Posted on by TracyC

Secrets in the Attic

Secrets in the Attic by Carol Beach York, 1991.

Following the death of Jodie and Peter’s father in a car accident, Jodie’s mother decides that she want to move to a new town and have a fresh start. For some reason, people have been gossiping about the family, particularly Jodie’s Aunt Claire. Jodie doesn’t really want to leave her old home, but she does make a new best friend in her new school. However, they don’t return to their home town of East Hill until Great Aunt Winifred invites them to visit for Christmas.

Jodie loves Aunt Winifred and her big, old-fashioned house with the old toys in the attic. She has fond memories of her whole family getting together for Christmas there, and she thinks that if they visit for Christmas, things will be like they used to be. Jodie’s mother knows differently. Things are not like they used to be with Jodie’s father gone and the gossip still hanging over the family, although Jodie doesn’t understand why. Her mother refuses to return to East Hill, but she says that Jodie can visit Aunt Winifred if she wants. Jodie doesn’t want to be away from her mother and little brother on Christmas itself, so they decide that Jodie can visit Aunt Winifred the week after Christmas, between Christmas and New Year’s.

Jodie still can’t understand why her mother doesn’t want to see Aunt Winifred, but it’s really Aunt Claire that she doesn’t want to see. Jodie’s mother explains that, around the time that Jodie’s father died in the car accident, some money was stolen from Mr. Carrington. Jodie’s father was a lawyer, and Mr. Carrington was once of his clients, and the theft was discovered after Mr. Carrington himself died of a heart attack. Aunt Claire accused of Jodie’s father of stealing the money, but since he was killed in the accident, he never had a chance to defend himself against the accusation. Uncle Phillip, Claire’s husband and vice-president of the bank where Mr. Carrington kept his safe deposit box, never believed that Jodie’s father took the money, but it was bad publicity for the bank when it was stolen. He was trying to get to the bottom of the situation, but he had been in the car with Jodie’s father during the car accident and was also killed. That may have been why Aunt Claire started making public accusations against Jodie’s father – to deflect any blame or suspicion of Phillip because of his role in the bank and maybe also because she blamed Jodie’s father for getting him killed in the car accident when they skidded on a snowy road.

In spite of everything that’s happened, and even because of it, Jodie feels like she has to return to East Hill to see Aunt Winifred and face Aunt Claire. She’s not sure how, but she thinks that if she goes back to East Hill, she might find something that will clear up the situation. There had been another suspect in the theft, a nephew of Mr. Carrington, who was known to be in debt, but nobody could figure out how he could have stolen the money. When it comes down to it, Aunt Claire herself spends more money than she should.

When she gets to East Hill, she realizes that her mother was correct that East Hill doesn’t feel like it used to. Jodie no longer feels like East Hill is her home. She likes her new town and misses her best friend. Her older cousin, Lisa, who is Aunt Claire’s daughter, used to get on her nerves sometimes because she was always the “perfect” child. She is very pretty and talented on the piano, always seems to look great and do everything right, and is also kind of a snob. When Lisa is at the train station with Aunt Winifred to meet Jodie on her arrival, Jodie realizes that Lisa bothers her even more than she used did before.

Lisa is still fussy and snobby and impatient with Aunt Winifred, who sleeps more because she’s getting old. One thing that interests Lisa about Aunt Winifred is that she’s heard that Aunt Winifred is making a new will, and she openly speculates about who is going to get the most out of it. Jodie is disgusted by this talk and asks her why anybody has to get more than anyone else, and Lisa matter-of-factly tells her that there is always a favorite and that the favorite always gets the most. (I can guess that her mother probably told her this.) From the way Lisa talks, Jodie can tell that she thinks of herself as the “perfect” favorite and, therefore, already entitled to receive the most. It disturbs Jodie that Lisa doesn’t seem to care that Aunt Winifred would have to die for her to get anything at all. One day, she overhears Aunt Claire lecturing Lisa that she needs to practice her piano music more while visiting Aunt Winifred because she wants Aunt Winifred to pay for Lisa to study music in Europe. Aunt Winifred seems to want it even more than Lisa does.

