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Jingle Dancer

Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu, 2000.

Jenna is inspired to become one of the jingle dancers at the powwow because her grandmother has been a jingle dancer. She loves the way the little cone-shaped bells on the dancers’ costumes sing!

Her grandmother tells her that there won’t be enough time to get the tin for making the jingles for her costume this time, but next time, she can dance with the Girls group.

Jenna knows how to do the dance because she has watched old videos of her grandmother dancing and has practiced. However, she can’t really do a proper jingle dance without the jingles for her dancing costume.

However, her grandmother isn’t the only person Jenna knows who has been a jingle dancer. Other women in Jenna’s family and among her family’s friends have also been jingle dancers, and not all of them dance anymore. Perhaps, with their help, Jenna can get the jingles she needs in time for this powwow!

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

My Reaction

I liked the way the book showed how Jenna’s family and friend supported her and helped her to take part in a tradition that they have all shared. They can’t all be there to see Jenna when she dances, but Jenna dances for all them, her dress covered in borrowed jingles!

A section in the back of the book explains more about Jenna’s tribe and the traditional dance shown in the story. The story is set in Oklahoma, and Jenna is part of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has Ojibway (Chippewa/Anishinabe) ancestry. Elements of both tribal cultures appear in the story. The tradition of jingle dancing originated with the Ojibway people, and the book describes details of the costume (called “regalia” in the book) that women and girls wear to perform the dance. The book also contains a glossary of words that appear in the story with some additional details about their significance.

I think this story is a fun way to introduce readers to Native American traditions that may not be familiar to them. I also enjoyed the pictures, which have a lovely, dream-like quality to them.

Posted on by TracyC

Kokopelli’s Flute

Kokopelli’s Flute by Will Hobbs, 1995.

Tepary Jones, called Tep for short, has always been fascinated by the ancient cliff dwelling known as Picture House. One night, he goes there with his dog, Dusty, because he think it would be a great place to watch a lunar eclipse. However, he and Dusty aren’t there alone. Tep witnesses a couple of looters illegally digging for valuable artifacts. The looters uncover the burial of a medicine man and begin taking some of the things he had buried with him. They damage the site before they leave, but Tep discovers that they have left behind an unusual artifact, a small flute made of polished bone. When Tep picks up the flute, he feels compelled to play it. Not wanting to leave the flute behind in case the looters return, Tep takes it home with him.

That night, Tep has a strange dream that he turned into a packrat, like one of the literal packrats he saw up at Picture House. However, he soon realizes that this was not just a dream. Ever since he played the flute, he finds himself turning into the animal he saw the first time he did so. Tep returns the flute to the body of the medicine man and reports the looting to the authorities, hoping that, once the body is respectfully reburied, whatever magic or curse is afflicting him will end. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Tep still finds himself turning to the packrat at night, having uncontrollable urges to go out and explore and find food, and it’s dangerous because animal predators and even his own parents are after him. Rodents in the house are a serious concern because they can carry hantavirus, which causes dangerous respiratory infections in humans. After his mother catches sight of him in packrat form, Tep’s parents start setting out traps. His dog, Dusty, seems to know him even when he’s a rodent and helps to protect him, but Tep knows that he’s going to have to stop this transformation somehow, before either his parents catch him or a predator eats him!

Tep’s parents are academics and researchers who study ancient agriculture and cultivate varieties of seeds on their farm that require little water to grow. To buy himself time from his parents’ efforts to catch the packrat, Tep makes the argument that the packrat is a part of the ecosystem and that it might be performing an important role in the environment, like birds that help propagate seeds by eating them and then depositing them in new places. Tep brings up the fact that there are some seeds that really need to be processed in a bird’s digestive system before they can grow. It’s a thoughtful argument, but the looming threat of hantavirus in their community still means concern about the presence of rodents. Hantavirus is serious, even fatal, and people in their community have already fallen victim to it.

Tep returns to Picture House to try to find the flute again to break whatever spell is affecting him, but he can’t find it. He only hears what he thinks is the sound of someone playing the flute, and he’s not sure if he really hears it or if he’s imagining it. Then, a stranger comes to the farm, a man who appears to be a humpbacked Native American or possibly someone from Mexico or Central America. He calls himself Cricket, and Tep’s family thinks that he’s probably just another migrant worker. Tep shows Cricket around the farm and explains the different types of seeds they cultivate and how they can be used to keep particular varieties of plants alive for their drought-resistant or pest-resistant qualities. Cricket doesn’t say much, but he seems to approve of the idea of cultivating more varieties of seeds. When he helps Tepary to plant seeds, Tep notices that he uses a planting stick, like Native Americans traditionally did.

Of course, Cricket is no ordinary farm worker. Tepary notices his unusual ability with plants and animals, and one night, Cricket speaks with Tepary while he’s in his packrat form. Cricket knows more of what’s been happening than anyone because he is one of the legendary figures from Native American folklore known as Kokopelli. Kokopelli was a legendary humpbacked flute player known for bringing seeds to people, and Cricket says that he still visits people like Tep’s family, who are interested in the past, who cultivate the land, and who keep seeds alive. Tep appeals to him for help with his transformations, and Cricket says he will help, if he can, although he notes that Tep seems to have been managing well. Cricket says that Tep can use the flute to reverse his condition, but only if he knows the right notes to play on it. If he plays the wrong notes, he could change into something else and make his condition worse. The clues to the notes are contained in the pictures on the walls of Picture House.

