Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall by Alice B. Emerson, 1913.
Since Ruth and her friends have helped her Uncle Jabez to recover his stolen cash box in the previous book, Uncle Jabez has decided to send Ruth to Briarwood Hall, the boarding school that her best friend, Helen Cameron will attend, so the two of them can stay together. Briarwood Hall is an exclusive school, where the primary entrance requirements are academic records and teacher recommendations. Ruth has already graduated from the local school in her uncle’s town although she is a little younger than Helen, and she is ready for the high school level. Helen’s twin brother, Tom, will be attending a military academy close to the girls’ boarding school.
The three of them travel alone to their schools, without adult chaperones. They amuse themselves by seeing if there are other students bound for their schools traveling on the same train and steamboat they take to their boarding schools, but they can’t find any. However, they do see an interesting older lady with a veiled hat who attracts their attention because she looks doll-like and speaks French. For some reason, this lady seems greatly upset by a strange man with a harp who is part of a musical group entertaining passengers on the steamboat.
The mysterious French woman turns out to be the girls’ new French teacher at Briarwood Hall. She seems very nice to the girls when they are introduced to her as they’re riding in a coach to the school after they get off the boat. Mary Cox, a fellow student who is older than Ruth and Helen, rides to the school with the girls and the French teacher. On the way to the school, Ruth notices that Mary seems to oddly ignore the French teacher, speaking only to her and Helen.
Mary is a Junior at the school, and tells the girls about the school clubs. The two main clubs at Briarwood are the “Upedes” and the “Fussy Curls.” I was glad that Ruth and Helen thought that these sounded by strange names for clubs, too. Mary explains that they’re just nicknames for the official club names. The Upedes are members of the Up and Doing Club, a group of girls who like lively activities. There are other groups at school, like the basketball players, but the Upedes and Fussy Curls have a particular rivalry for members. Mary is a member of the Upedes, although, in spite of the groups’ rivalry for gaining new members, Mary strangely doesn’t invite Ruth and Helen to join her group and doesn’t seem to want to explain what the rival group does.
When the girls leave the coach, Mary says that she doesn’t like the French teacher because she’s a poor foreigner, and Mary doesn’t know why she’s at the school. (Mary sounds like she’s rather a snob.) Mary says that she thinks it’s strange that the French teacher never wears any nice clothes and doesn’t seem to have any personal friends or relations. (Yeah, definitely a snob toward someone who just seems a bit unfortunate, like it’s some kind of moral failing, not having nice clothes or personal connections to show off.) Helen says that the French teacher does have personal acquaintances because she seemed to know the harp player on the boat, something that seems to interest Mary. Ruth has the uneasy feeling that they shouldn’t have mentioned it, not knowing exactly what the teacher’s connection to the harp player is. Helen likes Mary, but Ruth has reservations about her friendship.
Mary Cox shows the girls where their dorm room is. Helen and Ruth are sharing a room by themselves. Another girl, a senior named Madge Steel, comes by to talk to the girls and invites them to a meeting of the Forward Club (known as the “Fussy Curls” because of its initials) that evening. Ruth wants to go to that meeting because Madge seems very nice, and the Forward Club includes members of the school faculty. However, Helen says that she’d rather attend the meeting of the Upedes that evening that Mary told her about. Helen thinks that they owe Mary their loyalty because she was the first to meet them and was helpful in finding their room. Besides, the Upedes have no teachers in their club, and Helen thinks that it sounds more exciting and free from supervision than the Forward Club. Ruth thinks that she would prefer to get closer to her new teachers and some well-behaved girls instead, and it’s the first major disagreement that the friends have. Mary talks Ruth into going to the meeting of the Upedes that evening because that was the invitation that they received first, but Ruth says that she won’t join any club officially until she’s had a chance to see the other girls involved and learn what the clubs are really like. Ruth’s stance seems to be the wise one as the school’s headmistress tells the girls that joining clubs on campus are fun but that they should beware of getting involved too much with girls who don’t take their studies seriously and waste their time, and they learn that Mary Cox’s nickname at school is “the Fox”, suggesting that she’s as sly as Ruth has sensed. Although Mary didn’t mention it to the girls before, she’s actually the leader of the Upedes.
That evening, the girls are introduced to other students, and at the meeting of the Upedes, the school’s very own ghost story. Briarwood wasn’t always a school. It used to be a private mansion, and a wealthy man lived there with his beautiful daughter. The wealthy man was the one who commissioned the creation of the fountain with the marble statue that still stands on the school’s grounds. Although people on campus say that nobody really knows what the statue of the woman playing a harp in the fountain is supposed to represent, the ghost story claims that the figure was modeled after the beautiful daughter of the mansion’s former owner. However, according to the story, the girl fell in love with the man who sculpted the statue of her, and the two of them eloped, leaving her father alone and sad. Rumor had it, though, that the girl and her new husband must have died somewhere after they ran away because people started hearing mysterious harp music at night on the grounds of the mansion. Eventually, Briarwood was sold, and the school’s founders, the Tellinghams, bought it, and sometimes, people still hear harp music on the school grounds. Every time something strange or momentous happens at the school, people hear the twang of the harp.
That night, Ruth and Helen become the targets of a frightening hazing stunt by the Upedes that seems to bring the ghost story to life, but when something happens that frightens even the hazers, it brings into question how much of the ghost story is really true.
The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.
Spoilers and My Reaction:
I liked this story much better than the first book in the series because it is more directly a mystery story than the first book, and Ruth makes a deliberate effort to untangle some of the puzzling things happening at her new school.
It’s pretty obvious that there is a connection between the ghost story of the girl with the harp and the French teacher’s apparent discomfort at the suspicious harpist. Ruth finds out pretty quickly that the harpist from the boat is lurking around the school. That revelation explains the frightening happenings at the hazing incident, although it still leaves the question of the connection between the harpist and the French teacher. At first, I thought that it was going to turn out that there is some truth to the ghost story the Upedes told, but that actually has nothing to do with the real situation. In some ways, I felt like the real situation was a little to straight-forward and resolved a bit too quickly at the end, considering the build-up they’d had about it. It is interesting that, of the students at the school, only Ruth comes to learn the full truth of the French teacher’s secret. Even Helen doesn’t know what Ruth eventually discovers, partly to save the French teacher’s reputation and partly because Ruth and Helen’s friendship is suffering for part of the book.
Unlike newer series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, characters in the older Stratemeyer series, including the Ruth Fielding series, grow, age, and develop their lives and personalities. In this book, when the girls go away to boarding school, the differences in Helen and Ruth’s backgrounds and personalities become more obvious. It leads them to clash in some ways, and they both worry about endangering their friendship with each other, but by the end of the book, each of the girls develop a greater sense of who they are and what they really stand for.
Helen is more familiar and comfortable than Ruth is with the traditional rituals of boarding school, even taking some glee in the mean hazing ritual of the Upedes, and she badly wants to fit in with the cooler older girls at school, willing to put up with their mean bossing to take part in their schemes for the fun and excitement. However, Ruth, is naturally more serious and shy and less accustomed to having things her way or telling others what to do anywhere she’s lived than the wealthy Helen. Ruth overcomes some of her shyness and learns to be more assertive as she stands up for herself and the other new girls at school, called “Infants” by the older girls. Ruth decides to refuse to join either the Forward Club, which has a reputation of being made up of girls who toady up to the school faculty, or the Upedes (which was initially founded as a protest group to the Forward Club, which is why most of the activities of their club involve breaking various school rules and instigating pranks), after experiencing their mean pranks and bossiness. Instead, she takes a joke of Helen’s seriously and decides to form a secret society of her own. She talks to some of the other new girls at school, and they feel the same way they do, that they don’t want to choose between either the Upedes or the Fussy Curls and would rather have a club of their own, where they won’t be dominated or hazed by the older girls. Helen gets upset at Ruth starting this new group because she thinks that they won’t gain any new friends or have any real fun or really be a part of this school if they don’t join an already-established group. Helen thinks that a group of new girls would look ridiculous because they wouldn’t know what to do with their club and will look like a group of babies. However, Ruth realizes that this is nonsense. There are enough interested girls among the newcomers to give them a good group of friends and they can think of their own things to do where they can be the leaders. Ruth turns out to be more of a leader and Helen more of a follower, and Ruth is also more creative, thinking of new possibilities in life instead of stuck with someone else’s creation. I wish that the book had gone into more details about what Ruth’s club actually does. She and some of the other girls periodically go to meetings of their club, but they don’t say much about what they do at the meetings.
Helen and Ruth temporarily go separate ways at school. Helen joins the Upedes, and Ruth and some of the other new girls carry out the plan to form a new club that they call The Sweetbriars. The other girls who help form The Sweetbriars are as independently-minded and creative as Ruth and like the idea of forming their own school traditions. Helen criticizes Ruth for being a stickler from the rules because she doesn’t want to take part in school stunts that might get her in trouble, but although Helen is more inclined to break rules in the name of fun, she is still less independent in her mind than Ruth because her rule-breaking is done following the dictates of the Upedes and the traditional school stunts of having midnight feasts with other girls in their dorm rooms. They are not stunts of her own creation or particularly imaginative, and while she is brave about school demerits, she is not very brave about what other people think about her. After the Upedes have treated Ruth very badly and spread rumors about her, Ruth finds the courage to tell Helen how hurt she is that she continues to be friends with people who have treated her so badly when she wouldn’t have put up with people mistreating a friend of hers. She doesn’t ask for an apology and says that she’s not sure that one is even warranted, but she wants Helen to know how she feels. Helen has felt like hanging around Mary Cox has made her act like a meaner person, and she feels like she can’t help herself in Mary’s company. Understanding how Ruth really feels reminds Helen that she risks damaging her relationship with her best friend if she doesn’t do something about her behavior, and when Mary is ungrateful and lies to Helen after Ruth and Helen’s brother help save her life during a skating accident, Helen begins to see Mary for what she really is.
In the second half of the book, the Mercy Curtis from the first book in the series reappears. In the first book, she spent most of the time being bitter because she had a physical disability that prevented her from walking, and she was overly sensitive about how people looked her. However, at the end of the first book, Mercy received some treatment from a surgical specialist that has enabled her to regain her ability to walk. She still walks with crutches, but her spirits have improved now that she is able to move more easily on her own, without relying on her wheelchair. Because she had previously spent much of her time alone, studying, she qualifies for admittance to Briarwood and decides that she would like to join her friends, Ruth and Helen. When Mercy comes to the school, she is still sharp-tongued, although less bitter about herself. She rooms with Ruth and Helen and joins the Sweetbriars. She adds a nice balance to Ruth and Helen’s friendship. Ruth gets to spend some time with Mercy and the other Sweetbriars when Helen is with the Upedes, and Mercy is very serious about her studies, so she insists that her friends not neglect theirs, keeping then on task in the middle of their social dramas.
As a historical note, there is a place in the story in, Ch. 22, where the book describes Ruth as wearing a sweater, defining it as if readers might not know exactly what a sweater was, calling it “one of those stretching, clinging coats.” The reason for that is that sweaters were actually a relatively new fashion development for women in 1910s, although men had worn sweaters before. Women often wore shawls in cold weather before sweaters became popular, but sweaters left a woman’s arms more able to move freely than a shawl would allow, as this video about women’s clothing during World War I from CrowsEyeProductions explains.
#1 Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill or Jasper Parloe’s Secret, by Alice B. Emerson (The Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1913.
In the first book of the Ruth Fielding mysteries, one of the older series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, young Ruth Fielding has recently lost her parents and is traveling by train to New York state to live with her Great Uncle Jabez. She has never met him before, but she knows that he lives in a red mill outside of a small town. She meets the town doctor on the train when he notices how sad she looks and explains to him why she’s traveling to her great uncle’s home. Her old home was in a poor area, and although she would have liked to stay with her friends there after her father’s death, no one would have been able to keep her. Then, the train unexpectedly stops when the engineer sees what looks like a warning light.
It turns out that the light is a red lamp tied to a large mastiff, who seems very upset. Ruth, who is good with dogs, is the only person who is able to calm the dog enough to get a look at the dog’s tag. It turns out that the dog belongs to Tom Cameron, who doesn’t live too far from where her Great Uncle lives. Tom Cameron comes from a wealthy family, and he has a reputation for being a wild boy. The lamp tied to the dog appears to come from his motorcycle, and there is a note tied to the dog that appears to be written in blood and only says, “Help.” Ruth is very upset, thinking that the dog’s owner must be badly hurt somewhere. The adults around her aren’t so sure because they think Tom could be playing a prank, but they take the dog aboard the train. The town doctor says that it’s possible that Tom could have had an accident on his motorcycle, and when they get to town, the town doctor, some of the other men, and Ruth set out to see if the dog will lead them to where Tom is. Ruth needs to come because the dog behaves better for her than for the men.
When they find Tom, he really is hurt, having had a motorcycle accident. He is barely conscious and muttering, “It was J. Potter. He did it!” They don’t know what it means, although it sounds like he’s accusing Ruth’s great uncle of causing his accident. By the time they get Tom to safety, it is late, and it turns out that Ruth’s uncle visited the train station at the wrong time, before the train even arrived and not seeing Ruth, assumed that she wasn’t on the train and left. Because her uncle lives outside of town and it’s rather late, the station master, Mr. Curtis takes Ruth to stay the night at his house with his family. Mrs. Curtis is very nice, but Mercy is a young invalid. She doesn’t like other children because they stare at her because of her disability, and she can’t play the games other children play.
The next day, Helen Cameron, Tom Cameron’s twin sister, comes to the Curtis house to give Ruth a ride to her great uncle’s house. Ruth likes Helen, but Helen tells her that her great uncle is a good miller but has a reputation as a miser, and she’s surprised that he decided to take her in. That worries Ruth, but Helen assures her that there will be others in town who would be willing to have her if she can’t stand living with her great uncle. In fact, Helen’s father even told her that he would be interested in having Ruth come to stay with them because she would be a good companion for Helen. Tom and Helen’s mother died when they were babies, and Helen would appreciate having another girl in the house. It’s a generous offer, but first, Ruth needs to meet her great uncle and see what he’s like.
Great Uncle Jabez is very much like Helen described. He is a hard worker but an impatient, hard-hearted, and self-centered man who doesn’t do much of anything without analyzing what he can get out of it for himself. He makes it clear that if Ruth wants to stay with him, he’ll expect her to work and make herself useful to the household. There is only one other person who lives with Uncle Jabez, the housekeeper, who likes to be called Aunt Alvira, although she is no relation to either Jabez or Ruth. Aunt Alvira tells Ruth that her uncle is a good man for giving her the position of housekeeper when she had nowhere else to live and no family of her own. She is more warm and affectionate than Ruth’s great uncle, making Ruth feel more at home. Ruth sees that she can be helpful to Aunt Alvira by assisting her with household chores. Aunt Alvira is getting older and has aches and pains that cause her to often exclaim, “Oh, my back, and oh, my bones!” She appreciates having a strong young person to help her. Uncle Jabez becomes appreciative when he sees that Ruth knows how to do chores and make herself useful, and Aunt Alvira’s affection makes Ruth’s new home bearable for her.
One day, when Tom is feeling better, he and Helen come to see if Ruth wants to take a ride with them. Aunt Alvira says it’s okay for her to go, and while they’re out in the Camerons’ car, they witness the breaking of the mill’s dam. The young people realize that they need to warn others who are in danger. They drive around, shouting warnings for people to get out of the way, and they finally take refuge at the red mill, which is soon cut off like an island. The mill’s office is partially destroyed in the flood, but the mill itself is undamaged. Uncle Jabez makes it safely back to the mill, although he has to drive his mules hard to make it through the waters. Unfortunately, there are two major losses: Ruth’s trunk, which Jabez was bringing to the mill from the train station and was lost out the back of his cart in the water, and Uncle Jabez’s money box, which was in the mill office and contained his life’s savings, all of the cash he had in the world. Uncle Jabez hasn’t trusted banks since the last time he lost money when the town’s bank failed. Everyone thinks that the money box was swept away when the office was partly destroyed by the flood, but Uncle Jabez has other suspicions when he learns that Jasper Parloe, a disreputable man, was near the mill office around the time when it was destroyed.
The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.
My Reaction
As one of the earlier Stratemeyer Syndicate books, there are elements of adventure and general fiction as well as mystery. In fact, there is more of these elements than there is of mystery. There are the disasters that Ruth and her friends must confront, the motorcycle accident and the flood caused by the breaking of the dam, but they don’t really seem to try to investigate any further into these for much of the book. They also don’t really try to investigate the disappearance of Uncle Jabez’s money box, thinking that it just washed away in the flood, even though Jasper Parloe suspiciously ran to where he knew it was and then ran away immediately after. I don’t think it’s even that much of a spoiler to tell you that Jasper Parloe did indeed take Uncle Jabez’s money box. The fact that he has a “secret” is right in the title of the book, there are no other suggested secrets about him, he was right on the scene to take it at the time it disappeared, and there are absolutely no other suspects other than the flood.
Ruth has legitimate complaints about her uncle. Insisting that Ruth help out around the house isn’t bad, but at first, he resists the idea of sending Ruth to school, asking basically, “What’s in it for me?” Uncle Jabez never does anything for anybody without seeing what’s in it for him. Even though Aunt Alvira credits Uncle Jabez with giving her a home, Jabez got a free servant out of it, so it’s not like he was really doing Alvira a favor as a Good Samaritan. In fact, in places where slavery and indentured servitude are illegal, most people would pay a live-in housekeeper a salary as well as providing them with a place to live as part of the job. Jabez isn’t even doing that. His “favor” gets him free services most people would pay for.
I don’t fault him too much with not trying to immediately get Ruth some new clothes after he lost her trunk in the flood. While he should replace the clothes as soon as possible, his money was missing, so he might not have had the funds. Still, he is not the least bit sympathetic to Ruth about her loss and even seems to take some pleasure in telling her that he lost her trunk, which is awful. Uncle Jabez does get better, though, especially after he gets his money back.
A fun, expected part of the story is the fondness that unexpectedly develops between Uncle Jabez and Mercy Curtis. From the beginning of the book, Mercy is bitter about her physical condition and the fact that she has to use a wheelchair. The book makes it clear that Mercy’s bitterness is poisoning her chances of making friends in her community. She thinks that other people are mocking her or looking down on her for her disability. A major part of that exists only in Mercy’s own mind because she herself is upset about being disabled, so she exaggerates what she thinks other people are thinking about her or saying about her behind her back, and she’s often wrong. One thing that she’s not wrong about is that people pity her, and even if they’re not being mocking of her, they are sometimes overly sweet or pitying in their tone. She takes that as mockery, although it’s really meant to be a kind of sympathy. Mercy ends up liking Ruth because Ruth doesn’t do that around her. Ruth feels pity for Mercy, both because of her physical problem and because of her bitter attitude that’s making her more unhappy, but she purposely doesn’t show it because she knows that would only annoy Mercy more. Instead, she just speaks calmly and nicely to Mercy about things that she’s experiencing and finds pleasant, and that draws Mercy out of her shell. When Ruth describes her life at the mill while visiting Mercy, Mercy admits that she’s often admired the red mill and the grounds around it from a distance, the first time she really admits to liking anything. Most of the time, Mercy has a sharp tongue and is full of criticism. However, she expresses an interest in seeing the red mill up close and meeting Uncle Jabez. Uncle Jabez fascinates Mercy because he is ugly. Because Mercy is physically imperfect, she is drawn to other people who are also physically imperfect, and the fact that Uncle Jabez is blunt and biting in his speech also fits well with Mercy’s personality. She knows that Uncle Jabez won’t talk to her with any of the pitying sweetness that she can’t stand. In return, Uncle Jabez is pleasantly surprised that Mercy honestly likes him for being the crotchety old coot he is and enjoys letting her come for a visit at the mill. The twins take her to the mill in their car, which is a treat for Mercy, and the visit with other people who accept her for who she is does her good.
