Posted on by TracyC

Norse Myths and Legends

Usborne Illustrated Guide to Norse Myths and Legends by Cheryl Evans and Anne Millard, illustrated by Rodney Matthews, 1986.

I like this book because, before it begins telling the myths and legends, it first gives an introduction to the history, territory, and religion of the Norsemen. By “Norsemen“, the book means not only people living in Norway but Scandinavians and people of Scandinavian descent speaking related languages and living in various areas across Europe. The Norsemen include, but are not limited to, the Vikings, who were specifically seafaring traders, mercenaries, and pirates/looters as opposed to farmers and fishermen.

There is still much about the history of the ancient Norsemen that we don’t know because, for much of their history, they did not have their own system of writing and relied on oral stories for passing down historical and cultural knowledge. The Norse myths were originally oral stories before they were written down. The introduction also explains that there is one myth in the book, the story of Sigurd and the Nibelungs, that was originally a German legend but was later adopted by Scandinavians.

Norse mythology is somewhat unusual because, while Norsemen were polytheistic, like other ancient groups, and their gods and goddesses had human emotions and relationships, like the gods and goddesses in Greek and Roman mythology, Norse gods were not immortal. Norse gods could be killed, like human beings, which meant that any risks they took had genuinely serious stakes for them. In fact, the legends predict that, at a future, world-ending event known as Ragnarok, most of the gods will be killed.

Although this particular book doesn’t mention it, the qualities of Norse gods being able to perform incredible deeds while still being mortal makes them rather like our modern concept of a superhero. Thor and Loki were both made into comic book characters by the time this book was written, and characters and events in Norse mythology have helped to form the 21st century Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In Norse mythology, the gods and goddesses lived in a multilevel universe made up of nine lands or “worlds.” The highest level of their universe contained Asgard (home of the warrior gods), Vanaheim (home of the fertility gods), and Alfheim (home of the light elves). The middle level contained Midgard (our world, where humans live, connected to Asgard by a rainbow bridge), Jotunheim (home of the giants), Nidavellir (home of the dwarves), and Svartalfheim (home of the dark elves). The lowest level held Niflheim (land of the dead, dark and icy, ruled by a fearsome queen named Hel) and Muspell (where the creatures who will attack the gods at Ragnarok live). All three levels of this universe were kept in place by the roots of a giant ash tree called Yggdrasil.

The book has pages dedicated to specific gods and goddess, explaining their histories and roles in Norse mythology. Odin, for example, was the king of the gods, who created the world and humans and was the father of the other gods. His wife’s name was Frigg, and she was a mother goddess figure. Thor was the thunder god and the god of law and order. Unlike other gods, he mostly relied on his strength instead of magic or tricks, but he did have magic weapons, including his hammer, Mjollnir, which would always strike its intended target and return to Thor after. Freyja was one of the fertility gods, and she was the goddess of love and beauty. She later also became a goddess of death and was responsible for starting wars among humans. Loki technically wasn’t a god because his parents were fire-giants, not gods, but he was a close friend and sworn brother to Odin, so he was able to live in Asgard, too. Loki is known for being a trickster figure.

After the book profiles some of the gods and goddesses and other notable figures in Norse mythology, it tells some of the myths and legends associated with theses figures. One story that particularly interests me is “The Curse of the Ring” because this story and other aspects of Norse mythology provided some of the inspiration for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Before it inspired Tolkien, this same story was also made into an opera by Wagner.

In “The Curse of the Ring”, Odin, Loki, and Honir kill an otter who turns out to be the son of a magician who sometimes turns one of his sons into an otter to go fishing for the family. (Maybe not the safest choice of fishing methods.) The gods offer to compensate the magician with enough gold to fill the otter skin. Loki goes to get the gold from a dwarf named Andvari, who has a famous hoard. Andvari has no choice but to give Loki the gold he wants, but Loki notices that Andvari also has a gold ring on his finger, and Loki demands that Andvari give him the ring, too. Angry at having his ring stolen, Andvari curses the ring so that it will bring misery and destruction to anyone who wears it. When Loki brings the promised gold to the magician, the magician also sees the ring and wants it. Loki warns him about the curse on the ring, but the magician insists that he wants it anyway.

The curse on the ring comes true when one of the magician’s other sons, Fafnir, kills his father for his gold. Fafnir takes all of the gold instead of giving his other brother, Regin, a share of the inheritance and turns himself into a dragon so he can protect his hoard of gold from anyone who tries to take it. Regin raises their nephew, Sigurd, to kill Fafnir and avenge his grandfather. However, the curse of the ring and the gold doesn’t end there. Regin tries to kill Sigurd so he won’t have to share the gold with him, and Sigurd has to kill him in self defense. After Sigurd rescues a Valkyrie named Brynhild, and they fall in love, they both fall victim to treachery from Queen Grimhild of the Nibelungs. Wanting Sigurd’s gold, she gives him a love potion that makes him fall in love with her daughter, forgetting about Brynhild. Queen Grimhild’s son also wants to marry Brynhild. Abandoned by her lover, Brynhild marries him, but driven mad with by Sigurd’s abandonment of her, Brynhild arranges for Sigurd to be murdered and then kills herself, setting off a continuing chain of murder and revenge after her own death that destroys the royal family of the Nibelungs.

The book ends with a “Who’s Who” section with information about various characters and creatures in the Norse myths.

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

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Gingerbread House

Three Cousins Detective Club

#13 The Mystery of the Gingerbread House by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1997.

Sarah-Jane lives near a couple whose names are Jack and Jill. They live in an old Victorian gingerbread style house. They have been fixing up the old house, and Sarah-Jane has been acting as a messenger, carrying samples of wallpaper to them from her mother, who is a decorator.

Sarah-Jane brings her cousins to see the house, and Jill shows them an old photograph that she and her husband found of the children who used to live in the house a hundred years ago and a friend of theirs. When the kids first arrived at the house, they startled someone who was working in the parlor. However, Jack and Jill insist that it was not either of them. They look in the parlor and are surprised to see that someone has continued the work they were doing, removing some of the old wallpaper that needs to be replaced. Why would someone sneak into the house to continue their work?

Someone has learned an important secret about the house and something hidden inside, and they are trying to find it before Jack and Jill stumble across it in their renovation work.

The theme of this story is Proverbs 25:13, “A trustworthy messenger refreshes those who send him. He is like the coolness of snow in the summertime.”

Posted on by TracyC

The Hidden Message

Adventures in the Northwoods

The Hidden Message by Lois Walfrid Johnson, 1990.

The story, like the others in its series, is set on a farm in Wisconsin during the early 20th century.

One night, Kate McConnell wakes up to hear her mother and stepfather talking. The family needs money for the new planting season, so Papa Nordstrom has decided to take a job in a lumber camp over the winter. It will keep him away from home for a couple of months. He doesn’t really want to leave his family, but there’s a new baby on the way, and they really need the money. His absence on the farm means that the children will have to take on extra chores to help out. Kate also worries because conditions in lumber camps can be dangerous. Her birth father was killed in an accident in a similar camp, and she doesn’t want the same thing to happen to Papa Nordstrom.

Before Papa Nordstrom leaves for the lumber camp, he butchers a pig so his family will have meat while he’s gone. With winter setting in, it’s important to make sure that food supplies are secure. That’s why Kate knows it’s serious when her friend Josie tells her at school that someone stole her family’s steer, the one they were planning to butcher for meat this winter. Her family has no other source of meat, and they might go hungry if they can’t find the steer. Josie asks Kate for help because she and Anders solved a mystery involving a mysterious stranger who took things before.

One of the possible suspects is an older boy who has recently returned to school, who the others call Stretch. Kate has never met Stretch before because he’s been gone from school, doing farm work, since before she arrived in the community. Anders knows him, though, and he tells Kate that Stretch is trouble. Part of the reason they call him “Stretch” is that he has a habit of stretching the truth. Kate finds Stretch handsome at first, but Anders warns her not to get involved with him. Kate thinks Anders is exaggerating about Stretch because other people at school seem to like him. Anders says that if Kate wants to like someone, she should like Erik instead. Kate has a kind of rivalry going with Erik since he dipped her braid in his inkwell, and it permanently stained her dress. Anders says that Erik didn’t really mean to ruin her dress, but Kate is still unhappy about the incident. So, although Kate can tell that Erik is more responsible in other ways and is a bright and dedicated student, and they go to the same church, she has reservations about liking him.

However, Kate soon comes to realize just how dangerous Stretch is. Their teacher warns them all away from the frozen lake because the springs in the lake make the ice unpredictable. While the others play on the playground, Stretch talks Kate into walking by the lake with him. He says that he knows it’s safe because he was out on the lake earlier that morning, although Kate has her doubts about it. Then, Kate spots Anders’s dog out on the ice. Worried about the dog, Kate tries to call to him, but the dog doesn’t come to her like he usually does. Kate steps onto the ice to get the dog, and the ice breaks. Kate nearly drowns in the icy water, but Erik saves her. Kate realizes that, when she was in danger because of Stretch, Stretch actually abandoned her to drown. Later, he won’t even admit that he was the reason why Kate went down to the lake in the first place. When Kate is warmer and able to think better, she also begins to realize that the reason why Anders’s dog wouldn’t come to her when she called was because she was with Stretch, and the dog is afraid of Stretch, indicating that Stretch has been cruel to the dog in the past.

Kate’s brush with death opens her eyes to what Stretch is really like. It also creates a problem because the teacher writes a letter to Kate’s mother about the incident, letting her know that Kate did something very dangerous. Kate doesn’t want her mother to know what happened because it would upset her, especially with Papa Nordstrom being away and the children supposed to be behaving responsibly to help her on the farm. Kate wants to hide the teacher’s letter and not tell her mother, although Anders and Lars try to persuade her to be honest about what’s happened. They argue about it, and Kate accuses them of wanting to tattle on her, threatening to tell on them if they do something wrong. She feels sorry for upsetting them, especially young Lars, but she’s afraid of how her mother might react when she finds out what happened. Anders warns her that her mother might still find out what happened from someone else and that by being dishonest and fighting with Lars, she’s starting something that she’s going to regret. But, Kate can’t even bring herself to confide in anyone that Stretch was the reason she went down to the lake. Even though he almost got her killed and didn’t even try to help her, she can’t bring herself to tattle on him. (That’s dumb, on several levels. I’ll explain why below.)

After the incident with Kate falling through the ice, Stretch avoids going to school for awhile. Then, one day, Kate sees him stealing candy at the general store. Even though Kate knows what she saw, she still can’t bring herself to tell on him, and she even begins making excuses for him in her mind to make him seem less bad. When he offers her a ride home, she’s a little hesitant, but she decides to accept to avoid the long walk home. On the way, she asks him why he didn’t help her when she fell through the ice, but he never answers her. She also notices that his hand is oddly blue, and when she asks about that, he says that he must have just worked that hand too hard when he was cutting wood. However, he doesn’t have wood in the back of his wagon. He’s hauling boxes of something. This time, she decides to tell Anders about Stretch stealing, but she doesn’t mention the boxes in the back of Stretch’s wagon because she still doesn’t know what to think about them.

The secret about the ice incident comes out when Kate’s step-siblings, feeling uncomfortable about her deception, play a prank on her to get her to tell on herself. Knowing how afraid of mice Kate is, they put a dead one in a box with the label, “Pretty on the outside, like this on the inside,” on top. When Kate opens it, she screams, and her mother comes running. Knowing why they played this prank on her, Kate explains the truth to her mother. Her mother gives her a punishment for lying to her before, and Kate sees how upset she is that Kate didn’t tell her the truth earlier.

However, Kate hasn’t quite learned her lesson about lying. She sneaks out when she’s supposed to be grounded in her room by climbing down the tree outside the window. While she’s outside without permission, she spots a loose cow belonging to Josie’s family and guides it back to them. It’s a good deed, but she was still out without permission, and Tina spots her. Kate is angry and accuses Tina of “spying” on her and tries to persuade her not to tell. Kate can tell that Tina is upset and worries about lying to her mother and making her mad. Kate feels badly, but she can’t seem to stop herself from doing these things. She still continues to sneak out during her period of being grounded. When little Tina tries to imitate her by climbing down the tree herself and gets stuck, Kate has to rescue her. Her mother spots them once they’re down on the ground, and Kate confesses everything.

Kate feels like an awful person because Tina could have been badly hurt or even killed by following her example. Her mother says that everyone is awful in the sense that humans are all imperfect, and that’s why they commit sins. That is why God sent His son to redeem human sins. It’s good to be sorry when you’ve done something wrong and ask for forgiveness because forgiveness will be granted, and if you accept Jesus as your Savior, he will take away your sins. (I’ve heard this before, the part about everyone being “awful”, or words to that effect. This is kind of a Protestant way to phrase this. When I’ve heard it before, it usually seems to be from Protestants with a more Evangelical outlook, although that might vary. I don’t disagree with the principles, but Catholics would say it differently, and I may include a little more about it in my reaction.)

Meanwhile, there are still more thefts occurring in the community. Someone robs Erik’s family of all of the vegetables and fruit they’ve canned for the winter. Having food stores stolen at the onset of winter puts the family in a precarious position, and everyone else in the community worries about their foods stores, too.

One day, when Erik is at Windy Hill, Anders starts teasing Kate about her organ playing. He takes it too far, and both Kate and Erik tell him to stop. To Kate’s surprise, Erik hits Anders when he refuses to stop when asked, and the boys start to fight. Kate’s mother comes in, stops the fight, and makes the boys clean the room as punishment, which leads to several revelations. Kate comes to realize that Anders is a major reason why Erik has been teasing her. Anders has been urging Erik to tease her and also using Erik as an excuse for his own teasing. Now, Erik is getting as tired of it as she is. Erik confides in Kate that he knows that Stretch was the reason she went down to the lake when she fell in, and the only reason he hasn’t told anyone else is that he can’t prove that Stretch was there or that he abandoned Kate when she got into trouble.

As the kids move Kate’s organ back into position from the cleaning, Anders almost drops his end, and he accidentally opens a secret hiding place in the organ, knocking a hidden book onto the floor. The book contains church hymns in Swedish, but there’s also a torn part of a note in English. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough of the note to really understand what it means. (This is the “hidden message” of the title, and it doesn’t enter the story until about the final third of the book. I suspected it was a Biblical quotation, but I couldn’t place it from the fragment.) The note fragment contains the word “fear”, which makes the children worry that someone might be in trouble and asking for help. Erik asks them when and where they got the organ, but Kate explains that they bought it a few months ago at a fair in Grantsburg, and she doesn’t even know the name of the man who sold it. Papa Nordstrom might know, but since he’s away, they can’t ask him.

Stretch still seems like the likely suspect for the food thefts. Kate has seen him do some suspicious things, and he’s been telling some obvious lies, but she and Anders have difficulty finding any positive proof to get the authorities to intervene. Then, the thief takes the pig that Papa Nordstrom left for his family and the lid from their stove, rendering the stove useless until it’s replaced. With the stakes that much higher, Kate knows that they have to catch the thief, fast!

Kate also manages to figure out who originally owned the organ and who left the book and the message in the secret hiding place. The original owner is someone Kate already knows who used to play the organ. As I guessed, the message is actually part of a Biblical quotation (Psalm 118, Verse 6). The message is part of the theme of the story, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the theft directly. However, some strange things that the former owner of the organ has observed help to provide Kate and Anders with the proof they need to get back everything that was stolen. The story ends at Christmas.

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

Themes and My Reaction

In some ways, I was disappointed in this book. The identity of the thief isn’t really a surprise. Most of the mystery concerns how to prove it. Also, even though the title of the book refers to the hidden message, the mystery doesn’t center around the hidden message, and the hidden message doesn’t contribute directly to the solving of the mystery. Its main contribution to the story is to provide a theme: “The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me?” This quotation does give Kate the courage she needs to confront the thief.

