This book is a collection of short solve-it-yourself mini-mysteries based on the Clue board game. Each book in the series contains short mysteries that the reader is urged to attempt to solve before the characters do. The solutions to the mysteries come after each chapter.
Most of the mysteries involve a crime of some kind, but not all. Sometimes, characters try to steal things from each other, but there’s also an apple-bobbing contest at a Halloween party, a snowball fight, and a pie-eating contest.
In the final chapter of the book, it seems like Boddy, our host, has been murdered, and the reader has to solve his murder, just like in a game of Clue. However, Mr. Boddy doesn’t actually die. It’s a pattern in the series that he seems to have been killed in each book, but he always survives somehow to reappear in other books in the series.
At the end of the previous book of solve-it-yourself mini-mysteries, it looked like Mr. Boddy had been murdered, but at the beginning of this book, he explains how he survived. All of the books in the series follow this pattern. There’s generally a humorous twist to how he survives and explains the situation.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
The Stories in the Book:
Murder in the Cockpit – Mr. Boddy wants to take his guests for a flight on his private jet, but a fight breaks out over seating arrangements.
Baby Booty – Mr. Boddy has to watch his young nephew for a while, and he bribes his guests into helping him. Various guests take turns trying to make baby Frank happy, and readers are asked to figure out who has Frank.
Dance Until You Drop – Mr. Boddy and his guests were planning to have a croquet tournament, but they had to cancel it due to rain. To cheer everyone up, Mr. Boddy starts a dance party, but a couple of his guests take advantage of the situation and steal Miss Scarlet’s necklace.
The Halloween Costume Caper – Mr. Boddy is having a Halloween party for his friends, and he wants everyone to come in costume. When the guests arrive, no one is sure who is wearing which costume, but their identities are gradually revealed during a highly competitive game of bobbing for apples, where the guests are trying to find the apple that contains a “gold nugget.”
The Snowball Effect – It’s snowing, and the guests are getting on each other’s nerves because they’re cooped up inside. To change the mood, Mr. Boddy enlists everyone in a snowball fight. It’s up to the readers to determine who won from the information given.
The Case is All Sewed Up – Mr. Boddy is having an heirloom quilt restored, but the guests become interested when he says that one his ancestors hid the family treasures in the quilt during WWI. What are the Boddy family treasures, and who gets their hands on them?
Pie in Your Eye – Mr. Boddy is holding a pie-eating contest with his friends that unfortunately ends in a food fight. But, who is the winner?
Pea is for Pretender – The guests are talking about fairy tales when Miss Scarlet says that, like the Princess and the Pea, she would bruise if she tried to sleep on top of a single pea. The guests decide to put her claim to the test, and Mr. Boddy promises her a crown if she really bruises from sleeping on a pea. However, Miss Scarlet enlists the help of another guest to fake the results of the test. Who is her confederate?
The Thanksgiving Murder – Thanksgiving starts off peacefully enough with various guests volunteering to help Mrs. White prepare the meal and set the table … at least until Miss Scarlet realizes that Mrs. Peacock has removed her valuable jade ring and set it aside while helping. After Miss Scarlet swipes the ring, it changes hands several more times as others notice and take it for themselves. It’s up to the readers to figure out who finally ends up with it.
The Screaming Skeleton – Mr. Boddy unveils his latest acquisition – a skeleton made entirely of platinum. He’s planning to sell it to a museum, but of course, his guests plot to either steal the skeleton (or parts of it) or intercept the money from the museum. But, knowing his guests as he does, Mr. Boddy has also installed a security device on the skeleton that screams when someone tries to touch it.
The Mystery of the Missing Mummy by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1989.
Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!
It’s only two days before Halloween, and the Bobbsey Twins are getting their costumes ready. Flossie is going to be a black cat, Bert is dressing as Frankenstein (the monster, not the scientist, for purists), and Nan is a traditional witch in a pointed hat. Only Freddie isn’t sure what he’s going to be yet. He could just put a sheet over his head and go trick-or-treating as a ghost, but that doesn’t seem exciting enough. He wants to be something really scary, but he doesn’t have much time left to decide.
The children’s mother offers Freddie some inspiration when she tells them that she will be writing a story about a new museum exhibit for the local newspaper. The new exhibit is an ancient Egyptian mummy. She asks the kids if they want to go to the museum with her to see the mummy, and they eagerly accept. Freddie thinks that a mummy would make a great costume idea, so he will be a mummy for Halloween.
The museum curator, Mr. Foxworth, gives the Bobbseys a special tour of the exhibit after hours, when there are no other visitors. The Bobbsey Twins are fascinated with the exhibit, and they talk about Egyptian hieroglyphics and the reasons why ancient Egyptians wanted their bodies preserved as mummies for the afterlife. Mr. Foxworth says that the mummy belongs to a wealthy woman named Mrs. Truesdale, who is also there to see the exhibit with her fifteen-year-old nephew, Lex.
The kids notice that Lex seems nervous, and he tells them that there’s a legend about the mummy coming to life. He even says that he’s heard strange noises coming from the mummy case. Mrs. Truesdale thinks that’s nonsense. The mummy has belonged to their family for 60 years. However, when the case is opened, Flossie is certain that she hears the mummy sigh. Then, when Freddie takes a closer look after the others leave the room, he sees the mummy breathing, and it tries to grab him!
Freddie and Flossie try to tell everyone what they saw, but everyone assumes that it was just their imagination. The kids go to the library to do some research about mummies, and they learn that Lex was telling them the truth about the legends surrounding this particular mummy. Nan doesn’t believe that the legends are real, but when the kids walk home from the library, they see the mummy walking in the park!
The kids run home and tell their parents what they saw. Their parents remind them that it’s almost Halloween, and it could have been somebody in costume, on their way home from a Halloween party. It sounds like a reasonable explanation, but the next morning, they hear a news report on the radio that someone broke into the museum and stole the mummy from the exhibit! The kids wonder if the mummy could have really come to life and broke out of the museum itself rather than being stolen.
The Bobbsey Twins decide to report their mummy sighting in the park to the police. At they police station, they see the security guard from the museum. The security guard tells them that the mummy did come to life and that it knocked him unconscious before leaving the museum, but nobody believes him because it sounds too crazy. The kids believe the security guard, but it also occurs to them that their parents might be right, that it could have been someone dressed as the mummy rather than the mummy itself. But, why would someone want to dress up like the mummy to pull a stunt like that, and if that’s what happened, where is the real mummy now?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I was pretty sure I knew right away who one or two of the culprits was because I figured that a theft and stunt like this would have to involve more than one person. However, I figured that there had to be another confederate involved because my favorite suspects were accounted for the first time the mummy moved. It turned out that I was way off base because there were suspects I hadn’t considered. The motive behind everything was different from the one that even the kids believed. I was pleasantly surprised by the twists in the story. There is a clue later in the book that more than one person dresses up as the mummy at different times when the kids realize that the mummy looked thin one time and fat the next time they saw him.
I liked the pieces of historical information about mummies included in the story, although the part about tanna leaves bringing mummies to life and attracting them is fictional, a concept created for a movie called The Mummy’s Hand from 1940. That’s why it’s important that one of the books Freddie finds at the library is about mummies in movies. At one point, Freddie and Flossie use what they’ve learned to build their own trap for the mummy.
I also noticed that the mummy’s legend comes with curse that rhymes when it’s translated into English, sort of like how the clues on the old Spanish map rhyme in English in The Goonies. In real life, things translated from one language to another don’t maintain their rhyme scheme. That went over my head when I was a kid, but I hadn’t studied other languages at that point, so the idea didn’t occur to me.
At one point in the story, the kids receive a message from the “mummy” that is clearly written on modern paper that someone tried to make look old, and the kids notice right away. They realize that it’s modern computer paper that someone yellowed with a candle, and they see where the holes at the sides were torn off. Modern kids might not understand what they mean about holes being torn off at the sides of the paper, but this was a familiar feature of computer paper at the time the book was written in the 1980s. Modern computer paper doesn’t have holes at the sides, but when I was a kid in the 1980s, there were perforated sections on both sides of the dot matrix printer computer paper with a series of little holes in them. The holes were where the printer would grab the paper and feed it through the machine. They later became unnecessary when printer designs changed, which is why you don’t see paper like that any more. When I was a kid, we would tear off those perforated sections with the little holes after printing. We would also have to break the individual sheets apart at perforated points because the sheets of paper were all joined together to feed continuously through the printer. That’s the type of printer paper that the kids in the story have. I don’t know if everyone did this, but I’d sometimes use those edging strips with the holes for little craft projects, or make them into little chains or bracelets.
The Crime That Has No Name by Kazuki Sakuraba, illustrated by Hinata Takeda, 2003.
This is the second book in the Gosick series. Only two of these Japanese light novels were printed in English, but there is also an anime based on the series that has been dubbed in English.
