Posted on by TracyC

The Grey King

The Dark is Rising Sequence

The Grey King by Susan Cooper, 1975.

This is the fourth book in The Dark is Rising Sequence, and it picks up not long after the previous book ends.

Will Stanton has been very ill with hepatitis, and the doctor ask advised his parents to send him somewhere to rest for a while and recover his strength. In the previous book, his sister Mary had gone to stay with relatives in Wales after she had the mumps, so his parents agree to send him there. Even after he recovers, Will has a nagging feeling that he’s forgotten something very important. What he’s forgotten are the clues that he and his friends discovered at the end of the previous book, but little by little, they come back to him.

Will calls his relatives Aunt Gem and Uncle David, but really, they’re distant cousins. On his way to stay with them on their farm, Will sees a mountain that locals call “the Grey King”, which begins bringing back Will’s memory of the clues to the next item of power that he and his friends are supposed to find. An encounter with a strange dog with silvery eyes brings back the rest of Will’s memory, reminding him that he is the youngest of the Old Ones and it is his mission to find a magical harp in Wales.

The owner of the dog is an albino boy named Bran, who surprisingly knows the clues that Will had been struggling to remember. Bran reveals that Merriman visited him before Will arrived, told him to keep an eye out for Will and help him, and taught him the first part of the clue rhyme as a show that he can be trusted. The boys talk about what the clues in the rhyme mean. Will is supposed to find the harp on “the Day of the Dead”, which Will thinks means Halloween and which is coming soon, but he’s confused because the rhyme also refers to the end of the year. Bran says that Halloween might have once been regarded as the time of the New Year (which is true, and I discussed it in the History section of my Halloween Ideas site), and the two of them discuss some old traditions and superstitions about Halloween.

On Halloween, Bran and Will go into the mountains, and Will’s knowledge and abilities are tested before they are given the harp. Yet, Will is not the one to play it because he doesn’t know how. Bran is the harper. He also seems to have a strange connection to one of the lords who guarded the harp in the mountains. On the way down, the boys have a frightening encounter with a fox who has been killing sheep in the area, but weirdly, nobody else else can see the fox but the boys. A disagreeable farmer shoots poor Bran’s brave dog because he thinks that the dog is the one killing the sheep, and Bran is inconsolable. (I hate books where the dog dies.)

However, their work is not yet done. Will has to use what he’s learned from Bran about playing the harp to wake the Sleepers, who will aid the Light in the upcoming battle against the Dark. Bran also comes to learn his true identity and that of his mother. Although he is not one of the Old Ones, Bran is special and will play a pivotal role in the battle between Light and Dark.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Even though this book is the Newbery Medal winner in the series, I didn’t like it as well as the earlier books. It’s partly because the dog Cafall dies, and I always hate books where the dog dies. I love dogs, and also, I realize that it’s often a cheap way to give readers and emotional wrench, to kill off a beloved animal. Also, I missed the familiar characters from the earlier books. The Drew children are not in this story, and even Merriman doesn’t play much of a role. For most of the story, Will is alone, although he does make an important friend in Bran, whose past is more mysterious than most people know.

Although, Cafall also represents one of the innocent sacrifices in the name of the battle between good and evil. Bran is angry at Cafall’s death and says that neither he nor his dog were part of Will’s battle or quest, and it wasn’t fair for them to be dragged into it or for Cafall to be killed. He’s partly right, although he is actually much closer to the center of this battle than he knows. Another character in the book talks to Will about the apparent callousness of the Light for those who end up being sacrificed in the struggle. Will’s answer is that some things cannot be helped. They might want to protect everyone and make things work out well for everyone, but circumstances don’t always make it possible, and there are times when trying to save someone or make someone happy could cause something else to happen that would be worse for everyone. I’m not completely satisfied with that explanation because, in this particular instance, I don’t see why this sacrifice was necessary and I feel like it could have been avoided, like I felt that another tragedy in The Dark is Rising could have been avoided. I suppose the principle that avoiding one sort of bad thing could lead to something worse could be true, but I just don’t feel it in these stories.

I was more convinced and intrigued by the concept of people who aid the dark without knowing that they’re doing it. In the previous book in the series, the author addressed the idea of neutral parties in the struggle between good and evil, but this book introduces the idea of ignorant or deluded people who do bad things without realizing. In the story, they aren’t regarded as true agents of the Dark because they haven’t consciously joined the Dark side and don’t even know that there’s any Light/Dark struggle happening around them, but they are doing what the Dark wants them to do and hurting people and the cause of the Light either because they are being tricked and manipulated into doing it or because they have some other motive that allows them to do bad things because they don’t care as much about the concept of good and evil as much as accomplishing their own goal.

In this case, the unwitting helper of the dark is the farmer who shot Bran’s dog. He genuinely did think that the dog was killing his sheep, so he thought that he was just protecting his property by killing the dog. That could be seen as a good motive gone astray, but when Bran’s real history is revealed, it is also revealed that the farmer also has darker motives for his bad behavior that he has been trying to keep hidden. It’s not just about protecting his sheep but also his resentment against Bran and Bran’s father, so he enjoyed hurting them by killing their dog. The farmer’s resentment goes back to when Bran’s mother, Guinevere, brought him out of the past to be raised by his adoptive father in the 20th century. Bran’s real father is King Arthur, but by the time Bran was born, Guinevere had already betrayed Arthur and feared that he would reject his son because of what she did. She wanted Bran to grow up in a safe place, away from his parents’ struggles. At her request, Merlin (which is Merriman Lyon’s real identity), brought her forward in time to the 20th century to find a new home for Bran. Bran’s adoptive father is a good man, and Guinevere knew that her son would be safe with him. He loved her in return and wanted her to stay and marry him, but Guinevere knew she couldn’t stay, so she left secretly, leaving Bran behind. Her departure might have been hastened because the farmer was jealous of Bran’s adoptive father for having Guinevere. Although he didn’t know Guinevere’s true identity, she was a beautiful woman, and the farmer wanted her for himself. He apparently tried to attack her or maybe even force himself on her, and he was fought off by Bran’s adoptive father and a friend of his. Although the farmer is a married man, he still harbors possessive feelings about Bran’s absent mother and resentment toward the men who stopped him from taking her. By extension, he also resents Bran. In the end, he is driven mad by his obsessions and his manipulation by the forces of the Dark.

Posted on by TracyC

Greenwitch

The Dark is Rising Sequence

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper, 1974.

This is the third book in The Dark is Rising Sequence, and it brings together the two sets of characters who have already been established in the series: the three Drew children from the first book and Will Stanton and the Old Ones from the second book.

The story begins with the theft of the grail that the Drew children found in the first book with their Great-Uncle Merry, otherwise known as Merriman Lyon. The grail was stolen from the museum where it was being studied, and Merry wasn’t there because he was supposedly on an extended trip to Greece. However, when word of the theft spreads, Merry comes back to see the children. He is the only person other than the children who know that the thieves who took the grail were not ordinary thieves but agents of the Dark, the forces of evil. Merry say that he believes that they took the grail because it will lead them to something else that they’re seeking. He says that he will need the children’s help again and asks them to trust him. There will be danger, but he promises them protection. The children agree and accept Merry’s invitation to spend their holidays in Cornwall with him again.

Meanwhile, Will Stanton is bored because his older brothers and sister are off doing other things. Even though he is secretly one of the Old Ones and has great powers, he is also still the youngest in his family and feels left out of things that his older siblings are able to do. Then, a mysterious stranger arrives and introduces himself as Will’s Uncle Bill. Will was named after Bill, who is one of his father’s brothers and has been living in the United States for as long as Will can remember. Will’s parents are glad to see Bill, and Bill offers to take Will with him on a trip to Cornwall because a friend of his who is also staying there will have a couple of nephews about Will’s age staying with him. Will is eager to go, and his parents agree to let him.

Of course, the friend that Uncle Bill is talking about is Uncle Merry, and the nephews are Simon and Barney Drew, along with their sister Jane. At first, the Drew boys don’t like Will much because they think he’s going to interfere in their mission with their Uncle Merry, not knowing yet that Will has special powers and is directly involved in the fight against the Dark as their ally.

Shortly after they arrive in the village where the Drew children stayed in the first book, Will and Uncle Merry mention a pagan ceremony that is still being practiced in the area called the Greenwitch. Uncle Merry says that Jane may watch it, but not the boys because only women are allowed to attend the ritual. However, the dog Rufus that the children befriended on their last visit is kidnapped, and they are given the warning that the captain who owns him had better stay away from the Greenwitch if he wants him back. Unbeknownst to the children, the captain, who is the man who owns the house where they stayed last time, is another of the Old Ones.

Still, Mrs. Penhallow, the wife of a fisherman they met in the first book, invites Jane to come with her to see the Greenwitch being made. Jane doesn’t know what that means at first, but she goes to the ceremony anyway. Jane watches the local women weaving branches together to make a strange figure. It makes Jane uneasy because it doesn’t seem human but it has a kind of power. The women tell her that few people can sense its power but that people make wishes on it before tossing the Greenwitch into the sea for luck. Jane is given the opportunity to make a wish herself, and she finds herself wishing that the Greenwitch could be happy because she senses a loneliness about the figure. She feels a little silly for that wish after she realizes that she could have wished to find the grail again instead. One of the women there approves of the sentiment of Jane’s wish although she notes that it’s also a dangerous one because it’s difficult to know what might make someone happy. Some people find happiness in dark or dangerous things, but in this case, it might be a very good wish.

However, the forces of darkness are also targeting Barney. Barney has recently been developing artistic skills, like the children’s mother, and an artist who serves the Dark steals one of his drawings to gain control over him. The Dark needs Barney, at least for a short period, because he can do something that none of them can; Barney can look into the grail and tell them what he sees.

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

My Reaction

There are even more pagan references in this story than in the previous two. The Greenwitch is a fictional ceremony, but it seems like it’s based on or inspired by a kind of folk magic. It might be that the local women who make the Greenwitch are meant to represent a coven performing magic. I’m not going to go too deep into the history pre-Christian traditions because this isn’t a real ritual that I can trace and the history of neo-paganism is complicated. If you’re curious, I recommend watching this documentary about the life of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca. I don’t really believe in Wicca myself, but I think Gerald Gardner is a delightful eccentric and fun to hear about. (Just don’t show the documentary to kids without watching it yourself. There are a couple of things in there that night not be suitable for young kids.)

It’s not all focused on the folklore of the British Isles, though. At one point in the story, the characters seek the help of Tethys, a figure from Greek mythology. The Greenwitch is meant as a tribute to her, so she has power over it, and the characters need something from the Greenwitch. This story introduces the idea that, although the stories are about the struggle between good and evil, Light and Dark, there are also some powerful, ancient forces that are not part of this struggle, including Tethys and the Greenwitch. These forces are neutral, and their neutrality requires that they neither help nor hinder either side in the struggle. Tethys and the Greewitch are among those neutral forces.

Part of this story also involves characters doing things they shouldn’t because they don’t have all of the information they really need to make better decisions. Ignorance and half-knowledge are annoying parts of stories like this, plot devices to allow characters to get into dangerous situations. It all works out for the best in the end, though.

Posted on by TracyC

The Dark is Rising

The Dark is Rising Sequence

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, 1973.

