Posted on by TracyC

The Christmas Tree Mystery

The Christmas Tree Mystery by Wylly Folk St. John, 1969.

A couple of days before Christmas, twelve-year-old Beth comes running to her 10-year-old sister Maggie, saying that she’s in trouble and needs her help. Beth doesn’t know whether Maggie can help at all, but she thinks she’s done something wrong and needs somebody to listen to her. Someone stole the family’s Christmas tree ornaments the day before, and Beth saw someone running out of their backyard right after the theft. She was sure that the person she saw was Pete Abel, and that’s what she told everyone. However, the girls’ older stepbrother, Trace, says that it couldn’t have been Pete. Beth thinks that it would be awful if she’s leapt to the wrong conclusion and wrongly accused Pete of theft, but then again, she can’t be sure that Trace is right, either. Trace says that Pete was somewhere else at the time, but he doesn’t want to say where because, for some reason, that might also get Pete in trouble. Beth doesn’t know whether to believe him or not.

The kids are part of a blended family that has only been together for less than a year, so the children are still getting used to each other and their new stepparents. Beth likes their new little stepsister, Pip, but teenage Trace is harder to get used to. Trace is frequently angry, and much of his anger comes from his mother’s death. Beth knows sort of how Trace feels because her father died three years ago. She knows what it’s like to miss a parent, and try to keep their memory alive. Even though Beth doesn’t think of her stepfather, Champ, as being her father, she tries to be fair toward him and accept that he’s doing his best to take care of them. Sometimes, she wishes she could talk about it all with Trace, but Trace has made it clear that he doesn’t want to talk. Trace doesn’t like to talk about his mother and gets angry when anyone else even mentions her.

Beth thinks that Pete was the thief because the boy she saw running away was wearing a jacket like the one Pete has and has the same color hair. However, she didn’t actually see his face, and Maggie points out that other kids have similar jackets. Also, they found an old handkerchief of the house with the initial ‘Z’, and that wouldn’t belong to Pete. Beth has to admit that she may have been mistaken about who she saw. However, she can’t think of anybody whose name begins with ‘Z’, either. She worries that if she was wrong to say it was Pete that she saw she may have broken one of the Ten Commandments because she was bearing false witness. All that Beth can think of to make things right is apologize to Pete for being too quick to accuse him and try to find the thief herself, but she needs Maggie’s help to do that.

Why anybody would steal Christmas ornaments right off a tree is also a mystery. Some of the ornaments that belonged to Champ had some value and could possibly be sold for money, but most did not. The thing that Beth misses the most is the little angel that she had made for the top of the tree years ago. Its only value is sentimental, and Beth worries that a thief might just throw it away if he didn’t think it was worth anything. Also, if Trace is so sure that Pete is innocent, why can’t he explain where Pete really was when the theft occurred? Trace is sneaking around and seems to have secrets of his own. Then, after the family gets some new ornaments and decorates the tree again, the ornament thief strikes again! The new set of ornaments disappears, but strangely, the thief brings back Beth’s angel and puts it on top of the tree. If it had just been a poor kid, desperate for some Christmas decorations, they should have been satisfied with the first set. Is anybody so desperate for ornaments that they would take two sets, or is it just someone who doesn’t want this family to have any? And why did the thief return the angel?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

The idea of somebody stealing Christmas ornaments sounds like a whimsical mystery for the holiday, but even though I’ve read books by this author before, I forgot that Wylly Folk St. John can bring in some of the darker sides of life. Much of this story centers around getting ready for Christmas, but there are some truly serious issues in the story. This is a book that would be better for older children. For someone looking for someone for younger children or a lighter mystery for Christmas, something from the Three Cousins Detective Club series would be better. (See my list of Christmas Books for other ideas.) It’s an interesting story, and I enjoyed the book, but I wouldn’t call the mood light.

The ways this new blended family learns to get along with each other and Trace learns to cope with his grief at the loss of his mother are major themes in the book. The parents try to be conscientious of the children’s feelings, making joint decisions and rules for the children as “The Establishment” of the house so none of the children feel like a stepparent is discriminating against them. The reason why the stepfather is called Champ is because he’s a chess champion, and Beth knows that her mother gave him that nickname so the girls wouldn’t feel awkward, wondering whether to call him by his name or refer to him as their dad. Beth is grateful for the nickname because, although she likes and appreciates Champ as a person, she does feel awkward about calling anybody else “dad” while she still remembers her deceased father. Trace calls his stepmother Aunt Mary for similar reasons, and Beth understands that. What she doesn’t understand is why Trace insists on wearing the old clothes that were the last ones his mother bought for him, even though they no longer fit him. Aunt Mary has bought him some nice new clothes that would fit him better, but he won’t wear them, and he even insists on washing his clothes himself, without her help. Beth asks her mother about that, but she says it doesn’t bother her because, if Trace is willing to help with the laundry, that’s less for her to do. Beth says that they ought to just donate all of Trace’s old clothes so someone else who can actually wear them can have them, but her mother doesn’t want to be too quick to do that because she doesn’t want to upset Trace. I can understand that because Trace is still growing, and it won’t be much longer before he won’t be able to wear those old clothes anymore anyway. The day that he can’t pull one of those old shirts over his head or put on old pants without splitting them will be the day he’ll be ready to get rid of them. Time moves on, and eventually, Trace won’t be able to help himself from moving on with it, and I think Aunt Mary understands that.

Part of the secret about Trace and his grief is that his mother isn’t actually dead, although he keeps telling people that she is. The truth is that his parents are divorced and his mother left the state and has gone to live in Oklahoma with her relatives. At first, Beth’s mother doesn’t even know that Trace has been telling the girls that his mother died, but when Beth tells her mother that’s what Trace said, her mother tells her the truth. She doesn’t want to explain the full circumstances behind why Champ divorced Phyllis and why she left, but she says that she can understand why Trace might find it easier to tell himself and others that she’s dead instead of accepting the truth. There is an implication that Phyllis did something that Beth’s mother describes as something Trace would see as “disgraceful” (I had guessed that probably meant that she had an extramarital affair, but that’s not it) that lead to the divorce. So, Trace is actually feeling torn between losing his mother and learning to live without her and his anger at her for what she did. He both loves and hates his mother, and that’s why he finds it easier to think of her as dead and gone and refuse to talk about her any further than deal with these painful, conflicting emotions. Beth’s mother also indicates that Phyllis was emotionally unstable, saying that the atmosphere in the household wasn’t healthy for Trace and his little sister because Phyllis “kept them all stirred up emotionally all the time”, and that’s why she didn’t get custody of the children and isn’t allowed to see them now. It turns out that there was a lot more to it than that, and that figures into the solution to the mystery.

When I was reviewing an earlier book from the 1950s by a different author about children coping with grief and a new blended family, Mystery of the Green Cat, I talked about how books from the 1950s and earlier tended to focus on the deaths of parents when explaining why children lived in households with stepparents and step-siblings and how books from the 1960s and later started to focus more on the issue of divorce. This book kind of combines aspects of both of those types of stories. Beth understands the grief of a parent dying, and Trace has to come to terms with his parents’ divorce, which is a different kind of loss, although it’s still a loss. As I explained in my review of that earlier book, in some ways, divorce can be even more difficult for children to understand than death. Both are traumatic, but divorce involves not just loss but also abandonment (a parents who dies can’t help it that they’re no longer there, but it feels like a parent who is still living somehow could, that it’s their choice to leave their children and live apart from them, which leads to feelings of rejection) and the complicated reasons why people get divorced, including infidelity and emotional abuse. In this case, it also involves drug abuse.

I was partly right about the solution to the mystery. I guessed pretty quickly who the real thief was, but there’s something else I didn’t understand right away because I didn’t know until later in the book that Trace’s mother was still alive. Before the end of the book, Trace and Beth and everyone else has to confront the full reality of Phyllis’s problems. They get some surprising help from Pete, who has been keeping an eye on things and has more knowledge of the dark sides of life than the other children do. (Whether his father ever had a problem similar to Phyllis’s is unknown, but it seems that at least some of the people his father used to work with did, so it might be another explanation for Pete’s family’s situation.) Because Pete has seen people in a similar situation before and knows what to do. I had to agree with what Beth said that much of this trouble could have been avoided if Champ had been more direct with Trace before about his mother’s condition, but Beth’s mother says that sometimes children don’t believe things until they see them themselves. Champ was apparently trying to protect his children from Phyllis before, but because Trace had never seen his mother at her worst, he didn’t understand what was really happening with her. There is frightening part at the end where the children have to deal with a dangerous situation, but it all works out. Trace comes to accept the reality of his mother’s condition and that things will never be the same again, but he comes to appreciate the stepsisters who came to his rescue and brought help when he needed it.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man

Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1998.

Sammy Keyes decides that she wants to go trick-or-treating even though her grandmother thinks that she’s getting too old to do it. She’s still living secretly in her grandmother’s apartment in an apartment building that’s intended only for seniors, so she jumps at the chance to go out with friends on Halloween night. Dot (real name Margaret/Maggie), a new girl at school, invites her and Marissa to come over to her house to get ready before going out trick-or-treating, which works well for Sammy.

As Dot’s house, Dot is painting herself yellow as part of her bee costume. Sammy is going to color herself green so she can be a marsh monster (something she made up, but it sounds like a swamp monster from old movies). When Marissa comes, she brings Sammy a green sweater that she borrowed from her mother that would be good for a marsh monster costume, and the other girls help Marissa wrap herself in toilet paper for her mummy costume. As the girls set off to trick-or-treat, Sammy gets the idea to go by the old Bush House. The Bush House isn’t haunted, but it is a creepy place and there are stories about the crazy Bush Man who supposedly lives there and will jump out of the tangled bushes that surround the house and kill people. Sammy’s grandmother says that the stories are just stories and the old man who lives in the house is just a lonely old man, but Sammy thinks that it would be thrilling to visit the house and see it up close on Halloween.