Tep manages to use his animal form to play a trick on Coyote in the tradition of old trickster tales and to rescue his dog from the looters. Then, Tep’s mother contracts hantavirus. Cricket says that ancient people also suffered from the disease, and they used an herb to cure it. Nobody grows that particular herb anymore, but there should still be some contained in the medicine bundle buried with the old medicine man at Picture House. To save his mother and break the spell on him, Tep must return there to find the medicine man’s bundle and the flute.

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

My Reaction

I vaguely remember having read this book when I was a kid, around the time when it was first published in the 1990s. It stuck in my mind because it takes place in the Southwestern United States, where I grew up, and it was also the first time that I had heard about hantavirus, which is a serious concern in real life. I couldn’t remember exactly how the book ended, though.

Reading it as an adult, I understand more about the parents’ work and the commentary about interrelated aspects of the ecosystem than I did as a kid. I understood some aspects of environmentalism and ecosystems as a kid because those were topics that we discussed in science classes at school in the 1990s, but admittedly, science wasn’t my best subject, and I’ve had more time to grasp certain concepts since then.

There are agricultural researchers in real life who do what Tep’s parents are doing, trying to cultivate seeds for drought-resistant crops, which are important in places like the area where I live, that are very dry for much of the year, and are becoming even more important due to climate change. That type of research takes time to cultivate generations of plants and to propagate seeds with desirable qualities. Modern researchers also take information and inspiration from past agricultural practices to enhance modern techniques (paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany). When Tep is talking to Cricket, he explains why it’s important to keep growing a different varieties of crops because some varieties are more resistant to different types of problems that others, like drought-resistant crops or pest-resistant crops. One of the dangers of huge, corporate farms is that they produce too few varieties of particular types of crops, focusing on the most popular ones, leaving them vulnerable to being almost completely wiped out by particular disasters. People need to keep growing older and less popular varieties of crops to keep the plant varieties alive and keep producing seeds for new generations so agriculture as a whole will have those varieties to draw on for the plant qualities they need to cope with changes in the environment and/or particular plant diseases.

One of the reasons why I liked this book is that it references the legend of Kokopelli. Because I grew up in the Southwestern United States, I grew up seeing images of Kokopelli along with other Southwestern Native American symbols. Kokopelli is often used as a decorative image in Southwestern art, although not everyone who has or uses the decoration knows the legends behind it. Kokopelli is described in somewhat different ways in different stories, but he is generally a fertility figure who travels from village to village, bringing changes to the seasons and promoting good harvests. He is also a trickster figure and represents human fertility. In some stories, human women get pregnant everywhere he visits, including by Kokopelli himself, an aspect of the character that does not appear in this particular book because it’s not kid-friendly. There is a theory that the legends might be based on traveling Aztec merchants who arrived seasonally, carrying sacks of seeds and other goods to trade on their backs, giving them that hunched appearance.

The book frequently uses the word “Indian” instead of Native American. It seems to be meant in an informal way rather than a disrespectful one, although I found it irritating because it can be a bit confusing. When Tep uses it in relation to the Native American ruins nearby, context tells readers that he means “Native American”, but when he uses it when he talks about places around the world that use the seeds his family produces, it becomes more confusing. At one point, he uses the word “Indian” and then talks about an order his parents have received from Pakistan, so did Tep mean Native Americans or people from India the country in that context? I heard the word “Indian” used a lot in relation to Native Americans when I was growing up, and sometimes, I even have the urge to use it out of old habits, but I don’t really like using that word anymore. It’s not so bad if you say “American Indian”, but just saying “Indian” by itself is often confusing. I generally agree with the modern convention of saying “Native American” or using the name of a specific tribe, if you know the name to use, both because it sounds more respectful and because it really makes a difference in the clarity of the sentence. It’s just not as effective if someone immediately has to ask, “Wait a minute, do you mean ‘American Indian’ or ‘Indian from India’?”, and when it’s in writing, there isn’t even a live person there to ask.

Posted on by TracyC

Revenge of the Mummy

Clue

#13 Revenge of the Mummy by A. E. Parker, 1996.

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 a scavenger hunt, an ice cream tasting party, and a hot air balloon race.

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:

The Lion Ring – Mr. Boddy has obtained a new treasure for his collection: an ancient and valuable ring with a lion on it that once belonged to an African king. Naturally, his sticky-fingered guests all want it for themselves.

Full of Hot Air – Mr. Boddy and his guests are having a hot-air balloon race. Who will be the winner?

Urge to Earn an Urn – Mr. Boddy stops Mrs. White and Mrs. Peacock from arranging flowers in an old urn they found in the basement. It turns out that it’s a valuable Greek urn, and when the other guests realize it, someone plots to steal it.

Please Don’t Sneeze – Miss Scarlet is coming down with a cold and spreading it among the other guests. Mr. Boddy introduces them to his grandmother’s secret cold remedy.

For Goodness’ Snakes! – Mr. Boddy’s guests are frightened of his new pet boa constrictor, but when they try to catch the snake, the snake catches one of them.

The Inky Trail – Mr. Boddy has discovered that someone attempted to forge his signature on a $250,000 bond. Fortunately, the forger tried to use the pen that explodes ink if anyone other than Mr. Boddy uses it. Mr. Boddy thinks that it’s going to be easy to track down the ink-stained guest, but it’s more complicated than he thinks.

