Two Wheels for Grover by Dan Elliott, illustrated by Joe Mathieu, 1984.
Grover is happy about going to visit his aunt, uncle, and cousins in the country, but the visit becomes a little awkward when his cousin Rosie wants him to go bike riding with her. Grover doesn’t know how to ride a bike.
He points out to Rosie that he doesn’t have a bike to ride, but she offers to lend him one. Not wanting to admit that he can’t ride a bike and being too afraid to learn how, Grover keeps making excuses about why he can’t ride a bike.
There are still plenty of other fun things to do with his cousins, but the problem of not being able to ride a bike still bothers Grover. Rosie keeps trying to find ways around Grover’s excuses, and Grover keeps trying to find new ones. Secretly, he wishes that he could ride a bike with Rosie, but he is too afraid that he can’t. Grover’s older cousin Frank points out to him that he loves playing in the tree house now, even though he used to be afraid to climb up to it.
Grover eventually confides in Frank his worries about riding a bike, and Frank understands. Big Bird once tried to teach Grover to ride a bike, but he couldn’t do it then, and he doubts whether he can learn. Frank says that the problem is that Big Bird’s bike was too big for Grover, but he could learn to ride a smaller bike, like Frank’s old one.
Although Grover is still nervous, he lets Frank teach him to ride, and soon, he discovers that he can ride a bike!
Grover learns to ride a bike just in time for Rosie to come and tell them that someone is giving away kittens. Now, Grover can ride over with Rosie to get a kitten for himself!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It’s part of a series of picture books with the Sesame Street characters.
My Reaction:
This was a favorite book of mine when I was a kid, even though I found riding a bike much harder than Grover did. Some kids, like me, have more difficulty learning to balance than others, and it was often hard when other kids wanted me to come riding bikes with them when I couldn’t. Learning to ride a bike is one of those rites of passage that most people have during childhood, and it can be difficult for people who take longer to learn.
However, this book focuses on the rewards of perseverance. Just because Grover had trouble the first time he tried to learn to ride a bike doesn’t mean that he can’t do it. Frank understands that Grover is nervous about riding a bike, and it helps that he points out that there are other things that Grover has found difficult before that are now easy and fun for him, like climbing into the tree house. Learning new things can take time and multiple tries, but there are rewards for those who keep trying!
Molly Moves to Sesame Street by Judy Freudberg, illustrated by Jean Chandler, 1980.
The characters from Sesame Street greet a new neighbor who is getting used to a new home and needs some new friends.
Molly and her parents are moving into a new apartment on Sesame Street, but Molly feels uncomfortable because nothing in this new neighborhood feels familiar. Her new room is still bare and doesn’t look or feel like home. Molly’s parents reassure her that it will feel more like home once all of her belongings are unpacked.
After Molly helps to unpack for awhile, her parents encourage her to go out, explore the neighborhood, and make some new friends. They say that, by the time Molly comes back, they’ll have things unpacked, and her new room will look much better.
When Molly first meets the characters from Sesame Street, they’re playing a game of hide-and-seek, but they all come out when she calls to them. They all introduce themselves to Molly and invite her to join their game.
After they play, they all go to Mr. Hooper’s store for ice cream and sodas. Molly is happy that she’s having fun and starting to make friends, and she’s starting to like her new neighborhood.
When Molly returns to the apartment, her parents have finished unpacking and arranging her new room. Molly is happy because it looks and feels more like home, and she invites her new friends to come over and see it.
This is a fun and reassuring picture book for young children that shows how making a new home look familiar and making new friends can help them to feel more at home when they move to a new place.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, some in different languages), but some later printings of the book have different illustrations and include Elmo, who wasn’t in the first edition of the book.
Aaron is unable to speak and has been mute since birth, so he has to communicate with people mainly through writing messages he writes on a small chalkboard. His father was a sailor who died at sea, so he lives with only his mother. One day, his mother, who is a weaver, is planning to go to the market at Craftsbury so she can tell the cloth that she’s made. Usually, Aaron goes with her, but since he’s about to turn twelve years old, his mother decides that he’s old enough to stay home alone. His mother has always been protective of him because of his inability to speak, and Aaron is nervous at being alone at home overnight. Still, he agrees to stay home and look after the house while his mother is gone.
His mother warns him not to go far from the house until she returns home because they live far from the nearest town, and there are wild animals and brigands in the woods. She promises Aaron that she will bring him a special present for his birthday when she returns home.
