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Gone-Away Lake

Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright, 1957.

Eleven-year-old Portia and her six-year-old brother Foster are traveling alone by train to visit their aunt and uncle and twelve-year-old cousin Julian in the country for the summer while their parents are on a trip. Portia likes spending time with Julian because Julian is an amateur naturalist and tells her things about animals and birds. When Portia and Foster arrive, their aunt, uncle, and cousin tell them that their dog has had puppies. Portia is allowed to name them, and if her parents agree, she and Foster will even be able to keep one!

While Portia is out exploring the countryside with Julian one day, they find some garnets in a rock. They start chipping some out to take to Julian’s mother, and they find a carved inscription in Latin on the rock with the date July 15, 1891. They’re not sure what the Latin words mean. They figure out that part of the inscription refers to the Philosopher’s Stone, which was supposed to turn different substances to gold. Portia asks if this stone could be the real Philosopher’s Stone, but Julian says that’s impossible because they’ve been using knives to pry out the garnets, and they haven’t turned to gold. They continue to wonder what the inscription really means and why someone put it there.

They explore the countryside further, getting lost. They aren’t too worried because they don’t need to be back soon. They follow a brook and find themselves in a swampy area. Strangely, they stumble over an old rowboat. Then, they spot a row of old, abandoned houses. The houses are in bad condition, but the kids can see that they were built in elaborate Victorian styles. The children wonder why those houses are there on the edge of swamp. Portia finds it a little creepy, but Julian wants to get a better look.

Then, the children hear a voice. Strangely, the voice is repeating an advertisement for medicine for indigestion. The children think it’s funny because no ghost would say something like that. Taking a closer look at the houses, they notice that one seems to be in better condition than the others that it has animals and a garden, so someone must be living there. Thinking about it more, Julian says that the swamp was probably once a pond or a lake, and that’s why it had houses and a rowboat. He hasn’t heard of a lake in the area, but he and his parents haven’t lived in the area for long. The children wonder who lives in the house and decide to find out.

They find an old woman in old-fashioned clothing, listening to a radio. The old lady is surprised to see them but welcomes them, saying that it’s been a long time since she has seen children. She invites them to come inside her house, and the children find themselves in a cluttered and chaotic parlor with each wall covered in a different kind of wall paper. The woman introduces herself as Minehaha Cheever.

The children explain how they ended up there by coming through the swamp, and Mrs. Cheever says that they shouldn’t go through the swamp because there is a dangerous sinkhole there that they call the Gulper. She says that when it’s time for the children to go home, she’ll have her brother show them a better and safer way. Mrs. Cheever says that there used to be a lake there, and that her family and about a dozen others had summer houses there, but the lake largely dried up when a new dam was built. After that, the summer houses were abandoned, and many of them were vandalized. However, her father and another woman locked up their houses with the furniture inside, thinking that they would come back and move them, but they never did. The large and fancy old Villa Caprice is still untouched, but Mrs. Cheever says that she supposes that much of the contents is probably deteriorated. She says that the Villa Caprice gives her the creeps.

The children ask Mrs. Cheever why she’s there, and she says that she used to live somewhere else. After her husband died, she didn’t have much money, and she remembered that the house at the former lake was still there. Her brother, Pindar, also wanted to retire somewhere quiet, so they decided to go live in their family’s old summer house. There was enough furniture and old clothes left there for the two of them, and it suits them. They keep animals. Pindar still has their old car, so he can sometimes go into town for things they need. “Pindar” was one of the words in the inscription on the rock.

Pindar explains that he and his best friend when he was a kid, Tarquin (another of the words on the rock), were the ones responsible for the inscription on the rock. Tarquin was three years older than Pindar, but they were still close friends. However, they had a temporary falling out when Tarquin was 13 years old. Tarquin had gone away to boarding school for the first time, and the next time they met at their summer homes, Tarquin had brought a friend from his new school with him, Edward. Tarquin and Edward were putting on airs and showing off how sophisticated they were because they were 13 years old and knew so much more now that they had been to boarding school. Pindar felt bad about his old friend shunning him and treating him like a little kid, so he started hanging out with his other best friend, Barney. Then, Pindar had the idea of showing Barney the big rock with garnets stuck in it where he and Tarquin used to meet and hang out together.

When Pindar and Barney got to the rock, they discovered that Tarquin and Edward were already there, and the older boys said that they had claimed the rock for themselves. They called the rock the philosopher’s stone and wrote the inscription labeling it as the philosopher’s stone in Latin, which they had learned at their boarding school. The older boys said that the younger ones were too little to be philosophers, like the two of them. Pindar’s feelings were hurt all over again, and he told his father about the situation. Pindar’s father was amused by the older boys and their sophisticated philosopher talk. He said that there was no age limit on who could be a philosopher and explained to Pindar what a philosopher’s stone was supposed to be and how it was supposed to turn things to gold. Then, he suggested a prank that Pindar and Barney could play on the older boys, convincing them that the stone really did have the power to turn things to gold. The older boys were temporarily fooled by the trick. At first, Tarquin was angry about being tricked, but then, he had to acknowledge that he had provoked Pindar and that the trick was a clever one. Tarquin made up with both Pindar and Barney, and he added Pindar’s name and his own to the inscription on the rock. Pindar still considers Tarquin and Barney to be his best friends, and they still write letters to each other in their old age.

