Posted on by TracyC

Once Upon a Dark November

Once Upon a Dark November by Carol Beach York, 1989.

Katie Allen likes her part-time job helping Mrs. Herron with her housework. One of the best parts of the job is that she gets to see Mr. Herron, her English teacher, at home. Katie has a crush on Mr. Herron, although no one but her best friend knows it.

One day, while she’s at the Herrons’ house, Mrs. Herron tells her that her cousin Martin is coming for a visit. She says that Martin hasn’t been in Granville in years, although he used to live with their aunt when he was young. Their aunt is Miss Gorley, the creepy lady who lives across the street from Katie’s house. When Martin arrives, he turns out to be pretty creepy himself. He never says very much to anyone and spends a lot of his time just staring out the window. Mrs. Herron is not happy to have him there and wishes that he would leave.

One day, Martin disappears, and the next day, Miss Gorley is found murdered in her house. Did Martin return to Granville just to murder his aunt? Where is he now, and who is that mysterious person who tried to attack Katie at her house, dressed in a Frankenstein costume? Did Katie see something that she wasn’t meant to see?  Katie doesn’t remember seeing anything important, but now she has to figure out what it was before it’s too late!

This book is not for young children.  It would be best for kids in middle school (about 12 and up).  There is murder and attempted murder, including the attempted murder of Katie, who is a child, because the murderer of Miss Gorley thinks that she knows too much.  There is also some discussion of child abuse, which was part of the motive behind Miss Gorley’s murder.  Katie did see some things that are important to the case, but their full importance doesn’t occur to her until the attempt on her own life.  People are not quite who they seem to be, and some of Katie’s initial impressions were closer to the truth than someone wants her to know.

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

Posted on by TracyC

No More Magic

NoMoreMagic

No More Magic by Avi, 1975.

Chris has a fun time on Halloween with his best friend, Eddie.  The two of them are dressed as superheroes.  Eddie is Batman, and Chris is the Green Lantern.  However, the next morning he discovers that his bike is missing.

Chris loves his bike because of its wonderful green color.  He thinks of green as a magical color, and the bike has a great shimmery kind of green paint that reminds him of the Green Lantern.  Although his green bike was a little old and his mother gets a good deal on a newer yellow bike, Chris misses his old one and begins investigating, trying to figure out who could have taken it.

At first, the challenge seems difficult.  On Halloween night, lots of people were running around in costume.  However, Chris’s community isn’t too big, and he is able to identify many of the people who came to the house around the time that the bike disappeared.  One kid that he doesn’t know well is Muffin, a new girl at school, who came to the house in a nurse costume.  There was also a mysterious kid who came in a warlock outfit, with a cape and a tri-cornered hat.

When Chris interviews Muffin to see if she knows anything about his missing bike, he learns that the warlock costume originally belonged to her.  She had made it herself and was proud of it, but someone stole it while it was hanging up to dry.  The nurse costume was a last-minute substitute.  Chris thinks that whoever was wearing the warlock outfit is the most likely suspect for stealing his bike because the local police chief told him that a man had complained that someone riding a bike like his and wearing a costume like the warlock costume ran into him.  He suggests that the two of them team up to find the mysterious warlock/thief and get their stuff back.

Muffin is kind of a strange girl and is oddly evasive about her life and family.  At first, all she will tell Chris is that her real name is Maureen (but she doesn’t like that name) and that she has come to town to live with her aunt because her parents “aren’t around.”  Her aunt seems somewhat strict, and Chris donates some of his own money to Muffin to help her buy a used bike so the two of them can ride around together, looking for clues.

One of the first things they learn is that the person wearing the warlock costume won the prize for the best costume at the Halloween parade downtown.  Chris didn’t attend the Halloween parade, but his friend, Eddie, says that he went.  However, Muffin and Chris notice that Eddie’s name wasn’t on the list of attendees.  When they try to ask Eddie about it, he becomes strangely angry.  Chris doesn’t want to think that his best friend could have stolen his bike or the warlock costume or both, but why would he try so hard to avoid answering their questions if he didn’t have something to hide?

