Posted on by TracyC · 4 Comments

The Diamond in the Window

The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton, 1962.

Eleanor and Edward Hall are orphans who live with their Aunt Lily and Uncle Frederick in their family’s big but somewhat shabby old house in Concord, Massachusetts. The family has lived there for generations, and they are intellectuals with a particular interest in the literary history of Concord. Uncle Freddy is obsessed with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, although he doesn’t share Eleanor’s love of Louisa May Alcott. When a couple of the town leaders threaten to take the family’s house because of unpaid back taxes and to destroy it because they think it’s an eyesore, the children come to learn that their house holds more secrets and history than anyone knows.

As Eleanor and Edward look at the house from the outside, they suddenly realize that there’s an window at the top of the house that’s shaped like a key and made of colored glass. They’ve never seen that window from the inside of the house, so there must be a secret room! The children search the attic and find a trap door that they never realized was there before. When they look into the hidden room, they find a pair of children’s beds and toys.

The children ask Aunt Lily about the room, and she sadly admits that she hadn’t wanted to tell them about it. Then, she begins to explain more about the family’s history and the aunt and uncle the children never knew. Aunt Lily is their father’s sister, and Uncle Freddy is their brother, but there were once two more children in the family, called Ned and Nora. Eleanor and Edward were named after them, but Ned and Nora mysteriously disappeared years ago. Aunt Lily still believes and hopes that, somehow, they will return someday, so she has always kept their room ready for them.

When she shows the children pictures of Ned and Nora in the family’s album, they also see a picture of a young man in a turban and ask about him. Aunt Lily says that the man is Prince Krishna, son of the Maharajah of Mandracore. Their Uncle Freddy has written books about Emerson and Thoreau and was once considered an expert on the Transcendentalists. People who were interested in Transcendentalism, like Prince Krishna, used to come and study with him. Aunt Lily wasn’t really interested in Transcendentalism, but she explains, “I think he said that the Transcendentalists believed that men’s minds were very wonderful, and that they could know all kinds of important things without being taught about them through their eyes and ears –because they were part of something called an Over-Soul.” Eddy approves of this concept because it sounds like it’s about learning without school, and he approves of anything that involves no school.

Everyone was fond of Prince Krishna while he lived and studied with the family, and Aunt Lily said that he used to make up fun games for Ned and Nora, like treasure hunts with real jewels as prizes because the prince was very rich. The children get the sense that Aunt Lily was in love with Prince Krishna, but he also vanished shortly after Ned and Nora did. When they discovered that Ned and Nora were missing from their beds one morning, Prince Krishna dashed around, looking for them, but suddenly, he was also gone, and no one knew where or how.

Eleanor and Eddy return to Ned and Nora’s room upstairs to have another look at it, and they find a mysterious poem called “Transcendentalist Treasure.” From the handwriting, which matches a note that Prince Krishna wrote to Ned and Nora with a present he gave them, Eleanor and Eddy realize that Prince Krishna also wrote the poem. Since the poem seems to be some kind of treasure hunt, the children think that it was probably part of the treasure hunts that Prince Krishna used to make for Ned and Nora. They try to figure out what the clues in the poem mean and what it might lead to, hoping that it might be the jewels that Aunt Lily told them about and which haven’t been seen in the house since Ned, Nora, and Prince Krishna vanished. If they could find those jewels, they could pay the back taxes and save their house!

However, they don’t really begin to grasp the full importance of the poem until they ask Aunt Lily if they can spend the night in Ned and Nora’s room. During the night, they have a bizarre dream, in which they’re climbing an elm tree with Ned and Nora and find a harp, which is something that was mentioned in the poem. A dangerous wind blows them out of the tree, and they wake up. They could have believed that it was only a dream except that they realize that they both dreamed the same thing, Eleanor has bruises and a scratch on her leg that she got from falling out of the dream tree, and Eddy has located the harp in Ned and Nora’s bedroom.

