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Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall

Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall by Alice B. Emerson, 1913.

Since Ruth and her friends have helped her Uncle Jabez to recover his stolen cash box in the previous book, Uncle Jabez has decided to send Ruth to Briarwood Hall, the boarding school that her best friend, Helen Cameron will attend, so the two of them can stay together. Briarwood Hall is an exclusive school, where the primary entrance requirements are academic records and teacher recommendations. Ruth has already graduated from the local school in her uncle’s town although she is a little younger than Helen, and she is ready for the high school level. Helen’s twin brother, Tom, will be attending a military academy close to the girls’ boarding school.

The three of them travel alone to their schools, without adult chaperones. They amuse themselves by seeing if there are other students bound for their schools traveling on the same train and steamboat they take to their boarding schools, but they can’t find any. However, they do see an interesting older lady with a veiled hat who attracts their attention because she looks doll-like and speaks French. For some reason, this lady seems greatly upset by a strange man with a harp who is part of a musical group entertaining passengers on the steamboat.

The mysterious French woman turns out to be the girls’ new French teacher at Briarwood Hall. She seems very nice to the girls when they are introduced to her as they’re riding in a coach to the school after they get off the boat. Mary Cox, a fellow student who is older than Ruth and Helen, rides to the school with the girls and the French teacher. On the way to the school, Ruth notices that Mary seems to oddly ignore the French teacher, speaking only to her and Helen.

Mary is a Junior at the school, and tells the girls about the school clubs. The two main clubs at Briarwood are the “Upedes” and the “Fussy Curls.” I was glad that Ruth and Helen thought that these sounded by strange names for clubs, too. Mary explains that they’re just nicknames for the official club names. The Upedes are members of the Up and Doing Club, a group of girls who like lively activities. There are other groups at school, like the basketball players, but the Upedes and Fussy Curls have a particular rivalry for members. Mary is a member of the Upedes, although, in spite of the groups’ rivalry for gaining new members, Mary strangely doesn’t invite Ruth and Helen to join her group and doesn’t seem to want to explain what the rival group does.

When the girls leave the coach, Mary says that she doesn’t like the French teacher because she’s a poor foreigner, and Mary doesn’t know why she’s at the school. (Mary sounds like she’s rather a snob.) Mary says that she thinks it’s strange that the French teacher never wears any nice clothes and doesn’t seem to have any personal friends or relations. (Yeah, definitely a snob toward someone who just seems a bit unfortunate, like it’s some kind of moral failing, not having nice clothes or personal connections to show off.) Helen says that the French teacher does have personal acquaintances because she seemed to know the harp player on the boat, something that seems to interest Mary. Ruth has the uneasy feeling that they shouldn’t have mentioned it, not knowing exactly what the teacher’s connection to the harp player is. Helen likes Mary, but Ruth has reservations about her friendship.

Mary Cox shows the girls where their dorm room is. Helen and Ruth are sharing a room by themselves. Another girl, a senior named Madge Steel, comes by to talk to the girls and invites them to a meeting of the Forward Club (known as the “Fussy Curls” because of its initials) that evening. Ruth wants to go to that meeting because Madge seems very nice, and the Forward Club includes members of the school faculty. However, Helen says that she’d rather attend the meeting of the Upedes that evening that Mary told her about. Helen thinks that they owe Mary their loyalty because she was the first to meet them and was helpful in finding their room. Besides, the Upedes have no teachers in their club, and Helen thinks that it sounds more exciting and free from supervision than the Forward Club. Ruth thinks that she would prefer to get closer to her new teachers and some well-behaved girls instead, and it’s the first major disagreement that the friends have. Mary talks Ruth into going to the meeting of the Upedes that evening because that was the invitation that they received first, but Ruth says that she won’t join any club officially until she’s had a chance to see the other girls involved and learn what the clubs are really like. Ruth’s stance seems to be the wise one as the school’s headmistress tells the girls that joining clubs on campus are fun but that they should beware of getting involved too much with girls who don’t take their studies seriously and waste their time, and they learn that Mary Cox’s nickname at school is “the Fox”, suggesting that she’s as sly as Ruth has sensed. Although Mary didn’t mention it to the girls before, she’s actually the leader of the Upedes.

That evening, the girls are introduced to other students, and at the meeting of the Upedes, the school’s very own ghost story. Briarwood wasn’t always a school. It used to be a private mansion, and a wealthy man lived there with his beautiful daughter. The wealthy man was the one who commissioned the creation of the fountain with the marble statue that still stands on the school’s grounds. Although people on campus say that nobody really knows what the statue of the woman playing a harp in the fountain is supposed to represent, the ghost story claims that the figure was modeled after the beautiful daughter of the mansion’s former owner. However, according to the story, the girl fell in love with the man who sculpted the statue of her, and the two of them eloped, leaving her father alone and sad. Rumor had it, though, that the girl and her new husband must have died somewhere after they ran away because people started hearing mysterious harp music at night on the grounds of the mansion. Eventually, Briarwood was sold, and the school’s founders, the Tellinghams, bought it, and sometimes, people still hear harp music on the school grounds. Every time something strange or momentous happens at the school, people hear the twang of the harp.

That night, Ruth and Helen become the targets of a frightening hazing stunt by the Upedes that seems to bring the ghost story to life, but when something happens that frightens even the hazers, it brings into question how much of the ghost story is really true.

The book is now public domain and available to read for free online in several formats through Project Gutenberg. There is also an audio book version on Internet Archive.

Spoilers and My Reaction:

I liked this story much better than the first book in the series because it is more directly a mystery story than the first book, and Ruth makes a deliberate effort to untangle some of the puzzling things happening at her new school.

It’s pretty obvious that there is a connection between the ghost story of the girl with the harp and the French teacher’s apparent discomfort at the suspicious harpist. Ruth finds out pretty quickly that the harpist from the boat is lurking around the school. That revelation explains the frightening happenings at the hazing incident, although it still leaves the question of the connection between the harpist and the French teacher. At first, I thought that it was going to turn out that there is some truth to the ghost story the Upedes told, but that actually has nothing to do with the real situation. In some ways, I felt like the real situation was a little to straight-forward and resolved a bit too quickly at the end, considering the build-up they’d had about it. It is interesting that, of the students at the school, only Ruth comes to learn the full truth of the French teacher’s secret. Even Helen doesn’t know what Ruth eventually discovers, partly to save the French teacher’s reputation and partly because Ruth and Helen’s friendship is suffering for part of the book.

Unlike newer series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, characters in the older Stratemeyer series, including the Ruth Fielding series, grow, age, and develop their lives and personalities. In this book, when the girls go away to boarding school, the differences in Helen and Ruth’s backgrounds and personalities become more obvious. It leads them to clash in some ways, and they both worry about endangering their friendship with each other, but by the end of the book, each of the girls develop a greater sense of who they are and what they really stand for.

Helen is more familiar and comfortable than Ruth is with the traditional rituals of boarding school, even taking some glee in the mean hazing ritual of the Upedes, and she badly wants to fit in with the cooler older girls at school, willing to put up with their mean bossing to take part in their schemes for the fun and excitement. However, Ruth, is naturally more serious and shy and less accustomed to having things her way or telling others what to do anywhere she’s lived than the wealthy Helen. Ruth overcomes some of her shyness and learns to be more assertive as she stands up for herself and the other new girls at school, called “Infants” by the older girls. Ruth decides to refuse to join either the Forward Club, which has a reputation of being made up of girls who toady up to the school faculty, or the Upedes (which was initially founded as a protest group to the Forward Club, which is why most of the activities of their club involve breaking various school rules and instigating pranks), after experiencing their mean pranks and bossiness. Instead, she takes a joke of Helen’s seriously and decides to form a secret society of her own. She talks to some of the other new girls at school, and they feel the same way they do, that they don’t want to choose between either the Upedes or the Fussy Curls and would rather have a club of their own, where they won’t be dominated or hazed by the older girls. Helen gets upset at Ruth starting this new group because she thinks that they won’t gain any new friends or have any real fun or really be a part of this school if they don’t join an already-established group. Helen thinks that a group of new girls would look ridiculous because they wouldn’t know what to do with their club and will look like a group of babies. However, Ruth realizes that this is nonsense. There are enough interested girls among the newcomers to give them a good group of friends and they can think of their own things to do where they can be the leaders. Ruth turns out to be more of a leader and Helen more of a follower, and Ruth is also more creative, thinking of new possibilities in life instead of stuck with someone else’s creation. I wish that the book had gone into more details about what Ruth’s club actually does. She and some of the other girls periodically go to meetings of their club, but they don’t say much about what they do at the meetings.

Helen and Ruth temporarily go separate ways at school. Helen joins the Upedes, and Ruth and some of the other new girls carry out the plan to form a new club that they call The Sweetbriars. The other girls who help form The Sweetbriars are as independently-minded and creative as Ruth and like the idea of forming their own school traditions. Helen criticizes Ruth for being a stickler from the rules because she doesn’t want to take part in school stunts that might get her in trouble, but although Helen is more inclined to break rules in the name of fun, she is still less independent in her mind than Ruth because her rule-breaking is done following the dictates of the Upedes and the traditional school stunts of having midnight feasts with other girls in their dorm rooms. They are not stunts of her own creation or particularly imaginative, and while she is brave about school demerits, she is not very brave about what other people think about her. After the Upedes have treated Ruth very badly and spread rumors about her, Ruth finds the courage to tell Helen how hurt she is that she continues to be friends with people who have treated her so badly when she wouldn’t have put up with people mistreating a friend of hers. She doesn’t ask for an apology and says that she’s not sure that one is even warranted, but she wants Helen to know how she feels. Helen has felt like hanging around Mary Cox has made her act like a meaner person, and she feels like she can’t help herself in Mary’s company. Understanding how Ruth really feels reminds Helen that she risks damaging her relationship with her best friend if she doesn’t do something about her behavior, and when Mary is ungrateful and lies to Helen after Ruth and Helen’s brother help save her life during a skating accident, Helen begins to see Mary for what she really is.

In the second half of the book, the Mercy Curtis from the first book in the series reappears. In the first book, she spent most of the time being bitter because she had a physical disability that prevented her from walking, and she was overly sensitive about how people looked her. However, at the end of the first book, Mercy received some treatment from a surgical specialist that has enabled her to regain her ability to walk. She still walks with crutches, but her spirits have improved now that she is able to move more easily on her own, without relying on her wheelchair. Because she had previously spent much of her time alone, studying, she qualifies for admittance to Briarwood and decides that she would like to join her friends, Ruth and Helen. When Mercy comes to the school, she is still sharp-tongued, although less bitter about herself. She rooms with Ruth and Helen and joins the Sweetbriars. She adds a nice balance to Ruth and Helen’s friendship. Ruth gets to spend some time with Mercy and the other Sweetbriars when Helen is with the Upedes, and Mercy is very serious about her studies, so she insists that her friends not neglect theirs, keeping then on task in the middle of their social dramas.

As a historical note, there is a place in the story in, Ch. 22, where the book describes Ruth as wearing a sweater, defining it as if readers might not know exactly what a sweater was, calling it “one of those stretching, clinging coats.” The reason for that is that sweaters were actually a relatively new fashion development for women in 1910s, although men had worn sweaters before. Women often wore shawls in cold weather before sweaters became popular, but sweaters left a woman’s arms more able to move freely than a shawl would allow, as this video about women’s clothing during World War I from CrowsEyeProductions explains.

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The Rover Boys at School

The Rover Boys

The Rover Boys at School by Arthur M. Winfield (aka Edward Stratemeyer), 1899.

The three Rover boys, Richard, Thomas, and Samuel (called Dick, Tom, and Sam), live with their aunt and uncle in the country, but they learn that they are going to be sent to boarding school. The boys have been restless on the farm because they used to live in the city.

The boys’ father, Anderson Rover, is a mineral expert and made his fortune in mining. The family had lived in New York, so the boys are accustomed to city life. The boys’ mother died of a fever when they were young. After his wife’s death, the boys’ father traveled restlessly because of his grief, leaving the boys at boarding school in New York. Then, he had the notion to go to Africa and left the boys with their Uncle Randolph. The boys and their uncle haven’t heard from him since, and they worry that something has happened to him.

When the boys first arrived at the farm, they enjoyed the outdoor life of the country, but there isn’t much variety to the activities, and the boys start getting to trouble when they get bored. Their Uncle Randolph spends all of his time in studying scientific farming, and he can’t understand why the boys can’t take an interest in the subject or at least give him some peace and quiet for his work. The boys aren’t too impressed because, so far, their uncle doesn’t seem too successful at it. Richard (Dick) is the oldest of the three boys and is often quiet and studious, so he gets along better with Uncle Randolph than the others. He is 16 at the beginning of the series. Thomas (Tom) is fun-loving, likes to play pranks, and is 15 years old. His pranks are part of the reason why the boys are driving their uncle and aunt and their cook crazy. Samuel (Sam) is 14 years old and athletic.

Uncle Randolph doesn’t know much about kids or young people, so boarding school seems like the ideal solution. The boys’ aunt and uncle think that the boys need some discipline. They do, but the boys are also looking forward to seeing something of the world and having some adventures, so the prospect of going to boarding school sounds exciting to them. They’ve been to boarding school before, but they think it would be exciting to go to a military academy.

Before the boys leave the farm, Dick is attacked by a tramp, who steals his watch and pocketbook (wallet). The boys chase him and get the wallet back, but Tom almost drowns and Sam is almost swept over a waterfall while they try to pursue the tramp, who escapes in a boat with the watch. The boys are sad about the loss of the watch, which belonged to their father.

Tom gets a letter from his friend, Larry Colby, to say that he’s going to be attending the Putnam Hall Military Academy soon, and Larry’s father has recommended the school to the boys’ uncle. Uncle Randolph says that he’s decided to take the suggestion. The boys think it sounds exciting, and they’re glad that they’ll be going to school with someone they know. Uncle Randolph says that the headmaster of the school, Captain Victor Putnam, is a former military man who has a reputation for being kind to his students but strict on discipline, so it sounds like what the boys need.

Later in the story, they explain that Captain Putnam is a graduate of West Point and that he used to serve under Major General Custer, helping to put down Indian uprisings (Native American) until he was injured in a fall from his horse. For this book’s original audience of boys living in the late 19th century, this probably would have sounded exciting and noble, but not to people from the early 21st century. However Captain Putnam would have looked at it, quelling Native American uprisings would be essentially admitting to being part of their oppression because they weren’t uprising for nothing, and that fall from his horse is probably the only reason why he would even still be alive at the time of this story, given what eventually happened to Major General Custer. Because Custer had been a Civil War hero, people were shocked and saddened by his sudden and violent death. As with many people who die young, they romanticized his past and exaggerated his story, turning him into a legend for young people to live up to. Eventually, the romanticism wore off, and the reality stayed (he was the bottom of his class at West Point, not a student parents would really want their kids to emulate, and there were darker sides to his life and personality than most people in the 1800s would have known and which wouldn’t be appropriate talk for children), which is why his modern legacy isn’t as great as people a hundred years or more ago would have thought. Captain Putnam doesn’t look as exciting and heroic as advertised by association, but it’s enough to know that the Rover boys would have thought that it sounded impressive because of what their elders would have told them and so would their earliest readers, for similar reasons.

Before the boys leave for school on the train, Tom plays one last trick on the unpleasant station master by throwing a firecracker into some trash that the station master was burning, setting the mood for the boys’ eventual arrival at school.

After the train ride, the boy have to continue part way by boat. On the boat, they meet three pretty girls (how fortuitous) and a bully who also goes to their new school, Dan Baxter. The bully is harassing the girls by continuing to try to talk to them when they want him to leave them alone. Dan doesn’t say anything shocking to the girls, it’s more that he’s off-putting because he’s rather pushy and full of himself and can’t read a room to see that he’s making the girls uncomfortable because of the way he talks. It’s awkward. The Rover boys step in and try to get Dan to leave the girls alone, making an enemy of Dan. The girls (Dora Stanhope and her two cousins, Grace and Nellie Laning, who belong to prosperous farming families in the area) are grateful for the intervention and think that the Rover boys are better behaved than Dan is. The boys talk to the girls about their new school and learn that they don’t live far from the school, although they don’t mix with the students there much because the students at Putnam Hall don’t leave the campus very often. The boys hope that they’ll have the chance to see the girls again while they’re at Putnam Hall. (You know they will.)

