Posted on by TracyC

Then There Were Five

The Melendy Family Series

Then There Were Five by Elizabeth Enright, 1944.

It’s summer, and the four Melendy children have some big plans! They’ve already started building a dam to make the swimming area on the property of their new house bigger. Their father, who travels frequently, giving lectures, tells them that he’s going to be away for most of the summer. He has to work hard to provide for his big family, and he has also taken a government job that will help the war effort. Mr. Melendy isn’t going to be a soldier because he’s a little old for that and the father of four children. He says that he can’t tell the children about his job, but it will keep him away in Washington for long periods of time. While he’s away, the children will be in the care of the housekeeper, Cuffy, and the handyman, Willy. They will also largely be left to entertain themselves, which is something they definitely know how to do.

Aside from swimming and enjoying themselves this summer, the kids decide that they should also do something useful, to help the war effort. Because of the war, patriotism is running high, and the children feel like they should take on some serious responsibilities. They’ve held events to help the war effort and bought bonds before. This summer, Rush and Randy decide that they’re going to go door to door, collecting scrap metal. Their collecting efforts help them to further get to know their neighbors, and they make friends with the Addison children and a nice, older man named Mr. Titus, who likes to spend his time fishing and baking things and invites the kids to join him sometimes.

However, there is a nasty man called Orin who yells at the children and scares them away when they come to ask him for scrap metal. Soon after this unpleasant incident, Rush and Randy meet Mark, the nice boy who lives with Orin. Mark is an orphan, and he lives with Orin because he’s a distant cousin. Orin’s wife was a nice lady, and Mark liked her, but she died a couple of years before. Orin is mean to everybody, and he mainly sees Mark as a source of unpaid labor on his farm. The Addison children, who know Mark from school, confirm that all of this is true. Orin doesn’t even let Mark go to school very often because he wants to keep him working most of the time. Their teacher and the school superintendent both tried to go see Orin and insist that Mark go to school regularly, but Orin is a violent and frightening man. He chased them both away and sent his mean dogs after them. Nobody really knows what to do about Orin, and most people are afraid to try. He also locks Mark in his room to keep him from running away, although Mark has found a way out and sneaks out sometimes.

The Melendy children feel sorry for Mark, although they try not to be too pitying so they won’t make Mark feel too self-conscious. Rush and Randy start meeting with him secretly to go swimming and fishing and hunt for arrowheads left by the Iroquois who used to live in the area. Rush and Mark also play at being soldiers on a secret mission and go stargazing. Mark knows about the constellations, and the boys watch the Perseid meteor shower in August.

Then, Mark reveals to Rush that Orin and his few friends are making illegal alcohol in a still. They do it because it costs less than buying alcohol. Orin’s friends include a couple of brothers who live in the woods and hardly ever come to town and a man who’s been suspected of bank robbery and murder although nobody was ever able to prove it. The boys spy on Orin and his friends at their still one night, and they hear Orin talking about selling his farm and maybe getting one of the new defense jobs. His friends ask him what he’ll do with Mark if he moves out, and Orin says that he’ll probably just turn him over to the county. One of his friends say that giving Mark to the county might not be so easy because they’ll ask questions, but Orin says he’s thinking of changing his name. The suspected criminal says that he might take Mark because he has trouble keeping workers around his place. Mark tells Rush that he’d rather run away that go live with that criminal, and Rush says that Mark can come stay with his family. The men almost catch the boys listening because the boys are wearing citronella to keep the mosquitos away, but the boys manage to get away before the men catch them.

Rush tells Mark that he’ll talk to his father to see if Mark can stay with the Melendy family or if he knows what else Mark can do. Then, a series of events happen that change everything. First, Cuffy has to go away for awhile to take care of an injured relative, leaving the children even more to their own devices, with Willy and the older children in charge. Then, the in the middle of the night, Rush wakes up to realize that something is on fire. It turns out that Orin’s farm is burning! Rush wakes Randy, and the two of them hurry down to Orin’s farm to see if Mark is safe. They find Mark hurrying to get the animals out of the barn, and neighbors and firefighters are already working on the blaze, but it’s a loosing battle. They manage to save the animals, but both the house and barn are destroyed. Willy, who was also there to help fight the fire, take the Melendy children and Mark back to the Melendy house. Later, Willy informs them that they have discovered that Orin was still in the house and was killed in the fire. (A short flashback informer readers, although the characters in the story don’t know it, that Orin accidentally started the fire when he returned home from his still, drunk, and passed out in the kitchen with a lamp too close to a wall calendar.)

Mark was never fond of Orin because Orin treated him badly, but without Orin, Mark’s custody is in doubt. Mark doesn’t have any other relatives. He’s still only 13 and not old enough to live alone. Rush decides to call his father to ask if Mark can live with them. Mr. Melendy tells Rush to keep Mark at their house for now, and when he returns home from Washington, he’ll straighten things out.

The Melendy children make Mark welcome at their fascinating house, the Four-Story Mistake, and Mark begins to enjoy all the new experiences they give him. He gets to try their books, enjoying classics like Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, Eight Cousins, and various fairy tales. Mark also likes listening to Rush playing music on his piano. Above all, Mark gets the new experience of living with a family that really cares for him. Mark becomes part of the Melendy family’s idyllic summer, but the children worry about whether or not their father will allow them to stay with them permanently.

This is the third book in The Melendy Family series. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, as part of a collection.

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

The Darkest Book in the Series

This book is different from the earlier two books in the series because, while the other adventures were all just treated as fun adventures without anything truly tragic happening when things go wrong, this book actually contains some serious issues. Mark is an orphan living with a violent and abusive guardian who frightens all of the local adults who have tried to intervene on Mark’s behalf. Mark’s guardian is also involved with some seriously shady people and illegal activities. The sudden death of Mark’s guardian frees him from the abuse but also leaves his future in doubt. This is the darkest book in the Melendy series. The book doesn’t shy away from Mark’s feelings and the sadness of Orin’s death, even though he was an awful person. Fortunately, because the tone of this series is optimistic, things work out for the best.

Of course, Mr. Melendy agrees that Mark can stay with the family, but in a realistic touch, adopting him isn’t as simple for the family as taking in a stray dog. Some of the local farmers offer Mark a place working on their farms, including the disreputable man and possible criminal who was one of Orin’s friends. Social service agencies want to know about the home and family Mr. Melendy has to offer Mark before they decide whether or not to allow Mark to remain with them, and a social worker comes to interview him. The social worker sees a taste of the family’s boisterous children and eccentric hobbies (at one point, Mona enters the room, practicing the part of Ophelia from Hamlet), but she is charmed by them and sees that Mark loves being with them, and she decides that the Melendy family will be good for him. There is extra legal work for Mr. Melendy to officially adopt Mark after Mark is allowed to stay with them as a ward or foster child, and the local bank is also interested in Mark’s custody because Orin had a mortgage on his farm, and there are financial issues to be arranged.

In the end, the bank claims Orin’s property because of the mortgage, but Mark inherits the animals because he’s Orin’s only relative. Mark keeps a few animals that can live on the Melendy property, and the Melendys help him sell the others in an auction held on their property. They turn the livestock auction into a fair to raise money for the war effort. Some of them make baked goods to sell, Mona dresses up as a fortune teller, and they hold a talent show with other children from school.

The element of raising money for the war effort continues a theme from earlier books in the series and emphasizes the point that this book was set contemporary to the time when it was written, during WWII. I find books that were written during major events and that take those events into account interesting because it shows how people felt about those events and what they wanted children to understand about them. The kids sometimes make references to the war in casual conversation in a way that seems realistic for a child’s observations, such as when they describe someone as having “teeth like a Japanese general”, although I know that what they’re probably referencing is anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons at the time rather than actual pictures of them. That isn’t mentioned in the story, but I’ve seen those cartoons before, so I can envision what kind of teeth the kids in the story are probably picturing.

The Lighter Side

In spite of the dark parts of the story, the book still has qualities of idyllic life in a big house in the country and the outdoor fun the children have. Some of the images in the story would fit well with cottagecore themes today, such as Mona weaving a strawberry plant in her hair. Oliver collecting caterpillars and watching moths. On Oliver’s 8th birthday, the whole family, including Mark, goes on a picnic to a cave that Mark knows.

There is also a theme around cooking and baking in the story. Mona develops an interest in cooking and baking, and Mr. Titus teaches her recipes and helps her and Randy when they experiment with canning vegetables from the garden. Mona had told her brothers to leave her and Randy alone in the kitchen when they were canning because it was women’s work, and Rush thinks it’s funny that it’s Mr. Titus who rescues them when the job gets too much for them and it becomes obvious that the girls don’t know what they’re doing. Mr. Titus tells the kids at one point that, when he was younger, he was a little embarrassed about his interest in cooking because it didn’t seem like men’s work, but now, he doesn’t care anymore, and he just appreciates doing what he really loves to do.

Another fun note is that the Melendy children like to play a game they call the Comparison Game. One child leaves the room, and the others think of a person they all know or know about. When the other child returns to the room, the others say whether they thought of a male or female person, and the other child starts asking them what that person is like. The child who left the room earlier asks the others what color the person is like, what animal the person is like, what type of weather the person is like, etc., until the child can guess which person they’re talking about by the comparisons made about the person.

Posted on by TracyC

The Four-Story Mistake

The Melendy Family Series

The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright, 1942.

The Melendy family is moving out of their brownstone in New York and going to live in a house in the country. The children aren’t happy about moving because they’ll miss their old home. They’re sure that no other house would ever be as good as their old one.

However, when they arrive at the house in the country known as the Four-Story Mistake (because it was originally supposed to have four stories but the original owner ran out of money and only could manage three floors and a cupola at the top), they are fascinated and charmed by its size and peculiarities. For the first time, each child in the family can have their own room instead of having to share, and there’s also a room that they can turn into an office (really a playroom), like the children had at their old house. Their father takes them up into the cupola and points out the different directions the windows face and how they resemble the outlooks of each of the children. He reminds Randy, the one who misses the old house the most, of the importance of looking ahead.

The children start to enjoy exploring their new house and the countryside around it. Seven-year-old Oliver finds a secret room in the cellar with some old things that belonged to past children who lived in the house. He keeps it to himself for a while, enjoying his secret, but he gradually lets the other children in on it. It takes Randy more time to learn how to ride her bicycle than the others, but she is thrilled when she finally masters it. However, the others are still doing better than she is. When she is separated from them on a bike ride and crashes in town, knocking herself unconscious and getting a cut on her head, she causes a stir. She is tended to by a traffic cop and his wife, who have a house full of plants and a pet alligator named Crusty, among other pets.

Gradually, the children settle in at the house and start feeling more at home there. They start making friends at the nearby school, and Rush builds a tree house with help from the family’s handyman, Willie. One day, when Rush is home with a sore throat and a fever, he gets restless and sneaks out of the house to hide in his tree house. He falls asleep and gets trapped there during a storm when the ladder falls, and he can’t get down. Eventually, his family realizes that he’s missing and rescues him, but he ends up with a case of bronchitis from the hours he spent in the tree house in the rain. Even that isn’t so bad, though, because they bring him food and let him read in bed until he gets better.

As winter starts, the kids play in the snow and use the sleds that Oliver found in the secret basement room. They also discover a hidden door behind some wall paper upstairs. It leads to a hidden room with blue wall paper that they had never noticed before even though they realize that they should have noticed that there were windows on the outside of the house that should have told them there was an extra room. The children decide to keep the hidden room secret from the adults until they can explore it themselves. Inside the room, they find a portrait of a girl labeled “Clarinda.” The kids secretly clean up the room and try to learn who Clarinda was. It takes some time before they learn what happened to Clarinda, but it’s a fascinating and inspirational story rather than a tragic one.

Meanwhile, WWII is still going on, and Mona comes up with a plan to help the war effort. She enlists the other kids to help collect scrap materials, learn to knit, and buy war bonds. They’re a little dubious about some of Mona’s plans, but they get more interested when she says that she wants to put on a play and charge admission to raise money. Mona is writing the play herself. It’s a fairy tale type story called The Princess and the Parsnip. Of course, Mona will also play the leading role as their resident actress. She almost quits the play when she accidentally gives herself a bad hairdo, but fortunately Cuffy helps her fix it. In fact, the play is such a success and Mona does so well that she gets her first real acting job – a role in a radio play.

Her father knows that she’s young, and he talks to her seriously about accepting the job. He makes sure that Mona understands that an acting career will involve hard work and some odd hours. He expects her to keep up with her school work and also take some time to be a real person and family member and not to put on airs. Mona acknowledges that and is really happy when she gets the part.

Rush becomes a little temperamental when Mona gets her job, and he admits to Randy that it’s because he feels bad that he isn’t making real money, like Mona is. The war has been on his mind, and he feels like he wants to do something serious and important and to also feel like he’s earning money for the family. The problem is that he can’t think of anything he can do. Out in the countryside, there aren’t as many job opportunities, so he feels useless. Then, Randy gives him a suggestion: he can teach piano lessons. Rush has always had a special talent for the piano, and they know that there hasn’t been a music teacher in town since the last one left to get married. Rush isn’t sure he likes the idea, but Randy says that if he isn’t interested in the job he could do best, maybe he wasn’t really serious about wanting a job at all. Thinking it over, Rush decides to give it a try, and he’s actually more successful at it than he expected. He almost quits after a particularly difficult student causes him to lose his temper and hit the other boy, but a talk with the boy’s father straights things out between them.

The book covers most of the children’s first year at their new house, with changing seasons and changes in the children’s lives. They have a Christmas with homemade Christmas presents and a few special surprises from their father and Mrs. Oliphant (a wealthy woman who’s an old family friend). There are adventures with ice skating, and in the spring, Randy finds a diamond at the brook. They acquire some new pets, including Crusty the alligator, who becomes another of their Christmas presents, having outgrown the bathtub where he was living with the policeman. Crusty later escapes and takes up residence in the brook before apparently migrating to Pennsylvania. Besides Mona and Rush finding their first jobs, the children begin showing other signs of growing up. Mona attends her first dance, although the children make a point that they’re not too grown-up yet. By the end of the book, the children are well-settled in their new home and are starting to become comfortable with the changes in their lives that come with moving and starting to grow up.

This is the second book in The Melendy Family series. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, as part of a collection.

My Reaction

This story starts out as a story about kids adjusting to moving to a new house but also turns into a humorous story with Cottagecore elements. The house in the country known as the “Four-Story Mistake” is the stuff of many children’s dreams. It’s large enough for every kid to have their own room plus the room they call the “office”, which is a play room or activity room that all the kids in the family share. Their fabulous house has plenty of rooms to explore, including a cupola and a hidden room with a mysterious backstory.

One of the things I like about this book and others in the series is that there isn’t anything tragic or upsetting in the stories. They’re good books to relax with. When the kids hear the story of the secret, hidden room in their house, there’s an element of drama to the story (one of the stories-within-the story that often appear in this series), but nothing truly tragic. At first, I had thought maybe the original owner of that room had died young, and her family had sealed it up out of grief, but that’s not the case. It turns out that she had dreams of becoming a dancer, so she ran away to pursue her dreams. Her father disowned her and closed up her room after she left, but she actually did achieve her dream, so things worked out for her, and the Melendy kids find that inspiring.

There are woods and a stream nearby, so the kids have outdoor adventures. Even when something goes wrong and the kids have a hard time, like when Rush is sick and gets trapped in his tree house during a storm, it doesn’t end too disastrously, and the hardships are treated more as part of their exciting adventure. Even though Rush suffered during the incident, and Rush’s illness gets worse from being out in the storm, he kind of enjoys the fussing he gets afterward and the time when he’s allowed to stay in bed, reading, while he recovers.

The part where Rush lost his temper with a piano student and hit him surprised me, although how the student’s father reacted to it was even more of a surprise. I think most modern parents would be angry about Rush using physical violence against the other boy, no matter how he was provoked, but that’s not how the father in the story feels. The father knows his son very well, and he understands how he provoked Rush into losing his temper. He also knows why the son was being provoking. The boy wanted Rush to quit as his piano teacher because the boy doesn’t really want to take piano lessons at all. He’s only having piano lessons because his mother wants him to learn to play the piano. Rush handles his loss of temper as professionally as he can, admitting to the boy’s father what happened and offering to resign from the job, but the boy’s father, knowing his son and his son’s motives, refuses to accept that offer. If the father allowed his son to get away with provoking someone else to a fight and then rewarded him by giving the son what he wanted (the end to the piano lessons), the son would learn a bad lesson, that he could get what he wants by behaving badly and being too difficult to handle. It isn’t a good idea to give a kid the idea that acting out gets rewards because it provides an incentive for the kid to continue acting out to get his way.

