Garbage Juice for Breakfast by Patricia Reilly Giff, illustrated by Blanche Sims, 1989.
This book follows an earlier book in the series, The Case of the Cool-Itch Kid, while Dawn is staying at her summer camp, Camp Wild-In-The-Woods. Her friend from school, Jill Simon, is at camp with her, and they’ve made friends with another character from the earlier book, Lizzie Lee, who started out as a rival/antagonist for Dawn. Both Dawn and Lizzie like mysteries and being private detectives, and they’ve bonded over that. There is still an element of rivalry between them, but it’s a friendlier rivalry than when they first met each other.
When their camp counselor announces that she has set up a treasure hunt for the campers to solve, Dawn is excited. As the Polka Dot Private Eye, she’s sure that she’ll be the first to solve the mystery! However, Lizzie is the Cool Cat Detective. (Each of them take their names from the detective kits that each of them own.) Dawn knows that Lizzie will be tough competition.
Because the kids in their cabin are from different schools and some were friends with each other before they came to camp, the campers in the cabin have favorites between the two girl detectives. Jill thinks that Dawn is the best detective and will solve the treasure hunt before Lizzie will, while Lizzie’s friends think that she’s going to be the one to solve the mystery. They decide to turn the treasure hunt into a contest to show which of the girls is the best detective.
The first clue is in the form of a rhyme. It seems to have something to do with horses, and the girls are starting to learn horseback riding. There is also a hint about taking a particular trail. It’s tough for both Dawn and Lizzie to investigate the same mystery without getting in each other’s way, following one another or being suspicious that they’re following each other, or accidentally giving each other hints. Is the competition between them really a good idea, or is teamwork what they really need?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
I remember reading this book when I was a kid, and I loved it because I always loved treasure hunt books! There are parts of the treasure hunt that readers can solve along with the characters in the story, although it’s not one of those stories that pauses to ask readers if they’ve solved parts before the characters have. It’s just that the information necessary to solve each part of the treasure hunt is given in the story and shown in the pictures, so readers have the opportunity to think what the next step should be along with the characters or before the characters announce what they’ve figured out. Some of the clues point to features of the camp itself, like the names of the trails around the camp, but the story does provide that information to the readers, so there’s nothing that the characters know that the readers don’t. Other clues use pop culture references, like Donald Duck, because their camp counselor is a Disney fan and has items with Disney characters on them.
Dawn and Lizzie do compete with each other to solve the treasure hunt, until they solve the final clue. All through the book, Dawn struggles with the horse lessons because she’s actually afraid of horses. When reaching the prize means going through an area with a lot bugs, Dawn suddenly feels sorry for Lizzie, who is following her but struggling because she’s afraid of bugs. Understanding what it’s like to struggle with something that scares her, she feels some empathy for Lizzie and realizes that she can’t use Lizzie’s fear to get ahead of her and reach the treasure first. She tells Lizzie that they can go together to reach the treasure, so they are able to share the glory. The experience helps the girls a little with their respective fears, and they share the final prize.
The name of this book comes from a kind of mixed fruit juice that the camp serves in the dining hall. None of the campers know exactly what’s in it, nobody really likes it, and the camp rumor is that it’s just strained out of the garbage. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the mystery in the story, but it’s there for background color, the kind of stories that kids tell about food at camps and schools that they don’t like.
Aside from the mystery, the story has some fun camp atmosphere for beginning chapter book readers: horses and barns, the camp dining hall, a picnic with books, and a cozy, rainy night in their cabin with cookies.
The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.
When Dawn Bosco first joined Ms. Rooney’s class at Polk Street School, she stole Emily Arrow’s toy unicorn. Now, that incident has come back to haunt her. When the book begins, her theft of Emily’s unicorn was just weeks ago. Now, she and Emily are starting to be friends, although their friendship is a bit shaky.
At school, the teachers are talking about vegetables because it’s Good Vegetable Day. Everything is geared around vegetables all day, and the art teacher has the children make sculptures of vegetables out of clay. Dawn is bored because she’s been reading a mystery book, and she’d rather be finding mysteries and learning to be a detective than making silly vegetables out of clay.
Dawn gets irritated with Emily when she says that she’ll make a cucumber, which is what Dawn was going to make because it’s easy. The teacher won’t let Dawn make a cucumber because Emily already claimed that idea, so Dawn has to make a carrot instead. (Not that much different in shape, really, except one end is more narrow.) However, she still resents Emily for using the cucumber idea first.
As the girls push against each other by the sink, cleaning up from using the clay, Dawn spots a ring next to the sink. Later, Emily says that her ring is missing. It’s a special ring with a blue stone that she got for her birthday. Dawn is pleased that she’s found a mystery to solve. Remembering that she saw a ring next to the sink in the art room, Dawn proudly goes back to the art room to see if she can find the ring and return victorious. However, the ring isn’t there when she checks.
Then, suspicion turns to Dawn herself. After all, everyone knows that Dawn stole Emily’s unicorn before. Instead of being the hero detective, Dawn is turning into the main suspect in this crime. Now, she really needs to find the ring to clear her name!
Dawn’s grandmother, Noni, gave her a special detective kit for her birthday. Dawn uses it to turn into The Polka Dot Private Eye to hunt down Emily’s ring.
The book is available to borrow online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I liked the way the series returned to the subject of Dawn’s theft and used it to spark a spin-off mystery series. This is the first of the Polka Dot Private Eye books. In this series, Dawn becomes a more likeable character than she was when she first appeared in Fish Face, and she gets a little comeuppance for her earlier, unpunished theft of Emily’s toy unicorn in the form of her classmates’ suspicion of her. When I read this book for the first time when I was a kid, I hadn’t read the book where Dawn was first introduced, Fish Face, so I didn’t really understand the relationship between Dawn and Emily and how Dawn took Emily’s toy unicorn. We never really find out in either book exactly why Dawn took the unicorn, although in this book, she thinks of herself as having “borrowed” it instead of having stolen it.
Reading Fish Face isn’t necessary to understand the basic story in this book, but after having read it, I appreciate Dawn’s position in this book a little better. By now, everyone knows what Dawn did, and although Dawn thinks of “weeks ago” as a long time ago, it’s not really that long, and it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. Dawn is still a relatively new kid in class, and one of the few things everyone knows about her is that she has a history of taking things that don’t belong to her. It is a logical conclusion that Dawn might have helped herself to another of Emily’s belongings when everyone knows that she’s done it before. As my grandfather used to say, it’s easier to keep a good reputation than to redeem a bad one, but Dawn works at it and learns that she likes being a detective and that she has a talent for figuring things out. After Dawn figures out where Emily’s ring is, the two of them become better friends. Solving the mystery also makes Dawn a class hero and begins to establish Dawn’s reputation as a person who likes to solve mysteries and crimes rather than commit them.
This book gets bonus points from me for mentioning jelly sandals. Jelly shoes were a regular part of my childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s, and I’ve seen some of them return again in the early 2000s, probably partly because people my age now have children, and they’re nostalgic for some of the things from their childhoods. Jelly shoes (or “jellies,” as we called them) are sandals and sandal-like shoes made from flexible plastic in different colors, some clear or with sparkles inside. They were cheap when I was a kid, and I used to get a new pair or two when the weather turned warm. Eventually, they wear out, and the plastic bits snap. I’d wear them around my backyard with my toes sticking out the front as they started breaking, and I started growing out of them. By the time they were too broken to use anymore, my toes were usually beyond the bottom of the shoes, and I was always kind of proud of that because it was a sign that I’d grown over the summer. It wasn’t much of a loss when the shoes wore out because they’d be too small for me at that point anyway, so we’d throw them away, and I’d wear more solid shoes when the weather turned cold. Jellies, flip-flops, and cheap canvas shoes were a major part of what I wore when I was young and growing out of shoes fairly quickly. They were all inexpensive, and while they didn’t last very long, they lasted about as long as they needed to before I needed the next size and weren’t much to lose when I was rough on them.
Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1999.
Every year, Sammy’s town, Santa Martina, puts together a calendar with pictures of people’s pet dogs. People whose dogs are chosen for the calendar pictures get to ride in the town’s Christmas parade with their pets. Sammy is a cat-lover instead of a dog-lover, so she’s usually not too interested in the parade float with the dogs, but now, her friend Holly is living and working with the people who own the dog-grooming business and who prepare the float.
Sammy goes to the parade early to help Holly and the others to get the canine calendar float ready. She meets Mr. Petersen, the disagreeable man who assembles the dog calendar. Then, they learn that one of the dog owners has broken her leg and will need someone else to manage the dog, Marique, on the float. Marique is important because she’s trained to jump through a hoop, and they’re planning to have her jump through a Christmas wreath on the float. The dog owner’s daughter says she can’t be on the float with the dog because she promised her mother that she would make a video recording of the parade for her, so she has to be in the audience. Various other people also refuse to handle Marique because they have other jobs to do or other dogs to manage. Eventually, Sammy gets recruited to ride on the float and handle Marique.
At first, it goes pretty well, and Marique is a big hit with her jumping-through-the-wreath act. Then, some people show up dressed like the Three Wise Men and carrying cats, for some reason. Marique jumps off the float and runs off into the crowd. Before Sammy can do anything more than shout a warning to the others on the float to hold on to their dogs, both the cats and the other dogs start going wild and running in all directions. Everyone jumps off the canine calendar float and begins chasing after their dog. Sammy searches for Marique through the chaos.
