I couldn’t find a copy with its dust jacket intact.
Jessamy is a British orphan who is being raised by her two aunts, Millicent and Maggie. The two aunts aren’t really raising her together, though. Jessamy lives with Aunt Millicent during the school year, and she goes to stay with Aunt Maggie during school holidays. Truth be told, Aunt Millicent (her mother’s sister) and Aunt Maggie (her father’s sister) don’t really like each other, and they have different priorities and goals for Jessamy’s future. Aunt Millicent is doing her best to help Jessamy be pretty and popular, making sure that she wears a retainer to straighten her teeth and only allowing her to associate with “nice” children (apparently meaning ones from “good” families in the sense of social connections, who mostly don’t like Jessamy – Jessamy is usually not allowed to play with the children she actually likes and who like her). On the other hand, Aunt Maggie doesn’t care about beauty or popularity and just wants Jessamy to be well-behaved. Jessamy is confident that she is disappointing both of her aunts in all of these qualities. Her aunts are fond of her, but they are also occupied with their own lives. Aunt Millicent has her work, and Aunt Maggie has two children of her own, so Jessamy really has only half of their attention at any particular time.
However, Jessamy’s usual bouncing between her aunts is interrupted one summer when Aunt Maggie’s children, Jessamy’s older cousins Muriel and Edgar, catch whooping cough. Jessamy hasn’t had whooping cough herself, so she wouldn’t have any immunity. Rather than bring Jessamy into the household and have her end up sick, too, Aunt Maggie realizes that she has to find another place for her to stay until the other children are better. Jessamy can’t go back to Aunt Millicent because Aunt Millicent is leaving on a business trip, so Aunt Maggie arranges for Jessamy to stay with Miss Brindle, who is the caretaker of a large old house known to locals as Posset Place.
Miss Brindle is an older woman and is not used to spending time with children. Although Jessamy doesn’t really get along with her cousins, she isn’t sure if she’s going to like staying with Miss Brindle. However, Miss Brindle isn’t bad. She isn’t fond of Muriel or Edgar, either, and she says right up front that she’s glad that Jessamy seems different from her cousins. She also says that she’s going to treat Jessamy like an adult because she doesn’t know much about children, which suits Jessamy fine.
Miss Brindle tells Jessamy a little about the history of the old house. Posset Place was built in 1885 by a man named Nathaniel Parkinson, who made his money from producing a cough syrup called Parkinson’s Expectorant Posset. The house is largely empty now, except for the housekeeper’s quarters, where Miss Brindle now lives. Miss Brindle spends her time making sure the rooms are kept clean and well-aired.
Miss Brindle lets Jessamy explore the house a little before supper, and in particular, Jessamy is fascinated by the empty nursery. She finds herself imagining the children who used to live there and the toys and books the nursery once held. Then, she notices markings on the wall where the children’s heights were recorded, and she sees that one of the children was also named Jessamy. She tries to ask Miss Brindle about it, but Miss Brindle isn’t aware that there were any names written on the nursery wall.
During the night, Jessamy wakes up, still thinking about seeing her own name written on the wall of the nursery. She could have been mistaken, but it bothers her to the point where she feels like she has to go look at it again. Taking her flashlight, she goes upstairs again to look at the names. However, this time, the nursery is not empty, like it was before. There are clothes hanging on the wooden pegs on the wall and a line of shoes on the floor. When she checks the old measuring marks, she sees that there are fewer marks than she remembered before, but one of the names is definitely Jessamy, and the year next to that name is 1914. Jessamy lives in 1966 (contemporary with when the book was written), but the day in 1914 is the same day that she came to stay with Miss Brindle – July 23rd.
Then, to Jessamy’s surprise, she suddenly realizes that she is holding a lit candle instead of her flashlight. At first, Jessamy thinks that she must be dreaming, but then, an angry young woman comes and tells her that she should be in bed because she’s ill, not running around with a candle. The woman threatens to tell her aunt about this. When the woman lights her lamp, Jessamy sees that the nursery is now fully furnished.
It seems that Jessamy has gone back in time to 1914 and has been mistaken for the Jessamy who lived in the house in the past. The woman, who is Miss Matchett, the parlor maid, says that the other children named in the height markings – Marcus, Fanny, and Kitto – are all asleep and that it’s nearly midnight. The Jessamy of the past is the niece of the cook-housekeeper, which is why she is allowed to be with the children of the house. Jessamy’s head hurts, and she realizes that there is suddenly a bandage around it. Miss Matchett says that she fell out of a mulberry tree.
Jessamy realizes that the housemaid is only awake at this late hour and fully dressed because she had just returned from slipping out of the house secretly. When she points it out, Miss Matchett admits that she sneaked out to see her gentleman friend, and she says that if Jessamy doesn’t tell on her for doing that, she won’t tell her aunt that she was out of bed. Jessamy agrees, and Miss Matchett leads her back to her bed in the housekeeper’s quarters.
When Jessamy wakes up in the morning, she expects to find that everything that happened in the nursery during the night was a dream, but it isn’t. The room is the same one Miss Brindle gave her in the housekeeper’s quarters, but the bed and furnishings of the room are different. Jessamy is woken by a woman she’s never met before, not Miss Brindle.
This woman is the past Jessamy’s aunt, who tells her that she has had approval to stay on as the cook-housekeeper for the Parkinson family with Jessamy living with her. Not every household would accept a housekeeper with a young niece to raise, but as Nathaniel Parkinson himself says, the Parkinsons are not an ordinary family. Nathaniel Parkinson is a self-made man, from a humble background in spite of his current fortune, so he doesn’t put on airs, like other men of his current class. His granddaughter, Miss Cecily, at first disapproves of Jessamy, thinking that she might be too “common” (like the friends Jessamy’s Aunt Millicent disapproves of) and that she might not be a good influence on the children of the house, her younger siblings, who she is helping to raise. However, past Jessamy’s aunt defends her, and Nathaniel Parkinson says that she might actually be good for other children. He thinks Fanny has been acting too fine, and Kit could use the company of another child his age.
Jessamy is happy when she learns that past Jessamy has made friends with the Parkinson children and has really become part of the household. She is told that Fanny still thinks of her as being just the niece of a servant, but Kit (aka Kitto) is her special friend. Jessamy also likes this 1914 aunt better than her 1966 aunts because she seems nicer and more her kind of person. The realization that this is not a dream but that she has really traveled back in time is worrying, but Jessamy tells herself that she will somehow find her way back to her own time and that she should enjoy 1914 as much as she can while she can.
From the housemaid, Sarah, Jessamy learns that the Parkinson children live with their grandfather because their parents were killed in a carriage accident. Miss Cecily, the oldest girl in the family, takes care of her younger siblings and tries to manage the household while her oldest brother is away at Oxford. Miss Cecily is still learning about the running of a household, so past Jessamy’s aunt, Mrs. Rumbold, has to help her.
Jessamy also learns that she fell out of a tree house that she and Kit built together and that Fanny, who was also in the tree house at the time, was particularly upset by her accident. Fanny confesses to Jessamy that the reason she fell was because she pushed her. She hadn’t meant to push her out of the tree house or for her to fall, but the two of them were having an argument at the time. Fanny felt guilty about her getting hurt, but she’s still angry that Jessamy will be staying on at the house. She thinks that her grandfather and older sister decided to let her and her aunt stay partly because they felt badly about her getting hurt. Although Fanny is grateful that Jessamy didn’t tell on her for causing her accident, she still isn’t happy that Jessamy will be living with them. Fanny does put on airs, but she openly admits that she does it because everyone seems to be against her. Girls at school teasingly cough around her all the time because her grandfather made his money with his cough syrup, and since Jesssamy came, she feels like her brothers always side with Jessamy instead of her. Fanny has been in trouble before for bad behavior, and her brothers know that their grandfather has said if she does it again, he’ll send her to boarding school. Jessamy thinks that the idea of boarding school sounds exciting, but her brothers say that Fanny would hate it.
In spite of the drama with Fanny, Jessamy enjoys her time in 1914 and the other people there. She has the feeling that something important happened in 1914, and she remembers what it was when Nathaniel Parkinson and Kit talk about the possibility of war with Germany. Jessamy realizes that the coming war is going to be World War I and that it is going to start soon. Harry, the oldest boy in the Parkinson family, is back from Oxford, and he talks about how exciting it would be to be a soldier if there is a war, but Nathaniel Parkinson isn’t excited, understanding more about the nature of war than his grandchildren. Harry’s grandfather wants him to finish college, but Harry is in debt and wants to take his future into his own hands. Harry runs away, and at the same time, a valuable antique book belonging to his grandfather disappears. Jessamy doesn’t like to think that the pleasant young man stole his grandfather’s book, but what other explanation is there?
Just when Jessamy is getting caught up in the events in the Parkinson household and is concerned about the future of the past Jessamy and her aunt, Jessamy finds herself once again in 1966. Is it still possible for her to return to 1914 or learn what happened to the people she’s grown so fond of? Jessamy also begins to wonder who is the current owner of this old house and Mrs. Brindle’s employer? Learning the answers to those questions also explains a few things about Jessamy’s own family and past and gives her the one thing she really wants most.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
This story is a combination of fantasy and mystery, a combination that I always like. In some ways, this story reminds me of Charlotte Sometimes because the time switching takes place between similar eras, but there are some notable differences between the two books. Charlotte Sometimes took place at a boarding school, and Charlotte went back in time to the end of WWI, not the beginning. There was also no mystery plot in Charlotte Sometimes beyond Charlotte trying to figure out how and why she is switching places with a girl in the past. Also, in Charlotte Sometimes, it isn’t clear whether Charlotte influenced or changed anything in the past, but Jessamy definitely does. The modern Jessamy had to be the one to solve the mystery because she has access to information that the past Jessamy didn’t have.
In the past, Jessamy begins investigating the mysterious theft of the valuable book. Although she knows that Harry isn’t the type to steal from his grandfather, it takes a second visit back in time for her to discover who the real thief is and to clear Harry’s name. Unfortunately, she is unable to actually find the stolen book in the past to return it to its first owner. It is through a new friend that she makes in 1966 that she learns what really happened to the book and is able to return it to the current owner of the house … an old friend of hers from 1914.
Along the way, Jessamy also learns a few things about the history of her own family. She realizes at the beginning of the story that Jessamy is an unusual name, which is why she is surprised that the girl in the past is also called Jessamy. It turns out that Jessamy is a name that is passed down through her family. She is not a direct descendant of the past Jessamy, as I first suspected, but the past Jessamy is a relative of hers. She also comes to understand that her family used to be more grand, but during the past, they fell on hard times. This is also important to the story because class differences figure into the plot.
Everyone in 1914 is concerned about class differences, but in different ways. Nathaniel Parkinson is actually the least concerned with class because he has actually shifted to a higher class during his lifetime, making him aware that people from different classes are really just people, only in different circumstances. His granddaughters are more class conscious, although both of them also soften on that after getting to know Jessamy better. Even the servants are also class conscious, with some of the servants putting on airs because they’re above other types of servants.
Something that surprised me in the story is the realization, toward the end of the book, that class differences are partly the reason why Aunt Millicent and Aunt Maggie don’t get along. Aunt Millicent’s efforts to make Jessamy more pretty and popular and have her be friends with certain people are social-climbing efforts, partly because Aunt Millicent is aware of their family’s past and wants the family to climb up from their humbled circumstances. Aunt Maggie’s disapproval of Aunt Millicent seems to come somewhat from her disapproval of Millicent’s efforts at social-climbing or trying to act like she’s more grand than she actually is. It isn’t stated explicitly, but it is heavily implied. We don’t meet Millicent in the book, but from her description, I suspect that she disapproves of Aunt Maggie because she thinks of her as being too “common.” From the characters’ descriptions of Maggie’s children, it seems like people who don’t like them think of them as being “common” or uncreative, indicating that this branch of Jessamy’s family is rather prosaic, being typical in a rather dull way.
The objective reality is probably that Jessamy’s two aunts are not very far apart in their social status, but they have different attitudes toward their social status. Aunt Maggie doesn’t care much about it. She fits in well where she is, she doesn’t care about moving up in society, and she just focuses on the children behaving well within their social status. Aunt Millicent, however, has a high opinion of who she is and where the family ought to be in society, and she is focused on moving up. Jessamy doesn’t really fit with either of her aunts’ philosophies of life. What she really wants is the chance to make real friends and fit in somewhere with people who like her and who like the sort of things she likes. She gets the opportunity at the end of the story when the current owner of the old house becomes her benefactor and arranges for her to attend boarding school, which she has said is something that she’s always wanted to do. At boarding school, Jessamy will be out from under the direct supervision of both of her aunts and will have the opportunity to develop independently and make new friends who suit her, rather than her aunts.
Even Fanny finds boarding school beneficial. We don’t know exactly how her life ended up in the 1960s, but when Fanny realizes that she’s caused problems for the past Jessamy in more ways than one and that she needs to admit the truth to her grandfather and older sister, her character develops for the better. She begins to develop empathy and compassion for the past Jessamy, looking beyond feeling sorry for herself to feeling something for another person she has directly harmed, and she reforms her character. She accepts the consequences for her actions, even though she was afraid to do so before, and it leads her to better things because the consequences are not as bad as she thought and actually help her. Although she was initially afraid of being sent away from her family, when her grandfather decides that she needs the discipline and sends her to boarding school, she discovers that she actually likes it. Going to boarding school allows her to get away from the girls who were bullying her at her local school and make new friends, and she develops some self-confidence from the experience, turning into a young lady who helps her older sister in her volunteer work for the war effort.
One final thought I had is that every time I’ve ever read a book with a sickness like whooping cough in it, I feel like it really dates the book. I know this book does have a specific date by design, and I know people still catch whooping cough in the 21st century if they haven’t been vaccinated (get your tetanus shot – in the US, the tetanus shot includes the whooping cough vaccine), but to me, this type of illness feels like a time travel back to my parents’ youths by itself. My parents and their siblings had whooping cough when they were young, but I’m almost 40 years old and have never seen a case of it myself.
The story focuses on a young girl in Medieval England. She is about twelve or thirteen years old, but she doesn’t know her age or even her real name. Everyone just calls her Brat. For as long as she remembers, she’s always been alone, a homeless orphan traveling and begging from town to town. When a midwife finds her sleeping in a dung heap, she takes the girl on as a servant and apprentice. It isn’t as a kindness. The midwife just realizes that she can get some cheap labor out of the girl as long as she feeds her. Also, because the girl isn’t very bright or experienced, she is no professional competition for the midwife. People begin calling the girl Beetle because she was in the dung heap like dung beetle.
