The Return of the Doll Book of the Month Club! A Question of Time

   I know. The Doll Book of the Month Club has been on hiatus for a while. But it's back! I found a book to do, so we're back in business. 

  The book in question is, "A Question of Time" by Dina Anastasio. It was first published in 1978,  That's handy to know, considering the timeline of the story. The illustrations are by Dale Payson.

  Apparently the author's daughter's doll collection inspired the book.

  As the book opens, Syd Stowe is told that she and her parents will be moving from New York City, to a small town in Minnesota, leaving behind her great grandfather, Jake. 

  Jake left the same small town in 1910, as an 18 year old, to pursue his dream of acting in New York City. He only returned once, and he's in his 90's now. Syd hates leaving her beloved New York City, and her best friend, Jill. And she's determined to hate her new home town.

  Syd is finally persuaded to have a look around her new town. She visits a store, where there are some very interesting dolls on display. They are very detailed, hand carved wooden dolls. On one visit to the store, an old man arrives and delivers a new one. The shop lady tells Syd that his name is Mr. Stowe, (Syd's last name!), and that he makes the dolls. He wants them to all be sold together, and he still has one to make, so she isn't selling them yet.

  Of course, Syd is curious: about Mr. Stowe, (Is he related to her somehow?), about the dolls. (Supposedly they are based on real people. What is the doll made in a reaching position supposed to be doing?) She finds the exact people the dolls seem to be based on, in an old book about the town that she finds in the library. But then the book disappears. Mr. Stowe gives his address to the lady in the shop, but the only house there has been deserted for years, after the family who lived there died.

  Syd writes to her friend Jill often. As time passes though, she becomes caught up in unraveling the mystery surrounding the dolls. She meets a girl named Laura, who plays marbles on the sidewalk in front of a store, while waiting for her grandfather. Oddly, she looks just like one of the dolls. Even the bag of marbles looks like the one the doll carries. Syd becomes friends with the shy and depressed looking Laura.

  Does Syd solve the mystery? Why is a kid in the late 70's playing marbles? Is Syd related to the doll maker?

  Okay, I'm not going to discuss the ending completely. I'll just say that the book wasn't bad, but there were some plot holes. I would have liked it when I was a kid, because I loved this sort of thing: mystery, ghostly stuff, time travely things. There are some spoilers below you can check out after reading the book. My opinions on those plot holes.. 

  The book doesn't quite make sense. The house has been deserted and everybody in the town thinks Jake was murdered, because one night there was an argument, heard by passing locals, where someone threatened to kill someone. Then he disappeared, (to New York.). Okay. This is a small town, where everybody seems to know about everybody. Surely the whole town would have known that Syd's great grampa left town to become an actor. Maybe the family didn't like to talk about it, but wouldn't someone have asked where he was? If he left town, it was probably on a train, so wouldn't someone have seen him? And if there was suspicion of a murder, wouldn't the police have questioned his family?  And if the rest of the family died in a boating accident, everybody must have known about that too. After all, Syd finds it in the old newspapers. So why do they think the house is haunted by a murdered family?  Didn't anybody try to contact Jake when his family died? Okay, maybe they didn't know where to get in touch with him. Or, maybe they still thought his dad murdered him. But when he came back and his whole family was gone, didn't he ask anybody in town if they knew what happened? Surely somebody would have known. And they would have known he wasn't murdered if he came back. I have an issue with Jake leaving for New York to become an actor. In 1910, wouldn't he have gone into vaudeville or something? Was New York where people started an acting career in 1910?  And one thing, just personal, but if this guy is almost 100 years old, wouldn't you wait a couple more years before moving away and leaving him? Are you going to:

 A. Miss the last couple of years you might have with him. 

and B. Leave when he might need you the most? Suppose he needs help at his age? What are you, a monster?

