Heather has lived her entire life (as far as she can remember) in Scotland with her grandmother and her uncle, Donald. Donald has raised her since she was small. He’s been like a father to her, and she loves him like a daughter. However, he recently decided to move the two of them to the United States, taking them to a small town in Wisconsin. Heather can’t understand the reason for the move, and for the first time in her life, it seems like Donald is keeping secrets from her.
Donald seems oddly concerned that Heather shouldn’t tell people that she is adopted, something that he’s never seemed concerned about before. Heather has asked him about her parents before, but all he can tell her is that his wayward brother Ewen brought her to the family farm in Scotland, saying that she was his daughter and that her mother was dead. Ewen simply left her with Donald, never trying to see her or talk to her again and never sending her any money. Heather also knows that, although says that he’s going out to search for a new job, he’s been hanging out in other places, spending time with the mysterious Mr. Worley.
Heather makes friends with a boy named Gus who lives nearby. Gus lets her ride one of the horses that his family owns, Cloud, and invites her to go riding with him sometimes and participate in local riding events called “shodeos.” Heather loves horses and enjoys their rides together.
On one of these rides, the two of them go near a large, old, stone mansion that gives Heather a strange feeling. Gus’s family tells her the tragic story of the family who used to live there, the Selkirks. They were wealthy, but young John Selkirk was killed in an accident the day that his beautiful young wife, Molly, gave birth to their only child, a little girl named Hebron. John’s parents never recovered from the loss of their son and passed away soon after, leaving just Molly and the baby. However, when Hebron was only three years old, she was apparently abducted for ransom and later murdered, and her mother died soon after. The story makes Heather uneasy, and the house gives her a strange feeling, like she’s drawn to it.
However, other sinister things start happening. Someone in a car that looks disturbingly like Donald’s tries to run her and Cloud off a bridge. When Donald spends the night away from home “on business”, someone sneaks into the house. Heather begins to realize that someone is out to get her, some mysterious person means her harm. Memories, dangerous ones, are beginning to surface in Heather’s mind, and someone is determined to try to keep her from remembering.
Part of the mystery is pretty obvious (at least, I thought it was, and you might guess it from my plot description), but the part that I didn’t guess was who was behind it all.
Miss Bianca has decided to resign as Madame Chairwoman of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society. She has never felt particularly drawn to public life, really preferring her quiet life as a pet of an Ambassador’s son (whom she always calls “the Boy”), keeping him company during his lessons and writing poetry in her spare time. During the times when she is away from the Boy, undertaking rescue missions for the society, she knows that the Boy pines for her and worries about where she is. She has started to feel a little guilty that she might be neglecting her Boy.
Bernard, the Secretary of the society, actually feels a little relieved by her decision to resign. While he thought that she made a great chairwoman, he has always worried about the dangerous nature of their missions, afraid that something might happen to Miss Bianca. (Miss Bianca is a little annoyed that he seems so eager for her to resign, and his comment that “you’re too beautiful to be allowed into deadly peril” makes a weirdly chauvinistic compliment – like it would be okay for her to risk her neck if she were ugly because it would be less of a loss? – but Miss Bianca takes it in the spirit in which it seems to be offered.) The two of them reminisce about some of their past missions. Bernard thinks that the worst villain they’ve faced was the head jailer in the Black Castle (from the first book in the series), but Miss Bianca thinks that the worst was Mandrake (from the last book) because the target of his cruelty was a defenseless child.
The
society plans to throw a special dinner for Miss Bianca, and Miss Bianca
suggests that she would like a picnic by water.
The ideal place for it would be the moat around an old tower outside of
the city. Miss Bianca enjoys the picnic
and is fascinated by the crumbling old turret.
Then, she notices something white in the window. Thinking that it’s a piece of litter, one of
the mouse boy scouts goes to retrieve it.
It turns out to be a small piece of linen, and after the boy scout takes
it, it’s replaced by another. Miss Bianca
comes to the conclusion that there is someone in the turret and that the person
could be a prisoner, signaling for help.
