Posted on by TracyC

The Hidden Message

Adventures in the Northwoods

The Hidden Message by Lois Walfrid Johnson, 1990.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Themes and My Reaction

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

Honesty in Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sin and Forgiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Interesting Topics

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

Posted on by TracyC

Voyage to the Planets

Voyage to the Planets by Jeff Davidson, 1990.

This was my second favorite book about outer space as a kid! It would have been the first favorite, but my first favorite had glow-in-the-dark pictures, and this one doesn’t. I bought them at the same time at a school book fair, but the one with the glow-in-the-dark pictures definitely caught my attention first. This book does, however, have pictures of the planets taken by the Voyager 2 space probe.

The beginning of the book explains a little about the solar system and its place in the galaxy and the Voyager 2 probe.

Then, it takes readers on a journey through the solar system, beginning with the sun at the center of the solar system and moving outward, planet by planet. The page about each planet explains the origin of the planet’s name in Roman mythology and gives facts about the planet, such as its size, distance from the sun, and rotation and orbit periods.

The page about Earth specifically mentions, “The Earth will only support life as long as we are careful to maintain its special conditions. If people continue to pollute the environment, the delicate balance of our planet may be destroyed forever.” Books, movies, tv shows, and teachers in public school gave us environmental messages very early in life when I was young in the 1980s and 1990s.

The book ends with Pluto as the ninth planet, which is what we were taught as kids in the early 1990s. There is no mention of “dwarf planets” or the Kuiper Belt because the book was published in 1990 and scientists didn’t find definite evidence of Kuiper Belt objects until 1992.

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Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy

Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1999.

At the end of the previous book in the series, Sammy was given a punishment from her school for causing a disturbance during an assembly that requires her to complete 20 hours of community service. She’s working off her volunteer hours at St. Mary’s Church under the supervision of Father Mayhew. When Sammy lived with her mother, they weren’t religious, and Sammy hadn’t even been baptized. However, her grandmother is much more religious, and she had Sammy baptized by Father Mayhew soon after Sammy moved in with her. Father Mayhew is kind and understanding with Sammy. There are also some nuns at St. Mary’s from an order called the Sisters of Mercy. They’re helping out in the soup kitchen. When elderly Sister Josephine sees that Sammy is painting a wall in Father Mayhew’s office, she complains that he’s always getting the services that the nuns ask for and never get. They’ve been asking to have the house where they live painted for years, and it still hasn’t happened.

Father Mayhew’s gratitude for Sammy’s help fades when a small ivory cross is stolen from his office, and he thinks that Sammy did it because she was in there. Sammy tells him that she didn’t take it, but he doesn’t believe her and sends her to go work in the soup kitchen for awhile. (He didn’t ask her to turn out her pockets before she left his office. I would have because that would settle the matter right there.) In the soup kitchen, Sammy sees another girl about her age who reminds her somewhat of herself, partly because of the high-top shoes she wear. Sammy wonders who the girl is and why she’s eating at the soup kitchen, but she isn’t able to talk to her there.

Later, Sammy discusses the missing cross with Father Mayhew again. This time, he seems less certain that Sammy took it, and Sammy asks him if it was something valuable that might have been sold for money or if someone who is angry with him could have taken it as revenge. The one person who seems angry with Father Mayhew is Sister Josephine, but he can’t picture her taking the cross. However, there are other people who might have a reason to be angry with Father Mayhew. Brother Phil, who works in the soup kitchen, wants to become a full priest, but Father Mayhew doesn’t think that he’s suited to it.

The thefts also continue. A couple of gold chalices are stolen from the church. The nuns who are part of the Sisters of Mercy turn out to be traveling and staying in a trailer, and they’re only staying at St. Mary’s temporarily to hold a fundraiser. They tell Father Mayhew that someone tried to break into their trailer, but they scared the thief off. One of the nuns ask Father Mayhew to keep an heirloom locket in his safe until she can deliver it to her niece.

Meanwhile, at school, Sammy is playing on one of her school’s two softball teams. Her school nemesis, Heather, plays on the other school team, so their feuding and rivalry has transferred to the school’s sports field.

This book is the first book in the series to bring up the subject of Sammy’s father. Sammy’s grandmother gives her a catcher’s mitt that once belonged to her father. Sammy’s mother was going to throw it out, but her grandmother rescued it from the trash, and it’s the only thing Sammy has that was once her father’s. She sees her love of playing catcher at softball as a connection to the father she’s never known. Sammy has never seen a picture of her father and doesn’t know his name, and her mother has admitted that he has no idea that Sammy exists. She has asked her mother about her father in the past, but her mother refuses to tell her who he is or what happened to him. All she has ever told Sammy is that she was young when they met and her relationship with him was a mistake. Sammy can’t help but feel that her mother things of her existence as a mistake as well, maybe even a bigger one than her relationship with her father. The fact that her mother has essentially abandoned her to pursue her dream of being an actress has left her feeling like her mother never really wanted her. Sammy has to stay with her grandmother, even though it means keeping her living arrangements a secret, because staying with her father isn’t even an option.