Julian and Portia are fascinated by the stories that Pindar tells about the childhood summers he and his siblings and friends spent at this now-vanished lake. Mrs. Cheever said that she loves having children around the place again, and she suggests that Julian and Portia could use one of the old houses that is still in reasonably good condition as a kind of clubhouse. Julian and Portia love the idea, and Pindar and Mrs. Cheever suggest that they use the old house where Tarquin and his family used to stay. It’s in disrepair, but it’s much better than some of the other houses. There is plenty of furniture in the attic that the children can use, too. The children decide to invite some other kids to join them, and they call their club the Philosopher’s Club, after Pindar and Tarquin’s old group of friends.

Julian and Portia invite some other local children to join the Philosopher’s Club and spent a magical summer exploring this abandoned community, picking blackberries, learning about local plants and their uses, and scavenging things from old houses and trying on the clothes from Pindar and Mrs. Cheever’s youth. The boys help Pindar build a bridge over the large sinkhole they call “the Gulper” after Foster falls into it and has to be rescued. When Julian and Portia’s parents meet Uncle Pin and Aunt Min (as they come to call Pindar and Mrs. Cheever) and come to see Gone-Away Lake, the adults also experience the magical, dream-like qualities of this place, and Portia’s parents consider plans that may make the children’s future summers magical.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies – including a couple of copies of the sequel, Return to Gone-Away).

My Reaction

I remember a teacher reading this book or part of it to us when I was in elementary school, but I couldn’t remember much about the story except for the lake that had gone away and caused the town to be largely deserted. For some reason, I had thought this story was a mystery story, but it’s not.

In many ways, I think this is the perfect nostalgia book because a large part this story is about the nostalgia that the elderly brother and sister in the story have for the place where they used to have their childhood summer adventures, even though the place isn’t what it used to be. Through the stories that they tell the children and the children’s own adventures and explorations of this largely abandoned summer community, they begin building their own attachments to the place and their own nostalgic summer memories.

Because the story takes place in such a unique location, I think it would make a fun kids’ movie with a vibe of nostalgic summer adventure. Although, because the story is largely low-key slice-of-life and the flashbacks of Uncle Pin and Aunt Min to incidents in their youth, I can see that the story might have to be changed a bit to fit the usual movie format, focusing on one definite problem or a particular adventure to give the story its climax. I picture the kids and their Philosopher’s Club making it their mission to preserve this vanishing community, which fits with the way the original story goes, although the kids in the book enjoy the old community for the magic of its dilapidated state rather than wanting to fix it up and restore it to its former glory. I think they could lean into promoting the preservation of nature and the ecosystem of the area, with Julian in particular pointing out what makes this environment unique and how it has become home to animals and insects since the lake changed to a swamp and most of the people left. The Philosopher’s Club might connect with a local naturalist society, and they could build the bridge in the story together to make the swamp safer to traverse for nature lovers and bird watchers. Uncle Pin and Aunt Min could remain on the site as its caretakers. Perhaps, the kids might even find some old notes and drawings in one of the old houses that show some interesting aspects of how the environment has changed and some of the unique animals that make their home there. That didn’t happen in the book, but it would be a sort of environmentally-connected treasure the children could find.

Posted on by TracyC

Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch

Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch, or Schoolgirls Among the Cowboys by Alice B. Emerson, 1915.

In the last Ruth Fielding book, Ruth and her friends met a girl named Jane Ann who had run away from home. In this book, Ruth and her friends go to Silver Ranch in Montana, Jane Ann’s home, which is owned by her uncle, Bill Hicks. Ruth’s best friend, Helen, is surprised that Ruth’s Uncle Jabez let her come on the trip because he’s been very upset about the money he lost investing in a mine. Helen says maybe the investment will turn out fine after all, and Ruth says that the mine he invested in, the Tintacker Mine, is coincidentally nearby. It’s supposed to be a silver mine, although Uncle Jabez now doubts whether the mine is real or some kind of scam. The young man who talked him into investing hasn’t answered Uncle Jabez’s letters for months. So, while they’re staying at the ranch, Ruth plans to ask some questions in the area about the mine and see what she can learn.

On their first evening at the ranch, while they’re playing music, singing, and enjoying themselves, they suddenly get word that there’s a prairie fire up by Tintacker, and a cowboy says that it was probably set by “Bughouse Johnny.” (“Bughouse” is an old-fashioned slang word meaning “crazy”, so this is a descriptive nickname.) Ruth and her friends go to help the cowboys with the fire, and they watch as they slaughter three steers and use the carasses to smother the flames.

Ruth asks some questions about Tintacker, and the cowboys mention a new man who’s been hanging around that area. They don’t know much about him, but he’s pretty young, and they call him “the tenderfoot.” Ruth thinks he might be the young man her uncle has been looking for. She also asks them about Bughouse Johnny, but they don’t tell her much more than he’s a crazy guy who camps out in the area of Tintacker.