The day before his eleventh birthday on Midwinter, Will Stanton has an uneasy feeling that something is about to happen. First, the rabbits that his family keep behave oddly. Then, other animals seem to be afraid of him when they never have before. When he and his brother James go to pick up some hay from Mr. Dawson, Mr. Dawson makes an odd comment about “the Walker” being abroad and that it’s going to be a bad night. Then, Mr. Dawson says that he has something for Will for his birthday. He gives Will an odd iron ornament and tells him to keep it safe and not talk about it with other people. Everything about this day seems odd to Will, but he accepts this unusual gift.

That night, Will has an increasing sense of terror, and a rook apparently breaks the skylight in his room during a snow storm. The next day, Will can’t seem to wake up his sleeping family. He puts on warm clothes and leaves the house with a strange feeling that this is somehow his destiny. Things in the area look different, as if he is now in a different time, sometime in the past. Eventually, he sees a man he knows who works for Mr. Dawson, John Smith. John Smith is working on horseshoes for a black horse that belongs to a mysterious stranger in a dark cloak. The mysterious stranger offers him food and a ride on his horse, but Will refuses both. The stranger gives him an uneasy feeling, and without really knowing why, Will says that he is looking for “the Walker.” The cloaked stranger tells him that “the Rider is abroad” and tries to grab him, but John Smith pulls him out of the way, and the stranger is angry. John Smith tells Will that he is just newly woken and will have to figure things out for himself but to trust his instincts today. A beautiful white horse appears, and John Smith says that Will can ride it, if he wants, but Will’s instincts tell him that he needs to go on alone. As he leaves, Will sees John Smith giving the white mare shoes that look like the iron ornament that Mr. Dawson gave him.

As he explores the countryside further, Will encounters a wandering tramp that he saw attacked by rooks the day before and confronts him as being “the Walker.” The Walker is defensive and suspicious, and he asks Will to show him “the Sign.” Will realizes that he must mean the iron ornament that he now wears on his belt, but before he can show it to the Walker, the Rider comes and frightens the Walker away. The Rider sees his Sign and comments that Will only has one of them so far, and that won’t help him much. Fortunately, the white mare comes and carries Will away from the Rider.

The white mare carries Will away into the hills, he has a sensation like he’s falling, and then, he finds himself alone in the snow near a pair of carved wooden doors that appear to be standing by themselves, attached to nothing. Will pushes on the doors and finds himself in what seems to be a great hall, hung with tapestries. There is an old woman and a tall man standing by the fireplace, and they greet him. Will tries to ask them about the doors and why they seem to be standing by themselves, but the doors have vanished behind him. The man says that Will’s first lesson is that nothing is what it seems to be.

The man introduces himself as Merriman Lyon (introduced in the previous book in the series), and he says that he and Will were born with the same gift, the power of the Old Ones. Now that it’s Will’s eleventh birthday, his gift is awakening, but he must learn how to control it. At first, Will doesn’t think that he has any particular gift, so Merriman shows him how he can receive mental pictures from someone else’s mind and send them a mental picture and how he can even put out a fire with his mind. Will becomes convinced that he does indeed have powers that normal boys don’t have. Merriman tells him that this gift is a burden, like many special gifts, but he was born with this gift for a special purpose.

Merriman says that he doesn’t want to tell him too much yet because the full knowledge of his destiny may be dangerous for him while he is still learning to use his gift. However, he does tell Will that he is actually one of the Old Ones, the first of his kind to be born in the last 500 years, and he will be the very last of them. Like other Old Ones, he will play a role in the battle between good and evil. His first role is that of the Sign-Seeker. He must find the six Signs and guard them. The iron ornament is the first Sign, but the others won’t be as easy to find.

Will returns to his family and his ordinary life, buying Christmas presents for his siblings for the coming holiday, but he knows that his life is no longer ordinary. He has much to learn about how to use his powers, and the sinister forces that pursue him to try to stop him from carrying out his mission.

The book is a Newbery Honor Book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book was adapted as a movie called The Seeker in 2007.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Fantasy books sometimes have to deal with the subject of religion and the relationship between magic and religion. This book also does so somewhat, but I noticed that it also seems to try to remove itself from consideration of the issue at the same time. At one point, Merriman discusses the idea of witches and witchcraft trials with Will, telling him that none of those involved were Old Ones, like the two of them. He says that everyone involved with witchcraft trials were ordinary humans, most of the people who were called “witches” were innocent victims although a small number were genuinely evil, and generally, the witchcraft trials were the result of human madness and irrationality, not genuine magic. In other words, readers don’t need to worry about trying to reconcile the power of the Old Ones with witchcraft because the author says that the two of them are two different, unrelated things.

Will and his family celebrate Christmas during the course of the book, and they go to church, so it’s apparently fine for an Old One to also be a Christian. Yet, there is a scene at church on Christmas where Will and John Smith have to stop the forces of the Dark attacking the church. The minister tries by calling on the powers of God and exorcising the evil spirits, but John Smith says that the minister’s efforts don’t work because “This battle is not for his fighting”, apparently indicating that the powers of Light and Dark as portrayed in this story are somehow outside of any religion or the interference of any god because they are forces that are completely unto themselves. The traditional Christian view would be that God commands the forces of good and light while the devil commands the forces of evil and darkness, but they’re saying here that’s not the case in this story. Will’s thought is that there is a place that exists out of time where all the Gods that ever were came from and also all of the forces and powers in the world, and it seems like some of these exist independently of each other, that they don’t have any beginning and so none of them is less old than any of the others. There is an element of pagan and folklore traditions that runs through these books, and I think that part of this concept references that, but I also see that looking at the battle between Light and Dark in this way, as being something independent of absolutely everything else, leaves the author of the stories free to have it play out in whatever way makes a good story without having to make it adhere to any rules and traditions other than the ones she’s chosen.

Of course, even fictional magic has to follow some rules in order to make logical sense to the readers. As I said, there are pagan and/or folklore traditions that are implied to be true or to have more significance than most people would suspect. Will uses holly as a form of protection for his home during Christmas. Aside from its association with Christmas, there are also many folkloric superstitions about holly. It is also revealed that part of what makes Will so special is that he is the seventh son of a seventh son, another concept from folklore.

A theme that is carried over to this book from the first one in the series is that evil can sometimes appear innocent and even friendly. People who have appeared as friends before can be revealed to be secretly evil or coerced to the dark side, even people who have been close before. Those who aren’t as in tune with the battle between good and evil may be fooled by friendly smiles, charming manners, and a pleasant appearance, but those who are aware of the difference between dark and light can feel when someone isn’t right.

There is one case in this book where a previously good person turns to the Dark because he feels betrayed about how Merry put his life at risk for the cause of the Light. I feel like this could have been avoided if Merry had been more honest with him in the beginning about the risks of what they were doing and the reasons why it was so important, but Merry seems to feel like it was all inevitable, something that was fated to be. Yet, at the end of this person’s life, Merry emphasizes that all of the choices this person made were his own, and although he went through much suffering because of things that had to happen as they did, he could have still had a better life even while undergoing his ordeals if he had made different choices along the way. I think I see what he means, that there are some things in life that are unavoidable but people can make them better or worse through their own choices and behavior, but I still feel like Merry set him up for this bad situation because he didn’t explain things properly when he should have. Maybe that was Merry’s bad decision, too?

Parts of this book actually reminded me of The Box of Delights, a vintage children’s fantasy book that also takes place at Christmas. In both books, Herne the Hunter, a character from folklore, makes an appearance, and the boys in each story get turned into different animals through their adventures with magical books.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Over Sea, Under Stone

The Dark is Rising Sequence

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, 1965.

The Drew family is spending the summer in Cornwall with their Great-Uncle Merry. Professor Merriman “Merry” Lyon isn’t really a relative, but a very old family friend who teaches at a university and has a somewhat mysterious past. Of the three Drew children – Simon, Jane, and Barney – Barney is the one most looking forward to their time in Cornwall because he loves Arthurian stories, and he is fascinated by Cornwall’s connections with King Arthur. Simon is more interested in watching boats.

One day, while the children are bored because it’s raining, they start playing at being explorers inside the house where they’re staying and discover a secret passage to a hidden room. There, they find an old manuscript that seems to be some kind of treasure map! It seems like parts are written in Latin, but even Simon, who has studied Latin in school, can’t read it all. At first, they wonder if they should tell their parents about it, but they decide not to, at least not right away, because their parents would probably tell them not to touch it because it doesn’t belong to them. They feel like they just have to figure out what it means and what it might lead to.

The family makes the acquaintance of a yacht owner, Mr. Withers, and his sister, and the two of them invite the whole family to go for a ride on their yacht. Mrs. Drew is an artist and wants to spend the day painting, so she declines, and so does Jane. Jane says that she’s afraid of getting seasick, but really, the Witherses give her an uneasy feeling. Jane feels like there’s something that’s not right about them, and it’s strange that Miss Withers asks them if they’ve found any secret passages in the house just after they actually found one. None of the children confide anything in Miss Withers. Mr. Withers seems oddly interested in the books in the house.

The next day, while her father and brothers go out on the yacht with the Witherses, Jane studies the manuscript and tries to figure out what it means. When she also finds an old guidebook to the area in an old trunk, she realizes that the map on the manuscript shows the area where they are staying, but there’s something strange about the coastline. The coastline on the old map is a slightly different shape. Jane wonders if one of the two maps could be wrong or if the coastline has changed somehow over the years because the manuscript looks very old.

Since the guidebook was written by the local vicar, Jane decides to go see him and ask him about the coastline and whether it’s changed over the years. She takes along the guidebook but not the manuscript. However, the vicar she meets says he’s the new vicar, not the old one who wrote the book. She talks to him about the book and the coastline anyway, but he gives her a bad feeling, similar to the one that the Witherses give her. The vicar discounts the idea of the coastline changing, and he asks Jane uncomfortable questions about the books in the house, pressing her for answers that she doesn’t have and doesn’t want to give him.

When the boys come back from the yacht, and Jane tells them about the guidebook and the vicar, Simon is irritated that Jane tried to investigate the manuscript without them, and he doesn’t think she should have talked to the vicar. Jane says that she didn’t tell the vicar about the manuscript, only the guidebook, and Barney says that what Jane learned is important.

The next morning, they wake up to find that the house has been ransacked. Books have been tossed all over in the middle of the night by someone who was clearly hunting for something. The children are sure that their mysterious intruder was searching for the manuscript, which is safe because Jane had it hidden in her bed. But, who was it? Was it the vicar or the Witherses? All of them seemed interested in old books and manuscripts, and they all seem suspicious. What is the real significance of the manuscript anyway?

Still not wanting to tell their parents or the police who were called to investigate the break-in, the children confide in Great-Uncle Merry about the manuscript and their suspicions. Uncle Merry knows more about the manuscript than the children know, and he tells them about a lost grail, a copy of the original Holy Grail, inscribed with the true story of King Arthur and about an ancient struggle between good and evil, a struggle that the children have now joined.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book was once adapted as a tv mini-series, but apparently, no copies of it survive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

This book is the first in a series about the struggle between good and evil, known as the Light and the Dark, and all of the other books in the series also draw on Arthurian legends. Merry and the children appear in other books, although not always together. Merry (the children sometimes call him Gumerry, which is short for Great-Uncle Merry) isn’t quite what he appears to be, which is how he knows things that other adults don’t know. There are hints in this book about Merry’s real identity, but it isn’t explained in this book, although Barney has a feeling that his name is a clue.