While Lisa busies herself with practicing at the piano and calling her friends on the phone, Jodie goes up to the attic to see the old toys they used to play with. When she looks in the attic, she is surprised that her feelings about the attic have also changed. There is something about the attic that now bothers her, but she can’t quite think what it is. She feels like something in the attic has changed or that she wants to change something there, but she’s not sure why. When she looks for a log cabin toy with little pioneer and Indian (Native American) figurines that her father always loved, she is surprised that it is missing. Aunt Claire doesn’t think much of it, suggesting that Aunt Winifred might have just thrown it away, not knowing that it was Jodie’s father’s old favorite toy. However, Jodie knows that can’t be it. Aunt Winifred never had any children of her own, and she loved her two nephews as if they were her sons. She was very sentimental about the toys that they loved, and Jodie doubts that she would just suddenly decide to get rid of one of them.

When Jodie finally figures out what happened to the log cabin toy, the whole truth about the theft comes out.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

I liked the setting of the story. Big old houses like Aunt Winifred’s aren’t very common anymore, and I always wanted to live in a house with an attic that had a solid floor to it, like the one in the story. Jodie’s memories of playing with the old toys and dress-up clothes there sound fun. Although Jodie doesn’t spend Christmas itself at the house, she is still there during the Christmas season, so the Christmas tree with its unique, old ornaments is still there, and the family enjoys Christmas treats, like chocolates and mince pies.

I had theories about the mystery right from the start. I hoped that Mr. Carrington’s nephew, who we never met, wouldn’t be the thief because that felt too much like bringing in an outsider as the culprit. When Jodie meets a boy named Kenny and becomes friends with him, I thought his family might have something to do with the theft, but they don’t. He’s just a boy who likes Jodie and has fun with her, doing things that Lisa thinks she’s too grown-up to do anymore, like throwing snowballs and making a snowman.

I really suspected Aunt Claire as the thief from the beginning. She definitely has expensive tastes, and when she appears in the story, her clothes and hairstyle sound much more expensive than I would expect from a widow raising a daughter in a fairly small town. The way she and her daughter talk about getting their hands on Aunt Winifred’s money emphasizes how callous and money-grubbing she is. Even Lisa admits that she doesn’t really want to go to Europe to study music. Her mother is the one who wants to go to Europe, and she’s using Lisa as the excuse to get money so both of them can go there. Lisa doesn’t like her mother’s plans because she wants to stay at her school with her friends. It occurred to me that Claire’s accusations about Jodie’s father taking Mr. Carrington’s money could have been to cover up for herself doing it. Since her husband worked at the bank, she could have used his position to get access to the money herself. That’s not exactly what happened, though.

Claire is not the thief. In a way, she was the motive for the crime, so when the truth comes out, it’s still going to hurt. When Jodie discovers what really happened, she even feels sorry for her aunt because she knows that the truth will be hard for her to hear and will affect her reputation in this town in the same way that the suspicions about her father affected her mother. Jodie also feels sorry for Lisa, which I felt was more justified than sympathy for Claire. However, the story ends with Jodie finding out the truth for herself, and we aren’t shown the moment when she reveals it to everyone. We don’t get to see everyone’s reactions, and if it changes any of Aunt Winifred’s thoughts about her will, we don’t see that happen. We don’t know what arrangements Aunt Winifred made originally, so that doesn’t matter too much. The talk about the will is really to establish the moral characters of Aunt Claire and Lisa.

I suspected that Aunt Claire was set up as being so awful and unlikable that readers wouldn’t be sorry if she turned out to be the thief, kind of like how the people who get murdered in old episodes of Murder She Wrote are usually the people who are the most nasty to everyone during the first ten minutes of the show, so viewers are not too sad about them dying and can get on with the puzzle of figuring out who did it. Aunt Claire makes a great villain because I disliked her so much that I wouldn’t have cared no matter what she was guilty of or what happened to her. She’s the snotty kind of woman who says awful things about other people, both behind their backs and to their faces. She criticizes people she sees for being fat and offers unsolicited critiques of their clothes, like she’s the fashion police. She’s extremely manipulative of other people and their emotions for the sake of getting what she wants and making herself feel good, and this even extends to her own daughter. Basically, she’s one of those middle school mean girls who never grew up beyond that point. That she’s good at being awful to other people and getting things she wants is enough justification to her that she sees nothing wrong with being the way she is. I’ve known so many other horrible adults exactly like that in real life that I knew I would cheer to see her shoved under the proverbial bus.

I was expecting that her greediness and high maintenance lifestyle were her motives and that her nastiness was a set-up so readers could focus on the puzzle of how she gets caught. I even thought that the story might take a dark twist with her tampering with Aunt Winifred’s medicine to slowly poison her for the inheritance she expected, since Aunt Winifred said that her medicine was making her unusually sleepy. However, Aunt Claire isn’t an attempted murderer any more than she’s a thief. She’s just an awful person who uses people, and her high maintenance lifestyle was the motive for the real thief, who was probably also manipulated by Claire and her expensive tastes.