Ruth explains her uncle’s situation to Jane Ann’s uncle. Bill Hicks says that, as far as he knows, there’s no more silver left in the Tintacker Mine, and he thinks that Ruth’s uncle has been cheated. Ruth asks him if there’s any way that she can see the official papers associated with the mine, and Bill Hicks introduces her to a friend of his who is a lawyer, Mr. Savage. Mr. Savage confirms that ownership of the mine belongs to a man named John Cox, who bought out the other heirs of the mine’s original owners. Like Bill Hicks, Mr. Savage thinks that the mine isn’t worth anything, but if the young man Uncle Jabez invested with is John Cox, the investment is valid, just not one that’s likely to see a return. Ruth says that she will give the lawyer’s information to her uncle and that her uncle may ask him to act on his behalf later, depending on how he decides to handle this investment.

Ruth and her friends have some Western-style fun and adventures with Jane Ann, the cowboys, and the other locals. Jane Ann gets to show off her riding and ranching skills, and they all attend a local dance, where Ruth and her friends play matchmaker between a shy cowboy and the haughty schoolmistress he admires. They have a hair-raising encounter with a wild bear, and the man who saves them by shooting the bear turns out to be the man from Tintacker who Ruth wants to see.

When Ruth and one of Hick’s men go to see this man later, they find him deathly ill. If the man doesn’t recover, and if the mine turns out to be worthless, Uncle Jabez will lose his money, and there will be no way for Ruth to continue attending the boarding school she loves with her friends! However, the answer to the truth about John Cox’s identity is closer than Ruth and her friends suspect.

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

My Reaction

Like many other early Stratemeyer books, this story contains elements of a mystery but is really more of an adventure. I didn’t like parts of the adventure because there were repeated instances of characters being attacked by animals and then the animals needing to be killed. At one point, Ruth herself beats an attacking wolf to death, and I thought that was a shockingly violent scene for a Stratemeyer Syndicate book! Although, earlier Stratemeyer Syndicate books are quite different from the later ones.

The mystery part of the story focuses on the identity of John Cox, the man who convinced Uncle Jabez to invest in his mine, and the truth about his mine. I actually felt a little silly for not figuring out the true identity of John Cox sooner because he actually shares the same last name as one of the other regular characters in this series, and it’s not a coincidence. John Cox is Mary Cox’s brother.

Mary Cox, nicknamed “The Fox” by her schoolmates for being sly, is along on the trip with the other Briarwood Hall girls, although she is a nasty rival for Ruth in particular. Even though she has gotten along better with some of the other girls in the past, her snooty attitude and bad behavior have finally gotten on everybody’s nerves in this book.

When Mary is temporarily in control of a wagon Ruth and Helen are in, she does something reckless and almost gets them all killed until Ruth takes control of the reins and saves them. Everyone knows that the situation was Mary’s fault and that Ruth saved the day, and this is not the first time that Ruth has saved Mary from something. (By my count, it’s the third time.) However, Mary is ungrateful for her help and in denial that she did anything wrong (as usual). Just when everyone has decided that they’re completely fed up with her, the discovery of her brother changes things. While Mary is unmoved by Ruth saving her life, she is genuinely grateful to Ruth for saving her brother when he was ill and alone, which is astonishing for a girl who has never seemed to genuinely care about anybody else before. John Cox is an honest man, and Uncle Jabez’s investment turns out better than expected, guaranteeing that Ruth will be able to return to boarding school with her friends.

I want to warn readers that this is one of the Stratemeyer Syndicate books that has characters using racial slurs. The Ruth Fielding books were written before the Stratemeyer Syndicate revised its books in the mid-20th century to remove language like that. As in other Stratemeyer books, the use of inappropriate racial language is used to show which characters are crude and antagonistic, and in the case of this book, that character is Mary.

Mary Cox sneers at one of Bill Hick’s men, Jib, because he is of Native American descent, although Helen’s brother Tom stands up for Jib, pointing out that he’s much better educated than most of the men Mary knows, even though he works as a cowboy, and that Native Americans used to own the entire country before white people came, which is nothing to sneer at. Mary still insists on calling him a “savage”, mostly because Mary’s habitual method of communicating with people is to put someone else down so that she can look superior. This entire exchange takes place during an episode when Mary is trying to flirt with Tom, and bringing up racial slurs to put someone down during a flirtation with someone else is a very weird thing to do. It’s mostly a part of the story to show why Mary is such a pain. Tom just ends up being disgusted with her. It’s not the last time Mary uses racial slurs. At one point, she also calls the ranch cook a “fat and greasy Mexican squaw.” It’s pretty bad to see that kind of language in a kid’s book, even though it’s there to show that Mary has a nasty personality and behaves badly, which irritates and embarrasses people around her.