The midwife, Jane, became a midwife because she had six children of her own, although none of them survived. Beetle wonders if she could be a witch because of her strange mixtures, but really, she’s just a midwife. Whenever a woman in the area gives birth, Beetle goes to help carry things for Jane. Beetle is not allowed to watch the births herself, just stand by to fetch and carry. Beetle realizes that part of the reason she is not allowed to watch the births is so Jane can keep her professional secrets, although Beetle soon begins learning about plants and how to make medicines from them and she sometimes spies on births when she can to learn more.
People in town aren’t nice to Beetle. Jane is stingy and never helps anyone who can’t pay her fee. The local people don’t like her, but they tolerate her because they have need of her skills. Beetle often has to deal with the anger that people are afraid to show to Jane. Beetle’s best friend is a cat who was nearly killed by some mean local boys. She talks to the cat. Both of them are abused by locals, especially the mean boys.
Then, Beetle begins to notice that Jane keeps slipping away on mysterious errands, giving excuses for her absence that make no sense. Beetle begins to follow Jane to find out what she is doing. What Beetle learns is that Jane is having a love affair with a married baker.
One day, the miller comes looking for the midwife, but she isn’t home. Desperate for help with his wife’s birth, the miller makes Beetle come with him. Beetle doesn’t know what to do, and the miller’s wife angrily throws things at her until Jane comes to take over. Jane insults and abuses Beetle, too.
It seems like taking abuse is Beetle’s lot in life and that she has to take it or be thrown out into the street again. Her life starts to change when a kind merchant at a fair compliments her curls and gives her a wooden come with a cat carved on it. Then, another man mistakes her for a girl named Alice who can read. Beetle begins to look at herself in a new light. She realizes that at least some people see her as a person who can be pretty and smart, and maybe, she really can be pretty and smart. Liking the name Alice, Beetle decides that she will take the name for herself so she can gave a proper name.
When she returns to the midwife and the midwife abuses and insults her again, Beetle confidently tells her that her name isn’t dung beetle or brat but Alice. The midwife isn’t impressed and even people in town laugh at her for it, but Alice retains her new sense of confidence. She gives the cat a name, too, calling him Purr.
Without Jane realizing just how much Alice has been learning, Alice gradually begins helping people on her own. After saving the life of one of the local bullies, who almost drowned while chasing her, the boy starts treating Alice better. When his cow is having a difficult birth, the boy gets Alice to help him tend to the cow, increasing her knowledge of births.
Then, during one very difficult human birth, Jane leaves Alice to tend to the woman alone while she goes to tend to the lady of the manor, who is also giving birth. Alice protests that she doesn’t know what to do and can’t manage on her own, but Jane tells her she doesn’t have to do anything because this baby is likely to die. Jane just wants Alice to stay to cover for her so she can go earn another, even better fee. However, to everyone’s surprise, Alice saves the baby in Jane’s absence by applying what she has learned so far. The grateful mother names the baby after Alice, and the father refuses to let Jane take credit for Alice’s work. Jane is angry and jealous, especially when another mother insists that she wants Alice and not Jane to tend to her during her birth. Jane throws a fit and accuses Alice of stealing her customers.
Unfortunately, that birth doesn’t go well, and Jane has to step in to help and save the baby. In despair at what she sees as her failure, Alice runs away, convinced that she is just a nobody and too stupid to be anything, even a midwife’s apprentice.
At first, she wants to give up and die, but with the company of Purr the cat, she finds her way to an inn where she finds work. It’s enough to keep her alive, but Alice finds it difficult to shake her feeling that she is nothing and will never be anything. Alice really misses her work with the midwife, although not really the midwife herself, but she has trouble getting over the sense that she is just a failure. It takes a few lessons in reading from a scholar staying at the inn, the realization that she has been a help to someone else in a difficult situation, the encouragement of the boy who was one of her former bullies, and even some surprising comments from Jane the midwife herself to help Alice realize what she needs to do.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
I found this story stressful because there were so many mean people in it. I hated the casual cruelty of the local boys and how they almost killed the cat. I hated Jane, who used and abused a vulnerable orphan girl. I also hated the townspeople in general because this seems to be entirely a town of people who are looking to use and abuse anybody they can and who will also allow other people to abuse the vulnerable, both human and animal, if they can use the abuser for their purposes. For much of the book, I looked for a character other than our heroine with some redeeming quality of some kind and didn’t find one.
The first character I actually liked was the kind merchant who gave Beetle/Alice the comb, but I still felt like the town is the town of the damned because nobody there was really nice. Almost every interaction Alice has with anybody there is unpleasant to some degree until she does something to buy their goodwill or at least civility. The innkeepers are nicer to Alice, although she knows that they’re not entirely honest in the way they run the inn. The scholar was one of my favorite characters because he sees Alice’s potential and gives her lessons in reading by first explaining things to her cat to get her interested. His kindness didn’t need to be bought with anything. The scholar is also the first person who cares about what Alice wants out of life and gets her to consider what she really wants, which builds her confidence and her feeling that she is a real person with wants that matter.
William became nicer after Alice saved his life, which is a kind of cliche in stories about bullies and is still a form of being bought. He’s still not completely nice after that, although he does teach Alice a couple of useful lessons, and he tells Alice that he doesn’t think that she’s a failure as a midwife just because she didn’t know everything and still needed some help. Even better, he points out that Jane doesn’t really know everything, either; she just acts like she does.
I never grew to like Jane. When Alice overhears Jane talking about her, Jane actually says that Alice is bright, which is a surprising compliment, given all of the insults and abuse she constantly heaped on her and her fear and resentment that Alice might steal her customers. Jane doesn’t regard Alice as a failure for not being able to handle a birth on her own, but she says that Alice gives up too easily. She wants an apprentice who is willing to take everything she heaps on her and won’t give up, no matter what. While persistence is an important quality, I was angry with this character for trying to wrap up her own abuse nicely like it was all part of some important, intentional lesson. Jane never had any notion of turning Alice into a fully-trained midwife. She more wanted a cheap drudge than an honest apprentice to learn her craft. In fact, she actively tried to avoid telling Alice much because she was always afraid of training a competitor. Jane wasn’t trying to teach Alice to persevere at any point before she said that. She wasn’t trying to teach her any more of anything than she absolutely had to in order to get the cheap labor she wanted! Her attempt to wrap this whole mess up neatly like a PSA just didn’t work for me because she’s nothing but an abusive employer who screams and throws pots and doesn’t actually want her “apprentice” to progress enough to do as well or better than she does. While Alice does return to be her apprentice because she knows that she really does want to be a midwife and that there are still things she can learn from Jane, including the value of persistence, I still hope that Alice will eventually leave Jane and find a better community to exercise her skills and employers and clients who are better behaved, more appreciative, and generally less toxic and abusive.
Because of the content of this book, it is not for young children. It would be best for tweens and teens.
Catherine is a 14-year-old girl living in Medieval England in 1290. The entire book is written in the form of diary entries, but after the first few extremely short and unenthusiastic entries, Catherine reveals that she is not writing these entries of her own free will. Keeping a diary was her brother Edward’s idea. She explains that Edward, who is studying to be a monk, thinks that keeping a diary will help Catherine become “less childish and more learned.” At first, Catherine declares that she won’t continue writing and that Edward can write the diary himself if he wants it so badly, but she changes her mind when her mother releases her from the even more boring chore of spinning so that she can have more time to write. Although she can’t think of much of interest to write about her daily life at first, she would rather continue to try writing than spin.
From there, Catherine describes her life and family in detail. The diary continues for a full year, from September 1290 to September 1291. Catherine lives with her parents, but she isn’t fond of her father, who often hits her. Her father is a country knight, but not a particularly wealthy one. They have some servants but not enough that Catherine doesn’t need to help with household chores. She would much rather be out, running around the fields and playing than doing chores and sewing with the other ladies of the household. Catherine’s mother has suffered several miscarriages since her birth, and she still mourns for the children she has lost. Catherine is her youngest child, and she is the only one who still lives with her. Catherine has three older brothers, and none of them live at home anymore. Two of her brothers are away in the king’s service, and Edward is at his abbey. Catherine’s first diary entries are mostly about chores, avoiding chores, and pulling some admittedly childish pranks and stunts.
However, her diary entries soon note that a major change seems to be starting. She notices that her father is suddenly taking an unusual amount of interest in her. Usually, he pays little attention to her, except to give her a slap or smack, but suddenly, he starts asking her probing questions about herself and her health habits. It’s strange behavior for him, but Catherine soon realizes the reason why. Her father is planning to marry her off, or sell her off, as Catherine thinks of it. Catherine’s assessment is pretty accurate because the man is wealthy and has promised her father a handsome sum if Catherine marries him. Catherine’s father’s main interest in her and her future marriage is how it can benefit him.
Catherine doesn’t consider herself a great beauty, a very accomplished young lady, or a real prize, so she can’t imagine why this man might want her and even be willing to pay for the privilege. It turns out that her prospective suitor is a wool merchant whose ambition is to become mayor. Catherine’s family is nobility, although not very high-ranking or important nobility, but having a wife of noble blood would be to the merchant’s political advantage.
Catherine has already decided that she doesn’t want him. When Catherine learns that her prospective suitor will be coming to see her, she decides that she will act stupid and unappealing so he will give up the idea of marrying her. However, even though she scares away the first suitor, she is at the age when noble girls start to consider marriage, and there are soon other suitors. Catherine doesn’t want any of them! She doesn’t even want to be a noble young lady at all. The story of Catherine’s attempts to get rid of her unwanted suitors and to figure out what she really wants out of life are lively and humorous and sometimes touching.
The book is available to borrow and read for free through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
I enjoyed the details of everyday life that Catherine describes. She finds the typical chores that young ladies of her social class do boring, and she often dreams that she could do something more exciting or outdoors, whether it’s traveling on a Crusade or even just ploughing a field. Still, she describes her activities in detail, including the ingredients that she uses to make different types of medicines. One of the duties of a Medieval housewife was to tend to the health of members of the household, so like other Medieval young ladies, Catherine has been learning how to make various home remedies, with varying results.
Modern day anti-Semitism has roots in Medieval times, and this book also addresses that when Catherine’s mother allows a party of traveling Jews to stay the night. At this point in history, the king is ordering Jews to leave England because he thinks they are evil. These travelers are poor refugees on their way to live in Flanders (a region in modern Belgium). Catherine notes that her mother is not afraid of Jewish people, even though other members of their household are. Catherine herself is curious about them. She has heard stories that Jewish people secretly have horns and tails, like the devil, and she excitedly spies on them to see if it’s true. She is actually disappointed to find out that it’s not true and that these poor people are just poor people in ragged clothes. One of the women allows Catherine to listen while she tells stories to entertain the children in the group, and Catherine finds the stories charming. It occurs to her that there are different types of stories in the world, ones that are true and ones that aren’t, and that the stories people have told her about wicked Jewish people aren’t true. She even starts to think that it would be exciting if she were to join the Jewish group and go abroad with them to seek her fortune.
She does temporarily disguise herself as a boy to go with them, but when she explains to dissatisfaction with her life to the woman in the group, the woman discourages her from running away. The woman says to her that, in the end, nobody is going to ask her why she wasn’t like one of the boys or men but why she didn’t spend her life simply being Catherine. In one of her stories the night before, the woman had emphasized knowing who you are and where you are and what you are to orient yourself in the world. Although Catherine doesn’t fully understand it at first, the key to finding her happiness isn’t about running away from the things she doesn’t like in her life, whether it’s chores that she finds boring or a suitor she doesn’t like, but how to make choices that give her life a purpose that suits her and that lead her to better options.
Catherine daydreams about more exciting options in life, but none of them are really right for her because there are things that she doesn’t know about the realities of these other positions. She loves the beautiful illuminated manuscripts that monks like her brother make, and she wonders if she could disguise herself as a boy and become a monk so she can spend her days making beautiful paintings. Her brother laughs at the idea because he says that her figure is too feminine for her to be a boy, and there is no point in her becoming a nun because nuns spend most of their time sewing, one of the chores that Catherine doesn’t like. When she asks her Uncle George about being a Crusader, he tells her that war is more like hell than the heavenly adventure she is imagining. Although Catherine thinks than men’s work and war sound exciting, her brother and uncle realize that Catherine knows little of the reality behind them, and she would not be happy with the reality if she knew. Early in the book, she also laments about never having been allowed to see a public hanging, but when she learns more about them, she realizes that she doesn’t like them. This book reminds me a little of the picture book Hester the Jester, where another Medieval girl tries different professions before deciding that she’d rather be herself.
None of this is to say that there are only separate roles for men and women in life and that Catherine, as a young woman, would be incapable of doing anything other than typical women’s work. It’s really more that, while there are relatively limited possible occupations for a girl of Catherine’s time and social level, it’s the woman who makes the occupation rather than the occupation that makes the woman. Catherine can still be happy in her position as a young noblewoman of her time if she can learn to shape her position in life to suit her, learning and adjusting her life as she goes. That’s the best way for a girl in Catherine’s position to become her own woman.
An older noblewoman, who correctly guesses Catherine’s nickname of Birdy, talks to her about the lives of noblewomen. Although she is of a much higher rank than Catherine, she tells Catherine that her position also comes with duties and obligations, not the freedom and adventure that Catherine imagines. However, the older woman says that, just because she doesn’t spend all her time flapping her wings, doesn’t mean that she can’t fly, meaning that although she can’t control everything about her life and obligations, she is not powerless. She tells Catherine that she picks her battles and that Catherine should consider what she says and do the same. Catherine doesn’t understand her full meaning at first, but the older woman means that, rather than chafing over the position in life that she was born to and the things she can’t change, Catherine can focus on the parts that she can control and change. When Catherine gains a greater understanding of who she is and how she can remain herself in whatever circumstances she finds herself in life, she is ready to move forward in her life.
For a girl of Catherine’s social class, marriage is expected, unless she becomes a nun, which Catherine has already rejected as an option. Catherine doesn’t like the idea of marriage because she thinks that she knows what a marriage is like, based on her parents’ marriage, but Catherine’s mother tells her that a marriage is what you make it. Catherine’s father is a brutish man who drinks too much, but he treats his wife very differently from the way he treats everyone else, which is why she still loves him. Catherine observes that people can have layers and that sometimes, people are different when they’re in the company of different people. Even her brother Robert, who is frequently odious, surprises her with a great kindness when she needs it. It helps Catherine to realize that marriage might not be so bad if it can be with a person who is kind and agreeable in the ways that matter to her.
