Alpine Avalanche Adventure: Dogs in the Dead of Night (Magic Tree House #46) by Mary Pope Osborne

"His name is not Wild Dog, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always."
---Rudyard Kipling in The Just So Stories

Packing up for their usual school day, Jack and Annie are summoned by a desperate message from their magical friends Teddy and Kathleen. It is time for them to search out the second magical thing needed to restore Merlin's beloved penguin Penny to him, and this time their trip back in time takes them to the Swiss Alps in the early 1800s in search of the rare yellow glacial buttercup.

But finding a fragile flower seems an impossible assignment when their enchanted tree house sets them down in a howling Alpine snowstorm. Jack and Annie find themselves buried in a sudden avalanche until a team of huge shaggy dogs digs them out and a group of torch-bearing monks guides them to a monastery high in the Alps. Recovering with the help of the monks and the company of a rowdy young St. Bernard pup named Barry, Jack and Annie learn from the Abbot, Friar Laurent, that the flower they seek does indeed bloom briefly in the nearby Alpine meadows, but only when the snow has melted in the spring. To while away the time, Annie offers to help train the seemingly clueless Barry, who proceeds to escape the monastery into a blizzard and is soon in need of rescue himself.

Jack and Annie use the magic potion Teddy and Kathleen provided to turn themselves into a pair of rescue dogs and experience the thrill of running strongly through the storm and saving the lost themselves. When the potion's power fades and Barry is safely back where he belongs, Friar Laurent introduces them to the visiting Consul Napoleon Bonaparte and in the monastery's vaulted library shows all of them his life's work, a botanical catalog with many rare specimens--including the Ranuncululs glacialis, the "yellow flower" of their quest. Barry seems to have been matured by the experience into a promising rescue dog himself and with the feeling of having accomplished more than their original mission, Jack and Anne return to their Magic Tree House and home, just in time to head off to school.

Mary Pope Osborne's best-selling Magic Tree House series has a marketing magic of its own, as in this latest entry, Magic Tree House #46: Dogs in the Dead of Night (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)) (Random House, 2012), debuting this month, which has already taken its place among the top sellers. A touch of wizardry and a taste of European history, as presented in the appended "Author's Note" on the Napoleonic Wars and the history of St. Bernard's famous dogs, one of whom is always given the distinction of being named "Barry," make this adventure for early chapter readers educational as well as engaging fun.

As always, Osborne provides a companion study guide, now known as a Fact Tracker, titled Magic Tree House Fact Tracker #24: Dog Heroes: A Nonfiction Companion to Magic Tree House #46: Dogs in the Dead of Night (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)). Children are guided in research on the original Barry and his successors as well as many other famous and not-so-famous heroic dogs of history.

A Thief on Nob Hill: The Silver Guitar (A Julie Mystery) by Kathryn Reiss

"IT'S NOT EVEN A REAL FENDER STRATOCASTER. IT'S JUST A CHEAP FAKE!" THE SHOP OWNER TOLD JULIE.

Oil from a disastrous tanker spill in San Francisco Bay is reaching the shoreline, fouling the grasses and beaches and threatening to kill pelicans and other seabirds. As president of her school's student council, Julie has to do something to help.

The council decides that each class should create a quilt square honoring one type of sea life in the Bay and auction the resulting quilt to raise money to help rescue the birds. As a possible venue for the quilt's sale, Julie's mom invites her to go along to a pre-auction viewing of donated treasures in the Vernon mansion on posh Nob Hill, and Julie's friend T.J. tags along, drawn to the guitar collection of Robert Vernon, an eccentric and eclectic buyer of objects relating to the rich and famous.

Julie is intrigued by an old black hat purportedly belonging to Abraham Lincoln, but T.J. spends his time admiring famous guitarist Danny Kendrick's silver Fender Stratocaster. When Mr. Vernon's cat Mr. Precious takes a liking to him., Mr. Vernon asks T.J. to care for his favorite pet while he is away on a trip. But when Danny returns to Nob Hall the next day to feed Mr. Precious, he just has to sneak a peek at that famous guitar once more. Quietly he tiptoes into the guitar room, Mr. Precious trailing behind him, and takes it gingerly down from the wall. But while he is reverently fingering the strings, Mr. Precious tries to jump onto his shoulder, and the startled T.J. drops the valuable guitar, cracking the sound box.