They show the harp to Aunt Lily, and she says that Prince Krishna had given it to Ned and Nora years ago, hanging it in a tree so that they would hear the wind blowing across it. The poem and the dreams that Eleanor and Eddy have seem to be hinting at the treasure hunts that Prince Krishna had with Ned and Nora. Eleanor and Eddy begin to think that solving the riddles in the poem may not only lead them to the jewels but to the truth about what happened to Ned, Nora, and Prince Krishna.

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

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

The book introduces the concept of Transcendentalism. I remember my English and history teachers discussing the Transcendentalists when I was in high school, but for some reason, they didn’t appeal to me back then, even though I went through a kind of phase where I was interested in metaphysical topics. I think my teachers put a lot of emphasize on their interest in nature, and I wasn’t an outdoorsy person. The background information in this story revived old memories of my high school classes and actually clarified a couple of points for me. The kids visit real places in Concord, Massachusetts, including the house where Louisa May Alcott once lived, and the book is full of discussions of literary figures and their lives and quotations from their works.

The children’s surrealist dreams connect to real objects in their lives and in the history of the family and their house. The dreams follow the poem that Prince Krishna left behind, and in each of their dreams, they see Ned and Nora up ahead of them, so the Eleanor and Edward realize that they’re following their path. The poem and the dream reference pieces of Transcendental literature and thought, and the children’s uncle explains the references throughout the story.

Many of the dreams also show the children’s personal and mental growth. In one dream, the children examine different images of their future selves, seeing how different choices they make can lead their lives in different directions, and they make up their minds which version of themselves they want to aim to be. In another dream, the children are trapped in a nautilus shell, and they discover that they have to think their way out of it. The thoughts they have help them work their way through each chamber of the nautilus, but they have to use thoughts with increasing depth and complexity to make progress. At first, remembering nursery rhymes is enough to help them move forward, but as they go further, they have to concentrate on more complex poems and higher-level moral and philosophical thoughts.

Although the dreams the children have are very surreal, and readers have no idea where they might be leading, the children do find Prince Krishna and their missing aunt and uncle. When the three of them return, Prince Krishna does explain where they were the entire time they were missing. He doesn’t offer a detailed explanation because they were trapped in a sort of magical/metaphysical prison, but he does explain who trapped them and why. There is a villain in the story, but it takes a while to grasp who and what the villain is because readers don’t really see it/him in his true form and don’t understand who he is and what his motives are until Prince Krishna explains. Eleanor and Eddy end up understanding more than Aunt Lily and Uncle Freddy do in the end, but finding Ned and Nora, Prince Krishna, and Prince Krishna’s treasure changes everyone’s lives for the better. Throughout the book, Uncle Freddy is mentally unbalanced, eccentric at the best of times and outright crazy at others. Local people want to see him committed to an asylum, but his mind was unbalanced by Ned and Nora’s disappearance. Once they’re back, he regains his senses.

The author wanted to write realistic children as her protagonists to appeal to real children. Eleanor and Eddy have their own insecurities and dreams which play into their characters all through the book and appear in the visions of the futures and choices they have to make in their dreams.

Posted on by TracyC

The North Pole Mystery

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

This book is part of the Sherlock Street Detectives series.

David is supposed to be watching his younger brother, Adam, while his mother is gone, but he gets absorbed in his new book. When David’s friends come to see him, they realize that Adam is missing!

The kids look for Adam everywhere, but they can’t find him. David is very worried.

Walter tries to use his dog, Watson, to track down Adam, but Watson hasn’t been trained to track people. When that doesn’t work, Walter tries writing down everything David can remember about Adam’s disappearance, but because David was reading instead of watching, he can’t remember much.

One thing that David remembers is that Adam wanted to go for a walk. David didn’t want to go, so he let Adam play with his compass instead. David explained to Adam that a compass always points toward the North Pole, and that fascinated Adam because the North Pole is where Santa Claus lives. The kids realize that Adam still has the compass, so he is probably using it to go north and find Santa!