Tom’s Putnam Hall experience starts off with a bang … literally. As the boys arrive at the school, Tom decides to give the other students a “salute” by scaring them with another of his firecrackers. That’s when Tom gets his first taste of military discipline from the Head Assistant Josiah Crabtree, the second in command at the school and the strictest disciplinarian in the place. Most of the school would have given the prank a pass, especially from a new boy, but Josiah Crabtree takes exception to Tom’s attitude and doesn’t accept his excuse that he doesn’t need to answer to Crabtree because he has only just arrived at the school, isn’t an official student yet, and shouldn’t be subject to the school’s rules. (Tom may have thought that military school would be exciting, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have the first clue what military discipline is about.) Crabtree marches Tom off and locks him in the guard room to wait for Captain Putnam to return to the school and administer his discipline. This is actually in Tom’s favor because Captain Putnam understands that his students are still boys, and therefore, he isn’t as strict with them as he would be full adult soldiers.

Josiah Crabtree’s ultra-strictness has caused him to be not well-liked by other students at the school. When he and Tom discuss Tom’s prank while waiting for Captain Putnam, Tom continues to argue the point that he is not yet a student at the school and that Crabtree has no right to lock him up like he has. Tom tells him that he wants to be released to stay at the hotel in town so he can contact his guardian because he may not wish to join this school after all, threatening to tell his uncle of his mistreatment. Crabtree is correct that setting off a fire cracker to scare people isn’t the best way to start off on the right foot with the faculty (I wouldn’t have liked it if someone did it to me, and this is a school where people learn to fire real guns, so you can’t have people who treat firearms and explosives like toys), but Tom’s point that immediate imprisonment before he’s even really joined the school and been notified of the school’s rules is a valid criticism, and he is not so committed to the school at this point that he can’t leave if he wants to. If Tom makes false imprisonment a public issue, it would damage the reputation of the school. That threat is worrying to Crabtree, who knows that he has already rubbed others the wrong way and made a few enemies of his own.

Tom runs away from Crabtree and hides in the forest outside the school. He plans to walk into town, but along the way, he spots a campfire. He listens in on the conversation of the men sitting by the campfire. He discovers that one of them is the tramp who stole their father’s watch before, and he listens to the men discussing some clandestine “mining deal.” When they catch Tom spying on them, Tom confronts the man called Buddy about stealing his father’s watch. Buddy and his friend deny it, and Tom fights with them before running away and getting help at the Laning farm, where he meets Grace and Nellie again and the family gives him a room for the night. When he explains his story to the family, he learns that Josiah Crabtree has been courting Dora Stanhope’s widowed mother because she owns a sizeable farm and has money from her first marriage.

In the morning, Tom returns to the school and makes his case to Captain Putnam, arguing as he did the night before that he had not yet officially joined the school before Josiah Crabtree imprisoned him and confiscated and searched his luggage. Captain Putnam makes it clear to Tom that certain things, like fire crackers, are forbidden at the school, and he will have to accept that if he’s serious about being a student there. Tom asks what the point is of him joining the school if he’s going to have marks against him before he’s even had a chance to properly start, and Captain Putnam says that if Tom still wants to join, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones and let him start school with a clean slate. Captain Putnam sees Tom as intelligent and spirited even though he’s undisciplined, and is willing to give him a chance. Tom accepts and joins the school, although Crabtree is still annoyed at Tom getting away with his prank and running away the previous night. When Tom rejoins his brothers, he tells them about seeing the thief who stole the watch, and they discuss how awful it would be for Dora if the martinet Crabtree became her stepfather.

Because The Rover Boys is an early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, there is more adventure and the general friendships and rivalries of life at a boarding school than there is mystery. The boys and their friends get used to the routines, rules, and drills of military school, getting into fights with the bullies, playing sports, and pulling stunts with their friends. However, there are villains in the story with secrets for the boys to learn. Josiah Crabtree hasn’t been honest with Dora Stanhope’s mother, trying to use pressure to get her to marry him so he can use her money and property for his purposes … including money and property entailed for Dora under her late father’s will. Crabtree claims to have money of his own, bur shows no evidence of it. Although, who has been giving the bully, Dan Baxter, large sums of money and for what purpose? What about the watch thief and his friend? Why do they keep hanging around?

By the end of the book … not too much is resolved, compelling readers to continue on to the next book in the series to find out what happens.

This book and others in the series are now public domain and are easily available online in various formats through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (including audiobook).

My Reaction

I never read any of this series of books when I was a kid, but having grown up with other Stratemeyer Syndicate books, like Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, I was curious about this first series produced by the Syndicate. I picked several of the books to get a feel for the series, and I had several reactions. First, the Rover Boys, like other early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, is almost but not quite a mystery series. It has some elements of suspense, but the little mysteries and secrets of the villains in the story come secondary to physical adventures and the drama of boarding school life for much of the book. In fact, the action kind of breaks for stories about football and baseball games the boys play at school, which don’t really have anything to do with the villains’ plots and are just part of school life. Although, the bully Dan Baxter loses favor with other boys at school when they discover that he actually placed a bet against the school’s own football team before a game, which seems pretty disloyal. I also suspected at first that at least some of the villains’ threads would be connected, but really, they have very little to do with each other, which was disappointing.

Stratemeyer Syndicate books have a pattern of ending chapters on cliffhangers in order to keep kids reading to find out what happens, which begins to show in this book, and often, the mystery/suspense elements in early stories help to set up these cliffhangers while the plot is more about the characters’ lives. Personally, I prefer stories that are more definitely mysteries, where the characters are making active efforts to solve problems and discover the villains’ secrets instead of just randomly stumbling on information. This particular story kind of annoyed me because the entire book ends on a cliffhanger. In fact, the only problem/mystery that gets resolved in the story is that Dick eventually gets his watch back. The other villains are still hanging around. At the end of the book, Crabtree is still hanging around, in spite of multiple interventions, trying to get Dora’ mother to marry him and turn over Dora’s inheritance from her father. The bully, Dan Baxter, left the school, but is apparently hanging around with Crabtree. It also turns out that Baxter’s father is secretly an old enemy of the Rover boys’ father and thinks that Anderson Rover cheated him out a mine years ago and still has the paperwork to prove it, possibly carrying it with him to Africa, for some reason. The Rover boys’ father is also still presumably lost somewhere in Africa, doing who-knows-what there. All of these problems are left hanging, apparently to be resolved in later books with other problems probably being added along the way. The only thing that I felt really certain about at the end of the book is that Dick is probably going to marry Dora in the future because he is already trying to be her protector, and his brothers will probably marry her convenient cousins, Grace and Nellie, in some order.

Second, I was bracing myself throughout the story to watch for its use of racial language. One thing to watch with old Stratemeyer Syndicate books is racist language and attitudes. In the 1950s and 1960s, with the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the Syndicate revised and updated its different series. They changed and removed outdated language, including racial terms, and also updated references to culture and technology. The version of this particular book that I used for my review is the old public domain version. I already talked about Captain Putnam’s service with Major General Custer and how people at the time would have felt about that compared to modern people, but there is also a black man called Alexander who works at Putnam Hall. He doesn’t have a very big role in the story, but I wanted to talk about him because of the way the book describes him. The book describes him using the words “colored” and “Negro”, which are outdated now although acceptable for the time period (that’s why they’re part of the names of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909, and the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944). However, during the Civil Rights Movement, people wanted to distance themselves from terms that were used during periods of high discrimination, so they began shifting to the use of “African American” as the specific term and “black” as the generic. This is the sort of language update that the Stratemeyer Syndicate books received in later reprintings.

Later in the book, one of the boys’ friends jokingly imitates a “Negro minstrel” in an old minstrel show (an entertainment people of this time would have been familiar with which included caricatured characters of black people), saying “That’s the conundrum, Brudder Bones. I’se gib it up, sah!” (“Brudder Bones” was a stock character in one of those shows, although I don’t know much about it because I’ve never seen a real minstrel show. I think there was a similar reference to the name “Bones” as a minstrel show character in the book Cheaper by the Dozen as well.) This is another cultural element that would be removed from later Stratemeyer Syndicate books and that also appeared in other older children’s books that were written prior to the Civil Rights Movement, including at least one of the Little House on the Prairie books. These references get a bad reaction in modern times because this type of caricature is a mean style of humor that probably wouldn’t have lasted very long against anybody who had the authority to complain about it at the height of its popularity. To put it another way, it’s the kind of humor where someone is definitely being laughed “at”, not “with,” and some even included songs with descriptions of horrifically violent things happening to black people masked as comedy. If you’ve never seen this kind of reference to minstrel shows before, you are not missing anything for having grown up without it. There’s nothing inherently funny in the friend’s little joke, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who didn’t know what the reference referred to. It seems to be one of those things that only becomes amusing when someone recognizes the source of the reference, and as I said, I’m not even sure exactly who “Bones” was supposed to be, other than some kind of stock character. I vaguely know what the reference is from, but not enough to connect with it in the way the original audience might have, and anyone younger than I am probably wouldn’t recognize even that much. I don’t want to put undue emphasis on this line in the book because it was only one line, and the Rover boys weren’t really into it either because they were worried about a problem they had at the time that wasn’t really funny, but I thought that I should explain the background of this comment and point it out as another reason why the Stratemeyer Syndicate books needed revising.

When referring to their father, who is still missing in Africa, the boys also worry that maybe he was killed or taken prisoner by “savage” tribes. “Tribes” in many children’s books of this period are described as “savage.” The exact location their father was trying to reach is not specified, just somewhere in Africa where there is a jungle, although a later book in the series has more about it.

Some general old slang in this book really dates it, like the use of the word “fellows” instead of “guys” and the word “peach” for “tattle” or “tell on” someone. Even later Stratemeyer Syndicate series, like the Hardy Boys, use language that would sound dated to modern people, like the word “chums” for “friends.” These old slang terms were also changed and removed from later reprintings.

There were also some features of this story that took me by surprise. Pranks and stunts are regular features of boarding school stories, but I was surprised at some of the roughness of the boys at the school as well as some of the punishments. At one point, the boys realize that Crabtree has pushed Dora’s mother to marry him, and they’re on their way to town to get married immediately. The Rover boys tell their friends and get them to swarm the carriage, pretending that it’s part of a game they’re playing, trying to delay or disrupt their trip to town and their wedding plans. The boys cause an accident with the carriage that causes Mrs. Stanhope to get a broken arm and a cracked rib. They’re lucky nobody broke their neck. It’s a pretty violent way to interfere, even though they’re trying to save Mrs. Stanhope and Dora from Crabtree’s machinations.

One thing I did enjoy was the description of the game of Hare and Hounds (also called Paper Chase) that came right before the carriage scene. I’d never heard of the game before, but apparently, it’s been a popular game in British schools for centuries. Probably, the reason I’ve never seen it played is because the playgrounds and yards of the schools I attended wouldn’t have been large enough to make a really good game. One person plays the role of the “hare” and is given a head start, leaving a trail of bits of paper behind him as he goes. The other players are the “hounds”, and they try to find the hare by following the trail of paper bits, like they were hounds following a scent. The object of the game is for them to catch the hare before he reaches a designated finishing point. At a school where you can see pretty much the entire playground and everyone on it at once, there wouldn’t be any point in following a trail or any real challenge to the game, but it sounds like an interesting game to play if you can find a large enough space for it.

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Run Away Home

Run Away Home by Elinor Lyon

Run Away Home by Elinor Lyon, 1953.

When I first read this book, I didn’t have a copy of it because copies are collector’s items, and many of them are too expensive for me to afford, but after I read this book online, I managed to find a physical copy at an affordable price! I didn’t read this book as a child, but it’s exactly the kind of book I would have loved with atmospherically magical places (although no real magic), mysterious memories, and an orphan with a hidden past. This book was my introduction to the the Ian and Sovra series, although it’s the third book in that series. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Thirteen-year-old Cathie lives at St. Ursula’s Home for Female Orphans in Birmingham, England. She has lived there ever since she was a young child and was found wandering the streets of London after a bombing raid during World War II. When she was found, she was wearing only a nightgown and clutching a locket that held a picture of a dark-haired woman and some dried flowers. She was unable to tell anyone her full name, only calling herself something that sounded like “Cathie.” (Hint: It “sounded like” Cathie. It wasn’t actually “Cathie.”) There was a label attached to her clothes, but it was torn. It only had the first part of her name (“Cat”) and the words “Passenger to” followed by what looked like the beginning of a place name that started with the letter “K” followed by “via” and what looked like the beginning of King’s Cross. If the label had been intact, there would have been no trouble identifying the child at all. The authorities made inquiries for her family or anyone who could identify her, but no one came forward. The conclusion was that her parents must have been killed in the bombing raid and that she had no other living relatives. Her family, whoever they were, was probably not from London because she was found near some railway station hotels, which had been destroyed. Most of the people staying there were killed, and the hotel records were also destroyed, leaving no further clues to Cathie’s identity. Cathie was sent to the orphanage and given the full name of Catherine Harris, but she knows that isn’t her real name. She has no recollection of the traumatic night of the bombing, but she has a vague sense that she has a real home and family somewhere else and a desperate need to discover her real identity.

One day, while reading a poem by Wordsworth aloud, a description of the seaside awakens a memory in Cathie of her early childhood. She’s had dreams of the seaside before, but she’s never been to the seaside since coming to the orphanage. Her memory of it is so clear that she’s sure that it’s not a dream but a place she’s actually been in the past, perhaps even the place where she used to live. She clearly remembers playing in the white sand on the beach, but she just can’t remember where the beach is.

When Miss Abbott, the headmistress of the orphanage, chides her for stopping her reading of the poem aloud, Cathie is upset that she disrupted her vision and her attempts to remember and screams, throwing the book across the room. Later, when she is called to the headmistress’s office to explain her fit of temper, she explains about the memory. The headmistress once again tells her the story of the night when she was found and shows her the locket and label that were found with her. The authorities honestly tried everything to locate her family and learn her original name, but since all attempts failed, the headmistress tells Cathie that she’s going to have to reconcile herself to not knowing. They’re not even completely sure whether the locket is Cathie’s or not because she was carrying it instead of wearing it, so it might have been something that she just found in the rubble after the bombing and picked up.

The headmistress says that she’s known other girls before whose birth names and parents were unknown, and it’s common for them to imagine some grand past or wealthy relations, pretending that they’re the long-lost daughters of a duke or something, but she wants Cathie to be more practical than that. Her parents are almost certainly dead, and if Cathie had any living relatives, Miss Abbott thinks they would have claimed her before. Miss Abbott thinks it’s unlikely that Cathie will ever get the full story of her past, no matter what she may or may not remember from a seaside holiday. Even if she somehow managed to locate the beach she’s thinking about, Cathie’s parents are dead, and there would be no one waiting for her there. Miss Abbott wants Cathie to focus on the here and now, applying herself to making a future for herself and making friends with other girls. Miss Abbott says that family isn’t everything because even blood family members aren’t always supportive to each other, but learning how to make and keep supportive friends will ensure that Cathie won’t be lonely. She says that Cathie will have a much easier time making and keeping friends if she improves her attitude and learns to keep her temper. It’s actually not bad advice if it’s really impossible for Cathie to learn about her past or if she genuinely has no relatives, but Cathie has a strong sense that isn’t the case for her.

Cathie can’t stop wondering about her memory of the sea and her mysterious past. She’s sure that the locket really did belong to her, but she can tell that the picture in it is much too old to have been her mother because of the woman’s hairstyle, which looks like styles from about 100 years earlier. The woman is standing in front of some mountains, and Cathie wonders if those mountains are a real place as well. She keeps thinking that, if she can get away from the orphanage and see other places, maybe she could find the place she remembers and learn who she really is.

As punishment for her temper tantrum, Cathie is sent to do some mending work for Miss Langham, who owns a big house nearby, instead of going to the pictures with the other girls. Cathie doesn’t mind too much because they were going to see a movie that she didn’t really want to see, and she also likes sewing and Miss Langham. While the two of them have tea in Miss Langham’s garden, Cathie brings up the topic of mountains, and Miss Langham mentions that she likes mountains, too. When she was younger, she used to go for mountain hikes. Cathie shows Miss Langham some embroidery work that she’s been doing with a floral design based on the little flowers in her locket, which look like silver buttercups. Miss Langham recognizes the flowers as Grass of Parnassus, which grows in marshy places, but not in Birmingham. She says that she used to see those flowers when she was younger and went hiking in the mountains in Scotland.

For the first time, Cathie realizes that she might not be English at all. If she had come from somewhere else, that might explain why no one in England knew who she was. The place that she’s remembering might be somewhere in Scotland. If she had really been a passenger from King’s Cross station in London, the train that brought her there might have been the Flying Scotsman, which Cathie knows comes to that station. Cathie tries to think of a place in Scotland that starts with ‘K’, which might have been where she was originally from. Feeling increasingly stifled by the strict rules of the orphanage, the lack of privacy at the orphanage, the bleak city, and Miss Abbott’s attempts to get her to stop dreaming about her past, Cathie begins plotting how she can run away to Scotland and start looking for the secrets of her past.