Then, Chris learns why Muffin is so secretive about her life.  The school counselor has noticed that Chris has made friends with Muffin, which she thinks is good, but she tells Chris’s mother about Muffin’s circumstances because she thinks that they should know.  Muffin’s parents recently split up.  For unknown reasons, her mother walked out on her father.  Muffin’s father was distraught when his wife left, and he decided that he should go after her and try to straighten things out with her.  He left Muffin with her aunt and went to try to find his wife, although no one really knows exactly where they went or when Muffin’s father might be back to get her.  The part that worries the school counselor is that Muffin seems to be blaming her parents’ problems and their mysterious absence on magic.  She thinks that magic made her mother go away and that magic is what’s keeping her father away.  The school counselor thinks that being friends with Chris, who is a pretty practical kid (even though he also believes in magic a little), will help bring Muffin down to Earth, and Chris’s mother encourages him to be nice to Muffin and bring her over for dinner.

Still, Chris can’t shake the thought of magic from his head.  He has the strange feeling that, somehow, his magic bike and the magic that Muffin is looking for to get her parents back are connected.  One night, he even thinks that he sees the warlock flying across the sky with his bike, although his father thinks that he dreamed the whole thing.  Neither of his parents believes in magic, and Chris even comes to question whether Muffin is to be trusted.  However, as Chris’s father says, it’s often a matter of asking the right questions before ending up with the wrong answers.

Muffin’s belief in magic comes from what her father said after her mother left.  He said that “the magic had gone,” and he blamed himself for being too self-centered to realize it.  Adults would realize that “the magic” the father was talking about is the romantic feelings that come with love, but Muffin had interpreted the phrase literally.  When her father decided to go after her mother and try to work things out, he said that he was going to “go and find the magic and make it work again.”  Again, Muffin believed that was literally what he was going to do.

It turns out that there are perfectly logical explanations for what happened to both Chris’s bike and the warlock costume, and the two missing objects are not necessarily connected.  Much of what happened on Halloween night involved a series of coincidences, deceptions, and misunderstandings, but even when the full truth becomes known, Chris and Muffin can’t shake the thought that there was a kind of magic behind it all.  Plus, as the kids had guessed, Muffins parents return when they find Chris’s magic bike.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Who Knew There’d Be Ghosts?

Who Knew There’d Be Ghosts? By Bill Britain, 1985.

Tommy Donahue and his friends, Wendy “Books” Scofield (the smartest kid in their class as well as being pretty tough) and Harry “the Blimp” Troy (known for being the tallest and biggest kid in their class), prefer playing around the abandoned Parnell house instead of at the park because they like to play games of pretend, based on adventure stories that Tommy has read.  It’s hard to play games of pretend in such a public place as the park because other people either laugh or think that they’re just getting in the way.  Almost nobody goes near the old Parnell house because people think that it’s haunted.  They’re right; it is haunted.

Some people in their town have been trying to arrange for the Parnell house to be turned into a museum because the Parnells were the founding family of their town, but the movement hasn’t been able to raise the money needed to renovate the place.  Now, Tommy’s father, a lawyer, has been recruited to arrange for the house to be purchased by a private citizen who says that he wants to renovate the house and use it as his own residence.  However, Tommy and his friends overhear the buyer, Avery Katkus, and a confederate talking as they look over the house.  Mr. Katkus isn’t interested in the house at all; he wants something valuable that is hidden inside.  When they hear the two men plotting to sneak into the house at night to do some searching for this mysterious something, the kids decide that they will come back at night and watch for them to find out what they’re looking for.  The kids don’t want anything bad to happen to the house because they’ll lose their private playground.

Tommy is the first to go and check out the Parnell house at night, and that’s when he meets the ghosts, Horace and Essie Parnell.  At first, Horace tries to scare Tommy away, but when Tommy explains that he only came to keep watch, Horace asks him what he means by that.  Tommy explains to him about Mr. Katkus, and Horace says that he could use Tommy’s help.  Years ago, Horace’s father made a dying wish that all members of their family should be buried in the family cemetery on the property of the house.  Most of the members of the family are buried there, but Horace, who was killed during the Revolutionary War, and Essie, who accidentally fell overboard from a riverboat and was permanently lost in the Mississippi River, were only two Parnells who were not buried on the property, so their spirits are now bound to the house.  Naturally, Horace and Essie are concerned with the future of the house.

Tommy tries to tell his friends about the ghosts, but they don’t believe him until they see the ghosts for themselves.  When the three kids return to the house the next night, Horace saves them from being attacked by Mr. Katkus’s hired confederate.  Now convinced of the ghosts’ existence, Harry and Books are eager to help save the house, and the key in doing so is discovering what kind of hidden treasure the house holds.

