'From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler' by E. L. Konigsburg

Since its first appearance over 50 years ago, The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler has gained a place in the hearts of generations of readers - and has rightly become one of the most celebrated and beloved children's books of all time.

MY THOUGHTS: 

Phew, I can finally tick off this super-long title. (Just to be clear, I'm referring to the title being super-long, not the story itself.) For years I've seen this Newbery Award winning middle-grade novel from 1968 recommended far and wide. I finally borrowed a library e-book and found it both thought-provoking and very cute.

Claudia Kincaid decides to run away and live for a short time in New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, because it's such an elegant and important place in which to hide. She coerces her younger brother Jamie to join her, since he's a fiscal wizard who has saved loads of pocket money. Their simple mission to avoid detection soon becomes a compulsive quest to discover the origins of a stunning angel statue. Claudia isn't sure what appeals so strongly to her, but trusts that finding out will be an epiphany. All she and Jamie know is that it came from the collection of a wealthy lady named Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler who sold it to the museum for $225.  

It is the elderly and wise Mrs Frankweiler who deduces what drives Claudia so hard to find the answer, and what manner of mindshift will really make a difference in her restless heart. 

It wouldn't be such a fun read without the witty and evolving rapport between Claudia and Jamie, who forever banter but are truly in sync. They are now up among my favourite storybook sibling duos, and Konigsburg's illustrations reinforce what a lovable team they make. Claudia is a straight A student full of head knowledge, and as the eldest, a bit of a know-it-all. But Jamie is a very pragmatic 9-year-old, and I love how Claudia defers to him in all their economic decisions. 

The museum is an atmospheric setting. It housed over 365 000 works of art way back when this book was published, which means the Kincaids would have to look at 1000 exhibits per day to see it all within a year. When Claudia and Jamie settle down in an antique bed on their first night in hiding, we are told, 'The silence seeped from their heads to their soles and then into their souls.' Sounds a bit spooky to me, but I like it. 

When I read a couple of other reviews on Goodreads, one lady ranked it low and remarked that the modern kids she knows wouldn't grasp or appreciate the introspective and motivational messages that kids of the late 1960s apparently did. But as far as I'm concerned, the book is as great as it ever was, and using her own reasoning, if anything deserves to have stars lopped off, it should be our 21st century culture, if it discourages contemplation in juvenile fiction.

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'Charlotte Sometimes' by Penelope Farmer

A time-travel story that is both a poignant exploration of human identity and an absorbing tale of suspense.

It's natural to feel a little out of place when you're the new girl, but when Charlotte Makepeace wakes up after her first night at boarding school, she's everyone thinks she's a girl called Clare Mobley, and even more shockingly, it seems she has traveled forty years back in time to 1918.

MY THOUGHTS: 

This is a re-read from my childhood. Silent reading sessions were the best, and the details of this story were sketchy. The fact that it's a time slip story stood out most, for I love those. 

Feeling lonely and awkward, Charlotte drifts off to sleep on her first night at boarding school in a shared dorm room. She wakes up next morning and finds herself in the same room with oddly different furniture. In the opposite bed is a little girl who is adamant that Charlotte is, in fact, her own sister, Clare. It is not the next morning after all. Charlotte has been swept back 40 years into the past. 

This is a doppelganger yarn and time travel tale rolled into one. At first it chops and changes. Charlotte is sometimes her own self in 1958, and other times assumes Clare's identity in 1918 while World War 1 rages in the background. The same thing happens to poor Clare, although we never read that side of the switch. Eventually, circumstances transpire to keep them both permanently where (or rather when) they shouldn't be, unless they come up with a solution. 

All sorts of school politics happen in both time periods. Charlotte is thoughtful and intuitive, which people don't always notice through her sedate front, although I find her astonishingly slow on the uptake at times. (Hooray Charlotte, at last it dawns on you that women tend to change their surnames when they get married.) Emily Moby, her 'sister' in 1918, is defensive and non-conformist, possibly one of the story's most memorable characters. This little girl won't be pushed around by anyone. 

