Posted on by TracyC

Where’s Spot

Spot

Where’s Spot? by Eric Hill, 1980.

This is the first modern lift-the-flap book for children, inspired by the author’s young son, who was playing with some sheets of papers on which he had drawn some concepts for an advertisement. There was an earlier style of lift-the-flap book from the 18th century, but this first book in the Spot the Dog series led to the popularization of modern lift-the-flap books for children.

Spot’s mother, Sally, notices that her puppy hasn’t eaten his dinner. She doesn’t know where he is, so she goes looking for him.

Sally searches for Spot all around their house, looking behind a door, in a closet, inside a clock and piano, under the stairs, and under the bed. In each place, she finds different animals (no explanation, there are just a lot of animals in this house).

Finally, the turtle hiding under the rug suggests that Sally check the basket, which is where she finally finds Spot.

The story is very simple, and the lift-the-flap concept is what really makes it work. The interactive element is fun, as if the readers are participating in a game of hide-and-seek with the characters. Kids enjoy being surprised by the different kinds of animals hiding all over the house. I loved it when I was a kid!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies), but to be honest, it’s not really a good book to read online because the lift-the-flap effect doesn’t carry over.

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The Girl in the Window

The Girl in the Window by Wilma Yeo, 1988.

Kiley Mulligan Culver lives in a fairly small town, Meander, in the southern United States.  Although not much usually happens in their small down, about a year before the story begins, a little girl named Leedie Ann Alcott was kidnapped.  The crime literally hit Kiley very close to home because she and her father (Kiley’s mother died when she was a baby) live on the Alcott family’s estate.  The Alcott mansion was once a plantation, and Kiley and her dad, who is an author, live in the old house that once belonged to the plantation’s overseer, so they know the Alcott family well.  Mr. and Mrs. Alcott are divorced, and Mr. Alcott lives in another state.  Mrs. Alcott owned a children’s clothing shop in town, Kiley would sometimes babysit or play with Leedie Ann, who was younger than she was.  In some ways, Leedie Ann was kind of like a little sister to Kiley.  At the time she disappeared, Leedie Ann was four years old, and Kiley was about nine.  Mrs. Alcott never received a ransom note for Leedie Ann, but everyone is sure that her disappearance was a kidnapping, not just a child wandering off.

A year later, when the story begins, Leedie Ann has still not been found, and no one knows what happened to her.  After Leedie Ann disappeared, her mother closed her clothing shop, and a strange gypsy woman named Pesha came to stay with her.  Pesha is mysterious and secretive, and no one knows why Mrs. Alcott has her staying with her, although they seem to be holding seances.

Then, one evening, Kiley looks up at the Alcott mansion and sees Leedie Ann Alcott standing in the window of her old room! But, before she can do anything, another, shadowy figure closes the drapes on the window.  By the time that Kiley can tell her father what she’s seen, Leedie Ann is gone.  Her father goes to the Alcott house to ask Mrs. Alcott if everything is all right and if she needs anything, and everything seems to be normal (or what passes for normal at that time).  Kiley’s father thinks that Kiley imagined the whole thing, but Kiley knows that she didn’t, and she is sure that she wasn’t mistaken and that it was really Leedie Ann.

Kiley tells her friend, Sarah, about what she saw and persuades her to help find out whether Leedie Ann is really in the Alcott house or not.  Sarah is nervous about it, but she agrees to go along with Kiley’s plan to go to the Alcott house and ask to use the bathroom, pretending that she has been waiting for Kiley to meet her at her house but that she just can’t wait anymore.  While Sarah is supposedly using the bathroom, she’s supposed to check Leedie Ann’s room upstairs.  Kiley can’t do this herself because she wouldn’t have the same excuse that Sarah would and because Mrs. Alcott would know that Kiley knows where the downstairs bathroom is and that she would have no reason to go poking around upstairs.

When Sarah follows through on Kiley’s plan and checks Leedie Ann’s room, she tells Kiley that she did see Leedie Ann there!  However, Pesha saw her spying and made her leave the house.  Kiley and Sarah think that perhaps Pesha has both Mrs. Alcott and Leedie Ann under a spell and is holding them prisoner in their house.  But, what can the girls do to help them?