When she studies the scrap of linen more closely, she also realizes that
she knows who the prisoner is because it has the name Mandrake on it!
After the events of the previous book, the evil Duchess had Mandrake locked in the turret. To Bernard, it sounds like a just punishment for Mandrake, but Miss Bianca feels a responsibility to rescue him, in the hope that he might reform. However, Bernard is skeptical about that possibility, thinking that they would just be letting a criminal lose if they tried to free Mandrake, and Miss Bianca is unable to persuade the other members of the society to undertake the mission.
However, Miss Bianca is unable to give up on Mandrake and goes to see him in his turret. Mandrake is a shadow of his former self. She introduces herself to him as a member of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society, and it turns out that he’s heard about it from friends of his who have been in jail (having had many disreputable associations over the years). In order to test how likely Mandrake would be to reform, Miss Bianca asks him what he would do if he were freed from captivity, and he says that he’d like to be a gardener at an orphanage. He feels badly about the child slaves he helped to abuse while serving the Duchess, and he’d like to see children happy, making their garden a beautiful place. Miss Bianca is satisfied with this and sets about planning his escape. (She’s free to undertake this mission because her Boy is having his tonsils out and won’t miss her for awhile.)
At
first, Mandrake doesn’t know how people even bring him food, since his room in
the turret doesn’t seem to have a door and food just seems to arrive during the
night. Miss Bianca stays up at night to
see what happens and learns that there is a hidden staircase in the turret that
his jailers use. Before Mandrake can escape,
though, he needs to be stronger because he’s badly under-nourished. Miss Bianca recruits the mouse boy scouts to
bring him vitamins to help make him healthier and tries to figure out how the
secret passage works and think of some way to create a distraction so that Mandrake
can escape.
Shaun,
the leader of the boy scouts, helps her to come up with a plan. (The book says that Shaun is half-Irish and
thinks of himself as being a “handsome boy-o.”
Stereotypical.) Shaun has figured
out that the jailers watching Mandrake are actually grooms by trade, and he
knows of a race horse, Sir Hector, who could provide a good distraction for
them. Miss Bianca approves of the plan
and persuades Sir Hector to help them.
Meanwhile, the members of the Prisoners’ Aid Society are getting fed up with their strict new chairwoman, who only seems interested in forcing them to participate in group exercises. Members are starting to avoid going to meetings, and worse still, someone suggests to Bernard that the bossy chairwoman particularly likes calling committee meetings because she’s in love with him and wants the excuse to see him. The thought horrifies Bernard, but he’s afraid to say anything to Miss Bianca because he doesn’t want her to feel obligated to try to become the chairwoman again in order to solve the society’s problems (or his), not knowing what she’s actually been up to in her free time.
In the end, everything works out well. When Mandrake is rescued, he actually does become the gardener for an orphanage. The members of the society find out Miss Bianca’s daring mission, undertaken with just a handful of boy scouts, and feel badly that they didn’t take part. They complain to the new chairwoman that she was just wasting their time with exercises instead of real missions, and she resigns, saving Bernard from her attentions. Miss Bianca does not return to the society as its chairwoman, but the next chairwoman is more competent.
Miss Bianca is still a hero to the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society after the rescue of the Norwegian poet in the last book. Bernard is a lesser hero, even though he was part of the mission, but such is the lot the organization’s Secretary. Since the success of the rescue mission, the society is keen to perform another rescue, a deviation from the society’s usual role of merely providing comfort to prisoners. The rescue mission that they have in mind this time is that of a little girl. (The first Disney The Rescuers movie also featured the rescue of a little girl, but the circumstances in the book are very different.)
Patience
is an eight-year-old orphan who has been abducted and enslaved by the Grand
Duchess and is being held in her Diamond Palace. The Grand Duchess is cruel, and some people
think that she’s a witch. Miss Bianca
appeals to the Ladies’ Guild of the society to help free Patience. The Ladies’ Guild doesn’t usually take part in
the more exciting missions of the society.