Stories about invalids getting better through improving their attitude and outlook on life were a common trope in children’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Secret Garden was only published two years prior to this book. However, I was pleased that they chose to make it clear that Mercy has a genuine physical disability, not one that’s all in her head and vanishes as soon as she starts thinking pleasant thoughts. It makes the book more grounded in reality. Mercy did have a real problem that would be genuinely upsetting to have, and while making new friends and getting a new perspective on life did help her feel better, it takes real medical intervention to bring about improvement in her physical condition. Before the end of the book, the local doctor brings a specialist surgeon to see Mercy, and Mercy gets an operation that restores some of the use of her legs, giving her improvement that she can genuinely feel glad about. She doesn’t get completely better, which also is true to life with serious physical conditions. She still has to walk with crutches, so it’s not like they gave her an unrealistic, magical cure. However, Mercy accepts the marked improvement in her condition for the blessing it is. No longer being dependent on a wheelchair means that she can do more things than she was previous able to do, and in the next book in the series, she is even able to attend boarding school with Ruth and Helen.
The Rover Boys in the Jungle by Arthur M. Winfield (aka Edward Stratemeyer), 1899.
My Foreword
I wasn’t particularly eager for this book after the first one in the series. I didn’t think the Rover Boys was as much fun as later Stratemeyer Syndicate books and there are some instances of racial language that are uncomfortable to explain. However, this is the book where the boys actually go to Africa in search of their missing father, and it resolves one of the major problems that the first book in the series set up, and I wanted to see it end.
As the book says at the beginning, the boys’ father went to Africa before the beginning of the series to look for gold mines and hasn’t been heard from since. The boys don’t know if their father is alive or dead, and meanwhile, the boys’ enemies from the first book in the series are still hanging around. The Baxters were put in prison for attempting to kidnap Dora at the direction of Josiah Crabtree in the book immediately before this one, but Dan Baxter escapes early in this book, and Crabtree is still around somewhere. The introduction and first chapter to the book brings readers up to date on developments from the previous books, sort of like the introductions to episodes of movie serials that didn’t exist at the time these books were written. Books in this series really need to be read in order, and if you skip any, like I did, you really need the introduction to bring you up-to-date.
The Story
There is a new boy at school, Hans Mueller, who is from Germany. This book was written before World War I, so there is nothing critical or derogatory about Germans, but the boys decide to tease Hans a little by playing up myths of the Wild West to scare him. They tell him that the school will be teaching them how to fight Indians (Native Americans) and that he’ll have to learn how to scalp people. Hans doesn’t know what they’re talking about at first, and when they explain it to him, he’s alarmed. (Good, Hans. That’s a sign of sanity.) Hans says that the only time he’s seen American Indians was at a traveling Wild West show that came to Germany, and he thought they looked scary. The other boys have a laugh about spooking poor Hans and drop the matter.
I mentioned in my last Rover Boys review that early Stratemeyer Syndicate books had archaic racial language and sometimes questionable racial attitudes that was later rewritten when various series were reissued. This early series hasn’t been revised. This first scene with Hans isn’t really so much a slur against Native Americans as prank with the boys playing up Wild West stories, but the book is just starting out.
Hans becomes the boys’ friend, but they prank Hans again later, scaring him with Tom wearing a Native American costume as he threatens to scalp him to continue their earlier joke, and they use the term “red man.” (We haven’t even gotten to Africa yet, so I was cringing at this point at what might be in store.) When Hans realizes that it was all just a prank, he tries to get the better of Tom by taking away the gun that Tom was using as a prop to scare him, and Tom tells him that the gun is too old to fire and isn’t dangerous. He just found it in the barn, and it’s all rusty. Tom tells Hans to pull the trigger and see that it won’t fire, which is the dumbest thing that anybody can do with a random old gun they just found somewhere. The gun explodes in Hans’s hands, knocking both Hans and Tom unconscious and scraping them with shrapnel. The other boys are scared, but they finally manage to bring them both around. Tom is horrified when he realizes what happened, saying that he’s been playing with that gun for awhile and pulled the trigger a dozen times himself, which is why he thought that the gun was unloaded and harmless (meaning he did the dumbest thing that anybody can do with a random old gun they just found somewhere repeatedly because, up to this point, dumb luck was on his side). He is shocked to realize that he’s lucky that he hasn’t shot somebody before and that he and Hans weren’t killed by the exploding gun. He apologizes to Hans and promises that this is the end of the pranks. Tom was always the lead prankster in earlier books, but he grows up a little here, realizing that reckless pranks have consequences.
At school, the boys participate in a kite flying contest, and Sam is almost pulled over the edge of a cliff by his kite. (Seriously.) Dora tells Dick that her mother had a dream that Crabtree tried to shoot him in a forest. (Prophetic?) The boys also have a run-in with Dan Baxter, who is still lurking around and swearing revenge.
Then, the boys turn their attention to a thief at school. Sam witnesses someone, who is probably the thief, sneaking around at night. Unfortunately, he didn’t see the person’s face, only describing this person as tall. Captain Putnam comes to believe that Alexander “Aleck” Pop, a black man who works for the school, is the thief because he receives an anonymous note that says he’s guilty. Sam doesn’t trust the anonymous note and tells the Captain so, saying that he can’t believe anyone as good-hearted as Aleck is would be a thief. However, the Captain insists that Aleck’s belongings be searched, and some of the objects that have been stolen turn up among his stuff. It’s a pretty obvious frame, and Alexander protests that he’s innocent, but Captain Putnam doesn’t believe him. There’s some ugly racial language used during this part. The word “coon” is used twice, and when the students at the school discuss the situation, one says the n-word. Fortunately, our Rover boy heroes aren’t the ones using that language, and Tom even tells the boy who used the n-word that he’s just resentful against Aleck for catching him doing something he shouldn’t have done earlier. The boy who used the n-word, Jim Caven, is portrayed as mean and unreasonable, and he gets into a fight with Tom in which he almost hurts him very badly. I was uncomfortable with the language in this scene, although I was somewhat reassured to see that it was used to characterize the ones using the worst of it as being the bad characters. My reassurance wasn’t complete because that’s not the only questionable racial language in the book.
Captain Putnam sends someone to escort Aleck to the authorities. He says that he supposes that the boys think he’s being too harsh with him, but he’s also suspicious of Aleck because he knows that members of his family have been in trouble with the law, too. The boys say it isn’t fair to blame him for things his relatives did and that they still don’t think he’s guilty. However, Aleck escapes before they reach the authorities, and they hear rumors that he went to New York City and boarded a ship to go overseas somewhere. The boys are sad, thinking that maybe they’ll never see him again. (You know they will.)
It’s not much of a surprise when the Rover boys later learn that Jim Caven has sold some things that match the description of other objects that have been stolen. Apparently, he’s been the thief all along and deliberately framed Aleck to get revenge on him. (I partly expected that the thief might be Dan Baxter, considering that he’s escaped from jail and is hanging around somewhere, probably needing money.) When the other boys confront Jim Caven, he flees into the woods. The other boys explain the situation to Captain Putnam, and he searches Jim Caven’s belongings, finding the rest of the stolen items. (You know, they could have just conducted a general search of the school and everyone’s belongings before this. This is a military academy, so a surprise dorm inspection wouldn’t be out of character, and it would have settled the matter much earlier.) Aleck’s name is cleared, but since he’s fled, they don’t know how to find him and tell him. Captain Putnam is sorry that he didn’t believe Aleck before.
However, they don’t have much time to consider it because the boys are soon summoned home by their uncle because he’s had news of their father. A ship captain has written Uncle Randolph a letter saying that his crew rescued a man who was floating on a raft off the Congo River. The man died soon after they brought him aboard their ship. They don’t know who the man was, but he was carrying a letter from the Rover boys’ father saying that he found a gold mine in Africa but was taken captive by King Susko of the Bumwo tribe (not a real African tribe, I can’t find anything about it) in order to prevent him from telling the secret of the mine to outsiders. Specifically, the tribe is afraid that the English and French colonizers will come to loot the mine and kill them. (Actually, a depressingly reasonable fear.) Anderson Rover explains in the letter that they don’t understand Americans. (That wouldn’t help, Anderson. Your boys attend a school run by a man who served with General Custer, and if this tribe knew what happened to Native Americans when gold was discovered on their land, they wouldn’t be reassured at all.) Anderson Rover is in fear of his life and asks his brother Randolph to come and rescue him if he can, but the letter is dated a year ago, so his family still doesn’t know if he’s alive now or not.
Uncle Randolph tells the boys that he wants to go to Africa to find his brother and asks Dick to come with him, as the oldest of his nephews. Dick, of course, agrees to go, but Tom and Sam refuse to be left behind. They decide that all of them will go.
On the ship to Africa, they meet an English adventurer named Mortimer Blaze, who is going to Africa for big game hunting. Tom asks him what will happen if the big game decides to hunt him instead, and he just says that it will be a “pitched battle.” (Doesn’t sound appealing to me.) When they talk about the people in Africa, they use the word “native” a lot and not in a flattering way. The general attitude seems to be that the “native” Africans are not very civilized (I was expecting they would say that because of the time period of this book), and Mortimer Blaze tells stories about tribes of people who are either very tall or very short. (I think he’s really referring to people from folktales, which I covered in the Encyclopedia of Legendary Creatures.) At one point, the characters say that the warm climate is the reason why Africa hasn’t made more progress toward civilization, that the warmth makes people want to be lazy. The adults in the story shock the boys by saying that not only is there no Christianity but that people there don’t really believe anything in particular, putting them even behind people Christians would consider heathens. They also make a shocking comment at one point about unwanted children being fed to crocodiles. They conclude that “civilization” can’t come soon enough to Africa, even if it has to be forced in with weapons. (Wow. I knew there was bound to be a lot of generic “native” and “savage” talk when I started this book because of the time period, but these matter-of-fact slights and accusations sound like they came straight out of Mrs. Mortimer’s books about Countries of the World Described, which heaps criticism and accusations of violence and immorality on pretty much all of the people of the world. Mrs. Mortimer’s books are much older than any Stratemeyer Syndicate books, and I wonder if Edward Stratemeyer read them in his youth. It wouldn’t surprise me because the attitudes match, and here he is, passing it all on to the next generation of kids in the form of an exciting adventure story.)
In a stroke of good luck, they end up rescuing Aleck, who was stranded at sea from the ship he boarded during his earlier escape. Aleck is glad to see the boys again, and they tell him that his name has been cleared and the real thief was caught. Aleck is glad to hear that, but he’s worried when he finds out that the ship that picked him up is headed for Africa. Aleck reflects that he always heard that his ancestors came from the Congo region of Africa, but he doesn’t really want to go there because he’s used to life in America and wouldn’t know what to do in Africa. (The Rover boys and Aleck go on for awhile about how great the United States is, and I know they were trying to sound patriotic, but the way they said it felt oddly like a sales pitch to me. I felt like saying, “You don’t need to sell me on the place. I already live here.”) The boys explain how they’re going there in search of their father. Aleck decides that he’d rather join their expedition than stay on the ship, and he offers his services as a valet. Uncle Randolph and the boys are glad to accept his help, and Uncle Randolph says it might be useful to have a black man with them who they know and trust in case they need someone to blend in with the native population and spy for them.
In a surprising twist, the boys also run into Dan Baxter on their arrival in Africa. When they ask him what he’s doing there, he says that he got drunk and was Shanghaied onto a ship, forced to work as a sailor. He was treated cruelly on the ship and ran away as soon as he had the chance. Now, he’s alone and has no money and no way home. The Rover boys feel sorry for him and give him money for him to buy his passage back to the United States. Dan Baxter asks to join their expedition, too, and they consider it as a sign that Dan is starting to reform because of his expedition. However, Dan is still a bully and an opportunist, and when he gets a counter-offer from someone else who is willing to hire him to make trouble for the Rovers, he accepts that instead, still holding a grudge against the Rovers because his father always told him that Anderson Rover stole a mine from him years ago that would have made them rich.
When I reviewed the first book in this series, I complained about the various unresolved story lines and miscellaneous villains still running around at the end of the story, still left to work on their individual plots against the Rover boys and their friends. In this book, every unresolved story line and villain from the first book collides with each other in Africa. Not only is Dan Baxter in Africa coincidentally at the same time as the Rovers, but Josiah Crabtree is also in Africa, for completely unrelated reasons from either the Rovers or Dan Baxter. He does attempt to kill Dick, but Dick survives. He is even rescued from a lion by one of his brothers.
So, is there true resolution with the main villains of the story, Dan Baxter and Josiah Crabtree? Not really. I looked up summaries of other books in the series, and even after they get some comeuppance, they continue to come back in sequels.
What is resolved by the end of the story is that the Rovers find their father alive. They rescue him from the village where he was being held captive, taking some of the women and children from the village with them as hostages to keep the village warriors from attacking them. They say privately that they wouldn’t have really hurt the women and children, but they tell the men that they’ll kill them if they don’t let the rescue party go. (This was another shocking part for me because I wouldn’t have thought of any of the usual Stratemeyer Syndicate heroes doing this. Somehow, I can’t picture the Hardy boys going this far, taking women and children hostage and threatening to kill them.) Once the rescue party is sure that they’re safe, they release their hostages and head for home. Anderson Rover says that he did find a gold mine, and someday, he’ll come back and loot it, er, mine it, but right now, all he wants to do is go home with his boys. It would be heartwarming if I didn’t know that he’s going to come back someday for gold on land that belongs to someone else who would never willingly sell it to him, and his boys are talking revenge on the king of the tribe that held their father captive.
This book is in the public domain and is easily available online in various formats through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (which has an audiobook).
My Reaction
I already gave much of my reaction to this book during the description of the plot because much of my reaction had to do with the racial language of the book. I knew there were going to be problematic portions before I even started, but frankly, there were too many of them for me to go into detail on all of them. What I described gives the broad strokes. I won’t say the book is deliberately trying to be insulting to black people. Aleck is portrayed as a good character who was wronged by a white boy by being framed for theft. However, there is a kind of casual racism in the story, like the casual references to how “uncivilized” Africa is and the characters’ off-hand supposition that it’s probably due to the climate there. I wouldn’t say that the characters or author hate black people (except maybe the non-Christian ones who feed children to crocodiles, which sounds like things Mrs. Mortimer accused various people of doing in the worst parts of Countries of the World Described), but I would say that there is a kind of condescension and dismissiveness that everyone, characters and author, seems to take for granted.
I can’t recall any of the characters using the phrase, “you know how they are”, but that’s the vibe I was getting. I got the feeling like the characters were saying things to each other and the author was saying things to his child readers with that sort of knowing tone, like “we all know these things.” No. “We” don’t. I know that Stratemeyer probably got a lot of this from a combination of old minstrel shows and Mrs. Mortimer or something very similar because I’ve seen Mrs. Mortimer‘s books, and I know how she talks. I also know why she says the things she does, and I’m not putting up with her attitude, even when it’s coming from someone else. Maybe the Rovers boys as characters and their child audiences would have read her books or similar ones before and nodded along with what Stratemeyer says because it confirms “information” they’ve seen before, but I’ve had more than my fill of wild accusations and crazy conspiracy theories, and I have no more patience left for any of it.
Mrs. Mortimer portrayed her book series as a factual introduction to world geography and the habits of people in different countries, but the truth behind her criticism, condescension, outspoken rudeness, and many of the wild accusations she makes about badly-brought-up children, dead bodies floating in rivers or just left in the street (depending on nationality), or the “antics” of “savages” around the world is her religious agenda (and, I think, probably some personal emotional and self-esteem issues, but that’s just a guess). She used missionaries with their own agendas as references for anecdotes in her books and tried to make people of various religions around the world sound evil and crazy on purpose to emphasize why “the Protestant” is the best religion (her words – she was specifically Evangelical and downright pushy about it). I would say that she also never hated black people … except maybe non-Christian ones, who as I recall, she claimed didn’t know what religion they were and were given to “antics”, dancing around and yelling or something. She wasn’t too clear on that point, probably because she didn’t know what she was talking about herself. On the other hand, she seemed inclined to be sympathetic to black people in the US who were victims of ill treatment, probably because they were Christian and most likely Protestant, which would have made all the difference in the world to her. She probably would have been okay with Aleck because he’s a Christian who was born in the US and has definitely never fed a baby to a crocodile in his life. She did not approve of the the concept of slavery at all and wouldn’t have tolerated physical cruelty of anyone due to race, which is to her credit, but none of that stopped her from spreading stories and rumors of violent savagery and teaching children that anyone who believed anything other than Protestant Christianity was “ignorant”, “savage”, and “wicked”, all words she actually used in describing people from various countries around the world because that’s what she wanted young children to “know” about other people. Mrs. Mortimer’s religious prejudices probably would have gone over the heads of the children who were these books’ original readers, especially if it echoed the talk of the children’s parents, but that’s how we end up with generations of children who grow into adults with casually racist ideas, thinking nothing of it, throwing around racist language without a clue or a care for the consequences. It’s in the book because it’s what “we” all “know”, dear Mrs. Mortimer said as much before, and Stratemeyer is just saying what “we” were all thinking, right? I think that’s about how that goes.
Let me bring you into the real world. If readers want to know what was really happening in Africa during the 19th century, there are far better sources. Africa is an entire continent, and there were many complex events happening all over, particularly related to European colonization. Outside forces were claiming territory in Africa, not so much for benefiting the people there and bringing them “civilization” as accomplishing their own personal aggrandizement and enrichment. (You know, rather like a man who is already rich in his own country coming to find and claim a gold mine that’s on someone else’s land because he’s addicted to the thrill of the hunt and acquisition and uses that thrill to hide from his own personal problems that he doesn’t want to face at home, like dealing with the loss of his wife and the raising of his boisterous sons. Just saying.) There were wars, famine, and disease in various parts of Africa during this period, partly due to internal power struggles among different African groups and leaders. I don’t know if anybody ever fed anyone to a crocodile on purpose, but infanticide is part of the dark side of humanity that comes out when times are desperate and hopes of survival in general are low. It’s a symptom of a society that’s suffering, and societies have suffered in that way many times around the world. If someone is likely to die soon after birth anyway, the hopeless parents might say, why even try? I suppose some might be tempted to say that having a religion that forbids killing children would help, but it hasn’t always, and having food also helps. I don’t blame 19th century missionaries for attempting to help people, but those who came in with a sense of self-importance, deciding ahead of time what would help without understanding the situation they were walking into, often didn’t help. Missionaries sometimes ended up getting killed in the middle of the unrest and power struggles. Some were even actively deceptive, using trickery and their position to gain advantages for themselves or the governments they represented at the expense of the people they were supposedly trying to help. But, the 19th century wasn’t all war, famine, and exploitation in Africa. The missionaries who were serious about doing some good and set up practical schools did provide useful centers of learning that helped educate future leaders and professional people and gave them tools they could use to build the lives they wanted. African societies did continue to build their own nations and identities. Overall, the colonization of Africa was more of an intrusive, disruptive force, providing additional hardships and obstacles to success more than solutions to any problems that Africa had before, not the glorious “civilizing” force that prevents people from feeding children to crocodiles that the book described.
