Posted on by TracyC

Sing Down the Moon

Sing Down the Moon cover

Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell, 1970.

The story begins with a young Navajo girl, Bright Morning, admiring the beginning of spring, but she is caught in a storm and hurries home without the sheep she was supposed to be tending. When the girl’s mother realizes that she abandoned the sheep, she takes the girl back to the sheep, and they watch them all night. The sheep are very important to the family, and the girl’s mother refuses to allow her to take the sheep out by herself again for the rest of that spring.

When Bright Morning finally proves that she can be responsible and not leave the sheep to tend themselves, she is allowed to take them out again. Bright Morning likes to talk to the other girls, Running Bird and White Deer, as they watch all of their sheep together. The girls like to talk about their futures, who they will marry and what kind of children they have. They like to tease each other. Bright Morning’s friends know that she is likely to marry a young man called Tall Boy. The rumor is that Tall Boy’s parents want him to marry her because her mother owns so many fine sheep. Bright Morning knows that her friends tease because they are curious about Tall Boy and want her to talk about him, but she refuses. The girls know that he is supposed to be riding out with the warriors soon, and they tease that maybe he will bring back some other girl from the Ute tribe, but Bright Morning ignores them.

After the warriors have left for their raid on the Utes, the girls see some white men on horses approaching the village. The girls recognize them as oldiers and are worried that their village could be vulnerable to attack without the warriors. Later, the girls encounter more white men, but these men are not dressed as soldiers. They stop to talk to Bright Morning and Running Bird, asking them for directions, but the girls realize that they are slavers. They kidnap both girls and ride away with them!

They take the girls to a town of Spanish people and separate them from each other. They sell Bright Morning to a woman who uses her as a servant. The woman has other Native American girls as slaves, including a younger girl called Rosita. Rosita doesn’t mind her captivity or her life as a servant much. She came from a tribe that was very poor, and since she was brought to this woman’s household to work for her, she has had better food and clothing than she did at home. Rosita tells Bright Morning that the family they work for isn’t bad, and Bright Morning is allowed to keep her dog, who followed her when she was abducted. However, Bright Morning can’t stand her captivity. The woman who owns the house gives her new clothes, but Bright Morning doesn’t care. All she wants to do is find a way to go home.

Bright Morning is reunited with Running Bird when another captive girl comes up with a plan for the three of them to escape. They manage to steal horses and ride away from the town. Along the way, they meet up with Tall Boy and one of his friends, and the boys help fight off the Spaniards who are pursuing the girls. Unfortunately, Tall Boy is badly injured in the fight. He loses the use of one of his arms, and the other Navajos know that he can no longer be a warrior. Bright Morning still cares about Tall Boy, but her mother and sister tell her that she should no longer consider marrying him.

However, the Navajos’ troubles are just beginning. They haven’t heard the last of the soldiers. The American soldiers return and drive the Navajos off their land. They destroy all of their homes and eventually round them up and start them on a long march with little food, where many of them die. The Navajos fear that all of them will die. How will Bright Morning and her family survive, and will they ever see their homeland again?

The book is a Newbery Honor book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I remember reading this book when I was about 13 years old, in middle school! It takes place in my home state, the northern part, where the Navajo reservation is now, in the Four Corners region. I’ve been to Canyon de Chelly (“Chelly” is pronounced like “shay”, like in French) before, although I hadn’t been there at the time when I first read this book. Since I read this book as a kid, I’ve been to places and seen things that helped me understand the setting of the story better. As an adult, I appreciate the historical aspects of the story even more because I know more about the background. The book doesn’t give a date for the story until the postscript at the very end of the book, but the death march described in the story is Long Walk of 1863 to 1865.

The second half of the book is very depressing because there are horrible conditions and many deaths, including the deaths of children. I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to revisit this book at first because I remembered that it was depressing, but the book is well-written. The narrator describes events in an exciting, compelling way.

I had forgotten many details of the story, but there were some things that jumped out at me as an adult that I hadn’t noticed the first time. The postscript at the end of the story explains how life and Navajo culture changed after this traumatic event. If you see photographs of Navajo in “traditional” costumes now, they often include velveteen clothing, but that’s actually a relatively new tradition. The velveteen was adopted from white people during their captivity because they didn’t have access to wool to make their older style of traditional clothing. When Bright Morning was held captive in the Spanish town, she was given velveteen clothing there.

Another odd topic that is touched on only very briefly but that I know more about from other sources concerns the subject of flour. The book mentions that the Navajo were unused to eating wheat flour until it was their only form of rations during the Long Walk. Until then, their staple grain was corn, and when they started eating wheat flour, it made them feel sick. Their bodies just weren’t used to it. The book doesn’t explicitly explain this, but I know from other sources that the Long Walk and those flour rations were the origins of Navajo fry bread. Fry bread was not part of Navajo diet until that point. I grew up eating it on special occasions as a treat because it is greasy but good with powdered sugar, and it’s often served at carnivals and fairs here. However, as an adult, I came to realize that its origins as a food come from a very dark source. It was starvation food. It can keep you alive if there’s nothing else, but it’s not going to keep you healthy if you eat nothing else. It’s greasy and fatty, and it has little nutritional quality. Even now, I don’t have as much tolerance for it as I did when I was a kid. I can’t stomach it well these days if it’s too greasy or I eat too much.

That’s actually not a bad metaphor for the events described in this book. They’re heavy, and the more of it you understand and absorb, the sicker you feel. I absorb much more now than when I was a kid and only half understood the full significance of the events, and it makes me feel much worse than I did the first time.

So, do I recommend this book for kids? Actually, yes. I’m not a fan of depressing books with a lot of death, and I struggled through some depressing books when I was in school. If you had asked my 13-year-old self whether books with this much death and suffering were worth it, she might have had trouble answering that question, but time and further understanding have changed the way my adult self feels. There are some depressing topics that are worth the struggle to absorb them, but if I were the one teaching the lessons, I think I would do it a little differently than my teachers did for me back then.

I think this book is still a good introduction to topics that can be difficult to discuss. It’s worth reading once to understand the historical background of these events and what they really meant to the people who experienced them directly. It’s painful to read the bad parts, but it’s the kind of pain that leads to something better: real understanding. I recommend the book for kids in their early teens because I think that’s the best level for understanding it and accepting the bad parts. I think it should also be accompanied by nonfiction history lessons about the time period and events and discussion about their feelings about the story and historical events. I remember being told some of the history the first time I read this book, but I think that maybe there should have been more discussion about feelings.

I think it’s important to discuss feelings because they’re the hardest part of this book and they’re also the reason why it’s difficult to study some of the darker parts of history. I had a hard time with this when I was younger, and I still do in some respects, but I think understanding what causes those feelings is key to handling them. Reading books like this while discussing tools to handle difficult feelings could help students to better handle their emotions in other areas of life as well.

