#21 The Deserted Library Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1991.
Mr. Alden tells his grandchildren that a friend of his in a nearby small town, Pete, is concerned about their local library. The town is really too small to support a library, and when the last librarian left, they weren’t able to replace her. The library has fallen into disrepair and is in danger of being torn down. However, the building is old and has historical significance. It might be preserved as a historical landmark, but it needs some cleaning and organizing. Mr. Alden asks his grandchildren if they would be interested in the project, and they say they would. Pete spends part of the year living at his restaurant in town, so the Aldens can use his house while they’re working on the library project.
When they get to Pete’s house, they have to do a cleaning job there because Pete hasn’t been there in a while, and the place seems a bit spooky to them. The library seems a little spooky to them, too, when they begin looking around, but they soon begin finding some significant treasures. The children find a sword hilt from the Civil War along with a letter about the sword being awarded to a soldier by General Lee, but for some reason, the blade of the sword is missing! They children know that, if they can find the sword blade, it would be of great historical significance.
Then, strange things start happening in the library. Food that they bring for lunch disappears, and the kids start feeling like they aren’t along in the building. They search the library and find a 10-year-old boy named Miguel Morales. Miguel explains that his mother is dead and that he heard his father’s fishing boat sank. If his father is dead, he has nowhere to go and is afraid of being put in an orphanage or children’s home. The Boxcar Children sympathize with Miguel because they were once in a similar position, but they also tell Miguel that the situation might not be as bad as he thinks. They don’t know for certain whether Miguel’s father is dead or not. He can’t hide in the library forever, so they invite Miguel to stay with them and help with the library project while they check and see for certain what really happened to Miguel’s father. Henry contacts his grandfather to ask for his help and to see if he can learn anything about Miguel’s father. Mr. Alden agrees to help Miguel and is thrilled to hear about the Civil War sword.
Finding Miguel seems to clear up the mystery of who has been in the library, but the children soon begin to realize that there is a second intruder. The kids find a gray work glove in the library that doesn’t belong to any of them, and Jessie hears someone humming when no one is supposed to be there. Then, someone tries to trap them in Pete’s house by putting a big branch in front of the door, and when they get out and return to the library, they find the place trashed! Someone has thrown all the books around and torn them and turned the furniture over. Later, someone sneaks into Pete’s house at night, while the children are there but asleep, to search the place. Henry is pretty sure that the mysterious intruder is searching for the Civil War sword, the most valuable thing they’ve found so far.
My Reaction
I like the location and set-up of the story. An abandoned library makes a nice, spooky place to have mysterious things happening and people lurking around. Although this book was written by a ghost writer after Gertrude Chandler Warner’s death, it has a lot of the flavor of the original books in the series – opportunities for the Alden children to show off their self-sufficiency and community-oriented volunteer work, another child who is on his own and needs some help, and a mystery that is more adventure in some ways than mystery.
I liked the idea that the kids think they’ve solved the mystery of who’s been lurking around the library when they find Miguel, only to realize that there’s someone else snooping around. It was a little disappointing that we seem to know what the mysterious lurker is looking immediately for because there’s only valuable item associated with the library, and there’s no twist to it. We also don’t really get to to know the culprit as a character outside of his lurking. This isn’t the case that there are multiple people to suspect. By the time we learn the culprit’s identity, we already know him as the culprit. I would have preferred more mystery with a choice of known suspects, but something that does complicate the mystery is also that the antique sword is broken, so the kids have to find the other part of it.
The side plot with the question of whether or not Miguel’s father is alive adds some suspense. Although the Boxcar Children are optimistic that Miguel’s father survived his boat sinking, and Mr. Alden says that he will take care of Miguel, Miguel privately thinks to himself that, if it turns out that his father isn’t among the survivors, he will run away again. Readers are left in suspense because we are told that there were survivors from the boat, but we aren’t told whether Miguel’s father is one of them until the end.
It’s summer, and the four Melendy children have some big plans! They’ve already started building a dam to make the swimming area on the property of their new house bigger. Their father, who travels frequently, giving lectures, tells them that he’s going to be away for most of the summer. He has to work hard to provide for his big family, and he has also taken a government job that will help the war effort. Mr. Melendy isn’t going to be a soldier because he’s a little old for that and the father of four children. He says that he can’t tell the children about his job, but it will keep him away in Washington for long periods of time. While he’s away, the children will be in the care of the housekeeper, Cuffy, and the handyman, Willy. They will also largely be left to entertain themselves, which is something they definitely know how to do.
Aside from swimming and enjoying themselves this summer, the kids decide that they should also do something useful, to help the war effort. Because of the war, patriotism is running high, and the children feel like they should take on some serious responsibilities. They’ve held events to help the war effort and bought bonds before. This summer, Rush and Randy decide that they’re going to go door to door, collecting scrap metal. Their collecting efforts help them to further get to know their neighbors, and they make friends with the Addison children and a nice, older man named Mr. Titus, who likes to spend his time fishing and baking things and invites the kids to join him sometimes.
However, there is a nasty man called Orin who yells at the children and scares them away when they come to ask him for scrap metal. Soon after this unpleasant incident, Rush and Randy meet Mark, the nice boy who lives with Orin. Mark is an orphan, and he lives with Orin because he’s a distant cousin. Orin’s wife was a nice lady, and Mark liked her, but she died a couple of years before. Orin is mean to everybody, and he mainly sees Mark as a source of unpaid labor on his farm. The Addison children, who know Mark from school, confirm that all of this is true. Orin doesn’t even let Mark go to school very often because he wants to keep him working most of the time. Their teacher and the school superintendent both tried to go see Orin and insist that Mark go to school regularly, but Orin is a violent and frightening man. He chased them both away and sent his mean dogs after them. Nobody really knows what to do about Orin, and most people are afraid to try. He also locks Mark in his room to keep him from running away, although Mark has found a way out and sneaks out sometimes.
The Melendy children feel sorry for Mark, although they try not to be too pitying so they won’t make Mark feel too self-conscious. Rush and Randy start meeting with him secretly to go swimming and fishing and hunt for arrowheads left by the Iroquois who used to live in the area. Rush and Mark also play at being soldiers on a secret mission and go stargazing. Mark knows about the constellations, and the boys watch the Perseid meteor shower in August.
Then, Mark reveals to Rush that Orin and his few friends are making illegal alcohol in a still. They do it because it costs less than buying alcohol. Orin’s friends include a couple of brothers who live in the woods and hardly ever come to town and a man who’s been suspected of bank robbery and murder although nobody was ever able to prove it. The boys spy on Orin and his friends at their still one night, and they hear Orin talking about selling his farm and maybe getting one of the new defense jobs. His friends ask him what he’ll do with Mark if he moves out, and Orin says that he’ll probably just turn him over to the county. One of his friends say that giving Mark to the county might not be so easy because they’ll ask questions, but Orin says he’s thinking of changing his name. The suspected criminal says that he might take Mark because he has trouble keeping workers around his place. Mark tells Rush that he’d rather run away that go live with that criminal, and Rush says that Mark can come stay with his family. The men almost catch the boys listening because the boys are wearing citronella to keep the mosquitos away, but the boys manage to get away before the men catch them.
Rush tells Mark that he’ll talk to his father to see if Mark can stay with the Melendy family or if he knows what else Mark can do. Then, a series of events happen that change everything. First, Cuffy has to go away for awhile to take care of an injured relative, leaving the children even more to their own devices, with Willy and the older children in charge. Then, the in the middle of the night, Rush wakes up to realize that something is on fire. It turns out that Orin’s farm is burning! Rush wakes Randy, and the two of them hurry down to Orin’s farm to see if Mark is safe. They find Mark hurrying to get the animals out of the barn, and neighbors and firefighters are already working on the blaze, but it’s a loosing battle. They manage to save the animals, but both the house and barn are destroyed. Willy, who was also there to help fight the fire, take the Melendy children and Mark back to the Melendy house. Later, Willy informs them that they have discovered that Orin was still in the house and was killed in the fire. (A short flashback informer readers, although the characters in the story don’t know it, that Orin accidentally started the fire when he returned home from his still, drunk, and passed out in the kitchen with a lamp too close to a wall calendar.)
Mark was never fond of Orin because Orin treated him badly, but without Orin, Mark’s custody is in doubt. Mark doesn’t have any other relatives. He’s still only 13 and not old enough to live alone. Rush decides to call his father to ask if Mark can live with them. Mr. Melendy tells Rush to keep Mark at their house for now, and when he returns home from Washington, he’ll straighten things out.
The Melendy children make Mark welcome at their fascinating house, the Four-Story Mistake, and Mark begins to enjoy all the new experiences they give him. He gets to try their books, enjoying classics like Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, Eight Cousins, and various fairy tales. Mark also likes listening to Rush playing music on his piano. Above all, Mark gets the new experience of living with a family that really cares for him. Mark becomes part of the Melendy family’s idyllic summer, but the children worry about whether or not their father will allow them to stay with them permanently.
This book is different from the earlier two books in the series because, while the other adventures were all just treated as fun adventures without anything truly tragic happening when things go wrong, this book actually contains some serious issues. Mark is an orphan living with a violent and abusive guardian who frightens all of the local adults who have tried to intervene on Mark’s behalf. Mark’s guardian is also involved with some seriously shady people and illegal activities. The sudden death of Mark’s guardian frees him from the abuse but also leaves his future in doubt. This is the darkest book in the Melendy series. The book doesn’t shy away from Mark’s feelings and the sadness of Orin’s death, even though he was an awful person. Fortunately, because the tone of this series is optimistic, things work out for the best.
Of course, Mr. Melendy agrees that Mark can stay with the family, but in a realistic touch, adopting him isn’t as simple for the family as taking in a stray dog. Some of the local farmers offer Mark a place working on their farms, including the disreputable man and possible criminal who was one of Orin’s friends. Social service agencies want to know about the home and family Mr. Melendy has to offer Mark before they decide whether or not to allow Mark to remain with them, and a social worker comes to interview him. The social worker sees a taste of the family’s boisterous children and eccentric hobbies (at one point, Mona enters the room, practicing the part of Ophelia from Hamlet), but she is charmed by them and sees that Mark loves being with them, and she decides that the Melendy family will be good for him. There is extra legal work for Mr. Melendy to officially adopt Mark after Mark is allowed to stay with them as a ward or foster child, and the local bank is also interested in Mark’s custody because Orin had a mortgage on his farm, and there are financial issues to be arranged.
