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Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine

Danny Dunn

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin, 1958.

At the beginning of the book, Danny develops a device that allows him to do his homework and his friend Joe’s homework at the same time by using a system of pulleys and a board that holds two pens at once. (This seems like an unnecessarily complicated device, since he and his friend could accomplish the same thing just by sitting next to each other and talking over their answers as they both write them down at the same time, although Danny says that he plans to build a second pen board so Joe can work on their English homework at the same time as Danny does their math homework.) Danny thinks that it would save even more time if he could find a way to build a robot that will just do the homework for them, but Joe warns him to be careful because things often go wrong with his inventions.

Joe leaves to get more materials for their homework device, and suddenly, Danny is surprised by a tapping at the window, and he sees a girl’s face looking in at him. It’s surprising because Danny is on the second floor of his house. At first, he thinks that this girl who seems to be hovering in the air must be from outer space or something, but it turns out that she’s just an ordinary girl on a ladder.

The girl tells Danny that her name is Irene Miller and that her family just moved in next door. Her father, Dr. Miller, is an astronomer who will be working at Midston University. The reason why Irene is up on a ladder is that she’s built a weather balloon, and now, it’s stuck on the roof of Danny’s house. Unfortunately, she’s just discovered that her ladder isn’t quite long enough to reach the roof. Danny, who loves science, is intrigued by Irene’s weather balloon, and he helps Irene retrieve it by climbing out an attic window and onto the roof.

Danny shows Irene his device for doing homework, but Irene says it doesn’t seem quite honest because it’s basically like copying from someone else. Danny defends his idea, saying it’s not really cheating if the second person actually does know how to do the homework and would give the right answers anyway. He just sees it as a time-saving device. He also says that Professor Bullfinch, an inventor and physicist at the university, says that homework isn’t relevant to the learning kids do in the classroom. Danny’s father is dead, and his mother is Professor Bullfinch’s housekeeper, so Danny and his mother live with him.

Danny is surprised at how much Irene knows about science because he didn’t think girls would be into science. Irene says that there have always been female scientists, like Marie Curie, and she also wants to study physics. Although Danny has learned a lot from Professor Bullfinch, he’s a little intimidated that there are things that Irene knows that he doesn’t.

When Joe returns, he isn’t enthusiastic that Danny has made friends with a girl. When Joe is derisive about women and girls, Danny even defends Irene and how much she knows. Irene confesses to Danny that getting her weather balloon stuck on the roof wasn’t an accident. Her mother had already talked to Danny’s mother, so she knew Danny was interested in science. She purposely got the balloon stuck on the roof to get his attention and give them a reason for meeting. Joe uses that as part of his assertion that women are trouble.

Irene joins Danny and Joe’s class at school, and she starts making some other friends there. There is one boy in class, Eddie, who seems to have a crush on Irene. She’s a little flattered that he thinks she’s pretty, but she begins to feel uncomfortable with his attention because he keeps staring at her. Danny explains to Irene that people call Eddie “Snitcher” because he’s always telling on somebody for things they do, seemingly out of spite.

When Danny invites Irene to come to his house for cookies after school, Professor Bullfinch surprises them by telling them that he’s going on a business trip, and while he’s gone, he’s going to let Danny take care of his new computer. The computer is called Miniac, which is short for “miniature automatic computer.” It’s much smaller than most computers of its time. During the 1950s, computers could take up an entire room. The Miniac is about the side of a large sideboard.

Joe asks Professor Bullfinch how the Minaic works, and he explains that they can ask it questions through a microphone. The computer prints out answers with an electric typewriter. Irene asks if they can ask it a question to see how it works, and she asks the Miniac a question from their homework. Joe is amazed at how quickly the computer answers the question, and Professor Bullfinch explain a little more about how computer work, with a memory unit that stores information. He says that facts are stored on magnetic tape. (This was true at the time this book was written, although 21st century computers are constructed differently, in ways that allow them to be made much smaller than 1950s computers. What he says next about the nature of computer intelligence is still true, although I’m going to have some things to say about AI in my reaction section.)

Irene marvels at how the computer seems almost like something from science fiction (for her time) and how amazing it is to have a device that can give you the answers to everything. Professor Bullfinch explains to her that’s not quite true, and that there’s something more amazing: the human mind.

It is only a kind of supertool. Everything in this machine is inside the human head, in the much smaller space of the human brain. Just think of it — all the hundreds of thousands of switches, core memory planes, miles of wire, tubes — all that’s in that big case and in this console — are all huge and awkward compared to the delicate, tiny cells of the human brain which is capable of doing as much as, or more than, the best of these machines. It’s the human brain which can produce a mechanical brain like this one. … The computer can reason … It can do sums and give information and draw logical conclusions, but it can’t create anything. It could give you all the words that rhyme with moon, for instance, but it couldn’t put them together into a poem. … It’s a wonderful, complex tool, but it has no mind. It doesn’t know it exists.”

Danny’s assignment while the professor is away is to feed data to the computer. The professor has laid out the information and code tables that Danny will need, although the professor says that Danny can add some extra information if he comes across something new and interesting in Scientific American or one of the other science magazines he reads. Irene asks if she can help with this task because she finds it interesting, and the professor gives her permission. Before he leaves, he warns Danny not to get too carry away with his enthusiasm. He knows that Danny likes to experiment, and sometimes, he gets carried away when he has an idea, without stopping to think first. The computer is a tool, not a toy, and the professor wants him to treat it as such.

However, a few days after Professor Bullfinch leaves, Irene has a question about their homework that Danny and Joe can’t answer because they also don’t really understand the subject. Then, Danny gets the idea of asking the computer about it. Inspired by how easily the computer answers the question, Danny suggests to the others that they use the professor’s computer as a “homework machine.” After all, it can answer questions and supply them with information, and Danny thinks he could even program it to write short compositions. Irene is a bit dubious about it, but Danny amends his idea to say that the computer would “help” them with their homework.

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

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

Advancements in Computer Technology

One of the interesting things about reading a vintage book like this that focuses on the technology of its time is seeing how things have changed and how people’s perceptions of technology have changed. The kids in this book are amazed by the professor’s computer, which is cutting edge for their time, although 21st century children grow up accustomed to computers in their homes that they are allowed to use. Modern children do use computers as toys, playing computer games, and they are also tools for doing homework.

However, even though things have greatly changed in the decades since this book was written, some of the issues surrounding the ethical use of technology are still concerns in the modern world. This story brings up the issue of how much a reliance on technology to do homework borders on cheating and keeps students from gaining the skills they’re supposed to use. This has become a major issue in modern education in the 2020s, with the rise of AI technology. In the story, Professor Bullfinch says that a computer cannot write poetry, which might get a smirk from modern readers because AI has achieved compositional writing skills. What I’d like to point out, though, is that there are still limits on that. As of this writing, the ideal way to use AI in writing is as a starting point for writing and research but not as a replacement for human writers or the human mind to edit and control the content of the writing. AI also uses human writing as the basis for its compositions, not writing everything from scratch:

“… an AI writing tool will gather information based on what other people have said in response to a similar prompt. The bot will search the internet for information about what you’ve asked it to write, then compile that information into a response. While this used to come back as clunky and robotic, the algorithms and programming for AI writers have become much more advanced and can write human-like responses. … AI writers are, so far, limited in their abilities to create emotional and engaging content. Humans, by nature, are storytellers. We have been since the beginning. Robots, however, are not. They are limited by what they’re programmed to do, and AI bots are programmed to gather information and make an educated guess about what you want to hear.”