One of the first points that I think is important to understand and which my teachers didn’t really explain to me is that it’s natural to feel bad when you hear about bad things happening to other people, even when the bad things happened generations before you were born or even when those individual characters are fictional. (Bright Morning and her friends and family are fictional characters even though the events around them are historical. Real Navajos did experience what they experienced.) Empathy is a natural human emotion, and it’s an important tool for living with other people. Humans are social creatures. We live as part of larger groups, and we need at least some empathy to understand other people’s emotions and circumstances, how our actions affect them, and how to treat other people as we ourselves would truly like to be treated. The ability to experience empathy is a sign that you are mentally and emotionally healthy. It’s really only worrying when someone can’t feel it.

One of the most disturbing feelings about this story comes from realizing that the soldiers who are inflicting all of this death and pain either don’t feel empathy for the people they are harming or have actively chosen to ignore it to further their own purposes. That’s not a sign of being mentally or emotionally healthy or behaving in a moral way. When the readers feel repulsed by the soldiers and what they’re doing, it’s because they recognize that these people are a serious danger to others, and they are not functioning in a normal way. Your brain is warning you of a threat. It’s a past threat rather than an immediate one, but if you find the soldiers and their actions upsetting, it’s a sign that your brain has accurately assessed the risk associated with these people and the harm they do. You have accurately connected the suffering of other people for whom you feel empathy with the people who are the direct cause. I’m not saying that the soldiers were necessarily psychopaths, but lack of empathy and remorse and calculated manipulation are all symptoms of psychopathy and should raise alarms for anyone confronted with those signs. So, feeling bad about this situation and the people causing it is a sign that you yourself are mentally and emotionally healthy and have correctly recognized the seriousness of the situation and the harm being done to other people. What I’m saying is that, even when you’re feeling bad, it’s for good reasons, and that deserves recognition.

When I was young, I felt angry and frustrated by stories where people were doing terrible things to others. I still do because that’s part of empathy, but I also came to realize that part of my frustration when it came to historical situations came from my inability to change the situation. When harm has been done, it’s impossible to undo it. What was done was done. I can’t help the people who died, and I can’t even punish the wrong-doers because they’re dead now, too. It’s frustrating to find yourself confronted by a situation where nothing can change. But, I think it’s important to realize that change has happened and is currently happening. History is being written all the time, not even just through writing but through the ways that people live their lives every day. Even when a particular event is over, events and people keep moving. Bad events can cast long shadows, causing harm long after the initial event. That’s part of what makes them so bad. However, as time moves on, new people enter the scene, and new things happen, including things that people in the past would never have foreseen. It eventually reaches a point where the things that continue to happen rely on what we, the living, continue to do or allow to be done. History takes the long view, and I think people need to be reminded of that.

Do you suppose that the people in this story who act as villains thought of themselves like that? Further point, how much does it matter how they thought of themselves? Maybe they thought of themselves as winners at the time because they were getting their way and the people they were hurting were unable to stop them from hurting and killing them, but is that really “winning”? Lazy historians frequently brush things off by saying that “history is written by the victors“, but if that were really true, would we even be hearing or reading stories like this? Would we ever hear about slaves or care about the victims of war and atrocity? Would we ever consider the perspectives of people who died at all? Or does it change your mind about what “winning” really is and who’s really a “winner”? Maybe, in life and history, there aren’t any “winners” because neither of those was ever really a contest to begin with. (Or, as some put it, life is a collection of contests that people can simultaneously be both winning and losing. Personally, I think life is just for living, not for winning against someone else who is also trying to just live and probably couldn’t care less about you “winning” or not.) Apparent victories aren’t always real accomplishments, and people who see that reality are the ones who write the most accurate histories. Individual human lives only last so long, so any apparent “win” by an individual or group is never more than temporary. Our sense of what history includes and what people in the past were really like changes as we increase our knowledge of it and reconsider the context, not unlike the way my 40-year-old self has a deeper understanding of this book than my 13-year-old self did.

Remember that, at the beginning of this particular story, the Navajo warriors were going to raid the Utes. We never really find out in the book why they were going to do this, but does it matter anymore when the Navajos themselves get raided and subjected to something that might be even worse than what they were originally planning to do to their enemies? The story drops this subplot when the march begins. Life is like that, constantly moving, ever changing. History goes on and on. Sometimes, a young warrior who was praised for his prowess gets shot in the arm and can’t pull a bow anymore. Sometimes, a 40-year-old woman from the 21st century looks back on 19th century soldiers who may have thought of themselves as heroes and wants to tell them, to their faces, that they couldn’t be more wrong about that. If they’re not evil psychopaths, they’re doing a dang good job of pretending, and I never once thought of them as being “heroes” in my entire life. That’s life for you. Each of the people who have read this book or ever will read it are among the new people entering the story and its sequels, and we all have the ability to decide what role we want to play in the on-going story of history.

What happens after the book ends, is important, too. If I were teaching this, I would follow up this particular chapter of Native American and Navajo history by talking about some of the developments that continued to happen in their history, including some of the better moments, like the development of the written form of the Navajo language (for much of it’s history, Navajo was only a written language – that’s why the soldiers in the story couldn’t leave a written message in Navajo) and how code talkers used the Navajo language during WWII. The people who realized that these things were possible and something worth working toward were creative individuals. Rather than seeking to destroy something or repress it, they found creative ways to make use of what was there and put people’s talents to good use, helping others. The worst moments of history have been when people without empathy use others or seek to destroy them for personal gain, but the triumphant moments are when people take what they have and find a way to make it better. Noting these positive moments doesn’t make the bad parts of history any better than they actually were, but what we want is more of these positive moments of creativity and development and the type of people who are willing to work to make them happen.

It helps to balance out the explanations of what went wrong and people who did wrong with examples of what was better. Some teachers stress how we teach the bad moments so people learn from the past and don’t repeat it, and that’s true. However, I think we also need to add on what has worked and what we want people to do instead. A “don’t do this” needs to be followed up by “do this instead” to be an effective instruction. As a society, we don’t want more destroyers and takers. We want innovators and makers. We want creative people who find new uses for resources, including human resources and talents, and who are dedicated to truly helping others and human society as a whole instead of merely helping themselves to what others have that they want. This book demonstrates the dark side of humanity, but as I said, history is still being written every day with new players.

On the lighter side of this story, I enjoyed the descriptions of the coming-of-age ceremony for young women that Bright Morning has and the marriage ceremony later. During her time in captivity in the Spanish town, Bright Morning also attends Easter celebrations. She doesn’t understand Christianity and has never heard of Jesus before, and she doesn’t understand what the holiday is about or what’s going on. Rosita tries to explain to her who Jesus is in terms of Navajo religion. I found the explanation fascinating, but Bright Morning is still confused.