In the end, the bank claims Orin’s property because of the mortgage, but Mark inherits the animals because he’s Orin’s only relative. Mark keeps a few animals that can live on the Melendy property, and the Melendys help him sell the others in an auction held on their property. They turn the livestock auction into a fair to raise money for the war effort. Some of them make baked goods to sell, Mona dresses up as a fortune teller, and they hold a talent show with other children from school.
The element of raising money for the war effort continues a theme from earlier books in the series and emphasizes the point that this book was set contemporary to the time when it was written, during WWII. I find books that were written during major events and that take those events into account interesting because it shows how people felt about those events and what they wanted children to understand about them. The kids sometimes make references to the war in casual conversation in a way that seems realistic for a child’s observations, such as when they describe someone as having “teeth like a Japanese general”, although I know that what they’re probably referencing is anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons at the time rather than actual pictures of them. That isn’t mentioned in the story, but I’ve seen those cartoons before, so I can envision what kind of teeth the kids in the story are probably picturing.
The Lighter Side
In spite of the dark parts of the story, the book still has qualities of idyllic life in a big house in the country and the outdoor fun the children have. Some of the images in the story would fit well with cottagecore themes today, such as Mona weaving a strawberry plant in her hair. Oliver collecting caterpillars and watching moths. On Oliver’s 8th birthday, the whole family, including Mark, goes on a picnic to a cave that Mark knows.
There is also a theme around cooking and baking in the story. Mona develops an interest in cooking and baking, and Mr. Titus teaches her recipes and helps her and Randy when they experiment with canning vegetables from the garden. Mona had told her brothers to leave her and Randy alone in the kitchen when they were canning because it was women’s work, and Rush thinks it’s funny that it’s Mr. Titus who rescues them when the job gets too much for them and it becomes obvious that the girls don’t know what they’re doing. Mr. Titus tells the kids at one point that, when he was younger, he was a little embarrassed about his interest in cooking because it didn’t seem like men’s work, but now, he doesn’t care anymore, and he just appreciates doing what he really loves to do.
Another fun note is that the Melendy children like to play a game they call the Comparison Game. One child leaves the room, and the others think of a person they all know or know about. When the other child returns to the room, the others say whether they thought of a male or female person, and the other child starts asking them what that person is like. The child who left the room earlier asks the others what color the person is like, what animal the person is like, what type of weather the person is like, etc., until the child can guess which person they’re talking about by the comparisons made about the person.
Lady Margaret’s Ghost by Elizabeth McDavid Jones, 2009.
This book is one of the mystery stories published to accompany the American Girl series of historical books. The main character of this book, Felicity Merriman, lives in Colonial era Williamsburg, Virginia, around the beginning of the American Revolution.
Felicity’s mother is going on a trip to visit a relative, along with Felicity’s younger siblings. As the oldest girl in the family, Felicity will be in charge of the household while her mother is gone and her father and his apprentice, Ben, are working in the store her father owns. It’s a big responsibility and an honor that Felicity’s mother considers her capable of managing the household, but because Felicity is still young and some household tasks involve heavy work that is difficult for her to do alone, her mother has hired a temporary cook, Mrs. Hewitt, to help her. Because Felicity is known as a daydreamer who doesn’t always pay attention to what she should be doing, her mother reminds her to focus on the task at hand while she’s minding the house, although she has faith in Felicity and is sure that she will do a good job.
Soon after her mother leaves, a crate arrives at the house for Felicity’s father, along with a letter. The letter explains that a cousin of Felicity’s father has died and that the crate contains some family heirlooms that his cousin left to him. These heirlooms once belonged to a common ancestor of theirs, Sir Edward Merriman, a wealthy nobleman and the first member of their family to live in the colonies, more than 100 years earlier. Felicity’s father didn’t know his cousin well because they never lived very close, and his cousin was much older, but he does know the history of the heirlooms. The heirlooms include a lady’s silver vanity set and a silver cup and rattle for baby. The story is that Sir Edward’s wife, Lady Margaret, owned the vanity set, and the rattle and cup were for their infant son. Unfortunately, the baby was stillborn, and Lady Margaret died shortly after the birth. After her death, her husband and the household servants believed that she still haunted the house. The haunting may have been part of the reason why Sir Edward decided to leave his home in England and go to America, but even though he later remarried and had other children, he could never bring himself to part from the things that belonged to his first wife and child. Even before Felicity’s father tells her about the ghost story, Felicity gets a strange feeling from the vanity set, and she wonders if the objects could be haunted.
However, Felicity soon has to turn her attention to household issues. Mrs. Hewitt, the temporary cook arrives, and she is a brusque and unpleasant woman. She is rude and condescending to Felicity when they are working in the kitchen together. Because Mrs. Hewitt is so rude, Felicity is nervous and makes mistakes, making her look like more of a fool to Mrs. Hewitt. They can’t easily replace her because cooks are in demand right now because this is Publick Times in Williamsburg, and there are many visitors to the city. Everyone is busy tending to them. Mrs. Hewitt was the best they could find available. Felicity’s father does speak to her about her rudeness to Felicity. After that, Mrs. Hewitt is sullen and resentful, and she is even more pleased whenever she sees Felicity doing something wrong.
There is also an exciting event taking place. Felicity has entered her horse, Penny, in a horse race at the fair in town! Ben, her father’s apprentice, will ride her. The day of the race, Penny seems to be doing well, but then, she suddenly develops a problem during the race. When Felicity and Ben check her out to see what was wrong, they discover that someone put burrs under Penny’s saddle! Worse still, the wounds caused by the burrs become infected. Felicity is very upset and worried about Penny, and she wonders who would have hurt her horse. There were a couple of men looking at her before the race. There was also a boy named Dawson and a girl called Anne.
Dawson turns out to be a runaway, but he also has some knowledge of horses. Although Felicity is a little suspicious of him at first, Dawson helps to heal Penny’s wounds. He also says that he saw Anne gathering burrs, but it was probably on behalf of someone else.
When Felicity realizes that her treasured coral necklace, which her mother also wore as a girl, has disappeared, Felicity questions whether she carelessly lost it or if someone has stolen it. Felicity has been doubting herself and her ability to manage the household because of all the mistakes she has made since her mother left, and the clasp of the necklace was a little loose. This could just be another disastrous mistake, but it is suspicious that Anne seemed so friendly to her at the race and then ran away from her later. Anne also literally bumped into Felicity at the race. Could she have taken the necklace? Dawson seems to think so, but then again, can Felicity really trust everything he says?
Felicity still gets an odd feeling from Lady Margaret’s heirlooms, and she thinks that she sees something white moving around at night. At first, she thinks that it could be Lady Margaret’s ghost, but then, strange things begin happening around the house. Things disappear, and Felicity worries that maybe she carelessly mislaid them. Then, her necklace unexpectedly turns up, and Lady Margaret’s vanity set vanishes! Are these strange things part of the haunting of Lady Margaret or the work of a thief? If it’s a human thief, is it the work of the runaway Dawson, mysterious Anne, unpleasant Mrs. Hewitt, or the mysterious person who arranged for Penny to be hurt?
The book ends with a section of historical information about Colonial era Williamsburg. The story is set during Publick Times, which was when court was in session in Williamsburg. People would gather in Williamsburg during Publick Times to see the trials in court and attend a public fair in Market Square. The fair offered various kinds of entertainment, games, and races, like the horse race in the story.
My Reaction
The story leaves it a little ambiguous at the end about whether Lady Margaret’s ghost exists, but if she does, she is not harmful and has nothing to do with the thefts in the story or what happened to Penny at the horse race. As the section of historical information explains, there are many new visitors in Williamsburg during Publick Times. This was a good setting for the story because there are many strangers to the city with unknown pasts and motives, and crowds at the fair might harbor thieves.
Part of the story and part of the section of historical information in the back focuses on the subject of orphans. Both Dawson and Anne are orphans, and neither of them is really being cared for. Dawson admits that he used to steal to support himself after his father died, but he is seriously looking for work. Anne technically has a guardian, but her guardian is abusive and uses her as a servant rather than taking care of her.
When the thefts occur and mysterious things start happening around the Merriman house, both Dawson and Anne look like the best suspects, but there are also possible adult suspects. Even after Felicity realizes Anne’s situation, she isn’t entirely sure which of the men at the fair that day is Anne’s guardian. Mrs. Hewitt also looks suspicious because she is so unpleasant and seems to be trying to make trouble for Felicity. I though the book did a good job of supplying an array of suspects to consider. The solution to the mystery was one of the possibilities I thought was most likely, but there were enough other possibilities to make the story interesting.
This is the fifth book in the Chrestomanci series. In this series, there are many different dimensions, and in each of those different dimensions, there is a copy of every person. Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history across the dimensions, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the dimensions. There is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other dimensions. This person is called the Chrestomanci. All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other dimensions are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives. The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course.
Conrad lives in the 7 series of worlds in Chrestomanci’s universe. His family owns a bookshop. Well, technically, his Uncle Alfred owns the bookshop. He started it with Conrad’s father, but he says that Conrad’s father needed a large amount of money before his death, so he sold Alfred his half. When he was young, Conrad and his older sister, Anthea, imagined that their father probably lost a large amount of money at the casino. Conrad likes that idea because he’s a bit of a risk-taker himself and likes doing adventurous things, like rock climbing. Uncle Alfred tells them that they’re wrong about their father gambling. He says that he thinks that the aristocrats at the mysterious Stallery Mansion stole a large amount of money from their father. He doesn’t explain any more about how that happened, but he cautions Conrad not to be such a risk-taker because he has bad karma.
Conrad doesn’t understand what karma is, and his sister explains that karma is sort of like fate, but it’s the consequences of good or bad deeds committed in previous lives coming back to affect the present life. She thinks that the only way to clear bad karma is to correct for the misdeeds of the past. Conrad is intrigued and asks if it’s really possible for people to live more than once, but everybody else is busy with things they’re trying to do, and nobody will give him a straight answer. Conrad can’t help but wonder what this could all mean for his karma and his fate.