What they need to do is go north themselves to find Adam, but they don’t have another compass. What can they do?

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

My Reaction

It’s a fun picture book mystery, but it’s also educational. The books in this series use scientific concepts to explain the mysteries or to help solve problems. This book explains how a compass works, and to find Adam, the kids have to create a compass of their own.

There is also a vocabulary list and glossary in the back of the book.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Girl in the Window

The Girl in the Window by Wilma Yeo, 1988.

Kiley Mulligan Culver lives in a fairly small town, Meander, in the southern United States.  Although not much usually happens in their small down, about a year before the story begins, a little girl named Leedie Ann Alcott was kidnapped.  The crime literally hit Kiley very close to home because she and her father (Kiley’s mother died when she was a baby) live on the Alcott family’s estate.  The Alcott mansion was once a plantation, and Kiley and her dad, who is an author, live in the old house that once belonged to the plantation’s overseer, so they know the Alcott family well.  Mr. and Mrs. Alcott are divorced, and Mr. Alcott lives in another state.  Mrs. Alcott owned a children’s clothing shop in town, Kiley would sometimes babysit or play with Leedie Ann, who was younger than she was.  In some ways, Leedie Ann was kind of like a little sister to Kiley.  At the time she disappeared, Leedie Ann was four years old, and Kiley was about nine.  Mrs. Alcott never received a ransom note for Leedie Ann, but everyone is sure that her disappearance was a kidnapping, not just a child wandering off.

A year later, when the story begins, Leedie Ann has still not been found, and no one knows what happened to her.  After Leedie Ann disappeared, her mother closed her clothing shop, and a strange gypsy woman named Pesha came to stay with her.  Pesha is mysterious and secretive, and no one knows why Mrs. Alcott has her staying with her, although they seem to be holding seances.

Then, one evening, Kiley looks up at the Alcott mansion and sees Leedie Ann Alcott standing in the window of her old room! But, before she can do anything, another, shadowy figure closes the drapes on the window.  By the time that Kiley can tell her father what she’s seen, Leedie Ann is gone.  Her father goes to the Alcott house to ask Mrs. Alcott if everything is all right and if she needs anything, and everything seems to be normal (or what passes for normal at that time).  Kiley’s father thinks that Kiley imagined the whole thing, but Kiley knows that she didn’t, and she is sure that she wasn’t mistaken and that it was really Leedie Ann.

Kiley tells her friend, Sarah, about what she saw and persuades her to help find out whether Leedie Ann is really in the Alcott house or not.  Sarah is nervous about it, but she agrees to go along with Kiley’s plan to go to the Alcott house and ask to use the bathroom, pretending that she has been waiting for Kiley to meet her at her house but that she just can’t wait anymore.  While Sarah is supposedly using the bathroom, she’s supposed to check Leedie Ann’s room upstairs.  Kiley can’t do this herself because she wouldn’t have the same excuse that Sarah would and because Mrs. Alcott would know that Kiley knows where the downstairs bathroom is and that she would have no reason to go poking around upstairs.

When Sarah follows through on Kiley’s plan and checks Leedie Ann’s room, she tells Kiley that she did see Leedie Ann there!  However, Pesha saw her spying and made her leave the house.  Kiley and Sarah think that perhaps Pesha has both Mrs. Alcott and Leedie Ann under a spell and is holding them prisoner in their house.  But, what can the girls do to help them?

Kiley comes up with a daring plan to trick Pesha into revealing what she knows about Leedie Ann Alcott by writing an anonymous letter to her as if she already knew that Pesha was involved in her disappearance, but the plan backfires.  The police reopen the inquiry into Leedie Ann’s disappearance (don’t ask me why they didn’t notice that the letter appeared to be written by a child), but Kiley accidentally implicates an innocent person.  Adults in town are nervous, and Sarah’s mother doesn’t want Kiley to see her anymore.  Just as Kiley thinks things can’t get any worse, Pesha asks for her help, offering a charm to help restore Kiley’s friendship with Sarah in return.  Pesha claims that her only purpose is to use her psychic abilities to help Mrs. Alcott find Leedie Ann and that what Kiley believed was Leedie Ann in the window was actually a mannequin left from Mrs. Alcott’s clothing store that Leedie Ann had always begged to have as a life-size doll for herself.  Is Pesha really as innocent as she claims to be?  Can Kiley trust her?  What about Mrs. Alcott?  Above all, where is Leedie Ann Alcott?