The mice are somewhat concerned about what they will do with the child
once they have rescued her because other prisoners they’ve helped have had
homes to return to, but Miss Bianca assures them that they have a home in mind
for the girl, a farm family in Happy Valley who have lost a daughter and would
be likely to take in another girl. The Ladies’
Guild agrees to undertake the mission. Bernard
wanted to come, too, but Miss Bianca insisted that they didn’t need his help.
The Diamond Palace is a strange place, in many different ways. People often come to see it because it looks like it’s made out of diamonds, although it’s actually rock crystal. It’s cold all the time, but even weirder than that, there seem to be less servants in the Palace than Miss Bianca would expect, given that the Duchess is always surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, who would be expected to have maids of their own. It turns out that the “ladies-in-waiting” aren’t real people – they’re clockwork automatons!
Rather
than being a witch, the Duchess is simply an odious person who has so much
money that she can give full reign to a nasty personality without anyone
stopping her. She’s so nasty and spoiled
and used to forcing people to do what she wants that all of her previous, human
ladies-in-waiting found that they just couldn’t handle her increasingly unreasonable
demands, like insisting that they all stand perfectly still all day long while
she sits on her throne, not even the slightest movement allowed. No human being could possibly manage that. When the human ladies-in-waiting all fainted
after trying to keep perfectly still for forty-eight hours straight, the
Duchess screamed that they all must have done it on purpose and dismissed them,
replacing them with automatons. The mechanical
people are almost perfect because they always stand perfectly still until they’re
needed and never complain or have human needs, but the Duchess discovers that they’re
not quite perfect because there are some chores that they can’t do and she also
misses seeing people react fearfully or start crying when she bullies
them. Keeping Patience as her slave
gives the Duchess someone to do those chores and also someone to abuse. The Duchess has had other child slaves before,
but the others have died from the abuse, ill-nourishment, and general bad treatment. (This is a darker story in a lot of ways from
the Disney one.)
When Miss Bianca and the other mice meet Patience, she is also under-nourished and desperately lonely. Miss Bianca sends the others back to the society to report about the automatons and stays with Patience to keep her company, trying to decide how to deal with the strange, mechanical people. Bernard worries anxiously about Miss Bianca when the others come back without her and decides to go after her.
The Duchess’s
other human servant, Mandrake, her Major-domo, is also little more than a slave. The Duchess has evidence of a crime that he once
committed and uses it to keep his loyalty.
Usually, he’s the only one who gets to go out the back door because he
doesn’t trust Patience to take out the garbage without running away. However, Patience tells Miss Bianca that the clockmaker
sometimes comes in that way when he comes to wind up the mechanical ladies-in-waiting. Miss Bianca hatches a plan that involves
making the ladies-in-waiting break down.
However, to Miss Bianca’s surprise, the Duchess commands Mandrake and Patience to come with her to her hunting lodge when the ladies-in-waiting break down. There is no opportunity for escape. However, it turns out that the hunting lodge is actually above Happy Valley, and Bernard knows where it is.
Of
course, they do get Patience safely to her new foster family. Miss Bianca actually talks to the girl’s
foster mother and tells her that Patience will probably forget about her eventually,
when she grows up, but the foster mother likes the lullaby that Miss Bianca
sings for Patience and promises to keep it as a family tradition.
The darker aspects of the story really bothered me, and I have to admit that I didn’t like it as well as the Disney version. Mandrake actually reappears in another book in the series.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Peter and his best friend, Archie, live in a big city (probably New York City), and they often play in empty lots between the apartment buildings. One day, Peter and Archie are playing in a lot filled with old, discarded junk, when Peter finds a special prize: a pair of motorcycle goggles!
The boys have fun playing with the goggles, but then they’re spotted by a gang of bigger boys. The bigger boys try to make Peter give them the goggles, one of them even knocking him to the ground when he attempts to take them.
Peter’s dog, Willie, runs off with the goggles, and the boys split up to get away from the bullies, meeting back at their “hideout” in the vacant lot.
However, the big boys are still looking for Willie and the goggles. What can Peter and Archie do to get rid of them?
