Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Empty House

Mystery of the Empty House by Dorothy Sterling, 1960.

Patricia Harrison’s family has recently moved from their apartment in New York to a house in Haven. Her father used to live in Haven when he was a boy. His mother still lives in town, and he still knows some of the other people who live there. Patricia, called Pat, is still unpacking her belongings when a boy from across the street, Jim Gray, calls to invite her to play ball with him and some of his friends in the field behind her house because his mother used to know his father when they were kids. Pat isn’t very used to playing with boys because she went to an all-girls school when she was in New York, but she agrees to go play ball with the boys.

When she goes to meet the boys, some of the other boys, the Paine brothers, don’t want her to play with them. When Jim said they were meeting “Pat”, they assumed that “Pat” was another boy. Jim says he doesn’t care if Pat is a girl or not because they could really use another player. Pat thinks they’re rude, and since they don’t seem to want her, she starts to leave, but Jim stops her and persuades her to stay. Even though Pat is usually good at baseball at school, she finds herself making clumsy mistakes when she plays with the boys, probably because she feels uncomfortable with them. Finally, she hits a home run, which is great, but there’s a problem. She accidentally hit the ball into the window of an old, abandoned house nearby that looks haunted.

The boys are mad because it’s the only baseball they have. Pat says they could just go get the ball, but the boys say they can’t. When she asks them if they’re scared, they say that’s not the problem; they’ve just promised that they won’t go near the old house. Pat says that, since she didn’t promise, she can just go get the ball, but Jim stops her from going into the house. He tells her that they can just buy a new ball. When Pat asks him why he doesn’t want her to go in, Jim says that it’s a secret having to do with the Paines. Pat says that she’s sick of the Paines and insists on going into the old house.

The old house is dark and spooky. When she climbs in through the window, Pat is startled when she runs into another person inside. At first, she can’t see the other person too clearly because it’s dark, but when she asks the girl who she is, the girl tells her that she’s Patricia Harrison. Pat is shocked and tells her that she can’t be Patricia Harrison because that’s her name. The girl finally laughs and admits that her real name is Barbara Thomas. Barbara lives next door to Pat’s grandmother and decided to stop by and meet her. When she saw Pat playing with the boys, she decided to go explore the old house instead.

Barbara is the one who explains the history of the house and the Paines’ attitude to Pat. The Paine family used to live in the old house. It’s the oldest house in town, dating back to the Colonial era. Nat Paine, the oldest of the Paine boys, was always proud of his family’s old home and used to brag about how George Washington and Lafayette visited the house during the Revolutionary War. It was even occupied by British soldiers at one time. Unfortunately, the father of the Paine boys was killed during the Korean War several years earlier (dating this story to the late 1950s or 1960, the year it was published). Since then, the family has fallen on hard times, and they’ve been unable to pay the taxes on the house. Now, because of the unpaid taxes, the town council is threatening to sell the old house to pay the unpaid taxes. The Paines have been forced to move out of the house and into a much smaller place, and Nat is very upset about it. Plus, he’s been going through this phase where he’s decided that he hates girls because he’s just getting into middle school, where all the boys either start developing crushes or decide that they hate girls. His younger brothers are being pests because they’re following his lead.

Barbara says that her father felt bad about what happened to the family and tried to convince other people in town to help the Paines pay the taxes on the old place. They could have helped, but they’ve made it plain that they just don’t want to. As Barbara’s father put it, “people in Haven are a bunch of rock-ribbed, rugged individualists who wouldn’t help their own grandmas.” (I have strong feelings about that, and I’ll explain them in the reaction section.) Barbara reveals right away that the secret Jim is keeping for the Paine brothers is that Nat made his brothers take a vow with him that they wouldn’t enter that house again “until it was rightfully theirs.” Barbara says that Nat’s sense of pride talking, and “You know how boys are.” She thinks Nat’s being overly dramatic, although she sympathizes with the family’s plight. When Pat suggests that maybe they shouldn’t be in the house, either, Barbara says that she comes there all the time to explore. Barbara thinks the old house is fascinating and that there might be a secret passage somewhere. She invites Pat to help her look for it sometime.

At dinner that night, Pat finds out that her parents already know about the death of the boys’ father and the trouble that the family is having over their old house. Pat’s mother says that the old house is a good example of the saltbox style of house that was popular in Colonial New England. (I remember my old high school history teacher explaining how the slope of the roof was meant to help snow slide off during the winter, but the uneven slope also allows more living space to be added onto an existing house.) However, Pat’s mother says that there probably aren’t any secret passages in the house because houses from that time were built pretty simply and didn’t even have closets or bathrooms. She doesn’t think that there’s any place in the old house to conceal a secret passage.

Now that Pat knows the issues with the Paine family, she begins to feel better about them, and they start being nicer to her. As Pat begins settling in, she becomes better friends with Barbara and is happy that she has another girl as a friend. They ride their bikes downtown together, and Barbara sleeps over at Pat’s house. As the girls are getting ready for bed, Pat looks out the window and sees a light in the old Paine house when no one is supposed to be there. Barbara says that whoever’s in the house is probably looking for the secret passage and the treasure. When Pat asks what she means by “treasure”, Barbara says that there’s a rumor that there’s treasure hidden in the house from Revolutionary times. The family used to be rich, but after the American Revolution, when the children of the family returned to the house after their parents were killed, the family fortune had vanished. People think that the ancestors of the Paines hid their fortune somewhere during the war and that it’s still waiting to be found. (I already had some misgivings about the people of Haven and their intentions in kicking the Paines out of their house, and now, suddenly, my suspicions are even worse.)

Barbara says that they can’t just let this mystery sneak steal what should rightfully belong to the Paines and ruin the only chance they have left of regaining their house. The girls sneak over to the house to spy on the intruder, and they end up frightening him away. The girls tell the boys about what they witnessed the next day, and they persuade the Paine brothers to come into the house with them in spite of their “vow” to look around and see what the intruder was searching for. As they inspect the kitchen fireplace, where the man was searching, and look at the flashlight he dropped, the man shows up again. It turns out that he’s a college student doing research on the Paine family.

Back in Revolutionary times, the family that lived in the house was the Woodruff family. (A Paine ancestor married into the Woodruff family, changing the family name, but the Woodruffs are also ancestors of the current Paines. It’s the same family.) The college student, Robert Popham, found some old papers that indicate that the head of the Woodruff family, the first Nathaniel Woodruff, was a Tory. Nat, who was named for this ancestor (full name Nathaniel Woodruff Paine IV), angrily denies it, saying that his family was known to associate with George Washington and Lafayette, hosting them at their house. Robert explains more about the papers he found, but he also says that the last letter Nathaniel Woodruff wrote to his wife before he was killed indicates that he feared for his life and left something hidden in an old post box to pass on to his young son. However, as Nat points out, the date on this final letter was shortly after Nathaniel Woodruff’s wife was murdered by unknown assailants. (She was found scalped, so people blamed her death on American Indians, but it’s also possible that she was killed by someone else who just wanted to make it look that way to cover up the real reason for her murder.) Nathaniel Woodruff didn’t know his wife was already dead, and since she never got the letter and he was also killed soon after, the box is probably still hidden somewhere. Robert thinks that what Nathaniel hid was proof that he was actually a spy for the Patriots and that he feared for his life because he suspected that the British knew he was a spy. He says that he wants to find this hidden box and the information it holds because it would make a fantastic historical research paper.

The kids are completely on board with the search for the hidden box, both because the Paines want to preserve the reputation of their ancestors and because there may be valuables hidden in the box that will help the Paines pay their taxes and keep their home. However, they only have until August 15, the date that the town council has set for selling the Paine house. They only have until the end of summer to figure it out!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The book is also known by the title Secret of the Old Post Box.

My Reaction and Spoilers

To begin with, I didn’t like the people of Haven right from Barbara’s description of them as “rugged individuals who wouldn’t help their own grandmas.” It is pretty cold to turn out a war widow who is working as an underpaid nurse in the community and her children after their father was killed serving his country. I completely agreed with Barbara’s father’s assessment of the townspeople’s levels of generosity from the first. I suppose at least some of the townspeople of Haven probably thought they were actually being kind, giving Mrs. Paine several years after her husband’s death to come up with the mounting tax money, while doing nothing to help her and not actually paying her enough to manage and letting her family sink deeper into the hole until there was no way for them to escape, but in realistic terms, that’s not really kind at all.