The Scavenger Hunt – Mr. Boddy’s guests are bored one evening, so he starts a scavenger hunt with them.

Screaming for Ice Cream – Mr. Boddy has an ice cream tasting party with his guests to determine the best flavor. However, not everyone is willing to eat certain flavors of ice cream. Readers have to determine who is the only person who tried every flavor.

Caught Bare-Handed – Someone attempts a daring but unsuccessful theft of Mr. Boddy’s priceless chandelier, which sends it crashing. Who was the attempted thief?

Revenge of the Mummy – Mr. Boddy shows his guests the mummy case that he has recently acquired. The guests are a little too fascinated after someone mentions that mummies were buried with their valuables. Mr. Boddy warns the guests that the mummy may get angry and seek revenge, but they don’t believe it … until someone has an encounter with the mummy.

Posted on by TracyC

The Screaming Skeleton

Clue

#10 The Screaming Skeleton by A. E. Parker, 1995.

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.

Posted on by TracyC

Mummies in the Morning

Magic Tree House

Mummies in the Morning by Mary Pope Osborne, 1993, 2014.

This time, Jack and Annie use a book in the magic tree house to travel back in time to Ancient Egypt. Jack has a fascination for mummies and pyramids, and Annie can’t wait to see them up close. When the children arrive, they witness what appears to be a royal funeral procession, but the people seem to vanish awfully quickly. Annie wonders if they could have been ghosts, although Jack thinks that’s nonsense. He thinks it was probably just a mirage, although he has reason to rethink that later.

The children follow a mysterious black cat into a pyramid. Annie is eager to see a mummy, but the children are startled when they see what appears to be a walking mummy that drops a scepter. Jack realizes that what they saw wasn’t a real mummy but probably a tomb robber in disguise. He reads in their book about Ancient Egypt about the problem of tomb robbers.

Then, the children encounter a real ghost! She is see-through, and objects pass through her. Fortunately, the ghost is nice instead of scary, and she explains to the children that she needs their help. She is the ghost of an Ancient Egyptian queen, and she has been unable to progress to the afterlife because she cannot find her copy of the Book of the Dead, which is supposed to guide her through the obstacles on the way to the afterlife. She knows that her brother, who designed her tomb, hid the book to protect it from tomb robbers and left clues for her in the symbols carved on the walls of her tomb. However, her brother apparently forgot that her vision was always bad, and she can’t read the symbols. (Apparently, poor vision doesn’t improve after death.) Jack would be willing to loan her his glasses, but since she’s incorporeal (not a word used in the book, but basically, she no longer has a physical presence and can’t use physical objects), the glasses wouldn’t stay on her face.

Instead, she asks the children to describe the symbols on the wall to her so she can interpret them. Together, the children and the ghost use the clues to find the scroll containing the Book of the Dead. After that, Jack and Annie have one more task: escaping the maze-like tomb!

My Reaction

The ghost in the story is a non-scary ghost, but there’s enough mild creepiness and mystery to satisfy kids who enjoy a little creepiness in their stories. Toward the end, they have to put the scroll in the sarcophagus with the queen’s mummy, which both grosses out and fascinates the children.

The historical information was good, although translating Egyptian hieroglyphics is much more complicated than the book indicates. In the book, the symbols are meant to literally depict specific objects, which some hieroglyphics can, but others are used to represent sounds to spell out words or names. I think the story just kept things simple for kids.

I liked the part where the kids get lost in the pyramid because pyramids were build with false hallways and dead ends to confuse tomb robbers. Everything work out fine in the end!

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The Mystery of the Missing Mummy

The Bobbsey Twins

Bobbsey Twins The Mystery of the Missing Mummy cover

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.

Posted on by TracyC

The Crime That Has No Name

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.

Posted on by TracyC

Gosick: the Novel

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.

Posted on by TracyC

The Time of the Ghost

The Time of the Ghost cover

The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, 1981.

This isn’t a very long book, but it packs a lot in! This is both a time travel story and a supernatural ghost story, but with the odd twist that we don’t initially know who the “ghost” is, and she isn’t really dead. She’s trying to save her own life.

In the beginning, although this book is from the first person perspective, we don’t know quite who the narrator is. Even the narrator isn’t quite sure who she is or what has happened. Her last memory is that there was some sort of accident, and her mind doesn’t seem to be working right. Now, she seems to be walking through the countryside, but she can’t remember what happened earlier that day or even what she had for lunch. When she looks down to see what she’s wearing that day, she realizes in a panic that she can’t see herself. She has become a ghost!

It takes her some time to get her panicked thoughts together, but she gradually begins to recognize the countryside. She is surprised that she can look over a hedge, thinking that it was something she had always wanted to do before, and she must have grown. There is a small hut nearby, and she recalls that there is an old rag doll called Monigan inside. Exploring further, she finds herself at a school and locates a classroom she recognizes. To her surprise, she discovers that it’s a Latin class full of boys, and although she has no body, she is sure that she’s a girl, so this can’t be her class. However, she does recognize the teacher as someone familiar but also intimidating.