Lisa’s character softens a little during the course of the story. She’s still fussy and a little spoiled because of the way her mother is, but Jodie realizes that Lisa isn’t very happy with the way her mother is. Lisa likes music, but her mother is manipulating her as much as anyone else to further her lifestyle. Lisa knows what she wants for herself, and hopefully, even though the truth about the theft is going to hurt her, it might actually change things for Lisa’s benefit in the long term.

I also wondered whether the car accident had anything to do with the theft, but apparently, it doesn’t. It doesn’t seem to have been caused deliberately or by anything directly related to the theft. It was just an accident that took place at an unfortunate time.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Mystery of the Green Cat

Mystery of the Green Cat by Phyllis Whitney, 1957.

Things just haven’t been the same for twins Andy and Adrian Dallas since their mother died two years ago. Now, their father has remarried to a woman he met through his work, and Adrian has been having an even harder time coping with it than Andy has. The twins have always been different from each other, not identical in appearance or personal interests, but now, Adrian is frequently angry and moody, and he’s getting on Andy’s nerves.

Their new stepmother, Emily, isn’t bad, and Andy can tell that she’s trying hard to be nice to them so that they’ll like her, but it does make the boys uneasy that their father seems to be having an easier time moving on from their mother’s death than they are. Also, Emily has two daughters, Jill and Carol, who have been living with their grandmother. Now that Emily has remarried, Jill and Carol are coming to live with her, her new husband, and the two boys in San Francisco. Emily has been saying that they’ll all be one big family now, but all of the children have misgivings about it. The twin boys have never lived with girls before, and they’re not looking forward to having a bunch of girly stuff around or Carol practicing her dancing in their new house. Meanwhile, the two girls aren’t sure that they’re really looking forward to suddenly having a couple of brothers. Carol is optimistic and thinks it might be fun, but Jill remembers that she hasn’t gotten along with the brothers of some of her friends. This new blended family is a major adjustment for everyone.

Adrian is so angry and upset about the coming of the girls that he refuses to go meet them at the airport with the rest of the family. Andy goes, although he is uneasy about meeting his new stepsisters, and Jill can tell that he’s not really happy to see them. Andy’s father explains Adrian’s absence by saying that he had a summer school art project to work on, although he does warn Jill that Adrian might need some time to get used to being around girls because he doesn’t make friends easily. Jill bluntly asks if that means that Adrian doesn’t want them around, and her stepfather says that it’s more that Adrian is still mourning his mother and having trouble adjusting to his new stepmother. But, he adds that he and his sons have really been lonely since his first wife’s death, and they’ve really needed someone like Emily in their lives, and he’s sure that Adrian will eventually realize that. He asks Jill, as the oldest girl, if she would try to make friends with Adrian. Jill’s not sure how she’s going to do that if Adrian doesn’t want to be friends with her. (This is a recurring theme in other mystery stories by Phyllis Whitney. The solution usually involves shared experiences binding people together, and this is partly the case in this book, too.)

The Dallas family house is situated on Russian Hill, and as they approach it, Jill’s mother points out another house higher on the hill, which she calls a “mystery house,” knowing that Jill loves mystery books. Her stepfather says that there are two women living there, Mrs. Wallenstein and Miss Furness. The two women are somewhat reclusive, and nobody really seems to know much about them. Andy says that Mrs. Wallenstein is a baroness, but his father says he thinks that’s just a rumor. The two elderly ladies also have a Japanese family working for them. The wife is their cook, and the husband is their gardener. Later, Jill spots someone spying on the Dallas house, peeking down from a wall surrounding their property, and Andy says that’s probably the daughter of the cook and gardener. Andy and Adrian have seen her around before, although they haven’t spoken to her much.

While they’re all sitting at the table, eating and talking, someone suddenly throws a rock through one of their windows. The rock came from the baroness’s house, so the father of the family says he’s going to call her and talk to her about it. However, when he calls, Miss Furness answers the phone, denies that anyone at her house would do such a thing, and hangs up. The boys tell Jill that this isn’t the first time someone has thrown rocks, but the last time, the rock just landed on the terrace and didn’t break anything. The boys haven’t wanted to tell the parents about the last time. Jill asks why not, and Andy refers to a “green cat” but doesn’t really explain what that means.

