Fourteen-year-old Kathryn Gordy, called Kit, is going to boarding school for the first time. She doesn’t really want to attend the Blackwood School for Girls, but her widowed mother has remarried, and she and Kit’s new stepfather, Dan, will be going on an extended honeymoon in Europe. Kit tried to persuade her mother to take her with them on the trip to Europe, but Dan is firm that she can’t come on their honeymoon trip. The Blackwood School has a good reputation, and graduation from the school would guarantee Kit entrance to a good college. At first, Kit thought it might not be so bad if her best friend, Tracy, could attend the school, too, but although Tracy applied to Blackwood, she wasn’t accepted there. Kit hates the idea of going there alone. Worse still, when her mother and Dan take her to the school, it’s an imposing, castle-like mansion that gives Kit the creeps. Her mother and Dan think it looks impressive, but just the sight of the building gives Kit a terrible sense of evil. Even though she doesn’t want to stay, her mother and Dan insist.
Because her mother and Dan have to leave on their trip, Kit has arrived at the school a day early, before classes will start. Madame Duret, the headmistress of the school, welcomes them and explains a little about the school’s history. The school is fairly new. Before it was a school, the mansion was the private home of a man called Brewer, who died about ten years ago. Because few people would want a house that size outside of town, the building was vacant for some time before the Blackwood School moved in, and there are some ghost stories and urban legends about it in the area. Kit’s mother and Dan laugh it off.
Madame Duret gives them a tour of the school and mentions her art collection. She says that she enjoys collecting lesser-known works by famous artists. The dorm rooms are incredibly luxurious. Each student will have a room to herself with a private bath and a canopied bed with velvet draperies. Art is important to Madame Duret, and she says that she wants the surroundings to inspire her students. When it comes time for Kit’s mother to say goodbye to her, her mother asks her if she thinks she could be happy at the school. If Kit really feels like there’s something wrong with the place, her mother is willing to delay her trip and make other arrangements. Shrugging off her earlier misgivings, Kit tells her mother that she will be fine, and her mother and Dan leave.
The school still bothers Kit, but she feels like she has to try to do well there for her mother’s sake. She knows that things have been hard for her since her father died several years before. Although nobody believes her, Kit remembers seeing her father’s ghost in her room the night he died in a car accident while he was on a business trip. Her mother has managed since then, but she wasn’t really happy until she met Dan, and Kit appreciates that her mother needs adult companionship. Still, Kit senses that this school is very strange, and there are things wrong it it. She can’t figure out why her friend, Tracy, was rejected by the school. The canopied bed is luxurious but kind of creepy because it reminds her of a scary story. Then, she notices that the bedroom doors have locks on the outside of the doors but not the inside.
At dinner that evening, Kit meets Professor Farley, who is a teacher at the school, and Madame Duret’s son, Jules. Professor Farley teaches math and science, and Jules, who has only recently gotten his degree, will teach music, giving the students piano lesssons. Madame Duret herself teaches languages and literature, and apart from these three, there are no other teachers at the school. Professor Farley says that he is the one who convinced Madame Duret to open a school in the United States, having seen her success at her school in England. A young cook named Natalie also works at the school, but strangely, Natalie says that Madame Duret doesn’t want her to speak to the students much.
When the other students begin arriving, Kit realizes that there aren’t going to be many students at this school, either. In fact, there are only three other students besides Kit: Sandy, Lynda, and Ruth. All of the girls also seem to be somewhat removed from their families. Sandy is an orphan who lives with her grandparents, who don’t drive, so they didn’t even drop her off at the school. Lynda and Ruth have both been to boarding schools before, and they were dropped off by a chauffeur. They say that Blackwood isn’t like their old school. Kit still wonders why Tracy wasn’t accepted to the school when there are so few students. Kit realizes that she herself isn’t a top student, and the other three students at this school are quite different from each other. However, Professor Farley says that there are other qualifications besides grades, and all of the girls at this school have the qualities they were looking for. Madame Duret refuses to discuss test results at all.
Kit does her best to settle into the school. Everyone acts nice to each other, and the classes are like having private tutors because there are so few students. However, Kit is still nervous and having strange dreams. She never remembers what she’s been dreaming about, but she dreads these strange dreams, so she has trouble getting to sleep. The only way she can get to sleep is to exhaust herself by reading and writing letters late at night until she is exhausted.
One night, while Kit is writing a letter to Tracy late at night, she hears a scream that is choked off suddenly. Although Kit is afraid, she feels like she has to investigate and find out if there is someone in trouble. She thinks the scream came from Sandy’s room. When Kit tries to check on Sandy, Sandy doesn’t answer, and she has trouble getting into Sandy’s room. Kit feels like there is someone in Sandy’s room, and the room is weirdly cold. When Kit finally gets the light on, Sandy is a little disoriented. She doesn’t remember screaming, but she remembers a strange dream about a young woman in old-fashioned clothing, who was watching her. Sandy tells Kit that she’s had strange dreams like this before, although not about this particular woman. When her parents were killed in a plane accident, Sandy sensed the accident when it happened, and she saw her parents in a dream, not unlike the apparent dream that Kit had about her father when he died. The next day, Kit talks to Lynda and Ruth and learns that they have also been having strange dreams that they have trouble remembering.
These dreams seem to be the one thing that all four of the Blackwood girls have in common, and all of them find them disturbing. When Kit has morning piano lessons, she feels strangely tired and her fingers are sore, as if she’s been playing the piano for hours already. Kit tries to talk to Jules about the strange things that have been happening and her own sense of unease. He tries to give her reasonable explanations, but from the way he speaks, Kit has the uneasy feeling like he knows something that he’s not telling. Jules tells Kit that he’s had some strange dreams himself, but he thinks it’s just the atmosphere of the strange old house. Kit asks him if he’s still having the dreams, and he says he is, but he also likes the house and thinks that it’s just a matter of getting used to the place.
Strange things continue to happen at the school. Lynda wakes up from a nap and suddenly draws an incredibly realistic portrait of Kit when she’s never even taken art classes or done any drawing before. Then, someone steals the portrait out of Kit’s room. Letters and post cards from Kit’s mother and Tracy reveal that they haven’t received any of the letters that she’s been writing to them. Sandy tells Kit that she has a sense that Blackwood School is evil, just like Kit felt when she first arrived.
Ruth is the one who realizes that all of the girls have ESP. Sandy and Kit both experienced ESP when they saw visions of their dead parents. Ruth admits that her excellent grades are only partly due to her naturally high IQ. She can also sense the contents of books without reading them and read the minds of people giving her tests, so she can give them exactly the answers they’re looking for. Lynda isn’t as bright as the other girls, but Ruth has been friends with her for a long time and has discovered that Lynda has memories of herself in a past life, when she lived in Victorian England. Ruth realizes that the girls’ psychic abilities are the reason why the four of them, and only the four of them, were chosen to be students at Blackwood School. The school has a dark purpose beyond providing an education, and these four isolated girls are there to fulfill that purpose.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It was also made into a movie in 2018.
My Reaction and Spoilers
I read this book because it was mentioned as a book a character was reading in another children’s book, The Shimmering Ghost of Riversend, and because it occurred to me that it would fit the Dark Academia genre that’s been popular in the last few years. The reason why this book was mentioned in the other story is that both books involve ghosts who have the ability to act through other people and help them to do things that the living people couldn’t do by themselves. I have a tolerance limit on scary stories, but I felt like I had to read this one because it was mentioned in the other book, and I was curious about it. I’m not sure that I want to see the movie because trailers of the movie make it look even darker than the book, but the book didn’t go beyond my tolerance limits.
In Down a Dark Hall, Madame Duret has psychic abilities of her own and is using girls with psychic abilities to channel the spirits of famous dead people so they can complete works that they were unable to complete in life. Lynda draws and paints pictures that she shouldn’t be able to produce because she has no natural talent for art or training in it. She also begins signing her pictures with the initials TC because she is actually channeling the spirit and abilities of Thomas Cole. Sandy begins writing sonnets without having any prior interest and ability in poetry before because she is channeling Emily Bronte. Ruth finds herself making mathematical notes that are really too advanced for her and barely within her understanding. She’s not sure who she’s been channeling because the scientific and mathematical principles she’s been receiving have little personality attached to them. The reason why Kit’s fingers are always sore and she’s so tired every morning is that she’s been channeling Schubert and other musicians, playing piano music at night. There is one night when multiple musicians fight to control her and get their music out.
The girls are not channeling these spirits through any will or conscious effort of their own. Each of these episodes occurs either while the girls are asleep or just after they wake up from having been asleep. Madame Duret isn’t just facilitating this possession for the sake of art, literature, and scholarship, but also out of greed. She is known for having an impressive collection of works of little-known works of art from famous artists, but what no one else knows is that those works were not produced within the artists’ lifetimes. She has performed this same trick of using the psychic abilities of students to channel the spirits of dead artists to produce new works before, and she artificially ages these works so no one knows that they are new instead of previously-undiscovered works.
Being possessed by the spirits of the dead is disturbing enough, but the girls of Blackwood School also come to realize that the psychic bonds between them and these famous spirits are getting stronger over time. If they don’t find a way to escape Blackwood School soon, they will become permanent. Records in Madame Duret’s office reveal that some of her previous students died from their experiences, and others lost their minds and ended up in mental institutions. No one could stand this type of channeling over the long term and keep their sanity intact, and the spirits themselves don’t seem to have much or any concern for the well-being of the girls channeling them. They seem to have so many ideas that they want to get out that they push the girls harder and harder to produce them. Some of the spirits are gentler and more personable than others, but some regard the girls simply as tools to be used. They can even get violent when the girls resist them or when different spirits interrupt each other’s work. This is a very creepy book, and the girls have some close calls, but fortunately, it has a good ending. I like atmospheric books, but I don’t like books that are overly dark, and I was relieved that all the girls survived. I would have found it hard to take if children died during the course of the story.
Although I knew before reading the book that the story involved ghosts and possession, I initially thought that the isolation each girl has from family and friends was part of the reason why these particular girls were chosen for the school. Before I found out that each girl has psychic abilities, I noticed that none of them are in a position where they are very closely watched by their relatives. Kit’s mother and stepfather are going to be traveling through Europe, so they won’t be trying to visit the school anytime soon, and it would make sense if they didn’t hear from Kit for a while. Sandy is an orphan whose grandparents can’t travel easily, so they won’t be coming to check on her every weekend. Lynda’s mother is an actress who now lives in Italy, so again, there is a separation by great physical distance. Ruth’s parents are busy professionals with doctorates. None of the girls is likely to have any visitors while she’s at school or anybody who would be overly concerned about not hearing from them for a while. At first, I thought that could have been part of the reason why Tracy was rejected as a student, because she has both parents living, and those parents would be in more of a position to check on her and more likely to go to the school themselves if they didn’t hear from her. However, it turns out that her rejection is really because she isn’t psychic, like Kit. The chosen students’ relative isolation from family is just icing on the cake to their psychic abilities and plays into the plot as a reason why nobody outside the school realizes all the weird things that are going on.
I thought that the build-up of the sinister atmosphere at the school was great! Kit has a blatant sense of evil when she first arrives, which feels at first like we’re just being told that the place is evil, but there are also a lot of little details that support it. First, the place is overly luxurious for a boarding school, especially one with so few students to support it. Kit is quick to spot that the girls’ doors can only lock from the outside, which is chilling, although Jules says that’s just to keep people from going into their rooms when they’re not there themselves. However, someone does enter Kit’s locked room to take the portrait of her that Lynda drew, indicating that the girls’ rooms are not safe from anyone and that it’s possible for them to be locked in and unable to get out.
There are also hints from the beginning of the book that Madame Duret and Professor Farley are sinister. Blackwood is actually Madame Duret’s third school that we know about. She had one in France, one in England, and now, one in the US. For some reason, she tends to move countries, which seems odd for someone building a reputation as an elite educator. Boarding schools often have an air of tradition, and their reputations rest on long-term success, which is built over time. Moving around is actually a warning sign, at least to me, that Madame Duret doesn’t want to stay places long enough for people to figure out what she’s really been doing at her schools. Even Jules admits that he doesn’t know things about his mother because he has spent most of his life at other boarding schools himself, not at her schools, so the two of them have mostly been living apart. However, he does know about the possessions of the girls because he has the recordings of the music Kit plays at night. It’s just that he doesn’t fully realize the harm being done to the girls until the end of the book or the harm his mother has already done to previous students.
The old mansion the school is in has a sinister history. The former owner, Mr. Brewer, lost his wife and children, including a baby, in a fire at the house, mostly due to smoke inhalation because the fire didn’t damage the building too badly. After that, he lived as a recluse, and he would act like his family was still alive, buying things for them in town. He could have just lost his mind from grief, but there are indications that his family still haunted the house as ghosts. Locals started telling ghost stories about the place after a plumber heard a baby crying in the house.
Recent reprintings of this book have been updated to include the concepts of laptops, cell phones, and emails, which were not in use when the book was first written. The explanation for why the girls can’t use their laptops to email anybody or get outside help is that there is no Wi-Fi or Internet access at the school. They can write reports on their laptops, but they can’t do much else. Their cell phones don’t get signals, so they can’t call or text anyone.