So, now that I’ve talked about the historical and cultural influences behind the more uncomfortable parts of this book, I think it’s pretty obvious why early Stratemeyer Syndicate books had to be rewritten and revised in the mid-20th century. I knew this book was going to be cringe-worthy in places, but I have to admit that I was surprised at just how bad certain parts got. I hadn’t even considered that the word “coon” might appear. I never heard that word growing up and didn’t even know what it meant until I was in college, so I was pretty taken aback that a just-for-fun book for kids would use it, even one from the late 19th century. I suppose having grown up with the tamer, revised versions of books from the Stratemeyer Syndicate, I underestimated what the older series were like. I can only hope that I’ve made it pretty clear for people reading this review what the problems with this series were.
I debated about whether or not to even post this review, but I’ve talked about some uncomfortable books before (and said many highly critical things in my earlier rant about Mrs. Mortimer, my favorite example of a very popular bad influence in children’s literature – if you only know about her from The Peep of Day, you haven’t seen anything yet, even though the first chapter of that book is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read that was intended for small children). I’ve been planning a page discussing Stratemeyer Syndicate series books because they have been an important force in American children’s literature for so long, and it seemed only right to talk about their first series. So, now I’ve talked about it, and nobody else has to suffer through this book if they don’t want to. I found the characters, language, and situation aggravating, and the rewards for perseverance were inconsequential. This is certainly not something to spring on suspecting people, especially modern children, who might try using certain words for the attention-getting shock value without really understanding what they mean. I would say that this series should be primarily for adults interested in the history of children’s literature and others who know what they’re reading, understand what’s behind it, and can draw the line between fictional book and real life.
I’m not sure if I want to read any further books in this series because the unresolved problems of the stories get on my nerves, and there will probably be further issues with racial language, and I’d just have to repeat all the same explanations I’ve already given. I’m not saying a firm “no” to the rest of this series because there are indications that some people would like to see more coverage of them, but if I do any more, it’s probably going to be awhile and will only be delivered in small doses.
I wasn’t quite expecting to have these Mrs. Mortimer flashbacks from this book, but in honor of that experience, I might as well say that even though I’m leaving the Rover boys behind for now, I’m planning to go read many other useless novels “about people who have never lived”, which Mrs. Mortimer despised, and because I have access to some of them in audio book format, I can listen to them while knitting something completely unnecessary just because I want to. (If you read my rant/review about Countries of the World Described, you know what I’m talking about.) I’m not going to do it just because it would annoy Mrs. Mortimer. It’s something that I enjoy and do routinely anyway. I would do it even if it was something I thought Mrs. Mortimer would actually like. It’s more that knowing that she would have disapproved and can’t do anything about it makes me feel like we’re even because that’s the way I feel about her books and others like them.
The Rover Boys at School by Arthur M. Winfield (aka Edward Stratemeyer), 1899.
The three Rover boys, Richard, Thomas, and Samuel (called Dick, Tom, and Sam), live with their aunt and uncle in the country, but they learn that they are going to be sent to boarding school. The boys have been restless on the farm because they used to live in the city.
The boys’ father, Anderson Rover, is a mineral expert and made his fortune in mining. The family had lived in New York, so the boys are accustomed to city life. The boys’ mother died of a fever when they were young. After his wife’s death, the boys’ father traveled restlessly because of his grief, leaving the boys at boarding school in New York. Then, he had the notion to go to Africa and left the boys with their Uncle Randolph. The boys and their uncle haven’t heard from him since, and they worry that something has happened to him.
When the boys first arrived at the farm, they enjoyed the outdoor life of the country, but there isn’t much variety to the activities, and the boys start getting to trouble when they get bored. Their Uncle Randolph spends all of his time in studying scientific farming, and he can’t understand why the boys can’t take an interest in the subject or at least give him some peace and quiet for his work. The boys aren’t too impressed because, so far, their uncle doesn’t seem too successful at it. Richard (Dick) is the oldest of the three boys and is often quiet and studious, so he gets along better with Uncle Randolph than the others. He is 16 at the beginning of the series. Thomas (Tom) is fun-loving, likes to play pranks, and is 15 years old. His pranks are part of the reason why the boys are driving their uncle and aunt and their cook crazy. Samuel (Sam) is 14 years old and athletic.
Uncle Randolph doesn’t know much about kids or young people, so boarding school seems like the ideal solution. The boys’ aunt and uncle think that the boys need some discipline. They do, but the boys are also looking forward to seeing something of the world and having some adventures, so the prospect of going to boarding school sounds exciting to them. They’ve been to boarding school before, but they think it would be exciting to go to a military academy.
Before the boys leave the farm, Dick is attacked by a tramp, who steals his watch and pocketbook (wallet). The boys chase him and get the wallet back, but Tom almost drowns and Sam is almost swept over a waterfall while they try to pursue the tramp, who escapes in a boat with the watch. The boys are sad about the loss of the watch, which belonged to their father.
Tom gets a letter from his friend, Larry Colby, to say that he’s going to be attending the Putnam Hall Military Academy soon, and Larry’s father has recommended the school to the boys’ uncle. Uncle Randolph says that he’s decided to take the suggestion. The boys think it sounds exciting, and they’re glad that they’ll be going to school with someone they know. Uncle Randolph says that the headmaster of the school, Captain Victor Putnam, is a former military man who has a reputation for being kind to his students but strict on discipline, so it sounds like what the boys need.
Later in the story, they explain that Captain Putnam is a graduate of West Point and that he used to serve under Major General Custer, helping to put down Indian uprisings (Native American) until he was injured in a fall from his horse. For this book’s original audience of boys living in the late 19th century, this probably would have sounded exciting and noble, but not to people from the early 21st century. However Captain Putnam would have looked at it, quelling Native American uprisings would be essentially admitting to being part of their oppression because they weren’t uprising for nothing, and that fall from his horse is probably the only reason why he would even still be alive at the time of this story, given what eventually happened to Major General Custer. Because Custer had been a Civil War hero, people were shocked and saddened by his sudden and violent death. As with many people who die young, they romanticized his past and exaggerated his story, turning him into a legend for young people to live up to. Eventually, the romanticism wore off, and the reality stayed (he was the bottom of his class at West Point, not a student parents would really want their kids to emulate, and there were darker sides to his life and personality than most people in the 1800s would have known and which wouldn’t be appropriate talk for children), which is why his modern legacy isn’t as great as people a hundred years or more ago would have thought. Captain Putnam doesn’t look as exciting and heroic as advertised by association, but it’s enough to know that the Rover boys would have thought that it sounded impressive because of what their elders would have told them and so would their earliest readers, for similar reasons.
Before the boys leave for school on the train, Tom plays one last trick on the unpleasant station master by throwing a firecracker into some trash that the station master was burning, setting the mood for the boys’ eventual arrival at school.
After the train ride, the boy have to continue part way by boat. On the boat, they meet three pretty girls (how fortuitous) and a bully who also goes to their new school, Dan Baxter. The bully is harassing the girls by continuing to try to talk to them when they want him to leave them alone. Dan doesn’t say anything shocking to the girls, it’s more that he’s off-putting because he’s rather pushy and full of himself and can’t read a room to see that he’s making the girls uncomfortable because of the way he talks. It’s awkward. The Rover boys step in and try to get Dan to leave the girls alone, making an enemy of Dan. The girls (Dora Stanhope and her two cousins, Grace and Nellie Laning, who belong to prosperous farming families in the area) are grateful for the intervention and think that the Rover boys are better behaved than Dan is. The boys talk to the girls about their new school and learn that they don’t live far from the school, although they don’t mix with the students there much because the students at Putnam Hall don’t leave the campus very often. The boys hope that they’ll have the chance to see the girls again while they’re at Putnam Hall. (You know they will.)
Tom’s Putnam Hall experience starts off with a bang … literally. As the boys arrive at the school, Tom decides to give the other students a “salute” by scaring them with another of his firecrackers. That’s when Tom gets his first taste of military discipline from the Head Assistant Josiah Crabtree, the second in command at the school and the strictest disciplinarian in the place. Most of the school would have given the prank a pass, especially from a new boy, but Josiah Crabtree takes exception to Tom’s attitude and doesn’t accept his excuse that he doesn’t need to answer to Crabtree because he has only just arrived at the school, isn’t an official student yet, and shouldn’t be subject to the school’s rules. (Tom may have thought that military school would be exciting, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have the first clue what military discipline is about.) Crabtree marches Tom off and locks him in the guard room to wait for Captain Putnam to return to the school and administer his discipline. This is actually in Tom’s favor because Captain Putnam understands that his students are still boys, and therefore, he isn’t as strict with them as he would be full adult soldiers.
Josiah Crabtree’s ultra-strictness has caused him to be not well-liked by other students at the school. When he and Tom discuss Tom’s prank while waiting for Captain Putnam, Tom continues to argue the point that he is not yet a student at the school and that Crabtree has no right to lock him up like he has. Tom tells him that he wants to be released to stay at the hotel in town so he can contact his guardian because he may not wish to join this school after all, threatening to tell his uncle of his mistreatment. Crabtree is correct that setting off a fire cracker to scare people isn’t the best way to start off on the right foot with the faculty (I wouldn’t have liked it if someone did it to me, and this is a school where people learn to fire real guns, so you can’t have people who treat firearms and explosives like toys), but Tom’s point that immediate imprisonment before he’s even really joined the school and been notified of the school’s rules is a valid criticism, and he is not so committed to the school at this point that he can’t leave if he wants to. If Tom makes false imprisonment a public issue, it would damage the reputation of the school. That threat is worrying to Crabtree, who knows that he has already rubbed others the wrong way and made a few enemies of his own.
Tom runs away from Crabtree and hides in the forest outside the school. He plans to walk into town, but along the way, he spots a campfire. He listens in on the conversation of the men sitting by the campfire. He discovers that one of them is the tramp who stole their father’s watch before, and he listens to the men discussing some clandestine “mining deal.” When they catch Tom spying on them, Tom confronts the man called Buddy about stealing his father’s watch. Buddy and his friend deny it, and Tom fights with them before running away and getting help at the Laning farm, where he meets Grace and Nellie again and the family gives him a room for the night. When he explains his story to the family, he learns that Josiah Crabtree has been courting Dora Stanhope’s widowed mother because she owns a sizeable farm and has money from her first marriage.
In the morning, Tom returns to the school and makes his case to Captain Putnam, arguing as he did the night before that he had not yet officially joined the school before Josiah Crabtree imprisoned him and confiscated and searched his luggage. Captain Putnam makes it clear to Tom that certain things, like fire crackers, are forbidden at the school, and he will have to accept that if he’s serious about being a student there. Tom asks what the point is of him joining the school if he’s going to have marks against him before he’s even had a chance to properly start, and Captain Putnam says that if Tom still wants to join, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones and let him start school with a clean slate. Captain Putnam sees Tom as intelligent and spirited even though he’s undisciplined, and is willing to give him a chance. Tom accepts and joins the school, although Crabtree is still annoyed at Tom getting away with his prank and running away the previous night. When Tom rejoins his brothers, he tells them about seeing the thief who stole the watch, and they discuss how awful it would be for Dora if the martinet Crabtree became her stepfather.
Because The Rover Boys is an early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, there is more adventure and the general friendships and rivalries of life at a boarding school than there is mystery. The boys and their friends get used to the routines, rules, and drills of military school, getting into fights with the bullies, playing sports, and pulling stunts with their friends. However, there are villains in the story with secrets for the boys to learn. Josiah Crabtree hasn’t been honest with Dora Stanhope’s mother, trying to use pressure to get her to marry him so he can use her money and property for his purposes … including money and property entailed for Dora under her late father’s will. Crabtree claims to have money of his own, bur shows no evidence of it. Although, who has been giving the bully, Dan Baxter, large sums of money and for what purpose? What about the watch thief and his friend? Why do they keep hanging around?
By the end of the book … not too much is resolved, compelling readers to continue on to the next book in the series to find out what happens.
This book and others in the series are now public domain and are easily available online in various formats through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (including audiobook).
My Reaction
I never read any of this series of books when I was a kid, but having grown up with other Stratemeyer Syndicate books, like Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, I was curious about this first series produced by the Syndicate. I picked several of the books to get a feel for the series, and I had several reactions. First, the Rover Boys, like other early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, is almost but not quite a mystery series. It has some elements of suspense, but the little mysteries and secrets of the villains in the story come secondary to physical adventures and the drama of boarding school life for much of the book. In fact, the action kind of breaks for stories about football and baseball games the boys play at school, which don’t really have anything to do with the villains’ plots and are just part of school life. Although, the bully Dan Baxter loses favor with other boys at school when they discover that he actually placed a bet against the school’s own football team before a game, which seems pretty disloyal. I also suspected at first that at least some of the villains’ threads would be connected, but really, they have very little to do with each other, which was disappointing.
Stratemeyer Syndicate books have a pattern of ending chapters on cliffhangers in order to keep kids reading to find out what happens, which begins to show in this book, and often, the mystery/suspense elements in early stories help to set up these cliffhangers while the plot is more about the characters’ lives. Personally, I prefer stories that are more definitely mysteries, where the characters are making active efforts to solve problems and discover the villains’ secrets instead of just randomly stumbling on information. This particular story kind of annoyed me because the entire book ends on a cliffhanger. In fact, the only problem/mystery that gets resolved in the story is that Dick eventually gets his watch back. The other villains are still hanging around. At the end of the book, Crabtree is still hanging around, in spite of multiple interventions, trying to get Dora’ mother to marry him and turn over Dora’s inheritance from her father. The bully, Dan Baxter, left the school, but is apparently hanging around with Crabtree. It also turns out that Baxter’s father is secretly an old enemy of the Rover boys’ father and thinks that Anderson Rover cheated him out a mine years ago and still has the paperwork to prove it, possibly carrying it with him to Africa, for some reason. The Rover boys’ father is also still presumably lost somewhere in Africa, doing who-knows-what there. All of these problems are left hanging, apparently to be resolved in later books with other problems probably being added along the way. The only thing that I felt really certain about at the end of the book is that Dick is probably going to marry Dora in the future because he is already trying to be her protector, and his brothers will probably marry her convenient cousins, Grace and Nellie, in some order.
Second, I was bracing myself throughout the story to watch for its use of racial language. One thing to watch with old Stratemeyer Syndicate books is racist language and attitudes. In the 1950s and 1960s, with the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the Syndicate revised and updated its different series. They changed and removed outdated language, including racial terms, and also updated references to culture and technology. The version of this particular book that I used for my review is the old public domain version. I already talked about Captain Putnam’s service with Major General Custer and how people at the time would have felt about that compared to modern people, but there is also a black man called Alexander who works at Putnam Hall. He doesn’t have a very big role in the story, but I wanted to talk about him because of the way the book describes him. The book describes him using the words “colored” and “Negro”, which are outdated now although acceptable for the time period (that’s why they’re part of the names of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909, and the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944). However, during the Civil Rights Movement, people wanted to distance themselves from terms that were used during periods of high discrimination, so they began shifting to the use of “African American” as the specific term and “black” as the generic. This is the sort of language update that the Stratemeyer Syndicate books received in later reprintings.
Later in the book, one of the boys’ friends jokingly imitates a “Negro minstrel” in an old minstrel show (an entertainment people of this time would have been familiar with which included caricatured characters of black people), saying “That’s the conundrum, Brudder Bones. I’se gib it up, sah!” (“Brudder Bones” was a stock character in one of those shows, although I don’t know much about it because I’ve never seen a real minstrel show. I think there was a similar reference to the name “Bones” as a minstrel show character in the book Cheaper by the Dozen as well.) This is another cultural element that would be removed from later Stratemeyer Syndicate books and that also appeared in other older children’s books that were written prior to the Civil Rights Movement, including at least one of the Little House on the Prairie books. These references get a bad reaction in modern times because this type of caricature is a mean style of humor that probably wouldn’t have lasted very long against anybody who had the authority to complain about it at the height of its popularity. To put it another way, it’s the kind of humor where someone is definitely being laughed “at”, not “with,” and some even included songs with descriptions of horrifically violent things happening to black people masked as comedy. If you’ve never seen this kind of reference to minstrel shows before, you are not missing anything for having grown up without it. There’s nothing inherently funny in the friend’s little joke, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who didn’t know what the reference referred to. It seems to be one of those things that only becomes amusing when someone recognizes the source of the reference, and as I said, I’m not even sure exactly who “Bones” was supposed to be, other than some kind of stock character. I vaguely know what the reference is from, but not enough to connect with it in the way the original audience might have, and anyone younger than I am probably wouldn’t recognize even that much. I don’t want to put undue emphasis on this line in the book because it was only one line, and the Rover boys weren’t really into it either because they were worried about a problem they had at the time that wasn’t really funny, but I thought that I should explain the background of this comment and point it out as another reason why the Stratemeyer Syndicate books needed revising.
When referring to their father, who is still missing in Africa, the boys also worry that maybe he was killed or taken prisoner by “savage” tribes. “Tribes” in many children’s books of this period are described as “savage.” The exact location their father was trying to reach is not specified, just somewhere in Africa where there is a jungle, although a later book in the series has more about it.
Some general old slang in this book really dates it, like the use of the word “fellows” instead of “guys” and the word “peach” for “tattle” or “tell on” someone. Even later Stratemeyer Syndicate series, like the Hardy Boys, use language that would sound dated to modern people, like the word “chums” for “friends.” These old slang terms were also changed and removed from later reprintings.
There were also some features of this story that took me by surprise. Pranks and stunts are regular features of boarding school stories, but I was surprised at some of the roughness of the boys at the school as well as some of the punishments. At one point, the boys realize that Crabtree has pushed Dora’s mother to marry him, and they’re on their way to town to get married immediately. The Rover boys tell their friends and get them to swarm the carriage, pretending that it’s part of a game they’re playing, trying to delay or disrupt their trip to town and their wedding plans. The boys cause an accident with the carriage that causes Mrs. Stanhope to get a broken arm and a cracked rib. They’re lucky nobody broke their neck. It’s a pretty violent way to interfere, even though they’re trying to save Mrs. Stanhope and Dora from Crabtree’s machinations.
One thing I did enjoy was the description of the game of Hare and Hounds (also called Paper Chase) that came right before the carriage scene. I’d never heard of the game before, but apparently, it’s been a popular game in British schools for centuries. Probably, the reason I’ve never seen it played is because the playgrounds and yards of the schools I attended wouldn’t have been large enough to make a really good game. One person plays the role of the “hare” and is given a head start, leaving a trail of bits of paper behind him as he goes. The other players are the “hounds”, and they try to find the hare by following the trail of paper bits, like they were hounds following a scent. The object of the game is for them to catch the hare before he reaches a designated finishing point. At a school where you can see pretty much the entire playground and everyone on it at once, there wouldn’t be any point in following a trail or any real challenge to the game, but it sounds like an interesting game to play if you can find a large enough space for it.
When the story begins, in 1912, the four Linnet children are in a bad situation. With their father on his way to serve in the army in India with a stop in Egypt, they have been left behind to stay with their grandmother, who is not an indulgent, “grandmotherly” sort of grandmother. First, she’s planning to give away the children’s dog because she doesn’t like dogs. Then, she’s planning to send the two eldest children, Robert and Nan (short for Anna), to boarding school, while keeping the younger children, Betsy and Timothy, to be tutored at home. Worse, she locks the children up by themselves, sometimes in the dark, leaving them to scream.