(AI Writing: What Is It And How Does It Work?, July 2023)

Computers, even those in the 21st century, which are both smaller and more efficient than the ones from the 1950s, still rely on input from human sources to do anything. AI work is not original, it only builds on what humans have given it to use. In spite of the word “intelligence” in the name “artificial intelligence”, it still “has no mind“, as Professor Bullfinch put it. It’s literally artificially intelligent. It knows nothing independently of human beings, and one of the current problems with AI is that, although it can write convincingly and sound almost human, it not only does so only because it’s basing its writing on human writing that has been supplied to it but also, it has no idea whether or not anything it says is true or not. As the Microsoft article points out, it’s only using predictive technology to guess at what you want to hear and just tell you what you want to hear. It still takes a human being to reason out how much sense AI writing actually makes or whether or not it’s accurate.

One of the current problems with AI in the 2020s is AI hallucinations. Sometimes, AI seems to make things up that aren’t true at all because the way it processes information sometimes produces errors, and by itself, AI has no way of knowing when this has occurred. It has no understanding of the subject its writing about. It’s only attempting to predict and supply what it thinks the human who supplied the prompt wants it to supply.

“AI hallucination is a phenomenon wherein a large language model (LLM)—often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool—perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.

Generally, if a user makes a request of a generative AI tool, they desire an output that appropriately addresses the prompt (that is, a correct answer to a question). However, sometimes AI algorithms produce outputs that are not based on training data, are incorrectly decoded by the transformer or do not follow any identifiable pattern. In other words, it “hallucinates” the response.”

There are currently problems with students relying too much on AI to do both their thinking and writing for them, and even professionals who rely too much on AI tools to get through their work faster sometimes fail to notice when the AI writing says things that don’t make sense or are just blatantly untrue. The AI doesn’t know what’s true or not, it’s just telling you what it thinks you want to hear, based on information given to it, put together, and rearranged in its logic programming. Because it doesn’t actually understand the information fed into it, it has no idea when it gets the story wrong. Computers are faster at processing data than a human, but actual understanding of information is still entirely a human quality. A computer cannot understand anything on behalf of a human mind because it “has no mind” of its own to do the understanding.

There have been cases where professional lawyers who have relied on AI writing instead of doing their writing themselves have been sanctioned when AI hallucinations included information that was not only inaccurate but actually fictitious, citing court cases that never actually existed. The lawyers who received disciplinary action about this did not proofread the writing produced by AI, just trusting it to do all of their writing and thinking for them. Yet, the errors jumped out immediately when actual humans read the writing.

The more complex the writing is, the more the limitations of AI become apparent. AI can sound convincing in a short article (especially if you’re not doing any fact checking to see whether it’s talking about something real or not), but it isn’t always consistent or coherent in longer writing. The drama department of one of the local colleges where I lived put on a performance of a play written entirely by AI as a kind of thought experiment, and the results were hilarious. It was a mystery play, and the script was confusingly written. The AI had trouble keeping track of which characters were currently on stage and which were not, so actors who were not actually present in particular scenes had dialogue. At one point, when the detective was questioning everybody, he even talked to the person who was murdered, and the corpse responded. The play didn’t make sense because the AI doing the writing didn’t really understand the story it was telling. It just told a story in the pattern that was requested of it. It was, technically, a complete play, and if you gave it a cursory glance, it would have looked like a fully written play. It’s just that it had absent people and dead people talking. Perhaps at some point in the future, AI can do its own proofreading and learn to catch these types of problems, but for it to do so with the accuracy of an actual human, it would have to have a human level of understanding about the world and the subject matter it writes about. That is, it would have to have real intelligence, not just artificial intelligence.

This video from Wired on YouTube features AI and machine learning professor Graham Morehead from Gonzaga University, answering common questions about the nature of AI. In the video, he explains some of the differences between how AI “thinks” and how a human brain thinks, which help explain why AI can do some things that a human being would find pretty stupid. AI often thinks in terms of two-dimensional images as opposed to the three-dimensional world we live in as humans, and it doesn’t always understand the consequences of actions because, to AI, everything comes down to simple numbers and data as opposed to a physical world where actions have context and consequences.

Overall, I think this story did a good job of evaluating the differences between the human brain and the electronic brain at a point in history where the technology was relatively new and evolving. It also did a surprisingly good job of anticipating some of the developments and problems associated with the use of artificial intelligence, although the form it takes in this story isn’t quite what we’ve seen in the 21st century, and the kids in this story encounter an issue that modern students attempting to use AI to do their homework aren’t likely to encounter.

At the end of this story (spoilers), Danny and his friends come to realize, to their surprise, that they’ve actually been doing more homework than their classmates in order to make their wonderful homework machine function. They had to teach the machine the subjects they’re studying in order to have it do the assignments because the machine doesn’t innately understand the subject matter. The kids have to supply the knowledge base for the machine learning to function, and that ultimately takes more work and study for them than simply understanding the subjects in their own minds and just doing the assignments themselves. Danny’s mother and his teacher allow the kids to continue using the machine once Danny’s mother explains to the teacher how the process works so the kids can experience how a seeming shortcut can actually take more effort.

This is a little different from the 21st century AI tools, where someone else has already done the basic programming work, and students don’t have to actually understand the subjects themselves to use the AI tools. Of course, if the student doesn’t understand the subject matter of the assignment, there’s less chance that they’ll even notice when the AI produces an AI hallucination and says something that isn’t true or doesn’t make sense. There is an incident in the book where the computer messes up and outputs something that makes no sense, and the kids have to figure out why it did that.

The kids also consider the issue of whether or not using the machine to do their homework is cheating or not. Irene has serious reservations about it at first, and their teacher and some classmates think it gives them an unfair advantage when they find out. Danny, on the other hand, defends it, thinking of the computer as just a time-saving tool, like a typewriter, although the computer is doing more for them than a typewriter does. Danny is only focused on the idea of saving time so he can do things other than homework because he’s confident in his own ability to understand the academic subjects and thinks that practicing his skills or proving his knowledge through homework is a waste of his time.

The only reason why the teacher agrees to let them continue using the computer is that Danny’s mother figures out before he does how much extra work he and his friends are doing to teach the computer how to do their homework. This becomes obvious after the teacher gives them a special assignment, beyond what was covered in class, so Danny and his friends have to work extra hard and spend far more time to understand the material themselves and then teach the computer to understand it well enough to do the work. The first assignments weren’t so hard for Danny and his friends to teach the computer how to complete because the kids are at the top of their class, and they do know the material. However, the more difficult the assignments get, and the less familiar they are with the subject matter, the harder it gets to program the computer to handle the assignments. This exposes the flaws in their system and highlights the need for them to understand the material themselves rather than depend on the computer to do their work for them or even necessarily do it more efficiently. The great use of computers is to do tasks more efficiently, but that depends on the task and whether or not the computer has accurate instructions and an efficient knowledge base to draw on to do it. Building the programming and the knowledge base takes the work of a human mind that knows what it’s doing and is willing to put in the effort to do it correctly and to troubleshoot errors.

School in the 1950s

In this book, we get a glimpse of school in the 1950s. Something that stood out to me was when the teacher mentions that the class sizes have grown considerably in recent years, meaning that she has less time to work with individual students than she used to. This was a real problem in the 1950s, due to the effects of the Baby Boom. This generation of children was much larger than previous generations, so there were shortages of teachers and class space, and teachers and students did complain that students got less individual attention. (This documentary on YouTube shows some of the overcrowding.)