We don’t actually hear the townspeople express their own feelings because the children don’t talk to the adults about their search and discoveries until they’re sure of what they found. When Barbara explained how her father felt about the townspeople’s unwillingness to help the Paines, I was also a little suspicious of their motives, and when Barbara mentioned that there’s been a popular rumor about hidden treasure in the Paine household for years and everyone has heard of it, I got really suspicious. Basically, I started looking for thieves among the townspeople. I immediately suspected that the “rugged individuals”, or at least some influential ones in the community, wanted to steal some historical treasure from a veteran’s widow and orphans because people who would would kick the widow and orphans out of their home might as well be out to steal their legacy, too.

If that was part of their plan, they weren’t very good at it, and they never even show up in the story. Perhaps I’m judging them a bit harshly, although in a way, I’m a little disappointed because that kind of Machiavellian plot would have made the story much more exciting. From the way the story goes, the townspeople might just not believe that there’s any treasure to be found because that rumor has been going around for so long and nothing has come of it. Still, I was suspicious of them for a good part of the book because it looked like the author was setting them up to be suspicious.

I was also annoyed by the townspeople because I found them ineffectual and uncreative in their approach to a community problem. They miss opportunities, and worse, they deny opportunities to others because they’re apparently stuck in their “rugged individual” mindset and won’t even entertain ideas that might help themselves as well as others when people like Barbara Thomas’s father suggest them. I often think that high-and-mighty rugged individualistic attitude cuts out so many genuinely fun, creative, and amazing possibilities that can make a community rich in character as well as money. It’s maddening to a person who thrives on creativity and likes to consider possibilities.

When I started getting really irritated at the townspeople, I guessed that, before the end of the story, they would do something to redeem themselves that would simultaneously leave me unsatisfied. I figured that the point where the townspeople finally come together would probably result in something that I thought they should have been working on from the beginning, and then, they’d act like it was such an amazing idea that they’d never thought of before and I’d be really irritated with them all over again because I thought of something like it very early in the story. Actually, that’s not how the story goes, and it’s still irritating to me.

So, what would I want them to do in this situation? Basically, the community wants its tax money, and the family wants to keep their house with a living wage that can support them. Fine. So, I asked myself, why not make this historic house, which is known to be the oldest house in town, into a community project which would actually contribute to the common good of the community (I don’t think “common good” is a dirty word, although I’m aware that some “rugged individualists” think so) and provide the Paine family with an additional source of income? If the town council invested in fixing up the house, which is also known to contain some very interesting Colonial antiques as well as fascinating architectural details and a unique history, the house could be turned into either a museum or a period bed-and-breakfast to encourage local tourism. (Sleep where George Washington and Lafayette slept!) Since it does have original furnishings and actual bedrooms, it probably wouldn’t take a lot to make the conversion for either of those projects.

The town and its business owners would benefit from the tourism, giving them an actual monetary return on their investment, and the Paine family could stay on with the house as its caretakers, receiving additional wages from visitors. People couldn’t say that the Paines simply received a handout because they would be doing valuable community work to support the town’s image and industry. It would satisfy Nat Paine’s family pride because he could talk to tour groups on the weekends and during the summer about his family’s great legacy to the history of his town. The whole community could even expand on the idea to further attract visitors, setting up a sort of local living history center, where people can learn Colonial crafts and recipes (something like what the Townsends demo on their YouTube channel), and schools from neighboring towns and cities could book field trips. Local business owners could support it with a themed restaurant and shops selling Colonial-era replicas and memorabilia and books about the time period. The town could hold special celebrations a few times a year to draw in more visitors, like a big Fourth of July parade or a Colonial Christmas celebration (although I known not all of the American colonies actually celebrated Christmas) or a re-creation of old harvest parties (more historically accurate) with plays by the local theater group (if they don’t have one, they could form one) or dramatic readings from Washington Irving at the local library or a themed fair with people selling local artisan crafts. They wouldn’t have to do all of this at once, but they could start with the matter of the house and build up from there. It’s an idea that has the potential for future expansion. This story is even set pre-Bicentenniel, so imagine what the town could do if they already had everything up and running by July 4th, 1776! Doesn’t anybody plan ahead? That’s creative use of resources. That’s community action. That’s job creation. Even if it’s not as big as Plimoth Plantation (now called Plimoth Patuxet to better incorporate the Native Americans) or Colonial Williamsburg (which both already existed by the time this story was written and could have provided inspiration), it’s still a money-making industry that is inherently built into the town’s very nature and won’t disappear tomorrow because some outside business decides to move or close a job-providing factory or something. Even if they didn’t get national or international attention, they would probably still be a destination for people from around their state and neighboring ones, and there’s potential for continued development. The project just need to be supported and promoted by the community.

Unfortunately, that’s not what they do. My griping aside, I guess if the solution was really that simple and the townspeople were more thoughtful and pro-active, we would lose the source of tension and the obstacle that our heroes have to overcome. The August 15th deadline is what pressures the kids to hurry up and find the treasure, so as irritating as it is to me, I have to put up with it.

The treasure hunt part is a lot of fun, and I liked the children’s logical, methodical approach to their search. When the children eventually find the hidden box, the story isn’t over. There are coded messages in the box that they have to decode to learn the full truth about Nathaniel Woodruff. Part of the story explains how they figure out how to decode the substitution code and the book code that compose parts of the message. The story they learn about Nathaniel Woodruff is better than anything the Paines had originally thought.

So, did they save the old house and do anything cool, like start a unique museum? Yes, and no. Although they don’t find any jewels, gold, or traditional sort of treasure, the letters that they find in the box are worth quite a bit. They sell them to a wealthy local business owner, and he donates them to a local university library. (So, you know, the wealthy business owner who never makes an actual appearance in this story and who wouldn’t have helped a war widow and her orphans for their sake can buy their family legacy and present it as his magnanimous gift to the university. I can’t say that he’s terrible for doing this because it does help, but I still think my idea was better.) The Paine family has enough money to keep their house and fix it up. It’s a pretty good ending, but I still prefer my vision. The story points out that it’s not a matter of everyone living happily ever after because they’re all their imperfect selves and still have some problems, but one lesson that they all learned from this experience is how to create their own book code to use for passing notes in class. It’s not profound, but codes are fun.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Black Diamonds

Mystery of the Black Diamonds by Phyllis A. Whitney, 1954, 1974.

Twelve-year-old Angie (Angela) Wetheral and her eleven-year-old brother Mark are visiting the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. They’re from New York, but their father is a mystery novelist, and he’s doing some research over the summer for a book that will take place in Colorado. As the kids explore the area and speculate about the murder that’s going to happen in their father’s new book, they meet Benjamin Ellington, an old timer who talks to them about the days when the gold and silver mines in the area were active. He tells the kids to call him Uncle Ben, and they talk about whether or not there’s any treasure still to be found in the area. They also meet Sam Springer, the park ranger, who worries about Uncle Ben exploring and digging in the hills by himself because he could get hurt and people wouldn’t know where to find him and help him. Uncle Ben says that Sam worries too much and that he knows the area well because he’s been digging out there for years.

Sam later tells the kids that Uncle Ben came to the area in 1889, when he was 15 years old. That means that Uncle Ben was born in 1874, and Angie says that means that he’s almost 70 years old now, which puts the date of this story in the early 1940s, during WWII, but they don’t talk about the war. Sam says that Uncle Ben actually struck it rich while he was in his teens and owned three or four mines. Apparently, Ben blew through most of his money pretty quickly, so he’s not that rich anymore. However, the kids are fascinated by the idea of finding gold or silver and striking it rich.

The reason why the family lives in New York is that it’s helpful for their father’s work. Besides writing mystery novels, he also writes shorter stories for magazines and does book reviews for various publishers, so it’s important for him to live close to the New York book publishers. Angie misses their old home in New Hampshire, where they had a view of the mountains. Colorado reminds her of her old home, and she wishes that they could stay there, so she could enjoy the beauties of nature and the outdoor life. Their father says that someday, when he’s saved enough money, they’ll be able to live anywhere they want, and he’ll take time away from his regular projects to work on a serious novel that he’s been thinking about writing for some time. Mark suggests to Angie that if they could strike it rich in the mountains, the family would have all the money they needed, they could live where they want, and their dad would have the time to write anything he wants.