The version of the book that I used for the cover image is one of the new, revised books with modern technology, and it also has an interview with the author, Lois Duncan, in the back, in which she talks about the inspiration behind the story, her own beliefs about ghosts and psychic abilities, and how she was impacted by the murder of her own daughter, which she earlier documented in a book called Who Killed My Daughter?, in which she consulted psychics for insight into her daughter’s death because the police seemed unable to make progress in the case. Her daughter’s murder happened in 1989, years after Down a Dark Hall was written. Lois Duncan wrote many suspense books for children and young adults, but after her daughter’s death, she gave up writing suspense because it was too upsetting for her to write about girls in danger. She started writing picture books instead. Duncan had already passed away by the time one of the suspects in the case confessed more than 30 years after the murder.
I haven’t found a copy with its dust jacket intact.
Gone Away by Ruth Tomalin, 1979.
Time flies? Ah no. Time stays. We go.
Sundial motto from the beginning of Gone Away
Francie is an only child living on a farm called Goneaway Farm in Sussex in the 1930s. It’s a very old farm, and there’s a story about it that, hundreds of years before, another family once lived there, another couple with only one child. One day, this family went to a fair in another town, Alchester, and for reasons nobody understands, they never returned to this farm. The farm stood empty for a long time before it had a new owner. Because this old family went away with no explanation, the farm came to be called Goneaway. In spite of this strange story and the age of the farm, Francie has never felt that the farm was haunted or that there was anything sinister about it. Then, Francie finds herself staying in a real haunted house.
There are no illustrations in the book. It starts with this quote.
Because the farm where Francie lives with her parents is far away from local schools, Francie studies her lessons at home with her parents’ help, but she often gets distracted by the animals on the farm and doesn’t focus on her lessons. Francie’s great-aunts, Aunt Berta and Aunt Fanny, live in Scotland, but when they come to visit the farm, they see how Francie isn’t getting her schoolwork done. The aunts are also concerned at how isolated Francie’s life is. There are no other children living nearby to be friends with Francie, and they think that her life must be lonely. They talk to Francie’s parents about sending her to boarding school, but they say that they can’t afford it. They can’t even afford a car, which is why they can’t drive Francie to school in town. The aunts remind Francie’s mother that she used to board in a private house with a nice family so she could attend school when she was young. Boarding with a family wouldn’t cost as much as a fancy boarding school, and she could come home on weekends. Still, Francie’s parents are reluctant to send her away because they think she’s too young, and they’re not ready to part with her.
When the aunts leave after their visit and her parents don’t bring up the subject of school again for a while, Francie is relieved. She loves her life on the farm, and she doesn’t want to leave. Yet, she also finds herself oddly disappointed, too. She’s read stories about children at schools, and their adventures do sound exciting. She thinks it would be ideal if she could go to school during the day and come home afterward, like other children do, but that just won’t work with her family’s circumstances. Her parents’ attempts to find friends for her just aren’t working, either. Her parents start inviting other farm families to visit on Sundays, but Francie doesn’t get along with their children. The reasons why she doesn’t get along with them are largely because the other children don’t behave well, but these incidents convince Francie’s parents that maybe the aunts were right and that Francie could benefit from going to school and meeting a wider range of other children.
Her parents write to the high school in Alchester and inquire about registering Francie. They arrange for Francie to take entrance exams, but Francie has mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the idea of boarding and going to school, with the knowledge that she will come home on the weekends, seems exciting, but on the other hand, she worries that the children at the school won’t be any more friendly than the children of the nearby farm families. Her mixed feelings continue through the day when she and her mother visit the school. At first, Francie thinks that maybe she’ll flunk the entrance exams on purpose so she won’t have to leave her farm. Then, after the initial tour of the school, Francie thinks that going there may be exciting after all, so maybe she’ll try to pass the exams. The exams are difficult, and she expects she’ll fail them after all because she really can’t do the work. Her parents tell her not to worry because, if she fails this year, she can always study more and try again next year. However, it turns out that she did pass. The arithmetic portion of the exam really was too difficult for her because the person giving her the exam accidentally gave her a higher level test instead of the basic entrance exam, but Francie did an excellent job on the writing portion of the test.
Since Francie will be attending the school in Alchester after all, she and her mother begin shopping for her school uniforms and other supplies. Francie is still worried about the prospect of boarding with strangers in town, and her mother isn’t sure how to find a house or family willing to take her. A boarding prospect turns up because Francie is too small and skinny for even the smallest available size of the school uniform, and she and her mother have to visit a professional tailor. The tailor, Mrs. Majendie, also has a few rooms that she rents out to boarders. Francie isn’t sure that she’ll like boarding with Mrs. Majendie at first because she and her house seem a bit grand, her dog seems oddly bored and unresponsive to Francie’s friendliness, and her other boarder is the headmistress of another school in town, the Chantry School. However, the available room is beautiful, with a four-poster bed and tapestries, and the room has a view of the nearby churchyard, where the children from the Chantry School are playing among tombstones in the old graveyard. Mrs. Majendie says that the Chantry School was once a chapel, and her own house was once an old inn. She also says that a new housekeeper will be moving in soon with her daughter, who will attend the Chantry School. It all seems like a fairy tale kind of place to Francie, and she is reassured that there will be another girl living in the house with her, so she tells her mother that she would like to board there.
When she actually starts school, it goes pretty well. The classes aren’t too hard, the subjects are interesting, and she gets along well with the other girls. There is an older girl called Trixie who likes to play pranks on the younger students, and some of the girls tease Francie about her height, but the older girl who is assigned to look after her, Verity, tells Francie not to take any notice of those girls. At first, Francie is able to use her bicycle to get from school to the train station, so she is able to go home every night, but then, as the days grow shorter, and it gets dark sooner, she can’t do that anymore, so she starts to board in town with Mrs. Majendie.
Her boarding experience turns out to be different from what she first thought, though. It turns out that the new housekeeper isn’t very friendly, and her daughter decided to stay with her grandmother instead of coming to town with her mother, so the house is lonelier than Francie had expected. The atmosphere is also different in the winter than in the summer, when Francie first saw her room. The room seems colder, darker, and a little more sinister in the winter, and in the evening, there aren’t any children playing in the churchyard outside. At night, she hears strange sounds, like a tapping and a wailing. When Trixie learns that the place where Francie is boarding is Falcon House, she implies that there’s something really wrong with the place, but Francie assumes it’s just another of Trixie’s tricks. Then, when other students try to get Trixie to shut up and remind her that they all promised not to talk about it in front of Francie, Francie realizes that there really is something weird about the house. She tries to get Verity to explain it to her, but Verity refuses, which just makes Francie angry and more scared. Now, she knows there is a real secret about the house, but she doesn’t know exactly what it is.
A strange man comes to visit Falcon House, and Francie sees that his card says he is Dr. D. Bone Fane from the Circle for Psychical Research. Francie doesn’t know what it means, so she asks some of the other girls at school if they know. One of them, Bryony, says that she’s met this man before. He’s a ghost-hunter from the United States, investigating supposedly haunted places. Bryony’s father teaches in the Abbey choir school, and this man has been pestering him about stories of a haunting there, although Bryony’s father thinks it’s all boring nonsense. From this information, Francie realizes that Dr. D. Bone Fane is interested in Falcon House because he thinks it’s haunted. She confronts Verity about it, and Verity admits that there are stories of hauntings at Falcon house. Nobody’s ever actually seen the ghost that haunts the house, only heard things, and the only people who have heard the ghost are children. According to the stories, Mrs. Majendie’s own children were the last children to be haunted by the ghost, and they were so scared of the house that they begged their mother to send them to boarding school so they could get away from it. Francie is the first child to live in the house since the Majendie children grew up. Francie realizes that this is why the housekeeper didn’t bring her own daughter to the house and why she seems uneasy about Francie’s presence in the house. Mrs. Majendie even gave her nightlights as a gift because she was expecting Francie to be frightened. The headmistress at Francie’s school told everyone not to talk about the ghost stories, not because she believes in them, but because she was afraid that Francie would believe them and get scared. Everyone but Francie has known about the ghost stories from the beginning, and they’ve all been waiting to see what she will experience in the house, if anything.
The more Francie thinks about it, the more she realizes that she sensed the presence of the ghost on her first visit to the house. Besides the noises she’s been hearing at night, the dog in the house reacted to something at the top of the stairs, as if an invisible hand was petting him. When Francie returns to Falcon House after visiting Verity, it’s a stormy night, and she’s terrified about what might be waiting for her at the top of the stairs. However, when she gets there, and she realizes that it’s just her, the dog, and the ghost, she suddenly realizes that the ghost isn’t a menacing presence. The dog likes it, and it seems a little teasing, but it doesn’t mean Francie any harm. Strangely, its presence begins to feel reassuring to Francie because she’s no longer alone in the house, the only child among adults. The ghost is a child, too. In fact, it’s the ghost of the child from Goneaway, the one who disappeared hundreds of years ago, along with its parents.
The more that Francie investigates, the more she comes to realize that the ghost needs her help. Helping the ghost means learning the truth about the family who once lived on the farm that Francie calls home.
This book was originally published in the UK. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is a sequel to this book called Another Day.
My Reaction and Spoilers
This book fits well with the Dark Academia aesthetic, and it could also be considered Dark Cottagecore because of the farm and countryside themes. When Francie is on the farm, she describes the animals and plants in the countryside. Francie’s school isn’t a boarding school, but she does have to board in a spooky place to go there. There are many literary references throughout the story, and there’s a note in the beginning of the book about the poetry references. Francie reads The Story of the Amulet by E. Nesbit for fun, and her class at school reads Treasure Island. She uses stories she’s read to help her understand what is happening around her. When she makes friends with a girl named Geraldine at school, Geraldine also uses story references to explain what she thinks is happening with the ghost.
When Francie first begins to interact with the ghost, she is only able to sense its presence but not really see it. As the ghost begins to interact with her, it gradually begins becoming more visible. At first, Francie can’t even tell whether the ghost is a boy or a girl, only that it’s a child about her size. She wonders why the stories she’s heard about this child and its parents never mention whether the child is a boy or a girl or what its name and age were. She thinks it’s sad that so many little piece of history get lost.
What she eventually realizes is that the child and its parents were probably plague victims because they disappeared around the time that the plague came through this area in the Middle Ages. She thinks that they probably caught the plague when they came to town for the fair and were buried in one of the unmarked mass graves she’s heard about, and that’s why they were never able to return home. When she talks it over with Geraldine, Geraldine realizes that the children who have been able to see the ghost were all suffering from homesickness when they first arrived at Falcon House. The ghost is awakened by feelings of homesickness in other children because that’s what the ghost has been feeling the entire time. What it wants is to go home to the farm, and Francie has to find a way to help bring it home with her. There is a twist in the ghost story later that leaves Francie wondering how much of what she’s perceived about the ghost is her imagination and another girl, the housekeeper’s daughter, sneaking around the house. However, there really is a ghost, and Francie does figure out how how to help it. It comes home for Christmas with Francie.
During the story, Francie struggles with the difficulties of being away from home and going to school for the first time, and she also starts to consider what it’s going to mean for her future. She still thinks of herself as living at Goneaway Farm, but then, the wife of a farm hand refers to her as becoming a “visitor.” Francie feels uneasy about that because she knows that the woman’s son also went away for school and decided that he would rather do something other than farming, so he now lives somewhere else. Francie still thinks of the farm as her home, and it upsets her to think of the farm without her or her life without the farm in her future. But, is that really what she wants? Before her great-aunts raised the issues of school and friends, Francie was content with her life and didn’t realize that either of those things was something she was missing or might want. Now that she’s going to school in town, meeting new friends, and experiencing some independence to explore the town on her own, what else might she discover that she wants and never knew she could experience before? Will the new things she learns and wants to experience mean giving up her old life, which she still loves? These are all questions that people have as they’re growing up and pursuing an education.
Nobody really knows where life will lead them when they’re just starting out, and that can be scary, but at the same time, growing up does mean change. The changes that Francie experiences are ones that she would have experienced anyway, eventually. Her mother understands some of how Francie feels because she also boarded as a child so she could go to school, but at the same time, Francie realizes that her mother doesn’t understand everything that she’s going through because she isn’t there with her every day. Her mother doesn’t fully know what her classes or teachers are like or what the other people she meets and lives with at Falcon House are like. For the first time in Francie’s life, she and her mother are starting to live different lives, and there are some things that Francie must experience and make decisions about on her own.
The practice of children from rural areas boarding at a private house to attend a day school in town is a real part of history, both in the UK and in the US. I covered that earlier when I reviewed Sixteen and Away From Home, a book set in the 19th century Midwestern US, and The Secret School, when a teenage girl named Ida wants to go to high school in the 1920s. Anne Shirley did the same in Anne of Green Gables, which is set in 19th century Canada. This is what children from rural areas in different countries have had to do if they wanted more schooling than they could get in their area.