Instead, the father acknowledges Rush’s professional authority as the piano teacher and says that the boy’s mother wants the piano lessons to continue. Because Rush is the professional authority here, he authorizes Rush to use whatever methods he deems necessary to deal with his student. The father says that he will have a word with his son about this. We never hear exactly what he says to his son, but the son at least grudgingly behaves himself from that point onward, so it seems that the father made it clear to him that bad behavior wouldn’t get him what he wants. It’s true that hitting people isn’t good, but neither is provoking people to a violent reaction, and I was glad that the father acknowledged the provocation and didn’t let it slide. Considering the context of the situation and the character and motives of the people involved, the father’s solution to the problem seems to have been an effective one.

There are coming-of-age elements in the book, partly because the kids are settling into a new home, but also because they’re generally growing up. Some children’s book series have characters who never age, but the Melendy children do age throughout their series. In this book, the two oldest Melendy children get their first jobs, and Mona attends her first dance. I did like it how, after Mona gets home from the dance, she and her siblings run outside to have fun because they want to make the point that they’re not too grown-up yet.

As in the first book in the series, WWII is happening in the background because the series is set contemporary to the time when it was written. The children undertake activities to support the war effort, and their knowledge that the war is happening does cause them to think a little more seriously about life, about doing their part, both for their country and their family. I thought it was an interesting choice for the author to write about children’s thoughts concerning the war while it was happening and the outcome of the war was still unknown. The author seems to be promoting children taking part in civilian activities to support the war, like raising funds, buying war bonds, and collecting useful scrap materials. I think that was probably the attitude of many adults in the 1940s, wanting children to make themselves useful and to show patriotism, and I can see those motives in the choice to let the war be part of the children’s reality. With the story’s other themes of moving, exploring the countryside, growing up, and finding fun and adventure in a new home, I can see how the author could have chosen to focus on those elements and left the time period of the story vague, but I appreciated how the author faced the reality of child readers, acknowledging the war and giving them suggestions for how they could handle their feelings through useful support activities. The countryside in the story isn’t a place where the children hide from the troubles of the world around them but where they can find their own way dealing with them creatively.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Saturdays

The Melendy Family Series

The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, 1941.

The four Melendy children live in a brownstone townhouse in New York City during the early 1940s. Their mother is dead, but they get along well with their father, and their housekeeper, Cuffy, is a motherly woman and helps look after the children. Each of the children has their own responsibilities in the house and distinctive talents and ambitions in life. Mona is the eldest at age 13, and she wants to be an actress. Rush, age 12, wants to be a mechanical engineer and a pianist. Miranda, who is 10 years old and usually goes by the nickname “Randy”, loves dancing and painting. Oliver, the youngest at 6 years old, wants to be a train engineer.

The children have a room at the top of the house which is a sort of playroom, although they call it the “office.” It has the children’s toys and books and plenty of things that they’ve gathered for their various hobbies, activities, and experiments. However, one rainy Saturday, the kids are bored. It isn’t that they don’t have anything to do. It’s more that the day is so wet and miserable that they have trouble getting interested in anything. While they debate different things they could do or wish they could do and complain about the weather and the size of their allowance, Randy comes up with an interesting idea.

Each of the four children has something that they wish they could do, but they’ve never been able to afford to do it because it costs more than the allowance they receive. Randy suggests that they form a kind of Saturday club. Every week, they will pool their allowances, and one of them will use the collected money to do something they’ve always wanted to do. To make it worth the investment from the others, they all have to agree that they won’t just blow the money on something they could do any time, like buy a bunch of candy. Each child’s special Saturday should be something really exciting and worthwhile. All of the kids are interested and have ideas about what they could do if they had a lump sum equal to four allowances and one free Saturday to do whatever they want by themselves.

When they explain the plan to their father and Cuffy, they agree that the children can do what they like with their allowance money, including taking turns pooling it and sharing it with each other. They also agree that the children can go off by themselves for their adventures as long as they agree to some basic safety rules. Over the next several Saturdays, the children take turns having their own special days with their pooled allowance money.

Randy is the first one to have her turn. As an art lover, she goes to an art gallery. To her surprise, Randy also sees an elderly woman she knows, Mrs. Oliphant, who is an old friend of the Melendy family. Mrs. Oliphant is a kind woman, but the Melendy children never thought of her as much fun. Randy loves the art and the ways the paintings make her feel, almost as though she could step into them and experience what the people in the paintings are experiencing. There is one particular picture that interests her, a picture of a girl who looks like she’s the same age as Randy is now. Randy finds herself wishing that she could meet the girl in the painting, like the girl might be someone she could have been friends with.

Then, Mrs. Oliphant approaches Randy and asks her about whether or not she likes the painting. Randy is surprised when Mrs. Oliphant tells her that it was painted 60 years ago and that she was the girl in the picture. Randy’s artistic afternoon takes an unexpected turn when Mrs. Oliphant invites Randy to have a snack with her, and she tells Randy about her youth in Paris, when she was a lonely only child being raised by a strict father, elderly aunts, and a governess. The artist who painted her was a friend of her father’s, who thought that she looked like a little princess. It was at the inspiration of the artist that young Mrs. Oliphant snuck out of her house to visit her first carnival when her overprotective family wouldn’t let her go, and she was kidnapped for ransom by a gypsy fortune teller. Fortunately, she was found again by the artist at another carnival where the fortune teller was performing. The artist persuaded her father to let him paint her after the rescue. Randy loves that exciting story and is surprised at how romantic and fascinating Mrs. Oliphant really is. Mrs. Oliphant invites her to visit her sometime and see some of the fascinating things that she’s collected over the years, and she buys a little box of petite fours (fancy little cakes that the children have never had before) for Randy to take home to her siblings.

When it’s Rush’s turn for a special Saturday, he decides that he wants to go see an opera because he loves music. He goes to see Wagner’s opera Siegfried (part of a series of operas based on the Nibelungenlied epic poem that helped inspire Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings), about a hero and a magic ring made by dwarves and a fearsome dragon. On the way home, Rush rescue’s a stray dog and brings him home. He tries to clean up the dog before showing him to his father and Cuffy, but the dog gets loose before he’s done washing him. Fortunately, the dog manages to charm the rest of the family, so the family gains a pet.

Mona’s turn is next. She really hates her long braids, so she decides to use her Saturday for her first trip to a beauty parlor and asks for a hair cut. She isn’t really sure that her father or Cuffy would approve of it, but nobody has told her not to (because she didn’t ask). At the beauty parlor, they ask her if she’s really sure that she wants a hair cut because her braids are almost down to her waist, but she insists. While she works on Mona’s hair, the stylist tells her a story about how she and her brother ran away to New York as children and how she got into the beauty business.

When she’s finished, Mona is impressed with how beautiful she looks, and she even lets the stylist paint her nails. However, the reception she gets at home is about as bad as Mona might have expected. Her father and Cuffy are pretty conservative on the subject of girls’ hair and makeup. They disapprove of her trying to be too grown up and not consulting them about her hair, and they want to get the nail polish off her fingers as soon as possible. Even her siblings think that she’s been too daring with her appearance.

When Cuffy sees how upset Mona is about their criticism and disapproval, she comforts her, and she admits that the hair cut is actually practical because it will be easier to wash and brush shorter hair than long hair. Mona’s father admits that he might also get used to the hairstyle and come to like it. He further admits that it can be hard for parents sometimes, when they see signs that their children are growing up. Randy also says that Mona really does look like a movie star.

The children continue taking turns with their special Saturdays. Oliver, being only 6 years old, can’t go out into the city alone, like the others can, so the others spend their Saturdays at home with him whenever it’s his turn. Then, on one of Oliver’s Saturdays, he disappears. Sneaking out of the house by himself, he takes the money that he’s saved and asks a policeman the way to the circus, which is at Madison Square Garden.

While his siblings panic when they realize that Oliver is missing, Oliver has a great time at the circus, watching all the animals perform and buying cotton candy and other treats. However, when it’s time to leave, Oliver gets lost on his way home, and he starts feeling sick from everything he’s eaten. He gets a ride home from a friendly policeman on a horse, and looking back on it, Oliver decides that was the best part of his day. He decides that maybe, instead of being a train engineer, he’ll become a policeman on a horse when he grows up.

After Oliver’s circus adventure, the siblings decide that they want to do a shared adventure, so they go on a picnic. Their new dog, Isaac, later saves them from a disaster caused by a careless mistake that could have killed them all at home. The children’s father decides on some home repairs, and the children realize that they won’t be able to go away for their usual summer trip and that they’ll have to economize on their Saturday adventures. Fortunately, Mrs. Oliphant has an idea for a summer adventure for the family. She owns a lighthouse, and she invites the Melendy family for a summer visit!

This is the first book in The Melendy Family series. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, as part of a collection.

My Reaction

I like this series because it’s set contemporary to the time when it was written, in the early 1940s. This first book sets the time period with a comment about a mark on the floor left by one of the children trying out roller skates on Christmas 1939 and one of the children commenting that a stain on the wall looks a lot like Hitler because it looks like a man’s face with a mustache. (One of the other children comments that he’s going to turn the stain into a bearded man, like George Bernard Shaw, because he doesn’t want to see Hitler.) Toward the end of the book, the children talk about the war a little with Cuffy. The war has definitely been going on because they mention bombs and blackouts in London, and Randy asks Cuffy what it was like when the world was peaceful. Cuffy says that it seemed lovely, at least on the surface, but the peace didn’t last. There was another bad war before this one, and a peaceful time in between the two wars when people could travel freely. When Mona was a baby, their parents took a trip through Europe, and Cuffy was there to look after Mona. Because the children live in New York, they never see the war directly, but they’re aware that it’s happening, and they have feelings about it.

Apart from the historical war references, this book is just generally fun to read. It’s fun to see what each of the children does when they have a little money and the freedom to go where they want and do what they want in the city. The kids have minimal adult supervision on their adventures, and it’s the sort of thing that kids today might dream about doing. In general, kids love stories about other kids with the freedom to do what they want to do, although because this family likes the arts and culture, many of their chosen activities, like going to an art gallery or an opera, are things that many other children might not think to do. I was thinking that, probably, one adventure that many kids in my area could do or might do unsupervised might be to get their hair cut and/or nails done in some fancy way, like Mona did.

I was a little surprised that the father of the family reacted as strongly as he did to Mona having shorter hair because shorter hair for women and girls had become more acceptable by the 1940s. I think that regarding short hair as scandalous was more common when the style was new in the late 1910s and the 1920s (see the story Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald from 1920). On the other hand, the real issue here seems to be that the father and Cuffy think that Mona is trying to act too old for her age (which is a way of saying too attractive or too sexy for a girl who is still too young to date). The father somewhat admits that it can be a shock to a parent to see how much his daughter is growing up. In that case, it’s not so much about short hair in general but now grown-up and attractive Mona looks in a more adult hairstyle.

Something else I’ve noticed about books in this series is that they frequently contain mini-stories told by other characters to the Melendy children. In this book, we get the story told by the hairdresser about how she and her brother ran away to the city when they were young and the story of Mrs. Oliphant’s adventures when she was kidnapped by a gypsy as a child. Children kidnapped by gypsies is a theme in vintage children’s books, although this is considered a stereotypical depiction in the 21st century. The stereotype of the child-stealing gypsy was probably based in prejudice, the use of community outsiders as scapegoats, and erroneous conclusions drawn from observing family members who do not physically resemble each other. (For example, I remember being told as a child that two blue-eyed parents would not produce a brown-eyed child because blues eyes are a recessive gene, yet it actually does happen, although it’s relatively rare. It’s just that human genetics are complex and produce more variations or throw-backs to earlier generations than some people might expect.) The main character in another book by a different author, The Girl in the Window, challenges the prejudices of adults in her community when they start to blame the disappearance of a local girl on a gypsy.

Posted on by TracyC

Dig for a Treasure

Dig for a Treasure by Dean Marshall, 1949.

This is the second book in The Invisible Island series. It begins with the arrival of the Lennox family and their two children, Hugh and Barbie. The Lennox family has been staying with various relatives since the father got out of the army, but now, they’ve found a house to rent in the small town of Anchorage, Connecticut. The children are looking forward to having a yard to play in, and the mother wants to have a garden.

Unfortunately, when they arrive they are shocked to see that the house they were going to rent has been destroyed by fire. Their landlord, Mr. Prentice, is also on the scene, and he regretfully tells them that the fire just happened, although they don’t know the cause, and that there are no other houses in the area to rent. At first, they think that they will have to go back to staying with relatives, but Mrs. Lennox says firmly that they won’t. The family has had enough of staying with relatives, and they desperately need a place of their own. It’s summer, so her idea is that they can camp out on the property of the burned house for a few months while they look around for another place to rent. The children are excited about the idea of a camp-out. Mr. Prentice says that he wouldn’t have any problem with the family camping on the land, and he returns their rent deposit to them, saying that they can stay at his house that night and get some camping equipment the next day.

While Hugh and Barbie are exploring the area and looking for their cat, who ran off, they meet the children from the first book in the series. Hugh is about the age of David Guthrie, and Barbie is about the same age as Winkie Guthrie, the youngest of the children who play on the island they call “The Invisible Island.” Since the previous book in the series, they have finished their stone hut, and it has a grass and sod roof and four built-in beds for the four Guthrie children. Mr. Guthrie is an architect, and he helped the children build the house.

Hugh and Barbie admire the hut, and they say that they wish they had a stone house like that because it couldn’t catch fire. They explain to the other children what happened to the house that their family was going to rent, and they ask the children if they would consider renting the stone hut to their family until they can find another place to live. Mr. Lennox isn’t really happy about the idea of camping in tents because he lived out of tents when he was in the army.

At first, the Guthrie children and the Leigh children aren’t sure that they want to rent out their stone hut. They spend a lot of time there, and they’ve been trying to save up money to add improvements. The hut really belongs to the Guthries, who built it, but they want to add an extra room for the Leighs. However, after thinking it over, they realize that they can earn more money as rent from the Lennox family than they can by just doing chores, and while the Lennox family stays in the hut, they can camp out on other parts of their little island, like the woods that they call “Sherwood Forest.”

Since the little hut is just a one-room hut with no bathroom or other amenities, the children aren’t sure at first whether the Lennox adults would want to stay there or not. However, staying in a stone hut does sound better than in a tent, where they would also have no bathroom or amenities. Mr. Lennox is also intrigued by the pond, where he can go fishing. The children and the Lennox family talk things over with Mr. Prentice and the Guthrie children’s parents, and they all agree to renting the stone hut to the Lennox family.

The Lennox family still isn’t sure whether or not they’ll find another house for sale or rent in the area. They want to stay in the area because Mr. Lennox has a job nearby and Mrs. Lennox knows that some of her ancestors used to live in the area, although she doesn’t know much about them. However, Anchorage is a small town, and most of the houses already have people living in them. There is only one empty house in the area, but the owner has always refused to rent it or sell it. Mr. Prentice explains that the owner believes that there is a treasure in the house or nearby, a necklace that once belonged to a queen, and she’s been looking for it for years. Mr. Prentice doesn’t think that there really is a necklace or, if there once was, it’s probably long gone, but the owner insists that it exists and is still there, somewhere.

The children are fascinated, and they ask Mr. Prentice to tell them the story of the queen’s necklace. He says that during the time of Queen Elizabeth (Tudor), the ancestors of the Winthrop family who owned the house did something for Queen Elizabeth that caused her to reward them with a golden necklace that was passed down through the family for generations. When the Winthrops came to the colonies in America around 1650, they brought that necklace with them. However, when they came to this area and settled there, they had problems with the local Indians (Native Americans).