Kiley comes up with a daring plan to trick Pesha into revealing what she knows about Leedie Ann Alcott by writing an anonymous letter to her as if she already knew that Pesha was involved in her disappearance, but the plan backfires.  The police reopen the inquiry into Leedie Ann’s disappearance (don’t ask me why they didn’t notice that the letter appeared to be written by a child), but Kiley accidentally implicates an innocent person.  Adults in town are nervous, and Sarah’s mother doesn’t want Kiley to see her anymore.  Just as Kiley thinks things can’t get any worse, Pesha asks for her help, offering a charm to help restore Kiley’s friendship with Sarah in return.  Pesha claims that her only purpose is to use her psychic abilities to help Mrs. Alcott find Leedie Ann and that what Kiley believed was Leedie Ann in the window was actually a mannequin left from Mrs. Alcott’s clothing store that Leedie Ann had always begged to have as a life-size doll for herself.  Is Pesha really as innocent as she claims to be?  Can Kiley trust her?  What about Mrs. Alcott?  Above all, where is Leedie Ann Alcott?

Although Kiley may have made a big mistake, the reopening of the kidnapping case does bring to light the real secret behind Leedie Ann’s disappearance.

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

Themes and My Reaction

One of the side plots in the story is about how differences between people can lead to mistrust because people sometimes get a false impression.  Kiley knows that her friends’ mothers don’t really approve of her because she is being raised by her father alone.  Some of her friends’ mothers, especially Sarah’s because she’s overprotective, think that Kiley is a wild child because she doesn’t have a mother to look after her, and they worry that Kiley will be a bad influence on their daughters.  Kiley does sometimes get into trouble because she’s a little daring and a little impulsive, but those are more personal character traits rather than the result of growing up without a mother, and some of her escapades are undertaken in the name of helping someone, like trying to find Leedie Ann.  Her friends’ mothers don’t understand Kiley’s intentions, though, and they never ask enough questions to find out what is really going on.  It seems oddly cold behavior from mothers to me.  Where I grew up, other people’s mothers would have taken more of an interest in a motherless child, purposely checking up on her and wanting to have her hanging around where they could keep an eye on what she was doing.  If they push her away, then she’s even less monitored than she was before.

However, Kiley realizes that everyone’s suspicions about Pesha, including her own, were also based largely on the fact that Pesha is different from everyone else.  For awhile, Kiley helps Pesha to hide from the police because Pesha fears their inquiries.  The two of them get to know each other better.  Pesha is actually a Holocaust survivor. Pesha has the tattoos on her body that the Nazis used to put on prisoners in their concentration camps (I’ve see those tattoos in real life, and I recognized them from the book’s description before Kiley understood what they were) and she tells Kiley about a place in Germany where her family was and terrible things happened.  Besides Jewish people, gypsies were also targets of the Nazis during the Holocaust and were sent to concentration camps along with them.  Pesha fears the police because she fears being locked up again, something that Mrs. Alcott tells to the police to explain Pesha’s sudden disappearance.  Knowing this helps Kiley to become more sympathetic to Pesha and more determined to help straighten out the mess that she helped to cause, eventually discovering the real whereabouts of Leedie Ann in the process.

Something that bothered me about the adults in the story, pretty much all of them, is their lack of interest in asking questions and taking charge.  Even after Kiley’s father realizes that she was helping Pesha to hide from the police, he doesn’t ask enough questions about why she was doing it.  He simply reports Pesha to the authorities and orders Kiley to stay out of it, just like he simply told her to stop imagining Leedie Ann Alcott and making up stories back when Kiley first saw the girl in the window.  Kiley’s father didn’t want to ask the awkward questions to verify what Kiley saw, so it was easier to assume that she didn’t see anything.  Part of that is a plot device, so that Kiley has a reason to dig for the truth herself, but it also figures into the way other adults, like Sarah’s mother, treat Kiley and how they approach the whole inquiry into Leedie’s disappearance.  Instead of checking on what motherless Kiley is doing and helping her father to supervise her, they want to just shrug her off as a problem they don’t want to deal with, figuring that someone else will handle it because they don’t want to get involved.  Then, when Sarah’s mother finds out about Sarah helping Kiley to write the letter that reopened the investigation, she refuses to tell the police the truth about it, allowing the investigation against Pesha to go forward even when she knew it was groundless, just because she didn’t want to get involved.  Disbelieving adults/adults not wanting to get involved is a trope of children’s mysteries because the adults’ non-involvement provides a reason for the children to investigate, but I still find it annoying and irresponsible.

