they confront her about what she’s doing, she denies everything, and it ends up taking the children almost twice as long to finish the task. The children don’t know what Dr. Skyler’s problem is and why she would want to sabotage their cleaning of the planetarium when she had badly wanted it cleaned.

When Dr. Titus Pettibone, who is the fossil expert in charge of the dinosaur room, returns from a trip, he discovers that bones are missing from the tyrannosaurus skeleton! Benny and Soo Lee are sure that Dr. Pettibone was the man they saw sneaking around the museum the night before. Dr. Pettibone avoids their questions about sneaking around the museum and is every bit as opposed to the children working on the new dinosaur exhibit as Dr. Skyler is about the children helping to clean the planetarium.

Then, someone removes all the posters that the children put up about the new dinosaur exhibit. Mrs. Diggs knows that someone removed them on purpose because, when she asks people at the places where the children put them up, they say that a woman took them, saying that she wanted them as souvenirs. In spite of that, everyone in town knows about the new exhibit because word about the missing dinosaur bones has spread. Is someone trying to drive people away from the new exhibit, or are things that have been happening part of a publicity stunt? The children known that someone is sneaking around the museum, especially at night, and both Dr. Skyler and Dr. Pettibone seem to have something to hide.

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

My Reaction

One of the first things that I noticed about the book is that many of the characters have pun names – Mr. and Mrs. Diggs, who operate the natural history museum; Dr. Sklyer, who is in charge of the planetarium; and Pettibone, who is the fossil expert.

The book does a good job of making everyone look equally guilty. From the beginning, I suspected that was because there are multiple people doing multiple things for different reasons, and it helps to make the mystery more complicated and involved, keeping readers guessing.

This is another instance of the Alden children having the opportunity to do something unusual and build work experience because of their grandfather’s connections. Their grandfather knows Mr. and Mrs. Diggs and arranges for the children to stay with them, and their previous experiences with museums, like in one of the later books, The Mystery of the Mummy’s Curse, were also due to Mr. Alden’s connections. Although the children’s grandfather allows the children to have independent adventures without him, he is usually the one who sets them up in the stories. Most real children never get opportunities like this and may not be allowed to do some of the things the Alden children do because of rules regarding volunteers, especially juvenile volunteers, due to insurance liabilities. I would have loved to work in a museum when I was a kid, but my family never had the connections that the Aldens do.

I can understand why children aren’t allowed to do certain jobs. Dr. Pettibone is correct that there are certain tasks that require specialized knowledge and delicacy. After he warms up to the kids more, he begins showing the children some of the details of his work and what his equipment does. He lets Violet do some of the delicate work after he shows her what to do because she does artwork and plays the violin, so she is accustomed to fine, detailed work. In real life, though, I don’t think that a 10-year-old child would be allowed to do this kind of work as quickly or as well as Violet does in the story. The Aldens have to learn to do things quickly in the interest of time in their stories, and they rarely make the kinds of mistakes that beginners do at anything they try.

I have done volunteer work in museums as an adult, and one thing that they don’t tell you in this book is that, when you see an assembled dinosaur skeleton in a museum, it’s probably all or partly a plaster model of the bones rather than the real bones. That’s because fossilized bones are no longer actual bone. They are petrified, so they are as heavy as other stones. When you have stones the size of large dinosaur bones, it’s extremely difficult to mount them so that they stand up, like the dinosaur would in real life. Sometimes, plaster models also fill in for bones that are missing from an incomplete skeleton. Complete skeletons are very, very rare. There were only two places where there were real dinosaur bones on exhibit in the last museum where I volunteered. One was a dinosaur thigh bone that visitors were allowed to touch to learn what fossilized bone feels like. The other was a collection of pterosaur wing bones mounted on a wall, where no one could touch them, and it wasn’t a complete wing. Some museums have exhibits marked so you know which bones are models and which are real fossils.

I also liked the art style in this book. Boxcar Children books vary in art style because they were produced over multiple decades, but my favorite illustrations are the ones that look the most realistic. I think realistic illustration styles are best for this book in particular because they show the details of the dinosaur skeleton realistically.