The focus on science and technology in the Danny Dunn stories is also important to the 1950s because that was the beginning of the era of the Cold War technology race, exemplified by the Space Race. The capitalistic United States and its allies competed against the USSR and its allies for world supremacy following WWII, and one of the ways they did that was by trying to develop superior technology and technological skills. This need to compete in the areas of science and technology led to changes in the US public education system, emphasizing the skills that we would call “STEM” skills today (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Echoes of those changes still influence the way we think about education in the 21st century.

This technological and scientific focus also influenced children’s entertainment, as adults tried to encourage children to take an interest in science and technology. The Danny Dunn series is one example of this, showing children who are interested in science and new inventions and portraying them as fun and exciting. Another example was the educational tv show Watch Mr. Wizard, which was being broadcast at the time the Danny Dunn books were written and published. Watch Mr. Wizard featured the title character performing experiments in his laboratory and demonstrating scientific concepts to child visitors. It was very popular, and in the 1950s, there were science clubs for children based around this show. This show also helped inspired new generations of shows with a similar premise, such as Bill Nye, the Science Guy, which was popular when I was a kid.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Silly Goose

Three Cousins Detective Club

#10 The Mystery of the Silly Goose by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1996.

As soon as they arrive home from their trip to the powwow in the previous book, the cousins are approached by Timothy’s neighbor, the snobby 13-year-old Lyddie, with another mystery. While they were out of town, someone went around the neighborhood, stealing lawn ornaments. Lyddie is concerned because her grandmother has come to live with her and her parents, and her lawn geese were stolen. One of the geese was the mother goose with a silly-looking bonnet on her head, and the others were her goslings. Lyddie’s grandmother is rather attached to the geese because they were a present from someone.

The three cousins don’t really like Lyddie because she and her friends are usually unfriendly and too concerned with being “cool” all the time. However, they feel sorry for her grandmother and agree to take the case. To their surprise, most of the lawn ornaments are actually pretty easy to find. They were hidden in some obvious places around the neighborhood. The only ones that are difficult to find are the geese. Who hid the lawn ornaments and why?

The theme of this story is Proverbs 24:3-4, “It takes wisdom to have a good family. It takes understanding to make it strong. It takes knowledge to fill a home with rare and beautiful treasures.”

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

My Reaction

Part of the mystery has to do with image, but it also has to do with sentimental attachment. Lyddie is very obsessed with image because she and her friends try so hard to maintain their cool image. Although she calls in the cousins to find the missing lawn ornaments, she only does it because her grandmother takes the loss of the mother goose so hard. Lyddie doesn’t see why the goose is so important, although she knows that her grandmother is attached to it because it was a present from someone.

The situation changes when Lyddie’s grandmother reveals the full story behind the lawn geese and her own understanding of the situation. Lyddie cares for her grandmother, and she comes to see the geese in a new light once she understands why they matter to her grandmother. It’s not the value of the geese, and it’s not about how the geese look. It’s all about the person her grandmother associates with them. Fortunately, Lyddie’s grandmother is a very understanding woman, and when the lawn ornament thief explains the issue, they work things out to everyone’s satisfaction.

Posted on by TracyC

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum by Kate Bernheimer, pictures by Nicoletta Ceccoli, 2008.

In this story, there is a little girl who lives in a castle in a museum, inside a big, glass globe.

Children love to come to the museum and look at her in her castle. The girl also likes it when the children come to see her.

Although the girl in the castle has other creatures to play with and things she likes to do, like making music, she sometimes gets lonely when the museum closes, and all the children go home.

When the girl in the castle dreams, she dreams of the children who come to visit her at the museum, imagining their journeys to come see her.

When the children are visiting or when she’s dreaming about them, the girl isn’t lonely, but when she wakes up from a dream and there aren’t any children, she gets lonely again.

However, the girl gets an idea. If you, the reader, want to be her friend, you can give her your picture. When she looks at your picture, she won’t be lonely anymore!

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

My Reaction

I love the surreal, fantasy pictures in this book! We don’t know exactly what the girl is or why this tiny girl lives in a miniature castle in a museum. The book says that people claim “she’s lived there forever.” She is alive and has feelings, but she seems to be surrounded by fantasy creatures as companions in her castle rather than other people. She doesn’t seem to have parents or family. My theory is that she is a magical, living toy because the museum seems to be filled with other toys, the fantasy creatures in her castle seem to be toys with little wind-up keys in their backs, and the castle itself incorporates little toys and odd-and-ends, like buttons and marbles. However, the girl’s backstory is left up to the imagination of the readers.

This book breaks the fourth wall of the book, with the girl inviting readers to put their own pictures into the book and saying that the girl can see them through the book when they read it. Readers looking at the book keep the tiny girl company when she doesn’t have visitors to her museum. It’s not the first book that I’ve seen that uses the concept of readers keeping a book character company through their books. There is a book from the 1930s called The Tale of Corally Crothers, where a lonely girl with no brothers and sisters goes in search of a friend and finds you, the reader. (I haven’t found a copy of it myself, but you can see some pictures of this book on this site.) Books that involve the reader and invite the reader into their world are charming, and I found the fantasy elements of this particular book delightful!

Posted on by TracyC

Emma in Winter

Emma in Winter by Penelope Farmer, 1966.

This is the second book in the Aviary Hall Trilogy. Each of the books in the series could be read independently of each other, but this book in particular makes more sense if you have read both the first book, which is The Summer Birds, and the third book, Charlotte Sometimes before reading this one. People in this book directly reference events in The Summer Birds, something with Charlotte Sometimes does not. Although Charlotte Sometimes was written and published after this book, it actually takes place during the autumn before this story and it does inadvertently contain a spoiler for Charlotte Sometimes because Charlotte appears at the beginning of the book. It’s just my own preference that it’s better to read this book after Charlotte Sometimes because it makes Charlotte Sometimes more suspenseful. Like Charlotte Sometimes, this book also involves time travel, and the characters do some research on the subject of time and how it works.

At the beginning of the story, Emma Makepeace is upset because her older sister, Charlotte, will be leaving early for the new term at her boarding school after Christmas. At this point, Charlotte has already had her first term at boarding school (which is where and when Charlotte Sometimes takes place, although there are no references to the events of that story here), and she has been invited to visit one of her new friends from boarding school before they return to the school together. All through Charlotte’s first term at boarding school, Emma has been lonely without her and has been finding life at their home, Aviary Hall, increasingly difficult. 

The girls are orphans (although the books never explain what happened to their parents) who live with their grandfather and his housekeeper. Between the two of them, Charlotte is the more serious and responsible and Emma is the more mischievous and thoughtless. Up to this point in their lives, Charlotte has acted the part of the caring older sister, trying to teach Emma to behave herself and covering for her when she doesn’t. Charlotte has realized that their grandfather has little patience for misbehaving children and that Emma pushes the limits, so she has frequently intervened and smoothed things over when Emma tries his patience. 