The kids ask Uncle Ben about searching for treasure, and he gives them a piece of paper with a strange coded message that is supposed to be the map to the treasure. He tells the kids that if they want the treasure, they’ll have to work for it by figuring out how to read the message. Mark wonders why Uncle Ben would give them the key to a treasure when he could just go after it himself, but Uncle Ben says, “I’ve got all I need. I’ve had enough of treasure and the way it can ruin men’s lives.” Uncle Ben says that maybe the kids would do better with a treasure than most people, but he insists that the kids will have to work for whatever they find and refuses to give them any hints about what the message means.

Uncle Ben continues helping the children’s father with background for his mystery story. He suggests that Mr. Wetheral have a look at a nearby ghost town. Unfortunately, Uncle Ben is killed in a fall soon after. The children are nearby when he falls and call for help, but there is little that anyone can to for him. Just before he dies, he whispers to the children, “Black diamonds. Right where Abednego used to be.” It’s a reference to the coded message that he gave the children, one final hint at the treasure. His death leaves it entirely up to the children whether or not to go after it.

To the Wetherals’ surprise, they soon learn that Uncle Ben recently added Mark and Angie to his will, leaving them a house and some land in Colorado. The catch is that the house is in the old ghost town. Angie is hopeful that if they own a house in Colorado they might be able to stay there instead of going back to New York, but the question is whether or not they’d be willing to live in a ghost town.

The Wetheral family decides to go to the ghost town and camp out in their new house and see what it’s like. Mr. Wetheral thinks the ghost town would make a good setting for his book, and staying there will give him a chance to do some research and soak up the atmosphere. Plus, the family is going to have to decide exactly what they’re going to do with the house the kids have inherited.

Most of the ghost town is crumbling, but the house they’ve inherited appears to be in better condition than most. They even find some furniture they can use in a back room. As they explore the town, the kids have their mind on the treasure that Uncle Ben talked about. Most people think that was just a story he made up because he gave copies of the same treasure map message to other friends of his, and nobody has ever figured out what it’s supposed to mean. Mark and Angie think that there is more to the message than most people believe, and they’re determined to find the answers.

It turns out that the ghost town isn’t completely uninhabited, though. The Koblers and their granddaughter Juanita, who is nicknamed Jinx, also live there with their pet skunk. Grandpa Kobler is an old friend Uncle Ben’s, and he talks to the children about him and the old says of the ghost town, Blossom. He used to own the general store there, and his wife was once the schoolteacher, and they didn’t move away from Blossom when the others did. He’s aware of Uncle Ben’s “maps” and hints of treasure, but has no interest in treasure-hunting himself because he likes the life that he and his family are living and doesn’t want it to change. However, Angie can tell that Juanita/Jinx is unhappy and can’t understand why she doesn’t want to talk about her parents and where they are. Then, someone else shows up in Blossom, looking for the clues to Uncle Ben’s treasure. If there really is a treasure to find, can Mark and Angie find it first?

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

Themes, Spoilers, and My Reaction

It isn’t easy for the kids to get to know Juanita/Jinx because she has a prickly and defensive personality and doesn’t like to talk about her past. However, she gradually starts to bond with Mark and Angie because of their shared love of the town of Blossom. Eventually, she tells Angie that her parents died when she was very young. Her father was killed in a mining accident. He thought that there was still treasure worth finding in the old mine outside of town and tried to get at it even though Grandpa Kobler told him that it was dangerous and that there was probably nothing worth finding anyway. Juanita’s mother died of pneumonia soon after her husband’s death, leaving little Juanita to be raised by her grandparents. Juanita has a warm relationship with her grandfather, the only person who calls her by her real name. However, Juanita is convinced that her grandmother doesn’t love her and is only raising her out of a sense of duty. Juanita’s grandmother never approved of her mother, partly because her son’s early marriage is what stopped him from going to college. Juanita also thinks that her grandmother didn’t like her mother because she was Mexican, which is why Juanita has a Hispanic name. Her grandmother was the one who gave her the nickname “Jinx” because that’s what she would call her when she was chiding her for something, which seems to have happened all too often. Jinx often calls herself Jinx instead of Juanita because she’s trying to get away from her Mexican-sounding name and seem more American.

For part of the book, Jinx actively tries to sabotage the Mark and Angie in their treasure-hunting activities because she’s afraid that if they find treasure, everything in Blossom will change. She worries that other people will come to Blossom seeking treasure. If that happens, the town will be built up again, but that means destroying what’s already there. Also, Jinx fears the way other people will treat her. She doesn’t want other people to come into Blossom or to be sent away to school if her grandparents suddenly have the money to do it because she thinks that outsiders will always treat her badly and look down on her. Her grandmother has repeatedly told her that people look down on Mexicans, and Jinx thinks it’s true because some kids she met in Boulder were also mean to her and called her names. Angie tells her that it isn’t true that everyone hates Mexicans. The Wetheral family lived in Mexico one summer while her father was researching another book, and they liked it, and Angie still has a friend there. Angie realizes that the reason why Jinx’s behavior and attitude are so poisonous is that her grandmother has poisoned her mind because of her own twisted feelings. Angie declares that she’s going to have a word with Jinx’s grandmother about it, but Jinx stops her because she says that will just make her grandmother mad. She says that sometimes, when she’s especially well-behaved, her grandmother forgets that she’s half Mexican, and if anyone reminds her, she’ll just get angry all over again. It’s a pretty sick way to raise a vulnerable child who is isolated from other people who could give her a more balanced view of life and people’s feelings. Grandpa Kobler seems to realize this, which is why he wants Angie to be friends with Juanita and show her that there are different people in the world, including people who are willing to be friends. As Angie points out to Juanita, her grandparents are getting older, and someday, she will be an adult and they’ll be gone. Juanita is going to have to learn to get along in the wider world without them, and actually, dealing with strangers in the outside world might not be as bad as living full-time with her grandmother’s nasty attitude.

Some of Juanita’s feelings are resolved when Angie’s mother has a heart-to-heart talk with her about the things her grandmother has been telling her and her own opinions about herself. I agreed with Angie that some of the things her mother said to Juanita while challenging her attitudes were rather harsh, and I wouldn’t have said things like that, but Juanita does take what Mrs. Wetheral says to heart and realizes that she has as much reason to take some pride in herself and her background as anyone else. I didn’t like the part where Angie’s mother says that Juanita’s grandmother can’t help her opinions about Mexicans because that’s just the way she was raised and there’s nothing that can be done about it now. It seems to me that they’re discounting the idea of personal accountability. If Juanita’s grandmother can’t be responsible for her own mind and behavior, what can she be responsible for?

I know people can cling pretty hard to some weird ideas. One night, we took my grandmother out to dinner at a nice restaurant for a family celebration. My grandmother was actually really upset that the restaurant had given her so much food that she couldn’t eat it all, and she said that she was worried because her parents would never have approved of her not clearing her plate. She was genuinely upset about it, not just making an idle comment. It really bothered her. Now, I know that part of my grandmother’s youth took place during the Great Depression, when wasting anything was a sin, but at the time this incident took place, she was a widow who was over 80 years old. The Great Depression had been over for more than 60 years. I was her youngest grandchild, and I was an adult at this time. Her parents had been dead for longer than I had been alive. She was not only a parent herself, but she was also a grandparent and a great-grandparent. She was literally the oldest living member of our family, and nobody would have said a word about what she wanted to eat or not eat for dinner, but my grandmother just couldn’t get past the idea of what her parents told her years ago about always clearing her plate. It’s an odd thing to cling to, but admittedly, there are far more harmful ideas that people can’t bring themselves to give up because of stuff their parents said back in the day.