Honesty in Relationships

I don’t blame Kate for having reservations about liking Erik at first. I know that things end up improving between them as the series goes along and even during this book, but he really did do something dumb and started off on the wrong foot with her. He’s not the first to do it, and frankly, it’s become a rather sad cliche. (It’s not unlike Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables and the way he started off wrong with Anne by making those “carrots” comments about her hair.) I’ve heard people say that boys will do mean things like that because they like girls and just don’t know how to say it, but you can’t just let people keep causing problems without some feedback about it because it doesn’t lead to good relationships. You don’t want to give someone the impression that you’re okay with teasing or rough play when you’re not because, if they don’t know it bothers you, they’ll never stop doing it, and it will drive you crazy. We all teach people how to treat us through the feedback we give. If Erik really cares about Kate, he’ll learn to give her the kind of attention she wants instead of the kind she doesn’t.

I started feeling better about Erik when he started standing up to Anders because Anders was going to far and wouldn’t stop even after both Erik and Kate telling him to stop. I appreciated that, while Erik may have initially felt compelled to join Anders in teasing Kate, Erik seems to have developed a sense of when to stop teasing and is willing to draw a hard line when necessary, even standing up to a friend and telling him “no.” Toward the end of the story, Anders finally has an honest talk with Kate, asking her why she didn’t tell him that Stretch was with her at the lake and abandoned her when she got in trouble. The answer is that Anders teases Kate all the time about everything. His constant teasing prevents her from confiding in him about things that they really should discuss. His teasing shuts down conversations before they even start. Anders finally tells Kate that he is her brother and wants to help her when she needs it, and he says that he wouldn’t tease her about anything really important. That attitude sounds promising. Unfortunately, he still insists that he’ll be the judge of what’s important, so I think that relationship still needs some work.

I’ll never understand people who say that teasing helps build relationships. Never. I’ve never seen it work that way in real life, not for building relationships of any depth, at least not unless the relationship has already been established on another basis first. It usually goes the other way, preventing relationships from developing or getting deeper than being shallow because relentless teasing does tend to shut down conversations and prevent people from opening up to each other. Why should someone tell you anything at all if they know that’s the reaction they’re going to get from you and that you don’t care that they don’t like it? The only times when teasing seems tolerable in real life is when the people involved already have built solid relationships with each other based on other qualities, really know each other well, and trust each other. Relationships are frequently based on trust, and you simply can’t trust someone who’s not really listening to what you say so much as trying to figure out how to use any and every little thing you say as a punchline for a dumb and hurtful joke for their own amusement or so they can score a few points off someone else and feel clever about it. I see it more as using other people than building a relationship with them. I just don’t feel endeared to anyone who only seems to be using me to score points to impress some third party onlookers. You can’t build a relationship based on teasing by itself. At least, I know I can’t. It just doesn’t work. What I’m trying to say is that Anders has not built a relationship with Kate and is both oblivious or resistant to feedback. He does not know when to take a hint and shut up even when people tell him plainly and not even when someone physically tackles him to the ground over it. So far, Kate has been doing all the heavy lifting in her relationship with Anders, trying to win him over, and he’s not really giving her much in return, although he’s slowly starting to show some signs of being helpful.

The characters in the story also alternately worry about being thought of as tattle-tales or criticize others for “tattling.” I’ve always thought all that “tattling” stigma was dumb. I know sometimes “tattling” means complaining about really petty things to one-up someone else, which is truly annoying (as I think all forms of one-upmanship are). However, people also use that word to try to shame people for talking about problems that really do need to be discussed. The way I look at it, if you’re going to be either mean or an idiot in a way that hurts other people, you forfeit your rights to complain about those other people talking about your meanness or idiocy. It’s not like the person talking about you made you do what you did, they didn’t ask to hurt by you, and if you did what you did in public, where other people could see it, it already counts as public knowledge anyway.

In 1906, when the story takes place, the Kate’s biggest worry is that her mother will hear about things she’s done from a neighbor at church because that’s their biggest opportunity for seeing and talking to other people. Every kid at school knows that she almost drowned, and since that was the big event of the day, they all no doubt told all of their parents about it. It’s common knowledge, not tattling. In the early 21st century, news of Kate’s brush with death at the lake would be all over social media before the end of the day because an entire classroom of people is aware of what happened and will be excited to talk about it. Even in cases where something happened that wasn’t serious enough for the school to immediately call the parent and tell them directly, any usual incident at school will get around fast. Usually what irritates people about “tattling” is that it can be pointless, petty nitpicking. However, the lake incident in this book was a matter of life and death, so I think complaining about anybody “tattling” is pretty dang petty itself. I think there needs to be a distinction between petty complaining and serious discussion. I think the anti-tattling attitudes people have teach bad morals, including dishonesty, self-delusion, and excuse-making, all issues that Kate has to confront in herself during the course of the story.

By choosing not to “tattle” on Stretch, which actually wouldn’t be “tattling” so much as just giving an honest answer to questions people were directly and specifically asking Kate about how she happened to be out on the frozen lake, Kate has also left Stretch open to doing similar things in the future to other innocent victims. She isn’t helping herself or the next person who could use some honest warnings. She didn’t initially trust Anders’s warnings about Stretch because he wouldn’t answer her questions about Stretch in specific terms (perhaps for fear of being thought a tattler), but Kate is now in a position to describe Stretch’s behavior in very specific terms herself, from first-hand knowledge. Anders was trying to be honest with Kate in his warnings, but he wasn’t fully honest and is already known for being an annoying teaser, which is why he didn’t seem believable. For all Kate knew, it just might have been another of his dumb jokes to embarrass her. (Another problem with too much teasing – no one knows when you’re actually trying to be honest and sincere about something, and few people are prepared to believe it because those are not a teaser’s default modes. If the teaser has already built a relationship based on qualities other than teasing alone, I suppose those close to him might be able to tell the difference, but no one else will, and Anders hasn’t built that kind of relationship with Kate yet.) If Anders had simply said why he didn’t trust Stretch, maybe Kate would have believed him and been more careful in the first place. Kate had to learn the hard way that Anders was telling her the truth about Stretch, and now, she’s going to have to learn the hard way that she also needs to drop her “tattling” hang-ups and be fully honest with herself and other people. Again, we teach others how to treat us, and Stretch could use some fully honest lessons from various people in his life. Don’t worry; he does get some help at the end of the book.

I was interested in what Anders said at the part of the story where he and Kate are talking about whether it’s better for her to like Stretch or Erik. Anders says that Papa Nordstrom has said that liking people is a choice, and people can make good choices or bad choices about who to like, which leads me to a few comments I have about the religious themes in the stories.

Sin and Forgiveness

I’ve explained before that I came from a family of mixed religions, although I was raised Catholic, and my religious education has also been somewhat mixed from childhood, although mainly Catholic. The only reason why I mention it is because, although Catholics and Protestants have similar ideas about the flawed nature of humanity, the causes of sin, and the role of Jesus in redeeming humanity, they have different ways of phrasing these concepts, which can sometimes give people wrong impressions and make it seem like their views are more different from each other than they actually are. When I see it, the differences are partly on where each puts the emphasis and the words they use.

A friend of mine (Mormon) was taking a college religious studies course and she was irritated by the way the teacher talked about original sin and about human beings as being “awful.” I can’t remember the exact phrasing she said that the teacher used, but it was something similar to what the mother says in this book about everyone being “awful.” My friend told me about it because she knows I’m Catholic and don’t mind discussing these things, and she thought her teacher was Catholic. I said that didn’t sound like a Catholic speaking. I looked it up, and it turns out that the teacher was specifically speaking from an Evangelical viewpoint, which is what I expected would be the case because, as I said, I’ve heard this before. I get the concept, but I don’t like that phrasing. It seems like it implies that all humans are inherently “bad” (which is what got on my friends’ nerves), but that’s not really the concept, not in real life or in this book.

The article that I linked in the first paragraph of this section explains it very well, but as a quick overview, the real issue is not that humans are inherently “bad” or “awful.” Not completely. (That’s what some people call the doctrine of “total depravity“, although even some of its adherents say that’s still a misunderstanding of the concept of “total depravity.”) It’s just that human beings are not perfectly good. Humans are inherently imperfect, which is different from just being flat-out “awful.” We’re not completely good or completely bad, just imperfectly between the two. Since we have elements of each in us, neither side can be ignored to get the full picture, and we can make choices about which of our sides we favor and try to maximize. Because we are imperfect as humans, we all sometimes have impulses, desires, and lapses in judgement that lead us to sin. That’s a part of who we are, but at the same time, we also have other desires for relationships with God and our fellow human beings that lead us to self-improvement and a desire to do good for others.

As Papa Nordstrom observed, we all have the ability to make choices. (This is part of the concept of “free will.” Catholics believe strongly in the concept of free will and reject any concept that original sin renders people unable to use their free will to make good decisions and consciously reject flawed impulses. I think that helps make “original sin” seem less of a tragedy because, while there’s always a struggle, knowing that there are still things you can do about it helps. Nobody’s doomed just for being human.) People can make good choices or bad choices. They can choose to give in to their worst impulses or practice mindfulness and self-discipline to resist them and strive for improvement. Understand that there are times when anyone could potentially do the wrong thing or have the impulse to do it. It happens to everyone from time to time, in varying degrees, throughout their lives. But, having the impulse to do something doesn’t mean you have to give in to it every time. Because human beings are imperfect, we often need some help and support to make the right choices when we’re struggling, and that’s the help that Christians look for when they turn to Jesus, accepting Him as their Savior, the example of what to do when they’re not sure how to control their feelings and impulses. People just need to make the choice to seek out that help when they’re struggling with bad habits or a crisis of conscience because there is help available, both spiritual help and help from other human beings. People can choose to say they’re sorry for bad decisions they’ve made and ask for forgiveness and guidance for making better choices, both from God and their fellow humans. (Kate should have been honest with her mother because she’s there to help and guide her and needs to know when something serious happens.) I prefer that description to saying that “we are all awful.” We’re not “awful.” We’re imperfect, and even if we’ll never be perfect in our human state, we can improve. That doesn’t sound as bad, does it?

The part where Kate rescues Tina from the dangerous situation she was in because of Kate’s bad example sort of reminds me of the end of Disney’s Freaky Friday from 1976, when the mother and daughter are talking about what they’ve done and what they’ve learned from being each other for a day:

“I am so much smarter than I thought. And so much dumber.”
“Oh, my darling, aren’t we all?

Other Interesting Topics

I thought the part of the story where Kate was talking to her organ teacher, Mr. Peters, about the difference between playing by ear and learning the notes was interesting. Mr. Peters points out that Kate is in the habit of playing songs by ear but she hasn’t really learned to read music. He tells her that she’ll learn more if she gets in the habit of reading the music for herself instead of depending on someone else playing a song for her to learn it. She later uses her new knowledge of reading music to learn to play one of the songs in the Swedish book of hymns. Musical notes are the same even if the songs are written in other languages.

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

Run Away Home

Run Away Home by Elinor Lyon

Run Away Home by Elinor Lyon, 1953.

When I first read this book, I didn’t have a copy of it because copies are collector’s items, and many of them are too expensive for me to afford, but after I read this book online, I managed to find a physical copy at an affordable price! I didn’t read this book as a child, but it’s exactly the kind of book I would have loved with atmospherically magical places (although no real magic), mysterious memories, and an orphan with a hidden past. This book was my introduction to the the Ian and Sovra series, although it’s the third book in that series. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Thirteen-year-old Cathie lives at St. Ursula’s Home for Female Orphans in Birmingham, England. She has lived there ever since she was a young child and was found wandering the streets of London after a bombing raid during World War II. When she was found, she was wearing only a nightgown and clutching a locket that held a picture of a dark-haired woman and some dried flowers. She was unable to tell anyone her full name, only calling herself something that sounded like “Cathie.” (Hint: It “sounded like” Cathie. It wasn’t actually “Cathie.”) There was a label attached to her clothes, but it was torn. It only had the first part of her name (“Cat”) and the words “Passenger to” followed by what looked like the beginning of a place name that started with the letter “K” followed by “via” and what looked like the beginning of King’s Cross. If the label had been intact, there would have been no trouble identifying the child at all. The authorities made inquiries for her family or anyone who could identify her, but no one came forward. The conclusion was that her parents must have been killed in the bombing raid and that she had no other living relatives. Her family, whoever they were, was probably not from London because she was found near some railway station hotels, which had been destroyed. Most of the people staying there were killed, and the hotel records were also destroyed, leaving no further clues to Cathie’s identity. Cathie was sent to the orphanage and given the full name of Catherine Harris, but she knows that isn’t her real name. She has no recollection of the traumatic night of the bombing, but she has a vague sense that she has a real home and family somewhere else and a desperate need to discover her real identity.

One day, while reading a poem by Wordsworth aloud, a description of the seaside awakens a memory in Cathie of her early childhood. She’s had dreams of the seaside before, but she’s never been to the seaside since coming to the orphanage. Her memory of it is so clear that she’s sure that it’s not a dream but a place she’s actually been in the past, perhaps even the place where she used to live. She clearly remembers playing in the white sand on the beach, but she just can’t remember where the beach is.

When Miss Abbott, the headmistress of the orphanage, chides her for stopping her reading of the poem aloud, Cathie is upset that she disrupted her vision and her attempts to remember and screams, throwing the book across the room. Later, when she is called to the headmistress’s office to explain her fit of temper, she explains about the memory. The headmistress once again tells her the story of the night when she was found and shows her the locket and label that were found with her. The authorities honestly tried everything to locate her family and learn her original name, but since all attempts failed, the headmistress tells Cathie that she’s going to have to reconcile herself to not knowing. They’re not even completely sure whether the locket is Cathie’s or not because she was carrying it instead of wearing it, so it might have been something that she just found in the rubble after the bombing and picked up.

The headmistress says that she’s known other girls before whose birth names and parents were unknown, and it’s common for them to imagine some grand past or wealthy relations, pretending that they’re the long-lost daughters of a duke or something, but she wants Cathie to be more practical than that. Her parents are almost certainly dead, and if Cathie had any living relatives, Miss Abbott thinks they would have claimed her before. Miss Abbott thinks it’s unlikely that Cathie will ever get the full story of her past, no matter what she may or may not remember from a seaside holiday. Even if she somehow managed to locate the beach she’s thinking about, Cathie’s parents are dead, and there would be no one waiting for her there. Miss Abbott wants Cathie to focus on the here and now, applying herself to making a future for herself and making friends with other girls. Miss Abbott says that family isn’t everything because even blood family members aren’t always supportive to each other, but learning how to make and keep supportive friends will ensure that Cathie won’t be lonely. She says that Cathie will have a much easier time making and keeping friends if she improves her attitude and learns to keep her temper. It’s actually not bad advice if it’s really impossible for Cathie to learn about her past or if she genuinely has no relatives, but Cathie has a strong sense that isn’t the case for her.

Cathie can’t stop wondering about her memory of the sea and her mysterious past. She’s sure that the locket really did belong to her, but she can tell that the picture in it is much too old to have been her mother because of the woman’s hairstyle, which looks like styles from about 100 years earlier. The woman is standing in front of some mountains, and Cathie wonders if those mountains are a real place as well. She keeps thinking that, if she can get away from the orphanage and see other places, maybe she could find the place she remembers and learn who she really is.

As punishment for her temper tantrum, Cathie is sent to do some mending work for Miss Langham, who owns a big house nearby, instead of going to the pictures with the other girls. Cathie doesn’t mind too much because they were going to see a movie that she didn’t really want to see, and she also likes sewing and Miss Langham. While the two of them have tea in Miss Langham’s garden, Cathie brings up the topic of mountains, and Miss Langham mentions that she likes mountains, too. When she was younger, she used to go for mountain hikes. Cathie shows Miss Langham some embroidery work that she’s been doing with a floral design based on the little flowers in her locket, which look like silver buttercups. Miss Langham recognizes the flowers as Grass of Parnassus, which grows in marshy places, but not in Birmingham. She says that she used to see those flowers when she was younger and went hiking in the mountains in Scotland.

For the first time, Cathie realizes that she might not be English at all. If she had come from somewhere else, that might explain why no one in England knew who she was. The place that she’s remembering might be somewhere in Scotland. If she had really been a passenger from King’s Cross station in London, the train that brought her there might have been the Flying Scotsman, which Cathie knows comes to that station. Cathie tries to think of a place in Scotland that starts with ‘K’, which might have been where she was originally from. Feeling increasingly stifled by the strict rules of the orphanage, the lack of privacy at the orphanage, the bleak city, and Miss Abbott’s attempts to get her to stop dreaming about her past, Cathie begins plotting how she can run away to Scotland and start looking for the secrets of her past.