Sammy doesn’t find Marique, but she does meet an unhappy little girl named Elyssa, who is dressed as an elf. Officer Borsch finds both girls and escorts them back to Elyssa’s mother. Officer Borsch wants to take Sammy home (which is a problem because Sammy secretly lives with her grandmother at a retirement community that doesn’t allow children, and they’ve been trying hard to avoid anyone finding out), but Elyssa insists that she wants Sammy to stay with her. When Elyssa goes to buy Sammy a soda, her mother questions Sammy about what Elyssa said to her. Elyssa seems to have an odd obsession with the moon and a tendency to run off by herself (making her the “runaway elf” in the title), but her mother doesn’t want to explain it. Elyssa asks if Sammy can spend the night with her. Sammy says that she has to get home, but Elyssa’s mother says it’s okay if the girls want to see each other tomorrow. Elyssa’s mother encourages the friendship between Elyssa and Sammy because Elyssa seems to need someone to open up to, although Sammy isn’t quite sure why.
Sammy’s grandmother’s friend Hudson finds Sammy, and she explains what happened with the Canine Calendar float. The more Sammy thinks about it, the more she suspects that her school nemesis, Heather Acosta, was one of the people dressed as Wise Men and holding cats. She can’t prove it, but it’s the sort of nasty trick Heather would do. The problem is that Sammy has also realized that Marique jumped off the float right before the cats and dogs went crazy. Just before the chaos started, Sammy heard someone calling Marique’s name, and Marique took off in the direction of the voice. Who was calling to Marique, and where is the dog now?
Marique’s owner, Mrs. Landvogt, is blaming the groomer who was managing the float for the disaster and her dog’s disappearance, which Sammy knows isn’t fair. Then, Sammy’s best friend, Marissa, calls her and says that Mrs. Landvogt is a neighbor of hers and wants to see Sammy. When Sammy meets Mrs. Landvogt, she is angry and in no mood for excuses. Mrs. Landvogt has received a ransom note for her dog, proving that someone took the dog on purpose. Rather than expecting apologies from Sammy for losing her dog, she insists that Sammy find Marique and get her back. At first, Sammy says that she doesn’t think she can do that, but Mrs. Landvogt says that she knows all about Sammy, and more importantly, she knows where Sammy really lives. If Sammy doesn’t find Marique, Mrs. Landvogt threatens to report Sammy and her grandmother for violating the terms of the retirement community. Sammy has no choice but to undertake the investigation. She also needs to find out where Mrs. Landvogt gets the information she uses to pressure people. Sammy isn’t her only victim … and therein may lie the solution to the mystery.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
In this book, Sammy feels a little awkward about Elyssa wanting to be friends with her because Elyssa’s a few years younger than she is. When kids are young, a few years’ difference in age makes a big difference in terms of knowledge, behavior, and interests, and she has trouble seeing what she and Elyssa would have in common and do together. When she talks to Hudson about it, he doesn’t think that age is such a big issue. He’s in his 70s, about the age of Sammy’s grandmother, and a few years’ age difference doesn’t make much of a difference to adults. Sammy is uncomfortable, thinking about how Hudson is decades older than she is. She likes spending time with him, but she worries that maybe she looks like a baby to him and that he just tolerates her in the way she tolerates Elyssa as first. As an adult who’s spent time babysitting and playing with younger cousins, I know it’s not really like that, not to people with depth to their relationships and personalities. People of different ages and backgrounds can still bond with each other over common interests and enjoying talking to each other and spending time together. People who are young at heart and enjoy nostalgia can also have fun sharing in kids’ activities. Playing kids’ games with kids won’t make you a kid again, but it can be fun to feel like one for a few hours at a time, now and then. There’s also something to be said for getting in touch with earlier versions of yourself that have never completely left you and being reminded of the things that you loved when you were young, another theme that enters into the story when Sammy considers some of the unhappy adults around her and what’s made them that way. During the course of the story, Sammy and Elyssa become real friends, and Sammy does help her to come to terms with what’s really bothering her.
During her investigation and through her budding friendship with Elyssa, Sammy begins to learn the secrets of some of the unhappy people in her community. The truth is that everyone has suffered some form of hardship or loss in their lives, and as I mentioned last year when I was talking about experiencing Christmas in a Pandemic, feelings like this can come out stronger around Christmas. Christmas is both the last major holiday before the New Year and a time that people romanticize as being perfect and magical. The problem is that life itself isn’t perfect and magical, and people can feel angry and depressed when the reality of their situations doesn’t match their vision of how their life and Christmas should be, especially if they’re really dealing with a serious situation or long-term unresolved feelings, as many people in this story are.
There is real grief and loss in the story. Elyssa is still struggling to come to terms with the death of her father the year before. He was a police officer who was killed in a situation that went horribly wrong. Elyssa was not at her father’s funeral because a psychologist said that she might find it traumatic at her age. Instead, her mother simply told her that her father went to heaven. However, Elyssa understands more than her mother thinks she does. She knows where her father is buried, and when she runs off by herself, she often goes there to stare at his grave and try to understand how he can be underground and in heaven at the same time. Elyssa’s worries and confusion come out when Sammy’s nosy neighbor, Mrs. Graybill, the one who suspects the truth about Sammy’s life with her grandmother and has often tried to expose it in the past, becomes injured. Mrs. Graybill’s health deteriorates, and she becomes a patient in the nursing home where Elyssa’s mother works. Sammy becomes her only visitor there and learns the truth about her unhappy past and how the resentments she’s borne throughout her life have harmed her and left her with many regrets. Sammy is actually at Mrs. Graybill’s side when she dies, and the two make peace with each other before the end. Witnessing the death of a former nemesis and coming to terms with her real humanity is an emotional roller coaster for Sammy, but facing her own inner turmoil helps her to see how to help Elyssa face hers.
Not everything in the story has a perfect resolution. Sammy does figure out where Marique the dog is, and the dog is safe, but she can’t bring back Elyssa’s dad or Mrs. Graybill, and there are some people who are going to have to learn some lessons of their own about how to resolve their feelings and face up to their own hardships and bad decisions. The brighter spots in the story are what Sammy learns from her experiences and with helping other people face their problems. People really do have to face up to their situations, even when they’re unpleasant, and deal with their emotions in healthy ways. The people in the story who are the most unhappy are those who have tried to hide from their feelings or deal with them through spite and long-term resentment. Sammy comes to understand the importance of forgiveness and focusing on positives instead of negatives when it comes to dealing with one of her own long-term problems: her own mother.
Before the beginning of the series, Sammy’s mother, Lana, left Sammy with her grandmother while she was pursuing an acting career. Even though Sammy had missed her mother when she first left, she has come to realize that she resents her mother for abandoning her to the precarious, secretive life she lives with her grandmother and for putting her second to her acting ambitions. She feels like being a mother wasn’t important to Lana and that her mother only thinks of her as an afterthought when Sammy was depending on her so much. I would say that there is definite truth that Lana has neglected Sammy and her welfare and that Sammy has justification for being angry with her. In this book, Lana is excited about getting her biggest part yet, and Sammy is mortified to find out that this amazing role is in a commercial for anti-gas medicine. Lana sees the commercial as a possible stepping stone to something better, but Sammy thinks it’s embarrassing and a terrible result for the sacrifices that Sammy herself has had to make in her life for the sake of Lana’s “career.” However, seeing what long-term anger and resentment has done to other people in the story causes Sammy to consider that she should also learn to cultivate some forgiveness in her life for Lana so she won’t go down the unhappy paths that other people have. To get past the parts that she has genuine reason to feel angry about Sammy remembers the good times that she and her mother shared before, the times when Lana was nice to her and motherly, and the reasons why she missed her mother in the first place.
I can see why a little forgiveness can be healing, but I don’t see it as a perfect solution, especially not to problems like Sammy’s. Sammy and her grandmother are genuinely living a precarious life which Lana doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate. Even though Sammy finds a way to stop the blackmail in this story, her danger isn’t over, and she lives with it every single day. If Sammy is caught living with her grandmother, her grandmother could actually lose her home, and Sammy might be sent into foster care because social services might decide that neither her mother nor grandmother can or is willing to provide for her. I think it’s important to understand that Sammy isn’t just harboring a petty resentment against her mother; she’s dealing with a serious situation. Hiding in her grandmother’s little senior apartment with only extremely minimal belonging isn’t a fun adventure for her, it’s actually a serious situation with lasting consequences to her well-being. While her desire to temper her resentment toward her mother with some forgiveness and positive memories can help her get a healthier emotional balance, as a responsible adult, I think that Lana’s failure to address the reality of this situation and her role in it is going to remain an unhealthy problem in the lives of her nearest and dearest. If this were real life instead of a fictional story, I think it’s likely Sammy would be showing even more emotional trauma and would probably be in foster care already. It wouldn’t matter then if Lana wanted forgiveness or for people to look only at her good points when she had fun with her little girl because I don’t think judges award custody on that basis, not to someone with a long-term history of neglect because she wanted the freedom to “follow her dreams.”
This book isn’t a particularly happy story for Christmas. It turned out to be darker even than I thought it would be when I started, and Sammy Keyes mysteries tend to be a bit gritty. I would say that it’s more thought-provoking. I would not give this book to a child currently suffering from trauma because, when someone is actively suffering, dealing with characters’ suffering can feel like pulling double duty or rubbing salt in the wound. However, for those in the mood for a deeper understanding of dealing with life’s difficulties, especially at a time of year when everyone expects happiness and joy, it isn’t bad.