When Merry explains about the battle between good and evil, he says that the struggle has been going on for ages, and neither side ever completely wins or completely loses. It’s like that in this story, too. At first, I wasn’t completely sure whether they would actually find the grail or if it would turn out to be a MacGuffin, only existing to drive the action without it being really important whether it was actually found or not. The heroes do actually find and successfully retrieve the grail, but they also lose the manuscripts they’ve found before they can completely study them. It’s a victory, but not a total victory, and the villains are still around and may reappear in the future. This story ends in a way that indicates that this could have been a standalone book, which it might have been originally, before the author decided to continue the series, but the ending is also open, making the continuation of the series natural.

There are references to old folklore traditions throughout the story. I’ve never seen The Wicker Man, but I saw a comment on a YouTube video where someone compares a public festival from this story to a scene in The Wicker Man, so there may be the implication that this is a more ancient form of celebration with more significance than the modern characters think. In fact, old traditions and folklore from the British Isles also appear in various forms throughout the series, and there are references to pagan beliefs.

I didn’t like the part where the kids were pretending to be explorers, and they were talking about acting out one of those scenes with “rude natives” (Simon’s words, and even he has to admit that he doesn’t quite know what it means when Barney asks him, although he’s aware that it’s a different sort of “rude” from the word meaning “impolite”) who want to make them gods and encountering cannibals. That type of scene always annoys me in books, and I’m sure that they’re referencing some of the vintage books I’ve read where that happens or ones very much like them. It’s really my only complaint about this story. Fortunately, that part doesn’t last very long because the kids find the manuscript and get on with the fantasy story.

Posted on by TracyC

Two Are Better Than One

Two Are Better Than One by Carol Ryrie Brink, 1968.

This is a gentle coming-of-age story about two thirteen-year-old girls in Idaho during the early 1900s, but it’s told in a interesting format, as the reminiscences of one of the girls as an old woman and focusing on a story that the girls were writing together as teenagers. It’s like a story about a story within a story.

One Christmas, elderly Chrystal Banks receives a special present from her old friend, Cordelia Crump. The package contains two miniature dolls (she calls them “pocket dolls”) that Chrystal gave to Cordelia 60 years before. At first, Chrystal doesn’t remember giving her friend Cordy” these dolls but admits that her memory is starting to fail her. As she studies the little china dolls and their exquisite details, she begins to remember them and when she gave them to her friend. The dolls’ names are Lester and Lynette, and Chyrstal remembers how Cordy used to say that the little dolls were magical because any day she carried them seemed to become special and exciting. Even when Chrystal and Cordy grew older, supposedly too old for dolls, they still continued to love and believe in the magic of their special pocket dolls.

Before young Chrystal Reese (as she was known before her marriage) gave the dolls to Cordy, they were a Christmas present to Chrystal from her Uncle Dick. That was the Christmas when the girls were in seventh grade and were early thirteen years old. Uncle Dick had acquired a number of interesting presents for Chrystal on his trip to Europe. He doted on his niece because she had no parents or siblings, living only with her grandmother and Aunt Eugenia and their dog, Rowdy. All of the presents are wonderful, but the little dolls are something special. As she unwraps them, they are hidden within a small box inside another box inside of another box (not unlike the story itself). Chrystal loves the elegant, detailed, jointed dolls immediately and names them Lester and Lynette because they just seem like the right names for the dolls.

Immediately, she goes to see if the little dolls will work well in the dollhouse that she’s made out of orange crates. She has spent considerable time and most of her allowance money putting paint and wallpaper into the little house and making furniture for it. She made all of the dollhouse furniture to fit two small dolls that she already has, Elsie and Eileen. However, Elsie and Eileen are four inches tall, and Lester and Lynette are only about two-and-a-half inches tall, so they won’t work in the house. At first, Chrystal is unsure what to do with the tiny dolls. She loves them, but she’s going to have to figure out where to put them and how to play with them if they won’t fit into the doll house. Then, she gets the idea to give the little dolls to her best friend, Cordy. It’s a sacrifice to part with such a lovely present so soon after getting it, but she wasn’t satisfied that the little bottle of perfume she was going to give Cordy was really a good present. Besides, the girls are so close that they already share everything with each other, and as they like to say “Two are better than one.” Giving the dolls to Cordy won’t be like giving them so much as sharing them with someone who can help to make them even more fun.

Cordelia Lark (her maiden name) grew up in a well-off family with mostly boys. Her father was president of the local bank and president of the school board and a civic leader in other ways, and Cordy had four brothers and no sisters. Cordy and Chrystal are kind of like the sisters neither of them ever had. They like to call each other “Tween”, which is their special pronunciation of “Twin.” They justify being twins because their birthdays are only two weeks apart, so they’re almost exactly the same age.

On the way to Cordy’s house to give her the special Christmas present, Chrystal passes by the courthouse. When she and Cordy pass the courthouse, they can see the barred windows of the jail, and they make up stories to spook each other about how one of the prisoners might escape. On this particular day, Chrystal sees one of the prisoners gripping the bars of his window and looking out. He’s the first prisoner Chrystal has ever actually seen. She’s a little afraid of him, and when he starts talking to her, she doesn’t know what to say at first. The man first asks her what she’s staring at, and then he wishes her a Merry Christmas, even though he’s not having one. Not knowing what else to do, Chrystal murmurs “Merry Christmas” back and hurries on.

When Chrystal gets to Cordy’s house, the two girls exchange presents. It turns out that each of them almost got the other some perfume, but each of them changed their mind at the last minute and decided on something better. Cordy’s present to Chrys (as she sometimes calls her) is a book, which makes Chrystal happy because she loves books and didn’t get any for Christmas this year. But, it’s not just any book. This is Chrystal’s first grown-up novel instead of a children’s book. (They mention the Oz books, the Little Peppers, and the Little Colonel series as books they’ve read.) It makes Chrys feel grown-up. It’s a romantic story about a Southern girl during the Civil War who falls in love with a Northern soldier and eventually marries him. Chrys says that Cordy shouldn’t have told her the ending before she’s read it, but she’s still thrilled at having her first grown-up book.

Chrys worries that, since Cordy gave her a grown-up present, she’ll think that the little dolls are babyish, but Cordy loves Lester and Lynette immediately. She says nobody gave her a doll this year, and she felt disappointed because she loves dolls, and it just didn’t seem like Christmas without one. Chrys explains that these are pocket dolls, and they’re meant to be carried around in pockets, so they can go everywhere with the owner. Cordy says that they’re so tiny and perfect that they must be magic, and she decides to keep the names that Chrys gave them, Lester and Lynette. Cordy thinks that the little dolls are perfect to take along on adventures.

When Chrys tells Cordy about the prisoner, the two of them are nervous, although they don’t really think he can escape. Chrys asks Cordy to walk her home, but after they pass the courthouse, Cordy realizes that she’d have to walk past the courthouse alone on her way home. So, Chrys and Cordy turn around and walk the other way again, but then, they realize that they still have the same problem. No matter which way they go, they have to pass the courthouse, and no matter who walks who home, one of them will have to go alone at least partway. After they go back and forth a couple of times, they pause in front of the courthouse, and Cordy has an idea. She gives Chrys the Lester doll, keeping the Lynette doll for herself. That way, each of them will have someone to keep them company, and it will be like they aren’t alone. It gives each of them enough courage to go the rest of the way home, and it’s the beginning of their adventures with the dolls.

Chrys is inspired by her first grown-up book, and she thinks that maybe she’d like to write novels when she grows up. When the girls are in school, they like to write notes and funny poems with each other when they’re supposed to be studying, and Chrys suggests to Cordy that they start writing a novel together. Cordy agrees, and they decide to take turns writing chapters. They decide that the story will be about Lester and Lynette, and Chrystal writes the first chapter. Chrystal calls the story “The Romantical Perils of Lester and Lynette.”

However, the girls get in trouble for goofing off and not paying attention in class. Their strict teacher, Miss Hickenlooper, decides that the two girls can’t sit together anymore, and she confiscates Lester and Lynette and locks them in her desk. The girls are devastated. If the teacher wanted them to move desks, that was disappointing but justified, but she had no right to just take the dolls. The girls think that they’ll have to wait until the end of term to get them back, but they continue writing the story about the dolls. Chrystal had been going to write the first chapter about an elopement, but because the dolls are now imprisoned in the teacher’s desk, she decides to write it as a prison escape instead.

In the new version of the first chapter of the story, Lester and Lynette are brother and sister, and they are imprisoned in a castle overlooking the Rhine river in Germany (part of the the girls’ geography lesson in school) by their evil guardian, Baron von Hickenlooper. Lynette is rescued/kidnapped by a Viking pirate named Oskar, who carries her away from her brother, who still remains in the castle.

From this point on, the events in Chrys and Cordy’s lives alternate with new chapters of their tandem story about Lester and Lynette. Pieces of the girls’ lives work their way into the story. When the girls are ready to trade turns writing the story, they give each other what they’ve written so far and say “Muggins!” (The word comes from playing games like Dominoes and Cribbage where, if one player spots that another has missed a score or failed to count something properly, they can call “Muggins!” and add the overlooked points to their own score. I think what they’re implying is that this story is a game where one person picks up whatever the other one has left unfinished.) The girls also continue adding verses to an unflattering poem that they started writing about their teacher.

By accident, the girls loose track of the mean poem about their teacher, and Miss Hickenlooper finds it. At first, the girls are terrified that Miss Hickenlooper is going to be furious with them and do something horrible in punishment, but to their surprise, she starts crying. Miss Hickenlooper end up having a heart-to-heart talk about the girls’ experiences in Miss Hickenlooper’s class, what Miss Hickenlooper hoped for when she started teaching, and why she took Lester and Lynette from them. Miss Hickenlooper had wanted to be a teacher for a long time and was looking forward to it, but she had been away from it for a long time because she had to take care of her mother during a lengthy illness. Since she started teaching again, she can tell that her students haven’t been happy with her, but after reading the poem, she realizes that it’s worse than she thought. Even strict teachers can be respected by their students as long as they’ve taught their principles well and the students are learning valuable lessons. Miss Hickenlooper feels like she’s failed as a teacher because she hasn’t managed to connect with her students at all, and she’s making them miserable. The girls come to the surprising realization that their teacher really does care about her students and what they think of her.

The talk between the girls and Miss Hickenlooper was a little uncomfortable because the girls realize that they’ve done an injustice to Miss Hickenlooper by writing the mean poem about her, but I actually liked this part of the story because it’s the kind of honest communication that I often find missing in stories. Rather than anyone blustering or dodging or trying to save face, the girls and their teacher honestly discuss what happened and how they feel, and everyone involved learns something from the experience. The girls appreciate having this “human” communication with their teacher, and it earns their respect, more than any angry tirade or show of strength on their teacher’s part ever would have. It’s this very kind of open honesty and humanity with real feeling behind it that’s been missing from the class so far, and it’s what has prevented Miss Hickenlooper from really connecting with her students.

The girls apologize to Miss Hickenlooper about the poem, and Miss Hickenlooper admits the justice of some of their complaints. Miss Hickenlooper admits that maybe she went a little far in making Cordy turn out her pockets and taking her dolls from her for an extended period of time. Getting into someone’s pockets and taking personal possessions is a kind of invasion of privacy, and Miss Hickenlooper says that she only did it because the girls weren’t paying attention in class, which is true. In return, Chrys and Cordy acknowledge that they only wrote the poem to blow off steam because they were angry, but they also went too far, and they really should have considered their teacher’s feelings. The girls promise not to write any more poems like that, and Miss Hickenlooper gives Lester and Lynette back to them. Miss Hickenlooper says Cordy can keep the dolls in her pocket if she wants as long as the girls pay attention in class from now on. To further apologize, the girls make cards for their teacher and give her the two bottles of perfume that they almost gave each other for Christmas (“Two are better than one.”), and they start going out of their way to be nicer to her.