  I thought it was going to be a time travel book of sorts. I thought that way into the book. Instead, it turned out to be a weird ghost story/magic sort of book. Why did Syd's family come back as ghosts at that particular time? Why didn't they just talk to her? What was the purpose any way? And didn't she think it might make her Great Gramps feel better to know what happened to his family? Why didn't she tell him they found out? One final thing, if you don't want to read the book, but you're wondering what happens to the dolls, the shop keeper says Mr. Stowe said to give them to Syd.

  That's it for this month's Doll Book of the Month Club. See you soon.

The Doll Book of the Month Club: The Mystery of the Silent Friends

  First of all, here's an update on the leg situation. I pulled an Elephant Man last night, and decided to 'sleep like a normal person'. I laid on my right side. Big mistake. A few hours later my leg was hurting bad enough to distract me from sleep, so I had to switch. It's afternoon now, and I have been stretching my leg, pressing the spot on my leg that feels like a tensed muscle to try to relax it, and laying on my left side, but today that's just not working. I am still having leg pain even when I'm laying still, and now my lower back is hurting too from laying on my back trying to stretch out my leg. This leg is definitely a work in progress! 

  This month's Doll Book of the Month Club entry is one I am pretty sure I read as a kid. It is called "Mystery of the Silent Friends" and is by Robin Gottlieb. 

  As a kid I read A LOT, and I would read almost anything that had a title that began with  "Mystery of the". This book was originally published in 1964, and the copy I would have read, and the one we have now, is a Scholastic paper back. I found our copy at the library book sale when the kids were little, and I read it to them. I don't remember any of their reactions to it, but Ivy says she thinks she remembers it, and she liked it. And I like it!

  The story begins in Mr. Martin's antique shop, where his daughter Nina is playing with a pair of 200 year old automatons. (Automatons are mechanical figures that perform a specific action, or series of actions. Kind of like Horsman's 1970 doll Peggy Pen Pal, 1989's Susie Scribbles doll by Wonderama, or Mattel's 1970 drawing doll Sketchy.)  In this case, the figures are a boy, that writes, and a girl that draws pictures. Oddly, the girl draws four pictures of Swiss scenes, and one picture of a 'See no evil' monkey.) Nina's father has owned the automatons for years, and no one has ever been interested in them. That suits Nina, as she loves the automatons. 

She asks her father to never sell them, and he says that isn't very likely anyway, since nobody seems to want them. So of course the next thing that happens is that a man walks into the shop, asking about the automatons. (You know how these old books go!) He claims to be the son of the previous owner, and that he has the third doll in the series, and he wants to reunite them.

  The only thing is, the next day another man comes in, giving the same name: George Ballentine III!  (I had to laugh when one of the girls puts forth the idea that maybe the men are brothers, and the other says, "But who would have two sons and name them both George?" Uh, George Forman? Maybe he read this book.) But George the third the second offers to have them come to his house and see his doll. The father and daughter go, and are amazed by the guy's collection of automatons, which includes birds in cages, acrobats, jugglers, and the supposed 'third doll', who plays a spinet.

  Nina and her friend Muffin, a devotee of practical jokes, decide that the only thing to do is to ask the first man to show them his 'third doll'. This guy is kind of suspect anyway, since when he came in he was wearing a hat over his red hair, and seemed very upset when he bumped into some antlers in the shop and his hat was tipped. 

Nina tips one of the George's hat with a spear, to check his hair colour.

He also claims to be well off, but Nina, who was apparently born to be a detective, notices that he has a broken shoe lace that's been knotted back together. And it only gets more confusing. When the red haired man comes back to hear Mr. Martin's final word on selling the automatons, he now has brown hair, like the second man. And even more weird, he takes them to the exact same 5th Avenue Brownstone, and shows them the exact same doll playing a spinet. But he doesn't give them the full tour as the other man did, and whisks them out hurriedly after the doll plays her tune.

  Now what?! Mr. Martin has told both men he's not selling, as he wants to distance himself from the whole strange situation. But, of course, this is a 1960's kid's book, so Nina and Muffin, who have to know what the deal is with the two George's, do some detective work on their own, strolling unchaperoned around New York City and Central Park. 