Emma has often thought of Charlotte as a kind of spoilsport for trying to act grown-up and mature, but during Charlotte’s absence at boarding school during the previous term, Emma has suddenly come to see how much Charlotte has been helping her and saving her from the consequences of her own actions and the realities of their home life. Without Charlotte there to be the motherly big sister, providing some warmth and affection and acting as a buffer between Emma and the adults, the grandfather has become more impatient with Emma’s immaturity. Both he and the housekeeper have been more direct with Emma about her behavior and bad habits, and there’s no one there to shield Emma from it. Emma is lonely for Charlotte’s company and feels picked on by the adults, so when Charlotte cuts her time with Emma short after her first visit home to go visit one of her school friends, Emma is angry and resentful. Charlotte is tempted to back out of her friend’s invitation for Emma’s sake, but she feels like she can’t, and their grandfather tells her that she must go ahead with the visit.

Emma is in a state of emotional turmoil through most of the story, adjusting to Charlotte’s absence, the new expectations of the adults in her life for her to mature and improve her behavior, and her own resentment about these things. While all this is happening, something else strange happens. Emma begins having strange dreams about flying. They remind her of the children’s flying adventures from two years previously, as described in The Summer Birds. It has been so long since she last flew that she struggles to remember how in her dreams, and when she wakes up, her muscles feel sore from the effort. However, at first, she can’t remember what happened in her dreams.

At school, when the new term begins, Emma is made head girl because she is the eldest girl in the class. A boy called Bobby Fumpkins is made head boy because he is the eldest boy. Emma is embarrassed and uncomfortable about being the head of the class in partnership with Bobby. She hates Bobby because he is fat, awkward, and spoiled. Before his mother gave birth to Bobby’s younger sister, who is still a baby, she babied Bobby more than she really should have at this age. Their family also has their own tv set, something most of the other children’s families don’t have at this time, and which Bobby bragged about when they got it. For these reasons, most of the other children in the class don’t like Bobby, either, and they’ve teased him mercilessly for years. They think he’s a sissy and a baby because of his mother’s attention and because he’s milder-mannered than they are and never stands up to them. Because of his awkwardness, they like to call him Jemima Puddle-Duck after a character from a children’s book by Beatrix Potter. Bobby tells himself that his classmates mean all this teasing good-naturedly, but they don’t really. Emma is particularly adamant within herself that she genuinely hates Bobby.

However, like it or not, Emma’s life has become intertwined with Bobby’s. Their teacher expects the two of them to work together at school during the day, and at night, she gradually begins to realize that he is sharing in her same dream of flying. Other children at school tease Emma about being friends with Bobby, particularly one girl who really wants to cause trouble for Emma because, as the next eldest, she would be next in line for the head girl position herself. Emma denies being Bobby’s friend, partly because he still gets on her nerves and partly because she’s still lonely without Charlotte and is worried by being shunned by the other children at school. However, she gradually begins to feel guilty about the way she and others have been treating Bobby, and she begins to feel the impulse to try to be nicer to him. 

As her relationship with Bobby improves, Emma begins remembering more of their shared dream, and the two of them talk about the dream together. Bobby was one of the children at school who shared in their flying adventures two years before, and the two of them discuss their past adventures with each other and how they compare to the dream they’re now having. There are a few things that they begin to notice that are different from their past flying adventures. One is that they both have the feeling that someone is watching them. It seems to be a stern or hostile presence, a pair of eyes that belong to some unknown person, but they don’t know who it is. They also begin to notice that it looks like plants are growing backward as they fly over the countryside. That is, grown plants seem to be returning to small plants and seeds. They gradually notice that the land seems to be going back in time. Eventually, they start seeing dinosaurs in their dreams, and it looks like they might be going back to the beginning of the world. What will happen to Emma and Bobby in their dream when they eventually reach the beginning of everything?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

I’ve already explained my reasoning about the reading order of the books. The Summer Birds is the first book in the trilogy, and you really have to read it before you read this book because the characters directly reference events from that story. Actually, I thought that was a really interesting choice, to have Emma and Bobby talking openly with each other about the summer when they learned to fly. They just accept that event as a common event in their lives that they shared and that everyone who shared it with them openly acknowledges. Sometimes, in children’s fantasy stories, the characters later downplay magical events, feeling like they were dreams they had or games of pretend they played because they seem too strange to have really happened, but no, in this book, the characters all know what happened to them and just accept it as a part of their lives. I thought it was interesting that this book acts as a bridge between the theme of flying and the themed of time travel in Charlotte Sometimes, although I still think that Charlotte Sometimes keeps more of its suspense if you don’t know that Charlotte safely returns to her own time before you read it. 

I still think that Charlotte Sometimes is the best book in the trilogy. It is the best known, and unlike this book, it can be read independently of the others in the trilogy. It doesn’t reference either of the other two books at all. There are no references to Charlotte having participated in any previous magical adventures in that story. That may be partly because she is among strangers at her new boarding school who wouldn’t know anything about her flying adventures, but even her private thoughts don’t give any hint to that. What I think that The Summer Birds and Emma in Winter add to Charlotte Sometimes are some further insights into Charlotte and Emma’s personalities and the relationship between them. I still think that Charlotte Sometimes is the best book in the trilogy. It is the best known, and unlike this book, it can be read independently of the others in the trilogy. It doesn’t reference either of the other two books at all. There are no references to Charlotte having participated in any previous magical adventures in that story. That may be partly because she is among strangers at her new boarding school who wouldn’t know anything about her flying adventures, but even her private thoughts don’t give any hint to that earlier adventure. What I think that The Summer Birds and Emma in Winter add to Charlotte Sometimes are some further insights into Charlotte and Emma’s personalities and the relationship between them. Emma in Winter also adds some thoughts about the nature of time and time travel, which add some further insights into Charlotte’s time travel experiences.

Emma and Bobby do some research about time in her grandfather’s study, a room where Emma is usually forbidden to go. One of the theories they find is that time moves in a coiled pattern, like a spring, and that the coils of the spring can be pushed together so different points on the coils can touch each other. This theory really relates better to Charlotte Sometimes than to Emma in Winter, but what is more relevant to this story is the idea that human thought can be the force that pushes the coils together and makes them touch. This is also a part of Charlotte Sometimes, and I explain in my review of that story about how Charlotte and Clare having many similarities and being in a similar state of mind as well as sharing the same physical space at different times allowed them to switch places with each other. However, the emphasis in Emma in Winter is Emma and Bobby realizing that their own thoughts and feelings influence their dreams and, therefore, their time travel.

This story is rather metaphysical and a little difficult to follow during the dream phases. I noticed that some other reviewers seemed confused about the point of the time traveling. I found it a little confusing, too, but it seems like this is a coming-of-age story, like the other books in the trilogy. The Summer Birds focused on Charlotte and how her more mature outlook helped the other children make an important decision that would alter their lives forever. Charlotte Sometimes raises the question about what defines a person’s identity and how a person’s identity can be tied to someone else’s even when they’re separate people. Emma in Winter focuses on emotional understanding.

Both Emma and Bobby are going through major changes in their lives, particularly ones that require them to become more mature than they once were. Bobby has been somewhat spoiled and coddled by his mother, but he’s no longer the center of attention at home, now that he has a little sister. At first, Bobby finds it hard to cope with his mother no longer giving him the attention she used to give him, but it does give him the opportunity to become more independent and mature. Emma despises Bobby for being babyish because he was spoiled and overprotected by his mother when he was younger, but the truth is that Emma is also babyish. She’s not accustomed to being accountable for her own behavior and bad habits because Charlotte usually takes responsibility for her and shields her from some of the reactions of the adults and other people. 