A major part of Catherine’s problem is that her choice of who to marry largely depends on what her father arranges, and her father is an uncaring, brutish man who sees Catherine more as an asset to be used than a person whose own future needs to be nurtured. Although Catherine doesn’t like the men her father would pick to be her suitor, mostly because they would benefit him more than Catherine, circumstances eventually allow Catherine to marry a man who would suit her instead. Like Catherine, her new intended husband is known to be a man who values learning and was criticized by his brutish father about it, so the two of them may understand each other and share similar ideals in life. Being a married woman who is married to a man who suits her, rather than trapping Catherine in an unwanted position in life, will allow her to run her own household in her own fashion and give her a way to escape from her father and his abusive and self-serving treatment.
I particularly liked some of interesting the Medieval superstitions that Catherine believes. When her mother gives birth to her little sister at the end of the book, Catherine unties all of the knots in the house, which I’ve heard of before as a superstition to help ease births.
Because of some of the content of the book, like the description of the difficult birth of Catherine’s sister, I think this story would be best for tweens and teens.
This is the first book in the Vesper Holly series. Vesper Holly is like a female Young Indiana Jones.
The story begins in 1872, when Professor Brinton Garrett and his wife, Mary, receive a letter saying that Professor Garrett’s colleague, Dr. Holly, has died overseas. Dr. Holly named Professor Garrett as executor of his will, gave him the rights to organize his person papers for publication, and made him the guardian of his 16-year-old daughter, Vesper. When Professor Garrett and his wife arrive at Dr. Holly’s country estate in Pennsylvania to meet Vesper and take charge, they at first expect that they will have to comfort a timid and grieving orphan. However, Vesper is anything but timid and seems to have gotten over whatever grief she was feeling and has quickly taken charge of the situation. She welcomes the professor and his wife, calling them Uncle Brinnie and Aunt Mary, and she quickly persuades them that, rather than her coming to live with them, it would be better for them to take up residence at the Holly estate, where there is plenty of room and Uncle Brinnie would have full access to her late father’s library and papers. At first, they’re reluctant to leave their own home, but Vesper Holly is practically a force of nature and very difficult to resist.
Vesper is intelligent and multi-talented, with interests in everything from science to women’s rights. (In some ways, she seems kind of like Mary Sue – impossibly talented and skilled at everything, with her main flaws seeming to be that she is difficult for everyone else to keep up with.) Uncle Brinnie quickly realizes that she is a daunting girl to have as his ward, and rather than he and his wife taking charge of her, Vesper has efficiently taken charge of them.
Soon after Professor Garrett and Mary settle in at the Holly estate, Vesper asks Uncle Brinnie if he’s read a piece of classic literature called the Illyriad and if he knows anything about Illyria. Professor Garrett has read this less-known classic piece, and while he’s never been to Illyria, he knows that it’s an incredibly unstable place. While the Illyriad is thought to be mostly legend, Vesper says that her father believed that there was more truth to it than most people know. He believed that the magical army described in the story may actually have been an army of clockwork automatons. Professor Garrett remembers Dr. Holly saying something like that before, but no one in the academic community took the theory seriously, and Professor Garrett says that he thought Dr. Holly had abandoned the idea. Vesper reveals that her father was still working on the theory and that, shortly before his death, he wrote to her, saying that he found something that seemed to support his ideas. Unfortunately, he died before revealing what he found. Vesper says that she wants Uncle Brinnie to take her on an expedition to Illyria so that she can finish her father’s work. Once again, Professor Garrett balks at the idea because of the dangerous political situation in the region, but also once again, Vesper’s powers of persuasion win.
Professor Garrett is sure that they won’t be granted permission to enter the country much less move around Illyria because of the unrest there, but to his astonishment, Vesper gets them permission to do both by writing to the king of Illyria himself. Although the king never met Vesper’s father, he has read Dr. Holly’s research and is fascinated by his theories, which is why he also grants Vesper a personal audience. Before their meeting with the king, Vesper and Professor Garrett are caught up in a riot while touring the city, and someone tries to stab Vesper! Although it could have been an accident during the riot, Vesper is sure that someone deliberately tried to kill her, and she tells the king about it at their meeting. The king is troubled by the news and admits that he had assigned someone to follow Vesper and Professor Garrett to protect them. It’s a failure on the part of his guard that they were attacked anyway.
The king’s vizier immediately says that they have to crack down harder on the native Illyrians, bringing up the cultural and political struggle that has made this country so dangerous. (Don’t worry too much about understanding it. This isn’t a real life historical situation with real groups of people.) Vesper boldly says that it doesn’t make sense to her that one half of the country crack down on the other half of the country, and she advocates for more respect for the native Illyrians and their wishes. The vizier is scandalized at a girl speaking up to the king like that, and the king tells Vesper that the situation isn’t that simple. The king has been trying to modernize and improve the infrastructure of the country with projects like building schools and railroads lines, but each of these projects has been ruthlessly sabotaged, apparently by the native Illyrians. The vizier has suggested hiring outside sources from other countries to complete the projects, but the king still thinks it’s important to keep the projects within the country. Hiring outsiders would be costly and would make Illyria dependent on outsiders. (Right about at this point, I was sure that I fully understood who the real villain of this story was and who was really responsible for the sabotage, and it wasn’t the native Illyrians. However, there is one more important character yet to be introduced.)
The king grants Vesper and Professor Garrett the ability to travel to the village Vesper wants to visit to pick up the trail of her father’s studies, but before they leave the palace, the king introduces them to anther visiting scholar, Dr. Desmond Helvitius. Dr. Helvitius is there to catalog the palace archives and conduct research for a book about the early history of Illyria. Dr. Helvitius says that, based on his studies, he believes that the army from the Illyriad Dr. Holly was researching never existed and was purely imaginary and says that the palace archives, which are thorough and complete, prove it. However, Vesper insists on seeing the archives herself, and she quickly notices that there is a gap in the records. Our heroes ponder what is missing and why Dr. Helvitius doesn’t want anyone to know that anything is missing.
As Vesper and Uncle Brinnie continue in pursuit of Dr. Holly’s theory, there are further attempts on their lives.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
Although there are themes of history and archaeology in the Vesper Holly stories, I think it’s important to point out that all of the history and archaeology in the stories is fake. The locations they visit are fictional. The series takes place in the Victorian era, but this is not really a historical fiction series because they mostly focus on the history of places that don’t exist. The Indiana Jones and Young Indiana Jones franchise based their adventures on real places, people, artifacts, and legends that exist outside of the franchise, but that’s not the case with Vesper Holly. Really, the Vesper Holly series is just an adventure series. The locations and circumstances only exist to create the opportunities for adventure. That’s fine and fun, as long as readers understand that’s the case.
The name of Illyria comes from an ancient name for a region in the Balkans where people spoke a language that was called Illyrian, but Illyria didn’t exist as a country in the 1870s. People stopped referring to Illyria in the sense of a nation after the Ottomans invaded the region in the 15th century, and that was after it had already been under both Roman and Byzantine control. The term “Illyria” sometimes emerged after that in a cultural sense. The Illyriad doesn’t exist and seems to be based on the real piece of classical literature, the Iliad. I couldn’t find any references to a King Vartan, but there is a St. Vartan or Vardan, who was an Armenian military leader and martyr, who died in 451 AD. The political and social tensions in the story are between the ethnic Illyrians and the Zentans. The captial city of this fictional Illyria is Zenta, and I think it is based on the city now called Senta in modern day Serbia, which was the site of a battle in 1697, where the Ottomans were defeated and lost control of the region. So, my overall impression of the time period and location of the story is that it seems to take place in a sort of alternate reality of the Victorian world, semi-based on real places and historical concepts from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, especially the Balkans, but not adhering strictly to real history so the author could set up the adventure creatively.
The Illyrian characters in the book use words like “dragoman” (a term for a guide and interpreter, usually used in the Near East, particularly in areas with Arabic, Turkish, or Persian influence) and “effendi“, which is an honorific for a man of high status in eastern Mediterranean countries. It’s plausible that these terms would be used in the Balkans in the 19th century, but this isn’t really my area of expertise, so I can’t say how common that would have been.
The adventure in the story is good, and it has an element of mystery that adds an interesting twist to the ending. At the beginning of the story, Vesper and Professor Garrett explain that Dr. Holly had a theory about the historical events behind a legend described in a piece of classical literature. His theory was that this special army described in literature was actually some kind of mechanical or clockwork army, an army composed of something man-made rather than real humans. Professor Garrett and his colleagues never took Dr. Holly’s theory seriously because it does sound rather unbelievable, too technologically advanced for the time when the historical events took place. However, Vesper believes in her father and his theories, and now that he is dead, she wants to investigate and find the proof that her father wanted for the sake of his memory. If they had really found an amazing clockwork army, it would have been an incredible adventure, but I was pleased that what they actually found is a more plausible explanation that would have fit the time period. It turns out that Dr. Holly was half right; the legendary army was not composed of real people, but there is another kind of army that nobody considers until Vesper actually finds it. Legends tend to magnify things out of their original proportions. This particular legend not only exaggerated the army’s capabilities but also its size.
I liked the twists to the story, but Vesper herself got on my nerves a bit. Vesper only really makes sense if you look at her as being the kind of heroine of tall tales. She is overly perfect with no noticeable flaws. She rarely gets frightened or upset at anything, from the death of her own father to being threatened with death herself. She cheerfully pulls her new guardian into dangerous situations, and her guardian can’t even really get angry with her for doing it. Vesper is incredibly persuasive, whether it’s dealing with her guardian or a foreign king, and her guardian is adoring of her and constantly admires her intelligence and abilities. Like Sherlock Holmes with Watson, Uncle Brinnie is always one step behind both Vesper and the readers in figuring things out. Characters who are overly perfect can be a little grating, partly because there are times when they drag their friends into dangerous situations but, somehow, it’s never their fault because they’re perfect. In fiction, this kind of confidence and seeming perfection are strengths, but in real life, over-confidence is a sign of incompetence and lack of awareness. People who charge directly into dangerous situations in real life are just kind of clueless about the dangers they’re plunging into. The books in this series are just meant as fun adventure stories, not serious or true-to-life in either characterization or historical background, so Vesper’s amazing qualities, whether it’s her ability to eat all kinds of strange foods or learn new languages in barely any time at all or to compete intellectually with professional academics who are decades older than she is, fits with the story type. Vesper isn’t mean to be a real person so much as the ultimate teenage adventurer.
Kids can enjoy this teenage heroine who is on top of every situation, can rush into danger without any sense of fear, and gets her way with little argument from anyone. However, I think I would enjoy Vesper more if she did have a few more flaws and limitations. I would have liked it if Vesper had a definite fear of something, like Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes. It could be played for comedy, like in the Indiana Jones movies. I also would have liked it if Professor Garrett could have appeared more sharp than he did and provide more useful knowledge so that Vesper had to depend a little more on him professionally during their expedition. I felt like the story dumbed down the professor a bit so Vesper could appear more brilliant, and I don’t like it when characters are made to look stupid so another character can look more intelligent by comparison.
Vesper’s relationship with her deceased father is never really explained or developed, either. When we first meet her, she is well over being sad about his death and ready to embark on an adventure in his name. I would have liked it if she and her Uncle Brinnie had a heart-to-heart talk about her feelings during their travels. Dr. Holly seems to have spent a significant amount of time away from home or involved in his research work. Vesper is a motherless only child who does not seem to attend a regular school or have friends her own age. I would expect that this unconventional life would have an effect on her development and that she would have feelings about it. I would have liked her to explain more to Brinnie that her eclectic range of knowledge and expertise with languages comes from having been dragged around the world with her father from a young age, from spending time around her father’s professional colleagues and witnessing their discussions with each other, and from becoming an active research assistant to her father because their family consisted of only the two of them, and sharing his interests was a way for them to bond. I picture Dr. Holly reading pieces of classical literature to Vesper as bedtime stories because he would have little or no interest in the typical nursery rhymes or picture books.
If Vesper had more knowledge of ancient history and literature than things typical children know and like, that could also show character quirks and development. It might even be a flaw in the sense that Vesper knows more about how to speak to and relate to professional academics than girls her own age at a time when female academics were often not taken seriously. Vesper occupies an odd position in life but without the obvious awkwardness that would cause in real life. Her confidence and ability to stride forward in situations that would cause anyone else hesitation might actually come from the knowledge that, if she allowed anyone else time to think about what she’s barging into, she would never be able to accomplish what she wants to accomplish because other people wouldn’t accept it. She could be feeling more of the awkwardness of her position more than she lets on, and some discussion of her need to hide her own feelings, act more confident than she feels, or compensate for other people’s feelings about her would add depth to her character. It’s possible that later books in the series develop other sides of her personality and history more, but I would have liked more of that in this book.
Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch, or Schoolgirls Among the Cowboys by Alice B. Emerson, 1915.
In the last Ruth Fielding book, Ruth and her friends met a girl named Jane Ann who had run away from home. In this book, Ruth and her friends go to Silver Ranch in Montana, Jane Ann’s home, which is owned by her uncle, Bill Hicks. Ruth’s best friend, Helen, is surprised that Ruth’s Uncle Jabez let her come on the trip because he’s been very upset about the money he lost investing in a mine. Helen says maybe the investment will turn out fine after all, and Ruth says that the mine he invested in, the Tintacker Mine, is coincidentally nearby. It’s supposed to be a silver mine, although Uncle Jabez now doubts whether the mine is real or some kind of scam. The young man who talked him into investing hasn’t answered Uncle Jabez’s letters for months. So, while they’re staying at the ranch, Ruth plans to ask some questions in the area about the mine and see what she can learn.
On their first evening at the ranch, while they’re playing music, singing, and enjoying themselves, they suddenly get word that there’s a prairie fire up by Tintacker, and a cowboy says that it was probably set by “Bughouse Johnny.” (“Bughouse” is an old-fashioned slang word meaning “crazy”, so this is a descriptive nickname.) Ruth and her friends go to help the cowboys with the fire, and they watch as they slaughter three steers and use the carasses to smother the flames.
Ruth asks some questions about Tintacker, and the cowboys mention a new man who’s been hanging around that area. They don’t know much about him, but he’s pretty young, and they call him “the tenderfoot.” Ruth thinks he might be the young man her uncle has been looking for. She also asks them about Bughouse Johnny, but they don’t tell her much more than he’s a crazy guy who camps out in the area of Tintacker.
