Posted on by TracyC

The Shadow Guests

The Shadow Guests by Joan Aiken, 1980.

When Cosmo’s mother and brother mysteriously disappear, Cosmo’s father sends him to live with eccentric cousin Eunice in England, who is a mathematician educated at Cambridge and who now lives in Oxford. Cosmo’s father plans he will join Cosmo in England later, after he’s finished wrapping up the family’s business in Australia.

After Eunice picks up Cosmo at the airport, she tells him that she’s arranged for him to attend a small boarding school. Cosmo has never been to any kind of school before because his family lived too far outside of town. He and his brother always had their lessons together at home. Cosmo isn’t sure he’s going to like living with all these strangers at school, but Eunice says that she arranged for him to be a boarder rather than a day pupil so he would make friends faster. Eunice lives at the old Curtoys mill house, and Cosmo joins her there on weekends.

However, most of the other students at school don’t seem particularly friendly, and one of the teachers seems oddly confrontational about Cosmo’s father. He knows that Cosmo’s father, Richard Curtoys, was once a well-known cancer researcher in London, and he doesn’t know why he gave it all up and moved his family to the middle of nowhere in the Australian Bush. Cosmo doesn’t know what to say because he was very young when his family moved to Australia, and he doesn’t really know why they moved.

On his next weekend with Cousin Eunice, he asks her about it and whether or not the family’s sudden move to England had anything to do with what happened to his mother and brother. Eunice admits that it did. Cosmo’s father hadn’t wanted to explain and had left it up to Eunice to decide how much to tell Cosmo, but Eunice believes that it’s better for people to know everything than not know anything. Eunice reveals to Cosmo that their family has been under a curse for generations.

The Curse

The curse apparently started with the Roman invasion of Britain. Their family seems to have Roman roots, and one of their ancestors was apparently a Roman soldier. When the Romans took over Britain, they wanted to convert the inhabitants to the Roman religion, which was still pagan at that time. According to the legend passed down in their family, their ancestor was one of a group of soldiers who were ordered to destroy a pagan British temple. The son of one of the priestesses at the temple tried to resist them, and Cosmo’s ancestor killed him. The boy’s mother then killed herself out of grief. The boy’s grandmother, who was also a priestess, placed a curse on Cosmo’s family: in every generation, the eldest son of the family would die in battle, and his mother would die of grief.

Since then, Eunice says, the curse seems to have come true. She can list generations of their family where the eldest son has died in battle, including Cosmo’s father’s generation. Cosmo’s father was the youngest son of his family, and his elder brother, Frank, died young in battle. After Frank’s death, when Richard was only 10 years old, his mother died of grief, just like in the curse. Richard claimed that the curse was all nonsense when he was an adult, and he refused to tell his wife about it when they got married. However, Eunice had been friends with his wife before she met Richard, and she didn’t think it was fair to keep the secret from her, now that they had two sons of their own. Eunice admits that she told Cosmo’s mother everything, and that the story seriously upset her. It was Cosmo’s mother who insisted on moving to Australia, hoping to get as far away from the curse and any potential war as possible.

When Eunice explains this, some of the things about Cosmo’s family begin to make sense to him. Eunice admits that it seems like the elder brothers of the family resent the younger ones, who are safe from the curse, and Cosmo realizes that he sensed that his brother seemed to be hard on him or resent him, indicating that he probably had some sense that he had an ordeal or possible early death to face that Cosmo would be spared. Yet, younger brothers in the family are not entirely spared from the curse. It’s true that they live to carry on the family line, but each of them is also destined to lose their first son, and shortly afterward, to lose their wife to grief at their son’s death. Cosmo considers that maybe, when he’s grown up, he’ll just adopt a child to get around the problem.

He somewhat compares the family curse to a form of cancer. Some families are more genetically prone to particular types of cancers than others, and the way that members of those families survive is if, somehow, a genetic mutation is introduced to the family line, something that makes those individuals different from the ones before. It’s an indication that, maybe, this curse might not afflict their family forever. If someone, like Cosmo, can figure out how to be different from earlier generations of his family, and not pass on the cursed element to the next generation, there might be an end to the curse. Figuring out how to do that is going to be difficult, though.

Eunice says that his mother tried to evade the curse by running away, but apparently, it didn’t work. Nobody knows exactly what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother, only that their car was found abandoned, and that they appeared to go off into the Australian desert on foot. Searchers have found no sign of them since, and because it’s such a harsh environment, people don’t think it’s likely that they’re still alive. Nobody knows why they went off into the desert, except maybe either the curse drew them there or they were trying to escape from it. Eunice’s housekeeper, who also knows about the curse, talks about it with Cosmo, and Cosmo asks her whether she thinks it’s possible to break the curse. Like Cosmo, she thinks it might be a case of gradual changes, members of the family doing things differently from earlier generations. Unlike Eunice, she thinks that maybe what Cosmo’s mother and brother did was one such change, and it’s difficult to tell what effect it has had yet.

Cosmo remembers a strange old man who visited them once in Australia. He thinks the man was probably a sorcerer or something because he told them things about their futures. He’s not sure what the man said to his mother, except that it seemed to upset her, and she was never the same afterward. Eunice suspects that the man may have told her that it’s impossible to run away from heredity and destiny. The man told his brother something about there being many different types of battles, which might indicate that staying away from wars would not be sufficient to save him from his destiny. The old man didn’t clarify that statement, but it’s true that people also fight internal and emotional battles every day, no matter where they are. Was this the battle Cosmo’s brother lost or could lose, and has it actually claimed his life already?

Cosmo had always thought his brother and mother were braver than he was, but now, he comes to question that. They had tried to run from their apparent destinies, and maybe the running caused them to go missing, and maybe even to die. When Cosmo’s father writes to him about the family curse, he explains that he has come to believe that the curse is a self-fulling prophecy, that it only comes true because people expect it to. Perhaps Cosmo’s mother and brother would have been fine if they hadn’t tried so hard to outrun their curse, putting themselves into a dangerous situation.