On a lighter note, the story is peppered with all sorts of Western words and slang. Since slang changes over time, and I’m not sure how people said things in the 1910s, I’m not sure how accurate the slang is for the time, but I’d like to call attention to a couple of words in the story that will be familiar to readers, but not in the way that they usually see them. “Cañon” is actually the Spanish word for “canyon”, pronounced the same way that we say in English, but the little tilde symbol over the ‘n’ adds the ‘y’ sound. The word that confused me the most was “kiotes,”, not because I didn’t know what they were talking about, but because that is not the Spanish version of the word. It looks like a phonetic spelling of the way we pronounce “coyotes” in English, but the Spanish word is also spelled “coyotes”, just pronounced a little differently. I didn’t know where the spelling “kiotes” came from, and I’d never seen it anywhere else before. I tried Googling it to find out more, and I saw a few mentions of the word with that spelling. One mention said that it was a Native American word, but it didn’t explain much more than that, so I can’t be sure. The book also uses the plural of “beef”, which is “beeves“, a word that used to be a joke with my brother and my friends the first time we heard it years ago because we thought it sounded funny. It also mentions the girls wearing “furbelow“, a word that I’d never heard before that means ruffles, pleats, or flounces in women’s clothing.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery Ranch

The Boxcar Children

Boxcar Children Mystery Ranch

Mystery Ranch by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1958, 1986.

Boxcar Children Mystery Ranch Grandfather

The children can tell that something is wrong when their grandfather, Mr. Alden, comes home and bangs the doors. When they ask their grandfather what’s the matter, he says that he’s worried about his sister, Jane, because he just got a disturbing letter about her. The children have never met their Great-Aunt Jane before, and she lives on a ranch out west. The trouble is that Jane is a difficult person to get along with. She can’t stay at the ranch alone because she’s elderly and needs help, but the person who was helping her before is leaving, and because Jane is such a difficult person, their grandfather doesn’t know where he’s going to find someone else willing to help her. Their grandfather admits that he doesn’t even get along with Jane himself, confessing that he hasn’t been very nice to her, either. (We never find out exactly why the children’s parents originally told them that their grandfather wasn’t a nice man, as established in the first book of the series, but this confession hints that he used to be much harder on his relatives than he is now, perhaps having mellowed a bit with age and experience.)

Boxcar Children Mystery Ranch wagon

Their grandfather says that the ranch where Jane lives is the ranch where both of them grew up. When he moved east years ago, Jane wanted to stay on at the ranch. He knows that Jane doesn’t have much money and doesn’t even keep many animals anymore, but because of her sense of pride and their past quarrels, Jane won’t accept any money or help from him. The children wish they could do something to help, and their grandfather says that he has to think things over. They ask who wrote the letter about Jane, and their grandfather says that it was written by the neighbor who has been staying with Jane. She says that she can’t put up with the bad treatment from Jane anymore. The letter further says that Jane wants to see Mr. Alden’s grandchildren. Naturally, the children say that they would like to see Jane themselves and try to help her. However, their grandfather isn’t sure that it’s a good idea because he doesn’t know how Jane would treat the children.

After talking it over some more, they all decide that the two girls, Jessie and Violet, will go to see Aunt Jane without the boys because Jane might find all four children at once to be too overwhelming. Mr. Alden says that if Jane gives them too much trouble, they should go to the neighbors, who are nice and will help them. When the girls get off the train at the town near their aunt’s ranch, they notice that a man gets off at the same time and quickly disappears. They are curious about him and wonder where he went. The townspeople are curious, too, because it’s rare that anybody comes to their little town, let alone a mysterious stranger.

Boxcar Children Mystery Ranch arrival of the girls

When the girls arrive at the ranch, the neighbor, Maggie, helps them get settled. Aunt Jane refuses to get out of bed, and Maggie says that she hasn’t been eating much and won’t let her eat much, either. The girls ask Maggie what’s wrong with Aunt Jane, and she says Jane feels like she doesn’t have anything to live for, so she’s kind of given up. Jessie and Violet insist that they’re all going to eat, and they fix some food. The girls and Maggie eat first, and then, the girls take Jane some orange juice with a beaten egg. Jane finds it difficult to refuse the girls, so she drinks it. Aunt Jane starts asking the girls questions about their brothers and says that she would like to see them.

Aunt Jane begins eating better because she finds these interactions with her young nieces interesting and because they speak more kindly to her than anybody else has for years, and she enjoys the attention. Maggie stays on at the house and continues to help because the girls have money and buy more and better food. Things seem like they’re getting better at the ranch, but when Maggie and the girls return from buying food in town, Aunt Jane says that three strange men came to the house while they were gone, even entering her bedroom, and they tried to badger her into selling her ranch to them. At first, Maggie doesn’t believe that, but Aunt Jane has the paper the men left to prove it. Of course, Aunt Jane refused to sign anything and told the men to go away, but she seems a little shaken by the experience.

Boxcar Children Mystery Ranch Jane and Benny

The girls miss their brothers, and Aunt Jane tells them that the boys can come and stay, provided that they’re not like their grandfather. When the boys come, Aunt Jane likes them, too. To the children’s surprise, she tells them that she’s decided to give her ranch to the four of them because she has no children of her own and she would rather they have it than those men who tried to get her to sell. The prospect is thrilling, but when the lawyer comes to arrange everything, they make sure that the arrangement includes providing for Aunt Jane, too.

