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The Black Jacket Mystery

Trixie Belden

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#8 The Black Jacket Mystery by Kathryn Kenny, 1961.

Trixie and the other Bob-Whites are concerned about their pen pals in Mexico because an earthquake has damaged their town. To help them rebuild their school library, the Bob-Whites decide to hold a benefit carnival to collect books.

While they are planning the carnival, Trixie becomes worried about Regan, who is in charge of Mr. Wheeler’s stable. She overhears him speaking to her mother about a problem, asking her advice, but saying that he doesn’t want the kids to know. Although Trixie doesn’t want to pry to into Regan’s business, she can’t help but worry about him and wonder what he doesn’t want them to know.

Then, a boy called Dan Mangan comes to live with Mr. Maypenny. Dan wears a black jacket and looks like a member of some kind of street gang. At school, he brags about brushes with the law. The Bob-Whites try to be friendly with him, but something about Dan gets on Trixie’s nerves.

When someone sells Honey’s missing watch at Mr. Lytell’s store, people begin to suspect that Dan may be a thief. But, soon, Trixie and the others start to suspect that someone else may be hiding out in the woods.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mysterious Code

Trixie Belden

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#7 The Mysterious Code by Kathryn Kenny, 1961.

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The title is a little misleading because the code is really only a mystery for a small part of the book.

When the story begins, the existence of the Bob-Whites is threatened because there has been some vandalism at the school and there are fears of gang activity in the area. The school board is considering outlawing all clubs that are not directly supervised by the school and do not serve a specific purpose.

The Bob-Whites explain to their principal that they are a club that supports benevolent causes, but the principal says that they must demonstrate that they support something specific. Trixie suggests to the others that they raise money for UNICEF because it is a good cause and something that the school board would approve of. The Bob-Whites decide that they will hold an antique show to raise money, and they get people to donate items for them to exhibit and sell.  Honey’s mother says that they can have some things that were left in their attic by the former owner of the Manor House.

TBMysteriousCodeSwordIn the attic, Trixie finds a key with a tag on it. The tag is covered with a bunch of little stick figures, which turns out to be a form of code (one that fans of Sherlock Holmes would be likely to recognize). The key opens a box hidden in the attic, which contains a treasure that will raise a considerable sum of money for their cause. However, there is more mystery to come.

While Trixie and her little brother are on their way home from picking up an antique lap desk from a neighbor, they are attacked by three robbers, who steal the desk. A set of samurai swords is also stolen from the Bob-Whites, and someone attempts to burn their clubhouse. Can they find the criminals and recover the missing antiques, or will their antique show be ruined?

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Meg Mackintosh and The Mystery at the Medieval Castle

Meg Mackintosh Mysteries

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Meg Mackintosh and The Mystery at the Medieval Castle by Lucinda Landon, 1989.

Meg is visiting Dundare Castle with her teacher and some other students.  Dundare Castle is a special museum where people can learn about life in Medieval times, although it used to be a private home.  The owner’s family came from Scotland, and they built their home to look like their ancestors’ castle there.  Eleanor, the owner, now calls herself the Duchess of Dundare, and with her staff, dresses up to recreate the lives of people from the 1300s.

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One of the Duchess’s prized possessions is a silver chalice studded with jewels that has been in her family for generations.  She keeps it on display in the castle’s “abbey,” guarded by the actor playing the part of a knight, Knight Henry.  But, when Meg and her classmates get to the abbey, the chalice is gone, and Knight Henry is lying on the floor, unconscious!

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Not long before they found Knight Henry, the kids had seen a robed figure run across the courtyard.  Monk William falls under suspicion, although the Duchess doesn’t really believe that he is guilty because he’s been with her family for a long time.  There are other possible suspects, and Meg believes that both the thief and the chalice are still in the castle.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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My Reaction

I love this series because the books are interactive, giving readers the opportunity to figure out the clues and solve the mystery along with Meg. As Meg interviews the other actors in the castle and explores every room, readers are invited to study the pictures and consider the evidence to see if they can solve the mystery before Meg can.  At various points in the story, there are questions for the reader to consider, giving them the chance to pause and see if they’ve noticed what Meg has seen. I recommend that adults who are introducing children to the mystery genre read a couple of these stories along with them and discuss the clues as they go, helping children to learn how to notice details, solve puzzles, and think critically. It’s a good learning opportunity as well as a fun mystery!