As the girls approach the house, they almost collide with someone in a skeleton costume who’s running away. He looks bigger than the girls are, and he’s carrying a pillowcase that looks pretty full. The girls are startled, but Sammy is determined to go up to the Bush House and just knock on the door once for the experience of it. What Sammy sees when she knocks on the door is even more startling.

The door of the house just swings open, and there’s a pile of newspapers on the floor inside that are on fire. Sammy calls out to see if there’s anybody in the house. There’s no answer, so Sammy rushes inside and manages to put out the fire by smothering it with her marsh monster sweater. As the girls are about to leave, Sammy sees someone in a Frankenstein costume in a chair, and they scream and run outside. Then, Sammy realizes that the Frankenstein mask was on sideways, and it’s not easy to breathe in a sideways mask, when the nose and mouth holes don’t line up, so she decides that she has to go back and see if the person wearing the costume is really alright. It’s definitely a human in a costume, and not a dummy. When Sammy removes the mask, she at first fears that the person in the costume is dead because he’s so still, but it turns out that the person under the mask is the Bush Man. He’s tied up, has a head injury, and is barely conscious. He begs the girls for help. The Bush Man is having trouble talking, so after the girls untie him, he writes a message down on paper, asking the girls to go next door and call the police. He also wants to know if the girls saw the skeleton man.

The Bush Man’s real name is Chauncy LeBard, and the reason he can’t talk is that he’s had surgery on his throat because of smoking-related throat cancer. He needs a device held up to his throat to really speak in an electronic voice (an electrolarynx, I’ve seen one used before). While Dot and Marissa run next door and call the police, Sammy stays in the house with him. When the police come, Sammy uncomfortably recognizes the police officer who knows her from the previous book in the series, Officer Borsch. Last time, she and Marissa told him that Sammy is Marissa’s foster sister so they wouldn’t have to reveal where Sammy is actually living. Dot is confused when Marissa refers to Sammy as her “sister”, but she doesn’t give them away.

Mr. LeBard explains that the man in the skeleton costume had forced his way into the house and tied him up, but he doesn’t know who the man is or why he did it. The girls can’t fully describe the man because he was wearing a full-body costume, although they agree that he seemed like a full adult, not just a tall teen. It seems like the skeleton man was a thief because Mr. LeBard’s wallet and a pair of candlesticks are missing.

After the night’s adventures are over, Sammy winds up spending the night at the house of an elderly friend, Hudson Graham, because her grandmother’s nosy neighbor is awake, trying to find proof that Sammy is illegally living with her grandmother in their apartment building. Hudson agrees to let Sammy stay with him, and it turns out that he’s also an old friend of Chauncy LeBard. Mr. LeBard used to be a political science professor at the local college, and Hudson was one of his students. The two of them liked to get together and have political debates. Then, Mr. LeBard’s mother died, leaving him her estate. The local rumors say that’s when Mr. LeBard went crazy and became the Bush Man. The reality is that he developed health problems because of his smoking and didn’t want his old friends to know. Chauncy also has a brother, who was disinherited by their mother because she disapproved of his wife, but nobody knows why the mother didn’t like her.

Sammy can’t forget about what happened with Chauncy LeBard, even if she wants to. She at least has to go back to the Bush House to get Marissa’s mother’s sweater, which turns out to be worth a lot more than either of them thought. Marissa tells her that, even though her mother never wears that old green sweater, she did notice that it was gone and was upset because it turns out that it was a designer sweater that she bought for $500. Sammy is horrified because, having put out a fire with that sweater, she’s pretty sure that it’s done for, and if she has to come up with $500 to replace it, so is she! When Sammy goes to see Chauncy about the sweater, she starts learning more about him and how his inheritance from his mother turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. Sammy also starts to wonder whether theft was really the motive for what happened on Halloween. If Chauncy didn’t have that hole in his throat from his surgery, the sideways mask might have smothered him. Did the skeleton man want Chauncy dead?

The mystery of the skeleton man and the ruined $500 sweater aren’t Sammy only problems, though. At school, there’s a nasty rumor going around that Sammy has been calling a boy name Jared, trying to get him away from his girlfriend, Amber. Amber is angry with Sammy, and Sammy’s school nemesis, Heather, has been gleefully making sure that everyone in school knows about it in order to embarrass her as much as possible. Sammy knows that she has never called or even spoken to Jared in her life and doesn’t care about him, but it’s not easy to convince everyone else of that. So who really has been calling Jared? Sammy is sure that it’s really Heather, pretending to be her and saying embarrassing things to get her in trouble. It would certainly be in character for Heather to do that. The rumors are get so out of hand even in a day that one of Sammy’s teachers even suggests that maybe she should talk to a school counselor about her issues with Jared so it won’t affect her schoolwork.

Because the characters are middle school kids, Sammy decides that the best way to get evidence that Heather is her phone imposter is to crash her Halloween party. With everyone in costume and the whole class from school invited (except for Sammy, of course), Sammy, Marissa, and Dot are pretty sure that Sammy can sneak in with them, posing as Dot’s cousin “Nikki.” What could possibly go wrong?

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

My Reaction

There are characters in the Sammy Keyes series who smoke, which was becoming uncommon in children’s books in general when I was young in the 1980s and 1990s because adults didn’t want to set a bad example for children. In the last book, the fortune teller character smoked, and it kind of surprised me, but it seems that the series follows the unspoken rule for children’s books that include smoking, that the only characters who do it are either villains or oddballs, not cool people to be imitated. This book confronts the issue of smoking more directly, with Chauncy LeBard’s throat cancer. Mean girl Heather also turns out to be a secret smoker who bribes one of her friends to spy on Sammy and her friends by giving her cigarettes. Sammy later finds out that Chauncy’s mother was also a smoker who died of lung cancer. Between Chauncy’s throat cancer and his mother’s death, the story helps illustrate the hard realities of long-term smoking. Chauncy seems to be living in reduced circumstances, without heat or electricity in his house. My first thought was that his mother’s medical expenses and subsequent funeral and Chauncy’s surgery drained his funds. Medical expenses have wiped out people’s savings before in the US, and I remember that one of the stories they told us to discourage smoking when I was in school years ago was about a woman who was forced to sell her family’s heirlooms to cover her cancer treatment. When Sammy meets Chauncy’s brother, Douglas, she finds out that Douglas was trying to get his mother and brother to quit smoking, but neither of them would, and that’s part of the reason for the family rift. Douglas says that if Chauncy has suffered health problems and blown through the family’s money, it’s really his own fault. It’s true that Chauncy should have taken the hint and quit smoking a long time ago, and he might have spared himself a lot of pain and misery if he had, but it turns out that he didn’t sell the family heirlooms to pay for his medical expenses. There was something in his house that was worth a great deal of money, something that Chauncy couldn’t bear to part with even to improve his own living situation because of the sentimental value. The thief is one of the few people who understood what Chauncy had and how to take it without him even noticing that it was gone right away. In a way, what the thief really stole is as much of a mystery for most of the book as who the thief was. The skeleton man turned out to be one of the people I suspected, but not my first suspect, so I was actually in suspense for most of the book.

As for the side plot with Heather calling Jared as Sammy: Oh, criminy! This is one of those ridiculous tween problems that seems so impossibly complicated when you’re in middle school but pretty dumb when you’re not. I appreciate that the math teacher is concerned when Sammy seems distracted in class and her work suffers, but I have trouble believing that an adult teacher would really be interested in rumors about who at school is calling who. I can’t remember any of my teachers ever caring about that stuff because adults usually know that rumors are wrong and that this kind of school drama passes faster if you don’t feed it. I don’t recall any massive rumor campaigns getting the attention of teachers when I was a kid, and I can’t imagine any of my old teachers giving rumors much weight or interest. I think my teachers would have just told us to stop being drama queens, focus on our work, and save the gossip for after school. A few of the more outspoken and direct communicators on the faculty would have flat out told us that gossip isn’t worth anything, that most of it is wrong anyway (that was actually the subject of a play I was in at school once), and that everyone will have gotten bored of whatever it is and moved on in a week or two because nothing we were talking about was really that earth-shaking and we all had the attention spans of chihuahuas on a sugar rush.

If I had to say something to these kids about this situation, I might just tell Sammy not to go calling people who don’t want to speak to her (if I were to assume that she was doing that) because it’s just going to annoy everyone. As for Amber, it’s not really her business to control either her boyfriend or the person calling him, whoever it is. Her decision is whether or not she’s satisfied with how Jared is responding to the situation and if she wants to still be his girlfriend when he acts that way. I’d make it a point to tell Jared, as the center of this drama, that if he doesn’t want to talk to somebody on the phone, he should just hang up without saying anything. You don’t need to stay on the line with someone who’s bothering you. With today’s caller IDs and cell phones that identify everyone who calls, it’s even easier because you don’t have to pick up the phone in the first place if you recognize a number you don’t want to answer. I can’t remember if they had those in the late 1990s, or if that was more an early 2000s development, but I know we definitely had answering machines, and I knew people who would just let the machine answer most of the time, only picking up if they recognized the voice leaving a message. Either way, just because someone calls you doesn’t mean that you have to take the call. On the other hand, if Jared likes being called by a girl other than his girlfriend, it might be time for him to rethink his relationship and decide what he really wants. That seems to be where Jared is. The book describes him as not being too bright and going on an ego trip from whoever keeps calling him. Actually, if I were one of the teachers, the people I’d really want to talk to the most would be Jared’s parents because I think they’d have more power to stop the situation than anybody, no matter who the caller was. Jared’s a kid who still lives at home, so his parents could answer the phone first and find out who wants to talk to him or let the machine record a message that could be used as proof against a prankster who’s bothering him if it gets excessive. Most child pranksters would give up if they called a few times and only got the boy’s parents, especially if the parents sound annoyed or angry when they answer. If Jared’s family got the call on a landline (probable for the 1990s), an annoyed parent could also *69 to last-call return the prankster’s number or look it up on their phone bill if they want to confront the prank caller or talk to the prankster’s parents. It’s annoying to deal with a prank calling kid but not really that hard. I didn’t have access to my parents’ phone bill as a kid, but everyone knew how to *69. Of course, if people in the book handled the situation sensibly, the book would probably be less exciting, and we wouldn’t get the payoff of seeing Sammy get the best of Heather.