Posted on by TracyC

Native Americans

Native Americans by Jay Miller, 1993.

This book is part of the New True Books series, a series of nonfiction picture books on a variety of topics. This particular book gives an overview of the history and culture of Native Americans.

The book starts with some basic definitions and broad explanations of certain aspects of Native American culture, beginning with the explanation of why Native Americans are sometimes called “Indians.” The book notes that each tribe of Native Americans also has a name for itself. Each tribe has had its own culture, which it thought was better than other tribes’ cultures, but throughout history, tribes have interacted and traded with each other. One factor that made Native American cultures different from each other was whether tribes relied mainly on farming or hunting and gathering for food.

The book refers to hunter-gatherers as “caretakers”, a term that I can’t recall seeing before for hunter-gatherers. The reason why they use the term “caretakers” is they say that hunter-gatherers took care of their environments and only took the plants and animals they needed for survival, not wasting anything.

There are sections of the book that discuss some general aspects of Native American culture, like types of homes and tribal leaders. Of course, as the book notes, many cultural aspects varied, depending on the tribe, the environment where they lived, and whether they were mainly farmers or “caretakers.”

The book also has sections about the Native America tribes of various regions of North America, like the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest, the Northwest Coast, and the Plains.

The book ends with a brief section called Changes, which explains how Native American cultures were impacted by the arrival of Europeans in North America.

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

Posted on by TracyC

And This is Laura

And This is Laura by Ellen Conford, 1977.

Twelve-year-old Laura Hoffman feels out of place in her family. Her other three siblings are over-achievers. They all have particular talents and interests and earn awards for them or just have the ability to impress people. Laura gets good grades in school, but apart from that, she doesn’t seem to have any unique talents or interests. She doesn’t think there’s anything about her that would earn an award or impress anybody. Laura feels depressingly average next to the other members of her family.

It isn’t that her family is pressuring her to achieve anything in particular or to be like them or do what they’re doing. It’s just that Laura wishes that she had something more interesting and distinctive about herself. Other people who know Laura’s siblings keep comparing her to other members of her family. When she joins the drama club at school, one of her teachers seems a little disappointed that she’s not quite as good at acting as her older sister is. Laura’s friend, Beth, tells her that she’s good, but Laura feels like she’s never good enough, never as distinctive as she should be.

By contrast, Beth’s family is much more conventional. She only has one younger sibling, not three siblings, like Laura. Her mother is a lawyer, and their house is always neat and stylish. Laura’s house is noisy and chaotic, and she describes their household clutter as looking like a rummage sale. Laura thinks of herself as being a more ordinary, conventional person, and it occurs to her that she feels more at home in a conventional house. When Beth comes to visit Laura’s house, Laura worries at first that Beth will think her family is too weird. However, Beth is charmed by their eccentricity. In fact, Laura feels a little hurt at how interesting Beth finds the rest of her family. Laura worries that she’ll always be boring and ordinary compared to everyone else. However, Laura has a special talent that even she doesn’t realize that she has.

While Beth is having dinner with Laura and her family, Laura’s mind wanders from the chaotic conversation at the dinner table. She suddenly finds herself having a vision of her scientist father in his laboratory. She sees him meeting a man in a white shirt and then acting excited, like he’s just had an important discovery. The vision feels strange to Laura different from a daydream. When it’s over, she hears her father saying that he has a lot on his mind, and Laura absent-mindedly tell him that he’ll figure it all out tomorrow, after the man with the white shirt comes. Suddenly, everyone stops eating and stares at her, wondering what she meant, but even Laura herself isn’t sure. She’s aware that she knew her father was working on some difficult problem because he was juggling hard-boiled eggs earlier (something her eccentric father does whenever he needs to think), but she’s never had visions like that before and doesn’t know who the man in the white shirt is or what her vision really means. She just thinks it’s nice that everyone seemed to notice her.

There must be something to Laura’s visions because her father later tells her that he figured out his problem just like she said she would. Beth is intrigued by Laura’s apparent ability to predict things and tries to help her have another vision. Laura sees Beth on a stage with flowers at her feet and takes that to mean that she’ll be the star of the drama club play. However, Laura isn’t sure that her visions are always true because, when Beth tries out for the lead, she only gets the second best part in the play.

Another odd thing about Laura’s ability is that the girls realize that it doesn’t work well in a quiet environment, like Beth’s house. Laura gets visions when she’s surrounded by noisy chaos and starts to feel like she’s either outside of the situation or wants to be outside of it.

At first, Laura likes feeling special and noticed because of this unusual ability she seems to have, but it soon starts to worry her. She’s not sure that she can always trust her visions to be right or her ability to interpret them. She also begins to realize that it’s not so much that people are starting to notice her as a person but to pay attention to her ability, which is different. It starts to make her feel even more out of it than before.

Then, Laura has a terrifying vision where her younger brother, Dennis, is missing and her mother is frantic with worry. Is that vision real? Is something really going to happen to Dennis, or is there another explanation? The vision wasn’t clear on what would happen to Dennis, and if it is a real vision, can Laura do anything to protect her little brother?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

This story starts off like many other kids’ books I’ve read, where a character feels out of place in their family or wishes that they had some talent that would make them stand out from their siblings. Then, it takes a turn for the mysterious when Laura begins to have visions that make it seem like she can predict the future. At first, Laura enjoys the feeling of being special and noticed, but then, her visions start to frighten her.

Another girl at school, Jamie, hears her talking about it with Beth, and she tells Laura that she’s fascinated by people with psychic abilities. She’s read about it before, and she points out to Laura that not being right all the time or not knowing what a vision means at first doesn’t mean that she isn’t gifted. When she explains to Laura how alarming visions can have perfectly innocent explanations because visions can be metaphorical, Laura feels better.

Jamie persuades Laura to give psychic readings to classmates for money, but the idea of turning her newfound ability into a business doesn’t feel right to her. Sometimes, she sees things that she doesn’t like, things that frighten her. It’s bad enough to predict that a classmate will fail a class, but another vision suggests that a classmate will die. He doesn’t die, but he does get into a car accident, and that’s bad enough. Laura realizes that it’s horrible to see that bad things will happen without having a way to do anything about it. Also, instead of being pleased and proud of her, her family finds the whole business unnerving and all of the kids who come to see her for psychic readings too chaotic, even for them.

There are also the disturbing visions that Laura keeps seeing about Dennis. She takes her friends and her old sister, Jill, into her confidence. Jill says that she will keep a close eye on Dennis to make sure nothing happens to him. Dennis does disappear during the story, and people worry about him, but nothing bad happens to him. Nobody in this story dies, and Laura uses her visions to figure out where Dennis is.

