Posted on by TracyC

Aunt Eater’s Mystery Halloween

AuntEatersHalloween

Aunt Eater’s Mystery Halloween by Doug Cushman, 1998.

This is a cute Halloween book for kids.  There are actually four short mystery stories in the book as Aunt Eater, dressed as Sherlock Holmes, goes to a Halloween party and encounters various spooky happenings.

Aunt Eater Sees a Monster

While she’s on her way to the Halloween party, Wally stops Aunt Eater and says that there’s a monster in his kitchen and that it ate his father.  When Aunt Eater takes a look, she sees a scary shadow in the kitchen and hears a terrible groan.  Is it really a monster?

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Aunt Eater Sees a Ghost

Aunt Eater continues walking to the party with Mr. Chumly, who is dressed as a turnip.  Mr. Chumly points out a hollow tree that they pass and tells her that it’s supposed to be haunted by a headless ghost.  Aunt Eater doesn’t believe in ghost, but then a scary jack o’lantern appears, moving by itself, and it’s followed by a ghost with no head!  Fortunately, there is a logical explanation.

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Aunt Eater Hears Some Music

Aunt Eater is glad to see all of her friends at the party.  Miss Underbelly has brought her pet snake with her.  Later, the piano suddenly starts playing strange music without anyone sitting at it, and the snake has disappeared!  What do you suppose is happening?

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Aunt Eater Dances a Jig

Mr. Fragg, a friend of Aunt Eater’s, is wearing a scarecrow costume, and he tells Aunt Eater that he’d like to dance with her later in the evening.  She does dance with a scarecrow, but then learns that it wasn’t Mr. Fragg because Mr. Fragg hurt his foot.  Who was that mysterious scarecrow?  Aunt Eater never figures it out, but readers do.

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The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Ghost Belonged to Me

GhostBelongedToMe

The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck, 1975.

The book takes place in the 1910s in a small town on the Mississippi River. Alexander Armsworth, a boy in his early teens, is approached by a girl from his class who tells him that the barn on his family’s property is haunted and that Alexander himself has the ability to see the “Unseen.” The girl, Blossom Culp, is a poor girl from a family of outcasts who has been known to tell tall tales, so Alexander isn’t sure he believes her at first. However, he can’t help but be curious, and when he sees a light coming from the barn at night, he decides to investigate.

Inside, he finds the ghost of a young girl who warns him of danger on the trolley tracks near his house and tells him that he must act fast to save everyone. Frightened, Alexander gets the trolley to stop and learns that by doing so, he has saved the lives of everyone on board from a disaster at the bridge further on. Naturally, everyone wants to know how Alexander knew to warn them. When Alexander explains, he is met with skepticism from his social-climbing mother and sister and unwelcome attention from news people and curiosity-seekers from town.

The ghost, who tells Alexander that her name is Inez Dumaine, is also in need of help before she can rest peacefully. Alexander will need the help of those who believe in him and the ghost to find Inez’s body and return it to her home in New Orleans.

In this first book in of the Blossom Culp series, Alexander is the main character, but the other books focus more on Blossom, who discovers that she also has the ability to see ghosts.  The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

This is the movie that the Disney movie Child of Glass was based on, and the movie is available on dvd. Sometimes, you can also find it on YouTube, at least clips and reviews of it.

My Reaction

The story has sad and scary points, but those are balanced out by humorous situations. Alexander’s sister’s turmoil over the fiasco at her coming-out party is hilarious, and his mother’s change in attitude when she realizes that, instead of making them social outcasts, the ghost business actually attracts attention from one of the town’s leading citizens is a hoot. Blossom, of course, is wonderfully nosy, elbowing her way into Alexander’s life and selling tours of the haunted barn.

I was very young when I saw the Disney movie based on this book, Child of Glass (a live action movie that aired on television), and I was afraid of ghosts. However, years later, I took another look at the movie and decided to read the book that it was based on. When I did, I saw things I didn’t appreciate when I was young. The dialog and depiction of life in the early 20th century in the book are wonderful. It conjured up memories of Meet Me in St. Louis, especially the Halloween scene (which took place only about a decade earlier than this story). Unfortunately, this early 20th century setting wasn’t present in the movie version of this book because Child of Glass was placed contemporary with the time it was made, during the late 20th century.

The Disney movie was also different from the original book because it added the feature of the “child of glass” which didn’t exist in the original book. The “child of glass” was mentioned in a poem at Inez’s grave that explained how to lay her ghost to rest. At first, the Alexander and Blossom in the movie don’t know what it means, but it turns out to be Inez’s doll, which was lost when she was murdered by her wicked uncle. In the book, Inez died under different circumstances. However, the discovery of the doll in the movie uncovers the secret motive behind her murder, which is similar to the reason why Inez’s body was hidden in the book after she died in a riverboat accident.  In the book, Inez’s spirit finds rest after her body is found and taken to her family’s cemetery in New Orleans.  The Disney movie also turns this story specifically into a Halloween story, which wasn’t the case in the original book.