As the children explore their new ranch together, they see that things are as their grandfather described to them. The only animal Aunt Jane currently has is an old, black horse that Benny ironically names Snowball. However, they find an old hut that looks like someone has been living there recently. Who has been secretly camping out on Aunt Jane’s land? Is it the mysterious stranger who got off the train or the three tough guys who tried to get Aunt Jane to sell the ranch to them? Why would anybody even want the ranch anyway? The children find it charming, and while the girls like to imagine how they’d like to fix up the house, they know it isn’t worth much monetarily. There aren’t many animals, and while there’s fool’s gold on the land, there’s no real gold. Is there something else on the ranch that they don’t know about?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Boxcar Children Mystery Ranch geiger counter

As readers might have guessed, there is a resource on the ranch that the Aldens have overlooked for years, but other people have figured it out. However, more than the mystery, I like this book for the insights into the Alden family’s past. As I said, we never fully find out why Mr. Alden’s son and his wife had a falling out with him years ago and told the children he wasn’t very nice, but his sister’s feelings about him offer some clues to the type of boy and young man Mr. Alden was. Mr. Alden admits that he wasn’t always nice to his sister, and Jane says that he was always “bossy.” I get the feeling that Mr. Alden used to be the kind of man who thought that he knew best about everything and started feeling like he could tell everyone what to do. Perhaps his falling out with his son helped show him that he didn’t really know best about everything, including how to get along with his own family, but admittedly, that’s speculation.

Boxcar Children Mystery Ranch Jane's Presents

Jane also admits to being difficult to get along with in other ways. Her major problem has been her sense of pride, which is one of the reasons why she never wanted to listen to her brother or go to him for help when she needed it. One of their chief disputes had been about the ranch itself. Years ago, her parents and brother were ready to give up the ranch and move east, but Jane felt more attached to it than the others and insisted on staying there and running it herself. Unfortunately, Jane admits that she didn’t really know how to run the ranch properly. There were points when she could have asked for help, but that would have been admitting to the others that she had been wrong to insist on staying, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Things gradually got worse over time because Jane wouldn’t listen to anybody or ask for help, which is how the ranch got into its current state.

The discovery of an important resource on the ranch brings more money to the family, greater security for Jane, and a chance for the brother and sister to make up. Jane invites Mr. Alden to the ranch to celebrate her birthday and to help her and the children arrange things. Mr. Alden is careful to arrange the situation so that the resources can be mined while not disturbing the old ranch house, so his sister can continue to live in the house she always loved so much.

Posted on by TracyC

Blue Bay Mystery

The Boxcar Children

#6 Blue Bay Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1961, 1989.

Grandfather Alden has a surprise for his grandchildren. He is arranging a special trip for them as an extension of a business trip of his. A business associate of his, Lars, has a ship going to Tahiti, and he offered to let them come along. However, rather than just having a tour of Tahiti, which would be pretty exciting by itself, Lars is going to take them to camp out on a tropical island. Lars found this island while escaping from a shipwreck himself. No one lives there, but there is plenty of fresh water and edible plants and no dangerous animals. Not every family would like to be on an uninhabited island when they could be in Tahiti, but the kids love camping out and do-it-yourself activities. Grandfather Alden has also invited the children’s friend, Mike Wood (who was introduced in a previous book), to join them. Mike is the same age as Benny.

The trip will take place during the school year, so their grandfather has arranged for the children to bring along some school supplies and lessons to study while they’re on the boat to the island. The lessons help not only to pass the time while they’re traveling but also to enhance it. They have science lessons about marine animals and how parts of the ship, like the radio room, work. Violet tells the others about how she’s been reading about Captain Cook and how he realized that eating certain types of food, like citrus fruit and sauerkraut, helped to prevent scurvy, even though he didn’t realize that the reason is that those foods are rich in vitamin C.

Once they reach the island, their grandfather says that they won’t have time for school lessons because they will have to set up their shelter and learn how to fish and forage for food, although he considers those to be educational lessons as well. They bring some supplies and tools with them so they won’t have to forage for everything, but the kids like assembling their own shelter and improvising things, like they did when they made their own home in a boxcar in the first book. They eat out of shells they find, whittle their own spoons, and use a huge turtle shell they find as a cooking pot.

However, they soon realize that they are not as alone on the island as they thought. Some of their food disappears, and they find some colored stones arranged in patterns. There is a stone with a carved face, sort of like the Easter Island heads, and the turtle shell they find has been carved with a knife. Later, they encounter a myna bird who keeps repeating the phrase, “Hello, Peter!” Someone taught the bird the phrase in English, but who is on the island, and why does this person seem to be hiding from them?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

In the early Boxcar Children books, the children aged as the series progressed. After the death of the original author, when other authors continued the series, the children became frozen in age, but this book is one that was written by the original author. At the beginning of the story, the children’s grandfather mentions that the two oldest children, Henry and Jessie, are in high school, showing that they’ve aged about two or three years from the first book. This remark about the children’s ages only appears once at the beginning of the book, and their increasing ages aren’t really reflected in the story. The lessons the children have on the boat seem to be roughly about the same subjects, although it seems like the children’s lesson books aren’t identical because Violet seems like she’s the only one with the lesson about Captain Cook and scurvy.