The next time that Sammy sees the mysterious girl in high-tops at the soup kitchen, she and her friends follow her to see where she lives. It turns out that she’s homeless and living in a cardboard box. This discovery raises some personal questions and concerns for Sammy. On the one hand, she’s unfortunate because her living situation is precarious and depends on not being caught in her grandmother’s apartment, which is meant only for seniors, but on the other, she does have her grandmother to rely on. This other poor girl doesn’t seem to have anyone. At one point, Sammy asks her grandmother about what would have happened to her if she hadn’t been able to take Sammy when her mother left. It’s an uncomfortable question for both of them because it raises the question of whether Sammy’s mother would have just abandoned her completely if she hadn’t had her mother willing to take her. Sammy’s mother doesn’t seems to care how awkward their living arrangement is because they have to keep Sammy’s presence in the apartment a secret. Without Sammy’s father in the picture, there is no one else but her grandmother to take her. There is also the constant question of what would happen to Sammy and her grandmother if someone manages to prove that Sammy is living with her against the rules. Sammy is better off than the homeless girl, not by much, but still better.

Later in the story, after Sammy’s beloved mitt is stolen, Sammy tells Hudson about everything that’s going on. She’s pretty sure that Heather is the mitt thief because she’s the one person who’s always doing awful things to her. Hudson points out that, in a way, Sammy is fortunate to know who she can trust and who she can’t, and she has one definite enemy. Holly has never really had anybody to trust before, and Father Mayhew has no idea who he can trust or not trust in his church. His thief is obviously one of the people who works with him on daily basis, someone who can come and go while seeming above suspicion, and Father Mayhew is only just beginning to realize that there are people around him he can’t trust as much as he thought.

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

My Reaction

For awhile, Sammy suspects that the homeless girl who visits the soup kitchen might be the thief who is stealing things from the church, but she’s not. The girl, whose name is Holly, becomes a regular character in the series. She is a runaway foster child who’s had an even tougher life than Sammy. When she and Sammy talk, she explains how she was abused in previous foster homes, which is why she ran away to live on her own. At one point, she is attacked by a man, and Sammy has to help fight him off. The girls realize that Holly can’t keep camping out on her own, and Sammy helps her find a place to stay with people who turn out to be able to provide a much more stable home for her, which is how she remains a character for the rest of the series. Holly begins attending school with Sammy and her friends, with her new foster family making up a story about how she transferred from New Mexico. Her new home seems to be a kind secretive foster home, not unlike Sammy’s living arrangements. Her new foster family doesn’t seem to try to legalize their custody of Holly (not in this book, anyway), possibly out of fear of her being taken away and put in other abusive or dysfunctional foster homes in the flawed system she came from. There is also a standalone book which focuses specifically on Holly called Runaway, which explains more about her personal history. Some of the things that happened to Holly are an indication that this series isn’t meant for young children. I would say that it’s best for tweens and up, probably about around the middle school level.

One of my favorite characters in this series is Hudson Graham, a retired old man who acts like a grandfather to Sammy. She often goes to see him when she needs help and advice. He is knowledgeable on an eclectic range of topics, and he has a massive private library that can answer most of Sammy’s questions. In this book, Sammy thinks about how, even though she and Hudson have talked about many things together, including his wide-ranging hobbies, she doesn’t really know that much about his past, even what he used to do for a living before he retired. Because he has a collection of foreign language dictionaries and recording devices, Sammy thinks that he might have once worked for the CIA or something. When the people who own the dog grooming business down the street lose the key to their safe because a dog ate it, Sammy asks Hudson what they can go, and he tells her some fascinated facts about safes and how to get into them. The fact that he knows about that suggested to me that he probably worked in law enforcement or security at some point. My thought is that he might have once been a private investigator because they do security work and would have some basic law knowledge and use devices that Hudson has, like recording machines and cameras. My next guess would be that he was a journalist, also because of the recording devices and cameras and because journalists can write on a wide range of topics, giving Hudson his eclectic knowledge and the need for his own private research library. Aspects of Sammy’s life and the lives of people she knows add extra mystery to the story. Hudson’s past isn’t explained in this book in the series, and I’m not sure if it ever is.

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief

Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1998.

Samantha “Sammy” Keyes lives with her grandmother in her apartment because her mother (who she calls “Lady Lana”) left her with her grandmother a year before, when she left to pursue an acting career. Much of the time, Sammy doesn’t have much to do at her grandmother’s apartment, so she spends her time watching people and nearby buildings with her binoculars. Technically, Sammy isn’t supposed to be living in her grandmother’s apartment because the apartment building is for seniors only, so they have to keep her presence a secret. Sammy only keeps a few belongings that are easily hidden, and she has to hide in a closet when people they don’t know and trust come to the door. She can’t come and go as often as she wants because her grandmother’s nosy neighbor will notice and report her. One day, while looking at a seedy hotel nearby, she witnesses someone with black gloves stealing money from someone’s purse. As she watches, this man looks directly at her and can tell that she’s watching. Sammy has the strange feeling like she’s seen the man somewhere before, but she can’t think where, and she’s nervous that he saw her, too.

A little later, Sammy’s friend, Marissa, comes to the apartment and asks Sammy to help her find her younger brother, who’s missing. Sammy knows that the best place to look for Marissa’s brother is at the pet store, so the two girls hurry off to find him. On her way back to her grandmother’s apartment, Sammy sees that there are police at the hotel, so the theft has been discovered. There are other kids standing around and watching, so Sammy decides to take a look, too. She sees the police interviewing the woman whose money was stolen. As she listens to them talk and mention looking for fingerprints, she can’t help but comment that there won’t be any fingerprints because the thief wore gloves. When the police and victim all hear her say that, they realize that she’s the only witness to the crime. As they question her, she describes what she saw while giving them as little personal information as possible so her secret of living with her grandmother won’t be exposed. When the police take down her name and address, she gives them her real name but Marissa’s address in a wealthy part of town.