Posted on by TracyC

The Summer Camp Mystery

The Boxcar Children

The Summer Camp Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 2001.

Grandfather Alden is taking the Boxcar Children to Maine to go to summer camp. Henry and Jessie are going to be junior counselors. Violet will be an overnight camper, and because he’s younger, Benny will be a day camper, staying with Grandfather Alden at a nearby inn overnight. The camp is located on an island and can only be reached by boat. It used to be owned by the Pines family, but the family lost of a lot of money trying to keep the camp going and had to sell the camp to Ginny and Rich, who run things differently. The camp activities used to be mostly sports, but Rich and Ginny have added other activities and special awards for other things because not all the campers are good at sport. They want more variety, and they want to give every camper to have a chance to participate in activities that they really enjoy.

However, things go wrong from the beginning. Kim, one of the other counselors, is mean. She stops the Aldens from loading their own trunks on the boat to go to the island, saying that she’ll take care of it, but she doesn’t. She leaves their trunks behind on the dock and makes a big deal about the Aldens being incompetent and not even taking care of their own belongings. The Aldens are embarrassed, and they don’t even call attention to the fact that Kim stopped them from handling their own trunks.

The missing trunks create more problems because the camp has a running competition between different teams of campers. When the Pines family owned the camp, the competition was entirely based on sports, but the new owners offer points to teams for different projects and events, even incorporating being neat and responsible into the contest, so the Aldens have lost points for their teams by leaving their trunks behind.

Because the teams are randomly assigned, three of the Aldens are on one team, and Violet is by herself on Kim’s team. Kim makes no secret of the fact that she doesn’t like Violet, and because there is a rule that different teams can’t talk to each other about what they’re doing for different parts of the contest, Violet feels even more isolated from her siblings. Also, the Pines children, Zack and Lizzie, who still attend the camp, aren’t happy with their team. Lizzie really wanted to be on Kim’s team because she looks up to Kim. She was on Kim’s team the previous year, when the camp was all sports stuff, and they won every event. Violet thinks that the best solution is for her and Lizzie to switch teams, so Lizzie can be with Kim, and she can be with her siblings, but Ginny says that switching teams is against the rules.

Meanwhile, Zack is resentful of Henry because Henry has been given his usual job of flag raising at the camp. Ginny and Rich say that they’ve reduced the number of things that Zack does at the camp because they want him to experience and enjoy the activities at the camp instead of working and doing all the little jobs he used to do when his family owned the camp. Also, Henry can play the bugle, providing a live bugle performance instead of just using the old bugle recording the camp has been using.

However, besides the incident with the Aldens’ trunks being left behind, someone steals the camp’s flags before the flag raising. Henry looks incompetent when he can’t find them, although Jessie’s cabin comes to the rescue by quickly drawing some new ones as emergency replacements. Then, the missing flags later appear on Henry’s bed, and he has no idea how they got there. The Aldens lose points for this incidents, and Kim’s team also steals Jessie’s cabin’s idea for a good deed event, even submitting it to Rich and Ginny before Jessie does. Jessie isn’t sure how she knew what her cabin was planning, but Kim even gave her event idea the same name. It can’t be a coincidence.

The Aldens are having a frustrating time at camp, and they have to figure out exactly what’s going on and prove that they’re not the ones messing things up.

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

My Reaction

Not Much of A Mystery

This mystery story isn’t really a “whodunit” kind of mystery so much as “howdunit” and “how are our heroes going to prove it?” The culprits were really obvious from the very beginning and every step of the way. There are no other suspects. It’s definitely Kim, Lizzie, and Zack, and the rest of the story is how the Aldens prove what they’re doing. There is a slight element of “whydunit” because the Aldens don’t really understand why the three of them are doing all these things, although I thought at least part of that was obvious, too.