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

Posted on by TracyC

The Secret of Terror Castle

The Three Investigators

TITerrorCastle#1 The Secret of Terror Castle by Robert Arthur, 1964, 1992.

In the first book in the series, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob form the Three Investigators, an organization dedicated to solving all kinds of mysteries.  It was particularly Jupiter’s idea. They have been friends for a long time, and they used to have a club dedicated to solving puzzles. Now, they’ve decided that they want to solve more complicated problems and mysteries. Jupiter has won the use of a Rolls Royce and chauffeur for a month by entering a contest at an auto rental agency, so he thinks that it would be a good time to get started because they will have transportation to anywhere in the city.

Jupiter also has an idea for their first case, something that will help them get publicity for their new investigative organization. There is a rumor that a director, Reginald Clarke, is looking for a genuine haunted house to be the setting of his next movie. Jupiter manages, through some clever trickery, to get an interview with Reginald Clarke and persuades him to introduce this account of their first case if he and the other investigators can find a genuine haunted house right in town. Clarke takes them up on it, not because he thinks they will succeed, but because he sees it as the only way to get Jupiter to stop doing an unflattering impersonation of him.

Jupiter, however, is confident that they will be successful because he already knows the perfect place to investigate. Terror Castle is a large mansion that was built years ago by an old actor who was in silent films. All of his movies were scary ones, and since his death under mysterious circumstances, no one has succeeded in staying in the castle very long. Strange apparitions have been seen there, and anyone who tries to spend the night there is overcome by inexplicable terror. As far as Jupiter is concerned, all they have to do is prove that the castle is really haunted, and that means that the Three Investigators must visit it themselves.

In the original books, the director that Jupiter tries to find a real haunted location for was Alfred Hitchcock.  Alfred Hitchcock introduced the early books in the series and played minor roles in some of them, and The Three Investigators capitalized on his reputation.  When the series was re-released, however, Alfred Hitchcock was replaced by a fictional director, and his role in later books was taken by a fictional mystery author named Hector Sebastian.  In the re-released version of the first book, Reginald Clarke refers the boys to Hector Sebastian at the end of the story so they can help a friend of his to find his missing parrot, which leads directly into the subject of the next book.

The haunting in this story (as with others in the series) has a reasonable explanation, not a supernatural one.  In fact, one of the things that I always found memorable about this book was the explanation of how the inexplicable feelings of terror people experienced were created using sound waves which could be felt but which were beyond the normal range of human hearing.  I’m not sure whether the book was completely correct about the science behind this technique, but I have heard about sounds being used to create odd or even harmful effects on human beings in real life.  As for the reasons behind the haunting, they concern the original owner of the castle and the life he lived.

This is one of the books in the series which was made into a movie, The Three Investigators and the Secret of Terror Castle, but the movie was very different from the original book.  In the movie, the owner of the castle was an inventor, not an actor.  Part of the plot also concerned Jupiter’s deceased parents and a mystery that they had been investigating.  Jupiter’s parents were not part of the original book at all.  A villain who appears in some of the other books in the series also makes an appearance in the movie, although he had nothing to do with this particular story in the original series.  Overall, I don’t recommend the movie for fans of the original series.  The changes don’t seem to be for the better, and I think people who remember how the original story was and liked it would be disappointed in the movie.

There are multiple copies of this book available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive, both the original version with Alfred Hitchcock and the updated one.

Posted on by TracyC

Frankenstein and the Whiz Kid

Frankenstein and the Whiz Kid by Vic Crume, 1975.

This book is a novelization of a made-for-tv Disney movie called The Whiz Kid and the Carnival Caper (some editions of this book also use that title).  There was also an earlier movie with the same characters called The Whiz Kid and the Mystery at Riverton.  I haven’t been able to find either of these movies for sale or on YouTube.  Both of the movies are based on a character created for a series of books by Clifford B. Hicks.

The “Whiz Kid” is Alvin Fernald, a boy who is always creating amazing inventions.  He has quite a reputation in his town.  Sometimes, people also call him “The Magnificent Brain.”