The next day, both Sammy and Marissa have their first day of junior high school. Sammy immediately gets the attention of the school mean girl, Heather Acosta (who becomes her school nemesis for the rest of the series). When Heather jabs Sammy in the butt with a sharp pin, Sammy punches her in the nose. Of course, the vice principal shows all kinds of sympathy to poor Heather and punishes Sammy because he claims that nobody saw Heather jab Sammy in the butt with a pin. He makes her sit alone in a tiny closet that the school calls “the Box” to think about what she’s done. Even when Marissa tells the principal what really happened, supporting what Sammy said, the principal just says that there’s never any excuse for punching anybody and that Sammy is suspended. The vice principal expects Sammy to shake hands with her rotten abuser and make peace when she returns to school. (Ooh, I hate that. I’ve got a rant for later.)

After Sammy’s suspension, she and Marissa walk home together, and Sammy tells Marissa about what she witnessed at the hotel. When the two girls stop at the store, they see the woman whose purse was robbed and learn that she’s an astrologer called Madame Nashira (real name Gina). Surprisingly, she admits that she doesn’t really believe in fortune-telling, but she does it anyway because she needs the money. She likes drawing up astrological birth charts for people, though. There’s an interesting scene in the book where she does one for Sammy and explains how it works. (I’ve never been serious about astrology, and I doubt it even more since I took an astronomy class and my teacher showed us how to use a star globe and used it to explain why people’s birth signs aren’t their real birth signs, but it was still kind of fascinating just to think about. I’ve never actually seen a real birth chart before.)

When Sammy gets back to her grandmother’s apartment, Sammy’s grandmother’s nosy neighbor, Mrs. Graybill, tries to find evidence that Sammy is living there against the rules, or Sammy has to pretend like she’s only visiting and leaves to visit a nearby friend, Hudson Graham, an old man who has a lot of books. The two of them talk about other robberies that have happened in the area recently. When Sammy gets back to the apartment, she finds Mrs. Graybill angrily telling her grandmother that Sammy wrote her a threatening note and slipped it under her door. Of course, Sammy didn’t do any such thing. When Sammy sees that the note says, “If you talk, you’ll be sorry,” she knows that the threat is actually from the thief. The thief knew that someone from the apartment building was watching him, but he accidentally delivered the threat to the wrong apartment. With a threatening thief wanting to keep her quiet, Heather and the school principal wanting her butt to suffer at home, the nosy Mrs. Graybill wanting her sent away from her grandmother’s apartment, and the police wanting Sammy at her friend Marissa’s house, Sammy’s witnessing of the theft threatens to expose her own secrets.

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

My Reaction

One of the things that stands out to me is that neither Marissa nor Sammy really live in the best homes. Marissa’s family has a lot more money, and they live in a big house, but her parents are busy business people who spend most of their time working and traveling, often leaving Marissa alone with her younger brother, fending for themselves with Pop Tarts and tv dinners. Marissa feels neglected, and she really is. She also doesn’t have many real friends. A lot of the other kids who play up to her, like Heather, are trying to get her to give them money because they’re aware that her parents give her a lot of spending cash, and Marissa has had trouble saying “no” to them in the past. One of the thing Marissa likes about Sammy is that she’s never asked her for money. Sammy likes Marissa for herself.

Sammy is surprised when she finds out that Marissa actually envies her because her grandmother is always there for her in ways her parents aren’t. Sammy doesn’t feel lucky because, even though her grandmother cares about her, she always lives on the edge, having to pretend like she’s not really living with her grandmother, keeping only a few belongings that are easily hidden, and ducking into a closet to avoid being caught. She can never be completely at home in her grandmother’s apartment because she isn’t supposed to be there at all. Sammy’s mother occasionally calls, but Sammy always feels uncomfortable and neglected by her mother’s abandonment of her, which is why she refers to her as “Lady Lana” instead of as her mother.

I thought at first that Sammy’s housing situation might be solved by the end of the book, but it wasn’t. At the end of the story, she’s still secretly living with her grandmother and lying to the police about being Marissa’s foster sister. However, there are hints in this book about another possible place for Sammy and her grandmother to live in the future, so that situation might change. At no point in the story does anyone mention who Sammy’s father is, where he is, or why he didn’t take Sammy when her mother left. The identity of Sammy’s father is actually an over-arching mystery in this series, something that they discuss later.