Later, the Japanese girl from the house next door stops by and introduces herself to Jill as Hana Tamura. (Hana’s English is imperfect, and this is one of those books where the author tries to write like the character is speaking to reflect the accent. Hana switches her ‘r’s and ‘l’s when she speaks in that stereotypical way Asians in old movies speak.) Hana admits to breaking the window and says that she did it by accident. She was just climbing the wall to see the new children who moved in next door when she kicked a stone loose from the wall that broke the window. She offers to pay for the damage. Jill’s mother says that won’t be necessary, but Hana insists that she accept some money. Jill’s mother invites her to stay and visit with Jill and Carol, but Hana says she can’t because Miss Furness doesn’t like her visiting with neighbors. Miss Furness doesn’t seem to like people much. Jill is disappointed because she could use a new friend in her new home, and Hana is interesting because she’s the first Japanese person Jill has ever met. (That’s interesting to me because Jill and Carol were originally from New York, and I would think that they’d see all sorts of people there.) Before Hana leaves, Jill asks her if she knows anything about a green cat. Hana refuses to answer, but Jill can tell that she’s a little disturbed at the mention of the cat. Jill’s mother is a little concerned that Hana isn’t being allowed to associate with neighborhood children and says that she’s going to try to talk to Miss Furness about it.

It turns out everyone has completely misunderstood the relationship between Miss Furness and Mrs. Wallenstein (“the baroness”). Rather than Miss Furness being the housekeeper for Mrs. Wallenstein, she’s actually Mrs. Wallenstein’s sister and the head of the household. When Jill spots Mrs. Wallenstein watching her with binoculars, Adrian says that she’s done that before and also finally confides that Mrs. Wallenstein was the one who threw a rock at him and Andy when they were on the terrace, not Hana. The “rock” Mrs. Wallenstein threw was actually just a little pebble, and Andy scooped it up, refusing to even show it to Adrian, although he doesn’t immediately explain why.

After a visit to the house next door to deliver a letter for Mrs. Wallenstein that was accidentally delivered to the Dallas house, Jill comes to realize that Miss Furness doesn’t treat her sister well, reading her mail and keeping people from her, and that Mrs. Wallenstein is in need of help. Andy finally explains to Jill that the rock Mrs. Wallenstein threw had a note tied to it, asking them to help her find her “little green cat.” He didn’t want to tell Adrian before because he didn’t think Adrian would take it seriously. The kids aren’t sure what the “little green cat” is, but both Jill and Andy want to help poor Mrs. Wallenstein.

Miss Furness doesn’t really mean to be mean to her sister, but she is extremely overprotective of her and keeps her isolated from other people because she has been suffering from ill health and memory problems. Mrs. Wallenstein went through hard times in her life after her husband died, and she was badly injured in an earthquake in Japan, which is why she’s now confined to a wheelchair. Sometimes, when Mrs. Wallenstein starts reminiscing about the past, she becomes confused about what’s past and what’s present, and it all begins blending into one. Her sister has been trying to shield her from past traumatic memories, but Mrs. Wallenstein has the feeling that there’s something important that she wants to remember, and she can’t quite figure out what it is. The key to unlocking Mrs. Wallenstein’s memory and learning the truth about the past lies in finding the little green cat.

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

Themes and My Reaction

Adjustment to changing family situations is a common theme in Phyllis Whitney’s young adult mystery stories, but this one is a little different from most. Most books by Phyllis Whitney are told only from the point of view of a girl, using third person limited. Even when boys play a major part in stories, the focus is usually on the girl. This book is told mostly from Jill’s perspective, but Andy is the one who begins the story, giving some insight into how he and his brother are feeling before the girls arrive. Although the boys and girls are separate when the book begins, their feelings toward each other are pretty similar. All of the children are trying to adjust to major changes in their lives and having misgivings about suddenly having new siblings of the opposite sex.