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Fish Face

The Kids of the Polk Street School

FishFace#2 Fish Face by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1984.

When there’s a new girl in Ms. Rooney’s class, Emily Arrow is happy at first that she’ll be sitting next to her and thinks maybe they’ll be friends.  However, that feeling doesn’t last very long.  Dawn Bosco doesn’t seem interested in making friends.  She doesn’t respond to the compliments that Emily gives her.  Instead, she brags about herself, saying things that Emily learns later aren’t true.  Worst still, she steals Emily’s toy unicorn, Uni.

Uni is Emily’s best friend, and she’s convinced that he brings her good luck.  Without him, everything seems to go wrong.  Emily even has trouble sleeping because she always sleeps with Uni.  When she tries to get Dawn to give Uni back, she denies taking him, but Emily knows that Dawn is hiding him in her pencil box.  She saw him there, but she just can’t get to him.  Will Emily ever get Uni back?

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and  Spoilers

FishFacePic1The title of the story comes from the fish faces that Emily was making, imitating the classroom pet fish.  She shows Dawn her fish face when she’s trying to joke with her, but Dawn just thinks it’s weird.  Dawn worries that she’s not making friends, but at the same time, she also seems determined not to like things and people at her new school and stealing Emily’s unicorn and lying about it was a sure way to make her angry.

I didn’t like this book as well as others in the series.  The kids in the series don’t always explain their actions or completely understand them, which is somewhat true to life.  Young children don’t always understand their true feelings or motives because they don’t have the words or the experience to explain what they feel.  However, this book felt more unexplained than normal.

Dawn steals Emily’s toy unicorn just moments after they first meet, while sitting in the desk next to her in their classroom.  Emily doesn’t get help getting her unicorn back right away, and by the time she does, it’s too little help, and Dawn gets away with keeping the unicorn.  We’re supposed to believe that Dawn did it just because she felt awkward in a new place with no friends, but that’s shaky because even a second-grader would know that stealing something isn’t going to win friends.  The kids later find a letter Dawn was writing to a friend at her old school, saying that she’d done something bad but that Emily was mean and that she was upset about not having friends.  So, she understands that she did something wrong, but still thinks Emily is mean for trying to recover her stolen property?  Children can say and do some odd, sometimes contradictory, things, but Dawn’s feelings seem to be all over the place and her character difficult to pin down.

It’s difficult to tell what, if any, lesson to take away from this story.  That if someone steals your stuff, it’s because they’re lonely and you just don’t understand them?  Things partly get resolved because Emily is interrupted in searching for her unicorn and ends up taking Dawn’s reader out of her desk.  Returning the reader seems to be what causes Dawn to have a change of heart, maybe because missing it made her understand Emily’s feelings about the loss of her unicorn, but we never really find out.

Fortunately, Dawn does become a more distinct character in other books, and later, because she wants to be a detective, she gets her own series of mysteries.  One of the mysteries in her spin-off series references this story because something else disappears in class, and Dawn is suspected because people know that she stole something before.  In that book, Dawn has to figure out the mystery in order to clear herself of suspicion.

One thing I did like about this book was that, although losing Uni was very hard for Emily at first, she does come to realize that she can do without him, that he is not her sole source of good luck, and that she can sleep without him at night.  She is pleased when Dawn agrees to give him back, but she does recognize that learning that she can be okay on her own is a sign of growing up.

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Mystery on Taboga Island

TabogaIslandMystery on Taboga Island by Patricia Maloney Markun, 1995.

Amy is excited to be spending the summer with her aunt on Taboga Island, off the coast of Panama, near the Panama Canal.  Aunt Rhoda is a curator for an art museum, and she is writing a series of art lectures.  In particular, she has an interest in Paul Gauguin, who painted in Panama in the late 1800s.  She has invited Amy to join her for the summer not only so that she can visit another country but because of their mutual interest in art.  Amy loves drawing and painting and wants to be an artist someday.

