practical jokes – Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

Sleepover Friends

#6 Kate’s Camp-Out by Susan Saunders, 1988.

Kate’s family is spending the weekend at a cabin at Spirit Lake, and Kate is allowed to bring her Sleepover Friends with her. However, what promised to be a fun and exciting weekend soon comes with complications. First, Kate discovers that the Norwood family will be in a cabin nearby. Dr. Norwood is a colleague of her father’s, but his two sons, Sam and Dave, are pests who like to play practical jokes. When they arrive at the cabin, there is also no electricity (a problem that they fix the next day), and they learn that the reason the lake is called Spirit Lake is because there are some scary stories about the place. Kate’s father tells the girls a story before bed about an old fur trapper who murdered another fur trapper for his money. The ghost story is interrupted by Dr. Norwood, who comes over to see if everything is all right because there have been some break-ins in the area recently.

The girls are spooked by the ghost story, but the next day, they also encounter the Norwood boys and realize that they’re every bit as awful as Kate remembers them. First, Sam and Dave trick a couple of the girls into wading out into a deeper area of the lake so that they’ll fall in and get wet. Then, when the families meet for a barbecue, the boys give a couple of the girls worms in a bun instead of sausages.

Because of their bad experiences with the boys, the girls are allowed to go back to their cabin while the others finish the barbecue. While the girls are at the cabin, they accidentally find a secret hiding place in the fireplace with a pouch of old coins inside! The girls wonder if that could be the stolen money from the ghost story, but Stephanie, who has been reading a book about ghost stories from the area, says that the dates on the old coins are later than the story took place. According to the book, a ghost child was once seen around their cabin, but the girls can’t figure out why a child would have hidden so much money.

While the girls wait for the adults to return from the barbecue, they fix dinner for themselves and decide to hold a séance to contact the spirits. They don’t really believe that the séance will work when they try it, but without any tv or radio, they don’t have anything else to do, and they can’t get their minds off the ghost stories.

To the girls’ surprise, they actually hear strange knocks in reply to the questions that they ask the spirits. Then, a child’s giggle convinces them that it’s just the Norwood boys, spying on them and trying to scare them again. It’s the last straw, and the girl plot how to get even with the Norwood boys!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is one of those stories that has a somewhat ambiguous ending. When the girls try to catch the Norwood boys playing ghost, they instead discover the identities of the people behind the recent break-ins at the cabins. Later, they learn that Sam and Dave actually have alibis for the time that they heard the ghost noises, leaving them wondering if the knocking and giggling could have actually been a ghost. The girls do manage to play a prank on the boys before the end of the story, but they never learn the story behind the old coins.

I liked the part where they never firmly establish whether or not there was a ghost because it’s fun to leave people wondering. People who like ghost stories can imagine that the girls did hear a ghost, but if you don’t like the scary explanation, you can imagine that there’s another explanation for the noises. However, I found the lack of resolution behind the presence of the coins a little disappointing. The owner of the cabin they were using lets each of the girls keep a single coin as a souvenir (and the coins really are valuable collectors’ items) and gives the others to a local museum. I think I would have liked the story better if the girls found an explanation for the presence of the coins at the museum, so at least part of the story would be resolved.

There are two main theories that I have behind the events in the story. One is that the thieves in the area hid some stolen coins in the cabin for some reason and they were the ones trying to scare the girls during their seance. The other is that the mystery of the coins ties in with the child ghost in some way, hinting at dark unknown deeds from the past. Alas, there is no confirmation about which of these theories, if any, is true.

Molly, An American Girl

Meet Molly by Valerie Tripp, 1986.

Molly McIntire misses her father, who is a doctor stationed in England during World War II. Things haven’t been the same in her family since he left. Treats are more rare because of the sugar rationing, and she now has to eat yucky vegetables from her family’s victory garden all the time, under the watchful eyes of the family’s housekeeper. Her mother, while generally understanding, is frequently occupied with her work with the Red Cross. Molly’s older sister, Jill, tries to act grown-up, and Molly thinks that her brothers are pests, especially Ricky, who is fond of teasing. However, when Molly and her friends tease Ricky about his crush on a friend of Jill’s, it touches off a war of practical jokes in their house.

Halloween is coming, and she wants to come up with great costume ideas for herself and her two best friends, Linda and Susan. Her first thought is that she’d like to be Cinderella, but her friends are understandably reluctant to be the “ugly” stepsisters, and Molly has to admit that she wouldn’t really like that role, either. Also, Molly doesn’t have a fancy dress, and her mother is too busy to make one and also doesn’t think that they should waste rationed cloth on costumes. Instead, she suggests that the girls make grass skirts out of paper and go as hula dancers. The girls like the idea, but Halloween doesn’t go as planned.

Everyone loves the girls’ costumes, and they collect a good number of treats in spite of the war rationing, but Ricky takes his revenge for their earlier teasing by spraying them with water and ruining their costumes and all of their treats. When the girls get home, and Mrs. McIntire finds out what happened, she punishes Ricky by making him give the girls the treats that he’s collected, except for one, which she allows him to keep. However, to the girls, this seems like light punishment, and they’re offended that he got off so lightly.

Because he laughed at the girls, saying that he could see their underwear after he sprayed them with water and ruined their skirts, the girls decide to play a trick that will give Ricky his just desserts. The next time that Jill’s friend comes to visit, the girls arrange to have Jill and her friend standing underneath Ricky’s bedroom window when they start throwing all of his underwear out the window, right in front of Ricky. Ricky screams at the girls that “this is war!” just as their mother arrives home.

Their mother makes it clear that war is a serious thing, not a joke. There is a real war on, and their childish pranks are wasting time and resources (like the food that Ricky ruined on Halloween – sugar is rationed, and some of their neighbors had gone to a lot of trouble to save their rations to give the kids a few treats). She also points out that this is how real wars start, with “meanness, anger, and revenge.” Faced with the reality of what they were doing, Molly and Ricky apologize to each other and clean up the messes that they each made under their mother’s direction.

In the back of the book, there is a section of historical information about what life was like for civilians in America during World War II. People with relatives overseas worried about them, but people in service had to be careful about what they said in letters home, in case those letters were intercepted by enemy forces. Some of the luxury goods that people were accustomed to having became more scarce, although the rationing wasn’t as bad in the United States as it was in Europe (this is covered more in a later book in the series) because certain types of materials had to be saved for the war effort (like the metals used to make cans for food, which is why victory gardens were important) and because factories that ordinarily made civilian goods were converted to make equipment for the armed forces. For example, they mention that car factories were making things like tanks and airplanes and clothing factories were making tents and uniforms. People referred to the efforts that civilians were making to save needed materials for the war as “fighting on the home front,” reminding themselves and others that the small sacrifices that they made each day, like driving their cars less to save gas or raising food for their families, helped to make a big difference for a larger cause.