However, his mother doesn’t return when she promised she would. Aaron begins to worry about her, thinking that she might have had trouble on the road because of the snow. Since he has traveled the road to Craftsbury with her before, Aaron decides to head to Craftsbury himself and see if he can find his mother on the way and help her. He assembles a pack with some supplies, and ignoring his mother’s instructions to stay at the house, he sets out to look for her.
The journey is more complicated than Aaron imagines, partly because, when he meets other people, not all of them know how to read the messages Aaron writes, making it difficult for Aaron to explain that he cannot talk and that he is looking for his mother. A ragman gives him some food and a ride on his wagon, but Aaron is frustrated because the man doesn’t understand what he writes or the pictures he draws.
The ride on the wagon takes a worrying turn when the ragman takes Aaron on a route he doesn’t recognize. When they come to an inn, the ragman drops off Aaron. Aaron thinks that he can stay the night at the inn and continue his journey on his own in the morning. Unfortunately, the woman who keeps the inn, Miss Grackle, can’t read Aaron’s notes, either.
Miss Grackle says that she’ll let him stay the night in exchange for a few chores, like lighting fires in the fireplaces, and Aaron nods that he accepts. He tries to show Miss Grackle the drawing he made of his mother, but she still doesn’t understand. Eventually, Miss Grackle comes to understand that Aaron can’t speak, but he still can’t seem to explain to her where he is going or why.
To Aaron’s surprise, Miss Grackle tells him in the morning that she looked into his dreams during the night. Through his dreams, she saw his mother and his home. She says that she knows he’s far from home and not likely to be found by anyone looking for him, if there is anyone looking for him. She has taken his belongings and boots, and she tells him that he will be staying at the inn, working for her and that he will now answer to the name of Sam, like the last boy she had.
Aaron has become Miss Grackle’s prisoner at the inn, unable to leave on his own without his boots! Miss Grackle is a thief, stealing from her guests, and she is confident that Aaron won’t be able to tell anyone about it. At first, Aaron thinks that he can get some help from one of the guests staying at the inn, but he encounters the same problem he’s had all along: he can’t talk to explain anything to anyone. The guests don’t even pay attention to him, Miss Grackle intercepts messages that he tries to write, and even when he manages to sneak a message onto the inn sign, other people can’t read it because they don’t know how to read. What can he do? How can he escape and find his mother?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
This story is an adventure story that takes place at an indeterminate location and an indeterminate point in history, when people traveled by horse and wagon. It’s not a long story, but it is an intriguing one where a clever boy manages to outwit sinister villains. It reminds me a little of The Whipping Boy in setting, but there was no magic in that story, and there is in this one.
The atmosphere of the story seems like a fairy tale or folk tale. The evil, thieving innkeeper has a potion of some kind that she uses to put her guests to sleep and look into their dreams, which is how she saw Aaron’s dreams. The reason why she looks into people’s dreams is so she can learn more about who they are and where they come from. She’s looking for people who are more wealthy and important than they seem so she can hold them for ransom instead of just robbing them.
Miss Grackle’s magic apparently comes from her parents. Her mother was the one who came up with the method of looking into people’s dreams and robbing them. Her father was honest, and his determination to enforce honesty is the reason why Miss Grackle can’t run the inn by herself. Miss Grackle needs Aaron to light the fires in the inn because no fire will light in the hearths there if it is lit by a person who has been dishonest, and Miss Grackle has never been honest with anyone. Aaron finds a way to turn Miss Grackle’s greedy schemes to his advantage and escape. With Aaron gone and the only other person left in the inn as dishonest as she is, the villains are left to their fate in a snow storm that lasts for days.
This is the first book in the Vesper Holly series. Vesper Holly is like a female Young Indiana Jones.
The story begins in 1872, when Professor Brinton Garrett and his wife, Mary, receive a letter saying that Professor Garrett’s colleague, Dr. Holly, has died overseas. Dr. Holly named Professor Garrett as executor of his will, gave him the rights to organize his person papers for publication, and made him the guardian of his 16-year-old daughter, Vesper. When Professor Garrett and his wife arrive at Dr. Holly’s country estate in Pennsylvania to meet Vesper and take charge, they at first expect that they will have to comfort a timid and grieving orphan. However, Vesper is anything but timid and seems to have gotten over whatever grief she was feeling and has quickly taken charge of the situation. She welcomes the professor and his wife, calling them Uncle Brinnie and Aunt Mary, and she quickly persuades them that, rather than her coming to live with them, it would be better for them to take up residence at the Holly estate, where there is plenty of room and Uncle Brinnie would have full access to her late father’s library and papers. At first, they’re reluctant to leave their own home, but Vesper Holly is practically a force of nature and very difficult to resist.