There are some laughs when Sammy finds a clever way to record Heather making one of her calls and play the recording for the whole school. It was the sort of victory moment that I would have loved when I was about twelve. However, Sammy’s secret life living in her grandmother’s apartment complicates any problems that Sammy has with the authorities and school administration. After she turns Heather into a public spectacle during a school assembly, the vice principal insists that Sammy’s mother attend a parent-teacher conference. Since Sammy’s mother isn’t available, her grandmother has to attend instead, risking the exposure of their secret.

There is a little more insight into Heather when Sammy sees what Heather’s home and mother are like, but understanding doesn’t equal approval. Heather’s life isn’t perfect, and she lets slip at her party that her mother is a 40-year-old who dresses really inappropriately and flirts with much younger men, possibly including some of her daughter’s teenage classmates. She doesn’t appear to know about Heather’s smoking habit or the truth about any of the other things Heather does. Knowing that her mother is odd and may have really inappropriate taste in men/boys doesn’t make Heather any more likeable, though. At the end of the book, Heather’s outbursts in front of the vice principal may lead to the school insisting on counseling for Heather, which is a hopeful sign, but since Heather remains a bully mean girl for the rest of the series, it’s not that hopeful. You can lead a person to professional help, but you can’t make them internalize it and make use of it.

For me, one of the best parts of this book was the further development of the relationship between Sammy and her grandmother and Hudson Graham. There are hints that Hudson is romantically interested in Sammy’s grandmother, and he treats Sammy like his granddaughter. He seems to be in on the secret of Sammy living with her grandmother and is one of Sammy’s best protections against getting caught. He willingly aids and abets Sammy’s investigations, giving her knowledge and guidance whenever she needs it, and at the end of the book, he gives Sammy and her grandmother a ride to the parent teacher conference.

The ending of the story sets up the beginning of the third book in the series with Sammy being given the assignment of completing some volunteer hours to make up for the disruption that she caused at school.

Posted on by TracyC

The Hidden Message

Adventures in the Northwoods

The Hidden Message by Lois Walfrid Johnson, 1990.

The story, like the others in its series, is set on a farm in Wisconsin during the early 20th century.

One night, Kate McConnell wakes up to hear her mother and stepfather talking. The family needs money for the new planting season, so Papa Nordstrom has decided to take a job in a lumber camp over the winter. It will keep him away from home for a couple of months. He doesn’t really want to leave his family, but there’s a new baby on the way, and they really need the money. His absence on the farm means that the children will have to take on extra chores to help out. Kate also worries because conditions in lumber camps can be dangerous. Her birth father was killed in an accident in a similar camp, and she doesn’t want the same thing to happen to Papa Nordstrom.

Before Papa Nordstrom leaves for the lumber camp, he butchers a pig so his family will have meat while he’s gone. With winter setting in, it’s important to make sure that food supplies are secure. That’s why Kate knows it’s serious when her friend Josie tells her at school that someone stole her family’s steer, the one they were planning to butcher for meat this winter. Her family has no other source of meat, and they might go hungry if they can’t find the steer. Josie asks Kate for help because she and Anders solved a mystery involving a mysterious stranger who took things before.

One of the possible suspects is an older boy who has recently returned to school, who the others call Stretch. Kate has never met Stretch before because he’s been gone from school, doing farm work, since before she arrived in the community. Anders knows him, though, and he tells Kate that Stretch is trouble. Part of the reason they call him “Stretch” is that he has a habit of stretching the truth. Kate finds Stretch handsome at first, but Anders warns her not to get involved with him. Kate thinks Anders is exaggerating about Stretch because other people at school seem to like him. Anders says that if Kate wants to like someone, she should like Erik instead. Kate has a kind of rivalry going with Erik since he dipped her braid in his inkwell, and it permanently stained her dress. Anders says that Erik didn’t really mean to ruin her dress, but Kate is still unhappy about the incident. So, although Kate can tell that Erik is more responsible in other ways and is a bright and dedicated student, and they go to the same church, she has reservations about liking him.

However, Kate soon comes to realize just how dangerous Stretch is. Their teacher warns them all away from the frozen lake because the springs in the lake make the ice unpredictable. While the others play on the playground, Stretch talks Kate into walking by the lake with him. He says that he knows it’s safe because he was out on the lake earlier that morning, although Kate has her doubts about it. Then, Kate spots Anders’s dog out on the ice. Worried about the dog, Kate tries to call to him, but the dog doesn’t come to her like he usually does. Kate steps onto the ice to get the dog, and the ice breaks. Kate nearly drowns in the icy water, but Erik saves her. Kate realizes that, when she was in danger because of Stretch, Stretch actually abandoned her to drown. Later, he won’t even admit that he was the reason why Kate went down to the lake in the first place. When Kate is warmer and able to think better, she also begins to realize that the reason why Anders’s dog wouldn’t come to her when she called was because she was with Stretch, and the dog is afraid of Stretch, indicating that Stretch has been cruel to the dog in the past.

Kate’s brush with death opens her eyes to what Stretch is really like. It also creates a problem because the teacher writes a letter to Kate’s mother about the incident, letting her know that Kate did something very dangerous. Kate doesn’t want her mother to know what happened because it would upset her, especially with Papa Nordstrom being away and the children supposed to be behaving responsibly to help her on the farm. Kate wants to hide the teacher’s letter and not tell her mother, although Anders and Lars try to persuade her to be honest about what’s happened. They argue about it, and Kate accuses them of wanting to tattle on her, threatening to tell on them if they do something wrong. She feels sorry for upsetting them, especially young Lars, but she’s afraid of how her mother might react when she finds out what happened. Anders warns her that her mother might still find out what happened from someone else and that by being dishonest and fighting with Lars, she’s starting something that she’s going to regret. But, Kate can’t even bring herself to confide in anyone that Stretch was the reason she went down to the lake. Even though he almost got her killed and didn’t even try to help her, she can’t bring herself to tattle on him. (That’s dumb, on several levels. I’ll explain why below.)

After the incident with Kate falling through the ice, Stretch avoids going to school for awhile. Then, one day, Kate sees him stealing candy at the general store. Even though Kate knows what she saw, she still can’t bring herself to tell on him, and she even begins making excuses for him in her mind to make him seem less bad. When he offers her a ride home, she’s a little hesitant, but she decides to accept to avoid the long walk home. On the way, she asks him why he didn’t help her when she fell through the ice, but he never answers her. She also notices that his hand is oddly blue, and when she asks about that, he says that he must have just worked that hand too hard when he was cutting wood. However, he doesn’t have wood in the back of his wagon. He’s hauling boxes of something. This time, she decides to tell Anders about Stretch stealing, but she doesn’t mention the boxes in the back of Stretch’s wagon because she still doesn’t know what to think about them.

The secret about the ice incident comes out when Kate’s step-siblings, feeling uncomfortable about her deception, play a prank on her to get her to tell on herself. Knowing how afraid of mice Kate is, they put a dead one in a box with the label, “Pretty on the outside, like this on the inside,” on top. When Kate opens it, she screams, and her mother comes running. Knowing why they played this prank on her, Kate explains the truth to her mother. Her mother gives her a punishment for lying to her before, and Kate sees how upset she is that Kate didn’t tell her the truth earlier.

However, Kate hasn’t quite learned her lesson about lying. She sneaks out when she’s supposed to be grounded in her room by climbing down the tree outside the window. While she’s outside without permission, she spots a loose cow belonging to Josie’s family and guides it back to them. It’s a good deed, but she was still out without permission, and Tina spots her. Kate is angry and accuses Tina of “spying” on her and tries to persuade her not to tell. Kate can tell that Tina is upset and worries about lying to her mother and making her mad. Kate feels badly, but she can’t seem to stop herself from doing these things. She still continues to sneak out during her period of being grounded. When little Tina tries to imitate her by climbing down the tree herself and gets stuck, Kate has to rescue her. Her mother spots them once they’re down on the ground, and Kate confesses everything.

Kate feels like an awful person because Tina could have been badly hurt or even killed by following her example. Her mother says that everyone is awful in the sense that humans are all imperfect, and that’s why they commit sins. That is why God sent His son to redeem human sins. It’s good to be sorry when you’ve done something wrong and ask for forgiveness because forgiveness will be granted, and if you accept Jesus as your Savior, he will take away your sins. (I’ve heard this before, the part about everyone being “awful”, or words to that effect. This is kind of a Protestant way to phrase this. When I’ve heard it before, it usually seems to be from Protestants with a more Evangelical outlook, although that might vary. I don’t disagree with the principles, but Catholics would say it differently, and I may include a little more about it in my reaction.)

Meanwhile, there are still more thefts occurring in the community. Someone robs Erik’s family of all of the vegetables and fruit they’ve canned for the winter. Having food stores stolen at the onset of winter puts the family in a precarious position, and everyone else in the community worries about their foods stores, too.

One day, when Erik is at Windy Hill, Anders starts teasing Kate about her organ playing. He takes it too far, and both Kate and Erik tell him to stop. To Kate’s surprise, Erik hits Anders when he refuses to stop when asked, and the boys start to fight. Kate’s mother comes in, stops the fight, and makes the boys clean the room as punishment, which leads to several revelations. Kate comes to realize that Anders is a major reason why Erik has been teasing her. Anders has been urging Erik to tease her and also using Erik as an excuse for his own teasing. Now, Erik is getting as tired of it as she is. Erik confides in Kate that he knows that Stretch was the reason she went down to the lake when she fell in, and the only reason he hasn’t told anyone else is that he can’t prove that Stretch was there or that he abandoned Kate when she got into trouble.