One day, his sister, Daphne (called “Daffy”), borrows one of Alvin’s rockets, showing a friend how they work.  However, the rocket ends up falling down a storm drain, and Daffy climbs in to retrieve it.  Alvin comes along as Daffy has trouble getting out and gives her directions to the storm drain’s opening.  Daffy follows the directions and gets out, but while she’s still walking around in the storm drain, she sees a mysterious man with a gun.  Fortunately, he doesn’t spot her, but she wonders what he was doing in the storm drain with a gun.

The place where the storm drain comes out is near a carnival that has come to town.  Alvin, Daffy, and Alvin’s friend Shoie want to go to the carnival, but they need some money.  To get some, Alvin brings out one of his earlier invention, a car-washing machine.  The others are dubious about that invention because it has caused problems before, but Alvin says that he’s fixed it.

Their first prospect for a car wash is the person who has moved into a spooky old house in their neighborhood.  It turns out to be a beautiful young woman named Cathy Martin.  Alvin is eager to impress her, but unfortunately, his invention goes haywire and ends up making a mess that the kids have to clean up (as well as making apologies to other people affected by the chaos).  However, Cathy agrees to go to the carnival with Alvin.

The carnival turns out to be an opportunity for another of Alvin’s inventions when the automaton that they’re using as Frankenstein’s monster in a carnival show breaks down.  Alvin also has a robot that he has built, and he offers the use of it to the man who works on the carnival’s automaton, so the show won’t have to close down.  The man accepts Alvin’s offer, and Daffy volunteers to help with the robot’s costume.

Cathy meets them at the carnival, and to Alvin’s annoyance, suggests that the four of them have fun together, instead of just her and Alvin.  The four of them do have fun, but they stumble onto something strange about Cathy.  They spot a man who Alvin and Shoie met at Cathy’s house.  Cathy said that he was her younger brother, on leave from his base, and that he had to be heading back there soon.  But, Alvin and Shoie wonder what he’s doing at the carnival if he’s supposed to be back and his base.  Then, Daffy recognizes him as the man she saw in the storm drain with a gun!  Who is he really?

The kids decide to spy on Cathy’s house, and they learn that the man, called Ernie, and the magician from the carnival, Moroni, are planning a bank robbery and that Cathy is in on their plans.  It’s a terrible disappointment to Alvin because he liked Cathy, but he thinks that they have a duty to tell Police Chief Moody about their plans.

Chief Moody is somewhat skeptical about what the kids overheard, but he and he deputy stakeout the bank.  When nothing happens, he thinks that the kids raised a false alarm, but it turns out that the robbers’ plan is more complicated than they know.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Terror By Night

PFTerrorNight

Terror By Night by Vic Crume, 1971.

This book is part of the Partridge Family book series, based on the The Partridge Family tv show.

Shirley has been thinking that she and her children could use a vacation, and her family band’s manager, Reuben Kinkaid, suggests a place where they could have a little vacation and do some rehearsing.  Reuben arranges for the family to rent a large house with several acres of land attached in a small New England town not far from Salem, Massachusetts.  That should have been their first clue.  That, and the fact that the town’s name is Haunt Port.

At first, the Partridges are just thinking about how they can rehearse without disturbing anyone on such a big place, and Danny and Chris want to try camping out.  However, when they arrive in town, they learn that the name of the house they’ve rented is Witch’s Hollow and that it’s close to a place called Hangman’s Hill.  Soon after the family arrives at the house, Keith and Laurie also find a dummy hanging from a tree with a note that says, “Welcome! The Hangman.”  It’s pretty disturbing, but Keith and Laurie decide to hide the dummy and not scare the others.  They don’t know who is behind this awful joke, but they don’t want to give that person the satisfaction of seeing them react to it.

However, the disturbing things don’t end there.  The family’s dog, Simone disappears.  Also, people in town seem to have a strange attitude toward the house’s cook/housekeeper, Mrs. Judbury, and her daughter, Prudence.  Prudence is sullen and anti-social with a habit of catching toads for fun.  Keith has to admit that he can see how Prudence might have gotten a reputation for being a witch, but there’s more behind the strange happenings at Witch’s Hollow than that.