It’s 1924, and mysterious things happen around the fictional European country of Sauville. The students at the elite boarding school called St. Marguerite Academy are obsessed with ghost stories and spooky legends, as are many of the people of Sauville. Kazuya Kujou, a Japanese student attending the school, is among the few who doesn’t enjoy these stories, but he can’t help but become involved. One of his closest friends is the mysterious and enigmatic Victorique, who is the subject of some spooky legends herself. Victorique is both a student and prisoner at the school. She is a child genius, and rather than attend classes with the other students, she prefers to spend all of her time reading and studying by herself in the conservatory at the top of the library. Kazuya is one of the few people who ever sees or speaks to Victorique because he brings her assignments from class.
The reasons why Victorique is allowed to skip class, have special library privileges, and housing away from the other students but is still a prisoner, forbidden to leave the school, are partially, but not completely, explained in this book. Victorique is not a normal girl or a normal student, and there are some dark secrets in her past that even she doesn’t fully understand.
When the story begins, Kazuya has just received his allowance from home, and another friend at school, Avril, convinces him to come shopping with her. Avril is one of the students who really loves ghost stories, and she insists on telling them to Kazuya, even though he doesn’t want to hear them. Avril knows about Victorique, and she tells Kazuya that the rumor is that Victorique isn’t really a human but a legendary creature call a “gray wolf.” Kazuya doesn’t think Victorique is anything other than an extremely smart but also extremely temperamental girl.
While they are shopping, Avril is a little offended that Kazuya has her help pick out a present for Victorique. Kazuya wants to give Victorique something because she’s normally not allowed to leave the school. Avril and Kazuya study some items being offered for sale by a nun, and Avril suggests that Kazuya give Victorique a fancy turban. As they look over the other items, a music box that is apparently some kind of magic trick bursts open and releases a pigeon. Then, the nun cries out that the most expensive item for sale, a fancy plate with historical value, has been stolen! Kazuya thinks that Victorique will enjoy hearing about the theft even more that getting a present.
When Kazuya tells Victorique about the theft, she says that it’s not that interesting because it’s a very simple matter. Before she can explain why it’s simple, her half-brother, Inspector Grevil de Blois, comes to the library to once again indirectly consult with his sister about the case. When he walks in and sees Victorique sitting there, wearing the fancy turban that Kazuya bought for her, he panicks, mistaking her for someone called Cordelia Gallo. Kazuya has no idea who he’s talking about, but neither of them seems to want to explain. Once Grevil realizes that he was mistaken, he pretends like nothing happened and starts talking about the case. Victorique simply explains that the thief was the nun, and that she was the one who set up the distraction with the music box and the pigeon.
The next day, Kazuya looks at the newspaper, and he sees that Grevil was unable to catch the nun before she got away. Then, something else in the newspaper catches his attention, a notice that says, “Descendants of the Gray Wolves. Midsummer Feast is near. We welcome you all with open arms.” The people of Sauville, and the school in particular, are obsessed with legends and ghost stories. The story of the Gray Wolves is a popular legend about a mythical race of people who are smarter than normal humans. The basis of the legend is that people who were unnaturally smart were said to be human-wolf hybrids. Kazuya remembers that people at the school call Victorique a “reincarnation of a Gray Wolf”, like they’ve been calling him “the Reaper” based on their stories and legends. He decides to show the notice to Victorique.
When Kazuya shows the notice to Victorique, she is shocked. After she accidentally trips and falls and throws a childish fit about it, she shows Kazuya a centuries-old account of a village of gray wolves who spoke human language. Kazuya doesn’t know what to think about the stories. To be honest, he’s never been very interested in the legends and ghost stories of Sauville, even though everyone else is obsessed with them. Instead, he finds himself wondering if Victorique is unnaturally sensitive to pain because it seemed like she really overreacted from her trip and fall. As an experiment, he gives her forehead a slight flick. When he does that, Victorique reacts as if he had just slapped her and tells him that she’ll never speak to him again. He tries to apologize, but Victorique ignores him, so Kazuya just storms out of the library.
Later that night, while Kazuya is studying, he looks up and sees what looks like a large suitcase moving on its own outside the window. It turns out to be Victorique, trying to sneak out of the school with way too much luggage. She’s still not speaking to Kazuya, but Kazuya is concerned about her because even normal students aren’t allowed to leave the school grounds after hours, and Victorique isn’t supposed to leave the school at all. Kazuya doesn’t know exactly why Victorique is sneaking out of the school, but he knows that, while she is extremely intelligent, she has very little knowledge of or experience with the outside world. He worries that she won’t be able to cope on her own. Even though Victorique still isn’t speaking to him, he leaves the school with her and finds out that she’s taking a train to the village that is hosting the Midsummer Feast and inviting the descendants of the Gray Wolves.
Victorique and Kazuya find themselves on a train with the thieving nun from before. She’s heading to the same town they are because she says that she grew up there. She introduces herself as Mildred Arbogast. When they get to town, the innkeeper says that they had better get inside because there’s a storm coming and the Gray Wolves come out on nights like that. He says that the Gray Wolves live in a village in the mountains and that they’re werewolves. They look like normal humans, but they hunt people when they come out. When the innkeeper describes them as being short with golden hair, it suddenly occurs to him that Victorique looks just like them.
In spite of Victorique looking like a Gray Wolf, the innkeeper allows them to rent rooms for the night. He lets Kazuya know that, since that notice appeared in the newspaper, other people who have been curious about the Gray Wolves have been showing up, but he thinks that they’re asking for trouble because the Gray Wolves won’t tolerate anyone looking into their affairs. When Kazuya says that the nun is from this town, the innkeeper says that isn’t true. It’s a small town, so everyone knows everyone else, and the nun is a total stranger.
When Victorique finally starts talking to Kazuya again, she says that the reason why she wanted to come to this place was to clear her mother’s name. Her mother is Cordelia Gallo, which is why Grevil mistook her for Cordelia. Victorique shows Kazuya a pendant she has made from a gold coin. On the other side of the pendant is a picture of Cordelia Gallo, and she really does look like Victorique. For the first time, Victorique talks to Kazuya about her mother. Cordelia was a dancer, but at some point, she became involved with Victorique’s father, the Marquis de Blois. After she gave birth to Victorique, she mysteriously disappeared, and Victorique was raised in isolation in her father’s mansion. (This is why Victorique is so naive about the outside world and awkward and temperamental around other people. She’s extremely learned in terms of book knowledge but low on experience with the outside world and other people.) Victorique only remembers seeing her mother once, when she sneaked up to her window one night and gave her the pendant, but she knows that her mother still watches over her. Victorique also knows that her mother was originally from the village of the Gray Wolves. Apparently, Cordelia was once a maid there, but she was banished from the village for committing a terrible crime. Her father became involved with Cordelia because he wanted a child with the blood of the Gray Wolves, although he has always been a little afraid of Victorique, which is why he keeps her at a distance, either held prisoner in his mansion or at the school for her entire life. (The Marquis de Blois is a nefarious character with grandiose schemes of power, which are addressed further in other stories in the series and in the anime based on them, and he wanted a child like Victorique as part of those schemes.) Now that an invitation has been extended to the descendants of the Gray Wolves, Victorique is determined to see the village where her mother came from and, if possible, clear her name of the crime she supposedly committed.
The next day, Victorique and Kazuya travel to the village of the Gray Wolves along with the nun and three young men, who say that they’re college students. The village has a Medieval look to it, and the people there wear old-fashioned clothes. People there recognize Victorique as Cordelia’s daughter immediately. It makes them uneasy, but they say that they do not hold her responsible for what Cordelia did and say that she is welcome to stay for the Midsummer Festival, even though her mother is a murderer.
The leader of the Gray Wolves, Sergius, explains that the Gray Wolves aren’t really werewolves. They’re normal people, but they prefer to live in isolation from the outside world. People just assume things about the Gray Wolves because they have odd, old-fashioned lifestyles, don’t mix with other people much, and inhabit a village in a mountainside surrounded by real wolves. The Midsummer Festival is one of the few times that they allow other people in from the outside. The purpose of the festival is to welcome home the spirits of their ancestors and pray for a good harvest.
Sergius invites Victorique and Kazuya to stay with him for the festival. In his manor, a maid called Harminia says that Cordelia murdered the previous village chief, leaving gold coins scattered around his body. Cordelia was an orphan who worked as a maid for the village chief at the manor. She was blamed for the chief’s death because she was the only other person who had access to his study, where he was murdered. Victorique says that they only have until the end of the festival to investigate the murder her mother was accused of committing because the village won’t let them stay any longer. However, there are more crimes afoot in the village, and the original murderer is still there after all these years.
There is an English translation available to read for free online at Internet Archive.
My Reaction
This is not a series for young kids. It’s more for teens and young adults because parts get truly violent and disturbing. I find the series interesting for its references to other detective series, ghost stories, and legends, but I have to admit that the plots of the stories get a little over-the-top. As the series goes on, the stories get weirder.