Of course, Cosmo realizes that it’s easier for Cosmo and his father to put aside their fear than it was for Cosmo’s mother and brother. Being the direct subject of an existential curse is certainly much more terrifying than just being part of a family that has a curse that may kill people around you. These thoughts cause Cosmo to consider the nature of fear and how people can be afraid of many different things and how the nature of a person’s fears make a difference in how they are affected by them. What one person can face with courage may be the undoing of another.

The Ghosts

Meanwhile, the other kids at school have become deliberately hostile to Cosmo. They accuse him of being stuck up and lying to them about Australia, and they start saying that Cosmo has probably never even been to Australia. Cosmo knows that all of the things that they say about him are untrue and unfair, but there isn’t much he can say to refute it. It seems to be a form of hazing at the school. He thinks about how petty and childish the other kids are and how they have no concept about the serious issues that are hanging over Cosmo. In a way, though, Cosmo discovers that he’s actually more comfortable brooding over the curse than he is thinking about the obnoxious kids at school. There is a kind of comfort in knowing your life fits a pattern, even if it’s a disturbing and unpleasant one. He also thinks about what the old man told him, that one day, he would have three friends. Because of the way kids at school act, Cosmo can’t image having any friends there at all, but that prediction comes true as well.

Cosmo gradually discovers that the mill house where his aunt lives is haunted. Eunice tells him about a phantom coach and horses that are supposed to appear at night, and Cosmo begins seeing a boy who calls himself Con. Con first appears to him as a little boy, about 4 years old, but each time Cosmo sees him, he gets a little older. He also eats Cosmo’s candy bars from his room. Eventually, Con speaks to Cosmo as a young man. He admits that he took the candy because eating someone else’s food forms a relationship between the two of them. Con explains to Cosmo that his father was a free Roman soldier, but his mother is a slave woman, so Con himself is a slave. The only way he can win his freedom is to play in the gladiatorial games, and he needs Cosmo’s help to practice. At night, Cosmo practices Roman style fighting with Con, but it is gradually revealed that Con does not expect to survive his upcoming fight. When Con speaks to Cosmo more about his family, it is revealed that Con is a member of Cosmo’s family from the distant past. He is the eldest son in his generation, and he knows about the family curse. Because of the curse, he expects to die fighting. Cosmo tries to explain to Con that he doesn’t need to believe in the curse.

Whether that helps Con or not isn’t apparent because Cosmo has to spend the next weekend at school and doesn’t see Con again. The next ghost he sees is a boy called Sim. Sim has been living at a monastery in the Middle Ages, getting an education, but his father has pledged him to his uncle to go fight in the Crusades. Sim is worried because he doesn’t know anything about fighting and thinks that he’ll be killed. He asks Cosmo if he can help him learn to fight. Again, Cosmo doesn’t know much about fighting, but he tries his best to help Sim. He doesn’t really see why Sim has to be obligated to go to war if he’s no good at it and doesn’t want to go, but he does notice that Sim’s eyesight is poor, and what he really needs are glasses.

Then, some of the hauntings at the mill house turn frightening. Cosmo is almost killed in multiple, inexplicable accidents. It seems like a poltergeist is out to get him. One of the boys who’s been giving Cosmo a hard time at school is also visiting the mill house and witnesses some of these accidents one weekend because his father works with Eunice. Not only do the boys learn to get along better after getting to know each other, but Cosmo starts realizes that the boy, Moley, actually has some problems of his own. He has an unhappy home life because of his stepmother. Moley also has a weak heart that keeps him from participating in certain school activities. Knowing this makes Cosmo feel more sympathetic toward him. Moley also comes to realize that something mysterious and threatening is happening to Cosmo, and he witnesses a ghost that Cosmo doesn’t see: a stern old woman in black. Moley has the sense that this old woman is responsible for the accidents happening to Cosmo, although he doesn’t seem to recognize that she is a ghost at first. It seems like Cosmo has now become the target of his family’s curse, which shouldn’t happen because he isn’t the eldest son. Has Cosmo become the target of the curse or some other supernatural force that now sees him as a threat?

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed the story, although I feel a little conflicted about the ending. The story is somewhat open-ended. We know that Cosmo survives his ordeals. Part of me wonders if the curse may have actually saved his life, after a fashion. If his bother was fated to die and Cosmo was fated to survive, then the forces trying to kill Cosmo were destined to fail. But, that’s just conjecture. These questions are never really answered. In the end, Cosmo doesn’t know if anything he’s done has changed the nature of the curse or if it actually can be changed. He still doesn’t know what might be in store for his future wife and children or if he will actually have a future wife and children. The only way to know is to live his life as best he can and deal with whatever comes along the way.

There are two things that I can see that he gains from his ordeals: closure about his mother and brother and a glimpse at what various other relatives have done in the past to change their fate (or if they did anything). I think there are some indications, based on Cosmo’s encounters with family ghosts, that what his father believes about the curse is probably true, but the story leaves that up to the imaginations of the readers. If you like speculative books, you might enjoy this one.

Metaphysics

Although Eunice is a mathematician, she’s also interested in metaphysics. She and Cosmo have discussions about the nature of time and reality and the possibility of other dimensions or other realities, which have a bearing on whether or not we interpret the ghosts that Cosmo sees as ghosts or not. In some ways they seem like ghosts, but in others, they might be people who have not yet died but who have crossed over in time.

This isn’t confirmed, though, and during Cosmo’s ghost experiences, someone from the past is attempting to kill him. (Spoilers) At first, I thought that the old woman attempting to kill Cosmo was the old priestess who originally put the curse on his family and who was trying to stop Cosmo from helping the ghosts who came to him to survive and thwart the curse. That isn’t the case, though. What Cosmo discovers is that various ancestors have tried different ways of thwarting the curse themselves. So far, none of them have been successful (and I’ll have more to say about that), but Cosmo discovers that one ancestress and her son actually became evil sorcerers themselves. The old lady is a sorceress, and she believes a prophecy that her son will die in a fight with Cosmo, so both she and her son are traveling through time and actively trying to kill Cosmo to save the son from the family curse.