There is a new baby in Peter’s family, his little sister, Susie, and things are changing for Peter. He is no longer the baby of the family. He must play quietly to avoid disturbing the baby, and his father is painting all of his old, blue baby furniture pink for little Susie.
Peter feels badly, seeing the baby getting all of his old things. Spotting his old baby chair, which hasn’t been painted yet, Peter runs off with it, taking along some of his other old things.
However, what Peter eventually realizes is that he has grown too big to fit into his old chair. Nobody stays a baby forever, and Peter’s old baby things are of no use to him anymore.
Seeing that he is out-growing these old baby things helps Peter to be willing to let go of them and help his father repaint them for his little sister.
This is a cute story about change and growing up and the worries that children sometimes have about their siblings taking their place in the family. The art style of the book is also interesting because it includes pieces of patterned or textured paper for things like wallpaper, people’s clothing, the newspapers under the furniture being painted, and the baby’s lacy blanket. Other books by the same author also use this technique, such as Jennie’s Hat.
This is a pleasant, slice-of-life story about the fun and wonder of a snowy day for young children.
A young boy named Peter wakes up on a winter morning to discover that it snowed during the night.
Peter hurries out into the snow, experiencing all of the fun it has to offer. He studies the footprints that he makes in the snow and uses a stick to make marks in the snow and knock snow off of tree branches. He’s still too little to join in the snowball fight that the big boys have, but he has fun making a snowman and snow angels.
The snow is so much fun that Peter makes a snowball amd put it in his pocket to save for later. Of course, the snowball in his pocket doesn’t last, and he worries that the snow outside will disappear as well, but there is even more snow the next day. He gets a friend of his to come outside and join him in the fun.
It’s a simple, sweet story about one of the simple pleasures in life and one boy’s discovery of the wonders of snow. It would make a nice, calm bedtime story for young children.
This book is also a Caldecott award winner, and it is noted for being one of the first children’s books to feature a black main character. Peter’s race is never mentioned in the text and is not directly a part of the story, but it is shown in the pictures. Really, I think that’s part of what makes the book so great; although the book was considered ground-breaking for representing minorities, it does so in a way that’s completely relatable because his story could really happen to just about any child.
Mimi is a good little goat who lives with a poor farmer and his wife. They like her and take good care of her, and in return, she provides them with milk that they sell to help make their living. However, things change for Mimi when she happens to see a circus parade with a dancing dog. From that moment on, all Mimi wants to do is to dance!
It wouldn’t matter so much except that Mimi develops a bad habit of dancing when the farmer is trying to milk her, spilling the milk. Eventually, the farmer concludes that he can no longer afford to keep Mimi, even though he and his wife don’t really want to part with her. Mimi is upset at the thought of losing her home, and when the farmer takes her to the market to sell her, she starts to cry.
The people at the market don’t want to buy a crying goat and think that something is wrong with Mimi. To cover up the noise of Mimi crying, the farmer starts to blow a tune on his comb. Hearing the music, Mimi starts to dance again.
To the farmer’s surprise, everyone in the market loves Mimi the Dancing Goat, and they throw coins. With the money that Mimi makes with her dancing, the farmer can now only afford to keep her but buy other livestock as well. From then on, the farmer regularly takes Mimi to the market to show off her dancing and earn some extra money. He plans to buy another goat to keep Mimi company, and he hopes that the new goat turns out to be a dancer, too!
I usually don’t like “animal almost loses their home” type stories because I always feel too sorry for the poor little animal, but the risk in this story is over pretty quickly, which helps. It also helped that the farmer and his wife genuinely liked Mimi and were only going to part with her reluctantly, so it wasn’t difficult for the farmer to change his mind as soon as Mimi showed that she could bring in money to help earn her keep.
Owlgate is a very orderly little village. Everything has a purpose and a place, and nothing unexpected happens . . . until the day the cookie tree appears in the middle of town. The tree is silver and gold and has chocolate cookies.
A girl named Meg notices it first, but her parents refuse to allow her to pick a cookie from the tree because they’re worried about where it came from. For all they know, the cookies could be poisonous! Meg’s father gets the mayor to come look at the tree.
