The Case of the Vanishing Ventriloquist by E.W. Hildick, 1985.
Mari Yoshimura, Wanda’s pen pal from Osaka, Japan has just arrived in the United States, and she’s eager to meet Wanda’s friends. Mari’s father is the head of Yoshimura Electronics, and he is visiting different cities in the United States on business. While her father travels, Mari gets to enjoy an extended visit with Wanda. Wanda has told her all about the McGurk Organization, and Mari is eager to join up with them during her stay in America. Unfortunately, when she first arrives, McGurk isn’t in a very receptive mood.
McGurk tells Mari that she can’t join the organization, which hurts Mari and offends Wanda, because he has organized a series of challenges in order to decide which of the current members to give a promotion. McGurk thinks that Mari’s presence would upset the challenges, and he can’t promote her because she hasn’t actually done anything with the organization yet. However, Wanda negotiates with McGurk. Since Mari is her guest, and she can’t neglect her guest, she arranges for Mari to just follow along on the challenges, working through them herself just for fun. McGurk allows it on the condition that Mari not help Wanda because that would give Wanda an unfair advantage. Wanda and Mari agree to the arrangement, and Mari writes all of her notes for the challenges in Japanese, just to make sure that Wanda doesn’t accidentally see any of her answers.
Mari turns out to be really good at the challenges that McGurk sets. When he tells the members of the organization to spend a day observing people and notice how many times people do things that would be a temptation to criminals (like leaving packages in a car, tempting someone to break in and get them), Mari ends up with more observations than anyone else. Mari also proves to be good at noticing suspicious behavior when she sees a man that no one else notices, who seems to be hanging around a bus stop for no reason, not showing any interest in getting on any of the buses.
Then, Brains accidentally discovers a real mystery that the McGurk Organization can investigate where Mari plays a special role. While Brains is working on one of his latest inventions, a new kind of portable phone for kids (this is before cell phones became popular), he accidentally gets his signals crossed and ends up overhearing part of someone else’s conversation. It sounds like the two men Brains overhears are going to target someone at the Senior Citizens’ Annual Picnic. However, because Brains didn’t hear the whole conversation, they can’t be sure what these men are going to do. They report the incident to Patrolman Cassidy at the police station, but he doesn’t think too much of it. He says that he’ll look in on the picnic but that what Brains overheard might not really have to do with a crime. He heard too little of the conversation to be sure what the men were actually talking about.
Fortunately, because Wanda’s mother is part of the committee organizing the picnic, the kids have a good opportunity to investigate the matter themselves. Wanda will be helping her mother to serve food, and Mari is going to be part of the entertainment, putting on her ventriloquist act. Mari says that the other members of the organization can be part of her act, so they can be on hand to keep an eye on things. McGurk is pleased about this and finally offers Mari a position as a trainee of the McGurk Organization.
However, it turns out that everyone has completely misjudged the situation. A very serious crime is being planned, and the McGurk Organization doesn’t realize it until Mari is kidnapped from the picnic! Mari was the target all along, and the suspicious man at the bus stop was actually there to watch her. Can the others get her back before it’s too late?
From this book on, Mari becomes a regular character in the series and a full member of the McGurk Organization. Mari’s father decides that he wants to open one of his electronics factories in the United States, so Mari and her family will be living there for awhile to oversee it, giving Mari the chance to stay with the McGurk Organization for an extended period of time. McGurk starts dreaming that when Mari eventually goes back to Japan, she will open a branch of the McGurk Organization there, but that would be years in the future, if it happens. McGurk dreams big.
One of the funniest parts of this book is when the kids are supposed to be looking around for examples of suspicious behavior. Before the challenge begins, McGurk admits that what is “suspicious” is difficult to quantify and that most of what they’ll notice will have perfectly reasonable, non-criminal explanations behind it. Joey Rockaway notes that, for most of that particular challenge, the members of the McGurk Organization themselves are the ones who are acting most suspiciously, running around and spying on random people. At one point, Joey almost gets thrown out of a supermarket because the manager noticed the creepy way he kept spying on a woman who kept picking up packages of cookies and then putting them back. It turns out that the manager of the store knows that the woman is on a diet and has had trouble wrestling with temptation. She routinely gets tempted to buy cookies, picks some up, and then puts them back on the shelf when she realizes that she shouldn’t have them. Her behavior may look odd to people who don’t understand what she’s going through or what she’s doing, but perfectly understandable to those who do, like so many things.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
The year is 1908, and eleven-year-old Innocenza Moretti lives with her relatives in Boston. They are immigrants from Italy. Innie, as her family calls her, is an orphan. According to the story that her grandmother told her, she was the only one of her parents’ children to survive infancy, her siblings being born prematurely and dying shortly after birth. Innie’s mother was so grateful that Innie survived that she promised her to the Holy Mother at her baptism. Then, Innie’s parents died in a fire in their tenement building when she was about two years old. Innie and her grandmother, Nonna, survived the fire only because little Innie had started crying in the night, and she took her outside to walk her around so that she wouldn’t wake her parents. Because of that experience, Nonna is deathly afraid of fire and also has become convinced that the Holy Mother must have spared Innie (as well as herself). She thinks that Innie is destined to become a nun and has continued to promise her to the Holy Mother in prayer, repeating the promise regularly. Although Nonna thinks that the miracles surrounding Innie’s life are signs of a future life in the Church for Innie, her grandmother’s promises in prayer terrify Innie.
Innie feels trapped by her grandmother’s expectations for her, expectations that the rest of her family don’t even know about. She doesn’t want to be a nun, but her grandmother is sure that she will be. Because of her fears that her grandmother may force her to become a nun when she grows up, Innie is never on her best behavior. She thinks that if she gets a reputation as a trouble-maker, the Church will decide that she is unsuited for a religious life. Unfortunately, Innie’s long-practiced habit of ignoring rules and her problem child reputation lead her to be suspected of something worse than just minor misbehaving.
Innie’s family owns a boardinghouse where they provide food and lodging for young immigrant men. Innie and Nonna live on the ground floor, and Innie’s aunt, uncle, and cousins live above them. Innie spends a lot of time with her cousins, especially Teresa, who is about her age. Her older cousin, Carmela, persuades both Teresa and Innie to join a library club at a new settlement house with her. The settlement house helps girls and young women from immigrant families by teaching them work skills and aspects of American culture that they can use as they become American citizens in exchange for some of the work that the girls do on behalf of the settlement house. Carmela has taken a new job as a pottery painter there and tells her parents that it will be good for Teresa and Innie to go there as well because they will receive help with their schoolwork and they will also have classes to teach them skills like sewing, knitting, and pottery, that they can use to make money later. However, the real attraction of the club for the girls is that they get to listen to music, have dancing lessons, read books, and socialize with other girls about their age. The prospect of sewing classes isn’t appealing for Innie, but she loves books and looks forward to borrowing some from the settlement house library.
At the settlement house, Innie meets a variety of girls from other immigrant families, not just Italian ones. In particular, Innie makes friends with a girl named Matela, who is a Jewish girl from Russia. As the girls talk about a recent, large fire in town, Matela talks about the czar’s soldiers burning things back in Russia and how she misses her grandfather, who is still there. Innie understands Matela’s feelings because she knows what it’s like to miss someone. She doesn’t really remember her parents, but she feels the lack of them in her life. Teresa also becomes friends with Matela, but the three girls agree to keep their friendship secret because each of their families prefers them to associate with girls from backgrounds similar to their own. Innie’s uncle wants the girls to spend time with other Italians, and Matela admits that her father prefers her to spend time with other Jewish girls. The adults don’t really understand the cultural mix at the settlement house.
However, from the very first day that the girls begin going to events at the house, strange things start happening. Things disappear or are oddly moved about. Food disappears. A silver teapot belonging to the ladies who run the settlement house is stolen. Then, someone steals some pottery and a shawl.
To Innie’s horror, she ends up becoming the prime suspect for the thefts because she was caught snooping in an area of the house where she didn’t belong and because she accidentally broke one of the pieces of pottery that the others girls made and tried to sweep it up without telling anyone. When she and her friends snoop around and try to find the missing objects, Innie discovers one of the missing pottery pieces. However, instead of being happy for the clue, the ladies who run the house just think that Innie must have broken more of the pottery and tried to cover it up, like she did before, by hiding the rest of the set. After all, if she was doing some things she shouldn’t have been doing, it’s plausible that she could be a thief, too.
If Innie is going to remain a member of the library club (and continue to have access to books that she can read), she’s going to have to prove her innocence. In fact, proving her innocence may also be important for Carmela, who is supposed to have a citizenship hearing soon. If Innie’s bad reputation causes problems for her at work, she may lose her job and be denied American citizenship!