I think it’s also important to point out that, although the story focuses on a blended family, there is no divorce in the story. The two parents who are entering into a second marriage were widowed. This book was written in the 1950s, and in the first half of the 20th century, people didn’t talk about parents getting divorced as much. In children’s books of this time period, single parents and remarriages were usually the result of the death of a parent. It’s not that divorce was never mentioned; it’s just that it wasn’t nearly as prevalent in children’s literature, partly due to the social stigma against divorce at the time. I’ve sometimes thought that, in some ways, it was also probably easier for authors to explain the loss that accompanies a parent’s death, which would not have been the parent’s choice and was just a tragedy that couldn’t be helped, than the reasons why parents would willingly choose not to continue living with each other or why one parent would no longer live with the children. This is different from modern children’s books, where it’s usually more common to see divorced parents than dead ones. In fact, quite a lot of modern children’s books include divorced parents. Both death and divorce involve feelings of grief and loss, but if the loss is from a death that just couldn’t be helped, the author can avoid addressing the painful questions of “why” the separation happened. In real life, the reasons for a divorce can involve complex and sensitive issues that many adults would find difficult to discuss with children, including marital infidelity, emotional neglect, financial problems, addiction, and physical or psychological abuse. There’s never a happy reason for a divorce, so saying that the absent parents in the story died allows authors to skip over all of that. Death is sad, but it’s a little more self-explanatory. Andy and Adrian’s mother died from an unspecified long-term illness, and there’s no need for the characters to explain more than that. I could be wrong about some of my theories here, but that’s the impression that I sometimes get from older books. There is less social stigma surrounding divorce in modern times, and the prevalence of divorce in society has made it increasingly important to address children’s feelings about divorce in children’s literature, which is why there are now more books about it. That being said, the loss of a parent because of death is something that children still experience today, and the author of this story makes some important points about the feelings that someone can experience when they lose someone close to them.

As Jill gets to know Adrian, she comes to learn some of the reasons why he’s really unhappy. It’s partly because, when they moved to the new house after his dad remarried, he and Andy had to start sharing a room to make room for the two girls. Adrian and Andy have very different interests, and sharing the space has been particularly hard on Adrian. Adrian is a tidy person, and he’s very serious about art. He needs space to work on his artwork, and Andy is messy and likes to hoard pieces and parts for building things. Jill starts making friends with Adrian when she figures out how to make a better working space for him, but she upsets him again when she accidentally breaks the vase holding his brushes, which reveals the second reason why Adrian is unhappy. When the family moved to the new house, his father got rid of many of the things that used to belong to his first wife. Adrian has been blaming his stepmother for the loss of many of these sentimental reminders. Adrian doesn’t have many reminders of his mother left, and the vase was one of them, so now he blames Jill and her mother for the loss of that. As all the little reminders of his mother seem to be disappearing and Emily and her daughters are moving into the space, Adrian is afraid of losing all of the memories he has of his mother. It’s a situation that’s somewhat similar to Mrs. Wallenstein’s problem, using physical objects as a reminder of the past.

Mrs. Wallenstein has suffered sadness and trauma, which is part of the reason why her memory is so faulty. However she badly wants to remember some of the things she’s forgotten since her injury in the earthquake because they hold the key to the truth about her husband’s death. He died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and his business partner was murdered. Some people claimed that her husband might have actually killed his partner, but Mrs. Wallenstein doesn’t believe that. The clues to what really happened are tied up with the mysterious green cat.

However, part of the story also involves selfishness and self-centeredness. Mrs. Wallenstein’s husband’s business partner was a very selfish man, always needing to be the center of attention and taking credit for things that Mrs. Wallenstein’s husband did, and that’s tied in with the story of what happened to the two of them. In his own way, Adrian is selfish, too. It’s true that he’s still grieving for his mother, but the way he shows his grief is selfish, and Jill finally tells him so. Just because his stepmother isn’t his mother is no reason for him to be constantly cold and rude to her. Adrian is also rude and inconsiderate to other people, including Jill, their new friend Hana, and his own brother. Each of them is also dealing with something hard in their lives, but all Adrian cares about are his own feelings. While they all tiptoe around him, trying to make friends with him and be extra careful of his feelings because he’s “sensitive”, he says rude and condescending things to them or suddenly goes into a moody pout if he’s reminded of his mother’s death and/or his father’s remarriage. As Jill says, he’s sensitive, but only about himself; Adrian has no sensitivity for anyone else’s feelings. He’s even careless with Mrs. Wallenstein’s green cat after he learns that it has no monetary value, not considering what it means to her and her past. For someone who’s hyper-aware of belongings that have meaning for him, it’s an incredibly selfish thing to do. He not only doesn’t try to help the others solve the mystery of the cat, but when he finds out some information on his own, he deliberately doesn’t tell them until he can show off how clever he is while taunting the others about how they’re not as clever as they think they are. I honestly thought that he was going to be more help to the others in the story and reconcile his feelings through their shared adventure, but only Andy does that. Adrian resists right up until the very end, when Emily has a very honest talk with him about his feelings and hers.