The details of the war era makes the earlier of the two settings the focal point. All sorts of desperate cost-cuttings and rationings become part of everyday life, including the sacrifice of flower gardens for vegetables. When Charlotte and Emily are billeted out with the Chisel Brown family of Flintlock Lodge, the grievous loss of their son Arthur in the trenches of France spreads to impact even the girls, who have never met him. (Whoa, he's a haunting character, in more ways than one!) 

The story is not perfect. The premise itself is strained, since the bed portal only works with Charlotte and Clare, regardless of whoever else sleeps in it throughout the years. Even the characters remark on the crazy unlikelihood of this, so Farmer herself must have realised what a stretch of credulity she was creating. It may seem an unfair thing to mention, considering the same implausibility applies to all time slip stories to some extent, but this one seems particularly clunky. 

Penelope Farmer's writing style sometimes makes me pause mid sentence to wonder, 'Whatever next?' She matches emotive qualities to simple objects in a way that's a bit jarring. For example, how can a cake of soap have a 'glum and parsimonious' smell? That's super specific. In another instance, chubby Mrs Chisel Brown speaks in a 'fat' voice. Come on, how can a person's voice match their physical shape? It's obviously stylistic, but jolts me out of the story's flow to roll my eyes at Farmer's weird technique.

I think the story is strongest if we read it as an analogy that shows the strain of maintaining masks in our own lives. The Charlotte/Clare swap reveals the exhausting juggling act of trying to be different things to different people, rather than just our own straightforward selves. We can take that on board in this story without the fascinating benefit of time travel.    

Overall, this is quite a fun time slip story, though I think Penelope Farmer could have tied up a few loose ends and revealed where 40 years had taken several different characters. I'll give it the extra half star for Emily and for Arthur, who lived and breathed on the pages, even though he's a dead character.

Oh, and check out the song by The Cure. 

🌟🌟🌟½

'Death Comes as the End' by Agatha Christie

In this novel of anger, jealousy, betrayal and murder, the Queen of Mystery transports us back to ancient Egypt 2000 B.C. where a priest’s daughter, investigating a suspicious death, uncovers a wasp’s nest of jealousy, betrayal, and serial murder.

MY THOUGHTS:

I'd just hopped into a bubble bath with an Agatha Christie mystery expecting 1930s Britain as usual, but got Ancient Egypt instead! Whoa, that took me totally off guard but I decided to flow with it. It seems that spurred on by her Middle East field observations with her archaeologist husband, the Queen of Crime challenged herself to create a detective story with a radically different setting, while retaining her hallmark for murders on family estates with assorted motives between an extensive cast. The foreword of my library book shows she was encouraged by her friend, Professor Stephen Glanville, who sent her heaps of literature.  

I've often thought about the potential pitfalls of historical research for authors who are used to writing contemporary fiction. My husband always insists that any plot can be tailored to fit any time period and setting. I believe Agatha Christie aimed to prove the same thing in her own way, and did a pretty good job.

It's some time around 4000 BC and Renisenb, a young widow, has returned to her family home after eight years away. She's relieved to find that her brothers, sisters-in-law, granny and father haven't changed at all. Time tends to stand still at her family home, which comforts her. Yet Hori, the young estate manager, challenges Renisenb that this is not the case. He's certain that turmoil brews beneath the appearance of family unity which needs just one spark from outside to make it all combust. 

This spark comes in the form of Nofret, their elderly father's hot new concubine, who turns out to be an artful troublemaker and makes no friends for herself. When Nofret is discovered dead on a walking trail, it appears she accidentally fell from another path high above, yet everyone tacitly agrees that convenient conclusion is a copout. The big question is, who resented Nofret enough to push her? Could it be any of Renisenb's brothers; gentle, compliant Yahmose, Sobek, the inept grumbler, or Ipy, the mutinous and spoiled 16-year-old? Perhaps Henet, the two-faced and calculating poor relative, knows more than she's letting on. 

When it appears that Nofret's vengeful spirit is at large, trying to get even with every single member of her hapless husband's family, it's clear something must be done. 

The story delves into the masks people wear, yet in this context, the wise Hori likens them to false doors in pyramids and tombs. Sadly, I wasn't convinced by the revelation of the murderer. Usually Agatha Christie's unexpected twists work fine, but this one feels forced. Even though she left a characteristic hint to justify the great reveal, I didn't buy it. The chasm between what we see of the murderer and what we get is simply too huge to swallow, and I can't believe for a moment this person would snap to the extent of embarking on the reckless rampage that ensues.