Matela thinks that the thief could be a ghost from the nearby Copp’s Hill graveyard, but Innie is sure that it must be a human being. There are secrets at the settlement house that even the ladies who run it are unaware of and someone who desperately needs help and can’t ask for it.
Teresa and Matela continue to help Innie, and in the process, Innie confesses to Matela her fears about becoming a nun. It is Matela who helps Innie to find the solution to her problem, urging her to step outside of the small community of Italian immigrants that her family clings to and to seek advice from a priest in the Irish area of the city. As a priest, he has the knowledge that Innie needs to understand her faith, and because he doesn’t know Innie’s family personally, he has the objectivity to help Innie to see her grandmother’s promise in a new light and to understand that her future destiny is still in her own hands. No one can speak for another person or make important promises on their behalf. A religious vocation is a serious decision that only a mature adult can make for herself, or not make, as the case may be. The priest tells her that, as young as she is, Innie should focus on learning to be a good person, and then she will see what direction life leads her. With that knowledge, of course, Innie realizes that she will have to put more effort into behaving herself, but it’s a relief to her to realize that she doesn’t need to purposely misbehave in order to control her life.
Eventually, Innie’s aunt also learns about the grandmother’s promise and Innie’s worries and reassures her that, although her grandmother can be an intimidating woman with what she wants, Innie’s family loves her and that she shouldn’t be afraid to come to them with her questions and concerns. Innie has thought of herself as parentless, at the mercy of her grandmother’s wishes and expectations, but her aunt says that she loves Innie like she does her own daughters and that Innie is as much a part of their family as they are. If Innie has problems, her aunt will be there for her, helping her find whatever answers she needs.
There is also a subplot about how girls in immigrant families (at least, in ones like Innie’s family) aren’t as highly-regarded as boys. When the family is discussing important matters, Innie often tries to comment on what she thinks, but her grandmother keeps telling her to be quiet because it isn’t a girl’s place to comment on business that men should handle and her male cousins sneer at her because they don’t think she knows anything. However, when Innie’s uncle is worried about the legal papers he has to sign in order to open his new grocery business because his English still isn’t good enough to understand them, Innie points out that Carmela’s English is the best of the family because of all the books she had to read and the paperwork she had to complete when she was applying for citizenship and that she would be the best person to study the paperwork. At first, her grandmother makes her try to be quiet and her male cousins laugh, but Carmela speaks up and says that she can help her father, if he wants her to, and her father agrees, on the condition that she act as translator and adviser and let him make the final decisions about the business. Carmela is happy because the arrangement allows her to use her skills without taking her away from the pottery painting that she loves. The point of this part of the story is about acknowledging the talents that people possess and not disregarding them because they are outside of the usual roles and expectations. It fits in with the subplot about the grandmother’s expectations for Innie’s future, which are not really in keeping with either her talents or character. The young people in the story are growing up under different circumstances than their parents, and they will have to learn to find their own way in life, using the abilities they have and the education they can find.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about Boston in 1908. The fire that happens around the time that the story takes place was a real event. The settlement house with its library club was also real, and the ladies who run the settlement house, Miss Brown and Miss Guerrier, were also real people. The book explains more about what life was like for immigrant families like Innie’s and about what the future held for girls like her. Many of the girls who attended the library clubs later became librarians and teachers themselves, which may be Innie’s eventual destiny when she grows up. The book also mentions that the area of Boston where Innie’s family lived still has many Italian restaurants and groceries that were started by immigrant families like Innie’s, so we can imagine that the grocery store that Innie’s uncle wants to open will be successful.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Pippi Longstocking is an iconic figure in children’s literature, a little red-haired girl with amazing strength (she can lift a horse all by herself) and a quick wit, who can “always come out on top” in any situation and is frequently doing exciting and hilarious things without adult supervision. The books in her series were originally from Sweden, with the first one written in 1945, but I’m reading a later English translation.
In the first book, she comes to live by herself in a house, which she calls Villa Villekulla, in a small town in Sweden when her father, a ship’s captain, is washed overboard at sea. Although others fear that he is dead, Pippi thinks it more likely that he was washed up on an island of cannibals, where he will soon be making himself their king. (Of course, Pippi turns out to be right, but that’s getting ahead of the story.) Her mother died when she was a baby, so Pippi now lives all by herself, except for her pet monkey and horse. She pays for the things she needs with money from the suitcase of gold coins that her father left for her and spends her time doing just as she pleases.
Tommy and Annika, the children who live next door to Ville Villekulla, are perfectly ordinary, basically obedient children, who live normal lives with their parents. When Pippi moves in next door, their lives get a lot more exciting. The first time they meet her, she’s walking backward down the street. When they ask her why she’s doing that, she says that everyone walks that way in Egypt. Tommy and Annika quickly realize that she’s making that up, and Pippi admits it, but she’s such an interesting person that they accept her invitation to join her for breakfast. They’re amazed when they find out that Pippi has no parents, only a monkey and a horse living with her, and are entertained by the tall tales that she tells.
When they go back to see her the next day, Pippi tells them that she’s a “thing-finder” and invites them to come and look for things with her. Basically, Pippi is a kind of scavenger, looking for valuable things, things that might be useful, or (which is more likely) just any old random junk that she might happen across. Pippi does find some random junk, although she makes sure that Tommy and Annika find better things (probably by hiding them herself).
Then, the children see a group of bullies beating up another boy and decide to intervene. The meanest of the bullies, Bengt, starts picking on Pippi, but picking on a girl with super strength isn’t the wisest move. She picks him up easily and drapes him over a tree branch. Then, she takes care of his friends, too.
Word quickly spreads through town about this strange girl. Some of the adults become concerned that such a young girl seems to be living on her own. A couple of policemen come to the Ville Villekulla one day to take Pippi to a children’s home, but she saucily tells them that she already has a children’s home because she’s a child and she’s at home. Then, she tricks them into playing a bizarre game of tag that ends with them being stuck on the roof of the house. The policemen decide that perhaps Pippi can take care of herself after all and give up.
Tommy and Annika try to persuade Pippi to come to school with them, but that doesn’t work out, either. Pippi, completely unfamiliar with the routine of school, thinks that the teacher is weirdly obsessed with numbers because she keeps demanding that her students give her the answers to math problems that Pippi thinks she should be able to solve on her own. The teacher concludes that school may not be for Pippi, at least not at this point in her life.
Tommy and Annika delight in the wild things that Pippi does, like facing off with a bull while they’re on a picnic, accepting a challenge to fight a strongman at the circus, and throwing a party with a couple of burglars. When they invite Pippi to their mother’s coffee party, and their mother’s friends begin talking about their servants and how hard it is to find good help, Pippi (having already devastated the buffet of desserts and made a mess in general) jumps in with a series of tall tales about a servant that her grandparents had, interrupting everyone else. Tommy and Annika’s mother finally decides that she’s had enough and sends Pippi away. Pippi does leave, but still continuing the story about the servant on the way out, yelling out the punchline from down the street.
However, Pippi becomes a local hero when she saves some children from a fire after the fireman decide that they can’t reach them themselves.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I have to admit that, as a character, Pippi sometimes annoys me with her obvious lies and some of the stuff she does. She openly admits that she lies after telling some of her tall tales, but it’s the parts where she admonishes her listeners not to be so gullible that get to me. You can tell that her listeners aren’t really fooled at all; they’re just trying to be polite by not calling her a liar directly, and then she insults them for it. Maybe it’s Pippi who’s really the gullible one, thinking that she’s fooling people when she isn’t really.
Admittedly, Pippi’s wild stories are sometimes amusing. I liked the one where she claimed that the reason why other people don’t believe in ghosts is that all of the ghosts in the world live in her attic and play nine-pins with their heads. When Tommy and Annika go up there to see them, there aren’t any, of course, and Pippi says that they must be away at a conference for ghosts and goblins.
I just don’t like it that Pippi seems to be deliberately trying to make people look dumb when she’s the one saying all the stupid stuff and it’s really obvious that people know it. I also don’t like the part where she makes such a mess at the coffee party because she seems to be trying to be a messy pain on purpose. She insists that it’s just because she doesn’t know how to behave, but I get the sense that it’s just an excuse and that Pippi just likes to pretend to be more ignorant than she is, pushing limits just because she likes to and because she usually gets away with it. I didn’t think it was very funny. But, Tommy and Annika seem to just appreciate Pippi’s imagination, enjoying Pippi’s antics, which bring excitement and chaos to a world controlled by sensible adults, which can be boring to kids, and accepting Pippi’s stories for the tall tales they are, playing along with her.