Although Kiley may have made a big mistake, the reopening of the kidnapping case does bring to light the real secret behind Leedie Ann’s disappearance.

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

Themes and My Reaction

One of the side plots in the story is about how differences between people can lead to mistrust because people sometimes get a false impression.  Kiley knows that her friends’ mothers don’t really approve of her because she is being raised by her father alone.  Some of her friends’ mothers, especially Sarah’s because she’s overprotective, think that Kiley is a wild child because she doesn’t have a mother to look after her, and they worry that Kiley will be a bad influence on their daughters.  Kiley does sometimes get into trouble because she’s a little daring and a little impulsive, but those are more personal character traits rather than the result of growing up without a mother, and some of her escapades are undertaken in the name of helping someone, like trying to find Leedie Ann.  Her friends’ mothers don’t understand Kiley’s intentions, though, and they never ask enough questions to find out what is really going on.  It seems oddly cold behavior from mothers to me.  Where I grew up, other people’s mothers would have taken more of an interest in a motherless child, purposely checking up on her and wanting to have her hanging around where they could keep an eye on what she was doing.  If they push her away, then she’s even less monitored than she was before.

However, Kiley realizes that everyone’s suspicions about Pesha, including her own, were also based largely on the fact that Pesha is different from everyone else.  For awhile, Kiley helps Pesha to hide from the police because Pesha fears their inquiries.  The two of them get to know each other better.  Pesha is actually a Holocaust survivor. Pesha has the tattoos on her body that the Nazis used to put on prisoners in their concentration camps (I’ve see those tattoos in real life, and I recognized them from the book’s description before Kiley understood what they were) and she tells Kiley about a place in Germany where her family was and terrible things happened.  Besides Jewish people, gypsies were also targets of the Nazis during the Holocaust and were sent to concentration camps along with them.  Pesha fears the police because she fears being locked up again, something that Mrs. Alcott tells to the police to explain Pesha’s sudden disappearance.  Knowing this helps Kiley to become more sympathetic to Pesha and more determined to help straighten out the mess that she helped to cause, eventually discovering the real whereabouts of Leedie Ann in the process.

Something that bothered me about the adults in the story, pretty much all of them, is their lack of interest in asking questions and taking charge.  Even after Kiley’s father realizes that she was helping Pesha to hide from the police, he doesn’t ask enough questions about why she was doing it.  He simply reports Pesha to the authorities and orders Kiley to stay out of it, just like he simply told her to stop imagining Leedie Ann Alcott and making up stories back when Kiley first saw the girl in the window.  Kiley’s father didn’t want to ask the awkward questions to verify what Kiley saw, so it was easier to assume that she didn’t see anything.  Part of that is a plot device, so that Kiley has a reason to dig for the truth herself, but it also figures into the way other adults, like Sarah’s mother, treat Kiley and how they approach the whole inquiry into Leedie’s disappearance.  Instead of checking on what motherless Kiley is doing and helping her father to supervise her, they want to just shrug her off as a problem they don’t want to deal with, figuring that someone else will handle it because they don’t want to get involved.  Then, when Sarah’s mother finds out about Sarah helping Kiley to write the letter that reopened the investigation, she refuses to tell the police the truth about it, allowing the investigation against Pesha to go forward even when she knew it was groundless, just because she didn’t want to get involved.  Disbelieving adults/adults not wanting to get involved is a trope of children’s mysteries because the adults’ non-involvement provides a reason for the children to investigate, but I still find it annoying and irresponsible.