The next time she sees Miss Langham, she shows her the locket with the flowers, and Miss Langham confirms that the flowers are Grass of Parnassus. She also notices something that no one else who has looked at the locket has noticed – the little ribbon that’s holding the flowers together has a tartan pattern (a special kind of plaid pattern). When Cathie looks closer, she sees that the woman in the picture in the locket is wearing the same tartan. Cathie is excited because she realizes that this is confirmation that she was originally from Scotland. Even better, Miss Langham tells her that there are tartans that are specific to certain families or clans. Miss Langham doesn’t know enough about tartans to recognize which clan’s tartan is in the locket, but Cathie realizes that if she can find someone who can identify tartans, she has the key to learning who her family is! (Yes, the tartan pattern in the story is a real tartan, and it is one of the tartans shown on the tartan site page I linked. I checked after I knew what family to look for. But, it’s tricky to figure it out based only on the description in the book because some clan tartans share color combinations. To really identify which is which, you’d have to actually see and recognize the patterns of the colored lines and squares in the tartan. There are no pictures in the book.)

Miss Langham begins to like Cathie and sends an invitation to the orphanage to invite her to spend a few days with her in her home. Since Cathie has been pretty well-behaved lately, Miss Abbott decides to let her visit Miss Langham for a few days, although she has some misgivings because she can tell that Cathie has been acting oddly, as if she were keeping a secret. This visit to Miss Langham is critical because it gives Cathie the means to go to Scotland and try to find her home and family.

When Cathie goes to Miss Langham’s house, she isn’t there. Instead, Mrs. Riddle meets her and apologizes to her on Miss Langham’s behalf. The visit is canceled because Miss Langham’s brother is ill, and Miss Langham has gone to see him. There was no time to inform the orphanage of the change in plans before Cathie left because they don’t have a telephone. Cathie is bitterly disappointed because she had been looking forward to the visit, but Mrs. Riddle gives her some tea and cake and a note that Miss Langham left for Cathie. The note tells Cathie where to find some money that Miss Langham left for her to pay for purchasing the embroidered place mats that Cathie had been making with the Grass of Parnassus design. Suddenly, Cathie realizes that she now has money that no one else knows about. Her clothes already packed in her luggage for a few days away, including some holiday clothes that are different from the orphanage uniform, and no one is expecting her back at the orphanage for days because they all think that she’s with Miss Langham. Her opportunity to escape has come!

Feeling obligated to let everyone know that she isn’t dead when they discover that she’s missing, she adds a note of her own onto Miss Langham’s note that asks her to tell Miss Abbott that she has gone back to the place where she came from. Cathie thinks that, when the message reaches Miss Abbott, Miss Abbott will assume that Cathie has gone to London, the place where she was found as a young child. But, she has a few critical days to reach Scotland before her disappearance will even be discovered. She changes into her plain holiday clothes and goes to the train station in Birmingham. After she gets on the train, she uses her sewing things to remove the distinctive red trim on her coat so it won’t look like it’s part of an orphan uniform anymore.

The first place she goes is Derby, and she decides to hitchhike further north from there to save some money. She gets a ride from a truck driver (lorry driver, this is a British book), but he gets concerned that she might be a runaway or in some kind of trouble. He notices that the name she gives him isn’t the same as the one written on her luggage, a detail that Cathie had forgotten. At least, the driver has no bad intentions toward her and is kind enough to be genuinely concerned for her welfare. He tries to take her to a police station in Sheffield, but Cathie slips away from him and hides in the back of his truck, so he’s tricked into taking her further. When she gets the chance, she gets out and hides in the back of another truck that takes her almost to the border of Scotland. When this driver discovers her, she makes up a story about hitching rides to Scotland because she’s going there for a job in Edinburgh. She decides to take a train the rest of the way to Edinburgh, but by this time, Miss Abbott has already discovered that Cathie is not with Miss Langham. At first, Miss Abbott does think that Cathie might be going to London because of her note, but the police report of a possible runaway in Sheffield gives Miss Abbott the idea that Scotland might be Cathie’s intended destination. Cathie narrowly avoids being picked up by the police as she falls asleep in the waiting room of the train station because they think that she’s already left on an earlier train.

Once Cathie successfully reaches Edinburgh, she isn’t quite sure what to do next, but she enjoys being in the city, feeling like Scotland is the right place for her to be. Then, she spots a boy and a girl who are about her age, noticing that the boy is wearing a tartan kilt (but not the tartan in Cathie’s locket). When the boy, Ian, trips and drops the parcels he’s carrying, Cathie helps him. She makes friends with Ian and Sovra (the girl), and they invite her to come with them to see Edinburgh Castle. They notice that she speaks with an English accent and ask her about where she’s from. She confides in them about running away to find where she’s from, hoping that the answers lie in Scotland. Ian and Sovra are thrilled by Cathie’s story.

Ian and Sovra Kennedy don’t actually live in Edinburgh but on the west coast of Scotland. They’re only in Edinburgh temporarily to help their Aunt Effie. The name of their town is Melvick, and they live in a house called “Camas Ban”, which they tell Cathie means “White Bay” because of the white sand on the beach there. More than ever, Cathie is sure that she’s headed in the right direction!

Ian and Sovra catch the train home while Cathie returns to the cafe where she ate breakfast, searching for her locket, which she lost earlier. By the time she finds it and returns to the station, they are already gone, but Cathie asks about other trains to Melvick. There is going to be another train to Melvick early in the morning, and Cathie is told that it goes straight through to Melvick via Kinlochmore, with no changes necessary. Kinlochmore is the first Scottish place name Cathie has heard that starts with a ‘K’, and from the description of the area that Ian and Sovra gave her, which include a beach with white sand and mountains, Cathie is convinced that is where the secrets of her past can be found!

Cathie is on the right trail for finding the answers that she seeks, but getting caught is still a concern. The police and Miss Abbott are still looking for her, and she’s running out of money. Ian and Sovra help her and hide her in their secret hidden cottage (from the first book in the series), but unbeknownst to all of them, they’ve actually met Cathie before. Cathie really is remembering the beach near their home, and while she doesn’t remember the two of them, there was a time when they were all there, back before Cathie’s parents were killed in the Blitz and Cathie was known by her real name … Catriona, or as her parents used to call her, Catri.

My Reaction and Spoilers

One thing that I appreciated about this story is that there are no evil characters in it. None of the strangers Cathie meets wish her harm, and they even try to help her, although she dodges some of their help because it would take her back to the orphanage instead of allowing her to move forward on her mission. The orphanage where Cathie lives isn’t terrible. It’s kind of like a boarding school, so she is being educated, and she is not starved or beaten there. The worst Cathie can say about it is that the discipline is somewhat strict and she never has real privacy from the other girls.

Miss Abbott is the closest that Cathie comes to having an antagonist, and she does give Cathie punishments early in the story for the emotional and discipline problems she has while trying to revive her memories and reconnect with her past. In modern times, I think most caregivers would recognize the emotional turmoil Cathie is experiencing and be more patient and supportive to help her work through her feelings and memories, but Cathie’s orphanage doesn’t seem to offer professional counseling. Miss Abbott isn’t trying to harm Cathie. She does repeat the story of Cathie’s past when she asks her to, and when she lectures her on her behavior or gives her punishments, it’s not blind, unfeeling discipline; she explains her reasons to Cathie and tells her not just what she doesn’t want her to do but how she wants her to act and why. Miss Abbott is strict, but she actually does care what happens to Cathie and is trying to do what she thinks is best for her. The only reason why she doesn’t want Cathie to pursue the past in the beginning is that she thinks that it’s hopeless, and she’s pretty clear about that. She’s seen other girls pine for families they just don’t have or who are never going to reclaim them, for whatever reason. She thinks that there just isn’t enough information for Cathie to reconnect with her past and that she has no living relatives to find. Thinking about what she’s lost and will never find could just lead to more frustration, anger, and depression for Cathie. Even if she could find the beach she once visited as a young child, what would she do if there’s no one there waiting for her? Miss Abbott wants Cathie to reconcile herself to her loss and focus on the present and the future, building skills and relationships with the people around her, because she thinks that is what will lead Cathie to a better life. Cathie admits that Miss Abbott is nice, but she likes to plan other people’s lives, and she didn’t like the life that Miss Abbott had planned for her. In some books, that might actually be the moral of the story, learning to reconcile with the past and move forward without getting all of the answers, but this is is a sort of mystery/adventure story, so Cathie is on the path to finding the answers she seeks. It is a pretty calm, relaxing sort of adventure story, though, because no one is trying to harm Cathie, and the only threat is that they will put an end to her inquiries and take her back to Birmingham.

I liked the part of the story where Ian and Sovra are talking about which of the adults in their family and community would be most likely to give Cathie away to the authorities if they found out about her, and Ian says that even the two of them might turn Cathie in if they were a lot older. Cathie demands to know what he means by that, and Ian explains that it has to do with priorities. Kids and adults have different priorities. The biggest concern for the adults would be that Cathie is running around unsupervised and might get into all kinds of dangerous situations on her own, with no adult to supervise and take care of her. They would feel like they have to reign her in for her own good, and they’re also probably angry with her for causing them worry about her. However, Ian says, explaining the priorities that he and Sovra share with her as children, “You see, we know what’s more important. It doesn’t matter a bit if people are worried about you and rushing around looking for you. It does matter a lot for you to find out who you are.” Maybe he and Sovra would feel differently about it if they were older than Cathie and directly responsible for her safety, but as friends and equals in age, they put their concentration on helping her to accomplish her mission instead. It’s not that the kids and adults have different understandings of the situation. Both understand what Cathie is trying to do and both know know that there are risks involved in what Cathie is doing, but the main difference between them is that the children think that it’s still possible for Cathie to accomplish her mission to find out about her past, and the adults in Cathie’s life have already given up on that possibility and are just concerned with keeping her safe.

One of my early thoughts about the book was that Cathie’s parents might not necessarily be dead, since we don’t know in the beginning why Cathie was in London during WWII or how she got there. However, they really were killed in the bombing attack the night that Cathie was found, and they really are dead. For a long time, Cathie’s other relatives have assumed that Cathie/Catri died with them because the place where she was found wasn’t the place where they expected her to be and where they had been making inquiries for her and her parents. When they never heard from any of them again and they found out that there also had been a bombing in the area where they were supposed to be around the time when they disappeared, they had assumed that the whole family had been killed. Not everyone who died in bombing raids was able to be identified, so there were times when families weren’t notified of deaths and had to assume them from the circumstances and lack of contact from their relatives.

Stories about mysterious orphans with unknown pasts are staples of children’s literature and make great topics for mystery stories, but one of the fascinating things about this particular story is that it’s the kind of thing that could and did happen around the time of WWII. The time period really makes this story because it’s not only plausible that an orphan could go unidentified for a long period of time, but this is just the time and place where that would actually make sense. England was a war zone in World War II. It wasn’t actually invaded, but it was bombed frequently. People were killed, and children were separated from their parents in the chaos. In this era of chaos and sudden death, children were sometimes born out of wedlock to parents having a wartime fling and grew up without knowing who their parents were, or at least not knowing who their fathers were. That could account for some of the other children at the orphanage with unknown parents, but not Cathie. Some children were abandoned by desperate parents or were accidentally left when arrangements for unofficial adoptions suddenly fell through. Those are all things that really happened around that time, but that isn’t Cathie’s story, either.

In modern times, DNA evidence can help solve mysteries of this type, and it has helped to solve some past mysteries for people who were adopted as children, but back in the 1940s and 1950s, that wasn’t an option. Also, in modern times, Internet news stories and televised communication methods would also have helped the story of the found girl travel further, making it more likely that it would reach her relatives or someone who knew them. During this time, they would have been relying solely on newspapers and radio, and there might not have even been a picture to accompany a news story about the found child that would help someone recognize her. Modern methods don’t always solve every mystery, but they can help a great deal. That’s why this story really only works for this time period – a time when chaotic events happened that separated families and orphaned children and when modern investigative tools were unavailable.

Early in the story, I had thought that Cathie might have been about to head on her way out of London to somewhere else at the time of the bombing as a child evacuee because many children were sent away from London for safety from the bombings around that time. That wasn’t the case with Cathie, but it would have been a plausible explanation for the tag on her clothes. Child evacuees were known for having tags with their names attached to their clothes, and some children never returned home to their families when the war ended because their parents had died or had abandoned them. However, that’s not the case in this story, either. At the time her parents were killed, young Catri was actually traveling with her parents en route to another destination. The stop in London was unplanned, and they never made it to the place where they were supposed to be because of the bombing. It was just a case of bad luck and being caught up in the larger chaos of the war happening around them. The story does provided details of exactly how that happened, but since the book is available online, I decided not to include some of that information to preserve some suspense for people who want to read the story.

The special magic of this book isn’t just that Cathie discovers her identity, but how she does it. Readers know that when Cathie sets out on her journey, she’s likely to find some answers or at least a new home that will be better for her than the orphanage because the title of the book is “Run Away Home.” But, in the beginning of the story, readers are not quite sure how Cathie will do it and exactly what waits for her at the end of her journey. It’s the journey toward the truth and her special connection to the other children who help her that make the story satisfying. Little by little, Cathie uncovers pieces of the past. There are some lucky coincidences where she connects with people who were already connected to her and who can explain the past to her. When she comes to Melvick, Ian and Sovra hide her in a shieling or hut that they found hidden behind a waterfall in the first book of this series, which is a magical place to stay. For the first time in her life, Cathie has time alone where she can explore the beach and nearby mountains, and she enjoys the peace and serenity of the countryside more than the big city where she had been living. The characters in the book mention that, during WWII, parts of the west coast of Scotland were blocked off to visitors, except people who lived there or had relatives in the area, due to military exercises. The fact that Cathie definitely remembers being there during that time tells her and others that she either lived there or had family there, and it wasn’t just a one-time beach holiday.

At one point, Alastair Gunn and Dr. Kennedy figure out that Cathie is some sort of runaway, and Ian is physically punished for hiding her. I thought at that point in the book, Alastair handled the situation clumsily, saying too soon that Cathie can’t stay hiding there without first questioning her more closely about what she’s doing there and where she came from. I habitually ask a lot of questions, and it seemed to me that the adults in the book act too soon without finding out what they need to know about the situation. In their place, I would have wanted to get the situation straight before declaring anything or punishing anyone. At that point, the adults hardly know what the kids have been up to. By the time Miss Abbott arrives in Melvick, there is no need for her to return to the orphanage. Just when Cathie is thinking that she’ll have to reconcile herself to not knowing about her past and build a new future in the new home she’s been offered, the final pieces of the puzzle of her life fall into place, and Cathie gets the answers she’s been looking for. Even Miss Abbott is satisfied that Cathie has finally found the home she’s been looking for. After this book, Cathie becomes one of the major characters in this series.

I also liked this book for explaining the meanings of some Gaelic terms and place names. The Scottish characters do use some words that American readers might not be familiar with, like “dreich” and “havering,” but their dialogue is still easy to understand. The book doesn’t go overboard with trying to write to show the characters’ accents, which can get confusing and annoying in some books. The Scottish characters use “och” as an expression sometimes, but they don’t overdo it.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The House in Hiding

The House in Hiding by Elinor Lyon, 1950.

This is the first book in the Ian and Sovra series, which takes place in Scotland.

Ian and Sovra Kennedy are brother and sister, and they live by the sea in western Scotland. Their father is the doctor in their small town. One day, after Ian and Sovra have been asking their dad to rent a boat for them so they can explore some of the islands just off the coast where they live, their father tells them that he has bought a boat for them. It’s just a small boat for rowing, but it’s theirs, and it gives them the freedom to explore that they want. There is one island in particular that they want to explore, the one they call Castle Island. Its real name is Eilean Glas, which means “Gray Island”, but they like to call it Castle Island because there’s a square-shaped rock in the middle of the island that looks somewhat like a castle. However, their visit to this particular island has to wait for the end of the book because other events intervene to distract them.

When the children come back from trying out their boat for the first time, they hear their parents arguing about how to accommodate some house guests. Their father’s fishing friend wants to come for a visit. He was going to rent rooms in town for himself, his wife, and their daughter, but the innkeeper has had a stroke and can’t handle guests right now. So, Dr. Kennedy has offered to host the family, but the Kennedy house isn’t very big. If the guests use the children’s rooms, Ian and Sovra will have to camp out in the bothy, which is an old hut in back of the house. Ian and Sovra sometimes camp there anyway for fun, but it does get damp when it rains. Mrs. Kennedy doesn’t like the idea of the children sleeping there if the weather gets bad, but the children think that it sounds like fun and tell their mother that they’ll be fine and that they want to do it.