Mr. Prentice says that he can’t blame the American Indians for resenting strangers coming and taking over their lands and hunting grounds or for them trying to stand up for their rights, but the situation escalated with increasing violence. David Guthrie protests that American Indians scalped people and that, if he’d been there at the time, he’d “show them.” Mr. Prentice explains that was exactly the problem – everybody who was there at the time thought he’d “show them”, and that’s why the violence escalated. As for the scalping, Mr. Prentice says that white people committed their share of atrocities, too, and when David is older and learns more about it, he might not feel so proud of his side in this battle. (I thought that was an amazingly honest and self-aware interlude about European colonization and its effects on Native Americans for a book written in the late 1940s, when cowboy and western shows were becoming popular, and American Indians were mainly portrayed as violent enemies to be defeated. I was a little concerned at first when “Indians” entered the story, but I was relieved that the author took this attitude.)

Continuing with the local legend, Mr. Prentice explains that the colonists received warning one day that the local tribe was going to attack. In preparation for the attack, some families hid valuable items that they didn’t want stolen or destroyed in the coming battle. Some people buried valuables, and others hid their valuables in wells or caves. Presumably, the Winthrops hid their necklace, called the Queen’s Chain, during this time, but nobody really knows what happened to it. The colonists fled the area, and the American Indians burned the entire village to the ground. Every man-made structure was destroyed during this attack. Although people later returned to the area and rebuilt the town, it’s unknown what valuables they retrieved or when or if they ever retrieved them from their hiding places. Because all the buildings and some of the trees were burned, many landmarks were destroyed, so some people might not have found their hidden valuables again, even if they managed to return to look for them.

Mr. Prentice is related to the Winthrop family, and so is his cousin, Lizzie, who currently owns the rebuilt house known as the Winthrop house. Lizzie is firmly convinced that the Queen’s Chain is still there, somewhere. She thinks it was never hidden during the attack that destroyed the first house and was passed down through the family but hidden by a later generation, which is why she won’t sell or rent the house. Mr. Prentice, on the other hand, thinks that the necklace is lost forever. He thinks that either the necklace was hidden with other valuables that were never retrieved after the attack or that the family found the necklace and sold it to get money to rebuild the farm that was destroyed. Mrs. Prentice, on the other hand, sides with Lizzie, saying that nobody in the Winthrop family would have sold the necklace because it was part of a family trust.

The children are fascinated by the story, and they immediately begin thinking about searching for the necklace themselves. They talk to Miss Lizzie about the story Mr. Prentice told them and use some of the descriptions that she gives them of the old Winthrop property and the plants that once grew in their herb garden to see if they can pinpoint the exact location of the original house and the hiding place that the Winthrops might have used for their valuables. Even though everything manmade was destroyed in the attack, some plants have a way of coming back, and the remains of the old herb garden might still be there, even almost 300 years later.

The treasure hunt takes on greater importance when the Guthrie children learn that their family might not be able to buy the island from Mr. Prentice. Mr. Prentice is also the Guthrie family’s landlord, and the family has been saving up to buy their house from him. They had also hoped to be able to buy the island where the children have been spending so much time, but Mr. Prentice is reluctant to sell it. Lumber is valuable, and he’s thinking of cutting down the pine trees on the island to sell the wood. The children are horrified at the thought that their beloved “Sherwood Forest” might be cut down! Perhaps, if they can find the missing treasure, they can persuade Mr. Prentice to sell the land to them and Miss Lizzie to rent her house to the Lennox family.

The book is available to borrow and read online through Internet Archive (in audio form!).

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

There isn’t as much imaginary play as “castaways” in this book as their was in the first book in the series, but the theme still shows up in some ways. The kids still go camping on the island. They use tents when the Lennox family is living in their hut. The children’s search for treasure also offers plenty of outdoor adventure, and I really enjoyed the element of mystery in the story.

The children approach the treasure hunt from the assumption that the necklace is still hidden wherever the Winthrops hid their valuables. They do find that spot and recover some relics of the 17th century, but the necklace is not among them. Readers probably won’t guess exactly where the necklace has really been hidden, but there are a few clues to notice along the way. Mrs. Lennox says at the beginning that her ancestors were from this town, even though she doesn’t know much about them. I had guessed that they might have a connection to the Winthrops, especially when Miss Lizzie explains that the name of the girl who hid the family’s valuables before the attack was Elizabeth, and there are other Elizabeths in the family. Besides Miss Lizzie, Mrs. Lennox is called “Betty” when her husband addresses her by her first name, and Betty is another nickname for Elizabeth. When Barbie recognizes something that Miss Lizzie has as being like something her family owns, Miss Lizzie realizes that the Lennox family is related to her. By comparing what each of them has and what Miss Lizzie knows about their family, they figure out what really happened to the necklace. It not only solves the mystery of the necklace, but once Miss Lizzie realizes that the members of the Lennox family are relatives, she’s happy to have them living in the old Winthrop house.

The problem of what will happen to the children’s island and the trees on it is solved when the children win a bet with Mr. Prentice. In the first book, the children called their island “The Invisible Island” because it isn’t obvious at first that it really is an island, surrounded by water on all sides. So far, the children have kept the knowledge to themselves and their parents. When the children accidentally refer to the island in Mr. Prentice’s presence and realize that Mr. Prentice isn’t aware that it’s really an island, they start to explain. Mr. Prentice can’t believe that there’s actually an island on his land, and he says that he will give up ownership if they can prove that it’s really an island. The children easily demonstrate that it’s truly an island, showing him all of the waterways and bodies of water around it, and Mr. Prentice says that they’ve won. The Guthries end up with control of the island and the trees on it.

Posted on by TracyC

The Invisible Island

The Invisible Island by Dean Marshall, 1948.

The four Guthrie children (Dit, Allen, David, and Winkie – short for Winifred) find it difficult to play in their family’s apartment, where they always have to be careful not to disturb the neighbors. One rainy day, while their mother is at a dentist appointment, the children act out a scene from The Swiss Family Robinson, where they’re throwing the animals overboard from the shipwreck to swim to the desert island when they accidentally break part of the floor, which is also the same as breaking part of the ceiling for the neighbors underneath. When they get a knock at their door, shortly after, they figure that the neighbors have come to complain.

However, it turns out that their visitor is the neighbors’ cousin, who is staying with them. The children explain about The Swiss Family Robinson, the shipwreck, and how they were throwing particularly heavy ducks overboard from their wrecked ship. The neighbors’ cousin is a good-natured man who enjoys talking to the children. When the children’s mother comes home, she apologizes for the damage and explains that she and her husband are currently looking for a new house with more room for the children to play, but they haven’t found a place yet. The cousin says that he comes from a smaller town himself, Anchorage, Connecticut, and he might be able to help them find a place to buy there.

The Guthries do rent a house in that town that has some land attached to it, and the children are excited about the move. They want to be able to camp out on their land, like castaways from their favorite book. When they stop in town to buy some supplies before heading to their new house, they are surprised that there don’t seem to be any children around. The shopkeeper explains that there’s a measles epidemic going around town, and most of the children have it right now. He asks the Guthries if their children have had measles before, and their mother says they have … except for the youngest, Winkie. She decides that, for safety’s sake, she should keep the children close to home until the epidemic is over, and the kids should wait to try to make some new friends in town.

The children are hoping to find some new friends, but there’s plenty to do at their new house in the countryside to keep them occupied for a while. On their first day there, they are delighted to find out that there’s a brook and a lake on their property. The children convince their father to come exploring with them, and he has them help him to make a map of the area, knowing that they will want to camp out later. After walking around a piece of land that’s bordered by the lake and the brook, they realize that it’s actually an island because it is bordered on every side by water. The lake is on one side, the brook on another, and there are two more brooks or streams on the other sides that separate it from the land around it and make it into a sort of oblong-shaped island. They call it “The Invisible Island” because it isn’t obvious that it is actually an island until someone walks all the way around it and realizes that it’s actually surrounded by water on all sides. As far as they know, nobody else besides them is even aware that it’s an island.

The children’s mother has some reservations about the children camping out on the island, but the children agree to some safety rules and bringing along some practical camping supplies. They make a raft to carry their supplies across the water to the island. The children begin calling their new house “The Wreck”, imagining that they are rescuing supplies from a shipwreck, like The Swiss Family Robinson. They create a hiding place for their tents, and they find a spring on the island, although their father won’t let them drink from it until he has the water tested to make sure that it’s safe.

The children have enough supplies to camp on the island for a week, and they begin having an idyllic summer, with little adult supervision. They swim and bathe in the lake, using colorful soap on a rope that Winkie found when the family bought supplies at the store in town. They feed the birds, explore, and pick wild strawberries. They get ideas for how castaways are supposed to act from The Swiss Family Robinson and The Mysterious Island.

Their parents do come to visit them and check on them, playing along with the shipwreck theme by calling themselves friendly “savages” when they visit the camp. Their father helps the children to bring stones from a quarry to build a hut. Their mother tells them that she has started to meet the neighbors, and they have some nice children who could make good friends for the Guthries, once they’re out of quarantine from the measles. Both the nice man who helped them find the house to rent and the local doctor have nieces and nephews. The children don’t care that their mother thinks the children are well-mannered. They’re more concerned about whether or not they’ll be adventurous types, who would have fun with them on their special island. They think that they would hate to share their island with “apron-string children” who would be too tied to their parents and home and wouldn’t appreciate the independence and adventure the island allows. The truth is that the children have been enjoying their freedom on the island so much that they’re not sure that they want to give it up yet to make friends with the local children, and in a way, they’re grateful to the quarantine for giving them this time to explore by themselves.

However, there are some strange things that the children have started to notice about the island. One day, Winkie’s soap on a rope disappears and reappears in a different place, strangely looking less used than when they last saw it. The children’s wishes also seem to be granted by a mysterious, unknown person. When they wish aloud for a book about castaways that they haven’t read before and book about birds so they know more about the birds they’ve been seeing, they soon find a wooden box that contains books matching that exact description. When they wish that they had more strawberries, they suddenly find more strawberries in their icebox that they can tell came from a store instead of the wild strawberry patch. Winkie has a bizarre encounter with a “dryad”, and the footprint of a 6-toed giant suddenly appears on the beach. Maybe they’re not as alone on the island as they thought, but who else is there with them?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (in audio form!)

My Reaction and Spoilers

Copies of this book are difficult to find now. It’s become a collector’s item, and copies go for hundreds of dollars on Amazon at the time of this writing. It’s a shame because it’s really a charming story, and I think it would really appeal to fans of Cottagecore. If I hadn’t found a copy on Internet Archive, I couldn’t even talk about this book at all.

There were many children’s book series published in the mid-20th century about children having adventures in the countryside and independent of their parents and guardians, like The Boxcar Children series or many of the books by Enid Blyton. Some of these books and series seem a little more realistic than others. Most require the children’s families to be at least middle-class or wealthy to be able to set the children up for their adventures. Some books, particularly the ones by Enid Blyton, feature parents who are preoccupied with their own problems or activities and seem less concerned with the children’s welfare than about getting the kids out of their hair. I thought The Invisible Island had a good balance of independence for the children and adult supervision.

The adults in this book know that the children have been camping before, so they have some basic camping skills, and they come to visit the children about every two days, to see how they’re doing and make sure they aren’t having any problems. The kids pride themselves on their independence (they brag that they’re “not apron-string children”), but at the same time, their parents do regularly check on them and are aware of developments on the island, sometimes more so than the children realize. The children confide to their parents some of the strange things they’ve noticed on the island, but not everything because they’re enjoying their adventure so much that “the castaways” don’t want to be “rescued.” Eventually, readers come to understand that the parents know who’s been hanging around the island and that the children are not in any danger.

Adults will probably realize pretty quickly that some of the neighbor children are also camping out in the area, and that these children are the ones moving things around, giving them things, and staging fantastical stunts, like the appearance of the “dryad” and the giant’s footprint. It’s just that they can’t introduce themselves to the Guthrie children yet because the quarantine is still on, and they have to stay mostly separate. As the quarantine ends, they’re able to let the Guthrie children see them and interact with them more, although the game doesn’t completely end until the official end of the quarantine and the surprise party they hold to celebrate. The book ends with the children and their new friends making plans for more adventures that summer.

One of the great things about this book is that it’s one of those children’s books that reference other children’s books. There are other vintage children’s books like this, where the child characters take their inspiration for their games of imagination from their favorite books. The books are named throughout the story, and presumably, child readers from the time when this book was originally printed, would also know these stories and identify with the children’s pretend play. The main favorite book of the Guthrie children is the classic The Swiss Family Robinson, which inspires them not just to camp out but to turn their camping trip into one big game of imagination in which they’re shipwrecked. Most of the things they do in the story are based around that concept, although some fantasy elements also creep in, like fairies and dryads and granted wishes, because the children also enjoy fantasy books and poems. The new friends they make in the area turn out to enjoy similar stories, so some of the mysterious incidents they stage are also based on those stories, further appealing to the children’s imaginations as well as their sense of adventure.

I wasn’t completely sure if the book that their new friends gave to the Guthrie children was meant to be a real book because there are many books with titles like The Smuggler’s Island, and I had trouble locating a book from before 1948 with that exact title. Since the other books and poems they reference are real, The Smuggler’s Island might be real, too. If anybody knows what it is and who wrote it, please let me know. On the other hand, that book, because the children say they’ve never read it before, might just be invented by the author to represent that general genre of children’s fiction.

Other real books, stories, and poems referenced by this story include The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (which is a sequel to both his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways), The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll (at one point, David recites the lines from the poem, “His intimate friends called him “Candle-ends”, And his enemies “Toasted-cheese”), and the poem Overheard on a Saltmarsh by Harold Munro (which was the inspiration for the dryad scene because it contains a nymph and a goblin and a necklace of green glass beads).

The concept of a quarantine probably would have made this an excellent story for the coronavirus pandemic, but the setting is idyllic and enchanting for any time. The children are clever in the way they set up their camp, trying to keep it as secret as possible. Their island also includes a spring (which is safe to drink from) and a cave, and they start building a stone hut in this book.

There’s only one thing I can think of to complain about in this book, and that’s the concept of the “savages.” When the parents describe themselves as “savages” when they visit the children, they’re playing on themes from earlier vintage books with islands and shipwrecks. “Natives” and “savages” in those stories can either be helpful or, more commonly, threats to the castaways. I’ve complained about this before in previous book reviews with similar themes because there are stereotypes around these generic “natives” and “savages”, and modern children should be taught not to talk about people in those ways. However, there is no malice behind it in this story. The characters aren’t making fun of anyone or disparaging anybody for being “primitive.” It’s just that they’re playing a game of imagination built on these earlier stories, and they’re using this concept as a plot device to work themselves into the story as something other than visiting parents, preserving both the children’s sense of independence and the imaginary world of the children’s game. Anybody who can understand that should be fine with this book.

My only other complaint is that this book is so rare and so long out of print. I really do think it would appeal to modern audiences, especially fans of cottagecore.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Swallows and Amazons

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, 1930.

Roger Walker is staying at a farm near a lake for the summer holidays in 1929 with his mother and siblings. His father is away on a ship, a destroyer, and the family write letters to him. The children are particularly waiting for a reply from their father because they’ve asked him for permission to do something special, and their mother says that they will be allowed to do it if their father agrees. What they want is permission to sail the family’s sailboat, the Swallow, by themselves and to camp out on an island in the middle of the lake. They are all thrilled when their father agrees that they can do it! Roger is especially thrilled because, until their littlest sister, Vicky, was born, he was the baby of the family, and he was often left out of things that the older children were allowed to do.

There are a couple of conditions on the permission for the children to go sailing and camping by themselves. The first is that the two oldest children, John and Susan, are in charge. Roger and their other sister, Titty, will have to follow their orders. Before the children can camp out, their mother also makes them tents to use, shows them how to set up the tents, and takes them on a sailing trip so she can make sure that the children know what they’re doing. The excited children prepare for their sailing and camping expedition, giving themselves sailing roles, working out ship’s articles, and gathering supplies. John will be the captain of their ship, while Susan will be the mate and cook. Roger is a cabin boy, and Titty is an able seaman.

When the children go to the island, they find a nice place to set up their camp and a harbor for their boat. Surprisingly, they also discover signs that someone else has been on the island before them, but they don’t know who that is. They begin to think of the mysterious people who have been there before as “Natives” of the island, and they also start to think of their mother and other adults who help them as “Natives.” Their mother plays along with it, as if she’s part of one of the stories the children have probably been reading. When their mother comes to bring them some supplies, the children also mention seeing a man with a parrot on a house boat. The man helping their mother, Mr. Jackson, says that the man often has his nieces with him, but they don’t seem to be with him this time. The children’s mother tells the children where to go to pick up milk, and she says that she wants the children to talk to her every couple of days so she will know they’re all right and so they can pick up more provisions from her.