One day, while Conrad is looking for a book in the shop that is part of a series he’s been reading, he realizes that the books in the series have changed titles, and although he can tell that the basic stories are the same, some of the details are different. When Conrad asks his uncle about it, Uncle Alfred is very angry. He says that it’s the fault of the aristocrats at Stallery Mansion. Uncle Alfred explains that the aristocrats at Stallery Mansion make themselves richer by very literally playing the possibilities. They use powerful magic to evaluate different possible realities and make little shifts in the nature of reality itself to make things go the way they want them to go for their business interests, so they can turn bigger profits. The problem is that any little change in reality can have a ripple effect, changing many other details of life around them, from the titles of books to the color of everyone’s mailboxes. Not everyone notices these magical changes in reality because they use mind games to fool people into thinking that whatever changes they made were always like that. (It’s a weird combination of gaslighting and the Mandela Effect.) They also use powerful enchantments around their area to stop people from sensing what they’re doing, so powerful that they disrupt computers and television sets. Uncle Alfred is a magician himself, so he can tell what they’re doing, and he despises them for their manipulations.
However, Uncle Alfred is greedy and manipulative, too. Conrad discovers how greedy and manipulative he is after his sister leaves home to go to university. Both his mother and uncle are angry at her for leaving because she had been doing much of the work around the house and bookshop, and they had never had to pay her to do it. Anthea knows they’ve been taking advantage of her, and that’s the reason why she knows that she needs to leave and build a life of her own. Conrad misses her after she goes, and his uncle has to actually hire another girl and (gasp!) pay her to work for him. He frets constantly about how much it costs to actually pay someone wages in exchange for work. The other girl, Daisy, tells Conrad that his uncle isn’t hard up for money at all. The bookshop is very successful, and with what it brings in, Uncle Alfred could afford to pay her much better than he does. He just doesn’t want to do it because he’s so stingy. All of the money he brings in, he spends on himself. For the first time, Conrad becomes aware of how much money his uncle spends on fine port and tailored clothes. His mother is also two-faced, spending all of her time writing books about the oppression and subjugation of women while making Conrad do all the cooking in Anthea’s place. Conrad’s not very good at cooking, but his mother won’t cook anymore because she doesn’t want to be subjugated as a woman. She’s not above subjugating her own children for her benefit, though.
Conrad realizes that he has to use the techniques that Daisy uses to get his mother and uncle to stop exploiting him as badly as Anthea. He stops cooking and refuses to make any more food until his uncle agrees to give him things he wants as payment, like a bicycle. He notices that other kids at school get presents from parents without having to work for them or bargain for them, like he does, but he supposes that it’s all part of his bad karma.
Uncle Alfred has been blaming all of the changes that have taken place since Anthea left on Conrad’s bad karma. Conrad isn’t sure whether he lived a past life or not, since Anthea said that she didn’t believe in past lives, but since he keeps getting into trouble in various ways, he suspects that his karma might really be bad. He also starts blaming his bad karma for any accident he has (which all sound like perfectly ordinary accidents that could happen to anybody, really), and he starts feeling like maybe he deserves it all somehow for past sins. He asks his uncle what he could have done that could cause his karma to be bad. His uncle says he doesn’t know and that he’ll try to figure it out with magic.
When Conrad is getting old enough to go to high school, Conrad realizes that he’s going to have to use some kind of persuasion or negotiation to get his uncle to let him go on with his education. He wants to learn magic himself, but he knows that his uncle will probably want him to work in the bookshop for free, like Anthea did. His plan is to offer to work part time for his uncle in exchange for the money to attend high school with his friends when word spreads that Count Rudolph of Stallery Mansion has died. His heir is a 21-year-old man, and he only has a younger sister. People speculate that both of them will have to marry soon to ensure that their family line will continue. Sure enough, there is an announcement that the new count, Robert, will marry soon. People say that the old count’s wife is a controlling person and that she will control her son and his new wife, too. For some reason, the news upsets Uncle Alfred and his group of magicians.
Then, when it’s time for Conrad to leave his school and declare whether or not he’s going on to high school, his mother shocks him by telling him that he can’t go to high school because he already has a job at Stallery Mansion. Conrad demands that his Uncle Alfred explain what this job at Stallery Mansion is and why he signed him up for it. His Uncle Alfred says that he has learned through his magic that, in Conrad’s previous life, he was supposed to kill a wicked person, and he failed to do it, so this person continued their wickedness and has been reborn as an equally wicked person. Uncle Alfred says that this person’s current incarnation is someone at Stallery Mansion and that he got Conrad a job as a servant there so he can take care of the mission he failed to do in his previous life … to kill the person he is supposed to kill. Uncle Alfred says that this is the only way that Conrad can clear his bad karma and go on to live his own life. If he doesn’t, fate will take retribution on him by killing him before the year is out. Conrad isn’t sure whether to believe Uncle Alfred or not, but Uncle Alfred’s magician friends all say the same thing to Conrad, that they can read his bad karma and that it will hang over him and may kill him soon if he doesn’t clear it. As horrible as it is, twelve-year-old Conrad resigns himself to going to Stallery Mansion as a servant with a mission to kill some unknown evil person to save his own life.
When he goes for his interview at Stallery Mansion, Conrad is hired on as a page boy along with another boy, who is taller, handsomer, and very well-dressed. This other boy calls himself Christopher Smith, although Conrad is sure that “Smith” isn’t really his last name. At first, Conrad regards Christopher as a professional rival, but Christopher assures him that he isn’t interested in competing to move up the ranks of the servants. In fact, he admits that he is here for another purpose, and as soon as he’s found what he’s looking for, he will leave. Both Conrad and Christopher have their own intrigues.
Of course, Christopher is really Christopher Chant, who is currently in training to be the next Chrestomanci in his world. He is in Conrad’s world to find Millie, who has run away from boarding school because the other girls there were bullying her, and she didn’t feel like she was learning anything. Christopher had tried to tell their guardian, Gabriel DeWitt, who is the current Chrestomanci, that Millie was miserable, but he wouldn’t listen. After Millie disappeared, DeWitt still wouldn’t listen when Christopher tried to tell him that Millie was no longer in their world, so he went in search of her himself. He knows that she’s somewhere close, somewhere in Stallery Mansion, but he can’t find her, and he’s very worried. It feels like she’s trapped somewhere, but Christopher isn’t sure where.
Conrad is moved by Christopher’s story and offers to help him find Millie. Then, Christopher also witnesses the changes in reality that Conrad has seen and sees how someone at Stallery has been playing with probabilities. When Conrad confides in Christopher about his bad karma from a previous life, Christopher is sure that what his uncle told him isn’t true, no matter what his uncle and his uncle’s friends said. Together, Conrad and Christopher must confront the mysteries of Stallery: who is changing the nature of reality at Stallery and how, where is Millie and why can’t they find her, what is the truth about Conrad’s fate?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
I really liked seeing young Christopher Chant in this adventure, while he’s still learning how to be the Chrestomanci. As an adult, Christopher is always very sure of himself and able to handle just about anything, but here, he’s still young and not always sure of himself. He has high self-confidence from knowing that he’s a powerful, nine-lived enchanter, but in this story, he runs up against things that he doesn’t completely know how to handle. He puts on a show of knowing what he’s doing, but both Conrad and Millie know that there are times when he’s just bluffing or muddling his way through.
I also enjoyed seeing Christopher’s relationship with Millie develop more. They were both children in The Lives of Christopher Chant, but they have known each other for years now. It’s pretty clear that Christopher has strong feelings for Millie from the way he desperately searches for her when she’s lost. Millie knows that he’s powerful, but she also knows his faults from growing up with him. She knows that there are times when he’s lazy and doesn’t want to bother learning something, so he just bluffs his way through. He’s also grown accustomed to getting his way with things. When Millie first told him that she was unhappy at school, he wanted to run away with her so they could live alone on an island together, and Millie realized that was a terrible idea. She likes Christopher, but she doesn’t want to live alone on an island or have him constantly dictating what they’re going to do. That was why she took matters into her own hands and ran away on her own. Since Christopher is a teenage boy, I can guess why he wants to be alone on an island with the girl he likes, and even Conrad realizes that Christopher is trying to be like a knight errant to Millie by single-handedly charging to her rescue. Christopher really does love Millie, and he’s trying to be her hero and help her in romantic ways.
Christopher is a little full of himself and still has some growing up to do, but both Conrad and Millie admit that they like him in spite of his faults. The fact that they know both his good and bad points and still like him makes their relationships with him stronger. Christopher’s faults, like his superior attitude and fussiness about his clothes are minor in the face of bigger issues. He’s on the side of good, where other people in the story definitely aren’t, and although he is powerful, he never abuses those powers. Millie respects Christopher, and he does his best to look after her. At the end of the story, Conrad says that Christopher and Millie are engaged to be married, and Christopher trusts Millie with the ring that contains one of his extra lives.
When Conrad and Christopher start working at Stallery Mansion, they both learn about the divided world of a wealthy mansion with servants, with areas where the family lives and the areas where the servants live, like that shown in Upstairs Downstairs, Gosford Park, and Downtown Abbey. The boys have to learn to make themselves unobtrusive, like they’re pieces of furniture, except when they’re needed to do something for the family. They also learn to be observant and to anticipate the needs of the people they serve. Conrad has some experience with housework and cooking from home, but when Christopher arrives, he has little or no idea how to do certain things because there are staff at Chrestomanci Castle to take care of the chores. Christopher isn’t exactly humbled by his time as a servant, but he does gain the experience of working a regular job and doing menial chores, like polishing shoes. It is a learning experience for him.
I thought it was pretty obvious from the beginning that Uncle Alfred and his friends were villains and that they made up the idea of Conrad’s bad karma to manipulate him into doing their bidding. Fortunately, both Christopher and Anthea help to convince Conrad of the truth before he does anything horrible. Anthea has also discovered that her father was the real owner of the bookshop, not their uncle, even has a half partner. When he died, he left it to their mother and to his children after her. Uncle Alfred has been using memory spells of his own to manipulate everyone into believing that he owns the bookshop. Anthea only realizes it after being away from his influence for a few years and meeting Conrad again at Stallery.
What Christopher realizes about Stallery Mansion is that it’s built on a probability fault, a place where several different probabilities happen to meet. The mansion keeps shifting between different probabilities, and the reason why they have trouble finding Millie is that she has gotten trapped in one particular probability. They can’t reach her until the mansion is in her particular probability. Part of the peculiar shifting of the mansion through probabilities seems to happen naturally because of its location, but both Christopher and Anthea realize that someone is helping it along. Unraveling the mystery of who is responsible reveals some further secrets about Conrad’s family and Conrad himself. Conrad has magical abilities and ends up receiving training from de Witt along with Christopher.