Vesper is intelligent and multi-talented, with interests in everything from science to women’s rights. (In some ways, she seems kind of like Mary Sue – impossibly talented and skilled at everything, with her main flaws seeming to be that she is difficult for everyone else to keep up with.) Uncle Brinnie quickly realizes that she is a daunting girl to have as his ward, and rather than he and his wife taking charge of her, Vesper has efficiently taken charge of them.
Soon after Professor Garrett and Mary settle in at the Holly estate, Vesper asks Uncle Brinnie if he’s read a piece of classic literature called the Illyriad and if he knows anything about Illyria. Professor Garrett has read this less-known classic piece, and while he’s never been to Illyria, he knows that it’s an incredibly unstable place. While the Illyriad is thought to be mostly legend, Vesper says that her father believed that there was more truth to it than most people know. He believed that the magical army described in the story may actually have been an army of clockwork automatons. Professor Garrett remembers Dr. Holly saying something like that before, but no one in the academic community took the theory seriously, and Professor Garrett says that he thought Dr. Holly had abandoned the idea. Vesper reveals that her father was still working on the theory and that, shortly before his death, he wrote to her, saying that he found something that seemed to support his ideas. Unfortunately, he died before revealing what he found. Vesper says that she wants Uncle Brinnie to take her on an expedition to Illyria so that she can finish her father’s work. Once again, Professor Garrett balks at the idea because of the dangerous political situation in the region, but also once again, Vesper’s powers of persuasion win.
Professor Garrett is sure that they won’t be granted permission to enter the country much less move around Illyria because of the unrest there, but to his astonishment, Vesper gets them permission to do both by writing to the king of Illyria himself. Although the king never met Vesper’s father, he has read Dr. Holly’s research and is fascinated by his theories, which is why he also grants Vesper a personal audience. Before their meeting with the king, Vesper and Professor Garrett are caught up in a riot while touring the city, and someone tries to stab Vesper! Although it could have been an accident during the riot, Vesper is sure that someone deliberately tried to kill her, and she tells the king about it at their meeting. The king is troubled by the news and admits that he had assigned someone to follow Vesper and Professor Garrett to protect them. It’s a failure on the part of his guard that they were attacked anyway.
The king’s vizier immediately says that they have to crack down harder on the native Illyrians, bringing up the cultural and political struggle that has made this country so dangerous. (Don’t worry too much about understanding it. This isn’t a real life historical situation with real groups of people.) Vesper boldly says that it doesn’t make sense to her that one half of the country crack down on the other half of the country, and she advocates for more respect for the native Illyrians and their wishes. The vizier is scandalized at a girl speaking up to the king like that, and the king tells Vesper that the situation isn’t that simple. The king has been trying to modernize and improve the infrastructure of the country with projects like building schools and railroads lines, but each of these projects has been ruthlessly sabotaged, apparently by the native Illyrians. The vizier has suggested hiring outside sources from other countries to complete the projects, but the king still thinks it’s important to keep the projects within the country. Hiring outsiders would be costly and would make Illyria dependent on outsiders. (Right about at this point, I was sure that I fully understood who the real villain of this story was and who was really responsible for the sabotage, and it wasn’t the native Illyrians. However, there is one more important character yet to be introduced.)
The king grants Vesper and Professor Garrett the ability to travel to the village Vesper wants to visit to pick up the trail of her father’s studies, but before they leave the palace, the king introduces them to anther visiting scholar, Dr. Desmond Helvitius. Dr. Helvitius is there to catalog the palace archives and conduct research for a book about the early history of Illyria. Dr. Helvitius says that, based on his studies, he believes that the army from the Illyriad Dr. Holly was researching never existed and was purely imaginary and says that the palace archives, which are thorough and complete, prove it. However, Vesper insists on seeing the archives herself, and she quickly notices that there is a gap in the records. Our heroes ponder what is missing and why Dr. Helvitius doesn’t want anyone to know that anything is missing.
As Vesper and Uncle Brinnie continue in pursuit of Dr. Holly’s theory, there are further attempts on their lives.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
Although there are themes of history and archaeology in the Vesper Holly stories, I think it’s important to point out that all of the history and archaeology in the stories is fake. The locations they visit are fictional. The series takes place in the Victorian era, but this is not really a historical fiction series because they mostly focus on the history of places that don’t exist. The Indiana Jones and Young Indiana Jones franchise based their adventures on real places, people, artifacts, and legends that exist outside of the franchise, but that’s not the case with Vesper Holly. Really, the Vesper Holly series is just an adventure series. The locations and circumstances only exist to create the opportunities for adventure. That’s fine and fun, as long as readers understand that’s the case.