Dr. Kennedy’s friend is named Tom Paget. Dr. Kennedy doesn’t like Mrs. Paget, although it isn’t completely clear why. All he says about her is that she likes to wear a cloak and paint with water colors, which doesn’t sound very objectionable by itself. (I was actually a little irritated at Dr. Kennedy because he makes repeated comments about how much he doesn’t like Mrs. Paget without offering any more information than that. If she’s just a little eccentric in her style of dress and likes art, so what? I found the parts in the book where they get nitpicky and really down on her irritating.) Their daughter Ann is about the same age as Ian, and because Dr. Kennedy hasn’t yet met her, he’s not sure what she’s like until the family arrives, although he makes a point of saying, to his children, directly, that he hopes Ann isn’t like her mother. (Nope, no further information about why, and Dr. Kennedy sounds rather rude.) Dr. Kennedy’s comments about Ann and her mother leave Ian and Sovra feeling unenthusiastic about their guests, so they plan to spend most of their visit staying out of their way and possibly avoiding Ann, too, if she turns out to be like whatever her mother is like. (Way to go, Dr. Kennedy. Let’s start this whole experience off on a bad foot with everyone primed to hate your house guests, shall we?) Ian thinks that their whole camping outside the house experience would be even more fun if they were further from the house, so they won’t have to deal with the guests poking their noses into the bothy to see where they’re staying or worrying about whether Ann will want to join them because that would be bad for vague reasons.

Ian and Sovra start camping out in the bothy before the guests actually arrive to get things in order. However, they accidentally set fire to the bothy during an accident with their camp fire. With the bothy burned, where are Ian and Sovra going to camp out while the guests use their rooms? Their parents won’t let them have a tent because it won’t be dry enough if it rains. Fortunately, an important discovery that Ian and Sovra make turn this misfortune into an adventure.

While their parents worry about finding them another place to stay during their guests’ visit, the kids go exploring further in their boat. Their boat gets caught in a whirlpool and is drawn around the back of a waterfall, where they find a hidden cave. More importantly, someone else discovered this cave a long time ago. There are stone steps carved into the rock and a metal ring set into the wall for tying up boats, showing the children that this is an intentional landing spot. When they go up the stone steps, they discover an old, abandoned cottage hidden in a green hollow. (They call it a shieling.) The old cottage is in remarkably good condition for being abandoned for a long time, and Ian thinks that if they clean it up, it would be the perfect place for the two of them to stay during the guests’ visit. Sovra thinks that their parents aren’t likely to agree because the cottage is too far from their own house and rather isolated, and the landing place behind the waterfall is too dangerous. However, Ian is sure that there’s a better landing place somewhere else, if they approach from another side. Upon further exploration, the kids find a collection of cottages that were once a tiny village, older than the shieling they found and abandoned for a long time. The little abandoned village does have a landing place, and they decide that was probably how the people who once lived in the shieling got to where they built their home. They have to be careful, though, because the area is surrounded by a bog that might contain quicksand, and they’re not sure how to get across or around the bog. In the end, they decide that the waterfall entrance is actually the best way to reach the shieling, and they learn to navigate the currents around the waterfall safely.

The children’s father finally gives them permission to camp out in the old shieling, although their mother still has misgivings because the parents aren’t completely clear on exactly where the children will be camping and haven’t seen it yet themselves. The children describe the shieling to their father and tell him that it’s over near Lochhead, another town nearby. Dr. Kennedy is satisfied from their description that the house will be safe to camp in and says that they can communicate with them daily by sending them a message by the postal van from Lochhead, and if they need anything, the parents will send it to them by the same van the next day. Their mother is still uneasy, but since their father is convinced that it will be fine, she finally agrees to let them go. Ian and Sovra are thrilled at having this secret house all to themselves, but Ian says that they will need to keep it a secret and be careful not to leave signs that they’re there, just in case someone still owns the old house and doesn’t want them there, even if they’re not using the house themselves right now.

The children’s discovery and use the shieling is not only the beginning of this story but also the rest of the series. The children’s secret hiding place not only provides them with a secret place of their own but also leads them to some important discoveries about their own family and other people. This book in particular focuses on the missing chieftain of the Gunn clan, who has been presumed dead, but it takes awhile for that mystery to enter the story.

While Ian and Sovra are enjoying their freedom in their secret house, the Pagets arrive with their daughter, Ann. Mrs. Paget turns out to be a somewhat eccentric woman, sometimes overly enthusiastic about little things, raving about them with some cutesy talk. She often elaborates her daughter’s name from Ann (which is what it really is) to the longer Annabel or Annabella (neither of which is her actual name) and referring to the absent Ian and Sovra as the “dear little children.” (Yeah, it’s kind of an annoying cutesiness, but I still think that Dr. Kennedy shouldn’t have been maligning her before she arrived.) Mrs. Paget isn’t just a hobby painter; she has actual shows of her work and has been successful at selling her paintings. When she arrives, she tells the Kennedys that she wants to find the best places in the area to paint, and she’s particularly interested in things like old castles, old bridges, and waterfalls. (I think you can see where this is going.) The Kennedys mention that there are abandoned villages in the area.

Mrs. Paget thinks that sounds exciting and asks about the history of these villages. The Kennedys say that they don’t know the full story behind them, but Donald, the old man they bought the boat from, might know. They think that the people who used to live there probably moved to the bigger cities to find work or something. (This is something that actually did happen to small villages in Scotland in real life. If you’d like to know more about the circumstances and see pictures, I suggest looking at Hirta Island. Although it looks like a pretty spot, living conditions there were harsh, and after a young woman died there who might have been saved if she had lived near a city with a hospital, the people decided that it was too isolated, and they didn’t have the population levels and support they needed to stay there.)

Poor Ann is bored and disappointed by the absence of Ian and Sovra. (Yeah, thanks again, Dr. Kennedy, for all the negative talk that made them not want to even meet poor Ann and be friends with her. In his first message to the children after the guests arrive, Dr. Kennedy makes fun of Mrs. Paget’s sandals, which he says are “made of pink string” and says he doesn’t know why Mrs. Paget wants them to meet Ann. Oh, I don’t know Dr. Kennedy. Let’s all think hard about this. Could it possibly be because Ann is lonely, there are no other kids in the area, and she could use a friend? Why is Dr. Kennedy so mean and weird about this? He’s an adult, for crying out loud! Ian and Sovra think that it would be “frightfulness” if they have to meet Ann and actually “be nice to” her if she’s like her mother. Keep in mind that they still don’t even know what Mrs. Paget is really like because they haven’t met her, and oh, noes, how awful to be nice to somebody who’s a little strange or eccentric during a temporary visit. What a family!) Ann often finds family holidays boring because she’s an only child. When her mother is busy painting and her father is busy fishing, Ann has very little to do and nobody to talk to. Ian and Sovra know that the Pagets have arrived, but they try to avoid meeting them, both because they think that they won’t like the Pagets, not even Ann, and because they want to keep the house where they’re staying a secret.

The very first time Ian sees Ann, he tries to run away from her and ends up falling and getting hurt. Ann tries to help him, although he resists at first, partly because he is afraid that if his mother finds out that he’s hurt, she’ll put an end to the camping trip. Ian messes up Ann’s name, calling her “Animosity,” and I’m not sure if he did it on purpose or because he actually has a head injury from his fall. (Actually, it was probably on purpose because he does it repeatedly from this point on in the story. No, Ian, “animosity” is what your family cultivates for other people and what I’ve been feeling each time your dad criticizes Mrs. Paget behind her back.) Ann messes up Sovra’s name, asking if Ian is saying “Sofa”, but I cut her more slack because Sovra is a more unusual name, and she’s not doing it deliberately. She’s just asking if she heard that right. Ian does explain that although Sovra mostly spells her name “Sovra” for school, her name is really supposed to be the Gaelic word “Sobhrach”, which means “Primrose.” Same name and pronunciation, but different spelling. Ann likes the name for being unusual. Ann goes to get some water for Ian, and while she’s gone, Sovra finds Ian and helps him into their boat. By the time Ann gets back, they’re gone.

Sovra worries about whether Ian has given away their secret to Ann. Ian says he doesn’t think so, but he has been rambling and not thinking straight since he hit his head, so he can’t be sure. He’s dizzy and disoriented and definitely showing signs of having a concussion. He should be checked out by a doctor, who happens to be his dad in this area. However, Sovra takes Ian back to the shieling. Ann worries about where Ian disappeared to, but she realizes that he couldn’t have gone anywhere by himself in his condition, so someone else must have come and helped him. She doesn’t mention what happened when she returns to where her mother is painting by the abandoned village because she doesn’t know where Ian is and can only assume that someone took him somewhere to get help. Both she and her mother spot smoke rising from the hollow where the shieling is, and Ann wonders if that could be Ian and Sovra’s campsite, although she isn’t sure. When Ian and Sovra get another note from their parents, it says nothing about Ian’s injury, so they realize that Ann didn’t tell the adults about it, and they begin to think more highly of her for keeping their secret. (Yeah, as if that was the smartest or most caring thing she could have done. But, these are kid priorities. You’d think with a father who’s a doctor that they’d know better than to be too cavalier about head injuries, though.)

However, soon, there are other things on the kids’ minds. When Ian went to go see Donald about a bung for their boat, he noticed that Donald has a special two-handled cup called a quaich, and his quaich has a symbol on it that’s the same as a symbol that was carved into the hearth of the shieling. Ian and Sovra wonder if that means that Donald actually owns the shieling. When they ask him about it, he tells them that the symbol is a juniper sprig and it’s the badge of the Gunn clan. Donald questions them about why they want to know, and they carefully say that they’ve seen the symbol carved somewhere else. Donald realizes what they’re talking about, and he tells them that he once helped to build the little house where they’re staying. Years ago, his cousins lived in the little abandoned village, and he found that secret cave behind the waterfall himself when he was young. He’s the one who created the secret landing place and stone steps. The Gunns once owned the village and the land around it, but the head of the family, Colonel Gunn, died without children. Since then, Kindrachill House, the bigger house where Colonel Gunn lived, has been empty. Colonel Gunn did have a nephew named Alastair, but everyone believes that he died somewhere in the Far East. Alastair used to live in the shieling where Ian and Sovra have been staying. Donald gives the kids permission to continue staying there, since it seems that the original owner isn’t coming back. He also tells them that there’s a superstition in the Gunn family that, when Kindrachill House is empty, the heir to the estate will not arrive until someone lights a fire in the hearth. Ian wonders if they really have to light a fire only in the hearth at Kindrachill to make the legend come true or if it would count that they’ve been lighting fires in the hearth at the shieling, where Alastair used to live and where he carved his family’s crest in the hearth. Sovra says that it doesn’t really matter since Alastair’s dead and can’t come back … but is that really true?

When things in the shieling are moved around when Ian and Sovra aren’t there, they assume that Ann has found their hideout. They know that she’s been looking for it. Later, she admits to them that she has been there, having figured out a way to get there that Ian and Sovra don’t even know about, but she didn’t move all of the things that have been moved. Someone else who knows about the shieling has been there. They know it’s not Donald because he has trouble walking and can’t make the trip to the shieling by himself. So, who else could it be?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

The location of the story gives it an almost timeless quality. The children spend much of their time in nature, with few references to modern technology, so the story could take place in many time periods. However, the book is set contemporary to the time when it was written, in the mid-20th century, after WWII. That time period is especially important in the third book in the series. This first book in the series could take place during many possible decades, but the third book can only be set during the 1950s because WWII is important to that story.

There is a slight element of mystery to the story, but the kids aren’t actively trying to solve the mystery element. Mostly, it’s a kind of adventure story with elements of slice-of-life about how these kids spend their summer in an exciting location with a somewhat mysterious history. Little pieces of the situation are gradually revealed to the characters during their adventures. Kids like stories about other kids who have adventures without adult supervision, and parts of the story are about the fun things they do, setting up house in the old cottage and enjoying themselves in and around the secret hideaway.

The Kennedys’ Attitude Problems

I have to say that I didn’t like the attitudes of any of the Kennedys. I actually read the third book before this one, and I liked the characters better in that book. In this book, both the parents and the kids seem to be some kind of snobs. They’re negative and mean about Mrs. Paget and her daughter for little reason. Granted, I don’t like cutesiness much, but Mrs. Paget just seems to be a mildly eccentric artist who dresses a little oddly and acts overly enthusiastic about some things. I didn’t think there was any call for a medical man like Dr. Kennedy, who should be at least somewhat understanding about human nature because of his profession, to be so mean about the way Mrs. Paget dresses or try to discourage his children from being nice to Ann. There’s almost a mean girl exclusiveness quality to the Kennedys’ behavior. Most of the men I know have little knowledge about women’s clothes, but Dr. Kennedy sounds like a middle school mean girl, nitpicking the way the poor woman dresses. He even writes about it in the notes that he sends to his kids during their camping trip. The pink rope sandals bother him so much that he wants to put that in writing to his kids who aren’t even there and who should be polite to this guest when they actually meet. Dude, you live a “simple” life in a cottage near a small town on the coast of Scotland. You’re not exactly in a high society fashion district, and there are few people around to see or care what anybody dresses like. So what if she likes to wear cloaks with sandals? It’s an odd clothing choice because it seems to indicate that she’s dressing for two different types of weather at once, but it’s harmless. Calling the landscape “delicious” and the children “dear little children” (“dear” seems overly generous to me, but Mrs. Paget doesn’t know any better) might seems a little sappy, but again, so what if she’s somewhat sappy and romantic in her speech? Calling her daughter Ann by much longer names which she could have just named her in the beginning, like Annabel or Annabella, is also a little odd, but if Ann doesn’t seem to care, why should anybody else? Families do sometimes have odd nicknames for kids, and it’s not the worst I’ve ever heard. Going from a shorter name to a longer one is the opposite of what most nicknames do, but again, it’s just harmless eccentricity. None of the things Mrs. Paget does seem really that bad. Mrs. Paget doesn’t do anything rude or mean, and she seems like a pretty unobtrusive guest. Mostly, she just wants to find pretty spots where she can sit most of the day and work on her paintings while her husband fishes, so if they don’t like her cute, sappy talk, they don’t have to hear it much. She only seems to return to the Kennedy house to eat and sleep, and that’s literally the least a host can provide a house guest.

The Kennedys are fine in the scenes when they’re just by themselves, but when their guests are around, they’re barely holding back inner meanness and rudeness for the guests that seems completely undeserved. That was a constant source of tension for me while reading the book. When Mrs. Paget is asking about beautiful spots in the area with enthusiasm and interest in their history, Dr. Kennedy is thinking about the best way to answer her questions quickly so he can just talk to her husband (about fishing, I guess), like he just wants her to shut up. The men are going to go off fishing together, during which they’ll have hours to talk about anything they want, and Dr. Kennedy thinks it’s such an imposition to talk to Mrs. Paget for a few minutes when they first arrive about the area where he lives and its history, for which Mrs. Paget has only expressed admiration and interest. Mrs. Kennedy also seems oddly defensive to Mrs. Paget about the “simple” life they lead, which she seems to think is too simple for Mrs. Paget, but Mrs. Paget reassures her that isn’t the case, that she thinks the area is charming and the children’s camping trip sounds like fun. Mrs. Paget seems overly enthusiastic about how great it all is. Whether she’s really that enthusiastic on the inside, I couldn’t say, but at least she speaks positively and makes an effort to show interest. She is definitely interested in the artistic possibilities of the area and sincerely curious about its history. She follows up her curiosity by asking Donald about what he knows, which shows effort.

Meanwhile, the Kennedys are trying to hide their negativity, which seems to spring from ideas they have about Mrs. Paget that aren’t born out in real life. There’s little indication of how the Kennedys got these ideas except their own inner negativity and insecurity. When I was a kid, my mother would tell me to be nice to other people and to make visitors feel welcome, and even if I wasn’t having fun with particular visitors, to remember that their visit was only temporary and make the best of it until it’s over. You can feel any way you want, but you still have to behave yourself. Being nice to a temporary guest is not a terrible imposition, and putting up with a less-than-ideal guest is completely bearable and encourages return hospitality. The Kennedys don’t impart these lessons to their children, and the father seems to particularly discourage this thinking. This is the type of family that breeds little bullies, people who think that generally being nice to people is a terrible burden to endure. It really struck me as pretty rotten for Dr. Kennedy, a grown man in a position of trust and responsibility for the welfare of people in their community, to try to discourage his children from meeting and being nice to Ann, a lonely child who never did anything to Dr. Kennedy and doesn’t deserve this bad treatment from him, smearing her reputation and making it difficult for her to make friends. Why is Dr. Kennedy trying to get his kids to be mean to Ann instead of telling them to be kind to a guest and make friends?