As for the book’s introduction of “Rear” Admiral Heather the Butt Poker, the book doesn’t use the phrase “rotten abuser”, but that’s my take on it. Get ready for another one of my anti-bullying rants, or skip the rest of this long paragraph and the next two after that. I always find bullying in books stressful, especially when adults take the side of the young bully. It’s not as bad when a bully is punished or at least called out for their bullying, but when adults refuse to believe the victim, it’s awful. I know from long, bitter experience how the worst, most twisted mean kids provoke fights so their victims end up looking like the bad ones when they finally snap. The abusive kids know that the adults like them and will favor them every time. I’ve seen it happen before, and the fact that situations like this end up in books like this shows that it’s a sadly common experience that many people relate to. The abusers’ behavior never changes because they never experience consequences. The adults delude themselves that the abusers are either “normal” kids or will change (somehow, magically) as they get older and gaslight the victims that the situation is their fault and that it’s possible to be friends with the abuser without the abuser changing their behavior and continuing to act the same mean way they always act. I appreciate that the book shows the unfairness of the situation by adults who just want the situation easily resolved and make the kid they don’t like as well take the brunt of it. I know that Sammy’s use of physical retaliation is what put her in trouble, but honestly, I feel more inclined as an adult to think that sometimes physical force is necessary when dealing with a physical abuser. I’ve never heard of anyone who stopped being physically or emotionally abusive because they were asked politely, and when people in authority refuse to do anything, there sadly isn’t much recourse. Heather should not be touching anyone else’s butt, not with a sharp object, not with her hands, and not with anything else. It’s someone else’s butt. Heather should NOT be touching anyone else’s butt for any reason at all, let alone inflicting pain to someone else’s butt by penetrating it with something sharp. At her age, she should be old enough to understand that sort of thing has connotations other than a kid’s prank, and if she isn’t, someone needs to have a long, serious talk with her to explain why. I know that Heather’s meant to be just a thoughtless mean kid and not molester or something, but she’s still young and someone should put a stop to this before it goes any further. Understanding of these things has to come at some point in a person’s life. If there’s any lesson that’s difficult to carry too far, it’s the concept that no one should mess with someone else’s butt and cause pain. If Heather is allowed to mess with people’s butts in this school, understand that there is absolutely nowhere else in this society where she would be allowed to do that without repercussions. There’s no shame in having some weirdo you don’t even know assault your butt, but there’s a whole world of shame for being that weirdo who can’t leave someone else’s butt alone. Also, Heather jabbed Sammy with something sharp that penetrated her skin. Am I the only adult thinking about tetanus and blood poisoning?

Kids who are bullies in school are more likely to engage in aggressive, anti-social, and criminal behavior in adulthood. Shrugging and saying “Kids will be kids” while doing nothing is one of the worst possible things to do. Bullies don’t magically get better when they hit a certain age. If no one intervenes and teaches them that there are some forms of behavior that are never acceptable and really enforce the rules, they will continue their bullying for the whole rest of their lives, seeing the whole rest of the world as being in the wrong for complaining about their behavior, causing workplace stress, family turmoil, and failed relationships. It’s a serious problem. It’s not harmless. It seems like decades past time for the school vice principal to have this explained to him as well. A school can have all kinds of anti-bullying rules, but if they never enforce them for all parties involved, they’re completely useless because it’s like they don’t even exist at all. Kids are pretty good judges of who’s a pushover and what they can get away with, so anyone who’s worked with them should realize that the only rules that matter are the ones that actually get enforced. Unless the vice principal is one of those grown-up bullies himself who never got a clue and can’t stand to realize the reality about himself, which is always a possibility. I just have no sympathy for that.

I wonder if the vice principal considered how his reaction to what Sammy told him about being jabbed in the butt by a sharp object, actively punishing Sammy for what she said and for her physical retaliation to the violation of her body, might be teaching her some terrible lessons about how to respond to a sexual assault, including the one that people in authority will never believe her and will actively punish her because it’s the easiest thing for them to do and that’s all that matters. That happens quite a lot in real life, as the #MeToo movement has shown. This video, which is rather explicit in its descriptions and not for kids, explains about university officials who act like this vice principal and the harm they do when they let sexual violators go unpunished and even rewarded, while their victims are sent jumping through hoops for justice they never plan to give them because they just want them to shut up, go away, and not make trouble for the bullies they really like. At their core, bullying and sexual violence are both about power and control over other people and using people for the perpetrator’s purpose. It’s not really surprising that there is a connection between the two and that young bullies can turn into perpetrators of sexual violence. I wonder if the vice principal’s response would have been different if it had been a boy who jabbed Sammy’s butt instead of a girl. Actually, I don’t really wonder. I’m sure he would never think of that and would spend a lot more time coming up with reasons why this situation is different is different from any form of sexual assault, so harmless, and how he shouldn’t have to think of it if someone asked him. I liked the part where Sammy offered to show him the mark from the pin if he refused to believe her, an offer the vice principal didn’t accept. I know he’s just taking the easy way out here, punishing the person who didn’t lie and deny throwing a punch and maybe sympathizing with Heather because she got noticeably hurt in a place that isn’t covered by pants and underwear, but as an adult who remembers kids like Heather, I have absolutely no respect for this vice principal for his hard-line punish-the-bullied stance. I don’t feel for Heather at all because she got what she provoked, and there was repeated provocation followed up by a physical attack before Sammy finally broke. Every human on Earth has a breaking point, anyone might snap when pushed too far, and nobody is clever for exploiting someone’s human emotions to the point where they break. Learning that is a valuable life lesson. Of course, I know Heather sticks around as a bully for other books, so she’s not learning a thing.