Mrs. Kobler has had years of living her own life and ample opportunity to work out her feelings, but I think that part of the reason she hasn’t is because there’s something else that’s preventing her. This theory is conjecture on my part because there’s never a point when Mrs. Kobler explicitly explains her thought processes, but although the book doesn’t really explain it, I think that her son’s death is probably the reason why Mrs. Kobler has been harboring so many negative attitudes and taking them out on Jinx. Although nobody actually says it, I suspect that Mrs. Kobler assigned blame to Jinx’s mother for her son’s death. If he hadn’t gotten married at a young age and went looking for a fabulous discovery to raise a fortune for his young family, he might have gone to college, gotten a good career, and still been alive. Even though the characters don’t explicitly say it, I think it’s logical. I further suspect that the really problematic part for Mrs. Kobler is that she needs to blame Jinx’s mother for what happened because, if she can’t, some part of her might blame herself for not stopping her son from doing what he did, and she can’t handle that. As long as she can tell herself (and Jinx) that her daughter-in-law was awful because she was Mexican and caused the downfall of her son, she won’t have to question why she wasn’t able to stop her son from dying. In her mind, I think Mrs. Kobler thinks that her son’s marriage was a terrible mistake that led to his early death, and by extension, her granddaughter really was a “jinx” because she came from that unlucky marriage. Some of Mrs. Kobler’s feelings get resolved later, when they discover that her son was right about the type of treasure he was seeking, even though he got killed pursuing it. A sudden disaster also makes Mrs. Kobler realize that there are many things that a person can’t control in life and that God’s will is taking her family in a direction she never anticipated. This book doesn’t really lecture about the subject of God and religion, but there are some Christian themes in the story.

All through the story, there is the theme of treasure – what is treasure, what do people do with treasure when they get it, and what are they willing to risk to get it? Early in the story, Uncle Ben talks about having lost his taste for treasure-hunting because he’s seen the way it ruins lives. It isn’t until the Wetheral family gets to Blossom and the children talk to Grandpa Kobler that they get the rest of the story about why Uncle Ben felt like that. After Uncle Ben dies, he is buried in the old cemetery in Blossom because that’s where his wife and young daughter are buried. They both died of diphtheria, and he blamed himself for them contracting the disease because they went to live in the big city after he got rich. Grandpa Kobler, who knew Uncle Ben back then tried to console him by saying that they could have caught that disease anywhere, not just in the city, but Uncle Ben still felt responsible. (Diphtheria is now a very rare disease in the US, thanks to the development of a vaccine to prevent it. It’s often given in a combination vaccine that also protects against tetanus and whooping cough, which is how I’ve received it. I was first given the vaccine when I was very young, and I still get my booster shots. I’d recommend it to anyone capable of receiving vaccines. I have never actually seen a person with any of those illnesses in my entire life, and I’m in my late 30s now.) The point is that money doesn’t buy love and happiness, and Uncle Ben came to the conclusion that the lifestyle his family lived when they were rich was unhealthy. He would rather have had his family back than the money from his mines.

Grandpa Kobler understands how Uncle Ben felt because, when Uncle Ben once asked him if he wanted a treasure, he said no. He was happy with the life he was living in Blossom, and he had enough money for his family to live comfortably. If he suddenly got rich, people would expect him to move to a bigger house in the city and start living a completely different life, and he realized that he wouldn’t be as happy doing that. In his youth, he saw the lives that other people lived after they got rich, and he didn’t like what he saw. Later, his son got killed while chasing a dream of treasure, which further emphasizes that there is a price for treasure-hunting, and sometimes, that price is too high. In the Wetheral family, Mark is the one who thinks that their lives would be better if they could find a fortune, but Angie points out that they don’t really need a fortune; they just need enough for their dad to feel comfortable taking the time to write the book that he wants to write and for them to have a home away from the big city, which is what they really want. There is the idea that having enough money is good, but having too much or trying too hard to acquire more can cause problems and complicate a person’s life.

Spoilers

Things are about to change in Blossom, in spite of what the people there want, and as Grandma Kobler concludes, it might be the will of God that they do. In the most dramatic part of the book, much of the town of Blossom is destroyed in a flash flood. Fortunately, all of the people and animals in the town survive, although the Koblers have a close brush with death. Juanita is in less danger because she’s on a picnic with Angie and her mother when the flood startes, and she is the first to realize the danger. At first, everyone is afraid that the Koblers drowned, but they eventually find Mrs. Kobler, just barely keeping her own head and her husband’s out of the water. During this time when they were almost killed, Mrs. Kobler admits that she had some revelations about many things, especially when she realized that she could depend on Juanita to come and help them. In spite of all of her nagging at Juanita, Juanita is bright and dependable and cares about her grandparents, even the grandmother who’s been making her life miserable. Mrs. Kobler never completely changes her mind about Mexicans, but she does change her mind about Juanita, giving her more respect than she did before. The book explains that she comes to realize that, while Mrs. Kobler disparaged Juanita as her mother’s daughter, she came to remember that she was her son’s daughter, too. It’s not as much as could be hoped for, but it’s a start. Mrs. Kobler also realizes that everything that’s happened is the will of God, there is nothing anyone could have done that would have changed the outcome, and God is leading her family in the direction He wants them to go, so she is just going to have to go with the flow (not exactly her words, but I think you catch my drift – ha, ha).

The secret of Uncle Ben’s treasure is also revealed. What he found wasn’t really “black diamonds” but something else that’s very valuable, the same mineral that Juanita’s father was looking for at the time he died. However, Juanita’s father was looking in the wrong part of the mine, which was why he got killed instead of finding what he was looking for. (Maybe he should have gone for his geology degree before going for the “treasure.” Just saying.) Uncle Ben was more experienced with mining and figured out the right place to look himself. It wasn’t until after Juanita’s father died that he came to realize the full value of what he had found, though. (It’s important that this story is set after WWII.) Uncle Ben’s lawyer reveals that, since samples of this mineral were sent to be analyzed, it has activated a part of Uncle Ben’s will that leaves the mine to Juanita Kobler, making her an heiress. Since the town of Blossom was destroyed in the flood, there’s nothing left to preserve that would prevent mining. Now that Juanita is an heiress, she’s going to have a much higher standing in the community, which might take care of some of the bullying she received at school in Boulder. The Wetherals also benefit from the discovery, as the mysterious stranger who came to town informs them that there’s a government finder’s fee for locating valuable mineral deposits.

Posted on by TracyC

The 13th Clue

The 13th Clue by Ann Jonas, 1988.

This picture book is almost entirely pictures. The pictures present clues to a treasure hunt and reveal the true story of the book.

The book begins with a diary entry. At first, we don’t know who is writing it, but this person writes about what a bad day it’s been. We know that the person must be a kid because they mention school, and I guessed that it was the person’s birthday because people sang to them at school. But, she thinks that others have forgotten her birthday. The diary entry breaks off when the person notices a light going on in the house when, supposedly, no one else is home.

From this point on, until the very end of the book, the text is presented in the form of clues for our birthday kid (who turns out to be a girl, as shown in shadows and a reflection in water in later illustrations) to follow that lead to the place where her friends are waiting to give her a surprise party. Readers can figure out the clues along with the girl, some of which are easier and more direct than others.

I love puzzle books, and I thought that it was interesting how we don’t even know who the main character of the book is, only finding that out as the book continues. I liked the challenge of figuring out the clues as the book went along, although none of them were particularly difficult. They aren’t written in any kind of code, just kind of hidden in plain sight, most of them using objects that are part of the rest of the scene. Some of the letters of words are jumbled and have to be unscrambled. I’m sure it would seem harder to children.

This is a pretty easy book, but not one that would be suitable to read to children who can’t read themselves. There are no solutions provided to the puzzles, but that’s okay because, first of all, they aren’t very hard, and second, there are no opportunities for the reader to make choices based on the puzzles, so there is nothing for the reader to get wrong. The end of the story is obvious. Most of the fun is just studying the pictures to see the cute ways her friends decided to hide their “secret” messages. The hardest message to spot is the one written in the hillside.

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

Posted on by TracyC

Aria Volume 3

Aria Volume 3 by Kozue Amano, 2003, English Translation 2004.

This is the third volume of the second part of a fascinating manga series that combines sci-fi, fantasy, and slice of life. The series takes place about 300 years in the future, when Mars has been terraformed and renamed Aqua (because of all the water on its surface). The human colonies on Aqua are designed to resemble old-fashioned cities on Earth (called Manhome here). The people of Aqua prefer a much slower pace of life than people on Manhome, and aspects of life on Aqua more closely resemble Earth’s past.

The series is divided into two parts. The first two books are the Aqua volumes and introduce Akari Mizunashi, the main character, a young girl who came to Aqua to learn to become a gondolier in the city of Neo Venezia (which resembles Venice). Female gondoliers, called Undines, give tours of the city, giving Akari plenty of time to admire the beauty of her new home and meet interesting people. The two Aqua books are the prequel to the main series, Aria. Aqua covers Akari’s arrival on the planet, her introduction to life on Aqua, and the beginning of her training. The main Aria series show Akari’s continuing training, her progression to becoming a full Undine, her evolving relationships with her friends, and as always, her delight in learning more about her new home and admiring its beauty.