While Christopher and Millie learn a few things from their experiences, Gabriel de Witt also admits at the end of story that he has learned a few things about the way he was treating both of them. As their guardian, he takes his job of educating them and preparing them for the future seriously, something that he berates Conrad’s mother for neglecting for her own children. However, he confesses that he has neglected the emotional well-being of his wards and that he is partly responsible for them running away. When Millie complained about her school and Christopher told him off for ignoring Millie’s unhappiness, Gabriel brushed it off as teenage melodrama, but he later admits that he should have taken their complaints more seriously. After Millie ran away, he did what he should have done in the first place and went to the school to see the conditions there for himself, and he admits that Millie was right that it wasn’t a good school. He promises Millie that he will find her a better school where she can finish her education. He still makes it clear to Christopher that he was behaving like a hothead by running off himself and taking unnecessary risks, but the two of them eventually forgive one another. Later books show that Christopher and Millie still have respect and affection for Gabriel as adults. Gabriel de Witt isn’t always a perfect guardian and he doesn’t always understand young people, but he does care about his young wards and wants the best for them, which contrasts with the way Conrad’s mother and uncle were just using him and his sister with no thought to their well-being or future.
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd, 1942.
A little bunny tells his mother that he’s thinking about running away, but his mother assures him that, no matter where he goes or what he does, she would always come after him because he’s her little bunny, and she loves him.
The pictures where the little bunny talks about all of his ideas for running away and evading his mother and where his mother explains what she would do to follow him are in black-and-white.
However, there are large, full color pictures after each of these sections showing what would happen as the mother follows her little bunny.
The little bunny’s plans for running away become increasingly imaginative and outlandish, from going up a mountain and joining the circus to transforming himself into a fish, a bird, or a sailboat.
No matter what the little bunny thinks of for running away and changing himself into something else, his mother assures him that she would find a way to come after him and be there for him. In the end, the little bunny decides that he might as well stay with his mother, just as they are.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
This is a very well-known and much-loved book about parental love and the lengths that parents will go for their children. The mother bunny is determined to be there for her child, even when the child wants to run away. We don’t know why the little bunny was talking about running away from his mother, and without that, it seems just like the little bunny was just trying to provoke his mother to find out how much his mother loves him. When she tells him all the things she would do to reach him if he ran away, he seems reassured and content to remain her little bunny.
This book was originally published during WWII and is a calm and reassuring story that probably comforted many children living through unsettling times. It has never been out of print since its original publication.
The author and illustrator of this book also later wrote and illustrated Goodnight Moon. The scene where the little bunny imagines himself as a boy in a house and his mother says that she would still be his mother reminds me of the illustrations in that book, and I wonder if the mother and child rabbits in that book came from this one.
When the character of Maniac Magee is introduced, he is described as a legend or a tall tale. Even though he is a young boy, his origins are unusual, and people have built up stories around him. The story even admits that his personal story is part fact and part legend.
The truth is that “Maniac” is an orphan. His real name is Jeffrey Lionel Magee, and he was born a normal boy with normal parents, but his parents were killed in a trolley accident when he was only three years old. After that, he went to live with his aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania. However, his aunt and uncle had an extremely dysfunctional marriage. They didn’t believe in divorce, so they stayed married, but they lived a strange, separated life in their house. They divided their home in half so they could effectively live apart, avoiding each other most of the time. They shared Jeffrey by taking turns eating meals with him, but they never ate together as a whole family. Eventually, Jeffrey couldn’t take this weird life anymore, where his aunt and uncle never talked to each other. One day, he blew up at them at a program at his school, and he ran away.
For the next year, Jeffrey seems to have wandered around by himself. Nobody is sure exactly where he was during that year, but he eventually turned up in another town about 200 miles from where he started. He wore ragged clothes and worn-out shoes, but he greeted people with a cheery, “Hi.” One of the first people he meets is a black girl named Amanda with a suitcase, and he asks her if she’s running away. Amanda tells him that she’s not running away, just going to school. Her suitcase is full of books. Jeffrey is fascinated by the books, and he offers to carry her suitcase. Amanda thinks it’s strange that a white boy like him is in an area of town that is almost entirely black, and she asks him who he is and where he lives. Jeffrey doesn’t quite know how to answer her at first because he doesn’t really live anywhere.
He asks her why she carries so many books to school, and she explains that she has younger siblings who color all over everything and a dog who chews everything, so she feels like she has to carry her whole personal library around with her to protect it. Jeffrey begs Amanda to loan him a book. At first, she refuses because she doesn’t know if he’ll give it back, but he swears he will. After they argue about it, Amanda tosses him a book because she has to hurry off to school and can’t take time to argue anymore.
Jeffrey continues to wander around the town for several days. People begin to notice him, how he runs everywhere goes, how he’s always carrying a book, and how he shows off his sports prowess by bunting a frog during a baseball game he joins. He lives in the deer shed at the zoo and eats some of the food for the animals, although he also joins a large family at dinner one night because they’re always taking in people or inviting people to dinner, so one extra person doesn’t attract too much attention. Nobody knows what to call him, so they start thinking of him as that “maniac” and start calling him Maniac.
The bully who threw the frog at him in the baseball game gets angry because Maniac’s bunt ruined his perfect record of strikeouts, so he decides to beat up Maniac in revenge. When he and his friends chase after Maniac, Maniac runs in the direction of the invisible line that divides the town in half, into the white portion and black portion of town. Maniac doesn’t understand the division between the parts of the town, but the other kids do, and they won’t follow him across the line between their part of town and the other part of town. Maniac’s disregard of the racial separations in this town is one of the things that sets him apart from other people and accentuates his oddness. He’s not afraid to share food with a black kid, even eating over the same place where the other kid bit.
When one of the black kids fights with Maniac, trying to get the book away from him, a page is torn. Fortunately, Amanda knows immediately which of them ripped the book. Jeffrey/Maniac reassures her that they can fix the torn page, so Amanda invites Jeffrey home with her. He spends the rest of the day with Amanda and her family. In the evening, Amanda’s father offers to take him home, but Jeffrey doesn’t know how to explain that he lives the deer shed at the zoo. In the car with Amanda’s father, Jeffrey tries to pretend that he lives in a house a few blocks down the street, but Amanda’s father knows immediately that it can’t be true. Jeffrey still doesn’t understand the division in the neighborhoods in town, and the house he picked for his pretend house is in the black area of town. When Amanda’s father presses Jeffrey for an explanation, Jeffrey admits that he doesn’t have a home and explains about his past. Amanda’s father immediately takes Jeffrey back to his family’s house, and Amanda’s mother insists that Jeffrey stay with them.
For the first time in about a year, Jeffrey has a home! Jeffrey gets along well with the family and is good with Amanda’s little brother and sister. He likes reading Lyle, Lyle Crocodile to them. He doesn’t even mind taking baths with the little kids or untying their knotted shoelaces.
Maniac starts feeling at home in the black neighborhood, although he’s still regarded as an oddity. His new family calls him Jeffrey, but everyone else calls him Maniac. He is a strange kid, who turns out to be allergic to pizza and breaks out in a pepperoni-shaped rash when he eats it. He’s a very fast runner and good at sports, and he seems to have a special talent for untying knots. Because of his time spent living in a dysfunctional house where people didn’t talk to each other and his time living alone on the streets, there are many things that Jeffrey doesn’t understand about other people. He doesn’t understand social dynamics and racial issues, and it takes him some time to understand how other people look at him as well as at each other.
One day, when he’s playing with the other kids in the street, an older black man calls him “whitey” and tells him to go home, back to his “own kind.” He doesn’t believe that Maniac lives in the neighborhood. His new siblings tell the old man to go away, and the old man keeps ranting about people belonging with their “own kind” until a woman leads him away. The incident disturbs Maniac. Amanda says that the old man is a “nutty old coot” and that Jeffrey should ignore him, but the incident makes Jeffrey realize that there are some people in the neighborhood who don’t want him there. Jeffrey wants to stay with his new family, and they want him to stay, but Maniac worries that his presence is creating a problem for them. Can he find a way to truly become part of this new family he so desperately needs?
This book is a Newbery Medal winner. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies), and there is also a Literature Circle Guide for book groups and classrooms.
My Reaction and Spoilers
I remember reading this book in class when I was in elementary school. The story is interesting because it’s framed as a tall tale but about a contemporary boy. “Maniac” Magee is described as being a legendary child because of his unusual ability for untying knots and his strange allergy to pizza. No real human being can actually be allergic to pizza because pizza isn’t a single food. There are many different ways of making pizza using various combinations of common ingredients. People can be allergic to some of the ingredients in a pizza, but if they were, that wouldn’t be an allergy to pizza itself, and those people would also be allergic to other types of food containing those same ingredients. That’s not Maniac’s problem, though. He seems to be particularly allergic to just pizza by itself. Maniac does things that are impossible and inherently beyond the normal child in everything he is, even in his defects, a classic tall tale character. One of his famous feats, untying an infamous knot in the neighborhood, is like the legendary Gordian Knot. The story is dressed with humor and tall tale elements, but it has themes that are very serious and even heart-rending.
Tall tale elements aside, this is a story about racial issues and a lonely, neglected child who desperately needs a family and a place to belong. Because the story focuses on Maniac as a tall tale character, the racial issues in the story aren’t immediately obvious, although they begin entering the story as soon as Maniac finds his way to his new town and encounters the girl who will be his new sister. The one thing that Maniac really needs is a stable and loving home. He is an orphan, and he ran away from his aunt and uncle’s home because they were too dysfunctional. As a runaway, he wanders for a time, looking for a better home and people who really care about him. He eventually finds that loving home with a family of a different race. Some people might find it strange that he feels a sense of belonging with people who, on the surface, seem quite different from him, but a sense of family goes much deeper than surface appearances. Maniac himself, on the surface, is a very unusual boy compared to most boys in the world, but deep down, he’s still a kid who needs love, attention, a family, and a place to call home. His new family offers him all these things, regardless of how unusual he is, and what they look like doesn’t matter.
The opposition of some parts of the community messes up this loving home for Maniac partway through the story, and he runs away and spends time on his own again. For a time, he lives in the locker room of a baseball stadium, looked after by a groundskeeper who is an elderly, washed-up baseball player. The groundskeeper, Grayson, passes away during the course of the story, but their friendship helps Maniac to understand some things about people. Grayson was also a neglected child. His parents were drunks, and unlike Maniac, he never learned to read because his teachers never tried to teach him. He was placed in a class with kids who were considered unable to learn because they were troubled or had learned problems. Because his teachers never had any faith in his ability to learn, he never really tried. Maniac is like a grandson to him and opens his eyes to many things before his death.