The next time she sees Miss Langham, she shows her the locket with the flowers, and Miss Langham confirms that the flowers are Grass of Parnassus. She also notices something that no one else who has looked at the locket has noticed – the little ribbon that’s holding the flowers together has a tartan pattern (a special kind of plaid pattern). When Cathie looks closer, she sees that the woman in the picture in the locket is wearing the same tartan. Cathie is excited because she realizes that this is confirmation that she was originally from Scotland. Even better, Miss Langham tells her that there are tartans that are specific to certain families or clans. Miss Langham doesn’t know enough about tartans to recognize which clan’s tartan is in the locket, but Cathie realizes that if she can find someone who can identify tartans, she has the key to learning who her family is! (Yes, the tartan pattern in the story is a real tartan, and it is one of the tartans shown on the tartan site page I linked. I checked after I knew what family to look for. But, it’s tricky to figure it out based only on the description in the book because some clan tartans share color combinations. To really identify which is which, you’d have to actually see and recognize the patterns of the colored lines and squares in the tartan. There are no pictures in the book.)

Miss Langham begins to like Cathie and sends an invitation to the orphanage to invite her to spend a few days with her in her home. Since Cathie has been pretty well-behaved lately, Miss Abbott decides to let her visit Miss Langham for a few days, although she has some misgivings because she can tell that Cathie has been acting oddly, as if she were keeping a secret. This visit to Miss Langham is critical because it gives Cathie the means to go to Scotland and try to find her home and family.

When Cathie goes to Miss Langham’s house, she isn’t there. Instead, Mrs. Riddle meets her and apologizes to her on Miss Langham’s behalf. The visit is canceled because Miss Langham’s brother is ill, and Miss Langham has gone to see him. There was no time to inform the orphanage of the change in plans before Cathie left because they don’t have a telephone. Cathie is bitterly disappointed because she had been looking forward to the visit, but Mrs. Riddle gives her some tea and cake and a note that Miss Langham left for Cathie. The note tells Cathie where to find some money that Miss Langham left for her to pay for purchasing the embroidered place mats that Cathie had been making with the Grass of Parnassus design. Suddenly, Cathie realizes that she now has money that no one else knows about. Her clothes already packed in her luggage for a few days away, including some holiday clothes that are different from the orphanage uniform, and no one is expecting her back at the orphanage for days because they all think that she’s with Miss Langham. Her opportunity to escape has come!

Feeling obligated to let everyone know that she isn’t dead when they discover that she’s missing, she adds a note of her own onto Miss Langham’s note that asks her to tell Miss Abbott that she has gone back to the place where she came from. Cathie thinks that, when the message reaches Miss Abbott, Miss Abbott will assume that Cathie has gone to London, the place where she was found as a young child. But, she has a few critical days to reach Scotland before her disappearance will even be discovered. She changes into her plain holiday clothes and goes to the train station in Birmingham. After she gets on the train, she uses her sewing things to remove the distinctive red trim on her coat so it won’t look like it’s part of an orphan uniform anymore.

The first place she goes is Derby, and she decides to hitchhike further north from there to save some money. She gets a ride from a truck driver (lorry driver, this is a British book), but he gets concerned that she might be a runaway or in some kind of trouble. He notices that the name she gives him isn’t the same as the one written on her luggage, a detail that Cathie had forgotten. At least, the driver has no bad intentions toward her and is kind enough to be genuinely concerned for her welfare. He tries to take her to a police station in Sheffield, but Cathie slips away from him and hides in the back of his truck, so he’s tricked into taking her further. When she gets the chance, she gets out and hides in the back of another truck that takes her almost to the border of Scotland. When this driver discovers her, she makes up a story about hitching rides to Scotland because she’s going there for a job in Edinburgh. She decides to take a train the rest of the way to Edinburgh, but by this time, Miss Abbott has already discovered that Cathie is not with Miss Langham. At first, Miss Abbott does think that Cathie might be going to London because of her note, but the police report of a possible runaway in Sheffield gives Miss Abbott the idea that Scotland might be Cathie’s intended destination. Cathie narrowly avoids being picked up by the police as she falls asleep in the waiting room of the train station because they think that she’s already left on an earlier train.

Once Cathie successfully reaches Edinburgh, she isn’t quite sure what to do next, but she enjoys being in the city, feeling like Scotland is the right place for her to be. Then, she spots a boy and a girl who are about her age, noticing that the boy is wearing a tartan kilt (but not the tartan in Cathie’s locket). When the boy, Ian, trips and drops the parcels he’s carrying, Cathie helps him. She makes friends with Ian and Sovra (the girl), and they invite her to come with them to see Edinburgh Castle. They notice that she speaks with an English accent and ask her about where she’s from. She confides in them about running away to find where she’s from, hoping that the answers lie in Scotland. Ian and Sovra are thrilled by Cathie’s story.

Ian and Sovra Kennedy don’t actually live in Edinburgh but on the west coast of Scotland. They’re only in Edinburgh temporarily to help their Aunt Effie. The name of their town is Melvick, and they live in a house called “Camas Ban”, which they tell Cathie means “White Bay” because of the white sand on the beach there. More than ever, Cathie is sure that she’s headed in the right direction!

Ian and Sovra catch the train home while Cathie returns to the cafe where she ate breakfast, searching for her locket, which she lost earlier. By the time she finds it and returns to the station, they are already gone, but Cathie asks about other trains to Melvick. There is going to be another train to Melvick early in the morning, and Cathie is told that it goes straight through to Melvick via Kinlochmore, with no changes necessary. Kinlochmore is the first Scottish place name Cathie has heard that starts with a ‘K’, and from the description of the area that Ian and Sovra gave her, which include a beach with white sand and mountains, Cathie is convinced that is where the secrets of her past can be found!

Cathie is on the right trail for finding the answers that she seeks, but getting caught is still a concern. The police and Miss Abbott are still looking for her, and she’s running out of money. Ian and Sovra help her and hide her in their secret hidden cottage (from the first book in the series), but unbeknownst to all of them, they’ve actually met Cathie before. Cathie really is remembering the beach near their home, and while she doesn’t remember the two of them, there was a time when they were all there, back before Cathie’s parents were killed in the Blitz and Cathie was known by her real name … Catriona, or as her parents used to call her, Catri.

My Reaction and Spoilers

One thing that I appreciated about this story is that there are no evil characters in it. None of the strangers Cathie meets wish her harm, and they even try to help her, although she dodges some of their help because it would take her back to the orphanage instead of allowing her to move forward on her mission. The orphanage where Cathie lives isn’t terrible. It’s kind of like a boarding school, so she is being educated, and she is not starved or beaten there. The worst Cathie can say about it is that the discipline is somewhat strict and she never has real privacy from the other girls.

Miss Abbott is the closest that Cathie comes to having an antagonist, and she does give Cathie punishments early in the story for the emotional and discipline problems she has while trying to revive her memories and reconnect with her past. In modern times, I think most caregivers would recognize the emotional turmoil Cathie is experiencing and be more patient and supportive to help her work through her feelings and memories, but Cathie’s orphanage doesn’t seem to offer professional counseling. Miss Abbott isn’t trying to harm Cathie. She does repeat the story of Cathie’s past when she asks her to, and when she lectures her on her behavior or gives her punishments, it’s not blind, unfeeling discipline; she explains her reasons to Cathie and tells her not just what she doesn’t want her to do but how she wants her to act and why. Miss Abbott is strict, but she actually does care what happens to Cathie and is trying to do what she thinks is best for her. The only reason why she doesn’t want Cathie to pursue the past in the beginning is that she thinks that it’s hopeless, and she’s pretty clear about that. She’s seen other girls pine for families they just don’t have or who are never going to reclaim them, for whatever reason. She thinks that there just isn’t enough information for Cathie to reconnect with her past and that she has no living relatives to find. Thinking about what she’s lost and will never find could just lead to more frustration, anger, and depression for Cathie. Even if she could find the beach she once visited as a young child, what would she do if there’s no one there waiting for her? Miss Abbott wants Cathie to reconcile herself to her loss and focus on the present and the future, building skills and relationships with the people around her, because she thinks that is what will lead Cathie to a better life. Cathie admits that Miss Abbott is nice, but she likes to plan other people’s lives, and she didn’t like the life that Miss Abbott had planned for her. In some books, that might actually be the moral of the story, learning to reconcile with the past and move forward without getting all of the answers, but this is is a sort of mystery/adventure story, so Cathie is on the path to finding the answers she seeks. It is a pretty calm, relaxing sort of adventure story, though, because no one is trying to harm Cathie, and the only threat is that they will put an end to her inquiries and take her back to Birmingham.

I liked the part of the story where Ian and Sovra are talking about which of the adults in their family and community would be most likely to give Cathie away to the authorities if they found out about her, and Ian says that even the two of them might turn Cathie in if they were a lot older. Cathie demands to know what he means by that, and Ian explains that it has to do with priorities. Kids and adults have different priorities. The biggest concern for the adults would be that Cathie is running around unsupervised and might get into all kinds of dangerous situations on her own, with no adult to supervise and take care of her. They would feel like they have to reign her in for her own good, and they’re also probably angry with her for causing them worry about her. However, Ian says, explaining the priorities that he and Sovra share with her as children, “You see, we know what’s more important. It doesn’t matter a bit if people are worried about you and rushing around looking for you. It does matter a lot for you to find out who you are.” Maybe he and Sovra would feel differently about it if they were older than Cathie and directly responsible for her safety, but as friends and equals in age, they put their concentration on helping her to accomplish her mission instead. It’s not that the kids and adults have different understandings of the situation. Both understand what Cathie is trying to do and both know know that there are risks involved in what Cathie is doing, but the main difference between them is that the children think that it’s still possible for Cathie to accomplish her mission to find out about her past, and the adults in Cathie’s life have already given up on that possibility and are just concerned with keeping her safe.

One of my early thoughts about the book was that Cathie’s parents might not necessarily be dead, since we don’t know in the beginning why Cathie was in London during WWII or how she got there. However, they really were killed in the bombing attack the night that Cathie was found, and they really are dead. For a long time, Cathie’s other relatives have assumed that Cathie/Catri died with them because the place where she was found wasn’t the place where they expected her to be and where they had been making inquiries for her and her parents. When they never heard from any of them again and they found out that there also had been a bombing in the area where they were supposed to be around the time when they disappeared, they had assumed that the whole family had been killed. Not everyone who died in bombing raids was able to be identified, so there were times when families weren’t notified of deaths and had to assume them from the circumstances and lack of contact from their relatives.

Stories about mysterious orphans with unknown pasts are staples of children’s literature and make great topics for mystery stories, but one of the fascinating things about this particular story is that it’s the kind of thing that could and did happen around the time of WWII. The time period really makes this story because it’s not only plausible that an orphan could go unidentified for a long period of time, but this is just the time and place where that would actually make sense. England was a war zone in World War II. It wasn’t actually invaded, but it was bombed frequently. People were killed, and children were separated from their parents in the chaos. In this era of chaos and sudden death, children were sometimes born out of wedlock to parents having a wartime fling and grew up without knowing who their parents were, or at least not knowing who their fathers were. That could account for some of the other children at the orphanage with unknown parents, but not Cathie. Some children were abandoned by desperate parents or were accidentally left when arrangements for unofficial adoptions suddenly fell through. Those are all things that really happened around that time, but that isn’t Cathie’s story, either.

In modern times, DNA evidence can help solve mysteries of this type, and it has helped to solve some past mysteries for people who were adopted as children, but back in the 1940s and 1950s, that wasn’t an option. Also, in modern times, Internet news stories and televised communication methods would also have helped the story of the found girl travel further, making it more likely that it would reach her relatives or someone who knew them. During this time, they would have been relying solely on newspapers and radio, and there might not have even been a picture to accompany a news story about the found child that would help someone recognize her. Modern methods don’t always solve every mystery, but they can help a great deal. That’s why this story really only works for this time period – a time when chaotic events happened that separated families and orphaned children and when modern investigative tools were unavailable.

Early in the story, I had thought that Cathie might have been about to head on her way out of London to somewhere else at the time of the bombing as a child evacuee because many children were sent away from London for safety from the bombings around that time. That wasn’t the case with Cathie, but it would have been a plausible explanation for the tag on her clothes. Child evacuees were known for having tags with their names attached to their clothes, and some children never returned home to their families when the war ended because their parents had died or had abandoned them. However, that’s not the case in this story, either. At the time her parents were killed, young Catri was actually traveling with her parents en route to another destination. The stop in London was unplanned, and they never made it to the place where they were supposed to be because of the bombing. It was just a case of bad luck and being caught up in the larger chaos of the war happening around them. The story does provided details of exactly how that happened, but since the book is available online, I decided not to include some of that information to preserve some suspense for people who want to read the story.

The special magic of this book isn’t just that Cathie discovers her identity, but how she does it. Readers know that when Cathie sets out on her journey, she’s likely to find some answers or at least a new home that will be better for her than the orphanage because the title of the book is “Run Away Home.” But, in the beginning of the story, readers are not quite sure how Cathie will do it and exactly what waits for her at the end of her journey. It’s the journey toward the truth and her special connection to the other children who help her that make the story satisfying. Little by little, Cathie uncovers pieces of the past. There are some lucky coincidences where she connects with people who were already connected to her and who can explain the past to her. When she comes to Melvick, Ian and Sovra hide her in a shieling or hut that they found hidden behind a waterfall in the first book of this series, which is a magical place to stay. For the first time in her life, Cathie has time alone where she can explore the beach and nearby mountains, and she enjoys the peace and serenity of the countryside more than the big city where she had been living. The characters in the book mention that, during WWII, parts of the west coast of Scotland were blocked off to visitors, except people who lived there or had relatives in the area, due to military exercises. The fact that Cathie definitely remembers being there during that time tells her and others that she either lived there or had family there, and it wasn’t just a one-time beach holiday.

At one point, Alastair Gunn and Dr. Kennedy figure out that Cathie is some sort of runaway, and Ian is physically punished for hiding her. I thought at that point in the book, Alastair handled the situation clumsily, saying too soon that Cathie can’t stay hiding there without first questioning her more closely about what she’s doing there and where she came from. I habitually ask a lot of questions, and it seemed to me that the adults in the book act too soon without finding out what they need to know about the situation. In their place, I would have wanted to get the situation straight before declaring anything or punishing anyone. At that point, the adults hardly know what the kids have been up to. By the time Miss Abbott arrives in Melvick, there is no need for her to return to the orphanage. Just when Cathie is thinking that she’ll have to reconcile herself to not knowing about her past and build a new future in the new home she’s been offered, the final pieces of the puzzle of her life fall into place, and Cathie gets the answers she’s been looking for. Even Miss Abbott is satisfied that Cathie has finally found the home she’s been looking for. After this book, Cathie becomes one of the major characters in this series.

I also liked this book for explaining the meanings of some Gaelic terms and place names. The Scottish characters do use some words that American readers might not be familiar with, like “dreich” and “havering,” but their dialogue is still easy to understand. The book doesn’t go overboard with trying to write to show the characters’ accents, which can get confusing and annoying in some books. The Scottish characters use “och” as an expression sometimes, but they don’t overdo it.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The House in Hiding

The House in Hiding by Elinor Lyon, 1950.

This is the first book in the Ian and Sovra series, which takes place in Scotland.

Ian and Sovra Kennedy are brother and sister, and they live by the sea in western Scotland. Their father is the doctor in their small town. One day, after Ian and Sovra have been asking their dad to rent a boat for them so they can explore some of the islands just off the coast where they live, their father tells them that he has bought a boat for them. It’s just a small boat for rowing, but it’s theirs, and it gives them the freedom to explore that they want. There is one island in particular that they want to explore, the one they call Castle Island. Its real name is Eilean Glas, which means “Gray Island”, but they like to call it Castle Island because there’s a square-shaped rock in the middle of the island that looks somewhat like a castle. However, their visit to this particular island has to wait for the end of the book because other events intervene to distract them.