When Charlotte goes away to boarding school, Emma is left on her own for the first time to deal with the consequences of her actions and other people’s reactions to them. It’s a bit of a shock for her at first, and she realizes that she hasn’t fully appreciated what Charlotte was doing for her for the whole time. She also comes to the disquieting realization that, even thought she feels like the adults are picking on her over her behavior, she doesn’t like the way she behaves, either. She comes to feel guilty about the way she treats Bobby, and when she draws some nasty pictures of her teacher, she is startled to realize how much she has hurt her teacher’s feelings and how badly she feels about doing that. For the first time in her life, Emma has to face her own behavior and see how her behavior truly affects other people. She is shocked and troubled when she realizes that she doesn’t like what she sees and it’s her own fault. Only Emma can decide how nice or how mean she is and who she really wants to be.

The children’s time traveling adventures that they have while dreaming lead them to explore their relationship with each other. Emma realizes that she has to be nice to Bobby and learn to get along with him for them to be able to function with each other in the dream. Their final dream together is confusing and rather surreal, but it also involves the two of them confronting aspects of themselves, their lives with other people, and their own behavior. 

When they move all the way back in time as far as they can go, they’re confronted by a vision of their teacher, not as she actually is, but as Emma drew her in a mean drawing. Emma has to remind herself and tell the figure that it’s only a drawing she made; it’s not reality. They also see visions of other people in their lives and even of themselves at their worst and most frightening, but they have to hold on to the reality of themselves, as they are now, the people they’re becoming, not who they used to be or how other people see them. I took it to mean that neither of them can go backward in their lives anymore, to their old habits and who they were or how they were as younger children, but they have to accept the changes taking place in their lives and in themselves to return to the real world, their own time, and the lives they have ahead of them. They discover that the key to traveling through time is thinking, so they have to think themselves out of their time travel dreams, focusing on their real selves and the real lives, accepting and even loving themselves as they are. Change has been coming for both of them, but they have to make the decision to face it and embrace it and to let go of their past selves to move on in time and in their lives.

Posted on by TracyC

The UFO Mystery

The UFO Mystery by Mary Blount Christian, illustrated by Joe Boddy, 1989.

This book is part of the Sherlock Street Detectives series.

Halloween is approaching, and the Sherlock Street Detectives are talking about their costumes. David is going to be a bear, and he made his costume out of an old rug. Pedro is going to be a clown. Walter and Ann, who are twins, refuse to tell anyone what their costumes are because they want it to be a surprise.

Then, David says that he has to go home because it’s dinnertime, and after dinner, he’s going to look for a comet with his telescope. Pedro says that he’s never used a telescope before and asks if he can look, too. David says he can, and Pedro says that he will come back to his house when it’s dark.

When David and Pedro meet to use the telescope, David shows Pedro how to use a star map to find the constellations. While Pedro is looking through the telescope, he thinks that he sees a UFO! At first, David doesn’t believe him. It’s too early to see the comet, so he thinks maybe Pedro saw a meteor. Pedro insists that it was a UFO, and David points out that UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. That means that anything that “unidentified” can be a UFO. Pedro can’t identify exactly what it was he saw, but that only means that he didn’t recognize the object. It doesn’t have to be an alien spacecraft, just some normal thing he didn’t recognize, like a meteor, a comet, or even just a firefly.

Since David’s dad works for NASA, Pedro says that they should ask him if it could have been a comet other than the one they were expecting to see. However, David’s dad confirms that there should only have been one comet that night and that the comet should have been in a different part of the sky. The boys talk about getting Walter and Ann to help them investigate, but then, they see some strange creatures in the bushes!

What did Pedro really see through the telescope, and could those weird creatures really be aliens?

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

My Reaction

This is fun mystery picture book! Figuring out what/who the aliens are is the easiest part of the mystery, since this is before Halloween and the twins were being mysterious about what their costumes are, although it might seem harder to young children. The answer to what Pedro thought he saw through the telescope is revealed first, although I wasn’t entirely sure what to think of it myself. At first, I thought that the “aliens” might have been throwing around some glowing toy or something, but they would have to have thrown it really high to get it in front of the telescope because the boys were using the telescope on the roof. There’s a perfectly logical explanation behind the phenomenon, and David figures it out by noting where the object was and it was moving. David’s father confirms David’s guess with a call to NASA.

One of the nice things about this simple mystery story is that it introduces some real concepts for stargazers and amateur astronomers. There is a vocabulary list and glossary in the back of the book.

This series also offers good representations for racial diversity. Racial issues don’t enter into the story. The kids are just a bunch of kids who happen to live in the same neighborhood and are friends and like to solve mysteries, but they are a mixed racial group, and that’s nice to see. David is black, Pedro is Hispanic, and the twins are white. The children’s races are not referred to in the text of the story, but they are shown in the pictures.

Posted on by TracyC

Spooky Sleepover

Eagle-Eye Ernie

The Spooky Sleepover by Susan Pearson, 1991.

A couple of weeks before Halloween, Ernie decides to have a sleepover party for her friends. The kids enjoy scaring each other with ghost stories, and a thunderstorm adds to the spooky atmosphere.

Michael, in particular, keeps insisting that an old witch called Mrs. Maloney used to live in Ernie’s house with a bunch of cats. When spooky things happen during the course of the evening, Michael says that Mrs. Maloney and her cats have returned to haunt Ernie’s house. The kids try to stay up until midnight because ghosts are supposed to appear at midnight, but there’s no telling what they might actually see.

The kids fall asleep, but they wake up around midnight when they hear a crashing sound from the basement. Although they are afraid, they take their flashlights and go down to see what it is. Will they find a ghost?

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

My Reaction

This is one of those stories that has a pretty simple explanation, but the adventure seems bigger to the kids because their imaginations run away with them. I remember liking this series when I was a kid, and I think this is one of the books I read back then. I liked the creepy-cozy atmosphere of the story. Even though the kids have been scaring each other with ghost stories, they’re still just at a sleepover in an ordinary, safe house, and there’s nothing there that is harmful. It’s that kind of safe scariness that Halloween represents to young kids. They can enjoy the spookiness, knowing that there’s a logical explanation for everything. Adults and older kids will figure out pretty quickly what’s really going on.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Mystery of the Green Ghost

The Three Investigators

#4 The Mystery of the Green Ghost by Robert Arthur, 1965.

Bob and Pete are looking at an old, abandoned house that’s in the process of being torn down when they hear an unearthly scream from the house! There are stories that the old house is haunted, and the boys run away, only to be stopped by a group of local men, who ask them what’s going on. When the boys explain, the men talk about calling the police or going inside the house to investigate. The men decide to just go in and have a look around themselves, in case someone’s hurt and needs help right away. They tell the boys that they can leave because they will handle the situation, but the boys decide that they can’t leave without having a look themselves.

As they take a look around inside, they see the remains of the ornate wall paper and impressive features of the once-rich house, and the men talk about Mathias Green, who used to live in the house. At first, the searchers can’t find anything, but then, they spot a greenish figure on the stairs. Thinking that there’s some prankster in the house, the searchers go upstairs to confront the person, but they can’t find whoever it was. The boys suggest that they have a look at the dust on the floor and try to follow the person’s footprints, but the only footprints the searchers can find are their own. Could they have seen a ghost?