Of course, I really know why the Kennedys have to be this way. It’s a plot device. Their reasons for not liking Ann and her mother don’t have to be fair or make complete sense because it’s the results that matter. It’s all to set up part of the conflict of the story. If Dr. Kennedy was nicer about Mrs. Paget and encouraged his kids to be nice to Ann, they wouldn’t be so worried about having Ann around or joining them on their camping trip. Ian wouldn’t have been so worried about Ann seeing him that he tried to run from her, fell, and got that concussion. If the kids were friendlier with each other, Ann wouldn’t have needed to get a ride from a stranger or might have told them about the man she met who gave her a ride and who turns out to be important. Quite a lot of the problems the kids encounter would have been different or simplified if characters were nice with each other and worked together more. It’s a theme that appears often in literature, and actually, quite a lot in real life, too. It doesn’t make it any less annoying for me.

Character Development

The parts where I thought Ian and Sovra were at their best were when they were completely by themselves. They seem to have a good brother-and-sister relationship and know how to function as a team. Even when one of them messes something up and they criticize each other, they still have each other’s back and work together to clean up their messes. However, I never really got to like Ian and Sovra as people during this book because of their meanness and snobbishness, which is ironic because they later say that they don’t like Ann because she thinks that she’s better than they are. This seems to be a retroactive decision by the author because she doesn’t show that trait right away. It seems to surface later in the story, long after Ian and Sovra have decided that they don’t like Ann and need to avoid her and think it would be frightful to be nice to her.

My favorite characters in the story are thoughtful Ann and kind Alastair. Yes, Alastair does appear in the story. He’s not dead. Ann is the first to meet Alastair on his arrival back in the area, and he helps her when Ian and Sovra have been mean to her, stealing her shoes so she can’t follow them back to their secret house from the beach and leaving her to limp back to the Kennedy house over rocks with a hurt foot. Ann vents to Alastair about her troubles with the Kennedys without knowing who he really is, and he tells her that he’s sorry that she’s having such a bad time and that the Kennedys have been unpleasant to her. Finally, a voice of reason and compassion in the story! Ann doesn’t mention this encounter with Alastair to anybody at first because she doesn’t know who he is, that they all think he’s dead, or that his return has any special meaning.

Little by little, Ian and Sovra do start to feel guilty about the way they’ve treated Ann and start looking at her differently, noticing the things she does well and acknowledging some of the skills and knowledge she has. Eventually, Sovra does apologize to Ann for stealing her shoes. When Ann is seasick the first time they take her out in their boat, she admits that she’s not as used to sailing as they are, which makes her seem less superior than Ian and Sovra thought she was. Ann even apologizes for talking like she knows everything when she doesn’t, but I still thought it was weird because that wasn’t the impression that I was getting from her until after Sovra and Ian started saying that’s what she was doing. The apologies they each give each other and their mutual acknowledgement of each other’s faults and strengths help them come to a better understanding of each other and resolve their conflicts.

Ann also proves to Ian and Sovra that she does know things that even they don’t know about the shieling and the area around it because of the questions her mother asked Donald about the history of the area. Donald told Mrs. Paget that there was once a pathway between the abandoned village and the shieling that was lost years ago, apparently swallowed up by the bog, and nobody knows quite where it is now. However, this summer has been drier than normal in the area, and Ann realizes that the path might have been exposed again by the lower water levels in the bog. She carefully observes the area from a high vantage point when they go hiking in the mountains until she spots where the path goes and marks it on her map. Then, the next time her mother goes to the village to paint, she scouts for the beginning of the path from the ground, finding a series of stepping stones through the bog.

When Ian and Sovra ask her later how she got to the shieling when she didn’t know about the waterfall entrance, she explains to them what she did, and they ask her to show them where the path is. I liked this part because Ian and Sovra were smug earlier about Ann’s map, saying that they didn’t need any local maps like that because everyone knows where everything around here is anyway, and their big source of pride with Ann was that they know more about the area than she does. (They thought that her explanations of what’s on her map when they asked her to show it to them earlier was just her trying to be “superior” to them.) They do know a lot from living there for their whole lives, but the problem is that they count too much on that sometimes and don’t think to ask the questions Ann and her mother do because Ann and her mother are aware of what they don’t know and are actively trying to learn.

I also liked it that when Ian and Sovra finally let Ann join them camping at the shieling, they also let her take over the cooking. Earlier, they took exception to her father saying that she’s an excellent cook because they saw it as bragging and acting superior, but Ann really is good at cooking and likes doing it, and Sovra admits that she isn’t terribly good at it and doesn’t really like it herself. I was relieved when the characters stopped worrying about who was superior to who and who was acting superior when they shouldn’t and just let people do what they’re good at and interested in doing, acknowledging when someone does something well without adding a kind of put-down onto it, like Ian and Sovra did earlier.

Alistair

Getting back to Alastair’s return, he eventually shows up at the shieling and talks to the children, explaining what happened to him. He says that he tried to talk to them before, but they weren’t at the shieling the last time he stopped by. His plane was wrecked in the Pacific (They don’t say that it happened during the war, so it might not have been. I thought they might have been implying that he was a pilot in the war, but that would play with the timing of later books in the series.), as they heard, and he spent some time living with a native group on an island. The natives were friendly enough and helped him, but it took him awhile to learn enough of their language to really communicate with them and figure out how to get to a place where he could arrange passage home. That was when he first learned that he’d been declared dead. Since then, he’s been reestablishing his identity and checking on the estate that he’s inherited. By the time that Alastair finally shows up at the shieling and introduces himself to the children, they’ve heard that Kindrachill House is supposed to be sold to pay the mortgage. When they ask Alastair about it, he confirms that he doesn’t have the money he needs to pay the mortgage. He almost didn’t come back to the area at all because he didn’t think there was anything there for him. However, it turns out that he’s an art lover, and when he went to a showing of Mrs. Paget’s paintings in Glasgow, he saw the painting she did of the old village and how she included the smoke rising from the shieling where Ian and Sovra were staying. That made him want to return to his old cottage and see who was there. So, the legend about a fire in the hearth bringing the Gunn heir home comes true.

There is an argument among the four of them whether Ian and Sovra should get the credit for Alastair’s return because they lit the fire in the hearth at the shieling or whether Mrs. Paget should get the credit because her painting is what drew it to Alastair’s attention, but it’s a good-natured debate. There is still the problem of the mortgage that needs to be paid, but Ian, Sovra, and Alastair find the solution to the problem when they finally go take a look at Castle Island, and Ann rescues them when they accidentally maroon themselves there. Since Ian was the first to spot the solution to their problem, Alastair thanks him by giving him the shieling so he and his sister can use it whenever they want. Alastair is able to save Kindrachill House and takes up his role as chieftain of the Gunn clan, which sets up the other stories that follow in this series.

My Favorite Parts

The best parts of the book for me were its timeless quality and the location. A secret house, forgotten by everyone, accessed by going behind a waterfall and climbing a hidden stone stairway is just the sort of place I would have loved as a kid. Even as an adult, I love the idea of a secret hideaway in a picturesque spot. The location and atmosphere are what I recommend to other readers the most. The imagery of the setting is wonderful, and it’s a great place to escape to mentally, if you can’t get to such a spot physically.

I also like books that bring up interesting facts and bits of folklore for discussion. At one point in the book, Ian explains singing sand to Sovra, which is dry sand that makes a sound when people walk on it under the right conditions. (This YouTube video demonstrates what singing sand can sound like on Prince Edward Island.) A less pleasant but still informative part is when Sovra breaks the necks of the fish they catch to kill them quickly. I’m not sure if I’ve heard of other people doing that when they fish or not. It makes sense when they explain it, but I know very little about fishing. I’ve never lived near bodies of water and haven’t gone fishing, and I get squeamish about things, so I’ve never asked.

On a day of heavy mists, Ian and Sovra are also fascinated with how muffled and mysterious the land looks and talk about how it probably inspired stories they’ve heard about ghosts and “second sight” and doppelgangers (although they say it as “doublegangers”). Ian explains how doppelgangers are like “the wraith of someone who’s still alive, so there are two of them.” This piece of folklore is why we refer to people who bear a strong resemblance to each other without being actual twins as doppelgangers. (Some people also call them “twin strangers.”)

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief

Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1998.

Samantha “Sammy” Keyes lives with her grandmother in her apartment because her mother (who she calls “Lady Lana”) left her with her grandmother a year before, when she left to pursue an acting career. Much of the time, Sammy doesn’t have much to do at her grandmother’s apartment, so she spends her time watching people and nearby buildings with her binoculars. Technically, Sammy isn’t supposed to be living in her grandmother’s apartment because the apartment building is for seniors only, so they have to keep her presence a secret. Sammy only keeps a few belongings that are easily hidden, and she has to hide in a closet when people they don’t know and trust come to the door. She can’t come and go as often as she wants because her grandmother’s nosy neighbor will notice and report her. One day, while looking at a seedy hotel nearby, she witnesses someone with black gloves stealing money from someone’s purse. As she watches, this man looks directly at her and can tell that she’s watching. Sammy has the strange feeling like she’s seen the man somewhere before, but she can’t think where, and she’s nervous that he saw her, too.

A little later, Sammy’s friend, Marissa, comes to the apartment and asks Sammy to help her find her younger brother, who’s missing. Sammy knows that the best place to look for Marissa’s brother is at the pet store, so the two girls hurry off to find him. On her way back to her grandmother’s apartment, Sammy sees that there are police at the hotel, so the theft has been discovered. There are other kids standing around and watching, so Sammy decides to take a look, too. She sees the police interviewing the woman whose money was stolen. As she listens to them talk and mention looking for fingerprints, she can’t help but comment that there won’t be any fingerprints because the thief wore gloves. When the police and victim all hear her say that, they realize that she’s the only witness to the crime. As they question her, she describes what she saw while giving them as little personal information as possible so her secret of living with her grandmother won’t be exposed. When the police take down her name and address, she gives them her real name but Marissa’s address in a wealthy part of town.

The next day, both Sammy and Marissa have their first day of junior high school. Sammy immediately gets the attention of the school mean girl, Heather Acosta (who becomes her school nemesis for the rest of the series). When Heather jabs Sammy in the butt with a sharp pin, Sammy punches her in the nose. Of course, the vice principal shows all kinds of sympathy to poor Heather and punishes Sammy because he claims that nobody saw Heather jab Sammy in the butt with a pin. He makes her sit alone in a tiny closet that the school calls “the Box” to think about what she’s done. Even when Marissa tells the principal what really happened, supporting what Sammy said, the principal just says that there’s never any excuse for punching anybody and that Sammy is suspended. The vice principal expects Sammy to shake hands with her rotten abuser and make peace when she returns to school. (Ooh, I hate that. I’ve got a rant for later.)

After Sammy’s suspension, she and Marissa walk home together, and Sammy tells Marissa about what she witnessed at the hotel. When the two girls stop at the store, they see the woman whose purse was robbed and learn that she’s an astrologer called Madame Nashira (real name Gina). Surprisingly, she admits that she doesn’t really believe in fortune-telling, but she does it anyway because she needs the money. She likes drawing up astrological birth charts for people, though. There’s an interesting scene in the book where she does one for Sammy and explains how it works. (I’ve never been serious about astrology, and I doubt it even more since I took an astronomy class and my teacher showed us how to use a star globe and used it to explain why people’s birth signs aren’t their real birth signs, but it was still kind of fascinating just to think about. I’ve never actually seen a real birth chart before.)

When Sammy gets back to her grandmother’s apartment, Sammy’s grandmother’s nosy neighbor, Mrs. Graybill, tries to find evidence that Sammy is living there against the rules, or Sammy has to pretend like she’s only visiting and leaves to visit a nearby friend, Hudson Graham, an old man who has a lot of books. The two of them talk about other robberies that have happened in the area recently. When Sammy gets back to the apartment, she finds Mrs. Graybill angrily telling her grandmother that Sammy wrote her a threatening note and slipped it under her door. Of course, Sammy didn’t do any such thing. When Sammy sees that the note says, “If you talk, you’ll be sorry,” she knows that the threat is actually from the thief. The thief knew that someone from the apartment building was watching him, but he accidentally delivered the threat to the wrong apartment. With a threatening thief wanting to keep her quiet, Heather and the school principal wanting her butt to suffer at home, the nosy Mrs. Graybill wanting her sent away from her grandmother’s apartment, and the police wanting Sammy at her friend Marissa’s house, Sammy’s witnessing of the theft threatens to expose her own secrets.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

One of the things that stands out to me is that neither Marissa nor Sammy really live in the best homes. Marissa’s family has a lot more money, and they live in a big house, but her parents are busy business people who spend most of their time working and traveling, often leaving Marissa alone with her younger brother, fending for themselves with Pop Tarts and tv dinners. Marissa feels neglected, and she really is. She also doesn’t have many real friends. A lot of the other kids who play up to her, like Heather, are trying to get her to give them money because they’re aware that her parents give her a lot of spending cash, and Marissa has had trouble saying “no” to them in the past. One of the thing Marissa likes about Sammy is that she’s never asked her for money. Sammy likes Marissa for herself.

Sammy is surprised when she finds out that Marissa actually envies her because her grandmother is always there for her in ways her parents aren’t. Sammy doesn’t feel lucky because, even though her grandmother cares about her, she always lives on the edge, having to pretend like she’s not really living with her grandmother, keeping only a few belongings that are easily hidden, and ducking into a closet to avoid being caught. She can never be completely at home in her grandmother’s apartment because she isn’t supposed to be there at all. Sammy’s mother occasionally calls, but Sammy always feels uncomfortable and neglected by her mother’s abandonment of her, which is why she refers to her as “Lady Lana” instead of as her mother.

I thought at first that Sammy’s housing situation might be solved by the end of the book, but it wasn’t. At the end of the story, she’s still secretly living with her grandmother and lying to the police about being Marissa’s foster sister. However, there are hints in this book about another possible place for Sammy and her grandmother to live in the future, so that situation might change. At no point in the story does anyone mention who Sammy’s father is, where he is, or why he didn’t take Sammy when her mother left. The identity of Sammy’s father is actually an over-arching mystery in this series, something that they discuss later.

As for the book’s introduction of “Rear” Admiral Heather the Butt Poker, the book doesn’t use the phrase “rotten abuser”, but that’s my take on it. Get ready for another one of my anti-bullying rants, or skip the rest of this long paragraph and the next two after that. I always find bullying in books stressful, especially when adults take the side of the young bully. It’s not as bad when a bully is punished or at least called out for their bullying, but when adults refuse to believe the victim, it’s awful. I know from long, bitter experience how the worst, most twisted mean kids provoke fights so their victims end up looking like the bad ones when they finally snap. The abusive kids know that the adults like them and will favor them every time. I’ve seen it happen before, and the fact that situations like this end up in books like this shows that it’s a sadly common experience that many people relate to. The abusers’ behavior never changes because they never experience consequences. The adults delude themselves that the abusers are either “normal” kids or will change (somehow, magically) as they get older and gaslight the victims that the situation is their fault and that it’s possible to be friends with the abuser without the abuser changing their behavior and continuing to act the same mean way they always act. I appreciate that the book shows the unfairness of the situation by adults who just want the situation easily resolved and make the kid they don’t like as well take the brunt of it. I know that Sammy’s use of physical retaliation is what put her in trouble, but honestly, I feel more inclined as an adult to think that sometimes physical force is necessary when dealing with a physical abuser. I’ve never heard of anyone who stopped being physically or emotionally abusive because they were asked politely, and when people in authority refuse to do anything, there sadly isn’t much recourse. Heather should not be touching anyone else’s butt, not with a sharp object, not with her hands, and not with anything else. It’s someone else’s butt. Heather should NOT be touching anyone else’s butt for any reason at all, let alone inflicting pain to someone else’s butt by penetrating it with something sharp. At her age, she should be old enough to understand that sort of thing has connotations other than a kid’s prank, and if she isn’t, someone needs to have a long, serious talk with her to explain why. I know that Heather’s meant to be just a thoughtless mean kid and not molester or something, but she’s still young and someone should put a stop to this before it goes any further. Understanding of these things has to come at some point in a person’s life. If there’s any lesson that’s difficult to carry too far, it’s the concept that no one should mess with someone else’s butt and cause pain. If Heather is allowed to mess with people’s butts in this school, understand that there is absolutely nowhere else in this society where she would be allowed to do that without repercussions. There’s no shame in having some weirdo you don’t even know assault your butt, but there’s a whole world of shame for being that weirdo who can’t leave someone else’s butt alone. Also, Heather jabbed Sammy with something sharp that penetrated her skin. Am I the only adult thinking about tetanus and blood poisoning?