Admittedly, the reason why they were locked up was because their grandmother had arranged a tea party to show them off to her friends, and the children, not liking parties, had barricaded themselves in a hen house, fighting off the gardener and their grandmother’s companion with rhubarb stalks until they were finally caught. They were locked away from the party guests until they were ready to apologize, which none of them want to do. (Bad strategy on the part of the adults. Some things are their own punishment. Rather than locking the children up, which is cruel, they should have let the children suffer the consequences of their own bad choice. Don’t get them out of the hen house; insist that they stay out there, not being allowed any of the goodies at the party or even being allowed back into the house until they first clean themselves up in the yard. The kids aren’t very good at planning, and I’m sure they don’t have food stores in the hen house. Everyone gets hungry eventually, and it should be clear to the children that it’s their personal choice how long they want to stay that way. But, the grandmother also shouldn’t give away the children’s dog without their consent, so it’s hard to feel too sympathetic here.) Realistically, it is acknowledged that their grandmother could be quite kind with children who were gentle, quiet, and well-behaved, but also realistically, this is not the case with her grandchildren. Frankly, the children are wild and have no inclination to compromise with their grandmother. With all of these things combined, it is clear that life with their grandmother is going to be impossible, and Robert decides that there’s only one thing to do: escape.
Robert manages to break out of the room where he’s been locked up, and he frees his siblings and their dog, Absolom. The four children set off with their dog, intending to walk to the mountains (just some mountains, somewhere to the west – nowhere specific and no real plan involved) and make their living there because Robert imagines that would be a good idea. As they pass an inn, they spot a pony and cart tied up outside, and they decide to appropriate them for some transportation. Besides, Robert has always wanted a pony. Nan is concerned that they’re stealing, but Robert says that they’re just “borrowing.”
The Linnet children have much more in common with their Uncle Ambrose than with their grandmother or other relatives. Uncle Ambrose is similarly unsociable and impatient. Uncle Ambrose was once a teacher, but now that he’s retired, he has no desire to spend time with children again. He also doesn’t like dogs. But, it turns out that the pony they “borrowed” belongs to him and takes them to his house. When Uncle Ambrose realizes who the children are, he takes them into his house and keeps them over night, although he doesn’t introduce himself to them immediately. The children feel much more at home with Uncle Ambrose, even when they don’t know who he is, because his house is a bit shabby and untidy, and he has a pet owl and a cat with kittens. Also, in spite of his gruff manner and assertion that he’s not happy about having children around, Nan has the sense that he actually likes them. The children decide that they’re going to try to behave themselves in this house because they like being there and want to stay.
In the morning, Uncle Ambrose goes to town to get the groceries that his peg-legged gardener, Ezra, neglected to get the other day when the children stole the pony and cart in town. When he returns, he also has the children’s luggage with him. Uncle Ambrose went to see his mother about the children, and when he suggested that he could keep them at his house, the children’s grandmother eagerly took him up on the offer. The children are all intensely relieved that they won’t be sent back to their strict grandmother and her overly-tidy house and can stay with their eccentric uncle, the peg-legged gardener who comes home singing in the middle of the night when he gets drunk, and the wonderfully untidy garden outside, where they can play.
Uncle Ambrose confesses to the children that he has actually missed his students since he retired from teaching. He isn’t particularly fond of children by themselves, but he is fond of teaching them. As a condition of the children staying with him, Uncle Ambrose insists that they allow him to educate them. The children agree to this because one of their reasons for running away was so they would not be split up when Robert and Nan were sent to boarding school. The children just want to stay together with their dog. Uncle Ambrose agrees to this, saying that he doesn’t approve of sending young girls to boarding school at all, although he insists that girls be properly educated as well as boys. He says that he wouldn’t even consider sending Robert to boarding school until he’s had a better grounding because he’s not satisfied with the reports he’s had of Robert’s academic abilities. The children aren’t thrilled at the idea of studying, but they agree to it because staying together and studying with Uncle Ambrose sounds better than being split up or the other alternative, being sent to stay with their Uncle Edgar in Birmingham. Also, Uncle Ambrose is willing to give the children some time each day to themselves, to play or do what they want. He won’t even insist that they show up for meals, but if they miss them, they’ll just have to go hungry. (See? I told you it was a better strategy than fighting to get them out of the hen house.) As much as the kids don’t like the idea of studying, they love the idea of having some freedom. Freedom means that adventures could happen.
Now, the story at this point could have been a complete story by itself – a group of wild, undisciplined kids are left with their strict grandmother, and after a battle of wills between the children and the grandmother and some overly-harsh punishment, the children run away, finding a gruff but kindly bachelor uncle who rediscovers the pleasure of having children around and also happens to have once been a teacher and can tutor the children while their father is away, managing to inspire the children to behave a little better and learn to make some better decisions by granting them a little freedom to make some of their own choices instead of being too controlling. That’s all very nice as a single story. However, in this case, all of that is just the background for the story to come. We’re still in just the first part of the book.
Segue to the Magic
After it’s settled that the children will stay with Uncle Ambrose, they decided to go into town for their first free excursion. They stop at the little store in town to buy some sweets and a picture postcard to send to their grandmother because Nan has been thinking over their time with her and has realized that they were badly behaved and feels guilty about it. The store is managed by Emma Cobley, an old woman in an old-fashioned dress and cap and a red shawl who owns a black cat named Frederick. Emma is a little creepy and she warns the children to stay away from Lion Tor because it’s a dangerous place. (A “tor” is “a high, craggy hill.”)
When the children return to the house, Ezra insists upon introducing them to the bees. The children think that this is a very odd thing to do, but Ezra says that it’s important, and he asks the bees to look after the children. Timothy asks if it’s possible for bees to look out for people, and Ezra says that they once saved his life when he fell into an old tin mine and showed the vicar (the children’s uncle, after he retired from teaching – they’re all living at the vicarage now) where to find him. When Ezra hears that they’ve been to Emma Cobley’s shop, he tells them not to go there anymore. The most Uncle Ambrose buys there is stamps, but neither of them ever buys anything else from her, and Ezra is reluctant to tell the children why. There is something a bit creepy about Emma and some suspicious things in her shop, like the overly-appealing candy and the one postcard that she refuses to allow the children to buy or even look at for long.
As the children start having lessons with Uncle Ambrose, Robert asks him if he will be giving them pocket money. Uncle Ambrose says that he doesn’t give pocket money, but there are opportunities for earning some. He gives them a list of chores that they can do and what he’s willing to pay for doing them. He also points out to Robert that, as the oldest boy, he can’t expect to wriggle out of the tougher chores or leave them to the girls, but if he’s willing to tackle the tougher chores, he will pay him well for it. Uncle Ambrose has somewhat chivalrous sensibilities about what girls can handle, and he also reminds the boys that there are consequences for misbehavior, lying, or stealing. He says that he would never use corporal punishment on a girl, but he has caned boys before and could do the same to his nephews if they give him reason. He tells the children that, from this point on, they cannot interrupt their lesson time with any subjects that aren’t related to the lesson. (He never does hit any of the children and does make reasonable exceptions to this rule later in the story.) It isn’t just the threat of punishment that keeps the children in line, though. It turns out that Uncle Ambrose is an excellent story-teller, and when he starts describing other countries or historical events, the children are captivated. In many ways, Uncle Ambrose makes learning fun because he really loves his subjects and knows how to share what’s fascinating about them with other people. There are parts of the learning that seem like drudgery, but they are balanced out by the parts that are truly fascinating.
The children also gradually begin learning more about the other people who live nearby. There is a black man (called a “Negro” in the story) called Moses Glory Glory Alleluja. (That’s apparently his real name in the story and not just a nickname, to which I say, “God help us all!”) When the children first see him, they’re startled and afraid of him because he’s carrying a curved knife and looks like “a coal-black giant.” They stop and stare at him because they’re afraid, and Ezra tells them not to hurt the poor man’s feelings because he’s a gentle man. As he gets closer to the children, they realize that he’s not as fearsome as they had first thought from a distance. He’s actually very pleasant, and the knife he’s carrying is just a scythe for clearing plants.
Moses works for Lady Alicia (a sort of man-of-all work – cook, gardener, butler, etc.), and Lady Alicia also has a monkey called Abednego. When the kids go with Ezra to pick up a couple of extra beds that Uncle Ambrose is borrowing from Lady Alicia for the children, Abednego takes Betsy’s doll, and she has to chase after him to get it back. In the process, Betsy meets Lady Alicia, an elderly lady in very worn fancy clothes and wearing jewelry. The two of them introduce themselves to each other and explain a little about who they are. Lady Alicia once lived there with her husband and son, but she says that her son, Francis, was “lost” years ago on Lion Tor at the age of eight. She doesn’t explain at this point how that happened or even if her son died or simply disappeared. Her husband also disappeared a few years later overseas because he was a traveler and explorer. She doesn’t seem to expect to see either of them again. This is really where the main plot of the book is introduced.
The Magic
So, now we know that there’s a creepy old lady who owns a shop that isn’t quite what it seems to be and a mysterious and sad old lady whose husband and son have disappeared, and it’s all connected to Lion Tor. The children’s first encounter with Lion Tor happens when Betsy’s siblings realize that she’s missing at Lady Alicia’s house. Not knowing that she’s with Lady Alicia, they assume that she’s wandered off into the woods to pick flowers and go searching for her. Nan finds her way to Lion Tor, where she discovers a cave that is filled with paintings. She knows they weren’t done by cave people ages ago because people in the drawings are wearing modern hats. The artist turns out to be a bearded man in ragged clothes who seems unable to speak.
Nan learns that this man is called Daft Davie, but Nan doesn’t think that’s fair because he seems intelligent and artistically talented, even though he isn’t able to speak. Ezra explains to her that Davie used to work for a blacksmith in another village nearby but some boys kept teasing him and tormenting him because he couldn’t speak, so he eventually went to live by himself at Lion Tor.
The boys eventually find Betsy with Lady Alicia. To their surprise, Lady Alicia seems to be enjoying Betsy’s company, even though she doesn’t normally like visitors. She invites the children to return again with Nan, making an odd comment about how the Linnet family seems “inevitable” but might do her some good.
Uncle Ambrose allows Nan to use the parlor of his house as her private room, where she can do her sewing and darning or just have time to herself. He says that he hasn’t done much with the parlor himself, other than putting furniture in it, because the parlor is usually for the lady of the house, and he’s unmarried. Now that Nan is there, she counts as the lady of the house as the oldest girl, and Uncle Ambrose can tell that she’s a reflective kind of person who can use some quiet time to herself, away from the other children. Nan is appreciative, and she’s also surprised when Uncle Ambrose tells her that the previous lady of the house was Lady Alicia. Before her marriage to the local lord, she was the daughter of the previous vicar, and he found some of her old books in a hidden cabinet in the room.
Uncle Ambrose removed the books from the hidden cabinet and put them on the bookshelf in the room, but out of curiosity, Nan investigates the hidden cabinet and finds that it still contains a notebook. However, the notebook belonged to a young Emma Cobley, not Lady Alicia. The notebook contains what looks like evil witchcraft spells. Nan is alarmed, although later, she’s confused because she sees Emma Cobley at church. She isn’t sure what to think because she can’t imagine that a real, evil witch would go to church. Nan considers that perhaps Emma used to practice witchcraft in her youth but repented later and changed her ways. However, if that’s true, why does Ezra disapprove of her, and how can they explain Emma’s creepy black cat? When Nan studies the spells in the book, seeing spells that can prevent a person from speaking, cause a person to lose his memory, and cause a person to forget affection for another, Emma’s true character and some of the mysterious events of the past begin coming a little more clear.
When Nan talks to Ezra later, he says that Emma Cobley’s father was a black-hearted warlock who taught her evil spells. Ezra says that his own mother practiced white magic and that his family is descended from ancient peoples who were called fairies or gods. Nan had thought that there was something gnome-like in his appearance and isn’t surprised that he’s a bit magical. Ezra further describes the day that Lady Alicia’s son disappeared at Lion Tor. They’d been on a picnic with the boy’s nurse, and the nurse and the boy had been playing hide-and-seek. A mist came up, and they were unable to find the boy. They feared that he might have drowned in the marsh because his cap was nearby, but they were never able to establish that. Some other people thought he might have been kidnapped by gypsies, but there was no evidence of that, either.
In the cemetery of the churchyard, there is a memorial to Lady Alicia’s husband, Hugo Francis Valerian, and his son who was named after him, but the husband’s death date is unknown. The children argue about what that really means. Robert says that the Valerians are dead, but they’re just not buried at the site of the memorial because they were lost and nobody knows exactly when they died and where the bodies are. However, Betsy has the feeling that they’re not dead, and Nan agrees that disappearing isn’t the same as dying. But, is that really true? Are the Valerians alive or dead, and if they are alive, where are they?
Pieces of the past continue falling into place. Betsy and Nan accidentally find old love letters that Emma Cobley wrote to the elder Hugo Valerian … love letters that also contain angry threats when the love wasn’t returned. Pictures that Davie painted on the walls of his cave resemble ones from Lady Alicia’s tapestry. Uncle Ambrose doesn’t believe in the power of witches and thinks that what Ezra has been saying about magic and spells is just superstition, but Ezra knows a few things that Uncle Ambrose doesn’t. He’s the one who knows how to undo Emma Cobley’s wicked spells.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. Sometimes, this book also appears under the title The Runaways.
My Reaction and Spoilers
A Few Concerns
I didn’t like the parts with the harsh punishments or threats of it for the children. Locking children up or caning them would be considered child abuse by modern standards, although my feelings about that are somewhat offset because they kids are pretty wild and the book makes it clear that they are badly behaved in the beginning and provoked the punishment they received. I’m willing to let it go partly because nobody actually gets caned and because of the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story. In fairy tales, there is often a cruel relative, and in this case, it’s more like an overly-provoked one at her wit’s end. In either case, the children’s situation with their grandmother in the beginning establishes the reason why they go to live with their eccentric uncle and have magical adventures.
Some people might not care for the different standards for boys and girls in the story. It’s old-fashioned, out of date even for the time when the book was first published, but the setting is also old-fashioned, so I think it’s meant to establish the time and place. It’s common in older children’s books and stories that imitate them for boys to be given more freedom than girls but also for boys to be subjected to harsher, more physical punishments when they get out of line. Uncle Ambrose seems to have similar feelings in that direction, although he does give the boys and girls the same lessons because he feels that girls’ minds also need to be educated, and he allows all of the children to have equal free time and ability to play and explore the area together.
As another reviewer of this book observed, it seems a little strange that the children would be so frightened of Moses when they first meet him because they used to live in India, and you would think that they would be accustomed to the idea that there are people of different races in the world. This can’t be the first time that they’ve seen people who look different, although I suppose they could be a little intimidated by him being especially tall and carrying a scythe. That might be something that would be a little startling to see very suddenly until you look again and realize it’s just a really tall guy with a farm implement because we’re living in the countryside now. I liked the warning from Ezra to the children to behave themselves and not hurt Moses’s feelings. I thought it was good to emphasize that other people’s feelings are important, and that comment helped to humanize Moses because, even if he looks a little strange or intimidating at first, he’s still a human being with feelings.
However, there is another part of the story not too long after that, when they’re looking for Betsy and Robert, who has a habit of play-acting, pretends like he’s a Roman emperor giving a command to a “coal-black Nubian standard-bearer”, saying, “Slave, lead on.” There seems to be some self-awareness in the story that this wasn’t a good thing for Robert to say to Moses (who is a servant, not a slave, although Ezra later says that there is a rumor that Lady Alicia’s husband may have bought him in a slave market overseas when he was young), and Timothy is concerned that Robert might have offended him. The story says that Moses isn’t the kind of person who takes offense or holds grudges, and he seems to understand that Robert is play-acting, but I felt like this somewhat undermined the message of considering other people’s feelings by suggesting that the best way to be is not to have any particular feelings to consider. That’s not something anybody can count on in real life or insist that others provide for them. Real human beings are not like stuffed teddy bears, who can take endless abuse or respond to any comment with a constant smile and still be lovable and want to snuggle afterward, like none of it matters. Real humans have both feelings and limits, and this is one instance where I felt like someone should have thrown a little cold water on Robert’s play-acting. The whole story has an air of unreality about it, which is part of the charm, but I think even fantasy stories should be real about human behavior.
The Fantasy
The fantasy in the story is really very light, compared to most fantasy books. Although it becomes well-established by the end of the book that Emma Cobley is definitely a witch who cast evil spells which caused Lady Alicia to lose both her son and her husband, the spells and their undoing were done in such a way that Uncle Ambrose never seems to realize that it was all magic. Basically, the children and Ezra find the little figures with pins in them that Emma made, and Ezra recites a magical rhyme that allows them to remove the pins, thus breaking the spells. Then, they burn the figures and Emma’s old spell book, destroying her magic forever. After that, Lady Alicia’s son and husband both come back, Emma actually becomes a much nicer person, and everybody lives happily ever after.
The pace of the story is fairly slow, which is actually part of its atmospheric charm. For a book dealing with an evil witch, black magic spells, and unhappy people, it’s really pretty relaxing. I think part of that effect is because of its gradual pace and also because there are never very serious consequences for anybody in the story. It’s sad that Lady Alicia, her husband, and her son were all parted from each other for a period of years, but when the spells are broken, they are pretty quickly very happy again. Emma Cobley does try to prevent the children from learning her secrets and breaking the spells, but really, nothing bad happens to the children at all. There is one semi-frightening part where the boys and their dog are up a tree with Emma and her friends below it, but then Uncle Ambrose comes and takes the children home, and everything is fine. Emma tries to cast spells on the children at once point, but the children don’t even notice until they find the figures of themselves later. Ezra tells them that the witch’s spells were ineffective against them because he made his own figures of the children first and put them in the church, so they are protected. Emma herself faces no consequences in the end, either. They don’t have to destroy the witch to destroy her magic, and once her magic is gone, she is so changed and everyone is so happy that there’s no retribution, only forgiveness.
On the one hand, the lack of consequences in the story for things the children do make the story feel like the stakes are low. There is a sense of sadness around characters in the story, but is no particular sense of urgency. They are not racing the clock to break the spells, and the villains are pretty ineffectual at putting up obstacles to their success. On the other hand, it seems like most of the story focuses on atmosphere over action. This little village is an enchanting place to be. It’s charming, and the lack of consequences for the children, whether it’s for being racially insensitive or facing down a witch or even just staying out late, make the story feel like a very safe kind of adventure. Uncle Ambrose, Ezra, and their bees won’t let anything serious befall the children, and the worst punishment they have for misbehavior is being sent to bed with gruel (a kind of thin porridge) instead of a proper supper. Uncle Ambrose told them that if they missed meals, it would be their fault, and they’d have to go without. However, he never lets children go to bed hungry, and he even allows them sugar on their gruel. Again, very low stakes, but charmingly so. This story is not stressful, which is good, but it’s not for people looking for excitement.
I was a little impatient with the children for not making the connection between the spells in the book and Daft Davie even after seeing the figurines, including the one with the pin in its tongue. This spell is supposed to prevent people from talking, and who else do they know who can’t talk? There aren’t that many people in the area, and there’s only one person in the story whose main characteristic is an inability to speak. Even as they’re breaking the spells, they don’t know who they’re breaking them for, like they can’t even guess, and Nan is surprised when Davie can suddenly talk afterward. I think this is one of those stories that wants to make readers feel clever for figuring it out before the characters, but that can also feel a little frustrating. If there’s one thing I would change about this story (other than the racial bits), I would want the children to realize the truth about the spells faster and break them more deliberately.
I don’t really mind that Uncle Ambrose never believes in the magic. The book leaves the situation a little open for the characters, and possibly even the readers, to believe that there are other explanations for what happens. Maybe “Davie” lost his memory and ability to speak through an illness. The children in the story know that’s not it, but it’s not important for anybody else to know. Although, perhaps Uncle Ambrose knows more about magic than he lets on because, for reasons that are never explained, his pony never grows old, and his pet owl seems immortal. But, maybe that’s for the readers to decide.