The children continue with their camping and fishing, and they continue to notice the man on the houseboat, who they think of as being like a “retired pirate” with his parrot. They also notice that he has a small cannon on his houseboat. One day, the children spot another boat approaching the island, sailed by a pair of girls. The children hide and watch the boat. Then, it sounds like the cannon on the boat goes off, and the “retired pirate” is on the deck, appearing to shake his fist at the girls in the boat. The children from the Swallow think that the man on the houseboat might be firing at the girls! The girls also run a flag with a skull and crossbones on it up their mast. The girls are being pirates! The children try to follow the girls’ boat, the Amazon, to see who the girls are and where the boat docks, but they lose track of the Amazon.

The lady who gives the children their milk talks to them when they come to get their supplies. She tells them not to bother Mr. Turner, the man on the houseboat. The children realize that Mr. Turner thinks of them as a nuisance, although they don’t know why. The crew of the Swallow takes it as the “retired pirate” stirring up the “Natives” against them. Then, someone steals their boat, the Swallow, and the children are set upon by the pirate girls at their camp!

There is a battle at the camp between the Swallows and the Amazons, but one of the Amazons asks for a “parley.” The crew of the Swallow confronts the Amazons about the theft of their boat, and the Amazons confront the Swallows about the campers trespassing on “their” island. The crew of the Amazon says they’ve been coming to this island for years, and they’re the ones who built the little fireplace the Swallows found when they started setting up camp.

During their “parley”, the children sort of continue their imaginary roles as explorers and pirates in their talk, but they also reveal some of their real backgrounds. The two girls from the Amazon explain that Mr. Turner on the houseboat is their Uncle Jim. At least, they say that sometimes he’s their uncle and is nice to them. They’ve been visiting the island for years, and their uncle is the one who gave them their boat. However, this year, their uncle is a hostile “native” and their enemy. The Swallows say that Mr. Turner has apparently been complaining about them to the local adults, “stirring up the natives” against them, so he is their enemy, too. The Amazons, Nancy (real name Ruth) and Peggy (Margaret) Blackett, suggest a truce between the Amazons and the Swallows and an alliance against their shared enemy, the “pirate” Jim Turner, characterized as a Captain Flint type character. If the two crews are allied, it won’t matter who technically “owns” or controls the island because they have a shared mission against their enemies, particularly Uncle Jim, aka “Captain Flint.” The Amazons admit that they really have wanted to be allies all along. The Swallows agree to this plan, and the two crews sign a treaty with each other.

As the two crews celebrate their new alliance, the Amazons explain how their uncle came to be their enemy. Usually, their uncle likes playing with them when they visit during the summer, sailing and exploring with them and teaching them things he knows about sailing. However, this year, he’s writing a book about his travels, and he doesn’t have time for them. He gets upset when they disturb his work, and the girls’ mother has told them to leave him alone when he’s working. The girls feel betrayed that he isn’t paying attention to them and gets annoyed by them. The day when the crew of the Swallow thought the man on the houseboat fired his cannon at them, the girls say that it wasn’t the cannon. They set off a firecracker when Uncle Jim was asleep as a prank, and that’s why he was shaking his fist at them as they fled in their boat.

It sounds like the Blackett girls have been a nuisance to their uncle because they’re hurt that he’s not spending time with them, and they’re trying to get his attention. Still, the Swallows enjoy their new alliance with the Amazons. Each of the crews has some experience sailing, the Amazons having learned what they know from their uncle and the Swallows having been taught by their father. John is impressed by what the Amazons teach them, but there are a few things that they know that the Amazons don’t. The two crews learn from each other, and they begin planning war games with their two ships to practice for a battle with their sworn enemy. In between, they enjoy their camping and exploring activities.

It turns out that Mr. Turner on the houseboat has been blaming the children from the Swallow for his nieces’ pranks with fireworks, which is why he’s been complaining about them to local people. When Mr. Turner leaves a complaining note at the Swallows’ camp, John realizes why he resents them. John knows that he could tell Mr. Turner the truth about who had the fireworks, but he doesn’t want to tattle on the Amazons because of their alliance and because Mr. Turner is angry and offensive and accuses him of being a liar when he insists that he and his siblings didn’t do what he’s accusing them of doing.

The Swallows and the Amazons start a daring war game with each other, a contest for them to try to capture each other’s ship. The winning crew will have their ship declared the flagship of the fleet! The Swallows attempt to capture the Amazon after dark, but their attempt is foiled because the Amazons sneak out of their house and head for the island that night. Titty, left alone on the island to mind their camp, realizes that the Amazons are on the island and decides on a risky plan to take their ship herself!

However, the children aren’t the only marauders abroad that night. When Titty takes the Amazon, she overhears some men in another boat. Some charcoal burners told the children from the Swallow earlier that Mr. Turner should make sure that he locks up his houseboat securely because they’ve heard some talk that someone might try to break in, but they never delivered the message because Mr. Turner accused John and his siblings of setting off the fireworks, and they forgot they were going to tell him what the charcoal burners said. The men that Titty overhears are suspicious, and they seem to be hiding something. After the Swallows win the mock war, the Swallows tell the Amazons what the charcoal burners said, although the Amazons are reluctant to tell their uncle to lock up his boat because they want to stage their own raid on it.

The Walker family will be heading home in only three more days and bad weather may be coming, so the children have to hurry to make the most of their adventures as Swallows and Amazons. Titty tells her siblings about the men who seemed to be hiding something, and she thinks it’s some kind of treasure. Her older siblings think that she probably dreamed about hearing men hiding something because she fell asleep on the Amazon, but Titty persuades Roger to come with her to find the treasure.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. This is the first book in a series, and it’s been adapted for film and television multiple times.

My Reaction

The author of the story, Arthur Ransome, named the character of Roger after Roger Altounyan, who he met when the real-life Roger was a child, visiting grandparents in the Lake District of England with his sisters. (Real-life Roger Altounyan later became a doctor and pharmacologist, known for a pioneering treatment for asthma.) The names of the fictional Roger’s siblings are also based on the real-life Roger’s siblings. The name “Titty” is odd, but it’s actually a nickname. The real-life Roger had a sister, Mavis Altounyan, who was called “Titty” as a nickname after a children’s story, Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse by Joseph Jacobs. The character of Titty is sometimes called “Kitty” in some adaptions of the story.

Although the story explicitly states the year as 1929 when the Swallows and Amazons sign their treaty with each other, most of the book could take place at just about any time during the 20th century and into the 21st century because the children are dedicated to camping and sailing and don’t use any form of technology that would firmly date the book. The book has a timeless quality, and it’s the sort of independent adventure that many children dream of having!

The books in this series have been popular in Britain since they were first published, and they have also inspired other books for children on similar themes, having outdoor adventures with minimal adult help or interference. Enid Blyton wrote several series for children on these themes after Swallows and Amazons was published, such as The Famous Five Series and Enid Blyton’s Adventure Series, and Elinor Lyon started her Ian and Sovra series in the 1950s, explicitly stating that she wanted to write books with similar adventures for children but with child characters who weren’t as competent as the children in Swallows and Amazons. The children in Swallows and Amazons are very knowledgeable about sailing and camping and seem to do almost everything right, and Elinor Lyon thought it would be more realistic if the children in her stories didn’t entirely know what they were doing but somehow managed to muddle their way through anyway. There are also similar books by American authors written after Swallows and Amazons, like The Invisible Island by Dean Marshall.

The children in the story take their inspiration for their imaginary play from books they’ve read, like Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. All of the children in the story seem familiar with sea stories and books about exploration and island adventures, and they make references to aspects of them and use those aspects when they’re playing. For example, they refer to adults and anyone who is unfamiliar to them as “Natives” and “savages”, and they call their bottles of ginger beer “grog”, while tea is “hot grog”, lemonade is “Jamaica rum”, toffee candy is “molasses”, and tins of corned beef is “pemmican”, living out their fantasy that they’re sailors exploring unknown territory. Later, they compare Jim Turner, the man on the houseboat, to Captain Flint and call him that for most of the story. Some of the language that the children use, like “natives”, “savages”, and the phrase “Honest Injun” are racially out of date and can have some offensive connotations. The children probably got those phrases from the books they’ve been reading, and they seem to think of them innocently, as part of their imaginary play, living out the stories they’ve read, but modern readers should be aware.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster

Danny Dunn

Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin, 1971.

Professor Bullfinch receives a cryptic message, which he says is written in the style of a telegram (he calls it “cablese” – a way of shortening messages because people pay for telegrams by the word). As Professor Bullfinch and Danny study the message further, they can draw more conclusions about the sender, who is not specified. They know it’s someone with money because the hotel it was sent from is expensive. From one of the terms used, they think the sender is a scientist, and because he sent a message written to be a telegram as a letter, he’s probably absent-minded. That description seems familiar to Professor Bullfinch.

Then, a strange man comes to the door who seems oddly distracted and confused. He greets Danny as if he were an old friend, but Danny has no idea who he is. He thinks the man is crazy, but Professor Bullfinch recognizes him as his old friend Dr. Benjamin Fenster. Of course, Dr. Fenster is the person who sent the confusing message. It turns out that Dr. Fenster meant to send that message to Dr. Ismail at the University of Khartoum, but he accidentally got it mixed up with the message he was going to send to Professor Bullfinch. Dr. Fenster is an absent-minded professor type, and he’s always doing things like that. Although, he does correct Danny when he mentions this, saying that he’s not actually a professor, and it’s not so much that he’s absent-minded so much as that he has a lot to think about and can’t think of everything at once.

Their conversation is interrupted when something goes wrong with the experiment that Professor Bullfinch and Danny were working on before Dr. Fenster arrived. A warning goes off, and Professor Bullfinch yells to Danny to shut off the machine. However, Danny can’t find the shut off switch, so he panics and pulls an electrical cord, sending an electrical current through the project before Professor Bullfinch turns off the switch. When they examine the results of the experiment, they’re surprised. Professor Bullfinch was trying to develop a new polymer, but the accident with the machine and the electrical current have turned the polymer into a superconductor and a very powerful ring magnet with a circular magnetic field.

While they’re examining the results of the experiment, Dr. Fenster wanders off, lost in thought. Danny worries if he’ll be okay, wandering around on his own, but Professor Bullfinch says that he’ll be fine. Dr. Fenster often does this when he’s thinking something through. Danny’s friends, Joe and Irene, arrive, commenting on seeing a man who was acting strangely and wondering if there’s something wrong with him. Danny explains to them who Dr. Fenster is and tells them about the ring magnet. Then, Dr. Fenster bursts back in, very excited, because he’s figured something out. He thinks the magnetic polymer ring might be the solution to a problem he’s been trying to solve.

Dr. Fenster is a zoologist, and one of his projects is to investigate accounts of legendary animals. Although many scientists tend to disregard stories of unknown animals as purely legendary, sometimes, they turn out to be previously unreported/undiscovered species. (“Undiscovered” in the scientific sense. Obviously, people have seen them, or they wouldn’t tell stories about them. These are species that haven’t been officially documented as having been discovered among the scientific community.) Investigating rare or possibly unknown species is what Dr. Fenster does.

Dr. Fenster is currently investigating reports of a creature called the lau, which apparently lives in swampy areas around the source of the Nile River in Uganda. The lau is supposed to be an enormous serpent with tentacles on its head. The legend around it says that if a person sees the lau first, the lau will die, but if the lau sees the person first, the person will die. When the others ask him if he thinks that’s real, Dr. Fenster says that he thinks that’s more metaphorical, like when someone says they felt petrified, it doesn’t mean that they literally turned to stone, or if someone says that their blood froze, it just means that they felt horrified. He thinks that the idea is that a serpent could kill a person, if they didn’t see it and disturbed it, but if the person saw the serpent first, they would kill it to avoid the threat.

The problem that Dr. Fenster has been trying to solve is how to move around the swamp and keep the area under observation during the night as well as the daytime, without possibly disturbing the creature he’s trying to find. It’s difficult to get around that swampy area in daylight, but it’s even more difficult at night, and he doesn’t want to use lights because that could frighten away the lau. He’s been thinking that he would like to mount some specialized cameras in certain strategic areas, but he couldn’t figure out how to mount them, and the cables he would have to use would be long and heavy. Having seen what the magnetic polymer can do, though, he thinks that could be the solution to the problem. It doesn’t weigh much itself, but when they test it, they discover it can support the weight of a grown man.

Dr. Fenster invites Professor Bullfinch and the children to join him on his expedition. He’s independently wealthy, and he can afford to pay for all them to come along. However, Danny’s mother has reservations about how safe this expedition is, and she can’t imagine that Joe or Irene’s parents will allow them to go on the trip, either. It takes time for Dr. Fenster to persuade the children’s families that the trip is safe enough for them. Eventually, they give in and allow the children to travel to Africa as a special Christmas present. Dr. Fenster doesn’t have any time limit on his own investigations, but the parents limit the children to only two weeks.

When they get to Africa, the first place that Dr. Fenster takes them is to Khartoum University in Sudan, where he introduces them to Professor Ismail, the Director of the Department of Zoology. Professor Ismail has helped Dr. Fenster with travel arrangements, equipment for the expedition, and the necessary government permits. Danny asks Professor Ismail what he thinks about the stories of the lau and whether it could be something like a dinosaur that has somehow survived. Professor Ismail says that many things are possible because there known oddities among animals, like the platypus, which lays eggs even though it’s a mammal. He shows them a fish called clarias lazera, which has the rare ability to leave water and live on land for a period of time.

The children get something to eat at a local cafe and talk excitedly about what the lau could really be and how its discovery could be “the most important discovery of the century.” Irene notices that a man in the cafe looks very interested in what they’re saying and follows them when they leave.

When the expedition reaches the site Dr. Fenster wants to investigate, they persuade some of the Nuer people who live there to show them where they’ve see the lau. They are initially reluctant and warn them that the lau is dangerous, but they do show them an area, and the members of the expedition start setting up cameras to watch it. As they begin exploring, they do find large trenches that are like the paths supposedly left by the giant serpents.

Dr. Fenster explains to the disappointed children that he won’t take them along to confront the lau directly, even if they do find it because of the possible danger. He and Professor Bullfinch will handle the creature, using the tranquilizer gun that Dr. Fenster brought along. They plan to have the children watch on the monitors and keep an eye on the base camp. However, the children see something unexpected when they’re looking at the monitors: the same strange man who was following them in Khartoum. Who is he and why has he followed their expedition?

When the children tell Professor Bullfinch and Dr. Fenster about him, they meet up with the man, and he introduces himself as a rare animal collector. He offers to join their expedition and help them, but Dr. Fenster refuses. One of the Nuer recognizes the man as a disreputable character who would do anything for money, and Dr. Fenster thinks he’s a poacher, who would try to capture rare animals and sell them, rather than simply study them scientifically. It seems that, aside from protecting themselves from the possibly dangerous lau while they study it, they might also have to protect the lau.

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

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

The lau is a cryptid in the real world as well as in the story, and the details Dr. Fenster offers about where it supposedly lives and historical mentions of the creature are accurate. Accounts of what the lau might actually be in real life vary. It could be a type of python or a very large fish, like a catfish. In the story, when they do find the lau, it turns out to be an enormous catfish, the kind that can live without water for a time and move on land, but it also turns out to be electrical, like an electric eel. Professor Bullfinch and Dr. Fenster decide that it’s related to the malapterurus, which is in keeping with real world theories about the lau.

The story makes some good points about known animals in the real world that are considered oddities because they have qualities that don’t normally apply to other animals of their type, like how the platypus is an egg-laying mammal. Just because something sounds unusual doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. There are wide variations among creatures in the animal kingdom. I thought it was interesting that they brought up the clarias lazera, which is a type of catfish that can live and move on land. A similar type of catfish that can live and move on land appeared in the children’s mystery book The Mystery of the Other Girl.

I’m not sure whether the accident that produced the magnetic polymer makes any reasonable scientific sense, but there a few interesting facts in the story. When they get to Africa, Dr. Fenster explains to them that there are actually two Nile rivers – the White Nile and the Blue Nile. They get their names because the soil they pass through gives them each a different color.