Ruth explains her uncle’s situation to Jane Ann’s uncle. Bill Hicks says that, as far as he knows, there’s no more silver left in the Tintacker Mine, and he thinks that Ruth’s uncle has been cheated. Ruth asks him if there’s any way that she can see the official papers associated with the mine, and Bill Hicks introduces her to a friend of his who is a lawyer, Mr. Savage. Mr. Savage confirms that ownership of the mine belongs to a man named John Cox, who bought out the other heirs of the mine’s original owners. Like Bill Hicks, Mr. Savage thinks that the mine isn’t worth anything, but if the young man Uncle Jabez invested with is John Cox, the investment is valid, just not one that’s likely to see a return. Ruth says that she will give the lawyer’s information to her uncle and that her uncle may ask him to act on his behalf later, depending on how he decides to handle this investment.
Ruth and her friends have some Western-style fun and adventures with Jane Ann, the cowboys, and the other locals. Jane Ann gets to show off her riding and ranching skills, and they all attend a local dance, where Ruth and her friends play matchmaker between a shy cowboy and the haughty schoolmistress he admires. They have a hair-raising encounter with a wild bear, and the man who saves them by shooting the bear turns out to be the man from Tintacker who Ruth wants to see.
When Ruth and one of Hick’s men go to see this man later, they find him deathly ill. If the man doesn’t recover, and if the mine turns out to be worthless, Uncle Jabez will lose his money, and there will be no way for Ruth to continue attending the boarding school she loves with her friends! However, the answer to the truth about John Cox’s identity is closer than Ruth and her friends suspect.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies) and Project Gutenberg (multiple formats).
My Reaction
Like many other early Stratemeyer books, this story contains elements of a mystery but is really more of an adventure. I didn’t like parts of the adventure because there were repeated instances of characters being attacked by animals and then the animals needing to be killed. At one point, Ruth herself beats an attacking wolf to death, and I thought that was a shockingly violent scene for a Stratemeyer Syndicate book! Although, earlier Stratemeyer Syndicate books are quite different from the later ones.
The mystery part of the story focuses on the identity of John Cox, the man who convinced Uncle Jabez to invest in his mine, and the truth about his mine. I actually felt a little silly for not figuring out the true identity of John Cox sooner because he actually shares the same last name as one of the other regular characters in this series, and it’s not a coincidence. John Cox is Mary Cox’s brother.
Mary Cox, nicknamed “The Fox” by her schoolmates for being sly, is along on the trip with the other Briarwood Hall girls, although she is a nasty rival for Ruth in particular. Even though she has gotten along better with some of the other girls in the past, her snooty attitude and bad behavior have finally gotten on everybody’s nerves in this book.
When Mary is temporarily in control of a wagon Ruth and Helen are in, she does something reckless and almost gets them all killed until Ruth takes control of the reins and saves them. Everyone knows that the situation was Mary’s fault and that Ruth saved the day, and this is not the first time that Ruth has saved Mary from something. (By my count, it’s the third time.) However, Mary is ungrateful for her help and in denial that she did anything wrong (as usual). Just when everyone has decided that they’re completely fed up with her, the discovery of her brother changes things. While Mary is unmoved by Ruth saving her life, she is genuinely grateful to Ruth for saving her brother when he was ill and alone, which is astonishing for a girl who has never seemed to genuinely care about anybody else before. John Cox is an honest man, and Uncle Jabez’s investment turns out better than expected, guaranteeing that Ruth will be able to return to boarding school with her friends.
I want to warn readers that this is one of the Stratemeyer Syndicate books that has characters using racial slurs. The Ruth Fielding books were written before the Stratemeyer Syndicate revised its books in the mid-20th century to remove language like that. As in other Stratemeyer books, the use of inappropriate racial language is used to show which characters are crude and antagonistic, and in the case of this book, that character is Mary.
Mary Cox sneers at one of Bill Hick’s men, Jib, because he is of Native American descent, although Helen’s brother Tom stands up for Jib, pointing out that he’s much better educated than most of the men Mary knows, even though he works as a cowboy, and that Native Americans used to own the entire country before white people came, which is nothing to sneer at. Mary still insists on calling him a “savage”, mostly because Mary’s habitual method of communicating with people is to put someone else down so that she can look superior. This entire exchange takes place during an episode when Mary is trying to flirt with Tom, and bringing up racial slurs to put someone down during a flirtation with someone else is a very weird thing to do. It’s mostly a part of the story to show why Mary is such a pain. Tom just ends up being disgusted with her. It’s not the last time Mary uses racial slurs. At one point, she also calls the ranch cook a “fat and greasy Mexican squaw.” It’s pretty bad to see that kind of language in a kid’s book, even though it’s there to show that Mary has a nasty personality and behaves badly, which irritates and embarrasses people around her.
On a lighter note, the story is peppered with all sorts of Western words and slang. Since slang changes over time, and I’m not sure how people said things in the 1910s, I’m not sure how accurate the slang is for the time, but I’d like to call attention to a couple of words in the story that will be familiar to readers, but not in the way that they usually see them. “Cañon” is actually the Spanish word for “canyon”, pronounced the same way that we say in English, but the little tilde symbol over the ‘n’ adds the ‘y’ sound. The word that confused me the most was “kiotes,”, not because I didn’t know what they were talking about, but because that is not the Spanish version of the word. It looks like a phonetic spelling of the way we pronounce “coyotes” in English, but the Spanish word is also spelled “coyotes”, just pronounced a little differently. I didn’t know where the spelling “kiotes” came from, and I’d never seen it anywhere else before. I tried Googling it to find out more, and I saw a few mentions of the word with that spelling. One mention said that it was a Native American word, but it didn’t explain much more than that, so I can’t be sure. The book also uses the plural of “beef”, which is “beeves“, a word that used to be a joke with my brother and my friends the first time we heard it years ago because we thought it sounded funny. It also mentions the girls wearing “furbelow“, a word that I’d never heard before that means ruffles, pleats, or flounces in women’s clothing.
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.
Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1998.
Sammy Keyes decides that she wants to go trick-or-treating even though her grandmother thinks that she’s getting too old to do it. She’s still living secretly in her grandmother’s apartment in an apartment building that’s intended only for seniors, so she jumps at the chance to go out with friends on Halloween night. Dot (real name Margaret/Maggie), a new girl at school, invites her and Marissa to come over to her house to get ready before going out trick-or-treating, which works well for Sammy.
As Dot’s house, Dot is painting herself yellow as part of her bee costume. Sammy is going to color herself green so she can be a marsh monster (something she made up, but it sounds like a swamp monster from old movies). When Marissa comes, she brings Sammy a green sweater that she borrowed from her mother that would be good for a marsh monster costume, and the other girls help Marissa wrap herself in toilet paper for her mummy costume. As the girls set off to trick-or-treat, Sammy gets the idea to go by the old Bush House. The Bush House isn’t haunted, but it is a creepy place and there are stories about the crazy Bush Man who supposedly lives there and will jump out of the tangled bushes that surround the house and kill people. Sammy’s grandmother says that the stories are just stories and the old man who lives in the house is just a lonely old man, but Sammy thinks that it would be thrilling to visit the house and see it up close on Halloween.
As the girls approach the house, they almost collide with someone in a skeleton costume who’s running away. He looks bigger than the girls are, and he’s carrying a pillowcase that looks pretty full. The girls are startled, but Sammy is determined to go up to the Bush House and just knock on the door once for the experience of it. What Sammy sees when she knocks on the door is even more startling.
The door of the house just swings open, and there’s a pile of newspapers on the floor inside that are on fire. Sammy calls out to see if there’s anybody in the house. There’s no answer, so Sammy rushes inside and manages to put out the fire by smothering it with her marsh monster sweater. As the girls are about to leave, Sammy sees someone in a Frankenstein costume in a chair, and they scream and run outside. Then, Sammy realizes that the Frankenstein mask was on sideways, and it’s not easy to breathe in a sideways mask, when the nose and mouth holes don’t line up, so she decides that she has to go back and see if the person wearing the costume is really alright. It’s definitely a human in a costume, and not a dummy. When Sammy removes the mask, she at first fears that the person in the costume is dead because he’s so still, but it turns out that the person under the mask is the Bush Man. He’s tied up, has a head injury, and is barely conscious. He begs the girls for help. The Bush Man is having trouble talking, so after the girls untie him, he writes a message down on paper, asking the girls to go next door and call the police. He also wants to know if the girls saw the skeleton man.
The Bush Man’s real name is Chauncy LeBard, and the reason he can’t talk is that he’s had surgery on his throat because of smoking-related throat cancer. He needs a device held up to his throat to really speak in an electronic voice (an electrolarynx, I’ve seen one used before). While Dot and Marissa run next door and call the police, Sammy stays in the house with him. When the police come, Sammy uncomfortably recognizes the police officer who knows her from the previous book in the series, Officer Borsch. Last time, she and Marissa told him that Sammy is Marissa’s foster sister so they wouldn’t have to reveal where Sammy is actually living. Dot is confused when Marissa refers to Sammy as her “sister”, but she doesn’t give them away.
Mr. LeBard explains that the man in the skeleton costume had forced his way into the house and tied him up, but he doesn’t know who the man is or why he did it. The girls can’t fully describe the man because he was wearing a full-body costume, although they agree that he seemed like a full adult, not just a tall teen. It seems like the skeleton man was a thief because Mr. LeBard’s wallet and a pair of candlesticks are missing.
After the night’s adventures are over, Sammy winds up spending the night at the house of an elderly friend, Hudson Graham, because her grandmother’s nosy neighbor is awake, trying to find proof that Sammy is illegally living with her grandmother in their apartment building. Hudson agrees to let Sammy stay with him, and it turns out that he’s also an old friend of Chauncy LeBard. Mr. LeBard used to be a political science professor at the local college, and Hudson was one of his students. The two of them liked to get together and have political debates. Then, Mr. LeBard’s mother died, leaving him her estate. The local rumors say that’s when Mr. LeBard went crazy and became the Bush Man. The reality is that he developed health problems because of his smoking and didn’t want his old friends to know. Chauncy also has a brother, who was disinherited by their mother because she disapproved of his wife, but nobody knows why the mother didn’t like her.
Sammy can’t forget about what happened with Chauncy LeBard, even if she wants to. She at least has to go back to the Bush House to get Marissa’s mother’s sweater, which turns out to be worth a lot more than either of them thought. Marissa tells her that, even though her mother never wears that old green sweater, she did notice that it was gone and was upset because it turns out that it was a designer sweater that she bought for $500. Sammy is horrified because, having put out a fire with that sweater, she’s pretty sure that it’s done for, and if she has to come up with $500 to replace it, so is she! When Sammy goes to see Chauncy about the sweater, she starts learning more about him and how his inheritance from his mother turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. Sammy also starts to wonder whether theft was really the motive for what happened on Halloween. If Chauncy didn’t have that hole in his throat from his surgery, the sideways mask might have smothered him. Did the skeleton man want Chauncy dead?
The mystery of the skeleton man and the ruined $500 sweater aren’t Sammy only problems, though. At school, there’s a nasty rumor going around that Sammy has been calling a boy name Jared, trying to get him away from his girlfriend, Amber. Amber is angry with Sammy, and Sammy’s school nemesis, Heather, has been gleefully making sure that everyone in school knows about it in order to embarrass her as much as possible. Sammy knows that she has never called or even spoken to Jared in her life and doesn’t care about him, but it’s not easy to convince everyone else of that. So who really has been calling Jared? Sammy is sure that it’s really Heather, pretending to be her and saying embarrassing things to get her in trouble. It would certainly be in character for Heather to do that. The rumors are get so out of hand even in a day that one of Sammy’s teachers even suggests that maybe she should talk to a school counselor about her issues with Jared so it won’t affect her schoolwork.
Because the characters are middle school kids, Sammy decides that the best way to get evidence that Heather is her phone imposter is to crash her Halloween party. With everyone in costume and the whole class from school invited (except for Sammy, of course), Sammy, Marissa, and Dot are pretty sure that Sammy can sneak in with them, posing as Dot’s cousin “Nikki.” What could possibly go wrong?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
There are characters in the Sammy Keyes series who smoke, which was becoming uncommon in children’s books in general when I was young in the 1980s and 1990s because adults didn’t want to set a bad example for children. In the last book, the fortune teller character smoked, and it kind of surprised me, but it seems that the series follows the unspoken rule for children’s books that include smoking, that the only characters who do it are either villains or oddballs, not cool people to be imitated. This book confronts the issue of smoking more directly, with Chauncy LeBard’s throat cancer. Mean girl Heather also turns out to be a secret smoker who bribes one of her friends to spy on Sammy and her friends by giving her cigarettes. Sammy later finds out that Chauncy’s mother was also a smoker who died of lung cancer. Between Chauncy’s throat cancer and his mother’s death, the story helps illustrate the hard realities of long-term smoking. Chauncy seems to be living in reduced circumstances, without heat or electricity in his house. My first thought was that his mother’s medical expenses and subsequent funeral and Chauncy’s surgery drained his funds. Medical expenses have wiped out people’s savings before in the US, and I remember that one of the stories they told us to discourage smoking when I was in school years ago was about a woman who was forced to sell her family’s heirlooms to cover her cancer treatment. When Sammy meets Chauncy’s brother, Douglas, she finds out that Douglas was trying to get his mother and brother to quit smoking, but neither of them would, and that’s part of the reason for the family rift. Douglas says that if Chauncy has suffered health problems and blown through the family’s money, it’s really his own fault. It’s true that Chauncy should have taken the hint and quit smoking a long time ago, and he might have spared himself a lot of pain and misery if he had, but it turns out that he didn’t sell the family heirlooms to pay for his medical expenses. There was something in his house that was worth a great deal of money, something that Chauncy couldn’t bear to part with even to improve his own living situation because of the sentimental value. The thief is one of the few people who understood what Chauncy had and how to take it without him even noticing that it was gone right away. In a way, what the thief really stole is as much of a mystery for most of the book as who the thief was. The skeleton man turned out to be one of the people I suspected, but not my first suspect, so I was actually in suspense for most of the book.
As for the side plot with Heather calling Jared as Sammy: Oh, criminy! This is one of those ridiculous tween problems that seems so impossibly complicated when you’re in middle school but pretty dumb when you’re not. I appreciate that the math teacher is concerned when Sammy seems distracted in class and her work suffers, but I have trouble believing that an adult teacher would really be interested in rumors about who at school is calling who. I can’t remember any of my teachers ever caring about that stuff because adults usually know that rumors are wrong and that this kind of school drama passes faster if you don’t feed it. I don’t recall any massive rumor campaigns getting the attention of teachers when I was a kid, and I can’t imagine any of my old teachers giving rumors much weight or interest. I think my teachers would have just told us to stop being drama queens, focus on our work, and save the gossip for after school. A few of the more outspoken and direct communicators on the faculty would have flat out told us that gossip isn’t worth anything, that most of it is wrong anyway (that was actually the subject of a play I was in at school once), and that everyone will have gotten bored of whatever it is and moved on in a week or two because nothing we were talking about was really that earth-shaking and we all had the attention spans of chihuahuas on a sugar rush.