The series has received some criticism for being slow and lacking danger and adventure, but that is not really the point of the series. The main purpose is to show people how to appreciate the small pleasures of life. The sci-fi and fantasy elements (the spaceships, advanced environmental controls, intelligent Martian cats, and even the occasional appearances of the legendary Cait Sith) are mainly background to the stories about the magic of friendship and simple pleasures. Each volume contains a few short stories about Akari and her friends and the little adventures they have on a daily basis and the life lessons they learn. It’s a great series for relaxing when you’re stressed out.

The stories included in this volume are:

First Gale of Spring

It’s been a full year (full Martian year, which is equal to two Earth years) since Akari moved to Aqua and began her Undine training, and she’s happy that it’s spring again! While Akari and Aika are practicing their rowing one day, they meet another trainee Undine, Alice.

Alice is a young prodigy, only 14. Even though she is rather young and still in school, she’s really good at handling a gondola. However, Aika takes an instant dislike to her, partly because she belongs to Orange Company, a rival of Aika’s gondola company, Himeya. Akari tries to be friendly to Alice and tries to invite her to join them for lunch, but Alice is rude and unfriendly to them.

Aika thinks that Alice has an uppity attitude and is disrespectful to them even though they’re higher level trainees than she is. (There is some mild swearing in this part of the story. Most of the Aria series doesn’t have any swearing at all.) To prove her point and put Alice in her place, Aika decides to challenge Alice to a race.

Part of the reason why Alice is so prickly and unfriendly is that she thinks that people look down on her for being young and because they’re jealous of her skills , but she doesn’t realize how her abrasive attitude affects the people around her and their perceptions of her.

Aika has Akari row their gondola in the race, partly so she can use her secret ability to row a gondola backwards really fast, but Akari has her own ideas of how the race will end. Akari is still thinking of the beauty of spring, and even though she makes sure that her gondola will come in second by stopping to pick flowers (the fact that they had time to pick an entire boatload of flowers indicates just how much of a lead they had), she uses them to remind the other girls

Alice actually appeared in one of the prequel books to the Aria series, Aqua Volume 2, as the friend who went with Akari to visit Aika when Aika had a cold. It was the only Aqua story she was in, and this story in the third volume of the Aria series is the true introduction to her character.

Under the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom

Alicia and Akari decide to go on a picnic to enjoy the beauty of nature in spring. Alicia has a special place in mind for a picnic, but the two of them get lost on the way. Although Alicia remembers that getting to her special spot involves following some old train tracks, when they split off in different directions, she can’t remember which way to go.

Akari picks a random direction. It turns out that the direction she picks doesn’t take them to Alicia’s special place, but they find something else interesting: an abandoned train car underneath a cherry tree in full bloom.

The girls explore the train car and find that part of the roof is missing. They lie in the train car and enjoy the cherry blossoms raining down on them. Akari apologizes to Alicia for not finding her special place, but Alicia says that’s fine because this place is nice, too. She says that sometimes, you have to get a little lost to find something new.

Town Treasure

Akari, Aika, and Alice find a message in an old gondola that they borrow from the gondola repairman while Aria Company’s gondolas are being service. The message is in a small box in a hidden compartment of the gondola, and it turns out to be the first clue in a treasure hunt with a special surprise at the end.

Curious to find the treasure, the girls follow the clues through Neo Venezia, and their search leads them to take a second look at places they pass by all the time with little notice and takes them to lesser-known parts of the city that even Aika and Alice, who were born there, haven’t seen.

The treasure hunt finally ends on an often over-looked stairway that actually provides an excellent view of Neo Venezia, and the treasure they find there is the one that made Akari enjoy the treasure hunt from the very beginning.

The girls decide to put all the clues back where they found them, and to their surprise, they notice that there are marks that indicate that many other people have done the same.

Three Water Fairies

Akari and Aika are training under two of the Three Water Fairies, the best-known Undines on Aqua. However, Aika’s mentor, Akira, is much more strict than Alicia. One day, Aika gets fed up with Akira’s strictness and decides to run away and train under Alicia.

When Akira shows up to reclaim her wayward trainee, Akari learns more about Alicia, Akira, and especially about Aika. Akira was seen briefly in Aqua Volume 2, when Aika snuck out of her room to go buy some pudding, and she was the person Aika was trying to avoid because she was the one making her rest from her cold. However, Akira wasn’t actually introduced until this book, like Alice. This story reveals that Alicia and Akira were friends as trainees, like Akari and Aika, and have had a bit of a rivalry, being considered among the three best Undines, but they haven’t seen each other much in recent years.

Aika had reveals that the reason why she admires Alicia so much is that Alicia was nice to her when she was a child. One day, when she was upset about something, Alicia found her and gave her a ride in her gondola and cheered her up by trying different hairstyles with her hair. This experience is what made Aika want so badly to become an Undine herself. However, Aika could not train under Alicia at Aria Company because her parents actually own Himeya Company, something that Aika has never told Akari before. Aika’s family expects her to work her way up through the ranks as an Undine and eventually take over Himeya Company.

To settle the matter of Aika’s future training, Akira proposes a contest, a race between Aika and Akari, to determine whether Aika will become Alicia’s student or return to Himeya Company with Akira. As Alicia guesses, the “race” between their trainees gives Aika an opportunity to return to Himeya without sacrificing her dignity. It also gives both Akira and Aika an opportunity to consider how they really feel about each other and how much they appreciate each other.

While Akira and Alicia talk about Aika and how she’s both similar to and different from her mentor, Akari and Aika aren’t really having a race. Instead, they talk about how Aika feels about Akira.

Aika says that her position as the future heir of Himeya Company doesn’t matter much to her because she just wants to be an Undine, like Alicia, but she admits that people at Himeya treat her differently from the other trainees because they know who she is. They are extra nice to her and try to avoid getting on her bad side because they want to be friends with the boss’s daughter, who will be their future boss someday. Aika admits that, strict as Akira is, she’s also the one who’s the most honest with her, correcting her when she needs it and not worrying about making her angry. Aika realizes that she needs that honesty in her life and that Akira’s training is helping her. At Aika’s insistance, the girls end their “race” and go buy some walnut pastries for Akira, which Aika offers to her as an apology before returning to Himeya with her. Akari realizes the the bond between Aika and Akira is stronger than either of them wants to admit, and she hopes that, someday, she’ll have a bond that strong with Alicia.

This story is important for explaining more of the backstory of the characters and how they relate to each other. There is a running theme in these stories of having characters whose names begin with the letter ‘A’. In most cases, I don’t mind because the names are usually different enough that it doesn’t matter, but Akira and Akari are rather close.

Festa del Boccolo

Festa del Boccolo is the time when men give red roses to the women they love. Akatsuki has had a crush on Alicia for a long time, and he enlists Akari’s help to give her a boatful of roses to impress her. He needs her help because the town is flooded during high tide again, as it is every year during late spring.

Unfortunately, his elaborate gesture doesn’t go as planned because Alicia has already received many other roses from other people, and she assumes that Akatsuki has bought all of his roses for Akari.

Akatsuki accidentally spills the roses in the water, while trying to get Alicia’s attention. He thinks that he’s completely screwed everything up, but Akari points out that his gesture wasn’t futile because, like the roses floating on the water, his love for Alicia spreads out around him and touches everyone, and one day, Alicia is bound to notice. Akatsuki gives Akari a single rose to thank her for her help, and the two of them enjoy a walk together through the flooded city.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Secrets of the Pirate Inn

The Secrets of the Pirate Inn by Wylly Folk St. John, 1968.

One day, Jack, Amy, and Sally’s mother receives some surprising mail for her deceased father.  The children never met their grandfather, who died before they were born, but the letters concern their grandfather’s Uncle Will.  Uncle Will is an 88-year-old man, and one of the letters is from Miss Dibble from the Welfare Department in Port Oglethorpe, Georgia, the seaside town where Uncle Will is living.  Miss Dibble is concerned that Uncle Will is no longer in his right mind and not capable of taking care of himself, and she is hoping that his family will persuade him to go live in a retirement home. 