I understand that Kim, Lizzie, and Zack weren’t happy about how the camp changed after the Pines family had to sell it, but that’s no excuse for treating other people the way they do. To me, at least at first, it looked like they weren’t so much sad about change as angry that they weren’t the favored, “special” campers anymore. Lizzie and Zack were no longer special for being the owner’s kids and getting to perform special duties the other campers couldn’t do, and Kim was no longer special for winning everything all the time because she’s good at sports. The new owners of the camp got Henry and Jessie to be junior counselors and help with some of the chores around the camp, like the flag raising, because they thought that Lizzie and Zack could use more time to enjoy the fun activities, but instead of having fun, they’re just angry that they lost another status symbol. I didn’t like or feel sorry for Kim, Lizzie, and Zack at all. To me, they were just mean, selfish, and entitled. Because I hate one-upmanship so much, it just made me angry.

There were a couple of points that softened my feelings a bit, but not by a lot. I felt a little less angry when Zack talked about how the flag-raising ceremony had special, sentimental value to him because members of his family have always done that job at camp, and the bugle recording the camp always used for the flag-raising ceremony was made by his uncle. He misses the feeling that he’s following in his family’s footsteps. In the end, he acknowledges that Henry’s live bugle playing is better than his uncle’s recording, but his uncle’s recording was always good enough for them before, and that he’s still attached to it because it’s his uncle on the recording, giving it that personal connection. Emotional attachment and that sense of family and tradition are more understandable and easier to sympathize with than just selfishness and status-seeking.

Lizzie also says that they were resentful of the Aldens because three of them got to be overnight campers, something she’s always wanted to do but was too young to do before. The Pines kids were angry that Rich and Ginny somehow managed to find room in the cabins for three of the Aldens but told them that the overnight slots were full, and they would have to be day campers instead, like Benny. The story doesn’t make it clear whether the camp owners actually bumped the Pines kids to make room for the Aldens as overnight campers or if the Aldens just submitted their request before the Pines kids. If Rich and Ginny canceled the Pines kids’ overnight reservations just to give the Aldens special treatment, that would be bad, and the Pines kids would have a genuine complaint. However, I think that the Pines kids’ father, who runs the ferry to the island where the camp is, probably just didn’t settle their overnight reservations in time because he took it for granted that they would be given places, forgetting that they don’t own the camp anymore and would have to register, just like everyone else.

Competitiveness

Kim is a major part of the reason why I didn’t feel sorry for the culprits. She’s not a member of the Pines family, so she doesn’t really have sentimental reasons behind her behavior. She’s just all about winning, and she’s sore because she used to win all of the camp’s sports events. Now that the camp isn’t just all about sports, sports, sports, she can’t take it for granted that she’s going to win everything, and that makes her angry. She feels entitled to the activities that she’s good at and resentful that she now has to take part in activities where other people are better than she is and where she might lose. She says that leaving the Aldens’ trunks behind was an honest mistake because she was just so busy on the dock, but once she realized the mistake, she didn’t do anything to correct it, just using it to her advantage in the competition. She also encouraged Lizzie to slip away from Jessie and come talk to her, both getting Jessie in trouble for losing track of one of her campers and pumping Lizzie for information about what their team was doing, so she could steal their ideas. She complains that she had to do it because she knows that she’s only good at sports, not the creative things that the Aldens do, and that she had no chance of winning if she didn’t cheat. I think that comment points to what was wrong with the camp under the Pines’ leadership, and probably, why the camp was failing and losing money.

I think the Pines’ camp was probably losing popularity with campers because it mainly catered to the Pines’ interests and those of a select group of sports nuts, like Kim. As Rich and Ginny observed, the camp was all about sports. People who were good at sports won everything, all the time. Kim got used to what she thought of as her guaranteed victories because all the activities were geared to her interests and talents, but most of the other campers felt left out and possibly resentful of the favored ones. To me, it sounded like the Pines’ camp had become like this little clique where certain, favored campers won everything and had everything their way, and nobody else could do much of anything. It was like most of the camp was just along for the ride while certain people did the things they liked and continually won at everything. It was getting to be the same every year. People who were very sportsy and competitive might still have enjoyed the camp, but it was just so niche in its focus that a lot of other campers probably just lost interest. Enrollment in the camp fell because it wasn’t fun anymore for a lot of campers. That’s probably why Rich and Ginny wanted to change things, because they could see how people were feeling left out and tired of the same old things with the same “winners” every time.