Leaving the classroom, she continues exploring the school, and she finds people she is sure are her family. She remembers that the woman is called Phyllis, and Phyllis is her mother. There are also girls called Imogen, Fenella, and Charlotte. The ghost thinks that these are her sisters and that her name is Sally because Phyllis seems to call her Sally, although nobody really seems to see her. Sometimes, people just seem to have a sense that someone is there, and the dog, Oliver, seems to know she’s there. Pieces of information click in the ghost’s mind. This family’s last name is Melford. The teacher in the Latin class is her father. Sally is short for Selina. Charlotte is called Cart as a nickname.

The ghost finds herself angry and hating her family. She wonders if she could have died in the accident she vaguely remembers and if she came back to get some sort of revenge on her family, but the idea horrifies her, and she’s sure that she wouldn’t have thought of it in other circumstances.

The ghost watches as Fenella goes to the little hut and pretends to worship the doll Monigan and call her forth, like the doll is some kind of oracle. The ghost remembers that Cart was the one who started this game a year before and that she always thought that it was a boring game. Cart started the game because the four sisters had been fighting over the doll or playing with it too roughly one day, and they had each grabbed an arm or leg and pulled the doll apart. Cart had felt guilty about that, so she sewed the doll back together (badly, because she’s bad at sewing), and she turned the doll into a kind of oracle that the girls would worship to make it up to the doll that she had been ruined. Now, the doll is moldy and mildewy from being left in the little hut for a year. Only little Fenella still plays this game, although the doll has never actually done anything magical when they’ve called on her.

Gradually, the ghost begins putting the pieces of her memories together. Her parents manage a boarding school for boys. The girls help out with chores at the school, but they’re mostly expected to stay out of the way. Although they attend a different school themselves, it feels like they never get a break from school because they live at one. They never even get summers off because there are summer courses for disabled children at the boarding school.

Sally the ghost listens to her sisters complaining about her in her absence. They resent her for being overly sweet and a perfectionist and for defending their parents when the other girls criticize them. Sally is angry with them for the things they say behind her back and for their constant bickering and drama. Imogen gets melodramatic and picks at her sisters because she’s worried about not achieving the music career she really wants. Cart keeps trying to shut Imogen down because she feels overwhelmed by sentiment and emotions, and admittedly, Imogen’s emotions are frequently overwhelming. This dynamic between Imogen trying to express her overwhelming emotions and Cart trying to shut her down is a large part of the quarreling between the girls. Fenella, the youngest of the sisters, is just being a silly little girl, and she is rather fed up with her older sisters. At one point, Sally finds a poem that Fenella wrote that explains her relationship with her sisters:

“I have three ugly sisters
They really should be misters
They shout and scream and play the piano
I can never do anything I want.”

It’s a pretty accurate description of what goes on in their house. All of the girls are loud and argumentative, and a large part of the tension in their house comes from the inability of any of them to do what they want to do. Sally notices some pictures on the walls and remembers their father (whom the girls only refer to as “Himself”, never as “father” or “dad”) yelling at them and calling them “bitches” for stealing art supplies from the school for drawing and painting. Imogen’s drama about her music career is because she’s not allowed to use the music room at the school for practicing, and she thinks that she’ll never get a chance to develop her abilities. The parents pay more attention to the students at the school than they do to their own daughters, even forgetting to leave the girls any supper sometimes. The girls’ home life is not happy, and that’s why they’re not happy with each other. The two oldest girls especially are not happy with their parents because of their neglect.

As Sally listens to her sisters talking about her, Cart and Imogen admit that they’re both jealous of Sally because she gets to be somewhere else that will be important to her future career. Sally wishes that they would say where she’s supposed to be because she can’t remember. She finds a few unfinished rough drafts of letters that she wrote to her parents, trying to tell them that life at the school didn’t have much to offer her and that she was going away, but Sally can’t imagine where she would have gone. One of the letters even says that her life is in danger, but from what?

There is a bright spot in the girls’ lives, and that’s a secret friendship they’ve developed with some of the boys at school. The boys visit them in the kitchen after dinner, and they have coffee together. As ghostly Sally watches one of these visits, the boys ask the girls what happened to Sally, which ghostly Sally is (literally) dying to hear. Sally’s sisters explain that Sally’s disappearance is part of a Plan the girls have.

It’s obvious that the girls’ parents neglect them. While Sally has always been defending their parents to the other girls, the other girls want to prove to her that their parents would never notice if something awful happened to one of them. A lot of the strange things that Sally has witnessed them doing that day are part of this Plan. Fenella has been going around the entire day with big knots tied in her hair, and their parents haven’t noticed. Fenella says that if they continue to not notice, she’ll act like she’s fallen seriously ill. Sally’s sisters say that Sally has gone to stay with a friend named Audrey Chambers, but their parents don’t know and still haven’t noticed that she’s even gone.

The sisters and the boys decide to try holding a seance for fun, and ghostly Sally uses this as an opportunity to communicate with them. Although she has some difficulty and misspells her message, she manages to convince Imogen that she’s the one communicating and that she’s dead. Imogen gets hysterical, but the others calm her down by phoning her friend’s house and confirming that Sally is there and that she’s fine. Ghostly Sally can’t understand it. She’s sure that she’s really Sally, but how can that be if Sally is definitely at her friend’s house?

Ghostly Sally seeks out living Sally, and to her surprise, she finds her, although she feels disconnected from this girl. She also learns that this Sally has been secretly doing things with a boy from the school, Julian, performing nighttime rituals with the doll, Monigan. Although ghostly Sally remembers having been friends with Julian, seeing him from outside herself makes her realize that Julian is actually sinister and disturbed. In her spirit form, she also realizes that their rituals with Monigan have stirred up something genuinely supernatural, apart from herself.