Pippi herself is really a tall tale, with her super strength, her father the cannibal king, and her ability to turn pretty much any situation her to advantage. Part of her ability to “come out on top” is due to her super strength and part of it is that Pippi approaches situations from the attitude that she’s already won and isn’t answerable to anyone but herself. This approach doesn’t always work in real life (I can’t recommend trying it on any of your teachers, or worse still, your boss – not everyone is easily impressed, especially the people who pay your salary), and nobody in real life has Pippi’s super strength to back it up. The adults in the story frequently let Pippi win because they decide that fighting with her just isn’t worth it. (Admittedly, that does happen in real life, too. I’ve seen teachers and other people give in to people who are just too much of a pain to argue with because they’re too impatient or find the argument too exhausting.) Kids delight in Pippi’s ability to get the better of the adults, who usually have all the control, and in Pippi’s freedom to do what she wants in all situations.
One thing that might surprise American children reading this story is that the children in the story drink coffee. Tommy and Annika say that they are usually only allowed to drink it at parties, although Pippi has it more often. It isn’t very common for American children to drink coffee in general because it’s usually considered more of an adult’s drink and because of concerns about the effects of too much caffeine on young children. Children in Scandinavia tend to drink coffee at a younger age than kids in the United States.
Ira, a young boy, is happy when his friend, Reggie, who lives next door, invites him to sleep over at his house. Then, his sister asks him if he’s going to take his teddy bear with him. At first, Ira says no, but his sister points out that he’s never slept without it.
Ira starts to worry about whether he should take the teddy bear with him or not. He worries that Reggie might laugh at him for having a teddy bear. His parents say that he won’t and that Ira should go ahead and take the bear with him. However, his sister says that Reggie probably will laugh.
Ira tries to talk to Reggie and sound him out on the idea of teddy bears to see if Reggie will laugh, but Reggie ignores Ira’s questions. Reggie is excited about all the things that he and Ira can do at the sleepover and eagerly explains his plans. It all sounds like fun, but Ira gets nervous when Reggie mentions ghost stories.
Ira continues to debate about whether or not he should take his bear with him. Before going over to Reggie’s house, he decides to leave his teddy bear at home.
The two boys have a lot of fun playing together at the sleepover. At bedtime, Reggie starts to tell a ghost story, and both of the boys are a little spooked. That’s when Ira discovers that Reggie has a teddy bear of his own.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
This is a nice story about how the things that we worry other people will find ridiculous or embarrassing are often more common and less embarrassing than we think. At first, Ira worries (because of what his sister said) that Reggie will think that his teddy bear, named Tah Tah, is silly and childish, but after discovering that Reggie has a teddy bear named Foo Foo, Ira realizes that Reggie will understand how he feels about his bear and decides to run home and get it. Reggie probably dodged Ira’s earlier questions about teddy bears because he was similarly worried about what Ira would think of his bear. Sometimes, when people really open up to each other and talk honestly about the way they feel, they learn that other people have shared their feelings and experiences more than they might have thought.
Thirteen-year-old Laurie is looking forward to her family’s vacation. They’ve rented a cabin for a week, Cabin 13, by the lake at Backbone State Park (It’s a real state park in Iowa. Link repaired 10-19-22.), and her friend Jenny is staying there with them. Laurie’s mother isn’t looking forward to the trip. She hates dirt and bugs and doesn’t like the cabin when they arrive. As everyone starts unpacking, Laurie looks around the cabin and finds a note that warns them to leave because the cabin is haunted. Supposedly, it was written by the ghost herself. The note is signed “Eleanor.” Laurie’s mother thinks that they should leave right away, but Laurie and the rest of the family persuade her that it’s just a joke. At first, Laurie’s sure that’s all it is.
Then, the park ranger tells the family that the other families who have tried to stay in that cabin this summer also found similar notes. It might be just a prank, but it might not. He also tells them that a girl named Eleanor, the same age as Laurie and Jenny, drowned there the summer before, and strange things have been seen there since, like lights around the lake. Laurie’s brother, Ricky, thinks it sounds cool that they’re staying in a haunted cabin by a haunted lake. Like others, Laurie thinks that the notes are the product of a prankster, but what would be the point behind it?
The girls meet a pair of brothers who are staying nearby, Kevin and Matt. When they tell them about the note, Matt is eager to investigate. Jenny enjoys flirting with boys, and she’s mostly interested in flirting with good-looking, athletic Kevin. Matt is in a wheelchair, so Jenny doesn’t pay much attention to him. She just makes an awkward comment about cripples being able to contribute to society that makes everyone feel uncomfortable. Although Laurie knows that Jenny’s comment was inappropriately personal and callous, Laurie also underrates Matt’s ability to help with their note mystery at first, and she’s shy about talking to him because she’s often shy around boys. However, needing someone to confide her thoughts in when Jenny isn’t interested, Laurie talks to Matt about her theories about the mysterious notes. Matt turns out to be easy to talk to, helping Laurie get over her nervousness about talking to boys.
At first, Laurie tells Matt that she thinks that the prankster is trying to drive people away from Cabin 13 because something important is hidden there. However, as she starts asking questions about Eleanor, she learns that the notes haven’t just been directed at Cabin 13. Staff at the park have also received notes from “Eleanor.” Laurie also sees a figure in black sneaking around the park, who she is sure is not a ghost.
It isn’t long before Laurie receives more notes from “Eleanor,” hinting that she might be in danger, and she and Jenny see the mysterious lights that people have been talking about. Then, when the children are out in a canoe together, it develops a leak and sinks. Matt panics because his legs are paralyzed, and he can’t swim, but Laurie saves him with the help of some people in another boat.
Was that accident just an accident, or could it have something to do with Eleanor’s “accident” last year? There are plenty of suspects who might have reasons for playing ghost and stirring up trouble at the lake. Matt’s father blames the park ranger for the accident that paralyzed Matt. At a previous visit to the lake, Matt was crossing a road with his father and brother and was struck by a speeding car. Matt father says it wouldn’t have happened if the roads had been policed properly. Laurie realizes that he might have a motive for revenge. Then again, some people have been coming to the lake, drawn by the ghost stories and hoping to see the mysterious lights. Could the ghost be a publicity stunt to drum up business?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
When Laurie discovers that Eleanor’s half sister has come to the lake to investigate Eleanor’s death herself, she thinks that she has the mystery solved, but she’s only half right. It’s true that Eleanor’s sister has been responsible for some of the things happening at the lake, but not all of them. She explains to the kids that Eleanor loved mystery stories and was always playing detective games, but she thinks that perhaps the game got too real for Eleanor the summer that she died. There is something sinister going on at the lake, something that Eleanor also realized before her death, and there is more to Eleanor’s death than most people know.
At the end of the book, Matt gets a chance to be a hero and stop the bad guy from escaping, using his wheelchair to his advantage because a person on wheels can sometimes move faster than a person on foot. Even before that, Laurie had gained an appreciation for Matt and his sensible thinking, realizing that a person who is impaired in one way can still have great abilities in other areas of life. She also comes to think of Matt as being brave for coming back to the site of the accident that made him a paraplegic. Matt says that he had to come in order to prove to himself that there was nothing inherently bad about the place and to stop the nightmares he was having about his accident. Matt and Eleanor’s sister both make Laurie realize that everyone has something difficult or frightening that they have to deal with in their lives; it’s just that some people’s problems are more obvious than others. Everyone can see what Matt’s dealing with at first glance because he’s in a wheelchair, but no one knew about the pain and fear that Eleanor’s sister was carrying around with her until she admitted it.
I consider this story a pseudo-ghost story because the obvious parts of the haunting were caused by living people, for reasons of their own. However, Laurie seems to feel that Eleanor’s spirit was there with them, waiting to see the mystery of her death solved. It’s left open to interpretation, but if Eleanor was there, it was only seen in the odd feelings that Laurie had from time to time, not in any more obvious or physical way.
Something that confused me a little in the book is that, at one point, Jenny tells someone that Laurie already has a reputation for being an amateur detective, having discovered that Jenny herself had been kidnapped when the authorities thought that she had run away from home. Jenny gives full details of the time when she was kidnapped, including who kidnapped her and why and how Laurie figured out where she was. When I read that section of the story, I thought at first that the author was talking about a previous book that she had written with these two characters, but I had trouble figuring out which it was, if any.
Interesting fact: some of the children in the story are named after the author’s own children.