Pesha’s innocence is finally established when Kiley finds the courage to admit what she did in front of everyone at Pesha’s court hearing.  Kiley comes to realize that a quality that she and her father both have is honesty.  Her father didn’t try to hide it when he discovered that Kiley was harboring a fugitive the way Sarah’s mother tried to hide the truth to avoid becoming involved and to hide her child’s involvement, and that’s something to be proud of.  The aftermath of her confession also gives Kiley the opportunity to spot the tell-tale clue of Leedie Ann’s current whereabouts, and Leedie Ann is safely returned to her mother.

Posted on by TracyC

Rosy Noses, Freezing Toes

Pee Wee Scouts

#13 Rosy Noses, Freezing Toes by Judy Delton, 1990.

At one of the scout meetings, Mrs. Peters, the troop leader, says that her antique vase is missing. It’s a family heirloom, and Mrs. Peters wants to ask the scouts if they know anything about its disappearance or if they have any idea of what could have happened to it. None of them knows, but they’re fascinated by the mystery. After they search the house and can’t find it, Mrs. Peters says that she’ll just have to report its disappearance to the insurance company. Mrs. Peters is willing to let the matter go at that, but the scouts keep wondering what happened to the vase and if one of them could have taken it.

Mrs. Peters tells the scouts that the next badge they will earn will be their music badge. To earn the badge, the children will have to sing or play an instrument or tell the group about the life of a composer. Some of the children already play instruments and know what they’re going to do, but others aren’t sure. Since it’s December, Mrs. Peters suggests that some of them could sing popular Christmas songs or a Hanukkah song.

Sonny Betz declares that he doesn’t want to participate because he can’t play an instrument and over the next few days, he seems upset and nasty with people. Molly asks him what the matter is, and Sonny tells her that his mother is forcing him to take violin lessons. Mrs. Betz has always wanted Sonny to learn to play the violin, and his new violin teacher has assured her that Sonny will be able to learn the first line of Jingle Bells in time for the scouts’ music show, even though it’s coming up fast. Sonny isn’t happy about it, and to make him feel better, Molly tells him that he’s lucky because nobody else will be playing the violin and it will make him different. Unfortunately, the other kids tease him and call him “Maestro,” so he starts feeling bad.

Molly doesn’t like the way the others keep teasing Sonny, and when Tracy says that Sonny is a baby, Molly tells her that it’s not his fault because his mother is the one who makes him take violin lessons and keep the training wheels on his bike even though he’s in the second grade and all the other things that people tease him about. Mrs. Betz doesn’t realize how much Sonny hates some of the things that she makes him do and how much the other kids tease Sonny about these things. Molly overhears her mother saying that Sonny will “be a handful by the time he gets to high school,” probably because she’s imagining that Sonny will rebel against all things his mother has been making him do once he’s a teenager. Actually, it’s not going to take that long.

Mrs. Peters uses the insurance money from her vase to buy a piano. The scouts’ music show goes okay at first, although none of the kids are spectacular at music. Molly, Mary Beth, and Lisa paint their noses red and sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Kevin whistles. Roger plays White Christmas on the drums with no other accompaniment, confusing everyone about what song he’s actually playing. Poor Sonny has to go last, when everyone is starting to get tired of the entertainment, but he doesn’t play well. The other scouts cover their ears, and the screeching of the violin makes the dog bark and Mrs. Peters’s baby cry. Sonny is so upset that he runs away from the show and has a fit.

The next day, Molly learns that Sonny has run away from home completely, leaving behind a note that he’s heading to Alaska. Everyone is searching for Sonny and getting worried about him being outside alone in the snow. However, Molly soon discovers that Sonny hasn’t gone as far as everyone fears and he’s certainly not on his way to Alaska. She discovers Sonny hiding in her family’s bathtub. Sonny explains to her that he didn’t have the money to go to Alaska, but he couldn’t bring himself to go home, and he picked Molly’s house to hide in because Molly is the only one who didn’t tease at him. Molly promises not to turn him in, but she says that he won’t be able to stay in her bathtub forever. His mother has called the police to report his disappearance, and Molly’s parents are bound to find him eventually. Sonny swears that he can’t go home because he hates playing the violin so much. What can Molly do to help him change his mind?