  I won't tell you how the book ends and spoil the fun. And it is a fun book. Do kids these days like this kind of book? I don't know. If you're considering reading it to you own child, or grandchild, (or some random kid on the street. I don't know what you do...), you know them and what they'll like or put up with. As I said, Ivy liked it, but then Ivy was raised on the Scholastic kid's books of my childhood, and also has most of the tastes of an old person, so there you go.

  It's a short 154 pages, and an easy read. The illustrations are by Al Brule, and are fun pictures typical of the period. If anybody wants a copy of this book, I managed to get an extra copy recently, so let me know. I will ask you to pay shipping though. If you aren't into physical books, and you have an account with the Internet Archive, you can read the book HERE. 

  There is a sequel to this book, called "Secret of the Unicorn", which features Nina, but unfortunately not her more colourful friend Muffin. Muffin has been replaced by a girl named Polly. No word on Muffin's whereabouts... 

Doll Book of the Month Club: Missing Melinda

   The sort of second part of the Our Dolls, Ourselves post will have to wait a little longer. It's the first of the month, and time for the next entry in The Doll Book of the Month Club.
  This month's book is "Missing Melinda", by Jacqueline Jackson. It was first published in 1967. The illustrations in mine are by Irene Burns.

Mine is a somewhat grubby ex-library edition.

  This book has been sitting here waiting to be read for years. We bought it at the library sale, where the books are donated by the library and regular people, and sold to raise money for the library. I always meant to read it to Ivy, but never got around to it. We bought so many books at the book sale and from school order forms, as well as the book store. We couldn't read them all! So I finally got around to reading it myself a couple of weeks ago.
  At first I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. I didn't think much of the writing at the very beginning. It got better quickly, and I ended up enjoying it. Beware though! The very first few pages give away the endings of several doll based books, including "Miss Hickory",(which you can read my post on HERE.) and "The Dolls' House", by Rumer Godden,which I recently featured as The Doll Book of the Month. You can see that post HERE.

Edited for your protection.

  "Missing Melinda" involves a pair of twin girls who move into an old deceased relative's loaded house. They venture into the crowded attic the first day there, and find a very old and beautiful doll, who they name Melinda. 

Finding Melinda inspires them to write a book. "Missing Melinda" is actually the book they supposedly write about their adventure.

  The adventure really gets going when the girls take Melinda to the park, in a wagon. The girls decide to climb a tree, leaving Melinda below in the wagon, lest they break her. When they come back down they discover that Melinda has been stolen.

  As I said, the book is 'written' by the twins, who alternate chapters. They're a colourful couple of kids, who have developed the habit of quoting Shakespeare, and using his flowery speech, from their Shakespeare addicted father. (The girls are even named Cordelia and Ophelia.)
  The twins set out to find who stole Melinda, and get her back. Along the way they get help from the boy next door, Jimmy, who insists he doesn't want girl neighbours to play with,(but could they play with him, please?).
 

He helps the girls as they try to solve the mystery of Melinda's disappearance. Jimmy actually knows quite a lot about dolls himself, and introduces the girls to one of their suspects.

   They have a list of suspects to investigate. The suspect that Jimmy introduces them to is a lady who knows a lot about dolls. The author must have known quite a bit about dolls, because the character, Mrs. Otis, reels off loads of doll makers and names, as well as describing various dolls. She gives them a tour of her doll filled house and takes them to a doll hospital. Both trips are filled with descriptions of dolls, and doll mechanisms. There's so much to take in! You'll see many names you'll recognize if you know anything about dolls yourself. Mrs. Otis and the doll hospital 'doctor' even go into some history on dolls, and it's all quite interesting. So much so that I wonder if kids would enjoy this book as much as a grown doll collector! It's all enjoyable though, even if a child might feel somewhat  bogged down with 'boring' information at various times.
  That's not to say a child wouldn't enjoy the book. The twins are likeable. There's mystery and humour. The girls visit some interesting places and run into memorable characters.