This particular story fills it parts of Victorique’s back story, which even she doesn’t fully understand at first. As I said, the Marquis de Blois is a nefarious character with an over-the-top, long-term plan to seize power in Sauville, using his young daughter’s mysterious heritage and Sauville’s obsession with legends and stories. His plot is revealed later, but this book focuses on Victorique’s mother backstory. Years ago, Cordelia was framed for a murder she didn’t commit. If she hadn’t been, she would never have left the village, and Victorique wouldn’t have been born. Victorique eventually discovers who committed the original crime and clears her mother’s name, but nobody from the outside will be able to return to the village for a long time because the drawbridge to the village gets destroyed. At the end of the book, Victorique still doesn’t know where her mother currently is, but she learns a few things about her life.
The motive for the original murder concerns prophecies and fortune-telling, like the first story in this series, although in a different way. The Gray Wolves believe in prophecies, just like the rest of Sauville believes in legends. In a similar way, there is at least some truth to these prophecies just like there is always at least some basis for Sauville’s legends. The previous chief of the village was murdered because he gave his murderer a prophecy at a past Midsummer Festival that person couldn’t bear to hear. As Victorique explains it, “It’s just fortune-telling. You didn’t have to take it seriously. But you had strong faith in the laws of the village and the words of the village chief. You could not doubt the divination.” Because this person didn’t doubt what the village chief said, they believed that the only way to change their fate was to kill the person who made the prophecy. Ironically, it is that crime that makes the prophecy come true.
The story raises the questions of whether fate is unavoidable and whether prophecies are self-fulfilling. If the murderer had asked the previous chief a different question at the festival or just refused to believe what he said, would things have turned out differently for everyone? There’s no real answer to that, but the murderer’s belief that the prophecy had power is what set everything in motion. Victorique and Kazuya also receive prophecies about their futures that cause them some worry. Because I know how the rest of the series goes, I know that there is some truth in the prophecies for them, that they will be caught up in events larger than themselves that will separate them, but that’s not the entire story for them. There is a separation coming for them in this series, but it’s only a temporary one. As strange as this series is, it actually does have a happy ending for our heroes. Whether the two of them might be separated again once WWII starts is a matter of speculation because the series doesn’t extend that far. It’s possible, but they will have plenty of time together first, and as Victorique points out, you don’t really have to believe fortune-tellers.
Gosick: the Novel by Kazuki Sakuraba, illustrated by Hinata Takeda, 2003.
The year is 1924, and a boy from Japan named Kazuya Kujo is attending a prestigious boarding school called Saint Marguerite Academy, in the small European country of Sauville (fictional). The students at this school have an obsession with ghost stories. Kazuya is a very serious boy, and he doesn’t see the appeal of all of these gruesome stories, although his friend, Avril Bradley (an international student from Great Britain) loves them and insists on sharing scary stories with him. Part of the reason why Kazuya doesn’t like all the scary stories is that other students insist on calling him “the Reaper” based on a character from one of the more popular ghost stories. However, he’s not the only student at school who stands out, and some of the school’s ghost stories have more truth behind them than Kazuya would have dreamed.
There is one seat in Kazuya’s class which is always empty. That seat belongs to Victorique, and Kazuya is one of the few people at the school who has ever seen her. Victorique never comes to class, preferring to spend her time reading and studying by herself in the conservatory at the top of the library. One day, when their teacher gives Kazuya some papers to take to Victorique, Avril tries to ask Kazuya what Victorique is like. Kazuya doesn’t want to explain much about Victorique, just saying that she can be blunt and kind of mean, which is true. Victorique is brilliant, a child genius, and she looks like a little china doll, but she’s not easy to get along with. She’s temperamental and not used to dealing with other people in general. She smokes a pipe, like Sherlock Holmes, and makes deductions using her “fountain of knowledge”, even about places she hasn’t been and things she hasn’t witnessed, like Nero Wolfe.
Victorique is not allowed to leave the school grounds (for reasons which are explained as the series continues), and aside from Kazuya, there’s only one other person who visits her: her older half-brother, a local police detective. He never admits that he gets help from Victorique on his cases, and he typically prefers to act like he’s talking to Kazuya rather than speak to Victorique directly. Victorique, who is often bored, enjoys solving puzzles and mysteries, so she does give her brother help, although there is little affection between them.
One day, Victorique’s brother, Grevil de Blois, comes to consult with her, through Kazuya, about the murder of an elderly fortune teller. After hearing a description of the murder, Victorique correctly realizes that the fortune teller was killed by her maid. However, that isn’t the end of it. Kazuya thinks that it’s unfair that de Blois always takes the credit for Victorique’s solutions to mysteries. This time, when he finds out that the grateful family of the fortune teller has given de Blois a yacht as a present and that he’s planning to spend the weekend on it, Kazuya decides that he’s going to make de Blois share this present with Victorique. Victorique is normally forbidden to leave the school grounds, but with Kazuya threatening to reveal the true secret of his success, de Blois agrees to take Kazuya and Victorique with him on the weekend yachting trip. Neither of the two kids really likes de Blois, and the thought of spending an entire weekend with him, even aboard a luxury yacht isn’t great, but it is one of the rare opportunities Victorique has to leave the school.
Victorique has rarely been anywhere other than the mansion where she was born and the school, so everything is new and fascinating to her as they take a train to the seaside to meet de Blois at the yacht. When they get there, de Blois informs them that they’ve been having trouble understanding the maid who murdered the fortune teller because she only speaks Arabic, but apparently her motive was revenge for something she calls “the box.” Then, de Blois suddenly gets word that the maid has escaped. He has to leave the kids aboard the yacht, but he tells them to just stay there and wait for him.
Victorique realizes that the yacht once belonged to the fortune teller and that some of her belongings are still on it. Among them, they find a strange invitation to a dinner party called “Evening at the Bottom of the Box” on a luxury cruise ship anchored nearby. The invitation also mentions that the main dish will be rabbit. This is chilling because it is known that the fortune teller kept rabbits and periodically allowed her dog to hunt them. It was part of her fortune telling – she would predict things based on which rabbits survived the hunt and which did not. (There is a graphic description of this at the beginning of the book that I hated. Although I found the overall mystery intriguing, there are some very gross and violent things in it.) Since they are bored and want to learn what the mystery is about, Victorique and Kazuya decide to use the invitation and attend the dinner in the fortune teller’s place.
When Victorique and Kazuya join this mysterious dinner party on the luxury ship, Kazuya suddenly recognizes that the name the of ship is the same as the one of a ghost ship in one of the scary stories that Avril told him at school! The ghost stories that have been going around the school have more truth to them than Kazuya or even the students who are obsessed with them have guessed. Some dark things have happened in the history of Sauville which have become part of its local legends. Events that resemble the ones that happened years before and are described in the ghost story are starting to repeat themselves. There is at least one murderer among the dinner party guests, and someone is playing a deadly game. Now, Victorique and Kazuya will have to play along to find the answers and save their own lives!
This is the first book in the Gosick series of Japanese light novels and one of only two that were published in English. There is a full set in Japanese, of course, and I think the German language translation is also a complete set. There is an English translation of this first book available to read for free online at Internet Archive. Because not many copies were published in English, English copies are collectors’ items and can be expensive. As of this writing (September 2023), the cheapest copies on eBay are about $30, and they can go for much higher on Amazon. All of the stories in the series have been made into an anime, and that is available in the US on Amazon Prime. Because of the violence in the story, I would recommend this book and the anime for teens or young adults. It’s not for young kids!
My Reaction
This was the first book in this series that I read, one of only two published in English. The first time I read it, I was surprised at how many tropes of old ghost stories and detective stories that the series references. Victorique uses a pipe, which is an obvious reference to Sherlock Holmes and his famous pipe, but Victorique is also frequently a Nero Wolfe type of detective, relying on an assistant to go places that she can’t go and give her information. She spends most of her time amassing knowledge through reading, and she is able to use that knowledge to make order out of the “chaos” of a mystery.
The basis of this mystery is in fortune telling, and at the beginning of the story, Victorique is reading a book about fortune telling. She explains to Kazuya Kujo how fortune telling actually works. Basically, it’s all about psychology. People think that fortune telling works because they believe it will work, and they make things happen to cause the predicted future to happen. It’s like all prophecies are self-fulfilling prophecies – they may or may not have happened except that people believed that they would, so they made sure they did. People remember and record accurate predictions because those are the most exciting and amazing, and they forget all the inaccurate ones. Fortune tellers are also good at reading people and telling people what they want to hear, which is what they already think will happen or what they’re hoping and working to make happen.
Fortune telling is at the heart of the mystery. Mysteries in this series tend to have over-the-top plots, and this one is no exception. The grudge against the fortune teller and the other guests invited to the dinner goes back to when the fortune teller staged a very large experiment in fate at the request of some very wealthy and influential clients. This past fortune telling experiment was along the lines of the ones that she did with rabbits, only it was with human children. As I said, there are violent and gruesome aspects of this story, and in this case, they were playing with human lives.