If I had to say something to these kids about this situation, I might just tell Sammy not to go calling people who don’t want to speak to her (if I were to assume that she was doing that) because it’s just going to annoy everyone. As for Amber, it’s not really her business to control either her boyfriend or the person calling him, whoever it is. Her decision is whether or not she’s satisfied with how Jared is responding to the situation and if she wants to still be his girlfriend when he acts that way. I’d make it a point to tell Jared, as the center of this drama, that if he doesn’t want to talk to somebody on the phone, he should just hang up without saying anything. You don’t need to stay on the line with someone who’s bothering you. With today’s caller IDs and cell phones that identify everyone who calls, it’s even easier because you don’t have to pick up the phone in the first place if you recognize a number you don’t want to answer. I can’t remember if they had those in the late 1990s, or if that was more an early 2000s development, but I know we definitely had answering machines, and I knew people who would just let the machine answer most of the time, only picking up if they recognized the voice leaving a message. Either way, just because someone calls you doesn’t mean that you have to take the call. On the other hand, if Jared likes being called by a girl other than his girlfriend, it might be time for him to rethink his relationship and decide what he really wants. That seems to be where Jared is. The book describes him as not being too bright and going on an ego trip from whoever keeps calling him. Actually, if I were one of the teachers, the people I’d really want to talk to the most would be Jared’s parents because I think they’d have more power to stop the situation than anybody, no matter who the caller was. Jared’s a kid who still lives at home, so his parents could answer the phone first and find out who wants to talk to him or let the machine record a message that could be used as proof against a prankster who’s bothering him if it gets excessive. Most child pranksters would give up if they called a few times and only got the boy’s parents, especially if the parents sound annoyed or angry when they answer. If Jared’s family got the call on a landline (probable for the 1990s), an annoyed parent could also *69 to last-call return the prankster’s number or look it up on their phone bill if they want to confront the prank caller or talk to the prankster’s parents. It’s annoying to deal with a prank calling kid but not really that hard. I didn’t have access to my parents’ phone bill as a kid, but everyone knew how to *69. Of course, if people in the book handled the situation sensibly, the book would probably be less exciting, and we wouldn’t get the payoff of seeing Sammy get the best of Heather.
There are some laughs when Sammy finds a clever way to record Heather making one of her calls and play the recording for the whole school. It was the sort of victory moment that I would have loved when I was about twelve. However, Sammy’s secret life living in her grandmother’s apartment complicates any problems that Sammy has with the authorities and school administration. After she turns Heather into a public spectacle during a school assembly, the vice principal insists that Sammy’s mother attend a parent-teacher conference. Since Sammy’s mother isn’t available, her grandmother has to attend instead, risking the exposure of their secret.
There is a little more insight into Heather when Sammy sees what Heather’s home and mother are like, but understanding doesn’t equal approval. Heather’s life isn’t perfect, and she lets slip at her party that her mother is a 40-year-old who dresses really inappropriately and flirts with much younger men, possibly including some of her daughter’s teenage classmates. She doesn’t appear to know about Heather’s smoking habit or the truth about any of the other things Heather does. Knowing that her mother is odd and may have really inappropriate taste in men/boys doesn’t make Heather any more likeable, though. At the end of the book, Heather’s outbursts in front of the vice principal may lead to the school insisting on counseling for Heather, which is a hopeful sign, but since Heather remains a bully mean girl for the rest of the series, it’s not that hopeful. You can lead a person to professional help, but you can’t make them internalize it and make use of it.
For me, one of the best parts of this book was the further development of the relationship between Sammy and her grandmother and Hudson Graham. There are hints that Hudson is romantically interested in Sammy’s grandmother, and he treats Sammy like his granddaughter. He seems to be in on the secret of Sammy living with her grandmother and is one of Sammy’s best protections against getting caught. He willingly aids and abets Sammy’s investigations, giving her knowledge and guidance whenever she needs it, and at the end of the book, he gives Sammy and her grandmother a ride to the parent teacher conference.
The ending of the story sets up the beginning of the third book in the series with Sammy being given the assignment of completing some volunteer hours to make up for the disruption that she caused at school.
Ruth Fielding at Lighthouse Point or Nita, the Girl Castaway by Alice B. Emerson (the Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1913.
When this story begins, Ruth’s friend Helen is finally being initiated into the society that Ruth and some of their friends founded at their boarding school, Briarwood Hall. In the second book of the Ruth Fielding series, when the girls started attending Briarwood, they found themselves caught between two rival social groups. One of them had the reputation for being led too much by the school faculty instead of the students themselves. Ruth, Helen, and some of the other girls craved more independence from the teachers. However, the other main social group, which was more student-led, was led by a sly bully of a girl named Mary Cox. That group had basically turned into a cult of personality centered around Mary Cox, where everyone else had to do whatever she said. The initiation into Mary Cox’s group was a mean trick, and Mary Cox, known as “the Fox” to many girls at school because of her slyness, used bullying tactics to dominate the other girls.
For awhile, Helen was a member of Mary Cox’s group, finding it exciting, but Mary Cox took exception to Ruth very soon after they first met because Ruth is more independent-minded and not easily led or intimidated by Mary. Although Ruth was one of the new girls at school and one of the youngest, she decided to assert her independence and create a new society without some of the problems that plagued the older ones. She found other interested girls who felt the same way she did, and they soon attracted more members who were similarly tired of the old groups. Ruth’s group is called the Sweetbriars, or S.B.s for short, although Ruth frequently reminds people that the group is not hers exclusively. To avoid the problem with Mary’s group, having everything monopolized by one person, Ruth established in the rules that leadership of the Sweetbriars will rotate, with no member serving as the club president for more than one year. That way, no one will have total control, and there will be opportunities for new people with fresh ideas to get more involved.
Helen, who eventually figured out what kind of person Mary was, stuck with her group for awhile anyway, out of loyalty to the membership, but since then, Mary’s group has fallen apart. Helen was one of the last to leave it, but Mary is still resentful that many of her old members have joined the Sweetbriars, including Helen.
Shortly after Helen’s initiation, Ruth and her friends are talking about taking a summer trip to a friend’s beach house. They started talking about their summer plans over the winter break, and now, they’re making the final arrangements. Mary, still looking for ways to cause trouble for Ruth and the Sweetbriars and regain her social dominance, tells Helen that the only reason she’s being invited to the beach house is because she’s now a Sweetbriar, implying that the other girls wouldn’t have wanted her around if she hadn’t joined their club. Frankly, Helen is a bit of a sucker and falls for Mary’s manipulation. She confronts the other girls about what Mary said.
The other girls all remind her that, first of all, they started planning this trip well before her initiation. Second, they are inviting people who aren’t part of the Sweetbriars. They’ve invited Madge, who is the student leader of the faculty-led social club, and she’s coming. They’ve also invited some boys, brothers of girls at the school and their friends, who attend the nearby boys’ boarding school. Helen says that Madge is also an honorary Sweetbriar, even though she’s in another club, and the other girls correctly realize that Mary’s comments to Helen were a manipulation to secure her own invitation. The girl whose family owns the beach house, Jennie Stone (nicknamed “Heavy” by the other girls because she’s “stout”), is actually one of Mary’s roommates at school, and she reminds Helen that she also invited Mary but that Mary was non-committal about accepting.
The girls debate among themselves whether or not Heavy should renew the invitation and encourage Mary to come with them. It’s pretty obvious to the girls (except maybe Helen) that Mary is being manipulative and probably has a trick up her sleeve. (They don’t call Mary “the Fox” for nothing, and if the reader has any doubts that this is a ploy, Mary is listening to this whole conversation through the keyhole.) Mercy, known for her outspokenness, thinks they should all just forget about Mary because her meanness will spoil the fun. Ruth doesn’t like Mary, either, but she can see that Helen will feel bad if they act exclusionary, and Mary will try to use that against them. Ruth tells Heavy that it’s only right for her to invite her roommate, and not only does Ruth want her to invite Mary, she insists on it.
So, Mary will be going to the beach house with the other girls, but before their trip even gets started, the situation is rocky. When the girls get on the boat that will take them from the school to the train station, Mary goofs off, teasing one of the other girls, and she ends up falling overboard. Since Mary can’t swim, Ruth has to jump in and save her. This is the second time that Ruth has saved Mary’s life since she arrived at the school. The first time, Mary credited the rescue to Helen’s brother, Tom, who also helped, but this time, Ruth gets the credit alone, and everyone witnessed it. One of the other girls says that Mary will have to change her attitude toward Ruth now, but Ruth knows that isn’t likely. Just because Mary might owe her some gratitude for the rescue doesn’t mean that Mary will like her, and Mary is the kind who would resent “owing” a person she doesn’t like.
Worse still, Ruth learns that her Uncle Jabez has lost a considerable amount of money in a bad investment, and he might not be able to afford to sent her back to Briarwood Hall! It’s a heavy blow because she’s finally settled in there and has a good group of friends. He’s become so paranoid about money again that he might also stop the money he was contributing toward Mercy’s education, which would be a double blow.
Ruth is an ambitious girl and determined not to give up on her education so easily. Raising the money for her next year’s tuition would be difficult all on her own, but Ruth knows that she has to find a way to do it over the summer. At first, she isn’t sure that she should go to the seaside with the others as planned, but Uncle Jabez surprises her by giving her some money and telling her to go. As the girls set out on their trip, Heavy also tells Ruth that Mary Cox’s family is having trouble. Mary’s father died a year ago, leaving the family with money problems, and her brother left college to tend to his father’s business affairs. Now, her brother has disappeared on a business trip, and she and her mother are worried about him. With the girls’ problems hanging over their heads, they all set off for Heavy’s family’s seaside bungalow at Lighthouse Point.
When the party arrives at Lighthouse Point in Maine, there’s a storm, and they hear that there’s a shipwreck on a nearby reef. The young people all go down to the seaside to watch the rescue efforts. At first, they think it’s all very exciting, but then, the destructive power of the storm and the real risk to the rescuers makes them realize the seriousness of the situation. They watch, horrified, as a lifeboat overturns in the storm. It seems like there won’t be any survivors of the wreck, but some people are saved.
Among the survivors is a girl who calls herself Nita. Nita, who is about the same age as Ruth and her friends, admits to being a runaway, but she is evasive about where she came from and what her situation is. The ship captain’s wife, Mrs. Kirby, is also rescued, and she says that it’s her impression that Nita was not well cared for when they first met and that Nita was trying to go to New York, possibly to stay with some relatives there. Nita says that she wants to go to New York, but she is still evasive about why, what she plans to do there, or if she knows anyone there.
In spite of her recent traumatic experience, Nita is very self-controlled, mentally sharp, and even a bit sly. The party of young people and Heavy’s Aunt Kate take Nita with them to the bungalow where they give her a bed and question her more about her past. She lets a couple of things slip, referring to a man named Jib Pottoway, who was a “part Injun” (that’s how Nita puts it, she means that part of his family is Native American, saying that “Jib” is short for Jibbeway, which is apparently either an older version or slang corruption of Ojibwe) “cow puncher” who lent her books to read. Nita apparently came east from somewhere in the western United States, having romantic notions from books about how poor girls can make friends with wealthy families in the east who can help them with their education and help them rise up in society. She’s been finding out that the realities of the east are very different from what she’s read in books, but she still has her stubborn pride. Nita says that she can move on if the others don’t want her around or if they’re getting too nosy about her past, but Aunt Kate is reluctant to let her go until she knows whether Nita is going to be able to manage on her own or has somewhere to go.
Since Nita has only the clothes she was rescued in and those are ruined, the part gets her some new clothes to wear. They notice that a somewhat disreputable man named Jack Crab seems strangely interested in Nita, as if he recognizes her from somewhere. There is an explanation later when Tom picks up a newspaper clipping that Jack Crab drops about a girl named Jane Ann Hicks, who has run away from her wealthy uncle who owns a ranch in Montana. Nita certainly first the description of the missing Jane Ann. In her uncle’s and the reporter’s words, “‘Jane Ann got some powerful hifalutin’ notions.’ She is now a well-grown girl, smart as a whip, pretty, afraid of nothing on four legs, and just as ignorant as a girl brought up in such an environment would be. Jane Ann has been reading novels, perhaps. As the Eastern youth used to fill up on cheap stories of the Far West, and start for that wild and woolly section with the intention of wiping from the face of Nature the last remnant of the Red Tribes, so it may be that Jane Ann Hicks has read of the Eastern millionaire and has started for the Atlantic seaboard for the purpose of lassoing one–or more–of those elusive creatures.” They’ve got her pegged, although the “or more” part of lassoing millionaires makes her sound more like a gold-digging adventuress than an overly-romantic teenager who’s read too many novels. However, if Nita really is Jane Ann Hicks with a wealthy, ranch-owning uncle, why would she need to find a wealthy benefactor to buy her the piano she says she wants and fund her education?
Nita runs away from the beach house, but unfortunately, she trusts the wrong person and is soon in need of Ruth and her friends to rescue her again.
The book is now public domain and is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies) and Project Gutenberg.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Racial Language and Other Issues
I think I should start with a warning that there are some issues with racial language in this book, which is pretty common with early Stratemeyer Syndicate books. I already mentioned the word “Injun” and the newspaper article that mentions “Red Tribes” above. I also noticed that in the article that describes Jane Ann’s disappearance, it is mentioned that she was raised by her uncle alone at his ranch “for a woman has never been at Silver Ranch, save Indian squaws and a Mexican cook woman.” I’m sure they’d be thrilled to find that they don’t count. The Stone family’s cook at their beach house is a black lady called “Mammy Laura” who speaks in a stereotypical way with phrases like “lawsy massy.” (Although, to be fair, Mr. Hicks the rancher also speaks like a stereotypical cowboy, so stereotypes are being used in a very general way and not directed at any group in particular. I know, it’s still not great.)
