The Codebreaker Kids by George Edward Stanley, 1987.
Dinky Lakewood likes living in Washington, D.C. because it’s such an interesting place, and he loves the stories about spies and government intrigue that appear in the local newspaper. His father, who deals in plumbing supplies, thinks that all this sneaking and spying is awful and threatens to move his family somewhere else when he hears about another spy being caught, but Dinky decides that he’s going to get in on the action because he has a special skill that the spies really need.
The newspapers say that the reason why the latest spy was caught was because he and his associates were so bad at cryptology — they either picked codes that were way too hard or way too easy to decode. Although Dinky’s parents don’t like spies, they did give him a book about secret codes for his birthday: The Complete and Total Book of All the Secret Codes That Have Ever Been Devised and That Ever Will Be Devised. Dinky has worked his way through all of the codes in the book, so he feels qualified to open his own Secret Code Service, helping spies to encode and decode their secret messages.
Dinky recruits his best friend Wong and a girl he knows from school named Lulu to be part of his organization. Lulu is a little strange, but Dinky knows that she’s always wanted to be a spy, so he figures that she would be good for dealing with real spies. Wong is more interested in the money because he wants to get a new bike.
Their first clients are a little strange. One of them is an elderly lady, Emma, who wants to stop her younger sister from snooping in her diary. She turns out to be a repeat visitor because her sister turns out to have a talent for breaking codes. The next client is Boris, the world’s worst Bulgarian spy. He admits that he’s horrible with codes because he cheated at spy school, copying off of a cute female spy. Dinky and his friends help him, although they start to question whether they’re doing the right thing since he is obviously spying on their country and they might be guilty of treason.
They decide that Boris is protected under their pledge of confidentiality, but soon, Dinky is approached by someone from the State Department, who turns out to be tracking Boris the Bulgarian. Can Dinky and his friends continue their service, helping both sides at the same time? Also, will they ever figure out a code that Emma’s sister can’t break?
The premise of the story is a little corny, with spies and government agencies going to a kid’s backyard clubhouse for help with some pretty simple codes, but the book is a lot of fun and doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s a good introduction to cryptology for children, starting out with very simple Caesar ciphers (basic substitution codes) and gradually moving on to more difficult ones, like Trithemius’s Square Table. There are points in the story where readers are given the chance to decode messages before Dinky does, and in the back, there are some additional secret messages to decode using the codes presented in the book.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive. There is a sequel to this book, but unfortunately, I don’t have it and never read it.
Mystery of the Secret Message by Elizabeth Honness, 1961.
Fudge-A-Mania by Judy Blume, 1990.
Mystery on Taboga Island by Patricia Maloney Markun, 1995.
They also introduce Amy to Madame Odelle, who people call The Bird Woman because of all the birds she keeps around her house. She is a widow who lives alone and hardly ever sees people, but she invites the children in and when she learns that Amy is interested in art, she shows them a special painting that her family has had for generations. Madame says that her grandfather bought the painting years ago from a traveling Frenchman who was in need of money. Amy thinks that it looks like one of Paul Gauguin’s paintings, and she knows that some of his work is unaccounted for. However, the initials on the painting are PGO. What could the ‘O’ stand for?
In the Kaiser’s Clutch by Kathleen Karr, 1995.
The General Store by Bobbie Kalman, 1997.
Store owners also had to decide how much they should charge for each item or how much they would be willing to take in trade. Farmers often bartered for goods with the produce from their farms, and it was common for store owners to use a form of credit to keep track of what their customers owed and what they owed to their customers. Farmers would typically sell their goods at harvest time, and the store owners would give them a certain amount of credit at their store, based on what they thought the farmers’ produce was worth. Then, the farmers could use the credit on their account at the store until the next harvest and selling time. If a farmer ran out of credit before the next harvest, the store owner would usually extend credit at the store to the farmer to allow him and his family to buy some necessities, knowing that the farmer could make up for it when he came to sell his next batch of produce.
Another odd kind of code that the book mentions was the kind that people would use on mailed letters. Instead of the sender paying the postage, as they do now, people receiving letters were supposed to pay for them when they picked them up from the general store. If a receiver returned a letter unopened, they wouldn’t need to pay anything, so some people would try to cheat the system by writing a message in code on the outside of the envelope so the receiver would know the most important part of what the writer wanted to tell them for free.
Colonial Crafts by Bobbie Kalman, 1992.
Going to School in 1776 by John J. Loeper, 1973.
These explanations are told in story form, rather than simply explaining listing the ways children could live, learn, and go to school, trying to help readers see their lives through the eyes of the children themselves. The children’s lives are affected by the war around them. As the book says, many town schools in New England were closed during the war, so the students would attend “dame schools” instead. A dame school was a series of lessons taught in private homes by older women in the community. In other places, such as cities like Philadelphia, official schools were still open. Discipline was often strict, and school hours could be much longer than those in modern schools. Sometimes, children would argue with each other over their parents’ positions on the war.
There were different standards for what girls and boys were expected to learn because their learning was guided by what they were each expected to do with their adult lives. A typical school might teach boys subjects like, “writing, arithmetick [sic], accounting, navigation, algebra, and Latine.” Generally, “reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion” were common elementary school subjects. Latin lessons and other advanced subjects were typically for boys who planned to become lawyers or clergymen. Girls were likely to receive little formal education beyond reading and writing, and black people were less likely to receive even that.
Trapped in Time by Ruth Chew, 1986.
Franz had only joined the army in the first place because his parents were dead, and he didn’t know what else to do. Now, he has to find a new place to live, somewhere where there won’t be other Hessians who would recognize him as a deserter. Andy and Nathan also have problems because they’ve now realized what time they’re in, and they don’t know how to get home. The watch no longer seems to work.
The Keeping Room by Anna Myers, 1997.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 