There is a scene in the story with some gyspies. The book calls them both “gypsies” and “travellers.” One of them tells Francie’s fortune, which gives her hints about what to do. There is also a scene where girls from Francie’s school put on a performance, and there is a dancing dragon and a student who is dressed as a “Chinese boy” for part of it. The “Chinese boy” costume is only mentioned briefly and not described in detail. It’s the sort of thing that is discouraged now in school, people dressing up as people from other races.
“Sooner or later everyone has to go away from home for the first time. Sometimes it happens when a person is young. Sometimes it happens when a person is old. But sooner or later it does happen to everyone. It happened to Victoria North when she was eight.”
Victoria North is attending boarding school for the first time at the Coburn Home School. Victoria is only eight years old, and this is her first time being away from home at all, so she is very nervous and shy. When she arrives at the school, she is met by an older girl named Ann, who shows her where her room is in the dormitory. Ann shares a room with Victoria and is supposed to show her around and tell her the rules, but she doesn’t really explain much. Victoria still feels lost and has trouble even finding the table where she is supposed to sit at dinner.
At dinner, one of the other girls, Martha Sherman, starts uses funny words, and she tells the other girls that they are part of a secret language that she made up. However, she refuses to tell anybody what they mean. Martha is moody and rude to the other girls at dinner, so the housemother sends her to her room before the meal is over.
Overcome with homesickness, Victoria cries at dinner and during the songs they have to sing afterward. No one has any patience with poor Victoria. Ann tells her that she’s being a crybaby. Other girls laugh at her when they see that she’s been crying. Victoria doesn’t know how she’ll be able to handle boarding school if every day is going to be like this!
The other girls in the dormitory say that Miss Mossman, the housemother, is strict. She blows her whistle at them and makes them line up for inspection every morning. Miss Blanchard, another teacher, is nicer, and she tries to reassure Victoria that things will get better when she gets to know the other students and makes some friends. However, nobody seems to want to be friends with Victoria. Nobody except Martha.
Martha is the only girl who seems interested in talking to Victoria. Martha doesn’t like Coburn Home School, either. More than anything, Martha wants to live at home and just go to an ordinary day school instead of being boarder. Victoria knows just how Martha feels! The other girls are surprised at how well Martha seems to get along with Victoria because Martha doesn’t usually want to be friendly with anyone.
The two of them start to talk about their homes and families. Martha’s father is an importer. She keeps saying that her parents are going to let her come home from boarding school and just go to day school, but it quickly becomes apparent that it isn’t likely. Victoria only has her mother, who works and sometimes needs to travel for work. She doesn’t even remember much about her father. Martha likes math, a subject which Victoria finds hard, but Martha says that she doesn’t reading, which is Victoria’s favorite subject. The two complement each other well.
Although Martha misses home, like Victoria does, and doesn’t really want to be a boarder, she is more experienced about boarding school life, and she helps Victoria to adjust to the school. Martha starts teaching Victoria about pieces of boarding school lore, like school rhymes and the traditions made up and passed down by students, and she also begins teaching her the secret language that she made up. There are only three words in Martha’s secret language, but Martha explains to Victoria what they mean, and the girls decide that they’ll make up more together. Martha becomes Victoria’s best friend all through the rest of her first year at boarding school.
Being friends with Martha makes boarding school feel better to Victoria. Martha still constantly talks about hating boarding school and how she definitely won’t come back next year, although Victoria realizes that’s just a wish of hers. Victoria also comes to realize that many other kids at the boarding school feel the same way. Even the ones who like the school admit that they’d really rather be at home with their parents. They daydream about just going to school during the day and coming straight home afterward, where they can just relax at home and eat what they want and not have to answer to whistles or line up for inspections. When Ann’s family decides to bring her home, Martha and Victoria ask Miss Mossman if they can share a room, and she agrees as long as the girls behave themselves.
Victoria is fascinated at the things that Martha knows about life at boarding school. Martha teaches her about “pie beds.” (I always heard it called “short-sheeting” when I was a kid, although I was never good at making beds the normal way in the first place, so I never fully grasped how to pull off the trick, and I didn’t go to summer camp or boarding school, where people typically did this anyway.) The girls argue about what costumes to wear to the school’s Halloween party, but the school’s handy man helps them make ice cream cone costumes that win a prize for the most original costume. The costumes are uncomfortable to wear, but Victoria is pleased and thinks that Martha should get the credit because the costume concept was her idea. Martha says that, next year, they’ll start planning their costumes earlier and come up with an even better idea. That’s the moment when Victoria realizes that Martha is no longer talking about how she’s definitely not coming back next year.
After the girls come back from Christmas vacation, Victoria is homesick again, but it turns out that their old, strict housemother has left to take care of her father, who is ill. Instead, they get a new housemother, Miss Denton, who is much nicer. She doesn’t blow whistles at the girls to wake them up. Victoria likes Miss Denton right away, and even the other girls in the house start calling her “Mother Carrie” as Miss Denton requests, even though the name strikes them all as silly at first. Martha finds Miss Denton to be overly sweet (“ick-en-spick” in the secret language), although she admits that she’s better than Miss Mossman.
Martha also finds herself liking Miss Blanchard, who teaches math. Miss Blanchard was nice to Victoria in the beginning, but Victoria can’t bring herself to like her much because she has so much trouble in math. Victoria has a fanciful imagination and likes to imagine that certain numbers are boys and others are girls, and Martha finds it frustrating because the idea doesn’t make sense to her, and Victoria doesn’t even follow an exact pattern, like odds vs. evens in her designation. Meanwhile, Victoria is confused by the math tricks that Miss Blanchard teaches Martha. Martha thinks they’re fun, but Victoria isn’t as good at math and has trouble following them.
The two girls find themselves arguing sometimes because of their different preferences, but they remain friends. It’s more that, now that they’re getting comfortable with each other and their school, more of their individual personalities are coming out. Victoria is also surprised to realize that, while she still frequently misses her mother, she no longer agrees with her mother about certain things. When her mother comes to visit the school, she worries about Victoria sleeping in the top bunk of their bunk bed, but Victoria herself loves it and has to assure her mother that she likes the top bunk. One thing that boarding school has done for Victoria is to give her a sense of independence and room to develop her own identity and preferences. She no longer has to get her mother’s permission for everything she does, as long as her housemother approves.
Victoria and Martha are both imaginative, and they begin enjoy their shared adventures at school. They try to hold a midnight feast in their room and search for hidden passages or secret compartments in the dormitory because Martha has heard or read that these things happen in boarding schools. Neither of those adventures goes as planned, but Miss Denton allows the girls to build a little play hut of their own with help from the school’s handy man. Miss Denton also gives the girls a little lockbox to keep some of their treasures in, and they hide it so they can have a buried treasure.
As the year comes to an end, Victoria knows that she’ll be coming back to boarding school next year, and the prospect doesn’t seem so bad as it did before. Martha isn’t sure whether she will or not, talking sometimes about what they’ll do next year but still hoping to live at home with her parents. But, if Martha doesn’t come back to school, it just wouldn’t be the same for Victoria!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
One of the things I found interesting about this book is that it is set in the US. The iconic boarding school stories for children tend to be British stories, but the Coburn Home School is in New York state. The girls’ parents live in New York City.
Most of the story focuses on the girls’ relationship with each other and their growing sense of self-identity and confidence at their boarding school. They talk about classes they take and how they each feel about the other’s favorite subject, but they aren’t shown in classes themselves. The school is also a co-ed school, with both boys and girls, but the boys don’t enter into the story much because most of the action takes place around the girls’ dorm. The boys live in a different dorm. There is only one instance where a boy is shown talking to Victoria, with a hint that he might have a crush on Victoria, another new development in Victoria’s life at school. The little developments in the girls’ lives and attitudes through the school year and each little experience and adventure they have are the main focus of the story. These are the things that are helping the girls understand and develop their identities, self-confidence, and sense of independence.
Toward the end of the book, Miss Denton encourages the girls to think about all of the things they’ve learned this year, and not just the ones they’ve learned in class. The girls don’t fully understand and appreciate that Miss Denton is talking about personal growth and development, but they do consider things they’ve learned, like how to make beds, that midnight feasts aren’t as fun as they sound, and how Victoria learned not to be homesick. These are some of the little things that are part of their school experience and that are slowly making them more grown up and independent than they used to be.
Although Martha is a little older than Victoria and sometimes chides her for being babyish about some things (like putting a lose tooth under her pillow) or still homesick, the truth is that Martha has been just as homesick the entire time. Martha doesn’t appear to be as upset about boarding school as Victoria because she is not a new student in this book, like Victoria. She already went through her first year at boarding school before Victoria got there, so she no longer openly cries about being away from home. Still, the reason why she keeps talking about going home and living with her parents all the time is that she misses them. While the girls’ adventures during the school year and Victoria’s realizations about how boarding school gives her the opportunity to do things and be with people she wouldn’t at home make her feel better about coming back next year, Martha still feels uncertain about it. Martha has also come to love being friends with Victoria and even loves Miss Denton, but her feelings of homesickness leave her feeling torn about what she really wants.
There are hints that Martha will probably return to boarding school anyway, but Miss Denton reassures Victoria that she will be fine at boarding school even if Martha decides not to come next fall, reminding Victoria that she is now one of the “old girls” instead of a scared new one, like she used to be. Victoria also starts to feel that way herself. Martha will probably be back the next year to be with Victoria, Miss Denton, and Miss Blanchard, but readers can be reassured that, even if she doesn’t return, Victoria will be all right with her new sense of identity and independence. This first year at boarding school with Martha may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship or just one step to Victoria finding herself and building other friendships. Maybe it’s both. Victoria’s future life will be fine in general as she continues growing up and finding her way, learning to manage her life one step at a time.
There is a modern 21st century documentary about young children going to boarding school for the first time at 8 years old, What’s Life Like in a Private British Boarding School? | Leaving Home at 8 Years Old, on YouTube. The school in that documentary is British, but I was struck by the common feelings in the documentary and the book, even though they take place decades apart in different countries. There are just some parts of the human experience that last through the generations. The documentary also shows the parents’ side of the boarding school experience, the reasons why they choose to send their children to boarding school, and how they cope with their feelings about sending their children away and being separated from them.
Boarding school isn’t always easy for parents in terms of emotions, and there are hints of that in The Secret Language. We never see Martha’s parents in the book, so we don’t know what’s going on with them, but Victoria’s mother fusses over Victoria when she gets the chance, and she talks about how great it would be if she could arrange things so that Victoria can be home with her all the time again, too. If Victoria’s mother wasn’t a working single mother who has to travel for work, she probably wouldn’t have sent her away to boarding school at all. Miss Denton is very in tune with people’s feelings, and I think that she’s aware of all the complexities in the lives of the girls and their parents. She does her best to look after the girls emotionally, and that’s part of her urging the girls to consider other people’s feelings, to be thoughtful about each other, and to think about the ways they’ve been changing inside as well as outside. I think that the universal nature of the girls’ and adults’ feelings in the book are a sign of the author’s emotional awareness, understanding of how different types of people feel.
Ursula Nordstrom, the author of the book, was actually a famous children’s book editor. She is credited with helping to transform mid-20th century children’s literature to have more of a focus on children’s feelings, experiences, and imagination instead of being morality tales, focused on what adults want children to know or understand. The Secret Language was the only children’s book that she wrote herself. This YouTube video explains about her life and career.
This is the second book in the Bruno and Boots series (also called the MacDonald Hall series), which is about a pair of boys at a Canadian boarding school for boys and their humorous adventures and pranks.
Once again, Bruno and Boots are faced with a problem when Boots’s parents consider sending him to a different school. MacDonald Hall, unlike its athletic rival York Academy, doesn’t have its own swimming pool. MacDonald Hall is superior to York Academy in academics, but they often lose to them at swim meets because the MacDonald Hall team can only train at the local YMCA once week. Boots’s father is an athlete who once competed in the Olympics, and athletics are very important to him. Because of York’s superior athletic facilities, he’s considering sending Boots there instead. Bruno and Boots ask their headmaster why the school doesn’t have a pool, and he says that they want to build one but haven’t been able to raise the necessary money. Of course, Bruno, the idea man, immediately starts getting ideas.
Boots loves MacDonald Hall and doesn’t want to leave his friends, especially his best friend and roommate, Bruno. Although Bruno’s schemes often cause chaos, they do produce results in the end, so he is able to convince his friends to go along with them. While Boots writes letters home, talking about how great MacDonald Hall is and how much he loves it there, hoping to sway his parents’ minds, Bruno begins scheming for a way to raise the money so that MacDonald Hall can build a new pool.
First, Bruno gets the other students at the school to hold a rummage sale, selling things of their own and even some furnishings from their dorm rooms. The girls from Miss Scrimmage’s school across the road also join in their efforts, including donating some items that they liberated from their headmistress’s rooms. Mr. Sturgeon, the headmaster of MacDonald Hall is upset when he finds that the boys are holding a large public sale without his permission, and there are some complications because of the items that the girls stole from Miss Scrimmage, including the shotgun that she keeps for protection. While almost everyone would be relieved by someone else buying that gun and removing it from Miss Scrimmage’s dangerous hands, the purchaser turns out to be a robber, who uses the gun in a holdup. Chaos ensues when the police come to arrest Miss Scrimmage because the gun had her name and address engraved on it. However, Mr. Sturgeon manages to get the situation under control by explaining about the sale and giving Miss Scrimmage an alibi for the crime, and he is persuaded not to punish the boys by his wife, who is sympathetic to the boys, and a member of the school’s board of directors, who is impressed by the boys’ initiative and school spirit. However, Mr. Sturgeon tells the boys not to hold any more sales and that he needs to know about any future fundraising efforts.