As things become more clear to her, the ghost begins to think that she was wrong about being Sally. She is still sure that she is one of the four sisters, neglected at her parents’ school, but she doesn’t think that she’s Sally after all, and that’s why she had no knowledge of Sally’s secret rituals with Julian and couldn’t remember where Sally was or what she was thinking. She also realizes that everything she has seen happened when she was younger. Somehow, after her accident, her spirit went back into the past, seeing things that she and her sisters used to do.

As the “ghost” wakes up in the hospital in the present day, she also realizes that she is not actually dead. She’s been having an out-of-body experience. Worse, her “accident” wasn’t really an accident. Someone tried to kill her. Julian, also older now in the present day, shoved her out of his car while they were driving somewhere. He was deliberately trying to kill her! Something that happened during that time in the past, during the time with the Monigan rituals and the girls’ Plan to confront their parents over their neglect led up to this attempted murder.

The “ghost” still can’t remember everything that happened in the seven years since then, leading up to the attempted murder, and she’s still confused about who she really is. She only senses that Monigan tried to kill her through Julian. Although the girls once thought that Monigan was just a game, Monigan is actually a real, evil spirit. Seven years ago, Monigan told them that it would claim a life, and now, Monigan is trying to do so. Can the “ghost” regain her memories and figure out what to do in time to save her life before the next attempt?

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

My Reaction

Earlier, I covered The Headless Cupid, in which children play at being witches and doing magical rituals that are clearly nonsense, but this book has children who are coerced by some ancient supernatural spirit into doing “real” occult rituals. The children’s rituals involve blood and cruelty to animals, which I didn’t like when I was reading the story. We don’t fully get to know what Monigan actually is, although there are indications that Monigan might be some kind of ancient goddess that craves sacrifices, especially human sacrifices. Monigan seems to remember receiving sacrifices before, in the distant past. Although Cart thinks that she invented Monigan, that Monigan is just a doll they tore, and that all of their rituals are just playacting, the “ghost” realizes that they were all being manipulated by the spirit called Monigan into thinking that. Monigan took advantage of the neglected children and their mentally ill friend for its own purposes. I think Monigan was based on Morrigan from Irish mythology. We are told in the story that this British boarding school is built on a site that has been inhabited from ancient times, and the girls’ father is obsessed with the archaeology of the area, which may also be responsible for stirring up this ancient spirit.

The intriguing part of this story is first that the readers aren’t sure whether or not the “ghost” is actually dead, and then, the readers as well as the ghost have to determine the ghost’s true identity. At first, the “ghost” thinks that she knows who she is, but then, she thinks that she was wrong. (Or was she?) Even when she is awake in the present day, her mind is still confused, and even two of her sisters, while they know that Julian’s attempt to kill her was part of Monigan’s curse, find it difficult to remember everything that happened when all of this started. The “ghost” has to go through the events of the past, with Monigan working against her all the time, to figure out what set off this threat against her before she runs out of time. She knows that Monigan plans to kill her before the day is over, and she doesn’t have much time left to break this curse or prevent it from happening in the first place. The “ghost” isn’t sure at first that she can change the past, but she gradually manages to get through to the other children and figure out a solution with the help of her sisters.

I found the parents in the story not just neglectful but actually cruel and infuriating. The father keeps calling his daughters “bitches” when he gets angry at them. When the girls appeal to their mother about how they’re not being fed and have to keep begging food from the school’s kitchen, the mother shuts her eyes and tells them to stop bothering the cook. The cook is also revealed to be stealing food from the kitchen herself, which may be the reason why both the girls and the students have little to eat, but when the girls tell their mother about it, their mother doesn’t want to hear about it. She just doesn’t want to go to the bother of finding another cook. I’m amazed that the girls haven’t actually died at some point before this or that social services hasn’t gotten involved. The girls do attend a different school from the one their parents manage, so they would have the opportunity to get help and attention from an outside source.

At one point, Fenella openly tells her mother that she’s neglecting them while she only pays attention to the boys at the school, and her mother says that girls can look after themselves while boys can’t. It’s like her mother looks at the girls like some people look at pet cats when they just let them roam and hunt for their own food. I don’t even approve of people neglecting their cats, like they don’t even have pets so much as a nodding acquaintance with feral animals. Even in the present day, when our “ghost” lies in a hospital bed after a murder attempt, their mother doesn’t come to see her because she’s too busy helping the boys at the school to pack their trunks. The father is openly hostile to his daughters, and the mother doesn’t seem to have any feeling or concern for them at all.

The concept of the book was interesting, but it’s not one that I would care to read again because I found it dark and frustrating, although it does end well. Things do improve for the girls in the past after their father discovers their weird rituals and sends them off to their grandmother’s house, angrily declaring that he never wants to see any of them again. The father’s rejection of them is actually a blessing. At their grandmother’s house, they get regular food and the attention that they desperately need. The mother partly redeems herself at the end of the book by coming to see her daughter after all, saying that she felt obligated to get the boys all packed but now that’s done, so she is free to stay with her daughter until she’s fully recovered. The girl does recover, and she begins reconciling herself to her past traumas, both the supernatural ones and the ones resulting from her parents’ neglect and her tumultuous relationship with her sisters.