There are some words of another language included in the story when they reach Uganda, but I’m honestly not sure whether they’re real words or just made up to make it seem like Dr. Fenster can speak the local language. I tried putting them through Google translate to see if it could recognize them as anything, but it came out as nonsense. However, it’s supposed to be a language spoken by the Nuer people, so it might be something that Google translate doesn’t know.

Sometimes, I’m a little suspicious when I encounter obscure foreign words in old children’s books. I’ve read other old children’s books which use made-up words in place of an actual foreign language, probably because the writers didn’t know how to write something in a real foreign language but they wanted something that looked like it could be from another language. They were probably also acting with the assumption that kids wouldn’t know the difference, so it wouldn’t matter. I could be doing these authors a disservice by being a little suspicious here. Perhaps they did some extra research to learn a few phrases in a language that would be very obscure in the United States. It’s just that, having seen fakery elsewhere, it’s something I find myself looking for when I see instances of languages that would be difficult to fact-check.

Faking words in a real spoken language is less tolerated in the 21st century than it used to be, especially in a book that’s supposed to have educational qualities, so I hope they didn’t attempt to do that. Faking lesser details in a fiction book that’s supposed to have some real facts tends to cast suspicion on just how many of the other “facts” in the book are fake. This is an adventure story, not a textbook, so it’s true that some creative license is allowed. I still don’t know if their magnetic polymer concept is at all plausible, but the Danny Dunn stories are science fiction adventures, so some creative license there is allowed. However, readers like to feel that they can trust a certain amount of supporting detail to be correct. It’s also considered a cultural insult to use fake nonsense words in place of actual words from a language people really speak. Hopefully, that’s not the case here, but I wanted to point out the concept so readers can see how the use of real words strengths a story while faking them weakens it.

The story offers about the Nuer people, but I’m not sure how accurate they are. I don’t know where the authors got their information. They say that Nuer people don’t have chiefs and don’t follow orders from anybody, but according to the eHRAF World Cultures collection through Yale University, their clans do have headmen, and they also have sub-chiefs.

Posted on by TracyC

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed by Virginia Hamilton, 1983.

It’s Halloween 1938, and Willie Bea’s relatives have gathered at the old family farm, near where she lives. Money is tight because of the Great Depression, but one of her aunts lives and works in the city, making more money than the others, and is willing to help fund family dinners and provide a little extra for her nieces and nephews when they need something, like new clothes. The aunt is a little scandalous in their family for her multiple marriages, but the others appreciate her generosity, and the nieces and nephews like getting some extra attention and a few treats from her.

The family gathering is a bit chaotic with children running around and getting into trouble. One of Willie Bea’s cousins gets into particular trouble with her mother for using his bow and arrow set to shoot a pumpkin off of Willie Bea’s younger brother’s head. Their mother panics when she catches them doing it because he could have missed and killed the little boy, but Willie Bea tries to calm her mother. Willie Bea was less worried because she knows her cousin’s archery skill and that he wasn’t going to miss, but she understands that adults think of the risks and aren’t fully aware of what the kids are capable of doing. (I’m siding with the mother on this one. Even people who are very good at something can miss now and then, and it’s a big risk to take with someone’s life.) Willie Bea also realizes that the decision to use her little brother for the William Tell act actually came from another cousin because the cousin doing the archery wouldn’t have thought of it himself, and it’s not fair that her mother doesn’t know to blame this other cousin.

Willie Bea talks to her father about the incident, hoping that he’ll understand how unfair it is. However, her father tells her that what her cousin did was dangerous, no matter why he did it. Even though he has a reputation for being good with archery, even people who are good can still miss, and accidents can happen. (See?) Her father lets Willie Bea know that he’s aware that she and her cousins do risky things sometimes when they’re playing with each other, but as an adult, he and the other adults have a responsibility to tell them when something they’re doing is too risky and to put a stop to it. No matter how many times they’ve done some of these things without having an accident, some things are just accidents waiting to happen. They should never assume that an arrow can’t go wrong just because it hasn’t yet or that they can’t fall from a high place just because they haven’t fallen yet.

Willie Bea is a little embarrassed by the talk and feels like her father still doesn’t understand. However, Willie Bea herself has been starting to understand a few things about her relatives this Halloween, things that she either hasn’t noticed before or only half noticed. She can see that one of her cousins is too manipulative, noting the little tricks she uses to get her way and the things she says and does when she wants to be spiteful. She can see that her other cousin has trouble asking up for himself and is particularly vulnerable to manipulation.

Willie Bea also begins to notice things about the adults in the family and their relationships with each other. Aunt Leah, the aunt who has more money than the others and has been married multiple times seems glamorous and fascinating to Willie Bea. Aunt Leah is into horoscopes and fortune telling, and when she reads Willie Bea’s palm, she predicts something special for her. Although Willie Bea loves her own mother, she is intrigued by the family gossip that her father was seeing Aunt Leah before falling in love with her mother, and Willie Bea fantasizes about what it would be like to live with Aunt Leah in the city. She imagines that it would be exciting, and she asks her father why he chose her mother instead of Aunt Leah. Her father knows that Willie Bea doesn’t entirely understand what it’s like to make that kind of choice and what living with a woman like Aunt Leah would really mean. (It occurred to me that the multiple divorces Leah has had might be a clue.) He just explains to Willie Bea that his choice became clear after he got to know her mother as well as her sister, Leah. He knew her mother was the right choice because she was the kind of steady woman who would always be there for him.

That evening, while Willie Bea is putting together her hobo costume and the ghost costumes for her younger siblings and her parents are listening to the radio, Aunt Leah suddenly bursts in and starts having hysterics about it being the end of the world! It takes Willie Bea’s parents a while to get a clear answer from Aunt Leah about why she’s so upset. When she recovers enough to explain things, she says that she was listening to the radio, and she heard that Martians have invaded New Jersey! She describes the horrible, terrifying reports that the radio announcer made about the Martians destroying army troops with their deadly heat ray. Aunt Leah was so terrified by what she heard that she not only turned off the radio but unplugged it, and she says that she’ll never plug it in again, which might be a moot point, if aliens really are here to destroy the world. (If you know what was infamously broadcast on Halloween 1938, you know what Leah heard and that it’s not what she thinks it is.)

While Willie Bea’s parents are trying to decide what to make of Aunt Leah’s story, Willie Bea’s Uncle Jimmy arrives. He says that the rest of the family has also heard what Aunt Leah heard and that they’re all gathering at the old family farm. Rumor has it that people have seen the terrible invaders over at the Kelly farm. Willie Bea’s mother gathers the children and heads to the family farm that Willie Bea’s grandparents own to be with the rest of the family, while Willie Bea’s father tries to see if he can find the station that Leah was listening to and hear the reports for himself. It occurs to him that it might not be an invasion of the Martians but could actually be Germans and German war machines because they’ve all heard about the Nazi takeover of Germany, and he remembers the horrible Hindenburg disaster. If Germans could make a blimp that explodes into a fiery terror like that, then he thinks maybe they could make something that resembles an alien invasion.

At her grandparents’ farm, Willie Bea watches as various relatives panic, cluster around the radio, trade rumors, and try to figure what’s going on. Rumor has it that there are Martians on the Kelly farm, so Willie Bea convinces young Toughy Clay to go over there and try to see them for themselves. At Willie Bea’s insistence, they use the stilts that the children like to walk on to give themselves longer legs, so they can get there faster. Nothing is as it seems this Halloween, and Willie Bea’s expedition to see the Martians definitely doesn’t go as planned.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including a short picture book version).

My Reaction

Almost of the characters in this book are African American. I don’t think it’s ever stated directly because there’s no need in the story to describe them, compared to anyone else, but I think it’s subtly implied. There is only one point in the story where race is mentioned at all, and that’s when Willie Bea is hurt, and the doctor comes to see her. Willie Bea describes the doctor as an old man who delivered most of the babies in her family and knows everybody in the community, and she says that he visits everyone, black or white, rich or poor. Willie Bea’s family is at the poorer end of the community because the doctor knows that people like them don’t normally call the doctor unless it’s something that they really can’t handle by themselves.

I found the family relationships in the story confusing at first. The kids are all referred to by nicknames, and when they are first introduced, it’s difficult to keep it straight who is whose sibling and who is a cousin, and who is older and who is younger. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. Relationships are explained gradually as the story continues, along with characters’ real names as well as nicknames, but it takes some time to get to the explanations.

The story has a slow start, and the real adventure doesn’t begin until about halfway through the book. In some ways, it’s a coming of age story for Willie Bea because she finds herself seeing her family in ways that she never has before, becoming more aware of different sides of their personalities and gaining more insights into their relationships with each other. She also comes to see firsthand what her father means about the stunts that she and her cousins pull and how she should never assume that they can’t get hurt just because they haven’t before. Much of this book is what I would call “slice of life”, a sort of glimpse into Halloweens of the past in a rural community, especially one particular Halloween that would have been memorable for anyone who was alive at the time in the United States.

The radio broadcast that has Willie Bea’s family and others in the community panicking over an alien invasion is The War of the Worlds, a play based on the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells. This type of panic over this particular radio performance was a real, historical incident because the radio play was presented in the format of news broadcasts at the time, and some people who tuned into the program late misunderstood what they were hearing and thought that it was a real news broadcast about an actual emergency. It wasn’t a widespread panic because, first, people who started listening to the broadcast from its beginning knew what they were listening to, and second, not everyone was listening to the broadcast at all. Still, there was enough panic over the radio performance that it became newsworthy and has become a piece of American history and lore.

I enjoyed the historical details in the story, particularly all the radio play references throughout the story. Willie Bea’s family likes to listen to radio shows, and I’m familiar with some of them because I also enjoy old radio plays. Her family likes to listen to The Shadow and Little Orphan Annie. Willie Bea likes to amuse her siblings by imitating people from the radio, singing theme songs and reciting jokes from Jack Benny, like the famous “your money or your life” joke.

Posted on by TracyC

Ruth Fielding at College

Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding at College; or The Missing Examination Papers by Alice B. Emerson (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1917.

Ruth Fielding and her friends have graduated from their boarding schools, and now, they’re headed off to college! Ruth and her best friend, Helen, will be attending Ardmore, a college for young women only. Helen’s twin brother, Tom, will be going to Harvard. When they were at boarding school, they also attended girls’ only and boys’ only schools, but their schools were located near each other, and they were able to visit each other on weekends and attend joint social events held between the schools. Helen and Tom are close as twins, and Helen worries that she won’t be able to see her brother as often while they’re in college. Tom and Ruth are also fond of each other, and although they’re excited about college, they’re also a little sad at the idea of being apart.

The Rescue

While they’re having tea with Aunt Alvirah (the housekeeper), the hired hand working for Ruth’s Uncle Jabez, Ben, comes in and says that there is a boat adrift on the river that runs by the mill where they live. Everyone goes outside to have a look at the boat. At first, they think no one is in it, and Uncle Jabez says, if it’s abandoned, then he will go after it as salvage. Then, they see that someone is in it after all, just lying down in the bottom of the boat, but the boat is drifting toward the dangerous rapids below the mill! Whoever is in the boat seems incapacitated or unaware of their dangerous situation.

Uncle Jabez is less eager to go after the boat when he knows there’s somebody in it than he was when he thought he could get a free boat, but Ruth persuades him that they have to rescue whoever is in the boat. They manage to reach the boat, and they find an unconscious girl in it. They bring the girl back to the house with them, and Tom says that he will get a doctor. However, Aunt Alvirah doesn’t think that a doctor will be necessary because it looks like she has only fainted, and she thinks that the girl will be all right.

When the girl wakes up, she explains that her name is Maggie and that she was working at Mr. Bender’s camp for summer vacationers up the river. After the season ended, the vacationers left, and Mr. Bender paid her for her time at the camp, someone was supposed to give her a ride across the river with her luggage, but Maggie fell asleep while she was waiting in the boat. When she woke up, she was drifting down the river alone. She got scared, and she fainted. Ruth says, if her job is over, then she has no reason to return to Mr. Bender’s camp, and Maggie says that’s true and that she needs to find another job. Ruth says they can use their telephone to call Mr. Bender’s camp to explain the situation and reassure Mr. Bender that Maggie is all right.

Ruth likes Maggie, and she notices, from the way she talks, that she seems more refined than most poor working girls. Aunt Alvirah is getting older, and she often has trouble with her rheumatism. Ruth suggests to Uncle Jabez that they hire Maggie to help Aunt Alvirah at the mill this winter while Ruth is away at college. Uncle Jabez is still a miser and he grumps about Ruth spending his money. Ruth has money of her own now, and she is willing to pay Maggie’s wages, although she says that Uncle Jabez must make sure that Maggie has good food because she looks undernourished. Ruth and Uncle Jabez often butt heads over the issues of money and Ruth’s education because Uncle Jabez never had much education and is both proud of the money he has now and is tight-fisted with what he has. At this point, the story explains some of the history of the characters. Since Ruth retrieved a stolen necklace for the aunt of one of her school friends and received a reward for it (in Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies), Ruth has had enough money to be financially independent of her uncle and to fund her education. She is also correct about Aunt Alvirah’s age and health, and she is concerned for the older woman’s future.

Aunt Alvirah welcomes the idea of help at the mill, and Maggie accepts the position. Ruth notices that Maggie studies an Ardmore yearbook, and she is surprised that Maggie is interested in the school. She has the feeling that there is more to Maggie’s past than she knows.

Arrival at Ardmore

When Ruth and Helen go to Ardmore, some of the girls have already heard about Ruth’s reputation as a writer of movie scenarios from the movie that Ruth wrote and her classmates helped make to raise funds to replace a dormitory that burned at their school. Some of them are prepared to despise Ruth as being stuck up about her writing, although some who saw the moving picture liked it.

A girl named Edith thinks that they’ll have to “take her down a peg or two” as soon as she arrives. One of the other girls, Dora, reminds the others about the rules against hazing at the school. The rules have been strictly enforced since a hazing incident went too far last year and traumatized a student, Margaret Rolff, who was trying to join the Kappa Alpha sorority. Since that incident, the college has forbidden sororities to initiate freshmen or sophomore students as members and cracked down on hazing rituals. Edith, a sophomore, thinks that’s a shame because the sororities are fun, while May sarcastically remarks about how fun “half-murdering innocents” is. The students aren’t really supposed to talk about what happened to Margaret, although the sophomores don’t see why not because everybody who was at the school when it happened knows about the incident.

Margaret’s nerves were apparently shattered by the incident, and a valuable silver vase, an ancient Egyptian artifact, disappeared from the college library the same night. It isn’t entirely clear what the Kappa Alpha sorority told Margaret to do, specifically, but it seems that Margaret’s initiation task involved both taking the vase from the library and going to nearby Bliss Island alone at night. She was found there the next day in a terrible state. Nobody is sure what happened to the vase, and Margaret was apparently unable to explain it. She left the school soon after, and nobody knows where she is now. The vase might have been stolen by somebody else that night, or it might have somehow been lost in the confusion of the initiation stunt that went wrong. Because the Kappa Alpha sorority was responsible for telling Margaret to commit a theft from the school (or, at least, borrow a rare and valuable object without permission), they are raising money to replace the vase. The students’ opinions about the incident waver back and forth between thinking that Margaret was a naturally nervous and delicate person to be so dramatically affected by the incident to thinking that maybe she faked her trauma as an excuse to get away with the theft herself.

When the other girls start discussing Ruth Fielding again and how grand she must think herself, being involved with the movie industry, a plump girl who is listening to them starts laughing, but she refuses to tell the other girls why. Then, a wealthy-looking girl with a lot of fancy luggage arrives at the school, brought by a chauffeur. Her luggage is stamped with European labels and has the initials “R. F.” on it, so the other girls assume that this must be the overly-grand Ruth Fielding. The plump girl struggles not to laugh as she watches their reactions because she knows Ruth and knows that this girl is someone else.

Meanwhile, Ruth and Helen have traveled to the school by train and are coming from the train station by bus. They arrive at their college dormitory, Dare Hall, just in time to see the other girls giving “R. F.” a hard time because of her fancy luggage. When Edith addresses “R. F.” as “Miss Fielding”, “R. F.” corrects her in front of the other girls, telling her that her real name is Rebecca Frayne. The plump girl, Jennie Stone, laughs at Edith’s presumptuous mistake and greets the real Ruth Fielding and Helen.