As with other books and stories in this series, the ghost stories that the kids pass around at school turn out to have at least some basis in fact. Sauville (remember, it’s a fictional country) and some of its leading citizens have violent histories. There is a long history of conspiracies, power struggles, and general skullduggery in this place. Because of the citizens’ long obsession with stories and legends, much of what has happened there has become legendary, and important people have used the citizens’ superstitions and stories to obscure the truth. Solving the crime means exposing what really happened and the truth behind the legends.
What I found most interesting about this story was its references to some classic characters in detective fiction and ghost stories, and I appreciated Victorique’s thoughts on the nature of fortune telling and human expectations. In the end, it may be more important what people believe and work to make true than what was actually predicted. However, I have to admit that the over-the-top plots of these mysteries are probably a large part of why this series wasn’t printed beyond the second book in the United States. In the beginning of the book, there is also a reference to Kazuya being suspected of a crime. This incident was in the Gosick manga, not the light novels. It is shown in the anime, but I don’t think the manga was printed in English.
I haven’t found a copy with its dust jacket intact.
Gone Away by Ruth Tomalin, 1979.
Time flies? Ah no. Time stays. We go.
Sundial motto from the beginning of Gone Away
Francie is an only child living on a farm called Goneaway Farm in Sussex in the 1930s. It’s a very old farm, and there’s a story about it that, hundreds of years before, another family once lived there, another couple with only one child. One day, this family went to a fair in another town, Alchester, and for reasons nobody understands, they never returned to this farm. The farm stood empty for a long time before it had a new owner. Because this old family went away with no explanation, the farm came to be called Goneaway. In spite of this strange story and the age of the farm, Francie has never felt that the farm was haunted or that there was anything sinister about it. Then, Francie finds herself staying in a real haunted house.
There are no illustrations in the book. It starts with this quote.
Because the farm where Francie lives with her parents is far away from local schools, Francie studies her lessons at home with her parents’ help, but she often gets distracted by the animals on the farm and doesn’t focus on her lessons. Francie’s great-aunts, Aunt Berta and Aunt Fanny, live in Scotland, but when they come to visit the farm, they see how Francie isn’t getting her schoolwork done. The aunts are also concerned at how isolated Francie’s life is. There are no other children living nearby to be friends with Francie, and they think that her life must be lonely. They talk to Francie’s parents about sending her to boarding school, but they say that they can’t afford it. They can’t even afford a car, which is why they can’t drive Francie to school in town. The aunts remind Francie’s mother that she used to board in a private house with a nice family so she could attend school when she was young. Boarding with a family wouldn’t cost as much as a fancy boarding school, and she could come home on weekends. Still, Francie’s parents are reluctant to send her away because they think she’s too young, and they’re not ready to part with her.
When the aunts leave after their visit and her parents don’t bring up the subject of school again for a while, Francie is relieved. She loves her life on the farm, and she doesn’t want to leave. Yet, she also finds herself oddly disappointed, too. She’s read stories about children at schools, and their adventures do sound exciting. She thinks it would be ideal if she could go to school during the day and come home afterward, like other children do, but that just won’t work with her family’s circumstances. Her parents’ attempts to find friends for her just aren’t working, either. Her parents start inviting other farm families to visit on Sundays, but Francie doesn’t get along with their children. The reasons why she doesn’t get along with them are largely because the other children don’t behave well, but these incidents convince Francie’s parents that maybe the aunts were right and that Francie could benefit from going to school and meeting a wider range of other children.
Her parents write to the high school in Alchester and inquire about registering Francie. They arrange for Francie to take entrance exams, but Francie has mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the idea of boarding and going to school, with the knowledge that she will come home on the weekends, seems exciting, but on the other hand, she worries that the children at the school won’t be any more friendly than the children of the nearby farm families. Her mixed feelings continue through the day when she and her mother visit the school. At first, Francie thinks that maybe she’ll flunk the entrance exams on purpose so she won’t have to leave her farm. Then, after the initial tour of the school, Francie thinks that going there may be exciting after all, so maybe she’ll try to pass the exams. The exams are difficult, and she expects she’ll fail them after all because she really can’t do the work. Her parents tell her not to worry because, if she fails this year, she can always study more and try again next year. However, it turns out that she did pass. The arithmetic portion of the exam really was too difficult for her because the person giving her the exam accidentally gave her a higher level test instead of the basic entrance exam, but Francie did an excellent job on the writing portion of the test.
Since Francie will be attending the school in Alchester after all, she and her mother begin shopping for her school uniforms and other supplies. Francie is still worried about the prospect of boarding with strangers in town, and her mother isn’t sure how to find a house or family willing to take her. A boarding prospect turns up because Francie is too small and skinny for even the smallest available size of the school uniform, and she and her mother have to visit a professional tailor. The tailor, Mrs. Majendie, also has a few rooms that she rents out to boarders. Francie isn’t sure that she’ll like boarding with Mrs. Majendie at first because she and her house seem a bit grand, her dog seems oddly bored and unresponsive to Francie’s friendliness, and her other boarder is the headmistress of another school in town, the Chantry School. However, the available room is beautiful, with a four-poster bed and tapestries, and the room has a view of the nearby churchyard, where the children from the Chantry School are playing among tombstones in the old graveyard. Mrs. Majendie says that the Chantry School was once a chapel, and her own house was once an old inn. She also says that a new housekeeper will be moving in soon with her daughter, who will attend the Chantry School. It all seems like a fairy tale kind of place to Francie, and she is reassured that there will be another girl living in the house with her, so she tells her mother that she would like to board there.
When she actually starts school, it goes pretty well. The classes aren’t too hard, the subjects are interesting, and she gets along well with the other girls. There is an older girl called Trixie who likes to play pranks on the younger students, and some of the girls tease Francie about her height, but the older girl who is assigned to look after her, Verity, tells Francie not to take any notice of those girls. At first, Francie is able to use her bicycle to get from school to the train station, so she is able to go home every night, but then, as the days grow shorter, and it gets dark sooner, she can’t do that anymore, so she starts to board in town with Mrs. Majendie.
Her boarding experience turns out to be different from what she first thought, though. It turns out that the new housekeeper isn’t very friendly, and her daughter decided to stay with her grandmother instead of coming to town with her mother, so the house is lonelier than Francie had expected. The atmosphere is also different in the winter than in the summer, when Francie first saw her room. The room seems colder, darker, and a little more sinister in the winter, and in the evening, there aren’t any children playing in the churchyard outside. At night, she hears strange sounds, like a tapping and a wailing. When Trixie learns that the place where Francie is boarding is Falcon House, she implies that there’s something really wrong with the place, but Francie assumes it’s just another of Trixie’s tricks. Then, when other students try to get Trixie to shut up and remind her that they all promised not to talk about it in front of Francie, Francie realizes that there really is something weird about the house. She tries to get Verity to explain it to her, but Verity refuses, which just makes Francie angry and more scared. Now, she knows there is a real secret about the house, but she doesn’t know exactly what it is.
A strange man comes to visit Falcon House, and Francie sees that his card says he is Dr. D. Bone Fane from the Circle for Psychical Research. Francie doesn’t know what it means, so she asks some of the other girls at school if they know. One of them, Bryony, says that she’s met this man before. He’s a ghost-hunter from the United States, investigating supposedly haunted places. Bryony’s father teaches in the Abbey choir school, and this man has been pestering him about stories of a haunting there, although Bryony’s father thinks it’s all boring nonsense. From this information, Francie realizes that Dr. D. Bone Fane is interested in Falcon House because he thinks it’s haunted. She confronts Verity about it, and Verity admits that there are stories of hauntings at Falcon house. Nobody’s ever actually seen the ghost that haunts the house, only heard things, and the only people who have heard the ghost are children. According to the stories, Mrs. Majendie’s own children were the last children to be haunted by the ghost, and they were so scared of the house that they begged their mother to send them to boarding school so they could get away from it. Francie is the first child to live in the house since the Majendie children grew up. Francie realizes that this is why the housekeeper didn’t bring her own daughter to the house and why she seems uneasy about Francie’s presence in the house. Mrs. Majendie even gave her nightlights as a gift because she was expecting Francie to be frightened. The headmistress at Francie’s school told everyone not to talk about the ghost stories, not because she believes in them, but because she was afraid that Francie would believe them and get scared. Everyone but Francie has known about the ghost stories from the beginning, and they’ve all been waiting to see what she will experience in the house, if anything.
The more Francie thinks about it, the more she realizes that she sensed the presence of the ghost on her first visit to the house. Besides the noises she’s been hearing at night, the dog in the house reacted to something at the top of the stairs, as if an invisible hand was petting him. When Francie returns to Falcon House after visiting Verity, it’s a stormy night, and she’s terrified about what might be waiting for her at the top of the stairs. However, when she gets there, and she realizes that it’s just her, the dog, and the ghost, she suddenly realizes that the ghost isn’t a menacing presence. The dog likes it, and it seems a little teasing, but it doesn’t mean Francie any harm. Strangely, its presence begins to feel reassuring to Francie because she’s no longer alone in the house, the only child among adults. The ghost is a child, too. In fact, it’s the ghost of the child from Goneaway, the one who disappeared hundreds of years ago, along with its parents.