Posted on by TracyC

Who’s Haunting the Eighth Grade?

Junior High Series

JHHaunting

#13 Who’s Haunting the Eighth Grade? by Kate Kenyon, 1988.

A group of eighth graders are going on a field trip to see a Shakespeare play in another town, but right from the start, everything seems to be going wrong. The teachers who are accompanying them on their trip are in a foul mood and spend a good part of the trip arguing with each other, which bothers the kids because they know that the teachers have recently become engaged to each other. Then, the bus breaks down in a small town before they can reach their destination.  The entire class is going to have to spend the night somewhere in the small town.

At first, things look like they’re going to improve when the group decides to spend the night at a local bed and breakfast in a big, beautiful, old house. However, their spirits are almost immediately dampened again when they are told that the house is haunted and that anyone who tries to stay there is scared away by the ghost. Still, they proceed with their plan to stay there in order to avoid staying at the dumpy local motel, the only other choice of accommodation.

Needless to say, before the night is over, the ghost puts in an appearance, and strange things start to happen.  By then, the students have come to feel sorry for the owner of the bed and breakfast, a nice older lady who grew up in the house but can’t really afford to keep it unless she can make her inn a success. Can the eighth graders catch the ghost, stop the hauntings, save the bed and breakfast from having to close, patch up the relationship between their feuding teachers, and still make it in time to see the play?

The book takes place in the 1980s, and the kids in the story are 14 years old. They mention the decade somewhere during the course of the story, and the descriptions of the clothes and some pop culture references make the time period fairly obvious. It also has some of the stock characters that books for pre-teens and early teens in the 80s have (ex. a boy-crazy space cadet, a level-headed health nut, a class clown, and a couple of young punks). Still, even though there are some things about the book that are a bit dated, it is still pretty enjoyable. The author has a sense of humor, and she plays with the characters’ stereotypes a bit. The class clown is secretly quite sensitive and even a bit perceptive. There are also a couple of fun scenes when the girl who is only interested in boys is shocked to discover that the boys are more interested in the mystery than in her.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Janie’s Private Eyes

JaniesPrivateEyes

Janie’s Private Eyes by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, 1989.

This is part of the Stanley Family mysteries series.

Janie Stanley has decided to open her own detective agency, The J.V. Stanley Agency, Incorporated, Private Eyes, with the help of her younger siblings and some other friends.  Eight-year-old Janie has had many different aspirations in her young life, from being a Shakespearean actress to being a vampire, so her older brother, David, doesn’t take her detective games too seriously at first.

However, at Mr. and Mrs. Stanley’s New Year’s Eve party, Janie’s “investigations” come to everyone’s attention when she borrows David’s tape recorder to make audio recordings of guests talking and plays them on the stereo that has been hooked up to speakers to play music for the party.  Gossipy Mrs. Dorfman recognizes her own voice, saying uncomplimentary things about her hosts and the other guests, and leaves in a huff of embarrassment.  When Janie’s father confronts her over the incident, Janie says that she was trying to find evidence on a murderer.  When her father and David question her further, she says that old Mr. Rupert, the deceased father of the Mr. Rupert who owns the local grocery store in Steven’s Corners, was murdered.

When old Mr. Rupert died around Thanksgiving, all the kids in the area were sad.  He was always nice to kids when they were in the grocery store and would sometimes give them candy for free.  They called him Grandpa Rupert.  But, Grandpa Rupert’s death was a heart attack, natural causes.  When David asks Janie what makes her think it was murder, she says that she suspects his son and his wife because they inherited the grocery store.  David says that he doesn’t think that Al Rupert would have killed his father.  Janie also says that she heard that there was no autopsy after the death, and she thinks that’s suspicious.  David says that it was well-known that Grandpa Rupert had heart trouble, so a heart attack wasn’t unexpected.  Janie also says that Huy, the younger brother of her friend, Thuy Tran, saw the mailman talking to Grandpa Rupert just before he died, but David doesn’t see why that’s so suspicious.  Eventually, David and her father talk Janie out of her murder investigation idea, but it turns out that the “murder” wasn’t the only investigation that Janie has undertaken.

Dogs in the area have been disappearing, and the Tran family has come under suspicion.  The Trans haven’t been living in the United States for very long.  Originally, they came from Vietnam.  The reason why people are looking at them suspiciously is because dogs started disappearing around the time the Trans moved to the area, and there are rumors that Vietnamese people eat dogs. (Hint: No, the Trans aren’t eating dogs. That’s an old stereotype/rumor that’s been used against various immigrant groups, and no dogs are eaten in this story.)  Janie knows that the Tran family isn’t guilty of dognapping, but proving it is another matter.  After the trouble at the New Year’s Eve party, she asks David and Amanda to help her investigate.  At first, they don’t want to, but David does have to do a journalism project for school with a partner, Pete Garvey.  Pete Garvey is the school bully who also has a crush on Amanda (which is established in a previous book in the series), but he likes the idea of interviewing people about their missing dogs.