The ending, especially, is exciting. It's a race to catch the culprit before Melinda disappears forever.

  The only age recommendation I could find said 7 to 10 year olds, but there was also a review by someone who said it was their favourite book in middle school. (I think middle schoolers read more mature things these days, which isn't to say some might not still enjoy the book.)
  I found that Jacqueline Jackson is a local lady! She was born in Washington, worked as a professor of English at the University of Illinois, but at the time "Missing Melinda" was written, she lived in Kent, Ohio, and taught Children's Literature at Kent State University. (Kent State was the site of the famous 1970 shooting, where the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the bombing of neutral Cambodia, killing four, and injuring nine, students. The incident was the inspiration for the song "Four Dead in Ohio" by Crosby,Stills,Nash,and Young.)
  Here's the inside of the "Missing Melinda" dust jacket.

 So her daughters reading interests, and actual requests, inspired "Missing Melinda". Other books by Jacqueline Jackson include "Julie's Secret Sloth", "The Paleface Redskins", "The Ghost Boat", and "The Taste of Spruce Gum".  According to Good Reads she considers "Stories From the Round Barn" and "More Stories From the Round Barn" to be her best works.

  Ms. Jackson is still writing! She writes a poem every week for the Illinois Times. She and her helper commented on this post, which you can see below, and I have been in contact through Messenger on the blog's Facebook page. Ms. Jackson has a webpage, for those who are interested. You can see it HERE. You can read an interview with her HERE.
  I enjoyed "Missing Melinda", and I recommend it for kids who like mysteries with a bit of humour, people who are interested in dolls, and kids who like a good, interesting read they can really get into. The book appears to be out of print, but a used copy can be found on Amazon or Ebay. Some of them can be quite expensive, so shop well!

Cozy Winter Reads: Magic Elizabeth by Norma Kassirer

    First of all I have to welcome our two newest followers,sara scales and Allenoel. I get an error page when I click on you sara. Any suggestions? Allenoel has three blogs you can check out,including For The Love Of Dolls  Thanks for joining us guys.
  If you live where the weather has been hitting you the way it has here, you're having plenty of extra time with your kids, as they celebrate some welcome snow days. When it's cold outside it's so nice to be cozy and warm inside, snuggled down with the kids and a good book. When my kids were little they all loved "Magic Elizabeth", by Norma Kassirer,another of my childhood favourites.

  "Magic Elizabeth" was a book I checked out of the school library several times when I was  a kid, before I managed to buy a copy of my own from the book orders they hand out at school. It was another of those classic Scholastic paper backs.  The book was originally published in 1966, but I know it has been reprinted as recently as 1999,(with a different cover from mine.).
The book opens on a rainy night,when Sally finds herself suddenly dropped off with an aunt she hasn't seen since she was a baby and remembers nothing about.

Sally's parents are away, and the lady looking after her has to leave to help her sick daughter. Sally is scared in her aunt's strange, old fashioned house, but she finds a friend in the house next door, and little by little, in Aunt Sarah.

Sally also finds herself caught up in a mystery. In the room she is staying hangs a painting of a little girl with a doll on her lap. Aunt Sarah tells Sally the portrait is of a little girl, also named Sally, who used to live in the house, and the girl's favourite doll, Elizabeth.Sally falls instantly in love with Elizabeth, and is saddened to learn that Elizabeth mysteriously disappeared from the top of the Christmas tree one Christmas Eve long ago. She has to still be in the house somewhere! Sally makes it her mission to find Elizabeth. Soon she must return home, and her aunt plans to sell the house.Elizabeth will be lost forever!
  The best parts of the book involve Sally 'becoming'  the other Sally and reliving moments from her life: does she really time travel, or was she dreaming?