The name of Illyria comes from an ancient name for a region in the Balkans where people spoke a language that was called Illyrian, but Illyria didn’t exist as a country in the 1870s. People stopped referring to Illyria in the sense of a nation after the Ottomans invaded the region in the 15th century, and that was after it had already been under both Roman and Byzantine control. The term “Illyria” sometimes emerged after that in a cultural sense. The Illyriad doesn’t exist and seems to be based on the real piece of classical literature, the Iliad. I couldn’t find any references to a King Vartan, but there is a St. Vartan or Vardan, who was an Armenian military leader and martyr, who died in 451 AD. The political and social tensions in the story are between the ethnic Illyrians and the Zentans. The captial city of this fictional Illyria is Zenta, and I think it is based on the city now called Senta in modern day Serbia, which was the site of a battle in 1697, where the Ottomans were defeated and lost control of the region. So, my overall impression of the time period and location of the story is that it seems to take place in a sort of alternate reality of the Victorian world, semi-based on real places and historical concepts from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, especially the Balkans, but not adhering strictly to real history so the author could set up the adventure creatively.
The Illyrian characters in the book use words like “dragoman” (a term for a guide and interpreter, usually used in the Near East, particularly in areas with Arabic, Turkish, or Persian influence) and “effendi“, which is an honorific for a man of high status in eastern Mediterranean countries. It’s plausible that these terms would be used in the Balkans in the 19th century, but this isn’t really my area of expertise, so I can’t say how common that would have been.
The adventure in the story is good, and it has an element of mystery that adds an interesting twist to the ending. At the beginning of the story, Vesper and Professor Garrett explain that Dr. Holly had a theory about the historical events behind a legend described in a piece of classical literature. His theory was that this special army described in literature was actually some kind of mechanical or clockwork army, an army composed of something man-made rather than real humans. Professor Garrett and his colleagues never took Dr. Holly’s theory seriously because it does sound rather unbelievable, too technologically advanced for the time when the historical events took place. However, Vesper believes in her father and his theories, and now that he is dead, she wants to investigate and find the proof that her father wanted for the sake of his memory. If they had really found an amazing clockwork army, it would have been an incredible adventure, but I was pleased that what they actually found is a more plausible explanation that would have fit the time period. It turns out that Dr. Holly was half right; the legendary army was not composed of real people, but there is another kind of army that nobody considers until Vesper actually finds it. Legends tend to magnify things out of their original proportions. This particular legend not only exaggerated the army’s capabilities but also its size.
I liked the twists to the story, but Vesper herself got on my nerves a bit. Vesper only really makes sense if you look at her as being the kind of heroine of tall tales. She is overly perfect with no noticeable flaws. She rarely gets frightened or upset at anything, from the death of her own father to being threatened with death herself. She cheerfully pulls her new guardian into dangerous situations, and her guardian can’t even really get angry with her for doing it. Vesper is incredibly persuasive, whether it’s dealing with her guardian or a foreign king, and her guardian is adoring of her and constantly admires her intelligence and abilities. Like Sherlock Holmes with Watson, Uncle Brinnie is always one step behind both Vesper and the readers in figuring things out. Characters who are overly perfect can be a little grating, partly because there are times when they drag their friends into dangerous situations but, somehow, it’s never their fault because they’re perfect. In fiction, this kind of confidence and seeming perfection are strengths, but in real life, over-confidence is a sign of incompetence and lack of awareness. People who charge directly into dangerous situations in real life are just kind of clueless about the dangers they’re plunging into. The books in this series are just meant as fun adventure stories, not serious or true-to-life in either characterization or historical background, so Vesper’s amazing qualities, whether it’s her ability to eat all kinds of strange foods or learn new languages in barely any time at all or to compete intellectually with professional academics who are decades older than she is, fits with the story type. Vesper isn’t mean to be a real person so much as the ultimate teenage adventurer.
Kids can enjoy this teenage heroine who is on top of every situation, can rush into danger without any sense of fear, and gets her way with little argument from anyone. However, I think I would enjoy Vesper more if she did have a few more flaws and limitations. I would have liked it if Vesper had a definite fear of something, like Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes. It could be played for comedy, like in the Indiana Jones movies. I also would have liked it if Professor Garrett could have appeared more sharp than he did and provide more useful knowledge so that Vesper had to depend a little more on him professionally during their expedition. I felt like the story dumbed down the professor a bit so Vesper could appear more brilliant, and I don’t like it when characters are made to look stupid so another character can look more intelligent by comparison.