When the children come back from trying out their boat for the first time, they hear their parents arguing about how to accommodate some house guests. Their father’s fishing friend wants to come for a visit. He was going to rent rooms in town for himself, his wife, and their daughter, but the innkeeper has had a stroke and can’t handle guests right now. So, Dr. Kennedy has offered to host the family, but the Kennedy house isn’t very big. If the guests use the children’s rooms, Ian and Sovra will have to camp out in the bothy, which is an old hut in back of the house. Ian and Sovra sometimes camp there anyway for fun, but it does get damp when it rains. Mrs. Kennedy doesn’t like the idea of the children sleeping there if the weather gets bad, but the children think that it sounds like fun and tell their mother that they’ll be fine and that they want to do it.

Dr. Kennedy’s friend is named Tom Paget. Dr. Kennedy doesn’t like Mrs. Paget, although it isn’t completely clear why. All he says about her is that she likes to wear a cloak and paint with water colors, which doesn’t sound very objectionable by itself. (I was actually a little irritated at Dr. Kennedy because he makes repeated comments about how much he doesn’t like Mrs. Paget without offering any more information than that. If she’s just a little eccentric in her style of dress and likes art, so what? I found the parts in the book where they get nitpicky and really down on her irritating.) Their daughter Ann is about the same age as Ian, and because Dr. Kennedy hasn’t yet met her, he’s not sure what she’s like until the family arrives, although he makes a point of saying, to his children, directly, that he hopes Ann isn’t like her mother. (Nope, no further information about why, and Dr. Kennedy sounds rather rude.) Dr. Kennedy’s comments about Ann and her mother leave Ian and Sovra feeling unenthusiastic about their guests, so they plan to spend most of their visit staying out of their way and possibly avoiding Ann, too, if she turns out to be like whatever her mother is like. (Way to go, Dr. Kennedy. Let’s start this whole experience off on a bad foot with everyone primed to hate your house guests, shall we?) Ian thinks that their whole camping outside the house experience would be even more fun if they were further from the house, so they won’t have to deal with the guests poking their noses into the bothy to see where they’re staying or worrying about whether Ann will want to join them because that would be bad for vague reasons.

Ian and Sovra start camping out in the bothy before the guests actually arrive to get things in order. However, they accidentally set fire to the bothy during an accident with their camp fire. With the bothy burned, where are Ian and Sovra going to camp out while the guests use their rooms? Their parents won’t let them have a tent because it won’t be dry enough if it rains. Fortunately, an important discovery that Ian and Sovra make turn this misfortune into an adventure.

While their parents worry about finding them another place to stay during their guests’ visit, the kids go exploring further in their boat. Their boat gets caught in a whirlpool and is drawn around the back of a waterfall, where they find a hidden cave. More importantly, someone else discovered this cave a long time ago. There are stone steps carved into the rock and a metal ring set into the wall for tying up boats, showing the children that this is an intentional landing spot. When they go up the stone steps, they discover an old, abandoned cottage hidden in a green hollow. (They call it a shieling.) The old cottage is in remarkably good condition for being abandoned for a long time, and Ian thinks that if they clean it up, it would be the perfect place for the two of them to stay during the guests’ visit. Sovra thinks that their parents aren’t likely to agree because the cottage is too far from their own house and rather isolated, and the landing place behind the waterfall is too dangerous. However, Ian is sure that there’s a better landing place somewhere else, if they approach from another side. Upon further exploration, the kids find a collection of cottages that were once a tiny village, older than the shieling they found and abandoned for a long time. The little abandoned village does have a landing place, and they decide that was probably how the people who once lived in the shieling got to where they built their home. They have to be careful, though, because the area is surrounded by a bog that might contain quicksand, and they’re not sure how to get across or around the bog. In the end, they decide that the waterfall entrance is actually the best way to reach the shieling, and they learn to navigate the currents around the waterfall safely.

The children’s father finally gives them permission to camp out in the old shieling, although their mother still has misgivings because the parents aren’t completely clear on exactly where the children will be camping and haven’t seen it yet themselves. The children describe the shieling to their father and tell him that it’s over near Lochhead, another town nearby. Dr. Kennedy is satisfied from their description that the house will be safe to camp in and says that they can communicate with them daily by sending them a message by the postal van from Lochhead, and if they need anything, the parents will send it to them by the same van the next day. Their mother is still uneasy, but since their father is convinced that it will be fine, she finally agrees to let them go. Ian and Sovra are thrilled at having this secret house all to themselves, but Ian says that they will need to keep it a secret and be careful not to leave signs that they’re there, just in case someone still owns the old house and doesn’t want them there, even if they’re not using the house themselves right now.

The children’s discovery and use the shieling is not only the beginning of this story but also the rest of the series. The children’s secret hiding place not only provides them with a secret place of their own but also leads them to some important discoveries about their own family and other people. This book in particular focuses on the missing chieftain of the Gunn clan, who has been presumed dead, but it takes awhile for that mystery to enter the story.

While Ian and Sovra are enjoying their freedom in their secret house, the Pagets arrive with their daughter, Ann. Mrs. Paget turns out to be a somewhat eccentric woman, sometimes overly enthusiastic about little things, raving about them with some cutesy talk. She often elaborates her daughter’s name from Ann (which is what it really is) to the longer Annabel or Annabella (neither of which is her actual name) and referring to the absent Ian and Sovra as the “dear little children.” (Yeah, it’s kind of an annoying cutesiness, but I still think that Dr. Kennedy shouldn’t have been maligning her before she arrived.) Mrs. Paget isn’t just a hobby painter; she has actual shows of her work and has been successful at selling her paintings. When she arrives, she tells the Kennedys that she wants to find the best places in the area to paint, and she’s particularly interested in things like old castles, old bridges, and waterfalls. (I think you can see where this is going.) The Kennedys mention that there are abandoned villages in the area.

Mrs. Paget thinks that sounds exciting and asks about the history of these villages. The Kennedys say that they don’t know the full story behind them, but Donald, the old man they bought the boat from, might know. They think that the people who used to live there probably moved to the bigger cities to find work or something. (This is something that actually did happen to small villages in Scotland in real life. If you’d like to know more about the circumstances and see pictures, I suggest looking at Hirta Island. Although it looks like a pretty spot, living conditions there were harsh, and after a young woman died there who might have been saved if she had lived near a city with a hospital, the people decided that it was too isolated, and they didn’t have the population levels and support they needed to stay there.)

Poor Ann is bored and disappointed by the absence of Ian and Sovra. (Yeah, thanks again, Dr. Kennedy, for all the negative talk that made them not want to even meet poor Ann and be friends with her. In his first message to the children after the guests arrive, Dr. Kennedy makes fun of Mrs. Paget’s sandals, which he says are “made of pink string” and says he doesn’t know why Mrs. Paget wants them to meet Ann. Oh, I don’t know Dr. Kennedy. Let’s all think hard about this. Could it possibly be because Ann is lonely, there are no other kids in the area, and she could use a friend? Why is Dr. Kennedy so mean and weird about this? He’s an adult, for crying out loud! Ian and Sovra think that it would be “frightfulness” if they have to meet Ann and actually “be nice to” her if she’s like her mother. Keep in mind that they still don’t even know what Mrs. Paget is really like because they haven’t met her, and oh, noes, how awful to be nice to somebody who’s a little strange or eccentric during a temporary visit. What a family!) Ann often finds family holidays boring because she’s an only child. When her mother is busy painting and her father is busy fishing, Ann has very little to do and nobody to talk to. Ian and Sovra know that the Pagets have arrived, but they try to avoid meeting them, both because they think that they won’t like the Pagets, not even Ann, and because they want to keep the house where they’re staying a secret.

The very first time Ian sees Ann, he tries to run away from her and ends up falling and getting hurt. Ann tries to help him, although he resists at first, partly because he is afraid that if his mother finds out that he’s hurt, she’ll put an end to the camping trip. Ian messes up Ann’s name, calling her “Animosity,” and I’m not sure if he did it on purpose or because he actually has a head injury from his fall. (Actually, it was probably on purpose because he does it repeatedly from this point on in the story. No, Ian, “animosity” is what your family cultivates for other people and what I’ve been feeling each time your dad criticizes Mrs. Paget behind her back.) Ann messes up Sovra’s name, asking if Ian is saying “Sofa”, but I cut her more slack because Sovra is a more unusual name, and she’s not doing it deliberately. She’s just asking if she heard that right. Ian does explain that although Sovra mostly spells her name “Sovra” for school, her name is really supposed to be the Gaelic word “Sobhrach”, which means “Primrose.” Same name and pronunciation, but different spelling. Ann likes the name for being unusual. Ann goes to get some water for Ian, and while she’s gone, Sovra finds Ian and helps him into their boat. By the time Ann gets back, they’re gone.

Sovra worries about whether Ian has given away their secret to Ann. Ian says he doesn’t think so, but he has been rambling and not thinking straight since he hit his head, so he can’t be sure. He’s dizzy and disoriented and definitely showing signs of having a concussion. He should be checked out by a doctor, who happens to be his dad in this area. However, Sovra takes Ian back to the shieling. Ann worries about where Ian disappeared to, but she realizes that he couldn’t have gone anywhere by himself in his condition, so someone else must have come and helped him. She doesn’t mention what happened when she returns to where her mother is painting by the abandoned village because she doesn’t know where Ian is and can only assume that someone took him somewhere to get help. Both she and her mother spot smoke rising from the hollow where the shieling is, and Ann wonders if that could be Ian and Sovra’s campsite, although she isn’t sure. When Ian and Sovra get another note from their parents, it says nothing about Ian’s injury, so they realize that Ann didn’t tell the adults about it, and they begin to think more highly of her for keeping their secret. (Yeah, as if that was the smartest or most caring thing she could have done. But, these are kid priorities. You’d think with a father who’s a doctor that they’d know better than to be too cavalier about head injuries, though.)

However, soon, there are other things on the kids’ minds. When Ian went to go see Donald about a bung for their boat, he noticed that Donald has a special two-handled cup called a quaich, and his quaich has a symbol on it that’s the same as a symbol that was carved into the hearth of the shieling. Ian and Sovra wonder if that means that Donald actually owns the shieling. When they ask him about it, he tells them that the symbol is a juniper sprig and it’s the badge of the Gunn clan. Donald questions them about why they want to know, and they carefully say that they’ve seen the symbol carved somewhere else. Donald realizes what they’re talking about, and he tells them that he once helped to build the little house where they’re staying. Years ago, his cousins lived in the little abandoned village, and he found that secret cave behind the waterfall himself when he was young. He’s the one who created the secret landing place and stone steps. The Gunns once owned the village and the land around it, but the head of the family, Colonel Gunn, died without children. Since then, Kindrachill House, the bigger house where Colonel Gunn lived, has been empty. Colonel Gunn did have a nephew named Alastair, but everyone believes that he died somewhere in the Far East. Alastair used to live in the shieling where Ian and Sovra have been staying. Donald gives the kids permission to continue staying there, since it seems that the original owner isn’t coming back. He also tells them that there’s a superstition in the Gunn family that, when Kindrachill House is empty, the heir to the estate will not arrive until someone lights a fire in the hearth. Ian wonders if they really have to light a fire only in the hearth at Kindrachill to make the legend come true or if it would count that they’ve been lighting fires in the hearth at the shieling, where Alastair used to live and where he carved his family’s crest in the hearth. Sovra says that it doesn’t really matter since Alastair’s dead and can’t come back … but is that really true?

When things in the shieling are moved around when Ian and Sovra aren’t there, they assume that Ann has found their hideout. They know that she’s been looking for it. Later, she admits to them that she has been there, having figured out a way to get there that Ian and Sovra don’t even know about, but she didn’t move all of the things that have been moved. Someone else who knows about the shieling has been there. They know it’s not Donald because he has trouble walking and can’t make the trip to the shieling by himself. So, who else could it be?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

The location of the story gives it an almost timeless quality. The children spend much of their time in nature, with few references to modern technology, so the story could take place in many time periods. However, the book is set contemporary to the time when it was written, in the mid-20th century, after WWII. That time period is especially important in the third book in the series. This first book in the series could take place during many possible decades, but the third book can only be set during the 1950s because WWII is important to that story.

There is a slight element of mystery to the story, but the kids aren’t actively trying to solve the mystery element. Mostly, it’s a kind of adventure story with elements of slice-of-life about how these kids spend their summer in an exciting location with a somewhat mysterious history. Little pieces of the situation are gradually revealed to the characters during their adventures. Kids like stories about other kids who have adventures without adult supervision, and parts of the story are about the fun things they do, setting up house in the old cottage and enjoying themselves in and around the secret hideaway.

The Kennedys’ Attitude Problems

I have to say that I didn’t like the attitudes of any of the Kennedys. I actually read the third book before this one, and I liked the characters better in that book. In this book, both the parents and the kids seem to be some kind of snobs. They’re negative and mean about Mrs. Paget and her daughter for little reason. Granted, I don’t like cutesiness much, but Mrs. Paget just seems to be a mildly eccentric artist who dresses a little oddly and acts overly enthusiastic about some things. I didn’t think there was any call for a medical man like Dr. Kennedy, who should be at least somewhat understanding about human nature because of his profession, to be so mean about the way Mrs. Paget dresses or try to discourage his children from being nice to Ann. There’s almost a mean girl exclusiveness quality to the Kennedys’ behavior. Most of the men I know have little knowledge about women’s clothes, but Dr. Kennedy sounds like a middle school mean girl, nitpicking the way the poor woman dresses. He even writes about it in the notes that he sends to his kids during their camping trip. The pink rope sandals bother him so much that he wants to put that in writing to his kids who aren’t even there and who should be polite to this guest when they actually meet. Dude, you live a “simple” life in a cottage near a small town on the coast of Scotland. You’re not exactly in a high society fashion district, and there are few people around to see or care what anybody dresses like. So what if she likes to wear cloaks with sandals? It’s an odd clothing choice because it seems to indicate that she’s dressing for two different types of weather at once, but it’s harmless. Calling the landscape “delicious” and the children “dear little children” (“dear” seems overly generous to me, but Mrs. Paget doesn’t know any better) might seems a little sappy, but again, so what if she’s somewhat sappy and romantic in her speech? Calling her daughter Ann by much longer names which she could have just named her in the beginning, like Annabel or Annabella, is also a little odd, but if Ann doesn’t seem to care, why should anybody else? Families do sometimes have odd nicknames for kids, and it’s not the worst I’ve ever heard. Going from a shorter name to a longer one is the opposite of what most nicknames do, but again, it’s just harmless eccentricity. None of the things Mrs. Paget does seem really that bad. Mrs. Paget doesn’t do anything rude or mean, and she seems like a pretty unobtrusive guest. Mostly, she just wants to find pretty spots where she can sit most of the day and work on her paintings while her husband fishes, so if they don’t like her cute, sappy talk, they don’t have to hear it much. She only seems to return to the Kennedy house to eat and sleep, and that’s literally the least a host can provide a house guest.

The Kennedys are fine in the scenes when they’re just by themselves, but when their guests are around, they’re barely holding back inner meanness and rudeness for the guests that seems completely undeserved. That was a constant source of tension for me while reading the book. When Mrs. Paget is asking about beautiful spots in the area with enthusiasm and interest in their history, Dr. Kennedy is thinking about the best way to answer her questions quickly so he can just talk to her husband (about fishing, I guess), like he just wants her to shut up. The men are going to go off fishing together, during which they’ll have hours to talk about anything they want, and Dr. Kennedy thinks it’s such an imposition to talk to Mrs. Paget for a few minutes when they first arrive about the area where he lives and its history, for which Mrs. Paget has only expressed admiration and interest. Mrs. Kennedy also seems oddly defensive to Mrs. Paget about the “simple” life they lead, which she seems to think is too simple for Mrs. Paget, but Mrs. Paget reassures her that isn’t the case, that she thinks the area is charming and the children’s camping trip sounds like fun. Mrs. Paget seems overly enthusiastic about how great it all is. Whether she’s really that enthusiastic on the inside, I couldn’t say, but at least she speaks positively and makes an effort to show interest. She is definitely interested in the artistic possibilities of the area and sincerely curious about its history. She follows up her curiosity by asking Donald about what he knows, which shows effort.