Pesha’s innocence is finally established when Kiley finds the courage to admit what she did in front of everyone at Pesha’s court hearing.  Kiley comes to realize that a quality that she and her father both have is honesty.  Her father didn’t try to hide it when he discovered that Kiley was harboring a fugitive the way Sarah’s mother tried to hide the truth to avoid becoming involved and to hide her child’s involvement, and that’s something to be proud of.  The aftermath of her confession also gives Kiley the opportunity to spot the tell-tale clue of Leedie Ann’s current whereabouts, and Leedie Ann is safely returned to her mother.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery Madness

Mystery Madness by Otto Coontz, 1982.

While Murray’s parents are on vacation, his older sister, Blanche, is in charge of the house. One day, he calls Blanche to get a ride home from the dentist and hears what he thinks is Blanche shooting their housekeeper.

Earlier that morning, he had heard Blanche talking on the phone to someone about a gun. Then, when he calls home, a friend of Blanche’s, Harold, answers, and Murray hears a gun going off in the background and Blanche apologizing to the housekeeper and talking about blood on the carpet. When Murray gets home, his mother’s Persian rug is missing and sees what appears to be a head in a bucket under the sink in the kitchen, further proof that the housekeeper is dead and that her blood stained the carpet.

Murray doesn’t know what to do because he is sure that his sister would never shoot anyone on purpose, and he doesn’t want to see her go to jail. He consults a private detective, Mat Cloak, who he met in a doughnut shop, for help.

The detective agrees to look into the case, and along the way, he realizes that it has connections to a case that he is already investigating. What really happened to the housekeeper? Is Blanche really guilty of murder? Moreover, who is the strange man who is following Murray around?

It’s a very funny story with some twists that readers won’t be able to guess right away. Part of the mystery is pretty obvious because Blanche is a theater student, but the real mystery is one that Murray isn’t even trying to solve and the real villain is someone who Murray thinks is a victim.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Detective McGruff Sniffs Out a Thief

Detective McGruff Sniffs Out a Thief by Megan Durand, illustrated by John Sullivan, 1983.

Sniffy books, or scratch-and-sniff books, were popular during my early childhood in the 1980s, and they are still being made today. Scratch-and-sniff books are picture books with special patches that release a scent when they’re scratched. Kids like interactive books, so it can be fun for them to scratch a flower or some food in a picture and then smell it. I know from my old books that these scented patches eventually wear out, although I’m amazed that some of them still have a scent more than 30 years after the books were originally made. I had expected that the ones that my brother and I liked and scratched the most would be the ones that would eventually wear out the fasted, but it also depends on the strength of the original scent. The milder, more subtle scents are often more difficult to smell decades later. Scratching a little harder can sometimes help. This picture book is a mystery story, and I thought that it was clever, using the sniffy patches as part of the mystery story.

Mrs. Tabby loves shopping, but she often forgets to pay attention to her purchases while she’s looking at other things. One day, someone steals her shopping bag while she’s trying on hats at a sale. It’s terrible because the bag contained the chocolate cake for her son’s birthday.

Fortunately, Detective McGruff is nearby when Mrs. Tabby realizes that her bag is missing. Unfortunately, finding it isn’t going to be easy because many people are carrying blue shopping bags that look like hers. Mrs. Tabby isn’t sure what to do, but McGruff decides to use his nose to sniff out the correct bag.

McGruff approaches various shoppers and gives their bags a sniff. All of the bags look alike, but readers can scratch and sniff the special patches on each bag and try to guess what they contain before McGruff reveals the truth.

After sniffing several bags, McGruff eventually locates the one that smells like chocolate and finds the cake. But, curing Mrs. Taffy of being forgetful is another matter.

Detective McGruff, or McGruff the Crime Dog, was created in the early 1980s as a mascot for anti-crime messages from U.S. police and law enforcement agencies through the National Crime Prevention Council, including anti-drug messages and information related to the issue of child abduction. Sometimes, police use McGruff costumes when visiting schoolchildren to talk to them about crime.

Posted on by TracyC

Peter Rabbit's Sniffy Adventure

Peter Rabbit’s Sniffy Adventure by Jane E. Gerver, illustrated by Pat Sutendal, 1984.