Usually, the girls of Cabin 6 at Camp Sunnyside have fun during the camp’s annual competition. Every year, the girls at camp are divided up into two teams, red and blue, and they compete against each other in a series of contests. Ms. Winkle, the camp director, cautions the girls at the beginning of the Color War not to let themselves be carried away by the competition, to remember that they’re all still friends and members of the same camp, and to keep the contests friendly. Usually, that isn’t a problem for the girls of Cabin 6. They each have their favorite activities, and every year, they’re always on the same team, working together against other cabins. However, this year is different.
When the girls of Cabin Six are split up and put on different teams, the competition between them threatens to ruin their friendship. Some of the girls of Cabin 6 are more competitive than others, especially Katie, who likes to be a leader and hates to lose at anything. Trina, on the other hand, values loyalty and friendship more than competition. She looks on the other girls in her cabin as being almost family because they’ve spent so much time together and considers Katie to be her best friend at camp. There is an unexpected clash between the two girls when Katie turns out to be the captain of the blue team, and Trina ends up on the red team.
Both Trina and Katie are disappointed about the team assignments. Trina had helped to campaign for Katie during the elections that were held for the team captains, before the teams were even assigned, and Katie had told her that she wanted her to be her assistant. But, teams are assigned randomly after the entire camp elects two captains to lead them, and none of the girls had any say in it when Trina and Erin were both placed on the red team, under the leadership of Maura, a snobby older girl who is even more competitive than Katie and not above stooping to some mean tricks to get ahead. Switching teams is against the rules, so there’s nothing to be done about it.
Trina feels badly that she can’t be on Katie’s team and still thinks of her as her friend. But, she notices that, from the moment when the teams are assigned (the girls each have a dot of a different color paint on their foreheads when they wake up one morning, indicating what their team will be), Katie starts behaving awkwardly around Trina, treating her almost as a suspicious stranger, or worse, an enemy. When Katie tries to play on Trina’s sympathies, getting her to let her have an edge at certain contests or even bow out so Katie’s team can win, Trina is willing to go along with it at first because she likes Katie and wants to see her win, if it’s important to her. But, gradually, Katie’s pushy competitiveness begins to wear on Trina, especially when she sees her taking advantage of her and other friends without regard for their feelings. When someone tries to deliberately sabotage an activity that Trina is taking part in, it seems like Katie is willing to stoop to some dirty tricks and even cheating against her “best friend” in order to win, and it doubly hurts.
With Katie expecting Trina to give her advantages and inside information on demand and then shutting her out immediately afterward and acting suspicious of her, even accusing her of doing some of the things Katie herself is doing, Trina is fed up! Katie’s seeming sabotage is the last straw, and Trina decides from that point on, she’s going to treat the Color War as the serious competition Katie acts like it is. The girls’ unfriendly attitudes toward what are supposed to be fun games turns the Color War into a real war with friend against friend. When people as well as friendships seem to be getting hurt, the girls have to decide what’s really important to them and what the cost of winning is going to be.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Although I liked this book when I was a kid, it frustrates and even angers me now. I have a long-standing contempt for one-upmanship in all of its forms, and I lose respect for anyone I see using one-upmanship tactics. (I didn’t write this, but I agree with it, especially the part that says, “You really do not need to be the winner every single time.” Seriously.) As a character, Katie is my least favorite of the girls because of her overly-competitive attitude and lack of consideration for others. It’s all the more aggravating because, as much as Katie likes to be the leader and the other characters follow her, she isn’t actually good at leading. She’s mainly good at being bossy and manipulative. As soon as Katie gets put into a leadership role in a competitive atmosphere, her usual standards of behavior go straight out the window, and she uses even close friends as mere tools to her glorious victory. Note that she isn’t focusing on leading her troops to victory. The victory is all about her and the trophy she wnats, regardless of what it does to people around her, and that’s why she’s not good at leading. In this story, she’s mainly just selfish. Some people can enjoy some harmless competition without losing their scruples, but sadly, Katie is not one of them. Now that I’m an adult with more experience with this personality type, I have less patience for it than I ever did.
It’s true that Katie isn’t as bad as Maura, who we learn later actually did some of the worst things that Katie and Trina suspect each other of doing. Neither Katie nor Trina actually sabotaged each other’s activities. Maura did that both to give her team an edge and also to stir up Trina’s anger against Katie. Maura saw that Trina wasn’t a competitive person and was willing to let Katie win just for the sake of friendship, and she realized that the only way to get Trina to even try to win would be to make her fighting mad.
Maura’s lying and acts of sabotage were worse than what Katie did because it was direct cheating, but Katie’s tactics were also a kind of cheating. Katie persuades Trina to let her have the better horse for the riding contest, even though Trina was supposed to ride that horse, and she tries to convince her to fake an injury so that she can bow out of a gymnastics contest, which she knows Trina loves, just because she knows that Trina is likely to win that activity.
Supposedly, Katie’s a nice person most of the time, but you wouldn’t know it to see her in this contest. Almost from the word go, Katie turns into a rabid little win-monster, ready to shove even her closest friends under a bus to win . . . at summer camp games. At one point, she tries to make Sarah compete in a pie-eating contest because she knows Sarah is normally a big eater, but Sarah gets upset because she’s been dieting, and it was just starting to pay off, and she doesn’t want to ruin what she’s done just for the sake of some dumb contest. When Trina sees how upset Sarah is, she tells her to be honest with Katie about how she feels, and Katie flies off the handle irrationally, as if she had never heard of Sarah’s diet before (she had, a lot, because Sarah had been talking a lot about how hard it was to fight temptation) and accuses Trina of trying to make her lose. Katie can’t stand the idea of not winning, in case you couldn’t tell, and she doesn’t care about what her friends stand to lose in the pursuit of her personal victory or what the lasting consequences might be after the contest ends.
You might be wondering why winning is so important to Katie. What’s really at stake for her in this summer camp contest? I was wondering this a lot, all through the book. It turns out that winning is important because the alternative, not winning, will make Katie feel like a loser, and people might think she was lame. And . . . nothing. That’s it. Whoopty doo. Katie fears getting jeered as the loser at the end of the contest, which is silly because no one does jeer the loser at the end, and most of the younger girls they talk to while campaigning for Katie to be one of the team captains in the beginning were kind of unenthusiastic about the games, not because they feared losing, but because they figured that the older girls wouldn’t let them try any of the more fun stuff, saving all the best parts for themselves. In other words, very few people beyond Katie and Maura were at all concerned about who won or lost, they just wanted to take part. Mostly, it seems that what Katie is really afraid of is coming up against an opponent, or even other teammates, who are just like her. Katie is the manipulator who uses her friends; her friends are not trying to manipulate her or make her lose. Katie is the rude one who jeers at losers. Ultimately, she’s afraid of what she does to other people coming back on her.
Part of the reason Katie was hoping that Trina would be her assistant on her team was because Katie remembered that the year before some of the girls had ganged up on their team’s captain over a part of the competition that had gone badly. Trina remembers that Katie had been the main instigator of the rebellion. Katie’s scared of getting a taste of what she dished out to someone else before. She fears getting jeered because that’s what she does to others when they lose. She fears teammates getting down on her for not winning because she does that herself, to them. And as the reader, we’re supposed to like her and hope she wins against awful Maura? I have pity for her former team captain, getting stuck with this bratty little girl who ruins fun and makes people miserable because she can’t win at everything. It must have been like babysitting, unpaid, while she’s supposed to be on vacation. Have I mentioned how much I hate one-upmanship?
It’s funny, but by the end of the book, I had more contempt for Katie than I did for Maura. It’s not that I liked Maura at all. Maura’s tactics were definitely worse. If I were in charge of the kids, she would be punished worse for what she did. My anger at Katie is because of her sense of entitlement and because she’s still considered one of the “good guys” at the end, and I don’t think she deserves either. She saw nothing wrong with manipulating her friends and forcing them to do what she wanted for her own personal glory, even when some of what she asked them to do would have been actually harmful to some of them, like interfering with Sarah’s diet. She plays on their feelings of friendship but with no feelings of friendship returned. If she feels real friendship for them, it all evaporates the moment the possibility of being a “winner” is on the horizon. Even if it’s just a dinky summer camp contest. Worst of all, Katie routinely does things to others that she fears and resents having done to her. She does them more frequently to others than anyone does them to her, and often, she’s the first to do them, so she can’t even say that it was retaliation. Part of Maura’s justification for her bad behavior is that Katie would do the same things she’s doing. While Katie might not stoop quite as low as Maura does, the sad part is, Maura’s not that far off in her assessment of Katie. Even though Trina doesn’t like Maura and sees her behavior as worse than Katie’s, she admits that Maura is pretty good at reading people and understanding their motivations.