It’s also a little uncomfortable how they keep referring to Mercy as “the lame girl” or “the cripple.” They don’t seem to mean it as an insult, more as a general description, and it’s true that it’s one of Mercy’s characteristics and a major part of her storyline in the first book. Her health has improved since then, although it’s established that she’s never going to be able to walk as well as other people and will always need some assistance, like crutches. It’s just that it feel like we’re being beaten over the head with it when they keep repeating that she’s “lame.” I think they’re trying to do it as a descriptor, trying to make the writing a little more colorful by referring to characters by some part of their appearance and not just by name, like how they keep calling Ruth “the girl from the Red Mill”, but it falls flat because it seems insensitive and shallow. First of all, this isn’t something that readers are likely to forget and need to be constantly reminded about Mercy. Second, it gives the impression that this is Mercy’s main characteristic. Mercy is the most blunt and sarcastic character among the girls, and she has quite a lot of personality, so she does have characteristics beyond her disability. Third, in the first book, they establish how much Mercy hates her disability and how bitter she was about it until she found a way to improve her situation, make friends, and move forward with her life and education. It doesn’t seem like she’d enjoy people constantly calling her “cripple” and “lame”, and it would be completely in character for her to bluntly say so if asked, so it’s a little uncomfortable when the invisible narrator of the book keeps doing it.
Heavy’s nickname is also a little irritating. She doesn’t seem to mind it, but this is a good opportunity to point out that older Stratemeyer Syndicate books do have a tendency to use characters’ weights as one of their defining characteristics. Even up through later series, like Nancy Drew, characters are often specifically described in terms like “slender”, “slim”, “stout”, etc. Typically, in Stratemeyer Syndicate stories, the slimmer characters are either the main characters or the nicer or more talented ones, while the fatter ones are either more comic relief, socially awkward, or villains. Actually, one of the things I like about Heavy is that she doesn’t fall into this pattern. Heavy is pleasant, cheerful, practical, and generous.
The Runaway
As Ruth considers Jane Ann’s position and why she would run away from her uncle, she remembers that she also considered running away from Uncle Jabez when she first came to live with him. Both Ruth and Jane Ann are orphans who depend on their uncles, who control the family finances and their education. Jane Ann’s uncle is far richer than Uncle Jabez, but he also has firm ideas about the kind of life Jane Ann is going to live as the future heiress to his ranch and what kind of education she’s going to need. He rejects the kind of education a girl would have on the east coast of the US as being too “effete” for a young woman who will someday have to manage a ranch with tough “cow punchers.” However, Jane Ann wants some of the refinements of east coast culture, like her own piano, an education, and the company of other girls her own age who share her interests, none of which are available at her uncle’s ranch. It’s true that Jane Ann has a lot of unrealistic notions about life from the books she’s been reading, but that’s largely because cheap romantic novels have been her main source of information about life outside of her uncle’s ranch. Getting an education and more interaction with the outside world would do her some good. Actually, I think Jane Ann’s problem does reflect a problem that exists even in modern education, when parents and instructors are so focused on job training and the roles they think the young are going to fill in life that they neglect the subjects that give students a broader view of life and how the world works, their roles as human beings outside of career roles, and their relationships to other human beings in the world.
When Mr. Hicks comes to the beach house later, looking for his niece, Ruth talks to him about what she knows about Jane Ann/Nita and what Jane Ann really wants. Mercy also adds some criticism because she has “a sharp tongue and a sharper insight into character”, pointing out to Hicks in no uncertain terms what a young girl needs and how she feels about things. Her criticism of the name “Jane Ann”, which seems as dull and plain to the other girls as Jane Ann thought it was herself, seems a little overdone. Jane Ann’s uncle picked that name because it was his grandmother’s name, and it is traditional for certain names to be reused in families. It’s not as romantic and modern as the girls think it should be, but it’s also simple and classic and could really belong to just about any time period, so I don’t think it’s as old-fashioned as they’re implying. I do appreciate Mercy’s straightforward talk and how she speaks her mind without being intimidated by either Hicks’s age or wealth. Mercy really is a character with a personality, which makes her different from some of the other cookie-cutter characters in Stratemeyer Syndicate books with little variation in their personalities, and she’s one of my favorites in this series.
Like other books in the series, there is an element of mystery, but the book tends to lean more toward adventure. However, as the series goes on, the stories are becoming more mystery, and this one is more mystery than previous books. There is first the question of who Nita really is. The newspaper clipping provides a clue, although it’s not a firm answer until Jane Ann’s uncle shows up, looking for her. Then, there is the question of where Jane Ann went after she left the beach house. Ruth is sure that Crab had something to do with her disappearance, but she and her friends have to do some intentional investigating and searching for Jane Ann to rescue her. In spite of some of the problematic language, I like the direction this series is heading.
At the end of the story, there is still something unresolved, and that’s how Ruth is going to pay for her boarding school. Jane Ann’s uncle offers a reward for rescuing her, but Ruth can’t bring herself to accept it because she doesn’t want it to appear that she was only helping Jane Ann for the sake of the money. Instead, she and her friends will be rewarded with a trip to the ranch where Jane Ann and her uncle live.
Odd Piece of Trivia
When Jack Crab tries to pester Nita about what her name is, Mercy bluntly tells him off using a children’s retort:
“Puddin’ Tame!” retorted Mercy, breaking in, in her shrill way. “And she lives in the lane, and her number’s cucumber! There now! do you know all you want to know, Hardshell?”
I not only appreciate that she pokes fun at Crab’s name, calling him “Hardshell“, but she brings up an interesting piece of children’s lore. The “Puddin’ Tame” retort was old-fashioned when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was a popular playground retort for decades, maybe over a hundred years, although I’m not sure of its actual age, and it’s possible that it’s still circulating in schools and playgrounds somewhere. When kids say it, the quick rhyme is more important than the meaning, although there are theories that “Pudding Tame” or “Pudding Tane” (as some people say it) is a reference to a devil character called Pudding of Thame.
#1 Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill or Jasper Parloe’s Secret, by Alice B. Emerson (The Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1913.
In the first book of the Ruth Fielding mysteries, one of the older series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, young Ruth Fielding has recently lost her parents and is traveling by train to New York state to live with her Great Uncle Jabez. She has never met him before, but she knows that he lives in a red mill outside of a small town. She meets the town doctor on the train when he notices how sad she looks and explains to him why she’s traveling to her great uncle’s home. Her old home was in a poor area, and although she would have liked to stay with her friends there after her father’s death, no one would have been able to keep her. Then, the train unexpectedly stops when the engineer sees what looks like a warning light.
It turns out that the light is a red lamp tied to a large mastiff, who seems very upset. Ruth, who is good with dogs, is the only person who is able to calm the dog enough to get a look at the dog’s tag. It turns out that the dog belongs to Tom Cameron, who doesn’t live too far from where her Great Uncle lives. Tom Cameron comes from a wealthy family, and he has a reputation for being a wild boy. The lamp tied to the dog appears to come from his motorcycle, and there is a note tied to the dog that appears to be written in blood and only says, “Help.” Ruth is very upset, thinking that the dog’s owner must be badly hurt somewhere. The adults around her aren’t so sure because they think Tom could be playing a prank, but they take the dog aboard the train. The town doctor says that it’s possible that Tom could have had an accident on his motorcycle, and when they get to town, the town doctor, some of the other men, and Ruth set out to see if the dog will lead them to where Tom is. Ruth needs to come because the dog behaves better for her than for the men.
When they find Tom, he really is hurt, having had a motorcycle accident. He is barely conscious and muttering, “It was J. Potter. He did it!” They don’t know what it means, although it sounds like he’s accusing Ruth’s great uncle of causing his accident. By the time they get Tom to safety, it is late, and it turns out that Ruth’s uncle visited the train station at the wrong time, before the train even arrived and not seeing Ruth, assumed that she wasn’t on the train and left. Because her uncle lives outside of town and it’s rather late, the station master, Mr. Curtis takes Ruth to stay the night at his house with his family. Mrs. Curtis is very nice, but Mercy is a young invalid. She doesn’t like other children because they stare at her because of her disability, and she can’t play the games other children play.
The next day, Helen Cameron, Tom Cameron’s twin sister, comes to the Curtis house to give Ruth a ride to her great uncle’s house. Ruth likes Helen, but Helen tells her that her great uncle is a good miller but has a reputation as a miser, and she’s surprised that he decided to take her in. That worries Ruth, but Helen assures her that there will be others in town who would be willing to have her if she can’t stand living with her great uncle. In fact, Helen’s father even told her that he would be interested in having Ruth come to stay with them because she would be a good companion for Helen. Tom and Helen’s mother died when they were babies, and Helen would appreciate having another girl in the house. It’s a generous offer, but first, Ruth needs to meet her great uncle and see what he’s like.
Great Uncle Jabez is very much like Helen described. He is a hard worker but an impatient, hard-hearted, and self-centered man who doesn’t do much of anything without analyzing what he can get out of it for himself. He makes it clear that if Ruth wants to stay with him, he’ll expect her to work and make herself useful to the household. There is only one other person who lives with Uncle Jabez, the housekeeper, who likes to be called Aunt Alvira, although she is no relation to either Jabez or Ruth. Aunt Alvira tells Ruth that her uncle is a good man for giving her the position of housekeeper when she had nowhere else to live and no family of her own. She is more warm and affectionate than Ruth’s great uncle, making Ruth feel more at home. Ruth sees that she can be helpful to Aunt Alvira by assisting her with household chores. Aunt Alvira is getting older and has aches and pains that cause her to often exclaim, “Oh, my back, and oh, my bones!” She appreciates having a strong young person to help her. Uncle Jabez becomes appreciative when he sees that Ruth knows how to do chores and make herself useful, and Aunt Alvira’s affection makes Ruth’s new home bearable for her.
One day, when Tom is feeling better, he and Helen come to see if Ruth wants to take a ride with them. Aunt Alvira says it’s okay for her to go, and while they’re out in the Camerons’ car, they witness the breaking of the mill’s dam. The young people realize that they need to warn others who are in danger. They drive around, shouting warnings for people to get out of the way, and they finally take refuge at the red mill, which is soon cut off like an island. The mill’s office is partially destroyed in the flood, but the mill itself is undamaged. Uncle Jabez makes it safely back to the mill, although he has to drive his mules hard to make it through the waters. Unfortunately, there are two major losses: Ruth’s trunk, which Jabez was bringing to the mill from the train station and was lost out the back of his cart in the water, and Uncle Jabez’s money box, which was in the mill office and contained his life’s savings, all of the cash he had in the world. Uncle Jabez hasn’t trusted banks since the last time he lost money when the town’s bank failed. Everyone thinks that the money box was swept away when the office was partly destroyed by the flood, but Uncle Jabez has other suspicions when he learns that Jasper Parloe, a disreputable man, was near the mill office around the time when it was destroyed.
The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.
My Reaction
As one of the earlier Stratemeyer Syndicate books, there are elements of adventure and general fiction as well as mystery. In fact, there is more of these elements than there is of mystery. There are the disasters that Ruth and her friends must confront, the motorcycle accident and the flood caused by the breaking of the dam, but they don’t really seem to try to investigate any further into these for much of the book. They also don’t really try to investigate the disappearance of Uncle Jabez’s money box, thinking that it just washed away in the flood, even though Jasper Parloe suspiciously ran to where he knew it was and then ran away immediately after. I don’t think it’s even that much of a spoiler to tell you that Jasper Parloe did indeed take Uncle Jabez’s money box. The fact that he has a “secret” is right in the title of the book, there are no other suggested secrets about him, he was right on the scene to take it at the time it disappeared, and there are absolutely no other suspects other than the flood.
Ruth has legitimate complaints about her uncle. Insisting that Ruth help out around the house isn’t bad, but at first, he resists the idea of sending Ruth to school, asking basically, “What’s in it for me?” Uncle Jabez never does anything for anybody without seeing what’s in it for him. Even though Aunt Alvira credits Uncle Jabez with giving her a home, Jabez got a free servant out of it, so it’s not like he was really doing Alvira a favor as a Good Samaritan. In fact, in places where slavery and indentured servitude are illegal, most people would pay a live-in housekeeper a salary as well as providing them with a place to live as part of the job. Jabez isn’t even doing that. His “favor” gets him free services most people would pay for.
I don’t fault him too much with not trying to immediately get Ruth some new clothes after he lost her trunk in the flood. While he should replace the clothes as soon as possible, his money was missing, so he might not have had the funds. Still, he is not the least bit sympathetic to Ruth about her loss and even seems to take some pleasure in telling her that he lost her trunk, which is awful. Uncle Jabez does get better, though, especially after he gets his money back.
A fun, expected part of the story is the fondness that unexpectedly develops between Uncle Jabez and Mercy Curtis. From the beginning of the book, Mercy is bitter about her physical condition and the fact that she has to use a wheelchair. The book makes it clear that Mercy’s bitterness is poisoning her chances of making friends in her community. She thinks that other people are mocking her or looking down on her for her disability. A major part of that exists only in Mercy’s own mind because she herself is upset about being disabled, so she exaggerates what she thinks other people are thinking about her or saying about her behind her back, and she’s often wrong. One thing that she’s not wrong about is that people pity her, and even if they’re not being mocking of her, they are sometimes overly sweet or pitying in their tone. She takes that as mockery, although it’s really meant to be a kind of sympathy. Mercy ends up liking Ruth because Ruth doesn’t do that around her. Ruth feels pity for Mercy, both because of her physical problem and because of her bitter attitude that’s making her more unhappy, but she purposely doesn’t show it because she knows that would only annoy Mercy more. Instead, she just speaks calmly and nicely to Mercy about things that she’s experiencing and finds pleasant, and that draws Mercy out of her shell. When Ruth describes her life at the mill while visiting Mercy, Mercy admits that she’s often admired the red mill and the grounds around it from a distance, the first time she really admits to liking anything. Most of the time, Mercy has a sharp tongue and is full of criticism. However, she expresses an interest in seeing the red mill up close and meeting Uncle Jabez. Uncle Jabez fascinates Mercy because he is ugly. Because Mercy is physically imperfect, she is drawn to other people who are also physically imperfect, and the fact that Uncle Jabez is blunt and biting in his speech also fits well with Mercy’s personality. She knows that Uncle Jabez won’t talk to her with any of the pitying sweetness that she can’t stand. In return, Uncle Jabez is pleasantly surprised that Mercy honestly likes him for being the crotchety old coot he is and enjoys letting her come for a visit at the mill. The twins take her to the mill in their car, which is a treat for Mercy, and the visit with other people who accept her for who she is does her good.