While Sammy is suspended, Heather and her friend Tenille start a scheme at school to get money from other students by milking their sympathy for her “broken nose” (what they call the “Help Heal Heather Fund”). Of course, her nose isn’t really broken. Sammy realizes it because she’s seen someone with a broken nose before, and the bandaging on Heather’s isn’t right. (The book doesn’t mention it, but people with a broken nose also typically get two black eyes or at least dark, obvious bruises under the eyes from the broken blood vessels. I didn’t know that as a kid, but someone told me about that as an adult, so that’s one of the first things I’d look for.) When Sammy realizes that Heather is faking a broken nose and putting bandages on herself, she figures out how to expose her scheme. She calls the office of the doctor Heather mentioned to someone else, pretending to be Heather, and has the doctor’s office call the vice principal to explain that she doesn’t really need to wear bandages, implying that the vice principal is forcing her to wear them against her will out of an abundance of caution. After the vice principal gets the call from the doctor, who chewed him out for forcing a girl to cover her nose in bandages over just a little nose bleed, he marches into the cafeteria and tells Heather to take her bandages off in front of everyone, exposing her fraud. He tells her that they’re going to have a talk in his office about her lies, and Heather tries to hit Sammy, accidentally hitting the vice principal instead. Heather gets suspended for much longer than Sammy was, and the other students are angry with both her and Tenille for taking their money. The vice principal never apologizes to Sammy for his earlier implication that she was lying and for making her sit in that little closet called “the Box” to think about it, but her reputation is restored at school.

Posted on by TracyC

Susannah and the Purple Mongoose Mystery

Susannah and the Purple Mongoose Mystery by Patricia Elmore, 1992.

This is the third book in the Susannah Higgins mystery series.

It’s summer, and Lucy has been helping Susannah practice for the Black Poetry Recitation contest. She’s not expecting the summer to get any more exciting than that because her father has told her that he can’t afford summer camp for her this year.

One day, Lucy and Susannah go to visit a friend of Susannah’s grandmother, Mrs. Quigley. Mrs. Quigley, often called Quiggy, says that she has a surprise for them. The “surprise” turns out to be that Quiggy has taken in a foster child, a girl named Theresa. Theresa is about the same age as the other girls and will be going to school with them in the sixth grade. Theresa tells the other girls that she likes Quiggy, but she doesn’t like Ruth, Quiggy’s cousin who lives with her. Ruth is a fussy woman who doesn’t like kids much, and Lucy tells Theresa that she’s like that with everyone. The only people Ruth really seems to like are Quiggy and her dog, Pipsqueak.

However, the girls are also shocked when they see that Quiggy’s garage has burned down. Fortunately, the fire didn’t spread to her house, but the garage is destroyed, and it looks like arson. Susannah tries to question Theresa about the fire, but Theresa says that she was asleep until Quiggy smelled smoke and woke her. Lucy thinks that the fire reminds her of when a girl she knew in second grade tried to set fire to a storage shed on the playground. Then, Lucy suddenly realizes why Theresa looks so familiar to her – Theresa was that girl from the second grade. Susannah doesn’t remember Theresa or the shed incident because she was going to a different school then.

Lucy is quick to suspect that Theresa is the one who set the garage on fire because of her firebug past, but Susannah is more doubtful. She wants to learn a little more about Theresa’s past since the second grade, where she’s been living, and whether she’s continued her firebug habit in other places she’s lived.

However, Theresa falls under suspicion again when another fire destroys Quiggy’s back porch, deliberately set by lighting a pile of newspapers on fire. Quiggy and Ruth were out at the time, and Theresa was home, but she says that she went to the park and didn’t know about the fire until she got back. Ruth is quick to accuse Theresa, saying that she knew that she’d be trouble from the beginning.

Mrs. Weinberger, the woman who called the fire department, said that she noticed the smoke right away because she was working in her garden around the time the fire started. When Susannah asks her if she was in the garden the whole time, she says that she did leave for awhile because she got an unexpected delivery of roses from a secret admirer, and the delivery boy even sang “You Are My Sunshine.” It sounds suspicious, like someone who knew Mrs. Weinberger’s normal habits deliberately tried to distract her so she wouldn’t see the arsonist arrive. Mrs. Weinberger describes the delivery boy, saying he looked about 18 years years old, he was blonde, and he had a tattoo on his arm. Also, both his shirt and his bicycle were purple. All she can remember about the name of the florist is “Mongoose”, which is a pretty odd name for a flower shop. The roses make it seem less likely that Theresa would have been the arsonist. Roses would be an expensive gift/distraction for a recently-arrived foster child to send.

When the girls learn from a boy Theresa used to live with in another foster home that she was sent away for trying to set a fire there, it looks bad for her. The girls talk to Theresa and suggest that she needs professional help, but Theresa denies ever setting any fires at all, at least, not on purpose. The fire at her last foster home was just a cooking accident, and Theresa wasn’t sad to leave there because the family wasn’t nice to her. As for the shed in the second grade, Theresa explains that she wasn’t actually trying to light the shed on fire. She was living in a foster home back then, too, and she’d just gotten a bad report card and a letter from her teacher that she was afraid to show to her foster family. She was trying to destroy them, and things just got out of control. Theresa insists that she would never want to do anything to hurt Quiggy or make her mad because she’s been nicer to her than any of her previous foster parents have, and she really wants to stay with her.