As the kids move Kate’s organ back into position from the cleaning, Anders almost drops his end, and he accidentally opens a secret hiding place in the organ, knocking a hidden book onto the floor. The book contains church hymns in Swedish, but there’s also a torn part of a note in English. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough of the note to really understand what it means. (This is the “hidden message” of the title, and it doesn’t enter the story until about the final third of the book. I suspected it was a Biblical quotation, but I couldn’t place it from the fragment.) The note fragment contains the word “fear”, which makes the children worry that someone might be in trouble and asking for help. Erik asks them when and where they got the organ, but Kate explains that they bought it a few months ago at a fair in Grantsburg, and she doesn’t even know the name of the man who sold it. Papa Nordstrom might know, but since he’s away, they can’t ask him.

Stretch still seems like the likely suspect for the food thefts. Kate has seen him do some suspicious things, and he’s been telling some obvious lies, but she and Anders have difficulty finding any positive proof to get the authorities to intervene. Then, the thief takes the pig that Papa Nordstrom left for his family and the lid from their stove, rendering the stove useless until it’s replaced. With the stakes that much higher, Kate knows that they have to catch the thief, fast!

Kate also manages to figure out who originally owned the organ and who left the book and the message in the secret hiding place. The original owner is someone Kate already knows who used to play the organ. As I guessed, the message is actually part of a Biblical quotation (Psalm 118, Verse 6). The message is part of the theme of the story, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the theft directly. However, some strange things that the former owner of the organ has observed help to provide Kate and Anders with the proof they need to get back everything that was stolen. The story ends at Christmas.

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

Themes and My Reaction

In some ways, I was disappointed in this book. The identity of the thief isn’t really a surprise. Most of the mystery concerns how to prove it. Also, even though the title of the book refers to the hidden message, the mystery doesn’t center around the hidden message, and the hidden message doesn’t contribute directly to the solving of the mystery. Its main contribution to the story is to provide a theme: “The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me?” This quotation does give Kate the courage she needs to confront the thief.

Honesty in Relationships

I don’t blame Kate for having reservations about liking Erik at first. I know that things end up improving between them as the series goes along and even during this book, but he really did do something dumb and started off on the wrong foot with her. He’s not the first to do it, and frankly, it’s become a rather sad cliche. (It’s not unlike Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables and the way he started off wrong with Anne by making those “carrots” comments about her hair.) I’ve heard people say that boys will do mean things like that because they like girls and just don’t know how to say it, but you can’t just let people keep causing problems without some feedback about it because it doesn’t lead to good relationships. You don’t want to give someone the impression that you’re okay with teasing or rough play when you’re not because, if they don’t know it bothers you, they’ll never stop doing it, and it will drive you crazy. We all teach people how to treat us through the feedback we give. If Erik really cares about Kate, he’ll learn to give her the kind of attention she wants instead of the kind she doesn’t.

I started feeling better about Erik when he started standing up to Anders because Anders was going to far and wouldn’t stop even after both Erik and Kate telling him to stop. I appreciated that, while Erik may have initially felt compelled to join Anders in teasing Kate, Erik seems to have developed a sense of when to stop teasing and is willing to draw a hard line when necessary, even standing up to a friend and telling him “no.” Toward the end of the story, Anders finally has an honest talk with Kate, asking her why she didn’t tell him that Stretch was with her at the lake and abandoned her when she got in trouble. The answer is that Anders teases Kate all the time about everything. His constant teasing prevents her from confiding in him about things that they really should discuss. His teasing shuts down conversations before they even start. Anders finally tells Kate that he is her brother and wants to help her when she needs it, and he says that he wouldn’t tease her about anything really important. That attitude sounds promising. Unfortunately, he still insists that he’ll be the judge of what’s important, so I think that relationship still needs some work.

I’ll never understand people who say that teasing helps build relationships. Never. I’ve never seen it work that way in real life, not for building relationships of any depth, at least not unless the relationship has already been established on another basis first. It usually goes the other way, preventing relationships from developing or getting deeper than being shallow because relentless teasing does tend to shut down conversations and prevent people from opening up to each other. Why should someone tell you anything at all if they know that’s the reaction they’re going to get from you and that you don’t care that they don’t like it? The only times when teasing seems tolerable in real life is when the people involved already have built solid relationships with each other based on other qualities, really know each other well, and trust each other. Relationships are frequently based on trust, and you simply can’t trust someone who’s not really listening to what you say so much as trying to figure out how to use any and every little thing you say as a punchline for a dumb and hurtful joke for their own amusement or so they can score a few points off someone else and feel clever about it. I see it more as using other people than building a relationship with them. I just don’t feel endeared to anyone who only seems to be using me to score points to impress some third party onlookers. You can’t build a relationship based on teasing by itself. At least, I know I can’t. It just doesn’t work. What I’m trying to say is that Anders has not built a relationship with Kate and is both oblivious or resistant to feedback. He does not know when to take a hint and shut up even when people tell him plainly and not even when someone physically tackles him to the ground over it. So far, Kate has been doing all the heavy lifting in her relationship with Anders, trying to win him over, and he’s not really giving her much in return, although he’s slowly starting to show some signs of being helpful.

The characters in the story also alternately worry about being thought of as tattle-tales or criticize others for “tattling.” I’ve always thought all that “tattling” stigma was dumb. I know sometimes “tattling” means complaining about really petty things to one-up someone else, which is truly annoying (as I think all forms of one-upmanship are). However, people also use that word to try to shame people for talking about problems that really do need to be discussed. The way I look at it, if you’re going to be either mean or an idiot in a way that hurts other people, you forfeit your rights to complain about those other people talking about your meanness or idiocy. It’s not like the person talking about you made you do what you did, they didn’t ask to hurt by you, and if you did what you did in public, where other people could see it, it already counts as public knowledge anyway.

In 1906, when the story takes place, the Kate’s biggest worry is that her mother will hear about things she’s done from a neighbor at church because that’s their biggest opportunity for seeing and talking to other people. Every kid at school knows that she almost drowned, and since that was the big event of the day, they all no doubt told all of their parents about it. It’s common knowledge, not tattling. In the early 21st century, news of Kate’s brush with death at the lake would be all over social media before the end of the day because an entire classroom of people is aware of what happened and will be excited to talk about it. Even in cases where something happened that wasn’t serious enough for the school to immediately call the parent and tell them directly, any usual incident at school will get around fast. Usually what irritates people about “tattling” is that it can be pointless, petty nitpicking. However, the lake incident in this book was a matter of life and death, so I think complaining about anybody “tattling” is pretty dang petty itself. I think there needs to be a distinction between petty complaining and serious discussion. I think the anti-tattling attitudes people have teach bad morals, including dishonesty, self-delusion, and excuse-making, all issues that Kate has to confront in herself during the course of the story.

By choosing not to “tattle” on Stretch, which actually wouldn’t be “tattling” so much as just giving an honest answer to questions people were directly and specifically asking Kate about how she happened to be out on the frozen lake, Kate has also left Stretch open to doing similar things in the future to other innocent victims. She isn’t helping herself or the next person who could use some honest warnings. She didn’t initially trust Anders’s warnings about Stretch because he wouldn’t answer her questions about Stretch in specific terms (perhaps for fear of being thought a tattler), but Kate is now in a position to describe Stretch’s behavior in very specific terms herself, from first-hand knowledge. Anders was trying to be honest with Kate in his warnings, but he wasn’t fully honest and is already known for being an annoying teaser, which is why he didn’t seem believable. For all Kate knew, it just might have been another of his dumb jokes to embarrass her. (Another problem with too much teasing – no one knows when you’re actually trying to be honest and sincere about something, and few people are prepared to believe it because those are not a teaser’s default modes. If the teaser has already built a relationship based on qualities other than teasing alone, I suppose those close to him might be able to tell the difference, but no one else will, and Anders hasn’t built that kind of relationship with Kate yet.) If Anders had simply said why he didn’t trust Stretch, maybe Kate would have believed him and been more careful in the first place. Kate had to learn the hard way that Anders was telling her the truth about Stretch, and now, she’s going to have to learn the hard way that she also needs to drop her “tattling” hang-ups and be fully honest with herself and other people. Again, we teach others how to treat us, and Stretch could use some fully honest lessons from various people in his life. Don’t worry; he does get some help at the end of the book.

I was interested in what Anders said at the part of the story where he and Kate are talking about whether it’s better for her to like Stretch or Erik. Anders says that Papa Nordstrom has said that liking people is a choice, and people can make good choices or bad choices about who to like, which leads me to a few comments I have about the religious themes in the stories.

Sin and Forgiveness

I’ve explained before that I came from a family of mixed religions, although I was raised Catholic, and my religious education has also been somewhat mixed from childhood, although mainly Catholic. The only reason why I mention it is because, although Catholics and Protestants have similar ideas about the flawed nature of humanity, the causes of sin, and the role of Jesus in redeeming humanity, they have different ways of phrasing these concepts, which can sometimes give people wrong impressions and make it seem like their views are more different from each other than they actually are. When I see it, the differences are partly on where each puts the emphasis and the words they use.

A friend of mine (Mormon) was taking a college religious studies course and she was irritated by the way the teacher talked about original sin and about human beings as being “awful.” I can’t remember the exact phrasing she said that the teacher used, but it was something similar to what the mother says in this book about everyone being “awful.” My friend told me about it because she knows I’m Catholic and don’t mind discussing these things, and she thought her teacher was Catholic. I said that didn’t sound like a Catholic speaking. I looked it up, and it turns out that the teacher was specifically speaking from an Evangelical viewpoint, which is what I expected would be the case because, as I said, I’ve heard this before. I get the concept, but I don’t like that phrasing. It seems like it implies that all humans are inherently “bad” (which is what got on my friends’ nerves), but that’s not really the concept, not in real life or in this book.