The year is 1842, and Maria Merryweather is on her way to her family’s ancestral home, Moonacre Manor. Thirteen-year-old Maria is an orphan. Her mother died when she was a baby, and now, her father has died. Their house in London had to be sold to pay his debts, and now, Maria is going to live with a distant cousin, Sir Benjamin Merryweather, in the country. She is traveling with her nurse, Miss Heliotrope, who has taken care of her since she was little and is like a mother to her, and her dog, Wiggins. Maria and her father were never really close. Maria isn’t sure that she’s going to like living in the country because she is accustomed to city life and the luxuries that come with it. She fears that life in the country will be rough and full of deprivation.
Maria begins to feel better when she actually sees Moonacre. It’s a lovely, romantic, castle-like manor house. The manor also gives her an odd feeling of home because so many Merryweathers have lived there for so long. Sir Benjamin welcomes her, and she likes him immediately. Oddly, Sir Benjamin refers to has as “one of the silver Merryweathers”, saying that she was born during a full moon. It’s true that Maria has unusual silvery gray eyes. Sir Benjamin says that he’s a “sun Merryweather”, born at midday, but that’s okay because moon Merryweathers and sun Merryweathers get along well. He does have a rather warm, sunny appearance.
Sir Benjamin shows them around the manor and to their rooms. The furnishings are a little shabby, but they’re quite comfortable, and they like their new rooms. Maria is charmed because her room is in a turret, and it has a very small door that’s really only big enough for a small girl like her to get in. Miss Heliotrope is worried that she won’t be able to get into Maria’s room if she is ill and needs her, but Maria is sure that isn’t going to be a problem. She loves the room because it just seems so perfect for her. Wiggins even seems to be getting along with Sir Benjamin’s big, old dog, Wrolf, although Maria has some doubts that Wrolf is actually a dog because he doesn’t look like any dog she’s ever seen before.
At dinner that evening, Sir Benjamin talks about giving Maria riding lessons, saying that he has a little gray pony who would be just right for her. Maria mentions a beautiful white horse that she saw from the carriage as they were approaching the manor, but Miss Heliotrope didn’t see it and thinks she just imagined it. Miss Heliotrope thinks that Maria imagines things all the time, like the little boy named Robin, who had a feather in his cap and was a childhood playmate, but Maria insists that the boy really did exist and so does the little white horse. Thinking about Robin makes her wish that he was here to keep her company at Moonacre, but she hasn’t seen him for a couple of years and doesn’t know where he is.
There are a few odd things that Maria and Miss Heliotrope notice about Moonacre, though. Aside from the odd dog, Wrolf, Sir Benjamin seems oddly evasive about who and where the servants are. They never see them, yet someone has been doing the cooking and cleaning and making fires in the fireplaces. There’s even a fire in Maria’s room, but she can’t figure out how anyone got in to make one since the door is too small for even an adult Miss Heliotrope’s size.
The next day, a riding habit appears in Maria’s room. It’s very nice quality, even though Maria can tell that it’s second-hand because it’s an older style and a little worn and has the initials LM on it. Maria like it, but who used to own it, and who put it in her room? In the parlor attached to her room, Maria also sees an old painting that contains a white horse and an animal that looks something like Wrolf, although she’s still not quite sure what kind of animal it is. (What’s that “brave-looking” animal that has a tawny mane and a tuft on its tail? I’m sure if we think about it, it will come to us.)
Sir Benjamin tells Maria that she shouldn’t wander the countryside alone, but she is free to explore as long as she’s with her pony Periwinkle or Wrolf. The one place he doesn’t want her to go is Merryweather Bay because there are rough fishermen there. He refers to Maria as a “princess” and the area around Moonacre as her “kingdom,” and from the way he says it, it seems that he somehow means that literally. Even the local people seem to have some kind of awe and respect for her.
Maria finds the nearby village of Silverydew charming. The Old Parson introduces her to the children of the village, and they tell her about the mysterious “Black Men” (because they all wear black, not their race) who hang out in the woods and by Merryweather Bay. They set traps for animals and steal livestock from the locals, and everyone is afraid of them.
Maria also discovers that Robin is here in the village of Silverydew, and he rescues her from an encounter with the Black Men. Robin tells her that her ancestor, Sir Wrolf, who founded the Merryweather family, was the one responsible for making the Black Men as evil as they are, and because of that, his soul has been unable to enter Paradise. Locals say that his spirit rides around nearby Paradise Hill, weeping because of what he did, and he will continue to do it until someone finds a way of solving the problem he caused.
Maria asks what exactly Sir Wrolf did, and Old Parson tells her the story of Sir Wrolf and how he acquired the lands around Moonacre. At first, Sir Wrolf just owned the land where the manor house sits, but he wasn’t satisfied with that. Although he was known for being brave and jovial, he was also a greedy and selfish person who thought that he was entitled to take anything he wanted from anyone. First, he kicked the monks out of the monastery on Paradise Hill and used the monastery for a hunting lodge. A fierce lightning storm made him abandon it later because he believed that it was sent by the monks as punishment. Then, he decided that he wanted the woods and bay around Moonacre for hunting and fishing, but they belonged to another nobleman called Black William. He tried various ways to take those lands from Black William, including direct warfare, but he was unsuccessful. Then, it occurred to him that Black William had a lovely daughter, his only child, and if he married her, he would share in her inheritance. Sir Wrolf put on a show of apologizing to Black William and demonstrating that he had mended his ways so he could win the affection of Black William’s daughter. The daughter, who was called the Moon Princess because she was as fair and lovely as the moon, believed that Sir Wrolf was sincere and married him. Sir Wrolf did end up falling in love with his bride, and they had a child together, but the lands he expected to acquire through her were still on his mind. Then, Black William suddenly remarried, and his new wife gave birth to a son, who replaced the Moon Princess as the heir to Black William’s lands. Sir Wrolf was outraged by this reversal of fortune, and while he ranted about it, he let slip how he had married his wife in the hopes of getting her lands. The Moon Princess was shocked and hurt, and although her husband insisted that he had come to love her even though he had married her for selfish reasons, she no longer believed him. She grew to hate him for his deception and even turned against the son they had together. She wanted no part of Sir Wrolf’s life anymore. Then, worse still, word reached them that Black William had mysteriously disappeared and his young son was dead. Although there were no indications of foul play, and it was possible that neither of them had really died at all, the Moon Princess came to believe that her husband was a murderer. One day, she rode away on the little white horse that her husband had given her when they married, and she was also never seen or heard from again. With Black William and his son and daughter gone, Sir Wrolf finally had possession of the lands he had coveted for so long, but he was no longer happy. He genuinely missed his wife and felt guilty for what he had done, and he couldn’t enjoy his prize.
The Old Parson explains that the sins of the past still affect the present and will continue to do so until someone makes them right again. The Black Men who now inhabit the disputed lands are probably the descendants of Black William’s supposedly dead son. The Old Parson believes that the boy’s mother probably feared what Sir Wrolf might do to the boy when his father left them, so she pretended that he was dead already. Every generation of Merryweathers since then have tried to push the Black Men out of the disputed lands, but they’ve never been successful. Also, every generation, a young woman very much like the Moon Princess comes to Moonacre, and she gets along well with the sun-like Merryweathers, but so far, a quarrel has always separated them. Maria worries about that because she likes her cousin Sir Benjamin and doesn’t want to leave Moonacre. Old Parson tells her that part of the legend of Moonacre is that, some day, there will be a Moon Princess who will come and will not leave. The legend states that she will right the wrongs of the past and make peace again, but only if she can get over the prideful nature that all Moon Princesses have and love a poor man who is below her station. The townspeople are in awe of Maria because they hope that she will turn out to be that Moon Princess.
Maria adopts the mission of righting past wrongs, reconciling old quarrels, and bringing peace to the valley once again, but she’ll have to be careful. Not everyone is ready for peace yet, and she has to guard against falling into the same bad habits that others have before her. Before she can complete her destiny, she must speak directly to the Black Men in their castle and when she does, they make a bargain with her. They agreed to end their poaching and thievery if she can prove that Black William wasn’t murdered by Sir Wrolf and if she will restore not only their lands but the pearl necklace that belonged to the original Moon Princess. However, that necklace has been missing since the first Moon Princess disappeared. How can Maria give them something that she doesn’t have and doesn’t know how to find?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Chinese). There is also a movie version of the story called The Secret of Moonacre.
My Reaction and Spoilers
I didn’t read this book as a kid, but it’s one that I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I saw the movie version years ago, and I was curious about what the book was like. The movie and the book set up a somewhat different situation for the quarrel between the two families. In the movie, the quarrel was about the fabulous pearls owned by the first Moon Princess and not about land. Also, Loveday and Robin were members of Black William’s family in the movie, which they weren’t in the book, changing the dynamics of their relationships with Sir Benjamin and Maria.
This story is an enchanting light fantasy. The setting by itself is magical, and Maria’s rooms in the manor are like every little girl’s dream! The story also includes odd, seemingly intelligent animals with unusual capabilities, such as the Zachariah the cat, who takes messages for people and lets them into the manor house or guides them around, and Wrolf, who is clearly a lion, even though everyone calls him a dog. The fact that Wrolf is a lion dawns on Maria toward the end of the book, and Robin confirms that’s true, saying that they all keep calling him a dog because it sounds less scary, and they don’t want to alarm anyone.
Maria’s family history is not something to be proud of, as Old Parson points out. Her ancestors were not the greatest people, in spite of their land-ownership and high status. People are looking to Maria to be better than the others who came before her and to make past wrongs right.
From Robin’s mother, Loveday Minette, who also becomes like a mother to her, Maria learns a little more about what it means to be one of the Merryweather “Moon Princesses.” Gradually, it is revealed that Loveday was the last Moon Princess before Maria. She was in love with Sir Benjamin, and the two of them were going to be married, but like all Moon Princesses and Merryweather men, they had a stupid quarrel and parted. Loveday married someone else and had Robin, but even though she has remained near Moonacre and secretly helps the household, she has been careful not to see Sir Benjamin ever since. Over the years, she has come to realize that she made a terrible mistake with Sir Benjamin and regrets it, but like other Moon Princesses, she has too much pride to admit that she was wrong and apologize. She is more mature now, and she sees that, in some ways, she was aggravating to Sir Benjamin and provoked him, and having provoked him to anger, because Moon Princesses tend to love men with tempers (one of the curses of the Merryweather men), was too proud to make up with him. By the same token, Sir Benjamin was legitimately disrespectful of her and her feelings, and when he attempted an apology, it was a half-hearted effort that attempted to preserve his pride more than demonstrate care for Loveday’s feelings, which is why Loveday didn’t feel like she could accept it.
Members of the Merryweather family and the people they marry have a tendency to attach enormous importance to and emotional investment in small things (geraniums, the color pink, etc. – they either passionately love these things or are violently or oppressively against them), and then they blow up at each other when their partner doesn’t feel exactly the same way about them, taking it as personal insult if someone likes something they don’t like or doesn’t like something they do like. (Like in the Internet meme, “Stop liking what I don’t like!”) They don’t know how to tolerate interests they don’t share, not sweat the small stuff, or live and let live. I would say that a lot of it has to do with poor relationship skills and, ultimately, a lack of respect for other people, even the people they love. They don’t respect each well enough to find out why the other person cares so much about something that seems small and annoying. They are self-absorbed in their own feelings, seeing situations only from their own point of view and putting their own feelings first. They see every conflict as some kind of contest about who’s right, with the drive to win against each other, which puts them both in a position of being on opposite teams instead, where one of them has to get the better of the other in some way, instead of on the same winning team. The result is that neither of them ever really wins, and even if one of them defeats the other in something, they ultimately end up losing their whole relationship, so it’s a net loss for everybody.
This is the cycle that has repeated for generations in this family. Loveday realizes that, for this destructive cycle to end, the Moon Princess has to learn not to provoke the one she loves as well as overcome her sense of pride. Also the Moon Princess’s love (it’s pretty clear to everyone that it’s going to be Robin, in this case) has to learn to control his temper, not respond to things as if they were some kind of personal attack, and consider the well-being of others, especially his princess. Both of them need to learn caring and consideration for others and how to put aside pride and self-interest for the sake of peace, both in their personal relationship with each other and for the sake of the wider community. Loveday emphasizes to both Maria and Robin that they must not quarrel with each other. People are depending on them to put things right in the area, and their own future happiness depends on learning to get along with each other.
The things Loveday and other adults emphasize for the children are personal skills that real people do need to learn in order to have relationships with other people and be mature members of a peaceful, stable community:
Don’t aggravate people. You can’t have peace if you’re always teasing or provoking people, and picking fights.
Choose your fights carefully, and wherever possible, avoid turning small disagreements into big fights. Remember that any battle comes with a cost, and the costs of petty fighting are higher than the rewards.
Be considerate of other people’s feelings and respectful of their property. You don’t have the right to do what you want with other people’s property just because you want it or it bothers you that they have it.
Understand that nobody is perfect, including you.
It is not your partner’s responsibility to please you in every way or give you everything that you want. It is your responsibility to deal with your own emotions and control your own choices and behavior.
Sometimes, you really are in the wrong, and you can’t always have everything you want. Accept both of these facts with maturity and take responsibility for your choices.
Being wrong can be embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing or destructive as not dealing with situations that need attention or problems that need to be solved.
The problems you cause affect more than just you, and problems do not go away when they are ignored.
Whatever the circumstances, no matter who or what you’re dealing with, it’s never just about you.
The word “responsible” has two meanings. The first is being at fault. (Sir Wrolf was responsible for the situation in the valley and the problems it caused.) The second just means taking charge of a situation and doing what needs to be done, sometimes because you’re the only one who can or is willing to do it. (Maria didn’t cause the problems, but she was responsible because she fixed the problems.) The second type of “responsible” is necessary for successful relationships, no matter who the first type applies to.
Love requires understanding and accepting each other and allowing each other to be their own person with their own likes and dislikes.
Caring means making each other a priority, working as a team, and doing what’s best for the team, even if it requires some compromise and self-sacrifice.
Building a shared life or solving shared problems is team effort, not a competition with each other. There is no “winning” unless it’s a shared victory. Otherwise, everyone loses.
It’s not exactly a spell, but the children’s mission is based around learning to function as a couple and to control their tempers and personal behavior. Magical things do start to happen when they learn to consider others’ feelings and not just their own.
There does seem to be some magic in the story. Robin later explains to Maria that the reason why nobody else could see him playing with her in London when they were younger is because he was always in or around Silverydew or Moonacre. He says that he traveled to London to play with her when he was asleep, so he wasn’t physically there. It’s like a form of astral projection or out-of-body experience. Also, like Sir Benjamin’s “dog” turns out to be a lion, the “little white horse” turns out to be a unicorn.
I couldn’t help but notice that all of the known Moon Princesses since the first one and the men that they seem to love before before they quarrel with them seem to be cousins of each other. Loveday Minette and Sir Benjamin were cousins of each other because their fathers were brothers, and Maria and Robin are more distant cousins of each other because their grandfathers were brothers. The idea of marrying a cousin or even loving them romantically seems odd for modern times, but that did happen in noble families in the past, so it might not seem so odd for the characters and others in the story.
This book also taught me what a mangel-wurzel is. They just mention it in passing, like readers should know what it is. It has such a strange name that I had to look it up. It’s a kind of beet, and apparently, it has also been used to make “punkies” or jack o’lanterns in areas where people didn’t grow turnips, before people adopted pumpkins for the purpose. Just an odd bit of trivia.
Barbara and Rick Benton have an old woman, Mrs. Cunningham, taking care of them while their parents are away on a trip. They don’t mind Mrs. Cunningham, but she has a habit of cooking cabbage, which makes the house smell bad. One day, they decide to buy a can of air freshener to make the house smell better, but they don’t have much money. After looking over the selection at the store, they realize that they only have enough money to buy a really cheap bottle with a damaged label. They’re not even sure what scent it’s supposed to have, but they decide that it’s better than nothing and take it.
However, the bottle isn’t air freshener at all. When they get it home and open it, a man with an umbrella pops out of the bottle. He introduces himself as a wizard named Harrison Peabody, saying that he was accidentally trapped in the bottle. When they tell him why they got the bottle, he offers to fix the smell for them, producing real roses by magic in Barbara’s bedroom.
It’s pretty impressive, but Barbara soon learns that magic has inconveniences. The roses get in the way when she tries to do her homework, they have thorns that prick her fingers, and she’s worried that it will get messy if she has to water them. She asks Harrison Peabody if he can take them away, but he says that undoing magic is more difficult than doing it. It’s even more inconvenient when he produces a pine forest in Rick’s room because he wanted his room to smell like pine.
The kids let Harrison Peabody, who they call Harry, stay in their attic because there’s an extra mattress there, but they’re careful to hide him from Mrs. Cunningham. Barbara uses Harry’s magical umbrella to get rid of the roses and pine trees while he’s in the bathroom.
It seems like Harry’s magic works sometimes but not always. In the morning, he’s able to use it to remake the attic into a comfortable living space and provide a lavish breakfast, but later in the day, he needs the kids to bring him food. Harry is reluctant to explain, but he finally admits that he’s not a very powerful wizard. All of his magic depends on his umbrella, and the umbrella only does magic when it’s raining. Even then, it will only work its magic if you ask it politely.
The kids take Harry to Prospect Park for a picnic, and in the lake, they spot a sea serpent. It turns out that the sea serpent can talk. His name is George, and he actually knows Harry. George gives Harry and the kids a ride around the lake, and they use the umbrella’s magic to clean the lake and make it suitable for swimming. Unfortunately, they accidentally lose the umbrella in the lake.
The next day, the kids go back to the park to look for the umbrella while Harry stays at home with a cold. George finds the umbrella for them, warning them to remember that it’s Harry’s umbrella and that things often go wrong, even when Harry tries to use it. Ignoring that, Rick impulsively wishes for the umbrella to take him and his sister to the zoo, and when they get there, he also impulsively wishes that all of the animals were free. Then, it stops raining, so he has no chance to take it back.
Chaos ensues, with all of the zoo animals roaming around free and the zookeepers struggling to round them all up again. Then, to the children’s horror, some of the zookeepers catch George, thinking that he’s another escapee. The zookeepers quickly realize that they’ve never seen any animal like George before. They don’t know what he is, but they decide that they can’t let him roam around free. They put him in an aquarium at Coney Island, and it’s up to the children to rescue him!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
This book is odd because it gave me so many feelings of the story being incomplete. It seems like it was written as a fantasy adventure story for fairly young kids because all of the problems are pretty easily solved, but there are so many questions left unanswered that I almost feel like it used to be a longer story but was cut down for some reason. Actually, it’s probably that it could have been a longer story but the author chose not to make it longer.
First, we never get any explanation of Harrison Peabody’s background, how he came to be a wizard, and how or where he got that magical umbrella. When the children ask him how he got into the bottle, he says that it was an accident, that he just went in for a little bit and someone capped up the bottle so he couldn’t get out. But why? Was someone trying to get rid of Harry, like those stories where someone tries to get rid of an evil genie by tricking him into going back into the bottle he came from? But, Harry’s not a genie and not a bad guy.
There is also no explanation of how he came to meet George the sea serpent. The closest we get to George’s background is that George says that he was one of the sea serpents that John Van Nyse saw at Steinbokkery Pond, which was once on the site of the Lefferts House, referencing an old story from New York. I liked the reference to a piece of local folklore, and it does help to date Harry a little because, when Harry encounters George in the park, George has to explain to him that the Steinbokkery Pond was drained to build the Lefferts House. Since Harry didn’t know that and has memories of what the area used to be like, Harry must have been in the bottle since before the house was constructed, around 1783. But, again, the story never explains that.