Stories about invalids getting better through improving their attitude and outlook on life were a common trope in children’s literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Secret Garden was only published two years prior to this book. However, I was pleased that they chose to make it clear that Mercy has a genuine physical disability, not one that’s all in her head and vanishes as soon as she starts thinking pleasant thoughts. It makes the book more grounded in reality. Mercy did have a real problem that would be genuinely upsetting to have, and while making new friends and getting a new perspective on life did help her feel better, it takes real medical intervention to bring about improvement in her physical condition. Before the end of the book, the local doctor brings a specialist surgeon to see Mercy, and Mercy gets an operation that restores some of the use of her legs, giving her improvement that she can genuinely feel glad about. She doesn’t get completely better, which also is true to life with serious physical conditions. She still has to walk with crutches, so it’s not like they gave her an unrealistic, magical cure. However, Mercy accepts the marked improvement in her condition for the blessing it is. No longer being dependent on a wheelchair means that she can do more things than she was previous able to do, and in the next book in the series, she is even able to attend boarding school with Ruth and Helen.
This is one of the most famous time slip stories for children! I remember either reading it or having it read to me when I was a kid, but I have to admit that I really remembered only the broad strokes of the story until I reread it as an adult.
When the story begins, Tom Long is sad and angry because his brother, Peter, has caught the measles, and it’s going to ruin their summer holidays. The two of them originally planned to spend the summer building a tree house in the apple tree in their backyard garden, but now, Tom is being rushed away from the house (sent into exile, as he thinks of it) so that he won’t catch the measles from his brother. Tom thinks that he would rather be sick with Peter than sent away by himself.
Tom is going to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen. His aunt and uncle are kind people who like kids, and in a way, it makes Tom feel worse because it makes him seem unreasonable for resenting spending the summer with them. If they were cruel, he could run away and everyone would tell him he was right for doing so, but when people are nice to you, there’s less to complain about, and Tom is in a complaining mood. The major problem with staying with Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen is that they live in a small flat with no garden. Tom can’t even get out and see the sights of the city because he’s supposed to be in quarantine for awhile, just in case he’s already caught the measles from Peter and it hasn’t started to show yet. (It takes about 10 to 14 days after infection before measles symptoms start to show, so Tom has to stay in quarantine that long to be sure he’s not sick. Anybody with experience of coronavirus quarantines knows the drill, even if they didn’t before.) So, basically, Tom is going to be temporarily shut up like he’s sick, with the goal of making sure that he’s not sick and not going to be, but without the company of his brother or the comforts of his own home. They’re doing it for Tom’s welfare because measles can have serious side effects, and it’s not something anybody wants to get. There are sound reasons for trying to both protect Tom from infection if he hasn’t been infected already and also trying to protect others that Tom might infect while they’re waiting to make sure that he’s really okay, but it’s still a depressing situation. They’re planning on Tom quarantining for ten days with his aunt and uncle, just about a week and a half, provided that he doesn’t show any symptoms that would force him to quarantine for longer. The only people Tom is allowed to see during his quarantine period are people who have already had measles and are now immune to it, like his aunt and uncle.
The flat where Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen live is in an old house in or near Ely, England that has been divided up into flats. It’s not a bad house, but Tom doesn’t think it seems particularly welcoming. He’s also a little offended that the guest room where he’s supposed to be staying used to be a nursery and has the characteristic bars on the windows that old-fashioned nurseries have to keep children from falling out. Aunt Gwen explains that those are left over from when the house used to be a private home and aren’t meant for him, but Tom is in no mood to be treated like he’s a baby. The one feature of the house he likes is the old grandfather clock that belongs to Mrs. Bartholomew, the owner of the house and his aunt and uncle’s landlady, who lives upstairs. The clock’s chimes can be heard all over the house, and it’s something of a joke and a source of irritation to the people living in the house because, even though the clock keeps perfect time, it never chimes the right number. The chimes are always some random number for no apparent reason. Of course, there is a reason.
Tom is bored and restless. All he has for entertainment is crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and his aunt’s old books from when she was a kid, and the books are just school stories for girls, so Tom doesn’t find them interesting. Tom helps his aunt in the kitchen, and he loves her cooking, but it’s a bit rich and gives him indigestion. Because of that, he often has trouble sleeping, but his aunt and uncle insist that he get ten hours of sleep a night because that’s what kids his age are supposed to need. They won’t let him read or get up or do anything when he can’t sleep, so he just has to lie awake, bored.
One night, while lying awake in bed, Tom hears the clock downstairs strike thirteen. That strikes him as odd because he’s never heard a clock strike thirteen times before, and he didn’t even think it was possible for a wrong clock to do that. He starts considering that maybe there is actually a hidden, thirteenth hour of night that his uncle knows nothing about, so that one free hour should belong to Tom, to with as he wishes. He’s not sure that idea really makes sense, but he feels compelled to get up and go downstairs to investigate.
When Tom gets downstairs, he can’t read the clock because it’s too dark, and he can’t find the light switch. Then, he gets the idea to open the back door so he can read the clock by moonlight. However, when he opens the back door, he sees a beautiful lawn and garden instead of the empty yard his aunt and uncle told him was there. At first, Tom is angry that they lied to him about there not being a garden. He thinks to himself that he’s going to come back and see the garden in daylight. As he’s heading back inside to look at the clock, he encounters a young maid. He’s surprised to see the girl enter someone else’s flat without knocking or ringing the bell in the middle of the night. Then, he begins to notice that the house is different from the way he saw it during the day. The grandfather clock is still there, but the laundry box, milk bottles, and travel posters have been replaced by an umbrella stand, a dinner gong, an air gun, and a fishing rod. The girl calls out that she’s lit a fire in “the parlour,” and Tom watches as she crosses to another room, kind of melting through the door instead of opening it like a living person would. Is Tom seeing a ghost? Then, the vision fades, all of the old-fashioned furnishing are gone, and everything in the downstairs hall looks the way Tom remembered it from his arrival.
In spite of realizing that the house might be haunted, Tom is happier from his adventures and knowing about the beautiful garden outside. He now has something more exciting to think about than just being bored. However, he’s still mad at his aunt and uncle for keeping him in the dark about the garden outside. He tries to hint to them that he knows about it, but when he mentions seeing hyacinths blooming, his aunt tells him that’s impossible because it’s summer, and hyacinths are out of season. Tom is unsettled by that, and he runs downstairs to check. When he gets there, the lock on the back door is different from what he remembered the night before, and when he opens the back door, there’s no garden there, only the dust bins his aunt and uncle mentioned and a man working on a car. Tom asks the man, who lives in the flat where Tom saw the maid enter to light a fire if he has a maid, and man tells him no. Tom tries to ask him about the garden, but he starts crying when he realizes that the garden couldn’t have been real. The man tries to ask him what’s wrong, but Tom doesn’t want to explain it. He stops Tom from running into old Mrs. Bartholomew, who has come downstairs to wind the grandfather clock. Tom watches the winding process with fascination and feels calmer.
Tom begins to reason out how he could have seen a garden the night before when there isn’t one there now. He’s sure that he didn’t just dream it or imagine it, so he decides to conduct an investigation. He considers the different pieces of the puzzle – the house that looks different at night, the clock that chimes thirteen times, and trees that are now in the backyards of neighboring houses but which must have been part of the large garden he saw. Tom begins writing a series of letters to his brother about what he’s experiencing and his investigations into it, which he asks Peter to burn after reading. At night, he stays up, waiting for the clock to chime thirteen again … and it does. When it does, everything is as he saw it before – the different furnishings downstairs, the different latch on the back door, and best of all, the garden.
Tom visits the garden every night, noting that every time he goes, it’s a different time of day or a different season of the year. Time in the garden doesn’t correspond to time in the real world. Months can pass between his visits, even though Tom goes there every single night. It seems like, no matter how long Tom spends there, exploring, only a few minutes of the night has passed when he returns. One night, he sees a tree struck by lightning, but the next time he looks, the tree is just fine. Tom starts a discussion with his aunt and uncle about time without fully explaining why he wants to know how time works. When he poses the question of how a tree could fall over and then be standing upright again later, his aunt thinks that he’s talking about fairy tale or something he dreamed or imagined. His uncle says that it’s impossible without turning back the clock. The mention of a clock being turned back intrigues Tom, but his uncle says that’s just an expression, meaning to relive the past, which nobody can actually do. It’s a clue to Tom, though, about what’s really happening in the garden.
Tom also quickly realizes that he seems to have little substance when he’s in the garden. He can climb trees in the garden, but he can’t open doors by himself, for some reason. If he concentrates hard, he can walk through doors like a ghost, which is both frightening and fascinating. Also, most of the people he encounters can’t see him. Animals react to his presence, but people tend to look through him or past him and don’t seen to hear anything he says. There are three brothers who spend time in the garden, and Tom thinks that he’d like to be friends with the middle boy, James, but James never sees or hears him. The boys have a younger cousin, Hatty, who follows them around. They’re not very nice to her and often ignore her or exclude her from their activities, but Tom discovers, to his surprise, that Hatty can both see and hear him. Hatty becomes Tom’s friend, and they begin talking to each other, playing, and exploring the garden together.
Hatty is a sad and lonely girl who often plays imaginary games by herself in the garden. She tells Tom that she’s a captive princess, that the cruel woman who claims to be her aunt isn’t really her aunt, and that the mean boys aren’t her real cousins. The truth is that Hatty is an orphan and that her aunt resents her being her responsibility. Hatty’s aunt and cousins have money and servants, but Hatty is emotionally neglected. She has no one to be close to and share secrets with except for Tom.
Tom is so captivated by his shared time in the garden with Hatty that he tells his aunt that he’d like to stay longer. His uncle is mystified that Tom is really that interested in staying with them because he knows their apartment is boring, but his aunt is enthusiastic about him spending an extra week beyond his quarantine so she can show him some of the sights of the city. Then, Tom catches a cold that requires him to stay in bed for longer, but he is still able to visit the garden at night.
By this time, Tom has figured out that the garden once existed in the history of the house and that Hatty was someone who lived in the house at some point in the past, but he doesn’t really understand how or why he is able to visit her in the no-longer-existing garden at night. He still thinks that Hatty might be a ghost and even the garden might be some kind of ghost that haunts the house. However, Hatty tells Tom that she thinks he’s the ghost. Tom denies it, knowing that he’s not dead in his own time, but it’s true that, whenever he’s in the garden with Hatty, he is somewhat non-corporeal, unable to affect physical objects but able to walk through solid objects when he tries, and he is invisible to most people. Tom says that the only reason why he can walk through closed doors is that the garden itself, and every physical thing in it, is a ghost – he’s not passing through them so much as they’re passing through him because he’s solid, and they’re not really. Tom and Hatty argue about who’s a ghost and who’s not because, from each of their perspectives, they’re both real and alive, but yet, the entire situation is unreal. Tom sees pieces of the past changing and disappearing, and he knows what’s real in his time. However, Hatty can also say the same – she knows what’s real in her time, and Tom has a definite ghostly quality when he’s in her garden. What is the truth, and how long can the two of them continue meeting like this?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Chinese). It’s been made into tv versions (parts sometimes appear on YouTube) and a movie in 1999. The movie is also available online through Internet Archive.
If you’re interested in other time slip stories, see my list of Time Travel books.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Things to Do
First of all, I just have to get it out of my system: Tom’s family is not a creative bunch. I know the aunt and uncle took Tom in on short notice, but I’m just saying that with a little imagination, they could find more things for Tom to do during his quarantine. Two weeks is not that long if you have things to do and think about. There were always art supplies at my house when I was a kid, and even if you don’t have them on hand, paper and colored pencils or crayons aren’t very expensive. The cooking is a good activity, and maybe the aunt could teach Tom some new recipes that he could make by himself. With as much as the aunt is cooking, she’s also probably using things that come in boxes and cans, and boxes and cans can be made into things. Also, they could get the kid a book on something more interesting he can learn and use, like magic tricks he can practice or secret codes. They wouldn’t have to buy him books for just a couple of week, either. They could just go to the local library and ask the children’s librarian for some recommendations. They could teach him how to fold different kinds of paper airplanes or carve things out of soap (save the shavings in an old nylon stocking – it’s almost like soap on a rope you can use in the shower) or make a kite he can fly in the park when his quarantine ends. Heck, if he had a deck of cards, he could at least learn different types of solitaire games. There are over one hundred variations, and the kid just has to be entertained for a couple of weeks, 14 days. The activities don’t have to be very impressive if you can think of enough of them to have a different one each day for him to try to break up the monotony of the the more usual stand-bys, like reading and puzzles. Just to prove that it’s possible, I made a list:
Drawing – I mentioned before that paper and crayons or colored pencils aren’t too expensive, and he doesn’t need to be any good at it. It’s just a challenge and would give him something creative to do, maybe while listening to music on the radio or something. Bonus points if you know enough about art to tell him about different styles of art and suggest that he try some different styles, like cubism or surrealism. He could also use art supplies to map out things, like a plan of the tree house he and Peter want to build. After he’s done that, he could draw a creative map of an imaginary castle or mansion or a haunted house or an entire amusement park or an elaborate clubhouse he would build if there were no restrictions on space or money. It doesn’t have to be possible or even drawn particularly well as long as it’s entertaining.
Paper airplanes or origami – You can make some fun things out of folded paper, and if you know how to make different styles of paper airplanes or can find a book about it, you can conduct tests to determine which styles fly the best. Yes, you then have a lot of paper airplanes laying around, but if your goal is to pass the time, cleaning up also takes up time.
Card games – I covered that. There are a lot of things you can do with a deck of cards, even if you’re just playing solitaire. He could try to build a house of a cards. He could also learn card tricks and the order of poker hands. (I know that not every family would be okay with a kid learning the rules to a gambling game, but my parents never minded as long as we didn’t gamble with money, and it’s the sort of mildly daring activity that appeals to kids. Besides, this kid has nobody else to play with right now, except for his aunt and uncle.)
Magic tricks – I covered this one. There are (and were back then) books of magic tricks that a boy could study, many of which use ordinary objects that a person could find around the house. He could practice a new trick each day or spend an entire day with one book, trying anything that looks interesting.
Secret codes – Again, they had books about this even back then, and once you know a few principles, you can start making your own codes. When I was a kid, I liked to experiment with basic alphabet shifts, and secret codes often formed the basis of treasure hunts that I had with my brother. Tom can’t have a treasure hunt for his brother yet, but he could be encouraged to plan one. Give him a notebook where he can practice his codes and make notes of possible hiding places. He can also write coded messages to send to his brother and challenge him to read them.
Current events – Kids don’t often read the newspaper, but his aunt and uncle could introduce him to features of the newspaper and what’s happening in the world. A new newspaper arrives every day, and it’s a source of reading material. At least, he could look at the comics or the sports pages, if he likes sports.