The searchers do notify the police about what they’ve seen in the house, but the police don’t take it too seriously … at first. However, they soon begin receiving other reports from various people around the city who claim to have seen a greenish, ghostly figure. Even then, the police might not have take the reports too seriously, except that a couple of officers on patrol witness a greenish, ghostly figure in the cemetery … at the burial site of Mathias Green, who died falling down the stairs in his house, 50 years before.

While Bob and Pete were at the house, Bob had his tape recorder with him, and he plays the recording of the scream they heard for their friend and fellow investigator, Jupiter. Jupiter is willing to believe it could be the scream of Mathias Green’s ghost, and the boys review the information they know about Mathias Green. Mathias Green was once the skipper of the ship, and he sailed to China. For reasons that nobody fully understands, he had to leave China suddenly, and the rumors were that Mathias’s wife was a Chinese princess and that Chinese nobles had a grudge against Mathias. Mathias brought his wife back to the United States with him, and they built their house in Rocky Beach after Mathias had a fight with his sister-in-law, and they moved away from San Francisco. They had some Chinese servants, but when Mathias was later found dead, apparently from an accidental fall down the stairs, the servants and his wife disappeared. People assumed that they left for fear that they would be blamed for Mathias’s death, and Mathias’s sister-in-law inherited the house. Recently, Mathias’s niece decided to sell the house to a developer, who is planning to tear it down and build more modern houses.

Local newspapers have picked up the stories about the green ghost and its apparent connection to the old Green mansion, and some of them have implied that the ghost is looking for a new place to haunt now that its house is being torn down. The Three Investigators have access to more information than most people because Bob’s father is one of the reporters covering the ghost incidents. The police chief tells them, off the record, that he witnessed the ghost himself, in the cemetery, and it looked like it disappeared by sinking down into Mathias’s grave. Then, the police chief learns that the workmen tearing down the house have discovered a hidden room. Bob’s father and the boys are allowed to come with him to see what the room contains.

The discovery is a shock. The hidden room contains an ornate coffin, holding the skeleton of Mathias’s Chinese bride, dressed in elaborate robes and with an unusual necklace of gray pearls, called ghost pearls. The story is that the reason why Mathias and his bride had to suddenly flee China was that Mathias reportedly stole the pearl necklace to give to his bride. When she died in Rocky Beach, he couldn’t bear to be parted from her, so he “buried” her secretly in his house, along with the necklace.

The discovery of Mathias’s wife’s hidden burial chamber doesn’t lay the ghost to rest, though. Bob and Pete get a phone call from Mathias’s niece, Lydia, asking them to visit her at the vineyard where she lives, to talk about what they witnessed at the house. She says that the ghost has actually appeared at her vineyard! Jupiter is not invited to the vineyard because he didn’t witness the appearance of the ghost with the others, but he couldn’t go anyway because he’s temporarily in charge of his uncle’s salvage yard while his uncle is out of town. He tells Bob and Pete to go ahead and meet with Lydia and let him know what they learn.

At the vineyard, Bob and Pete meet Lydia’s distant cousin, Harold, and Lydia’s great-nephew, Charles, who is actually the great-grandson of Mathias Green and the real heir to Mathias’s estate. Charles, who is called Chang, grew up in China, and they explain that he is descended from Mathias’s first wife, who died of an illness in China. After the death of his first wife, Mathias put his young son into an American missionary school in China and left him there as a boarding student. When he married his second wife and had to flee China, he left his son behind. His descendants remained in China since then, until it became unsafe for Americans or people of American descent in China. Then, Charles, who is an orphan and part Chinese (hence his nickname of Chang), was sent to live with Lydia in the United States. Until that point, he knew very little about his ancestors and his relatives in America. Technically, Mathias’s estate should have come to Chang’s side of the family when Mathias died, but they were living in China at that time and were not in touch with the rest of the family. Lydia says that Chang should even technically own the vineyard that she and Harold have built with the family’s money, but Chang doesn’t want to take it from them, so Lydia says that she is leaving it to Chang in her will. Chang is satisfied with this arrangement, but the family has debts, and if they don’t resolve them, they might lose the vineyard entirely.

Lydia believes that the green ghost is Mathias’s ghost, and he is haunting them because he’s angry with her for selling his old house to be torn down. The ghost has been scaring away workers at the vineyard, and if they can’t get the harvest processed, they won’t be able to keep the vineyard. However, Chang doesn’t believe that his great-grandfather would want to hurt his own family. Chang might be willing to believe that the ghost is an evil spirit, masquerading as his great-grandfather. That’s not the only possibility, though. There could be a human being with a motive for wanting to ruin the vineyard. Then again, there is the question of who really owns the ghost pearl necklace. If Mathias’s family owns the necklace, they could sell it to cover their debts, but it might really belong to the family of Mathias’s Chinese wife. Her family is more difficult to trace, but one person has stepped forward, claiming to be her heir. Then, someone attacks Harold and steals the necklace from him. Was the necklace always the ghost’s target, from the beginning? Meanwhile, back in Rocky Beach, Jupiter has a revelation. There was a dog present when Bob and Pete were searching the Green mansion with the men, and the dog … didn’t do anything. That might be the most important clue of all!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in other languages).

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

I enjoyed the mystery and the reference to Sherlock Holmes about the dog that did nothing in the nighttime. In this story, Jupiter takes the dog’s non-reaction as a sign that there was no supernatural presence in the house because animals are supposed to react to the presence of ghosts. There is definitely a human behind all the spooky happenings, and I was partly right about who it was. However, the author threw in a complication by inserting another mysterious villain who kind of usurped the original plotter’s plot for his own purposes and partly distracts the characters from the original villain for part of the story.

This added villain is a mysterious old man from China who claims that he’s 107 years old and that he wants the pearls because drinking dissolved ghost pearls is the key to immortality. This mysterious old man is wealthy, and he has bought up the family’s debts, meaning that he will get control of the vineyard, if they can’t pay their debts. However, he’s not really interested in the vineyard for its own sake. He just wants those pearls. Although he does some criminal things in the story, nothing much seems to happen to him at the end, and he works out a deal with Lydia, so she can keep the vineyard. It’s left open whether or not he truly ended up with the pearls or whether the pearls actually have properties for preserving someone’s life, but it seems that he truly believes it, and he has no other motivations for his part in the story.

This almost Fu Manchu style character, who uses hypnosis to control people, adds an element of exoticism to the story that I thought wasn’t really necessary. I liked the ghost mystery well enough with its original villain and without him, and I felt like the introduction of the extra villain sent the plot a little off the rails, but he does allow the story to end on a somewhat creepy and ambiguous note. We don’t entirely know who he is, and we never really find out what happens to him. We don’t know if he’s really as old as he says he is or if he continues much further in his quest to live forever. He just disappears after getting what he can of the pearls, presumably to go hunting for more elsewhere.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, the ghost pearls aren’t real, and the legend about them prolonging people’s lives isn’t real. However, there are legends and superstitions from around the world about pearls being associated with wisdom and longevity and having healing powers. Pearls can be dissolved in an acidic liquid and drunk by a human, as in the famous story about Cleopatra drinking a pearl in vinegar, which was supposed to be an aphrodisiac.