Parts of the story are genuinely touching. Sammy is understanding and gentle with Elyssa and changes her life for the better. There are even a couple of bonding moments between her and Officer Borsch. Officer Borsch was a friend of Elyssa’s father, and when Sammy asks him about what happened, Officer Borsch candidly admits that he was there when he was killed and still has nightmares about it. Sammy understands nightmares because she had them when her mother left her. Later, the two of them help each other. Sammy uses some of Hudson’s advice for a little psychological warfare on Heather that gets her to admit the cat prank in front of Officer Borsch. Officer Borsch promises to put some healthy fear into Heather that will help keep her in line in the future. The resolution of the prank also saves Officer Borsch some embarrassment at the office because he was on duty when it happened and took some flak for it, and Sammy also learns something about Borsch’s nemesis on the force from Mrs. Landvogt that will allow Borsch to resolve a serious problem that both he and Elyssa’s father had tried to solve.
Halloween doesn’t start out well for Susannah’s best friend, Lucy. Her father accidentally threw out her costume, thinking that it was trash because it was mostly made out of tin foil. (She was planning to be the Death Queen character from a comic book.) As she desperately tries to put together a last-minute costume for Susannah’s Halloween party, her father tries to buy her a costume at the discount store. Unfortunately, all the discount store left was a Little Bo Peep costume. Lucy thinks that she’s going to be mortified, showing up in something so childish when she told everyone her costume would be really cool. When another girl from school, Carla, comes by and teases her about her costume, Lucy gets the idea to make it a kind of double costume, painting her face an evil green so she can rip off her sweet Little Bo Peep mask and be the sinister Death Queen underneath.
Carla says that the secret identity costume idea is pretty good, but before she can go to the party, she has to buy a costume of her own. She had to wait for her stepfather’s pay day because her parents bought a new dress for her older sister, Nadine, for a high school dance earlier. As Carla explains about her delay in getting her costume, she mentions her sister’s social worker coming to dinner. Susannah asks why Nadine has a social worker, and Carla says that her sister got into trouble with drugs a couple of years before, but she’s not really supposed to talk about it. Lucy and Susannah want to do some trick-or-treating before the party, and Carla asks if they’ll wait for her to get her costume first. The other girls aren’t willing to wait, but they say that they’ll get some extra candy for her when they start out, and they’ll meet her at her family’s apartment at the Eucalyptus Arms apartment house. In her recounting of that Halloween night, Lucy says right out that it was at the Eucalyptus Arms that someone gave them poisoned candy.
When they reach the Eucalyptus Arms, Carla isn’t home yet, but they meet up with Knieval Jones (Lucy’s nemesis and Susannah’s occasional helper from the previous book), who is dressed like a vampire, and get some stale granola bars from Carla’s sister, Nadine. A nice lady name Mrs. Sweet gives them homemade cupcakes, and Mr. O’Hare, who is a vegetarian and thinks that sugar is poisonous, gives them organic treats from the natural food store. However, the strangest experience they have is in Mr. Mordecai’s apartment. Mr. Mordecai is a strange man with whitish eyes. He insists that they come in and pay their respects to the deceased “Jeremiah.” There is a coffin in the room with a wreath on it. The kids are spooked, but Susannah notices something odd about the wreath, which gives her an idea of who/what “Jeremiah” is. Mr. Mordecai gives them popcorn balls, and they leave.
They meet up with Carla, and Susannah’s grandfather, Judge Higgins, drives all four children to the party. However, Knievel and Lucy get into a fight over their treat bags, spilling both of them into the gutter and ruining their candy. Lucy is mad at Knievel, but then Knievel suddenly gets sick. At first, Lucy thinks that he’s just eaten too much because he’s been sampling his treats and stealing some of hers. Knievel misses the party because he’s sick, but it turns out to be much worse than that. The next day, the police come to the school to tell them that Knievel was poisoned and to interview the children about everything that happened the night before.
Because Lucy and Knievel spilled and ruined their bags of candy, it’s hard to say exactly what Knievel ate before he got sick, and Lucy never ate any of it. Carla had the same treats as the others, and she is also ill and being examined by a doctor, just in case she was also poisoned. Susannah turns her treat bag over the police for analysis. She never touched her candy because she had more than enough to eat at the Halloween party.
By process of elimination, they determine that the poisoned treats had to come from one of the apartments at the Eucalyptus Arms, and that it must have been in something homemade or unwrapped, not wrapped, commercially-made candy. Lucy says that they really know better than to eat unwrapped treats from a stranger, but Susannah points out that Knievel was hungry and ate treats almost as fast as he got them, regardless of whether they were wrapped or not. There are only a handful of suspects who could have handed out the poison in homemade or unwrapped treats, but which of them did it and why?
The title of the book is based on the fact that the apartment house is painted an ugly shade of green and all of the questionable treats the kids received were colored green.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
One of the best things about this book for me is that it was originally published in the year I was born, and it’s a Halloween story, and I happened to be born only a few days before Halloween. Even if I hadn’t already read and liked the first book in this series, that would have endeared me to this book right away. I originally read the first book in the Susannah Higgins series as a child in elementary school, but I think that’s the only book in the series that I read at the time. It might have been that the library didn’t have the full series and the first book was the only one I could find or that book was one of the many that I found at a used book sale and the others weren’t there. It’s been so long that I can’t remember. I just remembered one scene from the first book for years, and it took me a long time to figure out what I was remembering.
Because I was very young during the early 1980s, it was a long time before I understood that this was a period when people were especially worried about the possibility of poison and razor blades in Halloween candy. Like other kids of the 1980s and 1990s, I had to watch those Halloween safety videos that warn you to be careful and to inspect candy for signs of tampering before eating it. (Specifically, I saw this video, which I found one day on YouTube. I watched this 1970s film on reel-to-reel when I was in elementary school because they hadn’t yet installed TVs and VCRs in the classrooms yet and they had a library of old films that I’m pretty sure they bought when they originally built the school in the 1970s. The sound quality wasn’t any better when I saw it for the first time, but it still cracks me up that the ultimate solution to the girl’s unsafe Halloween costume turns out to be gradually changing it to be a different costume.) In 1974, a father murdered his own son for the insurance money, hoping that some random sadist would be blamed for the crime because there were already urban legends about such things. Even though it wasn’t long before the truth of the father’s crime came out, this incident added to the urban legends, seeming to confirm the stories of Halloween poisonings. Because of this, my early Halloweens were very different from the ones my parents had in the 1950s. I was allowed to go trick-or-treating, but I never received any homemade treats, like the popcorn balls and candy apples my parents sometimes got. By the time I was trick-or-treating, only fully-wrapped, commercially made candy was considered safe and acceptable.
At first, I thought that the solution to this mystery would be that Nadine had made marijuana granola bars because we were told right away that she was involved with drugs in the past. There have been real-life cases of children accidentally getting into drugs owned by family members, including cases that have become part of the Halloween urban legends. However, that’s not the case in this story. Susannah’s Aunt Louise, who is a nurse at the children’s hospital, tells Susannah that marijuana was one of the first things they ruled out when they were testing to see what had poisoned the children. The children were vomiting and hallucinating, so Aunt Louise says that it appears to be an overdose of some kind of medicine.
Aunt Louise wasn’t mentioned in the previous book in the series, but she comes to stay with Susannah because her grandparents have to go out of town. Again, Susannah’s parents are simply not mentioned in the story. It’s never clarified whether Susannah is an orphan or living with her grandparents for another reason, although I think it’s implied that she’s an orphan by the parents’ absence and the lack of any mention of why.
Carla is a new character who didn’t appear in the previous book, but again, children in these books do not live in conventional two-parent households. Nadine is actually Carla’s stepsister, and the two of them haven’t known each other very long and are having problems adjusting to their parents’ remarriage and living together. Books with divorced parents or blended families were becoming increasingly common in children’s literature during the 1980s and 1990s, and they were a regular staple of books that I read when I was young. It was pretty common for there to be at least one character with divorced parents in the books I read, but this series stands out to me because it seems like every kid in it so far is either from a divorced family or lives with relatives other than their parents, for some reason. A mixture of different family situations is to be expected, but an overwhelming number of kids in almost the same situation just seems a little odd.
The author does a good job of making everyone at the apartment house look equally suspicious. A number of people at the apartment house have secrets, and some of them are truly dangerous. One of the characters in the story, a man Nadine and Carla call “Uncle Bob” because he’s a friend of Nadine’s father, seems to be showing inappropriate attention to the girls. Carla is afraid to be alone with him, hinting that things that he does when she’s alone with him make her uneasy or even frightened. Uncle Bob isn’t the poisoner, but he does seem to have inappropriate sexual interest in the girls. There isn’t anything explicit described in the story, but the way that the characters refer to Uncle Bob and the dirty magazine that Lucy says she found in his trash can along with a bunch of empty liquor bottles imply what Uncle Bob is like when other adults aren’t watching. Carla says that she’s tried to tell her parents about it before, but nobody believed her because Uncle Bob has been such a good old friend of her stepfather, and he can’t picture him doing anything wrong. When she finally confides the problem to Nadine, Nadine confirms that she’s had the same experience with him and that her father didn’t believe her either, but she’s going to make sure that he listens this time. Susannah also says that they are going to tell the police about it and her Aunt Louise, and while Uncle Bob may not have actually done anything that would cause him to be arrested, he’s going to get some severe warnings and maybe some professional help.
Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1999.
At the end of the previous book in the series, Sammy was given a punishment from her school for causing a disturbance during an assembly that requires her to complete 20 hours of community service. She’s working off her volunteer hours at St. Mary’s Church under the supervision of Father Mayhew. When Sammy lived with her mother, they weren’t religious, and Sammy hadn’t even been baptized. However, her grandmother is much more religious, and she had Sammy baptized by Father Mayhew soon after Sammy moved in with her. Father Mayhew is kind and understanding with Sammy. There are also some nuns at St. Mary’s from an order called the Sisters of Mercy. They’re helping out in the soup kitchen. When elderly Sister Josephine sees that Sammy is painting a wall in Father Mayhew’s office, she complains that he’s always getting the services that the nuns ask for and never get. They’ve been asking to have the house where they live painted for years, and it still hasn’t happened.
Father Mayhew’s gratitude for Sammy’s help fades when a small ivory cross is stolen from his office, and he thinks that Sammy did it because she was in there. Sammy tells him that she didn’t take it, but he doesn’t believe her and sends her to go work in the soup kitchen for awhile. (He didn’t ask her to turn out her pockets before she left his office. I would have because that would settle the matter right there.) In the soup kitchen, Sammy sees another girl about her age who reminds her somewhat of herself, partly because of the high-top shoes she wear. Sammy wonders who the girl is and why she’s eating at the soup kitchen, but she isn’t able to talk to her there.
Later, Sammy discusses the missing cross with Father Mayhew again. This time, he seems less certain that Sammy took it, and Sammy asks him if it was something valuable that might have been sold for money or if someone who is angry with him could have taken it as revenge. The one person who seems angry with Father Mayhew is Sister Josephine, but he can’t picture her taking the cross. However, there are other people who might have a reason to be angry with Father Mayhew. Brother Phil, who works in the soup kitchen, wants to become a full priest, but Father Mayhew doesn’t think that he’s suited to it.
The thefts also continue. A couple of gold chalices are stolen from the church. The nuns who are part of the Sisters of Mercy turn out to be traveling and staying in a trailer, and they’re only staying at St. Mary’s temporarily to hold a fundraiser. They tell Father Mayhew that someone tried to break into their trailer, but they scared the thief off. One of the nuns ask Father Mayhew to keep an heirloom locket in his safe until she can deliver it to her niece.
Meanwhile, at school, Sammy is playing on one of her school’s two softball teams. Her school nemesis, Heather, plays on the other school team, so their feuding and rivalry has transferred to the school’s sports field.
This book is the first book in the series to bring up the subject of Sammy’s father. Sammy’s grandmother gives her a catcher’s mitt that once belonged to her father. Sammy’s mother was going to throw it out, but her grandmother rescued it from the trash, and it’s the only thing Sammy has that was once her father’s. She sees her love of playing catcher at softball as a connection to the father she’s never known. Sammy has never seen a picture of her father and doesn’t know his name, and her mother has admitted that he has no idea that Sammy exists. She has asked her mother about her father in the past, but her mother refuses to tell her who he is or what happened to him. All she has ever told Sammy is that she was young when they met and her relationship with him was a mistake. Sammy can’t help but feel that her mother things of her existence as a mistake as well, maybe even a bigger one than her relationship with her father. The fact that her mother has essentially abandoned her to pursue her dream of being an actress has left her feeling like her mother never really wanted her. Sammy has to stay with her grandmother, even though it means keeping her living arrangements a secret, because staying with her father isn’t even an option.
The next time that Sammy sees the mysterious girl in high-tops at the soup kitchen, she and her friends follow her to see where she lives. It turns out that she’s homeless and living in a cardboard box. This discovery raises some personal questions and concerns for Sammy. On the one hand, she’s unfortunate because her living situation is precarious and depends on not being caught in her grandmother’s apartment, which is meant only for seniors, but on the other, she does have her grandmother to rely on. This other poor girl doesn’t seem to have anyone. At one point, Sammy asks her grandmother about what would have happened to her if she hadn’t been able to take Sammy when her mother left. It’s an uncomfortable question for both of them because it raises the question of whether Sammy’s mother would have just abandoned her completely if she hadn’t had her mother willing to take her. Sammy’s mother doesn’t seems to care how awkward their living arrangement is because they have to keep Sammy’s presence in the apartment a secret. Without Sammy’s father in the picture, there is no one else but her grandmother to take her. There is also the constant question of what would happen to Sammy and her grandmother if someone manages to prove that Sammy is living with her against the rules. Sammy is better off than the homeless girl, not by much, but still better.
Later in the story, after Sammy’s beloved mitt is stolen, Sammy tells Hudson about everything that’s going on. She’s pretty sure that Heather is the mitt thief because she’s the one person who’s always doing awful things to her. Hudson points out that, in a way, Sammy is fortunate to know who she can trust and who she can’t, and she has one definite enemy. Holly has never really had anybody to trust before, and Father Mayhew has no idea who he can trust or not trust in his church. His thief is obviously one of the people who works with him on daily basis, someone who can come and go while seeming above suspicion, and Father Mayhew is only just beginning to realize that there are people around him he can’t trust as much as he thought.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
For awhile, Sammy suspects that the homeless girl who visits the soup kitchen might be the thief who is stealing things from the church, but she’s not. The girl, whose name is Holly, becomes a regular character in the series. She is a runaway foster child who’s had an even tougher life than Sammy. When she and Sammy talk, she explains how she was abused in previous foster homes, which is why she ran away to live on her own. At one point, she is attacked by a man, and Sammy has to help fight him off. The girls realize that Holly can’t keep camping out on her own, and Sammy helps her find a place to stay with people who turn out to be able to provide a much more stable home for her, which is how she remains a character for the rest of the series. Holly begins attending school with Sammy and her friends, with her new foster family making up a story about how she transferred from New Mexico. Her new home seems to be a kind secretive foster home, not unlike Sammy’s living arrangements. Her new foster family doesn’t seem to try to legalize their custody of Holly (not in this book, anyway), possibly out of fear of her being taken away and put in other abusive or dysfunctional foster homes in the flawed system she came from. There is also a standalone book which focuses specifically on Holly called Runaway, which explains more about her personal history. Some of the things that happened to Holly are an indication that this series isn’t meant for young children. I would say that it’s best for tweens and up, probably about around the middle school level.
One of my favorite characters in this series is Hudson Graham, a retired old man who acts like a grandfather to Sammy. She often goes to see him when she needs help and advice. He is knowledgeable on an eclectic range of topics, and he has a massive private library that can answer most of Sammy’s questions. In this book, Sammy thinks about how, even though she and Hudson have talked about many things together, including his wide-ranging hobbies, she doesn’t really know that much about his past, even what he used to do for a living before he retired. Because he has a collection of foreign language dictionaries and recording devices, Sammy thinks that he might have once worked for the CIA or something. When the people who own the dog grooming business down the street lose the key to their safe because a dog ate it, Sammy asks Hudson what they can go, and he tells her some fascinated facts about safes and how to get into them. The fact that he knows about that suggested to me that he probably worked in law enforcement or security at some point. My thought is that he might have once been a private investigator because they do security work and would have some basic law knowledge and use devices that Hudson has, like recording machines and cameras. My next guess would be that he was a journalist, also because of the recording devices and cameras and because journalists can write on a wide range of topics, giving Hudson his eclectic knowledge and the need for his own private research library. Aspects of Sammy’s life and the lives of people she knows add extra mystery to the story. Hudson’s past isn’t explained in this book in the series, and I’m not sure if it ever is.
The Green Cameo Mystery by Frances K. Judd, 1952, 1980.
The story begins with Kay’s friends, Betty and Wendy, treating her to lunch, but when the girls try to pay the bill, the cashier says that their money is counterfeit. Betty and Wendy say that their mother gave them the cash, and she got those particular bills on a recent trip to San Francisco. The cashier tells them to contact the Secret Service and report the counterfeit money and tell them where it came from. (This book is old, but the Secret Service still investigates counterfeit money.)
As the girls leave the restaurant, they talk about the errands they want to run this afternoon. There is an auction Kay wants to attend because there’s a beautiful Chinese desk that she wants to get for her cousin, Bill, for his new office. However, she remembers that she needs to drop Bill’s shirt off at a laundry before they go to the auction. The laundry is a cliched Chinese laundry (connections are building in this story), but the man Kay usually sees there is absent today. The woman at the counter, Lily Wong, says that she’s the man’s sister and that her brother is unwell. Kay asks if he’s been to a doctor, and Mrs. Wong fearfully says that she doesn’t think that there’s anything a doctor could do against the green cameo. She explains that her husband got the green cameo in Shanghai, but it’s cursed, and it brings misfortune to her family every three years. While the girls are talking to the woman, she gets a phone call from someone who tells her that her daughter Lotus is now missing, having disappeared from the college she attends. (Yeah, Lotus. I don’t know if that’s a name that Chinese people actually use, but many of the Chinese names in this book struck me as being made up. I could be wrong because I’m not an expert on Chinese names, but they have that look.)