This book also varies a little from the other books in the series because the children’s grandfather plays a larger role than usual. One of the hallmarks of the Boxcar Children books is that the children usually do things by themselves, with as little adult help or interference as possible. However, this time, their grandfather is with them on the island, sharing the adventure with them.

As with other vintage children’s mystery series, the early books of this series sometimes lean more toward adventure than mystery. The mystery in this story is pretty light, and the solution is pretty straight-forward. The children eventually find the person who’s camping out on the island with them. The person turns out to be a boy who was also shipwrecked. There was an adult sailor with him before, but the boy, Peter Horn, says that he went swimming one day and never came back, so he’s been alone ever since. The others say that he might have been attacked by a shark but they don’t dwell on it very long, as they do any time someone’s death is mentioned in one of the books in the series, so it doesn’t get too sad. Peter says his parents went overboard while they were escaping the shipwreck, and he doesn’t know whether they’re still alive. Mr. Alden says that he read about some people being rescued from a shipwreck, so it’s possible that they’re still alive. When they return to the mainland, Peter is reunited with this parents for a happy ending.

Posted on by TracyC

Seashells for Katie and Andy

Seashells for Katie and Andy by Solveig Paulson Russell, illustrated by Marjorie Cooper, 1973.

This is a cute little picture book that presents information about seashells in story form.

Katie and Andy are at the beach with their grandmother. As the children collect seashells, their grandmother tells them what kind of shells they are and a little about them.

The shells included in the book are: coquina shells, cowrie shells, triton shells, conch shells, lace murex, olive shells, scallop shells, and limpets.

Toward the end of the book, the kids ask their grandmother if they can find shells anywhere else besides the beach, and she tells them about snail shells.

The grandmother also tells the children about different uses people have for seashells. She talks about how they can be used for jewelry, vases, and decorations of different kinds. She also mentions that they can be broken up and used in roads, but the children don’t like the idea of breaking shells.

My Reaction

This book is nostalgic for me because my own grandmother was an amateur naturalist, and she used to give us gifts of seashells that she found in her own travels. Some of the shells in my old collection still have labels with the names of the shells in my grandmother’s handwriting.

In the beginning of the book, there is a note to parents and teachers from the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois about how the information in the book is educationally sound. I don’t have anything to criticize about the information in the book except one instance where the grandmother talks about “Indians” making necklaces from a certain type of shell. I’m pretty sure from context that they mean American Indians and not people from India, but I think that “American Indians” or “Native Americans” would be better terms to use for the sake of clarity.

They never say exactly where the beach in the story is, which would make a difference in the types of shells that the characters might find. Most of the shells covered in the book have a pretty broad worldwide distribution, but I suspect from the selection of shells given that the characters are probably in the Southeastern United States.

Posted on by TracyC · 5 Comments

Klutz Kids Travel

Kids Travel: A Backseat Survival Kit from Klutz Press, 1994.

This was one of the Klutz Press activity books that I had as a kid! I used to take it on the long road trips we would take across the country during the summer. The reason why this book is called a “kit” is that it came with a pouch with some extra equipment that could be used for the activities in the book and a special activity pad on a clipboard in the back. I don’t have my activity pad anymore, but it had pencil and paper games and puzzles, like mazes, connect-the-dots pictures, and grids for a Battleship style game that they called Lost on Earth, where you would attempt to find famous missing people or things instead of finding your opponent’s battleships.

The Lost on Earth games are especially funny when you know the references for who the missing people or what the missing things are, like who Amelia Earhart or D.B. Cooper is/was. When I was a kid, I didn’t know about D.B. Cooper (this YouTube video from Buzzfeed Unsolved explains), but I think one of the missing people on the activity pad grids was Jimmy Hoffa, and I knew that name (Buzzfeed Unsolved also covered that). The great thing about these references is that, if you’re playing this game with a kid who hasn’t heard of some of these people or things, just explaining who or what they are is activity by itself.

The pouch contained a set of markers for drawing and doing the activities on the activity pad, embroidery thread in different colors for making friendship bracelets and hair wraps, a loop of colorful string for making string figures, a small sheet for the Grown Up Pop Quiz, and some gummy playing pieces and dice for playing Parchesi (a board was included on one of the pages in the book). The gummy pieces would stick to the page, but not so tight that you couldn’t get them off. I think I saw a later edition of this book that used a different style of playing pieces, but I’m not sure now. The gummy pieces do gradually lose their ability to stick over time.

The activities in the book are meant to be done in a car. In the front of the book, there’s a section where you can record which license plates you’ve seen from different states in the US. (A common car activity on US road trips because there are 50 states, and they all have different styles of license plates. In theory, you could see examples of plates from all 50 states in a single, long car trip, but I never did. I’ve seen most of the states during a single trip, but I’ve never been table to check off all of them during a single trip.) There are also rules for playing many classic car games, mostly games that involve talking or hand motions or can be played on paper, like Twenty Questions, Paper, Rock, Scissors, and Hangman. It also describes popular car trip rituals, like holding your breath while passing a graveyard, lifting your feet while going over a bridge, or ducking your head while going under a bridge.