Jennie Stone was one of their fellow students at their boarding school, Briarwood Hall, in upstate New York. She was affectionately known as “Heavy” because she’s always been “plump” (or, as the book sometimes calls her, “fleshy”). Ruth and Helen are surprised to see Jennie at Ardmore because they thought that she was lacking some credits to go to college, but Jennie says that she made up those credits, and she wanted to go to college because she really had nothing to do after graduating from Briarwood but eat and sleep and put on more weight. There is some joking about Jennie’s weight, and Helen gives her a teasing pinch, but Jennie reminds her that she has feelings, too. People in Jennie’s family are naturally big, but she is determined that, as part of her college experience, she will lose weight. She wants to keep busy and reform her diet. The mathematics instructor at Ardmore has been advising her about her eating habits, urging her to eat more vegetables. The teacher seems to be hard on Jennie on the point of her weight, but the teacher openly tells her that’s only because she cares about Jennie. She knows that Jennie will want to make friends in college, and she won’t want to get a reputation as the heaviest girl in her class. It’s hard on Jennie, but she appreciates the teacher’s advice and the fact that she cares.

The mathematics teacher, Miss Cullam, also privately confides in the girls that she’s worried about the incident that happened on campus last year. She has some suspicions about the older classes of girls, although she can’t really prove anything against them. Few other people know this, but Miss Cullam admits that she had hidden some papers for last year’s mathematics exam inside the vase that disappeared from the library. It was an impulsive move and only meant to be temporary hiding place for them, but when she tried to get the papers out of the vase, she couldn’t because they were stuck. She went to get some tongs to retrieve them, but by the time she returned to the library, the vase was gone. At exam time, several students that she had not expected to pass her class did unexpectedly well on their final exam. She can’t prove that they got hold of the papers from the vase, and she hates to think that any of her students would cheat, but she still suspects they did. It bothers her that she doesn’t know for sure that they didn’t. Although the vase had value itself, the mathematics teacher’s story raises the possibility that someone knew that the exam papers were in the vase and that was the motive for the theft.

Campus Politics and the Mysterious New Girl

Ruth, Helen, and Jennie talk about the politics between the freshmen, sophomores, and upperclassmen in college. Edith seems undeterred by her earlier mistake and still gives Ruth a hard time about her writing and budding movie career. It doesn’t entirely surprise Ruth that people would give her a hard time because she is a noticeable figure among the freshmen, and having been to boarding school, she knows how things typically work among cliques and class levels at school. Although some of what Edith says embarrasses her and hurts her feelings, she knows that it’s best not to make too much fuss about the things people say, and just wait for it to blow over. It helps that Helen and Jennie stand by her and stand up to the other girls on her behalf. Ruth is somewhat reassured that hazing is forbidden at Ardmore, so she expects that little will happen other than occasional mean comments.

Although hazing is forbidden on campus, the college does allow the upperclassmen some privileges over the underclassmen. They do it with a purpose in mind, using it as a tool to get the freshmen to bond with each other and solidify their class leadership. Few freshmen pay attention to the elections for class president until the seniors put up notices to tell the freshmen that they must all wear baby blue tams (hats), that no other colors will be allowed, and that the freshmen only have three days to comply. The freshmen aren’t sure what the upperclassmen will do if they don’t comply, and some of them are resentful about the upperclassmen commanding them to buy new hats. Helen, like some of the others, initially thinks they should just ignore the command and not bother, showing the upperclassmen that they won’t be bossed around, but Ruth decides that she would rather buy and wear one of the tams because she doesn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to herself and maybe more resentment from the older girls on campus. When they go shopping in town, they see that every shop is selling baby blue tams, and one shop keeper (described as a “Hebrew” for no real apparent reason and having an accent that seems to indicate that he’s an immigrant) comments that blue is their class color, which gives the girls a clue that this is an organized campus tradition or stunt with the support of the local businesses. Because those tams are everywhere in town and other freshmen are buying them, even most of the reluctant freshmen end up with one of those hats. After that, the freshmen realize that they need to get serious about organizing their class leadership so the upperclassmen won’t be dictating everything to them.

There is one hold-out among the freshmen who doesn’t buy one of the tams, and that’s Rebecca Frayne. She just keeps wearing the same tam she was wearing when she arrived at school. When the three days are up, and Rebecca still doesn’t have a baby blue tam, the upperclassmen start boycotting her. If she comes to class in her usual tam, they all get up and walk out. They even walk out on meals when they see her. This seems like more of a punishment for the upperclassmen, who have to leave without finishing their meal, than it is a punishment for Rebecca, and someone does point that out.

(I see what the students say about these traditions being bonding experiences, but I really don’t have any respect for these catty and manipulative tactics because it looks dumb, and I think it just disrupts class for everyone to have so many students walking out. I think my college professors would have counted them as absent if they walked out of class over a dumb hat because student social activities need cannot impact the education they are supposedly here to receive and have no place in the classroom. Whatever they do needs to be done on their own time, not on the teacher’s or the class’s time. Actually, I did have a professor who used to award extra points to students who showed up on days when class attendance was low due to bad weather or people ditching class for sporting events. He would have us take notes or a short quiz and write a special phrase at the top of the paper as a sign that we were there that day when others weren’t, like “Rainy Day Faithful” or “Sports Day Faithful.” I kind of wanted to see the instructors in the story do something similar. On the other hand, if they self-punish themselves by sending themselves away from the dinner table, I’m inclined to think it’s deserved. I’d be inclined to let them do that until they get hungry enough to stop. It’s a rare example of a problem that will eventually solve itself.)

However, Rebecca’s apparent defiance of the social order even gets on the nerves of her fellow freshmen. The others have come to appreciate the bonding experience of buying the matching hats and solidifying their support of their own class leadership. It was a ridiculous and high-handed order from the upperclassmen, but ultimately, a fun and harmless one, a reason for a short shopping trip, and only a minor expense that supports local businesses. The other freshmen don’t understand why Rebecca isn’t joining in with them in class solidarity. Rebecca doesn’t mix much with the other students, and the others think that she doesn’t want to be friends, although Ruth can see that the boycotting she’s suffering is hurtful to her.

However, there may be another explanation for Rebecca’s behavior besides defiance or stand-offishness. Ruth begins to realize that Rebecca not only always wears the same hat but that she’s only ever seen Rebecca wear the same three outfits, over and over. They’re good quality clothes, but it’s odd that she never seems to wear anything else. Although they all saw Rebecca arrive at college with a lot of luggage, more than the other students had, she either doesn’t seem to have many clothes or never wears the other clothes she brought. From the way she arrived and the amount of luggage she had, everyone expected that Rebecca would be the wealthy fashionista of their class, but that hasn’t been the case. Is Rebecca not as wealthy as they thought, and could her choice to not buy a blue hat be because she can’t afford one? But, if her luggage wasn’t full of fashionable clothing, what was really in her large trunk? Ruth becomes concerned about her and tries to figure out what’s really going on with Rebecca.

Mystery on Bliss Island

Meanwhile, Ruth, Helen, and Jennie have been exploring the area around the college. One day, the three of them go to Bliss Island to have a look around. Jennie is hoping that hiking around the island will help her in her quest to lose weight. While they’re exploring, Ruth thinks that she sees someone else on the island. She doesn’t get a good look at this other person, but she thinks it looks a lot like Maggie. Helen thinks that she must be wrong because Maggie is supposed to be helping Aunt Alvirah back at the mill. Later, Ruth sees a light on the island at night and realizes that someone must be camping there.

When Helen and Ruth go to investigate who is camping on the island, Ruth expects to find Maggie. Instead, they find a strange girl who seems to bear a resemblance to Maggie. This other girl seems suspicious and doesn’t want to explain much about herself. What is she doing on the island, and does it have anything to do with what happened on Bliss Island during the hazing incident?

The book is in the public domain and is available to read for free online through Project Gutenberg.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The Mysteries (and some spoilers)

In a way, this story is what I had hoped that Ruth’s first adventures at boarding school in Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall would be like. It doesn’t have any spooky stories, but there is an unresolved mystery involving the initiation rituals of a campus sorority, the theft of a valuable object, and a possible cheating scandal. There also also mysteries about the behavior of other students and girls Ruth knows. At first, I thought there might be a connection between all of these things, but the mysteries aren’t call connected.

Ruth is correct that Rebecca isn’t as rich as she looked at first. When Ruth speaks to Rebecca privately, Rebecca explains that her family was once wealthy, and they still live in the biggest house in their small town, but the family’s fortunes have diminished over the years. Her aunt, who takes care of her, thinks it’s important to keep up appearances, which is why she has a few nice clothes but not many. The family has to make real sacrifices to keep up the pretense that they have more money than they really have, and Rebecca arrived at college thinking that she would have to make an impression on the others at the beginning that she came from money so they wouldn’t think that she didn’t belong.

Ruth explains to her that college isn’t really like that. Not everyone at college has much money, and many other girls get part time jobs, like waitress, to pay for their education. Belonging at college comes from participating in activities with everyone else, and Rebecca is pushing other students and potential friends away by not joining in the traditions of the college. Personally, I thought the other students were being too militant about this silly hat thing. I get how people can bond over shared traditions and how school traditions and spirit events are meant to be bonding experiences, but I just think that they went overboard, making too much of a big deal about this one student, with only Ruth thinking to actually talk to her and find out what’s going on with her. It does beg the question of whether the students are really focusing on this as some kind of school initiation/bonding ritual for the fun of it or because the older students are on a power trip and trying to exert control and be exclusive. In a lot of ways, I share Olivia Sharp’s feelings about exclusive clubs and initiation rituals from The Green Toenails Gang. It’s one thing if a club has a particular purpose, but being pointlessly exclusive is something else. This is something that Ruth actually addresses with the upperclassmen later, which was a relief.

However, even though Ruth is sympathetic to Rebecca, Ruth points out to Rebecca that her resistance to participation with the other students is causing problems in her relationships with others. When she doesn’t do what everyone else is doing, she isn’t sharing in their experiences and doesn’t bond with them. That’s when Rebecca says she really can’t afford to buy one of the blue tams, and her aunt would never allow her to take a part time job because that would ruin the pretenses the family tries to maintain about their actual money troubles. Ruth thinks the Frayne family pretenses are as silly as I thought the students’ militant hat ritual was, but she can see that a more creative approach is necessary to solve Ruth’s problem. Rebecca knows how to crochet, so Ruth suggests that she crochet a tam for herself in the baby blue color of their class because that would be cheaper than buying a tam. This will allow Rebecca to participate in this campus ritual and tradition but on her own terms and within her budget.

Then, Ruth quietly has a word with some of the senior students and freshman students about Rebecca’s situation to keep them from harassing Rebecca further while she’s working on her new tam and so they won’t give her a hard time about anything related to money. She even stands up to the seniors and tells them that, if their enforcement of the tam rules was for the sake of campus tradition and creating a memorable bonding experience among the students, they should have compassion for Rebecca and her situation, but if it was only to bully and exert power over the younger students, she will tell the other freshmen that’s the case, the freshmen will completely rebel, and everyone will stop wearing the hats or doing anything else the seniors say to do. If the upperclassmen continue to insist on leaving the dining hall in the face of their disobedience, the freshmen will make sure that the upperclassmen don’t eat on campus for the rest of the year. The seniors understand the situation, appreciate Ruth standing up for her classmate, and like her spirit, so they finally lay off their boycott of Rebecca.

Ruth also helps Rebecca solve her money problems when she realizes that Rebecca has brought something with her to college that is worth real money. Rebecca’s trunks were from the attic of her house, and she brought them just to create the illusion that she had more money and belongings than she really does, but she hasn’t appreciated the value of what they contain. Rebecca has many lessons to learn about the real value of many things. The contents of the trunk seemed a little anti-climactic at first because I had initially thought the story was building up the idea that she might be carrying something more suspicious, maybe something illegal or a smuggled person, but I liked the theme that Rebecca and her family know more about the superficial look of things rather than their true value.

The mystery of Rebecca and her behavior is an interesting side plot that adds dimension to the main plot and mystery, which concerns campus politics and initiation rituals and what happens when they go too far. Most of the rest of the plot and mysterious happenings centers around what happened to Margaret and the vase. In some ways, the solution to that problem turns out to be disappointingly simple. Margaret was a very nervous person who, although academically bright, was too easily influenced by other people and unable to stand up for herself. When Margaret got nervous and messed up the initiation ritual, she didn’t know how to explain herself and fix things. The situation does get resolved, and Margaret is fine. (You might have even guessed where she is through most of the story.)

However, I thought the story did a good job of demonstrating how social initiation rituals and school stunts can get out of hand when closed societies don’t consider how the things they do or ask others to do affect other people. The sorority didn’t really know Margaret as a person before they set her a task that was more difficult for her to do than it might have been for someone else, and Margaret was too timid, nervous, and anxious to be accepted by others to explain how she really felt about it or refuse to do it. This is part of the reason why the school later forbids the sororities from initiating freshmen and sophomores, so the younger students have time to get to know the campus and its groups, develop some confidence, and understand what’s acceptable for a group to ask and what isn’t. Having the sororities only recruit upperclassmen also gives them time to get to know prospective members and set appropriate tasks for people who know their own limits and when the groups are asking too much. The task should also not have involved taking a valuable object that didn’t belong to the sorority and putting it in a position where it could be lost. That is the Kappa Alpha sorority’s fault for setting a task that really wasn’t appropriate under any circumstances.

I liked the multiple mysteries of the story, the ones that connected to each other and the ones that were more stand-alone. There’s also a brief subplot where some of Ruth’s friends fake a haunting to get a relative of a faculty member to move out of her room in their dormitory so they can use the space. Before she came, that room was being used as a public sitting-room for the students, and they resent her taking it. The students involved in the plot don’t tell Ruth what they’re doing or ask her to join them, but they explain it to her when they’ve accomplished their goal. I appreciated that the plot was subtle, just making subtle noises at night using a rocking chair.

Characters That Age and Develop

Up to this point in the series, Ruth Fielding and her friends were teenagers at boarding school. Now, they’re becoming young women and young men in college. I liked how aspects of their college life resemble their experiences at boarding school, but the characters show that they are now more experienced. The things that happen with the social politics on campus build on the girls’ earlier boarding school experiences, but they are now more aware of the dynamics of these situations and how to deal with them. There are some times when it’s better to go along with the group for the sake of building friendships, but there are also sometimes when they have to stand up for themselves and others and tell the groups on campus that they’ve gone too far. There are times when it’s better to take some teasing and let it go, and there are times when teasing and enforcement of group conformity goes too far, and someone needs to be told to stop and go easier on someone. They still have things to learn, but it was nice to see their development and the use of things they have already learned. Students like Rebecca and Margaret suffer more at college at first because they are more new to the large school environment, and they don’t understand what others expect from them or when and how to stand up for themselves. They need some help from compassionate, experienced students to find their way.

Readers also see main characters are continuing to build their future lives and develop as people. Ruth has already started her writing career, and through the story, we are told that she is still working on a play she’s writing, and she and her friends also take part in the filming of another movie during a school break. Ruth is planning to go further in her writing and movie career, and she is serious about using her education to develop her career.

We don’t know as much about what Helen and Jennie are planning for their futures. Helen’s family is wealthy, so she technically doesn’t need a career, but she is a serious student. Jennie’s trait of being overweight, something which has helped to define her character through the series is interesting in this story both because Jennie stands up for herself and emphasizes that she has feelings and so more than just a fat person to be made fun of, and she’s also decided that she wants to change her image. While her teacher urges her to eat healthier, Jennie also starts joining in the sports on campus. At first, it’s difficult for her, but she gradually becomes stronger and more athletic, and she enjoys it. College is a time for people to experiment with their lives, habits, and self-image, and Jennie specifically wanted to go to college for that reason as part of her personal development.

I didn’t like the repeated references to Jennie as “plump” or “fleshy.” I did like seeing her try new activities to change her appearance and develop different sides of her personality, but the older Stratemeyer Syndicate books do have this odd focus on describing characters’ weight. Heroines are usually described as “slim” or “slender”, pleasant sidekicks are “plump”, and villains and unpleasant characters are actually fat. These designations appear repeatedly in various Stratemeyer Syndicate series, although I think they finally stopped doing it after people raised public awareness about fat shaming. In Jennie’s case, I minded it less than I’ve minded the weight references less than I’ve minded it in other books because she does remind people of her feelings and because her decision to try to improve her weight situation was her own decision rather than one she was bullied into making and is an extension of her trying new activities, experimenting with her self-image, and the college experience of personal development. Jennie was at a point in her life where she felt the need for a change, so she’s just going for it.