Vesper’s relationship with her deceased father is never really explained or developed, either. When we first meet her, she is well over being sad about his death and ready to embark on an adventure in his name. I would have liked it if she and her Uncle Brinnie had a heart-to-heart talk about her feelings during their travels. Dr. Holly seems to have spent a significant amount of time away from home or involved in his research work. Vesper is a motherless only child who does not seem to attend a regular school or have friends her own age. I would expect that this unconventional life would have an effect on her development and that she would have feelings about it. I would have liked her to explain more to Brinnie that her eclectic range of knowledge and expertise with languages comes from having been dragged around the world with her father from a young age, from spending time around her father’s professional colleagues and witnessing their discussions with each other, and from becoming an active research assistant to her father because their family consisted of only the two of them, and sharing his interests was a way for them to bond. I picture Dr. Holly reading pieces of classical literature to Vesper as bedtime stories because he would have little or no interest in the typical nursery rhymes or picture books.
If Vesper had more knowledge of ancient history and literature than things typical children know and like, that could also show character quirks and development. It might even be a flaw in the sense that Vesper knows more about how to speak to and relate to professional academics than girls her own age at a time when female academics were often not taken seriously. Vesper occupies an odd position in life but without the obvious awkwardness that would cause in real life. Her confidence and ability to stride forward in situations that would cause anyone else hesitation might actually come from the knowledge that, if she allowed anyone else time to think about what she’s barging into, she would never be able to accomplish what she wants to accomplish because other people wouldn’t accept it. She could be feeling more of the awkwardness of her position more than she lets on, and some discussion of her need to hide her own feelings, act more confident than she feels, or compensate for other people’s feelings about her would add depth to her character. It’s possible that later books in the series develop other sides of her personality and history more, but I would have liked more of that in this book.
Mystery Ranch by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1958, 1986.
The children can tell that something is wrong when their grandfather, Mr. Alden, comes home and bangs the doors. When they ask their grandfather what’s the matter, he says that he’s worried about his sister, Jane, because he just got a disturbing letter about her. The children have never met their Great-Aunt Jane before, and she lives on a ranch out west. The trouble is that Jane is a difficult person to get along with. She can’t stay at the ranch alone because she’s elderly and needs help, but the person who was helping her before is leaving, and because Jane is such a difficult person, their grandfather doesn’t know where he’s going to find someone else willing to help her. Their grandfather admits that he doesn’t even get along with Jane himself, confessing that he hasn’t been very nice to her, either. (We never find out exactly why the children’s parents originally told them that their grandfather wasn’t a nice man, as established in the first book of the series, but this confession hints that he used to be much harder on his relatives than he is now, perhaps having mellowed a bit with age and experience.)
Their grandfather says that the ranch where Jane lives is the ranch where both of them grew up. When he moved east years ago, Jane wanted to stay on at the ranch. He knows that Jane doesn’t have much money and doesn’t even keep many animals anymore, but because of her sense of pride and their past quarrels, Jane won’t accept any money or help from him. The children wish they could do something to help, and their grandfather says that he has to think things over. They ask who wrote the letter about Jane, and their grandfather says that it was written by the neighbor who has been staying with Jane. She says that she can’t put up with the bad treatment from Jane anymore. The letter further says that Jane wants to see Mr. Alden’s grandchildren. Naturally, the children say that they would like to see Jane themselves and try to help her. However, their grandfather isn’t sure that it’s a good idea because he doesn’t know how Jane would treat the children.
After talking it over some more, they all decide that the two girls, Jessie and Violet, will go to see Aunt Jane without the boys because Jane might find all four children at once to be too overwhelming. Mr. Alden says that if Jane gives them too much trouble, they should go to the neighbors, who are nice and will help them. When the girls get off the train at the town near their aunt’s ranch, they notice that a man gets off at the same time and quickly disappears. They are curious about him and wonder where he went. The townspeople are curious, too, because it’s rare that anybody comes to their little town, let alone a mysterious stranger.
When the girls arrive at the ranch, the neighbor, Maggie, helps them get settled. Aunt Jane refuses to get out of bed, and Maggie says that she hasn’t been eating much and won’t let her eat much, either. The girls ask Maggie what’s wrong with Aunt Jane, and she says Jane feels like she doesn’t have anything to live for, so she’s kind of given up. Jessie and Violet insist that they’re all going to eat, and they fix some food. The girls and Maggie eat first, and then, the girls take Jane some orange juice with a beaten egg. Jane finds it difficult to refuse the girls, so she drinks it. Aunt Jane starts asking the girls questions about their brothers and says that she would like to see them.