However, even though David, Amanda, and Pete Garvey begin talking to people about the missing dogs, Janie and the other members of her detective agency are still on the case!  David has great misgiving about Janie’s involvement.  Then, suddenly, Pete doesn’t want to work on the project anymore and starts behaving suspiciously.  What does he know that no one else does?

The book is available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Blair’s Nightmare

BlairsNightmareBlair’s Nightmare by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, 1984.

Now that school has started in the small town of Steven’s Corners, the Stanley family kids are dealing with the problems that kids have, handling teachers, friends, and the local bullies.  David has become the new favorite target of Pete Garvey, the bully in his grade in school. (At one point, he compares managing his time around Garvey to that old riddle about crossing a river where the boatman (a teacher, in this case) can’t leave one of the things he’s transporting alone with the other because one of them will eat the other – David sees himself as the prey and Garvey as the predator. Only, David, the prey, has to be the one to manage the maneuvering because the boatmen/teachers don’t.)  Blair, David’s younger brother, also seems to be suffering from school stress, reverting to an old habit of walking in his sleep at night.  Blair keeps saying that he’s getting up to see a nice dog who visits at night, but everyone thinks that he’s just dreaming while sleepwalking.  David thinks that having a dog actually sounds nice and is hoping that he can somehow convince his dad of that, too.

Mrs. Bowen, Blair’s teacher, isn’t amused by his stories about the dog or some of the other things Blair has been saying at school, like his friend “Harriette”, whom no one else has been able to see but apparently lives in the Stanleys’ house (see The Headless Cupid).  She thinks that Blair is “out of touch with reality,” and that his family should work on teaching him the difference between reality and fantasy.

In the middle of all this, things have been disappearing around Steven’s Corners, and people think that it might be the work of escaped prisoners.  The police have been looking for some escaped prisoners in the area, although they haven’t found anything, and the prisoners might not really be around.  David thinks that the things that have disappeared don’t really sound like the kinds of things that prison escapees would steal.  He thinks it’s more likely that Garvey and his trouble-making friends took them.

Then, David starts hearing that, for some reason, the sheriff’s dog has become afraid of going near the woods.  When they brought him out there to sniff for the escapees, he suddenly smelled something that seemed to make him very afraid, and now he shakes when they try to take him back to the area.  Janie, David’s younger sister, has also become very interested in the story of the escapees and seems to be trying to start her own investigation into the matter.

Part of the story has to do with the differences between perception and reality.  Amanda, David’s stepsister, proves to be an unexpected help in dealing with Garvey, taking it upon herself to punch him in the face when he tries to pick a fight with David.  However, it makes David embarrassed that Amanda feels like she has to stand up for him, and it’s further complicated by the fact that Amanda and Garvey seem to have a mutual crush on each other.  Life is full of mixed emotions, and David begins to discover that people’s personalities are more complicated than he once thought.  Some of Garvey’s bullying and trouble-making is really a bid for attention.  Garvey later admits that he didn’t really have intentions of beating David up; he was mostly hanging around David as an excuse to see Amanda and maybe do something that would get her attention.  However, learning that being mean and threatening isn’t the best way to get the kind of attention he wants from people isn’t a bad lesson.

David also learns that Amanda’s feelings toward him are more complicated than he originally thought.  Amanda and David fight a lot, and David thinks that she still doesn’t like having step-siblings, but she says that the reason she punched Garvey was that she suddenly realized that she couldn’t let anyone treat her brother badly.  It surprises her as much as David that, somewhere during their past couple of years of living together as siblings, having adventures, and having fights and arguments, she has come to think of him as her brother.  She shrugs it off as a sign that people just change over time.  She also tells him not to worry about their parents getting divorced when her mother, Molly, argues with David’s father about Blair’s sleepwalking and “dream” dog.  She says that their arguments are nothing like the ones that Molly used to have with her father and that it’s just human for people to fight once in a while.

As you might have guessed, there is also a lot more to Blair’s “sleepwalking” and his dog than his teacher suspects.  One night, while Garvey is over with David and Amanda, they learn how very real (not to mention extremely huge) Blair’s dog is.  For a time, all the kids in the family keep the dog a secret because they’re worried that their father will just send the dog to the pound.  All the while, David’s father and stepmother argue about whether discouraging Blair’s “fantasies” is healthy for him or not.  Molly doesn’t think it’s bad for a six-year-old child to daydream and have imaginary friends, but Blair’s father thinks that they should do as Blair’s teacher says and punishes the other children by revoking their allowance whenever they talk about Blair’s dog.  They have no idea that they’re actually the ones who have the least sense of what the true reality of the children’s situation actually is, and the children find themselves having to accept their punishments without argument in order to keep the secret, seeing it as a noble sacrifice for the safety of their dog.