The article that I linked in the first paragraph of this section explains it very well, but as a quick overview, the real issue is not that humans are inherently “bad” or “awful.” Not completely. (That’s what some people call the doctrine of “total depravity“, although even some of its adherents say that’s still a misunderstanding of the concept of “total depravity.”) It’s just that human beings are not perfectly good. Humans are inherently imperfect, which is different from just being flat-out “awful.” We’re not completely good or completely bad, just imperfectly between the two. Since we have elements of each in us, neither side can be ignored to get the full picture, and we can make choices about which of our sides we favor and try to maximize. Because we are imperfect as humans, we all sometimes have impulses, desires, and lapses in judgement that lead us to sin. That’s a part of who we are, but at the same time, we also have other desires for relationships with God and our fellow human beings that lead us to self-improvement and a desire to do good for others.

As Papa Nordstrom observed, we all have the ability to make choices. (This is part of the concept of “free will.” Catholics believe strongly in the concept of free will and reject any concept that original sin renders people unable to use their free will to make good decisions and consciously reject flawed impulses. I think that helps make “original sin” seem less of a tragedy because, while there’s always a struggle, knowing that there are still things you can do about it helps. Nobody’s doomed just for being human.) People can make good choices or bad choices. They can choose to give in to their worst impulses or practice mindfulness and self-discipline to resist them and strive for improvement. Understand that there are times when anyone could potentially do the wrong thing or have the impulse to do it. It happens to everyone from time to time, in varying degrees, throughout their lives. But, having the impulse to do something doesn’t mean you have to give in to it every time. Because human beings are imperfect, we often need some help and support to make the right choices when we’re struggling, and that’s the help that Christians look for when they turn to Jesus, accepting Him as their Savior, the example of what to do when they’re not sure how to control their feelings and impulses. People just need to make the choice to seek out that help when they’re struggling with bad habits or a crisis of conscience because there is help available, both spiritual help and help from other human beings. People can choose to say they’re sorry for bad decisions they’ve made and ask for forgiveness and guidance for making better choices, both from God and their fellow humans. (Kate should have been honest with her mother because she’s there to help and guide her and needs to know when something serious happens.) I prefer that description to saying that “we are all awful.” We’re not “awful.” We’re imperfect, and even if we’ll never be perfect in our human state, we can improve. That doesn’t sound as bad, does it?

The part where Kate rescues Tina from the dangerous situation she was in because of Kate’s bad example sort of reminds me of the end of Disney’s Freaky Friday from 1976, when the mother and daughter are talking about what they’ve done and what they’ve learned from being each other for a day:

“I am so much smarter than I thought. And so much dumber.”
“Oh, my darling, aren’t we all?

Other Interesting Topics

I thought the part of the story where Kate was talking to her organ teacher, Mr. Peters, about the difference between playing by ear and learning the notes was interesting. Mr. Peters points out that Kate is in the habit of playing songs by ear but she hasn’t really learned to read music. He tells her that she’ll learn more if she gets in the habit of reading the music for herself instead of depending on someone else playing a song for her to learn it. She later uses her new knowledge of reading music to learn to play one of the songs in the Swedish book of hymns. Musical notes are the same even if the songs are written in other languages.

Posted on by TracyC

Sidney’s Ghost

Sidney’s Ghost by Carol Iden, illustrated by Paul Galdone, 1969.

Nine-year-old Sidney Robinson’s best friend is a girl named Megan McKenna. The two of them have many interests in common, including fishing, cars, ghost stories, and horses. Megan’s father owns a stable, and Sidney envies Megan for having her own pony. Because Megan’s father sells horses to other people, the kids are used to seeing horses come and go. When Megan’s father can’t find a buyer for a horse, he’ll try to sell it at public auction. However, if he can’t sell a horse at auction at all, he sometimes sells it to the slaughterhouse, where they use the horse parts for glue and dog food. It’s sad, but the kids accept this as part of life until Megan’s father acquires a retired police horse whose former owner died, and Sidney realizes that he can’t let this beautiful black horse suffer this terrible fate.

The horse, officially named Sergeant O’Hara but called Uncle Charley by Megan’s family is a beautiful animal with a gentle temperament. Sidney wishes that he could persuade his parents to buy the horse for him. He is easy to ride and obeys commands, and he has an excellent history of his time as a police horse.

Megan’s father isn’t completely honest as a horse seller. The book goes into some detail about how he prepares horses for sale, painting on dapples and filing their teeth down to make them seem younger than they really are. Even Sergeant O’Hara gets this treatment, although Sidney worries that it hurts the horse. (I looked it up, and it turns out that it can be beneficial to file the sharp points off of a horse’s teeth, which is called teeth floating. However, this is something that should only be done by someone who has been trained to do it because it can hurt the horse to file the teeth down too much.)

Sidney and Megan love to watch the horse auctions and pretend they’re bidding on the horses, but Sergeant O’Hara is auctioned off as planned. Megan’s brother Michael let him loose in the paddock when he was supposed to be watching him, and he got all dirty, so he isn’t fit to be shown. Then, to Sidney’s shock, Megan tells him that her father is planning to just sell Sergeant O’Hara to the slaughterhouse instead of trying again at the next auction. If Sidney and Megan are going to save poor Sergeant O’Hara’s life, they’ve got to do something, fast!

Megan tells Sidney that she’s thought of a plan to save Sergeant O’Hara. The two kids sneak out and take the horse in the middle of the night and hide him in an old barn. As they go to hide the horse, they see a shadowy figure near the barn. Megan is afraid, and Sergeant O’Hara wants to chase the figure because of his police training, but Sidney stops him.

However, even with the horse safely in the barn where hardly anybody ever goes, there is the very real worry that they’ll be caught. The horse will need exercise, so Sidney will have to go ride him at night or when they’re sure nobody else will be around. Still, they feel like they need to come up with an additional plan in case the horse is spotted. Then, Sidney takes a hint from the way Mr. McKenna painted dapples on a horse earlier and suggests that they could paint Sergeant O’Hara a different color so he won’t be recognized. Megan thinks that’s a great idea, and they decide to paint him white, like the Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver.

They get the painting supplies from Sidney’s father’s hardware store, but Sidney grabs a can of paint labeled “Super Glo – White.” It turns out that it’s not just a really bright white; it’s a glow-in-the-dark white. The kids don’t figure it out until they’ve already painted half of the horse. When Sidney sneaks out to feed and exercise Sergeant O’Hara again, he’s frightened when this big, glowing thing comes out of the darkness at him. Somehow, the horse got out of the barn and scared him by running out in the dark, glowing. Sidney realizes after a moment of panic that’s what happened. Because they only painted half of the horse before they stopped, one side of Sergeant O’Hara is glowing white, and the other is pitch black. When the horse gallops back and forth, he looks like a glowing ghost that vanishes with each turn. It’s a neat effect, but having a ghost horse certainly isn’t inconspicuous.

One night, Sidney accidentally frightens his old teacher, Miss Winthrop, when she’s walking home from visiting a friend. Soon, she spreads the story of her ghost sighting all over town. Most people think that she’s getting a touch of senility in her old age, but Mr. McKenna thinks it over and notices Sidney’s comings and goings in the area. When he goes to the old barn to investigate what Sidney’s been doing. Seeing the horse and the glow-in-the-dark paint, he realizes what happened. He appreciates that Sidney and Megan wanted to save the horse and sees the humor in their unintentional ghost act.

Since the kids feel that strongly about wanting the horse and are taking good care of him, Mr. McKenna decides to let them continue to do so, but there’s still one thing that nobody has answered: Who was that mysterious figure they saw around the barn? The answer comes when this mysterious person sets fire to the McKenna’s stables and Sergeant O’Hara has the opportunity to show his skills as a police horse.

My Reaction

When I first read this book as a kid, I was expecting it to be a mystery. It kind of is, but the mystery isn’t about the horse or about any ghost. There are hints from the very beginning of the story that there is a thief in the area, but the story doesn’t really focus on that until near the end. Sidney and Megan hear people talking about a prowler, and they do see the mysterious prowler around the barn, but they’re too busy with their plans to save the horse to pay too much attention. Fortunately, their horse and his ghostly appearance help them to catch the the thief, and the reward money for catching him straightens out a lot of problems so Sidney can keep Sergeant O’Hara.

The gimmick of the “ghostly” painted horse has stayed in my mind for years since I first read this story, but it’s not the only memorable part of the book. One of the things that I remembered best about this book from when I read it as a kid was the difference in Sidney and Megan’s homes and families. The book puts some emphasis on the difference in their family lives, and it’s shown when each of the kids has dinner at each other’s home. Megan has several siblings, and their house is always noisy and boisterous. Sidney is Sidney is a fussy eater at home, but he just eats what’s put in front of him at the McKennas’, like the other kids do. Megan gets a rap on the knuckles from her father for starting to eat before Grace is said. One line from the book that stuck with me for years was when Megan’s brother, Frank, says Grace with this joking prayer: “We thank the Lord for the next meal – we’re sure of this one.” I still think of this whenever someone says Grace aloud.

By contrast, dinner at the Robinson house is much calmer, quieter, and more formal. Sidney is an only child, and his father owns a hardware store, so the Robinsons can afford nicer things. Megan is impressed at the nice tile in the bathroom, and the table is set with embroidered placemats and matching cloth napkins. Megan accidentally bites into one of the cloves in the ham, and when it burns her mouth, she spits the bite of food into her cloth napkin, feeling terribly guilty about it because the napkin really seems too nice for that sort of thing.

I could identify with the feelings the children have about being in houses where people have different habits. There were times when I was young when I felt a little out of place because they were either more formal than I was accustomed to being or more boisterous than I feel comfortable being. People always feel more comfortable with what they’re used to.

Posted on by TracyC

The Silver Spoon Mystery

The Silver Spoon Mystery by Dorothy Sterling, 1958.