Sniffy books, or scratch-and-sniff books, were popular during my early childhood in the 1980s, and they are still being made today. Scratch-and-sniff books are picture books with special patches that release a scent when they’re scratched. Kids like interactive books, so it can be fun for them to scratch a flower or some food in a picture and then smell it. I know from my old books that these scented patches eventually wear out, although I’m amazed that some of them still have a scent more than 30 years after the books were originally made. I had expected that the ones that my brother and I liked and scratched the most would be the ones that would eventually wear out the fasted, but it also depends on the strength of the original scent. The milder, more subtle scents are often more difficult to smell decades later. Scratching a little harder can sometimes help. If you look carefully at the pictures of our old book, you can see where the round scent patches are on the illustrations.

This book is based on The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. It’s meant as a continuation of Peter Rabbit’s adventures.

Peter Rabbit lives with his mother and three sisters. One day, Mrs. Rabbit leaves her children alone while she goes to run some errands, giving them a green pepper to eat while she’s gone.

Then, Peter’s cousin, Benjamin comes by and asks Peter to come with him and visit Mr. McGregor’s garden. Peter is reluctant to go because of the trouble that he got into the last time, but Benjamin finally persuades him to come.

In Mr. McGregor’s garden, the bunnies eat raspberries, get into a sawdust pile, and stop to pick some flowers. Peter’s clothes become more dirty, stained, and torn through their adventures.

Then, Benjamin spots a beehive and suggests that they get some honeycomb to take home. They end up angering the bees, and Peter falls in a stream as they run away.

When he returns home, Peter is a mess, and he apologizes to his mother for going to Mr. McGregor’s, promising not to do it again. His mother gives him a bath and puts him to bed with a cup of mint tea.

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Jessica the Blue Streak

Jessica the Blue Streak by Sucie Stevenson, 1989.

Jessica is a six-month-old puppy who has just arrived at her new home. The lady the family bought the dog from warned them to keep Jessica in her crate at night to keep her out of trouble, but the family is confident that they know about dogs.

They already have two dogs, Chelsea and Wolf, and they’re hoping that all three dogs will be friends. Chelsea doesn’t mind Jessica, but Wolf bites the new puppy.

On her first day with the family, Jessica runs wildly through the house, peeing on the floor and grabbing random things to run around with and chew on. She makes messes and eats the cat’s food. Soon, she’s even getting on Chelsea’s nerves.

That night, when they put Jessica in her crate, Jessica howls and cries. What can the family do with this wild puppy?

The story is based on a real dog, Jessica, who was owned by the author’s family, who are all characters in the story. I know from my own experience with my adopted rescue dog that it’s normal for a dog to cry at night in a new home. Puppies are little babies, and like small human children, they need comforting when they’re scared in a new place.

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Clifford Goes to Hollywood

Clifford

Clifford Goes to Hollywood by Norman Bridwell, 1980.

Clifford the big, red dog gets an offer to be in a movie. He passes a screen test where he has to act out different emotions, and he gets the part in the movie, so he has to go to Hollywood to accept the role, while Emily Elizabeth and her parents stay behind.

In Hollywood, Clifford is given a big, fancy doghouse and all sorts of fancy collars to wear.

However, Clifford quickly gets overwhelmed by all of the fans who mob him.

He misses Emily Elizabeth, so he runs back home to be with her.

The idea of someone going to Hollywood and missing friends back home is kind of cliche. Actually, I think the best part of the book was the screen test, where Clifford has to show different emotions. There are many books that demonstrate different types of emotions to kids, and I thought that was a nice addition to this book. The part where they show all the fancy collars that Clifford has to choose from was nice, too, because kids like to make choices, and this page is an opportunity for kids to decide which of the collars they like best.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Clifford's Family

Clifford

Clifford’s Family by Norman Bridwell, 1984.

Emily Elizabeth and her enormous dog, Clifford, were both born in a big city, although they live in a smaller town now. They decide to go back to the city and visit Clifford’s mother, who is still there.

Clifford’s brothers and sisters all live with different people now, so they decide to visit them, too. Clifford’s sister, Claudia, has become a seeing-eye dog.

His brother, Nero, is now a fire rescue dog.

Clifford’s other sister, Bonnie, lives on a farm and herds sheep.