Meanwhile, the Kennedys are trying to hide their negativity, which seems to spring from ideas they have about Mrs. Paget that aren’t born out in real life. There’s little indication of how the Kennedys got these ideas except their own inner negativity and insecurity. When I was a kid, my mother would tell me to be nice to other people and to make visitors feel welcome, and even if I wasn’t having fun with particular visitors, to remember that their visit was only temporary and make the best of it until it’s over. You can feel any way you want, but you still have to behave yourself. Being nice to a temporary guest is not a terrible imposition, and putting up with a less-than-ideal guest is completely bearable and encourages return hospitality. The Kennedys don’t impart these lessons to their children, and the father seems to particularly discourage this thinking. This is the type of family that breeds little bullies, people who think that generally being nice to people is a terrible burden to endure. It really struck me as pretty rotten for Dr. Kennedy, a grown man in a position of trust and responsibility for the welfare of people in their community, to try to discourage his children from meeting and being nice to Ann, a lonely child who never did anything to Dr. Kennedy and doesn’t deserve this bad treatment from him, smearing her reputation and making it difficult for her to make friends. Why is Dr. Kennedy trying to get his kids to be mean to Ann instead of telling them to be kind to a guest and make friends?

Of course, I really know why the Kennedys have to be this way. It’s a plot device. Their reasons for not liking Ann and her mother don’t have to be fair or make complete sense because it’s the results that matter. It’s all to set up part of the conflict of the story. If Dr. Kennedy was nicer about Mrs. Paget and encouraged his kids to be nice to Ann, they wouldn’t be so worried about having Ann around or joining them on their camping trip. Ian wouldn’t have been so worried about Ann seeing him that he tried to run from her, fell, and got that concussion. If the kids were friendlier with each other, Ann wouldn’t have needed to get a ride from a stranger or might have told them about the man she met who gave her a ride and who turns out to be important. Quite a lot of the problems the kids encounter would have been different or simplified if characters were nice with each other and worked together more. It’s a theme that appears often in literature, and actually, quite a lot in real life, too. It doesn’t make it any less annoying for me.

Character Development

The parts where I thought Ian and Sovra were at their best were when they were completely by themselves. They seem to have a good brother-and-sister relationship and know how to function as a team. Even when one of them messes something up and they criticize each other, they still have each other’s back and work together to clean up their messes. However, I never really got to like Ian and Sovra as people during this book because of their meanness and snobbishness, which is ironic because they later say that they don’t like Ann because she thinks that she’s better than they are. This seems to be a retroactive decision by the author because she doesn’t show that trait right away. It seems to surface later in the story, long after Ian and Sovra have decided that they don’t like Ann and need to avoid her and think it would be frightful to be nice to her.

My favorite characters in the story are thoughtful Ann and kind Alastair. Yes, Alastair does appear in the story. He’s not dead. Ann is the first to meet Alastair on his arrival back in the area, and he helps her when Ian and Sovra have been mean to her, stealing her shoes so she can’t follow them back to their secret house from the beach and leaving her to limp back to the Kennedy house over rocks with a hurt foot. Ann vents to Alastair about her troubles with the Kennedys without knowing who he really is, and he tells her that he’s sorry that she’s having such a bad time and that the Kennedys have been unpleasant to her. Finally, a voice of reason and compassion in the story! Ann doesn’t mention this encounter with Alastair to anybody at first because she doesn’t know who he is, that they all think he’s dead, or that his return has any special meaning.

Little by little, Ian and Sovra do start to feel guilty about the way they’ve treated Ann and start looking at her differently, noticing the things she does well and acknowledging some of the skills and knowledge she has. Eventually, Sovra does apologize to Ann for stealing her shoes. When Ann is seasick the first time they take her out in their boat, she admits that she’s not as used to sailing as they are, which makes her seem less superior than Ian and Sovra thought she was. Ann even apologizes for talking like she knows everything when she doesn’t, but I still thought it was weird because that wasn’t the impression that I was getting from her until after Sovra and Ian started saying that’s what she was doing. The apologies they each give each other and their mutual acknowledgement of each other’s faults and strengths help them come to a better understanding of each other and resolve their conflicts.

Ann also proves to Ian and Sovra that she does know things that even they don’t know about the shieling and the area around it because of the questions her mother asked Donald about the history of the area. Donald told Mrs. Paget that there was once a pathway between the abandoned village and the shieling that was lost years ago, apparently swallowed up by the bog, and nobody knows quite where it is now. However, this summer has been drier than normal in the area, and Ann realizes that the path might have been exposed again by the lower water levels in the bog. She carefully observes the area from a high vantage point when they go hiking in the mountains until she spots where the path goes and marks it on her map. Then, the next time her mother goes to the village to paint, she scouts for the beginning of the path from the ground, finding a series of stepping stones through the bog.

When Ian and Sovra ask her later how she got to the shieling when she didn’t know about the waterfall entrance, she explains to them what she did, and they ask her to show them where the path is. I liked this part because Ian and Sovra were smug earlier about Ann’s map, saying that they didn’t need any local maps like that because everyone knows where everything around here is anyway, and their big source of pride with Ann was that they know more about the area than she does. (They thought that her explanations of what’s on her map when they asked her to show it to them earlier was just her trying to be “superior” to them.) They do know a lot from living there for their whole lives, but the problem is that they count too much on that sometimes and don’t think to ask the questions Ann and her mother do because Ann and her mother are aware of what they don’t know and are actively trying to learn.

I also liked it that when Ian and Sovra finally let Ann join them camping at the shieling, they also let her take over the cooking. Earlier, they took exception to her father saying that she’s an excellent cook because they saw it as bragging and acting superior, but Ann really is good at cooking and likes doing it, and Sovra admits that she isn’t terribly good at it and doesn’t really like it herself. I was relieved when the characters stopped worrying about who was superior to who and who was acting superior when they shouldn’t and just let people do what they’re good at and interested in doing, acknowledging when someone does something well without adding a kind of put-down onto it, like Ian and Sovra did earlier.

Alistair

Getting back to Alastair’s return, he eventually shows up at the shieling and talks to the children, explaining what happened to him. He says that he tried to talk to them before, but they weren’t at the shieling the last time he stopped by. His plane was wrecked in the Pacific (They don’t say that it happened during the war, so it might not have been. I thought they might have been implying that he was a pilot in the war, but that would play with the timing of later books in the series.), as they heard, and he spent some time living with a native group on an island. The natives were friendly enough and helped him, but it took him awhile to learn enough of their language to really communicate with them and figure out how to get to a place where he could arrange passage home. That was when he first learned that he’d been declared dead. Since then, he’s been reestablishing his identity and checking on the estate that he’s inherited. By the time that Alastair finally shows up at the shieling and introduces himself to the children, they’ve heard that Kindrachill House is supposed to be sold to pay the mortgage. When they ask Alastair about it, he confirms that he doesn’t have the money he needs to pay the mortgage. He almost didn’t come back to the area at all because he didn’t think there was anything there for him. However, it turns out that he’s an art lover, and when he went to a showing of Mrs. Paget’s paintings in Glasgow, he saw the painting she did of the old village and how she included the smoke rising from the shieling where Ian and Sovra were staying. That made him want to return to his old cottage and see who was there. So, the legend about a fire in the hearth bringing the Gunn heir home comes true.

There is an argument among the four of them whether Ian and Sovra should get the credit for Alastair’s return because they lit the fire in the hearth at the shieling or whether Mrs. Paget should get the credit because her painting is what drew it to Alastair’s attention, but it’s a good-natured debate. There is still the problem of the mortgage that needs to be paid, but Ian, Sovra, and Alastair find the solution to the problem when they finally go take a look at Castle Island, and Ann rescues them when they accidentally maroon themselves there. Since Ian was the first to spot the solution to their problem, Alastair thanks him by giving him the shieling so he and his sister can use it whenever they want. Alastair is able to save Kindrachill House and takes up his role as chieftain of the Gunn clan, which sets up the other stories that follow in this series.

My Favorite Parts

The best parts of the book for me were its timeless quality and the location. A secret house, forgotten by everyone, accessed by going behind a waterfall and climbing a hidden stone stairway is just the sort of place I would have loved as a kid. Even as an adult, I love the idea of a secret hideaway in a picturesque spot. The location and atmosphere are what I recommend to other readers the most. The imagery of the setting is wonderful, and it’s a great place to escape to mentally, if you can’t get to such a spot physically.

I also like books that bring up interesting facts and bits of folklore for discussion. At one point in the book, Ian explains singing sand to Sovra, which is dry sand that makes a sound when people walk on it under the right conditions. (This YouTube video demonstrates what singing sand can sound like on Prince Edward Island.) A less pleasant but still informative part is when Sovra breaks the necks of the fish they catch to kill them quickly. I’m not sure if I’ve heard of other people doing that when they fish or not. It makes sense when they explain it, but I know very little about fishing. I’ve never lived near bodies of water and haven’t gone fishing, and I get squeamish about things, so I’ve never asked.

On a day of heavy mists, Ian and Sovra are also fascinated with how muffled and mysterious the land looks and talk about how it probably inspired stories they’ve heard about ghosts and “second sight” and doppelgangers (although they say it as “doublegangers”). Ian explains how doppelgangers are like “the wraith of someone who’s still alive, so there are two of them.” This piece of folklore is why we refer to people who bear a strong resemblance to each other without being actual twins as doppelgangers. (Some people also call them “twin strangers.”)

Posted on by TracyC

Sidney’s Ghost

Sidney’s Ghost by Carol Iden, illustrated by Paul Galdone, 1969.

Nine-year-old Sidney Robinson’s best friend is a girl named Megan McKenna. The two of them have many interests in common, including fishing, cars, ghost stories, and horses. Megan’s father owns a stable, and Sidney envies Megan for having her own pony. Because Megan’s father sells horses to other people, the kids are used to seeing horses come and go. When Megan’s father can’t find a buyer for a horse, he’ll try to sell it at public auction. However, if he can’t sell a horse at auction at all, he sometimes sells it to the slaughterhouse, where they use the horse parts for glue and dog food. It’s sad, but the kids accept this as part of life until Megan’s father acquires a retired police horse whose former owner died, and Sidney realizes that he can’t let this beautiful black horse suffer this terrible fate.

The horse, officially named Sergeant O’Hara but called Uncle Charley by Megan’s family is a beautiful animal with a gentle temperament. Sidney wishes that he could persuade his parents to buy the horse for him. He is easy to ride and obeys commands, and he has an excellent history of his time as a police horse.

Megan’s father isn’t completely honest as a horse seller. The book goes into some detail about how he prepares horses for sale, painting on dapples and filing their teeth down to make them seem younger than they really are. Even Sergeant O’Hara gets this treatment, although Sidney worries that it hurts the horse. (I looked it up, and it turns out that it can be beneficial to file the sharp points off of a horse’s teeth, which is called teeth floating. However, this is something that should only be done by someone who has been trained to do it because it can hurt the horse to file the teeth down too much.)

Sidney and Megan love to watch the horse auctions and pretend they’re bidding on the horses, but Sergeant O’Hara is auctioned off as planned. Megan’s brother Michael let him loose in the paddock when he was supposed to be watching him, and he got all dirty, so he isn’t fit to be shown. Then, to Sidney’s shock, Megan tells him that her father is planning to just sell Sergeant O’Hara to the slaughterhouse instead of trying again at the next auction. If Sidney and Megan are going to save poor Sergeant O’Hara’s life, they’ve got to do something, fast!

Megan tells Sidney that she’s thought of a plan to save Sergeant O’Hara. The two kids sneak out and take the horse in the middle of the night and hide him in an old barn. As they go to hide the horse, they see a shadowy figure near the barn. Megan is afraid, and Sergeant O’Hara wants to chase the figure because of his police training, but Sidney stops him.

However, even with the horse safely in the barn where hardly anybody ever goes, there is the very real worry that they’ll be caught. The horse will need exercise, so Sidney will have to go ride him at night or when they’re sure nobody else will be around. Still, they feel like they need to come up with an additional plan in case the horse is spotted. Then, Sidney takes a hint from the way Mr. McKenna painted dapples on a horse earlier and suggests that they could paint Sergeant O’Hara a different color so he won’t be recognized. Megan thinks that’s a great idea, and they decide to paint him white, like the Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver.

They get the painting supplies from Sidney’s father’s hardware store, but Sidney grabs a can of paint labeled “Super Glo – White.” It turns out that it’s not just a really bright white; it’s a glow-in-the-dark white. The kids don’t figure it out until they’ve already painted half of the horse. When Sidney sneaks out to feed and exercise Sergeant O’Hara again, he’s frightened when this big, glowing thing comes out of the darkness at him. Somehow, the horse got out of the barn and scared him by running out in the dark, glowing. Sidney realizes after a moment of panic that’s what happened. Because they only painted half of the horse before they stopped, one side of Sergeant O’Hara is glowing white, and the other is pitch black. When the horse gallops back and forth, he looks like a glowing ghost that vanishes with each turn. It’s a neat effect, but having a ghost horse certainly isn’t inconspicuous.

One night, Sidney accidentally frightens his old teacher, Miss Winthrop, when she’s walking home from visiting a friend. Soon, she spreads the story of her ghost sighting all over town. Most people think that she’s getting a touch of senility in her old age, but Mr. McKenna thinks it over and notices Sidney’s comings and goings in the area. When he goes to the old barn to investigate what Sidney’s been doing. Seeing the horse and the glow-in-the-dark paint, he realizes what happened. He appreciates that Sidney and Megan wanted to save the horse and sees the humor in their unintentional ghost act.

Since the kids feel that strongly about wanting the horse and are taking good care of him, Mr. McKenna decides to let them continue to do so, but there’s still one thing that nobody has answered: Who was that mysterious figure they saw around the barn? The answer comes when this mysterious person sets fire to the McKenna’s stables and Sergeant O’Hara has the opportunity to show his skills as a police horse.

My Reaction

When I first read this book as a kid, I was expecting it to be a mystery. It kind of is, but the mystery isn’t about the horse or about any ghost. There are hints from the very beginning of the story that there is a thief in the area, but the story doesn’t really focus on that until near the end. Sidney and Megan hear people talking about a prowler, and they do see the mysterious prowler around the barn, but they’re too busy with their plans to save the horse to pay too much attention. Fortunately, their horse and his ghostly appearance help them to catch the the thief, and the reward money for catching him straightens out a lot of problems so Sidney can keep Sergeant O’Hara.

The gimmick of the “ghostly” painted horse has stayed in my mind for years since I first read this story, but it’s not the only memorable part of the book. One of the things that I remembered best about this book from when I read it as a kid was the difference in Sidney and Megan’s homes and families. The book puts some emphasis on the difference in their family lives, and it’s shown when each of the kids has dinner at each other’s home. Megan has several siblings, and their house is always noisy and boisterous. Sidney is Sidney is a fussy eater at home, but he just eats what’s put in front of him at the McKennas’, like the other kids do. Megan gets a rap on the knuckles from her father for starting to eat before Grace is said. One line from the book that stuck with me for years was when Megan’s brother, Frank, says Grace with this joking prayer: “We thank the Lord for the next meal – we’re sure of this one.” I still think of this whenever someone says Grace aloud.

By contrast, dinner at the Robinson house is much calmer, quieter, and more formal. Sidney is an only child, and his father owns a hardware store, so the Robinsons can afford nicer things. Megan is impressed at the nice tile in the bathroom, and the table is set with embroidered placemats and matching cloth napkins. Megan accidentally bites into one of the cloves in the ham, and when it burns her mouth, she spits the bite of food into her cloth napkin, feeling terribly guilty about it because the napkin really seems too nice for that sort of thing.

I could identify with the feelings the children have about being in houses where people have different habits. There were times when I was young when I felt a little out of place because they were either more formal than I was accustomed to being or more boisterous than I feel comfortable being. People always feel more comfortable with what they’re used to.

Posted on by TracyC

The Silver Spoon Mystery

The Silver Spoon Mystery by Dorothy Sterling, 1958.

A group of families move into the new suburb built on The Hill overlooking the town of Dwighton. The kids in the new neighborhood become close friends, visiting each other’s houses, playing games, and running around town together. It’s idyllic, but then the boys in the group start playing baseball together, and they begin excluding the girls from the group, even though they’ve all played baseball together before and the girls are good at it. The boys also stop working on the tree house that the kids were all making together, taking some of the tools and materials and building themselves a clubhouse near the baseball field with a sign that says, “NO GIRLS ALLOWED.”