Simone eventually returns, although it’s clear that she’s frightened and hasn’t been fed well, and Mrs. Judbury tells the family the story of her family’s history in Haunt Port.  One of Mrs. Judbury’s husband’s ancestors was one of the accusers at the Salem witchcraft trials, but later, when people began to realize that they had executed innocent people, some of the accusers themselves found public opinion turning against them.  This ancestor decided to leave Salem and go to Judbury Port (the old name for Haunt Port) because he had family there, but he and his wife were never really accepted there, either.  This man later hanged himself in despair (at the place called Hangman’s Hill), and his wife later died alone, also shunned by the town.  Although some of the townspeople might feel bad about how things ended up with the Judburys, the old uneasy feelings about the family have remained, and Prudence’s stand-offish attitude, combined with her mother’s apparent psychic premonitions, has fueled some of the old stories.

At one point, Keith tells Prudence that he knows why she acts the way she does, because it’s much easier for her to keep her distance from people and behave strangely than it is for her to try to learn to get along with them and make friends.  Prudence isn’t responsible for what the townspeople did in the past, but she isn’t helping things in the present.  Jane Parsons, whose family owns the local store, also helps in a way because she and Prudence are cousins, and Prudence joins her in welcoming a cousin of their and his friend when they visit town.  As Prudence becomes friendlier, she and her mother become allies in trying to figure out the mysteries of Witch’s Hollow, which turn out to have less to do with past wrongs than current crimes.

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

Posted on by TracyC

The Haunted Hall

The Partridge Family

PFHauntedHall#2 The Haunted Hall by Michael Avallone, 1970.

The Partridge Family will be performing at the Larkland Rock Festival, which is great because, not only was their presence specially requested by the governor of the state, but Laurie will get the chance to meet her crush, fellow rock singer Jerry Jingo.  There is a catch, though.  Instead of arranging for the family to stay in a hotel, Reuben has rented an old mansion outside of town for them. 

Shirley isn’t thrilled about the accommodations because it sounds like a lot of extra work with no one to do the cooking and cleaning for them, but Reuben promises that he will arrange for a housekeeper, cook, and chauffer.  When Shirley asks Reuben about the owner of the house, Reuben says that the owner, J. Watterson Trumbull, doesn’t live there.  In fact, he is currently living in a sanitarium because he’s an incurable firebug.  That bit of disturbing news doesn’t daunt Shirley, though.  Reuben finally wins her over to the idea of staying in this nice, old mansion, and she even starts thinking that it might be fun.

Unfortunately, due to a mix-up at Reuben’s office, there are no servants waiting for the Partridge Family when they arrive at the Turnbull mansion.  The only person they find there is a young man named Duke, who says that he is the caretaker.  When Shirley asks him if Reuben contacted him about the family staying there, he says that he hasn’t heard anything from anyone because the phone is out.  However, he welcomes the Partridges in.  There aren’t many provisions at the house, so they make do with some canned soup for dinner.  There are plenty of beds, and bedding, though.  Laurie thinks that Duke is handsome, but the house is creepy.  She says that it reminds her of the Collins House from the Dark Shadows tv show.  Duke tells the family more about the house’s firebug owner and that the house is called Satan Hall (a detail which Reuben had not mentioned before).

All in Satan Hall is not what it seems.  On their first night there, Laurie hears crazy laughter coming from somewhere.  Duke is also not what he appears to be.  It’s soon revealed that he is not the caretaker, but he and his friends are rock music fans, squatting in what they thought was an abandoned house while they were on their way to the rock festival.  They’re worried about the family discovering the truth.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the people in the house, J. Watterson Turnbull has escaped from the sanitarium and is on his way home to stage what he hopes will be his biggest fire yet!

This story, while somewhat spooky, isn’t quite as mysterious as some of the other mysteries in this series because the reader ends up knowing the truth about Duke and that Turnbull has escaped before the Partridge Family figures it out.  Really, I thought that Duke and his friends didn’t behave very realistically.  When the Partridges moved into the house, most of Duke’s friends hid upstairs, in the attic, while he covered for them as the “caretaker.”  However, being rock fans on their way to the very festival where the Partridges would be performing and realizing that the Partridges were in need of help, I’m surprised that he didn’t just explain their circumstances, that they were looking for a place to stay and just happened to seek shelter there, and maybe apply for a job working for the Partridges during their stay.  It would have been a fairly easy way to earn a little extra cash doing some household chores or running errands for the family, it would have justified their stay in the house, and they would have gotten to brag about staying in a mansion with a rock group.  Instead, they try to hide and be mysterious.