Getting back to the mystery, though, I did like the Scooby-Doo-like mystery, and I was satisfied by the original plot, and the villain’s methods and motives. I was looking at that character with suspicion for a number of reasons. Perhaps, if the part about the pearl necklace, the ancient man who drinks pearls, and Mathias’s bizarre room with his dead wife weren’t in the story, the solution would be too obvious, but overall, I enjoyed it. I also appreciated how Jupiter worked out some of the details of the first haunting by visiting the house and studying the scene while his friends were at the vineyard. He comes to some conclusions about how that first haunting occurred that Bob and Pete didn’t think about, and his solution also provides a reasonable answer to the question of why that group of men happened to show up outside the house on the evening the haunting happened, to witness it.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Case of the Phantom Frog

McGurk Mysteries

The Case of the Phantom Frog by E. W. Hildick, 1979.

Mrs. Kranz, an elderly sculptor, has been looking after her nephew’s 7-year-old son, Bela, because his parents were in a car accident and are still in the hospital. She consults the McGurk Organization because strange things have been happening since Bela came to live with her. At first, she is reluctant to say what is really bothering her. She was referred to the McGurk Organization by Willie’s mother, and she frames her request as hiring the kids to watch Bela while she’s working. McGurk turns down the offer, saying that the oldest members of the McGurk Organization are only 10 years old, not really old enough to babysit, and babysitting isn’t the kind of job they handle anyway. Wanda tries to refer Mrs. Kranz to a regular babysitter she knows, but Mrs. Kranz is strangely desperate and insists that she wants the McGurk Organization.

Because they’re reluctant to accept the job, Mrs. Kranz finally admits that there is a mystery connected to Bela. She starts by telling them that she’s afraid of frogs, like some people are really afraid of bugs or rats or other creatures. Ever since Bela came to stay with her, Mrs. Kranz has been hearing an unusually loud frog sound in her house, particularly in the evening, after Bela is in bed. Bela insists that he never hears it, but it’s giving Mrs. Kranz the creeps. She’s tried to search the house as best she can, but she can’t find the frog anywhere. It’s not the kind of thing that she can go to the police about, but it’s driving her crazy. The real reason why she wants the McGurk Organization to spend time with Bela is to see if they hear the frog, too, and if they can figure out where it is.

This time, McGurk is intrigued enough to accept the case, plus Mrs. Kranz offers them a larger fee for their services than they usually have. They consider the idea that Mrs. Kranz could be making up the story about the phantom frog she hears just to get them to accept her babysitting job, but they decide that isn’t likely, both because of the generous amount of money she’s paying them and because she seems genuinely frightened.

When they get to Mrs. Kranz’s house, it’s a big place that looks almost castle-like, and it’s surrounded by trees. Mrs. Kranz invites them in and introduces them to Bela. Bela was born in Hungary, where Mrs. Kranz was from originally. He doesn’t seem glad to meet the members of the McGurk Organization. In fact, he tries to ignore them and talk to them as little as he can. He doesn’t really want to talk to them about the frog when they ask him about it. He just says that maybe he’s heard a frog and that his aunt has frogs on the brain.

McGurk is annoyed with the kid, so he teases him about his name, saying that Bela sounds like a girl’s name. Bela defends his name, saying it’s Hungarian. Joey tries to defuse the situation, saying that Bela Lugosi was a famous actor in old horror movies, and he was also Hungarian. McGurk is intrigued by the mention of old horror movies because he loves them, and he starts asking Bela about whether there are things like vampires and werewolves in Hungary. Bela says that monsters are just stupid kid things. Brains is inclined to agree with Bela because there’s no scientific evidence that such things exist, and McGurk gets irritated with both of them.

When McGurk consults with the other members of the organization about Bela, he says that he thinks Bela is hiding something. His theory is that Bela is making the frog sounds himself to scare his aunt as a prank and that his hostility toward their presence and their questions is to cover up for what he’s doing. Wanda takes a different view because she thought that Bela seemed scared of something when they were talking to him, and she thinks that Bela is covering up his fear. Maybe he’s afraid of the frog or the frog sound and doesn’t want to admit it. Brains thinks that the sound could have some ordinary explanation, like sounds from the plumbing system that have been misidentified.

Aside from his hostility toward their questions, Bela seems like a well-behaved kid to watch. When it’s time for bed, he doesn’t argue with the older kids or make a lot of special requests or excuses to stay up later. In fact, he seems eager to go to bed. His only requests are that they leave the lights on and the window slightly open for air. As soon as Bela is in bed, the members of the McGurk Organization station themselves at strategic points around the house, waiting to see what they can hear and where it seems to be coming from.

They do hear the frog, and it sounds unnaturally loud, like it’s a monster frog! Most of them aren’t sure where the sound came from, but Brains is pretty sure that it came from Bela’s room. When they go inside, Bela seems like he’s asleep, and they don’t see a frog anywhere. They’re convinced that Bela is faking that he’s asleep, although Bela puts on an act like he was really asleep. McGurk knows that he must have been awake while they were out of the room because they left the light on for him, and when they first entered the room, the light was off. At some point, Bela must have gotten up and turned it off himself, although they don’t know why he would do that. For some reason, he also shut his window.

It seems pretty clear that Bela has something to do with the frog noise. The next night, they rig up a microphone in Bela’s room so they can monitor the sounds there. When they hear a loud frog sound, they hurry up to Bela’s room and find a frog sitting on his pillow .. and there is no sign of Bela! McGurk stuns the others when he makes the announcement that Bela is a werefrog! McGurk thinks that Bela has the transformation powers of a werewolf, but he’s turning into a frog instead of a wolf. They go to the kitchen, where McGurk finds some garlic, and when they return to Bela’s room, the frog is gone, and Bela is back in bed. Is Bela really a werefrog, or is there another explanation for what’s happening?

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

My Reaction

I remember reading this book when I was a kid, and I did a book report on it for school. I even did a little diorama about the story that looked like Bela’s bedroom, with a little frog made out of modeling clay. It was cute, but I can’t show it because I don’t have it anymore.

I found the story pleasantly creepy when I first read it as a kid. Even though I was sure that there must be some logical explanation for the phantom frog and Bela’s apparent transformations, I honestly wasn’t sure what it was at first. The mystery isn’t that complicated for an adult, but it’s creepy and mysterious for a child.

It sometimes seems to me that kids in the McGurk books are a little mean to each other and call each other names too much. I didn’t like it that McGurk was teasing Bela about his name in this book. However, it does serve a purpose in this story because the discussion of Bela’s name is what introduces the mention of Bela Lugosi and the idea that there might be a supernatural explanation for the phantom frog and that Bela might be a werefrog. Mrs. Kranz doesn’t suggest that idea to the kids when she first consults them about the frog. McGurk is the one who thinks of it because he’s really into old horror movies, and Bela being Hungarian, like Bela Lugosi, suggests a connection to the supernatural to him.

Not all the others are really as convinced as McGurk is, but they are creeped out by the phantom frog that appears and disappears and Bela’s odd behavior. Brains is the least convinced of everyone that there’s a supernatural explanation for the frog, reminding everyone that he invented an “invisible dog” in a previous book. He knows that it’s possible to create some pretty convincing illusions. He’s the one who convinces McGurk to investigate the possibility that Bela is faking everything somehow.

I like to take note of times when characters in books reference pieces of pop culture from the time when they were written. At one point, the kids in the story are watching a Peanuts special on tv, based on the characters from the comic strip. That comic strip was still being written and published at the time this book was written, and I remember watching Peanuts specials on tv myself as a little kid in the 1980s.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Case of the Invisible Dog

McGurk Mysteries

The Case of the Invisible Dog by E. W. Hildick, 1977.