Their next fundraising project is a talent show with students from both MacDonald Hall and Miss Scrimmage’s. It doesn’t go too badly, although there are complications. Mrs. Sturgeon’s attempts to take pictures of the performers startle the performers with bright flashes that cause a few accidents. Elmer’s bird calls accidentally attract an owl that flies away with Miss Scrimmage’s hat. Then, several of Miss Scrimmage’s girls modify their dancing costumes to make them skimpier, scandalizing Miss Scrimmage. In spite of the incidents of minor chaos, Mr. Sturgeon appreciates that the boys have managed to raise more money, and they’ve also managed to get some of the more shy students, including Elmer, to participate in school activities.
Mr. Sturgeon does put a stop to some of Bruno’s more inappropriate ideas. He refuses to let them hold a casino-themed fundraising event or bet on a race horse because he can’t condone gambling, and he won’t let them enter a fellow student in an eating contest out of concern for the student’s health. However, Bruno convinces his fellow students to enter any contest they can find with a cash prize. Unfortunately, some of the contests also have non-cash prizes, which is how they end up with a massive amount of jelly beans and a refrigerator. When Bruno asks Mr. Sturgeon for permission for them to hold a funny photo contest at the school, he agrees on the condition that the photos be tasteful enough for a school environment. Of course, the students’ attempts to deliberately produce humorous pictures also lead to some antics and bizarre pranks.
After that, the boys hold a kind of carnival that they call “Individual Effort Day” because each student gets to do their own kind of fundraising effort, making and selling things or producing some form of entertainment. While everyone, including the girls at Miss Scrimmage’s school, who are also participating, tries to come up with an original idea, some of the students try spying on each other and stealing ideas. Mr. Sturgeon particularly enjoys the game that Bruno and Boots are holding, where people pay to throw wet sponges at them. He accurately hits both of them and also hits Miss Scrimmage when she passes by. Cathy and Diane’s haunted house scares Miss Scrimmage, and Mr. Sturgeon gets hooked on an elaborate pinball game built by Elmer.
When Mr. Sturgeon points out that the boys have mostly been getting money from the students and parents of MacDonald Hall and Miss Scrimmage’s, Bruno takes his attempts to get money from the public too far by setting up a toll stop on the road that runs by the school. It’s illegal to get money under false pretenses, so Mr. Sturgeon calls a halt to all the fundraising efforts. However, he changes his mind when he finds out that some of the boys’ parents, including Boots’s parents, have been considering sending their boys to York Academy because of the pool issue. Realizing that the boys have been trying to save the school and continue going to school with their friends, Mr. Sturgeon lifts their punishment, although he still gives them a warning that if they do anything illegal again, it will jeopardize the rest of their lives.
The boys still have the problem that they are thousands of dollars short of their goal, even after Cathy wins a large cash prize in a recipe contest. There is still one student at the school who hasn’t contributed to all the fundraising efforts, though: Boots’s old roommate from the previous book in the series, the wealthy but stuffy and fussy hypochondriac, George. George has resisted getting involved in all the weird activities happening on campus because he considers them all “vulgar”, but when they finally explain to him that the point of it all is to raise funds for the school, he approves. If there’s one thing George knows how to do well, it’s manage money. George convinces them that they don’t need to raise more money from other people if they know how to put their money to work for them in the stock market. The other boys are a bit dubious about letting George invest their money, but George knows what he’s doing. Meanwhile, Boots’s parents have been taking all the letters he’s been writing them about how great MacDonald Hall is and how happy he is there to heart. In the end, they just want their son to be happy.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). It’s also one of the MacDonald Hall books that was made into a movie. You can sometimes see the trailer for the movie or clips of it on YouTube.
My Reaction
I always liked the Bruno and Boots series when I was a kid. The pranks aren’t quite as funny to me as when I was a kid, but I like it that the boys’ antics always have a purpose. I don’t like stories where people play pranks just to be mean, but the boys’ escapades in this series are always in support of their school and their friends.
There are also aren’t really any villains in the series, and there are no villainous characters in the story. Even when people are in opposition to the boys, they aren’t really evil. There is the rival school, which is snobby and rude to the boys, but other than giving the boys a motive for fundraising for the pool project, they don’t play much of a role in the story. The headmaster of MacDonald Hall is a good man who really cares for the boys, and even when he punishes them, he has their welfare at heart. The boys, especially Bruno, have a tendency to go too far with their schemes, and they do need someone to restrain them at times. George wasn’t a very likeable character in the previous the book, and even here, he’s kind of fussy and not too fond of Bruno and Boots. However, he also cares about the school, and this time, he has just the talents that they need. The other boys at the school also appreciate what George does for them, and they hail him as a hero.
I also appreciated that, in the end, Boots’s parents acknowledge that it’s more important for him to be happy with his school and his friends than for him to seriously train for the Olympics. Boots’s letters are overly enthusiastic about the things he’s been learning in class, and I’m sure his parents know that he’s not really that excited about his math lessons, but they can read between the lines and realize that the purpose of his letters is to indirectly ask them not to make him switch schools. Even if MacDonald Hall wasn’t able to get a swimming pool of their own, I think his parents would have agreed to let him stay there if he insisted that he just wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.
The Mystery of the Blue Ring by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.
When Dawn Bosco first joined Ms. Rooney’s class at Polk Street School, she stole Emily Arrow’s toy unicorn. Now, that incident has come back to haunt her. When the book begins, her theft of Emily’s unicorn was just weeks ago. Now, she and Emily are starting to be friends, although their friendship is a bit shaky.
At school, the teachers are talking about vegetables because it’s Good Vegetable Day. Everything is geared around vegetables all day, and the art teacher has the children make sculptures of vegetables out of clay. Dawn is bored because she’s been reading a mystery book, and she’d rather be finding mysteries and learning to be a detective than making silly vegetables out of clay.
Dawn gets irritated with Emily when she says that she’ll make a cucumber, which is what Dawn was going to make because it’s easy. The teacher won’t let Dawn make a cucumber because Emily already claimed that idea, so Dawn has to make a carrot instead. (Not that much different in shape, really, except one end is more narrow.) However, she still resents Emily for using the cucumber idea first.
As the girls push against each other by the sink, cleaning up from using the clay, Dawn spots a ring next to the sink. Later, Emily says that her ring is missing. It’s a special ring with a blue stone that she got for her birthday. Dawn is pleased that she’s found a mystery to solve. Remembering that she saw a ring next to the sink in the art room, Dawn proudly goes back to the art room to see if she can find the ring and return victorious. However, the ring isn’t there when she checks.
Then, suspicion turns to Dawn herself. After all, everyone knows that Dawn stole Emily’s unicorn before. Instead of being the hero detective, Dawn is turning into the main suspect in this crime. Now, she really needs to find the ring to clear her name!
Dawn’s grandmother, Noni, gave her a special detective kit for her birthday. Dawn uses it to turn into The Polka Dot Private Eye to hunt down Emily’s ring.
The book is available to borrow online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I liked the way the series returned to the subject of Dawn’s theft and used it to spark a spin-off mystery series. This is the first of the Polka Dot Private Eye books. In this series, Dawn becomes a more likeable character than she was when she first appeared in Fish Face, and she gets a little comeuppance for her earlier, unpunished theft of Emily’s toy unicorn in the form of her classmates’ suspicion of her. When I read this book for the first time when I was a kid, I hadn’t read the book where Dawn was first introduced, Fish Face, so I didn’t really understand the relationship between Dawn and Emily and how Dawn took Emily’s toy unicorn. We never really find out in either book exactly why Dawn took the unicorn, although in this book, she thinks of herself as having “borrowed” it instead of having stolen it.
Reading Fish Face isn’t necessary to understand the basic story in this book, but after having read it, I appreciate Dawn’s position in this book a little better. By now, everyone knows what Dawn did, and although Dawn thinks of “weeks ago” as a long time ago, it’s not really that long, and it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind. Dawn is still a relatively new kid in class, and one of the few things everyone knows about her is that she has a history of taking things that don’t belong to her. It is a logical conclusion that Dawn might have helped herself to another of Emily’s belongings when everyone knows that she’s done it before. As my grandfather used to say, it’s easier to keep a good reputation than to redeem a bad one, but Dawn works at it and learns that she likes being a detective and that she has a talent for figuring things out. After Dawn figures out where Emily’s ring is, the two of them become better friends. Solving the mystery also makes Dawn a class hero and begins to establish Dawn’s reputation as a person who likes to solve mysteries and crimes rather than commit them.
This book gets bonus points from me for mentioning jelly sandals. Jelly shoes were a regular part of my childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s, and I’ve seen some of them return again in the early 2000s, probably partly because people my age now have children, and they’re nostalgic for some of the things from their childhoods. Jelly shoes (or “jellies,” as we called them) are sandals and sandal-like shoes made from flexible plastic in different colors, some clear or with sparkles inside. They were cheap when I was a kid, and I used to get a new pair or two when the weather turned warm. Eventually, they wear out, and the plastic bits snap. I’d wear them around my backyard with my toes sticking out the front as they started breaking, and I started growing out of them. By the time they were too broken to use anymore, my toes were usually beyond the bottom of the shoes, and I was always kind of proud of that because it was a sign that I’d grown over the summer. It wasn’t much of a loss when the shoes wore out because they’d be too small for me at that point anyway, so we’d throw them away, and I’d wear more solid shoes when the weather turned cold. Jellies, flip-flops, and cheap canvas shoes were a major part of what I wore when I was young and growing out of shoes fairly quickly. They were all inexpensive, and while they didn’t last very long, they lasted about as long as they needed to before I needed the next size and weren’t much to lose when I was rough on them.
#20 The Weird Science Mystery by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1990.
Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!
The Bobbsey Twins are all getting ready for their school’s science fair. Bert’s project is about dog behavior with the family’s dog as his subject. His twin, Nan, is also studying animal behavior, but with a chicken named Zelda. Because the science fair is open to both middle school and elementary school kids, the younger twins, Freddie and Flossie, can also enter. Freddie is entering with a large baking soda volcano.
When the kids arrive to drop off their projects, Nan and Bert notice another boy from their class, Martin Crane. Martin is a science whiz, but he isn’t very nice. He’s not really a bully, like Danny Rugg, but he makes fun of the Bobbseys’ science projects. They don’t know what Martin’s project is because he’s bringing it in boxes labeled “Top Secret”, but he swears that it’s going to win first prize.
When Freddie sees the other students’ projects, he starts to doubt that he has any chance of winning a prize himself. There’s a boy who has an impressive star chart display, and Danny Rugg has a display of spiders. There’s a girl named Ellen with an exhibit showing how pearls are made, including real pearls! Ellen says that her uncle is in the jewelry business and loaned her the pearls. Ellen’s younger sister, Melissa, says that Ellen’s project is unfair, although she doesn’t say why she thinks so. Melissa says that she didn’t do a project herself because she thinks the science fair is dumb.
Mr. Newman, Nan and Bert’s science teacher from an earlier book in the series, is one of the judges of the science fair. He’s going around the fair, taking pictures of the projects, but Martin refuses to unpack his project, saying that he will reveal it tomorrow. Then, Melissa screams that Danny’s poisonous spiders have escaped, and people start panicking and running! Mr. Newman says that Danny’s spiders are definitely not the poisonous kind, and he makes Danny apologize for telling people they were. The Bobbseys wonder if Danny could have let the spiders loose on purpose as one of his pranks. Then, suddenly, Ellen screams that her pearls are gone!
While the teachers are looking for the pearls and trying to encourage the thief to come forward, other accidents happen to other science fair projects. Freddie’s volcano suddenly erupts even though he didn’t set it up to do that yet. Someone cuts the leash on their dog, so he gets loose, and release’s Nan’s chicken from her cage. Ellen said that the pearls in her collection were valuable, so the teachers call the police. But, were the pearls stolen because they were valuable or because someone wants to sabotage the science fair? Was the theft of the pearls related to the sabotage of the other projects, or are these two separate acts? Also, what does Martin have in those boxes labeled “Top Secret”?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
Sean and I were talking earlier about how later books in the New Bobbsey Twins series focused more on the younger set of twins, Freddie and Flossie, and seemed to involve lower stakes in the mysteries. I reviewed this book shortly after The Clue in the Classroom, so I could compare two science-based mysteries that took place at the kids’ school, one earlier in the series and one later.