During his struggles with this unholy duo, Cosmo is very close to being killed, and he has a near-death experience. He sees a beautiful, peaceful place, with Con and Sim and his mother and brother. He wants to join them all there, but they tell him that it’s not his time, and they will wait for him there until it is. This seems to represent a vision of Heaven and to confirm the supernatural nature of the story and that Cosmo’s mother and brother are also both dead.

Destiny and Curses (Lots of Spoilers)

I already said that, in the end, we don’t know if anything that Cosmo has seen, done, or experienced has broken the curse or changed his future or his family’s future. What we do see through Cosmo’s experiences are two things: that different generations of the family have tried to thwart the curse in different ways and that (although the story doesn’t explicitly spell this out) there may have been reasons other than the curse itself for what happened to the sons who died, including what Cosmo’s father said about belief in the curse itself causing it to come true.

Con tried to practice his fighting skills in an effort to win his battle, but unlike Cosmo, he never seemed to seriously consider that maybe he didn’t need to fight that battle at all. We’re not sure exactly how many generations removed he was from the original curse (maybe one or two, possibly more?), but it seems that enough time has gone by to convince him that the curse is real and that he should believe in it. Did his belief that he was going to his destiny and going to die in the upcoming fight cause him to actually seek out that fight and also to lose it?

When Sim comes to Cosmo, Cosmo tries to talk to him about just choosing not to fight, but Sim explains that isn’t an option for him. His father arranged it with his uncle, and Sim has no power to refuse to go. The choice not to fight isn’t open to Sim, but Cosmo also realizes that, beyond simply not being a skilled fighter, Sim is also at a disadvantage because he has bad eyesight. So, was Sim’s death almost arranged by his family because they had already concluded that it was his fate to die in battle, never teaching him to actually fight and overlooking his eyesight? If they had left Sim in the monastery, where he was studying, maybe nothing bad would have happened to him.

After Cosmo recovers from his near death at the hands of the sorceress and her son, who was an 18th century member of the Hellfire Club, he learns their fate from Eunice. Both the evil mother and her son died at the same time in the river where they nearly drowned Cosmo, indicating that they accidentally got themselves killed in their attempt to kill him. The prophecy that said the son would die while fighting Cosmo was actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they simply hadn’t believed it and had ignored Cosmo, he would have never met them at all, living in a completely different time and having no way to magically travel through time on his own. It’s only because they sought him out and actually started the fight that both of them died, which lends credence to what Cosmo’s father says about believing in the curse causes it to happen.

Before the end of the story, Cosmo’s father tells him that searchers have finally found his mother’s and brother’s bodies in the desert, confirming his vision of them in Heaven. We still don’t know exactly why they went off into the desert to die. Were they trying to flee the curse in a panic, so they weren’t thinking about how this decision could lead to their deaths? If they had simply chosen not to believe in the curse and had continued living in London instead of trying to wildly flee, losing the battle with their own emotions, perhaps they would have both lived normal lives and not died early … maybe.

There’s no real way to prove exactly what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother. We never hear what happened to them from their point of view, and what decisions they made because of it. Both Cosmo’s father and Eunice says that they shouldn’t blame them for how they attempted to deal with something beyond themselves because they did the best they knew how at the time, even if no one else understands. This leads me to consider that maybe the real curse of the family is: bad decisions. Whenever the curse seems to arise again, each generation has to decide how they will handle it: run or fight, believe or not believe, etc. Each time, they’ve made the wrong choice for their circumstances.

In a way, Eunice bears some responsibility for what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother, although no one blames her for her role in the situation. Cosmo’s father, having concluded that belief in the curse causes it to come true, had decided not to tell his wife or kids about the curse, so they would never have to grapple with whether they believed it or not. But, apparently, he never explained that logic to Eunice because she spoiled it by telling Cosmo’s mother and shocking her into taking a course of action that led to her and her elder son dying. Would the situation have been different if she had said nothing or if she had said something but said it at a different time from the one she actually chose? Eunice says that she thought Cosmo’s father should have explained the situation before he got married. Maybe that would have changed things or maybe it wouldn’t, but if she felt that strongly that this was the right thing to do, she could have brought up the subject earlier. Maybe she should have talked to both of Cosmo’s parents before their marriage to either get everything out in the open or at least understand why she should keep the secret. Either Eunice didn’t do that or she weakened in her resolve to keep the secret, and she inadvertently set the curse cycle in motion again.

The supernatural nature of this story and its ghosts suggests that the curse is probably real on some level and not just a series of bad luck incidents and unfortunate mistakes that the family makes. The hopeful outlook, the one that Eunice’s housekeeper believes, is that, little by little, with each passing generation, the family changes. Each generation is a little different from the last. Cosmo’s brother was apparently the first not to die in a conventional battle or a physical fight. He died trying to avoid fighting. With him, it seems to have been some kind of internal battle. This may be true of later generations, or maybe this is the first step in shattering the pattern of the curse. Possibly, all that Cosmo has seen will grant him the ability to make better choices, teach this children how to break old patterns, or do something drastically different that nobody else has done before. It’s hard to say, but realizing that it’s hard to say what might happen or what could have happened is a major part of the story.

Thinking about the curse and all of the ways the family could break it and all of the ways they’ve failed to break it so far shows the unpredictable nature of the choices people make in life. Each generation apparently did something they thought was for the best, whether they were embracing fate, fighting fate, or running from fate. The story leaves open the possibility that fate (or the curse) will always find them in some form, no matter what they do. If they don’t actively go to war, they may face their battles in another way, like internal or emotional battles. Who’s to say whether a different sort of internal battle might have taken Cosmo’s brother in London, even if the family said nothing about the curse to him or his mother? As a teenager, he might have had a battle with drugs or depression and lost. He might have gotten a disease and lost that battle. Life has a lot of maybes, and none of us can foresee every possible struggle or disaster.