The girls’ talks with Miss Hickenlooper through the rest of the school year give her feedback that helps her to improve as a teacher. Later, when the girls are watching a lightning artist (someone who paints pictures very fast, not the more modern definition of someone who works in animation) at work and happen to see Miss Hickenlooper in the store as well, they point out that one of the artist’s pictures reminds them of the Rhine that they studied in class. Miss Hickenlooper doesn’t think much of the quality of the painting, but she admits that it does look like the Rhine and that another painting the artist did reminds her of Switzerland when she was there. The girls are amazed that Miss Hickenlooper has been to Europe because, other than Chrys’s Uncle Dick, they don’t know anyone who has. They ask her why she never talked about it in their geography lessons because that would have made them much more exciting, hearing about other countries from the perspective of someone who was actually there. Miss Hickenlooper is surprised. She says that she was only focused on teaching the lessons that she was assigned to teach and just never thought about including anything personal because she didn’t think her students would be interested in her personal stories. Again, it’s that personal element that Miss Hickenlooper needs if she wants to connect with her students on a personal level.

As the story continues, the girls also start to consider their attitudes about boys and men and future husbands. So far, most of their knowledge of boys has come from the boys at school and Sunday school and Cordy’s brothers, all pretty immature and rowdy. But, the girls are growing up, and so are some of the boys. New young men also come into the girls’ lives.

A friend of Chrystal’s grandmother asks her if she would be willing to rent a room to her 19-year-old son, who is looking for a place to stay as he takes his first teaching job at the local college. (That sounds young for a college teacher. In modern times, a nineteen-year-old would be a college student himself. Remember, this is the early 1900s, and education in the United States was very different then. Back then, teachers didn’t need to have the advanced degrees that they do now, and Mr. Banks later explains that he skipped grades when he was younger to get through school faster.) Chrystal’s grandmother agrees, although Chrystal isn’t anxious to have a teacher living in her house after her problems with her own teacher at school. Chrys also isn’t sure what to expect from a man living in the house because there’s never been a man in this house before. Cordy’s brothers are pretty rowdy. However, their new lodger, Mr. Banks, turns out to be quiet, polite, and very nice. (His last name is an indication that he’s going to be Chrystal’s future husband. There’s six years’ difference in their ages, but as times goes on, and Chrystal gets older, that’s not going to seem like as much of a gap.) He is the first person to ever address Chrystal as “Miss Reese”, which makes her feel grown-up.

Cordy’s family also has a boarder, Mr. Crump, who is attending the local college (obviously, Cordy’s future husband, based on her future last name). Mr. Crump is working his way through college by selling pots and pans, and Cordy goes with him to help carry things, bringing along Chrys because “Two are better than one.” The girls end up giving him some advice on his sales patter that helps him make more sales.

Meanwhile, the girls’ Sunday school class, which calls itself the Dorcas Club, decides to host a masquerade party with the boys’ class (who have dubbed themselves the Armored Knights) as their guests. Chrys and Cordy think of the boys as immature and uncouth and roll their eyes at the older girls who are boy-crazy. Then, because the party is on Presidents’ Day, all of the girls in the group want to go dressed as Martha Washington, and there’s a big argument about it. Originally, Chrys and Cordy wanted to be Martha Washington, too, but since that’s what all the others want, they decide that they want to do something completely original. Inspired again by the dolls, they decide to go dressed as dolls. However, because they don’t want to be like the prissy girls trying to be pretty and impress the boys, they decide not to go as elegant dolls but as old rag dolls in patched clothing.

The girls do win prizes for both the funniest and most original costumes at the party because they’re the only girls who don’t show up as some version of Martha Washington. However, the triumph turns against them because the girls who are in charge of the main entertainment for the evening have decided to turn it into the girls’ very first dance party with the boys, something that Cordy and Chrys weren’t expecting. Rag doll costumes are good for fun and games, but not so much for serious dancing and the possibility of budding romance. While all of the boys are wearing various fanciful costumes themselves, like pirates and clowns and cannibals, it turns out that they’re only interested in the girls who dressed in pretty clothes as Martha Washington, and none of them want to dance with the rag dolls. Chrys and Cordy were proud of themselves for being more original than the other girls, but it seems that the boys prefer “pretty” to “original.” At the end of the evening, none of the boys even want to walk Chrys and Cordy home. Chrys and Cordy feel embarrassed because their efforts to be “original” seem to have strayed a little into the outlandish at a time when the other girls and boys are starting to seriously get interested in each other.

Fortunately, their families guessed that something of the sort might happen and asked the young men boarding with them to go to the house hosting the party and walk the girls home if they had no one else to walk with them. Mr. Crump confirms to the girls that boys would prefer to walk with girls who made an effort to look pretty instead of girls who look like rag dolls. Mr. Crump says that there will be other parties, and next time maybe they’ll go as something more elegant, like Martha Washington, but the girls aren’t too thrilled about doing this type of party again. Mr. Banks takes a different view and says that he actually thought that the rag doll costumes were rather clever and that it was really better for the girls to be different instead of trying to be like every other girl in order to not stand out. “Sometimes it may hurt, but I think it’s better to be original.” Mr. Banks the college teacher is more mature than Mr. Crump the college student, and I think he has the right idea. Looks and clothing styles change, and people have different priorities when they get older, but original thinking and an interesting personality are hard to replace and never go out style. When Chrystal says that she doesn’t even know how to dance, Mr. Banks offers to teach her, so she can be more confident at future parties.

Having the boarders walk them home actually turns out to be an unexpected victory for Chrys and Cordy because, while the other girls were making fun of them for not having any of the boys dance with them or walk them home, Chrys and Cordy ended up being escorted by young men. Getting boys is all well and good for young girls, but being escorted by young men makes Chrys and Cordy look like young women, putting them on a higher level than mere girls. Chrys and Cordy don’t see it that way at first because Mr. Crump and Mr. Banks are just their families’ boarders and friends and treat them like younger sisters (at this point in their lives, anyway), but the other girls notice that the young men are more mature than the Sunday school boys, and it causes them to look at Chrys and Cordy with a little more respect for having their attention. In some respects, Chrys and Cordy might seem less mature than the girls who are excited about wearing makeup and getting boys because they’re into outlandish costumes and dolls and “romantical” stories, but in other respects, they may actually be a little more mature than the other girls for being confident in their individuality and the new awareness they’re acquiring of other people’s feelings. In the end, girls want to marry men, not little boys, anyway.

Through the spring, the girls have other adventures and continue writing their story with their dolls. Along the way, there are other signs that the girls are growing up. They notice that this is the first year when they’re more interested in getting new Easter bonnets than they are in their Easter eggs. Cordy’s family is heavily involved in the social life of the local college because two of their boys are students there, and Cordy even gets to go to some of the campus parties. She helps to serve punch there and sometimes gets to dance. She eventually arranges for Chrys to come with her to help with serving and have her first dance, too. Miss Hickenlooper also discusses the girls’ future with them, suggesting that they take exams to see if they can skip the eighth grade and go straight into high school because she thinks they’re smart enough to pass. The girls are uncertain if they want to go on to high school so quickly. They know they’re growing up, but they haven’t thought about high school yet (and this is a time period when not everyone even attended high school). There is also the horrible thought that one of them might pass the test while the other didn’t, and they might end up going to different schools and being in different grades. Miss Hickenlooper says that they don’t necessarily have to go on to high school yet, if they feel that they’re not ready, even if they’re offered the opportunity, but she urges them to take the tests anyway to see if they have the option. It makes the girls start questioning their future lives, what they really want, and where their education will take them.

At one point, Cordy’s brothers find their unfinished novel in Cordy’s room, steal it, and use it to make fun of the girls. The story isn’t really very well written because Chrys and Cordy are only thirteen years old. As readers will have noticed, there are spelling mistakes all through the story, and the girls also get mixed up about geography because they’re just focused on making the story exciting instead of really thinking about the setting. After their characters’ adventures on the Rhine, the girls send them floating in a boat to a tropical island with coconuts and palm trees because they don’t think about just how far away the tropics actually are. (Being shipwrecked on an island is also a common trope of vintage and antique children’s books, so they’ve probably read this type of story themselves. Just scroll through my lists of children’s books from the 1900s and earlier, and you’ll see what I mean.) Although Mr. Crump was laughing at the girls, too, he rescues the story from Cordy’s brothers and gives it back to them when he sees that the joke is going too far. However, the girls are somewhat dispirited, thinking that their story might be deeply flawed. At first, they don’t know if they really want to continue writing it, but in their desperation, they turn to the one person they know will be honest with them about what they’ve written and can not only tell them whether or not the story can be fixed but how to do it – their teacher, Miss Hickenlooper.

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

Themes, Spoilers, and My Reaction

The story is one of those gentle, calm stories with a few funny episodes and some genuinely touching moments. Fans of slice-of-life historical books like the Betsy-Tacy series will like this book. It is a coming-of-age story for Chrys and Cordy, as they begin to develop new attitudes and come to a deeper understanding of themselves and other people and start thinking about the future. However, the girls’ adventures also teach other people around them some lessons.

One of the themes of the book involves how people let their personalities show. Although the girls were originally thought silly for their outlandish rag doll costumes at the party, they were more bold and creative than the girls who just wanted to look like everyone else. Even though their creativity wasn’t fully appreciated at first, it ends up working in their favor in the long run.

One of the biggest developments in the story is the relationship between the girls and their teacher, and the keys to that relationship are learning how to see other people as people, how to be open about showing their personal sides, and how to appreciate people with different personalities. The girls begin as thoughtless students, and their teacher is a strict disciplinarian with little patience for their goofing off, which is why the girls see her as their antagonist. However, the girls’ eventually realize that, through their mean and complaining poem, they’ve hurt their teacher’s feelings as much as she’s hurt theirs, maybe more. It leads them to see her in a new light, as a person and just just their jailer (the role of her alter ego in the girls’ story). The honest talks between the girls and their teacher not only helps the girls to become more thoughtful and considerate of others’ feelings but also show their teacher that the key to improving her teaching and developing a better relationship with her students is to be a little more personal with her students. She gradually learns that letting her students see her as a person with interesting life experiences earns their respect more than just acting like an unfeeling drill sergeant enforcing discipline. Inspired by the girls’ interest in her travels when she was younger, Miss Hickenlooper starts bringing postcards and souvenirs from her travels to class to show during geography lessons. The students are fascinated by her souvenirs and stories and start thinking of her as an a kind of intrepid explorer or sophisticated world traveler instead of a dull woman who focuses on dry memorization and gets mad at them for daydreaming in class. As she tries new ways of approaching her lessons and adding in personal experiences, Miss Hickenlooper takes on a whole new role in the children’s lives and sparks all of their imaginations. All of the students, not just Chrys and Cordy, start behaving better because they become genuinely interested in what Miss Hickenlooper has to say and show them. They don’t want to make her angry because she’ll stop telling the interesting stories if they don’t get their work done. Just because she’s gotten more interesting and personal doesn’t mean she’s gotten soft. Don’t be afraid to be interesting and different!