One thing that the “ghost” accomplishes is that she gets a look at her past and herself as they really are, viewing herself and everything that happened from a neutral position as the “ghost.” Seeing herself from the position of a third person, she discovers that she doesn’t like the things she’s done or the person she’s been during these last several years. That’s why she has felt so disconnected from herself and her memories and why she couldn’t even recognize herself or the things she did in the past. The “ghost” is so upset with herself and ashamed of her life choices that she wonders if she’s really worth saving from Monigan. Fortunately, her sisters truly love her and know that she’s worth saving. Their bad choices and poor behavior to each other have been largely the result of their parents’ neglect, a trauma they all share and understand. Although the ghost doesn’t remember everything at first, the other sisters know that, after they went to live with their grandmother and received the attention and care they really needed, they all improved and their relationships with each other improved. They’ve been trying to move on from their past ever since, and they need to settle the matter about Monigan once and for all to truly be free to go forward in their lives. One of the sisters knows exactly what kind of sacrifice will finally appease Monigan and save her sister’s life.

Monigan wants something perfect as a sacrifice, but our “ghost” isn’t a perfect person. Nobody is perfect, and our “ghost” has become truly aware of her flaws and the nature of her troubled past through her out-of-body experiences. However, things can be perfect in someone’s imagination, and one of the sisters has a more powerful imagination than the others. Someone has a dream that is perfect, at least in her mind. When she gives Monigan that dream, she not only frees her sister from Monigan but herself from something that her future self has realized that she doesn’t really want. Both she and her sister have been clinging to things that were harmful to both of them, making them into the kind of people neither of them really wanted to be. It was their insecurity from their parents’ neglect that made them cling to things that they thought would make them special and distinct. Once they are free from these harmful influences, not only does Monigan stop trying to take their lives, but they are truly free for the first time to become something better. Monigan does claim one life at the end of the story, but in that case, it’s only justice.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Down a Dark Hall

Down a Dark Hall cover

Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, 1974.

Fourteen-year-old Kathryn Gordy, called Kit, is going to boarding school for the first time. She doesn’t really want to attend the Blackwood School for Girls, but her widowed mother has remarried, and she and Kit’s new stepfather, Dan, will be going on an extended honeymoon in Europe. Kit tried to persuade her mother to take her with them on the trip to Europe, but Dan is firm that she can’t come on their honeymoon trip. The Blackwood School has a good reputation, and graduation from the school would guarantee Kit entrance to a good college. At first, Kit thought it might not be so bad if her best friend, Tracy, could attend the school, too, but although Tracy applied to Blackwood, she wasn’t accepted there. Kit hates the idea of going there alone. Worse still, when her mother and Dan take her to the school, it’s an imposing, castle-like mansion that gives Kit the creeps. Her mother and Dan think it looks impressive, but just the sight of the building gives Kit a terrible sense of evil. Even though she doesn’t want to stay, her mother and Dan insist.

Because her mother and Dan have to leave on their trip, Kit has arrived at the school a day early, before classes will start. Madame Duret, the headmistress of the school, welcomes them and explains a little about the school’s history. The school is fairly new. Before it was a school, the mansion was the private home of a man called Brewer, who died about ten years ago. Because few people would want a house that size outside of town, the building was vacant for some time before the Blackwood School moved in, and there are some ghost stories and urban legends about it in the area. Kit’s mother and Dan laugh it off.

Madame Duret gives them a tour of the school and mentions her art collection. She says that she enjoys collecting lesser-known works by famous artists. The dorm rooms are incredibly luxurious. Each student will have a room to herself with a private bath and a canopied bed with velvet draperies. Art is important to Madame Duret, and she says that she wants the surroundings to inspire her students. When it comes time for Kit’s mother to say goodbye to her, her mother asks her if she thinks she could be happy at the school. If Kit really feels like there’s something wrong with the place, her mother is willing to delay her trip and make other arrangements. Shrugging off her earlier misgivings, Kit tells her mother that she will be fine, and her mother and Dan leave.

The school still bothers Kit, but she feels like she has to try to do well there for her mother’s sake. She knows that things have been hard for her since her father died several years before. Although nobody believes her, Kit remembers seeing her father’s ghost in her room the night he died in a car accident while he was on a business trip. Her mother has managed since then, but she wasn’t really happy until she met Dan, and Kit appreciates that her mother needs adult companionship. Still, Kit senses that this school is very strange, and there are things wrong it it. She can’t figure out why her friend, Tracy, was rejected by the school. The canopied bed is luxurious but kind of creepy because it reminds her of a scary story. Then, she notices that the bedroom doors have locks on the outside of the doors but not the inside.

At dinner that evening, Kit meets Professor Farley, who is a teacher at the school, and Madame Duret’s son, Jules. Professor Farley teaches math and science, and Jules, who has only recently gotten his degree, will teach music, giving the students piano lesssons. Madame Duret herself teaches languages and literature, and apart from these three, there are no other teachers at the school. Professor Farley says that he is the one who convinced Madame Duret to open a school in the United States, having seen her success at her school in England. A young cook named Natalie also works at the school, but strangely, Natalie says that Madame Duret doesn’t want her to speak to the students much.