What Kim really resents is other people being given the chance to win something and show what they’re good at. She doesn’t care if other people are frustrated at being made to do only activities that she’s good at so she can always “win” against them because she hates being made to do things where someone else is better and she’s less likely to win. In other words, what she really hates and fears is being treated exactly how she treats other people. That’s why she feels compelled to “fix” things, so she gets put in what she views as her rightful place as the eternal winner. I didn’t like her or sympathize with her as a character at all. She’s extremely self-centered and controlling, not even trying the new activities. Because she’s not a creative or thoughtful person, it never even occurs to her that she has an entire cabin full of campers who may be more creative and thoughtful than she is. She shuts down her own teams’ ideas as not being good enough so she can just use her stolen idea. She never even gives her own team a chance because she feels like she, personally, has to be the winner who does everything, and nobody else should even be allowed to contribute. She refuses to even help her campers in their efforts in activities and actively ignores them to focus on what she wants to do.

Kim reminds me of Kate in Color War in the Camp Sunnyside Friends series, although perhaps it’s more accurate to compare her to her rival in that book because of the cheating. When I reviewed that book, I was frustrated with the way Kate was declared the winner of the camp contest. It’s true that she didn’t cheat, like her rival, but they both behaved badly and were terrible sports. (Not terrible at sports, just really bad sports in the sense of being bad teammates, bad attitudes, and bad winners and bad losers.) It’s just really hard to like anybody whose biggest fear is other people treating them the way they treat others. However, I like the way this Boxcar Children book treats the contest better than the way the Camp Sunnyside Friends did. When I reviewed the other book, I wished that the camp counselors had just declared the contest a tie, both because that would have been fair and would have pleased most of the other campers while blowing the little win-monsters’ minds. This book takes a completely different approach, but I still appreciated it.

Spoilers

We never learn who wins the overall contest at camp. The book ends before the contest is finished. Once the Aldens realize how Kim is getting her information and stealing their ideas, they set a trap for her. They let her and Lizzie think that they’re going to do a particular theme for the camp’s costume contest when they’re actually doing something else. They write a letter to Rich and Ginny before the contest, telling them what they’re doing, to prove that Kim is cheating and stealing ideas.

Once the cheating is exposed, Kim, Zack, and Lizzie talk about their motivations. Rich and Ginny point out to the kids that they haven’t changed all the old camp traditions. They used to go to this camp when they were kids, and they preserved parts of the camp that they and other campers always liked, such as the camp legends about a monster on the island and offering points for campers who don’t scream during scary stories, events, and pranks. They also decide to allow Zack to retain some of the jobs he loves so much since that’s part of what makes camp fun for him, and they promise Lizzie that she can be an overnight camper next year.

When they have to decide who wins the costume contest, they don’t want to immediately declare Kim’s team the loser for her cheating because none of the other campers on her team were aware that she stole the idea for their costume theme and they honestly made their costumes themselves (without Kim’s help because she was too busy with her own costume and made Violet help the other campers instead). Since Kim’s team was competing honestly even though Kim wasn’t, Rich and Ginny think they deserve to be judged on their efforts and not on Kim’s. The Aldens agree that’s fair, and they suggest that the audience of camp visitors who came to see the event should be the judges of the contest since they’re only seeing the kids’ costumes and don’t know about the other things that have happened. They decide to let the audience vote for the team with the best costumes, and the story ends there, without saying what the results of the vote were.

I liked it that they found a fair, impartial way of settling the contest and that we never find out who won. If the story ended with a known winner, it would feel like the author was using who “wins” to declare who was on the side of right in the story. To declare the Aldens’ team the winners would reward hard work and not cheating, which is good, but Rich and Ginny have a point that Kim’s teammates aren’t responsible for Kim’s cheating. To not let them have their own, honest chance would be to punish them for having a bad leader, which isn’t fair. On the other hand, if it ended with Kim’s team winning, it would suggest that it doesn’t matter if you cheat or not as long as people let you win anyway to keep your teammates from being hurt, which would also be a bad lesson. Personally, I would still favor not having a “winner” at all because, in this type of situation, it’s just really awkward whichever way it goes. Not knowing who won or lost or if it turns out that the audience declared a tie also works. The focus of the story is kept where it should be: not on who won but how they each played the game.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Purple Pool

The Boxcar Children

The Mystery of the Purple Pool by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1994.