The girls never actually show Miss Hickenlooper their story because they’re a little embarrassed by what they’ve gotten wrong, but they ask her questions about some of the things that they put in their story to find out what’s right. They do end up finishing the story and giving Lester and Lynette a grand wedding, but they also acknowledge that they are getting too old and busy with other things to continue playing with dolls, even Lester and Lynette. They plan to put Lester and Lynette away for now as souvenirs of their childhoods. Later, they do tell Miss Hickenlooper about their novel, and while she hasn’t read it, she has the feeling that she knows what it’s like from knowing the girls and their writing. (The girls wrote about scenes from their novel when asked to describe places they know for their high school entrance exams.) She tells them that she appreciates their imaginations but that they should remember to focus on the real world around them and gaining real experiences to write about in the future.

There are also themes that focus on what growing up and maturity mean. Because the story focuses on one school semester in the girls’ lives, there are many questions that the book leaves unresolved about what happened in the girls’ later lives, but it seems that their lives turned out well, and they look back on their experiences with Lester and Lynette as a turning point when they really started growing up. Toward the end of the story, the girls begin appreciating some of the possibilities of life and the wider world that they never considered before. Through it all, there is also the girls’ constant friendship. At the very end, elderly Chrys writes a letter to elderly Cordy, thanking her for sending the dolls and reminding her of this special time in their lives.

The author of this book, Carol Ryrie Brink, was also a child around the time that Chrys and Cordy were children. There is a picture of her as a child above her biography on the dust jacket of the book. She is also the author of Caddie Woodlawn, which is better known than this book.

I love books that contain details about life in the past, and there are a lot of fun details included in this story. I’ve mentioned some above, but that’s just scratching the surface. At one point, Chrystal says that the only paper she has that’s good for painting pictures is the pieced of paper that separate pieces of Shredded Wheat in the box. The lined paper from the notebooks she uses for school isn’t as good. When she’s out of those pieces of paper, she has to eat more Shredded Wheat to get more. I don’t remember seeing any similar kind of paper in shredded wheat boxes in my lifetime, so this must be something that existed before modern packaging.

At the college dances, the girls have dance cards for the young men to write their names and initials in to secure spots for dances. There are also occasional mentions of food, and Chrys mentions having floating island pudding for dessert, which I’d never heard of before. It’s a kind of meringue that floats on a base of vanilla custard.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf

Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1999.

Every year, Sammy’s town, Santa Martina, puts together a calendar with pictures of people’s pet dogs. People whose dogs are chosen for the calendar pictures get to ride in the town’s Christmas parade with their pets. Sammy is a cat-lover instead of a dog-lover, so she’s usually not too interested in the parade float with the dogs, but now, her friend Holly is living and working with the people who own the dog-grooming business and who prepare the float.

Sammy goes to the parade early to help Holly and the others to get the canine calendar float ready. She meets Mr. Petersen, the disagreeable man who assembles the dog calendar. Then, they learn that one of the dog owners has broken her leg and will need someone else to manage the dog, Marique, on the float. Marique is important because she’s trained to jump through a hoop, and they’re planning to have her jump through a Christmas wreath on the float. The dog owner’s daughter says she can’t be on the float with the dog because she promised her mother that she would make a video recording of the parade for her, so she has to be in the audience. Various other people also refuse to handle Marique because they have other jobs to do or other dogs to manage. Eventually, Sammy gets recruited to ride on the float and handle Marique.

At first, it goes pretty well, and Marique is a big hit with her jumping-through-the-wreath act. Then, some people show up dressed like the Three Wise Men and carrying cats, for some reason. Marique jumps off the float and runs off into the crowd. Before Sammy can do anything more than shout a warning to the others on the float to hold on to their dogs, both the cats and the other dogs start going wild and running in all directions. Everyone jumps off the canine calendar float and begins chasing after their dog. Sammy searches for Marique through the chaos.

Sammy doesn’t find Marique, but she does meet an unhappy little girl named Elyssa, who is dressed as an elf. Officer Borsch finds both girls and escorts them back to Elyssa’s mother. Officer Borsch wants to take Sammy home (which is a problem because Sammy secretly lives with her grandmother at a retirement community that doesn’t allow children, and they’ve been trying hard to avoid anyone finding out), but Elyssa insists that she wants Sammy to stay with her. When Elyssa goes to buy Sammy a soda, her mother questions Sammy about what Elyssa said to her. Elyssa seems to have an odd obsession with the moon and a tendency to run off by herself (making her the “runaway elf” in the title), but her mother doesn’t want to explain it. Elyssa asks if Sammy can spend the night with her. Sammy says that she has to get home, but Elyssa’s mother says it’s okay if the girls want to see each other tomorrow. Elyssa’s mother encourages the friendship between Elyssa and Sammy because Elyssa seems to need someone to open up to, although Sammy isn’t quite sure why.

Sammy’s grandmother’s friend Hudson finds Sammy, and she explains what happened with the Canine Calendar float. The more Sammy thinks about it, the more she suspects that her school nemesis, Heather Acosta, was one of the people dressed as Wise Men and holding cats. She can’t prove it, but it’s the sort of nasty trick Heather would do. The problem is that Sammy has also realized that Marique jumped off the float right before the cats and dogs went crazy. Just before the chaos started, Sammy heard someone calling Marique’s name, and Marique took off in the direction of the voice. Who was calling to Marique, and where is the dog now?

Marique’s owner, Mrs. Landvogt, is blaming the groomer who was managing the float for the disaster and her dog’s disappearance, which Sammy knows isn’t fair. Then, Sammy’s best friend, Marissa, calls her and says that Mrs. Landvogt is a neighbor of hers and wants to see Sammy. When Sammy meets Mrs. Landvogt, she is angry and in no mood for excuses. Mrs. Landvogt has received a ransom note for her dog, proving that someone took the dog on purpose. Rather than expecting apologies from Sammy for losing her dog, she insists that Sammy find Marique and get her back. At first, Sammy says that she doesn’t think she can do that, but Mrs. Landvogt says that she knows all about Sammy, and more importantly, she knows where Sammy really lives. If Sammy doesn’t find Marique, Mrs. Landvogt threatens to report Sammy and her grandmother for violating the terms of the retirement community. Sammy has no choice but to undertake the investigation. She also needs to find out where Mrs. Landvogt gets the information she uses to pressure people. Sammy isn’t her only victim … and therein may lie the solution to the mystery.

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

My Reaction

In this book, Sammy feels a little awkward about Elyssa wanting to be friends with her because Elyssa’s a few years younger than she is. When kids are young, a few years’ difference in age makes a big difference in terms of knowledge, behavior, and interests, and she has trouble seeing what she and Elyssa would have in common and do together. When she talks to Hudson about it, he doesn’t think that age is such a big issue. He’s in his 70s, about the age of Sammy’s grandmother, and a few years’ age difference doesn’t make much of a difference to adults. Sammy is uncomfortable, thinking about how Hudson is decades older than she is. She likes spending time with him, but she worries that maybe she looks like a baby to him and that he just tolerates her in the way she tolerates Elyssa as first. As an adult who’s spent time babysitting and playing with younger cousins, I know it’s not really like that, not to people with depth to their relationships and personalities. People of different ages and backgrounds can still bond with each other over common interests and enjoying talking to each other and spending time together. People who are young at heart and enjoy nostalgia can also have fun sharing in kids’ activities. Playing kids’ games with kids won’t make you a kid again, but it can be fun to feel like one for a few hours at a time, now and then. There’s also something to be said for getting in touch with earlier versions of yourself that have never completely left you and being reminded of the things that you loved when you were young, another theme that enters into the story when Sammy considers some of the unhappy adults around her and what’s made them that way. During the course of the story, Sammy and Elyssa become real friends, and Sammy does help her to come to terms with what’s really bothering her.

During her investigation and through her budding friendship with Elyssa, Sammy begins to learn the secrets of some of the unhappy people in her community. The truth is that everyone has suffered some form of hardship or loss in their lives, and as I mentioned last year when I was talking about experiencing Christmas in a Pandemic, feelings like this can come out stronger around Christmas. Christmas is both the last major holiday before the New Year and a time that people romanticize as being perfect and magical. The problem is that life itself isn’t perfect and magical, and people can feel angry and depressed when the reality of their situations doesn’t match their vision of how their life and Christmas should be, especially if they’re really dealing with a serious situation or long-term unresolved feelings, as many people in this story are.

There is real grief and loss in the story. Elyssa is still struggling to come to terms with the death of her father the year before. He was a police officer who was killed in a situation that went horribly wrong. Elyssa was not at her father’s funeral because a psychologist said that she might find it traumatic at her age. Instead, her mother simply told her that her father went to heaven. However, Elyssa understands more than her mother thinks she does. She knows where her father is buried, and when she runs off by herself, she often goes there to stare at his grave and try to understand how he can be underground and in heaven at the same time. Elyssa’s worries and confusion come out when Sammy’s nosy neighbor, Mrs. Graybill, the one who suspects the truth about Sammy’s life with her grandmother and has often tried to expose it in the past, becomes injured. Mrs. Graybill’s health deteriorates, and she becomes a patient in the nursing home where Elyssa’s mother works. Sammy becomes her only visitor there and learns the truth about her unhappy past and how the resentments she’s borne throughout her life have harmed her and left her with many regrets. Sammy is actually at Mrs. Graybill’s side when she dies, and the two make peace with each other before the end. Witnessing the death of a former nemesis and coming to terms with her real humanity is an emotional roller coaster for Sammy, but facing her own inner turmoil helps her to see how to help Elyssa face hers.

Not everything in the story has a perfect resolution. Sammy does figure out where Marique the dog is, and the dog is safe, but she can’t bring back Elyssa’s dad or Mrs. Graybill, and there are some people who are going to have to learn some lessons of their own about how to resolve their feelings and face up to their own hardships and bad decisions. The brighter spots in the story are what Sammy learns from her experiences and with helping other people face their problems. People really do have to face up to their situations, even when they’re unpleasant, and deal with their emotions in healthy ways. The people in the story who are the most unhappy are those who have tried to hide from their feelings or deal with them through spite and long-term resentment. Sammy comes to understand the importance of forgiveness and focusing on positives instead of negatives when it comes to dealing with one of her own long-term problems: her own mother.

Before the beginning of the series, Sammy’s mother, Lana, left Sammy with her grandmother while she was pursuing an acting career. Even though Sammy had missed her mother when she first left, she has come to realize that she resents her mother for abandoning her to the precarious, secretive life she lives with her grandmother and for putting her second to her acting ambitions. She feels like being a mother wasn’t important to Lana and that her mother only thinks of her as an afterthought when Sammy was depending on her so much. I would say that there is definite truth that Lana has neglected Sammy and her welfare and that Sammy has justification for being angry with her. In this book, Lana is excited about getting her biggest part yet, and Sammy is mortified to find out that this amazing role is in a commercial for anti-gas medicine. Lana sees the commercial as a possible stepping stone to something better, but Sammy thinks it’s embarrassing and a terrible result for the sacrifices that Sammy herself has had to make in her life for the sake of Lana’s “career.” However, seeing what long-term anger and resentment has done to other people in the story causes Sammy to consider that she should also learn to cultivate some forgiveness in her life for Lana so she won’t go down the unhappy paths that other people have. To get past the parts that she has genuine reason to feel angry about Sammy remembers the good times that she and her mother shared before, the times when Lana was nice to her and motherly, and the reasons why she missed her mother in the first place.