At this point, I want to remind readers that characters who develop and change are rare in Stratemeyer Syndicate books, at least the ones that most people remember from their childhoods, because in the series that are still in print, the characters’ ages are frozen.

Characters That Never Age

I’ve pointed this out before, but one of the hallmarks of most of the classic Stratemeyer Syndicate books that most people remember reading when they were growing up is that the characters never age. In series like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, they’re always in their late teens or early twenties, and their exact age often isn’t specified. Readers just know that they’re old enough to be traveling around and doing things without adult supervision, sort of like the characters in the Scooby-Doo cartoons. Also, like Scooby-Doo cartoons, the series get redone about every decade or so to update technology, slang, and world circumstances so that the books take place roughly around the time when they were written. (For example, you won’t find any Cold War references in books written after the 1990s, and existing books for series that were still in print were rewritten and reissued in the mid-20th century, around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, to remove unacceptable racial terms and stereotypes.)

However, it’s worth reminding readers that this wasn’t always true of Stratemeyer Syndicate books. The oldest series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate are often unknown or forgotten by modern readers because the characters did age. As the series ran their course, characters grew up, graduated from school, married, and became parents themselves. When Stratemeyer Syndicate characters got too old to be teen detectives or young adventurers, the Stratemeyer Syndicate would simply stop producing their series and start a new one, often with characters who were somewhat similar to characters in previous series but not exactly the same, so they could continue writing series with similar themes and a similar feel, but also a little different. Ruth Fielding is one of those forgotten characters because she did age, and her series ended around the time that the first Nancy Drew books were published. Nancy Drew was meant to be the next generation series to Ruth Fielding, a similar character who has investigates mysteries and has adventures with her friends, but by that point, the Stratemeyer Syndicate realized that, if they never let Nancy age, they would never have to end her series or replace her with anyone else. This is the reason why 21st century readers know who Nancy Drew is, but not many people know Ruth Fielding.

Also, because Ruth Fielding books weren’t being produced during the mid-20th century, when existing Stratemeyer Syndicate books were being revamped and modernized, the Ruth Fielding books were not modernized. The movie industry, which becomes increasingly prominent in the books, makes silent movies because the stories are set in the 1910s. There are some racial terms in books, while not being deliberately insulting, also don’t sound right because they’re not polite by modern standards. It did throw me a bit when the book referred to a shopkeeper as being “Hebrew.” I think I might have heard this before in relation to Jewish people (I can’t remember where right now, although I think it might have been an older book as well), but not often. Using the word “Hebrew” in this way is acceptable in some languages, but not in modern English, and it is considered a derogatory reference by modern standards. It took me out of the story temporarily when I got to that part because I had to stop and think it over. I came to the conclusion that the kind of person who would use “Hebrew” instead of “Jewish” to describe a Jewish person sounds like someone whose primary knowledge of Jewish people comes from reading the Old Testament rather than talking to them in life. Then, after I considered that, I had to stop and consider how Ruth Fielding could know that the shopkeeper was Jewish without even knowing his name or him saying anything about it. I suppose it might have been his general look, but that’s not always reliable. More importantly, it’s a case of the author telling us something as if it makes a difference to the character or the scene when it doesn’t. This goes absolutely nowhere. Ruth has never seen this shopkeeper before because she’s new in town, and we never see him again. This is why writers are discouraged from bringing up people’s racial or ethnic backgrounds unnecessarily because it sounds like they’re trying to make a point about something when there’s no point. This is also why I don’t mind rewrites of books that include outdated or unacceptable racial terms because I read them as a distraction that actually takes away from the story. I suppose, from a scholarly viewpoint, it’s kind of informative about the way people spoke in the past, but from the point of view of someone just trying to enjoy the story, it acts like a speed bump that shakes the reader out of it.

I don’t think the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books ever connect the characters with any world events with known dates because that would also mark the characters’ ages relative to events and make it obvious that they don’t age over time, but the Ruth Fielding books do connect to world events, and we’re almost to the point in the series when the characters become directly in World War I. I’ll have more to say about that when we reach that point in the series.

Posted on by TracyC

Stories of Rainbow and Lucky: Selling Lucky

Stories of Rainbow and Lucky

Selling Lucky by Jacob Abbott, 1860.

This is the fourth book in the Stories of Rainbow and Lucky series. I’ve already started covering this series, and I have to do all five books in a row because the series is set up like a mini-series. That is, none of the books in the series can stand alone; they are all installments of one, longer story. They only make sense together.

It’s an unusual series from the mid-19th century, written on the eve of the American Civil War, by a white author with a young black hero. Rainbow is a teenage black boy who, in the previous installments of the story, is hired by a young carpenter, Handie, who is just a few years older than he is to help him with a job in another town, working on renovating a farm house that Handie has inherited. The rest of the series follows the two young men, particularly Rainbow, through their adventures leaving their small town for the first time, learning life lessons, and even dealing with difficult topics like racism. Lucky is a horse who belongs to a neighbor of Handie’s new farm, and Rainbow has befriended him.

The story is unusual for this time period because it was uncommon for black people to be the heroes of books and for topics like racism to be discussed directly. It’s also important to point out that our black hero is not a slave, he is not enslaved at any point in the series, and the series has a happy ending for him. People don’t always treat him right, but he does have friends and allies, and he manages to deal with the adversity he faces and builds a future for himself. Keep in mind along the way that there are a lot of pun names in this series and that people’s names are often clues to their characters.

This particular installment in the series focuses on the horse, Lucky. Lucky’s owner has decided to sell him, and she asks Handie and Rainbow to take Lucky from the town of Southerton to Boston to sell him. Along the way, they have encounters with thieves and further trouble with racism. However, the story ends happily for both Rainbow and Lucky.

This book is easily available to read online in your browser through NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN & WHAT THEY READ, I’m going to do a detailed summary below. If you’d rather read it yourself before you read my review, you can go ahead, but some people might want to know what it’s like in more detail.

The Story

The first three books in the series focused on Handie’s inheritance of the Three Pines farm, how he hired Rainbow to help him fix it up, their travels to the farm, and their adventures with their new neighbors there. Now, the summer is over, and they have returned to their own small town, but the adventures aren’t over yet.

It’s October, and since his time working for Handie over the summer as a carpenter’s apprentice, 14-year-old Rainbow’s own carpentry skills have improved, and he has bought himself a set of his own tools. Although Rainbow has faced his share of racism, even from people in his own small town, he is generally well-liked by most people because he is kind, friendly, and a good worker. He is still friends with a little white boy named Solomon, who lives nearby. Solomon looks up to Rainbow like an older brother because Rainbow spends time with him, especially since young Solomon’s father died. Solomon has started helping Rainbow with some of his work projects, as a kind of junior assistant. That’s what they are doing when Handie comes with a letter that he has just received from Southerton, the town where the Three Pines farm is.

During the course of the previous book, they befriended a difficult neighbor named Mrs. Blooman, who is the owner of the spirited colt called Lucky. Rainbow, who loves horses and has a talent for handling animals, made friends with Lucky, and he is still the person who is best able to handle him. Mrs. Blooman has had difficulty handling Lucky herself (which is partly her own fault, as the previous book explains), and she has now decided that she wants to sell Lucky. Since nobody handles Lucky as well as Rainbow does, she wants to hire Rainbow to take Lucky to Boston, find a buyer for him, and arrange the sale.

Rainbow is amazed at the job offer. The trip to Southerton was pretty momentous for him, and Boston is farther than he’s ever been, and he has never handled a horse sale before. Still, the money is good, and Rainbow really does like Lucky. Handie suggests that Rainbow think it over and talk to his mother about it. Rainbow is still a minor under the law, but his mother consents for him to take the job, and Handie accompanies Rainbow to Southerton again to pick up Lucky.

Another Stage Coach Journey

In the second book in the series, Handie and Rainbow traveled to Southerton by stage coach, and now, they’re making the same trip again with the same driver, Trigget. Since Trigget is a friend of theirs, they once again ride on top of the stage coach with him, so they can talk along the way, instead of riding inside. Trigget says that they have to stop to pick up another passenger, a young man who is bound for college. Trigget is disparaging of college-educated young men because he thinks that college makes them conceited. However, when college-boy William joins them, he turns out to be more friendly and personable than Trigget thought. Instead of sitting inside the coach, he decides that he would also like to ride on top and chat with them. The author/narrator uses this opportunity to point out that pre-conceived notions about what people are like are often wrong, and you can’t entirely depend on another person’s assessment of what someone else is like:

“Indeed, I think it may be laid down as a general rule, that if you hear a specially unfavorable account of any person whom you do not know, you will find, when you come to get acquainted with him, that he does not more than half deserve the ill account which was given of him. On the other hand, when you hear any one who is a stranger to you very extravagantly commended for certain excellent qualities which he is supposed to possess, you will find, if you come to know him intimately, that he is, after all, not so remarkable as you had been led to expect. People are very prone to exaggerate both the faults and the excellencies of those of whom they speak, by way of making what they say more striking and interesting to those who hear it.”

As they start their journey, Handie and Rainbow catch up with the changes in Trigget’s life since they last saw him. Trigget has gotten married and bought a house. He tells them about the house he bought, which used to belong to another person they also knew. The house needs some fixing up, but Trigget considers it a good deal that was beneficial to both himself and the selling. 

William protests that no deal can be beneficial to both the buyer and seller at the same time because, to his way of thinking, what defines a beneficial deal is the price of what is being sold. If the price is lower than the value of the product, the deal is beneficial to the buyer, and if the price is higher than the value of the product, the deal is beneficial to the seller. Since the price can’t be both higher and lower than the value of the product at the same time, William can’t see how the deal could benefit both the buyer and seller at the same time. (My first thought was, what if the price is neither higher nor lower but simply is the value of the product? However, there are other logical fallacies in William’s argument, as the narrator and the character point out.) The other characters debate the general idea of what makes a deal beneficial, putting forth the idea that the value of anything for sale can be difficult to pinpoint because value may be based on non-tangible aspects of the deal. For example, the same house may be worth more to one person than to another because, aside from the value of the physical aspects of the house, the house may be better suited to the circumstances of the buyer than to the seller, making the buyer view the house as being worth more than the seller might think of it. Rainbow listens to this discussion with interest because he will soon be arranging the sale of Lucky, and he wants the deal he makes to be beneficial to everyone involved.

After they get to Southerton, Rainbow receives instructions for how he can find a buyer and arrange a sale. It will take about four days of travel to reach Boston from Southerton, and Mrs. Blooman is providing money for his traveling expenses. Rainbow will go there on horseback, riding Lucky, and after he sells Lucky, he will return by train. (Unless he fails to sell Lucky, in which case, he is to ride Lucky back to Southerton.) When he gets to Boston, Rainbow is to present Lucky to the owner of a particular stable, Mr. Miles, and this stable-owner will help him to find a buyer for Lucky, if he doesn’t want Lucky himself. Rainbow also has the option to sell Lucky before reaching Boston, provided that he can find a suitable buyer who is willing to pay an acceptable price. 

Handie also gives Rainbow a letter of introduction to present to Mr. Miles, verifying his identity and that he is working for Mrs. Blooman and arranging the sale of Lucky on her behalf. Handie also presents Rainbow with a “certificate”, which he obtained on Rainbow’s behalf from the selectmen of their town before they left home. The “certificate”, as Handie describes it, is a “sort of universal letter of introduction.” This story is set long before drivers’ licenses and other, modern forms of identification, so from a modern standpoint, it performs the functions of an ID card with an added statement on the nature of the subject’s character. The certificate verifies Rainbow’s identity, the fact that is a citizen of his town, that he is known to his town’s leaders, and that he has a good character and can be considered trustworthy, for the benefit of everyone who needs to know any of that. It is signed by the selectmen (the town’s leaders) and says:

“This may certify that the bearer of this, commonly called Rainbow, colored boy, is well known to us, and to all the people of this town, and that he is a boy of excellent character. He is honest, truthful, and trustworthy. He speaks the truth and keeps his promises, and he needs no watching. He is accordingly hereby recommended, as a safe and reliable boy, to all who may have any dealings with him.”

Rainbow puts these important papers in his wallet. Then, he and Handie further discuss the arrangements with Mrs. Blooman. Rainbow wants to know if he needs to arrange a contract or memorandum in writing about their arrangements, but Handie says that this is unnecessary for this type of job. He says that women acting on their own don’t like to arrange contracts in writing like that, but he will act as a witness of the agreement between them, in case there is any dispute later. Handie is a good witness because, while he does care about Rainbow’s welfare and success as a friend, he has no legal or financial claims on the business between him and Mrs. Blooman. Neither of them thinks that there will be any difficult over the arrangement, but it’s important to consider these things, just in case.

The Journey Begins

Before they leave on the trip to Boston, Rainbow talks to Lucky about how he is going to be sold. Rainbow is sad about that because he likes Lucky and doesn’t expect to see him again after the sale. He thinks these few days that they’ll have together while they’re traveling will be their last time together.

Rainbow says that he wishes Handie would buy Lucky and let Rainbow train him and rent him. Trigget has told Rainbow that, if he can get a horse, he will hire Rainbow to carry mail, so if Handie bought Lucky, Rainbow could pay to rent him out of the wages he would earn as a mail carrier. Handie says that he wishes he could buy Lucky, so they could have that arrangement, but the problem is that Handie doesn’t have enough money to buy him and can’t borrow any more right now. He’s already working off a loan from the first book in the series, and he doesn’t think he can take on such a large expense right now. If Handie and Rainbow can’t buy Lucky themselves, they’re just going to have to let someone else buy him.

Rainbow sets out with Lucky the next day. Because he is riding Lucky to Boston, Handie is not going with him, and he is traveling completely alone for the first time. When they first start out, Lucky assumes that they are just going on one of the routine errands around the town, and as they keep going further and further, he starts getting more uneasy. He keeps wanting to turn back and looks for an opportunity to run away and go home. He almost gets away from Rainbow when they stop to eat, but Rainbow stops him and manages to calm him enough that he can get control of Lucky again.

As Rainbow continues his travels, he gets some questions about his horse from curious people he meets. A couple of them make offers to buy him or suggestions about where he might find a buyer, but none of them leads to anything. Some people make jokes or call him names, but Rainbow ignores them. At one point, he helps a boy with an injured foot, and the boy’s grateful mother gives him supper. She offers to let him spend the night, but he says that he wants to get further before the day ends.

Eventually, he stops at a cheap tavern and asks for a room. They say that he can stay the night, and he puts Lucky in their barn for the night. A black woman working in the kitchen gives Rainbow dinner and says that she will make up a bed for him, but Rainbow says that he would rather sleep in the barn to be near Lucky. It’s a good thing that he does because he overhears a couple of suspicious men he saw earlier talking about stealing his horse (and using some derogatory language about him while they do it). At first, they consider taking Lucky out of the barn that night, but then, they think about how people at the tavern have seen them and might identify them. Instead, they talk about waylaying Rainbow and Lucky further down the road, in the woods. After the men leave, Rainbow talks to Lucky, reassuring him. He also makes a pun about their use of the word “black” to describe him, saying to Lucky that these men seem like the real “black fellows.” (I think he’s referring to “black” in the old-fashioned, literary sense of “evil or sinister”, in this case. These sinister men are “black” in different way than Rainbow is, and it’s a much worse way.) Forewarned of their plans, Rainbow takes steps to make sure that the men can’t get into the barn again that night, and he foils their plans to steal Lucky the next day.

After this experience, Rainbow decides that traveling through smaller towns and country roads is too risky. He thinks that he might be safer from thieves if he sticks to better-traveled roads and bigger towns. When he comes to a larger town, he rents a room at a tavern for the night, and he is approached by a man who calls himself Mr. Truman. Mr. Truman is interested in buying Lucky, and he invites Rainbow to come to his room later to discuss it. The author/narrator informs readers immediately that Mr. Truman is a criminal, so there is no suspense about that, but there is some suspense about how or whether Rainbow will realize it in time to avoid being cheated by him or turning Lucky over to him.