Mrs. Wong tells Kay that she tried to hire a medium named Cara Noma to break the curse of the green cameo, but she hasn’t been able to do it. Right away, Kay is sure that Cara Noma is a fraud. Kay volunteers to help find Lotus. A prime motive for her disappearance is Lotus’s impending arranged marriage to an older but wealthy businessman named Foochow. (I Googled that name, and apparently, it’s a romanized version of a place name, not a last name.) Kay’s first thought is that Lotus may have run away because she decided that she didn’t want to participate in this arranged marriage. Mrs. Wong also tells Kay that Cara Noma claims that her daughter has sold a jewel box with a green lotus cameo on the lid that Mr. Wong gave her as a betrothal gift.
The medium Cara Noma shows up while Kay is discussing the situation with Mrs. Wong and starts into her mystical act about how she’s going to break the curse. Kay impatiently tells her that it’s all nonsense and that she’s just taking poor Mrs. Wong’s money. Even Mrs. Wong agrees because, so far, Cara Noma hasn’t produced any results, and Kay is nice enough to offer to help her for free. Angrily, Cara Noma grabs both Kay and Mrs. Wong and uses some blood from a cut on Mrs. Wong’s finger to draw a red X on Kay’s forehead. She declares that she has transferred the curse of the green cameo to Kay and that Kay will soon see that the curse is real.
Kay still doesn’t think that the curse is real, and she and her friends head over to the auction where she wants to buy that desk for her cousin. Before the auction begins, Kay and her friends are looking over the items for sale when Kay discovers that the desk she wants to buy has a secret compartment in it. On impulse, she puts the envelope holding her money in the secret compartment to try it out. (This is so dumb, Kay. Don’t put all of your money in the secret compartment of a desk you don’t own!) Then, she gets distracted when she spots a jewelry box matching the one described by Mrs. Wong. Then, Kay’s nemesis from school, Chris Eaton, shows up and tells her not to waste her time bidding on the jewelry box because she wants and she has more money than Kay.
It turns out that Kay is unable to buy the desk she wanted to buy because the bidding is much higher than she can afford. Then, a man named Sidney Trexler shows up and protests the auction, saying that the desk belongs to him and he doesn’t want to sell it. It turns out that he’d been storing the desk there, but the desk was being sold because he hadn’t paid his storage fees. Mr. Trexler says that he has the money to pay his fees now and wants the desk back because he’s planning to get married and will need the furniture. The man who was going to buy the desk agrees to cancel his offer to buy so Mr. Trexler can have the desk back. When the jewelry box comes up for sale, both Kay and Chris Eaton are outbid by Mr. Trexler as well. Kay is disappointed because she was hoping to get the jewelry box for Mrs. Wong.
However, the mystery is only just beginning. When Kay gets home, she finds that the envelope she thought held her money isn’t really her envelope. She did remember to retrieve the envelope from the desk before it was sold (for a moment, I was afraid that she would forget), but by mistake, she grabbed a different envelope. Is this the first bad luck of the curse? Kay knows that she has to talk to either the auction house or Mr. Trexler to get her envelope and money back! Then, a taunting comment from Chris Eaton reveals that Mr. Trexler’s fiancee is actually Lotus Wong. Now, Kay really needs to find Mr. Trexler!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
So, right from the beginning of this story we have the mystery of the counterfeit money, the mystery of the cameo curse, the mystery of the fake medium, the mystery of the disappearance of Lotus Wong, and the mystery of Mr. Trexler and his engagement and sudden money. The girls also come to wonder about Mr. Wong. He seems to have much more money than his brother-in-law who operates the laundry, and his wife seems afraid of him. What is Mr. Wong’s business, and why doesn’t he do more for his brother-in-law? Are any or all of these things connected? Actually, yes. At first, I wasn’t sure how they were going to circle back toward the counterfeit money from the beginning of the book, but it turns out that Cara Noma is in on the counterfeiting operation. For a time, it looks like Mr. Wong might be the head of the operation, but it turns out that he’s innocent. I thought that Lotus’s reasons for running away were poorly explained. Part of it is that she doesn’t want to marry Foochow, but there’s also a side plot about Cara Noma using hypnosis to control both Lotus and her mother. I think the implication is that she was doing it to milk Mrs. Wong of money while keeping Lotus hidden from her, but it seemed like an odd complication to me since Cara Noma was also involved in the counterfeiting ring.
I’m not sure that I’d call anything in the book “racist”, although I think there may be justification for saying that parts are “stereotypical” and probably a bit culturally shallow and “tone deaf.” My first impression was that the author and the characters in the story like Chinese culture for being exciting and exotic, but in that way where there’s no real depth to their knowledge it and it comes off as being a bit like caricatures of Chinese people you might see in old movies. I’ve seen some of the old Charlie Chan mystery movies, and the way the characters in the book talked kind of reminded me of them. The Chinese names seem pretty stereotypical and so does the way they speak in broken English. They don’t do the “Engrish” thing where the ‘l’s and ‘r’s are swapped, but the Chinese characters don’t speak proper English, and they throw in phrases and expressions that I think are meant to sound quaintly foreign. At one point, Mrs. Wong says to the girls, “When you see Lotus again, tell my lovely flower not study too hard. Much study make many wrinkles.” I’m not sure whether that was just a joke or if it was supposed to be some kind of pseudo-proverb, like Charlie Chan used to make. On the other hand, some of the speech patterns I thought might be old stereotypical tropes from movies might have more grounding in real life than I’ve credited them for having. Lily Wong also sometimes refers to herself in the third person, “Lily Wong not sure,” instead of “I am not sure.” I’ve met people in real life whose first language was Chinese, and none of them do this. I thought at first that this might be another trope carried over from old movies, but I looked it up, and apparently, actual Chinese speakers can do this sometimes. The technical name for it is illeism. So, while some of the speech patterns seem like old movie tropes, they might not be completely wrong for real life.
One part of the story that bothered me is the Chinese play that Kay’s school decides to perform. Kay and her friends are told that “a delegation of foreign visitors to the United States” (no nationality/nationalities specified at first) would be visiting schools in the area, including the high school that they attend. To entertain their foreign visitors, the school decides that they’re going to put on a short play, and of course, the drama teacher picks one with an “Oriental” theme called “The Pagoda Mystery.” (“Oriental” is the word they use, which is rather vague and considered somewhat outdated now. Some people consider it demeaning because it has old associations with stereotypes that people don’t want to perpetuate. The demeaning part seems to be more in the attitudes associated with its use than in the word itself. It is a technical geographic term that refers to the Eastern Hemisphere, but my thought is that referring to an entire hemisphere is rather vague. I don’t think the book meant it badly, but in modern times, it’s generally considered more polite and a sign of being well-educated to use the most specific word possible when describing geographic regions or groups of people. When people are overly vague, it makes it sound like they don’t know what they’re talking about or what the more specific word is. If this play is specifically about China, they could have just said that.) It’s rather coincidental that they’re doing a mystery play set in China right when Kay is working on a mystery involving people from China, but those types of coincidences happen often in Kay Tracey books. I wasn’t able to find any real information about this play, so I’m pretty sure sure that it was just made up by the author of the book so the school would have just the right kind of coincidental play to perform. Also, of course, Kay gets the lead role in the play when she tries out for it, that of a beautiful Chinese maiden. If there are any Asian students at this school, they aren’t mentioned, so I don’t think there are any. Charlie Chan was also not played by Asian actors, even though other characters in the series were, which is why they bother people now and there haven’t been any new ones made since 1981. The book says, “But because of her recent experiences at the Wong home, Kay spoke her lines with special feeling and proved her familiarity with Chinese customs and people. Therefore, the leading role was given to her.” I’m not convinced that her conversations with Mrs. Wong have really given her deep knowledge of China, but they did have tea together at her house, so maybe there’s an implication that she told her more about Chinese tea customs than the book described or something.
By another coincidence, it turns out that Mrs. Wong was in a production of the same exact play in China when she was young, and she played the part that Kay is going to play, so she coaches Kay in how to play the part. (What stroke of luck! See, Kay isn’t cursed!) Mrs. Wong assures Kay that when her face is made up to look Chinese, no one will know that she isn’t really Chinese because she’s such a good actress. I suppose that people in the 1950s, when this book was originally written, would be a little more accepting of non-Asians wearing makeup to play Asians (called “yellowface“) just because it was done more often back then, and people get comfortable with things they see often. It’s not particularly comfortable for modern people because our society is sufficiently diverse to have actual Asians playing Asian roles without the help of cheesy makeup, so this part of the story is eye-rolling, especially the way everyone fawns over Kay being so authentic-seeming. Also, much of what Mrs. Wong teaches Kay seems to involve making gestures with her hands and fluttering her eyelashes when she speaks, which the drama teacher praises as being very realistically Chinese. It’s hard to know exactly what that means without seeing exactly what Kay’s doing, and the description doesn’t say much. The fluttering eyelashes make me think that she’s acting flirty, but I don’t know if that’s suppose to be part of her role in the play or not because we’re never told the full story. Again, I could be wrong, but it Kay’s apparently authentic performance seems more like something from an old movie than real life.