I can see why a little forgiveness can be healing, but I don’t see it as a perfect solution, especially not to problems like Sammy’s. Sammy and her grandmother are genuinely living a precarious life which Lana doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate. Even though Sammy finds a way to stop the blackmail in this story, her danger isn’t over, and she lives with it every single day. If Sammy is caught living with her grandmother, her grandmother could actually lose her home, and Sammy might be sent into foster care because social services might decide that neither her mother nor grandmother can or is willing to provide for her. I think it’s important to understand that Sammy isn’t just harboring a petty resentment against her mother; she’s dealing with a serious situation. Hiding in her grandmother’s little senior apartment with only extremely minimal belonging isn’t a fun adventure for her, it’s actually a serious situation with lasting consequences to her well-being. While her desire to temper her resentment toward her mother with some forgiveness and positive memories can help her get a healthier emotional balance, as a responsible adult, I think that Lana’s failure to address the reality of this situation and her role in it is going to remain an unhealthy problem in the lives of her nearest and dearest. If this were real life instead of a fictional story, I think it’s likely Sammy would be showing even more emotional trauma and would probably be in foster care already. It wouldn’t matter then if Lana wanted forgiveness or for people to look only at her good points when she had fun with her little girl because I don’t think judges award custody on that basis, not to someone with a long-term history of neglect because she wanted the freedom to “follow her dreams.”

This book isn’t a particularly happy story for Christmas. It turned out to be darker even than I thought it would be when I started, and Sammy Keyes mysteries tend to be a bit gritty. I would say that it’s more thought-provoking. I would not give this book to a child currently suffering from trauma because, when someone is actively suffering, dealing with characters’ suffering can feel like pulling double duty or rubbing salt in the wound. However, for those in the mood for a deeper understanding of dealing with life’s difficulties, especially at a time of year when everyone expects happiness and joy, it isn’t bad.

Parts of the story are genuinely touching. Sammy is understanding and gentle with Elyssa and changes her life for the better. There are even a couple of bonding moments between her and Officer Borsch. Officer Borsch was a friend of Elyssa’s father, and when Sammy asks him about what happened, Officer Borsch candidly admits that he was there when he was killed and still has nightmares about it. Sammy understands nightmares because she had them when her mother left her. Later, the two of them help each other. Sammy uses some of Hudson’s advice for a little psychological warfare on Heather that gets her to admit the cat prank in front of Officer Borsch. Officer Borsch promises to put some healthy fear into Heather that will help keep her in line in the future. The resolution of the prank also saves Officer Borsch some embarrassment at the office because he was on duty when it happened and took some flak for it, and Sammy also learns something about Borsch’s nemesis on the force from Mrs. Landvogt that will allow Borsch to resolve a serious problem that both he and Elyssa’s father had tried to solve.

Posted on by TracyC

The Children of Green Knowe

Green Knowe

The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston, 1954, 1955, 1982, 1983.

Seven-year-old Toseland is traveling by train to stay with his great-grandmother Oldknow at the old family home, Green Noah, for Christmas. His mother is dead, and his father now lives in Burma with his new wife, who Toseland doesn’t know very well. He has no brothers or sisters, and he spends most of his time at boarding school, so he is often lonely, wishing that he had a family outside of school, like the other boys. His great-grandmother is the only other relative he has, and he has never met her before. He is a little nervous at the idea of meeting her because he knows that she must be very old.

When Toseland arrives at the station, it’s raining, and there has been flooding, but there is a taxi-man waiting to take him to the house. When he arrives, he is immediately fascinated by the large, old house and all of the things in it. It reminds him of a castle, and he marvels at how his great-grandmother could live in such a place. He is surprised at how at home he feels there and how easily he likes and gets along with his great-grandmother. For the first time in his life since his mother died, he really feels at home, and when he asks if the house partly belongs to him, too, his great-grandmother reassures him that it does.

The two of them talk about what to call each other. Toseland’s great-grandmother asks him to call her Granny (although she is still often called Mrs. Oldknow throughout the book), and she asks him if he has any nicknames. Toseland says that the boys at school call him Towser and his stepmother calls him Toto, but he doesn’t like either nickname. Granny Oldknow says that Toseland is a family name and there have been other Toselands before him. The last one was his grandfather, and his nickname was Tolly, so Granny asks him if he would like to be called that also. Toseland says that he likes that nickname better than the others, and his mother used to call him that, so he is called Tolly from that point on.

Granny Oldknow shows Tolly to his room and helps him begin to unpack. It’s a wonderful room with many old toys that used to belong to the other children who have lived in the house in the past. Among the toys is an old dollhouse which Tolly realizes is a miniature version of the house they’re in. When he finds the miniature version of his room, he notices that there are four beds in it instead of one. He asks Granny Oldknow if other children stay at Green Noah, and she cryptically says that they do sometimes, and he might see them, but they come when they want to.

Tolly becomes fascinated by a portrait of three children in old-fashioned clothes with their mother and grandmother. Granny Oldknow tells him that those three children lived in the house long ago. The oldest boy was an earlier Toseland, who was nicknamed Toby. His younger brother was named Alexander, and their little sister was named Linnet. Granny Oldknow had been an orphan when she was a child and was raised at Green Noah by an uncle. Because she was an only child, she often lonely and liked to pretend that the children in the picture were her siblings, so Tolly decides that he’d like to do the same thing.

Tolly asks his great-grandmother questions about Toby, Alexander, and Linnet and learns details of their lives. Toby had a sword because he was going to be a soldier when he grew up, a pet deer, and a horse named Feste who loved him. Alexander had a book in Latin that he loved to read and a special flute. Linnet used to keep birds in a wicker cage that is still in Tolly’s room, along with the toy mouse that used to belong to Toby. Sometimes, Tolly thinks that toys in his room move when he’s not looking, and at night, he hears children moving about and laughing, and he thinks that it’s the three children from the painting.

Tolly comes to the conclusion that the three children are still around Green Noah and that they’re playing hide-and-seek with them. He tries to play with them, too, and the children apparently give him a twig in the shape of a ‘T’. Granny Oldknow tells him that she used to play hide-and-seek with the children when she was young, and they would give her an ‘L’ twig because her first name is Linnet, like the little girl in the painting. Later, he hears the children singing Christmas carols. Tolly becomes frustrated that the children tease him and never really show themselves to him, but Mrs. Oldknow tells him that “they’re like shy animals” and that he has to give them a chance to decide that they’re ready to come to him.

He finds the key to the old toy box in his room, and inside the box, he finds more things that belonged to the three children. When he shows them to Mrs. Oldknow, she talks about how things were when the three children were alive at Green Noah. Tolly is shocked when he realizes for the first time that Toby, Alexander, and Linnet are all dead. Mrs. Oldknow gently tells him that they lived at Green Noah centuries ago and could not be alive now. Sadly, the children all died young in the Great Plague during the 17th century. Their illness was sudden and brief, and they all sickened and died in one day along with their mother. Tolly and his great-grandmother are descended from the children’s older brother, who wasn’t at home when this happened. However, the children never left Green Noah, which used to be called Green Knowe years ago. Tolly still loves the children, even though they’re ghostly and elusive. He craves the sense of family he gets from them, having been deprived of family feelings for so much of his young life.

Mrs. Oldknow continues to tell Tolly stories about the three children and other members of his family. As his connection to his ancestors grows, Tolly begins to catch glimpses of the children more and more, and eventually, he’s able to see them and talk to them. He asks the children about their mother, and the children say that she’s in heaven but doesn’t mind them coming back to visit their old home from time to time. The children don’t seem sad at being dead, enjoying the freedom of playing around their old home with the animals and the spirits of their old pets, who keep them company. Their final illnesses had only lasted a few hours before they died, and their deaths happened so long ago that they say that they hardly remember the Great Plague and what it felt like. Tolly is still sad and frustrated that the children appear and disappear so suddenly, but his attachment to them grows and so does his attachment to Green Noah itself. As Christmas comes, Tolly develops a bond with his family, both living and dead, and a realization that the old family home that connects them is also his home, a place they can all return to.

The book is the first in a series and is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is a ghost story, but it’s not a scary ghost story. There’s nothing frightening about the three ghost children. It’s sad that they died so young, but at the same time, they’re not very sad about it themselves. They seem to enjoy playing together endlessly with the animals around their old home and seeing the new relatives who inhabit the house, their older brother’s descendants. Even their former pets are no longer sad at the children’s passing because they are also spirits who continue to play with them through the centuries. There is one semi-scary part of the story involving a witch’s curse placed on an old tree called Green Noah, which is how the name of the house was changed from Green Knowe, but Tolly is protected by the ghosts of his ancestors.

There is never any desire for the characters to rid Green Noah of its ghosts. They are family and are part of the place, as much a part of it as the living are. The ghosts do not feel trapped there, either. They are just revisiting the home they loved and the family members who now live there. They can come and go as they please, and the ghost children often do.

This also is not the kind of story where a child knows that a place is haunted but can’t convince the adults or tries to hide the ghosts’ presence from the adults. Mrs. Oldknow is fully aware that the ghosts are there and has known about them since her own childhood. Generations of children in the family have probably known about them and played with them, and they are also not the only family ghosts who inhabit the old house. At one point, Tolly and Mrs. Oldknow hear a woman singing and the rocking of a cradle, and Mrs. Oldknow says that she’s heard it before around Christmas, a grandmother singing to a baby. Tolly is confused because even little Linnet wasn’t a baby when she died, and Mrs. Oldknow says that this isn’t the children’s grandmother but somebody from generations earlier than the three children. This grandmother ghost has been around so long that Mrs. Oldknow doesn’t know who she or the baby are supposed to be, although we are told that they are about 400 years old, where the three children died about 300 years earlier. Generations of the same family have lived in the house and have all left their mark on it, and part of them is still there. Now, Tolly has also become part of this family home, and it’s also a part of him. The ghosts are hesitant to fully show themselves to Tolly at first and seem more attached to Granny Oldknow, probably because she’s lived there longer, since she was an infant. The ghosts know her, and she knows all of their stories. However, they are all family, and Tolly develops a new connection to his family as his great-grandmother tells him the stories about them, and he can hear and see the ghosts more often.

Really, that feeling of connection and connectedness is the primary focus of the story. In the beginning, Tolly is lonely, feeling like he doesn’t have a family and doesn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. His father lives far away in Burma with his new wife, and Tolly doesn’t feel connected to them. His mother is gone, and he spends most of his time at school, even having to remain there during the holidays when other students are going home to their families. His great-grandmother inviting him to Green Noah is the first time that Tolly feels a real connection to anyone in his family since his mother’s death, and through her stories and his encounters with the ghosts, he comes to see that he really is part of a much larger family, going back ages. Just because most of his family is now dead or scattered doesn’t mean that they’re not his family. They still love him, and he loves them, even across the centuries. Green Noah really is a family home, and it’s a place that family can return to, even those who seem to be gone forever. It’s a place that has known both the joys of a happy family and the tragedies of loss that families experience from time to time. Through it all, it’s still home, and importantly, it becomes the home that Tolly has been wishing for.