The other science-based mystery in the series involved an invention and industrial espionage, while this one involves the school science fair. However, I thought the mystery was well-done. When the Bobbseys arrive at the science fair, the story establishes multiples suspects. Danny Rugg is a repeat suspect because he’s the school bully and general nemesis, and he could have set his spiders loose as a distraction while he took the pearls and set up other things to go wrong. Then again, Melissa seemed upset about her sister’s project, so she might have had a reason to sabotage it. Martin is being mysterious about his science fair project, but what if he doesn’t actually have one in those boxes of his? Maybe he couldn’t think of anything or ran out of time to do his project, so he’s sabotaging everyone else’s project to provide a reason for why his project will suddenly disappear or turn out not to work. I even had a theory that each of those people might have done something since multiple disasters happened at the same time or almost at the same time. From the beginning, there are multiple possibilities that seem about equally likely, which is good for making readers wonder, and the kids are active investigators in the story, investigating suspects individually, not just waiting for chance to give them the answers. Those are the ingredients for a good mystery.
Although the story takes place at a kids’ science fair, there are a couple of factors involved that add some excitement and higher stakes to the story. The value of the pearls has the adults worried about getting them back. (Personally, I wondered about just how valuable the pearls were. Since they didn’t seem to have any form of security to protect them, like a locked display case, and since Danny Rugg lied to everyone about his spiders being poisonous, it occurred to me that Ellen might have lied to everyone about the value of the pearls to make her project seem more exciting, although that is never clarified during the story.) I also appreciated the thief’s motive for stealing the pearls because it wasn’t just about the pearls’ value. It was one of the ideas that I can for a possible motive, but I’ll leave it a secret about which of my theories was right.
Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures; Or, Helping the Dormitory Fund by Alice B. Emerson (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1916.
One day, while Ruth Fielding is out with her friends, Helen and Tom, they see a film crew working by the river. (Because this is the 1910s, they are making a silent film and using the kind of old-fashioned movie camera that needs to be cranked, like the one shown in the picture to the right.) They talk about whether to not they would like to be in movies themselves. The girls think it sounds exciting, but Tom thinks that they’re too young. The girls say that they are not too young because the actress who is being filmed looks like she’s about their age. As they watch, the young actress accidentally falls into the river, which is freezing cold because it’s winter. Ruth and her friends hurry to help pull her out before she drowns. When they get her out of the river, Ruth is appalled at how unconcerned the director is for the actress’s health while she’s clearly suffering from the cold. Ruth and her friends take the actress, Hazel Gray, back to the Red Mill where Ruth lives, where she can warm up and recover.
While Hazel is resting at the Red Mill, she and Ruth tell each other about themselves. Like Ruth, Hazel is also an orphan. Her parents were actors, and some friends raised Hazel to be an actress after her parents died. Ruth tells Hazel that she has been thinking about writing a movie scenario (script) just for fun, and Hazel offers to show it to the director if she does. Ruth isn’t sure she likes the idea because she didn’t like the director, Mr. Grimes. Hazel explains that, while the director can be callous and abrasive, he is a famous director who really knows his business and can help actors and scenario writers make their careers.
The next day, Mr. Hammond, the manager of the film company, comes to the Red Mill to see how Hazel is and to ask Ruth about how the accident happened. He seems concerned about whether or not Ruth’s description of what happened matches what Mr. Grimes told him. Ruth explains what she saw to Mr. Hammond, and she also tells him what she thinks about Mr. Grimes’s lack of concern about Hazel’s welfare. Mr. Hammond says that it’s impossible to change other people, indicating that he knows how callous and unpleasant Mr. Grimes can be, but he promises to make sure that Hazel gets a fair deal for her acting and the accident she suffered.
While he is there, Mr. Hammond becomes fascinated by the quaintness of the Red Mill. He thinks that it would make an excellent setting for a movie. Ruth says that she would love to write a scenario about the Red Mill herself. Mr. Hammond asks her if she’s ever written a scenario before, and Ruth admits that she hasn’t, but there has to be a first time for everything. Mr. Hammond is amused and says that he would be very interested in any scenario that Ruth might write. However, he suggests to her that, before she writes a scenario about the Red Mill, she write a short story about something else, something exciting, so he can see what her writing is like. Ruth happily agrees, and after she returns to boarding school with her friends, she starts writing.
Ruth and Helen are now seniors at their boarding school, and they are starting to think nervously about their lives after graduation. They know that they want to go on to college, but they find the prospect intimidating, too. Neither of them is quite sure what they want to do with their lives. The idea of growing up in general sounds frightening.
The girls aren’t the only ones showing signs of growing up but feeling awkward about it. Ruth finds herself getting unexpectedly jealous about Tom having a crush on Hazel. Helen says that Ruth simply hasn’t been paying attention to the things the boys are doing. All of Tom’s friends at his school have crushes on actresses, and they’ve been collecting pictures of them from the newspapers and pinning them up in their rooms. At the same time, Tom seems oddly sullen that other people are starting to treat Ruth and his sister as young ladies. It’s one thing for him to have a crush on Hazel, who is a couple of years older than they are, but he doesn’t seem to like the idea of Helen and Ruth seeming too grown up.
These things are in the back of Ruth’s mind as she finishes writing her story. After she sends her story to Mr. Hammond, a fire breaks out in one of the dormitories at the school because of a neglected candle. The dormitory that is destroyed is the one where Ruth lives with her friends. Ruth is tempted to try to save their belongings, but the teachers tell her that it’s just too dangerous. They’re just thankful that all the girls are safe.
After the fire, there is the question of rebuilding the dormitory. At first, they think that the insurance money will pay for a new dorm, but it turns out that the school’s forgetful headmaster accidentally let the insurance policy lapse. Some of the girls at the school are from wealthy families, and they are sure that their parents would be willing to contribute to the building of a new dorm, but Ruth sees a couple of problems with that. First, while the wealthier students’ families would certainly be able to contribute sizable amounts toward the building project, the families of poorer students may hesitate to contribute at all because they may be embarrassed that they cannot possibly match the donations the wealthier families can contribute. Second, the girls are overly relying on their parents. While the parents may be glad to help, Ruth thinks it would be better to find a way that the students themselves can contribute to the building fund. The other students agree that they would all like to find a way for everyone to contribute.
An idea for a group project the entire school can participate in comes to Ruth when Mr. Hammond sends Ruth a check to pay for her first story. He thinks that Ruth has a great talent for writing, and he’s going to make her story into a short, one-reel movie! That makes Ruth realize that, if she can write a short story for a short movie, she can write one for a long, five-reel picture. If she can write a long scenario for a movie, all of the girls in the school can be in the film! She thinks that she can persuade Mr. Hammond to produce the picture and distribute it to the surrounding town, and the royalties from the movie can pay for the dorm reconstruction.
Mr. Hammond agrees to help Ruth and her friends make a movie on behalf of the school, and the school’s headmistress agrees to allow the students to participate in the project. The donations that the school has already received from the parents have paid for the removal of the ruins of the old dormitory and the beginning of the construction of the new one, and the money the girls earn from the movie can pay for the completion of the building project. Ruth already has an idea for the plot of the movie, one about girls at a boarding school, so they can film the movie on their own campus. Mr. Grimes turns out to be the film director, and he is still temperamental, but he shows more patience when dealing with the students than he had before.
There are complications, of course. Hazel Gray is one of the professional actresses helping with the movie, and Ruth is still jealous about how fond she seems of Tom. Then, there is drama when the other girls learn which girl left the candle unattended and vent their wrath on her. The girl, Amy, was already a troubled student with an unhappy home life. Then, Amy gets upset when the boy she likes seems to be getting too friendly with Ruth, and she runs away. Ruth and the other girls have to search for her, and they learn the embarrassing secret behind the dormitory fire and some other secrets that Amy has been hiding from them.
This book is now in the public domain and available to borrow and read for free online through Project Gutenberg.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Is There a Mystery in the Book?
Not exactly a mystery, but there are some things that Ruth and her friends discover some secrets about their prickly fellow student, Amy, and when she runs away, the other girls have to figure out where she went and rescue her. Although Ruth and the other girls are unhappy with Amy because of the dormitory fire and because Amy frequently has a sour attitude, but they become more sympathetic when they learn more about some secrets that Amy is hiding. The embarrassing secret behind the dormitory fire is that Amy is afraid of the dark. She doesn’t want to admit it to the other girls because she doesn’t want to be teased, but that’s why she left a candle burning in her room; she was afraid of returning to her room after dark. The school has electric lights, but she grew up in a more old-fashioned town and isn’t used to them.
Worse still, Amy is terrified that her father will find out that she caused a fire at school. He is already harsh with her, and it has gotten worse since he remarried. He seems to view the child from his first marriage as a nuisance, and it seems like he sent her to boarding school to get her out of the way as he starts a new life with her stepmother. Actually, Amy’s father’s reasons for sending her to boarding school were not just to get her out of the way. Ruth and the others learn that part of Amy’s difficulties with her stepmother have partly been because Amy behaved badly toward her because her aunts disliked her and were a bad influence on Amy. It wasn’t just that the boy she liked seemed to like Ruth that made her run away; she had gotten an angry letter from her father that not only accused her of doing something bad before she left home but also saying that he has heard rumors about her involvement with the fire. He is coming to the school to find out for himself what she’s been doing there, and Amy is terrified of what he will do when he gets there.
To find Amy, the girls and Curly (the boy Amy likes) have to think of all the things they know about Amy and the places she could have gone. Curly knows more than the girls do because Amy confides in him. I appreciated that Ruth and the other girls are much more active in this story in solving the problem of Amy’s disappearance than they often are in other books. In the earlier books in this series, Ruth and her friends frequently rely on chance and coincidence to reveal hidden information and other people to carrying out the final action, but this time, they use their own reasoning to figure out where to look for Amy and go after her themselves. In some ways, I think that the more active roles that Ruth and the others play in the story are because they are growing up. Amy is younger than Ruth and her friends, and they feel responsible for her. In earlier books, adults and others were looking after them and helping them, but now, they are older than someone else. I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops in other books in the series.
When they find Amy, she has had a bad reaction from poison oak or poison sumac, and everyone feels sorry for her. Amy gets the first sympathy that she’s had for some time. Amy straightens out her relationship with her father when he comes and realizes that she was unfair to her stepmother. The other girls at school forgive Amy for the fire when they find out what she’s been through, and her father makes a generous donation to the building fund.
Characters That Age
One of the most unique features of this book is that the characters are growing up, and it’s part of the story. That’s something that doesn’t happen in other, later Stratemeyer Syndicate books. In this book, Ruth and her friends graduate from their boarding school. As the girls think about their graduation and going on to college, they’re a little intimidated because they don’t know what they want to do with their lives, but Ruth discovers her talent for writing movie scripts/scenarios. (These are silent films in her time, so there’s no dialog for the “script.” Any dialog that the audience needs to understand would have been shown in text in the intertitles. I think that’s why they call this form of script a “scenario” in the book.) There is some awkwardness in the way the boys and girls in the story start looking at each other because they realize that they’re becoming young ladies and young men. They’re not used to thinking of themselves and each other in that way, and they’re developing crushes.
You won’t find this sort of thing much in the on-going Stratemeyer Syndicate book series, like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Those characters are frozen in age on purpose, and the Ruth Fielding series was part of the reason why. In early Stratemeyer Syndicate book series, like Ruth Fielding and the Rover Boys, the characters did age. They grew up, graduated from school, got married, and eventually, had kids of their own. The problem for the Stratemeyer Syndicate was that, when their characters got married and became parents themselves, they were starting to get too old to be teen detectives and young adventurers. Their child audiences wanted to read about kids like themselves or teenagers or young adults, not people who were more like their own parents. So, whenever characters started getting too old for the target audience, they would have to end that series and start a new one. After going through the Rover Boys and Ruth Fielding and some of their other popular series in this way, they realized that they could keep a book series going much longer if they just didn’t let the characters age.
That’s why Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are frozen in age somewhere in their late teens or early 20s, and the books typically leave it vague which it is. It’s mostly important that readers know that the characters are young but old enough to travel and have adventures by themselves. Nancy Drew is not going to school, and if she takes any classes in individual books, she isn’t studying for a degree. If she did, her series would eventually end because she would graduate and move on to adult life. Similarly, the Hardy Boys are learning to be private detectives by working with their father, who is a private detective, but they will always be in that apprentice phase, so their series can continue. There are times when the characters date other characters or have crushes, but their romances don’t progress to anything serious because that would also age the characters. Every decade or so, the books in those series get revamped or the characters get a new, updated series that incorporates modern technology and culture, but the characters stay roughly the same age throughout. It’s basically what happens with new Scooby-Doo cartoon series, but with books, and the Stratemeyer Syndicate did it with their characters first.
Part of the reason that I wanted to read the Ruth Fielding books was that I knew the characters would age, and I also knew that she was a kind of prototype for Nancy Drew. The Nancy Drew series started around the time Ruth Fielding’s series ended, as a replacement for Ruth Fielding. Fortunately, we’re not at the end of Ruth Fielding’s series yet. The series doesn’t end with her boarding school graduation. It continues through her time in college and into her career in the movies.
Mary Jane is a twelve-year-old African American girl in the American South in the 1950s. Her father is a lawyer, and her older brother, James, is also studying law. Her older sister, Lou Ellen, is a nurse. Her grandfather used to teach at the state agricultural college, and now, he has a farm where he likes to experiment with different types of plants. Mary Jane spends her summers on her grandfather’s farm. Although this seems like a perfectly normal middle-class background, as a black girl in the 1950s, Mary Jane is aware that her race makes all the difference to some people, and she’s about to become even more aware.