Model town or castle – As I said, there are probably cardboard boxes and cans being thrown out of this house, and they could be appropriated for some kind of craft project, ideally one that would take awhile for Tom to build and that he could add to each day. One of the best things to make out of random junk would be a town or a castle. Tin cans are towers and turrets, and cardboard boxes are the main buildings. Cover the outsides of the cans and boxes with plain paper and draw on them for decoration. Make people out of paper and cardboard. It could turn out amazing if he’s willing to put the time into making it as detailed as possible, but if it doesn’t turn out amazing, it’s okay because it was just junk anyway.
Plan for the future – This quarantine will end. Tom can mark off days on the calendar until he’s in the clear. Give Tom a guidebook to the city and tell him to make a list of places he wants to go and things he wants to do when the quarantine is over. It could be amusing for at least an afternoon. He’ll learn about the sights and landmarks of the city and be mildly entertained thinking of fun things to do in the near future. It will give him something to look forward to. It’s also an incentive for Tom to behave himself because his aunt and uncle can tell him that they’ll take him places he wants to go if he’s good about abiding by the rules of the quarantine until it’s over. Admittedly, Ely is one of the smallest cities in England, so there wouldn’t be as many sights to see as in London, and Tom already knows about the Cathedral, but there are shops, restaurants, and museums there. Some of them were founded after the 1950s, but there were some in Tom’s time, too. He visits at least one museum with his aunt at the end of the quarantine and goes to the movies with her. If they can’t find enough to do just in Ely when Tom’s quarantine is over, they could also spend a day visiting surrounding towns.
Discover or develop your mental powers – The amusement potential with this one depends on whether the kid has reached that phase where kids get fascinated by things like psychic abilities. Many kids go through a phase like that, and since Tom seems to like the idea of being in a haunted house, he’s probably the right age. If you can get him a book about psychic powers or telekinesis, he’d probably find it a fascinating read. The aunt and uncle could talk to him about whether or not such things actually exist, and he could try to test himself to see if he has any such powers. I had an English teacher in middle school who actually did that with us. There was only one test I really did well. Most people don’t do those types of tests well at all, but it’s amusing for at least an hour or two to try or talk about. If he happens to do better than average on anything, he could brag about it to his brother and his friends, telling them that he discovered and honed his psychic powers in a spooky old house during his vacation.
Write a story or poem – All you need is paper, a pencil, and some imagination. Writing a long story and trying to do it well could cover the entire quarantine period by itself, it would give him something to think about, and he’d have something to show for his relative isolation. Of course, the real goal is to be entertained and pass the time, so the story or poem doesn’t have to be great. It can be as crazy as Tom wants to make it, as long as he’s amused.
Start learning a language – Two weeks isn’t enough to really learn to speak a language, but it’s enough to learn a few words and phrases. If his aunt or uncle has an old textbook lying around from their student days, they could use that, or they could pick up a used one cheaply or get one from the local library. It might make Tom groan because it’s a little like school, but it would be a challenge to practice using words from another language. Of course, that depends on which words and phrases the kid learns. There can be a lot of amusement potential in learning to insult people in other languages, although that lesson should also come with the warning that you never know which languages other people might know.
Board games – A classic! If they’re not into card games, Tom can spend evenings playing board games with his aunt and uncle. Most people have chess and checkers sets (his uncle does offer to teach him chess later in his visit), and Monopoly and Clue (or Cluedo) were common back then. Monopoly games are notorious for taking a long time to finish.
Invent a game – There are a lot of things you can do if you have paper and pencils, and one of them is to design your own board game. It can be about anything, and the rules can be anything you want. When you think you’ve got it the way you want, try playing it and see if there are any adjustments you need to make. Tom can also make his own jigsaw puzzles by cutting up a picture he’s drawn or gluing a magazine picture to a piece of cardboard and cutting it up. The cardboard can come from an empty cardboard box or he can remove the cardboard back of a drawing pad, if he no longer needs it.
Jokes – Get Tom a joke book and have him mail his brother a new joke every day. When he’s done reading the book, they could challenge him to try to make up some jokes of his own. Sending and receiving mail is an activity by itself, and Tom does write to Peter during the story.
Learn to dance – This is assuming that the aunt and uncle also know how to dance, but I think it was pretty common back then for people to know at least a couple of basic dances. Tom could practice with his aunt in their living room (if they have to rearrange the furniture to do it, that’s another time-consuming activity), and it would give him something to do for some mild exercise. Even if a boy might be embarrassed to dance with his aunt, nobody’s going to see them while he’s in quarantine, he doesn’t have to tell people who taught him, and if he’s willing to learn, it could help him later at school dances.
See? If you think about it, there are plenty of things to do for just a couple of weeks. There are even more if you’re willing to invest in buying things like craft kits or model kits or other things necessary to start a new hobby, but I was trying to be as basic as possible, mostly relying on inexpensive books and paper and pencils. However, the plot of the book requires Tom to be bored and lonely, so they can’t do those things, and that brings us back to the story.
Measles
How readers receive the beginning premise of the story, that Tom was sent away from home because his brother has the measles, depends partly on their generation. I have never actually seen a live case of the measles in my entire life, as of this posting. I was born in the early 1980s, and growing up, everyone I knew who had the measles was an older person who had it as a child in the 1950s or earlier, before the time that this story was written. Vaccines against measles have been available in the United States since the early 1960s, too late for my parents but well before I was born.
I know that this disease still exists, and it’s been the subject of recent controversy because there’s been a recent outbreak in the American Southwest among unvaccinated people (2025), but I grew up in a community where measles vaccines were required for going to public schools. Because all of the kids I knew when I was young went to the same school with the same requirement, everybody I knew in my own generation was vaccinated, and none of us ever got measles.
I’m pointing this out because the first generation of children to read this story would have found the situation familiar, but it’s not something that happened to me or anybody else I knew as a kid. When I was a kid, I used to think of measles as an old-timey old people’s disease, one of the diseases that your characters could get in the Oregon Trail computer game that could either delay or kill your characters, but not something that I ever expected to encounter in the real, modern world. When I read books like this as a child, that was kind of how I thought about it. For me, it marked the time period of the story as “old.”
The closest equivalent from my youth was chicken pox because that was a spot-causing disease that I knew people had to be quarantined for, and it was unavoidable because there was no vaccine available in my earliest years. I did have chicken pox as a small child, which is why I have a scar on my face now, and I was isolated from other children when it became obvious that I had it. However, my younger cousins were vaccinated for chicken pox when that vaccine became available in the 1990s, so they’ve never experienced the disease that afflicted me. For the next generation, I get to be the older person who has a story about an old-timey disease because life moves on. It’s just part of the cycle of time and history. But, just as background for my mindset as a child reader, when I was a kid, I pictured measles as a kind of old-fashioned but more serious chicken pox. That’s not medically true because they’re separate diseases, but I just never saw or experienced actual measles, and that was the closest equivalent I could imagine at that age.
For younger generations, the covid pandemic of the 2020s might be what they picture when someone talks about quarantines.
The Truth About Hatty (Spoilers)
So, what is the truth about Hatty and the midnight garden? This is a time slip story, not a ghost story, although sometimes the two of those go together in books. In this case, the time slip is not based around ghosts but around memory. When Tom is seeing the garden as it was in the past, he is seeing it as it existed in Hatty’s memories. He is somewhat correct in saying that he is non-corporeal there because the garden itself is non-corporeal – it’s a memory. Hatty is still alive in Tom’s time, and Tom is able to enter the garden when she revisits it in her memories and when she remembers him.
The twist in the book (spoiler) is that Hatty is Mrs. Bartholomew, the current owner of the house and the landlady of the flats. When Tom is trying to figure out whether Hatty’s a ghost, he briefly considers asking Mrs. Bartholomew about the history of the house, but he rejects the idea because his aunt and uncle told him that Mrs. Bartholomew only moved to this house fairly recently, after the death of her husband, so Tom assumes that she has no connection with or knowledge of Hatty and her family.
I liked the part where Tom tries to do some research and figure out what time period child Hatty lives in based on the types of clothes people wear in her time. He has some difficulty finding a good source with details about the variations in clothing styles over the years. He does realize that Hatty was a child in the Victorian era, between the 1830s and the early 1900s, but he ends up guessing earlier in the Victorian era than she actually lived, which is why he thinks she’s definitely dead and a ghost instead of an elderly lady in the 1950s.
As Tom continues his time travels into the past, Hatty gradually ages because Mrs. Bartholomew is remembering different times in her life. Eventually, Tom sees Hatty fall in love with a young man she calls “Barty.” Tom is hurt because, when she falls in love with Barty, Hatty seems to forget about him and is suddenly unable to see him any more. It’s because Mrs. Bartholomew’s focus is shifting in her memories, focusing more on remembering Barty than remembering Tom. The last time when Tom tries to go back in time, the garden is suddenly not there, and he crashes into the dust bins outside. His aunt and uncle think he was walking in his sleep, and Tom is depressed that Hatty seems like she’s gone forever. He learns the truth when Mrs. Bartholomew insists that he come upstairs and apologize for waking her by knocking over the dust bins.
Mrs. Bartholomew thought for years that Tom was some kind of ghost who became harder and harder to see as she got older, probably because, as she got older and started thinking about other things, like Barty, she wasn’t concentrating so much on Tom. The night when the garden didn’t appear, Mrs. Bartholomew was dreaming about her wedding, so she wasn’t thinking about the garden. When Tom crashed into the dust bins, he called out her name, and she woke up and recognized his voice. Tom is happy that Hatty remembered him all these years, that she didn’t deliberately forget him, and that she’s not dead or a ghost. Mrs. Bartholomew tells him about what happened in her life after to marriage to John Bartholomew/Barty. Hatty and her husband moved away from the house, and they had two sons, who both later died during World War I. She and her husband continued living together for many years, until his death, when she returned to the house where she’d grown up.
The Time Traveling
So, now you know who Hatty is, but what does the clock and its thirteen chimes have to do with her memories and Tom’s time traveling? The mechanics of the time traveling in time slip stories are rarely fully explained, but the characters in this book do consider and discuss the possibilities. Part of it seems to involve the Biblical reference engraved on the clock about “Time no longer” from Rev. 10 1:6. I thought it was an interesting approach, bringing religious references into the story. When Tom tries to talk to his uncle about how time works, his uncle goes into scientific theories of time and gets annoyed with him when he tries to talk about the angel in the Bible. After talking to his aunt, Tom gets a sense that his uncle believes in a different version of “Truth”, and that makes it difficult to talk to him. Most of what his uncle says about more philosophical and scientific explanations of time goes over Tom’s head.
What Tom eventually figures out from bits and pieces of his uncle’s explanation and his own reflection about his time-traveling experiences, is that perspective matters in relation to time. He has his perspective of how time moves – he’s been traveling back to the garden every night for a few weeks during the summer. However, Hatty has her own perspective of time – Tom has appeared to her in the garden roughly every few months over a period of about ten years of her life. When Tom considers the situation from Hatty’s point of view, he decides that people’s individual experiences of time are just pieces of the much larger experience of time and history. This is the point when Tom realizes that neither he nor Hatty are ghosts, just two people whose experiences of time have crossed. When Tom enters into Hatty’s time, she perceives it as the present and him as a ghost because he’s outside of his natural time period and not fully a part of her present. Similarly, the maid appeared ghost-like to Tom at first because she had somewhat entered into Tom’s present before fading back to her present, appearing to vanish like a ghost. Time in the garden appears to jump around because Tom is entering into different sections of Hatty’s time. That’s why he sees the tree in the garden standing, then struck by lightning and fallen, and then standing again, and it’s also why he sees Hatty as being around his age, then younger, and then getting older. All of those things he sees are just sections of Hatty’s timeline that Tom experiences in isolation from each other, a different one every night.
Toward the end of the book, Tom tries to take advantage of the way time seems to stand still in his own time while he’s in the garden, so he can stay longer with Hatty. He thinks maybe he’ll stay for days or even forever, safe in the knowledge that time back home is standing still, and he can return there whenever he wants, enjoying carefree days of playing in the garden forever. However, he has not fully reckoned that time is still passing for Hatty even when it seems to pause for him while he’s in her time. Hatty has gradually grown up, and is moving forward with her life. She can’t stay a little girl, playing in the garden forever.
When Tom talks to the elderly Mrs. Bartholomew later, she observes that “nothing stands still, except in our memory.” When she was younger, she had always thought that the garden would stay the same forever, but it didn’t. She realized that when she saw the tree in the garden get struck by lightning. Everything changes, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly, but time always moves forward. The property was eventually split up by her cousin James when he was having trouble with his business and needed money. He sold off pieces of land at a time, so parts of the garden were built over by new houses. Eventually, all that was left was the main house and part of the old yard. When James decided to sell off what was left and move to another country to start over, Hatty and Barty bought the old house and some of Hatty’s favorite things, including the grandfather clock. Hatty admits to Tom that she used to intentionally misunderstand what time it was chiming on the clock and often got up extra early in the morning to go play in the garden. This is apparently the source of the clock’s weird chimes that don’t match the real hour. The clock is now connected to Hatty’s memories of the house and the garden, and Hatty’s memories are what controls what time it is in the garden when Tom makes his nightly visits.
Old Hatty was controlling the timing of Tom’s visits through her memories, although young Hatty was unaware of it. However, Tom realizes that even old Hatty wasn’t completely in control, either. Old Hatty comments that this summer, she’s thought of the garden far more than she ever had before and how much she wanted someone to play with when she was little. Tom realizes that old Hatty is describing his desires. When he first came to his aunt and uncle, he was bored and lonely and just wanted to play with someone, like he would have with his brother in their garden. It seems like Tom’s mood influenced Mrs. Bartholomew’s memories and dreams of the past, and their shared wish for friendship produced the midnight garden, so they could play there again.
In the end, Tom decides that “Time no longer” means that both the past and the present are both real and connected, not separate from each other, just as he and Hatty were always both real and connected to each other through their sharing of the same time. They were not separated by time but joined each other in it.
According to Wikipedia, the theory of how time works in this story is based on a book called An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne. When he was young during the late 19th century, Dunne had dreams that seemed to be visions of the future, seeing himself flying in a sort of airplane before airplanes had even been invented. He eventually became an airplane designer, and he also theorized about the nature of time. Dunne’s theory of time, called serialism, postulates that human beings are only conscious of traveling along a base timeline, where we experience the past, present, and future of our physical lives, but that there is also a higher level of time that can be experienced by a higher level of the mind or human spirit. Part of his theory states that, while people eventually die a physical death in the lower timeline, their spirit or consciousness lives on in the higher timeline for eternity. This is partly the conclusion Tom comes to when he starts seeing his time and Hatty’s as being part of some bigger timeline, and it’s referenced by the phrases “time no longer” and “exchanged time for eternity.”
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 