Eventually, the secret does come out after the dog, now called Nightmare, helps to save the children when they finally encounter the escapees.  (You just knew they were hiding somewhere nearby, didn’t you?)  Nightmare’s backstory is rather sad and involves animal abuse.  His former owner actually tried to kill him, and he is injured.  When the kids’ parents finally learn the full truth, David’s father tries to insist that his rule about no new pets applies until Molly says that having Nightmare around would actually make her feel safer.

Personally, I think that the father could have been a little more apologetic.  He admits that the children were “not guilty” and that they can have their allowances back, but I would have liked to hear him actually say that he was “wrong”, using that word, and maybe add the word “sorry” to it.  It feels like the father is still dodging the reality of his own actions himself, especially considering that the lessons that he was basically instilling in the children were that the “truth” is whatever the people with authority and the ability to punish you decide it is; if that doesn’t happen to be the real truth, you’re not allowed to speak up and say so or argue with them to have some compassion; and if you need to handle real-life problems that they’re denying exist, you have to do so in secret, behind the backs of authority, which is basically there to be part of the problem, not a source of help or solutions.  Real life might sometimes work that way, but I don’t think it’s good to teach children that it’s the way things are supposed to be and that it’s the way they should behave themselves when they become the adults.  Lots of things could have been cleared up much faster if the father had allowed open discussion or asked further questions or even done a little investigating on his own to figure things out.  Parents not listening is a plot device used in a lot of children’s mysteries to set things up for the children to do their own investigating, but it always pains me a little because I’m the type to ask more questions.  I like to be sure of my ground before I stand on it, and I don’t leave things alone if I think there’s a real problem.  It also seems oddly out of character for the father of this story, considering that, in the first book, they established that he had never had a problem in the past with the kids keeping little animals that they found, like lizards and snakes.  So, why wouldn’t he even entertain the notion that Blair might have really found a dog and started feeding it at night?  If it had been me, given the kids’ history with animals and doing things in secret, I would have checked on what was really happening at night, just to be sure.

The matter of “Harriette”, who is a carry-over from the first book in the series (and may possibly be a ghost), is never cleared up.  Blair says that Harriette helped lead him to Nightmare and told him that everything would be all right.  The books in the series imply that Blair is psychic and that he can communicate with a girl who used to live in their house years ago, but it’s never established for certain.  At the end of the story, David, who has been been considering the issue of perceptions vs. reality decides that who or what “Harriette” is – ghost or just Blair’s imaginary friend – may also be just a matter of perception, and that it is probably best left that way.  Other than Blair’s occasional comments about Harriette, her presence is not felt by anyone else in the family, and there are no unexplained supernatural happenings in this story.  There are, however, some dated references to ’80s celebrities, like Magnum and Burt Reynolds.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Wandering Weathervanes

McGurk Mysteries

WanderingWeathervanes

The Case of the Wandering Weathervanes by E.W. Hildick, 1988.

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Brains Bellingham brings a new case to the other members of the McGurk Organization: a weathervane that he was using for his latest science experiment has been stolen!  Although Brains says that the weathervane was extremely valuable because it was a critical part of his experiment, the others don’t think much of it.  However, Brains’ weathervane turns out to be just one of many weathervanes that have disappeared all over town.

At first, everyone is sure that it’s just a prank, probably by some local kids, and it gets reported as an odd tidbit on the local news.  However, the more weather vanes that disappear and the more time that goes by without them being returned, the more disgruntled the local citizens become.  People (like Brains) start claiming that their weathervanes were worth more than they probably were, although there were a couple of legitimate collectors’ items among the stolen weathervanes.  The police fail to see the humor behind the incident and start talking about serious consequences for the one responsible for the weathervanes’ disappearances.  Unfortunately, as often happens in these cases, people begin looking at Wanda’s brother, Ed, as the culprit.

WanderingWeathervanesEd

Ed has a long-standing reputation as a prankster, and so is the first person most people suspect when strange things start happening.  Wanda is sure that he isn’t guilty this time, though.  Her brother wouldn’t be above taking something for a short period of time just as a joke, but he wouldn’t just steal things from people and keep them.  When some of the weathervanes start reappearing, at the wrong houses, it looks like it might have been a prank after all, but Ed still maintains that that he’s innocent.

The members of the McGurk Organization believe that the real culprit might be a friend of Ed’s who admires some of his pranks and might be trying to imitate him with a wild scheme of his own.  However, if Ed’s friend is really guilty, where are the missing weathervanes and why haven’t they been returned?  A professional private investigator has been pressing the kids for what they know about the thefts, and Ed suddenly disappears!  There may be much more to the mysterious disappearing weathervanes than meets the eye.  What started as an odd prank may have uncovered something more serious!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

The Case of the Muttering Mummy

MutteringMummy

The Case of the Muttering Mummy by E.W. Hildick, 1986.