The one drawback of going is that Amy is worried that she will be lonely over the summer.  She doesn’t know whether there will be any kids her age close by or if she would be able to talk to them if there are because she doesn’t speak Spanish.  Fortunately, soon after they arrive on Taboga, Amy meets Zoe.  Zoe is from California but she comes to visit her relatives on Taboga every year.  She introduces Amy to her cousin, Juan, as well.  The three of them become friends, and Zoe and Juan even share their special, secret hiding place with Amy: a old lookout point on an old, abandoned pier left from World War II that can only be reached by walking on a narrow beam over the water.

TabogaIslandPicThey also introduce Amy to Madame Odelle, who people call The Bird Woman because of all the birds she keeps around her house.  She is a widow who lives alone and hardly ever sees people, but she invites the children in and when she learns that Amy is interested in art, she shows them a special painting that her family has had for generations.  Madame says that her grandfather bought the painting years ago from a traveling Frenchman who was in need of money.  Amy thinks that it looks like one of Paul Gauguin’s paintings, and she knows that some of his work is unaccounted for.  However, the initials on the painting are PGO.  What could the ‘O’ stand for?

Then, the painting is suddenly stolen, and there’s no shortage of suspects.  A strange woman named Phoebe Quincy has been lurking around Madame’s house and asking questions about her.  There’s also Donald S. Deffenbach, a birdwatcher who doesn’t seem to know much about birds, and Captain Billy, an Australian who owns a sailboat that he sails himself.  Dr. Denis Dobson, who is also a Gauguin expert, also happens to be staying at the resort on the island.  He is visiting places where Gauguin painted while writing a book about him.  Could he be the thief?

I like this book for the pieces of history about Panama and Paul Gauguin, which are important in solving the mystery and understanding the origin of Madame’s mysterious painting.  One of the things I remembered most about reading this book as a child, though, was when Amy and her aunt were eating at the little restaurant on the island and her aunt urged her to try a Panamanian dish so that she could get used to trying new foods when she travels.  Amy tries a tamale for breakfast and loves it, wishing that she had been brave enough to try it earlier since she and her aunt are now planning to do more of their own cooking.  I was familiar with tamales as a kid, but not for breakfast, although I like the idea.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Cool-Itch Kid

Polka Dot Private Eye

CoolItchKid#5 The Case of the Cool-Itch Kid by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1989.

Dawn heads off to summer camp!  At first, she’s not sure that she really wants to go, even though the idea of riding horses, swimming, and roasting marshmallows sounds appealing.  It turns out that there’s only one other girl from her school going, Jill Simon.  All of the other girls on the bus to camp are people she doesn’t know from another school called Coolidge (which Dawn pronounces “Cool-Itch”).

Before she leaves home, Dawn receives a package of small presents from her grandmother.  Among her grandmother’s gifts are some candy and cookies, a pin, and a small mirror surrounded by seashells that Dawn loves.  Later, after their bus stops at a rest stop, she realizes that some of these things are missing.  She particularly notices that the pin and the beautiful mirror are gone.

Who is the thief?  Could it be one of those kids from Coolidge (“Cool-Itch”)?

Dawn misses her family, especially her grandmother.  She hates the food at camp.  She’s upset about losing her grandmother’s presents.  Worst of all, she realizes that she left her Polka Dot Private Eye box at home!  How is she going to solve this mystery?

Part of the story is about the mistakes people make by jumping to conclusions.  Right from the beginning, Dawn assumes that her only friend at camp is Jill because the other kids are unfamiliar, and she thinks they’re unfriendly.  Also, she assumes that the presents disappeared because they were stolen, but actually, it’s due to a series of accidents and misunderstandings.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Secret at the Polk Street School

The Polka Dot Private Eye

SecretPolkStreet#3 The Secret at the Polk Street School by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.

Dawn’s class is competing against other classes in a contest to see which class does the most for the school.  All of the classes are working on their own special projects, trying hard to keep them a secret until the judging.  Dawn, as the class’s resident detective, suggests that she could solve a mystery on behalf of the class, but unfortunately, there is no mystery for her to solve.  Yet.

Instead, Ms. Rooney’s class decides to put on a play for the rest of the school.  It’s Little Red Riding Hood, and Dawn is playing the starring role.  Jason gets to be the Wolf, borrowing an old wolf costume from his sister without her permission.