The Boxcar Children are all bored, especially Benny. Grandfather Alden tells them that he has to go to New York City on business, and the children can come with him and see the city. That sounds like just the kind of excitement the kids need! Their grandfather calls the hotel where he’ll be staying and reserves a suite of room for all of them. Then, he tells the children to look through some guidebooks for the city and decide what they want to see there. He says that, during the time when he’ll be working, the two oldest children, Henry and Jessie, will be in charge. The children start looking through the guidebooks and talking about things they want to see in New York.

When they arrive at the Plymouth Hotel in New York, the children’s grandfather notices right away that the service isn’t how it usually is at this hotel. For some reason, their reservation was canceled, although they are still able to get rooms. Then, there are no bellhops to be found to carry their bags, and even the hotel management doesn’t know where they are. As they go to their room, they hear another guest complaining that his room wasn’t cleaned, even though the maid said that she’d cleaned it.

All of these things could be mistakes or signs of bad hotel management, but it soon becomes apparent that someone is deliberately trying to sabotage the hotel. When the children try to swim in the hotel pool, they find out that someone dyed the pool purple! Then, someone switches the sugar and salt in the hotel restaurant, ruining everyone’s breakfast. When the kids come back from sight-seeing, they see a crowd of people in the lobby, all complaining about various things missing from their rooms, like pillows and shower curtains. Then, the children get stuck in the hotel elevator when someone turns it off and have to call for help.

The Alden children have another mystery on their hands! Who could be the mysterious saboteur, and what would they want to harm the hotel? There’s a mysterious man who seems to be lurking around when bad things happen. There’s also a maid who is angry about her brother being fired from the hotel. The hotel manager isn’t always on hand to deal with things when they go wrong. There’s also an unfriendly woman who doesn’t like kids (named Karen before that name started to be used as a slang word for a disagreeable, complaining woman) and is always scribbling in her notebook, never letting anybody see what she’s writing. Any of them could be the culprit, or it could be someone they haven’t even thought to suspect.

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

My Reaction

I remember reading this book and liking it when I was a kid. One of the hallmarks of The Boxcar Children series is that the children are always allowed their independence in their adventures. Their grandfather lets them explore the city completely on their own, even though the oldest child in the family is only 14 years old. Few people would let their children roam around New York City completely on their own these days, and they didn’t when I was a kid in the 1990s, either. Another guest at the hotel even lets his young son go sight-seeing with the Alden children when they haven’t known each other very long.

The kids have fun exploring the amenities at the hotel, too. The book draws attention to various aspects of staying at hotel, like suites with kitchenettes, hotel restaurants, pools and exercise rooms, and the snacks and toiletries you might find in your hotel room. I thought it was interesting how the book explains how you can call for help in an elevator if it gets stuck. Its a useful thing for kids to know.

One thing that occurred to me when I revisited this story was that it doesn’t mention the World Trade Center. They characters could have visited the original World Trade Center in the story because the book was published 7 years before it was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, but the World Trade Center was not one of the sights that the children went to see. If it had been, it would have dated the story, but I can’t think of anything the children saw or did in the book that really dates it. The things they mention still exist in New York, and this story could still be set in the early 21st century.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery Behind the Wall

The Boxcar Children

Mystery Behind the Wall by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1973.

It’s summer vacation, and Benny doesn’t know what to do with himself because his friends have gone away for the summer. Mrs. MacGregor, the housekeeper, suggests that they invite a guest to the house to cure Benny’s loneliness. Her sister in Canada knows a boy who lives on a farm and is often lonely because they live a long way away from other people. The boy, called Rory (short for Roderick), is very lively and full of ideas, and he could use some company as much as Benny does. The kids are all eager to meet Rory and have him visit, so their grandfather calls Rory’s family and arranges for the visit.