Aunt Jane begins eating better because she finds these interactions with her young nieces interesting and because they speak more kindly to her than anybody else has for years, and she enjoys the attention. Maggie stays on at the house and continues to help because the girls have money and buy more and better food. Things seem like they’re getting better at the ranch, but when Maggie and the girls return from buying food in town, Aunt Jane says that three strange men came to the house while they were gone, even entering her bedroom, and they tried to badger her into selling her ranch to them. At first, Maggie doesn’t believe that, but Aunt Jane has the paper the men left to prove it. Of course, Aunt Jane refused to sign anything and told the men to go away, but she seems a little shaken by the experience.
The girls miss their brothers, and Aunt Jane tells them that the boys can come and stay, provided that they’re not like their grandfather. When the boys come, Aunt Jane likes them, too. To the children’s surprise, she tells them that she’s decided to give her ranch to the four of them because she has no children of her own and she would rather they have it than those men who tried to get her to sell. The prospect is thrilling, but when the lawyer comes to arrange everything, they make sure that the arrangement includes providing for Aunt Jane, too.
As the children explore their new ranch together, they see that things are as their grandfather described to them. The only animal Aunt Jane currently has is an old, black horse that Benny ironically names Snowball. However, they find an old hut that looks like someone has been living there recently. Who has been secretly camping out on Aunt Jane’s land? Is it the mysterious stranger who got off the train or the three tough guys who tried to get Aunt Jane to sell the ranch to them? Why would anybody even want the ranch anyway? The children find it charming, and while the girls like to imagine how they’d like to fix up the house, they know it isn’t worth much monetarily. There aren’t many animals, and while there’s fool’s gold on the land, there’s no real gold. Is there something else on the ranch that they don’t know about?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
As readers might have guessed, there is a resource on the ranch that the Aldens have overlooked for years, but other people have figured it out. However, more than the mystery, I like this book for the insights into the Alden family’s past. As I said, we never fully find out why Mr. Alden’s son and his wife had a falling out with him years ago and told the children he wasn’t very nice, but his sister’s feelings about him offer some clues to the type of boy and young man Mr. Alden was. Mr. Alden admits that he wasn’t always nice to his sister, and Jane says that he was always “bossy.” I get the feeling that Mr. Alden used to be the kind of man who thought that he knew best about everything and started feeling like he could tell everyone what to do. Perhaps his falling out with his son helped show him that he didn’t really know best about everything, including how to get along with his own family, but admittedly, that’s speculation.
Jane also admits to being difficult to get along with in other ways. Her major problem has been her sense of pride, which is one of the reasons why she never wanted to listen to her brother or go to him for help when she needed it. One of their chief disputes had been about the ranch itself. Years ago, her parents and brother were ready to give up the ranch and move east, but Jane felt more attached to it than the others and insisted on staying there and running it herself. Unfortunately, Jane admits that she didn’t really know how to run the ranch properly. There were points when she could have asked for help, but that would have been admitting to the others that she had been wrong to insist on staying, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Things gradually got worse over time because Jane wouldn’t listen to anybody or ask for help, which is how the ranch got into its current state.
The discovery of an important resource on the ranch brings more money to the family, greater security for Jane, and a chance for the brother and sister to make up. Jane invites Mr. Alden to the ranch to celebrate her birthday and to help her and the children arrange things. Mr. Alden is careful to arrange the situation so that the resources can be mined while not disturbing the old ranch house, so his sister can continue to live in the house she always loved so much.
#6 Blue Bay Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1961, 1989.
Grandfather Alden has a surprise for his grandchildren. He is arranging a special trip for them as an extension of a business trip of his. A business associate of his, Lars, has a ship going to Tahiti, and he offered to let them come along. However, rather than just having a tour of Tahiti, which would be pretty exciting by itself, Lars is going to take them to camp out on a tropical island. Lars found this island while escaping from a shipwreck himself. No one lives there, but there is plenty of fresh water and edible plants and no dangerous animals. Not every family would like to be on an uninhabited island when they could be in Tahiti, but the kids love camping out and do-it-yourself activities. Grandfather Alden has also invited the children’s friend, Mike Wood (who was introduced in a previous book), to join them. Mike is the same age as Benny.
The trip will take place during the school year, so their grandfather has arranged for the children to bring along some school supplies and lessons to study while they’re on the boat to the island. The lessons help not only to pass the time while they’re traveling but also to enhance it. They have science lessons about marine animals and how parts of the ship, like the radio room, work. Violet tells the others about how she’s been reading about Captain Cook and how he realized that eating certain types of food, like citrus fruit and sauerkraut, helped to prevent scurvy, even though he didn’t realize that the reason is that those foods are rich in vitamin C.