The children’s mother says that Uncle Will was an adventurer and a wild character even in his younger years, always playing games and doing eccentric things, so the situation may not be as bad as Miss Dibble thinks it is.  The mother has never met Uncle Will, either, because her grandmother disapproved of him and discouraged him from hanging around the rest of the family years ago.  She knows that her father always thought of him as being a fun uncle and that he used to own some land in North Georgia, where he found a priceless diamond.

The second letter comes from Uncle Will himself.  It contains a strange rhyme and a letter to his deceased nephew, saying that he sold his land and that the money from that sale and his diamond will go to him upon his death.  Uncle Will says that Miss Dibble is pressuring him to turn over his money to the state and to go live in the old folks’ home.  He’s been resisting her efforts, but he admits that he has gotten absent-minded and has forgotten where he hid his money and diamond.  He knows that the rhyme he wrote down is a clue that he made to remind himself of the hiding place, but now he’s confused, and he’s hoping that his nephew can help him figure it out because it’s based on a game they used to play years ago.  Because it’s been so long since he last spoke to the family, he has no idea that his nephew has died.  Uncle Will also says that he is currently living in an old pirate’s inn near Port Oglethorpe that has its own secret passage where pirates used to shanghai sailors.

The children think that Uncle Will and his pirate’s inn sound exciting, and they’d like to go meet him.  Their mother says that she’ll have to talk to their father about it, but she thinks that it might be a good idea for them to go and check up on Uncle Will and talk to Miss Dibble.  She makes up her mind when Miss Dibble sends an urgent telegram in which she says that Uncle Will is under the delusion that someone is now hiding in his house and trying to kill him for his money. The mother and the children decide to go see Uncle Will, although the father of the family can’t go because he has a business trip.

Of course, Uncle Will isn’t delusional, and there is someone after his hidden money. The old inn where Uncle Will lives is called The Bucket of Blood. When the children and their mother arrive, Uncle Will pretends to be an old pirate parrot, calling out “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” (Yes, he’s definitely an eccentric, and it’s a little more understandable why Miss Dibble thinks he might not have all of his faculties.) They introduce themselves to Uncle Will, and Uncle Will is sorry to hear that his nephew is dead, but he is pleased to meet his nephew’s daughter and her children. The children tell him that they want to help him to solve the rhyme and find his money.

The inn is full of fascinating things, although it’s lacking in modern conveniences. The mother asks Uncle Will if they can stay there, saying that they’ve brought sleeping bags with them. Uncle Will tells them that they can use the bedrooms upstairs but warns them that he’s worried that someone might be hiding somewhere upstairs (as Miss Dibble had said earlier). Uncle Will rarely goes upstairs these days because he finds it difficult to climb up there. However, the children realize that Uncle Will is not deluded when they notice footprints in the dust on the stairs, meaning that someone has been there recently. However, the footprints seem to be only going up, not down. When the search upstairs, they don’t find anyone. Where the footprints left by a ghost? Was someone really hiding in the inn, and if so, how did they leave?

There is a live action made-for-tv Disney movie based on this book. You can see the entire movie online at Internet Archive. The movie is different from the book in a number of ways. In the movie, there are three children, but it’s two boys and a girl (a brother and sister and the brother’s friend) instead of two girls and a boy (all siblings), and none of them are related to the old Irish sea captain living in the old inn. (Note: The child characters in the movie, Scott, Tippy, and Catfish, also appeared in another made-for-tv Disney movie called The Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove, which was also based on a book for children, The Mad Scientists’ Club, but that book was written by a different author, and none of those children actually appeared in either this book or that one.) The old captain in the movie has recently inherited the inn from his brother. The location was moved to Louisiana instead of Georgia, and the treasure they’re looking for was hidden by the pirate Jean Lafitte. There are rhyming clues to the treasure’s location, but they’re not the same as the rhymes in the book. The money and the diamond are also hidden in separate locations in the book. In fact, although the bulk of the money is in one place, some of it is hidden in other places.

In the book, there are also extra characters, a man named Miles who is staying with Uncle Will while he’s working on writing a book and a young runaway nicknamed Hop who is afraid that he will be sent to another foster home like the one he ran away from if Miss Dibble catches him. At first, I suspected one of these characters of being the villain of the story, trying to steal Uncle Will’s money. However, the real villain is someone we don’t really know until the end, although he has connections to other people in the story. This is different from the movie, where the villain is a suspect we meet and see often before his guilt is established. Because of this, I think that the movie was playing more fair with the readers about the mystery.

Near the beginning of this book, the characters reference The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis (also the author of Auntie Mame), which was published only a few years before this book was. Sally thought that the book was hilarious, but Jack thought that it was boring because the boy in the story, who was his age, “didn’t have a thing to do every day but listen to grownups talking.” I think this is meant to be a sign that the children’s parents are pretty modern and progressive, letting their children read a book about divorce and mixed-up family life in the 1960s. At one point, the mother tells Jack not to use euphemistic swear words like “Cripes!” just because characters in books to it. It gets on the mother’s nerves because she thinks that “They sound even worse than the words they’re being used to avoid.” She actually tells Jack, “When you’re old enough to swear by any words you like, I hope you’ll manage without euphemisms.” I mentioned in my page of 1960s children’s books that the 1960s were a turning point both in society and children’s literature, and this is an example of people’s changing attitudes. Sally, the oldest of the children, is allowed to wear lipstick, and Amy, who is twelve, is also allowed to wear it, although she thinks of it as being too much trouble to bother most of the time. (I can relate. I still sometimes throw out old make-up that I just plain forgot that I had because I’m too busy and preoccupied most of the time to think about it.)

Posted on by TracyC

The Secret of the Floating Phantom

SecretFloatingPhantom

The Secret of the Floating Phantom by Norma Lehr, 1994.

Kathy Wicklow is going to be staying with her grandmother in Monterey for a while, helping her while she recovers from a twisted knee.  Kathy is disappointed about it because she only just got home from visiting her Aunt Sharon, and she was looking forward to some time at home with her dog, Snuggles.  Snuggles can’t even come with her to her grandmother’s house because of her grandmother’s allergies.

Kathy’s grandmother is a dance instructor, but someone else has to teach her classes until she’s better.  Her friend, Loretta, owns a Spanish restaurant and sometimes visits and brings dinner with her.  (The grandmother describes it as a “Spanish” restaurant, but they serve things like tacos and burritos with salsa, which is what people where I live think of as Mexican food.)  Kathy’s grandmother is sure that Kathy will like Loretta’s granddaughter and grandnephew.  However, she is strangely secretive about what she and Loretta have been doing during her visits, saying that their meetings, which they hold with a mysterious man called Mason, are financial discussions and are “not for children.”

Kathy learns that her grandmother and her friend are really holding séances. Loretta’s husband is dead, and Loretta fears that she might lose her property unless she can produce the original deed to it. She thinks her husband knew where the deed was, and she hopes to contact him so that he can tell her.  When Kathy spies on them during a séance, she sees a mysterious fog that seems to be trying to tell them something. No one else can see it but her. It appears to Kathy several more times, and it seems to be leading her not only toward the deed but toward a lost treasure from the early days of California.

Kathy is suspicious of Mason’s motives and the fact that he doesn’t seem to like her. It turns out that he is not really trying to help Loretta and her family but trying to find a treasure that was hidden by an ancestor of Loretta’s over a hundred years ago. At that time, the area where they now live in California was attacked by pirates. Loretta’s ancestor, Ambrose, was given the task of hiding the treasures from the local mission. He buried them under a tree and marked the tree with a cross. However, during the attack, he was badly injured and blinded. He was unable to find the spot where he buried the treasure himself, and the others who went to find it couldn’t locate the tree.

The fog-like spirit that Kathy sees is Ambrose. Lisa, Loretta’s granddaughter and Kathy’s friend, is spooked by Kathy’s visions, but she helps Kathy to follow the clues that the ghost provides to the treasure. In a hole in the trunk of the tree, Kathy also finds the deed that Loretta has been searching for. Mason tries to take the treasure himself, but he can’t move the heavy bricks on top of it by himself. Mason leaves before anyone can confront him. Digger, Lisa’s cousin, feels especially betrayed because Mason had seemed like such a good friend to him. Kathy notices that Mason seems to share some characteristics with one of the pirates from the attack in Ambrose’s time, which might be a hint that Mason is a descendant of the pirates, but it’s never fully explained.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Liars

LiarsLiars by P.J. Petersen, 1992.