T.J. is horrified, and when Julie discovers what has happened, she urges him to have the guitar quietly repaired. In the guitar shop, the owner and his helper, a curly-haired boy their age named Matt, tells the two something shocking. The Stratocaster is a fake! Apparently, someone has taken the original from Mr. Vernon's display and substituted a cheap copy. Who could have taken the real Danny Kendricks guitar?

There are plenty of suspects--ditzy and nosy neighbor Mrs. Bizbee, Robert Vernon's indolent unemployed nephew Jasper, Mr. and Mrs. Olgivie, the photographers who were working on site during the society event and have motive and means to steal objects from Vernon's collection. And why does Matt suddenly seem to be shadowing them as they investigate? Unless Julie can sleuth out the real thief before Mr. Vernon's return, it looks like T.J. is going to be the leading suspect. Can the two young detectives concoct their own sting operation to flush out the real thief?

Kathryn Reiss' latest addition to this historical mystery series, The Silver Guitar: A Julie Mystery (American Girl Mysteries) (American Girl, 2011), again takes the reader into a complex mystery built around the scene in San Francisco in the early 1970s, this time beginning with the investigation of a tanker accident which threatens the ecological stability of the Bay itself. As always, the mystery story is backed up by an appendix providing history of the period and photos of artifacts from the time, including one of Jimi Hendrix's famous guitars which serves as a model for the silver guitar of the fictional "Danny Kendricks." Plenty of local color in its setting, convincing red herrings in the case, and a hint of danger make this story a great read for fans of the detective mystery genre and of the well-written and popular American Girls Mysteries.

Piece by Piece: Leaving Gee's Bend by Irene Latham

I mean to tell you, there ain't noplace in the world like Gee's Bend. It's like a little island sitting just about in the middle of the state of Alabama. Only instead of ocean water, it's caught up on three sides by a curve in the Alabama River. Ain't noplace in Gee's Bend you can't get to by setting one foot after another into that orange dirt that likes to settle between your toes. I reckon the hard part is how once you're in Gee's Bend, it ain't all that easy to get out.

Ten-year-old Ludelphia Bennett finds refuge from her monochromatic hard-working life in the tiny black community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, in 1932 by sewing any scraps of colored cloth she can get her hands on into quilt tops. But when her mother, already weakened from influenza comes down with pneumonia after giving birth to little Rose, Ludelphia believes that only Dr. Nelson across the river in Camden can save her life and their family's future.

But the river is way up and Joe's Ferry is abandoned when she arrives to cross. Ludelphia braves the current alone on the log raft ferry, but the cable breaks in the torrent and she is washed far downstream. Barely escaping the flood water with her life, Ludelphia is discovered hiding in her barn by the feared Mrs. Cobb, freshly widowed wife of the storekeeper to whom the Bennetts owe money they can't repay. Unhinged by the almost simultaneous sudden deaths of her husband and beloved niece, the old woman is alternately kind, giving Ludelphia breakfast and a ride to Camden, and threatening, waving her shotgun, calling her a witch, and promising that she's coming to Gee's Bend to take everything everyone has to pay off their debts to her husband. Ludelphia is treated kindly by Dr. and Mrs. Nelson, but the good doctor is too overworked to visit a patient with the then untreatable malady.

Now Ludelphia knows she has no choice but to return to Gee's Bend as quickly as she can to warn her family and neighbors to hide their livestock, tools, and seed stock from confiscation by the crazed Mrs. Cobb. With no ferry to speed her, the forty-mile walk around the river would take days, so in desperation Lu hides herself in one of the wagons in the shotgun-wielding Mrs. Cobb's caravan in the hopes that she can escape in time to warn everyone, not knowing whether her mother will be alive when she returns.