The story takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and by Christmas, Tolly has received important presents. First, the ghostly Alexander grants him the give of his special flute, which had been a reward from King Charles II for singing so beautifully for him when he was alive. Tolly also has musical talents, and his great-grandmother decides to switch him to a different school so he can develop his talents and so he can stay at Green Noah during his school holidays. On Christmas, Tolly also receives his own pet dog, very much like the one that the ghostly Linnet owned, and he names his dog after hers, just as he has been named after all the other Toselands who have gone before.

In some ways, the story reminds me a little of When Marnie Was There (some people might know the story from the Miyazaki movie version), which has similar themes of family and belonging and ancestors reaching out across time to remind children that, while life is brief and often complicated, love is eternal and everyone belongs somewhere and to someone. However, The Children of Greene Knowe is a much gentler story, and it also contains some shorter stories about Tolly’s family.

Posted on by TracyC

The Christmas Tree Mystery

The Christmas Tree Mystery by Wylly Folk St. John, 1969.

A couple of days before Christmas, twelve-year-old Beth comes running to her 10-year-old sister Maggie, saying that she’s in trouble and needs her help. Beth doesn’t know whether Maggie can help at all, but she thinks she’s done something wrong and needs somebody to listen to her. Someone stole the family’s Christmas tree ornaments the day before, and Beth saw someone running out of their backyard right after the theft. She was sure that the person she saw was Pete Abel, and that’s what she told everyone. However, the girls’ older stepbrother, Trace, says that it couldn’t have been Pete. Beth thinks that it would be awful if she’s leapt to the wrong conclusion and wrongly accused Pete of theft, but then again, she can’t be sure that Trace is right, either. Trace says that Pete was somewhere else at the time, but he doesn’t want to say where because, for some reason, that might also get Pete in trouble. Beth doesn’t know whether to believe him or not.

The kids are part of a blended family that has only been together for less than a year, so the children are still getting used to each other and their new stepparents. Beth likes their new little stepsister, Pip, but teenage Trace is harder to get used to. Trace is frequently angry, and much of his anger comes from his mother’s death. Beth knows sort of how Trace feels because her father died three years ago. She knows what it’s like to miss a parent, and try to keep their memory alive. Even though Beth doesn’t think of her stepfather, Champ, as being her father, she tries to be fair toward him and accept that he’s doing his best to take care of them. Sometimes, she wishes she could talk about it all with Trace, but Trace has made it clear that he doesn’t want to talk. Trace doesn’t like to talk about his mother and gets angry when anyone else even mentions her.

Beth thinks that Pete was the thief because the boy she saw running away was wearing a jacket like the one Pete has and has the same color hair. However, she didn’t actually see his face, and Maggie points out that other kids have similar jackets. Also, they found an old handkerchief of the house with the initial ‘Z’, and that wouldn’t belong to Pete. Beth has to admit that she may have been mistaken about who she saw. However, she can’t think of anybody whose name begins with ‘Z’, either. She worries that if she was wrong to say it was Pete that she saw she may have broken one of the Ten Commandments because she was bearing false witness. All that Beth can think of to make things right is apologize to Pete for being too quick to accuse him and try to find the thief herself, but she needs Maggie’s help to do that.

Why anybody would steal Christmas ornaments right off a tree is also a mystery. Some of the ornaments that belonged to Champ had some value and could possibly be sold for money, but most did not. The thing that Beth misses the most is the little angel that she had made for the top of the tree years ago. Its only value is sentimental, and Beth worries that a thief might just throw it away if he didn’t think it was worth anything. Also, if Trace is so sure that Pete is innocent, why can’t he explain where Pete really was when the theft occurred? Trace is sneaking around and seems to have secrets of his own. Then, after the family gets some new ornaments and decorates the tree again, the ornament thief strikes again! The new set of ornaments disappears, but strangely, the thief brings back Beth’s angel and puts it on top of the tree. If it had just been a poor kid, desperate for some Christmas decorations, they should have been satisfied with the first set. Is anybody so desperate for ornaments that they would take two sets, or is it just someone who doesn’t want this family to have any? And why did the thief return the angel?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

The idea of somebody stealing Christmas ornaments sounds like a whimsical mystery for the holiday, but even though I’ve read books by this author before, I forgot that Wylly Folk St. John can bring in some of the darker sides of life. Much of this story centers around getting ready for Christmas, but there are some truly serious issues in the story. This is a book that would be better for older children. For someone looking for someone for younger children or a lighter mystery for Christmas, something from the Three Cousins Detective Club series would be better. (See my list of Christmas Books for other ideas.) It’s an interesting story, and I enjoyed the book, but I wouldn’t call the mood light.

The ways this new blended family learns to get along with each other and Trace learns to cope with his grief at the loss of his mother are major themes in the book. The parents try to be conscientious of the children’s feelings, making joint decisions and rules for the children as “The Establishment” of the house so none of the children feel like a stepparent is discriminating against them. The reason why the stepfather is called Champ is because he’s a chess champion, and Beth knows that her mother gave him that nickname so the girls wouldn’t feel awkward, wondering whether to call him by his name or refer to him as their dad. Beth is grateful for the nickname because, although she likes and appreciates Champ as a person, she does feel awkward about calling anybody else “dad” while she still remembers her deceased father. Trace calls his stepmother Aunt Mary for similar reasons, and Beth understands that. What she doesn’t understand is why Trace insists on wearing the old clothes that were the last ones his mother bought for him, even though they no longer fit him. Aunt Mary has bought him some nice new clothes that would fit him better, but he won’t wear them, and he even insists on washing his clothes himself, without her help. Beth asks her mother about that, but she says it doesn’t bother her because, if Trace is willing to help with the laundry, that’s less for her to do. Beth says that they ought to just donate all of Trace’s old clothes so someone else who can actually wear them can have them, but her mother doesn’t want to be too quick to do that because she doesn’t want to upset Trace. I can understand that because Trace is still growing, and it won’t be much longer before he won’t be able to wear those old clothes anymore anyway. The day that he can’t pull one of those old shirts over his head or put on old pants without splitting them will be the day he’ll be ready to get rid of them. Time moves on, and eventually, Trace won’t be able to help himself from moving on with it, and I think Aunt Mary understands that.

Part of the secret about Trace and his grief is that his mother isn’t actually dead, although he keeps telling people that she is. The truth is that his parents are divorced and his mother left the state and has gone to live in Oklahoma with her relatives. At first, Beth’s mother doesn’t even know that Trace has been telling the girls that his mother died, but when Beth tells her mother that’s what Trace said, her mother tells her the truth. She doesn’t want to explain the full circumstances behind why Champ divorced Phyllis and why she left, but she says that she can understand why Trace might find it easier to tell himself and others that she’s dead instead of accepting the truth. There is an implication that Phyllis did something that Beth’s mother describes as something Trace would see as “disgraceful” (I had guessed that probably meant that she had an extramarital affair, but that’s not it) that lead to the divorce. So, Trace is actually feeling torn between losing his mother and learning to live without her and his anger at her for what she did. He both loves and hates his mother, and that’s why he finds it easier to think of her as dead and gone and refuse to talk about her any further than deal with these painful, conflicting emotions. Beth’s mother also indicates that Phyllis was emotionally unstable, saying that the atmosphere in the household wasn’t healthy for Trace and his little sister because Phyllis “kept them all stirred up emotionally all the time”, and that’s why she didn’t get custody of the children and isn’t allowed to see them now. It turns out that there was a lot more to it than that, and that figures into the solution to the mystery.

When I was reviewing an earlier book from the 1950s by a different author about children coping with grief and a new blended family, Mystery of the Green Cat, I talked about how books from the 1950s and earlier tended to focus on the deaths of parents when explaining why children lived in households with stepparents and step-siblings and how books from the 1960s and later started to focus more on the issue of divorce. This book kind of combines aspects of both of those types of stories. Beth understands the grief of a parent dying, and Trace has to come to terms with his parents’ divorce, which is a different kind of loss, although it’s still a loss. As I explained in my review of that earlier book, in some ways, divorce can be even more difficult for children to understand than death. Both are traumatic, but divorce involves not just loss but also abandonment (a parents who dies can’t help it that they’re no longer there, but it feels like a parent who is still living somehow could, that it’s their choice to leave their children and live apart from them, which leads to feelings of rejection) and the complicated reasons why people get divorced, including infidelity and emotional abuse. In this case, it also involves drug abuse.

I was partly right about the solution to the mystery. I guessed pretty quickly who the real thief was, but there’s something else I didn’t understand right away because I didn’t know until later in the book that Trace’s mother was still alive. Before the end of the book, Trace and Beth and everyone else has to confront the full reality of Phyllis’s problems. They get some surprising help from Pete, who has been keeping an eye on things and has more knowledge of the dark sides of life than the other children do. (Whether his father ever had a problem similar to Phyllis’s is unknown, but it seems that at least some of the people his father used to work with did, so it might be another explanation for Pete’s family’s situation.) Because Pete has seen people in a similar situation before and knows what to do. I had to agree with what Beth said that much of this trouble could have been avoided if Champ had been more direct with Trace before about his mother’s condition, but Beth’s mother says that sometimes children don’t believe things until they see them themselves. Champ was apparently trying to protect his children from Phyllis before, but because Trace had never seen his mother at her worst, he didn’t understand what was really happening with her. There is frightening part at the end where the children have to deal with a dangerous situation, but it all works out. Trace comes to accept the reality of his mother’s condition and that things will never be the same again, but he comes to appreciate the stepsisters who came to his rescue and brought help when he needed it.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mysterious Christmas Shell

The Mysterious Christmas Shell by Eleanor Cameron, 1961.

Tom and Jennifer are visiting their grandmother and their Aunt Vicky and Aunt Melissa Vining in Monterey for Christmas while their parents are in New York, taking care of Aunt Winny, who is sick. However, the children can tell that something is wrong as soon as they arrive because Mrs. Nipper, their aunts’ housekeeper, seems upset, and the house isn’t decorated for Christmas like it usually is. They have a Christmas tree, but there are no ornaments on it yet, and the Christmas greenery hasn’t been laid out.

The children hear their aunts talking about a letter that their father (the children’s grandfather) had written before he died. They know that he wrote the letter, but they’re upset because they can’t find it. The aunts explain to the children that they had to sell Sea Meadows, the wooded lands that they own, to a man called Theodore Bidwell. It’s a deep disappointment because Sea Meadows is full of ancient sequoias, and the children always liked to go camping and exploring there. Originally, Mr. Bidwell told them that we was only planning to put a few houses on that land that wouldn’t require removing many of the old trees, but now, they’ve learned that he’s actually planning on creating a large summer resort town. The aunts are upset that Mr. Bidwell lied to them to get them to sell the property, but there wasn’t much they could do anyway because they badly needed money to settle debts they had after their father died. The saddest part is that the family business has improved since they made the sale, and the aunts could now afford to buy back the property, but Mr. Bidwell refuses to sell it back to them.

There is one thing that might change the situation. Before the aunts’ father died, he discussed changing his will. He decided that, rather than leave that land to them as he originally planned, he wanted to leave it to the state of California to be turned into a state park. He thought it was the best way of ensuring that the natural beauty of the land would be preserved, and his daughters approved. The aunts already had the family business, and they didn’t need the land for their own sake. However, for some reason, his lawyer never got the letter their father said he was going send about the change in his will. The aunts are sure that he actually wrote the letter, but they think it got lost or mislaid instead of being mailed. If the aunts can find the letter that their father wrote, it would prove that the land actually belongs to the state of California and that it was never really theirs to sell. They’d have to refund Mr. Bidwell’s money, but they’re prepared to do that. It’s more important to them that the land would be preserved from development. Even local people have been angry with the family for selling the land to Mr. Bidwell because they don’t want the development, either.