Theresa isn’t the only suspect for the arsonist, though. Could Ruth have somehow arranged the fires to get rid of the child because she didn’t want to share a home with her? What about Mr. Reid, the cranky next door neighbor who is annoyed about the sound of kids playing? There’s also Toby, Quiggy’s handsome nephew, who does handyman work for his aunt. He has access, but does he have a motive? What about George Peterson, who wants to buy Quiggy’s house? What about Arthur Featherstone from Theresa’s former foster home? Could he be holding some kind of grudge? It seems like the key to finding the real arsonist is finding the boy who delivered the flowers on the purple bike with the name “Mongoose” printed on it.

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

My Reaction

One of my favorite things about this series is that the author does a good job of making a number of people look like equally good suspects. In the beginning, I had multiple theories about who the real arsonist could be, and I honestly wasn’t sure who it was for much of the book. One of my early theories turned out to be correct, but I changed my mind two or three times along the way.

Something else that I’d like to mention is that, at one point, the characters go to the library to do some research, and they use microfiche to read some old newspaper articles. When this book was written, the Internet and the World Wide Web were just starting to evolve into something that the general public could use, but most people didn’t have access yet. Even libraries didn’t have the rows of Internet-capable computers they have now. Some may have been starting to get them by this point, but it was a gradual process, and I don’t think my local library had them until a few years later. In fact, I think this was around the time that my school’s library replaced the old card catalog with the new computer catalog, and it wasn’t an online catalog; it was just a database stored on the computer in the library. Remembering things like this makes me feel old, but I was part of that 1980s/1990s generation of kids (the very oldest of the Millennials) who were first taught to use more manual forms of data storage before being gradually trained in more digital forms as we moved up through the grades in school.

Because, in those days, in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, there was no ability for most public libraries and other institutions to scan documents, like newspapers, and upload them to the Internet for easy sharing, or just write them directly to the Internet in the first place, they would convert printed materials to microfiche, which are essentially smaller film images taken of the documents. In order to read them, you would have to use a microfiche reader, physically load the images you want on sheets of transparent film, and look at a magnified version of them on the screen, scrolling through them until you found the information you were looking for. There was no way to make the process go faster with a keyword search. It was a royal pain. I had to do it a few times for various school reports, and I never thought it was fun. If you look at this video of people demonstrating how to use a microfiche reader, you see how they have to turn the dial to get the image aligned properly so they can read it, and also when they physical move the piece of film in the opposite direction to the way the image scrolls on the screen. I always thought that was annoyingly counter-intuitive. I know why it does that, because it’s about where the viewer is positioned over the image, not where film is moving, but I remember being annoyed with it when I was a kid because I’d move it in the wrong direction and get mixed up. Maybe it’s just how my mind works. When you find the image/page you want on the microfilm, there is a way to print it out on paper. Some libraries still use microfiche (which is why this video exists), and it can be useful for looking at old records, but online archives are starting to replace this method of data storage. When my local library underwent renovations in the early 2000s, they decided to replace their old microfiche area with a new teen center and more computers. I think they sent the microfiche machines and archives to the local university library. I’m not even 40 yet, and I feel old.

Posted on by TracyC

Somewhere in Africa

Somewhere in Africa by Ingrid Mennen and Niki Daly, illustrated by Nicolaas Maritz, 1990.

I didn’t read this book when I was a child, although it’s old enough that I could have, but I was fascinated when I found it in a Little Free Library because this is an American edition of a book that was originally from South Africa. I enjoyed the colorful painted pictures, and I think it’s a good book for explaining to American children what it would be like to be a kid in South Africa. For a child living in a city, life actually wouldn’t be too different from the lives of American children living in cities. Africa isn’t all savannas and animal safaris.

A boy named Ashraf lives in Africa. He doesn’t live in a place with lions, crocodiles, and zebras, though. He lives in a very busy city. Ashraf likes animals, and he reads about them in his favorite library book.

As Ashraf goes to the library, he sees all of the busy traffic of the city and passes by shops with fascinating things in their windows. In the market, there is a fruit seller singing about his products. Other people are selling flowers, and there are street musicians.

When Ashraf gets to the library, he checks out the same book about African animals again.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Dancing with the Indians

Dancing with the Indians by Angela Shelf Medearis, illustrated by Samuel Byrd, 1991.

I love books with historical background, and this is a fascinating picture book that is based on the history of the author’s family. Like the author’s earlier book, Picking Peas for a Penny, it is told in rhyme, from the point of view of the author’s mother as a child in Oklahoma during the 1930s.

The girl and her brother are going with their parents to visit the Seminole American Indians. As they travel in their wagon, the parents explain to the children the history of their family. Many years before, the girl’s grandfather (the author’s great-grandfather) escaped from slavery and ran away to Oklahoma, where he was accepted by the Seminole tribe. Ever since, his descendants have continued to visit the tribe and join in Seminole celebrations and ceremonies as part of their extended family.

The night is an exciting celebration with dancing, drumming, and songs and stories of past triumphs.

They all dance and celebrate through the entire night, until morning. As the family returns home to tend to their farm, the father promises them that they’ll return to dance with the Indians again.