The girls are offended at suddenly being shunned by the boys, so they decide that they need to have some special project, something that will show the boys that girls are just as good as they are and that the girls don’t have to rely on the boys to have some fun. They decide to start a neighborhood newspaper, writing about local events and having fun stuff, like jokes. The newspaper is a success, and adult neighbors buy copies. Then, the boys decide to start a competing newspaper themselves. One of the girls, Peggy, is upset because she’s sure that the boys’ newspaper will be more successful. Some of the boys are older than the girls so they might write better, there are more boys than girls in the group so they have more people to gather news and sell papers, Davey is better at drawing cartoons than the girls are, and worst of all, the boys splurged to buy a hectograph, which uses a gelatin substance for making copies of writing and drawings (as in this video) and will allow the boys to print papers by the hundred (“hecto” means one hundred, and that’s how many copies a hectograph makes at a time). (This is before home computers, so the characters have to rely on manual printing methods. People used hectographs to make copies before modern copy machines, but modern hectographs still exist, and some people use them for artwork or tattoo stencils.)

Peggy’s afraid that the girls won’t be able to compete with the boys’ advantages and thinks that the boys are mean for trying to steal their business. Peggy’s mother tells her that she shouldn’t worry about being better than the boys but focus on being different. She says that the girls should make sure that their paper has different content from the boys’ paper so people will still have a reason to buy theirs even if they’ve already bought the boys’ paper. If the boys’ paper has cartoons, the girls’ paper should have things the boys wouldn’t think to include, like recipes, poems, and fictional stories that could be written and submitted by local people.

Peggy gets an idea from what her mother says, but it’s not a good one. Peggy still wants to show up the boys, and she thinks that the best way to do it is to get a “scoop”, meaning printing an exiting news story that the boys won’t have in their paper. The problem is that the girls don’t know where they’re going to get an exciting news story that the boys don’t know anything about. Nothing that exciting is happening in their town anyway. There haven’t been any shocking events, no murders, no robberies. Peggy tells the other girls that means that they have write about something that hasn’t happened yet. Peggy poses the idea of writing about someone stealing the silver on display at the local library that was made by the silversmith who was the founder of their town. Of course, the problem with that is that the silver hasn’t actually been stolen. One of the girls, Ellen, objects to writing a story about something that hasn’t happened because that’s not actually “news.” However, Peggy talks the other girls into it by saying that they would be writing about it as fiction because people write fictional books all the time, and that’s allowed. Ellen still isn’t convinced, but Peggy goes ahead and writes the story anyway. (Basically, she’s turning the girls’ newspaper into a tabloid, although the kids don’t seem to quite get the difference, even though Ellen can tell that this isn’t right for a newspaper.) The girls all discuss how they would go about stealing the silver spoons from the library, if they were going to do it, and Peggy writes the story from their speculations.

You just know that there’s going to be trouble with Peggy trying to sell a story that everyone knows didn’t happen, but what actually happens is even stranger. After the girls sell their paper with the spoon theft story, Peggy gets home to find a policeman, Lieutenant Peters, waiting for her with her mother. Lieutenant Peters wants to talk to Peggy about the robbery at the library because it turns out that the very night when Peggy was writing her big fictional scoop about silver spoons being stolen from the library, someone was in fact stealing silver spoons from the library, and this thief apparently did it the way Peggy described in her story. Lieutenant Peters wants to know everything that Peggy knows about the theft, and he won’t believe that Peggy wasn’t there to witness it because her description of what happened is so accurate. She even has a description of the thief in her story. Since the theft happened in the middle of the night, Peggy points out that she was asleep in bed, but even Peggy’s mother isn’t sure that Peggy didn’t sneak out. When Peggy’s friends show up at her house, Lieutenant Peters questions them too and comes to the conclusion that Peggy and maybe also her friends stole the spoons themselves to make their story true. Lieutenant Peters says that they’ll be forgiven if they give the spoons back, but the girls can’t do that because they don’t have them.

As Lieutenant Peters and Peggy’s mother continue to question the girls about their story, the girls admit that they made up the whole thing as a fictional story just to attract attention to their paper. Lieutenant Peters catches the boys listening in on their conversation and questions them about what they know about the situation. The boys don’t really know anything about the theft, either, but they were pretty sure that Peggy made up the story she wrote, and they’re fascinated that she might be about to be arrested and taken to “children’s jail.” Peggy’s mother believes her that she just made up the story and it’s all a coincidence that someone happened to steal the silver spoons from the library around the same time, but Lieutenant Peters isn’t convinced.

Word of the spoon theft spreads across town quickly, partly because of Peggy’s story in the neighborhood newspaper and partly because of the story in the regular news. People call Peggy’s house to ask for details, and kids at school look at Peggy and her friends suspiciously, wondering how much they had to do with the theft. Peggy is especially offended when Davey says that his father thinks that it’s an unlikely coincidence that Peggy would write a story about the theft and then the theft would just happen. Before the boys started their “no girls allowed” stuff, Peggy and Davey used to be close friends. However, Davey assures her that he doesn’t think that she’s responsible for the theft. He also tells her that he and the other boys are sorry about pushing the girls by trying to compete with their paper, and they’ve decided to give up theirs and let the girls use the hectograph. The kids discuss trying to investigate the crime themselves because, until the real thief is found, people are going to keep looking at the girls suspiciously.

Most of the neighborhood kids, both boys and girls, join the investigation as the “Hill Detective Club”, except for one of the older girls who is studying for exams and Davey’s older brother, Allen, the only boy who’s mad at the other boys because they don’t want to play baseball now. (Allen is apparently the one who started all the “no girls allowed” stuff because he didn’t make the high school baseball team and he’s been ultra-serious about practicing during the neighborhood games. He’s trying to organize a game between the boys in the neighborhood and their fathers. The book doesn’t explicitly say so, but there might also be an element of embarrassment for him that some of the girls play better than he does. Peggy is described as being the fastest runner in the neighborhood, and Ellen is a good batter.) As they begin their investigation, the kids visit the scene of the crime and study the ways the thief could have gotten into the library, starting to separate the made-up details from Peggy’s fictional story from the real facts and circumstances of the case. Peggy admits that her mind is biased because she still thinks of her story as the way things happened and her fictional suspect as the type of thief they’re looking for, but the truth is that they don’t know for sure how the crime actually happened or what type of person they’re looking for.

When the kids talk to one of the librarians, Miss Bancroft, they learn that the police did find a few sets of fingerprints on the case that held the silver spoons: Miss Lowell, the head librarian; Mrs. Simpson, a descendant of the town’s founding father and part of the local antiquarian society; and Mr. Weatherspoon, who owns a local antique store. Could one of these people be the thief?

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

My Reaction

To begin with, this book seems like it’s meant for fairly young elementary students. It tries to teach readers the meaning of some of the words in the story because some of the characters don’t know the meanings of various words the other characters use or words that they encounter in various places, like “descendant” or “optometrist.” The kids in the story are a variety of ages even though they all play together in the neighborhood, and I could understand why some of the younger kids would struggle with bigger words, but there were times when I thought that they were carrying it a little far. Peggy is twelve years old, so it seems like she should have been old enough to know what an optometrist is. Has she never had her eyes checked before? Actually, maybe she never has. If her vision is good or seems good, maybe her family just doesn’t bother. I guess it’s educational for young readers just branching out into chapter books.

I like books that bring up interesting historical topics. The parts about older printing/copying techniques and Mrs. Simpson’s old electric car with the steering stick instead of a steering wheel (possibly a Baker Electric, like the one Jay Leno owns, or something very similar – this video explains the history of the Baker Electric and shows what it’s like to drive it) were interesting, and one of the characters in the story explains more about the history of the town’s famous silver spoons to the kids. Although the town, its founder, and the spoons are all fiction, spoons of this sort did exist in real life. The silver spoons are specifically christening spoons. It used to be traditional to give presents made of silver to new babies and their parents for the child’s christening. One of the most popular presents of this type was small silver baby spoons, especially with special designs or engravings to remember the child’s birth. The character explains why this particular set of spoons is so distinctive, talking about their unique design, how antique dealers would be able to look them up in a reference book and learn their history, and how each of the of the spoons is marked with the maker’s hallmark, the special symbol that the maker would use to identify himself.

Part of the mystery hinges on the coincidence of the theft occurring just when Peggy decides to write a sensational story about an imaginary theft to get attention for her neighborhood newspaper. For readers, the question is whether the timing of the actual theft is really just coincidental or if there’s a direct connection between the story of the theft and the theft itself. I would have been very disappointed in the book if it was just a coincidence, so I immediately approached the story with the idea that the timing of the theft was a clue. I enjoyed considering different possibilities. My first thought, when the theft happened mysteriously immediately after Peggy and her friends invented their theft story, was that someone overheard the girls talking about how they would commit a theft like that and decided to use their imaginary scheme as their own. However, the conversation between Peggy and her friends took place in Peggy’s room, which was pretty private. For someone to overhear them, it would have to be someone in Peggy’s own house, possibly family or a neighborhood friend, or someone listening in from outside, probably one of the neighborhood kids. Those possibilities didn’t seem likely. Then, I remembered the Nero Wolfe murder mystery story Not Quite Dead Enough. What if the theft didn’t occur when the police thought it did (mostly because they believed Peggy’s original story) but actually at the point where the theft was supposedly discovered? The person who claimed to discover the theft was one of the people with the strongest motives to commit it, and this person could have done it after reading the fake news story, seeing an opportunity to make it true and cast suspicion on Peggy’s fictional suspect. The mystery is simple enough to figure out for an adult who likes mystery stories, but probably much more mysterious for kids. Once the kids realize who has the spoons, there is also the additional challenge of proving it and getting the spoons back without getting everyone in trouble.

I thought it was interesting that the story shows some of the problems with sensationalist or tabloid style “news” stories, or “yellow journalism“, as it used to be called. It’s the sort of “news” that relies on flashy and misleading headlines, buzzwords and catch phrases that appeal to its fans and rile them up emotionally, hyperbole and emotionally-charged language, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and poorly-qualified or debunked “experts”, to draw readership and advertising money. Basically, they aren’t really “news.” They don’t try to describe things as they actually happened for informative purposes. These are “news” stories that are less about fact than about entertaining their audience or shocking people and stirring up strong emotions to grab people’s attention. That’s basically what Peggy was trying to do with her fake news story, even if she wasn’t quite thinking about it in those terms. Just like tabloid or sensationalist news, Peggy’s story was almost a kind of fan fiction based on the real world. That is, she took real things and situations that she knew existed (the silver display at the library) and wrote an exciting conspiracy story around them that didn’t actually happen (the made-up theft) as a shocking, attention-getting entertainment piece to encourage people to buy the paper she and the other girls were selling. She thought what she was doing was like harmless entertainment, but it wasn’t because it was based on something real, and her made-up story had real consequences. Not only is there a direct connection between the fake story and the real theft, but Peggy’s fake story confuses people, including the local police and insurance investigator, because they have trouble telling how much of Peggy’s story is false, and it biases their minds and the direction of their investigations. Even Peggy herself sometimes gets confused during the investigation, mixing up details from her made-up story with real events. Even though she wrote the fictional story herself, knowing it was fictional, she gets hung up on the way she imagined things would happen when she invented the story and needs to be occasionally reminded to look at the situation as it actually exists, not as she imagined it would be. If the author of the fictional news story can’t even keep her own fiction and the real facts straight in her mind at first, how can the police or anyone else?

Sensationalist journalism can and has led to real problems in real life, setting up dangerous situations by stirring up the emotions of people who may already be unbalanced and suggesting unrealistic events or courses of action that interfere with people’s sense of reality and ability to make informed, reasoned decisions (something else that ties in with the story). In a famous real life case from the early 1900s, the famous newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst had his own reputation seriously damaged when he published articles written by two of his columnists smearing President McKinley’s reputation and seemingly recommending his assassination. (“If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.”) These articles were published only months before President McKinley was actually assassinated. Hearst had used yellow journalism in his papers for years to manipulate public opinion to further his political causes and gain readership. (“War makes for great circulation,” Hearst said after successfully urging public opinion in favor of the Spanish-American War.) After the assassination of the president, people made a connection between the assassination the articles in Hearst’s papers seemed to be advocating (although they called it a “mental exercise” and a joke) and the assassination that actually happened. Whether Hearst actually wanted McKinley to be killed by someone or whether the man who assassinated McKinley was directly inspired by those sensationalist articles is questionable, but the suspicion that was what happened, in a sort of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” kind of moment, did seriously damage Hearst’s own political ambitions. Hearst did intentionally want to smear McKinley’s reputation, but his lack of consideration for the possible results of his stories, which seemed to be advocating an actual murder that did occur soon after, caused the public to turn against Hearst himself.

We frequently caution people to be careful of what they read because you can’t trust everything, which is sensible advice, but I’d go a little further and say, be careful of why you choose to read what you’re reading and why believe what you read. Was it because the information was presented logically and authoritatively, or is it because you decided ahead of time what you were going to read because of something you already believed or something you already knew you really wanted to do? Picking the right information source is good, but it may be even better to ask yourself what you, as an individual, plan to actually do because of the news sources you’re following. Is it a good thing to do that’s going to help someone or something that’s going to hurt people? Take a look in the mirror once in a while and question your motives as one of your own primary sources of information. You are the one who chooses what news sources you consume. You are the one who decides what you believe because you always have the choice to accept or reject anything you hear from someone else. You are the one who decides what your standards are and where your limits are set. You are the one person who knows exactly what you’re willing to do to accomplish your goals. You are the one who moves your body to the locations you decide to go and makes your mouth say the things it says and your body do the things it does. You are the one who has ability to say “yes” or “no”, not only to other people but yourself when necessary. Anything you may decide to do involves not just a single choice but multiple choices along the way that can only be made by you, so you’re going to have to be your own fact checker at every step, not just about what other people are telling you but what you’re telling yourself and why.

Sensationalist news stories are intentionally emotionally manipulative in order to get people hooked on reading that source, but you’re the only one who gets to decide if you’re hooked and what you’re going to do about it. The next time you read something that makes you really mad at somebody, before you do whatever you’re considering doing about it, pause a moment to ask, not just whether the source you just read might be wrong, but “What if I’m wrong? What if I’m wrong about this situation, and I’m about to do the wrong thing? Am I prepared to face the consequences for my actions if this turns out to be serious?” The reason for asking these questions is, if the consequences of what you’re planning to do are serious, there will be a point where people won’t want to hear about what you believed or thought you believed or what someone else told you earlier. If you’re the one who did the thing, you’re the one who’s going to be facing the consequences for that thing. There’s a point where everyone has to accept the consequences for themselves all by themselves. (To put a finer point on it, riot and people will riot with you, but you’ll be tried as an adult alone.)

Posted on by TracyC

Deadline at Spook Cabin

Deadline at Spook Cabin by Eugenia Miller, 1958.

Twelve-year-old Mitch Adams is a newsboy for the summer, but the bicycle that he uses to deliver his newspapers is old and frequently breaks down. He often has to stop and fix it, which means that getting anywhere and delivering his papers takes him longer than it does for the other newsboys. If he doesn’t do something about it soon, his bike might break down completely, and he won’t be able to keep his paper route.

However, the paper he works for is having a contest for the newsboys, and the prize is a new bicycle. If Mitch can win the new bike, his problems will be solved. He’s been saving some money that he could use to get a new bike, but he’s hoping that, if he wins the new bike, he can use the money to buy a special present for his mother – a piano to replace the one they had to sell because they needed money after his father died. It’s an important present because his mother now has a job playing the piano for a dance studio, and she’s been thinking that, if she had a piano of her own again, she could also give piano lessons. In order to win the newspaper contest, Mitch has to be on time with his route, not get any complaints from customers, and sign up more new subscribers this month than any of the other newsboys. Mitch has been working hard at it, and by his count, he’s tied for first place with another boy. If he can keep up the good work to the end of the week, he stands a good chance of winning.

Mitch also has ambitions of becoming a reporter some day. When one of the best reporters for the paper, Jim McCain, says he wants to talk to Mitch about something, Mitch is delighted. Jim invites Mitch to meet him at the newspaper office early the next day so he can show him how the reporters get information from the police and fire department for their stories. Mitch is excited because he’s been asking Jim about that and agrees to meet Jim the next morning.