At the class’s rehearsal, Dawn gets mad when someone dressed in the wolf costume tries to scare her, and she thinks that it’s Jason, goofing off.  But, it turns out that Jason wasn’t even there, and the wolf costume is missing.  Suddenly, Dawn has a mystery!

Dawn starts receiving messages from “The Wolf” saying that someone is going to get her and Jason.  Then, someone takes a bite out of the loaf of bread that Dawn has been using as a prop (the food that she’s taking to “Grandma’s House” in the play).  Could “The Wolf” be someone in a rival class, hoping to sabotage their play so they can win the contest?

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Egyptian Diary

EgyptianDiary

Egyptian Diary: The Journal of Nakht by Richard Platt, 2005.

A young boy in Ancient Egypt, Nakht, is excited because his family will soon move to Memphis because a distant relative has offered his father a job working as a scribe.  Memphis is a large, important city, with more opportunities than Esna, where the family currently lives.  Nakht is also training to be a scribe, so he begins writing an account of his family’s journey to Memphis and what they encounter when they arrive.

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The journey to Memphis includes a boat trip down the Nile, past the City of the Dead near Thebes, where pharaohs are buried.  When they arrive in Memphis, they make themselves at home in their new house, which is bigger than their old one.  For the first time, Nakht has a private bedroom of his own, and the wall is decorated with a hunting scene.  Nakht also has a bed to sleep in, although he is still more accustomed to sleeping on a mat on the floor, as he did back in Esna.

In Esna, Nakht’s father had taught him his lessons as a scribe, but in Memphis, Nakht begins attending a school with other boys.  There, he practices his writing as always, although he must also learn the older, more formal hieroglyphic form of writing used on the walls of temples and for public inscriptions as well as the less formal writing used more commonly.  Nakht also receives lessons in building and engineering, which includes calculating the weight of the building stones, how many people it would take to move them, and how much food and drink the workers would need during their time of service).  Sometimes, their teacher also takes the students places for lessons, like taking them to the fields near the river so they can see how to build canals and how farmers water their fields.

There are many exciting things going on in Memphis.  Ships come and go from many places.  When the Nile floods, Nakht describes how the Controller of Granaries sets the taxes on grain for the following year by measuring the highest height of the Nile during the flooding time, which is an indicator of how good the next year’s grain harvest will be.  Nakht and his sister Tamyt witness the funeral procession of a scribe, complete with dancers, paid mourners, and a procession of servants carrying all of the furniture and supplies to be loaded into the man’s tomb for him to use in the afterlife.

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Then, Nakht learns that his father and other scribes are investigating tomb robberies in Saqqara.  Nakht and Tamyt have never seen the tombs before, but their father refuses to let them come with him.  Instead, the two of them sneak over by themselves to have a look.  While they are there, they witness the robbing of a tomb!  They get a good look at an unusual ring on the finger of one of the robbers and are shocked to later see an identical ring on the finger of a very important person!

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At the end of the story, when Nakht and Tamyt are rewarded for their role in catching the thieves, it is revealed that the current king of Egypt is Hatshepsut, who is actually a woman.

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Among the other things that Nakht explains about his life are how the doctor treated him when he broke his arm, how grain is harvested, how different types of craftsman work, and how houses are built.  Nakht also undergoes a special hair-cutting ceremony as a coming-of-age ritual.

There is a section in the back that explains more about Ancient Egyptian history and society.  It also explains Egyptian writing, religion, mummies, and tombs.

The book is part of a series of historical picture books.  It is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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The Case of the Horrible Swamp Monster

horribleswampmonsterThe Case of the Horrible Swamp Monster by Drew Stevenson, 1984.

This is the first book in the Monster Hunter series.

Raymond Almond knows that his class project isn’t going to go well when he finds out that bossy Verna Wilkes is in his group. Verna convinces the group that their project should be a movie because her father recently gave her a movie camera. What makes it bad is that she insists that it should be a monster movie and that Raymond should play the part of the monster.

Raymond is embarrassed about having to stumble around the spooky Lost Swamp in the ridiculous monster costume, but he puts aside his embarrassment when what looks like a real swamp monster appears in the background of the footage.  Even bossy Verna is scared at the idea of a monster living in the swamp where they were filming.