The more that Francie investigates, the more she comes to realize that the ghost needs her help. Helping the ghost means learning the truth about the family who once lived on the farm that Francie calls home.
This book was originally published in the UK. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is a sequel to this book called Another Day.
My Reaction and Spoilers
This book fits well with the Dark Academia aesthetic, and it could also be considered Dark Cottagecore because of the farm and countryside themes. When Francie is on the farm, she describes the animals and plants in the countryside. Francie’s school isn’t a boarding school, but she does have to board in a spooky place to go there. There are many literary references throughout the story, and there’s a note in the beginning of the book about the poetry references. Francie reads The Story of the Amulet by E. Nesbit for fun, and her class at school reads Treasure Island. She uses stories she’s read to help her understand what is happening around her. When she makes friends with a girl named Geraldine at school, Geraldine also uses story references to explain what she thinks is happening with the ghost.
When Francie first begins to interact with the ghost, she is only able to sense its presence but not really see it. As the ghost begins to interact with her, it gradually begins becoming more visible. At first, Francie can’t even tell whether the ghost is a boy or a girl, only that it’s a child about her size. She wonders why the stories she’s heard about this child and its parents never mention whether the child is a boy or a girl or what its name and age were. She thinks it’s sad that so many little piece of history get lost.
What she eventually realizes is that the child and its parents were probably plague victims because they disappeared around the time that the plague came through this area in the Middle Ages. She thinks that they probably caught the plague when they came to town for the fair and were buried in one of the unmarked mass graves she’s heard about, and that’s why they were never able to return home. When she talks it over with Geraldine, Geraldine realizes that the children who have been able to see the ghost were all suffering from homesickness when they first arrived at Falcon House. The ghost is awakened by feelings of homesickness in other children because that’s what the ghost has been feeling the entire time. What it wants is to go home to the farm, and Francie has to find a way to help bring it home with her. There is a twist in the ghost story later that leaves Francie wondering how much of what she’s perceived about the ghost is her imagination and another girl, the housekeeper’s daughter, sneaking around the house. However, there really is a ghost, and Francie does figure out how how to help it. It comes home for Christmas with Francie.
During the story, Francie struggles with the difficulties of being away from home and going to school for the first time, and she also starts to consider what it’s going to mean for her future. She still thinks of herself as living at Goneaway Farm, but then, the wife of a farm hand refers to her as becoming a “visitor.” Francie feels uneasy about that because she knows that the woman’s son also went away for school and decided that he would rather do something other than farming, so he now lives somewhere else. Francie still thinks of the farm as her home, and it upsets her to think of the farm without her or her life without the farm in her future. But, is that really what she wants? Before her great-aunts raised the issues of school and friends, Francie was content with her life and didn’t realize that either of those things was something she was missing or might want. Now that she’s going to school in town, meeting new friends, and experiencing some independence to explore the town on her own, what else might she discover that she wants and never knew she could experience before? Will the new things she learns and wants to experience mean giving up her old life, which she still loves? These are all questions that people have as they’re growing up and pursuing an education.
Nobody really knows where life will lead them when they’re just starting out, and that can be scary, but at the same time, growing up does mean change. The changes that Francie experiences are ones that she would have experienced anyway, eventually. Her mother understands some of how Francie feels because she also boarded as a child so she could go to school, but at the same time, Francie realizes that her mother doesn’t understand everything that she’s going through because she isn’t there with her every day. Her mother doesn’t fully know what her classes or teachers are like or what the other people she meets and lives with at Falcon House are like. For the first time in Francie’s life, she and her mother are starting to live different lives, and there are some things that Francie must experience and make decisions about on her own.
The practice of children from rural areas boarding at a private house to attend a day school in town is a real part of history, both in the UK and in the US. I covered that earlier when I reviewed Sixteen and Away From Home, a book set in the 19th century Midwestern US, and The Secret School, when a teenage girl named Ida wants to go to high school in the 1920s. Anne Shirley did the same in Anne of Green Gables, which is set in 19th century Canada. This is what children from rural areas in different countries have had to do if they wanted more schooling than they could get in their area.
There is a scene in the story with some gyspies. The book calls them both “gypsies” and “travellers.” One of them tells Francie’s fortune, which gives her hints about what to do. There is also a scene where girls from Francie’s school put on a performance, and there is a dancing dragon and a student who is dressed as a “Chinese boy” for part of it. The “Chinese boy” costume is only mentioned briefly and not described in detail. It’s the sort of thing that is discouraged now in school, people dressing up as people from other races.
The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones, 1980.
This is the second book in the Chrestomanci series. In this series, there are many different dimensions with different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person. Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history across the dimensions, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. There is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds. This person is called the Chrestomanci. All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives. The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course. This book begins with a brief explanation, although most of this was established in the first book in the series, Charmed Life.
In the world where the Chrestomanci lives, magic not only exists but is a known and accepted profession, and society is a little more old-fashioned than in our world. Also, there is a kind of alternate history, and some of the countries are organized differently. This story is set in Italy, which is not a unified country in this world, but a series of small dukedoms. The Chrestomanci series is a somewhat loose series, meaning that, while Chrestomanci appears in the different books and always plays some kind of role, he is not always one of the main characters. This story sets up a Shakespearean kind of feud between two families.
The dukedom of Caprona is known to having the best spell-makers in the world. The problem is that the best spell-makers belong to two particular families, the Montanas and the Petrocchis, who have a long-standing feud. The adults in the families never explain how, exactly, the feud started. They just warn the children to avoid to avoid the children of the other family. When members of the two families meet in public, they usually ignore each other, although sometimes fights break out. The fights are particularly bad when they use magic. Locals and tourists alike are alarmed by these fights and get out of the way to avoid being caught up in them.
Because the adults don’t talk about the cause of the feud, the children of the two families tell each other stories about it. In the Montana family, the children say that it started because the Duke of Caprona favored their family over the Petrocchis. The children also tell each other stories about the other family’s atrocious habits. Young Rosa Montana particularly likes telling her siblings and cousins scandalous stories about how the Petrocchis never bathe and sometimes kill their unwanted babies or eat their own family members. Because the members of the two families almost never see each other, the other Montana children can only suppose that the stories they hear about the Petrocchis are true.
When young Tonino Montana starts school, he is very upset. Things don’t seem to come as easily to him as they do to his siblings and cousins, and he feels awkward when the teacher tells him to do things differently from the way he’s always been taught to do them or repeats things that he’s already learned. When Tonino runs off into the city by himself because he’s upset, the rest of his family worries about him. Old Niccolo, the head of the family, talks to Benvenuto, the head cat in the Montana household, about Tonino. The Montana family keeps cats, who help them at their spell-making, but not everyone in the family has the ability to talk to the cats and understand them. Old Niccolo can communicate with the cats, but even Tonino’s father, Antonio, can’t. Benvenuto tells Niccolo that he will look after Tonino and not to worry about him. Tonino, like Niccolo, can talk to cats, and he hasn’t fully appreciated the talent yet.
Benvenuto becomes Tonino’s special friend. He helps Tonino to understand that, like the kittens he talks to, he’s still young and learning. Tonino needs to give himself time to develop. Benvenuto also tells Tonino that it’s fine to tell his teachers what he already knows, and Tonino comes to realize that he is far ahead of the other students in some ways, having already learned to read. His talent for talking to the cats also gives him a special place in his family. Benvenuto also allows Tonino to give him brushings, which he would never allow from any other family member before, so he becomes more well-cared for.
As time goes on, however, Tonino comes to realize that the adults in the Montana family are worried about the state of their family and the state of Caprona itself. Other dukedoms around them are becoming more powerful, and some of the old spells that the two families made to protect Caprona are breaking down. Of course, the Montanas blame the Petrocchis for the weakness of the spells and for not maintaining them properly, but Tonino realizes that the old Montana spells are breaking down as well. It’s not, as the older Montanas said, that they have had to bear the weight of making up for the weak Petrocchi spells.
Tonino gets his first look at the Petrocchis when both families are summoned to the duke’s palace to discuss the state of their spells and the rival states that are seeking to conquer Caprona. Speaking together for the first time in a long time, both families come to realize that, even though they have separately been working to make their spells stronger, each year, the protective spells they cast on Caprona have been getting weaker. There is a rumor that there is an evil enchanter who has been working against them on behalf of their enemies. Naturally, both Petrocchis and the Montanas secretly suspect each other of being involved. They also can’t help but notice that something is seriously wrong with the duke himself. He seems strangely childlike, and his wife seems to be running everything.
The Montana family offers a solution that even they aren’t sure they can fulfill. There is an old story that all of the children know about an angel who once protected Caprona with a magical song. Everyone thinks that, as along as the song is sung, Caprona will be safe. The children learn this song in school, but what they don’t know is that the words they learn to the song aren’t the original words to the song. The tune is original, but the original words were lost to time. The Montanas know that the song is a powerful spell, but it won’t function correctly until the original words to the song are restored. In their pride against the Petrocchis and their worry about the state of Caprona, the Montanas have pledged that they will find the original words to the song. Also, naturally, the Petrocchis have promised the same. Neither family knows exactly how they will do that, but they are each determined to somehow do it before the other family can.