A group of families move into the new suburb built on The Hill overlooking the town of Dwighton. The kids in the new neighborhood become close friends, visiting each other’s houses, playing games, and running around town together. It’s idyllic, but then the boys in the group start playing baseball together, and they begin excluding the girls from the group, even though they’ve all played baseball together before and the girls are good at it. The boys also stop working on the tree house that the kids were all making together, taking some of the tools and materials and building themselves a clubhouse near the baseball field with a sign that says, “NO GIRLS ALLOWED.”

The girls are offended at suddenly being shunned by the boys, so they decide that they need to have some special project, something that will show the boys that girls are just as good as they are and that the girls don’t have to rely on the boys to have some fun. They decide to start a neighborhood newspaper, writing about local events and having fun stuff, like jokes. The newspaper is a success, and adult neighbors buy copies. Then, the boys decide to start a competing newspaper themselves. One of the girls, Peggy, is upset because she’s sure that the boys’ newspaper will be more successful. Some of the boys are older than the girls so they might write better, there are more boys than girls in the group so they have more people to gather news and sell papers, Davey is better at drawing cartoons than the girls are, and worst of all, the boys splurged to buy a hectograph, which uses a gelatin substance for making copies of writing and drawings (as in this video) and will allow the boys to print papers by the hundred (“hecto” means one hundred, and that’s how many copies a hectograph makes at a time). (This is before home computers, so the characters have to rely on manual printing methods. People used hectographs to make copies before modern copy machines, but modern hectographs still exist, and some people use them for artwork or tattoo stencils.)

Peggy’s afraid that the girls won’t be able to compete with the boys’ advantages and thinks that the boys are mean for trying to steal their business. Peggy’s mother tells her that she shouldn’t worry about being better than the boys but focus on being different. She says that the girls should make sure that their paper has different content from the boys’ paper so people will still have a reason to buy theirs even if they’ve already bought the boys’ paper. If the boys’ paper has cartoons, the girls’ paper should have things the boys wouldn’t think to include, like recipes, poems, and fictional stories that could be written and submitted by local people.

Peggy gets an idea from what her mother says, but it’s not a good one. Peggy still wants to show up the boys, and she thinks that the best way to do it is to get a “scoop”, meaning printing an exiting news story that the boys won’t have in their paper. The problem is that the girls don’t know where they’re going to get an exciting news story that the boys don’t know anything about. Nothing that exciting is happening in their town anyway. There haven’t been any shocking events, no murders, no robberies. Peggy tells the other girls that means that they have write about something that hasn’t happened yet. Peggy poses the idea of writing about someone stealing the silver on display at the local library that was made by the silversmith who was the founder of their town. Of course, the problem with that is that the silver hasn’t actually been stolen. One of the girls, Ellen, objects to writing a story about something that hasn’t happened because that’s not actually “news.” However, Peggy talks the other girls into it by saying that they would be writing about it as fiction because people write fictional books all the time, and that’s allowed. Ellen still isn’t convinced, but Peggy goes ahead and writes the story anyway. (Basically, she’s turning the girls’ newspaper into a tabloid, although the kids don’t seem to quite get the difference, even though Ellen can tell that this isn’t right for a newspaper.) The girls all discuss how they would go about stealing the silver spoons from the library, if they were going to do it, and Peggy writes the story from their speculations.

You just know that there’s going to be trouble with Peggy trying to sell a story that everyone knows didn’t happen, but what actually happens is even stranger. After the girls sell their paper with the spoon theft story, Peggy gets home to find a policeman, Lieutenant Peters, waiting for her with her mother. Lieutenant Peters wants to talk to Peggy about the robbery at the library because it turns out that the very night when Peggy was writing her big fictional scoop about silver spoons being stolen from the library, someone was in fact stealing silver spoons from the library, and this thief apparently did it the way Peggy described in her story. Lieutenant Peters wants to know everything that Peggy knows about the theft, and he won’t believe that Peggy wasn’t there to witness it because her description of what happened is so accurate. She even has a description of the thief in her story. Since the theft happened in the middle of the night, Peggy points out that she was asleep in bed, but even Peggy’s mother isn’t sure that Peggy didn’t sneak out. When Peggy’s friends show up at her house, Lieutenant Peters questions them too and comes to the conclusion that Peggy and maybe also her friends stole the spoons themselves to make their story true. Lieutenant Peters says that they’ll be forgiven if they give the spoons back, but the girls can’t do that because they don’t have them.

As Lieutenant Peters and Peggy’s mother continue to question the girls about their story, the girls admit that they made up the whole thing as a fictional story just to attract attention to their paper. Lieutenant Peters catches the boys listening in on their conversation and questions them about what they know about the situation. The boys don’t really know anything about the theft, either, but they were pretty sure that Peggy made up the story she wrote, and they’re fascinated that she might be about to be arrested and taken to “children’s jail.” Peggy’s mother believes her that she just made up the story and it’s all a coincidence that someone happened to steal the silver spoons from the library around the same time, but Lieutenant Peters isn’t convinced.

Word of the spoon theft spreads across town quickly, partly because of Peggy’s story in the neighborhood newspaper and partly because of the story in the regular news. People call Peggy’s house to ask for details, and kids at school look at Peggy and her friends suspiciously, wondering how much they had to do with the theft. Peggy is especially offended when Davey says that his father thinks that it’s an unlikely coincidence that Peggy would write a story about the theft and then the theft would just happen. Before the boys started their “no girls allowed” stuff, Peggy and Davey used to be close friends. However, Davey assures her that he doesn’t think that she’s responsible for the theft. He also tells her that he and the other boys are sorry about pushing the girls by trying to compete with their paper, and they’ve decided to give up theirs and let the girls use the hectograph. The kids discuss trying to investigate the crime themselves because, until the real thief is found, people are going to keep looking at the girls suspiciously.

Most of the neighborhood kids, both boys and girls, join the investigation as the “Hill Detective Club”, except for one of the older girls who is studying for exams and Davey’s older brother, Allen, the only boy who’s mad at the other boys because they don’t want to play baseball now. (Allen is apparently the one who started all the “no girls allowed” stuff because he didn’t make the high school baseball team and he’s been ultra-serious about practicing during the neighborhood games. He’s trying to organize a game between the boys in the neighborhood and their fathers. The book doesn’t explicitly say so, but there might also be an element of embarrassment for him that some of the girls play better than he does. Peggy is described as being the fastest runner in the neighborhood, and Ellen is a good batter.) As they begin their investigation, the kids visit the scene of the crime and study the ways the thief could have gotten into the library, starting to separate the made-up details from Peggy’s fictional story from the real facts and circumstances of the case. Peggy admits that her mind is biased because she still thinks of her story as the way things happened and her fictional suspect as the type of thief they’re looking for, but the truth is that they don’t know for sure how the crime actually happened or what type of person they’re looking for.

When the kids talk to one of the librarians, Miss Bancroft, they learn that the police did find a few sets of fingerprints on the case that held the silver spoons: Miss Lowell, the head librarian; Mrs. Simpson, a descendant of the town’s founding father and part of the local antiquarian society; and Mr. Weatherspoon, who owns a local antique store. Could one of these people be the thief?

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

My Reaction

To begin with, this book seems like it’s meant for fairly young elementary students. It tries to teach readers the meaning of some of the words in the story because some of the characters don’t know the meanings of various words the other characters use or words that they encounter in various places, like “descendant” or “optometrist.” The kids in the story are a variety of ages even though they all play together in the neighborhood, and I could understand why some of the younger kids would struggle with bigger words, but there were times when I thought that they were carrying it a little far. Peggy is twelve years old, so it seems like she should have been old enough to know what an optometrist is. Has she never had her eyes checked before? Actually, maybe she never has. If her vision is good or seems good, maybe her family just doesn’t bother. I guess it’s educational for young readers just branching out into chapter books.

I like books that bring up interesting historical topics. The parts about older printing/copying techniques and Mrs. Simpson’s old electric car with the steering stick instead of a steering wheel (possibly a Baker Electric, like the one Jay Leno owns, or something very similar – this video explains the history of the Baker Electric and shows what it’s like to drive it) were interesting, and one of the characters in the story explains more about the history of the town’s famous silver spoons to the kids. Although the town, its founder, and the spoons are all fiction, spoons of this sort did exist in real life. The silver spoons are specifically christening spoons. It used to be traditional to give presents made of silver to new babies and their parents for the child’s christening. One of the most popular presents of this type was small silver baby spoons, especially with special designs or engravings to remember the child’s birth. The character explains why this particular set of spoons is so distinctive, talking about their unique design, how antique dealers would be able to look them up in a reference book and learn their history, and how each of the of the spoons is marked with the maker’s hallmark, the special symbol that the maker would use to identify himself.

Part of the mystery hinges on the coincidence of the theft occurring just when Peggy decides to write a sensational story about an imaginary theft to get attention for her neighborhood newspaper. For readers, the question is whether the timing of the actual theft is really just coincidental or if there’s a direct connection between the story of the theft and the theft itself. I would have been very disappointed in the book if it was just a coincidence, so I immediately approached the story with the idea that the timing of the theft was a clue. I enjoyed considering different possibilities. My first thought, when the theft happened mysteriously immediately after Peggy and her friends invented their theft story, was that someone overheard the girls talking about how they would commit a theft like that and decided to use their imaginary scheme as their own. However, the conversation between Peggy and her friends took place in Peggy’s room, which was pretty private. For someone to overhear them, it would have to be someone in Peggy’s own house, possibly family or a neighborhood friend, or someone listening in from outside, probably one of the neighborhood kids. Those possibilities didn’t seem likely. Then, I remembered the Nero Wolfe murder mystery story Not Quite Dead Enough. What if the theft didn’t occur when the police thought it did (mostly because they believed Peggy’s original story) but actually at the point where the theft was supposedly discovered? The person who claimed to discover the theft was one of the people with the strongest motives to commit it, and this person could have done it after reading the fake news story, seeing an opportunity to make it true and cast suspicion on Peggy’s fictional suspect. The mystery is simple enough to figure out for an adult who likes mystery stories, but probably much more mysterious for kids. Once the kids realize who has the spoons, there is also the additional challenge of proving it and getting the spoons back without getting everyone in trouble.