When the other students begin arriving, Kit realizes that there aren’t going to be many students at this school, either. In fact, there are only three other students besides Kit: Sandy, Lynda, and Ruth. All of the girls also seem to be somewhat removed from their families. Sandy is an orphan who lives with her grandparents, who don’t drive, so they didn’t even drop her off at the school. Lynda and Ruth have both been to boarding schools before, and they were dropped off by a chauffeur. They say that Blackwood isn’t like their old school. Kit still wonders why Tracy wasn’t accepted to the school when there are so few students. Kit realizes that she herself isn’t a top student, and the other three students at this school are quite different from each other. However, Professor Farley says that there are other qualifications besides grades, and all of the girls at this school have the qualities they were looking for. Madame Duret refuses to discuss test results at all.

Kit does her best to settle into the school. Everyone acts nice to each other, and the classes are like having private tutors because there are so few students. However, Kit is still nervous and having strange dreams. She never remembers what she’s been dreaming about, but she dreads these strange dreams, so she has trouble getting to sleep. The only way she can get to sleep is to exhaust herself by reading and writing letters late at night until she is exhausted.

One night, while Kit is writing a letter to Tracy late at night, she hears a scream that is choked off suddenly. Although Kit is afraid, she feels like she has to investigate and find out if there is someone in trouble. She thinks the scream came from Sandy’s room. When Kit tries to check on Sandy, Sandy doesn’t answer, and she has trouble getting into Sandy’s room. Kit feels like there is someone in Sandy’s room, and the room is weirdly cold. When Kit finally gets the light on, Sandy is a little disoriented. She doesn’t remember screaming, but she remembers a strange dream about a young woman in old-fashioned clothing, who was watching her. Sandy tells Kit that she’s had strange dreams like this before, although not about this particular woman. When her parents were killed in a plane accident, Sandy sensed the accident when it happened, and she saw her parents in a dream, not unlike the apparent dream that Kit had about her father when he died. The next day, Kit talks to Lynda and Ruth and learns that they have also been having strange dreams that they have trouble remembering.

These dreams seem to be the one thing that all four of the Blackwood girls have in common, and all of them find them disturbing. When Kit has morning piano lessons, she feels strangely tired and her fingers are sore, as if she’s been playing the piano for hours already. Kit tries to talk to Jules about the strange things that have been happening and her own sense of unease. He tries to give her reasonable explanations, but from the way he speaks, Kit has the uneasy feeling like he knows something that he’s not telling. Jules tells Kit that he’s had some strange dreams himself, but he thinks it’s just the atmosphere of the strange old house. Kit asks him if he’s still having the dreams, and he says he is, but he also likes the house and thinks that it’s just a matter of getting used to the place.

Strange things continue to happen at the school. Lynda wakes up from a nap and suddenly draws an incredibly realistic portrait of Kit when she’s never even taken art classes or done any drawing before. Then, someone steals the portrait out of Kit’s room. Letters and post cards from Kit’s mother and Tracy reveal that they haven’t received any of the letters that she’s been writing to them. Sandy tells Kit that she has a sense that Blackwood School is evil, just like Kit felt when she first arrived.

Ruth is the one who realizes that all of the girls have ESP. Sandy and Kit both experienced ESP when they saw visions of their dead parents. Ruth admits that her excellent grades are only partly due to her naturally high IQ. She can also sense the contents of books without reading them and read the minds of people giving her tests, so she can give them exactly the answers they’re looking for. Lynda isn’t as bright as the other girls, but Ruth has been friends with her for a long time and has discovered that Lynda has memories of herself in a past life, when she lived in Victorian England. Ruth realizes that the girls’ psychic abilities are the reason why the four of them, and only the four of them, were chosen to be students at Blackwood School. The school has a dark purpose beyond providing an education, and these four isolated girls are there to fulfill that purpose.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It was also made into a movie in 2018.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I read this book because it was mentioned as a book a character was reading in another children’s book, The Shimmering Ghost of Riversend, and because it occurred to me that it would fit the Dark Academia genre that’s been popular in the last few years. The reason why this book was mentioned in the other story is that both books involve ghosts who have the ability to act through other people and help them to do things that the living people couldn’t do by themselves. I have a tolerance limit on scary stories, but I felt like I had to read this one because it was mentioned in the other book, and I was curious about it. I’m not sure that I want to see the movie because trailers of the movie make it look even darker than the book, but the book didn’t go beyond my tolerance limits.

In Down a Dark Hall, Madame Duret has psychic abilities of her own and is using girls with psychic abilities to channel the spirits of famous dead people so they can complete works that they were unable to complete in life. Lynda draws and paints pictures that she shouldn’t be able to produce because she has no natural talent for art or training in it. She also begins signing her pictures with the initials TC because she is actually channeling the spirit and abilities of Thomas Cole. Sandy begins writing sonnets without having any prior interest and ability in poetry before because she is channeling Emily Bronte. Ruth finds herself making mathematical notes that are really too advanced for her and barely within her understanding. She’s not sure who she’s been channeling because the scientific and mathematical principles she’s been receiving have little personality attached to them. The reason why Kit’s fingers are always sore and she’s so tired every morning is that she’s been channeling Schubert and other musicians, playing piano music at night. There is one night when multiple musicians fight to control her and get their music out.

The girls are not channeling these spirits through any will or conscious effort of their own. Each of these episodes occurs either while the girls are asleep or just after they wake up from having been asleep. Madame Duret isn’t just facilitating this possession for the sake of art, literature, and scholarship, but also out of greed. She is known for having an impressive collection of works of little-known works of art from famous artists, but what no one else knows is that those works were not produced within the artists’ lifetimes. She has performed this same trick of using the psychic abilities of students to channel the spirits of dead artists to produce new works before, and she artificially ages these works so no one knows that they are new instead of previously-undiscovered works.