Clifford’s father doesn’t live with his mother. He lives in a house in another town with a lot of children, and he loves playing with them.

Clifford wishes that his family could live together, but he understands that every member of his family has other people who also need them.

I thought that this book did a good job of pointing out some of the jobs that dogs do, like seeing-eye dog, rescue dog, and herding dog. Clifford and his parents are all companions animals, like most pet dogs, but his siblings all have specific jobs to do for their owners.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Song and Dance Man

Song and Dance Man by Karen Ackerman, illustrated by Stephen Gammell, 1988.

A grandfather likes to tell his grandchildren stories about when he was a young man and he was a vaudeville performer, a “song and dance man.” Back before the invention of television, live vaudeville performances were a major form of public entertainment in the United States during the late 19th century and early 20th century. A typical vaudeville performance in the United States was like a variety show with short skits, music, singing, dancing, comedy routines, juggling, magic acts, ventriloquists, and various other stunts, acrobatics, and miscellaneous acts.

When his grandchildren come to visit, he likes to take them up to the attic, where his old costume pieces and tap shoes are stored, and he gives them a private performance of his old vaudeville act.

He sings songs, plays the banjo, tells jokes, and also does small magic tricks for the children, like pulling coins out of their hair.

The grandfather loves performing for his grandchildren, and they love seeing him perform. The children can tell that he misses the “good old days” when he was a performer, although he says that he wouldn’t trade the time he has with his grandchildren for his life in the past.

In a way, the fact that the children’s grandfather was a former vaudeville performer dates this story. In the early 21st century, children’s grandparents are mostly people who were born in the mid-20th century, probably between the 1940s and 1970s, depending on the age of the grandchildren and how old the grandparents were when they were born. By the mid-20th century, vaudeville had already gone out of fashion, declining in popularity during the late 1920s and early 1930s, around the time when sound movies were first being produced, although some earlier vaudeville performances actually included short silent films among the other skits and acts. The book talks about television ending vaudeville’s popularity, but it was really movie theaters that were the main competition for vaudeville. Some movies produced during the 1930s and into the mid-20th century carried on some of the vaudeville traditions, like certain types of comedy and song and dance routines, as former vaudeville performers, including Fred Astaire and Bob Hope, transitioned into movie performers. Vaudeville elements show up frequently in Shirley Temple movies, and the Road series of movies with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour also features many call-backs to vaudeville variety acts, which is part of the reason why they’re so episodic, light on over-arching plot, and punctuated with song and dance routines. The people who were adults when vaudeville was still big would have been the parents or grandparents of modern, early 21st century grandparents. I first saw this book when I was a child, and my grandparents would have been among those old enough to remember vaudeville. The book was published in the late 1980s, a little over 30 years ago. The children in this book would be from my generation, about the age I was when this book was new, not the current 21st century generation of children. Even so, it is a fun glimpse at the past and can be a good opportunity to introduce children to the idea of changing tastes in entertainment and occupations that used to exist but either don’t exist now or have taken different forms in modern times. Modern grandparents could still use this book to talk about family history and memories of the past.

This book is a Caldecott Medal winner. The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Mystery of Drear House

The Mystery of Drear House cover

The Mystery of Drear House by Virginia Hamilton, 1987.

This book is the continuation of The House of Dies Drear, and the final book in the short series.

The Smalls are now settled into the house that formerly belonged to the abolitionist Dies Drear, who used secret tunnels to help smuggle escaping slaves to freedom as part of the Underground Railroad. Thomas Small’s father is a college professor, who finds the history of the house endlessly fascinating, especially now that they know about the hidden treasure that the caretaker, Mr. Pluto has been guarding for many years.

Apart from the Small family and Mr. Pluto, Pesty is only other person who knows where the hidden treasure is. Pesty (a nickname, her real name is Sarah) is the adopted daughter of the Darrow family, who live nearby. The Darrows are generally known to be nasty and scheming, and they have spent years looking for the treasure they know that Dies Drear hid. In the last book, Pesty helped the others to frighten off the Darrows when they were getting too close to the secret, but Thomas is still concerned that they might be a threat. He also privately questions Pesty’s loyalty, wondering if she’ll continue to keep the secret from the Darrows, although Mr. Pluto is confident that she will because she knew the secret of the treasure even before the Smalls did.