Once they reach the island, their grandfather says that they won’t have time for school lessons because they will have to set up their shelter and learn how to fish and forage for food, although he considers those to be educational lessons as well. They bring some supplies and tools with them so they won’t have to forage for everything, but the kids like assembling their own shelter and improvising things, like they did when they made their own home in a boxcar in the first book. They eat out of shells they find, whittle their own spoons, and use a huge turtle shell they find as a cooking pot.
However, they soon realize that they are not as alone on the island as they thought. Some of their food disappears, and they find some colored stones arranged in patterns. There is a stone with a carved face, sort of like the Easter Island heads, and the turtle shell they find has been carved with a knife. Later, they encounter a myna bird who keeps repeating the phrase, “Hello, Peter!” Someone taught the bird the phrase in English, but who is on the island, and why does this person seem to be hiding from them?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
In the early Boxcar Children books, the children aged as the series progressed. After the death of the original author, when other authors continued the series, the children became frozen in age, but this book is one that was written by the original author. At the beginning of the story, the children’s grandfather mentions that the two oldest children, Henry and Jessie, are in high school, showing that they’ve aged about two or three years from the first book. This remark about the children’s ages only appears once at the beginning of the book, and their increasing ages aren’t really reflected in the story. The lessons the children have on the boat seem to be roughly about the same subjects, although it seems like the children’s lesson books aren’t identical because Violet seems like she’s the only one with the lesson about Captain Cook and scurvy.
This book also varies a little from the other books in the series because the children’s grandfather plays a larger role than usual. One of the hallmarks of the Boxcar Children books is that the children usually do things by themselves, with as little adult help or interference as possible. However, this time, their grandfather is with them on the island, sharing the adventure with them.
As with other vintage children’s mystery series, the early books of this series sometimes lean more toward adventure than mystery. The mystery in this story is pretty light, and the solution is pretty straight-forward. The children eventually find the person who’s camping out on the island with them. The person turns out to be a boy who was also shipwrecked. There was an adult sailor with him before, but the boy, Peter Horn, says that he went swimming one day and never came back, so he’s been alone ever since. The others say that he might have been attacked by a shark but they don’t dwell on it very long, as they do any time someone’s death is mentioned in one of the books in the series, so it doesn’t get too sad. Peter says his parents went overboard while they were escaping the shipwreck, and he doesn’t know whether they’re still alive. Mr. Alden says that he read about some people being rescued from a shipwreck, so it’s possible that they’re still alive. When they return to the mainland, Peter is reunited with this parents for a happy ending.
I remember buying this book at a Scholastic book fair back in the early 1990s, and for a while afterward, I went through a phase where I kept trying to invent different types of decorative writing. I kept them in a notebook, and most look a bit silly, like the one where the letters were made of ice cream cones and the one where the letters were weird sheep with little feet, but I had fun!
The book is about types of lettering, but it’s really much more than that. The main focus is on designing a poster. The first part of the book goes into detail about planning your poster to convey your message to other people. It recommends making an outline of your information before beginning the project and deciding what visual elements you need to include, like diagrams and pictures. There are some useful tips about research and writing, if the presentation is part of a research project.
Then the book provides examples of how to design a page, showing different possible layouts for organizing page headings, text, and images. Although this book was planned around the idea of a printed poster, I think the layout suggestions and concepts could also be used for electronic media, such as web design or PowerPoint presentations.
There are also examples for the shapes of headings and pictures and the positioning of image captions.
The book recommends using decorative markers, borders, and horizontal rules to add visual interest to the information, separate sections of a page, and make projects look more finished.
When it comes to making the lettering of the poster or page, it explains the elements that define a print style – height and width of letters, slope, line variations, pattern, color, 3D effect, and separation and spacing of letters or overlapping of letters.
A large part of the book shows examples of letters of the alphabet and numerals in different fonts. Some of them are recognizable as fonts that still used in word processing software and on the Internet.
There are also pages with examples, showing how certain styles of lettering can convey a mood or idea in headings and sample phrases.
The front and back flaps of the book fold out, and there is a chart of the parts of a page, a couple of grids like those used for planning lettering styles, and a glossary of terms used in the book.
I couldn’t find this particular book online, but a couple of related books by the same author are available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. I think I also used to own The Lettering Book of Alphabets, probably purchased at the same time as this book, and that inspired my alphabet lettering phase. The Lettering Book Companion is a companion book to The Lettering Book, and it particularly focuses on decorative borders.