I thought it was interesting that the story shows some of the problems with sensationalist or tabloid style “news” stories, or “yellow journalism“, as it used to be called. It’s the sort of “news” that relies on flashy and misleading headlines, buzzwords and catch phrases that appeal to its fans and rile them up emotionally, hyperbole and emotionally-charged language, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and poorly-qualified or debunked “experts”, to draw readership and advertising money. Basically, they aren’t really “news.” They don’t try to describe things as they actually happened for informative purposes. These are “news” stories that are less about fact than about entertaining their audience or shocking people and stirring up strong emotions to grab people’s attention. That’s basically what Peggy was trying to do with her fake news story, even if she wasn’t quite thinking about it in those terms. Just like tabloid or sensationalist news, Peggy’s story was almost a kind of fan fiction based on the real world. That is, she took real things and situations that she knew existed (the silver display at the library) and wrote an exciting conspiracy story around them that didn’t actually happen (the made-up theft) as a shocking, attention-getting entertainment piece to encourage people to buy the paper she and the other girls were selling. She thought what she was doing was like harmless entertainment, but it wasn’t because it was based on something real, and her made-up story had real consequences. Not only is there a direct connection between the fake story and the real theft, but Peggy’s fake story confuses people, including the local police and insurance investigator, because they have trouble telling how much of Peggy’s story is false, and it biases their minds and the direction of their investigations. Even Peggy herself sometimes gets confused during the investigation, mixing up details from her made-up story with real events. Even though she wrote the fictional story herself, knowing it was fictional, she gets hung up on the way she imagined things would happen when she invented the story and needs to be occasionally reminded to look at the situation as it actually exists, not as she imagined it would be. If the author of the fictional news story can’t even keep her own fiction and the real facts straight in her mind at first, how can the police or anyone else?

Sensationalist journalism can and has led to real problems in real life, setting up dangerous situations by stirring up the emotions of people who may already be unbalanced and suggesting unrealistic events or courses of action that interfere with people’s sense of reality and ability to make informed, reasoned decisions (something else that ties in with the story). In a famous real life case from the early 1900s, the famous newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst had his own reputation seriously damaged when he published articles written by two of his columnists smearing President McKinley’s reputation and seemingly recommending his assassination. (“If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.”) These articles were published only months before President McKinley was actually assassinated. Hearst had used yellow journalism in his papers for years to manipulate public opinion to further his political causes and gain readership. (“War makes for great circulation,” Hearst said after successfully urging public opinion in favor of the Spanish-American War.) After the assassination of the president, people made a connection between the assassination the articles in Hearst’s papers seemed to be advocating (although they called it a “mental exercise” and a joke) and the assassination that actually happened. Whether Hearst actually wanted McKinley to be killed by someone or whether the man who assassinated McKinley was directly inspired by those sensationalist articles is questionable, but the suspicion that was what happened, in a sort of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” kind of moment, did seriously damage Hearst’s own political ambitions. Hearst did intentionally want to smear McKinley’s reputation, but his lack of consideration for the possible results of his stories, which seemed to be advocating an actual murder that did occur soon after, caused the public to turn against Hearst himself.

We frequently caution people to be careful of what they read because you can’t trust everything, which is sensible advice, but I’d go a little further and say, be careful of why you choose to read what you’re reading and why believe what you read. Was it because the information was presented logically and authoritatively, or is it because you decided ahead of time what you were going to read because of something you already believed or something you already knew you really wanted to do? Picking the right information source is good, but it may be even better to ask yourself what you, as an individual, plan to actually do because of the news sources you’re following. Is it a good thing to do that’s going to help someone or something that’s going to hurt people? Take a look in the mirror once in a while and question your motives as one of your own primary sources of information. You are the one who chooses what news sources you consume. You are the one who decides what you believe because you always have the choice to accept or reject anything you hear from someone else. You are the one who decides what your standards are and where your limits are set. You are the one person who knows exactly what you’re willing to do to accomplish your goals. You are the one who moves your body to the locations you decide to go and makes your mouth say the things it says and your body do the things it does. You are the one who has ability to say “yes” or “no”, not only to other people but yourself when necessary. Anything you may decide to do involves not just a single choice but multiple choices along the way that can only be made by you, so you’re going to have to be your own fact checker at every step, not just about what other people are telling you but what you’re telling yourself and why.

Sensationalist news stories are intentionally emotionally manipulative in order to get people hooked on reading that source, but you’re the only one who gets to decide if you’re hooked and what you’re going to do about it. The next time you read something that makes you really mad at somebody, before you do whatever you’re considering doing about it, pause a moment to ask, not just whether the source you just read might be wrong, but “What if I’m wrong? What if I’m wrong about this situation, and I’m about to do the wrong thing? Am I prepared to face the consequences for my actions if this turns out to be serious?” The reason for asking these questions is, if the consequences of what you’re planning to do are serious, there will be a point where people won’t want to hear about what you believed or thought you believed or what someone else told you earlier. If you’re the one who did the thing, you’re the one who’s going to be facing the consequences for that thing. There’s a point where everyone has to accept the consequences for themselves all by themselves. (To put a finer point on it, riot and people will riot with you, but you’ll be tried as an adult alone.)

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Fog Man

Mystery of the Fog Man by Carol Farley, 1966.

This is the first book of the Kipper and Larry mystery series. Kipper (real name Christopher) and Larry are 13-year-old cousins. The two boys meet each other for the first time in this book, when Kipper comes to visit Larry and his family in Michigan. The boys had written letters to each other before, but they were both excited to finally meet in person.

Larry and his father live in Ludington, on the shores of Lake Michigan, and Larry takes Kipper fishing soon after he arrives, which is when Kipper first encounters the mysterious figure known only as The Fog Man. This strange old man starts Kipper, and Kipper finds him eerie. Larry explains to Kipper that The Fog Man is kind of a local eccentric. He is apparently both deaf and mute. No one knows his real name. He apparently lives in the nearby forest, but during the summer, he comes to the beach to collect driftwood, which he sells to tourists, who are fascinated by this eccentric old man, and to the lady who runs the nearby gift shop, Miss Norton.

Shortly after this encounter, the boys learn that someone has stolen thousands of dollars from the safe on one of the car ferries that travel back and forth across Lake Michigan and Wisconsin. (Another book by the same author but in a different series takes place on one of these car ferries, The Case of the Vanishing Villain.) Kipper and Larry are able to see the scene of the robbery because of Larry’s father’s position as the local chief of police. However, the boys’ adventures are just beginning.

The most likely suspect in the robbery seems to be a man called Karminsky, who worked on the ferry. He disappeared around the time of the robbery, and Larry’s father thinks that he’s hiding out somewhere in the area, waiting for the police to stop looking for him so he can make his getaway. Larry is intrigued by the idea that the robber might be hiding out in the woods nearby. Although his father forbids the boys to go looking for the robber, they can’t resist checking out the woods anyway.

Larry confides in Kipper that he really wants to help his father catch this robber so that his father will be a big success and get public recognition. Larry sometimes feels bad that he and his father have been alone since his mother died when he was young. He thinks that, if his mother was still alive to help his father take care of him, his father would be able to do much more in his life and career, so Larry wants to be the help that he thinks his father really needs.

Soon, the boys think that they’ve found Karminsky’s hideout in the woods, but even though they lie in wait for him all night, they don’t manage to catch him there. The only person they see in the area is the Fog Man, and to Kipper’s shock, he sees the Fog Man walking without his characteristic limp!

When the boys later find the Fog Man’s coat and a fake white beard, they reach different conclusions about what happened. Kipper thinks that the Fog Man was involved in the robbery all along and that he was always in disguise from the beginning. However, Larry is accustomed to thinking of the Fog Man as a harmless old eccentric who has hung around town for the last few years, selling driftwood to tourists. Larry thinks that the Fog Man might be an innocent victim of Karminsky’s, that Karminsky may have killed him so he could take his place and blend in with the usual beach scene until he could make his escape.

Then, Larry’s father tells them that Karminsky has been found in another town, apparently having missed being on the ferry in the first place. So, if Karminsky was never on the ferry and never in Ludington, who stole the money and masqueraded as the Fog Man?

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

My Reaction

I bought this book because I always liked the Flee Jay and Clarice mystery story that I mentioned before and wanted to see more by the same author. I liked it because, while I thought that I understood things pretty quickly in the story, there are some surprising twists to the mystery. I thought that I had it figured out twice, but I was surprised both times, and the true identity of the Fog Man remains a mystery until the very end.

Posted on by TracyC

Cam Jansen and the Mystery at the Haunted House

Cam Jansen

#13 Cam Jansen and the Mystery at the Haunted House by David Adler, 1986, 1992.

Cam’s Aunt Katie and Uncle George take Cam and her friend Eric to an amusement park.  When they stop to buy food at the refreshment stand, Aunt Katie realizes that her wallet is missing.  She isn’t even sure exactly when it disappeared.  Cam thinks that someone stole her aunt’s wallet.  Who could have taken it?

Cam thinks at first that it might have been a couple of boys on roller skates who ran into her aunt earlier, but it wasn’t them.  Cam notices that another woman is complaining about a lost wallet and realizes that she had gone through the haunted house just before they did.  Someone in the haunted house is taking people’s wallets!

When they all go through the haunted house a second time, Cam figures out that a man dressed in black has been stealing people’s wallets.  When they went through the haunted house the first time, he jumped out at them, and they thought that he was just a part of the attraction meant to scare them.  She spots the man leaving the haunted house and tells the park’s security guards.  Everyone gets their wallets back, and the park’s owner gives Cam four free passes to the park for a month.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 4 Comments

Mairelon the Magician

Mairelon the Magician by Patricia C. Wrede, 1991.