Things are changing in society and education. When Mary Jane graduates from her old school, there is an announcement that the high school in her town that was formerly for white students only, Woodrow Wilson High, will become integrated and that black students, like Mary Jane, will be allowed to attend there the following school year, if they want to apply. It has a junior high school division, which is how she can move from the elementary school to the high school. Her older siblings attended the all-black high school for their education, and they have done well for themselves since, but Mary Jane knows that Woodrow Wilson High can offer her the best level of education that she can get for her town, and she wants to go there. It offers a wider curriculum than the all-black school, especially in the sciences, and Mary Jane’s ambition is to be a biologist. Her grandfather says that he became a biologist without attending the fancy high school. He was mostly self-taught, working his way up from being a farm laborer and cleaner to afford more education, but Mary Jane says that things are changing. People’s expectations about education are changing. Mary Jane knows that going to Woodrow Wilson High will give her knowledge she needs and wants and will open up important opportunities in her life. She also insists that it is her right to attend the school of her choice, so there is no reason for her not to go to that school. Her grandfather and parents ask her if any of her friends will be going to that school with her, and she says that only one boy she knows will be going, but she also insists that she doesn’t want to attend high school for socializing. She wants an education.
Education is the reason why Mary Jane’s family has done as well as they have. Mary Jane’s great-grandmother was a slave, and Mary Jane likes to hear her grandfather tell the story about how she learned to read and write in secret. When she had learned enough, she forged a pass for herself to leave the plantation where she lived so she could go north to New York City and start a new life. People with an education have an advantage in life.
Mary Jane thinks her great-grandmother was incredibly brave, and her grandfather says that she will also have to brave, especially if she attends Woodrow Wilson High. Even though she will be allowed to go there now, her grandfather knows that many people won’t want her there. Teachers and students and students’ parents have all made up their minds about what black people are like, and they’ll have many assumptions about Mary Jane before they’ve even met her. Her grandfather warns her that her education will be difficult, frequently lonely, and may involve some real hurt. Mary Jane isn’t too concerned at first because she says that things are changing and that she used to play with some white children in her neighborhood when she was little. Her grandfather says that it’s true that some white people care and can be friendly and helpful. People need friends and help from other people, and even Mary Jane’s great-grandmother found help from white people when she arrived in New York. Her grandfather says that there will be days when Mary Jane will feel like the whole world is against her, but it will help if she remembers that not everyone is against her and some will want to help.
When Mary Jane returns home from her trip to the farm to get ready for the new school year, things are exciting. Her father has given her new furniture for her room, so her room looks more grown-up and is a better place for studying. She also gets a new vanity table so she can do her hair in her room. Her mother buys her new clothes and has her hair done at a beauty parlor for the first time. Mary Jane doesn’t really care that much about clothes or having the latest hair style, but her mother says that appearances are important in high school. Her mother comments on the thing that “they” are wearing this year, not really defining who “they” are, and even the hair dresser says that if “they” say mean things about her, she shouldn’t pay attention. It bothers Mary Jane that people keep saying things like this to her because she realizes that “they” are the people who are going to be her new classmates at her new school, and it seems like everyone is bracing themselves and preparing Mary Jane to expect bad things from them. Mary Jane tries to tell herself and others that this experience of going to a new high school won’t be as bad as everyone seems to expect, but it really feels like everyone is trying to prepare her for a terrible ordeal. She knows that there are bound to be some mean kids, but there were mean kids at her old school, too. Is it really going to be that much different?
An article about Mary Jane and the other five black students who will now be attending Wilson High as it integrates appears in the local paper. (The book and the article refer to them as “Negro children” because “Negro” was a more common word at the time and considered one of the more polite words until around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, which is why it’s still a part of some organizational names, like the United Negro College Fund. Sometimes, the book also uses the term “colored” for similar reasons. The black people in the story refer to themselves by both of these terms. The Civil Rights Movement is responsible for the shift to “black” as a generic term because people wanted to distance themselves from older words that carried more emotional baggage, which is why “Negro” sounds out-of-date to us. It feels like it belongs to this time and these people, some of whom definitely have emotional baggage.) Everyone in town knows that there will be black students going to the formerly all-white high school. Mary Jane’s aunts and uncles give her presents and school supplies, and one of her aunts even thanks her for being the first in the family to do this because things will be much easier for the younger cousins who will come after her. It all makes Mary Jane realize that she is doing something very novel and that she will be accomplishing something beyond giving herself a better education. On the one hand, she feels proud, like a brave explorer entering uncharted territory, but on the other, she begins to get very nervous.
The night before Mary Jane’s first day at Wilson High, her father tells her that he will be taking her to school, accompanied by one of the other black students and his father. Mary Jane is surprised because the school is within easy walking distance. Then, her father tells her the reason why everyone is so nervous. While Mary Jane was visiting her grandfather on the farm over the summer, there were public protests and complaints about the black students attending the white high school. Some white adults have threatened that they will stop the black students from attending the school, and the students’ parents and the police are preparing to protect the children, if necessary. Mary Jane’s simple first day at a new school just a few blocks away is going to be much more complicated and possibly dangerous than she had imagined. Her father tells her that if she’s had second thoughts about it, nobody would blame her if she decided to back out at the last minute. However, Mary Jane can’t bring herself to do that. Even though she is starting to get scared, backing out would seem like a betrayal of the trust people are putting in her and her family’s dedication to improving themselves through education. Her aunt and cousins are hoping that she will pave the way for others. She wants to be like her brave ancestor, who escaped from slavery. She tells her father that she still wants to go to Wilson High.
As they approach the school on the first day, there are police cars in front of the building and angry, screaming protestors yelling things like, “Go back to Africa!” and “Two-four-six-eight, We ain’t gonna integrate.” (This is a direct, literal quote from one of these types of protests from real life. People shouted that at Ruby Bridges, too.) Grown women are threatening to rip young Mary Jane’s curls right out of her head, and all she can do is keep her eyes forward and keep walking past them into the school as the police officers physically retrain the protestors from actively carrying out their threats. (This is also completely true-to-life. Grown adults did threaten children, and there is historical film footage that shows them doing it. They really were like this, and I’ve had feelings about that since I saw some of that footage when I was still a child. In this one, the white man at the very beginning delivers an implied threat about how long the black students will live because he thinks it’s impossible for the police to stay at the school forever – remember, you heard it directly from him, not from me. I was a white child, but that didn’t make me feel any better when I saw things like this. I don’t think anybody in their right mind should ever trust that someone wouldn’t hurt you when you’ve already seen what they’re willing to do to some other defenseless kid, even if the ostensible reason doesn’t seem to apply to you. People’s toleration of you only lasts until they decide it doesn’t, and some people are more unstable, volatile, and generally untrustworthy in their personal temperament than others, especially when they’re deliberately being that way in public, in front of cameras and police. These people knew dang well what they were doing, it was deliberate and planned, and they were proud of themselves for doing it and weren’t at all sorry. Even young me could see that.) Fred, the black boy Mary Jane knows from her old school, shows Mary Jane how his hands are shaking after they get inside the building.
This ordeal is only the first of many ordeals. At the junior high assembly for the students in the lowest grades at the school, which includes Mary Jane and Fred, some of the students start chanting about how they don’t want her. The school principal puts a stop to that, calling the behavior “disgraceful”, but that doesn’t put a permanent stop to it. A girl named Darlene in her home room refuses to sit next to her because her mother told her not to, but the teacher tells the girl that students in her class sit where they are assigned and won’t take any nonsense. When Mary Jane talks to Fred, he says that he’s been receiving worse. Other students have kicked him and knocks his books out of his hands. The one white student who showed them any kindness at all was a blond girl who showed them how to find their classrooms. (This film footage of a newscaster interviewing white students at Central High in Little Rock in 1957 shows the mixed feelings of the white students at the time of integration. Some were against it, some seemed to be okay with it, and most seemed to think that the violent demonstrations against the black students were just taking everything way too far. I found it interesting when some students commented that the parents were more of a problem than the students because that was my sense as well.) The screaming mob is still outside the school when it’s time to go home, and flashes go off in their faces because there are photographers taking pictures of the new black students. At the end of the day, Mary Jane returns home to her mother, who has been listening to news reports about the protests at the school all day, picturing that her daughter might be beaten and bloody and could be lying in the halls of the school, dying.
Mary Jane is proud of herself for getting through this ordeal as well as she has, but this is only the first day of a very long school year. The ordeal isn’t confined to the classroom, either. Grown-up strangers, both men and women, call the house and threaten to murder her if she continues attending the school, some saying that they’ll blow up the family’s house. Mary Jane’s father just leaves the receiver off the hook and tells Mary Jane to ignore it. When Mary Jane sees her picture in the newspaper, awful Darlene is behind her in the picture with her face ugly and twisted in hate. (I think that image might have been inspired by the lady with the vicious expression in this famous photograph taken in front of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. When Darlene and her mother were first introduced, this was the face that I pictured for them.) Mary Jane thinks about what her grandfather told her and wonders if Darlene’s only problem is that she just doesn’t know Mary Jane and has too many assumptions about her. (I think Darlene’s issues go much deeper than that, but I’ll rant about that in my reaction below.) What keeps Mary Jane willing to keep going to Wilson High is the story about her slave ancestor. This school integration ordeal is a major defining moment of her life, and she imagines what stories she might have to tell her children someday.
The days continue, and the reactions to the students integrating at the school are almost schizophrenic. There are more protests, insults, and threats, but there are also more newspaper stories and even an offer for Mary Jane to be interviewed on a television show in New York. Mary Jane is excited at the idea of being on television, but her parents turn down the offer because she is a student who should be in school, not a television star in New York. Part of society declares that it wants to see the black students dead and might even make it happen if the police weren’t physically restraining them while part of society is praising the students for their bravery in the face of the protestors who are threatening to kill them. (The book doesn’t quite phrase it like that, but I think that’s actually a crucial point. This schizophrenic social reaction is like the mixed feelings that were exhibited in the footage I linked above.) Mary Jane even gets a fan letter from a girl in Tokyo, praising her for her bravery. Mary Jane tells everyone who asks that it’s “all right”, but on the inside, it really isn’t.
Mary Jane comes to understand what her grandfather tried to tell her about how her education at Wilson High would be lonely and even hurtful. She and Fred eat lunch together every day because no one else will eat with them. Other students either pointedly ignore them or stare at them like they’re exotic wild animals or harass them. Even though Mary Jane said that she wanted to go to school for an education, not to socialize, it’s hard when nobody wants to talk to her except to give her a hard time. Trying to ignore the yelling protesters outside the school also distracts her from listening to her teacher. Fred is the only one who really understands because he is going through the same experiences she is, but he gets busier when he joins the school’s basketball team. The boys on the team start accepting him because he plays basketball, but Mary Jane has trouble finding a club that will accept her. Even her old friends from her old school are busy now at the school where most of the black kids go, so they aren’t available to hang out on weekends, like they used to. It seems like they even resent her a little for going to Wilson, like she thinks that she’s better than they are and too good for their school. Gradually, the adult protesters stop coming to the school and calling the house, but the student bullies are still there at school, and Mary Jane is still painfully lonely.
There are times when people try to reach out to Mary Jane at school, but it doesn’t come off well because their efforts are clumsy and Mary Jane has been trying so hard to bury her feelings and resentment that she can’t bring herself to accept their efforts. A girl named Sharon acts nice and talks to Mary Jane, and Mary Jane briefly softens, but then, it turns out that Sharon is only pumping Mary Jane for information about her background because she believes a conspiracy theory that her family is actually from New York and that they were paid (by unspecified sources) to come to this town for the sole purpose of infiltrating this high school. Mary Jane is shocked, and when she tells Sharon that this is her home town and she was born there, Sharon loses interest and walks away from her before she’s even done speaking. This just makes Mary Jane even more reluctant to open up to anyone who approaches her. The choir teacher assumes that all black people are good at singing because of Negro spirituals, but Mary Jane insists that she can’t sing, which is true. She’s never been able to carry a tune, so it’s embarrassing to be pressured to sing when she knows she can’t. Although being good at music is a positive stereotype compared to some of the other stereotypes people have about black people, it’s still just as wrong for Mary Jane as all of the others, and it’s embarrassing to be confronted with it. Mary Jane feels like nobody will look at her outside of the usual stereotypes. Mary Jane does well in her classes, but she could use a little help in French. Her French teacher offers her tutoring after school, but Mary Jane turns it down because she feels like the teacher is offering it out of pity. At lunch, she buries herself in her French book, teaching herself phrases about all of the things she hates or how to tell herself that she doesn’t care, to avoid the other students who are being mean to her or staring at her, but in the process, she misses seeing students who are trying to get up the courage to actually talk to her for non-conspiracy and non-bullying purposes.