Toward the end of the book Laura talks to her parents about whether or not they’re proud of her because of her psychic abilities. They have a family talk about what it means to be proud of someone. The parents say that they’re not proud of their children for being talented because they don’t see themselves as being directly responsible for their talents. They love all of their children simply because they’re their children, and they’re good people, who do what they think is right and care about others. As far as talents and accomplishments go, the parents see their role as parents as making resources available to their children so they can develop whatever talents they have to the fullest, whether that means letting them have music lessons or encouraging them to try out for the school play. Whatever talents the children have are simply what they were born with, and their achievements are signs that they’re making use of what they have. The children accomplish what they work for themselves, and they’re doing it because they love doing it, not because the parents require it. What makes the parents proud of their children is when they find out what they’re good at and what they love doing. It doesn’t matter to them what their children’s talents are or how their talents compare to each other’s; they just want all of their children to find fulfillment in what they do.

In fact, her mother says that she thinks part of Laura’s trouble is that she’s good at too many things. She’s always gotten good grades in every class, so none of her subjects seems to stand out. If she only got mediocre grades in most subjects and good grades in just one, she would feel like she had a particular talent for that one subject. When she gets equally good grades for everything, nothing stands out to her as her special talent. Rather than being “boring” and “ordinary”, as Laura thinks of herself, she’s actually well-rounded and multi-talented.

Her parents have always been confident that Laura would find her own interests and talents in life. She just feels unaccomplished next to her siblings because, except for Dennis, her siblings are older than she is and have had more time to figure out what their interests are and build up accomplishments. Laura is also a good, caring person, who has been using her talent to help other people to the best of her ability. She looked into everyone else’s future but her own. Her parents say that having a lovable and loving daughter means more to them than any number of impressive accomplishments would be. Whatever anyone else in the world thinks about Laura and her abilities, her family loves her for who she is, not her abilities.

I like the parents’ attitudes, and it seems that the rest of Laura’s family feels the same way, especially her older sister, Jill. I enjoyed how supportive Jill was about both Laura’s psychic abilities and about her acting. When Laura tells Jill that she’s thinking about quitting the drama club because her teacher seems disappointed that her acting isn’t as good as Jill’s, Jill persuades her not to quit. Jill tells Laura that she would understand if she wanted to quit the drama club because she discovered that she really didn’t like drama after all, but she doesn’t want her to quit because she thinks she isn’t good enough. Jill says that Laura is good but that she just needs a little more coaching. She wants her sister to see that she is more talented and capable than she thinks and to make the best use she can of her talents, all of them.

There were a few instances of mild swearing in the book and one semi-dirty joke. When Laura thinks that she’s hopeless at acting because her teacher is disappointed that she’s not like her sister and says that she’s going to give up the drama club, Jill insists that Laura read the role for her so she can see what her performance is really like. Laura doesn’t really want to, but Jill insists that she stand up and read it properly because “You can’t act lying down.” Laura quips that “You can if you’re in an x-rated movie”, and Jill wryly tells her that she’s too young for that. The joke only works if the reader knows what an x-rated movie is, so it would probably go right over the heads of anyone too young to understand it.

One part of this book that I thought was amusing was when Laura explains about her mother’s writing career. When her mother was younger, she played bit parts in movies, and now, she writes gothic romance novels and westerns. Laura doesn’t like the westerns, but she’s read a couple of the gothic romances, and she has noticed that her mother’s gothic romances are very formulaic – “heroines who go to live in crumbling old castles where dark family secrets are buried and everyone acts strangely and the heroine finds herself in Terrible Danger.” That is a concise and accurate description of that entire genre of books. Her mother says that’s part of the challenge of writing gothic romance – writing the same story over and over in different ways so readers can hardly recognize that it’s the same story at all.

The reason why that’s funny to me is that, years ago, my brother and I were sorting through some old books, and we found our mother’s old collection of gothic romance books. I was immediately struck that all the covers on the books looked alike. They weren’t completely identical, but they all had young women in dresses running away from crumbling old manor houses or castles while looking scared. Sometimes, the heroine had a blue dress and sometimes a red one. (More often than not, the dress was blue, but sometimes, there would be a girl in red, pink, or white. Other colors were rare.) There were a few where it looked like it was even the same girl or the same castle viewed from a different angle. I thought it was so funny, I picked up a couple more with very similar covers from a thrift store and made a couple of digital collages with them that I turned into backgrounds for my computer screen. The same story, told over and over in different ways. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but these covers do explain a genre. I’m not saying it’s not a fun genre, only that I find it funny. Whoever did the covers for these books was undertaking the same sort of challenge that writers like Laura’s mother did in writing them.

Posted on by TracyC

The Magic Nation Thing

The Magic Nation Thing by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, 2005.

Abigail O’Malley’s life was turned upside down when her parents divorced when she was in kindergarten. They sold the family home, and her father went to live in Los Angeles and pursue his law career while her mother opened a detective agency. Abby isn’t fond of her mother’s detective agency and has no such ambitions herself. In fact, she would be satisfied if she just has a nice, normal family someday. She misses the nice house where her family used to live and doesn’t like the shabby Victorian house where she and her mother now live and use as the office of the detective agency. Abby envies her friend, Paige Borden, whose family has plenty of money and who life a much more “normal” life. Abby’s mother, Dorcas, isn’t too enamored of the Bordens, thinking that the family is boring. She wishes that Abby would become interested in joining her detective agency someday because the truth is that Abby isn’t quite normal herself, although she doesn’t like to think about it much.

Abby’s mother, Dorcas, says that Abby has an ability to notice information that other people miss, but that’s not quite it. Dorcas says that people in her family have had a “gift” for doing unusual things, like reading people’s minds or finding missing objects. Dorcas is convinced that Abby has inherited this “gift.” However, Abby denies having any such “gift.” As far as she’s concerned, she just occasionally gets hunches about things, and once or twice, they’ve turned out to be right. Abby resents the idea of a special gift partly because she thinks that her mother’s crazy desire to be a detective has something to do with her belief that she also has this special gift, and Abby doesn’t think she does. Abby doesn’t like to think about any of her relatives having been that strange. She just wants a normal family, like Paige’s.

However, Abby’s gift is re-awoken when her mother accepts a case involving a missing girl, who is believed to have been kidnapped by her own father because her parents are divorced. When Abby holds a locket belonging to the little girl, she begins to have visions, not unlike visions that she’s had at other times in the past. Mrs. Watson, who owned the day care that Abby used to attend said these vision episodes were just her imagination, which Abby used to think of as her “Magic Nation.” Abby has spent years trying to ignore it, but this is one of those times when it’s impossible to ignore. Abby has a vision of the little girl at Disneyland with her father. At first, Abby doesn’t want to admit the existence of this vision, but thinking about how worried the girl’s mother is, Abby casually suggests to her mother that, if the girl was taken in a custody dispute, her father might have decided to take her somewhere fun, like Disneyland, to try to win the girl’s favor so she’d want to stay with him. Her mother follows up on the hint, and with the help of the police, the girl is found and reunited with her mother.