The end of the book is also abrupt. When the kids retrieve the lost umbrella from George, Rick’s sudden wishes to go to the zoo and free the animals seem, well, pretty sudden. He didn’t mention anything about wanting to go the zoo before, and it seems like the kids would have been in a hurry to get the umbrella back to Harry. It feels like that incident was just thrown in to have something zany happen that would add some excitement to the story.
Rescuing George isn’t too hard with the magic umbrella. George decides that he wants to return to the ocean instead of going back to the lake in the park, so the kids wish him to be where he wants to go. Then, after they return to Harry and point out to him that their parents will return soon and will surely notice that he’s been living in the attic, he uses the umbrella to return the attic to its former state. Then, he whispers something to the umbrella, and they both abruptly vanish. There is no indication of where Harry is going; he’s just gone. I think it’s meant to be mysterious, but to me, it just felt odd and incomplete. I had been expecting that there would be some kind of resolution of the chaos that the magic umbrella causes. Maybe Harry would decide that magic has caused too much trouble and he’ll put the umbrella away, saving it only for emergencies. I even thought that there might be some romance with Mrs. Cunningham, who I assumed was a widow, and maybe they would go on to be caretakers for other children, like they were for Barbara and Rick, with the implication that their magical adventures would continue. Instead, Harry just disappears, and the story is over with no further explanation.
This book starts up after the events in the previous book in the series, Magic or Not?, but one of the interesting features of this book is that each of the characters takes a turn in telling the story from the first person. As with the previous story, it’s ambiguous about whether or not there’s any magic involved, although the story implies that there is. In the previous book, the characters came to believe that an old well on the Martins’ property was a magic wishing well, leading them and their friends on a series of adventures over the summer. At the end of the summer, they were still uncertain about whether the well was really magic or if their adventures were just coincidence and maybe some playacting on the part of the adults around them. In this book, they investigate the well more, starting the process of making wishes again, partly because they’re bored and need some excitement, but also to find out whether the well really is magical or not.
When I give my opinion of this story, I’m going to do much o it within the summary itself because there are things that I really need to address within each section of the story. In particular, there are some historical circumstances that I need to explain.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
The Story
James Martin begins the story in this book, starting by saying that he and his twin sister Laura normally can’t stand books told from the first person because they often contain characters lamenting “If only I had known …” or “If only I had” done this or that, and they think that the characters sound dumb for not thinking ahead more, realizing the significance of things happening when the reader can, and not taking appropriate actions like a real person would. However, they’ve decided that it’s okay to tell their story in the first person because they do realize the significance of things as they happened to them, and it’s Laura’s idea that each of their friends should tell their part of the story themselves because they all experienced what happened in a different way.
James Begins
James explains that he and his sister are in the same class at school, the one for more advanced students, along with their friends Kip and Lydia. Their other friend, Gordy, is in a different class at the same school because he’s a slower learner. It wasn’t easy for them to start being friends with Gordy in the previous book, but since then, they’ve tried to be especially nice to him … to varying degrees. (They don’t seem very nice to me.) Sometimes, they say that they still have to be firm with him on some things. In the previous book, he was a bit of a troublemaker because he is often thoughtless about his actions and has some rough tendencies. He comes from a wealthy family, and his mother is a fussy queen bee type, which has caused some awkwardness hanging out with him, which continues into this book.
In the previous book, James and Lydia moved to a smaller town from New York City, and they discovered that their new house has an old well on the property that the girl living nearby, Lydia, told them was a magic wishing well. James never believed that it was, but Laura did, and even James had to admit that the “wishing well” did give them and others things that they were wishing for. Or, at least, they got what they wanted in meaningful ways. It’s still questionable whether it was because of the well or not.
Since their previous adventures, the kids have settled back into ordinary life. They’re all getting used to their new school, and Kip and James try out for the football team. However, the kids soon start to feel that life is getting dull. The four main friends who are all in the same class start getting in the habit of leaving Gordy out of some of their activities, partly because he’s in a different class and partly because it gives them an element of secrecy that they feel like they’ve lacked since their previous adventures. They still do some things with Gordy and let him join them when he comes looking for him. Gordy isn’t the kind of guy to hold grudges, and that makes the others feel guilty about the times when they leave him out, which perversely makes them leave him out more because having him around reminds them that they feel guilty for excluding him earlier. James acknowledges that none of this is right or fair but says that it’s just a part of human nature and can’t be helped. He also says that they all genuinely like Gordy, but he often seems a bit childish, and there’s “something about him that makes people want to pick on him.”
(I genuinely hate people who have this attitude about taking advantage of others just because there’s “something” about them that just makes them want to, like it’s not self-entitled to feel and act that way. Besides, I know exactly what this “something” is, and that’s Gordy’s niceness. Other people might yell or complain at someone who’s being mean to them and tell them right to their face that they’re being a jerk, which can help put a quick end to their jerkiness or at least cause them to dump it on some other poor person instead. Unfortunately, the buck tends to stop with Gordy because he doesn’t lose his temper, doesn’t complain, and doesn’t tell others off when he should, and they’re the type who won’t change until someone does tell them off. They take advantage of Gordy’s niceness because he doesn’t stop them from taking advantage, and deep down, they know that’s what’s happening. That’s why they feel guilty, but not enough to stop what they’re doing. This really annoys me because it seems like they’re almost blaming Gordy for not stopping them from being mean to him, but yet, they totally know what they’re doing and could just stop it themselves. If you don’t like or respect what you’re doing, whose fault is that? You could just decide to do something different anytime you want. I found them annoying when they acted like this in the last book, and I thought that they’d learned something by the end of that story, but I guess not. It’s annoying when characters don’t seem to learn anything, especially when they’ve just been mocking characters in other books for being slow on the uptake. I also don’t like it when this type of character is one of the main characters in a story because, as readers, we’re expected to identify and sympathize with the main characters of a story, and in this case, I don’t want to do either. They’re just getting on my nerves at this point, and we’re not very far into the story. Fortunately, this does get better.)
One day, when the kids are sitting around on the porch of the cottage that they use as their clubhouse without Gordy, talking about how Halloween is coming but nothing feels exciting since their adventures with the wishing well, they start to consider wishing on the well again. They’ve thought of doing this before, but they hesitate to do it because they’re afraid of using up the “magic” (even though James claims he doesn’t really believe in it) or cause the well to become angry with them for making frivolous wishes. They decide to swear an oath to each other in blood not to wish on the well until the well gives them a sign that it’s time, although they don’t know what kind of sign they’re expecting. However, Gordy does not swear the oath because they left him out.
When Gordy comes along, he’s giving a piggyback ride to Deborah, James and Laura’s younger sister. Gordy is always nice to little Deborah and enjoys indulging her in small ways. Gordy’s niceness and the way Deborah gushes about it make the rest of them feel uncomfortable. (Enough to change your behavior and quit being such jerks about this? Hmm?) Then, Deborah happily tells the older kids that Gordy has “fixed the well” so it will give them “magic wishes all the time.” Laura, who is particularly protective of the well, demands to know how he “fixed” it, and Deborah says that he put a wish down the well, writing it down on her spelling paper, which had a gold star on it. When they ask Gordy what his wish said, he says that he wrote, “Get going, or else. This means you.” (That doesn’t sound like a “wish” so much as a threat. Admittedly, this heavy-handedness about Gordy is off-putting. I wouldn’t have blamed the others as much for avoiding him sometimes if that was their main motivation, but it’s not, so I still blame them.)
Laura is angry about that tasteless threat, feeling like it’s going to ruin everything. However, James reminds her that Gordy didn’t know about the oath that they’d just taken together and that he only did it to please Deborah. Besides, they’ve all also been more rude to the well in the past than Gordy was. However, Laura completely loses her temper, saying that the well and the magic belongs to them and not to Gordy. She tells him right to his face that he’s a pest, they never wanted him around, and he should just go home. James and Kip redeem themselves to me at this point by standing up for Gordy against Laura. The boys acknowledge that, although they’ve fought before, sometimes physically, Gordy isn’t a bad guy and doesn’t deserve this treatment. Gordy apologizes, saying he’s sorry if he’s caused trouble, but he felt like someone should do something, Deborah wanted him to, and nobody else seemed willing to do it.
(I liked the part where James says, “Stick and stones may break your bones, but names and plain truths and meanness can go much deeper and cut you to the quick.” I like that because I never approved of the usual saying that words can’t hurt you. Yes, they do. They’re often meant to. That’s the whole reason why people say mean things in the first place, to hurt or embarrass someone else in order to relieve their own feelings or settle a score which may or may not really exist outside of their own minds, and it’s just gaslighting to pretend otherwise. It’s just something that teachers and parents say when they want to ignore a situation instead of dealing with it or confronting someone else’s uncomfortable emotions directly.)
Laura goes into the clubhouse, upset, but Gordy and the others follow her inside. Gordy simply and directly tells her that he’s sorry, and if he did something wrong, it’s because he didn’t know better. James can tell that Laura really feels worse about her own behavior than about Gordy’s. She also apologizes, saying that the “magic” can’t be good if it makes her say mean things like that, and she doesn’t really mean what she said. (Nothing “made” you be mean but you, Laura. That’s just honest. It came from you, and that’s why you’re angry with yourself. Deep down, you know it. Now, learn to help it, so I can stop feeling like I need to explain it. Nobody can change your behavior but you. I do appreciate that the kids are now speaking more honestly and trying to work things out, though.)
James clarifies the situation for Gordy, who isn’t into reading fantasy stories like the other kids are. In fantasy stories, magic always operates by certain rules. If you break the rules, something bad might happen, and if it does, it would be his fault. To her credit, Laura says that if something bad does happen, they’ll all be in it together, but if the adventure goes well, Gordy should be the one in charge of it because he’s the one who started it. It pains Laura to admit that because the truth is that she had really wanted to be the one to make the wish herself, and that’s what’s really behind her temper tantrum. Gordy offers Laura the opportunity to be in charge, if she wants, but everyone agrees that it should be Gordy because it’s only right and in keeping with the “magic.” Gordy isn’t quite sure what being in charge means in this type of adventure, but the others say that they’ll be with him through the whole thing.
At that moment, somebody knocks on the door of their clubhouse, which never usually happens. The kids take that as a sign that the wishing well’s magic is starting, and they tell Gordy that he’d better answer the door as the leader of this adventure. The perspective of the story shifts to Gordy at this point.
Gordy’s Story
I actually enjoyed hearing Gordy’s perspective more than James’s. I hadn’t expected that at first because Gordy can be kind of rough and thoughtless, but he’s deeper than he lets on. Part of his difficulty is that he’s actually a very shy and nervous person, and that’s why he sometimes says dumb and awkward things; he just blurts things out from time to time because he’s nervous. Yeah, I’ve been there, too, kid. He’s worried about his friends seeing how scared he often is inside because he thinks that they won’t like him if they knew. His loud and rough manners are a cover for his shyness and nervousness. It pains him sometimes that he says or does things he shouldn’t, but he’s fully aware of what he’s doing and why. Like the others when they’re rude or mean to him, he can’t seem to stop himself. (There’s a lot of that going around.) He’s brighter than he pretends, and he knows that Laura lied to him earlier about having a dentist appointment so that the others could hang out without him. Even though he hasn’t confronted the others about that, he is hurt that they do these things and make him feel left out, and that’s part of what inspired him to make the wish on the wishing well. Even though they aren’t always as nice to him as they should be, he thinks they’re fun to be with, and he admires them for knowing what to do in different circumstances.
Gordy is nervous when he goes to answer the door of the clubhouse, not knowing who or what to expect. When Deborah sees who’s at the door, she screams, “Witches!” It’s a little old lady in a black cloak. She has gnarled hands and straggly white hair, and she does look kind of like a witch. For some reason, she’s also holding a bunch of branches and plant stalks. Gordy says the only thing he can think of, which is, “How do you do?”
It turns out that the old lady wants directions to Hopeful Hill. Gordy takes that as a bad sign because Hopeful Hill is a mental hospital. As Gordy describes it, it’s “a place where unhappy people come for the experts to make them hopeful again.” People from this mental hospital often walk up and down the road nearby for exercise, and mean kids from the area sometimes yell insults at them, calling them “loonies.” Gordy privately admits that he used to do that, too, when he was younger, but he’s ashamed of it now, and he hopes that his friends never find out about that, either.
Since Gordy knows that the wishing well magic is supposed to be based around doing good deeds, and he’s supposed to be the leader on this, he offers to show the little old lady the way to Hopeful Hill. As he walks with the lady, the others follow a little way behind them, which makes Gordy feel better. All the way, the woman creepily mumbles strange words to herself. Gordy isn’t sure whether she’s speaking in a different language that he doesn’t recognize, whether she’s a witch who’s casting spells, or whether she’s just a crazy person who’s mumbling gibberish. However, as he calms down a little, he starts to recognize what the woman is saying as the names of different plants. Relieved, Gordy starts talking to her about plants, and he starts liking her. Feeling a little bad that the lady would have mental problems, he politely asks her if she’d like to talk about her problems. However, the lady laughs and tells him that she’s not a patient. She’s one of psychologists. She’s also an amateur naturalist, and she likes to teach her patients about plants and birds. Gordy actually likes bird watching, but he doesn’t like to talk about it to other kids because he’s been teased about it before.
By the time they’ve arrived at Hopeful Hill, Gordy and the psychologist have become friends, bonding over their love of birds and nature. Before they part ways, the psychologist mentions that she has a patient named Sylvia who could use some help and maybe Gordy could be the person to help her. Sylvia is a little girl who recently lost both of her parents in an accident and has been having difficulty coping with the shock of it. Gordy understands, remembering how he felt when his father died. The psychologist thinks that maybe Sylvia needs other children to talk to, and she asks Gordy if he would be willing to talk to Sylvia. Gordy is often nervous talking to people, but he agrees to try.
There is an interlude in Gordy’s story where Laura explains how she and the others are still following behind Gordy and the old lady, still worrying about the old lady being a witch and what she’s going to do with Gordy. When he goes into the asylum with her, they’re still able to see them through a window, and they watch as the old lady introduces him to a pretty girl with blonde hair. Because they don’t know who Sylvia is and why Gordy is there, they think maybe the girl is under a spell.
Meanwhile, Gordy is surprised at what the asylum looks like on the inside. It sort of reminds him of a hotel. He meets Sylvia’s aunt, who is now her guardian and is an unsympathetic person. The psychologist, whose name is Doctor Emma Lovely, introduces Gordy to Sylvia. Sylvia is younger than Gordy (a sixth-grader) but older than Deborah (a first-grader). Gordy estimates that she would be in the third grade. At first, Gordy doesn’t know what to say to Sylvia, so he tells a dumb joke. He knows it’s a dumb joke, but it always makes him laugh, and it makes Sylvia laugh, too. The aunt is worried that Sylvia is becoming too excited, but Doctor Lovely says to let the children talk. Gordy later finds out that, up to this point, Sylvia had not spoken aloud for weeks, but she can’t resist asking him what “the third” at the end of his name means. Gordy explains that he was named after his father and grandfather, which is why he’s the third person to have that name. He tells her that his father is dead, too. He isn’t sure if he should say that, but he thinks it might be good for her to know that she’s not the only person who lose a parent. Then, he tells her a little more about his life, how he lives down the road, and what his friends are like. When it’s time for Gordy to go home, Sylvia doesn’t want him to leave, but Gordy says he has to go but maybe he can come back. Doctor Lovely says that she’d like him to come back.
It seems like their first good deed has gone well, and the kids go back to Gordy’s house for supper and to talk about what they should do next. However, while they’re talking, Sylvia suddenly shows up. She slipped away from the asylum and came to see Gordy because he mentioned to her where he lives. The kids invite her inside, although they’re concerned about what to do with her because she’s a runaway. Lydia’s impulse is to keep her, but James realizes that they’d have to make some special arrangements to do that. They consider keeping her at one of their houses, but they either don’t have the room or don’t think that their parents would let them. Gordy and his mother have the most money and space, and he’d like to have Sylvia stay there, but his mother is absorbed in all of her social activities and committees, and he doesn’t think that she’d have time or interest in Sylvia. (They also have a cottage that they use as a clubhouse, and I expected that they would consider keeping her there, but they don’t.) They end up calling Doctor Lovely and letting her take Sylvia back to Hopeful Hill, but Gordy doesn’t feel good about it because he doesn’t think Sylvia can really get better there.
The next day at school, Gordy is distracted, worrying about Sylvia, and does poorly in class. His teacher, Miss Wilson, keeps him after school to ask him why he’s been so distracted all day, so he explains the entire situation to her. Miss Wilson is moved by Sylvia’s story, so she gives Gordy a ride to Hopeful Hill, stopping by her house on the way to pick something up. When they get to the asylum, Miss Wilson gives Sylvia the box she got from her house, which contains a beautiful doll that Miss Wilson used to play with when she was young. Sylvia loves the present, and Miss Wilson invites her to come see her other dolls and dollhouses sometime.
While Sylvia plays with the doll, Gordy listens to Miss Wilson talking to Doctor Lovely, offering to take Sylvia. Miss Wilson has been teaching for many years and loves children. She’s wanted a child of her own, although she’s never had one, and she has the time to care for Sylvia because she works at a school, and her working hours would mean that she would only work when Sylvia herself is in class. Doctor Lovely says that could be arranged, if Sylvia is willing, and Sylvia agrees that she would like to stay with Miss Wilson for awhile and see if she likes it with her. (Sylvia’s aunt isn’t really discussed much, but since she doesn’t seem to want to be responsible for Sylvia, it seems that she’s willing to let someone else adopt her.)
Gordy is pleased because it seems like this little adventure is wrapping up nicely, and Miss Wilson even tells Gordy that she’s thinking of transferring him from her class to his friends’ class at school. His friends’ class is the more advanced one at school, and Gordy is a little more academically slow than they are, but Miss Wilson thinks that he can handle it and that being with his friends might motivate him to work a little harder and learn better. Gordy likes the idea, but he’s also starting to like Miss Wilson a little better now, so he says that he’d like to finish the semester with her before deciding. He hurries to meet his friends and tell them what happened with Sylvia, and Laura takes the story from there.
Laura’s Story
When Laura and the others hear Gordy’s story about Miss Wilson taking Sylvia, they’re a little disappointed because they had been planning to break her out of the asylum, and living with a teacher doesn’t seem like much fun, but Gordy says that Miss Wilson is really nice. Lydia is also dissatisfied because it seems like everyone was skipped over in this adventure but Gordy. Laura says that might be because she was so mean about it when they first found out about Gordy’s wish.
For a few days, things are pretty calm. They continue to visit Sylvia and are happy to see that she’s getting along well with Miss Wilson. Then, one day, James is reading a local paper, and he spots a letter to the editor that gets their attention. The letter wishes good luck to the new railroad station, and it’s signed “A Well-Wisher.” The kids are confused because they haven’t heard anything about a new railroad station in the area, and they wonder if it could be some kind of code. Then, they start thinking about the word “well-wisher.” It occurs to them that they are also well-wishers, both because they have a “magic” wishing well and because they wish everyone well.
The kids start wondering if anyone else in the area also has a magic wishing well, and if that’s what the “Well-Wisher” means. They start asking other people in the area who have wells if their wells are wishing wells, and they get a variety of responses, but nobody who sincerely says that their well is a wishing well. Since that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, they decide to go down to the town’s railroad station and see what the letter means by “new railroad station.” They don’t learn anything there, either.
The kids stop to buy apples from a man selling them from a nearby orchard, and the man tells them that the orchard has been condemned, and this is his last crop. The town is forcing him to sell his property to the town so they can use the land for the new railroad station. The farmer is upset about having to move and seeing his beloved trees cut down.