Barbie’s friends, Tracy and Todd, are getting married, and Barbie and Skipper are helping Tracy to get ready. Barbie is going to be Tracy’s maid of honor, and Skipper will be the flower girl for the wedding.
However, when they’re helping Tracy to get dressed for the wedding, Barbie’s cat gets loose and Skipper accidentally tears Tracy’s dress trying to catch the cat. The three of them take the dress to the dressmaker to be fixed.
After the dress is repaired, they stop at the shoe store to pick up Barbie’s shoes. However, when they leave the store, they suddenly realize that they no longer have the box with the dress in it. Instead, they have a box that contains several pairs of jogging shoes! Somehow, the boxes were switched, but how are they going to find the person with the right box?
Barbie, Skipper, and Tracy track the person with the dress across town, using the clues that the jogging shoes belonged to a woman in a floppy straw hat with a red van that says “Flo” on it.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I read this book when I was a kid and I liked to play with Barbies, and I thought that having them solve a kind of mystery was fun, although it’s a very simple sort of mystery, chasing down a lost object. I liked this book a lot when I was little.
Barbie fans might notice that Skipper doesn’t have her 2000s look, basically looking like a smaller version of Barbie herself, which was how she looked in the 1980s and 1990s, when I got my Barbie dolls. Since then, Mattel has changed Skipper’s hair. However, people who are younger than I am might not be aware that Tracy was also a doll from the 1980s, a friend of Barbie who came in a wedding dress. This 1982 commercial on YouTube shows bride doll Tracy with her groom, Todd. The Tracy and Todd dolls existed before this book was written, so the book was written to give the dolls a story, and the dolls weren’t created based on the book.
“Sniffy” books with scent patches for readers to scratch and sniff were a recent innovation in the 1980s and were popular with kids. Many books that included this feature used well-known characters from popular children’s cartoons, like this one featuring the Smurfs.
The Smurfs are making special treats as part of a surprise party for Papa Smurf’s birthday! The first scent in the book is the soap the Smurfs use as they wash their hands and prepare to help.
All of the rest of the scents in the book are ingredients they use to make the birthday treats. There is the jam that they put in the jelly rolls, the peach they put into the peach-flavored birthday cake, violets that they make into candied violets (not common in the US, but they can be used as decorations on desserts in real life), gingerbread that they make into gingerbread Smurfs, and lemonade.
When everything is ready, they surprise Papa Smurf with their fun birthday feast!
My Reaction
We’ve had this book since I was a little kid. Sniffy books gradually lose their scents the more the patches are scratched, but we used this one pretty frequently, and the scents have held up surprisingly well. You can see the scratch marks on the scent patches in the pictures, and the scents aren’t as strong as they used to be, but even more than 30 years later, the scents are still there and recognizable as what they’re supposed to be. The one that held up the least well is the lemonade scent, but the others are pretty good for being as old as they are!
Usborne First Book of Nature designed by David Bennett, 1980.
I remember getting this book as a present from my grandmother as a child because my grandmother was an amateur naturalist. Although it’s a nonfiction book, I’m sentimental about it for that reason.
The book is divided into four sections covering different types of plants and creatures (each of which has its own book in the Usborne collection, but this book is a compilation):
Birds
This chapter explains about the parts of birds, like the different shapes of beaks and feet different birds have, aspects of birds lives and behavior, and how birds fly.
Trees
This chapter explains the parts of trees, like how roots and twigs grow and the differences between different types of leaves, tree flowers, and seeds.
Flowers
This chapter explains the parts of flowers and about pollen and seeds. It also points out the creatures that like to visit flowers, like bees and hummingbirds.
Butterflies and Moths
This chapter explains the similarities and differences between butterflies and moths and what their life cycles are like.
One of the best parts of this book is that it is designed to be interactive as well as informative. Some of the activities are explained at the beginning of each chapter, and there’s a puzzle or game at the end of each chapter. The upper right corners of each chapter have images that are meant to be used as a flip book. In the bird section, readers can quickly flip the pages to watch a bird fly. In the tree section, a leaf bud opens. In the flower section, a flower opens. In the butterfly and moth section, a butterfly opens and closes its wings.
Each chapter also has a game where you hunt for different creatures within the pages of that chapter and see how many you can find, and then, there’s another game or puzzle at the end. At the end of the bird chapter, there’s a picture puzzle where you have to find all the birds hidden in a black-and-white picture. At the end of the tree section, you have to find how many products are made from or come from trees in a busy market scene. At the end of the flower chapter, you have to match up different types of fruits with their flowers. The butterfly and moth section doesn’t have a game at the end.
This book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 