Joey Rockaway needs to buy a special present for his mother’s birthday. Having broken his mother’s china cat ornament recently, he has decided that he will buy one of the replicas of a golden cat statue from Egypt at the Egyptian exhibit at the local museum. The other members of the McGurk Organization come to the museum with him, and McGurk uses this as an opportunity to give them a kind of memory test about objects in the exhibit.

Actually, everything in the exhibit is a replica, not just the items sold in the museum gift shop. Justin Matravers, a wealthy man who has recently died, collected Egyptian artifacts, but part of his will specified that the collection should never be put on public display. However, his widow, who wanted to show off the collection, had replicas made of everything in the collection so that she could have those put on display.

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McGurk sneers about how everything in the exhibit is fake, although he is actually surprisingly superstitious. The museum always did have a real mummy case on display. They always said that the mummy case was empty, but some of the more superstitious kids, like McGurk, believe that there is a mummy inside the case and that there is a curse on it. McGurk has nicknamed the mummy Melvin. The other kids aren’t afraid of Melvin or Egyptian curses, and while they are looking around the Egyptian exhibit, Mari plays a joke by using her ventriloquist skills to make the mummy case “talk.” This trick sets off a bizarre mystery for the McGurk Organization.

A scholar and author, Harrison Keech, is sketching the replicas at the exhibit and witnesses Mari’s trick and Joey picking out the replica cat for his mother. After he asks Joey if he can take a look at the cat, Keech suddenly becomes very upset, saying that the cat statue is cursed! He says that Mari’s joke has angered the spirit of the mummy and awakened the spirit of Bastet. The mummy was a follower of Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess, and it will now be drawn to the statue if they remove it from the museum. Mari tells Joey that she can tell from Keech’s voice that he’s making up the whole story and that he shouldn’t let that stop him from buying the cat.

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However, strange things start happening after Joey buys the cat. It seems like someone is following him home, a dark, shadowy figure. Joey thinks it might even be the mummy, come back to life! The others are skeptical, and McGurk arranges a kind of test where Joey brings the statue with him to a meeting of the organization. Sure enough, a strange figure lurks outside their meeting, and they hear strange whispers in a foreign language!

The spookiness doesn’t last for long. It turns out that Mari, as well as being a ventriloquist, has some skill with different languages and recognizes what the “mummy” says as being Greek, not Egyptian, and the phrases as being typical things that someone might say in a restaurant. When the kids find a scrap of bandage outside, they are quick to notice that it’s a modern, elasticized bandage, like the kind you can get at any pharmacy.

So, the question becomes who is playing at being a mummy and why? Is it Keech, wanting to make the kids think that the mummy story he told them is real, and if so, what would he have to gain from it? The only other two people who know about the story are Joanne, who works at the museum, and Donny, her fiancé, who is jealous of the attention she’s been paying to Keech when he comes to the exhibit.

MutteringMummyLies

I have some complaints about this book that hadn’t occurred to me when I read it as a kid. At one point, Donny, who is described as being a social worker, comes to visit the kids because he wants to hire the organization to check up on Keech and his relationship with Joanne. Donny is very jealous, and when he explains how Joanne seems to be falling for all of Keech’s crazy mummy stories, he suddenly turns to Wanda and Mari and says, “You women, you’ll believe anything when a smarmy two-bit jackass like that starts shooting his mouth off!” That’s just really inappropriate for an adult to say to kids, and the whole situation is weird on several levels. First of all, Donny is an adult, and if he’s having issues with his love life, especially with the woman he thinks he wants to spend the rest of his life with, the last thing he should do is hire kids (even really smart ones) to handle the issues for him. Second, Wanda and Mari are young girls, not “women,” and what little girls believe is no business of Donny’s. Trying to imply that Wanda and Mari might someday fall for a “jackass” is not only insulting but implies that Donny is thinking about Wanda and Mari in terms that no grown man should be thinking about girls their ages. I find it disturbing that Donny is apparently a social worker, a person in a position of trust who is supposed to help people in difficult situations to manage their lives, and he’s acting like this. Also, toward the end of the book when the bad guy (I won’t say who it is here, although I thought that the answer was pretty obvious even early in the story) is making his escape, he shoves Joanne aside and calls her a “slut.” That’s pretty strong language for a kid’s book of this level. None of this occurred to me when I was a kid, so maybe other kids reading this wouldn’t notice, but I thought that I’d mention it because these things bother me now.