I think that the drama coach choosing a play from China was meant to be some kind of salute to the foreign visitors (and a coincidence that helps further the plot of Kay’s mystery), but it seems like a kind of tone-deaf choice to me, not thinking about what people really want to see and experience when they visit a foreign country. If I were the person making the decisions, I don’t think that I would be comfortable with showing visiting foreign dignitaries a high school production of a play they would already know from their own youths in their country, entirely acted by people wearing makeup to look like them, probably with varying degrees of success. It just seems awkward and might give the impression that they were being made mocked rather than honored. People travel to see new and different things, not imitations of things they already have back home. That would be like someone from New York City going to New Orleans and spending their entire time there watching productions of Broadway plays instead of touring the French Quarter or the Garden District. If you’re just going to do something you could do back home, what did you even make the trip for? Traveling is about seeing things that make different places unique. So, if I were in charge of the high school play, I think I would have picked something that had nothing to do with China, something new and original that the visitors could describe to people back home as something you could only see if you go to America. It might be an American-written play or maybe something that the students put together themselves to show their individual personalities and interests, a view of the modern American teenager, like a collection of student-written short skits or a talent show. Musical performances would be good because people can still enjoy the sounds of the music even if they don’t know all of the words. It’s pretty likely that this school has a band or orchestra, and there may be some unofficial student bands that could play. Dancing, gymnastics, and juggling acts might be good, too, if there are people who know how to do those, because people understand what they are just by looking at them. They don’t require explanations like humor that involves puns and might go over the heads of people who aren’t completely fluent in a language. I like the idea of the entertainment being a sort of variety show with music and skits because that’s a traditional form of entertainment that was still popular in the 1950s, and it’s a good format when you have a large group of people because there are multiple leading parts and solos in different acts of the show, avoiding some of the inevitable arguments about who gets the best parts. They could even have displays of artwork or science projects from students who aren’t part of the performing entertainment. It would offer variety for the visitors and give everyone a chance to contribute something.
Of course, there’s a subplot to the story about Chris Eaton, Kay’s school nemesis, trying to steal her part in the play. Chris even goes so far as to drug Kay’s food so she’ll miss the performance. First of all, I’d never be as trusting as Kay, and I wouldn’t eat anything that someone who has a history of doing nasty things gave me. If Kay’s so sharp, she should have figured that Chris would do something nasty to her food. Second, drugging somebody isn’t a harmless prank. Chris apparently slipped Kay a strong sleeping pill, and Kay didn’t even finish everything Chris gave her. We don’t know whether Chris might have accidentally overdosed Kay if she’d eaten it all. People can die from drug overdoses. Chris also couldn’t know for sure whether or not Kay might have been taking some other medication at the time that would conflict with what she gave her. People can also die from mixing the wrong medications. For some reason, Kay and her friends don’t tell on Chris, and Chris isn’t punished. I understand that people don’t like to be thought of as tattletales, but I think that there are limits to what people should be willing to put up with, and being drugged should definitely something no one should tolerate. What she did was serious, and I don’t like it that they’re pretending like it isn’t.
Overall, I found myself often thinking of the old Charlie Chan movies while reading this book, comparing what I was reading to what I’ve seen in old movies. There are reasons why the Charlie Chan movies didn’t last, and I think this book is a decent example of some of those reasons. During their heyday, the Charlie Chan books and movies were welcomed as one of the first portrayals of an Asian hero in American culture who was kind, intelligent, and upheld justice. Even though Charlie Chan was a stereotypical character, he was a stereotype of all that was good, which was a welcome break from previous stereotypes of Asians as devious, evil characters, like the fictional villain Fu Manchu. Charlie Chan was one of the first fictional characters to encourage the American public to see Asian people in a friendly light and even as people to be admired. The Charlie Chan series encouraged a positive interest in Chinese people and culture, even though it was also somewhat shallow and stereotypical. As I said, the actors who portrayed Charlie Chan in movies were not Asian themselves. Hollywood back in the day couldn’t bring itself to put an Asian in the leading role. Culturally speaking, it’s probably best to look at that series as a stepping stone to better things. Once people have been introduced to a concept, we expect them to eventually gain more depth and understanding. Charlie Chan helped people to break away from old, toxic ideas and prejudices, but that doesn’t mean that people should stay at that level of cultural understanding and portrayals. People progress. They grow and learn, and so do societies and cultures.
What I’m saying is that nothing in this story related to China or Chinese culture is educational for children. They won’t learn anything from this book, and most of the books that I read as a child specifically included real facts about other countries and culture to be at least factually-correct or semi-educational. This book doesn’t even define the word “pagoda” for anyone who doesn’t already know it. There are no Chinese words in the story, and when Kay and her friends have tea with Mrs. Wong, they don’t say whether there are any special tea customs they observe. What the book tells you about Chinese people is very general – that they have some interesting antique furniture and art objects, they drink tea, they might be superstitious, not all of them speak good English, some are friendly and helpful while others are sinister criminals, and if you want to act like one on stage, hand gestures and fluttering eyes are pretty important (whatever that means). Some of that stuff is true, particularly the parts about tea, the fascinating antiques, and the fact that some can be good and some bad, like human beings in general. But, there’s not much concrete, factual knowledge here, and some parts might give kids the wrong impression. I had the feeling the whole time I was reading it that the person who wrote it was a fan of old movies and didn’t really know much about Chinese culture to tell anybody in a factual, educational way. The old Scooby-Doo cartoons were kind of like this when they talked about other countries and cultures, too, because many of them were written as kind of spoofs on movies that people would have known when they were first made. If you’re into old movies, you can recognize the references, but they weren’t meant to teach anything or include any real information. If you compare the older Scooby-Doo series to the more modern ones, you’ll notice that some of the modern ones make more of an effort to include some real, educational facts. Scooby-Doo isn’t an educational show, but I have noticed a slight shift in how they talk about other countries and cultures. That’s more the standard of children’s literature and entertainment I’m accustomed to – when someone says something about another country or culture, I expect it to be something factual that shows that the author did at least a little basic research and knows something about what they’re talking about. It’s grating to me sometimes that older, vintage children’s series don’t always do this. Some of them even shamelessly make things up about other countries and cultures just because they think it would make the story more exciting, assuming that the kids reading the books won’t notice or care. If this book sparked an interest and encouraged kids to learn more about China or Chinese culture, it’s not too bad, but by itself, it doesn’t demonstrate any helpful level of cultural knowledge and information.
The Mansion of Secrets by Frances K. Judd, 1951, 1980.
Kay’s cousin, Bill, is relieved when he finds a buyer for the old Greeley mansion. The former owner, Manuel Greeley, was an elderly man who passed away without leaving a will. As a lawyer, Bill was put in charge of trying to find the nearest Greeley relative as heir, who turned out to be a distant nephew of Manuel’s. The nephew isn’t interested in keeping the house for himself because he’s an airplane pilot and spends most of his time traveling, so he asked Bill to sell it on his behalf. It’s not a particularly desirable property because it’s a few miles outside of town and rather isolated. There’s also a local rumor that the place is haunted and that there’s a treasure hidden somewhere on the property, earning it the nickname “Mansion of Secrets.” The man who says he wants to buy the mansion, Clarence Cody, is from another state, Wyoming, and he doesn’t care about the isolated nature of the house because he wants to turn the place into a resort and riding school. The mansion would be an idea location because it already has stables and pastures on the property.
Kay is still fascinated by the stories of ghosts and treasure she’s heard about the house and asks Bill if she and some friends could take a look around the place before he completes the sale. She’s always wondered what it was like inside, and she thinks this might be her last chance to find out. Bill decides that the request is harmless enough, lends her the key to the house, and tells Kay that she and her friends can go out to the property and take down the “For Sale” sign for him. He doesn’t expect that Kay and her friends are really going to find any ghosts or treasure.
However, when Kay and her friends go out to the old mansion, they spot a strange woman on the property. This strange woman uses some tools to pry up one of the boards of the stairway and seems to find something hidden under the step, but she becomes frightened and runs away when she realizes that Kay and her friends are there. When the girls try to run after her, she gets away from them.
Then, a man shows up and introduces himself as Peter Greeley, Manuel’s grandnephew. He says that he just came to take some of the pictures from the walls of the house. The girls ask him if the stories about treasure in the house are true, but Peter says he doesn’t think so. He admits that he’s searched the house himself to see if he could find anything, but he never has, so he thinks that it’s just a story.
The girls investigate the steps where the mysterious woman was searching and discover another step with something hidden inside. The papers they find turn out to be blueprints of the house, and there are several spots marked with red ‘X’s and labeled “IMPORTANT.” Two of the ‘X’s represent the step where the woman was searching and the step where the girls found the blueprints, so the girls figure out that the other ‘X’s are also secret hiding places. The girls decide to try checking another one to see what they find, and they discover a hidden panel that holds diamond jewelry! The girls realize that they need to tell Bill and Peter immediately because this treasure and anything else hidden in the house legally belong to Peter, and he should claim it before moving forward with selling the house.
When they show the diamond jewelry to Bill, he takes it to the bank for safe keeping, and he goes out to the house with the girls to check out the other hiding places marked on the blueprints. They split up to search different spots, and Kay’s friends discover some antique Bibles that are valuable collectors’ items. Kay decides to consult the blueprints again, but someone stole them while everyone was looking at the Bible! Realizing that the thief could be hiding somewhere in the house, Bill decides to search, but the thief knocks him down and runs away. They don’t know who it was except that it was a man wearing a mask. Bill decides that the only thing to do is to call Peter Greeley and arrange for someone to guard the house.
They don’t know who either the man or the woman sneaking around the house are, but somehow, both of them seem to know something about what Manuel Greeley was hiding in his house and even where some of it was hidden. With Clarence Cody pressing to finalize the sale of the property, Bill, Kay, and their friends try to find the other stashes of hidden treasures in the house before anyone else can steal them.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. That copy is one of the older versions, where Kay’s friend “Wendy” is still called “Wilma”, and her nemesis at school is called “Ethel” instead of “Chris.” Those names changed in later printings of the stories. It also shows the girls with their true hair colors on the cover, something which most other books in the series don’t do. Kay is supposed to have brown hair, Betty is blonde, and Wendy/Wilma has dark hair (I think they usually just say “dark”, implying dark brown or black hair).