 It's also fun following the clues with Sally as she tries to figure out what happened to Elizabeth.
  The illustrations will look familiar to readers of Mary Norton's Borrowers books,(More of my favourite kid's books.).They're by Joe Crush who,along with his wife Beth also illustrated that series.(An interesting note: He was also a courtroom sketch artist at the Nuremberg trials.)
 My kids always tease me about the fact that so many of the books I loved as a kid had to do with somebody having to 'save the house'. While Aunt Sarah isn't about to loose the house, the kids say her selling the house and Sally's race to find Elizabeth before she does counts as 'saving the house'!
  I would say this book would be entertaining to kids as young as kindergarten age, and as old as 10.There are a couple of copies of Magic Elizabeth on Ebay as I right this, but they are massively expensive, especially since I see from the 'sold' page that the paperback usually sells for normal prices. There is also the more recent edition, so you should be able to find a very affordable copy.(Try Amazon.) 

Our Soggy Camping Trip and 2014 Summer Reading Assignment #2: Ginnie and the Mystery Doll by Catherine Woolley

    Well, we're back from our mini vacation. We got the van fixed just in time to have a couple of days before Ivy goes back to school in about a week.Unfortunately, it rained...sorry: POURED...most of the time we were there. Ken looks forward to cooking out more than just about anything else, so he was literally not a 'happy camper'. Here's what the view looked like from inside our snugly warm camper van: (Just a bit too warm for Ken. But then, everything is.)

The view out of the back door. I got yelled at: Close the door you're getting the bed wet!

 It had rained the night we got there, and the next day Ken spent ages drying out the wood by burning lighter fuel on it. (I'm not sure that works, but that's his idea.) He finally got it fairly dry and thought it would light and make a fire big enough to cook on. And then it REALLY began to rain.

Just to let you see just how submerged it became:

 He did finally get to cook out though. To prove it he had to take a picture of his fire.

We went through a small town we've stopped at a few times, but I never noticed this before:

Oh. A park. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But here's the whole picture...

 Nothing out of the ordinary there, and no park there either! That's the whole park?! But it wasn't...there is a picnic bench behind that tree. A fun day out for the whole family at the Paul and Ruth Bird Memorial Park.

It's nice to travel, and nice to spend concentrated time with Ken and Ivy, but I'll be glad to sleep in my own bed. The bed in the camper is not the most comfortable thing in the world by any stretch of the imagination. I'll be back to Doll-A-Day tomorrow with a review. But for today I'm going to share another book for you to enjoy with your kids.
   This summer's theme seems to be doll books, (That's fitting for a doll collecting blog anyway, right?) For our second 'summer reading assignment' of this year I'm suggesting "Ginnie and the Mystery Doll" by Catherine Woolley.

She's not holding a ball of light. I couldn't stop the glare from the flash.

  

This is another of the books I read as a kid that I checked out more than once from the school library. I never managed to get a copy as a kid though, and when I found this one at the library book sale here in town  I jumped on it so I could read it to the kids. (Ok, and so I could read it again myself!) It's a Scholastic paperback just like the one I got from the school library.

  The book is set in the summer, of course, and Ginnie and her best friend Geneva, and both their families, have rented a house on Cape Cod for the summer. The book was written in 1960, which accounts for how an average family, (or even a couple of them),could afford to rent a house on Cape Cod for a whole summer! Ginnie and Geneva are looking forward to swimming and having fun, but when they go next door to meet their summer neighbor they become involved in a mystery. The neighbor, Miss Wade, lets the girls play dress up in her attic on a rainy day and the girls discover an old diary. The diary belonged to Miss Wade's mother when she was a child, and mentions Lady Vanderbilt, a beautiful doll brought to the little girl from Paris by a sea captain uncle, and the 'valuable jewel' she wore.

The illustrations are nothing to write home about though.