The members of the McGurk Organization are having their annual picnic in McGurk’s backyard when, suddenly, a doughnut leaps off the table and begins traveling through the bushes and grass. None of them can understand what’s happening because they can’t see anything that would cause the doughnut to move like that.

They go after the doughnut to see what happened, and they find Brains Bellingham, the nephew of Miss Bellingham, who lives next door. Brains has been staying with his aunt while his parents are out of town, and he always has a put-down for the members of the McGurk Organization. Brains is holding his aunt’s Yorkshire terrier, Dennis, and the missing doughnut, which has apparently been chewed by the dog. Brains apologizes for the dog ruining their “crummy” picnic, but he says that Dennis can’t resist doughnuts. However, that explanation doesn’t satisfy the McGurk Organization because none of them saw a dog carrying the doughnut, just the doughnut moving by itself. Brains makes an excuse about the dog being small and blending in with his surroundings, but the others can tell that he’s hiding something.

When Brains leaves for a moment because he says his aunt is calling him, they spot a strange black box in the grass. The box has dials and switches on it, and there are two labels: “Increase Invisibility” and “Restore Visibility.” Brains is known for building various inventions, so they know this is probably something he made, but does this device really make things invisible? Is that why they couldn’t see the dog when he stole the doughnut? They have a look inside the device, but since none of them is particularly good with electronics, they just know that it contains a bunch of wires and seems to be powered by batteries, and there is some kind of light inside the box. There are also doughnut crumbs inside the box.

When Brains sees them messing with the box, he yells at them to stop snooping. Joey, the organization’s secretary, knows that part of Brains’s problem with the organization is that he’s jealous because he really wants to join. He’s hinted before that they need a laboratory man to help them with forensics. McGurk might have taken him up on the offer except that Brains was condescending and insulting in the way he made it, calling them “dummies.” He’s a little younger than the rest of them, too, so his condescending attitude makes him seem even more like an annoying little kid. McGurk tries to ask Brains about his strange device, but Brains just refuses to answer and takes the box and the dog away.

The members of the McGurk Organization return to their picnic, but they can’t stop wondering about Brains, his strange invisibility device, and how he accomplished the trick with the dog and the doughnut. Most of the organization members are pretty sure that there must be some kind of trick to it, but they can’t figure out how Brains did it. While they discuss it in their basement meeting room, they hear what sounds like the jingle of dog tags, and Willie, who has a very sensitive nose, says that he smells a dog. They search the basement and find a dog’s rubber bone. Then, Brains shows up, looking for Dennis. To their astonishment, Brains seems to pick up an invisible dog, who seems to be struggling and making dog noises, growling and jingling tags!

When the organization goes to confront Brains about what just happened, they find him with his strange box. The box appears empty on the inside, but they hear dog sounds from it. Brains operates the controls and opens the box again, and Dennis comes out! Brains claims that he invented the invisibility box by accident while he was trying to develop a treatment for getting rid of Dennis’s fleas and ticks using light rays. Brains says that there is a side effect where Dennis sometimes turns invisible at random times without Brains intentionally turning him invisible but that he’s working on the problem.

McGurk is thrilled at the possibility that Brains might be able to build a machine big enough to turn a person invisible, and he even offers Brains membership in the organization if he can do it. Brains says he could, but to everyone’s surprise, he turns down the membership offer. He says that he knows they don’t really want him in the organization; they just want his machine. It’s a little embarrassing, but it’s true.

The members of the McGurk organization consider ways that they could get Brains to change his mind. McGurk considers blackmail, but Wanda says that wouldn’t be right for a detective organization. Wanda thinks McGurk should apologize to Brains for the way he turned Brains away when he tried to join earlier, but McGurk can’t stand the idea of apologizing. Willie thinks they could offer to pay Brains, but they don’t really have anything they could pay him. They all ponder what would happen if they let word of Brains’s invention get out to the public or even the government.

Then, Brains comes to them, asking for help. He says that Dennis has turned invisible again, and he’s run off! Can the McGurk Organization find an invisible missing dog?

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

My Reaction

I didn’t read this book when I was a kid, although I read many others in the series. Because I didn’t read this book before, I didn’t really know the story of how Brains joined the McGurk Organization. There are some references to it in some of the later books in the series, so I knew that, when the other members of the organization first met Brains, they were investigating him for some trick he’d played on them. I was used to Brains being their friend, so it seemed odd to see him as the antagonist/suspect they are investigating in this book.

During the story, the members of the McGurk Organization are pretty sure from the beginning that Brains is playing some kind of trick, but they’re not sure how. He does manage to convince them temporarily that he has successfully developed an invisibility device, but McGurk soon realizes that something Brains has said contradicts what’s happened. Then, he and the others reexamine what happened to figure out how Brains staged his tricks. They’re a little mad at being tricked, so they pull one more trick on Brains to get even before they all forgive each other. Brains shouldn’t have called the others “dummies” or been condescending to them, and the others shouldn’t have been too quick to write him off just because he’s a year younger than they are. In the end, McGurk says that anybody who’s clever enough to work out a complicated trick like this one deserves to be a member of the organization, and they hold another picnic to celebrate their new member.

Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Bicycle Bandit

A Jigsaw Jones Mystery

The Case of the Bicycle Bandit by James Preller, 2001.

Jigsaw Jones and his friend, Ralphie, have to go to the library to get books for a book report at school. While they are at the library, somebody steals Ralphie’s bike!

First, it’s strange that Ralphie’s bike was stolen because Ralphie is sure that he locked it up using the same chain that he used to also lock up Jigsaw’s bike. How could someone take a bike that was chained up, and since the two bikes were chained together, why is Jigsaw’s bike still chained up, as if the lock was never opened?

Second, if someone could get the chain open to take one of the bikes, why did the thief take Ralphie’s bike? Jigsaw’s bike is new and in good condition, while Ralphie’s bike, which he calls “Old Rusty”, is old, beat-up, and always breaking in some way. Ralphie is fond of “Old Rusty”, which was a hand-me-down from his older brother, but if some stranger had a choice of stealing one of two bikes, wouldn’t it make more sense to take the one that’s in better condition?

Jigsaw Jones calls his friend, Mila, to help him investigate and find Ralphie’s missing bike, and they get some help from a classmate who is good at drawing portraits to interview witnesses and do sketches of suspects. Their most likely suspect is a skateboarder whose face nobody saw clearly. But, how did the skateboarder know how to open the lock on the bike chain, and why did he take only the old bike and lock up the newer one again?

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

My Reaction

Books in this series are easy, beginning chapter books with pictures that accompany the story. The mystery in this book is pretty simple, although it might seem more difficult to younger readers. I liked the way the characters reasoned it out, logically confronting the problem of how the thief opened the bike chain and why the thief took the older bike instead of the new one. I also enjoyed their use of an amateur sketch artist to find one of their suspects.

Even after Jigsaw does a stakeout and realizes who is responsible for taking the bike, he doesn’t seem to quite understand the motive until the thief explains it, although the motive was what I figured it was. Revealing the culprit in this book also includes a spoiler for an earlier book in the series.

I was amused when Jigsaw said that he charges a dollar a day for his detective services. At first, I thought that shows the inflation that’s happened since Encyclopedia Brown charged his clients a quarter. Then, Jigsaw checks out an Encyclopedia Brown book from the library, showing that Jigsaw is familiar with the books and also giving kind of a nod to an earlier boy detective who may have somewhat inspired this series. I always appreciate children’s books that reference other books.