That’s the end of the kidnapping case, but it’s only the beginning of Abby’s acknowledgement of her “gift.” Dorcas’s success in the kidnapping case brings more business to her detective agency. As Dorcas gets busier, Abby feels neglected, but Paige’s mother offers to look after her after school to help out, helping Dorcas to feel better about Abby’s friendship with the Bordens. Abby enjoys spending more time with Paige after school, and the girls even start getting along better with Paige’s annoying younger brothers, Sky and Woody. The youngest boy, Sky, particularly comes to like Abby when Abby intervenes after he makes the family’s intimidating cook angry by spilling juice in the kitchen. Abby sensed the boy’s fear and went to the kitchen to find out what happened. Although Abby still wonders how much of her “hunches” are really due to some kind of “gift” because they don’t work all the time, she increasingly realizes that what she still thinks of as her “Magic Nation thing” is not something that she can simply ignore.

Paige is fascinated by Abby’s mother’s work, and she particularly idolizes her pretty assistant, nicknamed Tree. When Abby tells her that her mother and Tree are investigating a case of arson, Paige talks her into coming with her on a little stakeout of their own, which messes up Tree’s actual stakeout and Dorcas’s plans. Dorcas is angry with the girls, and Abby finds herself using her “Magic Nation thing” to try to learn something about the arsonist and make up for ruining the stakeout. Abby does discover who the arsonist is, although she still doubts the reality of her “hunches.” When she shares that information with Tree, Tree also becomes aware of what Abby can do. Tree has known that Abby sometimes gets “hunches” about things, and although Abby still isn’t sure what to think about them, Tree says she’s noticed that Abby’s hunches pay off more than her mother’s do. Then, after the arsonist is caught and Paige goes overboard in her idolizing of Tree for catching the arsonist, Abby lets it slip that she was the one who figured out who the arsonist was.

Abby had been trying to keep this weird and questionable “gift” a secret, but once she tells Paige that she was the one who found the arsonist, she has to explain how she did it. To Abby’s surprise, Paige believes her about the “Magic Nation thing” and thinks it’s really cool. She’s noticed before that there are times when Abby seems to know things that other people don’t or learns things more quickly that most, and Paige thinks that’s a product of her “Magic Nation.” Paige is so enthusiastic about Abby’s “gift” that she thinks the two of them should start their own detective agency, and she starts trying to find cases for them to solve. Paige’s efforts to find an exciting mystery for Abby to solve don’t lead to much, and Abby finds herself doubting her “gift” and its usefulness again.

Then, Abby goes on a ski trip with Paige and her family, and young Sky disappears. Abby realizes that, whether or not her “gift” is real or reliable, she has to try again for Sky’s sake.

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

My Reaction

I like Zilpha Keatley Snyder books. She’s also the author of The Headless Cupid. This story is well-written and fun to read, and I enjoyed seeing how Abby comes to understand and accept her “gift” and make it work for her. I particularly liked the way that Abby comes to understand her “gift” and accept its limitations. There are points when Paige is disappointed or angry that Abby can’t use it to come up with all of the answers that she wants on demand, but Abby can’t make the “gift” do what her friend wants, and she makes it clear that Paige is going to have to accept that. Sometimes, Abby isn’t even interested in trying to use her gift in the way Paige wants, just like she isn’t really interested in using her gift to follow her mother’s profession. Abby comes to realize that an important part of learning to live with her gift is making it clear that this “Magic Nation thing” belongs to her – it’s her gift, to use or not use, as well as she can, in whatever way she sees fit. It’s her right to create her own boundaries, even refusing to talk about her “gift” when she doesn’t want to. The “Magic Nation thing” can’t be forced, and Abby herself won’t be pushed or bullied, either. This personal development is actually a bigger part of the plot than any of the mysteries that Abby solves or attempts to solve.

We don’t know what will happen with Abby and her “gift” after the story ends. There are hints that Abby might be willing to use her powers again, if the situation is important enough and she’s still able to do it. It seems that her mother no longer gets the visions that she used to get when she was Abby’s age, which is why her “hunches” don’t work out as well as Abby’s do now. Dorcas isn’t going to be able to rely on her “powers” to make her a great detective, but Abby comes to appreciate that her mother still enjoys her work and is pretty good at it, not because she’s relying on psychic powers, but because she works hard and is attentive to details. It’s possible that Abby’s powers will also fade as she grows up, but even if they do, it will be okay because Abby can also have a fulfilling life doing the things she loves and is good at. Dorcas is still more enamored of the idea of their shared “gift” than Abby is, but the reality is that neither of them really needs to rely on it. It might be there in the future, if they need it, but it’s not their only strength.

There are some contemporary cultural references in this story that help set the time of the story. Paige is a Harry Potter fan, Abby says that she has some Lemony Snicket books, and they refer to Jennifer Lopez, the Olsen Twins, Leonardo di Caprio, and Britney Spears.

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Happy Birthday, Little Witch

Happy Birthday, Little Witch by Deborah Hautzig, illustrated by Marc Brown, 1985.

This was one of my favorite Halloween books when I was a child, and so is the first book in the series, Little Witch’s Big Night. The first time I read these books, I read them out of order, but you really have to read the first book in order to understand Happy Birthday, Little Witch because it turns out that Little Witch still doesn’t understand the idea of trick-or-treating or that human children wear costumes on Halloween after meeting some children trick-or-treating on the previous Halloween. She really thinks that she met a small astronaut, pirate, and devil on Halloween, and that makes it difficult for her to find them when she wants to invite them to her birthday party.

The witches in Little Witch’s family are decorating and preparing for Little Witch’s birthday party, but Little Witch is sad. Witches are generally bad and nasty, and Little Witch knows all the tricks her family will pull at her birthday party. Little Witch is nicer than the other witches, and she wishes that her party could be nicer, too. Then, she gets the idea of inviting the new friends she met on Halloween, who she only knows as Pirate, Astronaut, and Devil.

She doesn’t know her friends’ real names, so she tries to search for them in place where she thinks that a pirate, an astronaut, and a devil might hang out, taking her cat Bow-Wow and her pet bat Scrubby with her. She hitches a ride on a rocket ship, but her astronaut friend isn’t inside.

She checks out a pirate ship, but her pirate friend isn’t there, and the captain makes her walk the plank.

As for the devil, she thinks that she should try someplace that’s red and hot and ends up in a tomato soup factory (which I think is the funniest part if you’re reading this as an adult and you realize what kind of red, hot place she was really thinking of going to look for a devil).

However, the cook in the factory suggests to her that if she’s looking for her friends, they’re probably in school. At the school, Bow-Wow the cat gets frightened and runs away.