However, the youths hiding in the attic are not responsible for some of the other strange things about the house.  Besides being a firebug, Turnbull also created some special illusions in different rooms in order to give guests a scare.  Before the end of the story, Turnbull does burn down the mansions (something he ends up regretting, although fortunately, no one gets hurt).  However, he does develop a new interest in music, which the sanitarium hopes will help take his mind off of fire.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Beware the Ravens, Aunt Morbelia

Beware the Ravens, Aunt Morbelia by Joan Carris, 1995.

This is the sequel to Aunt Morbelia and the Screaming Skulls.

Years ago, Aunt Morbelia inherited the Fearing family estate, Harrowwood, after her cousin died.  Aunt Morbelia goes to England to inspect the estate and make some decisions about its future.  The estate is in disrepair, and taxes have been eating up the funds intended for its upkeep.  Todd and his friend, Jeff, also go to England with Aunt Morbelia to see the family estate and famous places in London. 

Some of Aunt Morbelia’s fascination with creepy stories becomes apparent as she recounts the dark history of the estate and the mysterious death of her wicked, possibly murderous, uncle.  He was apparently killed by animals after his cruelty to the animals on his estate was discovered.  When they spend the night at the estate, Todd and Jeff hear a frightening howl.  They are only too happy to move on to London and go sightseeing. 

At Harrowwood, Todd finds an old journal belonging to his aunt’s cousin, Albert, and he thinks it would be interesting to see the places that he visited when he went to London years ago.  Albert was an eccentric man who died in an insane asylum because people thought he was crazy for going around town making bird sounds all the time.  Still, Todd is fascinated by the strange drawings and cryptic notes in the journal.   Before Todd can figure out what they mean, he and Jeff spot mysterious characters following them around, and someone leaves a threatening note at the bed and breakfast where they are staying.  Todd is determined to find out who their mysterious stalkers are and put and stop to it!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The first book in this two-book series wasn’t a mystery, but this one is. (The first book in the series focused more on Todd and Aunt Morbelia getting used to each other when she moved in with Todd and his parents, and it had more discussion of Todd’s dyslexia in it than this one did.) There are things that Aunt Morbelia doesn’t know about her family and the family estate. The estate has meaning for her, but it has greater meaning for someone else, and so does the journal that Todd found. The Fearings have always been an eccentric bunch, and when they learn who has been following them around, Todd and Aunt Morbelia have some suggestions that change things for the better.

Aunt Morbelia didn’t know it, but her cousin had a son before he died, and he is bitter that Morbelia inherited the estate instead of him.  He and his family have been secretly living on the estate for years, and they are afraid that Morbelia will have them thrown off.  They admit that they were trying to scare Aunt Morbelia and Todd away so they could have the estate to themselves.  They also want the journal that Todd found and has been carrying around the whole time.  The journal contains Albert’s notes of his research on birds and bird calls.  Albert believed that he had discovered the language of birds and could communicate with him.  His son wants to carry on his strange work and maybe learn to communicate with other animals, too.  Todd gives the journal back to them, and Aunt Morbelia assures them that she will not throw them off the estate.  In fact, she suggests that they give nature lessons to tourists in order to support the upkeep of the estate.  Because they demonstrated their skill with disguises and acting while following them around London, she also suggests that they put on mystery plays and host mystery weekends on the estate.  They enthusiastically agree to the plan, and Aunt Morbelia and Todd talk about visiting next year to see how things are going.

Posted on by TracyC

Who Stole the Wizard of Oz?

Who Stole the Wizard of Oz? by Avi, 1981.

One summer, Toby and his twin sister Becky see the police go to their local library. To the children’s surprise, Mrs. Brattle, the librarian, phones their house and asks Becky to come down to the library and bring one of her parents.  The children’s parents aren’t home, so Becky and Toby go.  Mrs. Brattle doesn’t seem to want to say much over the phone, only that The Wizard of Oz was stolen, and they need to talk to Becky.