I liked this book because it explains an aspect of American history that I don’t remember being discussed much when I was in school. In fact, I think that the first time I saw anything that explained that escaping slaves sometimes headed west instead of north before the Civil War was in a Disney Adventures magazine, where they were talking about cowboy, specifically mentioning black cowboys. However, another option was for escaped slaves to join up with Native American tribes. The Seminole tribe of Florida and Oklahoma was one group that was known to accept escaped slaves and adopt them into the tribe, starting in the early 1700s continuing into the 1850s. Some of the escaped slaves married into the tribe. The African Americans who joined the Seminoles and their descendants came to be called Black Seminoles. Parts of the two cultures intermingled. Black Seminoles adopted Seminole traditions, and they also introduced Seminoles to aspects of their traditions. The relationship has had complications as well, and even in modern times, there are debates about how much Black Seminoles count as part of the tribe and how much they should be entitled to certain benefits

This is a Reading Rainbow Book. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Picking Peas for a Penny

Picking Peas for a Penny by Angela Shelf Medearis, drawings by Charles Shaw, 1990.

This picture book is based on stories from the author’s family and is told from the point of view of her mother, when she was a child in Oklahoma in the 1930s. The story is told in rhyme with a kind of sing-song counting from one to ten as they pick peas and put them in their baskets.

The 1930s was the time of the Great Depression. Many people were out of work, but this African American family has a farm and makes money by growing and harvesting crops. It doesn’t pay much, and everyone needs to help, but because times are hard, they are glad that they are able to do the work and earn the money.

It’s hard work that takes all day in the hot sun, but the girl telling the story says that she and her brother have a little fun while they’re doing it, too. Their grandmother tells them not to goof off because they work to finish. The grandfather of the family offers the children a penny for every pound of peas they pick and says that he’ll take them into town to spend it, so the children start a pea-picking race with each other.

After the work is done, they visit the general store in town, and the children have the opportunity to buy treats for themselves. They only have pennies, but it’s enough to buy some penny candy and soda pop. After the hard work they’ve done, it feels like a rich reward.

In the back of the book, there’s a picture of the author’s family. Although the story itself doesn’t mention it, the name of the girl in the story is Angeline.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Addy’s Cook Book

Addy, An American Girl

Addy’s Cook Book by Rebecca Sample Bernstein, Terri Braun, Tamara England, and Jodi Evert, 1994.

This cook book is one of the activity books that was written to accompany the Addy series that is part of the American Girls franchise. The American Girls books were written to help teach American history (as well as sell the accompanying dolls and accessories), so this book has recipes of the type that people would have eaten during the American Civil War, when the character of Addy lived, and some historical information.

The book begins with sections of historical information about African Americans, kitchens, and table settings in the 1860s. It describes the lives of slaves and explains how they were given basic rations of food which they could supplement and extend by producing or gathering some food of their own, such as vegetables they grew or fish they caught themselves. When they managed to escape from slavery, they had to depend on help from others, such as churches or abolitionists, until they became established in their new lives. When they were able, many of them provided help to others who were in the same position. (This was a topic covered in the Addy books.)

The types of kitchens they used depended on where they were living. As slaves, Civil War era African Americans would do their cooking in small fireplaces attached to the small cabins where they lived. Because they needed the fire for cooking, they kept it burning all the time, even in hot weather. Free African Americans had more options. Depending on their living arrangements, they might have a stove for their cooking, or if they lived in a boarding house, they might be provided with meals as part of their boarding, paid for along with the rent on their rooms.

The recipes in the book are divided into three sections: breakfast, dinner, and favorite foods. There is a section with some general cooking tips, but there are other cooking tips and pieces of historical information included along with the recipes. Some information that I found particularly useful explains why some historical recipes can be confusing to read. Because some people were using cooking fires and some were using stoves, 19th century recipes can have vague-sounding instructions like “fry until golden brown” instead of specific cooking times and temperatures. It was also common for people to cook favorite dishes from memory instead of following written recipes. People learned to cook from their elders, and they just continued doing what parents and grandparents always did when they cooked. The book doesn’t mention it, but this style of cooking also continued into the 20th century, so even when people wrote down recipes, they might seem vague or incomplete to modern readers. It was like that with recipes that my grandmother and great-grandmother wrote down, too. They were accustomed to making certain recipes mostly from memory, and they didn’t feel obligated to write down every little step, assuming that anyone who read it would already know how to make that kind of dish and would just need a few reminders about amounts. Fortunately, the recipes in this book are all written with detailed, modern instructions and include cooking times and oven temperatures.

The book explains that poor people during the Civil War didn’t usually have much for breakfast because they had to rise early and get to work. Most mornings, they might have some leftovers from the previous night or some simple hot foods, like buttermilk biscuits and hominy grits, a traditional Southern breakfast food made from corn (my grandmother said that she had it when she was growing up on a farm in Indiana, too). As a special treat, they might have scrambled eggs or sausage and gravy.

The dinner section includes main dishes, like fried fish, and side dishes, like hush puppies. A particular recipe that gets extra attention is Hoppin’ John, a rice dish with black-eyed peas and bacon. Hoppin’ John is special because it’s a dish traditionally served at New Year’s Day.

The section of favorite foods include chicken shortcake, a few other side dishes, and a few special treats, including peach cobbler and shortbread. I’ve tried the shortbread recipe, and I like it. It’s easy to make and includes only a few ingredients, and it’s really good. It does contain a lot of butter, so it’s just an occasional treat.