Things change when Mary Jane rescues a squirrel from a cat. She loves animals and knows how to care for them because of her grandfather. Sally, the girl who helped her find her class on the first day, also loves animals and is happy that Mary Jane saved the squirrel, and the two of them bond over their temporary pet. Sally helps Mary Jane to get the squirrel home, where Mary Jane’s mother says that she can only keep it until it has recovered. The girls’ mutual caring for the squirrel and their attempts to find a permanent home for him help them develop their own friendship and help Mary Jane to create bonds with the other students.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
About the Author
The author of this book, Dorothy Sterling, was not a black woman herself, and even if she had been, she would have been too old to be one of the students experiencing desegregation directly at the time it happened because she was born in 1913. Everything she talks about in this book was based on what she observed as an adult at the time of the Civil Rights Movement. She was a Jewish-American journalist, writer, and historian from New York. As an adult writer, she was researching strong women from history to use as inspiration for girls when she learned about Harriet Tubman. She found Harriet Tubman’s story particularly inspiring, and she was amazed that nobody had ever taught her about Harriet Tubman or other strong black women when she was young. She supported the Civil Rights Movement, and when the characters in this book talk about sympathetic white people who try to help, she’s partly talking about herself. Although Dorothy Sterling also wrote mystery stories for children (I’ve covered a couple on this site already), one of her best-known books was a biography of Harriet Tubman for children. She also wrote other nonfiction books about African American history. This video on YouTube explains a few details about her life. She also wrote an autobiography.
My personal reaction and Past Reading History
I wanted to read this book because I was intrigued about a story involving school desegregation that was written while it was all happening. I noticed, as I was reading the book, that it particularly drew on the desegregation of Central High in Little Rock in 1957 for inspiration, and based on the historical footage that I linked above, it was pretty accurate in its interpretation. I think the author was paying close attention to the events and news footage available at the time.
However, I knew before I even started reading it that it was going to be stressful because I find all stories about bullying and one-upmanship in any form to be stressful. I’ve mentioned that many times on this site, and I’ve probably also mentioned that I believe that racism is an extension of a bullying personality and one-upmanship behavior. I firmly think that this is part of Darlene’s problems. If racists weren’t bullying someone based on race, I’m positive that they’d be bullying someone else for some other reason or no reason at all because I think they are the type of people who don’t feel like they’re on top until they’re putting someone else down. It’s the combined defensiveness and aggression of petty social climbers who are deeply insecure about what, precisely, their real social position is, like they automatically move down some kind of imaginary numbered rank anytime something good happens to someone, somewhere. Who they’re putting down or why are probably just a matter of opportunity for them. I think they’re obsessed with being on top and look for any excuse to justify it that they can, unless they’re in a situation where they don’t feel the need to justify themselves at all.
I’ve come to these conclusions based not just on my reading but observations from life, and for me, that’s the worst part of reading books like this. I have names and faces from real life that I associate with the racists in these stories and with aspects of their personal behavior. Some of them might be classified more as bullies than racists, but since their behavior is practically identical, how much difference does it really make? Not much to me. If that sounds like contempt, derision, and judgement … yes, it absolutely is. I am very judgemental about this. While I understand issues like anxiety and insecurity and sympathize with other sufferers, I have very little sympathy for someone who uses their anxieties and insecurities to actively harm other people, and I insist that they must be stopped. Tolerance, like everything else, has limits, and here is where I draw the line. I think everyone has some issue that deeply bothers them and which they find intolerable, and in choosing this particular one, I think I’ve made a decent choice.
When I was a kid, I have to admit that I didn’t enjoy reading books about racism like this in school, but not for the reasons that certain people have been alleging, and I have feelings about some of these allegations, too. I’ve been reading in the news recently that certain people don’t want kids to read books about racism and similar issues in school because they’re afraid that white kids will be ashamed to be white, a much-disputed assertion. Since I grew up a white girl in public schools where we read stories about the Civil Rights Movement and incidents of racism similar to the ones described in this story, I think I’m qualified to have an opinion about my feelings at the time and the long-term effect that type of reading had on me.
I can’t speak for every kid out there, but that definitely was not what bothered me as a kid. When I say that I didn’t enjoy reading about racism, what I mean is I just didn’t like the frustration of hearing about mean people while being unable to do anything about them. It is depressing and frustrating to hear about awful things happening when there’s nothing you can do to stop them or change them because they happened before you were even born. I wasn’t sorry for the racists in those stories, and I didn’t identify with them or what they were doing on a personal level. I didn’t feel like one of them or want to be one of them or even want to be friends with them. I didn’t want any of them in my vicinity or even in my mind. I wanted to be rid of them or to avoid them. They are very mean and extremely frustrating people who don’t care and won’t stop, and that is stressful even just to hear about! I don’t like having them around even in book form, and it just can’t be avoided when the main story is specifically about people dealing with them and their antagonism. That’s the main hardship for books about racism for me. I know that’s the feeling that these stories are supposed to impart, to make you feel like you were there and show you what that felt like. It’s not supposed to be fun reading because nobody thinks that going through situations like that with racists and bullies picking on you is fun. These kinds of books are meant for education and encouraging empathy and understanding. There can be a kind of fulfillment in that, although it can be an emotional ordeal to get there. Life is full of mixed emotions.
As an adult, I think that it was good for me to read some books about some of the more turbulent and racist periods of our history for general understanding of life, history, and society, even though they were emotionally difficult to get through. I don’t regret reading any of them, and I would recommend that kids and young adults read at least some books of this type. I don’t think it’s something to read all the time. It helps to vary it a bit with lighter subjects to avoid getting too frustrated and depressed. It’s not what I would call light reading, but it’s worth it when you go into it with the understanding of what you’re reading and why. I think talking to kids about what these kinds of stories are about and what they’re referencing before they read them can help to prepare them for the rollercoaster of emotions they’re bound to experience while reading them. In fact, I think discussing difficult emotions in the context of both history and fiction can be an important tool for learning to identify and deal with difficult emotions in life in general.
As for the responsibility of white people with racism, I’ve come to realize as an adult that there are two definitions for the word “responsible”: the one where someone is at fault for something and the one where someone feels called to take action and control of the situation. I knew, even as a child, that as far as these past incidents of racism were concerned, I was not in the first category, but I very much felt the second one while being in a position where I could not take the action I wanted to take. I always felt like an old soul who took life more seriously than the other kids, and I very much understand the feelings of the children in this particular story. They have no control over the adults in their lives and the adults’ behavior because they’re just kids, but because the adults have not been behaving responsibly and dealing with issues in their society, it all falls on the shoulders of the kids to work it out among themselves somehow. It’s doubly hard because some of those same adults are sabotaging their efforts and recruiting their classmates to be against them every step of the way.
I was very interested in the interviews of the white students that I linked above because some of them did have the feeling, even at the time, that the parents were more of a problem than the students in the desegregation process. Even in cases where the students were acting out, it seemed to be because their parents already were and were urging them to do it. Even today, it’s a common complaint from teachers that the students with discipline problems are the ones whose parents also behave badly and who urge them to ignore their teachers’ efforts to get them to control themselves and to treat others with respect. The things that happened in both the story and in real life desegregation look like just a more extreme version of the same types of disrespect and bad behavior.
Sally becomes Mary Jane’s friend, but she can’t always do everything she wants to do with her friend because the adults in her life try to stop her. Her parents wouldn’t be so hesitant about what they allow her to do or the friendships she makes if they were able to make all the decisions by themselves, but during the course of the story, we learn that they are under pressure and threats from the pushy and racist people in their neighborhood. Because those people put themselves and what they want to do first and seem willing to back that up with harm, Sally’s parents feel forced to put their own priorities and standards second. That means Sally and her feelings and priorities come third, pushed aside by the angry and pushy neighbors and Sally’s parents’ efforts to protect her … from their own neighbors. Neighbors are supposed to be the people who have your back, but in both the story and in real life situations like this one, neighbors could be the people threatening a knife in your back if you don’t do what they want, and that is truly scary.
The adults in this community may, possibly, care about Sally somewhat, in a sort of shallow and general way because she is a child, but their hatred and their suspicious conspiracy theories (like the one Sharon has) are far more important to them than Sally and her parents are, and it shows. They back up those feelings with definite and deliberate actions. If they have to hurt, intimidate, or frighten their neighbors to get their way, even a child, so be it. If they have to exclude Sally from a store to exclude the person Sally’s with at the time, they do that. Sally’s white, but these other white people are not her friends. They do not treat her like a friend at any point in the story. She’s just a pawn in this nasty game they’re playing, and they get upset when she doesn’t play like they want her to.
I can see that Sally’s still a little higher than black people like Mary Jane in this social hierarchy, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not by that much because certain other people insist on being first, and they back that up with threats and violence. That’s something that Mary Jane comes to see during the course of the story. Just because Sally is white doesn’t give her immunity from bad treatment from other white people. The people who are higher up the social chain have created their own team in this goal (like Darlene’s mother’s little coffee klatch of nastiness – the antagonistic mothers’ group that is not the PTA but thinks it should rule the school), and everyone else is the enemy or at least an acceptable casualty.
That was something I realized as a child, too. It’s something that still rankles. The racists and bullies both in real life and these stories might not have picked a white kid like me as their first target, if they had a more obvious target of opportunity, but that wouldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t be a target. There’s no such thing as being safe around someone like that. The list of people and things they tend to nitpick and attack certainly isn’t limited to just one thing, is it? From people who dress in ways they don’t like to people who read things they don’t like to people who believe things they don’t like, they have about as many things to criticize about people who live in their own neighborhoods as Mrs. Mortimer did about the whole entire world. (See Countries of the World Described … or don’t. It’s an example of Victorian era children’s nonfiction that can teach you about as much about prejudice and mental illness as it can about geography. Few geography books would go as far as being critical not only about the personal habits and beliefs of people in every single country they cover but also about the relative quality of their rivers and trees, but Mrs. Mortimer is an intrepid armchair explorer, mainly followed by people with morbid curiosity.) In fact, I’m pretty sure that there are at least two things about me that would have made me a target for this particular group eventually, including the fact that I clearly do not like those kinds of people because of the way they act.
They might think they’ve got the right to dislike anybody they wish, say whatever they want, and treat other people as badly as they like, while thumping on the First Amendment to justify it, but God help the person who openly says anything against them. It’s maddening. That’s why I have that urge to get rid of them or get away from people like that. There just can’t be anything good from a relationship with someone like that. I don’t like these kinds of people because they are mean and selfish, and I feel constantly frustrated and angry around them. Those are not likeable qualities to bond over. I think these people care about themselves and their own status way too much to be truly concerned for anyone else’s well-being, either in the short term or the long term. Everyone is disposable if they think their own ego or social status are in the balance. This is why I feel the way I do about bullying and one-upmanship. They get in the way of everything that’s more decent and interfere with everyone who’s more responsible. People who are determined to be #1 at all costs are bound to give someone else #2, if you see what I mean.
Darlene
I came back to add something to this review. I forgot to say what it was that I would have wanted to do if I had been present for the incidents described in this story or something similar. When I was a kid, I remember daydreaming about several possibilities, most of which would have likely ended with the racists and bullies wiping the floor with me because I was a small and nerdy little girl with glasses who wasn’t physically strong and didn’t expect any mercy from them for the sins of not liking them, telling them off, or fighting back. Of course, I’m 40 years old now, and that makes a difference.
If I were in charge of Darlene and had the ability to make unfettered decisions regarding her education and discipline, I know exactly what I would do, this is the way I would describe it to Darlene herself:
“Darlene, you know exactly why you’re here today and why I want to talk to you. By now, everyone at this school knows how you’ve been picking on Mary Jane and starting fights with her, and we all know why. I don’t want to argue this point with you. I’ve discussed this situation with your teachers, and you’ve been behaving this way in all of your classes. They’ve spoken with you and with your mother multiple times, and you have made no effort to improve. You’ve made it clear that you think that Mary Jane is undeserving of being at this school and that black people are inferior. You seem to think that you know a lot about black people. We’re going to find out just how much you really do know. Normally, when a student is physically aggressive with her classmates and disrespectful to her teachers, she might be suspended or expelled from school, but since you like to think of yourself as different and not bound by the rules of behavior that the other students follow, we are going to treat you as a special case. For the rest of this semester, you will be our exchange student to the local black school.
While you are there, you will follow their rules and listen to their teachers. Nobody will suspend you or expel you from that school because I know you would probably see that as a reward for your bad behavior. No, you will attend that school every day, and you will not be allowed to run away from any problems you decide to create there. Every day, you will return to that school and see the same people, who will all remember whatever you did or said to them the day before, and you will face the consequences of your actions. If you don’t, you might have to stay another semester to get their full school experience. You thought it was acceptable to be rude and abusive to the only black girl at a white school. Now, we’ll see how the only white girl at a black school manages.
Maybe you think you know how that will go, but I say that you don’t. Nobody really knows what other people will be like until they’ve actually met them and spent time with them. Nobody gets to control other people. The best any of us can do is behave as well as we can and hope that other people will do the same and at least treat us with respect. Of course, because humans have free will, they still have the ability to choose to treat you badly anyway, just like you did with Mary Jane, and that’s the risk you’ll be taking, both at the black kids’ school and everywhere else you go in life when school is over. The black children might surprise you. If the black students treat you better than you’ve treated Mary Jane, you might want to consider which of the two of you is really the better person. On the other hand, if they treat you just as badly as you’ve treated Mary Jane … well, at least you’ll find out what it’s like to be at the mercy of people who act just like you.