There is only one person both of the families accept and who can work with either family without earning the resentment of the other: Chrestomanci. The situation is serious, war is pending, and Chrestomanci has also been summoned for help. As the most powerful enchanter in the world, he has the respect of all sides. Since Chrestomanci is British, he admits that he is somewhat limited in how far he can interfere in Italian affairs. His main interest is in the evil enchanter and their misuse of magic, although he will help Caprona and his friends in the magical families, if he can.
Chrestomanci notices that, aside from being able to talk to cats, Tonino also has an ability to tell when someone is an enchanter without being told. Chrestomanci says that he needs to go to Rome to make some inquiries, and he asks Tonino to stay close to his grandfather when his grandfather has to meet with anyone, to see if he can spot the evil enchanter. However, the evil enchanter already knows too much about the two families and about Tonino in particular.
When Tonino is kidnapped by the evil enchanter, his family immediately blames the Petroccis and sets out to confront them … only to be met halfway by the Petrocchi family, on their way to confront the Montanas about kidnapping one of their children, Angelica. The feud between the two families becomes worse than ever, but an accidental encounter between Tonino’s brother Paolo and Angelica’s sister Renata reveals that neither family has kidnapped anyone. The evil enchanter is playing both of the families against each other to distract them from what they really need to do: find the children and prepare to defend Caprona from its enemies. Paolo and Renata have trouble convincing either of their families of the truth because they are already too convinced that the other family is their real enemy, so they struggle to figure out how to save Tonino and Angelica themselves.
Meanwhile, Tonino and Angelica team up in captivity to find a way to escape and tell their families where to find the secret words to the angel’s song. While they are being held captive together, Tonino and Angelica argue about the nature of their families, but by talking together, they come to realize that each of their families has held half of the answer to the problem all along. If only the children can get together and reach their families to tell them the truth about the angel’s song and the identity of the evil enchanter!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).
My Reaction
During the course of the story, we never learn the original cause of the feud between the two families. It might have been something with one family thinking that the other was being favored by a past duke, or maybe it was some private quarrel between the heads of the two families. The cause is less important than the result. For generations, each family has been quietly maligning the other to the children of the family, who have continued to pass on the stories.
When the younger members of both families finally meet and talk to each other, they are initially offended that the other family has been saying the same horrible things about them that they’ve been saying about the other family, but it’s also an eye-opening experience. The two families are actually very similar to each other, both in their professional work and in their private family life. In fact, they live nearly identical lifestyles. The fact is that both families have been contributing to the spells maintaining their city for centuries, working together since before their feud began. Their spells were always intertwined and made to work together. Since the feud started and the families stopped working together, they have still had to work together in the service of their city and duke, but the feud has also served as a distraction from the real sources of danger.
As with other Chrestomanci stories, Chrestomanci doesn’t solve all of the problems of the story himself. Instead, he acts as a helper, revealing key information and providing guidance to help the other characters to solve their own problems. As a neutral observer, Chrestomanci sees both of the families and their quarrel for what they really are. He also helps to reveal the true villain of the story for who they really are.
Chrestomanci also points out the hidden talents of the children in the story. Although Tonino doesn’t think he’s as good as magic as others in his family, he does have other talents and magical abilities. At the end of the story, he goes to England with Chrestomanci to study for a while. His adventures in England are part of one of the short stories in Mixed Magics.
This is the first book in the Chrestomanci series. There are many different dimensions with duplicate worlds, and in each of those duplicate worlds, there is a copy of every person. People’s lives can differ dramatically between the different worlds, but there is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other dimensions or worlds. This person is called the Chrestomanci. All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread among the duplicates across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives. Very often, the Chrestomanci doesn’t realize that he’s a Chrestomanci until he actually dies . . . and fails to die because he uses up one of his spare lives and continues living with the others.
When young Eric Chant’s older sister Gwendolyn gives him the nickname Cat at a young age, saying that he has nine lives, he doesn’t understand that it’s literally true. Then, he and Gwendolyn are unexpectedly orphaned during a boat accident. Their parents drown. Gwendolyn doesn’t because she’s a witch, and the water rejected her. Cat thought that he was saved because he grabbed hold of Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn knows differently.
After their parents’ deaths, Cat and Gwendolyn live with their downstairs neighbor for a time, receiving support from the town. Their neighbor, Mrs. Sharp, is also a witch, and she recognizes Gwendolyn’s talent. When she goes through the children’s parents’ things, she finds three letters from someone called Chrestomanci, and she recognizes immediately that they are important. Cat doesn’t fully understand who Chrestomanci is, but everyone regards him as an important person, so much so that they even hesitate to say his name out loud. His signature is valuable, and Mrs. Sharp offers the letters as payment for witchcraft lessons for Gwendolyn from the best tutor in the area, Mr. Nostrum. Gwendolyn breezes through the early lessons easily, and everyone in the neighborhood recognizes her talents. They are sure that Gwendolyn is destined for great things, and they are all eager to ingratiate themselves with her. A local fortune-teller even says that Gwendolyn will be famous and may be able to rule the world if she goes about it in the right way. The fortune-teller also tells Cat’s fortune, but his fortune is a warning that he is in danger from two sides. Cat is frightened and unsure what to think of it.
However, there is still the question about how the children’s parents knew Chrestomanci and what their father argued about with him in their letters to each other. Mr. Nostrum is particularly curious to know what the children know about Chrestomanci, having apparently tried to learn things about him through his signature and failing, but neither of the children can tell him much. Cat still isn’t sure exactly who Chrestomanci is, so he suggests that Mr. Nostrum just write to Chrestomanci himself to ask. It’s such a straightforward approach that it never occurred to either Mr. Nostrum or Gwendolyn to do that before. Gwendolyn ends up writing the letter to Chrestomanci herself, exaggerating her plight as an orphan to gain sympathy, and implying that Cat also drowned in the boat accident. When Chrestomanci arrives to see Gwendolyn, he is initially surprised to see Cat.
Although their relationship to Chrestomanci isn’t explained at first, Chrestomanci takes custody of the children and brings them to live at his castle with his own wife and children, Julia and Roger. Everyone tells the children how lucky they are because living with someone as important as Chrestomanci means hob-nobbing with other important people. Cat realizes that the reason why Gwendolyn wants to go to Chrestomanci is that she is serious about becoming famous and ruling the world. She sees life with Chrestomanci as the first step. Cat is more intimidated and homesick.
Life in Chrestomanci’s castle is quite different from what Gwendolyn expected, though. There is some kind of enchantment over the castle that muffles Gwendolyn’s powers, and that drives her crazy. Gwendolyn is contemptuous of Julia and Roger for being plain and fat, but both of them turn out to be better at magic than she is and are fully capable of standing up to her magical tricks and bullying. Worst of all, nobody seems impressed by Gwendolyn or thinks that she’s special, and Gwendolyn is accustomed to people thinking that she’s special and impressive.
Chrestomanci makes it clear that none of the children are supposed to be practicing magic unless they are under the supervision of their tutor, Michael Saunders. When Gwendolyn and Cat begin having lessons with Michael Saunders along with Julia and Roger, it becomes apparent that Gwendolyn is far behind in her normal subjects, like math and history, even behind Cat, who is younger. Gwendolyn airily tells the tutor that she never paid attention to such things at their old school because she was concentrating more on learning witchcraft. Michael Saunders tells her that she won’t have any more magical lessons until she catches up in her normal studies, and Chrestomanci backs up the tutor. Gwendolyn is infuriated because, not only is nobody treating her like she’s special and impressive, for the first time in her life, they are treating her like what she really is: a spoiled and naughty child.
Gwendolyn’s parents didn’t fully have the ability to impose consequences on Gwendolyn when they were alive, although they were a restraining influence. After they died, nobody tried to restrain Gwendolyn, only trying to ingratiate themselves so she would help them or they could use her for their own purposes. Although Cat has idolized his older sister, there are dark sides to her personality that he has never realized before, and he soon discovers that she has sinister intentions that involve him.
One day, Gwendolyn vanishes and is replaced by one of her duplicates from another world, where magic doesn’t exist. This other version of Gwendolyn, who is called Janet, has no idea where she is or how she got there. It is from her that Cat learns that there is no duplicate of himself in her world. While Cat struggles to figure out what is happening, he helps the new girl to pretend that she is the usual Gwendolyn, although she actually has a very different, much nicer, personality. The more Cat tells Janet about Gwendolyn, the less Janet likes her or the idea of being her, which makes Cat nervous.