In the end, Katie does acknowledge to Trina that the situation was really all of her fault and that she intentionally tried to make Trina feel bad about being on the opposite team because she genuine feared that Trina would win against her. I don’t have any sympathy for Katie at all, and her apology falls flat for me. Trina genuinely cared about about Katie. She let her win when she didn’t have to and was actually happy when she did well. All the time, Katie just cared about Katie and winning and that was about it. Even after her apology to Trina, Katie says that she still wants to win. Dang it, girl, don’t you have any other priorities in your life or any other dimensions to your character? I would have found Katie more interesting as a character if she liked winning but had exceptions where the price of winning was just too high. I wish she had limits.
The one part of the book that makes me feel better is when Trina is taking part in the gymnastics competition, and she realizes that if she made a mistake on a very difficult part, she could hand victory to Katie and no one would know that it was intentional. At that moment, Trina realizes that she can’t do that because it wouldn’t be honest. She says to herself, “You don’t have to prove your friendship this way . . . If Katie expects you to, then she’s not a true friend. And if you intentionally give this away, you’re not being a friend either – you’re trying to buy a friend. And that’s not what it’s all about.” Bravo, Trina, for growing a backbone and some self-respect! Katie also shows that she’s happy when Trina does well, and that’s something, a kind of progress for her, learning to care about someone else and be happy when they succeed at something that isn’t also a personal win for her . . . but dang it, that silly, shallow, win-monster still annoys me. I didn’t really want Maura to win, but I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely happy that Katie’s team won, either. I didn’t feel like either one of them really deserved it.
Since I disliked both Maura and Katie, I suppose it’s a given that I was going to be disappointed no matter which of them won. But, I keep thinking of ways that the story could have ended which would have been better. What if . . . no one won? Suppose it was a tie? Trina would have been happy since she doesn’t like to see people lose and doesn’t really care who wins. In a tie, no one wins, but no one loses, either. Also, it might bring it home to both of the team captains that the real goal of the contest, which they both somewhat failed, was to make the contest fun for their teammates. Instead, people on both teams repeatedly remark that the contest is so much nastier this year with both Maura and Katie in charge and everyone feels awkward about it. Nobody really enjoyed this contest except maybe Katie, because she won the trophy she was hungering for. Then, when Katie has her pretty trophy at the end, she doesn’t even acknowledge her teammates’ hard work or how they helped her to win. Many people would be thanking their teammates and talking about this trophy belongs to everyone because everyone won it together, but not Katie. She was just happy that she had her trophy. It’s her trophy, hers. Whee.
I understand that we’re supposed to learn from both Katie and Maura what not to do in competitions, but watching them do what they do is painful and frustrating, a slow train wreck on Katie’s way to victory, and I hated seeing her friends just letting her obsessive meanness slide in the beginning. In the end, the only person I felt was a real winner was Trina. She never cared that much about winning the contest because her self-esteem doesn’t depend on it. Trina is a valuable person and a true friend whether she wins a contest or not. She knows what’s really important to her, and nothing important changes if she wins a game or not. I think the world needs more people like Trina, who aren’t in it for the winning but are willing to work cooperatively with others to make good things happen for everyone. By contrast, Katie needs to win because she is . . . just a winner. At summer camp. She’s got a trophy now. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
In spite of the fact that a large part of this review is me venting about the frustration, I actually did like this series when I was a kid. This is the only book in it that I’ve been able to get my hands on recently, and it happens to be the one I find most frustrating.
Ginnie and the Mystery Doll by Catherine Woolley, 1960.
Ginnie and Geneva’s families have rented a house on Cape Cod for the summer, so they’ll be sharing their vacation at the beach. Their next door neighbor at Cape Cod is Miss Wade, a nice older lady. Miss Wade’s house is very old-fashioned, and when the girls make friends with her, she shows it to them, allowing them to see some of the neat old things in her attic on a rainy day. The girls have fun trying on the old clothes in the attic, and then they find an old diary belonging to Miss Wade’s mother when she was a girl. In the diary, the girl talks about the special doll that her uncle gave her, which has a “precious jewel.”
The girls ask Miss Wade about the doll, and she says that she knows the one they mean, but she no longer has it. Her mother’s uncle was the captain of a ship and used to bring her presents from around the world. The doll, called Lady Vanderbilt, was very fancy, and Miss Wade describers her costume to the girls. However, she says that the doll disappeared after she rented her house out to a family one summer while she was traveling. She never found out what happened to the doll, but she assumed that the children of the family probably found her and either took her or broke her. Miss Wade said that she didn’t think that the doll was worth making a fuss about, so she never asked the family about it. The girls note that Miss Wade doesn’t seem to know anything about a precious jewel in the doll, but they decide not to say anything about it since Miss Wade doesn’t have the doll anymore.
The girls decide to concentrate on enjoying their summer vacation, picking beach plums and digging clams with Miss Wade on the beach. Then, when they go to see a local auction, they spot a doll that looks exactly like the Lady Vanderbilt that Miss Wade described! The girls try to bid on the doll at the auction, but someone else buys her instead, and that lady leaves the auction before the girls can talk to her.
The girls tell Miss Wade and their mothers about the doll, but when they try to ask the people in charge of the auction where the doll came from and who bought her, they learn that the woman who was in charge of organizing the toys has already left on vacation. The only clue that the girls have is that the woman who bought the doll left the auction in a red Jaguar.
The girls make it their mission to track down the doll and its buyer, asking questions all over town about who might own a red Jaguar. Then, at an art exhibit at the Historical Society, they make a surprising discovery: a painting of the very doll that they’re looking for!
But, just when they figure out who has the doll and where she is, she disappears again when the red Jaguar is stolen with Lady Vanderbilt inside! Was it just an accident that the doll was stolen along with the car, or does someone else know that Lady Vanderbilt might be hiding a valuable secret?
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
John and Susan are brother and sister, living in a perfectly ordinary town in Connecticut. They are tall, good-looking, and good in school and at sports, so they are generally popular and are often chosen for positions like class president. However, their home life is unusual because they are orphans who live with their grandmother, who sometimes requires them to look after her as much as she looks after them. Their grandmother isn’t very strong, but she is spirited and is sometimes tempted to do things that she probably shouldn’t do at her age, like climbing trees. Because John and Susan feel like they have to look after their grandmother, it’s sometimes difficult for them to get out and do some of the things that other children their age are doing, like going to parties. They’re glad when Barnaby and his sisters move to a house nearby because they make life more exciting.
Barnaby and his sisters, Abigail (called Abbie) and Fredericka, become friends with John and Susan. Their father is a singer in advertisements, and their mother is a realtor. Because their parents work a lot to make ends meet, the children are often left to their own devices. Barnaby is opinionated, stubborn, and sometimes hot-tempered, which causes him to get into fights at school, but John likes him because he’s imaginative and full of interesting ideas.
Barnaby wants to be a writer. He’s secretly writing a story of his own, and he encourages the others to read more. Before meeting Barnaby, John hardly read anything at all, and Susan was mostly into the Sue Barton books, about a young woman who becomes a nurse (a real series that was popular in the mid-20th century, realistic fiction). Barnaby introduces them to a whole new world of fantasy stories, full of adventure. One day, while visiting the library together, the children talk about the kinds of stories that they like and wish that they could find a really good book full of magic and kids that are like themselves. Their wish comes true in a peculiar way.
On impulse, Susan checks out a rather worn-looking book with a red cover, not really knowing what it’s about but thinking that it just looked kind of interesting. The librarian seems a little uneasy when she takes it and warns her that she can only keep that particular book for seven days, which is surprising because that’s the limit usually imposed on new books, not old ones.
On the way home, the children show each other what they got and read parts of their books aloud to each other. When Susan opens the red book, they are all startled to find out that the book is about them. It starts out just like the real life book and tells about their lives and backgrounds and has their conversation about books they like, word-for-word. The children can tell that this is a magic book, but even while the idea is thrilling, it makes them uneasy. There is nothing written beyond their conversation about books, and the book won’t let them turn pages to see what might come next or how their story will end.
As much as the children like the idea of being the stars of their own magical book, it’s worrying. They don’t know what they’re in store for, and they even worry briefly that maybe their entire lives are fictional, that they might just exist in someone’s imagination, although they don’t really believe that because they can remember their lives before the story began. Barnaby points out that the book specifically mentions that he and his sisters recently moved to the area, but he remembers having lived elsewhere before that.
