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.

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Winnie-the-Pooh and the Pebble Hunt

Winnie-the-Pooh and the Pebble Hunt by Walt Disney Productions, 1982.

This is a First Little Golden Book.

Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet are trying to think of something to do. Piglet suggests a heffalump hunt, but Winnie-the-Pooh says that he would rather go on a pebble hunt because it’s easier to find pebbles.

They get a sock to keep their pebbles in, and they start collecting pebbles. However, they don’t notice right away that there is a hole in the toe of the sock, and the pebbles they collect fall out as they go.

They discover the hole when they stop to count how many pebbles they’ve found, and they realize that there’s only one pebble left in the sock. Also, they suddenly realize that they’re lost.

Fortunately, Winnie-the-Pooh realizes that they can follow the trail of pebbles they’ve lost to find their way back home. They tie a hole in the sock to stop the pebbles they’ve collected from falling out again, and they follow their pebble trail, picking up the pebbles again on their way home.

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

My Reaction

This is a cute and fun story where Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet discover that their mistake in losing the pebbles they’ve been collecting is actually a stroke of good luck because their trail of dropped pebbles helps them find their way home when they’re lost. This little picture book was a favorite of mine and my brother’s when we were little, and my family still likes to jokingly quote Piglet when he realizes that there’s only one pebble left, and Pooh asks him to count again, slowly, just to be sure: “One pebble. I counted very slowly.”

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The Little Red Hen

The Little Red Hen pictures by Tadasu Izawa and Shigemi Hijikata, 1968.

This cute picture book is part of a series of Puppet Storybooks. What makes it distinctive from other picture books is that the pictures are all photographs of tableaux with detailed puppets. The story is a retelling of the classic Little Red Hen folktale.

A hen finds a grain of wheat, but no one is interested in helping her plant it, so she does it herself. When it’s time to harvest the wheat, none of the other animals will help her, so she also cuts the wheat herself.

Because no one wants to help her, she takes the wheat to the mill to be made into flour and bakes it into bread all by herself.

When she has the nice loaf of bread that she has made, all of the animals who didn’t want to help before suddenly come to help her eat it. However, since none of them helped with making the bread, the Little Red Hen eats the bread herself with her chicks.

My Reaction

I’ve had this book since I was a little kid, and I always liked the pictures! The puppets are detailed and posed in realistic ways. The picture on the cover of the book is a 3D hologram, and I was fascinated by it as a young child. It was one of the first holographic images that I saw as a child!

(In my defense, I might not have been the one who scribbled crayon on that cover image. I was pretty good about not drawing on books when I was little, and most of my childhood books were used, so that scribble might have happened before I got it. I don’t remember anymore, so it’s hard to deny it completely, but according to my memory, my messy scribbles were done on the back wall of my closet, behind my clothes, because I knew that drawing on walls wasn’t allowed, and I was realized that if you’re going to draw on the wrong surface, it’s best to do it where nobody’s going to see it and complain. I was sneaky like that.)

While my copy of this book was printed in English, the books in the series were originally written, illustrated, printed, and bound in Japan. I never noticed that when I was a kid because I never bothered to look at the names of the illustrators and had no interest in where it was printed, but I found it interesting as an adult. It makes me think that there are probably also versions of this book written in Japanese, but I’ve never seen any.

Posted on by TracyC

How Fletcher Was Hatched

How Fletcher Was Hatched! by Wende and Harry Devlin, 1969.

Fletcher the dog is sad and upset because it seems like his owner, Alexandra, is forgetting about him. She’s been playing with the new baby chicks, which she thinks are cute, and she’s been forgetting to pet her dog or even fill his water bowl!

Distressed, Fletcher goes to see his friends, Beaver and Otter, at the pond. Beaver and Otter don’t have human owners, so they don’t understand Fletcher’s feelings about Alexandra, but they try to think of ways to get her attention. They think it would help if Fletcher could make himself more like the chicks Alexandra has been obsessed with. Aince he can’t make himself small and yellow, they decide that he should hatch out of an egg, like the chicks do. Fletcher is skeptical about this plan, but Beaver and Otter think that hatching out of an egg will be like having a new beginning in his relationship with Alexandra.

Beaver and Otter build an egg around Fletcher with reeds, grass, and clay from the river, leaving a little hole so they can give Fletcher water and food. When they’re done, it’s a very convincing but giant egg.

By the time they’re finished, it’s night. Fletcher is uncomfortable sleeping in the egg and wonders what Alexandra is doing. Meanwhile, Alexandra is having trouble sleeping because she’s worried about her lost dog.

In the morning, Beaver and Otto roll the egg over to Alexandra’s school to make sure that she sees it. The first person who sees the egg, though, is the school’s custodian. He’s shocked at the sight of such a giant egg and starts yelling for the science teacher to come look at it.

Soon, the egg is surrounded by children and adults, marveling over what kind of it could be and where it came from. The science teacher brings a friend who is a university professor, and the two of them are convinced that the egg must belong to a rare creature, although they disagree about the type of creature it is.

Fletcher waits to hatch until he hears Alexandra. Alexandra’s friends are excited about the egg, but she’s just upset and only wants to go looking for her lost dog.

Fletcher decides it’s time to hatch, and he busts his way out of the egg. Alexandra is happy to see him, even though Fletcher’s attempt at peeping is a little weak. Everyone is confused, but Alexandra is just relieved that she has her dog back. Fletcher feels better, realizing that he is important to Alexandra, and she really cares about him, even though he’s not yellow and doesn’t peep.

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

My Reaction

I read this book as a kid, but I had forgotten much of the story. I remembered that Fletcher hatched out of an artificial egg and that he did it to get his owner’s attention, but I couldn’t remember why he needed attention. I can understand Alexandra being temporarily distracted by the little chicks on the farm, but forgetting to give her dog water is really bad for a pet owner. I felt like her parents should have noticed and said something. But, mostly, the situation is just set up for the purposes of this humorous hatching of a dog from a giant egg. Because the egg was created by animals, the humans in the story never find out how or why Fletcher got in the egg, which is actually the funniest part for me as an adult.