Sam lives in the small town of Alder Creek in California. The town is so small that they only have a one-room school (well, two rooms, if you count the library/storage room). Sam’s friend, Marty, describes most of what happens there as SOT (Same Old Thing) or MOTSOT (More of the Same Old Thing). However, their town contains some disturbing secrets, which they are about to learn.

Uncle Gene, an old man in town, has a reputation for being a “water witch.” He has the ability to find good sources of water when they need to dig a new well. He lets the local kids watch him when he’s using his dowsing stick and even lets Sam and Marty have a try. Sam has never really believed that Uncle Gene has any special abilities, even kidding Marty for believing in it. However, when Sam takes hold of the dowsing stick, he finds it drawn toward sources of water, like a magnet. Uncle Gene says that Sam has the gift and is a water witch, too. Sam is still somewhat skeptical, thinking that there’s probably something more scientific behind what he experienced, but from that time on, he finds himself sensing other odd things from the people around him.

In particular, Sam can sense when people around him are lying. It sounds like it would be a handy gift to have, but it has some drawbacks. Even when he can tell that someone isn’t telling the truth, he can’t tell exactly what they’re lying about. Some lies are obvious, like those of classmates bragging about things or Mr. Lopez saying that he enjoys living in the small town when, apparently, he really doesn’t. However, Sam can’t always distinguish between small lies or serious ones. Some lies seem to affect him more than others, possibly because the liars themselves feel more guilty about those, but by itself, that doesn’t tell him whether the lie is serious or not. He knows about Mr. Lawlor poaching animals in the forest, so that lie is also obvious to Sam, and he later realizes that his wife is lying about her teaching credentials. When he exposes Mrs. Lawlor’s lies, everyone becomes aware of Sam’s gift.

This ability becomes disturbing for Sam because it seems like everyone around him is lying about something. It’s also somewhat unsettling for some of his friends, like Carmen, who worries about what he’ll think of her if he catches her in a lie. Even Sam lies somewhat himself, saying that he knows that Carmen wouldn’t lie to him when he’s already caught her. But, Carmen sees right through his reassurance, even without sharing Sam’s gift. She’s the one who points out to him that the problem with his gift is that, even though he can tell when someone lies, he can’t tell exactly what they’re lying about or why they’re doing it. She mentions the little white lies people tell to spare someone’s feelings, like saying that they like a person’s clothes when they really don’t, but also how people sometimes lie when the truth is none of someone else’s business. The lie that Carmen told Sam earlier was about why the two of them couldn’t hang out together one day. She said that her parents were expecting company that evening, but the truth was that her parents have been fighting a lot, and she didn’t want Sam to see it because their personal problems are no business of his. This incident, along with a time when Sam has suspicions about an innocent person because the person falsely thought that she might actually be guilty of a crime lead Sam to worry even more about his gift.

However, there are real crimes being committed in his town, and Sam’s gift might be the only way to find who is behind it all. First, someone tries to break into Uncle Gene’s house. Uncle Gene thinks he knows why. Supposedly, there’s a hidden mine in the area, and he’s been looking for it for a long time. He thinks that he’s getting close and that someone was after his maps. Later, his house is set on fire.

But, is the lost mine the real reason why someone is after Uncle Gene? He’s been poking around in some out-of-the-way places during his search, and the kids know that he’s reported someone for growing illegal marijuana. Is the grower out for revenge? With Sam’s own father lying to him about his whereabouts, Sam worries that he may have something to do with what’s going on. It’s only a pity that his gift can’t tell him what his father, or anyone else, is lying about. It only tells him that they’re liars.

With more places making marijuana legally these days, this part of the story might not seem so serious as it did back in the 1990s, when schools were emphasizing that kids should “just say no” to drugs. Marijuana was viewed as being as bad as any other drug, and in this book, the grower doesn’t seem concerned about the possible medical uses.

Sam’s father is not the villain of the story, although he is engaged in something that he doesn’t want to reveal to his son or the rest of the town immediately. There is also a subplot about the death of Sam’s mother. She is already dead when the story begins, but Sam and his father haven’t completely healed. At the urging of Marty’s mother, who also helps Sam to explore his gift, the two of them begin talking about her more, when they had been avoiding discussing her for some time because talking about her was too sad for them.

In the end, Sam thinks that he’s found a way to stop sensing people’s lies (the less he pays attention to what he senses, the less he feels it, so he thinks that ignoring his gift will cause it to fade over time), which is a relief to him because he didn’t like always wondering what people were really lying about, and as Carmen said, some lies are for the best and should be none of his business. I think that’s true, especially the part about lying about things that should be no one else’s business. Some people can be rather pushy in wanting to know the details of other people’s lives, and if they won’t accept “I don’t feel like talking about it” or “I don’t want to tell you” for an answer, a lie of some sort might be a person’s only recourse. Depending on the circumstances, a lie might be harmful or it might protect. Like with Sam’s gift, it may not be immediately obvious which it is, either. Not that people should make a habit of lying, but there are times when it might be the best course of action for all concerned.

I’d like to add that there are many different ways of being truthful as well as lying.  If there are partial lies, and there are partial truths as well.  Some people think that politeness is a kind of lying, like in Carmen’s example of pretending that you like someone’s clothes when you really don’t, but that’s not necessarily so.  Being polite doesn’t mean that you’re pretending but perhaps you’re just choosing which of your thoughts are the most important to mention. Many, perhaps most of us, don’t just think one thing when someone asks us what we think about something.  For example, when someone asks your opinion of their clothes, you might think something like, “Well, I like the color, but I don’t like the style.  At least, I don’t like the way that style looks on you.  But, maybe that’s just because I’m not used to seeing you wear things like that.  I might change my mind later.  Actually, later on, I’ll probably forget that you ever wore that because I don’t care that much about clothes anyway.  Still a nice color, though.”  At least, that’s what goes on in my mind frequently.  There’s no point in telling anyone those random, meandering thoughts, so I just pick the most important part and tell them that I like the color.  Why bother being critical in an effort to sound truthful when the real truth of the matter is that clothes in general aren’t that important to me and I’ll probably just change my mind later, if it sticks in my mind long enough for me give it a second thought?

Then, there are the lies that some people label as the truth for their own purposes. I’ve seen plenty of people say harmful and insulting things to others and then hide behind the defense that they are “just telling it like it is,” when they actually aren’t. Usually, when people say that, they’re actually telling it like it isn’t: lies, exaggerations, or just plain insults disguised as truth. In those cases, their intentions were not to point out some important truth for the benefit of anyone.  Often, they were just trying to hurt someone’s feelings and then further hurt them by accusing them of not being able to handle the truth.  My rule of thumb for distinguishing between people who are really “telling it like it is” and liars who are just pretending is the same as the one I use with assessing advertisements: If a company has to shell out lots of money to tell you something about their product, it’s because what they’re saying isn’t something that you’d ever notice by actually using it.  If it were obviously true, there would be no need to put so much effort into telling you because you’d just know.  I think it’s the same with people who “tell it like it is.”  If someone has to actually say that they’re “telling it like it is,” it’s a strong hint that they’re probably not.  Similarly, anyone who brags about being truthful and trustworthy is probably doing it because they know that no one else would ever think to associate those qualities with them without being told.

Posted on by TracyC · 6 Comments

Mystery of the Silent Friends

SilentFriendsMystery of the Silent Friends by Robin Gottlieb, 1964.

Nina Martin loves her father’s antique store. Although selling antiques is how her family makes their living, there are some that Nina finds it difficult to let go of when someone wants to buy them. Nina especially doesn’t want her father to sell the two automatons that she calls Henri and Henriette. The automatons are beautiful mechanical dolls that each do something special. Nina calls the boy doll “Henri” because he writes the name “Henri Bourdon” on a piece of paper. (Her father points out that it might be the name of the maker, not the doll itself.) The girl doll, Henriette, is a little more complicated and draws a series of different pictures. Most of the pictures seem to be of a little Swiss village, although one of them is oddly of a monkey that looks like the “speak no evil” monkey in the saying “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.”