The next day, Jim actually lets Mitch do some of the calling to the fire department himself after first coaching him about what to say. In particular, he teaches Mitch to base his questions around the “five W’s” – who, what, when, where, and why – that make up a story. Because they live in a small town, there isn’t any particularly startling news from the fire department or the police, but Jim explains that people will want to know what’s happening in the area anyway. Some people may have heard the sounds of a fire engine recently, so they’ll check the newspaper to find out where the fire was, even if it was just a little brush fire.

After Mitch is done with his work for the newspaper, he meets his friend Lyle and Lyle’s younger brother Beanie for a bike ride and a cookout. As they look for a good place to set up a camp fire, they find an abandoned cabin in the woods and decide to take a look inside. There’s not much there, and the boys think that it might be fun to fix it up like it’s their secret hideout and camp there some night. They give the old house the nickname “Spook Cabin” because Beanie thinks it’s kind of creepy. Exploring a little further, they also discover that there’s a tree house in one of the trees surrounding the cabin that’s hard to see from the ground.

Soon, some exciting news comes to Mitch’s paper after all. There was bank robbery in a nearby town. One of the robbers got away, and the police are searching for him. Police officers patrol the town, on the lookout for the fugitive.

Then, a report about a campfire that was left unattended comes from the local fire department. From the description of the campfire, Mitch knows that his friends were the ones who set it because they made it the way they said they would for sending smoke signals. However, they never would have left their fire unattended. Mitch knows that something bad must have happened, and his friends need his help!

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

My Reaction

This is a pretty short chapter book, and I thought it was pretty obvious where the missing bank robber was going to end up, but I really liked the story. The part I liked best was all of the information about how a newspaper works, or rather, how it worked in the mid-20th century. The book would have been educational for its time, and it still is, but many of the processes involved in putting together a newspaper would be done electronically now, using computers. The characters in the story are using manual typewriters, printing presses, and teletype machines. There’s a scene where Mitch asks Jim how the teletype machines work, and Jim explains that they’re “a combination telegraph and typewriter.” The machines in the story would be considered antiques or at least somewhat outdated now, but Jim’s tips for asking the right questions to write a story still apply. When I was a kid, though, my teachers usually said it as the “five W’s and an H” – to write a story or essay, you need to know who, what, when, where, why, and sometimes how something happened.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Other Girl

The Mystery of the Other Girl by Wylly Folk St. John, 1971.

It’s a rainy Saturday in Florida for the Barron family when Stevie (short for Stephanie) gets a strange phone call from Mobile, Alabama that’s meant for her ex-boyfriend, John Henderson. Stevie just broke up with John, who likes to call himself “Ian” because he thinks it sounds classy, the day before, and she has no idea who the strange girl on the phone is or why she’s trying to reach John/Ian at her number. Stevie asks the girl for her name, and she says that she’s Morna Ross, but suddenly, the girl screams and is cut off, like someone put a hand over her mouth, and then someone hangs up the phone at her end. Stevie is disturbed by the call, fearing that something bad happened to the other girl, but she doesn’t know what to do about it because she doesn’t know Morna Ross and doesn’t know exactly where she was calling from or why she wanted to talk to Ian.

Since Stevie already has a date to go dancing with friends at a place where Ian and his band are performing that night, she tells her friends about the weird phone call and asks them what she should do. They say that they’ve never heard of Morna Ross and tell her that she should talk to Ian about it. However, Stevie feels too awkward about the breakup to talk to Ian and asks a couple of her friends to do it for her.

That evening, Stevie and her friends run into Stevie’s old friend, Hope. She and Hope haven’t seen too much of each other lately because she’s not interested in dancing and dating and other things that Stevie wants to do. This evening, though, Hope is out with a visiting cousin from Mobile, Alabama named Phil Walters. Stevie is glad that Phil is getting Hope to come out of her shell a bit. Stevie and Phil say that the style of dancing popular with teenagers today is better than older styles of dancing because they don’t have to take any lessons to learn it – it’s just moving to the music, like everyone else. On impulse, she asks Phil if he’s heard of Morna Ross, but he says he hasn’t. Stevie’s friends say that when they asked Ian, he claimed not to know Morna Ross at first, but then he said something about her being a girl who’s “crazy about him.” Apparently, he dated her before he dated Stevie, and since he and Stevie broke up, he decided to invite her to the Old Seville Festival that’s happening next week, a local celebration of the history of their town. Stevie thinks it’s strange that Ian didn’t mention that Morna lives in Mobile, since that’s the place she was calling from. Stevie’s friends think maybe Ian was lying about Morna being crazy about him and that he probably doesn’t really know her because Ian is always bragging about things, like how great his family is. Hope thinks Ian makes up things to brag about because he wishes they were true even though he knows they really aren’t. After she thinks it over, Stevie thinks that’s true, that Ian likes to keep up appearances and a superior attitude because, underneath it all, he’s actually a very insecure person. But if he made up his relationship with Morna, and he doesn’t really know her, why was Morna trying to call him?

Before the evening is over, Ian confronts Stevie and reminds her that their first date was almost a year ago, at the last Old Seville Festival and that he’s planning to see her there again this year because they promised each other that they would see each other during the festival every year. In return, Stevie confronts Ian about Morna. Ian says that she’s just another of the girls who have come to see his band perform and likes him. When Stevie asks why nobody’s met Morna at any of the teenage hangouts in town, he says that they like to hang out at the more adult spots. He begins spinning a story that Stevie is sure is at least half fiction about how he and Morna order non-alcoholic drinks at adult nightclubs but they sneak in some gin to mix in with it and how they’ve tried marijuana. (Keep in mind that marijuana was illegal everywhere in the US at this time.) Ian says that he and Morna don’t really want to become potheads, but they see trying these things as part of growing up, “to experience everything and then make a choice.” Stevie pauses to wonder about the word “everything.” (That is always a good thing to wonder about when someone talks about wanting to try “everything.” Define “everything.”) Stevie asks him where Morna lives, and he says that she lives across town, but her family has moved around a lot because her father deals in real estate and sometimes even sells their own house and moves his family to a different one. (Ian sounds like he thinks that’s clever. I thought it sounded really suspicious, like maybe Morna’s family is actually involved with the mafia or something and has to keep on the move.) Stevie doesn’t really believe any of this, but she pries a few more details out of Ian about what Morna looks like. Although she thinks that Ian made up most of the things he said about Morna, there is still the girl who called her earlier and screamed like she was in trouble. She was a real person, even if what Ian said about her wasn’t all true.

When Stevie gets home, she tells her mother what Ian said about Morna and how Ian likes to make up things. Stevie is still concerned about the girl who called and wants to find out who and where she is and if she’s okay. Her mother says that her father will be coming home from a business trip the next day, and they can ask him what to do about it. Stevie’s father is a fingerprint expert at the police department, so he knows about police procedures and can make inquiries. Stevie wishes that she had Morna’s fingerprints so her father can analyze them himself, and in another weird development, she gets that opportunity.

The next day, Stevie gets a letter from Morna. The letter is addressed to her and not Ian. Morna didn’t know her home address, so she addressed it to the high school she attends, and the letter was forwarded to her from there. Stevie handles it carefully so she won’t disturb any fingerprints. The letter even has Morna’s return address, so she knows where she lives in Mobile. The contents of the letter are strange. Morna talks about her school band and how they’re always short of instruments. She says that she’s liked Stevie since she saw her playing with her school band in a competition (Stevie really is in her school’s band) and wonders if her school would be willing to sell spare instruments. The letter is oddly worded, the word “see” is underlined twice, and there are doodles all over page. Also, the specific instrument Morna says that she wants is written in French and doesn’t sound at all familiar to Stevie. Stevie looks up the term Morna uses, and it turns out to be a French horn. But, if Morna meant “French horn”, why didn’t she just say that? Also, the price she mentions for the French horn is far less than what an actual French horn would cost. It seems like Morna is either crazy or trying to say something else in her letter.

Stevie has a younger brother named Lyle who is really smart, and he suggests that the letter might be in some kind of code. As they talk it over, Stevie realizes that the French horn refers to Ian because he plays the French horn in her school band. Lyle wants to study the letter more to see if he can figure out other parts of the code, and Stevie decides to invite her friends over to see it, too, because most of them are also in the band and might notice something else in the message that’s music-related. Little by little, the kids begin working out the real meaning of Morna’s message. First, the amount of money that didn’t make sense is meant as a clue the reader that there’s more to this message than just an inquiry about musical instruments. Second, Morna phrases sentences oddly in order to work certain words into the message and put them in the right order for her hidden message. Third, the doodles around the message are the beginnings of pieces of music. Stevie and her friends providing their musical knowledge and Lyle coaches them through code-breaking techniques. After awhile, Lyle goes to his room to work on the code alone because he finds it easier to think by himself and likes surprising people with his discoveries. When he returns, she has the final solution.

Morna’s message says that she has to get in touch with Ian. She says that she is being watched and her mail is being read, which is why she has to communicate in this way. Morna asks Stevie to write to her in the same way, promising to explain the situation later. Stevie remembers that Ian wanted to see her at the Old Seville Festival, so she decides to tell Morna when and where to come if she wants to see Ian. Shortly after Stevie mails the letter, Morna calls again, saying that she needs to warn Ian because someone might try to kill him. Then, she screams and someone hangs up the phone again.

At first, Stevie’s father thinks that Morna is some kind of prankster or maybe having some kind of paranoid fantasy because she’s into drugs or something, but Stevie is sure that Morna really is scared. The danger is real, and Stevie’s family realizes it when Lyle is kidnapped at the Old Seville Festival.

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

My Reaction

I was pretty sure, for much of the early part of the book, that the whole thing with Morna’s mysterious phone calls and messages was just an act that Ian dreamed up and got someone to do for him as one of his dramatic bids for attention. It seemed weird to me that Morna second phone call ended exactly the same way as her first, like it was part of a rehearsed routine. Also, someone who wanted to interrupt Morna’s phone calls and keep her from talking could do it in easier ways that wouldn’t involve dramatic screams that would get attention. They could have just unplugged the phone or held down the hang up button. (Remember, this is the early 1970s. Morna’s using an older style of telephone that has to plug into the wall, and there are buttons where the handset rests that hang up the phone. That was the first type of phone I ever used as a kid, and I know that you can push those buttons down with your hand to end a call even if someone is still holding the handset.) I would think that if a sinister person was watching Morna, they would cut her off that way rather than try to put a hand over her mouth while she screams. Also, if they really didn’t want her to communicate with anyone, I don’t think they’d let her write any kind of letter, not even one that just seems to be about band instruments. Even if they couldn’t figure out the code, I doubt that they’d want to take the chance that she might communicate something to the wrong person. It all just seemed too theatrical and not realistic. So, I couldn’t really blame Stevie’s father for initially thinking that the whole thing might just be some kind of prank. However, I did wonder why he didn’t just phone the Mobile police department and ask a colleague to do a welfare check on the girl at the address on the envelope to find out if it was a prank or not. Better safe than sorry, and if it turned out to be just a prank, knowing that the police knew about it would probably be enough to get the girl to stop.

As it turns out, it’s not just a prank. There is something genuinely sinister going on, although I wasn’t sure what it was for quite awhile. I thought it might have something to do with drugs because there were repeated references to drugs in the story, but that’s not what’s going on. It turns out that Ian/John has been having trouble with his self-image and even self-identity because he’s adopted. He’s aware that he’s adopted, which is why he secretly worries that he doesn’t really fit in with his family or friends and makes up fantasies about himself to impress people while being inwardly insecure. However, there’s quite a lot that Ian/John doesn’t know about his past, not even his birth name, and the truth of Ian’s past is even stranger than anything that he’s ever imagined. His blood relatives love him and didn’t forget about him, even though they couldn’t take care of him when he was a baby, and now, they’re trying to protect him from a very real threat. Finding out the truth comes as a shock to Ian, but it’s an important step in making peace with himself and realizing just how important he is just for being himself, not only to his adoptive family but to the family who gave him up for adoption and to the friends who cared about him even when he was a bit of poser and who took great risks to protect him and help him find the truth.

Lyle is fun as an eccentric genius character who has a pet walking catfish. I hadn’t actually heard of a walking catfish before reading this book, but that’s part of the fun. I enjoy stories that bring up interesting facts that I didn’t know before. Walking catfish can actually survive out of water for long periods of time and move across land. The walking catfish ends up playing a role in catching the bad guys in a way that actually makes sense, which is nice. I also like that, although Lyle is pivotal in solving the mystery, he didn’t get all the answers too easily, like some geniuses in stories, and he needed some specialized knowledge from other people. That makes him a more realistic character.

I would like to discuss the costumes that the characters wear to the Old Seville Festival, though. They explain that it’s common for people attending the festival to dress in historical costumes from different time periods in the town’s history to get into the spirit of the event. Ordinarily, I would think that’s fun and be completely supportive, but there’s one exception that I think crosses the line a little. Some people, including Lyle, dress in Native American costumes. I’m not Native American myself, but I know that real Native Americans are usually not too happy to see traditional forms of dress being used as costumes. I would cut the characters more slack for it if they confined themselves only to wearing clothes like traditional Native Americans, but what pushes it over the line for me is that Lyle is described as darkening his hair and his skin as part of his costume. He also does some kind of warpaint on his face, but it’s the skin coloring that he does that I think is unacceptable. I think that’s going too far, and that’s what pushes this costume into the realm of the tasteless and offensive. A little more restraint, just sticking to the clothes might have been okay, but looking like one of those white actors trying too hard with makeup to pass for a minority in an old black-and-white movie is just too much. It’s one of the things that really dates this book because fewer people today would be willing to take it that far, at least not without some embarrassment or criticism from other people. It was published in the early 1970s, and may possible take place a little earlier, in the 1960s, because no exact year is given. I’ve heard some people claim that it was normal for them to wear racial face makeup as part of costumes when they were kids, and never having seen that even once when I was a kid in Arizona during the 1980s and 1990s, I’ve wondered just when and where kids did that of their own free will when they were given the opportunity to wear literally anything else, and I think I have at least a partial answer here. Lyle carries a tomahawk as an accessory to his costume and gives war cries. He also comments about how hippies are bringing Native American style headbands back into style, which further dates the story.

I should also explain that Lyle is not just dressing as any random Native American; he is trying to be a real historical figure. He is specifically trying to be William Weatherford, a mixed-race plantation owner known for his involvement in the Creek War in the 1810s. I like the part where Stevie wonders about the authenticity of Lyle’s costume. Apparently, Lyle got some help from someone at the local museum, but Stevie realizes that nobody else at the festival is going to know (or care) whether Lyle’s war paint designs are accurate or not, and even if he’s dressed accurately as a Native American of the area, the real William Weatherford probably typically dressed in the British style favored by other plantation owners of the era because he was living in the same manner as fully white plantation owners and going by his English name rather than his Native American name. I’m not actually sure how the real William Weatherford dressed because this isn’t a part of history that I know much about, but Stevie’s logic makes sense. My guess is that he probably wore a variety of different clothes in his life, depending on his circumstances at the time. (After all, various other historical figures did. Emperor Hirohito was photographed at various times wearing traditional Japanese ceremonial clothing, Western-style suits, and military uniforms, depending on the event.) One thing I could state with confidence is that William Weatherford probably didn’t have a pet walking catfish on a leash, which Lyle does because he insists on bringing his pet to the festival with him.

It’s part of the plot that Lyle is wearing an outlandish costume and has his walking catfish with him when he’s kidnapped, but I still think that there are equally outlandish historical costumes that he could have chosen that could have chosen that would have worked. It’s important that Lyle dyed his hair for the costume, so he had the same hair color as Ian on the day he was kidnapped when his ordinary hair color is much lighter, but I think there could be other ways around that or maybe he could have worn a hat so his hair wasn’t visible at first. I wouldn’t mind if he just dyed his hair, but the skin coloring is just too much.

Personally, I prefer the costumes that Stevie and her friends wear to the festival. They decide to dress as Gibson girls from the late 1800s and early 1900s. They basically wear old-fashioned-looking skirts and blouses and put their hair in the typical Gibson Girl hairstyles. Historical costumes that are based on wearing different clothes and hairstyles are the type of costumes I favor.