Fortunately, Raymond’s best friend is J. Huntley English, an intelligent boy and amateur cryptozoologist (or Monster Hunter, as he likes to put it). When Raymond and Verna tell Huntley what they’ve seen, he’s quick to join in the investigation, eager to discover proof of a real monster.

horribleswampmonsterpicThe course of their investigation takes a strange turn when friendly Mr. Walton, who works as a janitor at the same bank where Huntley and Verna’s mothers work, is arrested for stealing money. The kids refuse to believe that he’s guilty and soon learn that there is a connection between the thefts and the mysterious monster and possibly the strange fisherman who has also been lurking around the swamp.

The book is available online through Internet Archive.

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Mystery of the Black-Magic Cave

MegMagicCave

Mystery of the Black-Magic Cave by Holly Beth Walker, 1971, 1978.

MegMagicCavePic1Meg’s Uncle Hal takes her and her best friend, Kerry, with him on vacation to Merrybones, Maine.  He has a cabin there, and it’s a good place to go fishing or exploring in the woods.  However, Uncle Hal isn’t just there to relax this time.  His friend, Emily Hawthorne, has asked for his help because she’s received some mysterious, disturbing messages.

Emily was born in Merrybones but moved away at a young age to live with an aunt on the west coast because she was orphaned after the death of her father.  Her father’s death was mysterious, and Emily has had the feeling that people haven’t told her the full truth of it.  It was known that he had a heart condition, and he was found dead in the woods one morning, apparently having died of a heart attack.  Emily herself was also found wandering in the woods alone, frightened and talking about a “dark monster”, but she was very young at the time and no longer remembers what happened or what she saw that night.

MegMagicCavePic2She has returned to Merrybones to teach in the local school, but people in this town look at her as an outsider because she has spent so many years away.  Now, she has received threatening messages written in rhyme and signed with a star with the number 13 inside.  Her pet black cat, Melissa, has also mysteriously disappeared, and Emily is worried about her.

Someone doesn’t want Emily to stay in Merrybones, possibly because they’re afraid of what she might remember about the past.  Meg and Kerry soon learn that there are strange legends and stories of witches connected with a cave in the woods.  They later discover that someone has been there recently, lighting candles and drawing pentacles like the ones on the threatening messages to Emily.  In fact, Mrs. Stoner, the woman who owns the bed-and-breakfast where Meg and Kerry are staying because Uncle Hal’s cabin only has one room, has what appears to be a witch’s spell book hidden in the storage room next to where the girls sleep.  To get the answers, Meg and her friends, including Mrs. Stoner’s own children, must summon the courage to go the cave once more and learn more about these mysterious “witches.”

The book is part of the Meg Duncan Mysteries.  It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

A creepy mystery like this was just the sort of thing I loved as a kid, but this story kind of bothered me, reading it again as an adult.  I had forgotten how it ended, but as I was reading about the secret society in the book and the clues that Meg and her friends uncovered about them, I found myself not just thinking that their spells and witch names were a little hokey for a secret society of adults (“Endorella” indeed!) but also getting angry at the juvenile way they behaved.  Part of me thought at first that it was because the witches’ scariness was toned down for the sake of juvenile readers, but more and more, I found myself thinking of them as adults who never really grew up, whose mean, cliquish ways were carried over into adulthood, long after they should have grown out of them.  There are adults in real life who are like that.  To my surprise, that sense wasn’t just because their little rituals were toned down for children but was actually a genuine clue to the identities and motives of the “witches” and the origins of their secret society.  Discovering that actually made me feel a little better.  I also think the author did a good job of explaining how a little harmless “fun” can get out of hand and showing the adults’ embarrassment at being caught in their “game.”  The secret society isn’t quite as mean or sinister as it first appears, which is also a relief.

There is an interesting twist to the story in who the real author of the threatening messages was.  I was pretty sure who the writer was, and I guessed right, but I had expected that this person would be a member of the secret society, which wasn’t true.  Also, the secret that the villain is trying to protect isn’t how the father died years ago, which turns out to be just because of his heart condition with no foul play, but the fact that someone stole the money that the father had in his possession at the time he died.  The story does end happily, though, including the thief repaying Emily (this person had actually been trying to work up to it for a long time) and Emily agreeing to spare the person’s reputation.  The kitty is okay at the end, too!