At one point, Brains gives a demonstration of using water displacement to determine the volume of irregularly-shaped objects, explaining how Archimedes discovered the principal (although I’m not sure that Archimedes’ Principal was quite as he explains it), as the kids investigate what makes Joey’s cat statue so special. You might be able to guess what it is. It seemed pretty obvious to me. The one thing that seemed the most puzzling was how it was done. Mari also offers an interesting explanation of the different kinds of lies that people tell and their motives for doing so.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Case of the Vanishing Ventriloquist

VanishingVentriloquist

The Case of the Vanishing Ventriloquist by E.W. Hildick, 1985.

Mari Yoshimura, Wanda’s pen pal from Osaka, Japan has just arrived in the United States, and she’s eager to meet Wanda’s friends. Mari’s father is the head of Yoshimura Electronics, and he is visiting different cities in the United States on business. While her father travels, Mari gets to enjoy an extended visit with Wanda. Wanda has told her all about the McGurk Organization, and Mari is eager to join up with them during her stay in America. Unfortunately, when she first arrives, McGurk isn’t in a very receptive mood.

McGurk tells Mari that she can’t join the organization, which hurts Mari and offends Wanda, because he has organized a series of challenges in order to decide which of the current members to give a promotion. McGurk thinks that Mari’s presence would upset the challenges, and he can’t promote her because she hasn’t actually done anything with the organization yet. However, Wanda negotiates with McGurk. Since Mari is her guest, and she can’t neglect her guest, she arranges for Mari to just follow along on the challenges, working through them herself just for fun. McGurk allows it on the condition that Mari not help Wanda because that would give Wanda an unfair advantage. Wanda and Mari agree to the arrangement, and Mari writes all of her notes for the challenges in Japanese, just to make sure that Wanda doesn’t accidentally see any of her answers.

VanishingVentriloquistMariIntro

Mari turns out to be really good at the challenges that McGurk sets. When he tells the members of the organization to spend a day observing people and notice how many times people do things that would be a temptation to criminals (like leaving packages in a car, tempting someone to break in and get them), Mari ends up with more observations than anyone else. Mari also proves to be good at noticing suspicious behavior when she sees a man that no one else notices, who seems to be hanging around a bus stop for no reason, not showing any interest in getting on any of the buses.

Then, Brains accidentally discovers a real mystery that the McGurk Organization can investigate where Mari plays a special role. While Brains is working on one of his latest inventions, a new kind of portable phone for kids (this is before cell phones became popular), he accidentally gets his signals crossed and ends up overhearing part of someone else’s conversation. It sounds like the two men Brains overhears are going to target someone at the Senior Citizens’ Annual Picnic. However, because Brains didn’t hear the whole conversation, they can’t be sure what these men are going to do. They report the incident to Patrolman Cassidy at the police station, but he doesn’t think too much of it. He says that he’ll look in on the picnic but that what Brains overheard might not really have to do with a crime. He heard too little of the conversation to be sure what the men were actually talking about.

VanishingVentriloquistMariRescue

Fortunately, because Wanda’s mother is part of the committee organizing the picnic, the kids have a good opportunity to investigate the matter themselves. Wanda will be helping her mother to serve food, and Mari is going to be part of the entertainment, putting on her ventriloquist act. Mari says that the other members of the organization can be part of her act, so they can be on hand to keep an eye on things. McGurk is pleased about this and finally offers Mari a position as a trainee of the McGurk Organization.

However, it turns out that everyone has completely misjudged the situation. A very serious crime is being planned, and the McGurk Organization doesn’t realize it until Mari is kidnapped from the picnic! Mari was the target all along, and the suspicious man at the bus stop was actually there to watch her. Can the others get her back before it’s too late?

VanishingVentriloquistMariWelcome

From this book on, Mari becomes a regular character in the series and a full member of the McGurk Organization. Mari’s father decides that he wants to open one of his electronics factories in the United States, so Mari and her family will be living there for awhile to oversee it, giving Mari the chance to stay with the McGurk Organization for an extended period of time.  McGurk starts dreaming that when Mari eventually goes back to Japan, she will open a branch of the McGurk Organization there, but that would be years in the future, if it happens.  McGurk dreams big.

One of the funniest parts of this book is when the kids are supposed to be looking around for examples of suspicious behavior. Before the challenge begins, McGurk admits that what is “suspicious” is difficult to quantify and that most of what they’ll notice will have perfectly reasonable, non-criminal explanations behind it. Joey Rockaway notes that, for most of that particular challenge, the members of the McGurk Organization themselves are the ones who are acting most suspiciously, running around and spying on random people. At one point, Joey almost gets thrown out of a supermarket because the manager noticed the creepy way he kept spying on a woman who kept picking up packages of cookies and then putting them back. It turns out that the manager of the store knows that the woman is on a diet and has had trouble wrestling with temptation. She routinely gets tempted to buy cookies, picks some up, and then puts them back on the shelf when she realizes that she shouldn’t have them. Her behavior may look odd to people who don’t understand what she’s going through or what she’s doing, but perfectly understandable to those who do, like so many things.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

McGurk Gets Good and Mad

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McGurk Gets Good and Mad by E.W. Hildick, 1982.

