Posted on by TracyC

The Deserted Library Mystery

The Boxcar Children

#21 The Deserted Library Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1991.

Mr. Alden tells his grandchildren that a friend of his in a nearby small town, Pete, is concerned about their local library. The town is really too small to support a library, and when the last librarian left, they weren’t able to replace her. The library has fallen into disrepair and is in danger of being torn down. However, the building is old and has historical significance. It might be preserved as a historical landmark, but it needs some cleaning and organizing. Mr. Alden asks his grandchildren if they would be interested in the project, and they say they would. Pete spends part of the year living at his restaurant in town, so the Aldens can use his house while they’re working on the library project.

When they get to Pete’s house, they have to do a cleaning job there because Pete hasn’t been there in a while, and the place seems a bit spooky to them. The library seems a little spooky to them, too, when they begin looking around, but they soon begin finding some significant treasures. The children find a sword hilt from the Civil War along with a letter about the sword being awarded to a soldier by General Lee, but for some reason, the blade of the sword is missing! They children know that, if they can find the sword blade, it would be of great historical significance.

Then, strange things start happening in the library. Food that they bring for lunch disappears, and the kids start feeling like they aren’t along in the building. They search the library and find a 10-year-old boy named Miguel Morales. Miguel explains that his mother is dead and that he heard his father’s fishing boat sank. If his father is dead, he has nowhere to go and is afraid of being put in an orphanage or children’s home. The Boxcar Children sympathize with Miguel because they were once in a similar position, but they also tell Miguel that the situation might not be as bad as he thinks. They don’t know for certain whether Miguel’s father is dead or not. He can’t hide in the library forever, so they invite Miguel to stay with them and help with the library project while they check and see for certain what really happened to Miguel’s father. Henry contacts his grandfather to ask for his help and to see if he can learn anything about Miguel’s father. Mr. Alden agrees to help Miguel and is thrilled to hear about the Civil War sword.

Finding Miguel seems to clear up the mystery of who has been in the library, but the children soon begin to realize that there is a second intruder. The kids find a gray work glove in the library that doesn’t belong to any of them, and Jessie hears someone humming when no one is supposed to be there. Then, someone tries to trap them in Pete’s house by putting a big branch in front of the door, and when they get out and return to the library, they find the place trashed! Someone has thrown all the books around and torn them and turned the furniture over. Later, someone sneaks into Pete’s house at night, while the children are there but asleep, to search the place. Henry is pretty sure that the mysterious intruder is searching for the Civil War sword, the most valuable thing they’ve found so far.

My Reaction

I like the location and set-up of the story. An abandoned library makes a nice, spooky place to have mysterious things happening and people lurking around. Although this book was written by a ghost writer after Gertrude Chandler Warner’s death, it has a lot of the flavor of the original books in the series – opportunities for the Alden children to show off their self-sufficiency and community-oriented volunteer work, another child who is on his own and needs some help, and a mystery that is more adventure in some ways than mystery.

I liked the idea that the kids think they’ve solved the mystery of who’s been lurking around the library when they find Miguel, only to realize that there’s someone else snooping around. It was a little disappointing that we seem to know what the mysterious lurker is looking immediately for because there’s only valuable item associated with the library, and there’s no twist to it. We also don’t really get to to know the culprit as a character outside of his lurking. This isn’t the case that there are multiple people to suspect. By the time we learn the culprit’s identity, we already know him as the culprit. I would have preferred more mystery with a choice of known suspects, but something that does complicate the mystery is also that the antique sword is broken, so the kids have to find the other part of it.

The side plot with the question of whether or not Miguel’s father is alive adds some suspense. Although the Boxcar Children are optimistic that Miguel’s father survived his boat sinking, and Mr. Alden says that he will take care of Miguel, Miguel privately thinks to himself that, if it turns out that his father isn’t among the survivors, he will run away again. Readers are left in suspense because we are told that there were survivors from the boat, but we aren’t told whether Miguel’s father is one of them until the end.

Posted on by TracyC

Stage Fright

SBStageFright

Stage Fright by James Howe, 1990.

A well-known actress, Michaele, who is also an old friend of Sebastian Barth’s mother, has come to town to be in a play. She’s staying with Sebastian’s family, and Sebastian has a role in the play as Michaele’s son. His friends will be working on the sets for the play, and everyone is really excited. However, Michaele herself is nervous because she hasn’t done live theater for some time. She is also struggling to get to know her nine-year-old son, who has recently come to live with her.

Then, someone begins sending her strange notes. At first, they come in the form of secret admirer notes and are accompanied by little presents. Later, the notes take a nasty turn, and Michaele becomes the victim of suspicious accidents. Someone even calls her son pretending to be his father, who lives in another state, to get him to go off on his own to meet him somewhere. Although nothing bad happens to the boy and no one comes to meet him, his sudden disappearances cause Michaele to worry that he has been kidnapped. Someone seems to be trying to frighten Michaele out of doing the play, but who is it and why?

The theme of the story is the difference between what people imagine is true and what is really true. A lot of the people in the story have unrealistic expectations of others. For instance, Michaele is impatient with her young son, who has had a troubled history of being torn between his divorced parents, who are both busy with their careers. By the end of the story, she has come to understand him better and plans to spend much more time with him.

Michaele, as a well-known actress, also attracts many admirers, most of whom have different illusions about what she is really like and what she really wants. In the end, after Sebastian reveals the culprit, Michaele decides not to let what happened stop her from going for what she knows she really wants, whether her efforts succeed or not. Michaele’s confidence is restored, and she’s looking forward to a brighter future with her son.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 4 Comments

Mystery of the Black-Magic Cave

MegMagicCave

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

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

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