Eventually, everyone in town comes out to see the tree. The miller thinks that the whole thing is probably a big joke, but most of the other adults are worried because it’s weird. Some of them think maybe it’s some kind of bad omen. Little Meg’s theory is that a magician sent it as a present for the village, just to give them cookies. However, the adults reject that explanation, saying that it doesn’t make sense and they don’t any reason see why a magician would send them a cookie tree.
The mayor consults with the Village Councillors, but they don’t accomplish much other than to establish that there are indeed chocolate cookies growing on the tree when one of them samples a cookie. The adults argue back and forth about what to do about the tree, but by the time they come up with a plan, the tree has vanished!
While the adults’ backs were turned, the children of the village ate all the cookies, and once the cookies were gone, the tree disappeared. Apparently, Meg’s theory about the magician sending the tree just to give them cookies was correct.
One of the things that people sometimes praise children for doing is seeing things for what they are. Adults have a tendency to over-analyze things, looking for hidden meanings that may or may not exist. Sometimes, things really are just what they appear to be, and over-analyzing just confuses the issue. It can be like that with children’s books. Adults worry about every little thing in stories and possible messages being sent to children, but when people start over-analyzing stories, they can find themselves making up hidden messages and reading things into stories that aren’t really there. Sometimes, stories and other things are just for fun, and you might as well simply enjoy them for what they are!
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
It’s a hot night in the city, and John Henry’s parents decide that they should go to the park to cool off. John Henry is a little thrilled to be out with his parents at night, stopping to pick up a beautiful white marble he finds as they enter the park, but disappointed when he realizes that he is the only child there.
Then, a little girl he knows from school, Pamela, comes to the park with her mother. John Henry is pleased to see her because only another child could understand how magical this night in the park really is. He calls to her to come run with him, and the two children run off to play in the park together.
The children kick off their shoes and run barefoot in the cool grass. They lie in the grass for awhile, drink water from a fountain, and have ice sticks (we always called them popsicles when we were kids) from the ice cream man.
John Henry shows Pamela the little white marble he found. Pamela thinks it’s as beautiful as he does, and John Henry realizes that no adult could understand how beautiful a small, simple thing like that could be, only another child. That’s what binds John Henry and Pamela together. As children, they can still appreciate the simple pleasures of life and the beauty and magic of small, ordinary things that adults take for granted, like a small white marble someone forgot in a park or how nice an evening can feel as rain moves in after a hot day.
When it’s time to go home, John Henry gives Pamela the white marble, a memento of this special night.
The pictures in this edition of the book are different from the ones that I remembered from the first time that I read it as a child. This edition of the book, available through Internet Archive, shows the pictures that I remember. The pictures in the later edition of the book are black and white, but the ones in the original edition are done in three colors: black, white, and blue. Of the two, I really prefer the original drawings. They capture the magic of a lovely night shared with a friend.
The Case of the Cat’s Meow by Crosby Bonsall, 1965.
Four neighborhood friends, who call themselves by the nicknames Wizard, Skinny, Tubby, and Snitch, have their own private detective club. Their club meets in a backyard clubhouse. One day, Snitch gives them a case when he becomes worried that someone might try to steal his cat, Mildred. The other boys think that’s unlikely because Mildred is noisy, and the other boys don’t think that she’s that great, but Snitch loves her and is worried. The boys decide to keep her in their clubhouse with a special booby trap rigged up in case anyone tries to abduct her.
However,
the next day, Mildred disappears. Snitch
is convinced that someone stole her, although the others don’t believe it. The boys start asking around the neighborhood
to find out if anyone has seen her. When
that doesn’t work, they try putting food out for Mildred, but they end up with
every cat in the neighborhood except Mildred.
Eventually, they realize that Mildred has been coming back at night to visit her food bowl. When they keep a watch for her, they discover where Mildred has been hiding and the reason why.
Seeing Mildred’s adorable new kittens makes the other boys discover a new love of cats and take back all the disparaging things they said about Mildred earlier.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 