However, even though most of the activities are meant for car trips, many of them would be good for airplane trips as well. When I was a kid, airplanes were quieter, and it was much easier to talk to the person in the seat next to yours than it is now, so the talking games are still better for car trips. However, making friendship bracelets are ok for planes and trains as well as in a car. There are also activities for folding a dollar bill and making a paper fortune teller, making string figures, drawing superheroes, writing things in secret codes, reading palms, and learning some basic sign language.

What I’ve always liked best about this book is the variety of activities. There’s something for everyone in this book, and I’m still amused by some of the games and activities. If there’s an activity that the reader doesn’t like or that won’t work for the current location, there are plenty of others to move on to. Many of the activities in the book are either mentioned in other Klutz books or have entire Klutz books dedicated to them. Also, every part of this book is meant to be used for something. There is a finger maze around the title and copyright page, and when you remove the activity pad in the back, there is a board behind it to use for a game called Penny Hoops, which involves flicking pennies onto target areas on the board to earn points.

Sadly, I don’t think this book and activity kit are being sold new anymore, although there are some copies being sold used (I think most of the used books don’t come with the extra items in the original kit), and the book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

50 Card Games for Children

50 Card Games for Children by Vernon Quinn, 1933, 1946.

I love games of all kinds, and I was fascinated by this vintage children’s book about card games! Along with the card games, there is also a section in the book with card tricks. The vintage pictures in the book are also nice.

If you’re curious about what kind of card games children were playing during the Great Depression and around the time of WWII, this book offers some interesting insights! There were many games in the book that were already familiar to me, but there were some others that I had never heard of before.

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

Sections in the Book:

Card Games that Are Fun to Play

That struck me as an odd title for the very first section of the book, like whatever follows is going to be games that are not fun to play, but basically, this section contains multiplayer card games specifically aimed at children. It becomes clear when you study not only the contents but the titles of the other sections, which are about solitaire games, card tricks, and a section about popular card games that adults play.

I recognized a number of popular children’s card games in this section, like I Doubt It, War, Concentration, Hearts, Old Maid, and “Go Fishing” (which is what they call it instead of Go Fish, which is what I’ve always heard it called). There were some other games that I didn’t recognize, like The Earl of Coventry, Rolling Stone, Frogs in the Pond, and My Ship Sails.

Twelve Games of Solitaire

I was familiar with Klondike, Canfield, Pyramid, and Around the Clock (which I always called Clock Solitaire). I had never heard of Pirate Gold, Spread Eagle, Lazy Boy, or Down the Stairs before.

Twelve Card Tricks

These are magic tricks with cards. Some of them sound a bit complex when you’re reading the descriptions, but I think they would be more clean when actually trying them with a deck of cards.

Some Games That Grown-Ups Play

The games in this section are Rummy, Casino, Seven-Up (also known as High-Low-Jack), High Five, Cooncan, and Five Hundred. Actually, I have seen Rummy decks specifically for children, usually Animal Rummy, but that’s still a Rummy version, so that game isn’t just for adults.

An Easy Lesson in Contract Bridge

I never thought of Bridge as being easy because I’ve always been intimidated by the concept of bidding. I understand trick-taking games like Whist, but I haven’t wanted to try Bridge because of the bidding. Actually, I think this basic description for children is a good tutorial for people like me, who find the bidding concepts confusing.

Posted on by TracyC

The Lettering Book

The Lettering Book by Noelene Morris, 1984.

I remember buying this book at a Scholastic book fair back in the early 1990s, and for a while afterward, I went through a phase where I kept trying to invent different types of decorative writing. I kept them in a notebook, and most look a bit silly, like the one where the letters were made of ice cream cones and the one where the letters were weird sheep with little feet, but I had fun!

The book is about types of lettering, but it’s really much more than that. The main focus is on designing a poster. The first part of the book goes into detail about planning your poster to convey your message to other people. It recommends making an outline of your information before beginning the project and deciding what visual elements you need to include, like diagrams and pictures. There are some useful tips about research and writing, if the presentation is part of a research project.

Then the book provides examples of how to design a page, showing different possible layouts for organizing page headings, text, and images. Although this book was planned around the idea of a printed poster, I think the layout suggestions and concepts could also be used for electronic media, such as web design or PowerPoint presentations.

There are also examples for the shapes of headings and pictures and the positioning of image captions.

The book recommends using decorative markers, borders, and horizontal rules to add visual interest to the information, separate sections of a page, and make projects look more finished.

When it comes to making the lettering of the poster or page, it explains the elements that define a print style – height and width of letters, slope, line variations, pattern, color, 3D effect, and separation and spacing of letters or overlapping of letters.

A large part of the book shows examples of letters of the alphabet and numerals in different fonts. Some of them are recognizable as fonts that still used in word processing software and on the Internet.

There are also pages with examples, showing how certain styles of lettering can convey a mood or idea in headings and sample phrases.