I was a little annoyed at the way Hana’s speech was shown in the book because it always annoys me a little when authors try to show someone’s accent through spelling. It often seems to detract from what characters are actually saying, and the r/l swapping when Asians speak has a stereotypical feel to it. It’s not that Asians in real life never do the r/l swap, but it’s usually way overdone when it appears in books and movies, so it gets on my nerves. The real life r/l phenomenon is really based on the fact that Asian languages have a tendency to use the same symbol to represent r/l sounds, and the sound those symbols represent is about halfway between the two, depending on the language. In that case, it’s not really so much “swapping” the sounds as making one sound that is more in the middle than English speakers are used to hearing. The speaker may not actually be hearing the difference if they’re not accustomed to thinking of a difference between those two sounds, while listeners who are accustomed to listening for a difference in those sounds are confused about which of the two sounds they’re actually hearing when someone makes a sound that’s kind of in-between.

That being said, the perceptions of Asians, particularly Japanese people, in the book is favorable. This book was published about 12 years after WWII, so I thought it was nice that the characters were looking at the Japanese characters favorably. Jill is genuinely interested in being Hana’s friend, and Jill’s mother wants Jill to be friends with Hana. Later, Hana tells Jill and the boys a little about her own history, how her parents were married before WWII, but because her mother was unsure about coming to the United States, she ended up staying in Japan without her husband for a time. Hana was born shortly before the war started, and her father was unable to come to see her or bring his wife and child to the United States during the war. In fact, Hana and her mother were only reunited with her father a year before the story starts, so she was 13 years old the first time she met her father. Although the other children in the story have had their share of loss and family problems, Hana’s story about her own life helps to highlight that other people have their troubles, too.

The author, Phyllis A. Whitney, spent the first 15 years of her life in Asia because her father worked for an export business. She was actually born in Japan and also lived for a time in China and the Philippines. Because of all of the travel in her early life, Phyllis Whitney’s books often include travel to various countries around the world, people from different cultures, and children getting used to new homes or living among unfamiliar people, for various reasons.

There are some interesting tidbits of information about Asian cultures in the story, particularly about Japanese culture. I thought the part about how Japanese traditionally calculate age was interesting. There are also some interesting pieces of information about San Francisco and its landmarks. I’d heard of Telegraph Hill before, but I didn’t know the origin of the name until the book explained it.

I liked the book, both for the interesting tidbits of information and for the plot itself. This mystery is one of what I think of as the “mysterious circumstances” type of mystery. That’s a name I made up to describe mysteries where no crime (or at least no obvious crime) has been committed but yet there’s evidence of strange happenings and unknown events that must be figured out. I honestly wasn’t sure what direction this story was going to take when it started out, and I changed my mind several times along the way, but it has a very satisfying ending.

Posted on by TracyC

The Rag Coat

The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills, 1991.

Minna is a poor girl, the daughter of a coal miner.  Her father has been ill with the miner’s cough, so Minna has to help her mother to make quilts that the family can sell for money.  She wants to attend school, but she can’t because she is needed at home and her family can’t afford a warm coat for her when winter starts.  It’s too bad because Minna really wants to make some friends her own age, and she would meet other children at school.  Her father says that he will find a solution to the problem, but he dies before he can.

After Minna’s father’s death, some of the other women in the community come to the house to work on making quilts with Minna’s mother.  When the women say that the quilt pattern they are using is named after Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors, Minna wishes again for a coat.  When the other women, who are mothers themselves, realize that Minna cannot go to school until she has a coat, they decide to make one for her.  They don’t have much money, but they do have plenty of quilting scraps.  They decide to make a new, quilted coat for Minna out of their old scraps.

Minna starts going to school and does well, although she gets some teasing because, as a new student who has never been to school before, she has to sit with the youngest children, and Shane pulls her braid.  Something that Minna particularly likes at school is Sharing Day (what my school always called “Show and Tell”), where students are given the chance to show special things to the class and talk about them.  Minna decides that when her coat is ready, she will show it to the class during Sharing Day.

As the coat is being made, Minna admires all of the beautiful colors of the cloth scraps in the coat and adds a piece of her father’s old jacket as well.  Each of the other scraps in the coat also has a story that goes with it.  The cloth pieces come from old clothes and blankets that people in the families of the quilting mothers have used, and they memories attached to them.  The mothers tell Minna all of the stories as they work on the coat, and Minna loves it.

However, when Minna wears the coat to school for the first time, the other kids make fun of her for wearing rags.  Minna is really upset and runs away into the woods.  After thinking about it, Minna remembers what her father said about how people really need other people, and she decides to go back to school.  There, she tells the other students that the rags in her coat are actually their rags, and she begins reciting the stories that go with them.