After Grayson dies, Maniac returns to wandering again, believing that he is jinxed to lose any home he has and anybody he cares about. However, Maniac still cares about other people, and he discovers that other people also care about him. When he tries to introduce a tough black boy to some white boys he’s staying with, hoping to make a connection, it goes wrong, and Maniac starts to think it’s all hopeless. However, when Maniac is unable to help one of the white boys when he’s in trouble and the black boy saves him, the white boys come to see the black boy in a different light, grateful to him for saving one of them and taking care of them. The black boy also comes to look at Maniac differently. When he confronts Maniac about why he couldn’t rescue the boy, Maniac admits for the first time that he’s still haunted by the memory of how his parents died, and the situation reminded him too much of it, so he was unable to handle it. The black boy softens at seeing this human side to Maniac and the other white boys. He’s the one who brings Amanda to Maniac, and Amanda insists that he come home with her. Maniac hesitates at first because he thinks he’s jinxed, but Amanda won’t put up with any nonsense from him, and Maniac comes to realize that they really are a family and that he is really going home.
As a side note, I also remember my elementary school librarian reading Lyle, Lyle Crocodile to my class when I was in first grade. In fact, she said it was one of her favorite books, and she also read others in the series to us. I had forgotten that the book was mentioned in this story, which was published the year after I first heard Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, but it did bring back some nostalgia for me. When Maniac teaches Grayson to read because Grayson never learned when he was a kid, they find well-known picture books on the sale rack at the library, including The Story of Babar, Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel, and The Little Engine That Could.
Ruth Fielding at Sunrise Farm or What Became of the Baby Orphans by Alice B. Emerson (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1915.
When the story begins, Ruth and her friends are at boarding school, and they are having a secret night meeting of their club, the Sweetbriars, to initiate some new members. Their initiation ceremony includes the story about the statue with the harp in the fountain that the girls were told during a scary initiation to another club in an earlier book, but the Sweetbriars are against tormenting and hazing new members. Instead of the scary ceremony, their initiation ceremony involves marching around the fountain while chanting a rhyme about the statue. There is supposed to be a mild prank of splashing the new members as if the fountain did it, but that’s as much hazing as the Sweetbriars will allow.
However, their ceremony is interrupted when one of the girls who is already a member of the club starts screaming. When everyone runs to see what happened, the girl who was supposed to do the splashing of the new members is all wet and says that someone pushed her into the fountain. She doesn’t know who did it, but she saw someone run away afterward. Ruth catches this mysterious lurker, and it turns out to be a younger girl who doesn’t belong to their school at all. The girl says that she had just been at the fountain, getting a drink of water. She says her name is Raby and that she ran away from some people called Perkins, who beat her. Ruth isn’t able to get much of Raby’s story that night, but she can tell that the girl is in trouble, so she says that if Raby will meet her the next morning, she can give her some money and help her.
The next day, Ruth’s friend, Madge Steele, invites Ruth and the other girls to spend part of the summer at a farm that her family bought near Darrowtown, where Ruth used to live with her parents before they died. The farm is called Sunrise Farm, and this trip is also meant to be a graduation party for Madge. Madge is older than the other girls, a senior at Briarwood, so these are her last few months at the school.
Ruth slips away from the others to bring some food to Raby, and she learns more about the girl’s plight. Raby explains that she’s an orphan. Raby is her last name, and her first name is Sadie. She was at an orphanage with her two younger brothers, a set of twins called Willie and Dickie. However, kids are only kept at the orphanage until about age 12, when they are put to work. Sadie is about 12 1/2 years old, and she was separated from her brothers when they were taken in by another family and she was sent to work for the Perkins family. The Perkins family acted kind in front of the adults at the orphanage, but they started treating her badly as soon as they got her to their home. Ruth is very much aware that she is also an orphan, and if it hadn’t been for her uncle and her friends, she would never have been able to go to a school like Briarwood and might have ended up in a situation very much like Sadie’s.
Ruth gets to see for herself what Mr. Perkins is like. While the girls are talking, he enters the school grounds to find her. Sadie runs away and hides, and Mr. Perkins grabs hold of Ruth. He has a whip with him, and he whips Ruth across the knees, demanding that she tell him where the runaway girl is. Mr. Perkins is interrupted by a stage driver, Mr. Dolliver, who sees what’s happening and yells at Mr. Perkins to leave Ruth alone and not to bother any of the girls at the school. Mr. Perkins claims that he didn’t know Ruth was a student, and Mr. Dolliver makes Mr. Perkins leave. When he’s gone, Ruth explains the situation with Sadie to Mr. Dolliver. Mr. Dolliver tells her that it’s against the law to help runaways. Ruth asks if that means that Sadie will be sent back to the Perkins family if she’s caught, and Mr. Dolliver says that’s probably the case: “Ye see, Sim Perkins an’ his wife air folks ye can’t really go agin’—not much. Sim owns a good farm, an’ pays his taxes, an’ ain’t a bad neighbor. But they’ve had trouble before naow with orphans. But before, ’twas boys.” Ruth says she hopes that the boy orphans also ran away from the Perkins family, and Mr. Dolliver says, “Wal—they did, by golly!” (Oh, surprise, surprise.)
Ruth begs Mr. Dolliver not to turn Sadie in if he sees her, and Mr. Dolliver says that his plan is to not see her, and he advises Ruth to do the same. Ruth tries leaving some food out for Sadie again, but she doesn’t return to the school. She hasn’t been returned to the Perkins family, either. Ruth is glad that she’s not with the abusive Perkins family, but she’s still worried about where Sadie went and what she’s going to do. As the school year comes to an end, Ruth gets a letter from Aunt Alvirah saying that her Uncle Jabez is willing to let her go to Sunrise Farm with her friends during the summer. Aunt Alvirah has hired a “tramping girl that came by” to help with the work around the Red Mill, so Ruth will be free for a relaxing visit. Ruth later learns that the “tramping girl” was Sadie, but Sadie has moved on to find work elsewhere by the time Ruth gets home from boarding school. Ruth hears stories about her from other people who employed her or helped her, and her best friend’s brother, Tom, says that he paid for her to get a ride on a train to a town called Campton.
Soon, it’s time for Ruth and her friends to go to Darrowtown and meet at Sunrise Farm. It’s an emotional journey for Ruth because she has bittersweet memories of Darrowtown from when she lived there with her parents, when they died, and the period when she was an orphan there, before she went to live with her great uncle. While she’s there, she stops to visit with Miss Pettis, a seamstress who looked after her before she went to live with Uncle Jabez. Miss Pettis is happy to see her, and the two of them spend some time catching up on what’s been happening to everyone since Ruth left Darrowtown.
When they all get to Sunrise Farm, Madge’s father is annoyed because he’s discovered that their neighbors, the Caslons, are having a bunch of “fresh air children” coming in the summer. (“Fresh air children” are children who come from the city, usually from unfortunate backgrounds, to experience the fresh air and wholesome activities of the countryside. There are still programs that do this, including the Fresh Air Fund in New York. In fact, I think that might be the program that the Caslons are supposed to be participating in as a volunteer host family during the story because it existed in this time period, and the series is generally set somewhere on the East Coast.) Mr. Steele thinks that the Caslons are bringing in a bunch of children to make noise and annoy him personally, but Madge says that she’s heard that they take in children like this every summer. Madge’s parents see this as a personal inconvenience to them. Ruth knows that Mr. Steele is a wealthy businessman who has always lived in the city. He doesn’t know much about the countryside, doesn’t understand the people who live there, and has little patience for any of it. When he bought Sunrise Farm, he did it with the idea of being kind of a gentleman farmer, but it’s starting to become obvious that he has little idea of what that means.
It turns out that Sadie’s little brothers are among the group of orphans who are visiting the Caslons this summer, and Sadie soon shows up, looking for them. At first, Mr. Steele thinks he should call the orphanage when Sadie shows up at Sunrise Farm, but after she rescues his young son from a runaway horse, Mr. Steele is grateful and decides not to. Instead, he plays host to Sadie and her brothers at Sunrise Farm. Then, they learn that a lawyer has been looking for the Raby family because they have inherited some property in Canada. When the Raby twins and some of the other “fresh air” boys run away and get lost on a prank, Mr. Steele and Mr. Caslon join together to find them and get a new respect for each other.
This book is now in the public domain and available to borrow and read for free online through Project Gutenberg.
My Reaction and Spoilers
This is one of the books in the series that is really more adventure than mystery. There are some moments of slight mystery, when Ruth wonders where Sadie is or where her brothers are, but those are cleared up pretty quickly, just by chance, without Ruth having to go out of her way to investigate. The Raby children’s unexpected inheritance is quite a convenient coincidence, but it still leaves the children’s custody to be decided. At first, I thought that they might stay with the childless Caslons, but Mr. Steele, having been won over by the children, agrees to look after them and manage their inheritance until they’re old enough to manage it themselves. It feels a little classist that rich Mr. Steele gets the children and manages their inheritance, but by the end of the book, the Steeles are getting along better with the Caslons, so I suppose they’ll be seeing each other on a regular basis. The Caslons will also probably continue to invite “fresh air” kids from the city to visit their farm.
I really appreciated the part in this book where Ruth gets emotional about returning to the town where she used to live with her parents before they died. Orphans are common in children’s literature, partly because their orphaned status can be a reason for leaving home and finding adventure. However, I’ve noticed that many children’s series don’t dwell on the loss of the parents for long after it occurs and the adventure starts. Even when a child grieves for the loss of a parent, that grieving doesn’t show up much in sequels in a series as the story focuses more on the orphan’s adventures and new friends, like they kind of got over it. The Boxcar Children, for example, rarely mention their parents at all, and their cause of death isn’t even described in the main series (except for the oldest edition of the first book, which has a really dark first chapter). Ruth Fielding, as a character, was kind of a precursor to Nancy Drew in the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and Nancy Drew also lost her mother, but she never really talks about it. Ruth is usually a pretty happy person, even in difficult circumstances, but I like this acknowledgement that she still feels something from the loss of her parents. Even though she tries to keep cheerful and busy, there are times when she can still get sad about their loss. It’s like that in real life. Even when someone has had a long time to get accustomed to a loss, they can still have moments when they think about it and feel sad. This is the type of character development that I like in the Ruth Fielding series that doesn’t appear much in other vintage children’s series.