When Cat and the new Gwendolyn realize what Cat’s Gwendolyn intends to do, they will need the Chrestomanci’s help to stop her and for Cat to claim his true destiny, the one that Gwendolyn has been attempting to conceal from him all along.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
One of the best parts of the book for me was the setting at Chrestomanci Castle. The idea of living in a castle with magical playmates who can make toy soldiers move on their own is exciting! Cat and Gwendolyn’s rooms in the castle sound like the kind of bedrooms that any kid might imagine having. Even though the castle is strange and sinister things are happening, there is also a kind of coziness to the atmosphere. The children have hot cocoa every morning in the nursery. (I’m not sure why Cat, Gwendolyn, and Janet don’t like hot cocoa. Having hot chocolate for breakfast every morning would have made me happy as a kid, although I admit that, if Chrestomanci and Millie are concerned about their children’s weight issues enough to limit their marmalade intake, that’s not really the best morning drink they could have. I would have suggested tea instead. While we’re on the subject, I didn’t like the way they kept going on about the kids’ weight issues.) They have their own old-fashioned schoolroom in the castle with their own private tutor. When they get allowance money, they can walk to the charming, old-fashioned town nearby and buy candy and other small items. Millie is a doting magical mother, and even though Chrestomanci can be a little intimidating and fussy about appearances, he seems to genuinely care about the children and isn’t above sticking his well-dressed head into the nursery to say good morning and check on them.
During his time at Chrestomanci Castle, Cat learns things about his parents and his sister that he never knew before. His parents were actually cousins, and marriages between cousins in magical families are frequently dangerous, especially when they have children. Chrestomanci is also their parents’ cousin, and the argument he had with their father through their letters was about preventing the couple from having children any children with magical abilities, a suggestion that insulted and angered their father. Their father later came to regret that when young Gwendolyn first started using her powers, and even her parents started to see that she was dangerous. They weren’t quite sure how she was using Cat, but they had the sense that she was using him to do her magic somehow. Nobody thought to take Cat’s nickname seriously until Janet started questioning the reason why Gwendolyn started calling him that.
The truth is that Cat is a nine-lived enchanter. Gwendolyn realized this when he died at birth but didn’t actually die, and even though she was young herself, she found a way to hijack his powers. From the time when he was a baby, she’s been using his powers as if they were her own. That is how Gwendolyn appears to be unusually powerful for her age, even though she’s never really had the patience to go through any of her lessons by the numbers, just glossing over the beginning parts. Cat has been unable to use his own magical abilities because Gwendolyn has been keeping them all for herself, so for a long time, he assumes that he doesn’t have any magic at all. Since Gwendolyn has been doing this for his whole life, Cat has grown accustomed to how it feels and doesn’t notice it until Janet puts together the clues and realizes what’s been happening. When Gwendolyn does particularly powerful magic, she even sacrifices one of Cat’s extra lives, which she placed in a little matchbook for easy use.
Cat is appalled when he finds out about it, and he doesn’t want to believe it at first. However, when he tries to light one of the matches and instantly catches fire, he is convinced. What is even worse is that Gwendolyn and her magic tutor are planning to use him as a human sacrifice to open the gateway to other worlds so that they and the other evil magicians can use their powers to control these other worlds. Gwendolyn is a malevolent narcissist and always has been. Cat is devastated when he learns how little Gwendolyn cares about him, but he manages to finally summon enough anger to stand up to Gwendolyn and take his powers back from her. Like other victims of narcissists, he has always been the stronger and more powerful of the two of them, but he needed some help to see it.
Unlike Gwendolyn, Janet is not a narcissist and is capable of feeling empathy and caring for others. She’s even capable of selfless acts and personal sacrifices for the sake of others when necessary. When Gwendolyn escapes and permanently seals herself in another world where she is a queen, Janet is stuck in Cat’s world, unable to return to her own. It’s a terrible blow for her to be separated from her parents, who are alive in her world. However, when Chrestomanci asks her if she will be okay and if she wants him to try to return her to her own world, she refuses the offer because she has discovered that the double who replaced her in her world is an orphan who badly needs a family. While Gwendolyn was even going to volunteer Janet, one of her other selves as a sacrifice if Cat wouldn’t do, Janet is willing to sacrifice her former life in her world for the sake of one of her other selves. Janet is really the kind of sister that Cat has needed all along. She says that she was supposed to have a younger brother in her world but that he died at birth, and she is fascinated to find Eric/Cat alive in this new world and get to know the brother she lost. Janet learns to love her new brother and to get along with Julia and Roger, becoming the kind of girl Gwendolyn really should have been to her family. She doesn’t have any magical abilities, but she discovers that she can help help her new family because life in her usual world (which is supposed to be our world) has given her a different perspective from theirs. She is the one who suggests to Chrestomanci that he stop using silverware made of actual silver, which impedes his powers, and use stainless steel instead. When Gwendolyn played magical tricks at dinner, Chrestomanci always had trouble dealing with it because he was holding silver, but if he uses stainless steel, he won’t have that problem again. Chrestomanci and Millie admit that they never thought of that because stainless steel cutlery isn’t common in their world.
I remember finding this story fascinating the first time I read it as a kid. There are some dark themes with Gwendolyn’s narcissism, the threats to the children’s lives, and even Cat losing a few more lives. Cat’s growth is central to the story. Once Gwendolyn’s toxic influence is removed from his life, he begins to see the truth about himself and how Gwendolyn has treated him. Cat had always looked to her for comfort as his sister and his last living relative (so he thought), but all along, she was the one who was most dangerous to him, and that’s a terrible betrayal. Once Cat starts to understand the situation, he begins to see his own potential, and he also has some new people in his life who show him better treatment. The castle is charming, the world is fascinating, and the story is thought-provoking about the different ways a person’s life can go in different circumstances. Other books in the series go into more detail about how the different worlds in this universe function and how they split off from each other in different series, based on the outcomes of important events.
#24 The Mystery of the Book Fair by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1999.
Sarah-Jane is excited about the book fair being held in the public library. She helped to collect donations of books for the sale, and she wants to be first in line so that she can buy a set of old Winnie-the-Pooh books that she’s had her eye on.
But from the moment that she claims the books, people keep coming up to her and trying to get her to let them have them or buy them from her. Another volunteer at the sale, who is also a book dealer, looks over the books and tells Sarah-Jane that they are rare first editions that are worth a lot of money.
Even though Sarah-Jane bought the books in good faith from the library, she and her cousins feel that they ought to try to find the original owner to make sure that he really meant to donate them. The trouble is that Sarah-Jane remembers that the donor of the books behaved rather strangely and seemed very nervous. When he gave them the books, he even called them by the wrong name, “Winkie-the-Pooh.” What kind of book collector wouldn’t know the value of his own collection or even the correct name of the books? Did the books even really belong to him at all? Then, more than one person shows up at the library, claiming to own the books. Who is the original owner?
The theme of the story is Proverbs 3:3, “Don’t ever stop being kind and truthful. Let kindness and truth show in all you do. Write them down in your mind as if on a tablet.”
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Sarah-Jane wanted the books not only because she likes Winnie-the-Pooh but because she likes old things, and she found the old copies of the books charming. Although she did not originally collect old books, these particular books inspire her to start an old book collection. Many people have discovered their love of collecting old books thanks to the popularity of recent aesethics, like Cottagecore and Dark Academia.
However, as the book dealer in the story explains, most old books are not the rare collectors’ items that these first edition copies are. The dealer explains that the value of an old book depends on many factors, like the condition of the book, its rarity, and the number of people who would be interested in acquiring it. I’ve encountered this myself in collecting old children’s books. Many of the books that I cover on this site would be worth very little to other collectors because they are not rare, first edition classics, but they’re worth something to me because there are elements of the stories that I find interesting. I don’t have the funds to buy most of the really rare books, although I’ve occasionally managed to buy books that would ordinarily be out of my price range at used book sales or as library discards or as damaged books. I think the most expensive books I have are ones that would be worth perhaps $100 or $200 if they were in pristine condition, which none of my books are. I’ve never encountered anything that would be worth thousands of dollar, like the Winnie-the-Pooh books in the story. The Winnie-the-Pooh books are worth that much because they are not only first editions but they are in near mint condition and they are extremely popular classic books.
One of the adults who tries to pressure Sarah-Jane into selling the books to her is a woman who tries to make Sarah-Jane feel bad for buying books that are for younger kids. The woman says that she wants to buy them for a young child, but the nice dealer recognizes her as a fellow book dealer and knows that she’s trying to cheat Sarah-Jane because she has recognized the books for what they are and knows their value. The woman wasn’t being honest in anything she said. She wasn’t really interested in the books just for their own sake, as a book lover or as a present for a real child, but only for their monetary value. That makes her different from Sarah-Jane, who fell in love with the books for their own sake. I’m not the only one who collects old books, even old children’s books, just because I appreciate them for what they are. It’s a feeling that doesn’t know any particular age. The real owner of the bookss turns out to be an elderly man who was born the year that the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published and who has had the books since they were new. He loves them not just because they’re collectors’ items but because of their sentimental value.
The books were stolen from the house of the book collector along with some other things. One of the thieves donated the books to the library because he thought they were worthless. His partner in crime knew that they were worth a lot of money and came to the sale to try to get them back. He runs away when the real owner of the books shows up looking for them. Sarah-Jane calls the police and tells them what happened. The books are returned to their rightful owner, and as a reward, he buys another rare book of fairy tales that was donated to the sale (on purpose, by the owner) and gives it to Sarah-Jane.