The members of the McGurk Organization have been planning a kind of open house in order to show the other kids from the neighborhood the kind of mystery-solving work they do. However, someone seems to be doing their best to ruin it.

It starts with the mice that the members of the Organization find in their headquarters, which have already gnawed some of the exhibits for the open house. It quickly becomes obvious that the mice didn’t find their way in by accident when someone posts a sign warning people away from the open house because of the mice. There’s no way anyone could have found out that there were mice, especially not that quickly, unless they had planted them there deliberately. The mysterious sign is signed “Agent 93,” but who is that?

While Brains works on a way to get rid of the mice, the others begin thinking about who could have it in for the McGurk Organization. They consider past cases they’ve solved and villains that they’ve unmasked as well as some of the kids they know generally from school who don’t like them or were offended when they weren’t allowed to join the Organization.

By the time of the open house, they still don’t know who the saboteur is, and when it’s time to unveil the real police handcuffs that Patrolman Cassidy gave them as an award (the highlight of the open house for the McGurk Organization), they are suddenly and inexplicably replaced by a pair of fake mice and another note from “Agent 93.”

Whatever it takes, McGurk is determined to find the guilty person and get those handcuffs back!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Under Copp’s Hill

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Under Copp’s Hill by Katherine Ayres, 2000.

This book is part of the American Girl History Mysteries series.

The year is 1908, and eleven-year-old Innocenza Moretti lives with her relatives in Boston.  They are immigrants from Italy.  Innie, as her family calls her, is an orphan.  According to the story that her grandmother told her, she was the only one of her parents’ children to survive infancy, her siblings being born prematurely and dying shortly after birth.  Innie’s mother was so grateful that Innie survived that she promised her to the Holy Mother at her baptism.  Then, Innie’s parents died in a fire in their tenement building when she was about two years old.  Innie and her grandmother, Nonna, survived the fire only because little Innie had started crying in the night, and she took her outside to walk her around so that she wouldn’t wake her parents.  Because of that experience, Nonna is deathly afraid of fire and also has become convinced that the Holy Mother must have spared Innie (as well as herself).  She thinks that Innie is destined to become a nun and has continued to promise her to the Holy Mother in prayer, repeating the promise regularly.  Although Nonna thinks that the miracles surrounding Innie’s life are signs of a future life in the Church for Innie, her grandmother’s promises in prayer terrify Innie.

Innie feels trapped by her grandmother’s expectations for her, expectations that the rest of her family don’t even know about.  She doesn’t want to be a nun, but her grandmother is sure that she will be.  Because of her fears that her grandmother may force her to become a nun when she grows up, Innie is never on her best behavior.  She thinks that if she gets a reputation as a trouble-maker, the Church will decide that she is unsuited for a religious life.  Unfortunately, Innie’s long-practiced habit of ignoring rules and her problem child reputation lead her to be suspected of something worse than just minor misbehaving.

Innie’s family owns a boardinghouse where they provide food and lodging for young immigrant men.  Innie and Nonna live on the ground floor, and Innie’s aunt, uncle, and cousins live above them.  Innie spends a lot of time with her cousins, especially Teresa, who is about her age.  Her older cousin, Carmela, persuades both Teresa and Innie to join a library club at a new settlement house with her.  The settlement house helps girls and young women from immigrant families by teaching them work skills and aspects of American culture that they can use as they become American citizens in exchange for some of the work that the girls do on behalf of the settlement house.  Carmela has taken a new job as a pottery painter there and tells her parents that it will be good for Teresa and Innie to go there as well because they will receive help with their schoolwork and they will also have classes to teach them skills like sewing, knitting, and pottery, that they can use to make money later.  However, the real attraction of the club for the girls is that they get to listen to music, have dancing lessons, read books, and socialize with other girls about their age.  The prospect of sewing classes isn’t appealing for Innie, but she loves books and looks forward to borrowing some from the settlement house library.

At the settlement house, Innie meets a variety of girls from other immigrant families, not just Italian ones.  In particular, Innie makes friends with a girl named Matela, who is a Jewish girl from Russia.  As the girls talk about a recent, large fire in town, Matela talks about the czar’s soldiers burning things back in Russia and how she misses her grandfather, who is still there.  Innie understands Matela’s feelings because she knows what it’s like to miss someone.  She doesn’t really remember her parents, but she feels the lack of them in her life.  Teresa also becomes friends with Matela, but the three girls agree to keep their friendship secret because each of their families prefers them to associate with girls from backgrounds similar to their own.  Innie’s uncle wants the girls to spend time with other Italians, and Matela admits that her father prefers her to spend time with other Jewish girls.  The adults don’t really understand the cultural mix at the settlement house.