The front and back flaps of the book fold out, and there is a chart of the parts of a page, a couple of grids like those used for planning lettering styles, and a glossary of terms used in the book.

I couldn’t find this particular book online, but a couple of related books by the same author are available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. I think I also used to own The Lettering Book of Alphabets, probably purchased at the same time as this book, and that inspired my alphabet lettering phase. The Lettering Book Companion is a companion book to The Lettering Book, and it particularly focuses on decorative borders.

Posted on by TracyC

The Cartoon Book

The Cartoon Book by James Kemsley, 1990.

I remember buying this book at a Scholastic book fair back in the early 1990s. I didn’t draw a lot of cartoons, but I found the tips in this book to be helpful for drawing in general. The book begins with the useful advice:

“I believe that anyone can draw cartoons. All they need are a few hints to set them on the right track, self-confidence and heaps of PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!”

The book aims to make cartooning accessible and unintimidating to even the most basic beginners. There is a section where the author explains about the types of pens, pencils, markers, and other materials that a budding cartoonist can use, which seems overwhelming, but it ends by saying that all you really need is a pencil and a blank piece of paper. Our host is shown as a friendly cartoon pencil throughout the book.

The drawing tips begin with advice for creating character expressions, starting by focusing on the lines and shapes of the eyes. Then, it shows how to add those expressive eyes to heads. What I always liked about this book is that it says the heads can be any size or shape you want them to be. It doesn’t matter if they’re misshapen and lumpy because it’s a cartoon. It’s supposed to be fun and expressive, not perfect, which is very liberating. Even bodies can be different shapes, and they don’t have to be perfect!

Just draw a roundish shape on top of a body, give it expressive eyes, and add an expressive mouth that works with the eyes to show the character’s mood, and there you go!

From there, the book gives brief tips about adding clothes to the body and drawing hands, arms, and legs to show motion. It also briefly shows how to draw animals and animals that are like humans and how to add expressions to inanimate objects and make them characters.

One of the tips that I’ve appreciated is the advice that it’s okay to hide things that you can’t draw well until you’ve learned to draw them better. For example, if you don’t draw hands well, you can just have characters hold their hands behind their backs. There are also tips for fixing mistakes along the way.

The book also explains how to plan and plot a comic strip. It discusses considering your audience, choosing the types of characters you want to use and giving them personalities, and developing your presentation style with different types of panel borders and speech balloons. It also explains the cliches that cartoonists use, certain common visual signals that cartoonists use to express certain types of speech or events or show movement. The light bulbs over a character’s head when they have an idea is an example of a cartoonist cliche.

The author of this book, James Kemsley, was an Australian cartoonist particularly known for his work on the long-running Ginger Meggs comic strip. I wasn’t familiar with Ginger Meggs when I was a kid because it didn’t appear in newspapers in my area, but I found it interesting to read about when I was looking into the background of this book’s author.

Posted on by TracyC

Secrets Your Handwriting Reveals

Secrets Your Handwriting Reveals by Carole Gerber, 1991.

I brought this little book at a book fair when I was a kid, and trying to analyze other people’s handwriting made me feel like a detective! As an adult, I know that graphology is considered a pseudoscience because the techniques used and the results are subjective. (Forensic handwriting analysis is different.) I don’t know how much faith I’d put in any of the tips in this book for reading someone’s personality, but as a summer activity for kids playing detective, it’s not bad.

The book begins with an explanation of what graphology is and its history. Graphology has its origins in Ancient Greece, although the term “graphology” wasn’t coined until the late 1800s. The book discusses how graphology has been used in forensic situations, such as determining whether someone’s signature was forged, and how businesses sometimes using handwriting analysis as an indicator of which applicant would be the best for a job. I’m not sure how much stock I put in the second application, although the first one seems useful. The book also mentions that certain types of health problems can make a person’s handwriting shaky. I think that could be true since stable handwriting requires good muscle control, and muscle control can be weakened by disease. The book does say that a graphologist can’t diagnose disease from a person’s handwriting, but they can point out when a person seems to be weakened by a health problem.

From there, the book explains features of a person’s handwriting to watch in order to identify different personality traits, from the way the writing tilts to how consistent the connections between letters are, to the different ways that letters can be shaped.

Some of what they say about different people’s handwriting makes sense, even from just a cursory glance. It would make sense to say that writing that is neat and even (not to mention showing proper spelling and grammar) is a sign of a well-organized individual, compared to writing that is sloppy and full of errors and scratch-outs.

I did notice (even as a child, I think), that some of the personality traits they point out in their sample handwriting analysis comparisons could be just as easily deduced from what the person says as what their handwriting looks like. I think that’s because the author knew what personality traits she wanted to point out and made sure that the samples were written in character.

The book ends with a short quiz where readers are expected to match up handwriting samples with personality traits.

There is also a brief section at the very end that suggests that consciously changing your handwriting can help change your character. Personally, I doubt whether writing in a slightly different style by itself can help break bad habits, although I suppose if you want to be very conscious of a personal trait that you want to change, anything you do that helps keep it at the front of your mind can remind you to be more careful of your personal behavior and act differently than you might if you just weren’t thinking.