Kids who are bullies in school are more likely to engage in aggressive, anti-social, and criminal behavior in adulthood. Shrugging and saying “Kids will be kids” while doing nothing is one of the worst possible things to do. Bullies don’t magically get better when they hit a certain age. If no one intervenes and teaches them that there are some forms of behavior that are never acceptable and really enforce the rules, they will continue their bullying for the whole rest of their lives, seeing the whole rest of the world as being in the wrong for complaining about their behavior, causing workplace stress, family turmoil, and failed relationships. It’s a serious problem. It’s not harmless. It seems like decades past time for the school vice principal to have this explained to him as well. A school can have all kinds of anti-bullying rules, but if they never enforce them for all parties involved, they’re completely useless because it’s like they don’t even exist at all. Kids are pretty good judges of who’s a pushover and what they can get away with, so anyone who’s worked with them should realize that the only rules that matter are the ones that actually get enforced. Unless the vice principal is one of those grown-up bullies himself who never got a clue and can’t stand to realize the reality about himself, which is always a possibility. I just have no sympathy for that.

I wonder if the vice principal considered how his reaction to what Sammy told him about being jabbed in the butt by a sharp object, actively punishing Sammy for what she said and for her physical retaliation to the violation of her body, might be teaching her some terrible lessons about how to respond to a sexual assault, including the one that people in authority will never believe her and will actively punish her because it’s the easiest thing for them to do and that’s all that matters. That happens quite a lot in real life, as the #MeToo movement has shown. This video, which is rather explicit in its descriptions and not for kids, explains about university officials who act like this vice principal and the harm they do when they let sexual violators go unpunished and even rewarded, while their victims are sent jumping through hoops for justice they never plan to give them because they just want them to shut up, go away, and not make trouble for the bullies they really like. At their core, bullying and sexual violence are both about power and control over other people and using people for the perpetrator’s purpose. It’s not really surprising that there is a connection between the two and that young bullies can turn into perpetrators of sexual violence. I wonder if the vice principal’s response would have been different if it had been a boy who jabbed Sammy’s butt instead of a girl. Actually, I don’t really wonder. I’m sure he would never think of that and would spend a lot more time coming up with reasons why this situation is different is different from any form of sexual assault, so harmless, and how he shouldn’t have to think of it if someone asked him. I liked the part where Sammy offered to show him the mark from the pin if he refused to believe her, an offer the vice principal didn’t accept. I know he’s just taking the easy way out here, punishing the person who didn’t lie and deny throwing a punch and maybe sympathizing with Heather because she got noticeably hurt in a place that isn’t covered by pants and underwear, but as an adult who remembers kids like Heather, I have absolutely no respect for this vice principal for his hard-line punish-the-bullied stance. I don’t feel for Heather at all because she got what she provoked, and there was repeated provocation followed up by a physical attack before Sammy finally broke. Every human on Earth has a breaking point, anyone might snap when pushed too far, and nobody is clever for exploiting someone’s human emotions to the point where they break. Learning that is a valuable life lesson. Of course, I know Heather sticks around as a bully for other books, so she’s not learning a thing.

While Sammy is suspended, Heather and her friend Tenille start a scheme at school to get money from other students by milking their sympathy for her “broken nose” (what they call the “Help Heal Heather Fund”). Of course, her nose isn’t really broken. Sammy realizes it because she’s seen someone with a broken nose before, and the bandaging on Heather’s isn’t right. (The book doesn’t mention it, but people with a broken nose also typically get two black eyes or at least dark, obvious bruises under the eyes from the broken blood vessels. I didn’t know that as a kid, but someone told me about that as an adult, so that’s one of the first things I’d look for.) When Sammy realizes that Heather is faking a broken nose and putting bandages on herself, she figures out how to expose her scheme. She calls the office of the doctor Heather mentioned to someone else, pretending to be Heather, and has the doctor’s office call the vice principal to explain that she doesn’t really need to wear bandages, implying that the vice principal is forcing her to wear them against her will out of an abundance of caution. After the vice principal gets the call from the doctor, who chewed him out for forcing a girl to cover her nose in bandages over just a little nose bleed, he marches into the cafeteria and tells Heather to take her bandages off in front of everyone, exposing her fraud. He tells her that they’re going to have a talk in his office about her lies, and Heather tries to hit Sammy, accidentally hitting the vice principal instead. Heather gets suspended for much longer than Sammy was, and the other students are angry with both her and Tenille for taking their money. The vice principal never apologizes to Sammy for his earlier implication that she was lying and for making her sit in that little closet called “the Box” to think about it, but her reputation is restored at school.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mansion of Secrets

Kay Tracey

The Mansion of Secrets by Frances K. Judd, 1951, 1980.

Kay’s cousin, Bill, is relieved when he finds a buyer for the old Greeley mansion. The former owner, Manuel Greeley, was an elderly man who passed away without leaving a will. As a lawyer, Bill was put in charge of trying to find the nearest Greeley relative as heir, who turned out to be a distant nephew of Manuel’s. The nephew isn’t interested in keeping the house for himself because he’s an airplane pilot and spends most of his time traveling, so he asked Bill to sell it on his behalf. It’s not a particularly desirable property because it’s a few miles outside of town and rather isolated. There’s also a local rumor that the place is haunted and that there’s a treasure hidden somewhere on the property, earning it the nickname “Mansion of Secrets.” The man who says he wants to buy the mansion, Clarence Cody, is from another state, Wyoming, and he doesn’t care about the isolated nature of the house because he wants to turn the place into a resort and riding school. The mansion would be an idea location because it already has stables and pastures on the property.

Kay is still fascinated by the stories of ghosts and treasure she’s heard about the house and asks Bill if she and some friends could take a look around the place before he completes the sale. She’s always wondered what it was like inside, and she thinks this might be her last chance to find out. Bill decides that the request is harmless enough, lends her the key to the house, and tells Kay that she and her friends can go out to the property and take down the “For Sale” sign for him. He doesn’t expect that Kay and her friends are really going to find any ghosts or treasure.

However, when Kay and her friends go out to the old mansion, they spot a strange woman on the property. This strange woman uses some tools to pry up one of the boards of the stairway and seems to find something hidden under the step, but she becomes frightened and runs away when she realizes that Kay and her friends are there. When the girls try to run after her, she gets away from them.

Then, a man shows up and introduces himself as Peter Greeley, Manuel’s grandnephew. He says that he just came to take some of the pictures from the walls of the house. The girls ask him if the stories about treasure in the house are true, but Peter says he doesn’t think so. He admits that he’s searched the house himself to see if he could find anything, but he never has, so he thinks that it’s just a story.

The girls investigate the steps where the mysterious woman was searching and discover another step with something hidden inside. The papers they find turn out to be blueprints of the house, and there are several spots marked with red ‘X’s and labeled “IMPORTANT.” Two of the ‘X’s represent the step where the woman was searching and the step where the girls found the blueprints, so the girls figure out that the other ‘X’s are also secret hiding places. The girls decide to try checking another one to see what they find, and they discover a hidden panel that holds diamond jewelry! The girls realize that they need to tell Bill and Peter immediately because this treasure and anything else hidden in the house legally belong to Peter, and he should claim it before moving forward with selling the house.

When they show the diamond jewelry to Bill, he takes it to the bank for safe keeping, and he goes out to the house with the girls to check out the other hiding places marked on the blueprints. They split up to search different spots, and Kay’s friends discover some antique Bibles that are valuable collectors’ items. Kay decides to consult the blueprints again, but someone stole them while everyone was looking at the Bible! Realizing that the thief could be hiding somewhere in the house, Bill decides to search, but the thief knocks him down and runs away. They don’t know who it was except that it was a man wearing a mask. Bill decides that the only thing to do is to call Peter Greeley and arrange for someone to guard the house.

They don’t know who either the man or the woman sneaking around the house are, but somehow, both of them seem to know something about what Manuel Greeley was hiding in his house and even where some of it was hidden. With Clarence Cody pressing to finalize the sale of the property, Bill, Kay, and their friends try to find the other stashes of hidden treasures in the house before anyone else can steal them.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. That copy is one of the older versions, where Kay’s friend “Wendy” is still called “Wilma”, and her nemesis at school is called “Ethel” instead of “Chris.” Those names changed in later printings of the stories. It also shows the girls with their true hair colors on the cover, something which most other books in the series don’t do. Kay is supposed to have brown hair, Betty is blonde, and Wendy/Wilma has dark hair (I think they usually just say “dark”, implying dark brown or black hair).

My Reaction and Spoilers

Spooky old houses with secret hiding places and hidden rooms are classics in children’s literature, and it’s fun in this book to see them find various kinds of valuable objects hidden in this house by its eccentric former owner. I have to admit that the hidden room of animal trophies was more creepy for me than it was for the characters in the story. I’m an animal lover, and I would not be happy to find myself in a room with deceased animals staring at me reproachfully from the walls. The last thing on my mind at that point would be figuring out how much they were worth. It’s also a bit coincidental that one of Manuel’s “treasures” turns out to be a valuable jar of ambergris, a key ingredient in perfumes, when Kay accidentally broke a jar of the stuff on a class trip to a perfume factory.

Of course, Kay breaking the jar wasn’t actually her fault but that of her school nemesis, who bumped into her on purpose and made her drop it. Kay is one of those characters who seems a little too perfect at everything she does, and even her missteps are often someone else’s fault. I don’t hate Kay, but I have to admit that I’d prefer her being a little more realistic as a human character. Minor klutziness that wasn’t someone else’s fault wouldn’t be a bad characteristic for her to have. There is only one minor flaw that I’ve seen in Kay, which is occasional impatience. Her impatience is only very minor and never enough to seriously interfere with her investigations, but it does appear in this book, toward the end.

Even though they mention rumors of the house being haunted early in the story, there was never a point where the characters really thought that there were ghosts in the house or had to come to the realization that strange things happening were caused by humans instead of ghosts. They knew right from the beginning that there were real humans lurking around the house, looking for hidden treasures. Between the two people initially caught sneaking around the old house, looking for things, the man is more sinister than the woman, and he becomes the repeat visitor. It turns out that the woman used to work for Manuel Greeley and she was searching under one of the steps because Manuel told her to do that if her wages weren’t completely paid by the time he died. When Kay learns the reason why she was searching in the house, her situation is easily resolved.

In many Kay Tracey books, the mystery is less about who the villains are than where they’re hiding and how to catch them. What I mean is that the Kay Tracey mysteries are generally not the kind of mystery book where you have maybe five or six main suspects for committing a crime and the story is about figuring out which of them did it. Instead, the villains and criminals are typically people Kay and her friends have never met or seen before in their lives. In this case, they figure out that they’ve seen the man sneaking around the old mansion before in advertisements because his main career is being a model. It doesn’t take too long to find out his name (at least his professional name) by tracing the advertisements back to an agency, but tracking him down is harder. They eventually catch him when he returns to the mansion but the more mysterious part is how he knew about the mansion’s treasures and the secret hiding places marked on the blueprints. Kay eventually realizes that the man doesn’t have a connection to old Manuel Greeley but to the architect who designed his house. In a rare display of imperfection, Kay almost misses the key clue to the relationship because she gets impatient with the woman who is telling her about the architect and his family.

Posted on by TracyC

The Double Disguise

Kay Tracey

The Double Disguise by Frances K. Judd (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1952 (revised from 1941 edition), 1980.

Kay and her friends, Betty and Wendy, stop to help a woman who was knocked down at the train station. As they help the woman up, a man who claims to be the woman’s son picks up the woman’s suitcase and takes her purse away from Kay. However, the man is not the woman’s son and runs away with her things while Kay and the other girls focus on the woman. The woman, Alice Janey, is very distressed when she finds out that she’s been robbed, and Kay invites her to come stay at her house with her mother and cousin, who is a lawyer, while the police try to find her missing belongings.

The invitation to stay at the Tracey house turns out to be fortuitous because Alice Janey is actually an old friend of Kay’s mother, Kathryn. Kathryn Tracey tells Miss Janey that she’s sure Kay and her friends can help her because they’ve solved mysteries before. (Even though my copy of the book numbers this as the first book in the series, when the series was published for the first time, it was much further along in the series. The order of the books was changed in different reprintings, so the girls have had other adventures before this.) Miss Janey used to live in their town, Brantwood, and she has now returned in order to finish some work that her late father was doing. Her father’s old papers were in the suitcase that was stolen. Miss Janey thinks that the person who stole her suitcase was after those papers.

The next day, Kay takes Miss Janey to the house that she’s purchased on the edge of town, but the house is somewhat lonely and isolated. Miss Janey is a bit nervous about being there alone, so she asks Kay if she’s willing to stay with her until she can get a housekeeper. During the night, Kay wakes up because she hears voices, and she discovers Miss Janey talking to a woman who looks like a witch and seems to be some kind of medium or fortune-teller, telling her where to find her missing suitcase and purse. The next day, Miss Janey claims that she a dream about where to look for the purse and suitcase, not saying anything about the witch woman. Kay knows that Miss Janey is hiding something, but she’s not sure why.

When Miss Janey goes to the empty old house that the witch woman described as the place where she would find her bags, Kay and her friends follow her. The bags are there, but they’re empty. Miss Janey disappears, apparently taken away by a couple of men, and she later turns up at her own house.

As Kay befriends Miss Janey, Miss Janey opens up to her and explains a few things. She admits to Kay that she’s been consulting with the fortune teller, Nanna, for some time. Although Kay is suspicious of Nanna, Miss Janey trusts her. Miss Janey also explains that she used to help her late father in his chemical research and that she now has a laboratory set up in her house. Specifically, she’s trying to finish a formula that her father started working on for a substance that is like glass but which has more uses. She was carrying the formula in her bags when they were stolen, and that’s what the thief must have wanted. This technological development would be very valuable, at least when it’s finished, and the thieves might not have realized that the formula was incomplete.

The situation becomes more complicated when Kay discovers that the men who removed Miss Janey from the old house before are detectives who are investigating her because they suspect her of participating in a fraud that has robbed widows of their money. Kay knows that Miss Janey would never take part in such a thing, but this fraud has a connection to the theft of Miss Janey’s formula.

My Reaction

I found this book rather meandering and disjointed. It started off with a pretty strong premise – a lady has her bags stolen at a train station, and it turns out that she’s carrying an unfinished chemical formula that may be worth a lot of money once it’s finished. The fact that the formula is incomplete adds a complication to the story. Are the people who stole the formula capable of completing it on their own or will they have to trick or force the original owner to finish it for them?

Then, the plot is further complicated by a mysterious fortune teller who turns out to own the house where she told the lady her bags would be found. Is she in the plot to steal the formula? There’s a pretty case for it because it would explain how she seems to know things that she shouldn’t know otherwise, and also it turns out that the thieves have actually been renting her house and using it as a base for their plots without her knowledge, so that plot angle doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.

But, then, the plot is further complicated by a couple of detectives who suspect Miss Janey of being part of a fraud to steal money from widows. A widow’s son is briefly arrested breaking and entering because he entered the mysterious old house for his mother’s money, while various other people have entered and left that same old house with no complaints from anyone. Kay and her friend Ronald see a couple of men at the house who dress as women, and realizing that they must be part of the fraud, try to turn them over to the police only for them to drag Kay with them as a hostage when they go rob a train like bandits from a old western movie, resulting in her being temporarily accused of being their accomplice. Then, a vial marked “POISON” (not any specific poison, mind you, just “POISON” – why a chemist would have something with such a vague label is beyond me) is stolen from Miss Janey’s laboratory and ends up in the hands of the widow’s son. However, they don’t really explain why he had it or what he meant to do with it, he doesn’t use it on anybody, and he tells Kay that the fortune teller make him hand it over to her before Kay even reaches him, so that plot point doesn’t go anywhere, either. All the while, the school mean girl and Kay’s nemesis, Chris Eaton, competes with her to solve the mystery in a vague sort of way and spreads various wild rumors about her at various times that don’t really do anything and also don’t really go anywhere but provide temporary distractions from the plot.

Why would people who steal chemical formulas and have the connections to sell them also perpetrate financial frauds targeting widows and also rob trains? This criminal group is quite diversified. The book also has the criminals speaking a foreign language at times because, with such diversified skills, why wouldn’t they also be from some exotic foreign country? It never even leads anywhere. At first, I thought that they were setting it up for the thieves to also be spies, but that is also never explained and doesn’t go anywhere. The “double disguise” part of the story is that the two thieves are men who also periodically disguise themselves as women, but Kay actually sees them putting on their disguises at one point, so that isn’t a plot twist for very long.