The book ends with a section of advice for planning an Emancipation party. It explains how people celebrated when the Emancipation Proclamation was read publicly on December 31, 1862, having been transmitted to communities by telegraph. Children played games like Novel Writers (which is a story-writing game similar to Consequences) and Blindman’s Buff. The book also describes the origins of Juneteenth – slaves in Texas were freed on June 19th, 1865, about two and half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

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

Posted on by TracyC

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

The Twelve Dancing Princesses retold and illustrated by Ruth Sanderson, 1990.

This is a retelling of the classic German fairy tale collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. There are various retellings of this story, some changing the number of princesses and some giving the characters different names. This one is actually closer to the Andrew Lang version from The Red Fairy Book, published in 1890.

A king with twelve daughters has a strange mystery to solve. All twelve of his daughters sleep in the same room every night. The door to their room is always locked, but every morning, the girls’ shoes are completely worn out, like they’ve been dancing all night. The girls claim that all they do at night is sleep, but that doesn’t explain what happened to their shoes.

The king is confused and troubled by this odd mystery, so he promises the hand of one of his daughters in marriage to the man who can solve the mystery. A series of princes attempt to solve the mystery by sleeping in a room next to the princesses, but in the morning, each of the princes has mysteriously disappeared and the princesses’ shoes are still worn out.

With the mystery getting more mysterious and more urgent, with the princes’ disappearances, a commoner named Michael decides that he wants to try to solve the mystery. A woman Michael meets recommends that he take a job as a gardener’s helper at the castle and see if he can spot something that would give him a hint. The mysterious woman gives Michael a cloak that will make him invisible so that he can follow the princesses and see what they do.

Michael first meets the princesses when the gardener sends him to give a bouquet of flowers to each of them. He catches the attention of the youngest princess, Lina. Lina’s sisters tease her about admiring a simple garden boy, but Michael also likes Lina.

Because he is a commoner, Michael doesn’t think that he can go the king directly and ask to investigate the mystery of the princesses, so he decides to use his magic cloak to spy on them secretly. When he’s invisible, he slip into their room before the princesses are locked in for the night and hides. After everyone thinks that the princesses have gone to bed, they get dressed as if they’re going to a dance, putting on their new dancing shoes. The eldest princess opens a special trap door in the floor, and they all leave secretly, with Michael following them.

Michael follows the princesses through magical woods to a lake where the captive, now enchanted, princes wait to take the princesses to a magical palace in boats shaped like swans. There, the princesses dance with the princes all night, wearing their shoes to pieces.

Lina suspects that someone followed them because Michael accidentally stepped on her skirt a couple of times, and Michael confirms her suspicion when he places a branch from the magical woods into her bouquet of flowers. At first, Lina tries to bribe Michael into keeping their secret by offering him money, but he refuses. She asks him if he plans to tell the king and collect his reward by marrying one of the princesses, but Michael says he won’t. Lina tries to ask him why, but he doesn’t want to answer. The truth is that Michael loves Lina and doesn’t want to get her into trouble or force her to marry him if she doesn’t return his affections.

Eventually, Lina tells her eldest sister, the one who is controlling all of the magic behind their escapades, about Michael and what he knows. Lina’s sisters want to have Michael thrown in the dungeon to keep him quiet, but Lina is horrified and says that if they do that, she’ll tell their father the truth herself. Instead, they decide to openly invite him to their next dance and offer him the magical drink that would enchant him like they did with all of the other princes. Michael overhears their plan and decides that he will see if Lina really loves him. If can’t appeal to her heart, he’ll drink the drink and be enchanted.

When Lina prevents Michael from drinking the enchanted drink at the dance because she loves him and can’t stand to see him turned into a mindless magical slave, the spell is broken on all of the other princes. They all return to the castle, and the magical palace crumbles behind them. When they reveal the truth to the king, he makes Michael the heir to the kingdom with Lina as his wife.

I’ve heard many different versions of this story before, but there are always so many unanswered questions. Just how did the eldest princess come up with this whole magical dancing scheme in the first place? Where did she even learn to do magic? How come the princesses are never tired even though they dance every night instead of sleeping? (Well, I guess that could just be magic because magic can fill many plot holes.) Why did the king just keep giving the girls new dancing shoes when they kept wearing them out every night? My parents would have just stopped giving me things that I repeatedly broke, telling me that I can’t have new stuff if I can’t take care of the old. They’d probably say something like, “I don’t know what you’re doing with those shoes every night, but whatever it is, you’re not going to do it anymore because you won’t have them.” But, fairy tale characters just aren’t that practical, and if they were, the story would have ended much sooner. In fact, why didn’t the king himself just sit up for one night with his daughters and see for himself what they did or split them up and put them in different rooms of his castle to put an end to their hijinks? Just what is the king going to do with the eldest princess, now that he knows that she’s some kind of witch or enchantress? Did her powers break completely when Michael broke her spell? Also, what was the deal with the mysterious woman Michael met on the road, who gave him the invisibility cloak? How did she figure into this, or was she just some random, magical being or enchantress who, coincidentally, just happened to have a magical cloak that she could spare? The story doesn’t really say.

I love the pictures in this book because they are beautiful and detailed, but the art style is a little unusual. Instead of having every picture appear in its entirety on a page, some pictures wrap around to the next page, either giving a hint of what’s coming or a taste of what was on the previous page. Sometimes, I found myself wanting to see the whole picture at once, but I can see how the illustrator was trying to make scenes in the story kind of flow into each other.

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