My Reaction and Spoilers
Spooky old houses with secret hiding places and hidden rooms are classics in children’s literature, and it’s fun in this book to see them find various kinds of valuable objects hidden in this house by its eccentric former owner. I have to admit that the hidden room of animal trophies was more creepy for me than it was for the characters in the story. I’m an animal lover, and I would not be happy to find myself in a room with deceased animals staring at me reproachfully from the walls. The last thing on my mind at that point would be figuring out how much they were worth. It’s also a bit coincidental that one of Manuel’s “treasures” turns out to be a valuable jar of ambergris, a key ingredient in perfumes, when Kay accidentally broke a jar of the stuff on a class trip to a perfume factory.
Of course, Kay breaking the jar wasn’t actually her fault but that of her school nemesis, who bumped into her on purpose and made her drop it. Kay is one of those characters who seems a little too perfect at everything she does, and even her missteps are often someone else’s fault. I don’t hate Kay, but I have to admit that I’d prefer her being a little more realistic as a human character. Minor klutziness that wasn’t someone else’s fault wouldn’t be a bad characteristic for her to have. There is only one minor flaw that I’ve seen in Kay, which is occasional impatience. Her impatience is only very minor and never enough to seriously interfere with her investigations, but it does appear in this book, toward the end.
Even though they mention rumors of the house being haunted early in the story, there was never a point where the characters really thought that there were ghosts in the house or had to come to the realization that strange things happening were caused by humans instead of ghosts. They knew right from the beginning that there were real humans lurking around the house, looking for hidden treasures. Between the two people initially caught sneaking around the old house, looking for things, the man is more sinister than the woman, and he becomes the repeat visitor. It turns out that the woman used to work for Manuel Greeley and she was searching under one of the steps because Manuel told her to do that if her wages weren’t completely paid by the time he died. When Kay learns the reason why she was searching in the house, her situation is easily resolved.
In many Kay Tracey books, the mystery is less about who the villains are than where they’re hiding and how to catch them. What I mean is that the Kay Tracey mysteries are generally not the kind of mystery book where you have maybe five or six main suspects for committing a crime and the story is about figuring out which of them did it. Instead, the villains and criminals are typically people Kay and her friends have never met or seen before in their lives. In this case, they figure out that they’ve seen the man sneaking around the old mansion before in advertisements because his main career is being a model. It doesn’t take too long to find out his name (at least his professional name) by tracing the advertisements back to an agency, but tracking him down is harder. They eventually catch him when he returns to the mansion but the more mysterious part is how he knew about the mansion’s treasures and the secret hiding places marked on the blueprints. Kay eventually realizes that the man doesn’t have a connection to old Manuel Greeley but to the architect who designed his house. In a rare display of imperfection, Kay almost misses the key clue to the relationship because she gets impatient with the woman who is telling her about the architect and his family.
In the Sunken Garden by Frances K. Judd (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1952 (revised from 1941 edition), 1980.
Kay Tracey discovers that she has a doppelganger when she’s running some errands for her mother and some people in town act like they know her even though she’s never seen them before. As she heads home, a dog even follows her car, as if it thinks that she’s his owner. Kay is bewildered by this, but she decides to take the dog home with her until she can figure out who really owns him.
This is just the beginning of Kay’s entanglement with her mysterious double. Ronald Earle, the boy who likes Kay, gets angry because he thinks that he’s seen her out riding with someone else in his car after turning down a ride with him to attend her mother’s luncheon party. Kay straightens Ronald out only to be confronted with her cousin, Bill, who returns home, very upset because he has heard that Kay was in a car accident and is now in the hospital. Bill is relieved to see Kay perfectly fine at home, but that still doesn’t clear up the question of who this mysterious double is.
According to the hospital, the girl who was in the car accident told them she was Jane Barton, but she checked herself out of the hospital because she only had minor injuries. That isn’t the end of the matter, though. A man named Joe Craken shows up and accuses Kay of wrecking his car in the car accident. He says that the police identified her as the driver of the other car in the accident based on her physical description. With Joe Craken attempting to sue her for damages and the injuries done to a passenger in his car, Kay needs to find her mysterious double!
This mysterious double seems to have some connection to the old Huntley place, a mansion outside of town. The Huntleys were distant relatives of Ronald’s, and Kay learns about the family scandal from someone who used to work for the family. Years ago, Mrs. Huntley’s sister, Trixie Rue, was a dancer with a promising career, but she gave it all up to get married. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t really work out, and she and her husband fell on hard times. Mrs. Huntley gave her sister some money to help her get by, but apparently, it wasn’t enough because the sister resorted to stealing to help support herself and her baby daughter and ended up having to leave town in disgrace. Does this local scandal have any bearing on the sudden appearance of Kay’s double? One night, while having a look at the old Huntley mansion, Kay sees a ghostly white figure dancing in the garden. Was it her mysterious look-alike or someone else? Before the mystery is over, Kay’s look-alike will need her help as much as Kay needs hers.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
The various parts of this mystery fit together much better than the first Kay Tracey book I read. The first book I read in this series seemed rather awkward, but there is a more cohesive thread in this story. The mysterious double, the Huntley family scandal, and the ghostly dancing figure in the garden all fit together in a way that makes sense. However, there are two sets of villains in this story, and although Kay was not involved in the car accident, it turns out that, rather than her double trying to fob off responsibility on Kay, it’s actually the driver of the other car who was responsible for the accident and had always planned on trying to blame Kay for the accident to extort money from her. It was just his bad luck that he crashed his car into the car Jane was driving instead of Kay’s. This story also has a side plot involving a benefit show that Kay and her friends are putting on with others who are also taking dance lessons, and there’s more rivalry with Chris Eaton, the nasty snob they know from school.
I still find that the Kay Tracey books aren’t particularly good on readability, though. The language is a little old-fashioned, and at times, the plot seems to drag. I think this is one of the better books, plot-wise. The story felt more cohesive than the previous one and mystery stories with mysterious doubles, long-lost relatives, spooky mansions, and inheritance are pretty classic and compelling. However, I did get a little bored while reading it because I just didn’t find the writing style to be very engaging.
The Double Disguise by Frances K. Judd (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1952 (revised from 1941 edition), 1980.
Kay and her friends, Betty and Wendy, stop to help a woman who was knocked down at the train station. As they help the woman up, a man who claims to be the woman’s son picks up the woman’s suitcase and takes her purse away from Kay. However, the man is not the woman’s son and runs away with her things while Kay and the other girls focus on the woman. The woman, Alice Janey, is very distressed when she finds out that she’s been robbed, and Kay invites her to come stay at her house with her mother and cousin, who is a lawyer, while the police try to find her missing belongings.
The invitation to stay at the Tracey house turns out to be fortuitous because Alice Janey is actually an old friend of Kay’s mother, Kathryn. Kathryn Tracey tells Miss Janey that she’s sure Kay and her friends can help her because they’ve solved mysteries before. (Even though my copy of the book numbers this as the first book in the series, when the series was published for the first time, it was much further along in the series. The order of the books was changed in different reprintings, so the girls have had other adventures before this.) Miss Janey used to live in their town, Brantwood, and she has now returned in order to finish some work that her late father was doing. Her father’s old papers were in the suitcase that was stolen. Miss Janey thinks that the person who stole her suitcase was after those papers.
The next day, Kay takes Miss Janey to the house that she’s purchased on the edge of town, but the house is somewhat lonely and isolated. Miss Janey is a bit nervous about being there alone, so she asks Kay if she’s willing to stay with her until she can get a housekeeper. During the night, Kay wakes up because she hears voices, and she discovers Miss Janey talking to a woman who looks like a witch and seems to be some kind of medium or fortune-teller, telling her where to find her missing suitcase and purse. The next day, Miss Janey claims that she a dream about where to look for the purse and suitcase, not saying anything about the witch woman. Kay knows that Miss Janey is hiding something, but she’s not sure why.
When Miss Janey goes to the empty old house that the witch woman described as the place where she would find her bags, Kay and her friends follow her. The bags are there, but they’re empty. Miss Janey disappears, apparently taken away by a couple of men, and she later turns up at her own house.
As Kay befriends Miss Janey, Miss Janey opens up to her and explains a few things. She admits to Kay that she’s been consulting with the fortune teller, Nanna, for some time. Although Kay is suspicious of Nanna, Miss Janey trusts her. Miss Janey also explains that she used to help her late father in his chemical research and that she now has a laboratory set up in her house. Specifically, she’s trying to finish a formula that her father started working on for a substance that is like glass but which has more uses. She was carrying the formula in her bags when they were stolen, and that’s what the thief must have wanted. This technological development would be very valuable, at least when it’s finished, and the thieves might not have realized that the formula was incomplete.
The situation becomes more complicated when Kay discovers that the men who removed Miss Janey from the old house before are detectives who are investigating her because they suspect her of participating in a fraud that has robbed widows of their money. Kay knows that Miss Janey would never take part in such a thing, but this fraud has a connection to the theft of Miss Janey’s formula.