This book also addresses the fact that, as orphans go, Ruth has been more fortunate than some. Ruth’s uncle isn’t rich, and he’s kind of a miser, but he still takes care of her, gives her a place to live, and makes sure that she gets an education. Uncle Jabez sometimes says that he doesn’t know what good a fancy education will do for Ruth and that other girls like her stay home to help with chores or go out and get jobs. However, Ruth’s friends are getting an education, so Uncle Jabez decided in earlier books that Ruth should go to the same school and not be left out. Ruth comes to see how other people look at orphans. People accept Ruth because she lives with her uncle and goes to school with girls from better-off families, but would they all look at her the same way if she’d been forced to grow up like Sadie?
Mr. Steele is rather self-centered, thinking only of his convenience in everything. He sees the presence of the young orphans next door as some kind of personal affront to him because he thinks they’re just there to cause noise and mess and make trouble for him. Madge and her mother don’t like that kind of talk, but Madge’s brother echoes everything his father says. Even some of the other guests at Sunrise Farm express similar sentiments about how troublesome the young orphans are or must be, even for the Caslons: “Just think of troubling one’s self with a parcel of ill-bred children like those orphanage kids.” However, when the young people talk to the Caslons, they learn that the Caslons love having the orphans visit them every year. While Mr. Steele tells himself (and anyone who will listen) that the Caslons have only decided to do this out of spite for him, they’ve actually been hosting orphans for years, long before they ever met the Steeles, and it has nothing to do with the Steeles. Their own two children died very young, and they find joy and fulfillment in helping to take care of other children. They know that kids cause a certain amount of noise, mess, and chaos, but they feel like the inconveniences are worth it because they truly enjoy the children and have fun with them.
There is also a theme in the story about neighbors, what makes somebody a good neighbor or a bad neighbor. Mr. Steele thinks that the Caslons are bad neighbors from the beginning, both because they invite the orphans to join them for the summer, which Mr. Steele thinks is going to cause him some kind of personal inconvenience, and because the Caslons refuse to sell their farm to him when he decides that he wants to buy them out, like he’s entitled to their farm and they’re somehow “bad” for not letting him have it when he wants it. From my perspective, Mr. Steele is the bad neighbor because he’s the one who comes in without knowing the things that people in this area do, and he expects everyone to change their plans even sell out to him just on his say-so. Mr. Steele wants everything to be about him, even when it takes place on someone else’s property, and it bothers him that other people’s property belong to them and not to him. It seems to me that various characters in the story rate their neighbors not on how their neighbors behave or what they actually do but on how they happen to feel themselves at that particular moment. Mr. Steele seems to be in a mindset where I would expect that anything a neighbor did on his own property would be some kind affront to him because what he really wants is the neighbor’s property itself. It feels to him like his neighbor is doing things to him because, in his mind, the neighbor’s property is already his, even though it’s not, so the neighbor is already committing a trespass just because they are on their own land and doing what they’ve always done there, which Mr. Steele doesn’t own outside of his own mind. Fortunately, Mr. Steele’s experiences with the Raby children and his acknowledgement that Mr. Caslon is more experienced with this area and better able to find the lost children than he is humble him a little and get him to take a different view of both the Caslons and the “fresh air” children.
Some of the characters seem to have poor priorities when it comes to figuring out who makes the best neighbors, and I think maybe they should take some of their neighbors’ actions under realistic consideration. I don’t know what Mr. Dolliver means when he says that Mr. Perkins “ain’t a bad neighbor.” That’s definitely not the impression I’m getting. When someone storms onto someone else’s property in a full rage and starts randomly grabbing and whipping a girl he’s never seen before, it’s not just a red flag anymore. A red flag would be a warning of potential danger, and this is full-on, uncontrolled physical violence in action in front of a witness! Ruth’s skin is described as having red welts from the whip! If this is part of Mr. Dolliver’s definition of a neighbor who “ain’t bad”, just how does he define a bad one? Honestly, where are the limits? It seems like the only thing Mr. Perkins has going for him is money from his “good farm” and “taxes”, which makes me think maybe the locals are easily bought off. As long as this neighbor seems to be contributing money (through direct or indirect means, through taxes) and there is the option to ignore his behavior, the local people seem content to ignore the behavior and accept the money.
From what Mr. Dolliver says about Mr. Perkins’s problems with other orphans before, his physical violence is repeated behavior. By Mr. Dolliver’s admission, the Perkins family has never had a different result with any orphan they’ve had in their custody. Each time, they mistreat the orphan and the orphan runs away in desperation, unable to return to the orphanage that’s supposed to be caring for them because the adults there seem to think that it’s more important to not say “no” to the Perkins family than to ensure the physical safety of children. I’m pretty sure they’re getting money for this, because otherwise, why in the name of all that is truly good, holy, and sane, would anybody ever let him have access to any other orphans after he’s already gone through multiple orphans in this fashion already? To very loosely quote Oscar Wilde, to lose one might be considered unfortunate, to lose two begins to look like careless, and to lose three or more brings everyone involved in the process into question. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. How many minors is the orphanage prepared to sacrifice to the Perkins family before they decide it’s enough, and at what point will it dawn on them that the Perkins family is the common element to the disappearance of all of the previous orphans?
I’m just going to say it: Mr. Perkins is a dangerous weirdo. He’s unsafe with vulnerable children or really anyone who gets in the way when he’s angry and is not in a position of authority or able to fight back. I’m sure his neighbors are either being bribed or they’re all in deep denial about it and that’s why they end up being complicit in the continuance and repetition of orphan abuse. I know that, as a character, Mr. Perkins is deliberately set up as a villain and an obstacle in the story to be escaped or overcome, but he’s such an over-the-top violent character, running around with a whip that he uses on total strangers, it just brings the orphanage, the neighbors, and everybody in the community who still calls this wacko a basically decent neighbor into question.
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.
Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp or Lost in the Backwoods by Alice B. Emerson (the Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1913.
It’s shortly after Christmas, and Ruth and her friends, the Cameron twins, Helen and Tom, are home from boarding school. They’re excited because the twins’ father has purchased a snow camp, a kind of winter retreat in the woods, with a nice cabin that has enough room for the twins, Ruth, and some of their school friends. In fact, Mr. Cameron is allowing the young people to take a party of their friends there soon, before school starts again.
However, before they leave on their trip, Ruth and the twins have an unexpected confrontation with a neighbor’s bull that causes a boy hiding in a hollow log to be knocked into a freezing creek. They manage to rescue the boy and take him back to the Red Mill to warm up.
The boy reluctantly explains that he is Fred Hatfield and that he has run away from home, which is in Scarboro, New York, close to the snow camp. His father is dead, and he says that he has plenty of other siblings to help his mother at home. He is evasive about why he felt the need to run away, just saying that he was tired of where he was, and he’s sure his family won’t miss him. None of the adults are impressed by that explanation, saying that they’re sure that a mother would miss any of her children, no matter how many others she might have.
Ruth spots a newspaper clipping that Fred dropped, and when she picks it up and reads it, she realizes that Fred’s situation is more serious than anyone else thinks. At first, she doesn’t tell anyone else about the clipping, not sure how much she should reveal about what she knows (even to the readers). However, knowing that Fred might try to run away, she hides his trousers so he can’t leave in the middle of the night.
The next day, they tell Fred that the young people are going to the snow camp near Scarboro, and that Mr. Cameron will take Fred there on the train when he escorts his children and their friends there. As Ruth anticipates, Fred doesn’t want to go back to Scarboro. He tries more than once to run away, and one of his attempts to run and Ruth’s attempt to stop him cause them both to be separated from the rest of the party, lost in the winter woods. Fred isn’t happy with Ruth for tagging along with him and interfering in his business, and Ruth says that she’s not going to let him abandon her in the woods.
Together, they have a frightening encounter with a with a panther and get help from a hermit living in the woods. The hermit is a strange man who keeps rattlesnakes as pets, although the poison sacs have been removed. He teaches the Ruth and Fred to walk in snow shoes, and he helps them to reach the snow camp. They actually manage to get there before the rest of their party does, but Fred disappears just as they arrive.
When Ruth calls her friends in town to let them know that she’s all right and that she’s reached the snow camp, Mr. Cameron shocks her by telling her that the boy she’s known as Fred can’t possibly be the real Fred Hatfield. Mr. Cameron has learned from the local authorities that Fred Hatfield was killed in an apparent hunting accident months ago, although some people wonder if it was actually a murder. Fred’s half brother is being held by the authorities for Fred’s death. Did Fred just fake his death and run away? Or is the boy they know as Fred someone else entirely?
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
When we’re first told that Fred Hatfield was supposedly killed in a hunting accident, they mention that the boy’s body apparently rolled into a river after being shot, making it seem like Fred could still be alive, but then we’re told that the boy’s body was recovered from the river. That means that either Fred is actually dead and this new runaway Fred is an imposter or some other boy has been killed and Fred is just letting everyone think that the dead boy is him. Either way, there is a runaway boy whose identity needs to be established and a dead body whose identity also needs to be confirmed, and the circumstances of that death also need to be established. What really happened during that fateful hunting trip?
I liked the premise of this book because it’s much more of a mystery than the previous two books in the series. However, as an early Stratemeyer Syndicate book, there isn’t much deliberate investigation of the mystery. Most of the story is more adventure-oriented, and the characters learn the truth of the mystery almost by accident and through Fred’s eventual confession. In between, the characters have some outdoor winter fun. The girls make some homemade candy, which the boys spoil with a prank, causing some boy/girl rivalry. The girls get lost in a bad snow storm while trying to prove that they can be as daring and innovative as the boys when it comes to having fun and end up having to rescue Fred as well, which is when the solution to the story is revealed.
The solution is pretty much what people thought it was, which is a bit of a let down. At first, I thought that there might be more of a plot twist. Even the true identity of the dead body isn’t very exciting. Fred was labeled as a bad boy in the beginning, and that turns out to be true, but his half brother also admits that he was pretty hard on Fred at home because he’s smaller and not as physically strong as his older half brothers. They criticized Fred for not keeping up with the physical work they were doing and called him lazy, but realistically, Fred can’t do all the things they do, and his half brothers realize that they have to acknowledge and accept that. They say that they’re going to try to find him a different kind of work that he can do.
It’s not a bad ending, but I’d like to see a little more deliberate investigation from Ruth Fielding. I would have liked to see Ruth Fielding talk to other members of Fred’s family and maybe have one of them produce a picture of Fred to help establish his identity. Then, I’d like to have Ruth and her friends find Fred more deliberately than accidentally. The story isn’t bad the way it is, and there’s plenty of adventure, but as a mystery fan, I usually prefer more deliberate detective work.