When Tom and Jennifer begin helping with the Christmas decorations, and they start reminiscing about the Christmas before, the last Christmas when their grandfather was alive and he wrote his letter about the land, they remember that their cousin Elsa was also visiting. Elsa is about Jennifer’s age, and she and her parents are living in France now, so she doesn’t come to visit very often. The mention of Elsa makes the aunts remember that there was something that their father wanted to tell them about Elsa. He mentioned a funny thing she did, but then, they were interrupted, and he didn’t finish telling them what it was before he died. Everyone starts to wonder if Elsa may have done something with the important letter, but they can’t ask her because they know that she and her parents are visiting friends somewhere in France for Christmas, and they don’t know where or how to get in touch with them. (This is the 1960s, pre-Internet and pre-cell phones, so there are no methods of communication they can use that are independent of also knowing their physical location. They have to either know the address or phone number of where they are staying, and they don’t.)

The children’s grandmother recalls that Elsa was still with them even after Tom and Jennifer left with their parents, and they talked about Sea Meadows and showed her the deed to the land. Elsa had been helping to put away Christmas decorations at the time, and while the adults were talking, she suddenly started to cry. She had cut her finger on something, but they were never sure how she did that because none of the decorations were broken. Elsa was also upset because she had done two things earlier in the day that had caused trouble: she’d broken a little figurine and she’d forgotten to tell her grandfather about a phone call from a friend. She seemed worried that she had done yet another thing wrong, but her grandfather told her not to worry because troubles come in threes, and if the cut finger is her third trouble, she has nothing more to worry about. However, their grandmother recalls that Elsa didn’t seem reassured by that. Rather than being the third trouble of last Christmas, Elsa’s cut finger is a clue to a bigger problem that Elsa was afraid to admit, and that’s the clue they need to solve the problems of this Christmas.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is an earlier book with the same characters, a mystery about a sea monster in the same area of California, called The Terrible Churnadryne, but I haven’t read it and haven’t been able to find a copy.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I read this book years ago, and I remember liking it, but for a long time, I couldn’t remember the details of the story. I only remembered bits and pieces. I didn’t remember that it was a Christmas story, which would have helped. I remembered that a girl did something with an important paper, but until I reread the book, I couldn’t remember why the paper was important. What stayed with me the longest was the solution to the missing letter and the cut on Elsa’s finger. But, because I forgot that this was a Christmas story, I misremembered exactly what Elsa put the letter in.

I also remembered that one of the aunts had a secret hiding place in a cave when she was young, and when they revisit the cave, they find cave drawings done by Native Americans. I also remembered that the cave is dangerous at certain times because the tide comes in. Years ago, Aunt Melissa was almost trapped there because she stayed too long and was caught by the tide. When her father found out, he refused to allow her to go there alone again. Since her mother and sister didn’t like going to the cave at all and she and her sister soon went away to boarding school, she gave up going there entirely for a long time. She was always sad about the loss of her secret hiding place. However, when she returns there as an adult, it contains part of the secret to unraveling what happened to her father’s letter last Christmas.

At one point in the story, Jennifer finds a very distinctive seashell with red and green colors. Everyone is amazed because it’s a court cone, not a shell normally found on the shores of California, and it also doesn’t normally appear in those colors. This is the shell that Jennifer calls the Christmas Shell. This shell doesn’t directly contain the solution to the mystery, but its shape and something Jennifer does with the shell awaken some of Aunt Melissa’s memories. I also remembered that Jennifer was the one who figured out what Elsa did after watching her brother fiddling around with a napkin in a napkin ring.

While I was rereading this book, I was happy to see all the bits and pieces of my memories of this book fall into place alongside the clues to the mystery. Stories with secret hiding places are always fun, and this one has two – Aunt Melissa’s old secret hiding place in the cave and the place where the missing letter is hidden.

There is also a reference in this story to the Elsie Dinsmore books, a children’s series from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Box of Delights

The Box of Delights by John Masefield, 1935, 1957.

This book is a sequel to The Midnight Folk. Since the events of the previous book, Kay Harker has become a student at a boarding school, and he is now returning home for Christmas.

At the train station, Kay panics when he realizes that he can’t find his ticket, but it is returned to him by a nice old man with a dog named Barney. Kay also sees some men who seem to be looking for someone else. He overhears their description of the man they’re looking for, but they seem to conclude that the man isn’t on the train. Kay thinks that they might be police detectives, looking for an escaped criminal. His conclusion is proven correct when a porter tells him later that the detectives caught the man they were looking for, trying to disguise himself as a duchess. Kay asks what the criminal did, and the porter says that he’s murderer who killed his father-in-law in a very brutal way. Now, the detectives are taking him away in a special card with an armed guard, and he will probably hang for the crime. Kay finds the story thrilling, but he wonders if the guard made it up or embellished it. When he buys a newspaper, he doesn’t see anything about a murder like the porter described in it.

Kay enjoys the train ride home because, when he went to school, it was by car, so he’s seeing things on the journey home that he hasn’t seen before. On the train, he meets a couple of men dressed like theology students, but whether they’re really theology students is questionable. They sometimes speak to each other in a foreign language that Kay thinks might be Italian, and they trick Kay into playing a card game for money that’s like the Shell Game. Kay only plays once, and when he realizes that he’s been tricked, he decides the men are sinister. The two men ask Kay about the countryside, and one of them refers to him as “Mr. Harker” when Kay never introduced himself. Kay asks the man how he knew his name, but the man never really explains. When Kay arrives at his train station and meets Caroline Louisa, who looks after him, he realizes that his coin purse and watch are missing. Strangely, when he checks for them, he finds the ticket that he thought that he’d lost, so the ticket the nice man gave him must have been his own.

The nice man with the dog is also at the train station. Caroline Louisa thinks that he looks like a Punch and Judy man, and when Kay asks him, he simply says that he is a showman. He also seems to speak in odd riddles, telling Kay that “the Wolves are Running” and asking him if he will do anything to stop them biting. Kay says that he doesn’t know what he means. Rather than explaining, the man asks him to go to a shop in town to buy some muffins, and while he’s there, to look for a lady wearing a ring like the one he’s wearing and give her the message that “The Wolves are Running.” Kay is surprised that this man also seems to know his name and won’t explain how.

When Kay returns to Caroline Louisa, he mentions the men on the train who knew his name, and she says that they probably read it on his luggage labels. Without telling Caroline Louisa why, Kay asks if they can stop in town to buy some muffins. Caroline Louisa also mentions that the four Jones children, Peter and his three sisters, will be spending Christmas with them because their parents have to go abroad. Kay gets along pretty well with the Jones children, and Peter will be sharing a room with him. Kay says that he will have to get some extra presents for the Jones children in town as well. They stop in town, Kay buys the muffins as he was told, and sees the woman that the old man described with a ring like his. Not knowing why it’s important, Kay passes along his message to her, and she nods to him. Then, Kay notices that there are people in town with Alsatians, and they seem to be on the scent of something. Kay wonders if they could police dogs, and Caroline Louisa says she doesn’t know, but she doesn’t like them herself because they remind her too much of wolves.

When they get home to Seekings, the four Jones children are already there. (We did not met them in the previous book, so these are new characters to readers, although Kay has already met them at this point.) Kay thinks of Peter as “a good honest sort of chap.” Of his three sisters, Kay thinks of Jemima as being the smart one. Maria is untidy and has a toy pistol. She has a fascination with gangsters, like in the movies, and she wishes that they could find a gang of robbers and have a battle with them. Susan looks like a small fairy.

Kay gets the idea of inviting the man they’ve come to think of as the Punch and Judy man to the house to perform for them. When he goes back to town to invite him, another man wearing the same ring as the others stops him and tells him to pass on the message that “Someone is safe.” Kay thinks that the message is intended for the Punch and Judy man and passes the message on to the old man when he sees him. He tries to ask the old man what he’s been talking about when he talks about the “Wolves”, but he’s evasive. Instead, he tells Kay that he will come perform a Punch and Judy show for the children at Seekings at the time he was thinking of. Kay asks him how he knew he was going to make that request, but he ignores the question. The old man produces the image of a Phoenix in the fireplace at the pub where they are talking, and he says that he has other wonders in a little box that he will show him later.

When the old man, whose name is Cole Hawlings, comes to Seekings to perform for the children, he does many magic tricks that appear to be real magic. After his performance, some Christmas carolers come to the house, and Kay spots three men, who seem to be spying on the house, trying to see into the study. One of them is one of the men who tricked him with the card trick on the train. Cole Hawlings is very nervous about these men and starts talking about wolves running again.

Caroline Louisa is unexpectedly called away to tend to her sick brother, and while Kay is seeing her off, the other children are approached by one of the spying men, who asks where Hawlings went. Maria, who didn’t actually see Hawlings leave, mistakenly says that he left with the carolers. As Kay returns to the house, he overhears the spying men talking about it. They are definitely after Hawlings, and they are associates of Abner Brown, the villain from the previous book. Kay realizes that his old enemy has returned, and once again, he will have to face off against evil magic.

When Kay meets up with Hawlings again, Hawlings says that it’s not really him that the wolves are after but the Box of Delights that he carries. He gives it to Kay for safe keeping. Kay doesn’t fully understand the purpose of the box, although Hawlings shows him how to use it to return home without any time seeming to have passed. The next day, Kay brings Peter with him when he goes to see Hawlings, and the boys witness Hawlings being kidnapped and dragged into an airplane! They try to report it to the police, but the police don’t believe that they witnessed a kidnapping, and someone else turns up in another town, claiming to be Hawlings. Where is the real Hawlings, why do Abner Brown and his people want his box so badly, and what is Kay going to do with it?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiples copies). There have been multiple dramatizations of the book, and you can sometimes find them or clips of them on YouTube.

My Reaction

I felt like this story was more cohesive than The Midnight Folk, which seemed more disjointed. It is still episodic and tries to work in various elements from children’s fantasies, stories, and folklore. When Kay opens the box, he finds a strange book, and when he opens the book, he finds himself in a forest with Herne the Hunter, a character from folk legends. Herne turns Kay into different animals. After a delightful adventure exploring the woods with Herne in different animal shapes, Kay finds himself back in his own bedroom with hardly any time having passed. Later, the children use the box to shrink themselves to hide from the villains and meet fairies. Aside from the traditional and folklore elements, there are also elements of modern stories and fantasies. The children have a fascination with gangsters (probably from movies of the time), and the villains have some pretty impressive equipment, like a taxi that turns into an airplane and airplanes that fly silently, seeming to combine more modern technology with an element of fantasy or magic.

I also liked the addition of Peter and his sisters because it gave Kay other children he could talk to and who could see the things he sees and share in his adventures. Kay doesn’t tell his friends everything, although they do share in various parts of his adventures, and I’m actually amazed that they take these parts in stride and don’t ask as many questions as I think they should be asking. The adults around them are completely oblivious to the magical happenings, with the exception of Hawlings.

As an historical food note, the police inspector recommends to Kay that he have a hot milk drink called a posset, and he describes what goes into one, but the version that he describes is non-alcoholic. The original drink was an alcoholic beverage, but presumably, this one was toned down for children. The way they describe it in the book, it sounds similar to a non-alcoholic eggnog, but served hot.