The children carefully consider everything they had originally wished for in a book: that children, just like themselves, would be walking home from somewhere and a magical adventure would start before they even realized that it was happening and that they would have to figure out the rules of the magic in order to use it for their own purposes. Since the first part of their wish has literally (very literally) come true, they decide that they’re going to have to figure out what the rules of this magic are before they decide what to do next. Since looking ahead in the book seems to be against the rules, they decide that they will have to be very careful about anything they wish for next because their wishes seem to be what writes the story, and they need to discuss it first and come to an agreement about it.
Unfortunately, little Fredericka (the youngest of the children) is too impatient for discussion and immediately wishes for an adventure with wizards, witches, and magic, and she wants it to start right away so that they’ll know that the magic is really working. A minute later, a dragon suddenly appears and scoops up Fredericka, flying away with her!
The others try to figure out where the dragon came from, and it turns out that a stage magician who lives nearby was practicing his act at the time that Fredericka made her wish. When she wished for a magical adventure, the rabbit that the magician was supposed to pull out of his hat turned out to be a dragon. The magician, The Great Oswaldo, is mystified, but he’s destined to play the part of Fredericka’s requested wizard. The children ask him to help them, and he says he’ll try, although he’s not sure how.
As Oswaldo tries various tricks in his magic supplies, they don’t work in the way they usually do. Finally, he is able to make his landlady’s house fly after the dragon, much to the landlady’s horror (she’s cast in the role of the witch in Fredericka’s story). In the magical land where the dragon lives, the peasants inform them that the dragon is always carrying off girls and young women to eat them, and they have to think of something fast before Fredericka becomes his next meal!
This is where the children discover that the contents of the magical book change depending on who reads it. When the magician reads it, it’s full of magic spells. When the landlady, Mrs. Funkhouser, takes it from him, it has household hints. For the dragon, it’s all about dragons. Surprisingly, it’s Mrs. Funkhouser’s household hints that save the day, although it’s Oswaldo who gets most of the credit because one of his pet cats eats the dragon after Mrs. Funkhouser shrinks it.
Oswaldo and Mrs. Funkhouser decide to stay in the magic land (which the children think might actually be Oz, in its early days), where they are hailed as heroes, sending the children home by themselves with the help of Mrs. Funkhouser’s vanishing cream. As expected, this adventure is now written in the magic book when the children have another look at it (although Fredericka argues that the illustrations don’t really do her justice).
Susan, as the borrower of the book, says that she wants their next adventure to be calmer, the kind of everyday magic that just creeps up on you. This is the part of the story where it crosses over with the events in Half Magic (another book in the same series as this one). In these children’s world, Half Magic is a fictional book that they’ve read and liked. Susan’s requested adventure picks up where Half Magic left off, explaining what happened after the other four children (Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha) left their magic coin to be discovered by a new owner. Susan and her friends delight in explaining to the young girl who found the coin what it does. The girl says that she had thought that the coin might be magic, but was confused because she didn’t get her wish to go into the future and meet some other children. Because the coin only grants wishes by halves (interpreting that pretty liberally), Susan and her friends (who live in the future), came to meet her instead.
Once again (as is common in this series), it leaves the matter of what is fiction and what is reality open to question. Was it the girl’s wish that brought the other children to her, or their wish that took them into her story? Or Both? Was that fantasy story secretly real, or are Susan and her friends more fictional than they like to think? The author likes posing questions like this, but of course, you never completely know the answers, and in some ways, it hardly matters because the adventure doesn’t require anyone’s understanding for them to take place, which is something that, ironically, it has in common with real life – things frequently happen regardless of whether or not you understand the reasons why. Sometimes, figuring out how things work and to deal with them is about all you can do, never getting the complete “why” behind everything. That’s pretty much how all the stories in this series go.
After the children explain to the girl what the coin is and how it’s supposed to work, she makes a more careful, doubled wish to go to the future with the other children. Unfortunately, when they get there, she panics when she realizes that she forgot to bring her one-year-old baby brother with her and makes a hurried half-wish for him to be there, too. Because she didn’t wish right, what she gets is her brother at the age he would be in the other children’s time (about age 37) but still mentally the baby he was back in 1924 (the girl’s time). The “baby” is amazed when he realizes that suddenly he can walk and talk much better than he could before and that he’s suddenly much bigger and stronger than he used to be. He gets hold of the coin and refuses to give it back, telling his little “big” sister that he can do what he wants now, not what she tells him to do. Noting that he can even pick her up and carry her around now, he does that, with the others chasing after him to get the charm and bring him under control. (A somewhat similar incident, where a baby grows up too fast and is dangerously immature, happens in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It – another instance of Edward Eager playing off her books.)
It’s chaos for awhile because a 37-year-old man who acts like a 1-year-old can’t help but attract attention, especially when he gets it into his head that he wants to drive a train. Eventually, they get the “baby” back under control and to his proper age, allowing his sister to take him back to their own time and plan her future adventures with the coin.
Then, Susan and John’s grandmother gets hold of the book, and it takes her and her grandchildren back in time, to when the grandmother was a young woman working as a prairie schoolteacher. Susan makes a wish for the other children to join them, and they help their grandmother and her students to survive a sudden blizzard. They come to appreciate their grandmother’s youthful personality and formidable spirit even more from the experience. They even get to meet their grandfather, who died before they were born, seeing him rescue their grandmother and her students when he was a young man.
Then, Abbie decides that she wants to try to help her father’s singing career. He typically has to work long hours and never makes very much money, just being part of the chorus on advertisements. She thinks things will be so much better if they can help him to be discovered as a great talent. The others are kind of doubtful about her plan because the book seems to send them on rather “bookish” adventures, related to other stories they’ve read or people’s memories, like in their grandmother’s case because her early life actually did somewhat resemble things from the Little House on the Prairie series (a series which the grandmother enjoys reading for that reason). The other children just don’t know what would happen if Abbie tries to use the book for something more modern and everyday, like their father’s career. She tries it anyway, with some unpredictable results.
During a recording at a television studio (which the children are present to witness), the magic makes their father sing wonderfully but he also does his singing part out of sync with the other singers. He’s sure that he is singing his part at the right time, but for some reason, the other members of the chorus are silent when he sings. The director gets mad at him for singing out of sync and messing up the performance, and the singer who was supposed to be the star gets mad about being upstaged, but the reviewers end up loving the performance. So, while at first it looks like the father is going to be fired, he ends up with more singing parts because of the episode. The only problem is that all the singing parts are silly jingles, like the typical advertising jingles he gets. While he’d welcome more money, he always dreamed of being able to get better parts. However, the magic isn’t quite done, yet. When Abbie meets a playwright who is looking for a new talent to sing in his play, it turns out that he has seen Abbie’s father on tv and likes his voice.
Abbie’s wish is so great and does so much for their family that the kids start thinking that it might be the end of the magic. The seven days are really up, and the book has to go back to the library the next day. However, John and Barnaby haven’t had their chance to wish yet, and each of them wants to have a turn before the book goes back. Barnaby even suggests that perhaps they can keep the book an extra day, turning it in late. Surely a little late fee isn’t too much to ask for an extra day of magic, is it? Abbie is afraid, though, that keeping the book overdue would be breaking the rules and that the magic might go all wrong. She’s right.
Even with the idea of keeping the book for extra time, John and Barnaby argue over which of them will get to go first. The book’s magic, angry about not being returned to the library, turns sour on them, causing them to fight. John angrily tells Barnaby that just because he’s usually the group’s idea man doesn’t mean that he’s the only one who’s allowed to have ideas. (Which, in a way, is something that Barnaby needs to hear because that’s part of the reason why he often gets into fights – he always thinks he knows best.) John and Barnaby fight over the book, and the book gets torn. John ends up with a few pages, and Barnaby gets most of the book, which he uses to make a wish that he refuses to tell to the others. Barnaby disappears, and the others realize that the pages that Barnaby is holding are the last few pages from the end of the book, still blank. Without them, the book can’t end, and Barnaby could end up stuck in the book forever! Can the others find him and get him (and the book) back before it’s too late?
Before the end of the book, John does prove that, although he might not be as quick to come up with ideas as Barnaby is, he does get good ones. After he and the others find Barnaby, John uses his wish to get them back home and to return the book to the library in a most unusual way. (Actually two unusual ways because he couldn’t quite make up his mind about which was best. Both of them are homages to incidents in E. Nesbit’s books.)
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Laura and her twin brother, James, are practical children who are fond of useful facts, but still have imaginations and appreciate fantasy stories. In this part of the Tales of Magic series, all of the previous books in the series are fictional books that the characters have read and enjoyed, and real magic may or may not exist, as the title suggests. All throughout their coming adventures, the children are never quite sure how much of what happens is magic and how much isn’t, but they’re bound for an amazing summer.