The scene with the sleigh crash happens toward the end of the book, and they get one of the thieves from the wreckage. Kay locates the thieves’ apartment and finds the items they stole there, but she doesn’t get the other thief herself. The other thief gets away from her, and a detective just tells her that they caught him at the hospital, visiting his partner in crime. The end. It ends happily, but it was a confusing ride with a lot of points that didn’t really go anywhere along the way.

Posted on by TracyC

The Magician’s Company

The Magician’s Company by Tom McGowen, 1988.

This is the second book in the Magician’s Apprentice trilogy.

The story picks up where the previous book left off. Armindor the Magician, his apprentice Tigg, and their friend Reepah, who is a creature called a grubber, are on their way home with the “magical” devices that they retrieved in the last book, taking them back to their Guild for investigation. On their way home, they pass through a land consumed by civil war, and they pass a wagon surrounded by dead bodies. They can tell that the people were civilians, probably entertainers, and further down the road the find a young girl about Tigg’s age (around 12 years old), struggling along, carrying her belongings. They ask the girl about herself, and she breaks down crying, telling them how she and her family were fleeing the war, but her aunt and the other members of their puppeteer troupe were murdered by soldiers. The girl, whose name is Jilla, survived by hiding in a secret compartment in their wagon. After her aunt and the others were killed, Jilla gathered up what she could, taking the puppets that would help her to earn her living and a few other belongings not stolen by the soldiers, determined to continue her journey to a safer place, like the city of Inbal.

Armindor and Tigg have horses, and they offer to help the girl on her way to Inbal, a city in another territory. Along the way, Tigg tells Jilla the story of their previous adventures, and Armindor invites Jilla to stay with them awhile longer and even come home to Ingarron with them because it would be very difficult for a young girl to manage on her own in a strange city. Jilla is happy to stay with them because she is thankful for their help and worried about managing on her own yet.

In Inbal, Armindor and Tigg visit the sages in the city to show them their discoveries. They speak to Tarbizon, an old friend of Armidor’s, showing him what they found and explaining the threat posed by the reens, a species of intelligent but diabolical creatures that evolved/mutated from rats, have the ability to talk, use blowguns with poisoned darts, and are plotting to take over the world. (Yes, really. Even they think it’s weird.) Before they continue their journey to Ingarron, they decide to stay in Inbal for the winter because it would be difficult to travel until spring. Someone breaks into the place where they are staying and goes through their belongings. They have no idea who did it, but apparently, whoever it was didn’t find what they were looking for because nothing seems to be missing. Since they will be staying in the city for awhile, they decide to rent a house instead of staying in the guestinghouse (inn) where they have been staying.

While they are looking for a house to rent, Tigg is kidnapped. Fortunately, Reepah is able to sniff out where he is. Armindor pretends that his “magic” is what told him where his apprentice was in order to intimidate the kidnapper. Caught and frightened of the magician’s powers, the kidnapper admits that he was paid to abduct Tigg by Pan Biblo, who is the head servant of Councilor Leayzar, who is part of the High Council of Inbar and who has convinced the other sages that the reen do not pose a serious threat in spite of Armindor’s warnings. When they rescue Tigg, Tigg says that a man had questioned him about the spells that he and Armindor retrieved from the Wild Lands and Armindor would be willing to trade them for Tigg. From this information, Armindor realizes that Leayzar wants the lost technology they’ve discovered, but he can’t figure out why. It doesn’t take long for Armindor to realize that Leayzar is working with the reen. The reen have hired humans to work for them before, and they desperately want pieces of lost technology in order to gain dominance over humans.

Armindor and the others go to the sages in the city and tell them what they’ve discovered about Leayzar, and the other sages take it seriously. Some of them wonder why Leayzar would want to ally with a group that is an enemy of his own species, but Armindor says that it’s hard to say because they don’t know what the reen told Leayzar. Maybe Leayzar doesn’t understand what the reens’ full plans are and whatever they promised him in return was just too compelling to resist. At the end of the previous book, some of the weenitok gave Armindor a sealed box that they found, left over from the end of the Age of Magic. The sages decide that it’s time to open the box and study its contents in the hope of getting some answers. If the last book didn’t fully establish that their world is our world in the far distant future, the contents of the box explicitly state it.

Inside the box, there is a recorded message from the year 2003 (the future at the time this book was written, but the past to us in early 2021, and it’s interesting what this message has to say about the world in 2003). The message is from Dr. Dennis Hammond of the National Science Foundation Project for the Preservation of Civilization. He says that there has been a war between the “Pan-Islamic Brotherhood” (the closest real-life equivalent would probably be the Muslim Brotherhood, but that’s more of a social/political movement or terrorist group (depending on who you ask) rather than an official alliance of nations) and the United States and its allies, including Canada, Europe, China, and the Soviet Union (which stopped existing just a few years after this book was published in real life and would just be called Russia in 2003). Dr. Hammond says that thermonuclear war is pending, and he and other scientists are worried because they think the resulting destruction will be the end of civilization as they know it. (He doesn’t explicitly say this is World War III, but that’s basically what it amounts to. In real life, we haven’t actually had World War III yet as of early 2021, although in 2001 and the following years, there was some speculation that the destruction of the World Trade Center and other terrorist attacks might eventually lead to World War III, so it seems that the author has caught on to a source of world tension even if he didn’t predict how it would come out.) In order to preserve existing knowledge about science and world history, they made a series of these boxes containing small computers designed to last for about 10,000 years and hid them at various locations around North America (so now we know roughly where these characters are) so that future generations that find them will have access to knowledge that may have been lost. The computers even contain language tutorials just in case language has changed too much for this speech to be understandable. It’s fortunate that the early 21th century scientists thought of that because it turns out that none of the sages understood a word of what the voice in the box said. The readers now understand the full situation, but the characters don’t.

Everyone is astonished at this talking box. They’ve never even heard of such a thing, and they think that it must be a “spell” from a past “magician”, which he created to preserve his voice. They understand that the voice is speaking an unfamiliar language, and there is a picture on the included screen showing a finger poking one of the buttons in the box, so they get the idea that the box wants them to press buttons. When Armindor presses the red button indicated, the computer in the box begins a simple language tutorial, showing them pictures of familiar things and saying their names, like “sun” and “cloud.” The sages understand that they’re being taught an ancient language, and they quickly begin taking notes. Armindor is moved to tears because this is exactly what he has been hoping to discover for years, the secrets behind all of the ancient “magic.” They can tell that the “magician” who made the box was trying to teach them, and they’re more than ready to learn!

But, there is still the matter of Leayzar and the reen to deal with. When they learn that Leayzar is looking for Armindor, Jilla suggests a cover they could use to hide their identities: becoming a troupe of puppeteers with her puppets! Becoming puppeteers also gives them the opportunity to spread word of the reen threat to the public through their puppet plays.

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

My Reaction

I said in my review of the last book that Armindor and Tigg don’t find any easy answers or any miraculous device that instantly solves all of their society’s problems and launches them back into an age of technology. The computer in the box comes the closest to that, but it’s still not an easy answer because Armindor and the other magicians and sages of his time can’t understand the language it uses or how the computer works when they first find it. They understand enough to know that it’s trying to tell them something and that its creators are trying to teach them how to understand and use it, but it’s going to take some time before they reach the point where they will understand enough of the language to figure out all of the information that the computer has to share. There will be enough work cut out for future “magicians” (really, scientists) of their time, like Tigg, to figure out how the computer works, what information it has to share, and how they can teach the rest of their people what they’ve learned. It’s a turning point in their history, but it’s not an instant solution. Plus, although the characters don’t really understand it at first, the readers are told that there are other boxes that are still waiting to be found. Do these boxes all contain the same information, or are there other pieces of knowledge in each one? There are plenty of secrets for a new generation of scientist/magicians to unravel.

Posted on by TracyC

The Secret of the Indian

The Secret of the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks, 1989.

This is the third book in the Indian in the Cupboard series.

This book immediately picks up where the last book in the series left off, with Omri injured after witnessing the battle in Little Bear’s time and he and Patrick and their small army having just fended off the gang of local hoodlums who had tried to break into Omri’s house and rob it. Omri’s parents return home from the party they had attended and are appalled to see Omri hurt, although the story of the burglary covers up the real reason for Omri’s injuries, which the boys don’t think they can tell Omri’s parents. Omri still can’t adequately explain how part of his head got burned, but he makes up a story about him and Patrick trying to light a bonfire and accidentally getting burned. His parents are occupied, alternately angry with the babysitter who was supposed to come and didn’t and with themselves for leaving before they were sure that she had arrived. The police come to question the boys and inform the parents that the reason why the babysitter didn’t come was that she was mugged that night. Omri knows who the thieves are, but hesitates to turn them in.

First, Omri needs to deal with Little Bear and his band of warriors. Some of them were killed in the battle, and others are injured. Patrick and Omri bring the Matron who treated Little Bear before to life to help them, but although she does her best, she says that her skills aren’t adequate to help them all and that they need a real surgeon. The Matron is sharp and tells the boys that it’s useless to insist that this is all just a dream because she knows that, strange as this situation is, it’s all real and that the death and pain she’s witnessed around her are real. The boys explain to her about the key and cupboard that bring plastic figures to life, and she asks them if they can get a doctor. It’s Sunday, so the boys can’t just go buy one, but the Matron came from a set owned by Patrick’s cousin, Tamsin, and there were other medical professional figures in it. When Patrick’s other cousin, Tamsin’s twin, Emma, comes to Omri’s house to see Patrick, Omri is forced to let her in on the secret and recruit her to help him.

Meanwhile, Patrick has gone back in time with Boone the cowboy. In Boone’s time, Patrick is tiny, the size of the figures in his own time. Unfortunately, Patrick made a terrible mistake by going back to Boone’s time with Boone as a plastic figure. That meant that Boone became a real person in the chest, trapped under Patrick’s body and almost smothered to death and needs to be treated by the Matron in order to survive.

In Boone’s time, tiny Patrick ends up in the company of Ruby Lou, a woman who likes Boone. Patrick knows that Boone is unconscious in the desert and helps Ruby Lou to find him. The doctor in their time doesn’t know what’s wrong with Boone and can’t figure out why he’s unconscious, suggesting only that they let him rest for the present and recover. Ruby Lou presses Patrick for answers, and he explains everything to her about how they travel through time using the magic key and how Boone has just left his full-size body behind to go into the future in the form of a little figurine. It’s an incredible story, but Ruby Lou believes him and expresses concern about getting Boone back safely. But soon, they’re all in trouble when there’s cyclone threatening.

Also meanwhile, Mr. Johnson, the headmaster of Omri’s school, has learned about Omri’s story that won the contest. Back in the first book of this series, Mr. Johnson actually saw Little Bear. At the time, he thought that he was hallucinating, but Omri’s supposedly fictional story has now convinced him that he really saw what he saw. He demands that Omri tell him the truth about his “Red Indian.” (Omri corrects him, saying that it isn’t right to say “Red Indian” and that they prefer to be called “American Indian” or “native American”, but Mr. Johnson angrily insists that he’s always said “Red Indian” and will continue to do so, establishing him as an unsympathetic villain in the story.) Mr. Johnson is relieved to know that he wasn’t hallucinating before, but since Omri is reluctant to explain anything, he decides to call Omri’s mother. When she answers, she demands that Omri tell her where Patrick is because his mother is frantically looking for him.

Of course, Omri knows that Patrick is still in the trunk in his room, in a coma-like state because he’s still in the past and there are living miniature people in his room who will also be discovered if people start searching. Can Omri fix everything in time to rescue Patrick and his little friends and prevent their secret from being exposed?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

Although the story takes place immediately after the previous one left off, the rules of the magic in this world have changed a little. Before, when a person from Omri and Patrick’s time went back to the past, they kind of became part of the scenery. This time, when Patrick visits the Old West, he is there as a tiny person, although no figurines of the boys exist in the past. What this book does emphasize is that the magic key does change real people from modern times into little people into people in another time and real people from other times into tiny people in modern times. At this point in the series, it’s all still mysterious why the key is magic and why the little cupboard in particular only seems to affect plastic items and people. Some of those explanations come in the next book.

I did like the parts where other people, including Patrick’s cousin Emma and Mr. Johnson in the present and Ruby Lou in the past, catch on what’s happening with Omri and Patrick and their plastic figures. In so many children’s books, the magic absolutely depends on secrecy. In this series, Patrick and Omri both know that they don’t want most people to know their secret because they don’t want people either interfering or thinking that they’re crazy. With Patrick disappearing mysteriously and other things happening because of their interactions with the little people from the past, it makes sense that people would start noticing that the boys have become involved in something really strange, even thought some of them don’t know what it is. However, the magic still works for them even when other people find out and the people who could pose a threat to their activities either never find out the truth or are distracted or apparently discredited.

At the end of this book, Omri becomes more serious about the risks of the cupboard and decides that he wants the key put away, to be give to his future children in the event of his death. However, there are other books in this series to come, so they do use the key again.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Mystery of the Witches Bridge

Mystery of the Witches’ Bridge by Barbee Oliver Carleton, 1967.

Thirteen-year-old Dan Pride is an orphan. His father was an international correspondent, and during his early years, Dan lived in different European countries, as his parents traveled around to his father’s assignments. However, three years ago, his parents died in a plane crash. Since then, Dan has been living in a British boarding school. Now, he has returned to the United States to live with his father’s brother, Uncle Julian. Dan doesn’t know what to think about his new town because it’s very different from everything that he’s known before, but he likes the idea of belonging to a family once again because he has been lonely since his parents died.

The Pride family lives in a New England seacoast town. They were one of the founding families of the town in Puritan times, but Dan discovers that the local people aren’t particularly friendly with the Pride family. Billy Ben Corey, a man who works for his Uncle Julian, explains that the Pride family has been rather stand-offish with the townspeople, and there are also rumors and stories about witches that go back to Puritan times. Billy Ben says that most of the modern locals don’t really know all the details of the witch incidents, but the vague rumors that have circulated about the Pride family have caused the townspeople to treat them with suspicion.

This sounds like a somewhat sinister beginning to Dan’s life in York, Massachusetts as he comes to understand how much of life there is governed by the past relationships between the oldest families of the area. Billy Ben tells him that the Coreys have worked for the Prides for generations, but relations between the Prides and the Bishop family haven’t been good and that Dan should avoid them.

Dan presses Billy Ben for more information, and Billy Ben tells him the story of how one of his ancestors, Samuel Pride, was accused of witchcraft back in Puritan times. Some unfortunate happenings at the time, which were probably just the result of bad luck and bad weather, were blamed on him because he was kind of an odd, temperamental person. He was known for playing the fiddle extremely well, and people said that he used it to summon up the devil in the form of a black dog out of the marsh. The person who made the accusation and who led the group that came to arrest Samuel Pride was an ancestor of the Bishop family. Samuel came out to meet the group that came to apprehend them on the old stone bridge that leads to the island in the marsh where the Pride family has their house and farm, Pride’s Point. The story goes that when Samuel met the mob on the bridge, he placed a curse on them, that doom would come for them out of the night, out of the fog, and out of the marsh. Samuel and his wife were executed for witchcraft, and not only after, there was a terrible fog and a sickness that killed many people in town. People said that it was the result of Samuel’s curse. That’s why the Prides and the Bishops have a bad relationship even though they’re neighbors, why the townspeople are still a little suspicious of the Prides, why the Prides are somewhat standoffish of the townspeople (When you think about it, who really wants to be outgoing and friendly with people whose ancestors not only killed yours but who are not welcoming or friendly themselves because they have continually looked at you and your family with suspicion for generations, like you’re the weird ones? The townspeople basically created this situation and have been perpetuating it ever since, yet they act like the problem is with the Pride family instead of themselves. Gaslighting is a relatively new term from the 20th century, but the concept has been around forever, used even by people who don’t know what it is and that it’s what they’re really doing.), and why people in the area are afraid of the stone bridge that they call the Witches’ Bridge, the place where the curse was supposedly delivered. Even into modern times, people in the area see strange lights in the marsh and hear mysterious fiddle music or dog howls that they think might be Samuel’s ghost.