Aside from the costume issue, I really liked the story. I honestly wasn’t sure what the real problem was until the very end of the book. I had several theories, but Morna really surprised me when she explained who she really was and why Ian was in danger. I thought that she might turn out to be a relative, but the situation wasn’t what I expected.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Black Diamonds

Mystery of the Black Diamonds by Phyllis A. Whitney, 1954, 1974.

Twelve-year-old Angie (Angela) Wetheral and her eleven-year-old brother Mark are visiting the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. They’re from New York, but their father is a mystery novelist, and he’s doing some research over the summer for a book that will take place in Colorado. As the kids explore the area and speculate about the murder that’s going to happen in their father’s new book, they meet Benjamin Ellington, an old timer who talks to them about the days when the gold and silver mines in the area were active. He tells the kids to call him Uncle Ben, and they talk about whether or not there’s any treasure still to be found in the area. They also meet Sam Springer, the park ranger, who worries about Uncle Ben exploring and digging in the hills by himself because he could get hurt and people wouldn’t know where to find him and help him. Uncle Ben says that Sam worries too much and that he knows the area well because he’s been digging out there for years.

Sam later tells the kids that Uncle Ben came to the area in 1889, when he was 15 years old. That means that Uncle Ben was born in 1874, and Angie says that means that he’s almost 70 years old now, which puts the date of this story in the early 1940s, during WWII, but they don’t talk about the war. Sam says that Uncle Ben actually struck it rich while he was in his teens and owned three or four mines. Apparently, Ben blew through most of his money pretty quickly, so he’s not that rich anymore. However, the kids are fascinated by the idea of finding gold or silver and striking it rich.

The reason why the family lives in New York is that it’s helpful for their father’s work. Besides writing mystery novels, he also writes shorter stories for magazines and does book reviews for various publishers, so it’s important for him to live close to the New York book publishers. Angie misses their old home in New Hampshire, where they had a view of the mountains. Colorado reminds her of her old home, and she wishes that they could stay there, so she could enjoy the beauties of nature and the outdoor life. Their father says that someday, when he’s saved enough money, they’ll be able to live anywhere they want, and he’ll take time away from his regular projects to work on a serious novel that he’s been thinking about writing for some time. Mark suggests to Angie that if they could strike it rich in the mountains, the family would have all the money they needed, they could live where they want, and their dad would have the time to write anything he wants.

The kids ask Uncle Ben about searching for treasure, and he gives them a piece of paper with a strange coded message that is supposed to be the map to the treasure. He tells the kids that if they want the treasure, they’ll have to work for it by figuring out how to read the message. Mark wonders why Uncle Ben would give them the key to a treasure when he could just go after it himself, but Uncle Ben says, “I’ve got all I need. I’ve had enough of treasure and the way it can ruin men’s lives.” Uncle Ben says that maybe the kids would do better with a treasure than most people, but he insists that the kids will have to work for whatever they find and refuses to give them any hints about what the message means.

Uncle Ben continues helping the children’s father with background for his mystery story. He suggests that Mr. Wetheral have a look at a nearby ghost town. Unfortunately, Uncle Ben is killed in a fall soon after. The children are nearby when he falls and call for help, but there is little that anyone can to for him. Just before he dies, he whispers to the children, “Black diamonds. Right where Abednego used to be.” It’s a reference to the coded message that he gave the children, one final hint at the treasure. His death leaves it entirely up to the children whether or not to go after it.

To the Wetherals’ surprise, they soon learn that Uncle Ben recently added Mark and Angie to his will, leaving them a house and some land in Colorado. The catch is that the house is in the old ghost town. Angie is hopeful that if they own a house in Colorado they might be able to stay there instead of going back to New York, but the question is whether or not they’d be willing to live in a ghost town.

The Wetheral family decides to go to the ghost town and camp out in their new house and see what it’s like. Mr. Wetheral thinks the ghost town would make a good setting for his book, and staying there will give him a chance to do some research and soak up the atmosphere. Plus, the family is going to have to decide exactly what they’re going to do with the house the kids have inherited.

Most of the ghost town is crumbling, but the house they’ve inherited appears to be in better condition than most. They even find some furniture they can use in a back room. As they explore the town, the kids have their mind on the treasure that Uncle Ben talked about. Most people think that was just a story he made up because he gave copies of the same treasure map message to other friends of his, and nobody has ever figured out what it’s supposed to mean. Mark and Angie think that there is more to the message than most people believe, and they’re determined to find the answers.

It turns out that the ghost town isn’t completely uninhabited, though. The Koblers and their granddaughter Juanita, who is nicknamed Jinx, also live there with their pet skunk. Grandpa Kobler is an old friend Uncle Ben’s, and he talks to the children about him and the old says of the ghost town, Blossom. He used to own the general store there, and his wife was once the schoolteacher, and they didn’t move away from Blossom when the others did. He’s aware of Uncle Ben’s “maps” and hints of treasure, but has no interest in treasure-hunting himself because he likes the life that he and his family are living and doesn’t want it to change. However, Angie can tell that Juanita/Jinx is unhappy and can’t understand why she doesn’t want to talk about her parents and where they are. Then, someone else shows up in Blossom, looking for the clues to Uncle Ben’s treasure. If there really is a treasure to find, can Mark and Angie find it first?

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

Themes, Spoilers, and My Reaction

It isn’t easy for the kids to get to know Juanita/Jinx because she has a prickly and defensive personality and doesn’t like to talk about her past. However, she gradually starts to bond with Mark and Angie because of their shared love of the town of Blossom. Eventually, she tells Angie that her parents died when she was very young. Her father was killed in a mining accident. He thought that there was still treasure worth finding in the old mine outside of town and tried to get at it even though Grandpa Kobler told him that it was dangerous and that there was probably nothing worth finding anyway. Juanita’s mother died of pneumonia soon after her husband’s death, leaving little Juanita to be raised by her grandparents. Juanita has a warm relationship with her grandfather, the only person who calls her by her real name. However, Juanita is convinced that her grandmother doesn’t love her and is only raising her out of a sense of duty. Juanita’s grandmother never approved of her mother, partly because her son’s early marriage is what stopped him from going to college. Juanita also thinks that her grandmother didn’t like her mother because she was Mexican, which is why Juanita has a Hispanic name. Her grandmother was the one who gave her the nickname “Jinx” because that’s what she would call her when she was chiding her for something, which seems to have happened all too often. Jinx often calls herself Jinx instead of Juanita because she’s trying to get away from her Mexican-sounding name and seem more American.

For part of the book, Jinx actively tries to sabotage the Mark and Angie in their treasure-hunting activities because she’s afraid that if they find treasure, everything in Blossom will change. She worries that other people will come to Blossom seeking treasure. If that happens, the town will be built up again, but that means destroying what’s already there. Also, Jinx fears the way other people will treat her. She doesn’t want other people to come into Blossom or to be sent away to school if her grandparents suddenly have the money to do it because she thinks that outsiders will always treat her badly and look down on her. Her grandmother has repeatedly told her that people look down on Mexicans, and Jinx thinks it’s true because some kids she met in Boulder were also mean to her and called her names. Angie tells her that it isn’t true that everyone hates Mexicans. The Wetheral family lived in Mexico one summer while her father was researching another book, and they liked it, and Angie still has a friend there. Angie realizes that the reason why Jinx’s behavior and attitude are so poisonous is that her grandmother has poisoned her mind because of her own twisted feelings. Angie declares that she’s going to have a word with Jinx’s grandmother about it, but Jinx stops her because she says that will just make her grandmother mad. She says that sometimes, when she’s especially well-behaved, her grandmother forgets that she’s half Mexican, and if anyone reminds her, she’ll just get angry all over again. It’s a pretty sick way to raise a vulnerable child who is isolated from other people who could give her a more balanced view of life and people’s feelings. Grandpa Kobler seems to realize this, which is why he wants Angie to be friends with Juanita and show her that there are different people in the world, including people who are willing to be friends. As Angie points out to Juanita, her grandparents are getting older, and someday, she will be an adult and they’ll be gone. Juanita is going to have to learn to get along in the wider world without them, and actually, dealing with strangers in the outside world might not be as bad as living full-time with her grandmother’s nasty attitude.

Some of Juanita’s feelings are resolved when Angie’s mother has a heart-to-heart talk with her about the things her grandmother has been telling her and her own opinions about herself. I agreed with Angie that some of the things her mother said to Juanita while challenging her attitudes were rather harsh, and I wouldn’t have said things like that, but Juanita does take what Mrs. Wetheral says to heart and realizes that she has as much reason to take some pride in herself and her background as anyone else. I didn’t like the part where Angie’s mother says that Juanita’s grandmother can’t help her opinions about Mexicans because that’s just the way she was raised and there’s nothing that can be done about it now. It seems to me that they’re discounting the idea of personal accountability. If Juanita’s grandmother can’t be responsible for her own mind and behavior, what can she be responsible for?

I know people can cling pretty hard to some weird ideas. One night, we took my grandmother out to dinner at a nice restaurant for a family celebration. My grandmother was actually really upset that the restaurant had given her so much food that she couldn’t eat it all, and she said that she was worried because her parents would never have approved of her not clearing her plate. She was genuinely upset about it, not just making an idle comment. It really bothered her. Now, I know that part of my grandmother’s youth took place during the Great Depression, when wasting anything was a sin, but at the time this incident took place, she was a widow who was over 80 years old. The Great Depression had been over for more than 60 years. I was her youngest grandchild, and I was an adult at this time. Her parents had been dead for longer than I had been alive. She was not only a parent herself, but she was also a grandparent and a great-grandparent. She was literally the oldest living member of our family, and nobody would have said a word about what she wanted to eat or not eat for dinner, but my grandmother just couldn’t get past the idea of what her parents told her years ago about always clearing her plate. It’s an odd thing to cling to, but admittedly, there are far more harmful ideas that people can’t bring themselves to give up because of stuff their parents said back in the day.

Mrs. Kobler has had years of living her own life and ample opportunity to work out her feelings, but I think that part of the reason she hasn’t is because there’s something else that’s preventing her. This theory is conjecture on my part because there’s never a point when Mrs. Kobler explicitly explains her thought processes, but although the book doesn’t really explain it, I think that her son’s death is probably the reason why Mrs. Kobler has been harboring so many negative attitudes and taking them out on Jinx. Although nobody actually says it, I suspect that Mrs. Kobler assigned blame to Jinx’s mother for her son’s death. If he hadn’t gotten married at a young age and went looking for a fabulous discovery to raise a fortune for his young family, he might have gone to college, gotten a good career, and still been alive. Even though the characters don’t explicitly say it, I think it’s logical. I further suspect that the really problematic part for Mrs. Kobler is that she needs to blame Jinx’s mother for what happened because, if she can’t, some part of her might blame herself for not stopping her son from doing what he did, and she can’t handle that. As long as she can tell herself (and Jinx) that her daughter-in-law was awful because she was Mexican and caused the downfall of her son, she won’t have to question why she wasn’t able to stop her son from dying. In her mind, I think Mrs. Kobler thinks that her son’s marriage was a terrible mistake that led to his early death, and by extension, her granddaughter really was a “jinx” because she came from that unlucky marriage. Some of Mrs. Kobler’s feelings get resolved later, when they discover that her son was right about the type of treasure he was seeking, even though he got killed pursuing it. A sudden disaster also makes Mrs. Kobler realize that there are many things that a person can’t control in life and that God’s will is taking her family in a direction she never anticipated. This book doesn’t really lecture about the subject of God and religion, but there are some Christian themes in the story.

All through the story, there is the theme of treasure – what is treasure, what do people do with treasure when they get it, and what are they willing to risk to get it? Early in the story, Uncle Ben talks about having lost his taste for treasure-hunting because he’s seen the way it ruins lives. It isn’t until the Wetheral family gets to Blossom and the children talk to Grandpa Kobler that they get the rest of the story about why Uncle Ben felt like that. After Uncle Ben dies, he is buried in the old cemetery in Blossom because that’s where his wife and young daughter are buried. They both died of diphtheria, and he blamed himself for them contracting the disease because they went to live in the big city after he got rich. Grandpa Kobler, who knew Uncle Ben back then tried to console him by saying that they could have caught that disease anywhere, not just in the city, but Uncle Ben still felt responsible. (Diphtheria is now a very rare disease in the US, thanks to the development of a vaccine to prevent it. It’s often given in a combination vaccine that also protects against tetanus and whooping cough, which is how I’ve received it. I was first given the vaccine when I was very young, and I still get my booster shots. I’d recommend it to anyone capable of receiving vaccines. I have never actually seen a person with any of those illnesses in my entire life, and I’m in my late 30s now.) The point is that money doesn’t buy love and happiness, and Uncle Ben came to the conclusion that the lifestyle his family lived when they were rich was unhealthy. He would rather have had his family back than the money from his mines.

Grandpa Kobler understands how Uncle Ben felt because, when Uncle Ben once asked him if he wanted a treasure, he said no. He was happy with the life he was living in Blossom, and he had enough money for his family to live comfortably. If he suddenly got rich, people would expect him to move to a bigger house in the city and start living a completely different life, and he realized that he wouldn’t be as happy doing that. In his youth, he saw the lives that other people lived after they got rich, and he didn’t like what he saw. Later, his son got killed while chasing a dream of treasure, which further emphasizes that there is a price for treasure-hunting, and sometimes, that price is too high. In the Wetheral family, Mark is the one who thinks that their lives would be better if they could find a fortune, but Angie points out that they don’t really need a fortune; they just need enough for their dad to feel comfortable taking the time to write the book that he wants to write and for them to have a home away from the big city, which is what they really want. There is the idea that having enough money is good, but having too much or trying too hard to acquire more can cause problems and complicate a person’s life.

Spoilers

Things are about to change in Blossom, in spite of what the people there want, and as Grandma Kobler concludes, it might be the will of God that they do. In the most dramatic part of the book, much of the town of Blossom is destroyed in a flash flood. Fortunately, all of the people and animals in the town survive, although the Koblers have a close brush with death. Juanita is in less danger because she’s on a picnic with Angie and her mother when the flood startes, and she is the first to realize the danger. At first, everyone is afraid that the Koblers drowned, but they eventually find Mrs. Kobler, just barely keeping her own head and her husband’s out of the water. During this time when they were almost killed, Mrs. Kobler admits that she had some revelations about many things, especially when she realized that she could depend on Juanita to come and help them. In spite of all of her nagging at Juanita, Juanita is bright and dependable and cares about her grandparents, even the grandmother who’s been making her life miserable. Mrs. Kobler never completely changes her mind about Mexicans, but she does change her mind about Juanita, giving her more respect than she did before. The book explains that she comes to realize that, while Mrs. Kobler disparaged Juanita as her mother’s daughter, she came to remember that she was her son’s daughter, too. It’s not as much as could be hoped for, but it’s a start. Mrs. Kobler also realizes that everything that’s happened is the will of God, there is nothing anyone could have done that would have changed the outcome, and God is leading her family in the direction He wants them to go, so she is just going to have to go with the flow (not exactly her words, but I think you catch my drift – ha, ha).

The secret of Uncle Ben’s treasure is also revealed. What he found wasn’t really “black diamonds” but something else that’s very valuable, the same mineral that Juanita’s father was looking for at the time he died. However, Juanita’s father was looking in the wrong part of the mine, which was why he got killed instead of finding what he was looking for. (Maybe he should have gone for his geology degree before going for the “treasure.” Just saying.) Uncle Ben was more experienced with mining and figured out the right place to look himself. It wasn’t until after Juanita’s father died that he came to realize the full value of what he had found, though. (It’s important that this story is set after WWII.) Uncle Ben’s lawyer reveals that, since samples of this mineral were sent to be analyzed, it has activated a part of Uncle Ben’s will that leaves the mine to Juanita Kobler, making her an heiress. Since the town of Blossom was destroyed in the flood, there’s nothing left to preserve that would prevent mining. Now that Juanita is an heiress, she’s going to have a much higher standing in the community, which might take care of some of the bullying she received at school in Boulder. The Wetherals also benefit from the discovery, as the mysterious stranger who came to town informs them that there’s a government finder’s fee for locating valuable mineral deposits.