When I first read this book, I didn’t have a copy of it because copies are collector’s items, and many of them are too expensive for me to afford, but after I read this book online, I managed to find a physical copy at an affordable price! I didn’t read this book as a child, but it’s exactly the kind of book I would have loved with atmospherically magical places (although no real magic), mysterious memories, and an orphan with a hidden past. This book was my introduction to the the Ian and Sovra series, although it’s the third book in that series. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Thirteen-year-old Cathie lives at St. Ursula’s Home for Female Orphans in Birmingham, England. She has lived there ever since she was a young child and was found wandering the streets of London after a bombing raid during World War II. When she was found, she was wearing only a nightgown and clutching a locket that held a picture of a dark-haired woman and some dried flowers. She was unable to tell anyone her full name, only calling herself something that sounded like “Cathie.” (Hint: It “sounded like” Cathie. It wasn’t actually “Cathie.”) There was a label attached to her clothes, but it was torn. It only had the first part of her name (“Cat”) and the words “Passenger to” followed by what looked like the beginning of a place name that started with the letter “K” followed by “via” and what looked like the beginning of King’s Cross. If the label had been intact, there would have been no trouble identifying the child at all. The authorities made inquiries for her family or anyone who could identify her, but no one came forward. The conclusion was that her parents must have been killed in the bombing raid and that she had no other living relatives. Her family, whoever they were, was probably not from London because she was found near some railway station hotels, which had been destroyed. Most of the people staying there were killed, and the hotel records were also destroyed, leaving no further clues to Cathie’s identity. Cathie was sent to the orphanage and given the full name of Catherine Harris, but she knows that isn’t her real name. She has no recollection of the traumatic night of the bombing, but she has a vague sense that she has a real home and family somewhere else and a desperate need to discover her real identity.
One day, while reading a poem by Wordsworth aloud, a description of the seaside awakens a memory in Cathie of her early childhood. She’s had dreams of the seaside before, but she’s never been to the seaside since coming to the orphanage. Her memory of it is so clear that she’s sure that it’s not a dream but a place she’s actually been in the past, perhaps even the place where she used to live. She clearly remembers playing in the white sand on the beach, but she just can’t remember where the beach is.
When Miss Abbott, the headmistress of the orphanage, chides her for stopping her reading of the poem aloud, Cathie is upset that she disrupted her vision and her attempts to remember and screams, throwing the book across the room. Later, when she is called to the headmistress’s office to explain her fit of temper, she explains about the memory. The headmistress once again tells her the story of the night when she was found and shows her the locket and label that were found with her. The authorities honestly tried everything to locate her family and learn her original name, but since all attempts failed, the headmistress tells Cathie that she’s going to have to reconcile herself to not knowing. They’re not even completely sure whether the locket is Cathie’s or not because she was carrying it instead of wearing it, so it might have been something that she just found in the rubble after the bombing and picked up.
The headmistress says that she’s known other girls before whose birth names and parents were unknown, and it’s common for them to imagine some grand past or wealthy relations, pretending that they’re the long-lost daughters of a duke or something, but she wants Cathie to be more practical than that. Her parents are almost certainly dead, and if Cathie had any living relatives, Miss Abbott thinks they would have claimed her before. Miss Abbott thinks it’s unlikely that Cathie will ever get the full story of her past, no matter what she may or may not remember from a seaside holiday. Even if she somehow managed to locate the beach she’s thinking about, Cathie’s parents are dead, and there would be no one waiting for her there. Miss Abbott wants Cathie to focus on the here and now, applying herself to making a future for herself and making friends with other girls. Miss Abbott says that family isn’t everything because even blood family members aren’t always supportive to each other, but learning how to make and keep supportive friends will ensure that Cathie won’t be lonely. She says that Cathie will have a much easier time making and keeping friends if she improves her attitude and learns to keep her temper. It’s actually not bad advice if it’s really impossible for Cathie to learn about her past or if she genuinely has no relatives, but Cathie has a strong sense that isn’t the case for her.
Cathie can’t stop wondering about her memory of the sea and her mysterious past. She’s sure that the locket really did belong to her, but she can tell that the picture in it is much too old to have been her mother because of the woman’s hairstyle, which looks like styles from about 100 years earlier. The woman is standing in front of some mountains, and Cathie wonders if those mountains are a real place as well. She keeps thinking that, if she can get away from the orphanage and see other places, maybe she could find the place she remembers and learn who she really is.
As punishment for her temper tantrum, Cathie is sent to do some mending work for Miss Langham, who owns a big house nearby, instead of going to the pictures with the other girls. Cathie doesn’t mind too much because they were going to see a movie that she didn’t really want to see, and she also likes sewing and Miss Langham. While the two of them have tea in Miss Langham’s garden, Cathie brings up the topic of mountains, and Miss Langham mentions that she likes mountains, too. When she was younger, she used to go for mountain hikes. Cathie shows Miss Langham some embroidery work that she’s been doing with a floral design based on the little flowers in her locket, which look like silver buttercups. Miss Langham recognizes the flowers as Grass of Parnassus, which grows in marshy places, but not in Birmingham. She says that she used to see those flowers when she was younger and went hiking in the mountains in Scotland.
For the first time, Cathie realizes that she might not be English at all. If she had come from somewhere else, that might explain why no one in England knew who she was. The place that she’s remembering might be somewhere in Scotland. If she had really been a passenger from King’s Cross station in London, the train that brought her there might have been the Flying Scotsman, which Cathie knows comes to that station. Cathie tries to think of a place in Scotland that starts with ‘K’, which might have been where she was originally from. Feeling increasingly stifled by the strict rules of the orphanage, the lack of privacy at the orphanage, the bleak city, and Miss Abbott’s attempts to get her to stop dreaming about her past, Cathie begins plotting how she can run away to Scotland and start looking for the secrets of her past.
The next time she sees Miss Langham, she shows her the locket with the flowers, and Miss Langham confirms that the flowers are Grass of Parnassus. She also notices something that no one else who has looked at the locket has noticed – the little ribbon that’s holding the flowers together has a tartan pattern (a special kind of plaid pattern). When Cathie looks closer, she sees that the woman in the picture in the locket is wearing the same tartan. Cathie is excited because she realizes that this is confirmation that she was originally from Scotland. Even better, Miss Langham tells her that there are tartans that are specific to certain families or clans. Miss Langham doesn’t know enough about tartans to recognize which clan’s tartan is in the locket, but Cathie realizes that if she can find someone who can identify tartans, she has the key to learning who her family is! (Yes, the tartan pattern in the story is a real tartan, and it is one of the tartans shown on the tartan site page I linked. I checked after I knew what family to look for. But, it’s tricky to figure it out based only on the description in the book because some clan tartans share color combinations. To really identify which is which, you’d have to actually see and recognize the patterns of the colored lines and squares in the tartan. There are no pictures in the book.)
Miss Langham begins to like Cathie and sends an invitation to the orphanage to invite her to spend a few days with her in her home. Since Cathie has been pretty well-behaved lately, Miss Abbott decides to let her visit Miss Langham for a few days, although she has some misgivings because she can tell that Cathie has been acting oddly, as if she were keeping a secret. This visit to Miss Langham is critical because it gives Cathie the means to go to Scotland and try to find her home and family.
When Cathie goes to Miss Langham’s house, she isn’t there. Instead, Mrs. Riddle meets her and apologizes to her on Miss Langham’s behalf. The visit is canceled because Miss Langham’s brother is ill, and Miss Langham has gone to see him. There was no time to inform the orphanage of the change in plans before Cathie left because they don’t have a telephone. Cathie is bitterly disappointed because she had been looking forward to the visit, but Mrs. Riddle gives her some tea and cake and a note that Miss Langham left for Cathie. The note tells Cathie where to find some money that Miss Langham left for her to pay for purchasing the embroidered place mats that Cathie had been making with the Grass of Parnassus design. Suddenly, Cathie realizes that she now has money that no one else knows about. Her clothes already packed in her luggage for a few days away, including some holiday clothes that are different from the orphanage uniform, and no one is expecting her back at the orphanage for days because they all think that she’s with Miss Langham. Her opportunity to escape has come!
Feeling obligated to let everyone know that she isn’t dead when they discover that she’s missing, she adds a note of her own onto Miss Langham’s note that asks her to tell Miss Abbott that she has gone back to the place where she came from. Cathie thinks that, when the message reaches Miss Abbott, Miss Abbott will assume that Cathie has gone to London, the place where she was found as a young child. But, she has a few critical days to reach Scotland before her disappearance will even be discovered. She changes into her plain holiday clothes and goes to the train station in Birmingham. After she gets on the train, she uses her sewing things to remove the distinctive red trim on her coat so it won’t look like it’s part of an orphan uniform anymore.
The first place she goes is Derby, and she decides to hitchhike further north from there to save some money. She gets a ride from a truck driver (lorry driver, this is a British book), but he gets concerned that she might be a runaway or in some kind of trouble. He notices that the name she gives him isn’t the same as the one written on her luggage, a detail that Cathie had forgotten. At least, the driver has no bad intentions toward her and is kind enough to be genuinely concerned for her welfare. He tries to take her to a police station in Sheffield, but Cathie slips away from him and hides in the back of his truck, so he’s tricked into taking her further. When she gets the chance, she gets out and hides in the back of another truck that takes her almost to the border of Scotland. When this driver discovers her, she makes up a story about hitching rides to Scotland because she’s going there for a job in Edinburgh. She decides to take a train the rest of the way to Edinburgh, but by this time, Miss Abbott has already discovered that Cathie is not with Miss Langham. At first, Miss Abbott does think that Cathie might be going to London because of her note, but the police report of a possible runaway in Sheffield gives Miss Abbott the idea that Scotland might be Cathie’s intended destination. Cathie narrowly avoids being picked up by the police as she falls asleep in the waiting room of the train station because they think that she’s already left on an earlier train.
Once Cathie successfully reaches Edinburgh, she isn’t quite sure what to do next, but she enjoys being in the city, feeling like Scotland is the right place for her to be. Then, she spots a boy and a girl who are about her age, noticing that the boy is wearing a tartan kilt (but not the tartan in Cathie’s locket). When the boy, Ian, trips and drops the parcels he’s carrying, Cathie helps him. She makes friends with Ian and Sovra (the girl), and they invite her to come with them to see Edinburgh Castle. They notice that she speaks with an English accent and ask her about where she’s from. She confides in them about running away to find where she’s from, hoping that the answers lie in Scotland. Ian and Sovra are thrilled by Cathie’s story.