There is still more to come because the mysterious misfortunes of the Pride family have continued even into modern times. Dan is named for his grandfather, Daniel Pride, who died suddenly under very mysterious circumstances, something that still haunts his Uncle Julian. Young Dan learns the story from Mrs. Corey, a relative of Billy Ben’s, who is Uncle Julian’s housekeeper. Daniel Pride had been working to change the family’s image in the eyes of the local people, debunk all the old ghost and witch stories, and lay past quarrels to rest. To try to make peace with the Bishop family and restore the Pride family’s former fortunes, Daniel had been trying to arrange to buy the shipyards that the Bishop family owned, which had formerly been owned by the Pride family. The Bishop family initially agreed to the sale, and one foggy night, Daniel went to see the Bishops to finalize the sale. What happened after that is still a mystery. Daniel was found dead the next day near the old chapel with a look of terror on his face. It’s known that he had a heart condition, so he apparently had a heart attack, but from the marks on the ground, it also appears that he had been running before he collapsed, possibly deliberately frightened to death. Also, there were marks on the ground nearby where his briefcase fell, but the briefcase containing the sale papers was never found. The superstitious people in the area think that Daniel’s death was another symptom of the family’s curse, but it might also have been deliberate murder and theft. The Bishop family insist that they never finalized the sale of the shipyard with Daniel before his death, but Uncle Julian believes that the sale was finalized and that the Bishops are lying to take advantage of his father’s sudden death, just like their ancestors arranged the execution of Samuel for their own advantage. Uncle Julian remains suspicious and bitter about what has happened, just as the townspeople continue to look at the Prides suspiciously.

All of this makes York seem like it’s not the best place to raise a sensitive young orphan, and that’s basically what Uncle Julian says to Dan when Dan arrives at Pride’s Point. Uncle Julian seems elderly and physically frail, and Dan senses that he is a deeply troubled man. Uncle Julian tells Dan that the family and the old family home have a troubled history. That’s why Dan’s father decided to go away and live his life traveling to different places, and that’s why Uncle Julian delayed sending for Dan for so long after his parents’ deaths. Uncle Julian doesn’t seem to think that Pride’s Point is a very healthy place, and he hints at buried secrets. However, he does say that, now that Dan is there, there are going to have to be some changes.

Dan doesn’t think this sounds too hopeful, and he’s lonely and disappointed that he hasn’t found the happy family and home he was hoping for and that he doesn’t even seem particularly welcome there. He can’t even really enjoy playing his violin because of the connection people there seem to have between “fiddle” music, witchcraft, and his supposedly sinister ancestor. As Dan is looking around his new bedroom that night, he suddenly spots a mysterious flashing light from his window, outside in the marsh. It’s creepy because it not only supports all the ghost and witch stories that Dan has just heard but because he recognizes the patterns in the flashes of light as Morse Code … and the message being sent is his own name: D-A-N P-R-I-D-E.

Dan doesn’t believe that any supernatural force was using Morse Code to flash his name at night. It was obviously some human person, but who would do that and why? What is the truth about his grandfather’s death? Is Uncle Julian right that the Bishops caused Daniel Pride to die and then lied about the sale of the shipyard to cheat the Pride family? Or is someone else responsible?

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

My Reaction

I stand by my earlier statement that there is basically inter-generational gaslighting of the Pride family going on. It’s gone on for so long that the townspeople have trouble recognizing what they’re doing or stopping themselves from doing it, even though some of them seem to have the feeling that it isn’t right. At one point, some of the townspeople who come out to Pride’s Point to help fight a fire make jokes about the Pride curse. I could sense tension in them, and I think it was an attempt to lighten the mood, but under the circumstances, it wasn’t really appropriate for them to joke around, especially not about something that’s been a sensitive topic for the Prides, something that has literally caused members of their family to die and others to be persecuted for generations. Keep your audience in mind, and learn how to read a room, people of York!

Uncle Julian hates the stories and rumors that have circulated about his family since before he was born, but he doesn’t know what to do to stop it, and he sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be better for the family to simply leave their old family home and start up again somewhere else. Mrs. Corey tells Dan that every single time anything bad happens in the area, people either look at the Prides suspiciously or find a way to blame them, even though they didn’t have anything to do with whatever it was. Dan can tell that Uncle Julian is so accustomed to having people blame him and his family for things and repeat scary stories about them that he halfway believes the stories in spite of himself, and he’s overly sensitive anytime it looks like the townspeople might be trying to blame the Prides for something yet again. That’s what makes this situation gaslighting, because the community’s constant untrue stories have warped even the Prides’ sense of reality and views of themselves. The community of York as a whole has created a situation that makes it difficult for the Prides to make friends with other people and get reality checks, and the most dangerous part of it is that among the few people that the Prides are in the habit of trusting is someone who turns out to be the person they should fear the most.

I couldn’t help but notice that there was someone in the story that Dan trusted too much in the beginning. It’s partly because Dan is young and in a situation where he is just getting to know the circumstances and people involved, but even when this person says things that are untrue, contradictory, or just plain mean, he doesn’t call him on it or seem to question within himself why this person is talking like that, at least not until about the middle of the book. Gaslighters will do this to a person, playing mind games, lying, alternately being friendly and praising their victim and then putting down their victim and/or trying to blacken their name to other people, discouraging them from getting close to people who care about them and might actually help them, acting like normal things that the victim does or feels are somehow weird or abnormal, trying to keep their victims in a constant state of confusion, unsure of what the reality of the situation really is. Although I found myself angry with the people of York in a general way for perpetuating something awful that their ancestors did for generations and for being apparently oblivious to what they’re doing in modern times, there is a definite villain in the story who is both deliberately and concretely evil.

There is a parallel drawn in the story between Uncle Julian’s big, black dog, Caliban, who is disfigured from an old injury and the Pride family themselves. Dan is afraid of the big dog, and Billy Ben tells him that it attacked him once, but Uncle Julian says that Caliban is just distrustful because he was badly abused and injured in his earlier life. People are like that, too. I understand that because I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and that’s where I got my dog, Betty. (If you look at my About page, you’ll see a picture of Betty.)

I’ll never know Betty’s complete history because she was found wandering alone without a collar before she was brought to the shelter. However, I’m pretty good at reading between the lines, and I can read at least part of the story from her behavior. Betty is afraid of anyone, even me, walking behind her, and I’ve noticed since her shelter days that sometimes, her back end looks a little off-center when she runs. Her tail has an odd, permanent bend at the very tip that we didn’t discover until we had the hair on it trimmed. I think she’s been kicked hard from behind before, hard enough to leave permanent injury. She’s not as scared of things as she used to be after having lived with my family for a few years, but she used to be terrified of newspapers or anybody standing over her with anything in their hands, so I think she’s been hit with things before. Betty also gets scared when people laugh. She’s not as scared as she used to be because she’s gotten used to us laughing at something funny on tv, but there are times when she’s cringed and slunk away with her tail between her legs from people when they laugh and she can’t figure out why they’re laughing. Betty’s fear of laughter actually disturbs me because I think I know why it scares her. Based on her reaction, I’ve think that it’s likely that whoever hurt Betty before laughed when they did it. I think Betty has an association between laughter and pain, and that’s why she takes laughter as a bad sign, reacting fearfully to it when she thinks it might be directed at her. Laughing while inflicting pain is a sick thing to do, the product of a sick mind. There are stories in Betty’s reactions, and I’m disturbed by the mental picture I have of the person who had Betty before.

I have to admit that my own history has also both colored/given me insight into Betty’s behavior. If it isn’t obvious from comments in my previous reviews, I don’t see teasing as a positive thing. I’ve reacted to it in the past much like Betty does to sudden, unexplained laughter, which is why I understand the feeling behind it. Some people say that they like to tease their friends and people they like, but I just don’t like it, and I’ve learned to be more open and honest about how I never will like it. I do not have good feelings about people who tease others for fun, and I deeply resent being told that I have to like it because the people doing it are “just having fun.” It’s not a bonding activity, not with me, no matter who says it is. I absolutely refuse to “bond” with anyone who does it. Anyone telling me that I have to change myself to like people who tease is 100% guaranteed to get on my bad side. I have a bad history with teasing and bullying, I have a bad history with the people who do it, and I just don’t want to be around it. Teasing involves getting a laugh at someone else’s expense, benefiting from their discomfort, and getting a good feeling from making someone else feel bad. I don’t think any of that is right, and it doesn’t take much for it to get way out of hand, especially when people have the impulse press harder to get the reaction they want to their “jokes”, like the other person just didn’t get it, instead of cutting it out when their “jokes” just aren’t funny. It’s always awkward when it comes from people who don’t know the sore spots that they shouldn’t poke at and try to act like they’re special friends who should be cut some slack when the reality is that we don’t really know each other that well, we’re not really close friends, and no such special relationship actually exists between us. Real friends understand and demonstrate respect for each others’ feelings, and they don’t intentionally poke at a friend’s sore spots, like the people of York did to Uncle Julian with their jokes in this story.

What ties all of this together is that Betty’s reaction to laughter is like Uncle Julian’s reaction to the townspeople and their jokes and comments; it’s a conditioned response from long-term negative association. The townspeople are uneasy because Uncle Julian doesn’t laugh with them, but Uncle Julian doesn’t laugh with the townspeople because none of it was actually funny. By perpetuating these witch stories, even in the form of “jokes”, they’re constantly feeding the myths and ghost stories and making the situation worse, and they don’t seem to care about how he or his family feels or how it affects their lives. You can tell who respects you and who doesn’t by seeing who tries to treat you the way you want to be treated. The people of York were making jokes to soothe their own feelings, sharing in-jokes that they’ve had with each other at the Prides’ expense, and they got really uncomfortable when suddenly confronted with Uncle Julian’s, feelings that they helped to provoke and didn’t want to deal with.

Don’t worry about Betty. It’s sad that she’s been afraid of things and it’s kept her from being more outgoing and friendly, but we’re working through it. In non-pandemic times, I take her to places where I know she’s welcome, and she has acquired a fan club of people who like to see her and say hi whenever we visit. Anytime she seems uneasy because we’re laughing about something, I sit next to her, pet her, and praise her for being a Good Girl so she knows that nobody is trying to be mean to her and that we value her. When someone has been programmed through negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement is needed for balance. I’m trying to build more positive associations for her. It’s working, and she’s improving. She behaves very well and is very happy little dog when she’s treated well. Don’t worry about me, either. I’ve had some bad experiences, but I’m not the only one who’s had to deal with this stuff. There are lots of different kinds of people in the world, and I’ve learned some things about finding the kind of people I want to be around and making it clear how I want to be treated. I just gripe and vent now and then because I don’t like mean behavior or seeing others in these situations, and I’m all out of patience for it. I’ve learned what to do to help remedy such problems, but that doesn’t stop me from resenting the people who create problems that need to be solved.

The way both people and animals behave offers clues about what’s been happening with them. Sometimes, they offer warning signs of people to avoid, and sometimes, they are signs that the person or animal is in distress and needs some outside help and support. Caliban’s behavior in the story is more defensive than aggressive. That is, Caliban is reacting, not instigating … and if I saw what Dan saw in the story, I would know immediately to be very suspicious of the person Caliban hates the most because it explains where the source of harm in his life is. In a similar way, the Pride family is mostly reacting, not instigating. They have been harmed, both physically and psychologically, for an extended period of time, and while they seem to have the sense that’s the case, they’ve been too close to the problem for too long to see what the source of the greatest harm really is. But, about halfway through the book, Dan does learn to correctly read the people around him and comes to realize who is really his friend and how isn’t, based not on how others talk about them but by how they each actually treat him. When you pay attention and think about people’s actions in context, you can see who really has your best interests at heart and who doesn’t.

Dan spends much of the story, particularly at the beginning, feeling like he is unwanted, both in York and at Pride’s Point. At first, he thinks that his Uncle Julian doesn’t want him, but he gradually realizes that’s not it. There is someone else who doesn’t want Dan there, for reasons of their own. As I was reading, I noted times when this person said and did things that manipulated Dan’s feelings, even actively trying to make Dan feel bad while carefully seeming “honest” or “helpful” so Dan would continue to listen. I felt so much better when Dan finally realized the truth about this person. I have to say that I was really angry with Uncle Julian when I discovered that he was fully aware of who hurt his dog and that he still trusted this person. For me, the first hint of that would have caused me to permanently sever the relationship because it’s sick behavior and a sign of a disturbed mind, but I can only suppose that he felt unable to because he had been dependent on this person for too long, largely shunned by the wider community, who could have given him a reality check if they’d had a firmer grasp on reality themselves.

Dan, who had never heard of the Bishops before arriving in York, finds himself becoming angry and resentful of them, hating them for what they’ve done to his family for generations. His uncle even warns him not to get involved with the family, but that’s exactly what the real villain wants. When Dan makes friends with a boy named Pip Cole and his twin sister, Gilly, he confides his anger at the Bishops and how he blames them for this whole mess and for perpetuating it for generations, but Pip knows more about the situation than Dan suspects, and he has seen a different side of the problem. Pip tells Dan his family would have less problems if they would just forgive the Bishops, but Dan doesn’t believe it at first because, the way he sees it, the Bishops are the villains, who have actively profited from their villainy all along. I appreciate Dan’s situation. Pip doesn’t fully appreciate that, for Dan and his uncle, it’s not just about the past because they’re still actively suffering from the townspeople’s stories, rumors, and suspicions about them. It’s hard and maybe impossible to forgive something that’s ongoing from people who see no problem with the situation and aren’t particularly sorry. On the other hand, the resolution of this situation requires at least one of the parties involved to make the first move. Dan’s grandfather was trying, but his mysterious death prevented his mission from being completed. Even Uncle Julian reveals that he had been prepared to forgive the Bishops and marry their daughter, but some of the circumstances of his father’s death led him to believe that his fiance actually had a hand in it, and that apparent betrayal is what has left him such a haunted man all of these years.

The stories that Dan has heard about his family are not the complete story. Dan eventually comes to realize that the Prides and the Bishops each have only half of the real story, and because of their reluctance to associate with each other, the Bishops partly out of continued superstition and guilt, not knowing how to deal with the Prides’ anger, and the Prides, because they are both justifiably angry and accustomed to unfair treatment and being shunned by the community. However, it’s important that they do talk to each other because it’s the only way for each of them to get the complete picture of what’s really been happening and learn the real villain’s true motives.

The key to establishing the truth is in the missing briefcase, and both Dan and his enemy are searching for it. Dan needs to make peace with his family’s past, and he finds some help from a mysterious hermit called Lamie, who lives alone in the marsh. Lamie is another outcast of the York community. People avoid him because he has a reputation for being weird. People in this community in general may be “normal” in the sense that their behavior is fairly uniform, but uniformity by itself isn’t a virtue. When you’ve got an entire community doing something they shouldn’t, being the odd one out can be a good thing. Lamie helps Dan when he needs it, and Dan discovers that Lamie is actually a very kind and understanding person. Lamie’s solitary lifestyle is rather unorthodox, but he’s actually happy in his solitude because he knows who he is, he takes care of himself, he’s comfortable with himself, and he’s living the kind of life he likes, in touch with the natural world. When Dan talks to Lamie, he realizes that Lamie is comfortable with his own identity and at peace in his own mind in a way that his uncle isn’t. Even more importantly, Lamie sees things from a different perspective because he isn’t part of the groupthink of this community.

Lamie was friends with Dan’s grandfather, and he tells Dan about a hidden chamber built by the Prides’ ancestors, where Dan’s grandfather kept important family papers. However, Lamie tells Dan that he isn’t sure that he should look for it if his only motive is revenge. Dan does have a desire for revenge after all of the stories of injustice toward his family that he’s heard and what he’s suffered himself since he arrived in this area. Lamie helps to calm Dan’s desire for revenge by quoting from St. Francis of Assisi, emphasizing the importance of forgiveness instead of revenge. The part about truth speaks to Dan, and he comes to realize that what he really wants, more than revenge, is to know the truth about what happened to his grandfather. Lamie tells him that he saw some of what happened the night his grandfather died, from a distance. Because of the fog, he couldn’t see everything, but he knows that the Bishops were telling the truth that Dan’s grandfather didn’t make it to their place that night to complete their deal, defusing Dan’s anger at them for their supposed lies. Lamie’s memories also give him clues about the true identity of his grandfather’s attacker and the location of the secret hiding place. However, to find it and to evade his enemy, Dan will need the help of the very people his uncle has forbidden him to associate with.

I found the parts about the gaslighting of the Pride family and the poisonous duality of their true enemy frustrating and anger-inducing, but once Dan speaks to Lamie (really, my favorite charcter in the story) and begins to sort out who he can trust and who he can’t, I felt a lot better. The story is very atmospheric, with a grand old house and property, surrounded by a foggy marsh, and even when the characters know who their enemy really is, they are kind of trapped with him in a dangerous cat-and-mouse situation as they both race to find what they’re really looking for. By the end of the book, all of the old mysteries are wrapped up, including the source of the the mysterious “fiddler” music.