 

  Miss Wade explains that the doll disappeared one summer when she rented the house to a family from California. The girls despair over the long lost doll. One day, at an auction in the village the girls find what they are sure is the missing Lady Vanderbilt, but they haven't enough money to win her, and the doll disappears once again, in the red sports car of her new owner.
  The girls try to track Lady Vanderbilt down, while also enjoying Cape Cod. I always loved the descriptions of the beach, and the girl's experiences picking 'beach plums' to make jelly, and digging for clams. My kids always tease me that so many of my favourite books from my childhood involve somebody needing to save a house. In this book the house doesn't quite need saved, but Miss Wade needs to make some house repairs she just doesn't have the money for, and the return of Lady Vanderbilt and her 'valuable jewel' are just what she needs.

  The book is full of near misses and mystery. (Just where has Lady V been all these years, and where did she come from all of a sudden?) The descriptions of the girls' summer make you smell the sea air and feel the sand beneath your feet. This is the book that made me want to spend a summer in a cottage on Cape Cod, and I still want to do that someday!
  Catherine Woolley wrote 87 books, including a whole series of Ginnie Fellows books, (not all of which were mysteries.). In fact, she wrote so many books that her publisher suggested she use a pen name for some of them. She used her grandmother's name, Jane Thayer, on her books for younger children. She wrote well into her 90's. She died in 2005, at the age of 100.
  The age recommendation for the Ginnie books is 7 to 12+, but judge for yourself if your slightly younger child would be interested. There are  a few copies of Ginnie and the Mystery Doll on Ebay right now and the prices vary greatly. It still seems the book can be had for only $5 though, which is pretty good. The Ginnie books are available in a 10 book set that includes: Ginnie and Geneva; Ginnie Joins In; Ginnie and the New Girl; Ginnie and the Mystery House; Ginnie and the Mystery Doll; Ginnie and Her Juniors; Ginnie and the Cooking Contest; Ginnie and the Wedding Bells; Ginnie and the Mystery Cat; Ginnie and the Mystery Light.You could check Amazon.I'm not sure if it's currently in print, but you could check an actual book store. They're always happy to order books for you.

Summer Reading Assisgnment #3: Sea View Secret by Elizabeth Kinsey

  I hope everyone is having a chance to get some reading in this summer. We haven't had much of a chance ourselves, but that doesn't mean we can't push others to do so! "Do as I say, not as I do!" My latest 'summer reading with your kids' suggestion happens to be one of Ivy's favourites, Sea View Secret' by Elizabeth Kinsey. Ivy has insisted that we read it every summer for the last few years. This year, even though she's 13 now, she still wants me to read it to her. I am glad to do so, because I know that these days are soon coming to a close.
  "Sea View Secret" was originally published in 1964.

 I'm sure it's out of print. I spent years trying to find a copy. This one is much harder to find than the other two books I have talked about so far. It was always one of my favourite books though, and has turned out to be one of Ivy's too. The story is set one sweltering hot summer, when two kids around 10 years old move to the suburbs with their parents and toddler twin siblings. They befriend the family in the only old house left in the neighborhood and discover a mystery surrounding some valuable rings that have been missing for decades. The rings, it turns out, could be just what's needed to save the old house from destruction by a greedy land developer, so of course they have to find them. My kids have pointed out that alot of my favourite books have to do in some way with saving someone's house. Hmm... I wonder what that means?
  The book is full of mystery, nothing scary though, some humour,and a warm story about friendship and family love. It's a nice old fashioned book, but I think kids will still enjoy it. The kids in the story all have respect for adults and take responsibility for doing chores and helping out, so maybe something like this is just what kids these days need to read! There's nothing inappropriate, and the search for the mysterious missing rings is something I think kids can really get caught up in.
  The only copies of this book I have ever seen are Scholastic paperbacks, but I'm sure it was printed in hardback at some point. As with the other books, the age recommendation depends on your child's attention span and interests. I would say you could possibly read it to them from age 6 to 10. As I said, Ivy still likes to have it read to her, but then, it's one of her special books, and this will probably be her last summer to have me read it to her.
  On another subject, the cake topper in my Beatles post was described as being made by Gay-Gem. While Gay-Gem did indeed make the exact same cake top figures, and the ones I found in my research were mostly by them, mine does in fact say Wilton on it. Just saying.