Another maybe is that maybe the important point isn’t whether or not the curse exists or whether or not they can save all the potential victims but what each of them chooses to do with the life they have while they have it. Cosmo and his father will keep on living. His father will return to his important cancer research, and Cosmo will have decisions to make about his own life. He may or may not decide to have kids, he may or may not tell his future wife or fiance about the curse, and he may or may not try to adopt a child rather than have a biological one. In fact, unless the curse guarantees that sons will be born in the family, we don’t know for sure whether Cosmo might have all daughters. Really, anything is possible. What his future children’s struggles might be or what the real risks to them could be are a distant unknown right now in Cosmo’s life. In the end, he will have to trust them to a certain extent to make the right choices or at least the best choices that they know how when their battles come to them, in whatever form they take. We all have battles of our own to face and risks we take, no matter who we are, and nothing in life is guaranteed for any of us.

There is one last thing that did surprise me. In all of the ways it seems people in Cosmo’s family tried to end or thwart the curse, did nobody think of maybe some form of apology or atonement? The curse stems from an ancient offense someone in their family committed. Perhaps, if they found a way to say they were sorry, it would do something to end the vengeance against them, but it seems like nobody even suggests it. Heck, the evil sorceress lady and her son acquired the ability to use magic and travel through time, but because they were evil and stupid, they went after Cosmo, who was probably their greatest ally, instead of looking further back in time for the real source of their problems. Couldn’t they have gone and faced the priestess lady and either stopped her from creating her curse or stopped their ancestor from killing her grandson? There are a lot of maybes to this whole situation, but I’m honestly surprised that they didn’t think of that one.

School Troubles

Some of the school experiences in the story may have been based on the author’s own education. Joan Aiken was home schooled until she was 12 years old, and then, she was sent to the Wychwood School in Oxford, a boarding and day school. It’s possible that she also encountered difficulties adjusting to being at school with other children and the hazing and bullying that can occur in that type of environment. In the story, Eunice sees value in learning how to get along with other people, although Cosmo questions the value of learning to get along with people as awful as the kids at his school.

He gradually begins to learn more about the relationships of kids at school by observing them as an outsider. Some of the awful ways of treating him are considered some kind of hazing or initiation, and he’s expected to undergo it with some degree of grace before they will grant him acceptance. It’s all pretty idiotic and immature. Cosmo realizes it, although he knows he can’t show much reaction, or it will make things much worse. It’s the sort of thing I hated when I was a student myself. I admit that I was shy and socially awkward, and I didn’t get along well with many other kids because I just couldn’t stand this sort of thing.

Over 30 years later, I haven’t really changed my mind about that. I get that being around other people can open your eyes to human nature and how to deal with your fellow flawed human beings, but I see the same problem in this story as I do in real life: allowing this system of hazing encourages the personal entitlement of particular students, and it also is detrimental to the mental health of people who struggle to deal with them. I think schools do better at this now than they did when I was a kid, when it seemed like almost 100% of the personal development, learning, and personal responsibility was put on the shoulders of everyone else who has to deal with this type of person. I think I have much, much less patience for this kind of thing now than I used to due to overexposure early in life, which does call into question whether what I learned from that experience was really beneficial or not. On the whole, I actually do think that I benefited from exposure to other people, in spite of all the stresses and mental health issues along the way. Part of the issue is, when you’re part of a group of people, you have to put up with the worst parts of that group to spend time with the better parts of the group. If you avoid society too much, you don’t meet the better parts. Learning social skills and human understanding also requires time and practice, which is what Cosmo learns in the story.

People who bully and cause problems can be considered in the learning phase of developing social skills themselves. It’s just that there do have to be rules about how much of their bad behavior can be allowed while they learn. They can’t be allowed to sabotage other people’s social development for the sake of their own because that only leads to their personal entitlement at someone else’s expense. If they are spared consequences for their actions, they never learn anything, either, never improving or showing signs of development, just putting more needless stress on other people and never seeming to understand or care why. I’ve seen far too many examples of this in real life.

I actually enjoyed the way the school in the book handled some of these conflicts. The headmaster is a psychologist, and although some of the things he does seem a little unfair, he actually discusses his reasons for doing this with Cosmo. He understands how his students think and feel, and he knows how to give consequences for actions that not only enforce the school’s rules and better treatment for bullied children but also which affect their relationships with each other more positively.

At first, Cosmo is angry when he’s punished along with some of the other kids who have been bullying him for a prank he tried to discourage them from committing. However, the headmaster apologizes to him for that, saying that he knows those other kids have been giving him a hard time, treating him like he thinks he’s better than they are. One of the other teachers says that Cosmo has been targeted because he’s one of the bright students, and some of the members of his family have a more prestigious reputation than Cosmo realizes. By giving Cosmo the same punishment as the other boys, while the other boys are made to acknowledge that it’s unjust and that Cosmo doesn’t deserve it as much as they do, the headmaster is showing the other boys that they don’t have reason to think that Cosmo is being treated better than they are, ending some of their resentment against him. He also knows that the boys can now accept Cosmo as being one of them, united in resentment against the headmaster for being harsh and unfair. The headmaster is willing to take their resentment against him because, as an adult faculty member, he doesn’t need to be one of “them”, as in one of the students or their “friend” or “pal.” He’s apart from them anyway in terms of age and status, and part of his role is guiding their actions and relationships with each other. In a way, Cosmo admires the logic and the tactic, even though it means enduring the punishment, and it does improve the way the the other boys treat him.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Mystery of the Angry Idol

Mystery of the Angry Idol by Phyllis A. Whitney, 1965.