One of the scraps is from Shane’s old blanket from when he was a baby.  He was born so small that everyone was afraid that he’d die, but the blanket kept him warm, and he later carried it around with him until it fell apart.  Shane is happy, seeing the scrap of his favorite blanket again in Minna’s coat.  Everyone else gathers around Minna, looking for their scraps in the coat and listening to the stories behind them.  Each of the scraps in Minna’s coat is like an old friend that none of them ever thought they’d see again.  The other children apologize to Minna for their teasing and Minna says that friends share and that it took all of them to make her coat warm.

My Reaction

The book doesn’t say when this story is supposed to take place, but based on the children’s clothing, I think it’s about 100 years ago or more. It doesn’t say exactly where this story takes place, either, but a note on the dust jacket says that it takes place in Appalachia. The author said that she was inspired by Appalachian crafts that she learned from the women in her family and a patchwork coat that she wore as a child. However, years later, the author revisited this story and rewrote it in a longer version, and some of the explanations that accompany the new version of the story elaborate more on the background.

The author rewrote this story in a longer, novel form called Minna’s Patchwork Coat (2015). In the back of that book, the explanation behind the story mentions that the year of the story is 1908. It also discusses some cultural references and songs included in the expanded version of the story that were not part of the original. It states that the inspiration for this story came not only from the author’s experiences but from a song written by Dolly Parton, Coat of Many Colors, which was made into a picture book itself after the publication of this book.

There is also an expanded retelling of the story called Minna’s Patchwork Coat, and I’d like to talk about some of the differences. For example, the ending message of the story is slightly changed in the longer version, or at least the emphasis of the moral is different. The original book emphasized how much “people need people” and how the goodwill of many people (in the form of the quilting mothers and their hard work and scraps, cast-off from all of their children) changed Minna’s life. They emphasize it at the end, talking about how Minna’s coat is the warmest of all of them and that it took a lot of people to make it that way. However, in the expanded version, Minna also explains that when she started school, she liked her classmates better than they liked her because, thanks to their mothers’ stories as they made her coat, she already knew who the other children were, but none of them really knew anything about her. The message of the expanded version is that it is important to learn others’ stories to learn who they really are and to become friends with them.

Actually, I don’t like the second version of the story as well as the original. I thought that the moral and the story were stronger when the focus was on how people benefit from having relationships with other people because people can do great things when a lot of people contribute a little. Remember, it took a lot of people to make Minna’s coat warm because each of them contributed at least one scrap to it and others took the time to put them all together. It was their stories that made the coat special, more than just an ordinary coat. The expanded story has that element, too, but more emphasis is placed on Minna needing to share her story with the other children to win their respect and approval. I didn’t like the notion that Minna needed to win their approval by telling her story. Also, this story takes place in a small mining community. I find it difficult to believe that the other kids wouldn’t basically know her story already. Her mother knows their mothers. Their families see each other at church before Minna goes to school. The disease that took her father’s life isn’t terribly unusual for coal miners, and probably, a number of the other children are the children of coal miners as well. It seems to be the major industry in the area. Minna’s family might be more poor than the others’ since her father’s illness and death, but I don’t see why their circumstances would be so different and incomprehensible to people who must have seen her and her family around and who knew them from church or through their parents’ associations. One thing that small towns and communities are known for is everyone knowing everyone else and their business, so why didn’t they all know Minna’s story already? Even if the quilting mothers didn’t talk about helping to make the coat for Minna, the other kids should have known about the family’s money circumstances and the tragic death of Minna’s father. I don’t see why the other kids would have known so little about her or thought that she was so unusual.

The expanded version of the story also features a Cherokee midwife and a biracial friend for Minna who did not appear in the original story. This friend, Lester, is also something of an outcast among the other children, and Minna and the stories from her coat help the other children to be more accepting of him as well. It’s a nice thing, I guess, but it felt a little artificial to me because I knew that it wasn’t part of the original story. I hesitate to criticize it too much because the basic message of the story isn’t bad, but I guess that the way the second version came out just doesn’t have the same feel to me. The author put things into it that weren’t in the original, and with that change in emphasis on the ending, it makes the story and characters feel a little less natural to me now. I often feel the same way when I see a movie version of a story that adds things that weren’t in the original book.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Haunting at Cliff House

HauntingCliffHouseThe Haunting at Cliff House by Karleen Bradford, 1985.

This is a relatively short chapter book, but suspenseful, thoughtful, and well-written.