Being possessed by the spirits of the dead is disturbing enough, but the girls of Blackwood School also come to realize that the psychic bonds between them and these famous spirits are getting stronger over time. If they don’t find a way to escape Blackwood School soon, they will become permanent. Records in Madame Duret’s office reveal that some of her previous students died from their experiences, and others lost their minds and ended up in mental institutions. No one could stand this type of channeling over the long term and keep their sanity intact, and the spirits themselves don’t seem to have much or any concern for the well-being of the girls channeling them. They seem to have so many ideas that they want to get out that they push the girls harder and harder to produce them. Some of the spirits are gentler and more personable than others, but some regard the girls simply as tools to be used. They can even get violent when the girls resist them or when different spirits interrupt each other’s work. This is a very creepy book, and the girls have some close calls, but fortunately, it has a good ending. I like atmospheric books, but I don’t like books that are overly dark, and I was relieved that all the girls survived. I would have found it hard to take if children died during the course of the story.

Although I knew before reading the book that the story involved ghosts and possession, I initially thought that the isolation each girl has from family and friends was part of the reason why these particular girls were chosen for the school. Before I found out that each girl has psychic abilities, I noticed that none of them are in a position where they are very closely watched by their relatives. Kit’s mother and stepfather are going to be traveling through Europe, so they won’t be trying to visit the school anytime soon, and it would make sense if they didn’t hear from Kit for a while. Sandy is an orphan whose grandparents can’t travel easily, so they won’t be coming to check on her every weekend. Lynda’s mother is an actress who now lives in Italy, so again, there is a separation by great physical distance. Ruth’s parents are busy professionals with doctorates. None of the girls is likely to have any visitors while she’s at school or anybody who would be overly concerned about not hearing from them for a while. At first, I thought that could have been part of the reason why Tracy was rejected as a student, because she has both parents living, and those parents would be in more of a position to check on her and more likely to go to the school themselves if they didn’t hear from her. However, it turns out that her rejection is really because she isn’t psychic, like Kit. The chosen students’ relative isolation from family is just icing on the cake to their psychic abilities and plays into the plot as a reason why nobody outside the school realizes all the weird things that are going on.

I thought that the build-up of the sinister atmosphere at the school was great! Kit has a blatant sense of evil when she first arrives, which feels at first like we’re just being told that the place is evil, but there are also a lot of little details that support it. First, the place is overly luxurious for a boarding school, especially one with so few students to support it. Kit is quick to spot that the girls’ doors can only lock from the outside, which is chilling, although Jules says that’s just to keep people from going into their rooms when they’re not there themselves. However, someone does enter Kit’s locked room to take the portrait of her that Lynda drew, indicating that the girls’ rooms are not safe from anyone and that it’s possible for them to be locked in and unable to get out.

There are also hints from the beginning of the book that Madame Duret and Professor Farley are sinister. Blackwood is actually Madame Duret’s third school that we know about. She had one in France, one in England, and now, one in the US. For some reason, she tends to move countries, which seems odd for someone building a reputation as an elite educator. Boarding schools often have an air of tradition, and their reputations rest on long-term success, which is built over time. Moving around is actually a warning sign, at least to me, that Madame Duret doesn’t want to stay places long enough for people to figure out what she’s really been doing at her schools. Even Jules admits that he doesn’t know things about his mother because he has spent most of his life at other boarding schools himself, not at her schools, so the two of them have mostly been living apart. However, he does know about the possessions of the girls because he has the recordings of the music Kit plays at night. It’s just that he doesn’t fully realize the harm being done to the girls until the end of the book or the harm his mother has already done to previous students.

The old mansion the school is in has a sinister history. The former owner, Mr. Brewer, lost his wife and children, including a baby, in a fire at the house, mostly due to smoke inhalation because the fire didn’t damage the building too badly. After that, he lived as a recluse, and he would act like his family was still alive, buying things for them in town. He could have just lost his mind from grief, but there are indications that his family still haunted the house as ghosts. Locals started telling ghost stories about the place after a plumber heard a baby crying in the house.

Recent reprintings of this book have been updated to include the concepts of laptops, cell phones, and emails, which were not in use when the book was first written. The explanation for why the girls can’t use their laptops to email anybody or get outside help is that there is no Wi-Fi or Internet access at the school. They can write reports on their laptops, but they can’t do much else. Their cell phones don’t get signals, so they can’t call or text anyone.

The version of the book that I used for the cover image is one of the new, revised books with modern technology, and it also has an interview with the author, Lois Duncan, in the back, in which she talks about the inspiration behind the story, her own beliefs about ghosts and psychic abilities, and how she was impacted by the murder of her own daughter, which she earlier documented in a book called Who Killed My Daughter?, in which she consulted psychics for insight into her daughter’s death because the police seemed unable to make progress in the case. Her daughter’s murder happened in 1989, years after Down a Dark Hall was written. Lois Duncan wrote many suspense books for children and young adults, but after her daughter’s death, she gave up writing suspense because it was too upsetting for her to write about girls in danger. She started writing picture books instead. Duncan had already passed away by the time one of the suspects in the case confessed more than 30 years after the murder.