One thing I know for sure is that, if you’re as smart as you like to think you are, you’ll learn to work on making friends instead of enemies. Consider it important training for later life. Adults don’t always get to choose who they live near or who they have to work with, but they still have to live and get their jobs done. And you know what? Adults who know that they are capable of doing that, managing their emotions and getting on with life, no matter where they are who’s around have better self-esteem than those who don’t think they can do those things. That realization is an important tool in building self-confidence. Not all of the kids at school realize that your bad behavior is partly because you are not self-confident, but I can tell. That’s why you try so hard to control other people, isn’t it? I think you don’t feel like you have control of yourself or that you don’t measure up, and that’s why you put other people down, but that’s not a healthy way to deal with these feelings. Facing up to difficult situations and seeing that you can handle them and that you can control yourself, even when you don’t feel like it, will do much more for you. You won’t worry so much about who other people are or what they’re doing if you’re satisfied with yourself and your ability to manage yourself and deal with life, instead of trying to hide from things and people that make you uncomfortable or fight against them.
I know what I’m talking about, partly because that’s how I try to look at the situation when I’m dealing with you. I don’t find it easy or pleasant to deal with you because you do tend to take out negative emotions on other people. When you lash out at other people, it creates disturbances for me and your teachers to deal with, it encourages other students to behave badly, and it distracts everyone from the things they need to do. It makes my life and job as hard as you’ve been trying to make Mary Jane’s life and time at school, and that’s why this behavior can’t continue. However, as difficult as it is I’m still here, still doing my job, and trying to look after your education, even though it not easy or pleasant. I’ll still be checking up on you and working with you even while you’re attending the other school because I still want you to learn from this experience, both academically and emotionally. I also have a responsibility to your hosts at your new school to see that you don’t become a punishment or burden for them. You will learn how to behave yourself because I will be supervising your time there, I will tell you how to behave appropriately, and I will ask your hosts if you have been following my instructions. You will practice what I teach you, or there will be further consequences for you from me.
It’s better to work on developing emotional regulation skills and behavioral control while you’re young rather than older. This is serious, and it will affect your life in the future, even if you can’t imagine it now. The truth is that most adults quickly lose patience with other adults who can’t manage themselves and their emotions. Adults tolerate some of that in children, up to a point, because we know you’re learning and need time to practice, but by the time you are an adult, there will be the expectation that you have already mastered these skills. If you can’t control yourself as an adult, people will be angry with you and see you as immature and a troublemaker. It’s the sort of behavior that can end marriages and get people fired from their jobs. Employers will be less willing to tolerate bad behavior than your teachers are because they won’t want you to distract everyone from their jobs or drive away customers and co-workers. Even if you think that your only job will be that of a housewife, you should know that housewives sometimes have to help their husbands entertain bosses and co-workers. If you have a reputation for provoking people and creating disturbances and you make trouble between your husband and his co-workers, whoever they may be, it won’t reflect well on your husband’s career. Think, Darlene. This is your future we’re talking about. When you’re an adult, it will be no good saying that everyone should just accept you doing these things because people acted like that when you were a kid or your mom did this or said that when you were young. When you’re an adult, everyone will be looking at you and only you, and they won’t want to hear about what you did when you were a kid or what people used to let your mother do.
If you don’t learn to get along with people instead of antagonizing them or taking out your feelings on them, you’ll be arranging a lifelong punishment for yourself that will be far worse than anything I would arrange for a semester, and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. A person who can’t get along with people could end up very lonely. You may find it difficult to make new friends, except among people with equally negative habits, and you may even lose some friends that you have when people get tired of all the fights, drama, and negativity. After this exchange student experience, I believe that you will not only come to see the reality of the people you’ve been harassing but will also acquire greater discipline and emotional control. If you don’t work on these things or if you continue to do things that provoke other people, you will at least learn how to face the consequences of your actions. You are dismissed.”
The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles, illustrated by George Ford, 1995.
This is a beautifully illustrated picture book about Ruby Bridges, one of the first black children to attend a school that was formerly all-white during the desegregation of schools that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. The story is told in the form of the memories of Ruby and other people, looking back on their experiences, rather than as a first-person account.
When the book begins, it introduces Ruby as the child of a poor family who moved to the city after her father lost his job picking crops when farmers began using mechanical pickers instead. After her family moved to New Orleans in 1957, her father worked as a janitor, and her mother became a cleaner at a bank.
The book explains briefly that schools were segregated at the time, and that black children were not given an education that was equal to what was offered in white schools. Because the book is for children, it doesn’t go deep into detail about the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation or exactly how Ruby Bridges’s family became involved. (Ruby was selected as one of the children because she passed a test for academic aptitude, showing that she could keep up with a class of white children, who had better early education.) It simply says that, in 1960, a judge decided that four young black girls would be sent to schools that had been for just white children and that six-year-old Ruby Bridges was one of them.
It was a harrowing experience for young Ruby. There were protesters outside the school, yelling angrily and threatening the little girl. For her safety, she had to be escorted by armed federal marshals.
Parents in the area refused to send their children to school so they wouldn’t be in the same classroom with a black child, so Ruby Bridges was literally in a class all by herself. Her teacher, Miss Hurley taught Ruby in an otherwise empty classroom. Miss Hurley was surprised at how Ruby was able to keep a good attitude in spite of the angry protestors and the lack of other children.
One day, Miss Hurley was looking out the window as Ruby approached the school, and she thought she saw Ruby saying something to the angry crowd before coming inside. When Miss Hurley asked Ruby what she said to them, Ruby said that she was talking to them; she was praying for them. Miss Hurley hadn’t realized it before, but Ruby had a ritual of praying for the people who were angry and hated her every day before school. This was just the first time that Miss Hurley had seen her doing it.
Ruby also said the same prayer after school. This prayer was part of what helped her get through those difficult days of hostility and loneliness.
The book ends by explaining that the parents soon began to send their children to school again and let them join Ruby’s class because they realized that life had to continue and that keeping their children from their education was hurting them. The angry protestors gradually gave up. Ruby continued going to school and eventually graduated from high school. She later married a building contractor and had four sons of her own. She founded the Ruby Bridges Educational Foundation to help parents become more involved with their children’s education and to promote equality in education.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
I’ve heard the story before of Ruby Bridges praying for the people threatening her and protesting against her. This particular rendition is very good, although there is one thing that confuses me. According to this book, her teacher’s name is Miss Hurley, but I understood her name was Barbara Henry. I thought perhaps Hurley was her maiden name and that she later got married, but I haven’t been able to find anything to confirm that. I haven’t found anything to explain where the name Hurley came from at all. I’m not the only reviewer who questions the name confusion.
Ruby Bridges wrote books herself about her experiences, at different reading levels, and they’re also available on Internet Archive.
Nick is a creative boy in elementary school who is known for pulling elaborate stunts, like turning his classroom into a tropical paradise with fake trees and real sand. When he gets to fifth grade, he has Mrs. Granger as his language arts teacher. Mrs. Granger has a sense of humor about some things, but she also has some strict rules and is all business when it comes to her specialist subject. Her vocabulary lists for her students are extensive, and her favorite thing is the unabridged dictionary. Nick likes words and enjoys reading, but he finds the dictionary to be boring. When he sees a word he doesn’t know, he would rather ask someone else what it means than look it up in the dictionary.
In most classes, Nick is good at asking teachers questions to sidetrack them from assigning homework. The other kids know he does this, so they aren’t surprised when he asks Mrs. Granger about her big unabridged dictionary and where all the words in it come from. Unfortunately, for Nick, Mrs. Granger is also onto his trick, and rather than answering the question herself, she assigns Nick to look up the answer and tell the rest of the class what he’s learned the next day in addition to his usual homework assignment. Nick is upset because he usually doesn’t have much homework at all, and now, he has to do more.
When Nick gets home, he reads about dictionaries in his encyclopedia, but he’s not sure that he understand everything he’s read, and it all sounds terribly dull. Then, Nick gets one of his creative ideas that he thinks will make this boring assignment more fun. When it’s time for Nick to give his report, even he is surprised at how much he has to say about the dictionary. Mrs. Granger loves his report, although even she tries to cut Nick short when he goes on for too long. Although the other kids were initially bored, they begin to enjoy Nick’s report when they realize that he is actually using it to waste an entire class period. Eventually, Mrs. Granger tells Nick that he’s at a good stopping place in his report, and she praises him for all of his work. Nick, annoyed that she’s making him look like a teacher’s pet, decides to ask one more question. He says that he still doesn’t understands who decides what the meanings of words are, like who decided that the word “dog” refers to a dog. Mrs. Granger tells him that everyone who speaks English does. Words mean whatever the people who use them agree that they mean. People who speak other languages use different words to refer to the same animal, but those words are valid to them because they all agree on the meaning of the words.
Then, Mrs. Granger says something that really starts Nick thinking. She says that if everyone in their classroom decided that they wanted to call a dog by some other word, and they got other English-speaking people to agree on it, that word would come to mean “dog.” If enough people agreed to use their new word and agreed on its definition, the new word would be put into the dictionary. To answer Nick’s original question, people who speak a language determine the words of that language and whether they are included in the dictionary. Mrs. Granger adds that the dictionary is the work of many experts over many years, and there are good reasons why each of the words included in the dictionary are there. The dictionary contains the laws of the English language, and while those laws can change, it takes time.
Later, when Nick is walking home with his friend Janet, Janet finds a fancy pen. Nick thinks about what Mrs. Granger said about how people like him, who use a language everyday, decide what words mean. It reminds him how, when he was little, he used to use a baby word that his family understood meant “music.” He had to give up using that word when he went to preschool because nobody outside of his family understood that word, but Nick understands how the word had meaning in his family because they all understood what Nick meant when he used it. While he’s thinking about it, he bumps into Janet, who drops the pen. On impulse, when Nick gives the pen back to her, he decides to give the pen a new name. He calls it a “frindle.”
At first, Janet is confused about what Nick means by “frindle.” It’s the beginning of a new experiment for Nick. Out of curiosity, Nick tries to see if he can teach a saleslady at a local store that the word “frindle” means “pen.” He goes to the store and asks for a frindle, pointing to the pens. Then, he gets some of his friends to do the same thing. After several kids all ask the same lady for a “frindle”, she begins to respond to it by automatically reaching for a pen. Nick is excited because he has just created a new word. “Frindle” now means pen because he decided that it did, and he got other people to agree on the meaning. Nick is making language history!
To make sure his word becomes part of language, Nick gets his friends to use the word “frindle” instead of “pen” at school … in Mrs. Granger’s class. Mrs. Granger isn’t amused by the class’s excessive use of the word “frindle” for pen because she knows that this is another of Nick’s stunts, and it’s a distraction from school lessons. She tries to discourage Nick from promoting it at school, and Nick points out that he’s only doing what she said about how words are made. Mrs. Granger explains how words in language evolved from other words that also have meaning, but “frindle” doesn’t have that kind of evolution because Nick just made it up, based on nothing. Nick insists that “frindle” means something to him and his friends, and they’ve already sworn an oath to each other to keep using it.
To Nick’s surprise, Mrs. Granger responds by showing him a sealed envelope. She tells him that it’s a letter for him, but she doesn’t want him to read it now. The letter is for him after the question of “frindle” is resolved. For now, she just wants Nick to sign the envelope and date it so that he’ll know what she hasn’t switched envelopes or tampered with the letter in any way. Nick is confused, but he does sign the envelope, and Mrs. Granger mysteriously says, “And may the best word win.” It seems like Mrs. Granger is declaring a war of words, pen vs frindle, but are Nick and Mrs. Granger really on opposite sides?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
This is a fun and humorous story that does a great job of showing how languages evolve and the purpose and meaning of language. Nick and his friends unwittingly give themselves an education during the course of their stunt. The reason why Nick had to sign and date the envelope is that Mrs. Granger is also enjoying their experiment, and she has made a prediction about how it will all turn out. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a small child who has learned a bad word can guess what Mrs. Granger has realized and how her own actions are calculated to make sure she gets the result she really wants.
Something that not even Nick fully reckons with until his experiment is well underway is that, now that all of the kids at school know about “frindle”, he can’t stop them all from using the word, even if he wants to. Although Nick originally created the word, words in a language belong to everyone who uses them. This is both a thought-provoking book about the nature of words and language and a good story for stopping periodically and having kids make their own predictions about what will happen next.
Even kids have power because they are also language-users, and they have the ability to influence the language and understanding of everyone around them by the words they choose! Nick is very much an idea person, but after “frindle” starts getting so much national media attention, he starts to get intimidated by the level of power he has. He has become more conscious of the consequences of his ideas and how they can affect large numbers of people. For a time, he becomes more shy because of that realization, but Mrs. Granger gives him some encouragement. She tells him that he has many good ideas and that she’s sure he will go on to do great things with them. Nick regains his confidence and realizes that he can use his powers for good, supporting good causes.