I didn’t like the way the other scouts were so mean to Sonny in the book. Sonny does do childish things, like being mean to the younger kids on the playground when he’s upset and throwing fits when things go wrong. However, Molly tries to be understanding with Sonny, even when he’s being fussy and whining, and she recognizes that Sonny is in a difficult position. His mother has certain expectations of him, and Sonny doesn’t think that anything will change her mind. The way things work out, though, makes it seem like Sonny never really explained to his mother how upset he was about the violin lessons and maybe not even how upset he’s been about some other things. Part of Sonny’s difficulty and the reason why he seems babyish to the other kids is that he seems to have trouble managing and articulating his emotions, including standing up for himself and what he really wants. Some of the other scouts help Molly to convince Sonny that running away isn’t the solution, and Molly calls Mrs. Betz to tell her that Sonny is okay but won’t come home until she promises that he can stop playing the violin. Sonny declares that he wants to see that in writing, and his mother gladly writes him a note that says that he doesn’t have to play the violin again.

So, what about the antique vase mystery from the beginning of the story? Before the end of the book, they do locate the missing vase (not really stolen, more misplaced and forgotten), but Molly accidentally breaks it. Mrs. Peters says that it’s okay because, with the vase broken, she doesn’t have to give the money back to the insurance company, and she gets to keep her new piano. She’s been wanting a piano, and the truth is that she never really liked the vase, even though it was a family heirloom. Yay? Merry Christmas!

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

Posted on by TracyC

Changes for Addy

American Girls

AddyChanges

Changes for Addy by Connie Porter, 1994.

Since the Civil War ended, most of Addy‘s family has managed to reunite in Philadelphia. The one person who is missing is Addy’s little sister, Esther.  When Addy and her mother escaped from the plantation where they had been living as slaves, they were forced to leave Esther behind with family friends because she was too little to travel.  Since the end of the war, slaves have been released from plantations, but the Walkers haven’t received any word from their friends, Auntie Lula and Uncle Solomon Morgan and don’t know where they or Esther are.

Over the past months, the Walker family has sent inquiries to various aid societies helping war victims and displaced people, asking if the Morgans or Esther have sought help from them.  Finally, they get a response from the Quaker Aid Society, saying that the Morgans and Esther were at one of their camps in North Carolina.  They stayed for awhile because Esther was ill, but as soon as she was well enough to travel, they were eager to move on to Philadelphia.

Addy is happy because the news means that the Morgans and Esther might already be in Philadelphia, looking for them.  However, Addy’s parents are still worried because the Morgans are elderly, and from what the letter said, they were not in good health.  The family makes further inquiries to see if they could be at any of the local hospitals.

Eventually, the search for the Morgans and Esther pays off when Addy finds them at a church.  Uncle Solomon passed away on the journey to Philadelphia, and Esther seems unsure of who the people in her family are because she was so little the last time she saw them.  Auntie Lula pressed on for Philadelphia because she wanted to make sure that Esther made it safely back to her family.  Auntie Lula is in bad health herself, and she knows that she isn’t likely to live much longer, making the reunion bittersweet.

AddyChangesProclamationHowever, Auntie Lula does get to spend a little time with the family before her death, and she tells Addy not to be sad.  People don’t always get everything they want in life, but they can take some pride in what they do accomplish.  Lula and Solomon may not have gotten everything they wanted in life, not having had much time to enjoy being freed from slavery, but they did get to accomplish what was most important to them.  Solomon died knowing that he was a free man, far from the plantation where he’d been a slave.  Lula managed to reunite Esther with her family.  From there, Lula says, she is depending on the young people, like Addy and her family, to make the most they can of their lives, hopes, and dreams.