Laura and James’s family has recently bought a house in the country, and the story begins with the twins taking the train to their new town while their parents follow in the car with their luggage and their baby sister, Deborah. Laura and James haven’t seen the new house yet, but they know that it’s pretty old, and they speculate if it could be haunted or maybe even magical, like something from a fantasy story. James doesn’t think so. He thinks that magic, if it existed, is a thing of the past. Then, a strange girl on the train tells them that magic does exist. She insists that her grandmother is a witch and makes a comment about how they should “drop a wish in the wishing well, and wait and see!”
Laura and James don’t know what she means, but it turns out that there is an old well on the property of their new house. James ignores it, but Laura can’t resist giving the wishing thing a try. After struggling to come up with something appropriate to wish for, she finally writes a note that says, “I wish I had a kitten” and tosses it into the well. The next day, when they meet the boy next door, Kip (short for Christopher), they find a basket with two kittens in it sitting on the edge of the well. Kip figures that Lydia found the note that Laura wrote in the well bucket and decided to make her wish come true by leaving a couple of stray kittens for her.
It turns out that the girl from the train is Lydia Green. Kip says that she lives nearby with her grandmother. Lydia’s grandmother is an artist, and both of them are eccentrics. Lydia is kind of a wild child who likes to spend her time riding around on her black horse. She’s something of an outcast in the community, and she knows it. When the other children go to see her to ask about the kittens, Lydia seems prepared for them not to like her and for her not to like them, either. However, when she finds out that Laura’s names for the kittens were inspired by the book The Midnight Folk, she warms up to them because she also likes fantasy stories, and Laura offers to share the magic of the well with her.
James is more skeptical about Lydia and insists that she prove that there’s magic around, if her grandmother is really a witch. Lydia is reluctant at first, but then she shows the other children her grandmother’s garden. She insists that one of the plants in the messy garden (which does look like it might belong to a witch) can bring visions when it’s burned and maybe even a visitor from another world. (Sounds trippy.) The others want to see it work, so they decide to burn some. Nothing happens, and when James demands to know how long they have to wait, Lydia gives a vague answer that it might not be the right time or that maybe she just made the whole thing up. James believes the second explanation, but Laura is willing to give Lydia (and magic) more of a chance.
The two girls bond over their shared love of fantasy stories, and Laura invites Lydia to come to their house the next day. The boys admit to Laura that they kind of like Lydia, although she’d be easier to get along with if she didn’t have such a chip on her shoulder. Kip says that she’s always like that, and that’s why kids at school don’t get along with her either. Even so, Lydia is an interesting person.
When Kip gets home, he finds more of the strange plant that Lydia burned growing around his house, and his mother tells him that it’s an ordinary wildflower. Still, the next day, something happens which makes it seem like Lydia’s notion that it “makes unseen things appear and seen things disappear” has come true – the old lawnmower that came with the house is now missing, and there’s a young tree on the property that wasn’t there before. Coincidence? Maybe, but Lydia had also said that it could “transform people so they’re unrecognizable overnight”, and suddenly little Deborah has a new, weird haircut. When Deborah happily announces that she’s been transformed by magic, James realizes that it’s a trick and that Kip arranged everything. Lydia is angry that Kip was playing a joke, but he says that it isn’t really a joke, that he just wanted to keep the game going. Lydia says that it isn’t really a game to her, although she finally admits that she left the kittens.
Laura turns on the boys and says that it’s obvious that Lydia only did those things because she wanted to make friends. Lydia tries to deny it at first, but then admits that it’s true, but that she is never able to make friends and that she doesn’t know how. Laura says that she is Lydia’s friend, and the boys are, too. James agrees, saying that he just likes “to get the facts straight,” but now that the facts are known, he hopes that they can all start over again. The children each apologize to one another for the awkwardness, and Laura says that she is a little disappointed that there isn’t any real magic.
This part could be a story all by itself, but, not so fast! Just as the children are making amends with each other, a strange woman comes up to them in a horse-drawn carriage, looking like a visitor from another world in strange, old-fashioned clothing. They ask her if she came because they wished for her, and she says it’s difficult to say, but wonders why they would think so. The children say that they were playing a game and wished for a visitor from another world. The woman says that, in a way, she is from another world. She says that when she lived in this same valley, when she was young, life was very different, so it’s like she has come from the past to the present. The woman, Isabella King, lives in a house by the old silver mine. She invites the children to come and visit her sometime to have some of her silver cake and see the old mine. After she leaves, the children debate whether Isabella was brought to them by magic, but James says that it doesn’t matter because it looks like they’re going to have an adventure, magical or not.
Isabella King really does like to live in the past, maintaining her house and the old, disused silver mine that her father left her in the way that she’s sure he would want them to be maintained. However, her house and mine are threatened when the bank announces that it will foreclose on the mortgage. The children badly want to help Miss King, so they decide to go see the banker, Hiram Bundy, about it and try to persuade him to give her some leniency. Before they go to see him, Laura decides to make another wish on the wishing well because, in spite of Lydia’s earlier confession, she thinks that the well still might be magic.
Hiram Bundy agrees to talk to the children partly because he enjoys Lydia’s grandmother’s paintings, but he tells them that money isn’t the only concern about Miss King. Her family has a reputation for getting “peculiar” as they get older, and people have voiced concerns to him that Miss King is no longer capable of handling her own affairs and that she might be better off living in a nursing home. The children angrily deny that Miss King is mentally incompetent, giving him some of the cake that Miss King had baked for them as proof that she is still capable of doing things. Miss King is an excellent baker, and Mr. Bundy admits that he is impressed. Lydia also finally speaks up about the way the people in town, including Mr. Bundy himself, look at her and other people who are eccentrics. Lydia’s grandmother is allowed to be eccentric because she’s a talented artist and people make allowances for her, but those same people look at Lydia as if she’s terrible just because she likes to spend time by herself, riding her horse around. Adults in town are always saying that she’s a disgrace and that “somebody ought to do something” about her just because she doesn’t like things that other people like and wants to live her own life, doing her own thing. It’s not that there’s really anything wrong with either Lydia or Miss King so much as some of the people in town simply don’t like them and the way they do things. Because they aren’t the town’s little darlings, they are unfairly characterized as being worse than they really are and ostracized. Mr. Bundy admits the hypocrisy, which he is also guilty of, and assures her that he will take responsibility and straighten things out with Miss King.
When the children later see Mr. Bundy having cake and talking with Miss King at her house, Laura remembers that part of her wish at the well had been that Miss King would have Mr. Bundy eating out of her hand, and once again, the wish seems to have come true, literally. Although it still isn’t positive proof that Mr. Bundy’s change of heart was due to the well’s magic, the children think it might have been. They start considering that perhaps the well came through for them because they were doing a good deed, and perhaps they ought to try to do the same for others, thrilling in the apparent power they have to change people’s lives.
Testing out their theory proves difficult at first because they have trouble finding another person with a problem for them to solve. At first, the only person who seems to want their help is the woman downtown who asks them to help with setting up for a local art show to encourage amateur artists. The art show is open to anyone in town, and the kids think that maybe they should enter it, too. However, the only art supplies that they can afford are paper and crayons, and only Lydia manages to draw something that’s any good. Lydia doesn’t particularly like her drawing, saying it’s just a doodle, but Laura stops her from throwing it away. Then, the clerk at the store asks them if the small boy in the store is their little brother. It appears that the little boy is lost, so they decide that their good deed for the day will be helping him to get home.
They do find the boy’s home, and he turns out to be the child of a wealthy family who wandered off while his nurse was talking to a friend in town and ignoring him. The nurse at first blames the children for kidnapping the boy when they come to return him. The boy’s father doesn’t believe that, but he does reprimand the children for taking all day to return him because they had wanted to find his house themselves with the help of the wishing well instead of the police and allowed themselves to be sidetracked with something else they had also wanted to do. In the end, the children question how much they really helped the “lost heir”, as they think of him, because he might have been found sooner without their interference. However, one good thing does come out of their adventures: Lydia wins a prize in the art contest because Laura entered her picture on her behalf.
Lydia (as Laura had expected) is at first angry that Laura entered her in the contest without her permission, but Laura explains to her that she’s realized something about Lydia: Lydia prefers to think that no one cares about her or will ever appreciate her because she fears their rejection too much to risk trying to do anything that might earn their approval. Laura points out that their interest in her art proves that people really do appreciate her. Lydia’s grandmother even apologizes for not realizing before that Lydia has artistic talent. Lydia is amazed because she never really thought of her doodles as being anything special before. Kids at school had always made fun of her “crazy pictures,” and her teacher had always insisted that she “paint from nature” instead of drawing what she really wanted to draw.