The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.
When Dawn Bosco first joined Ms. Rooney’s class at Polk Street School, she stole Emily Arrow’s toy unicorn. Now, that incident has come back to haunt her. When the book begins, her theft of Emily’s unicorn was just weeks ago. Now, she and Emily are starting to be friends, although their friendship is a bit shaky.
At school, the teachers are talking about vegetables because it’s Good Vegetable Day. Everything is geared around vegetables all day, and the art teacher has the children make sculptures of vegetables out of clay. Dawn is bored because she’s been reading a mystery book, and she’d rather be finding mysteries and learning to be a detective than making silly vegetables out of clay.
Dawn gets irritated with Emily when she says that she’ll make a cucumber, which is what Dawn was going to make because it’s easy. The teacher won’t let Dawn make a cucumber because Emily already claimed that idea, so Dawn has to make a carrot instead. (Not that much different in shape, really, except one end is more narrow.) However, she still resents Emily for using the cucumber idea first.
As the girls push against each other by the sink, cleaning up from using the clay, Dawn spots a ring next to the sink. Later, Emily says that her ring is missing. It’s a special ring with a blue stone that she got for her birthday. Dawn is pleased that she’s found a mystery to solve. Remembering that she saw a ring next to the sink in the art room, Dawn proudly goes back to the art room to see if she can find the ring and return victorious. However, the ring isn’t there when she checks.
Then, suspicion turns to Dawn herself. After all, everyone knows that Dawn stole Emily’s unicorn before. Instead of being the hero detective, Dawn is turning into the main suspect in this crime. Now, she really needs to find the ring to clear her name!
Dawn’s grandmother, Noni, gave her a special detective kit for her birthday. Dawn uses it to turn into The Polka Dot Private Eye to hunt down Emily’s ring.
The book is available to borrow online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I liked the way the series returned to the subject of Dawn’s theft and used it to spark a spin-off mystery series. This is the first of the Polka Dot Private Eye books. In this series, Dawn becomes a more likeable character than she was when she first appeared in Fish Face, and she gets a little comeuppance for her earlier, unpunished theft of Emily’s toy unicorn in the form of her classmates’ suspicion of her. When I read this book for the first time when I was a kid, I hadn’t read the book where Dawn was first introduced, Fish Face, so I didn’t really understand the relationship between Dawn and Emily and how Dawn took Emily’s toy unicorn. We never really find out in either book exactly why Dawn took the unicorn, although in this book, she thinks of herself as having “borrowed” it instead of having stolen it.
Reading Fish Face isn’t necessary to understand the basic story in this book, but after having read it, I appreciate Dawn’s position in this book a little better. By now, everyone knows what Dawn did, and although Dawn thinks of “weeks ago” as a long time ago, it’s not really that long, and it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. Dawn is still a relatively new kid in class, and one of the few things everyone knows about her is that she has a history of taking things that don’t belong to her. It is a logical conclusion that Dawn might have helped herself to another of Emily’s belongings when everyone knows that she’s done it before. As my grandfather used to say, it’s easier to keep a good reputation than to redeem a bad one, but Dawn works at it and learns that she likes being a detective and that she has a talent for figuring things out. After Dawn figures out where Emily’s ring is, the two of them become better friends. Solving the mystery also makes Dawn a class hero and begins to establish Dawn’s reputation as a person who likes to solve mysteries and crimes rather than commit them.
This book gets bonus points from me for mentioning jelly sandals. Jelly shoes were a regular part of my childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s, and I’ve seen some of them return again in the early 2000s, probably partly because people my age now have children, and they’re nostalgic for some of the things from their childhoods. Jelly shoes (or “jellies,” as we called them) are sandals and sandal-like shoes made from flexible plastic in different colors, some clear or with sparkles inside. They were cheap when I was a kid, and I used to get a new pair or two when the weather turned warm. Eventually, they wear out, and the plastic bits snap. I’d wear them around my backyard with my toes sticking out the front as they started breaking, and I started growing out of them. By the time they were too broken to use anymore, my toes were usually beyond the bottom of the shoes, and I was always kind of proud of that because it was a sign that I’d grown over the summer. It wasn’t much of a loss when the shoes wore out because they’d be too small for me at that point anyway, so we’d throw them away, and I’d wear more solid shoes when the weather turned cold. Jellies, flip-flops, and cheap canvas shoes were a major part of what I wore when I was young and growing out of shoes fairly quickly. They were all inexpensive, and while they didn’t last very long, they lasted about as long as they needed to before I needed the next size and weren’t much to lose when I was rough on them.
#20 The Weird Science Mystery by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1990.
Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!
The Bobbsey Twins are all getting ready for their school’s science fair. Bert’s project is about dog behavior with the family’s dog as his subject. His twin, Nan, is also studying animal behavior, but with a chicken named Zelda. Because the science fair is open to both middle school and elementary school kids, the younger twins, Freddie and Flossie, can also enter. Freddie is entering with a large baking soda volcano.
When the kids arrive to drop off their projects, Nan and Bert notice another boy from their class, Martin Crane. Martin is a science whiz, but he isn’t very nice. He’s not really a bully, like Danny Rugg, but he makes fun of the Bobbseys’ science projects. They don’t know what Martin’s project is because he’s bringing it in boxes labeled “Top Secret”, but he swears that it’s going to win first prize.
When Freddie sees the other students’ projects, he starts to doubt that he has any chance of winning a prize himself. There’s a boy who has an impressive star chart display, and Danny Rugg has a display of spiders. There’s a girl named Ellen with an exhibit showing how pearls are made, including real pearls! Ellen says that her uncle is in the jewelry business and loaned her the pearls. Ellen’s younger sister, Melissa, says that Ellen’s project is unfair, although she doesn’t say why she thinks so. Melissa says that she didn’t do a project herself because she thinks the science fair is dumb.
Mr. Newman, Nan and Bert’s science teacher from an earlier book in the series, is one of the judges of the science fair. He’s going around the fair, taking pictures of the projects, but Martin refuses to unpack his project, saying that he will reveal it tomorrow. Then, Melissa screams that Danny’s poisonous spiders have escaped, and people start panicking and running! Mr. Newman says that Danny’s spiders are definitely not the poisonous kind, and he makes Danny apologize for telling people they were. The Bobbseys wonder if Danny could have let the spiders loose on purpose as one of his pranks. Then, suddenly, Ellen screams that her pearls are gone!
While the teachers are looking for the pearls and trying to encourage the thief to come forward, other accidents happen to other science fair projects. Freddie’s volcano suddenly erupts even though he didn’t set it up to do that yet. Someone cuts the leash on their dog, so he gets loose, and release’s Nan’s chicken from her cage. Ellen said that the pearls in her collection were valuable, so the teachers call the police. But, were the pearls stolen because they were valuable or because someone wants to sabotage the science fair? Was the theft of the pearls related to the sabotage of the other projects, or are these two separate acts? Also, what does Martin have in those boxes labeled “Top Secret”?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
Sean and I were talking earlier about how later books in the New Bobbsey Twins series focused more on the younger set of twins, Freddie and Flossie, and seemed to involve lower stakes in the mysteries. I reviewed this book shortly after The Clue in the Classroom, so I could compare two science-based mysteries that took place at the kids’ school, one earlier in the series and one later.
The other science-based mystery in the series involved an invention and industrial espionage, while this one involves the school science fair. However, I thought the mystery was well-done. When the Bobbseys arrive at the science fair, the story establishes multiples suspects. Danny Rugg is a repeat suspect because he’s the school bully and general nemesis, and he could have set his spiders loose as a distraction while he took the pearls and set up other things to go wrong. Then again, Melissa seemed upset about her sister’s project, so she might have had a reason to sabotage it. Martin is being mysterious about his science fair project, but what if he doesn’t actually have one in those boxes of his? Maybe he couldn’t think of anything or ran out of time to do his project, so he’s sabotaging everyone else’s project to provide a reason for why his project will suddenly disappear or turn out not to work. I even had a theory that each of those people might have done something since multiple disasters happened at the same time or almost at the same time. From the beginning, there are multiple possibilities that seem about equally likely, which is good for making readers wonder, and the kids are active investigators in the story, investigating suspects individually, not just waiting for chance to give them the answers. Those are the ingredients for a good mystery.
Although the story takes place at a kids’ science fair, there are a couple of factors involved that add some excitement and higher stakes to the story. The value of the pearls has the adults worried about getting them back. (Personally, I wondered about just how valuable the pearls were. Since they didn’t seem to have any form of security to protect them, like a locked display case, and since Danny Rugg lied to everyone about his spiders being poisonous, it occurred to me that Ellen might have lied to everyone about the value of the pearls to make her project seem more exciting, although that is never clarified during the story.) I also appreciated the thief’s motive for stealing the pearls because it wasn’t just about the pearls’ value. It was one of the ideas that I can for a possible motive, but I’ll leave it a secret about which of my theories was right.