When Little Witch gets home, she finds out that her friends are ordinary children. They found her pet cat and brought it to her house, so her mother invited them to join the party. Her friends introduce themselves by name for the first time.

Little Witch’s party is nicer than it usually is, and she gets to play different games with her new friends. Little Witch’s mother says that she loves her, even though she is more good that most little witches.

Something that I didn’t mention in the review of the previous book is that both of these books were illustrated by Marc Brown, who created Arthur. The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Little Witch's Big Night

Little Witch’s Big Night by Deborah Hautzig, illustrated by Marc Brown, 1984.

On Halloween night, all the witches in Little Witch’s family are busy getting ready for their big broomstick ride. However, when Mother Witch sees that Little Witch has cleaned her room and made her bed, something too nice for a witch to do, she punishes her by telling her that she will have to stay home.

Because Little Witch is left at home, she is there to answer the door for three trick-or-treaters dressed as an astronaut, a devil, and a pirate. Since she doesn’t have any treats to offer them, she offers to give them rides on her broomstick.

The trick-or-treaters have a great time as Little Witch has her broom do tricks and she shows the pirate a real pirate ship.

The trick-or-treaters have so much fun that they promise to come back next year. Little Witch resolves to be good all year so that her mother will punish her again and make her stay home from the Halloween flight, so she will be there to meet her new friends when they come back.

However, when the other witches come back, Mother Witch says that she missed Little Witch on the flight and that she will get to come on the flight next year. Little Witch asks if she can bring some friends with her, and Mother Witch says that will be fine, as long as Little Witch isn’t too good.

This was one of my favorite Halloween books when I was a child, and so is one of the other books in the series, Happy Birthday, Little Witch. The first time I read these books, I read them out of order, but you really have to read the books in order to understand Happy Birthday, Little Witch because it turns out that Little Witch still doesn’t understand the idea of trick-or-treating or that human children wear costumes on Halloween. She really thinks that she met a small astronaut, pirate, and devil on Halloween, and that makes it difficult for her to find them when she wants to invite them to her birthday party. The Little Witch in this series isn’t the same as the Little Witch in the Little Witch Craft Books.

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

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The Mystery of the Creep-Show Crooks

The Three Investigators

The Mystery of the Creep-Show Crooks by M. V. Carey, 1985.

The Three Investigators are at the beach when Bob finds a plastic tote bag that appears to belong to a girl. Trying to figure out who the bag belongs to, the boys look through it to see if there’s some kind of identification. They find a teddy bear, a copy of People magazine, a self-help book about achieving success, some makeup, and a pair of earrings, but nothing with the owner’s name on it. When Jupiter takes a closer look at the book, he realizes that it’s a library book from the Fresno Public Library. The boys decide to contact the library, tell them that they found the book, and ask how to contact the person who checked it out. However, this simple attempt to return lost property turns into a much bigger mystery.

The librarian in Fresno gives the boys’ phone number to a frantic woman looking for her missing daughter, Lucille Anderson. Sixteen-year-old Lucille apparently ran away to Hollywood to try being an actress. Her parents are worried, the police haven’t been much help, and the boys’ inquiry about the tote bag and library book is the first lead they’ve had to Lucille’s location. Since the Three Investigators are all about solving mysteries, they immediately decide to search for Lucille themselves.

The self-help book immediately offers a few clues. The premise of the book is that anyone can become successful at whatever they want to achieve by imagining that they’re already successful. This is actually a real theory that I’ve heard of before, after a fashion. In real life, the theory is that you will also adopt the positive habits of the successful person you envision yourself to be, therefore promoting positive change in your life. (“If your habits don’t line up with your dream, then you need to either change your habits or change your dream.”) The self-help book in this story doesn’t seem to go into those details, though. Judging by the pawn tickets that Lucille has used as bookmarks, it’s not going very well for her.

Mr. and Mrs. Anderson come to Jupiter’s uncle’s salvage yard to meet the boys and collect Lucille’s bag. The Andersons bring along pictures of Lucille, and they talk to the local chief of police. There isn’t much the police can do, and runaways of Lucille’s type are unfortunately all too common. However, the police chief vouches for the boys’ reputations as amateur investigators, so the Andersons agree to let the boys try to find Lucille.

The boys’ first move is to check out all of the pawn tickets. They discover that, at each place where Lucille pawned something, she used a different name, the name of an actress who is already famous. Lucille has also been using makeup to change her appearance. The boys spot her at a pizza place, but because of her disguise, she gets away from them before they fully recognize her. They talk to some other people at the pizza place who know her under the name Arianne Ardis. At first, Lucille’s new friends are reluctant to say much about her to strangers, but the boys explain that her parents are frantic and need to know where she is. Lucille’s friends tell them where Lucille has been living.

It turns out that Lucille is being helped by a kind woman named Mrs. Fowler. Mrs. Fowler owns a large house, and she sometimes takes in teenagers like Lucille and gives them a place to stay and some work to do while they’re getting themselves established in life. Mrs. Fowler met Lucille at the hair salon where Lucille works part time. Now, Lucille is doing some house-sitting and helping Mrs. Fowler’s housekeeper while Mrs. Fowler is on a trip to Europe. Lucille says that it gives her some security and time to take acting classes and look for acting work. It’s a pretty cushy position for a teenage runaway. When the boys convince her to call her parents and bring her parents to see her, Lucille is angry and says that she doesn’t want to go back home with them because she is actually getting somewhere with her life and acting career.

Lucille tells them that she’s been offered a leading role in a new horror movie called Dracula, Mon Amour. It’s supposed to be a sequel to the classic Dracula. It sounds cheesy, and her parents are understandably skeptical. Lucille’s father doubts whether this movie offer is legitimate, and he recruits the Three Investigators again to research this film company and the movie producer to find out whether they’re even real filmmakers.

It doesn’t take the boys long to determine that the supposed producer isn’t who he claims to be. He’s assumed someone else’s identity, and when the Three Investigators meet with the real producer, he says that the phony is probably out to take advantage of this girl in some way. He says that there are some real weirdos out there and tells the boys to warn the young actress to back away from this supposed movie offer. However, when they go to tell Lucille what they’ve learned, they discover that she’s missing and may have been kidnapped! Why would phony movie producers kidnap a teenage runaway/wannabe actress? To make matters worse, the Three Investigators start to suspect that this horror movie crew might have something to do with a series of robberies committed around town by people dressed as horror movie creatures.

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

My Reaction

For part of the mystery, while the characters are pondering the real identity of the movie producers and Lucille’s whereabouts, I found myself wondering why Lucille left her tote bag of stuff on the beach. I wouldn’t have expected a teenage runaway, who has few personal possessions and probably can’t afford to replace any she loses, to be so careless with her things. At first, I wondered if this was an oversight or plot hole in the story, but it’s not. Lucille’s tote bag and its contents are key to the mystery. They’re the reason why the criminals are interested in Lucille. In a way, this story reminds me of the movie Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. In both stories, there is a bag full of seemingly innocent contents, but someone wants something in the bag very badly. The challenge is to figure out what they want and what its significance is.