That's sad really, because other than that, I enjoyed the visit to Ancient Egypt. 

🌟🌟🌟         

'Pollyanna in Hollywood' by Elizabeth Borton

MY THOUGHTS: 

 This is the seventh Glad Book. Jimmy has been commissioned to build another big dam in Inyo County, California. They've rented a house in nearby Hollywood, where Pollyanna and the kids can enjoy the good life while he comes and goes. The Pendleton family strike up a friendship on the beach with Happy Bangs, a melancholic silent comedy star who introduces them to the glittery world behind the scenes where movies get made. Meanwhile the kids make some interesting friends. Junior develops a passion for cameras and filming, and Judy for dancing and choreography. 

Elizabeth Borton takes the baton from Harriet Lummis Smith. She was born in 1904, lived until 2001 and one of her other books won the Newbery Medal in 1966. Judging by this Glad Book alone, Borton's excessively detailed style of writing is no longer what we're used to in the twenty-first century. Some readers may claim that it doesn't move the story forward but rather drags it down. For example, Pollyanna and Jimmy treat Jamie and Sadie to dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and descriptions of the decor and staff linger for pages.

 Her prose could be likened to painstaking brushstrokes which allow no room for us to fill in details with our own imaginations. These slabs of excessive description bothered me a bit, but I think the key to enjoying this book is just to chill out with the slow moments and be content going nowhere for a while. Perhaps it's even the sort of meditative style that does us good, which is mostly found in older books now. 

Yet having said her writing style tends to be slow, Borton's plots themselves can move insanely fast. Meetings, marriages and movies happen in a snap. Another new friend of theirs, Maude Cravath, turns from down-and-out saleswoman to movie star within a few short weeks, I kid you not. Were motion pictures ever really made so quickly in the 1930s? Even if they were that slapdash, how did she build her fan base so fast, considering the red carpet event at which she shone was the debut night? It's pretty unbelievable. 

One thing I did appreciate is how yet another character, Myra Britton, decides she's content to have played lead role in one feature film to prove to herself that she can, and now she's done. She rejects further offers from producers. 'No, I have done one piece of almost perfect work. I could never do better. So I stop. I do not care for anti-climaxes. I have done well. It is enough.' Later, Pollyanna agrees with Myra's courage and conviction to retire before her ball really starts rolling. 'It would be a pity to follow that inspired piece with one less noble and less finished.' You rarely find such a refreshing attitude in our era, where celebrities struggle to maintain their platforms for as long as possible. 

 But we have to take positive dated attitudes with the negative. 'Junior was learning the lesson that boys must learn - to be strong in the face of grief. Girls may cry but boys must hold back the scalding tears as unmanly.' What a load of harmful nonsense.    

In other family news, Uncle John is researching and writing a book about American folklore, which means plenty of travel for him and Aunt Ruth. Jamie has signed a contract with a motion picture studio to write scenarios for them, with a stupendous salary he couldn't possibly refuse, so he, Sadie and their little boy (who they nickname Jamsie) head to Hollywood too, to live close to Pollyanna's family. But alas, Jamie hits a slab of writer's block and becomes even more touchy and harder to live with than normal. As his loved-ones know full well, it's tough on a chap whose only source of self-worth comes from his ability to write. Perhaps he's secretly irritated that his stepfather is treading on his turf.  

Borton's Nancy is a bit of a grumblebum, but in all fairness, Smith started it. Pollyanna is still an energetic sticky-beak who changes lives while others simply ponder good ideas they never implement. Jimmy is still dependable, humorous and dare I say sexy. The kids are growing up and developing distinct characters. My bottom line is that this book is fun for bringing us more stories about the Pendletons and Carews, but in all honesty, it's not as engrossing as the first six, by Porter and Smith. Any book that manages to be both speedy and snail-paced in the worst ways strikes a bad note, and I'd nod along with any reader who calls it a chore.   

Anyway, next up will be Pollyanna's Castle in Mexico. 

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