When her father inherits an old house in Wales from a distant relative, Alison, a young teenager, finds out that he plans for the two of them to spend the summer there.  Alison’s father is a university professor and is writing a book, and he thinks that the house in Wales sounds like a great place for him to get some writing done while he and Alison have a look at his new inheritance.  Alison isn’t enthusiastic about the trip, but she and her father are very close, especially because she lost her mother at a very young age.  Besides, the only place she could stay in Canada would be with her grandmother, and her grandmother didn’t seem enthusiastic about having her.

From the moment they arrive at the old house, called Pen-y-Craig or Cliff House by the locals, Alison has a bad feeling about it.  It stands on a lonely cliff by a small town.  The carved dragon over the door gives her the creeps, and there is something disturbing about a particular room in the house.  Sometimes, she can almost hear a voice calling out to her, and she has visions of another girl, about her age.  At first, she tries to tell herself that it’s all her imagination, but it soon becomes obvious that it’s not.

Some of the local people know that the house has an unhappy history, and Alison eventually learns that the great-aunt that her father inherited it from even refused to live there during her last years because it disturbed her too much.  A little more examination of the room that had disturbed her helps Alison discover the reason why.  After having a vision of a young girl hiding something behind a brick in the fireplace of one of the bedrooms, Alison searches the spot and finds a diary dating from 1810, written by a girl named Bronwen, who was the same age as Alison.  Like Alison, Bronwen was brought to the house by her widowed father and was unhappy about it, but those aren’t the only parallels between Bronwen’s life and Alison’s.

Alison becomes uncomfortable with her father’s new friendship with a Welsh neighbor, Meiriona.  Alison likes Meiriona’s younger brother, Gareth, but when it looks like her father’s friendship with Meiriona is turning into romance, Alison becomes jealous and fears changes in her close relationship with her father, a situation that mirrors Bronwen’s life when her father falls in love with her governess, Catrin.  Although Meiriona tries to be nice to Alison, Alison can’t bring herself to like her, and she argues with her father about it.

The only person who seems to understand her feelings at all is Gareth, and Alison confides her worries in him, both about Meiriona and about Bronwen, whose spirit keeps calling out to Alison to help her, although Alison doesn’t know how.  She struggles to read through the diary, whose pages are not all legible anymore because they’re damaged with age, to learn what happened to Bronwen and what Bronwen wants her to do now.  Gareth tries to reassure Alison that her father’s relationship with Meiriona will not be as bad as Alison thinks.  He thinks that the relationship would be good for both Alison’s father and Meiriona because they are both lonely, and he doesn’t think that Alison should worry about losing her father because he’s not worried about losing his sister, even if she goes to Canada to study and spend more time with Alison’s father.  At first, Alison isn’t comforted by these reassurances.  However, Gareth agrees that the matter of the ghost is serious, and he can feel her presence as well. Gareth warns Alison to be cautious about the ghost but to try to help if she can and to call out to him if she’s ever in danger.  Alison would really rather just go home to Canada, run away from her father and Meiriona, and forget the whole thing about Bronwen, but history seems to be repeating itself, and Bronwen’s voice calls out to her insistently for help that only Alison can give.

It’s a bit of a spoiler, telling you this, but although Alison at first thinks that the diary ends with Bronwen killing herself in despair, thinking that her father only loved Catrin and not her and that there was nothing left for her to live for, the truth is that Bronwen’s suicide attempt didn’t succeed and that she made another mistake that she wants Alison to help her to change.  Bronwen attempted to kill herself by going to a cave by the sea during a terrible storm, planning to allow herself to drown, but when the water started rising, she became too frightened and decided to leave by a secret entrance to the cave.  Not knowing that Bronwen was safe, Catrin attempted to save her and drowned in the cave herself.  As Bronwen was climbing to safety, she heard Catrin calling for her but was too frightened of the storm and angry at Catrin to go back for her.  Although Bronwen lived on after the incident, she could never get rid of her guilt at Catrin’s death, realizing that, even in the middle of her resentment toward Catrin, Catrin loved her more than she knew, even to the point of giving up her own life while attempting to save hers.

Now, the anniversary of Catrin’s death is approaching, and so is a storm very much like the one that killed her.  At the top of the cliff by the cave, Alison finds her time merging with Bronwen’s, and she will only have one chance to help Bronwen make the right decision the second time around.  Helping Bronwen to prevent the worst mistake of her life and to make a better choice also helps Alison to reconsider her own choices and future.  Just as Bronwen misjudged Catrin, Alison may have also misjudged Meiriona. Instead of losing her father or being forced to accept a poor substitute for her mother, Alison may be gaining a kind of sister who will love her more than she realizes.