This young adult book takes place in an alternate history version of Regency England.  In this world, magic is a normal and accepted part of society.  “Wizard” is an accepted profession, and there is even a Royal College of Wizards dedicated to magic.  Not everyone can be a wizard because not everyone has the ability to use magic.  It is a skill that people are either born with or born without, similar to people who have an innate talent for art or music, compared to people who are born tone-deaf or color-blind.

In this early 19th century world, there is a teenage girl, Kim, who lives on the streets and survives by her own wits, taking whatever jobs she can and committing a little petty thievery whenever she needs to.  She has spent most of her life dressing like a boy and pretending that she is one because life on the streets is even more precarious for a girl.  For a time, she was part of a gang of child thieves run by a woman call Mother Tibb.  As far back as Kim can remember, Mother Tibb was the only one who took care of her as a child.  Kim has no memory of her parents or any knowledge about what happened to them.  She doesn’t even have a last name.  However, before the story begins, Mother Tibb was caught and hanged for her crimes.  Some of the other child thieves were apprehended and put in prison or exiled to Australia, but Kim managed to escape.  Since then, she has been on her own.  So far, she has managed to avoid being pressured in to joining up with other gangs or turning to prostitution to survive, but the fear of that haunts her. Her future is uncertain.

At the beginning of the book, Kim is hired to sneak into the wagon of a traveling magician who is performing in the market and to see what he keeps among his belongings.  The man who hired her doesn’t want her to take anything, but he is particularly eager to see if the magician has a particular silver bowl in possession.  It’s a strange request, but the money that the man offers Kim is too good to pass up.

However, the magician, who calls himself Mairelon, isn’t quite what he seems.  He is not just an ordinary traveling entertainer using some sleight of hand to amuse people in the market.  Kim discovers that he can do real magic as she searches his wagon and is knocked unconscious by a real magical spell that Mairelon uses to protect his belongings.

When Kim wakes up, Mairelon and his servant, called Hunch, have tied her up.  Unlike Hunch, Mairelon has also realized that Kim is actually a girl, not a boy.  The two of them question Kim about why she sneaked into the wagon, and she tells them the truth about being hired to do it.  When she describes the man who hired her, it seems that Mairelon recognizes the description.  The part about the silver bowl also unnerves him.

Surprisingly, Mairelon makes Kim an offer to come with him and Hunch when they leave London.  He is fascinated by Kim’s skills in picking locks, even the lock on the booby-trapped trunk that knocked her unconscious, and he thinks that Kim might be useful to him and Hunch, perhaps helping with the magic act.  In return, he offers to teach Kim some of his magic tricks.  Hunch is dubious about Kim because she has obviously been a thief, and Kim also isn’t sure what to make of Mairelon.  She knows that he’s hiding something, but she isn’t sure what.  No one with real magical abilities like him would ordinarily be making a living with simple magic tricks in the market. 

However, Kim does accept the offer because she’s been worried about one of the major criminals in the area, Dan Laverham, who has been showing too much interest in recruiting her. He is heavily involved with a number of criminal activities, and he knows that Kim is a skilled lock pick.  If he found out that she was a girl, he would probably also press her into prostitution. Dan Laverham would be a good reason to get out of London for a while.  Also, Kim realizes that if she learns a few magic tricks from Mairelon, she might be able to set herself up as an entertainer and make an honest living, safe no matter who finds out that she’s female.  Besides, Kim realizes that if she’s not satisfied with the situation, she could always run away later.

Before leaving London with Mairelon, she returns to the man who hired her, at Mairelon’s suggestion, and tells him that she didn’t see a silver bowl in Mairelon’s wagon (which is true because she was knocked unconscious and didn’t see anything in the trunk).  The man is angry, but Mairelon, who followed her in disguise, helps to create a distraction so that she can get away from the man.  They leave London in the middle of the night because Mairelon says that he was spotted by someone who recognized him when he went out to get magic ingredients.

On the journey, Kim gradually gets to know Mairelon and his situation.  The silver bowl, which Mairelon does have, is actually part of a set of magical objects which, when used together, can compel people to tell the truth without interfering with their ability to answer questions intelligently.  Mairelon’s real name is Richard Merrill, and he is, or was, part of the Royal College of Wizards.  Years earlier, the Royal College of Wizards was analyzing this particular set of magical objects and the unique spell that they control, when they were suddenly stolen, and Merrill was framed for the theft.  At the time, Merrill was unable to prove his innocence (at least not without sounding as if he had done something inappropriate with a lady, which he also did not do – they were just together at the time of the theft because she was helping him and another friend with a magical experiment), but he was also recruited by his friend in the government to be a spy against the French, so the story of his supposed theft gave him a plausible reason for wanting to leave the country.  In the time since then, he and his friend have continued to look into the matter of the theft, and they have made some progress in tracking down the other pieces of the magical set.  At the time that Kim met him, he was on his way to the next piece of the set, a silver platter.

To their surprise, however, they soon discover that someone has been making copies of the platter.  The copies are not magical, but they do confuse the issue.  Who is making the copies and why would they want copies, since they do not have the powers that the original has?  As Kim and Mairelon investigate, they crash a house party at a lavish country estate and spy on a meeting of a rather inept society of druids.  All the while, they are getting closer and closer to finding the original thief.

I loved the combination of mystery, fantasy, history, and humor in this book!  It’s one of my all-time favorites.  It has a happy ending with Mairelon’s name cleared and the thief caught.  They also discover that Kim has the ability to use magic, and Mairelon offers to take her on as his apprentice, saving her from the streets forever.  There is a sequel to this book called Magician’s Ward, about Kim’s life and adventures as Mairelon’s student.  The hints of romance in this book are also much stronger in the next one.  There are only two books in this series, which is disappointing because the characters are so much fun, and I think that there is a lot more room for their development.  By the end of the next book, Kim’s future is looking more certain, but her past is still murky.  Originally, I had expected that there would be secrets revealed about Kim’s past because of her ability to use magic, possibly something that was passed on to her by her parents.  However, by the end of the second book, Kim still doesn’t know who her parents were/are, and it doesn’t look like there’s any chance that she will ever know.  Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes, secrets are more tantalizing when you imagine the answers than when you actually find out.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Do-It-Yourself Magic

Do-It-Yourself Magic by Ruth Chew, 1987.

Rachel and her younger brother, Scott, stop by the discount store on the way home to admire the model kits.  Most of the model kits are too expensive for them to buy, but one kit has been put on discount, The Build-Anything Kit.  The kids think it’s a good deal because they can use it to build more than one kind of model. 

When they get it home and begin to play with it, they are confused at first.  Scott tries to build a model stock car racer, but all the wheels and other pieces are all different sizes.  Then, Rachel finds a double-headed hammer labeled, “sizer.”  The kids discover that when they hit the model pieces with the hammer, they can make them bigger or smaller.  Besides working on pieces, the sizer can also make people bigger or smaller.  Rachel makes Scott smaller so that he can drive his stock car model around the room.  Then, when he drives outside, she makes both him and the car bigger, so the car is the size of a normal car.  A neighbor spots them in this strange car and calls the police, so the children are forced to shrink the car again quickly. 

When they get home, they discover that they left the door open and that a man is trying to steal their tv set.  Without thinking, Rachel hits him with the sizer and shrinks him.  Now, they have to decide what to do with him before the situation gets worse!

At first, the kids keep the thief in a glass, but then they let him out and allow him to drive around in the stock car model.  While they are trying to decide what to do with him, they take a look in the model box again and notice some pieces that weren’t there before.  They look and feel like stone blocks, so they begin building a castle with them.  To their surprise, the man they shrunk runs into the castle.  They are worried about him, so they hit the castle with the sizer to make it bigger.  Suddenly, the castle is as large as life, and they go inside to discover that they are back in medieval times. What will happen to the thief in the past, and will the kids get back home?

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Wandering Weathervanes

McGurk Mysteries

WanderingWeathervanes

The Case of the Wandering Weathervanes by E.W. Hildick, 1988.

WanderingWeathervanesReporter

Brains Bellingham brings a new case to the other members of the McGurk Organization: a weathervane that he was using for his latest science experiment has been stolen!  Although Brains says that the weathervane was extremely valuable because it was a critical part of his experiment, the others don’t think much of it.  However, Brains’ weathervane turns out to be just one of many weathervanes that have disappeared all over town.

At first, everyone is sure that it’s just a prank, probably by some local kids, and it gets reported as an odd tidbit on the local news.  However, the more weather vanes that disappear and the more time that goes by without them being returned, the more disgruntled the local citizens become.  People (like Brains) start claiming that their weathervanes were worth more than they probably were, although there were a couple of legitimate collectors’ items among the stolen weathervanes.  The police fail to see the humor behind the incident and start talking about serious consequences for the one responsible for the weathervanes’ disappearances.  Unfortunately, as often happens in these cases, people begin looking at Wanda’s brother, Ed, as the culprit.

WanderingWeathervanesEd

Ed has a long-standing reputation as a prankster, and so is the first person most people suspect when strange things start happening.  Wanda is sure that he isn’t guilty this time, though.  Her brother wouldn’t be above taking something for a short period of time just as a joke, but he wouldn’t just steal things from people and keep them.  When some of the weathervanes start reappearing, at the wrong houses, it looks like it might have been a prank after all, but Ed still maintains that that he’s innocent.

The members of the McGurk Organization believe that the real culprit might be a friend of Ed’s who admires some of his pranks and might be trying to imitate him with a wild scheme of his own.  However, if Ed’s friend is really guilty, where are the missing weathervanes and why haven’t they been returned?  A professional private investigator has been pressing the kids for what they know about the thefts, and Ed suddenly disappears!  There may be much more to the mysterious disappearing weathervanes than meets the eye.  What started as an odd prank may have uncovered something more serious!

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

WanderingWeathervanesSecret