But, the children aren’t done with the wishing well yet. Mrs. Witherspoon, the head of the local garden club and self-appointed arbiter of all that’s right and what everyone should think and do, has set herself against the new school that is planned for the area. She doesn’t like the idea of more traffic, more kids running around, and the possible risk to property values. However, many families with children live in the area, and they really want the school for their kids. Mrs. Witherspoon has set herself against them because she’s accustomed to people simply agreeing with what she wants (often just out of habit). She’s one of the big voices that enforces conformity in their town. She’s so awful that the kids consider making a voodoo doll of her, but then, it occurs to them that she might be much worse if she were actually in pain instead of just busy being one. They decide maybe she really needs people to be extra nice to her in order to make her more agreeable, but she refuses to accept any of their gestures of kindness because she thinks that they just want money from her, and she calls them juvenile delinquents. Can the power of the wishing well do anything to change her mind? Or, do they really need it?
A surprising friendship with Mrs. Witherspoon’s son, Gordy, leads the children on one last adventure that may (or may not) involve a ghost from the past and answer the question of whether or not the wishing well is really magic (unless there’s another explanation).
All through the book, there are other explanations besides magic for everything that happens. In fact, the wishing well may not do anything aside from acting as a source of inspiration for the children. Mr. Bundy might have been influenced by the children’s arguments even without the well, but the well is what influenced them to become friends with Isabella King and try to help her in the first place. Similarly, Lydia was always talented in art; it was just that no one recognized it until Laura was inspired to enter her drawing in the art show. The strangest episode takes place at the end of the book, when the children supposedly meet the ghost of the woman who may have made the well magic in the first place, but even then, the children realize that the “ghost” may have been the work of someone else, perhaps part of a conspiracy on the part of the people they’ve been helping all summer. However, it’s never established one way or the other, so it’s up to the readers’ imaginations to decide.
Much of the story is about fitting in and finding friends. In the beginning, Lydia was the main outcast in the community, but it turns out that many others, including Gordy, in spite of his mother’s social status, don’t quite fit in, either. In fact, it seems that perhaps more people in town would have liked Lydia more and encouraged her in her art if she had ever felt confident enough before to let people really get to know her. However, here I have to say that it was really the townspeople’s fault for driving her away in the first place. For a long time, Lydia had lost confidence in other people and in her ability to make friends because of the way people treated her. That was why Lydia sometimes purposely acted strange and didn’t try to get people to like her; she was already pretty firmly convinced that they didn’t and never would. It was just the message that everyone seemed to be sending her, and it kind of turned into a vicious cycle that was pushing Lydia further and further away from other people. Lydia really needed intervention from a third party to end the cycle. When Laura accepts Lydia and convinces the others to accept her as well, it opens up new sides of Lydia’s character and new possibilities for her.
The drive that some people have to assert control over others, enforce conformity within a group, and maintain an “us vs. them” mentality with non-conformists is responsible for many social problems and behavioral issues. Mrs. Witherspoon is an example of this, although it turns out that even our heroes are somewhat guilty in the way that they view Mrs. Witherspoon’s son Gordy at first.
This book taught me a new vocabulary word, purse-proud, which is used to describe Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends. Basically, it means pride in having money, especially if the person lacks other sources of pride. Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends are all wealthier members of the community, which is why they feel that they’re entitled to dictate to others what they should do and how things should be. They think that because they have more, they know best. (I’ve seen this before, but now I have a new word to describe it.) Initially, Mrs. Witherspoon is unconcerned with how local children are educated because she’s wealthy enough to send her son to private schools. Other people’s needs are of no concern and possibly a source of inconvenience for her. Gordy is the one who changes her mind when he realizes that he has a chance at making real friends with the neighborhood kids if he goes to public school, like they do, and convinces his mother that it’s what he really wants. Although his family is pretty privileged, Gordy never really made any friends at the private schools that he has attended and has actually been rather lonely. In a way, Gordy receives the final wish of the wishing well (for this book, anyway) in getting the new friends that he has needed and learning that there are other, more imaginative ways to have fun than what he’s been doing.
Gordy is a nice surprise as a character. At first, he seems to be a kind of clueless trouble-maker, but his friendship with the other kids brings out better qualities in him. Perhaps a better way to put it is that the others’ acceptance of him encourages him to show more of what he’s truly capable of. When James and Laura are introduced to Gordy, he doesn’t seem very bright, and he does things he shouldn’t, like swimming in the reservoir instead of the river and throwing rocks at windows to break them just because he can. In some ways, the other kids are right, that Gordy is thoughtless and doesn’t behave well. However, when they end up agreeing to hang out with Gordy one afternoon after failing to win over Mrs. Witherspoon with kindness, they realize that part of the reason that Gordy acts the way he does is that no one ever suggests to him that he do anything different. Gordy lacks somewhat for positive influences in his life. His mother thinks that she knows best in everything but isn’t always aware of what her son thinks and feels. Other people try to avoid talking to Gordy because they see him as an annoyance or source of trouble, so no one explains to him how his behavior is keeping him from making friends. However, Gordy does have good points. Unlike Lydia, Gordy doesn’t seem to hold any grudges in spite of experiencing similar problems with fitting in and making friends. Even when the other kids are less than enthusiastic about hanging out with him at first, he still keeps trying to be friendly and is quick to forgive their earlier coldness. Gordy knows that he really wants friends and that part of the key to getting them is to remain open to the possibility of being friends, even when those friends aren’t perfect. In the end, he is really good at showing the acceptance of others that is part of the theme of this story. Acceptance of others and willingness to be friendly improves things for everyone.
Another thing that I really liked about this book is the children’s attitudes toward people’s conventional views of art and literature. Many people are eager to tell others what art or writing should be and how it should be done. Lydia said that people had criticized her drawings before for being “crazy” or not from real life. They couldn’t see the imagination and talent that it took to make them because they weren’t what people expected. Even Lydia’s grandmother complains about always having to paint scenes with maple trees in them because that’s what grows where they live. She’d rather paint something else, but people expect maples trees, so that’s what she paints. Kip says that he kind of understands because his teachers always tell him to “write what he knows”, but really, he thinks that the things he doesn’t know well are much more interesting. They all want the freedom to explore new ideas, and that type of exploration is what makes fantasy stories so interesting. There may be magic, and maybe not, but considering the possibilities is half the fun!
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
The Sly Spy by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat and Mitchell Sharmat, 1990.
Someone has been trying to steal Olivia’s business by covering up her flyers with ones that say E.J.’s Spy Service. At the same time, Olivia’s friends are trying to keep Desiree’s birthday present a secret even though she has been snooping at their houses to find out what it is.
Olivia’s friends bought her a pet canary because she said that she likes feathers, and they ask Olivia to hide it at her penthouse until the party. However, it looks like Desiree has hired E.J. to spy on her friends and discover what they’re giving her for her birthday. Olivia has to outwit the spy and prove to him that some cases aren’t worth taking.
In a way, this story is kind of like business ethics for kids. First, covering up Olivia’s ads to prevent her from getting business was a form of unfair competition. Then, when Olivia points out to E.J. that he also has a surprise present to give to Desiree, she helps him to understand why the other kids want to keep their present a secret. It wasn’t really ethical for E.J. to take Desiree’s case in the first place since it would be better for her to be surprised on her birthday. Olivia makes sure that E.J. only has a vague notion about what Desiree’s present actually is, and he figures out what to tell Desiree so that he can fulfill his duty to her without giving away the surprise.
The Haunting of Cabin 13 by Kristi D. Holl, 1987.
#3 Color War! by Marilyn Kaye, 1989.
The girls ask Miss Wade about the doll, and she says that she knows the one they mean, but she no longer has it. Her mother’s uncle was the captain of a ship and used to bring her presents from around the world. The doll, called Lady Vanderbilt, was very fancy, and Miss Wade describers her costume to the girls. However, she says that the doll disappeared after she rented her house out to a family one summer while she was traveling. She never found out what happened to the doll, but she assumed that the children of the family probably found her and either took her or broke her. Miss Wade said that she didn’t think that the doll was worth making a fuss about, so she never asked the family about it. The girls note that Miss Wade doesn’t seem to know anything about a precious jewel in the doll, but they decide not to say anything about it since Miss Wade doesn’t have the doll anymore.
The girls tell Miss Wade and their mothers about the doll, but when they try to ask the people in charge of the auction where the doll came from and who bought her, they learn that the woman who was in charge of organizing the toys has already left on vacation. The only clue that the girls have is that the woman who bought the doll left the auction in a red Jaguar.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 