Janice Pendleton is sad and nervous because the rest of her family will be moving overseas for at least a year, and she is staying in the United States to go to school. Her father is a consultant to the government, and his latest assignment is in Saigon in Vietnam. (This book is set contemporary to the time when it was written, in the 1960s. The Vietnam War lasted from 1955 to 1975, which is probably why Jan’s father is going there, although he is going as some kind of government consultant instead of an ordinary soldier. This book was written after the Bay of Pigs Invasion and President Johnson’s continuing escalation of the conflict in Vietnam.) However, things are dangerous in Saigon, so Jan’s mother and younger brothers, a pair of twins, will be living in Okinawa, Japan, so her father will able to visit them sometimes. (There’s a US Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan, and I know it existed and was in operation during the 1960s because, coincidentally, my older cousin was born there while my uncle was stationed in Japan in the 1960s. The book doesn’t mention this, but I thought I’d tell you that there’s an American presence there, including civilian relatives of military personnel, so Jan’s mother and brothers will likely be among other Americans during their stay there.) Twelve-year-old Jan could have gone to Japan with them, but she is much more advanced in school than her young brothers. They are so young than their education won’t be disrupted much by living in another country for a year or two, but Jan is older, and her family was worried about her losing her place in school.

Instead of going to Japan, Jan will be living with her grandmother and great-grandmother in Mystic, Connecticut and attending school there while her family is gone. It’s summer now, so until school starts, she will be spending her time adjusting to her new living situation and getting to know her relatives. Jan doesn’t know her grandmother very well, and she’s never even met her great-grandmother before. At least when she’s with them, she will be with family. However, her grandmother is a little worried about her great-grandmother’s health. Great-grandmother Althea doesn’t really leave her upstairs rooms anymore, and although she was much more lively and interested in people when she was younger, she doesn’t seem to have much stamina for meeting and talking to people these days. Jan is told that she will have to be careful and behave herself because, if she upsets her great-grandmother too much, she won’t be allowed to stay with them in Connecticut anymore. Instead, she would have to attend a boarding school in Boston. If she goes to Boston, she will be there alone, without any friends and family nearby, and she is nervous about that. She already knows that, by going to Connecticut, she will be removed from her parents and siblings and her friends in California, where she grew up.

To help her feel better, her father tells her more about her family’s history and great-grandmother Althea. When she was younger, Althea traveled through Asia because her father, Jan’s great-great-grandfather, was a merchant dealing in Asian art. (This is very similar to what the author’s father did for a living and why she spent most of her youth in Asia. More about that below.) Althea spent years living in China with her parents while her father bought and commissioned pieces of Chinese art and sculpture that he could sell and collect for himself. However, after her mother died, Althea was sent to a boarding school in Boston. Her father was later killed during the Boxer Rebellion. Althea was in China at the time when they realized that trouble was coming. She survived and escaped to the United States because her father sent her to stay with some friends of his. She took some of the smaller pieces from his collection with her.

Now, Great-grandmother Althea has an impressive collection of Asian art herself, including some of the pieces that she managed to smuggle out of China when she had to flee. There is one piece in her collection that seems particularly mysterious, an ugly statue in the style of a Chinese idol that she keeps turned to the wall. (The “idol” was never used as an object of worship, for those worried that Althea’s father may have looted a temple or appropriated a Chinese national treasure of some kind. Althea says that one of his artist friends made the statue specifically for him. It’s important to the story that it is in the style of an idol but that it is also genuinely ugly and of little intrinsic value.) Jan’s father implies that there is some kind of mystery surrounding that statue, but he doesn’t really explain what it is. Jan’s father worries a little about Althea because she always used to be such a lively woman, and he says that, in her old age, she has become a kind of hermit who has shut herself away from the world and lives like a “vegetable.” He hopes that Jan’s youthful presence in the house will help her become more interested in life again, although Jan doesn’t see how that can happen when she risks being sent away to boarding school if she “bothers” Althea too much.

When Jan arrives in Connecticut, everything is awkward because she doesn’t get her own room in the house. Instead, she has to sleep on a cot in the living room. Her great-grandmother doesn’t even want to see her right away. There is a storm that night, and Jan has trouble sleeping. The next day, she sees a neighbor boy outside and decides to try making friends with him because she really needs someone her own age to talk to. The boy, Neil, doesn’t seem entirely friendly, but he does talk to her down by the nearby boat dock. He tells her that, the night before, he noticed a strange, suspicious-looking man hanging around her family’s house, and he wonders if anything from the house was stolen. Jan says that she doesn’t think so and that she didn’t hear anyone come in, but because of the noise from the storm, it’s hard to say for sure if someone tried to get into the house. Neil points out that the mysterious stranger is still hanging around the house, and Jan sees a man with a beard hanging around nearby.

Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a boy in a boat. Neil and the boy in the boat don’t seem to like each other, and the boy in the boat seems to immediately resent Jan for talking to Neil. He tells her that she’d better not try to get into his boat because Neil tried to get in uninvited earlier. Jan is insulted by this rude boy and returns to her relatives’ house. There, she learns two surprising things. The first is that the boy with the boat, Patrick, is actually the son of Mrs. Marshall, the housekeeper, so they will be seeing a lot of each other. Jan’s grandmother had hoped that Jan and Patrick would be friends. (So far, they haven’t gotten off to a good start.) The second is that it looks like something may have been stolen from the house last night. The mysterious statue is missing. Jan tells her grandmother and Patrick about the strange man that she saw and what Neil said. Her grandmother has trouble believing that a theft really occurred. She thinks that great-grandmother Althea may have just moved the statue and forgotten, but Patrick is interested in the mysterious man.

When Jan goes upstairs to meet her great-grandmother for the first time, she discovers that Althea is not the “vegetable” that she’s been lead to expect. Althea is physically feeble and stays upstairs because her knees are bad and can’t handle stairs anymore. However, she is mentally sharp and highly observant. She talks to Jan about her family’s past and her own past. She understands that Jan didn’t really want to come to Mystic and be separated from her family, but her father wanted her to come and learn more about her family’s history. Althea explains that she spent a large part of her youth living in Shanghai until her mother’s death, when her father sent her to a school in Boston, and she really hated it. This is reassuring because Althea is less likely to send Jan away, remembering her own youth.