As Becky and Toby walk down to the library from their house, which isn’t far, Becky says that shortly before school let out for the summer, Becky’s teacher for sixth grade next fall handed out a summer reading assignment.  The kids have to write two book reports over the summer, and the books can’t be mysteries, fantasies, or romantic adventures.  Miss McPhearson, the sixth grade teacher, believes in only factual books.  However, Becky decided that the best thing to do was to get the book reports over as soon as possible, so she went to the library.  (Toby wasn’t involved because he has a different teacher.)  While she was there, she decided that she’d check out The Wizard of Oz for Toby, knowing that he likes fantasy books, but she was told that it was already checked out.  Mrs. Brattle told her that there would be a book sale at the library tomorrow and that she had a copy of The Wizard of Oz that Becky could buy for five cents, but since the librarian wouldn’t sell her the book that day and Becky didn’t want to make a special trip to the library the next day, she turned down the offer.

When they come to the library, the policeman accuses Becky of stealing the copy of The Wizard of Oz that the librarian showed her as well as some other children’s books.  According to the librarian, the books were actually valuable collector’s copies, worth thousands of dollars.  Becky asks the librarian why she offered to sell her one for nickel if they were so valuable and Mrs. Brattle says that it was a mistake.  The policeman says that if Becky has the books, she can return them now, and there will be no problem, but Becky is insulted and insists that she didn’t take them.  In the face of Becky’s denial, the policeman says that there isn’t much that he can do because there is only the librarian’s word that the books were valuable, and she doesn’t deny that she earlier tried to sell them for five cents each.  Missing children’s books worth less than a dollar isn’t exactly a police problem.  (I’d like to say here that I was very glad that the policeman took that attitude. I hate those children’s books where adults not only falsely accuse children of doing things that they didn’t do but also make petty incidents seem like major crimes. The policeman is correct that there is no proof that the books were as valuable as the librarian says and that this evaluation of their worth comes only after their sudden disappearance and after she was offering to sell them very cheaply.)

Even though the matter seems to be dropped for the moment, it bothers Becky that the librarian still thinks that she might have taken the books.  She suggests to Toby that they could investigate and try to find out what really happened to the books.  The first thing that they decide to do is to look for the original owner of the books.  After inspecting other children’s books at the sale and looking at the names in the front covers, they decide that Gertrude Tobias is the most likely former owner because many of the other books at the sale belonged to her.  Unfortunately, Gertrude Tobias died a few months ago.  However, it turns out that her niece is Miss McPhearson.  Becky hurriedly finishes her book reports so that she and her brother will have an excuse to visit Miss McPhearson and ask her about the books.

When they ask Miss McPhearson about her aunt, she calls her aunt a “foolish woman” who “didn’t know any better.”  However, she refuses to explain any further what she means, and the children see her crying before they leave.

When the children speak to Mrs. Chesterton, they get a very different picture of Miss McPhearson’s aunt.  When Gertrude Tobias was a young woman, she was wealthy. She could have gotten married if she wanted to, but most of the young men didn’t like women who seemed too smart, and Miss Tobias prided herself on her intelligence and cleverness.  She resented the idea that adults seemed to want women to play dumb to get a husband, so she refused to get married and spent most of her time in the company of children.  Mrs. Chesterton remembers her saying, “Children like me smart. Grown-ups want me stupid.”  She liked to read children’s books, and she often volunteered to read books to children at the library.  The children liked her and often confided in her, just like she was their aunt.  She spent a lot of her money buying children’s books for her collection.  Mrs. Chesterton says that Miss Tobias and her niece never really got along well and that Miss McPhearson used to tease her aunt about her love of children’s books.  However, Miss Tobias was rich, and Miss McPhearson didn’t have much money at all.  Miss Tobias told her that she would leave her all of her “treasure.”  When she died, it turned out that she had left her niece five children’s books – the five that are now missing.  The others were willed to the library.

At first, the picture seems like it’s becoming more clear: Miss Tobias had one last joke on her niece by giving her valuable children’s books that Miss McPhearson thought were worthless simply because they were children’s books, and the person who took them recognized what they were worth as collectors’ items.  However, the situation is actually more complicated than that.  A series of strange break-ins have been occurring around town. Nothing else has been taken, but someone is clearly searching for something.  Miss Tobias was clever, and her books have an even deeper meaning than most people have realized.  To learn Miss Tobias’ secret, Toby and Becky have to learn the secrets of the books themselves.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I really loved the puzzle in this book! There were parts that I got before the kids did and parts that they realized before I did. It isn’t a kind of puzzle that readers call fully solve before the characters in the book because it requires knowledge of their home town to get the full answer.