The Alden kids are excited about Rory’s visit and start preparing the spare bedroom. They wonder if Rory will like it or not because the room seems old-fashioned and a little sad to them. The walls are covered with a wallpaper with roses, so the kids think that it must have been a girl’s room at one time. They notice an old photograph on the wall of a girl with her parents in front of the house, but the house looked different and smaller when the photograph was taken. There’s also a poster that says “Coolidge for President” in the window, dating the photograph to the 1920s, meaning that the picture is decades old. (The Aldens refer to that as being about 40 years yearly, dating the story to the 1960s.) Mrs. MacGregor puts a bright red bedspread on the bed to brighten the room up a bit, and the Aldens hope that Rory won’t mind that it still seems a bit old-fashioned.

Rory doesn’t mind the room at all. In fact, he is a bright and curious boy, who is interested in everything and notices little details. He notices the photograph in the room when he arrives, and he asks Grandfather Alden about it. Grandfather Alden explains that the people in the photograph are the Shaw family and that they owned the house before he bought it. The girl is named Stephanie, and she was the Shaws’ daughter. The Shaw family sold the house to Grandfather Alden when they moved to France, and Grandfather Alden built an addition onto the house, which is why it looks different now. The children wonder what happened to the Shaw family and to Stephanie, but Grandfather Alden says that he doesn’t know. They never wrote to him after they moved to France.

Another thing that Rory notices about the guest room is that it looks like the closet should be bigger than it actually is. Benny has the room next to Rory’s, and he has the idea making a hole in the backs of their closets so they can have a secret communication system between their rooms. Grandfather Alden doesn’t mind the project, so they cut holes in the backs of their closets. That’s when they discover that there is a secret, hidden space between the closets, and there’s something hidden in the space. They pull it out, and it’s a piece of cloth. They wonder what it’s for and why someone would hide it.

Grandfather Alden identifies the cloth as a coin case. He tells the kids a little more about Stephanie Shaw. He knows that Stephanie’s father was a very strict man. Her mother went to France ahead of the rest of the family, and her father was in charge of her in her mother’s absence. He had her tutored at home and didn’t let her play with other children, so she was often lonely. However, he allowed her to indulge in their shared hobby, which was coin collecting. The kids wonder what happened to the coins when Stephanie left for France. There are no coins in the coin case now. Professor Nichols, a coin collector who specialized in rare nickels, also helped Stephanie with her collection. He thought that Stephanie might have left her coin collection behind when she went to France, thinking that she might return one day, but Stephanie never did return. Professor Nichols would have asked Stephanie about it, but he didn’t have their address in France.

When the kids explore the hiding place in the closet further, they find an old notebook that turns out to be Stephanie’s journal from when she was 10 years old. Stephanie explains about her loneliness, and her coin collection. She talks about a puzzle that she created that will fool even her father, but the journal ends, so they don’t know what sort of puzzle Stephanie was talking about.

As the children explore Stephanie’s old room further, they find a clue that shows that Stephanie created a treasure hunt before she left for France, a treasure hunt that nobody has ever solved. The Boxcar Children and their new friend, Rory, begin playing along with Stephanie’s old treasure hunt, hoping that it will eventually lead to her missing coin collection.

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

My Reaction

This is one of the early Boxcar Children books, written by the original author. Because the book was written decades ago, a child who was 10 years old in the 1920s would have been about 50 years old at the time the story is set, but the children are sad to learn that Shaw family, including young Stephanie, was killed in a railway accident in Europe, which is why none of them ever returned to solve the treasure hunt and reclaim the coin collection.

The Boxcar Children run into multiple dead-ends in the treasure hunt because things have changed in the decades since Stephanie created her treasure hunt, and clues have been lost. They almost give up, but Benny and Rory realize something that helps them solve the final riddle.

When they finally find the coin collection, they call Professor Nichols to come and look at it, and he tells them about some of the rare coins in the collection, like a 20 cent piece and an Indian head penny. He explains some general principles of coin collecting to the kids, like the fact that the oldest coins aren’t always the most valuable pieces in a collection. There are some very old and even ancient coins that are not quite as rare as some newer coins, and the rarity is what makes them valuable. He helps the children to start their own coin collections. This book could be a fun mystery to help get kids interested in a new hobby!