Althea also explains that she isn’t unhappy with her relatively isolated life in the upper rooms of the house, surrounded by the pieces of Asian art in her collection. She says that it’s just another phase of life. Life moves in phases, and a person knows when they’re ready for the next phase. When she was a little girl, she loved paper dolls and couldn’t imagine life without them, but as she got older, playing with paper dolls became dull, and she was ready for new activities. Similarly, when she was young and active, she couldn’t imagine a life without travel and meeting other people. Now that she can’t get around as well as she used to, she has entered a new phase of life where she enjoys quiet time alone and thinking and remembering. She is still somewhat in touch with the world because her rooms have a nice view of the Mystic Seaport, but she no longer has to deal with crowds and traffic and bothersome household chores and schedules. Jan is still young and active, so she has trouble fully understanding Althea’s isolated life of reflection, but Althea says that she will understand someday, when she’s ready for that phase herself.

Jan is interested in the objects in Althea’s collection, and Althea shows her some pieces and explains a little about their history. There are some pieces of scrimshaw that Jan’s great-grandfather carved himself, like a carving of a woman’s hand that Althea says was originally meant as a paperweight but which she had mounted on the head of one of her canes. Her other cane has a carved cat. Althea also owns a chess board with red and white pieces made of ivory and cinnabar, with the figures carved in an Asian style. Jan notices an empty shelf in the room and wonders if that’s where the missing statue is supposed to be.

While Jan and her grandmother are standing on an upper porch, looking at the view, they look down and see the mysterious man talking to Mrs. Marshall, who seems worried and upset. Mrs. Marshall and the man notice that they’re being watched, and the man waves to Althea and greets her. Even though the greeting is friendly, the man seems to upset Althea. When Jan asks about him and tells Althea what Neil said, Althea says that the man’s name is Eddie. She loved Eddie when he was a little boy, but she thinks he’s become a scoundrel. She says that Eddie came to see her the night before, but she didn’t want to see him and sent him away. Althea thinks he probably took the missing Chinese idol, but she also says that she always hated that statue. It had such a reproachful expression on its face that she turned it to the wall so she wouldn’t have to see it. Rather than dealing with Eddie or discussing the situation further, Althea says that she would rather just forget about it all.

Jan spends more time with Althea, until Althea gets tired. Althea shows Jan other pieces from her father’s collection of jade objects, explaining the different colors of jade and their relative values and the connections the pieces in the collection have to Chinese folklore and mythology. She says that her daughter-in-law, Jan’s grandmother, worries about robbers breaking into the house to steal these things, but Althea prefers to keep her collection close rather than locked away somewhere. The pieces in the collection bring back happy memories for her.

Jan’s grandmother owns a book store in a local historical district. When Jan goes to see the book store, her grandmother allows her to explore the area and tells her to be sure to visit Patrick’s grandfather at the rope walk (the place where they make rope). Jan goes there and encounters Eddie again. Eddie seems to want to speak to her, but Jan is afraid of him and avoids him. Grandfather Marshall had just been arguing with Eddie, and he’s in a bad mood when Jan darts inside. At first, he snaps at her when she rushes in. When Jan introduces herself and explains that she was startled by Eddie, Grandfather Marshall calms down and apologizes for snapping at her. Jan tries to ask him more about Eddie, but all he says is that he doesn’t want to talk to him, and he advises her to keep avoiding him. He shows her around the rope walk and explains to her how rope is made, and he also shows her a model ship he’s making for Althea that looks like the sailboat her husband used to own called the Happy Heart.

On her way back to her grandmother’s book store, Jan meets Eddie again. He explains to her that he’s actually Patrick’s older brother and the black sheep of their family. He also used to be friends with Jan’s father when they were both young, although Jan’s father was older than he was. Eddie badly wants to communicate with Patrick. He asks Jan if she’ll take a message to Patrick for him, and he hands her a note, leaving quickly before she can say anything. Jan shows the note to her grandmother and asks her what she should do about it. Without going into specifics, Jan’s grandmother says that Eddie was always a wild child, and years ago, he did something that was very scandalous, and he had to leave town. That’s why most people in town don’t want to see him or talk about him in public, although there’s been plenty of private gossip about what he did. The Marshalls have been friends with the Pendletons for years, and Jan’s grandmother thinks that it’s probably time to forgive and forget what Eddie did, which is why she doesn’t want to pass on gossip about him and make things harder for him and his family. She tells Jan that it’s fine to give Patrick the note from Eddie.

Jan’s delivery of the note thaws her relationship with Patrick a little, and he gives her a ride back across the river to her family’s home in his boat. There, Mrs. Marshall tells Jan that, because her meeting with her great-grandmother went well, Althea has decided that she can be trusted, so she will now have a room upstairs in the house. Jan just needs to be quiet whenever she’s upstairs because Althea likes to nap. Jan begins to feel a little more at home and less like an awkward visitor.

However, strange things are still happening in and around the house. Eddie is still lurking around, and nobody wants to tell Jan what he did to turn himself into such a black sheep. She overhears a late night conversation between Althea and Eddie where the two of them seem to be discussing secrets and playing cat and mouse with each other. Yet, Althea gives Eddie a job doing yard work and seems to be trying to help him redeem himself. He returns the statue that Althea never liked but seems to take other things. Althea tries to send him away when he causes problems, but he insists on hanging around and claims that he’s trying to help Althea. Like others, he believes that there is a secret behind the ugly statue that seems to make Althea nervous, although Althea doesn’t think that the statue contains any real mystery.