There are also a couple of twists about the crimes being committed. The main criminals aren’t doing all of the things everyone suspects them of doing, and there is another criminal involved because there is another crime that isn’t discovered until the end.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow

The Three Investigators

#29 The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow by M. V. Carey, 1979.

Jupiter Jones is going on a buying trip with Hans and Conrad, the men who work for his uncle’s salvage yard, to see someone who had some things to sell to his uncle. Jupiter’s friends, Bob and Pete, go with them, but they’re all stranded when their truck blows a tire. They look around for a place where they can call the salvage yard to explain their situation and get help, and they see a large house with a cornfield nearby.

However as Jupiter approaches the house to ask to use the phone, he is suddenly tackled by a man with a jagged rock in his hand! Hans comes to his defense, and the man is surprised and sorry when he realizes that he’s just tackled a boy. It turns out that the man is nearsighted and has lost his glasses on the ground. He starts to explain that he thought that he was tackling a scarecrow, and then, he suddenly stops and says that he’s been having trouble with trespassers. Jupiter asks him what meant when he talked about the scarecrow, but the man dodges the question. Instead, he asks them why they’re there, and they explain about wanting to use the phone.

The man invites them into the house to use the phone. The man isn’t really a farmer. His name is Dr. Wooley, and he’s an entomologist who’s working on a book. He’s studying army ants, which are carnivorous. He shows them the colony he’s studying, but the sight of all those ants just encourages them to finish their call and leave fast.

However, Jupiter is still intrigued about why Dr. Wooley seemed to attack him because he thought he was a walking scarecrow. He persuades Bob and Pete to return to the area with him to investigate. When they stop in a cafe, a man there hears them talking about the scarecrow, and he says that he’s seen the walking scarecrow himself. He works in the area, doing security for a nearby museum. The boys ask him for details about his sighting of the walking scarecrow, and he says that he saw it near the Radford house, which is where the boys met Dr. Wooley.

When they go to the place where the man saw the scarecrow, they meet a woman named Leticia. Leticia asks them what they’re doing, and they explain about looking into a sighting of a walking scarecrow. Suddenly, Leticia gets very excited. She has seen the scarecrow herself, but no one will believe her. She asks the boys if they will come to the house and explain to Mrs. Chumley that she really did see a walking scarecrow.

Leticia Radford is a jet-setting heiress who lives in the mansion by the cornfield. Mrs. Chumley has been with her family a long time as a secretary and housekeeper, but she’s been confined to a wheelchair for years after being in a car accident. Leticia spends most of her time traveling in Europe, but she returns home periodically, usually after one of her disastrous romances. She has phobias of both insects and scarecrows. Actually, her fear of scarecrows is related to her fear of insects and other creepy-crawly things. Leticia explains that, when she was a child, a scarecrow fell on her when she visited a pumpkin patch one Halloween, and when it broke apart, it had spiders in it, so she always associates scarecrows with bugs. Until the boys explain that other people have seen the walking scarecrow, Mrs. Chumley had thought that Leticia had imagined it.

Leticia blames Dr. Wooley for the walking scarecrow because he made a scarecrow after he moved into the cottage on the estate property to do his research on the ants. Dr. Wooley makes her nervous because she associates him with both bugs and scarecrows. Leticia says that the scarecrow seems to be targeting her because it has shown up multiple times, seemingly looking for her, and once, it hid in her car and threw bugs on her.

While the boys are in Leticia’s mansion, explaining to the other people in the house that Leticia hasn’t imagined the scarecrow, Dr. Wooley shows up, angrily accusing the boys of faking their car trouble the day before just to get into his lab. Dr. Wooley says that someone dressed as a scarecrow entered his lab, hit him on the head, and stole a jar of some of the ants he’s been studying. It doesn’t take them long to figure out where the ants went because Leticia finds them in her bedroom, along with the jar from Dr. Wooley’s lab.

It’s obvious that someone is purposely trying to frighten Leticia by dressing as a scarecrow and tormenting her with bugs, the two things guaranteed to terrify her. The boys are surprised when Dr. Wooley is the one who hires them to find the person tormenting Leticia. Dr. Wooley says that he isn’t responsible for frightening Leticia, but he can see that it all looks bad for him because he was the one who made a scarecrow and the ants in Leticia’s room were his ants. He doesn’t want his professional reputation ruined, and he also feels sorry for Leticia. Leticia can’t figure out why anyone would target her because she’s never been a threat to anyone, but she may be more of a threat to someone than she knows.

My Reaction

The combination of a mystery involving scarecrows and insects and someone who is afraid of both scarecrows and insects is a little strange, but I thought the author did a good job of explaining how the two are related in this story. Leticia’s two fears are connected because she thinks of scarecrows as being homes for bugs.

One of my questions during the mystery was wondering whether someone is trying to convince Leticia that she is crazy (“gaslighting” her, like in the movie of the same name) or just trying to drive her away from the house. I had a couple of theories about what could be going on. Some of what I considered turned out to be right, but someone I suspected turned out to be completely innocent.

At first, I also wondered if there would be an unexpected romance between Leticia and Dr. Wooley because the story establishes that they are both single, and there are points when they hang out together when they don’t have to. However, the story doesn’t end with any clear romance. Leticia is still afraid of insects at the end, which would make romance with an entomologist awkward. She does allow Dr. Wooley to continue his work on her property, though. The boys also notice that Leticia seems to branching out and finding new interests at home rather than running off to Europe again, so that might represent some new developments in her character and a possible turning point in her life.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy

The Three Investigators

The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy by Robert Arthur, 1965.

In the original editions of The Three Investigators, their cases were introduced by Alfred Hitchcock. Later editions of the books in the 1990s were rewritten to remove Alfred Hitchcock, but I’m using the version of this book that includes Alfred Hitchcock’s introduction for my review.

This story begins with two letters address to The Three Investigators. One of them is from an elderly woman in a wealthy area of town, who has heard about how The Three Investigators helped a friend of hers find her lost parrot in the previous book in the series. This lady would like their help to find her missing cat. Bob and Pete thinks that sounds like a simple enough case, but their other letter is from Alfred Hitchcock, so they decide to read that before committing themselves.