My Reaction
I found this book rather meandering and disjointed. It started off with a pretty strong premise – a lady has her bags stolen at a train station, and it turns out that she’s carrying an unfinished chemical formula that may be worth a lot of money once it’s finished. The fact that the formula is incomplete adds a complication to the story. Are the people who stole the formula capable of completing it on their own or will they have to trick or force the original owner to finish it for them?
Then, the plot is further complicated by a mysterious fortune teller who turns out to own the house where she told the lady her bags would be found. Is she in the plot to steal the formula? There’s a pretty case for it because it would explain how she seems to know things that she shouldn’t know otherwise, and also it turns out that the thieves have actually been renting her house and using it as a base for their plots without her knowledge, so that plot angle doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.
But, then, the plot is further complicated by a couple of detectives who suspect Miss Janey of being part of a fraud to steal money from widows. A widow’s son is briefly arrested breaking and entering because he entered the mysterious old house for his mother’s money, while various other people have entered and left that same old house with no complaints from anyone. Kay and her friend Ronald see a couple of men at the house who dress as women, and realizing that they must be part of the fraud, try to turn them over to the police only for them to drag Kay with them as a hostage when they go rob a train like bandits from a old western movie, resulting in her being temporarily accused of being their accomplice. Then, a vial marked “POISON” (not any specific poison, mind you, just “POISON” – why a chemist would have something with such a vague label is beyond me) is stolen from Miss Janey’s laboratory and ends up in the hands of the widow’s son. However, they don’t really explain why he had it or what he meant to do with it, he doesn’t use it on anybody, and he tells Kay that the fortune teller make him hand it over to her before Kay even reaches him, so that plot point doesn’t go anywhere, either. All the while, the school mean girl and Kay’s nemesis, Chris Eaton, competes with her to solve the mystery in a vague sort of way and spreads various wild rumors about her at various times that don’t really do anything and also don’t really go anywhere but provide temporary distractions from the plot.
Why would people who steal chemical formulas and have the connections to sell them also perpetrate financial frauds targeting widows and also rob trains? This criminal group is quite diversified. The book also has the criminals speaking a foreign language at times because, with such diversified skills, why wouldn’t they also be from some exotic foreign country? It never even leads anywhere. At first, I thought that they were setting it up for the thieves to also be spies, but that is also never explained and doesn’t go anywhere. The “double disguise” part of the story is that the two thieves are men who also periodically disguise themselves as women, but Kay actually sees them putting on their disguises at one point, so that isn’t a plot twist for very long.
The scene with the sleigh crash happens toward the end of the book, and they get one of the thieves from the wreckage. Kay locates the thieves’ apartment and finds the items they stole there, but she doesn’t get the other thief herself. The other thief gets away from her, and a detective just tells her that they caught him at the hospital, visiting his partner in crime. The end. It ends happily, but it was a confusing ride with a lot of points that didn’t really go anywhere along the way.
It’s summer, and Lucy has been helping Susannah practice for the Black Poetry Recitation contest. She’s not expecting the summer to get any more exciting than that because her father has told her that he can’t afford summer camp for her this year.
One day, Lucy and Susannah go to visit a friend of Susannah’s grandmother, Mrs. Quigley. Mrs. Quigley, often called Quiggy, says that she has a surprise for them. The “surprise” turns out to be that Quiggy has taken in a foster child, a girl named Theresa. Theresa is about the same age as the other girls and will be going to school with them in the sixth grade. Theresa tells the other girls that she likes Quiggy, but she doesn’t like Ruth, Quiggy’s cousin who lives with her. Ruth is a fussy woman who doesn’t like kids much, and Lucy tells Theresa that she’s like that with everyone. The only people Ruth really seems to like are Quiggy and her dog, Pipsqueak.
However, the girls are also shocked when they see that Quiggy’s garage has burned down. Fortunately, the fire didn’t spread to her house, but the garage is destroyed, and it looks like arson. Susannah tries to question Theresa about the fire, but Theresa says that she was asleep until Quiggy smelled smoke and woke her. Lucy thinks that the fire reminds her of when a girl she knew in second grade tried to set fire to a storage shed on the playground. Then, Lucy suddenly realizes why Theresa looks so familiar to her – Theresa was that girl from the second grade. Susannah doesn’t remember Theresa or the shed incident because she was going to a different school then.
Lucy is quick to suspect that Theresa is the one who set the garage on fire because of her firebug past, but Susannah is more doubtful. She wants to learn a little more about Theresa’s past since the second grade, where she’s been living, and whether she’s continued her firebug habit in other places she’s lived.
However, Theresa falls under suspicion again when another fire destroys Quiggy’s back porch, deliberately set by lighting a pile of newspapers on fire. Quiggy and Ruth were out at the time, and Theresa was home, but she says that she went to the park and didn’t know about the fire until she got back. Ruth is quick to accuse Theresa, saying that she knew that she’d be trouble from the beginning.
Mrs. Weinberger, the woman who called the fire department, said that she noticed the smoke right away because she was working in her garden around the time the fire started. When Susannah asks her if she was in the garden the whole time, she says that she did leave for awhile because she got an unexpected delivery of roses from a secret admirer, and the delivery boy even sang “You Are My Sunshine.” It sounds suspicious, like someone who knew Mrs. Weinberger’s normal habits deliberately tried to distract her so she wouldn’t see the arsonist arrive. Mrs. Weinberger describes the delivery boy, saying he looked about 18 years years old, he was blonde, and he had a tattoo on his arm. Also, both his shirt and his bicycle were purple. All she can remember about the name of the florist is “Mongoose”, which is a pretty odd name for a flower shop. The roses make it seem less likely that Theresa would have been the arsonist. Roses would be an expensive gift/distraction for a recently-arrived foster child to send.
When the girls learn from a boy Theresa used to live with in another foster home that she was sent away for trying to set a fire there, it looks bad for her. The girls talk to Theresa and suggest that she needs professional help, but Theresa denies ever setting any fires at all, at least, not on purpose. The fire at her last foster home was just a cooking accident, and Theresa wasn’t sad to leave there because the family wasn’t nice to her. As for the shed in the second grade, Theresa explains that she wasn’t actually trying to light the shed on fire. She was living in a foster home back then, too, and she’d just gotten a bad report card and a letter from her teacher that she was afraid to show to her foster family. She was trying to destroy them, and things just got out of control. Theresa insists that she would never want to do anything to hurt Quiggy or make her mad because she’s been nicer to her than any of her previous foster parents have, and she really wants to stay with her.
Theresa isn’t the only suspect for the arsonist, though. Could Ruth have somehow arranged the fires to get rid of the child because she didn’t want to share a home with her? What about Mr. Reid, the cranky next door neighbor who is annoyed about the sound of kids playing? There’s also Toby, Quiggy’s handsome nephew, who does handyman work for his aunt. He has access, but does he have a motive? What about George Peterson, who wants to buy Quiggy’s house? What about Arthur Featherstone from Theresa’s former foster home? Could he be holding some kind of grudge? It seems like the key to finding the real arsonist is finding the boy who delivered the flowers on the purple bike with the name “Mongoose” printed on it.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
One of my favorite things about this series is that the author does a good job of making a number of people look like equally good suspects. In the beginning, I had multiple theories about who the real arsonist could be, and I honestly wasn’t sure who it was for much of the book. One of my early theories turned out to be correct, but I changed my mind two or three times along the way.
Something else that I’d like to mention is that, at one point, the characters go to the library to do some research, and they use microfiche to read some old newspaper articles. When this book was written, the Internet and the World Wide Web were just starting to evolve into something that the general public could use, but most people didn’t have access yet. Even libraries didn’t have the rows of Internet-capable computers they have now. Some may have been starting to get them by this point, but it was a gradual process, and I don’t think my local library had them until a few years later. In fact, I think this was around the time that my school’s library replaced the old card catalog with the new computer catalog, and it wasn’t an online catalog; it was just a database stored on the computer in the library. Remembering things like this makes me feel old, but I was part of that 1980s/1990s generation of kids (the very oldest of the Millennials) who were first taught to use more manual forms of data storage before being gradually trained in more digital forms as we moved up through the grades in school.
Because, in those days, in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, there was no ability for most public libraries and other institutions to scan documents, like newspapers, and upload them to the Internet for easy sharing, or just write them directly to the Internet in the first place, they would convert printed materials to microfiche, which are essentially smaller film images taken of the documents. In order to read them, you would have to use a microfiche reader, physically load the images you want on sheets of transparent film, and look at a magnified version of them on the screen, scrolling through them until you found the information you were looking for. There was no way to make the process go faster with a keyword search. It was a royal pain. I had to do it a few times for various school reports, and I never thought it was fun. If you look at this video of people demonstrating how to use a microfiche reader, you see how they have to turn the dial to get the image aligned properly so they can read it, and also when they physical move the piece of film in the opposite direction to the way the image scrolls on the screen. I always thought that was annoyingly counter-intuitive. I know why it does that, because it’s about where the viewer is positioned over the image, not where film is moving, but I remember being annoyed with it when I was a kid because I’d move it in the wrong direction and get mixed up. Maybe it’s just how my mind works. When you find the image/page you want on the microfilm, there is a way to print it out on paper. Some libraries still use microfiche (which is why this video exists), and it can be useful for looking at old records, but online archives are starting to replace this method of data storage. When my local library underwent renovations in the early 2000s, they decided to replace their old microfiche area with a new teen center and more computers. I think they sent the microfiche machines and archives to the local university library. I’m not even 40 yet, and I feel old.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 