SilentFriendsAutomatonsFor a time, it seems like there’s no risk of the automatons being sold because no one seems particularly interested in buying them. Then, suddenly, two different men come to the shop and ask to buy the dolls. Weirdly, each of them tells the same story to Nina’s father: that their name is George Ballantine the Third, that their family once owned the automatons, that the dolls are actually part of a set of three, that they own the third doll (a girl doll that plays the spinet), and that they want to purchase the other two in order to reunite the set. Nina’s father is bewildered by these two men with identical stories and identical names and refuses to sell the automatons because of his daughter’s attachment to them and because he doesn’t know which of the two men to believe and doesn’t trust either of them.

Nina comes to think of the two men as “Red Ballantine” and “Brown Ballantine” because of their different hair colors. Brown Ballantine seems to be the more credible of the two. He invites Mr. Martin and Nina to his home in order to show them the third automaton and, hopefully, persuade Mr. Martin to sell him the other two. They visit Brown Ballantine’s apartment in an old brownstone, and he shows them the beautiful, spinet-playing doll as well as the rest of his collection of mechanical toys. However, Mr. Martin still refuses to make the sale.

SilentFriendsMechanicalToys

Nina tells her friend, Muffin, about the two mysterious Ballantines. The two girls are curious about which of the men is the genuine George Ballantine the Third and decide to investigate. When “Red Ballantine” comes to the shop again, trying to persuade Mr. Martin to sell the automatons, the girls ask if he would consider showing them the automaton he owns as a test. At first, the red-haired man is hesitant, but then he agrees that they can come and see his doll. Mr. Martin is embarrassed at the girls’ forwardness in asking, but he admits that he is also curious about the two Ballantines.

SilentFriendsSpyingAt first, they all expect that Red Ballantine won’t be able to show them the third doll and will give up trying to buy the other two, but to their astonishment, he takes them to the same apartment where Brown Ballantine said that he lived and shows them the exact same doll they saw before. Instead of clearing things up, the identities of the two men seem to get all the more confusing. However, Muffin notices something strange about the tune that the doll plays on the spinet that gives them a clue as to why the three dolls are so important.  Later, someone breaks into the antique store and uncovers a hidden secret about Henri as well.

Together, the three automatons are hiding a secret, and only by considering the message that each of them offers can the girls discover what it is.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.  There is also a sequel to this book called Secret of the Unicorn, which involves a secret message hidden in a tapestry.

My Reaction

Although I was pretty sure which of the two Ballantines was the genuine one, I was never completely sure until almost the end.  In a way, I was a little disappointed by the dolls’ final secret because I though it was something that was especially old, from when the dolls were first created, but the secret messages were actually a more recent addition to the dolls’ repertoire by an eccentric man with a treasure to hide and a taste for practical jokes and riddles.  Muffin is a habitual practical joker, and that partly figures into the solution of the mystery.

I thought it was kind of interesting, too, that Mr. Martin has the habit of walking around with a cigarette in his mouth that he never lights, like Inspector Cramer in the Nero Wolfe mysteries.

Posted on by TracyC

The Bassumtyte Treasure

BassumtyteTreasureThe Bassumtyte Treasure by Jane Louise Curry, 1978.

When young Tommy Bassumtyte’s parents died, he went to live with his grandfather. However, his grandfather is now dead, and he is living with his 92-year-old great-aunt, who is in a wheelchair, and her 72-year-old daughter, who has recently had her driver’s license revoked due to her poor eyesight. Although the pair of them have taken good care of Tommy, neighbors have become concerned that they will not be able to do so for much longer because of their age and failing health. Rather than see Tommy sent to a foster home, they decide that he must go to the man who Tommy learns should really be his legal guardian, a distant cousin also named Thomas who lives in the family’s ancestral home, Boxleton House, in England.

The elder Thomas Bassumtyte, who should have taken Tommy when his grandfather passed away, has also since died, but his son, also named Thomas, agrees to take him. Tommy is quickly shipped off to England before there can be a custody hearing in the United States about him because the relatives fear that some official might try to prevent Tommy from being sent out of the country. Tommy is eager to go because he remembers fantastic stories that his grandfather told him about Boxleton House. The current Thomas Bassumtyte also lives there, although the place has become rather run-down, and he fears that he will not be able to keep the place much longer. Thomas was a mountain climber, but he was injured in a fall and hasn’t been able to work much since. He tells Tommy that the two of them might have to move when he is fully recovered and can do more work for the Foreign Office, but Tommy loves Boxleton House from the first moment he sees it and wants to stay.

According to the lore of Boxleton House, a distant ancestor of theirs hid a treasure there, but no one has been able to find it. If young Tommy and Thomas can find it, it would solve many of their problems, and they would be able to keep the house and restore it. All young Tommy has is the mysterious rhyme that his grandfather told him and the strange medallion that his great-grandfather brought with him when he went to the United States in the late 1800s. Thomas tells him that the treasure was supposedly hidden by a distant ancestor of theirs who was fond of riddles, called Old Thomas.

The Bassumtytes were secretly Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I. Old Thomas was alive then and had a son called Tall Thomas. Tall Thomas traveled frequently and was mysterious about the places he went. One night, he returned to Boxleton House with a young baby, who he said was his son. He had married in secret, and his young wife had died shortly after giving birth. Tall Thomas also brought her body back to Boxleton for burial. However, that wasn’t Tall Thomas’s only secret. Although he remarried, giving his son a stepmother, and lived on for a number of years, he was eventually executed for smuggling messages for the captive Catholic queen, Mary, Queen of Scots. The family was stripped of its noble title and only barely managed to hang onto their house and land. If there was a treasure hidden during this time, it was probably something that the Bassumtytes were afraid would be confiscated by the queen’s soldiers as punishment for the family’s disloyalty or something that Mary had given to Tall Thomas to hide for her.

As Thomas tells Tommy more about the house and the family’s history, he points out Tommy’s uncanny resemblance to Small Thomas, Tall Thomas’s son, as shown in an old painting. Tommy feels a strange connection to Small Thomas, and begins seeing and hearing strange things. An older woman comforts him in the middle of the night, having him recite the same rhyme that his grandfather taught him. A small painting later reveals that this woman was Small Thomas’s grandmother. She appears to Tommy other times, giving him a glimpse back in time and clues to solve the puzzles of Boxleton House.

It is only when Thomas accepts the advice of a family friend who works for a museum that they come to understand the full significance of their family’s heirlooms and the hidden treasure. The treasure may not be quite what the Bassumtytes have always believed it was, but then, the Bassumtytes themselves aren’t quite who they always thought they were, either.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Meg Mackintosh and The Case of the Missing Babe Ruth Baseball

Meg Mackintosh Mysteries

MMBaseball

Meg Mackintosh and The Case of the Missing Babe Ruth Baseball by Lucinda Landon, 1986.

MMBaseballAlbumThis is the first book in the Meg Mackintosh series, and it was the first mystery story that I ever read, when I was about seven years old.  It started a life-long love of mysteries!

Meg’s grandfather shows Meg and her friend Liddy some old family photographs and tells them about the time when his cousin Alice took his prize possession: a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth.  Alice was a bossy girl who always liked to tease him, and so she created a kind of treasure hunt, challenging him to solve it in order to get the baseball back.  Unfortunately, he could never figure out the clues and still doesn’t know what happened to the baseball.

Meg’s brother, Peter, has a Detective Club, but he refuses to allow Meg to join, saying that she needs to prove that she can solve a mystery.  Seeing this as her chance, Meg decides that she’s going to solve this old puzzle and find the Babe Ruth baseball!  However, she also has competition from Peter, who thinks that he’s the better detective and tries to send Meg off in the wrong direction.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

All of the books in the Meg Mackintosh series allow readers to try to solve the mysteries along with Meg, stopping periodically to ask them if they’ve noticed a clue that Meg has noticed or if they know what the significance of a clue is.  There are pictures to help, and readers are invited to stop and study the details before moving on. I think this is a good way to introduce children to puzzle-solving and help them develop critical thinking skills and an ability to notice details. I would recommend adults reading these books, or at least the first one or two along with children, so they can discuss the stories and clues with them, helping them spot clues as they begin to get used to the format of the books.

This is an excellent series for introducing children to the mystery genre for the first time! When I was young and just learning what mysteries were, I was fascinated to discover that I already had all of the knowledge I needed to solve this mystery along with Meg because all of the clues to Alice’s treasure hunt had to do with nursery rhymes. If you can recognize the rhymes in the book, you’re well on your way to solving the mystery!