At first, the kids think that their next wishing well mission is to prevent the new additions to the railroad station and save the orchard, but Kip points out that many commuters, like his father, rely on that railroad station, and the station has been getting more crowded and has insufficient parking. Just like the school the community decided to build in the last book, there is a community need for this expansion of the railroad station. Then, the kids wonder if there is a way to help the farmer keep his orchard even though he has to move it from its present site.
Fortunately, there is someone else who has an orchard and who could use an experienced farmer to help her manage it, and there might even be some romance in it!
Lydia’s Story
Dicky LeBaron has always been a rotten bully at school, particularly liking to pick on Gordy, although Lydia has had some bad experiences with him, too. The whole group has had a couple of run-ins with him just during the course of this book, and when it’s Lydia’s turn for a good deed, the first thing she thinks of is taking care of Dicky. Laura doesn’t think that the wishing well should be used for revenge, but Dicky keeps following them around, spying on them, and spreading mean rumors about what they do in their clubhouse. Lydia decides that she’s had enough of Dicky and is going to do something about him.
Lydia tells Dicky that what she and the others really do in the clubhouse is talk to ghosts, and she invites him to come see for himself. Dicky accepts the invitation, and Lydia feels a little guilty because she’s actually planning a trick on him. However, because Dicky has been so mean, she decides to go through with the trick anyway. There’s a hole in the floor of the clubhouse where an old furnace used to be. Normally, the kids keep the hole covered by an old chest so nobody falls into the basement, but Lydia moves the chest and covers it with a rug instead. Her idea is to trick Dicky into stepping on the rug and falling onto a pile of pillows in the basement. Then, while he’s trapped in the basement, she plans to scare him with spooky ghost noises, and then, when the rest of her friends come, they can all tell off Dicky for all the mean stuff he’s done to them and tell him that they won’t let him out of the haunted basement until he promises to behave better.
Of course, none of this goes according to plan. Instead, Lydia accidentally falls into her own trap, and when she falls into the basement, she hurts her ankle. When Dicky comes, she still puts on a ghost act, calling out from the basement in a ghostly voice and making a horrible face when Dicky looks down the hole. At first, Dicky really is scared, but then his older friends, who are even meaner, come along, realize that it’s a trick, and show him that it’s just Lydia in the basement. Dicky is mad at Lydia for tricking him, and he and the mean older boys talk about what they’re going to do to get even. However, when the older boys talk about doing something to little Deborah, Dicky draws the line because Deborah’s just a little kid. He and the other boys argue about it, and the older boys shove Dicky down the hole with Lydia.
Trapped in the basement together, Lydia and Dicky have a few honest words about what they’ve each done. Lydia apologizes for the trick, and Dicky reveals that he’s only been doing the stuff he’s been doing and sneaking around because he felt left out. Lydia asks him why he didn’t just ask to join in and be friends instead of acting like a creep, but Dicky cuts the discussion short while he figures out how to get out of the basement.
Dicky manages to climb out of the basement through a chimney, and when his “friends” try to stop him, they accidentally disturb a hornets’ nest, which drives them off. Dicky gets out and frees Lydia. Then, they go and rescue Gordy and Deborah from where the big boys had them tied up. Dicky gets a few hits from Gordy and from James and Kip when they come along because they all think he was one of the boys who attacked Deborah. Fortunately, they get the whole situation straightened out, and Deborah isn’t traumatized from the experience.
James admits that Dicky turned out better than he though under the circumstances, but he’s not sure he really wants him around because of the way he’s been acting toward them for a long time (a valid concern) and because he dresses like a juvenile delinquent (kind of shallow). Lydia tells James off for being a snob and not giving people a chance when they try to improve themselves (also a valid criticism). They all sit down with Dicky and explain to him what their group is really about, telling him about the wishing well and the good deeds and letting him decide for himself whether or not he’s interested in joining them. Even though Dicky is a bit superstitious, he thinks the wishing well sounds kind of childish and turns down the offer to join them. However, he thanks them for offering to let him join and seems to be fond of Deborah, and Laura thinks that he might help them out at some later point, if they need him.
Kip’s Story
Kip’s story in particular requires explanation because it’s topical for the time period when the book was written.
James and Laura’s family misses church next Sunday because they oversleep, but Kip is there, and he hears the minister giving the congregation a stern talk about a local issue. Apparently, there is a new family moving to the area, and some of the current residents disapprove and have been putting together a petition against the family. The minister tells the congregation that he disapproves of the petition and has written a letter of welcome to the new family, inviting members of the congregation to sign it as well.
The minister doesn’t say why people are against this new family, and this is the first that Kip has heard of it, but his parents are among those who sign the welcome letter. After church, Kip overhears some women talking about the minister, saying that he shouldn’t have brought up this issue in church and he “doesn’t know his place.” A couple of men are also talking, saying, “Once one gets in they’ll all come. We have to draw the line.” As far as lines go, I’m pretty good at reading between them, and I know that this book was published in 1960.
Even though nobody has openly said it, I knew at this point in the story that these people are talking about a black family moving to the area. The situation is like that of the Myers family in Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1957. I wouldn’t show the video I linked to kids because of some of the language involved, but the woman about 6 to 10:30 minutes into that video pretty much sums up her entire issue with having new neighbors who are black. She just “could never” accept them socially, like the snobbiest mean girl at the cool kids’ table in the middle school cafeteria, who thinks it’s weird and wrong that “uncool” kids want to be treated like human beings, too. She speaks like these people outside the church. I don’t know who the woman in the video is/was, but if she felt like she wasn’t being heard, I think that the way the characters talk in this book from 1960 show that people definitely heard her and others like her and noticed how they felt and what they said. Just because people don’t agree with you or even like you as a person doesn’t mean that they didn’t listen, hear, and understand. Understanding does not equal approval. It’s completely possible to understand someone else’s position yet not identify with it or approve of it, just like I felt irritated by the main characters in this story when they were being jerks to Gordy at the beginning, even though, as a reader, I was seeing the situation through their eyes. Seeing it through their eyes didn’t make me like it better. Sometimes, what you come to understand about a person is that they’re in the wrong or just being a jerk and you don’t want any part of their issues. That might sound harsh, but it’s true. It’s the risk we all take when expressing opinions, that when we get someone else’s attention, it won’t be the kind of attention we wanted but the kind that other people think we deserve.
In the story, Lydia’s grandmother calls the people against the new family “Philistines.” The kids don’t know exactly what that means although Kip vaguely remembers that the Philistines had “the jawbones of an ass”, which he thinks sounds like the situation here. (Actually, Samson killed Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, but I like Kip’s explanation because of the imagery.) Kip’s mother tells him that she doesn’t want to talk about the issue because it makes her “too angry”, so he talks it over with his friends instead. They still don’t openly say what the issue is with the new family because little Deborah is with them, and the older kids are careful about what they say around her, but Kip implies that he’s figured it out. They just refer to the disapproving townspeople as “snobbish”, which is true, although adults will recognize that it’s a particular kind of snobbishness.
I’d like to say here that I found it interesting that they never actually refer to the new family as black at any point in the story. I kept expecting that they would, but they never did. It’s all implied, and if you’re old enough to understand what’s going on, you get it. Deborah doesn’t get it at first, although she does when she actually sees the new family in person for the first time. They are never actually described, but the fact that their appearance makes Deborah immediately see the issue settles the matter.
The kids think that this issue with the new family in town might be their next mission and that Kip should be in charge of it, but Kip questions whether there’s anything for them to do because the minister has already been taking steps to deal with the situation. They consider signing the minister’s letter, if he’ll accept signatures from children, but they also wonder whether magic and their wishing well would go well with a church activity. They decide to go to the minster and ask him about it and if there’s anything they can do.
The minister is pleased that the children care and want to help, and he’s not overly concerned if they’re motivated by “wishing well” magic to do so. From the way he says it, it sounds like he regards the “wishing well” as a harmless children’s game or the product of overactive imaginations, which it might be, since the story never firmly settles it. The minister just appreciates that the children’s hearts are in the right place and uses the reference to fountains in Proverbs 5:16 as proof that a wishing well’s help is acceptable here. (Although, that verse is actually a metaphor for marriage and adultery, which completely goes over the heads of the children. He’s just humoring them here. Personally, I would have picked a reference to the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well because that has an actual well in it and “living water”, but it’s not a detail that’s really important to the story. The important point is the minister is happy to accept whatever help these imaginative children are willing to offer.) He says that, since the new family also includes children, it would be fitting if they could collect a page of children’s signatures to add to the letter. The kids are all happy to sign the children’s page and say that they can get some other signatures as well. They also get more signatures from other adults, not just children.
When the children go back to James and Laura’s house, Kip’s parents are talking to James and Laura’s parents. The adults are worried about the children hearing about the problem, although James’s father says that they might as well know that the world isn’t a perfect place and has its problems. The kids walk into the room and tell them that they know what’s happening already. James’s father says that he’s not really worried about whether can get enough people to sign the welcome letter. He’s pretty sure that the majority of the people in the community will be willing to accept the new family into the community. What worries him is that the people who are unhappy about the new family might escalate their behavior into some kind of demonstration if they don’t get their way. The kids say that they’ve wished on the wishing well, and they’re sure that will take care of it. Their parents know what the kids think about the wishing well, but they urge them to be careful here because this is a situation that makes people emotional, and it could get out of hand. Still, the kids have faith in the wishing well and in the friends they’ve made through their various adventures.
I found it interesting how the kids describe the way other children at school have heard about the issue from their parents. If their parents haven’t all talked to them directly about it, they’ve at least talked about it in front of them. The kids at school generally side with whatever their parents say about the issue, and the ones that are against the new family are described as being “stuffy, hopeless, purseproud ones” (“purse proud” people are people who are especially proud of their wealth because they have little else to be proud of, basing their self-esteem on monetary wealth) or “feckless goons who’ll do anything for a little excitement.” They also mention that there are “mindless ones who never have any opinion of their own and have to borrow other people’s,” and those people are up for grabs for either side, so they manage to sway a few of them. At one point, a bully tries to take their paper and tear it up, but Dicky stops him. Dicky orders the bully and some of the other kids to sign the paper, too, so he’s finally using his powers for good. Gordy’s mother is very influential in the community, and the “intolerant ones” (as the book describes them) try to recruit her to join their cause, but she turns them down. She doesn’t sign the welcome letter either, though, because she considers the entire situation tasteless and undignified and doesn’t want to get involved in any way.
It’s a little worrying when they hear that the “intolerant ones” are planning some kind of demonstration, but Kip comes up with a good idea for a demonstration of welcome: they recruit a bunch of friends to do a nice garden for the new family. People bring all kinds of plants for the garden, and many children help. The presence of the children gets the demonstrators to back out of their demonstration. The new family loves the new garden, and it turns into a big community celebration.
Before Kip’s story ends, he gets curious about who originally owned the new family’s house. After some research, he finds out that the original owner was an escaped slave who traveled through the Underground Railroad. Not only does it seem right that a black family should move to the property, but the original owner had a reputation for growing herbs in her garden that she used for magical cures, which seems to fit with the magic of the wishing well.
Deborah’s Story
I partly expected the story of the new family in town to be the climax of the book, but it’s not. They’ve safely moved in, but now, they’re going to have to live in the community, and there are still people who have bad feelings about that. This is where little Deborah gets a story in the book. The others hadn’t expected Deborah to get an adventure from the wishing well because she’s just a little sister of a couple of the main characters, but she’s in a unique position to do some good for the new family. Because Deborah is still only in the first grade, she dictates her story to another character, who doesn’t identify himself at first but who plays an important role in her adventure.
The three children in the new family are younger than most of the characters in the book so far, but the oldest, a boy named Hannibal, is six years old and in Deborah’s first grade class. Hannibal’s first day at school does not go well. He’s surly to his teacher and the other kids, making it clear that he doesn’t want to be there, and he doesn’t want to play with them. Hannibal’s behavior seems to confirm to the children whose parents didn’t want his family to move there in the first place that they were right not to want them, and some of the kids start teasing Hannibal on the playground at recess, making fun of his unusual name.
Dicky’s teacher has recently made him a playground monitor for the younger children in order to teach him some responsibility. Dicky (the other narrator who shares Deborah’s story and writes it down for her) knows that’s why he was given the job of playground monitor, but he finds that he actually doesn’t mind the job. When the other kids start teasing Hannibal and Deborah can see that he’s getting more upset, she runs to get Dicky. The mean kids are intimidated by Dicky and run away when he comes. At first, Dicky admits that he doesn’t quite understand the situation. Thinking that the other kids didn’t want to play with Hannibal, he calls one of his younger brothers over and tells him to play with Hannibal instead.
However, Hannibal says that he doesn’t want to play with anybody. He tells Dicky flat out that he doesn’t want to be there at this school and that the other kids don’t really want him. Dicky says that people do want him here, and that’s why they fixed up the garden and had that welcoming party. Hannibal is pretty sharp for his age, though, and he says that he knows that there are people here who didn’t want him or his family and the flowers in the garden aren’t going to fix that. He says he also knows that even people who do nice things often do them for their own sake, so they feel good, not because they really like or want to help someone else. Hannibal is also homesick for where they used to live in New York, and he wants to go back there.
Dicky can’t deny that a lot of what Hannibal said is true, but he also recognizes the emotional state that Hannibal is in. Dicky’s family has had a lot of problems, and even he realizes that’s why he’s often acted the way that he has. His family is poor, he has a lot of brothers, and social workers who have come to visit his family are often unhelpful because they don’t really understand the family or their situation. In the past, Dicky has often taken out his frustrations through vandalism and being mean to other kids, especially kids like Gordy, who have more than his family does. However, Dicky is now old enough to understand that breaking things and being mean don’t help anything and often make problems worse. He explains to Hannibal that making friends requires some effort from him as well as the other kids because they can’t be his friends if he won’t let them be, and even though he wishes he were back where he used to live, he lives here now, and he might as well make the most of it. Hannibal is too upset to listen, though, and when Dicky tells him to play with the other kids, he just starts shoving people around, pretending that he’s playing tag. Hannibal is so angry and surly all day that he really gets on everyone’s nerves, and when school’s out, he runs away from the other kids, some of whom are planning to get back at him for how he’s been treating them.
Deborah is worried about Hannibal, so she persuades Dicky to give her a ride on his bike while they go looking for him. Dicky is sympathetic and agrees. Deborah thinks that Hannibal is her mission from the wishing well, and even though Dicky doesn’t believe in it and thinks all the wishing well stuff is corny, he lets Deborah talk him into doing a ritual by the well where they wish that Hannibal would behave better and get along with others. Dicky does the ritual with Deborah to make her happy, although he worries that someone else might see them, and it will ruin his cool, tough guy reputation.
The person who sees them doing the ritual is Hannibal, who is hiding nearby. He is fascinated by the ritual that the others are doing and by Deborah’s “magic” wishing well. When Deborah tells him that they were wishing about him, Dicky expects that Hannibal will get mad again, but he doesn’t. Instead, Hannibal wants to make a wish of his own, wishing that he could be just like other kids.
Dicky tells Hannibal that he should learn to like himself and appreciate himself for being different because everyone is a unique person, and there will never be another person just like him again. Hannibal says that he likes himself just fine, but other people don’t, and that’s why it’s a problem. Dicky says that he can make the other kids behave themselves and play with him, but Deborah realizes that what Hannibal needs is someone to be nice to him for his own sake, because they want to, not because they have to.
Deborah invites Hannibal to come inside for some water, and when Hannibal notices that he’s ripped his clothes and worries about what his mother will say, Deborah suggests that her mother might be able to fix the rip. Seeing that someone is genuinely trying to be nice to him and that people will take care of him here softens Hannibal. The first grade teacher tells the other students to be nice to Hannibal on his second day because his first day was just really hard for him and that’s why he was behaving badly. The second day goes better, and Hannibal starts playing with the other kids and settling in.
The adventure does seem to do Dicky some good, too. He somewhat comes to believe in the magic of the wishing well, although he doesn’t like to admit it openly, and helping another troubled kid who reminds him a little of himself helps him to settle some of his own problems, teaching him the leadership and responsibility that his teacher hoped he would learn. He starts becoming more friendly with the other kids and hanging out with them more, although he also spends time with other friends or just by himself because he still likes being a kind of lone wolf. His personality grows and changes, but he also realizes that he can still be himself and his own man.
James’s Story
By this point, everyone has had an adventure of some kind except for James. Part of the reason why James is last is because he both believes in the magic of the wishing well and doesn’t. He likes fantasy stories and magic as much as Laura, but he also notices that everything that they’ve accomplished so far could also just be accomplished through kindness and thoughtfulness and that there doesn’t really need to be any magic. James likes facts and being sure of how things work, so for the last wish of the wishing well, he asks the well to give him some kind of evidence of whether or not there really is any magic.
One Saturday, the kids go on a long bike ride to just explore the area, finding a sign post that points to a place called Journey’s End Road. Curious about who would live on a road with such a strange name, they decide to check it out. At first, they’re expecting that they’ll find little cottages with elderly people in them, people who are at the end of life’s “journey”, so to speak. Instead, they find a mansion that looks like a castle.
While they’re admiring this castle-like mansion, a blonde girl in a blue dress steps out onto a balcony and calls to James for help, saying that she’s locked in and needs to get down. Laura thinks this is wonderfully romantic, rescuing a princess from a tower, and even James thinks that it seems pretty magical and romantic. Laura asks the girl if she’s being held prisoner by a wicked ogre, and she says yes. James doesn’t really believe that, but he’s more than willing to help. The girl tells him where to find a ladder, and he helps her to climb down from the balcony.
Once the girl is on the ground, she asks them to take her into town so she can get some important papers to the police and stop some international spies. James is still happy to help her, even though it’s weird that she’s now talking about spies. Gordy recognizes the girl as an older, teenage girl named Muriel who he’s seen at dance classes. Muriel tells them that her name is not her real name because she was stolen by the spies as a baby.
Her story gets weirder and more unbelievable, but James is enchanted by her because she’s pretty and gives her a ride on the handlebars of his bike, even leaving the others behind because she’s eager to get back to town quickly. She says that she needs to get to the town hall with the “papers”, but then, she says that they’re being followed, so they have to duck into a movie theater.
Of course, it turns out that she actually wants to meet another boy at the theater. She had a date with him to see the movie, but her father didn’t approve, and that’s why she was locked in her room. James is offended that she lied to him, let him pay for the tickets, and even referred to him as a “little boy.” Angry and humiliated, James hangs around in the theater’s lounge, afraid to face his friends and feeling let down by the “magic.” Then, he smells a gas leak in the lounge and warns the ticket seller. Seeing it as his opportunity to rescue Muriel from something that’s actually dangerous, James also goes back into the theater and makes Muriel leave with him.
Muriel is angry with James for interrupting her date, and then, he’s confronted by Muriel’s angry father, who mistakes him for Muriel’s date. Fortunately, James’s sister and friends come and explain all of Muriel’s lies to her father. Then, the movie theater is evacuated, and the ticket-seller and police praise James in front of Muriel’s father for saving everyone, pointing out that he personally saved Muriel and calling him a hero. Muriel’s father admits that he made a mistake thinking that James was the hoodlum that he didn’t want his daughter to date and says that they can see each other any time they want. James isn’t interested in seeing Muriel again, but he’s pleased at being a hero. He and his friends get their picture in the local paper.
James’s conclusion is that the wishing well proved that there is magic. His reasoning is that, if all he was supposed to do was to find the gas leak and be a hero, there were other ways he could have done it. He thinks that the wishing well directed him to Muriel so he could have the experience and excitement of rescuing a “princess” (or as close an approximation as they could get).