As Jan struggles to understand what’s happening around her, she risks getting on the bad side of the reclusive and temperamental Althea just as her great-grandmother seems like she’s becoming fond of her. The Pendleton house isn’t entirely a happy one, and the reasons why are buried in Althea’s past as well as Eddie’s. The clues have been right in front of Althea the entire time, but although Althea is intelligent and thinks she understands everything, there’s something critical that she’s overlooked all along, which changes everything.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Background of the Book

Many of the themes of Phyllis A. Whitney‘s juvenile mysteries come from her own life. When she was young, she lived with her family in Japan and other countries in Asia because her own father was working overseas. She was born in Japan, and her middle initial stands for Ayame (the Japanese form of the name Iris). Whitney’s parents were American, but she didn’t live in the United States until she was a teenager. Both of her parents died while she was a teenager, and she went to live with an aunt in Chicago, so she understood the feelings that kids could have, moving around, living in different countries, being separated from parents, and living with relatives. Because of her upbringing in Asia, many of her books, even those set in the United States, include some mention or aspects of Asian art or culture, especially Japan.

I think both Jan and Althea are reflections of the author and her life. They both share some aspects of their lives with the author, but Jan is probably more like the author in her youth, and Althea is the older version, looking back on her life and remembering what it was like to be young with the knowledge of what it’s like to be old.

The Atmosphere

I really liked the atmosphere of the story! It’s a lovely, old-fashioned house. Althea’s museum-like collection room is fascinating, and the room that she gives to Jan is cozy. Jan’s upstairs room has rosebud wallpaper and a four-poster bed and rocking chair. The room is a little worn and shabby, but Jan loves it. Her grandmother gives her milk and gingerbread on a china plate decorated with violets as a bedtime snack, and she reads old-fashioned children’s books, like A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Jan doesn’t usually read older children’s books, but there’s a collection of them in the house, left by the generations of children in her family who had grown up there.

Relationships

When Jan first meets Neil and Patrick, she realizes that neither of them is really the ideal friend for her. She continues to associate with them partly because she can’t help it. They’re both always around because Patrick’s mother is the housekeeper at Jan’s relatives’ house, and Neil’s family lives next door. Also, Jan doesn’t have anyone else her own age to talk to, although she is realistic and thinks that she should look for other friends in this town because both of the boys are difficult in different ways. Patrick is impulsive and temperamental (a bit like his grandfather the day Jan meets him – snapping at her just because he’s in a bad mood at someone else), and he has a chip on his shoulder because of his brother’s troubles.

However, Neil is even more temperamental. Jan quickly notices how Neil’s mood can abruptly shift from pleasant to irritable and how he doesn’t seem to have much compassion for other people. She later realizes that he’s most charming when he wants something from her or someone else. Neil’s ambition in life is to be a radio interviewer. His uncle is a radio announcer and has encouraged Neil’s ambition. Neil’s hobby is interviewing people and recording his interviews for practice. Some of his teachers have found his interviews fascinating and have played them in class because, while he has never interviewed anyone famous, Neil has interviewed people who have done some really interesting things, like the janitor who was once a prisoner of war during WWII. Neil’s also a little sensitive about his interviews because his father doesn’t think much about his ambitions and would rather that Neil go into his business when he grows up, and sometimes, other kids tease him. Part of the reason why Neil is interested in being friends with Jan is that he would love to interview her great-grandmother because she had a fascinating early life in China. He is also aware that there is some secret about the angry-looking idol in her collection, which she has always felt compelled to keep even though she doesn’t like it. Neil is obsessed with his life’s ambition and is willing to do just about anything to promote it. He also has a chip on his shoulder toward Patrick and Eddie and others who have made fun of what’s important to him and tried to discourage him from doing what he wants to do.

In the end, as Jan comes to know the two boys better and both confronts them over their behavior and helps them through the troubling situations they have, the relationships between the three of them improve. After everything that happens, they all come to realize that each of them has done something wrong or misjudged someone else. This doesn’t completely absolve any of them from things they’ve done because some of them could have had serious consequences for other people as well as themselves. There are things that each of them has to do to make things right, but because each of them has something they need to do to fix things, something to learn, or something they need to apologize for, they realize that they are willing to let each other make amends and to accept each other’s efforts to change. These feelings also extend to others in the story, especially Althea and Eddie. Everyone in the story has misjudged someone or the situation, and everyone has something they need to learn, understand, and change.

Happiness and Redemption

Themes about happiness and redemption run all the way through the story. Eddie’s part of the story focuses on redemption. Part of his troubles are of his own making, but Jan learns that he’s also been falsely accused and badly misjudged. Like others in his family, he has a quick temper and needs more impulse control, and he used to be pretty wild and hung out with a bad crowd. What others know about him and are initially reluctant to tell Jan is that Eddie went to prison for being involved in a robbery and is now out on parole. However, as both Patrick and Eddie explain, Eddie wasn’t actually involved in the robbery. Some of the friends he used to hang out with did it, and they implicated him out of spite when they got caught because he refused to go along with their plan. Althea believed him when he said he didn’t do the robbery and paid for his legal defense, but he was convicted anyway because of his history with the people who committed the crime and because witnesses misidentified him as one of the people who was there.

Althea still doesn’t really believe Eddie was involved in the robbery, but she does know that he causes trouble because he lacks self-control and has lingering resentment about the way people look at him because of the trouble he’s been in. Eddie later says that he’s unfriendly to other people because they’re not friendly with him, although I think it’s fair to point out that people believe badly of him because he’s lived the kind of life where everything he’s been accused of doing are completely credible. That means that, even before he was falsely accused of robbery, the way he lived and the way he treated other people made almost everyone he knows in his home town willing to believe that he was a criminal. There seem to have been significant lifestyle and behavioral choices on Eddie’s part that created his bad boy image and led up to this situation. He may not look at it this way, but he kind of set himself up almost as much as his supposed friends did because of the choices he made with his life, his choice of friends, and his neglect of people who once might have believed in him. Even his own parents believe the worst of him at the beginning of the story, and the way he’s been acting ever since he reappeared in Mystic supports the view that he’s still the kind of person he used to be and people think he is.