The theme of this story is hope and the need to persevere with determination.  Life has its difficulties, and not every problem can be solved.  However, things can get better.  After the reunion with Esther, Addy points out to her mother that Esther wasn’t walking or talking when they last saw her, and they never got to experience seeing her learn.  Addy is sad at the time they’ve lost with Esther, which they can never recover.  However, because of Lula and Solomon’s determination to bring Esther to them, they will have many more years to come with Esther.  Addy’s mother also reminds Addy that those who love us never leave us.  Auntie Lula and Uncle Solomon changed the family’s lives for the better because of the good people they were, and their memory will stay with them forever.

In the back, there is a section of historical information about the end of the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves, and it further explains how racial issues continued into the 20th century, leading to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

AddyChangesHistorical

Posted on by TracyC

The Red Trailer Mystery

Trixie Belden Series

trixietrailer#2 The Red Trailer Mystery by Julie Campbell, 1950.

This story picks up immediately where the previous book in the series leaves off.  Jim Frayne, although heir to a great deal of money, ran away to keep himself and his fortune out of the hands of his scheming stepfather.  He plans to find work to support himself until he’s old enough to return and claim his inheritance in his own right.

However, his uncle’s lawyer has collected enough evidence that Jim’s stepfather is an unfit guardian that he says he can arrange for Jim to have another guardian.  Trixie and Honey travel in a trailer along with Honey’s governess, Miss Trask, searching for their friend Jim so they can tell him that he’s safe from his stepfather.

Along the way, they meet a family traveling in a red trailer. The family is dressed in ragged clothes, and they look half-starved. They seem to be very upset about something, and the parents discourage their children from talking to Trixie and Honey. For reasons the girls don’t understand, the oldest girl in the family runs away into the woods and her family leaves the trailer camp without her.

Later, the girls meet a state trooper who is looking for a trailer matching the description of the red trailer the family had. Apparently, there have been several thefts of trailers in the area recently. Could the family they met be involved in the thefts?  Will Trixie and Honey ever find Jim?

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Lost Lookalike

LostLookalike

The Case of the Lost Lookalike by Carol Farley, 1988.

“I want to swoop in and spout out the answers to baffling mysteries while everyone around me blinks in befuddlement.  I want to reveal the amazing solutions to puzzles while everyone gasps in admiration.  Except the criminal, of course, who gasps for other reasons.”
— Flee Jay Saylor

This is the second book in the the Flee Jay and Clarice Mysteries.

In The Case of the Lost Lookalike, Flee Jay and Clarice are spending the summer at a lake with their aunt, and someone there says that Clarice is the very image of a little girl named Caroline who was apparently kidnapped 40 years ago.  Little Caroline disappeared from her own bedroom one night after her mother died under rather suspicious circumstances.  Most people assume that Caroline is dead, too.  The girl’s father is now a strange recluse who lives on an island in the middle of the lake.

LostLookalikePic

But, as the girls puzzle over this old mystery, other mysterious things begin to happen.  A woman produces pictures of the missing girl which look nothing like Clarice.  Then, her shop is broken into, and the pictures of Caroline disappear.

When someone persuades their aunt to let the girls visit the old recluse on the island, the man’s reaction is surprising, and they come to realize that Caroline’s disappearance might not be the real issue at all.  Clarice takes some frightening risks to get to the bottom of the mystery!

My Reaction

In a way, this story is two mysteries in one because Clarice figures out what really happened to Caroline when she disappeared years ago at the same time that the girls unravel the mystery that is affecting people who live in the small town by the lake now.  The mystery of what happened to Caroline would not have resurfaced at this particular time if someone else hadn’t brought up the issue as a distraction from something else.

What I like best about this series is the sense of humor and the way that Flee Jay says things as she narrates the story: “I mean, new cottages and magic lakes are terrific and all that, but nothing can ever take the place of a peanut-butter, brown sugar, and banana sandwich.”