When Rainbow meets with Mr. Truman later about Lucky, Mr. Truman agrees to the price that Mrs. Blooman wants for Lucky. Rainbow is pleased about finding a potential buyer who is willing to pay the right price, and he shows Mr. Truman the papers he has to prove that he is authorized to sell the horse. Mr. Truman asks Rainbow if he will return to Southerton immediately after selling Lucky, and Rainbow says that his plan is to take the train back. Mr. Truman suggests that they meet the next morning at the local train station, shortly before the train to Southerton will leave, to carry out the sale of Lucky, and Rainbow agrees.

However, after leaving Mr. Truman’s room, Rainbow begins to have some doubts about the deal and Mr. Truman himself. On the one hand, he was pleased to get an agreement to buy Lucky so easily, but on the other hand, he realizes that he doesn’t really know anything about Mr. Truman. Maybe Mr. Truman won’t show up to the train station at all to buy Lucky, or if he does, maybe he won’t bring the amount of money he agreed to pay or the money could be counterfeit. Because they agreed to meet shortly before the train will leave, Rainbow realizes that he won’t have much time to count the money or verify that money is real before the train leaves. Maybe that’s part of Mr. Truman’s plan.

Rainbow decides to ask the staff at the tavern what they know about Mr. Truman, but nobody there is able to tell them much. He’s just a man who arrived at the tavern recently and rented a room. Nobody there knows much about him, his background, or his business. Rainbow feels a little more uneasy, and he decides that, when they meet at the train station, he will ask the man who runs the ticket office to help him count the money and verify that the money is good because he figures that the person who sells the train tickets is accustomed to handling money and will know if there’s anything wrong with Mr. Truman’s payment.

When Rainbow arrives at the train station the next day, he finds the ticket seller, shows him his identification papers, and explains to him about the sale of Lucky and that he would like him to observe the sale and verify Mr. Truman’s payment to him. The ticket seller, Mr. Jones, seems intrigued by his request. He and some other men in the station’s freight office discuss Mr. Truman, and none of them know of anyone by that name in this town. Mr. Jones asks Rainbow some further questions about where he met Mr. Truman and what he knows about him. Although Rainbow doesn’t know it, there has been talk in this town about counterfeiters, and there has been some bad money found in the town. What Rainbow says about Mr. Truman awakens some suspicions that Mr. Jones and the other men have had about the origins of the bad money. Mr. Jones and the other men explain to Rainbow what they know about counterfeit money being spread in the town. They agree to witness the sale of Lucky, but they give Rainbow specific instructions about what to do and say so that Mr. Truman won’t sense their suspicions about him too soon and run away before they have evidence against him.

When Mr. Truman comes to buy Lucky, he seems unsettled when Rainbow calls Mr. Jones over to count and verify the money. Mr. Truman tries to make an excuse about wanting to talk to someone so he can leave, but the other men stop him, and he is arrested by an officer. Rainbow is astonished that his vague suspicions about Mr. Truman were correct and that Mr. Truman is an even worse criminal that he thought. He is also relieved that he didn’t go through with selling Lucky to this man. Rainbow offers to pay Mr. Jones for his help in observing the sale and stopping him from making a bad deal, but Mr. Jones says that isn’t necessary. After all, Rainbow has also provided a service by helping to expose the counterfeiter who has been spreading bad money all over town. As a reward for helping to catch the counterfeiter, Mr. Jones provides Rainbow with a pass for himself and a place for Lucky in the horse-box on the next train to Boston, saving them time and money on their journey. He even makes Rainbow’s ticket a round-trip ticket so that he can return to Southerton by train when his business in Boston is concluded.

Going to Boston

Lucky, being a horse, finds the train ride upsetting and disorienting. At first, Rainbow isn’t sure which car he should enter or where he should sit on the train, but the brakeman tells him he can sit wherever he likes because “they don’t pay any attention to color on this road, except it be the color of their money.” In other words, this train isn’t racially segregated; all they care about is whether or not the passengers have bought tickets. The brakeman explains more about how hard his work is as a brakeman, which is very hard for the money is paid. Nobody pays him enough to care about passengers’ race as well. Rainbow asks him why he stays in the job, since it sounds pretty demanding, and the brakeman says that it was hard enough to just get this job; getting another, different job would be even harder.

Since the train is about to leave, Rainbow gets on and looks around for an open seat. There are some ladies on board who have filled up some vacant seats with their parcels. Rainbow doesn’t want to disturb them, but a well-dressed young man, looking for a seat himself and seeing Rainbow’s difficulty in finding a place to sit, says that he will find a place for them both. Because the young man is handsome and charming, he is able to convince a young lady to allow him to put her parcels in the upper rack so that he and Rainbow can have the seats she was using for them. When the young man tells a story about how it is wrong to take more than a person has paid for, such as taking up multiple seats when she has only paid for just one, he tells it so charmingly and not in a directly accusing way, that the lady isn’t offended by it. The young man indicates that he thinks that men do this less often on trains than ladies because they are more acquainted with the transactional nature of train travel.

When Rainbow says that this is his first time traveling by train, the man lets Rainbow have the window seat so he can enjoy the view. Rainbow finds the view whizzing past the window as disorienting as Lucky does, although he enjoys it much more. As he watches the scenery moving past, he wonders why it seems like objects that are closer to the train move by faster than ones that are further away. He is tempted to ask the young man about it, but before he can think how to ask the question, the young man gets up from his seat.

When the train reaches Boston, Rainbow reclaims Lucky from the horse-box, and they set out to find Mr. Miles’s stables. Rainbow tries to ask a newsboy for directions, but the newsboy makes fun of him instead, teasing him about his race, “Say, Pompey, how came you both to be so black, you and your horse? Did he catch it of you, or did you catch it of him?” Rainbow ignores him and finds someone else to ask.

Getting around in Boston is tricky, especially for a person who has never been to the city before. A butcher tells Rainbow that the full instructions would be too complicated for him to understand and remember all at once, so he advises Rainbow to take it in steps. He gives Rainbow a part of the directions to his destination, the first street he needs to go down and the first turn he needs to make, and then advises him to ask the next person he sees when he has gone that far. Rainbow continues to ask directions of people in this way, and through a series of questions and answers and getting lost a couple of times, he gradually makes progress and finds his destination.

When Rainbow finds Mr. Miles’s stable, he shows Mr. Miles his papers and explains why he has brought Lucky there. Mr. Miles has one of his workers put Lucky in the stables, and he talks to Rainbow about his journey. He is impressed by the story about how he helped catch the counterfeiter, and he shows Rainbow to a restaurant where he can buy some dinner before they take a look at Lucky and discuss finding a buyer for him. When Rainbow returns, Mr. Miles examines Lucky carefully, and he is pleased with Lucky’s condition. He thinks that he won’t have any trouble finding a buyer for Lucky who will be willing to pay the price that Mrs. Blooman requests.

Soon, a man and a young boy come to the stables, and the boy is immediately fascinated with Lucky. The boy, called Johnny, says that he would like to ride Lucky, and Rainbow offers to take him for a ride because he has taken other boys for rides on Lucky before. The man, who is called Colonel Hammond (often simply called “the colonel”), agrees that Johnny can have a ride with Rainbow. While they have their ride, the colonel talks to Mr. Miles about Rainbow and Lucky. 

The colonel agrees that Lucky seems like a fine young horse, and he would consider buying him, but he already owns many other horses and doesn’t need another one. He is impressed with how well Rainbow handles Lucky and how well he works with young Johnny and asks Mr. Miles what he knows about him. Mr. Miles shows the colonel the identification papers that Rainbow provided to him, and the colonel is pleased with the statement about Rainbow’s character. He asks Mr. Miles about Rainbow’s plans while he is in the city. Mr. Miles doesn’t quite know about Rainbow’s plans, although he knows that he will probably be there for another day or two while they’re looking for a buyer for Lucky. Mr. Miles is planning to offer Rainbow a place to stay among the hostlers in the stable. The colonel says that he would like to invite Rainbow to stay at his house.

The colonel asks Rainbow if he would be willing to drive young Johnny home in the chaise and tells him that, if he would be willing to stay at his house while he’s in Boston, he would be welcome. Rainbow is happy to take Johnny home, and the colonel says that he if goes to the side door of the house and asks for Phebe, she will take care of him. Rainbow takes Johnny home and then drives the chaise back to the stable. He asks Mr. Miles if he should accept the colonel’s offer to stay with him, and Mr. Miles says that would be a good idea. The colonel is a wealthy man with a good reputation.

Rainbow returns to the colonel’s house again and asks for Phebe. Phebe is a black woman who works for the colonel, and she is expecting him. The two of them talk about Rainbow’s journey to Boston, and Rainbow also tells her about his home town. Then, Phebe suggests that he visit the colonel’s stable to see his horses. The colonel’s private stable is relatively small, much smaller than Mr. Miles’s stable, and there are two horses there. The colonel owns more horses than these two, but he boards the others with Mr. Miles. Rainbow is pleased with the stable and horses, and he helps the man who works in the stable until it’s time for supper.

Rainbow has supper with Phebe, and Colonel Hammond has another servant deliver the message that he would like to see Phebe in the library after supper. Phebe goes to talk to Colonel Hammond, and then, she tells Rainbow that Colonel Hammond would like to talk to him about Lucky.

When Colonel Hammond speaks to Rainbow, he says that he has an idea about buying Lucky on speculation. He thinks that Lucky is worth the price Mrs. Blooman is currently asking but that he might worth more in the future. Earlier, Rainbow had confided in Phebe that, if he had the money, Rainbow would buy Lucky himself so he could get the job carrying mail. Phebe told Colonel Hammond about Rainbow’s wish, so Colonel Hammond proposes that he buy Lucky on Rainbow’s behalf, with the idea that Rainbow will pay him back later, with interest. That way, Rainbow can have the horse and get the job he wants right now, and the colonel will gain a profit on his investment later. Rainbow is concerned about his ability to repay the debt, and the colonel tells him that he can pay in installments after he has started earning money from his new job. Colonel Hammond believes that it’s a safe investment because he thinks that Rainbow is trustworthy and will repay the debt in time, and if he can’t, for some reason, Colonel Hammond would have the horse, which is a good horse. To further secure the deal, Colonel Hammond says that they should buy insurance for the horse, in case Lucky gets sick or killed in an accident.

Rainbow is thrilled with Colonel Hammond’s proposal, although he is so overwhelmed that he isn’t sure how to respond at first. Colonel Hammond says that he can take some time to think it over, and Rainbow decides to write a letter to Handie Level about the deal, to see if he thinks this is a good arrangement. Colonel Hammond says that’s fine, and since it will take a couple of days to get a reply to the letter, he would be willing to have Rainbow stay in his house until the reply comes. Colonel Hammond provides Rainbow with a written proposal of the agreement between them to study and to describe to Handie.

When Handie’s reply arrives, Handie advises Rainbow to accept the deal with Colonel Hammond. Handie has spoken to Trigget, and Trigget is still willing to offer Rainbow the job of carrying the mail. Rainbow tells Colonel Hammond that he has decided to accept his offer, and they complete the transaction. Since Rainbow still has a return pass to Southerton for the train, he decides to use it for himself and to use some of his remaining money to pay for Lucky to travel by train, which shortens their journey considerably and saves them money finding places to stay on the way.

The return trip to Southerton takes only hours by rail rather than days by the road. In Southerton, he gives Mrs. Blooman the money for Lucky, and the next day, he and Lucky leave for Rainbow’s home town. Once he gets there, he accepts the job from Trigget. The author/narrator tells us that Rainbow performs the job well, although there are difficulties along the way, which we get to hear about in the final installment of the series.

My Reactions

Overall, I liked the story. I was a little concerned for Lucky’s welfare along the way, even though I already knew that Rainbow was going to end up as his owner eventually because I already knew the general course of the series. I just wasn’t sure exactly how that would happen. I was relieved that nothing really bad happened to the horse along the way because I always get upset with stories where bad things happen to animals.

There is a theme in 19th century and early 20th century books that I call “Rich People to the Rescue.” Although themes of hard work and having a good character are prevalent during that period, and the Stories of Rainbow and Lucky have those themes as well, I’ve noticed that the reward that hard-working people often receive in these stories is that some rich person will recognize and reward their hard work and good character. This story follows that same pattern. I liked the part where Rainbow helps to expose the counterfeiter and the kind ticket seller at the train station rewards him with a free train ticket, but I did feel like Colonel Hammond arranging everything for Rainbow at the end was kind of sudden. Colonel Hammond is a wealthy man, and Mr. Miles says that he often makes speculative investments of that kind to promote people or causes he thinks might be worth it. Because Colonel Hammond has plenty of money, it’s a small risk for him to do this, although he is reasonably careful about securing his investment with well-defined terms and insurance. Framing Colonel Hammond’s generosity as a business arrangement rather than pure charity does make it seem a little more realistic to me than those stories where a rich person just automatically buys things for the deserving main characters unconditionally, and I think that’s what the author means when he has Mr. Miles say that what Colonel Hammond does to help people is better than simply giving people money. Colonel Hammond enables people to proceed with useful projects and ventures in a practical and realistic way.

Racism

Racism is a constant theme throughout this series because Rainbow is black. It’s a bold choice for a children’s series written on the eve of the American Civil War. However, I was somewhat surprised that there was less racism in this particular installment of the series than I expected. 

This is the first story in the series where Rainbow is traveling alone instead of under the protection of a white employer. I could see that would make him more vulnerable, and the story does say that young black men who leave home feel more uncertain and vulnerable because they don’t know what kind of reception they might receive from people they meet and they’re aware that it can be nasty. In the first book in the series, the lawyer from their home town even says that there are some places that won’t offer food or accommodation to a black person during their time, which is a difficulty when traveling. At first, I expected to see an example of this with Rainbow traveling alone. However, he is never turned away from taverns or inns where he rents rooms for the night, and he doesn’t seem to have any difficulty finding places to eat. He does meet with thieves and con men along the way, but they’re more general criminals, not targeting him specifically because of his race. There are some random people Rainbow meets on his journey who say rude or derogatory things to him, but that’s about it. Also, nobody has used the n-word since Mrs. Blooman did it in the previous book in the series. I’m just surprised that Rainbow didn’t encounter more problems of that kind or that he wasn’t refused service anywhere.

I’m trying to decide whether Rainbow’s difficulties with racism in the story are more low-key than I expected because that’s more in keeping with the usual daily experienced of the times or if it’s because the author decided to put more emphasis on Rainbow’s adventures with the criminals he encounters. I’m leaning toward the idea that the author wants to put the emphasis on the adventure part of the story and on how Rainbow’s hard work and good character are rewarded in the end. If nobody in his time and location refused service to a black person, the concept of that happening wouldn’t have been mentioned earlier in the series. 

Travel in the 19th Century

The author, Jacob Abbott, likes showing the details of daily life in his time in his stories, and it’s interesting to read about Rainbow’s travels. In this story, we get to see Rainbow take his first train ride, during which we have an interesting observation about the way scenery appears to move thought the train window, and we also get a complaint about ladies with the habit of taking up extra train seats with their parcels and a lesson on why this is a form of theft. I get the feeling that the author has encountered this situation before, and it really annoys him, although he delivers his rebuke as diplomatically as he can.

We also get to see Rainbow eating in a city restaurant rather than the small town or countryside taverns where he has been before. I found the description of the restaurant interesting. It was one of the places where I though that Rainbow might be refused service at first, but he encounters no difficulties there. What particularly fascinated me about the restaurant is that all the food is pre-made and on display for people walking in to select what they want to eat. Foods that don’t need to be kept hot, like pies and sandwiches, are simply laid out on the counter, and hot dishes are kept behind the counter, warmed by “spirit lamps.” It seems almost like modern fast food, being kept warm under heating lamps. Rainbow just tells the restaurant staff what he wants from the foods he sees, and they give it to him. I see the benefits of this system because, especially in an era without microwaves to quickly warm up food, people can’t wait for dishes they just ordered to be cooked from scratch. Things need to be prepared when they come in. I just didn’t expect it to be so similar to the methods we use for modern fast food. I am a little concerned that the foods that are simply laid out on the counter, like sandwiches with cold meat in them are not being kept at a proper temperature, but it may not matter if they are not there for long because customers claim them pretty quickly.