However, from the very first day that the girls begin going to events at the house, strange things start happening.  Things disappear or are oddly moved about.  Food disappears.  A silver teapot belonging to the ladies who run the settlement house is stolen.  Then, someone steals some pottery and a shawl.

To Innie’s horror, she ends up becoming the prime suspect for the thefts because she was caught snooping in an area of the house where she didn’t belong and because she accidentally broke one of the pieces of pottery that the others girls made and tried to sweep it up without telling anyone.  When she and her friends snoop around and try to find the missing objects, Innie discovers one of the missing pottery pieces.  However, instead of being happy for the clue, the ladies who run the house just think that Innie must have broken more of the pottery and tried to cover it up, like she did before, by hiding the rest of the set.  After all, if she was doing some things she shouldn’t have been doing, it’s plausible that she could be a thief, too.

If Innie is going to remain a member of the library club (and continue to have access to books that she can read), she’s going to have to prove her innocence.  In fact, proving her innocence may also be important for Carmela, who is supposed to have a citizenship hearing soon.  If Innie’s bad reputation causes problems for her at work, she may lose her job and be denied American citizenship!

Matela thinks that the thief could be a ghost from the nearby Copp’s Hill graveyard, but Innie is sure that it must be a human being.  There are secrets at the settlement house that even the ladies who run it are unaware of and someone who desperately needs help and can’t ask for it.

Teresa and Matela continue to help Innie, and in the process, Innie confesses to Matela her fears about becoming a nun.  It is Matela who helps Innie to find the solution to her problem, urging her to step outside of the small community of Italian immigrants that her family clings to and to seek advice from a priest in the Irish area of the city.  As a priest, he has the knowledge that Innie needs to understand her faith, and because he doesn’t know Innie’s family personally, he has the objectivity to help Innie to see her grandmother’s promise in a new light and to understand that her future destiny is still in her own hands.  No one can speak for another person or make important promises on their behalf.  A religious vocation is a serious decision that only a mature adult can make for herself, or not make, as the case may be.  The priest tells her that, as young as she is, Innie should focus on learning to be a good person, and then she will see what direction life leads her.  With that knowledge, of course, Innie realizes that she will have to put more effort into behaving herself, but it’s a relief to her to realize that she doesn’t need to purposely misbehave in order to control her life.

Eventually, Innie’s aunt also learns about the grandmother’s promise and Innie’s worries and reassures her that, although her grandmother can be an intimidating woman with what she wants, Innie’s family loves her and that she shouldn’t be afraid to come to them with her questions and concerns. Innie has thought of herself as parentless, at the mercy of her grandmother’s wishes and expectations, but her aunt says that she loves Innie like she does her own daughters and that Innie is as much a part of their family as they are.  If Innie has problems, her aunt will be there for her, helping her find whatever answers she needs.

There is also a subplot about how girls in immigrant families (at least, in ones like Innie’s family) aren’t as highly-regarded as boys.  When the family is discussing important matters, Innie often tries to comment on what she thinks, but her grandmother keeps telling her to be quiet because it isn’t a girl’s place to comment on business that men should handle and her male cousins sneer at her because they don’t think she knows anything.  However, when Innie’s uncle is worried about the legal papers he has to sign in order to open his new grocery business because his English still isn’t good enough to understand them, Innie points out that Carmela’s English is the best of the family because of all the books she had to read and the paperwork she had to complete when she was applying for citizenship and that she would be the best person to study the paperwork.  At first, her grandmother makes her try to be quiet and her male cousins laugh, but Carmela speaks up and says that she can help her father, if he wants her to, and her father agrees, on the condition that she act as translator and adviser and let him make the final decisions about the business.  Carmela is happy because the arrangement allows her to use her skills without taking her away from the pottery painting that she loves.  The point of this part of the story is about acknowledging the talents that people possess and not disregarding them because they are outside of the usual roles and expectations.  It fits in with the subplot about the grandmother’s expectations for Innie’s future, which are not really in keeping with either her talents or character.  The young people in the story are growing up under different circumstances than their parents, and they will have to learn to find their own way in life, using the abilities they have and the education they can find.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about Boston in 1908.  The fire that happens around the time that the story takes place was a real event.  The settlement house with its library club was also real, and the ladies who run the settlement house, Miss Brown and Miss Guerrier, were also real people.  The book explains more about what life was like for immigrant families like Innie’s and about what the future held for girls like her.  Many of the girls who attended the library clubs later became librarians and teachers themselves, which may be Innie’s eventual destiny when she grows up.  The book also mentions that the area of Boston where Innie’s family lived still has many Italian restaurants and groceries that were started by immigrant families like Innie’s, so we can imagine that the grocery store that Innie’s uncle wants to open will be successful.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.