Mac, a boy about Thomas’s age, is the youngest of the Darrow brothers, and he’s not as mean as the rest of his family. Thomas kind of wants to be friends with him, but he’s not sure if he can really trust him. Mac tells Thomas that he can come over to visit sometime and that his mother is an invalid who sometimes spends months in bed. When Mac shows an interest in Thomas’s great-grandmother, who is coming to live with them, Thomas gets the idea to bring his great-grandmother over to the Darrow house to visit Mac and Pesty’s mother.

However, before they can visit Mrs. Darrow, she comes to visit them, entering their house through one of the secret passages that Thomas and his family haven’t learned about yet. She startles Thomas’s great-grandmother with her sudden arrival, and Thomas is irritated that Pesty didn’t tell him about that secret passage even though she knew about it. Pesty explains to them that her mother is mentally ill, a chronic condition of some kind, and she gets a little odd during times when she doesn’t take her medicine. Thomas’s great-grandmother seems to understand the situation, and she insists on escorting Mrs. Darrow home.

In the secret tunnel Mrs. Darrow used to come to their house, there are hidden rooms, and when they all arrive at the Darrow house, Mrs. Darrow begins telling them a kind of odd story, really little bits and pieces of stories that she has told Pesty and Mac before. Pesty seems to have a better understanding of what Mrs. Darrow is talking about than Mac does, but Thomas can tell that Mac has heard his mother tell these stories before and that he is also trying to get a better understanding of them. For some reason, Pesty seems to be holding back information from Mac as well as Thomas.

The story that seems to concern Mrs. Darrow the most is about an Indian Maiden (Native American). She seems to get upset at first when Thomas mentions that Mac had mentioned an Indian Maiden before. It turns out that the Darrows are part Native American, and the “Indian Maiden” is one of their relatives from the past. She played a role in the Underground Railroad with Dies Drear but lost her life when she was caught. The Indian Maiden was hiding secrets that Pesty is still trying to protect, and she has also been worried about Mrs. Darrow, who sometimes acts out part of the old story as if she were the Indian Maiden herself.

Meanwhile, it seems like someone is playing the ghost of Dies Drear and trying to frighten Mr. Pluto into telling him about the hidden treasure. Thomas and Pesty see the tracks of this person one day when they go to visit Mr. Pluto. The relationships between the different members of the Darrow family are complicated, and not all of them are really after the same thing.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

Mrs. Darrow’s mental illness and the different motives of the younger Darrows vs. the older Darrow boys and their father are at the heart of much of the mystery and peculiarity of the Darrow family. Mac actually opposed his father and brothers the last time they tried to get the hidden Drear treasure, and since then, they’ve been shunning him. Pesty tries to look after Mrs. Darrow as best she can, but she’s been handling the job largely by herself, and at the same time, she could really use the support of a mother who can look after her. Pesty doesn’t really like all of the secrets that she has been forced to keep, but for a long time, she hasn’t felt safe in confiding the full truth of anything to anybody. She feels even more left out of the Darrow family than Mac is because she’s their adopted child, not a blood relative, even though she is always looking after Mrs. Darrow and thinks of her as her “Mama.”

The solution to many of the problems with the Darrows comes with the public exposure of the Drear treasure and the end to all the secrecy. The Smalls decide to give Mrs. Darrow the credit for finding the treasure, so although Mr. Darrow is angry that he will never get his hands on the hidden treasure that he and his family have searched for so long, they will get part of the reward money for finding it. The foundation that receives the treasure also gives jobs to Mr. Small and Mr. Darrow, changing the lives of the Darrows for the better. Even though Mr. Darrow didn’t get what his family originally wanted, they end up with something that improves their situation, and they no longer feel the need to hide Mrs. Darrow’s condition from everyone. The Darrows are freed from part of their past, and now, they’ll be able to go forward with their lives. Mr. Darrow also shows that he really cares about his adopted daughter.

The Darrows are a mixed race family, and their heritage is in keeping with real events in American history. People with mixed black and Native American heritage are sometimes colloquially known as “Black Indians,” and people with that type of mixed ancestry have existed in the Americas since Colonial times. By the end of the story, the Darrows’ full history isn’t completely explained in detail, but it seems that it was probably Dies Drear’s work with the Underground Railroad that brought their ancestors together. Freed and escaped slaves did sometimes intermarry with Native Americans.