As an unmarried, childless adult who also enjoys children’s books, I could kind of sympathize with Miss Tobias. Children’s books, like some adults, are often very clever but go unappreciated by people who underrate them for what they appear to be. For example, Through the Looking Glass, which was one of the books featured in the story, involves a game of chess. The author, Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson), was a mathematician. His books are full of word games and logic puzzles, and the chess game described in Through the Looking Glass is an actual chess game that can be played with real pieces on a real board with a definite ending square, where Alice the pawn becomes Alice the queen (one of the clues to solving the final mystery in this book). To many adults who only know the basic story of Alice, it might just seem like a silly, nonsense children’s story, but they miss the real, clever puzzles planted in the story, just like Miss McPhearson did with her aunt’s legacy.

In the end of the story, Miss McPhearson never learns the truth about her aunt’s legacy, just as her aunt knew she would miss it. Toby and Becky come to an understanding with the real thief about Miss Tobias’ treasure that allows the library to benefit from the legacy, which is something that Miss Tobias would have appreciated. Miss McPhearson decides to give up teaching and leaves town to find another job, working with computers, a very “adult” field indeed. It’s only a pity that she wasn’t mature enough to behave nicely with her aunt and not tease her, so that her aunt would be more generous with her. People who play childish games are sometimes surprised when they meet a better game player.

Like Miss Tobias, I have little patience for people who try too hard to be “adult” or are too concerned with whether certain things are right for adults to do, especially when they show their immature sides in other ways. In the story, Miss McPhearson makes a point of being “adult” in all situations, but she wasn’t above childishly taunting an older woman about her hobbies, still expecting that woman to leave her all of her money. It reminds me of the kids I knew in elementary school who liked to act really grown up at age ten. Kids go through a phase where they start talking about doing grown-up things like having first boyfriends and girlfriends and wearing makeup and watching adult tv shows and listening to adult music, but in between doing all of that, they still act like childish brats because what they’re doing is trying on the trappings of adulthood without the real substance. Until they get some real maturity and better behavior, they’re just kids playing dress-up. Sometimes, I think that some people never quite leave that phase, which is how I view the character of Miss McPhearson.

I think of this every time I hear some adult my age or older talking about how real adults drink alcohol or real women wear high heels and lipstick. To hear them talk, there are quite a lot of rules to being grown up that very few people I know actually follow. Alcohol is expensive, plenty of people abstain for health or religious reasons, and driving drunk certainly isn’t mature behavior. High heels damage your feet the more you wear them. I’ve forgotten how much makeup I’ve thrown away because, most days, I’m just too busy to even think about putting it on, and they eventually dry out and get gross. It would be a waste of money for me to buy more, knowing I’ll never use it all. To my way of thinking, if you really are an adult and you know who and what you are, you have nothing to prove. If you aren’t mature as a person, things like high heels and lipstick aren’t going to help you, and alcohol just lowers your inhibitions and makes the immaturity more obvious. Maturity is a way of looking at things, assessing situations, and acting accordingly. It can be difficult to define, but you know it when you see someone living it, not just looking the part. Real adults don’t need to “act” like adults at all times because they aren’t “acting”; they’re just being themselves, confident that they are mature enough to handle what life throws at them along the way.

Posted on by TracyC

Cam Jansen and the Mystery at the Haunted House

Cam Jansen

#13 Cam Jansen and the Mystery at the Haunted House by David Adler, 1986, 1992.

Cam’s Aunt Katie and Uncle George take Cam and her friend Eric to an amusement park.  When they stop to buy food at the refreshment stand, Aunt Katie realizes that her wallet is missing.  She isn’t even sure exactly when it disappeared.  Cam thinks that someone stole her aunt’s wallet.  Who could have taken it?

Cam thinks at first that it might have been a couple of boys on roller skates who ran into her aunt earlier, but it wasn’t them.  Cam notices that another woman is complaining about a lost wallet and realizes that she had gone through the haunted house just before they did.  Someone in the haunted house is taking people’s wallets!

When they all go through the haunted house a second time, Cam figures out that a man dressed in black has been stealing people’s wallets.  When they went through the haunted house the first time, he jumped out at them, and they thought that he was just a part of the attraction meant to scare them.  She spots the man leaving the haunted house and tells the park’s security guards.  Everyone gets their wallets back, and the park’s owner gives Cam four free passes to the park for a month.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.