However, James does feel a little disillusioned, thinking about what “princess” Muriel is actually like, and he sees the need to grow up and see people and things for what they are. On the bright side, James has started to see the appeal of girls, and he’s learned to recognize that there are better girls than Muriel. He starts seeing a girl named Florence, and he sees his relationship with her as a kind of magic, so he’s satisfied, even though he now doesn’t have as much time for secret meetings with his friends and the “magic” wishing well.
The End
The book ends around Thanksgiving, with some final comments from everyone about how their adventures affected them and what they’re thankful for after their experiences.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle by Betty MacDonald, 1947, 1957, 1975, 1987.
This book has been printed and reprinted many times over the decades. The edition that I used for this review is the same one that I read when I was in elementary school, printed in the 1980s. One of the reasons why the edition matters is that the illustrations were different in the first printings in the book. In 1957, the illustrations were replaced by the ones you see here, which continued to be used in later printings.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a widow who lives in an upside-down house. Her husband was a pirate, and she has magical cures for the bad habits of the children who live in her neighborhood. Sometimes, she doesn’t need magic for a particular child’s bad habit, just using psychology. Sometimes, certain behaviors, like staying up all night instead of going to bed, are their own punishment, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle advises the parents to let the children do them for a certain period of time so they can find out for themselves why these things are a bad idea, usually with very funny results. This book is the first book in the series, and it particularly uses more psychology than magic.
As an adult, I actually prefer the psychological cures to the magical ones. These stories are meant to be humorous rather than practical, and because of that, they’re not realistic. First, they never really go into the psychological reasons why some of these kids do the things they do, like becoming over-protective of their belongings or suddenly becoming afraid of taking baths. Then, when children suffer the consequences of their misbehavior, the consequences are humorous and exaggerated, like the boy whose room gets so messy that he actually traps himself inside until he decides to clean up and the girl who gets so dirty that her parents can grow radishes on her. However, the fact that there are consequences for the children’s behavior is a useful touch of realism. It gives parents or teachers the opportunity to talk to kids about what they expect would happen if they actually did any of the things kids do in the stories and think about some of the consequences of their own actions. These are stories that can make kids chuckle and then make them think.
I think it’s important to point out that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle never actually blames the children for their bad behavior, seeing it more as an affliction that they need to be cured from. She likes all children in spite of their bad habits and bad behavior (something I admit that I find hard to do with people in real life), and she wants to cure them of their problems so that other people will see how likeable they are underneath. Even though Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle likes the children, she doesn’t spare them from the consequences of their actions because that is part of the cure that the children need to become the best versions of themselves. Sometimes, the consequences are the cure by themselves, and those are the stories I like best. After all, what makes bad habits “bad” is that they have bad consequences to them. They cause problems, both for the person behaving badly and others. Maybe, sometimes, people need to see the problems for themselves and experience the consequences directly before they find the motivation to fix their behavior. I can believe that part of these stories is realistic. The rest of it is just for fun.
The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books are collections of short stories, and each one focuses on a different child or set of children, their particular problems or bad habits, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s solutions for them.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
The Stories in this Book:
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Herself
This section of the book introduces and describes Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. She is a small woman with a hump on her back, which she says contains magic. (The hump isn’t really shown in the pictures of her in the book, but she’s supposed to have one.) She has very long brown hair, which she usually wears up, but sometimes, she lets it down so that children can comb and braid it or style it in different ways. Her eyes are also brown, and her skin is described as being a “goldy brown.” (Her racial identity is not specified because it’s not important to the stories. The pictures show her as being white, so maybe she just has a tan, but I find the written description interesting because it could leave the character open to different interpretations and playable by different types of actors. Her description could fit quite a lot of people, really.) She wears brown clothing (although that’s not how she’s shown in the pictures) and smells like sugar cookies. She claims not to know her own age, saying that it doesn’t matter, since she’ll never get any bigger than she is now.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a widow, and she tells the children that her husband was a pirate who buried treasure in the back yard before he died. She has no children of her own, but she loves all the neighborhood children, and she frequently looks after them and has them come over to play. She doesn’t often speak to the children’s parents because she gets nervous around adults. She also has a dog named Wag and a cat named Lightfoot.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lives in a little brown house that is upside down. She says that her house is upside down because, when she was a little girl, she used to look up at the ceiling when she was in bed and wonder what it would be like to walk on the ceiling, so when she grew up, she purposely built her house upside down just to find out. The only parts of the house that are normal are the kitchen, the bathroom, and the stairs because none of them would work properly if they were upside down.
When I was a kid, I thought that the upside-down house was the best part of the stories. When people walk around inside it, they have to step over the sills of the doorways because what should be the tops of doors are not flush with the ceiling the way the bottoms are flush with the floor, and these doorways are upside down. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle put little steps into and out of doorways to help with that, but kids like to jump the doorways as a challenge. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lets them make chalk marks to record the lengths of their jumps. Also, because the ceilings are now the floors, the chandelier is on the floor of the living room, shining upward instead of down, and kids sit around it like it’s a camp fire. The children can also use the slanting ceiling-floors of the house as slides.
Most of this part of the book is backstory for Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, but it explains that the first neighborhood child she made friends with was a girl named Mary Lou, who was running away from home because she hated doing the dishes so much. Seeing Mary Lou going down the sidewalk in the rain with her suitcase, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle invited her in for tea and cookies, and Mary Lou told her about her problems. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle tells Mary Lou that she really likes washing dishes because it’s fun to pretend that she’s a beautiful princess who was captured by an evil witch who makes her do all the cleaning and that the only way she can escape is to have everything clean by the time the clock strikes. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle draws Mary Lou into a game of pretend, where they both pretend that they’re cleaning the kitchen for the evil witch. Then, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle puts on her witch’s costume, pretending to be the witch, inspecting the kitchen to make sure that it’s clean.
It’s so much fun that Mary Lou gets over hating washing the dishes. When she tells her parents about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, they let her spend time with Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and she brings her friend, Kitty, to visit when Kitty says that she hates making the beds at her house. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle plays a similar game of pretend with Kitty and Mary Lou, where they pretend that they are making beds for a cruel queen who will throw them in the dungeon if the sheets are wrinkled.
Gradually, Mary Lou and Kitty start bringing their siblings and other friends to see Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle gets to know all of the children in the neighborhood. She shows them how to make chores fun, teaches them to do things like bake cookies and pies, and lets them dig for pirate treasure in the backyard. Because she is so good with children, parents in the neighborhood call her to ask for help and advice when they’re having problems with their kids.
The Won’t-Pick-Up-Toys Cure
Hubert Prentiss’s grandfather gives him many wonderful toys, but Hubert doesn’t like putting them away. It’s very difficult to get around his room, and the problem gets worse all the time. Hubert’s mother tries asking other mothers what they do with their children, but they either don’t have the same problem or don’t know what to do. Then, one of them suggests asking Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle because she’s so good with children. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has met Hubert before because he’s come to her house with the other children.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle suggests that Hubert’s mother let Hubert make his room messy and that she not try to pick up after him or even enter his room. Then, when the room gets to the point that it’s difficult for Hubert himself to even go in or out, to give her a call. After a week, Hubert’s room is so bad that he can’t open his bedroom door and can’t even use his bed. His mother has to feed him through his bedroom window. Even though she’s only able to give him things like peanut butter sandwiches through the window and Hubert doesn’t have anywhere comfortable to sleep anymore, he’s still not motivated enough to leave his room and put away all his toys. However, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has a plan to motivate Hubert enough that he’s willing to finally clean his room just to get out.
The Answer-Backer Cure
When Mary O’Toole’s teacher picks her to stay in at recess and help clean up the classroom, Mary is so irritated that she tells the teacher to do it herself and to let her go play with the other kids. Her mother tells her that was a rude thing to say to her teacher, but it’s just the beginning of Mary’s bad habit of being rude and impudent to people. Mary thinks that it makes her look smart to contradict people, and her new responses to any order or request her parents and teacher make are “Why should I?” and “I’ll do it because I want to but not because you tell me to.” (Nobody but you cares why you do it, kiddo. They just want it done because they just want to get through the day and accomplish things. You can either be the one who makes that easier or the one who makes that harder or more unpleasant, but things are still going to need to be done either way.)
Mary’s mother goes through the usual routine of calling other mothers for their opinions, and one of them suggests talking to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s solution is to let Mary keep her parrot, Penelope for awhile. Penelope is as rude as Mary is and repeats many of the things that Mary herself says. At first, Mary thinks it’s funny, but gradually, she begins to see how annoying it is and realizes how she sounds when she talks that way. Her dad actually laughs when he hears how much the parrot sounds like Mary, which makes Mary mad. Penelope also uses remarks that Mary thought that she’d made up herself, but she says them before Mary actually said them around her, making Mary realize that she’s not even as clever and original as she thought she was. When she sees how annoying it is to be around someone as rude and negative as she was, Mary apologizes to her teacher and gives it up.
(Actually, I know a lot of adults who talk just like Mary – “I’ll do it because I want to but not because you tell me to.” If they don’t use those exact words, it’s solidly the exact same attitude. They say they do it specifically because they’re adults and nobody should be telling them what to do under any circumstances, even if it’s something important. For them, it’s a kneejerk reaction to being told something, anything, no matter the circumstances and with little thought or attention to what they’re being told and whether it’s actually worthwhile. I always think of this story whenever I hear them talking that way.)
The Selfishness Cure
Dick Thompson is selfish and greedy. It’s no fun for other kids to come play at his house because he won’t share any of his toys or let anybody touch anything that belongs to him. It’s always “MY” this and “MY” that and everything is “MINE!” Dick’s mother realizes that something must be done when she gives Dick a box of peppermint sticks specifically to share with other kids in order to teach him how to share, and he actually hits Mary O’Toole on the hand with his baseball bat for trying to take one.
When Dick’s mother calls his father at work and asks him what they should do, the father’s first suggestion is a good, hard spanking because that’s something Dick can keep all to himself, but the mother is upset at the idea of more physical violence. The father then suggests that she talk to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle because she’s helped other children in the neighborhood.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Selfishness Cure is her special Selfishness Kit. It contains a variety of padlocks that Dick can use to lock up his stuff. It also has labels and paint that Dick can use to label all of his stuff, and it even has a pastry bag for labeling Dick’s food as his with frosting. The idea is to indulge Dick’s desire to prevent anyone from touching anything that belongs to him until it becomes so much of a hassle that he decides that it’s too much trouble.
At first, Dick is really happy that he can label everything he owns with his name and write “DON’T TOUCH!” on it, but as predicted, it turns out to be a big problem. Because Dick has everything, including his lunch, marked with his name and “DON’T TOUCH”, it isn’t long before everyone at school knows and is laughing at him. Plus, as my mother says, “With some kids, you can tell them not to touch something, and they won’t touch it, but there are also kids who, when you tell them not to touch something, just can’t wait to touch it.”
The Radish Cure
Patsy is a perfectly ordinary girl, but one day, she suddenly decides that she hates baths and refuses to take another one. There is no explanation why, and none of the other mothers in the neighborhood seem to be having that problem with their children, but Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has a solution.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle tells Patsy’s mother to led her go several weeks without washing at all, letting her get as dirty as she wants. Then, she should get a packet of small radish seeds and plant them on Patsy. When Pasty sees that she’s sprouting radishes, she suddenly decides that she’s ready for a bath.
The Never-Want-To-Go-To-Bedders Cure
The three children in the Gray family never like going to bed. Every night, when it’s time for bed, they beg to be allowed to stay up a little later and insist that nobody else in the neighborhood goes to bed as early as they do. It often takes about an hour of whining, complaining, and arguing before their parents are able to get them to bed.
Mrs. Gray goes through the usual routine of asking other parents if they have this problem with their children, but none of her friends do, so she asks Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle what to do.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s advice is to let the children stay up as late as they want to. Mrs. Gray worries that not getting enough sleep will be bad for the children’s health, but Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle says that a day or two with less sleep won’t make much of a difference, and by that time, they’ll realize why going to bed at night is a good idea.
The Gray children think it’s great at first that their parents no longer tell them to go to bed and even let them stay up half the night, but soon, they’re falling asleep in the middle of the day, missing movies that they go to see when they fall asleep in the theater and missing out on fun activities with other kids either because they’re asleep or too tired to enjoy them.
The Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker Cure
A boy named Allen has suddenly become obsessed with eating his food very slowly, taking super-tiny bites. It’s a very odd habit, and it makes meal times difficult because he eats very little and take a very long time to do it. I’d be worried if he was having difficulty swallowing, but his mother calls Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle gives his mother sets of dishes in different sizes, from fairly large to ridiculously tiny. At each meal, Allen’s mother uses progressively smaller dishes. Allen is fascinated by the tiny dishes, which fit his new dainty eating, but he’s getting weaker because he’s been hardly eating anything.
I actually found the descriptions of his weakness a little alarming, but his mother then reverses the order of the dishes she gives him, starting with the smallest and then moving to the biggest. As Allen realizes that he feels better when he starts eating more food, his appetite returns, and he gets his strength back.
The Fighter-Quarrelers Cure
Twins Joan and Anne Russell have been fighting with each other a lot, and it’s driving their parents crazy. The twins argue with each other over everything, like who is wearing whose clothing and who had more bacon or the biggest slice of melon on their plate at breakfast, and they even pinch and slap each other. Sibling quarrels are pretty common, but Mrs. Russell asks Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle if there’s anything they can do to end this constant fighting.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle advises the girls’ parents to make notes about the types of petty things that the girls argue about and spend a day having staged arguments of their own in front of the girls to show them what it’s like to be around that type of arguing all the time.
From the moment they wake up the next day, the twins suddenly find themselves in the awkward position of trying to reason with their parents and referee their quarrels as they become witnesses to the same kinds of petty behavior they’ve been doing themselves. Finally, the girls have had their fill of fighting, and with their petty quarrels now in perspective, the entire family promises each other that they won’t fight like that again.
An evil Duke lives with his niece, Princess Saralinda, in a castle with 13 clocks that do not work. The Duke is a cold-hearted man, so cold that his hands are always cold, and he has frozen all of the clocks. Time itself seems frozen in the cold castle. The Duke comes to believe that he has actually “murdered” time, that it will never again be “Now” in the castle. The Duke is afraid of “Now.” “Now” has urgency and consequences, and he hopes that by stopping time, he will never have to confront “Now.”
One of the Duke’s fears is of his niece’s suitors. Princess Saralinda is lovely and as warm as the Duke is cold, so the Duke does not want to let her go. He needs her warmth as relief from his own coldness. Every time a potential suitor attempts to call on Princess Saralinda and ask for her hand, the Duke thinks up some impossible task for the suitor to accomplish with a sentence of death for failing to accomplish the impossible so Princess Saralinda will never be married.
Then, a prince comes to town disguised as a minstrel named Xingu, which is dangerous because using a name that starts with ‘X’ is one of the things that the Duke sometimes kills people for doing. The prince is a youngest son, and as youngest sons often do in fairy tales, he has gone into the world to seek his fortune, adventure, and the lady of his dreams. At the town’s inn, the minstrel prince hears stories about Princess Saralinda, her suitors, and the Duke’s impossible challenges. In spite of the gruesome consequences for failing to complete the impossible tasks, the prince finds himself contemplating how he might be able to gain entrance to the castle and try his hand at defeating the Duke and winning the princess.
The minstrel prince begins making up a joking song about the Duke, and the people in town are nervous because the Duke kills people for any form of impertinence. One of the Duke’s spies, known as Whisper, witnesses the song and runs off to tell the Duke about it. Then, the prince is approached by a strange little man who calls himself the Golux and who offers to help him, although he freely admits that he makes up stories and often forgets what’s made up and what’s real. The prince doubts how helpful he can be, but the Golux suggests a story he can tell the Duke when the Duke considers killing him and feeding him to his geese, that Princess Saralinda can only be married two days after his death. The Duke would do almost anything to prevent Princess Saralinda’s marriage, so he wouldn’t kill him if his death might be the omen that causes her marriage to happen.
Soon, the Duke’s guards come to arrest the minstrel prince and take him to the dungeon. When he is brought before the Duke, the minstrel prince tells him what the Golux told him to say. The Duke isn’t sure whether he’s telling the truth or not, but since he’s not sure if he can kill him outright, he decides to set one of his impossible tasks for the minstrel to complete. The minstrel says that he can’t do an impossible task because he’s not a prince (as far as the Duke knows), but the Duke says that they’ll make him one just so he can do it.
As the guards escort the minstrel prince back to the dungeon, he sees Princess Saralinda, and she wishes him well, which is all that she can say in her uncle’s presence because she’s under a spell. The minstrel prince falls in love with her, and he realizes that his love is returned when she later manages to give him a rose.
In the dungeon, the minstrel prince encounters the Golux again and asks him how he got in and if there’s a way out, but the Golux is evasive, just telling another one of his stories about his mother being a witch and his father a wizard. However, the Golux has a useful suggestion for managing the Duke’s next impossible task: control what the task is through reverse psychology. He doesn’t use those exact words, but he tells the minstrel prince to beg the Duke to set him any task he likes but not to send him out in search of a thousand jewels. The Duke, being evil, will automatically set him the one task he begs not to be given. The minstrel prince says that he still can’t give the Duke a thousand jewels because he doesn’t have any jewels. The Golux points out that he’s no ordinary minstrel. He is actually Prince Zorn of Zorna, and his father will surely supply the jewels he needs. That’s all very well, but the prince isn’t sure if the Duke will give him the time he needs to reach his father and return.
Sure enough, the Duke sets the prince the task of getting a thousand jewels, but the matter is complicated because it turns out that he’s aware of who the prince really is. Knowing that it would take Prince Zorn 99 days to get the required jewels from his father and return, the Duke gives him only 99 hours to do it, and he further requires that all of the 13 clocks in the castle strike five o’clock (they are frozen at 10 minutes before five o’clock) when he returns with the thousand jewels.
The stakes of the task are high for both the Prince and the Duke because, as a guard explains to Prince Zorn, the Todal, which is a kind of blob monster in the service of the devil, waits to gobble up the Duke if the Duke fails to be sufficiently evil. If Prince Zorn passes whatever test the Duke sets for him, rescues the princess, and escapes, the Todal will surely put an end to the Duke.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
This isn’t a princess book for young children because it has some dark content in it. The Duke is cruel to animals and has even killed children. The cruelty and killing isn’t described in detail, but the story is better for older elementary school children or middle school level. I’d say about 9 or 10 years old and older.
Through the course of the story, it’s revealed that Princess Saralinda isn’t actually the Duke’s niece. He later confesses that he actually abducted her from a castle as an infant, and even he isn’t completely sure of her true identity. Even as a child, she had that magical, glowing warmth that the Duke craves. He’s been raising her with the idea of marrying her himself when she’s old enough. He’s been unable to marry her up to this point because her former nurse was a witch and cast a spell that prevents him from marrying her until she’s 21 years old, and that time is approaching soon.
Part of the fun of this book is that it draws on many elements from fairy tales, like the woman who can cry jewels, which somewhat resembles the fairy tale about the kind girl whose words produce jewels and flowers when she speaks. The solutions to many of the problems in the story are also riddles. For example, if nothing makes a person laugh or cry, then literally nothing is what you have to provide. In the case of how to get the clocks moving again, Princess Saralinda has been the key all along. The clocks aren’t dead, merely frozen, and her warmth can get them moving again.
Of course, it all ends happily. Princess Saralinda’s true identity is established by the end of the story, and Prince Zorn is able to marry her. The Duke is thwarted and eaten by the Todal.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 