Alfred Hitchcock’s letter is incredible! He tells The Three Investigators about an old house that has been turned into a private museum by an archaeology professor. His museum has relics from his archaeological digs in Egypt. Recently, a mummy has arrived at his museum from a museum in Egypt. Professor Yarbrough was the one who originally discovered that particular mummy, but since it arrived at his museum, he has noticed a bizarre phenomenon. The mummy seems to whisper! Professor Yarbrough can’t figure out how the mummy can whisper, but it seems like the mummy is trying to tell him something important. Professor Yarbrough has consulted with a friend, Professor Freeman, who is a language expert, but the mummy only seems to talk when Professor Yarbrough is alone. Knowing how crazy this predicament sounds and what his other colleagues would say if he told them, Professor Yarbrough decides to tell his friend Alfred Hitchcock instead. That is why Alfred Hitchcock decides to tell The Three Investigators and see what they make of it.

Bob and Pete think that the mummy mystery sounds exciting but creepy. Since Jupiter is away on an errand, they decide that they would rather try to find the missing cat first. However, when Jupiter returns, he already knows about their prospective cases, and as predicted, he can’t wait to investigate the mummy. At first, Professor Yarbrough doesn’t have much confidence in the boys because they’re younger than he expected, but Jupiter persuades him to let them try. The professor’s butler, Wilkins, is very nervous and tells the boys that there is a curse on the mummy. Strange things are happening that make Wilkins think that the professor is in danger from the curse. The boys are there when a large statue in the professor’s museum suddenly falls over, almost striking the professor. Wilkins would rather send the mummy back to Egypt, but the professor doesn’t believe in curses. In spite of the talking mummy, the professor is sure that there must be a logical, scientific explanation for everything.

Jupiter also believes in scientific solutions, and his first theory about the whispering is that it’s being transmitted electronically, but they can’t find any electronics on or around the mummy. His next idea is to capture some of the mummy’s speech on a recording, which is successful. Professor Freeman says that the mummy seems to be speaking a form of ancient Arabic.

Then, Wilkins sees someone walking around in a jackal costume. Someone steals the mummy, and strangely, comes back a second time to steal the mummy case. Even the missing cat puts in an appearance.

Who wants the professor to think that the mummy is whispering and believe that it’s cursed? Who wants the mummy case, and why is that case even more important to the thief than the mummy itself?

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

My Reaction

From the beginning of the book, I had a couple of theories about who could be responsible for the mummy’s whispering and “curse”, but I was only partially correct. There are different people involved, doing different things and for different reasons. The main villain is one of the people I suspected, but I didn’t know this person’s motive until it became clear that the mummy case is what they really want. The missing cat is part of the mystery, but don’t worry, the cat is fine and being cared for!

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Mystery of the Mummy’s Curse

The Boxcar Children

The Mystery of the Mummy’s Curse by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 2002.

The Alden children are at the museum to get a sneak preview of the new Egyptian exhibit because the man in charge of the exhibit is the son of one of their grandfather’s friends.  When he shows them the mummy that will be the centerpiece of the exhibit, one of his assistants accidentally falls off a stepladder and breaks her ankle.  The museum personnel joke that it’s the “mummy’s curse,” although they quickly reassure the children that they don’t believe in curses.

With the opening of the exhibit coming soon, there’s a lot of work to do, including cleaning up the exhibit hall where it will be set up.  Losing the assistant has left the museum short-handed, so the Aldens volunteer to help with the cleaning and setting up.

However, the children notice other odd things about the exhibit when they’re helping to clean up.  They hear strange noises, as if someone were creeping around the off-limits areas where the artifacts are being stored and the exhibit getting set up.  Then, some of the artifacts that they noticed when they were first introduced to the exhibit disappear.  When they check to see what else is missing, they realize that some of the artifacts they’ve seen aren’t even listed on the official roster.  Jessie tries making her own list of artifacts in the exhibit, since the master list isn’t reliable, but someone steals it.

Who is stealing from the Egyptian exhibit?

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

My Reaction

I enjoyed the mystery. I was pretty sure that I knew early on who was responsible for the thefts, but mysteries involving museums, mummies, and stolen artifacts are my cup of tea!

I did think, as I was reading this, that few museums would let random kids help set up an exhibit like this, including valuable artifacts, even if most of what they were doing is just cleaning up. In the story, the eldest of the Alden children is 14, and I’ve done enough volunteer work to know that there are age limits and training requirements for certain volunteer tasks. There are really only two reasons why kids like the Aldens would be doing this. One, the requirements of the story: having the kids help set up an exhibit of Egyptian artifacts is exciting, something that plenty of kids would find fascinating, and it allows them to be in the right place to notice the thefts. Two, Grandfather Alden is rich: if the children’s grandfather wasn’t rich and well-connected, the Aldens wouldn’t be doing most of what they do in the stories. The second reason isn’t as charming as the first, and it never occurred to me when I was younger that the Aldens are actually very privileged to be in the position to do the things they do and meet the people they meet, but they are.

I wouldn’t say that the knowledge spoils the story for me, but it did make me stop and think. Sometimes, when adults, especially older adults, look back on books like the Boxcar children series, they talk about how independent the kids in these stories are and how willing to work, but the truth is that, in most of the stories, the kids’ grandfather sets them up with the opportunities for volunteer work or independence that the children have. The kids didn’t get this volunteer position because it’s an extension of special classes any of them are taking in history or archaeology or because they’ve done lower-level volunteer work for the museum before, working their way up, or because they applied for the position. They got it because of someone their grandfather knows. The Alden children are still willing to take advantage of opportunities that come their way and work hard at them and learn whatever they can, but when you think about it, it’s not quite the same as people who have to prove themselves and their merits first just to get the opportunity to do the same thing. So, I enjoy the story for the fun and mystery, but thinking about it now, as an adult who has done volunteer work for museums as well, I’m not quite so impressed with the way other, older adults compare the characters to real kids of non-rich, non-connected parents.

There are still volunteer opportunities for youths who want to get involved in museum work, but most of them require the kids to be older teens. One of the reasons for the age requirements is that there can be liability issues if someone gets hurt on the job, but people who hire volunteers also want to know about the skills the volunteers have, what kind of training they’ve had or need, and how much they can alreay do unsupervised. Rules can vary by location and position, but in the places I’ve been, kids under 14 are usually required to be supervised by an adult, 18 or over. Often, teens who do those sorts of jobs have already proved their skills or worked their way up in some way, applying for volunteer jobs and discussing their skills, taking related classes, being part of museum programs for younger children before, and/or volunteering in tandem with a parent first. The same is true of other places where I’ve volunteered, like animal shelters. So, the kids who seem more independent are that way because the adults in their lives took them through the preparation and training first and helped them connect with people who could take them further. This is a fun mystery story, but just understand that real children often aren’t like kids in mystery adventure books because they are real people in the real world, where circumstances are different from the ones in fiction. Real life has rules and regulations, and not everybody has a rich grandfather or family friends who are willing to treat them as special exceptions to the rules. If you want to see the kids around you get involved in a cause like this and gain some skills, the best way to go about it is to get involved yourself, both with the cause and with the lives of the kids, and give them the training and knowledge they need to go further on their own. Things like this don’t just happen on their own.