As my grandfather used to say, it’s easier to keep a good reputation than to redeem a bad one. It’s not impossible to redeem a bad reputation, but it takes both work and time, and Eddie doesn’t have much patience with the people whose patience he’s already exhausted. He’s only just reappeared in town, but he’s already angry that people are looking at him suspiciously for just showing up. He’s upset that other people aren’t giving him a chance or instant forgiveness and acceptance, but at the same time, he really isn’t giving them much of a chance to see that he’s changed or giving himself enough time to demonstrate that change. Fortunately, some people, like Jan’s grandmother, are willing to drop the matter and give Eddie the chance to prove that he’s changed, and Althea tries to help Eddie by giving him jobs and letting him stay with them in the house for a while.

For a while, Eddie tries to prove that he’s a hard worker and a steady person, but, when Eddie loses his temper with Neil for carelessly wrecking his yard work while trying to catch his runaway dog and turns the garden hose on Neil, Miss Althea starts to think that she’s made a mistake. She craves peace and solitude, and Eddie is one disaster and temper explosion after another. At one point, she tries to send him away, telling him that it would be easier for him to start over somewhere else, where people don’t know his history, and he can cultivate a completely new life and image. Eddie moves out of her house, but he refuses to leave town. He has another job now, thanks to Althea’s recommendation, and he refuses to leave town as if he’s in disgrace when he hasn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t really like Eddie, particularly in the beginning, because he doesn’t really see the way he has made his own reputation and provoked other people, but I think his redeeming characteristics are his determination and perseverance. His attempts to change his reputation are clumsy and impatient. I think he expects too much of other people too soon as he tries to rebuild his relationships with the people he’s offended and pushed away before, but I appreciate that he still cares enough to keep trying until he gets it right.

In facing up to the situation with Eddie and with Jan’s clumsy efforts to figure out what’s going on and make things right, Althea also comes to some realizations about herself and the way she’s been living. Enjoying some solitude and a slower pace of life is fine as a person gets older, but Althea comes to the realization that the way she’s been going about it has been selfish and has cut her off from the people around her. She is out of touch with the lives of people who were once close to her and has failed to understand them and appreciate what they’re going through because of her determination to avoid becoming involved with other people’s problems or deal with anything unpleasant.

The reason why she doesn’t like the ugly statue is because her father carved a message in the back of it, telling her to find a “happy heart.” The theme of happiness used to be one of her father’s favorite topics of discussion when he was alive, and he often lectured her on how to be happy. Althea never liked it when he would lecture that happiness is based on the way a person lives and the choices they make, pointing out times when her own choices or priorities were making her unhappy. She always thought that her father sent her that ugly statue with the “happy heart” message before his death because he wanted to tell her, yet again, to be happy, and she felt like the statue’s ugly snarl was like a rebuke every time she wasn’t happy or made bad decisions. Being lectured and rebuked doesn’t make a person feel good when they’re already feeling bad, as Eddie knows from his experiences. However, Jan and Althea both come to realize that Althea has misunderstood her father’s message and intentions on multiple levels for most of her life.

Althea gets extremely upset one day when Jan says that someone tried to steal one of her most precious jade statues. At first, Jan’s grandmother thinks that Jan’s imagination is running away with her and that her presence in the house is too disturbing for Althea to handle, talking again about sending Jan to boarding school, but Althea later explains that Jan isn’t the reason why she’s upset. She’s upset with herself. She realizes that Jan was wrong about the person taking the statue because she herself had given the statue to Eddie, telling him to sell it to get money to start over somewhere else. However, part of the reason Eddie wants to stay in town is to help Althea, to pay her back for paying his legal bills when he was in trouble. When she sees that either Eddie or Patrick returned the statue because Eddie cares more about struggling to restore his reputation and relationships than about money, she feels terrible that she tried to bribe Eddie to leave out of her own selfish desires.

Happiness and peace of mind can’t be bought, either with money or precious objects, and it doesn’t come from avoiding the parts of life that are unpleasant. Happiness comes from embracing life, all of it, even the parts that are hard, and from maintaining meaningful relationships with people you love, even through their struggles. You have to take the bad with the good to experience life fully. Once Althea comes to these revelations about the life that she’s been living and the life she really wants to live, she feels the peace of mind she’s been seeking and no longer fears the gaze of the statue or the rebukes that she thought that her father was giving her through the statue. Her life doesn’t have to be perfect, every choice she makes doesn’t have to be perfect, other people don’t have to be perfect, and her happiness doesn’t have to be perfect and constant for it to be real happiness. However, there are a couple of other mysteries surrounding the story that Jan manages to clear up, including the fact that Althea’s father had something else in mind with his last message. Althea was so sure she knew what her father was telling her that she didn’t look deeper, but Jan does and discovers the treasure that Althea has been ignoring the whole time.

Posted on by TracyC

The Quilt Story

The Quilt Story by Tony Johnston and Tomie dePaola, 1985.

A woman (at some point in the 1800s, from the pictures) makes a special quilt for her young daughter, Abigail.  It has Abigail’s name on it and a pattern of falling stars.  Abigail loves it!

Abigail uses the quilt all the time, not just in bed.  She has tea parties with her dolls on the quilt, hides under it when playing hide-and-seek, generally taking it everywhere and playing all kinds of games with it.  The quilt gets worn and torn in the playing, but her mother mends it when necessary.

Eventually, Abigail and her family move to a new home, traveling in a covered wagon.  Everything in their new home seems strange to Abigail, but her old quilt comforts her.

Eventually, when Abigail is older, she puts the quilt away in the attic, and people forget about it.  Still, animals use the quilt.  A mouse makes a nest it in.  A raccoon hides food in it, and a cat naps on it. Then, one day, another girl finds the quilt in the attic.  She loves it and brings it to her mother to be repaired. 

Like Abigail, though, the modern girl’s family soon moves to a new home, where everything seems new and strange.  However, the old, familiar quilt comforts the girl once again.

This is a gentle, comforting story that would make nice bedtime reading or a story that could be read to a young child who is moving or has recently moved, reminding them that, even in a new place, you can bring a sense of home and the familiar with you.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.