Ian and Sovra Kennedy don’t actually live in Edinburgh but on the west coast of Scotland. They’re only in Edinburgh temporarily to help their Aunt Effie. The name of their town is Melvick, and they live in a house called “Camas Ban”, which they tell Cathie means “White Bay” because of the white sand on the beach there. More than ever, Cathie is sure that she’s headed in the right direction!
Ian and Sovra catch the train home while Cathie returns to the cafe where she ate breakfast, searching for her locket, which she lost earlier. By the time she finds it and returns to the station, they are already gone, but Cathie asks about other trains to Melvick. There is going to be another train to Melvick early in the morning, and Cathie is told that it goes straight through to Melvick via Kinlochmore, with no changes necessary. Kinlochmore is the first Scottish place name Cathie has heard that starts with a ‘K’, and from the description of the area that Ian and Sovra gave her, which include a beach with white sand and mountains, Cathie is convinced that is where the secrets of her past can be found!
Cathie is on the right trail for finding the answers that she seeks, but getting caught is still a concern. The police and Miss Abbott are still looking for her, and she’s running out of money. Ian and Sovra help her and hide her in their secret hidden cottage (from the first book in the series), but unbeknownst to all of them, they’ve actually met Cathie before. Cathie really is remembering the beach near their home, and while she doesn’t remember the two of them, there was a time when they were all there, back before Cathie’s parents were killed in the Blitz and Cathie was known by her real name … Catriona, or as her parents used to call her, Catri.
My Reaction and Spoilers
One thing that I appreciated about this story is that there are no evil characters in it. None of the strangers Cathie meets wish her harm, and they even try to help her, although she dodges some of their help because it would take her back to the orphanage instead of allowing her to move forward on her mission. The orphanage where Cathie lives isn’t terrible. It’s kind of like a boarding school, so she is being educated, and she is not starved or beaten there. The worst Cathie can say about it is that the discipline is somewhat strict and she never has real privacy from the other girls.
Miss Abbott is the closest that Cathie comes to having an antagonist, and she does give Cathie punishments early in the story for the emotional and discipline problems she has while trying to revive her memories and reconnect with her past. In modern times, I think most caregivers would recognize the emotional turmoil Cathie is experiencing and be more patient and supportive to help her work through her feelings and memories, but Cathie’s orphanage doesn’t seem to offer professional counseling. Miss Abbott isn’t trying to harm Cathie. She does repeat the story of Cathie’s past when she asks her to, and when she lectures her on her behavior or gives her punishments, it’s not blind, unfeeling discipline; she explains her reasons to Cathie and tells her not just what she doesn’t want her to do but how she wants her to act and why. Miss Abbott is strict, but she actually does care what happens to Cathie and is trying to do what she thinks is best for her. The only reason why she doesn’t want Cathie to pursue the past in the beginning is that she thinks that it’s hopeless, and she’s pretty clear about that. She’s seen other girls pine for families they just don’t have or who are never going to reclaim them, for whatever reason. She thinks that there just isn’t enough information for Cathie to reconnect with her past and that she has no living relatives to find. Thinking about what she’s lost and will never find could just lead to more frustration, anger, and depression for Cathie. Even if she could find the beach she once visited as a young child, what would she do if there’s no one there waiting for her? Miss Abbott wants Cathie to reconcile herself to her loss and focus on the present and the future, building skills and relationships with the people around her, because she thinks that is what will lead Cathie to a better life. Cathie admits that Miss Abbott is nice, but she likes to plan other people’s lives, and she didn’t like the life that Miss Abbott had planned for her. In some books, that might actually be the moral of the story, learning to reconcile with the past and move forward without getting all of the answers, but this is is a sort of mystery/adventure story, so Cathie is on the path to finding the answers she seeks. It is a pretty calm, relaxing sort of adventure story, though, because no one is trying to harm Cathie, and the only threat is that they will put an end to her inquiries and take her back to Birmingham.
I liked the part of the story where Ian and Sovra are talking about which of the adults in their family and community would be most likely to give Cathie away to the authorities if they found out about her, and Ian says that even the two of them might turn Cathie in if they were a lot older. Cathie demands to know what he means by that, and Ian explains that it has to do with priorities. Kids and adults have different priorities. The biggest concern for the adults would be that Cathie is running around unsupervised and might get into all kinds of dangerous situations on her own, with no adult to supervise and take care of her. They would feel like they have to reign her in for her own good, and they’re also probably angry with her for causing them worry about her. However, Ian says, explaining the priorities that he and Sovra share with her as children, “You see, we know what’s more important. It doesn’t matter a bit if people are worried about you and rushing around looking for you. It does matter a lot for you to find out who you are.” Maybe he and Sovra would feel differently about it if they were older than Cathie and directly responsible for her safety, but as friends and equals in age, they put their concentration on helping her to accomplish her mission instead. It’s not that the kids and adults have different understandings of the situation. Both understand what Cathie is trying to do and both know know that there are risks involved in what Cathie is doing, but the main difference between them is that the children think that it’s still possible for Cathie to accomplish her mission to find out about her past, and the adults in Cathie’s life have already given up on that possibility and are just concerned with keeping her safe.
One of my early thoughts about the book was that Cathie’s parents might not necessarily be dead, since we don’t know in the beginning why Cathie was in London during WWII or how she got there. However, they really were killed in the bombing attack the night that Cathie was found, and they really are dead. For a long time, Cathie’s other relatives have assumed that Cathie/Catri died with them because the place where she was found wasn’t the place where they expected her to be and where they had been making inquiries for her and her parents. When they never heard from any of them again and they found out that there also had been a bombing in the area where they were supposed to be around the time when they disappeared, they had assumed that the whole family had been killed. Not everyone who died in bombing raids was able to be identified, so there were times when families weren’t notified of deaths and had to assume them from the circumstances and lack of contact from their relatives.
Stories about mysterious orphans with unknown pasts are staples of children’s literature and make great topics for mystery stories, but one of the fascinating things about this particular story is that it’s the kind of thing that could and did happen around the time of WWII. The time period really makes this story because it’s not only plausible that an orphan could go unidentified for a long period of time, but this is just the time and place where that would actually make sense. England was a war zone in World War II. It wasn’t actually invaded, but it was bombed frequently. People were killed, and children were separated from their parents in the chaos. In this era of chaos and sudden death, children were sometimes born out of wedlock to parents having a wartime fling and grew up without knowing who their parents were, or at least not knowing who their fathers were. That could account for some of the other children at the orphanage with unknown parents, but not Cathie. Some children were abandoned by desperate parents or were accidentally left when arrangements for unofficial adoptions suddenly fell through. Those are all things that really happened around that time, but that isn’t Cathie’s story, either.
In modern times, DNA evidence can help solve mysteries of this type, and it has helped to solve some past mysteries for people who were adopted as children, but back in the 1940s and 1950s, that wasn’t an option. Also, in modern times, Internet news stories and televised communication methods would also have helped the story of the found girl travel further, making it more likely that it would reach her relatives or someone who knew them. During this time, they would have been relying solely on newspapers and radio, and there might not have even been a picture to accompany a news story about the found child that would help someone recognize her. Modern methods don’t always solve every mystery, but they can help a great deal. That’s why this story really only works for this time period – a time when chaotic events happened that separated families and orphaned children and when modern investigative tools were unavailable.
Early in the story, I had thought that Cathie might have been about to head on her way out of London to somewhere else at the time of the bombing as a child evacuee because many children were sent away from London for safety from the bombings around that time. That wasn’t the case with Cathie, but it would have been a plausible explanation for the tag on her clothes. Child evacuees were known for having tags with their names attached to their clothes, and some children never returned home to their families when the war ended because their parents had died or had abandoned them. However, that’s not the case in this story, either. At the time her parents were killed, young Catri was actually traveling with her parents en route to another destination. The stop in London was unplanned, and they never made it to the place where they were supposed to be because of the bombing. It was just a case of bad luck and being caught up in the larger chaos of the war happening around them. The story does provided details of exactly how that happened, but since the book is available online, I decided not to include some of that information to preserve some suspense for people who want to read the story.
The special magic of this book isn’t just that Cathie discovers her identity, but how she does it. Readers know that when Cathie sets out on her journey, she’s likely to find some answers or at least a new home that will be better for her than the orphanage because the title of the book is “Run Away Home.” But, in the beginning of the story, readers are not quite sure how Cathie will do it and exactly what waits for her at the end of her journey. It’s the journey toward the truth and her special connection to the other children who help her that make the story satisfying. Little by little, Cathie uncovers pieces of the past. There are some lucky coincidences where she connects with people who were already connected to her and who can explain the past to her. When she comes to Melvick, Ian and Sovra hide her in a shieling or hut that they found hidden behind a waterfall in the first book of this series, which is a magical place to stay. For the first time in her life, Cathie has time alone where she can explore the beach and nearby mountains, and she enjoys the peace and serenity of the countryside more than the big city where she had been living. The characters in the book mention that, during WWII, parts of the west coast of Scotland were blocked off to visitors, except people who lived there or had relatives in the area, due to military exercises. The fact that Cathie definitely remembers being there during that time tells her and others that she either lived there or had family there, and it wasn’t just a one-time beach holiday.
At one point, Alastair Gunn and Dr. Kennedy figure out that Cathie is some sort of runaway, and Ian is physically punished for hiding her. I thought at that point in the book, Alastair handled the situation clumsily, saying too soon that Cathie can’t stay hiding there without first questioning her more closely about what she’s doing there and where she came from. I habitually ask a lot of questions, and it seemed to me that the adults in the book act too soon without finding out what they need to know about the situation. In their place, I would have wanted to get the situation straight before declaring anything or punishing anyone. At that point, the adults hardly know what the kids have been up to. By the time Miss Abbott arrives in Melvick, there is no need for her to return to the orphanage. Just when Cathie is thinking that she’ll have to reconcile herself to not knowing about her past and build a new future in the new home she’s been offered, the final pieces of the puzzle of her life fall into place, and Cathie gets the answers she’s been looking for. Even Miss Abbott is satisfied that Cathie has finally found the home she’s been looking for. After this book, Cathie becomes one of the major characters in this series.
I also liked this book for explaining the meanings of some Gaelic terms and place names. The Scottish characters do use some words that American readers might not be familiar with, like “dreich” and “havering,” but their dialogue is still easy to understand. The book doesn’t go overboard with trying to write to show the characters’ accents, which can get confusing and annoying in some books. The Scottish characters use “och” as an expression sometimes, but they don’t overdo it.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 