In a a suspenseful narrative, Irene Latham's Leaving Gee's Bend (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2010) creates a small world peopled with characters simultaneously ignorant and wise, kind and cruel, centered around the ten-year-old Ludelphia, who, although blind in one eye, sees things with more clarity than most. Lu is indeed an unusually perspicacious young heroine, but then so is Scout Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with whom she shares an intimate and ultimately complex view of race and human nature in the Jim Crow South. Latham portrays the raw harshness of rural black life unflinchingly, but her strongly-drawn characters, even the "not right in her mind" Mrs. Cobb, wo believes that the "witches" of Gee's Bend are the cause of her grief, never lose their humanity. Ludelphia herself manages to find color and order in her quilts, as throughout the experience she pieces together scraps of bright fabric, her mother's apron tie, the doctor's handkerchief, and her own feed-sack-cloth pocket, to build a hard-headed but meaningful pattern out of it all.

I started again with the needle. Mama always said you should live your life the same way you piece a quilt. That you was the one in charge of where you put the pieces. You was the one to determine how your story turns out.

Well, it seemed to me some of them pieces had a mind of their own.

Irene Latham weaves her story around the history of her native Alabama, especially the very real and now famous quilt makers of Gee's Bend, whose work exhibited in the Whitney Museum of Art in New York has been likened to that of modern masters such as Picasso. Although Ludelphia is a fictional character, she bears the name of one of the famed quilting families of Gee's Bend, and her story, like Scout's, should become a staple of Alabama--and American--historical fiction.

Holding the Line: Longitude Zero Degrees by Dianne C. Stewart

With no time passing in the present, they would appear in broad daylight. Liv hoped the tourist crowd would be focused on the brass strip with the red LED printout that marked zero degrees longitude and so fail to notice the peculiar-looking foursome.

But there was no crowd.

The spacious brick-paved area in front of the Greenwich Observatory was planted
with grass. "Look, guys!" said Anthony. "It's gone!"

He was right. The dividing line between the Eastern and Western hemispheres, the Prime Meridian, was nowhere to be seen.

Liv read aloud the words on a brass plaque:

"After the assassination of George the Third, champion of John Harrison's H4 timepiece, which made possible the determination of longitude at sea, and the ensuing madness of Royal Astronomer Sir Nevil Maskelyne, England's prominence in that science was threatened. In 1884, the official Prime Meridian of the world was declared to be in Paris, France."

In Diane C. Stewart's latest time-travel fantasy, Longitude: Zero Degrees (Beanpole Books, 2009) Liv, Anthony, and Cal travel to London for a summer holiday where Liv's father is working. But on the airplane over the Atlantic, Anthony and Cal spot a familiar face, the former eighteenth-century pirate Robert Francis Morehouse, the man who tcaptured Cal and Anthony in 1772 and then saved the boys in exchange for his own safe escape to the twenty-first century. Now a semi-legitimate antiques merchant, Morehouse is travelling with two suspicious characters whom Liv immediately senses are tied up with Morehouse's past in a way which promises to be a danger to them as well.

Fearing that it might bring harm to any unsuspecting person who might find it, the three kids had decided to bring along the mysterious wooden box which has the power to move them through time. Then, trying to befriend Frederica, the troubled daughter of her mother's London friend, Liv accidentally spills the box from her backpack, and before she can stop her, Frederica opens it, taking them on an unexpected time trip back to 1772. There, in the garden of the Greenwich Observatory, they find themselves witnesses to a plot to thwart the astronomer John Harrison's plan to push his invention, a timepiece which will enable England's seaman to calculate longitude and thus rule the seas, a plot which results in the assassination of King George III right before the startled eyes of Liv and Frederica.

Knowing that this change in history will greatly alter England's future place in the world and endanger America's eventual independence, the four realize that they must return to 1772 to make sure that the proposed murder of George III does not occur, and to do so, they must enlist the aid of the only person who holds the key to the chain of events in 1772, the former pirate Robert Morehouse himself.

In this sequel to her 2008 fantasy Quimbaya (See my review here.) Stewart again shows that she can create believable and appealing young characters within a fast-paced historical chase which takes place simultaneously across four centuries.

More Tales from The Rock: Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko

"DONE."

That's all the note in Moose's laundry had said. "Done." But when Al Capone does your laundry, a note in your pocket is a big deal. Big Al may be confined to a five by seven cell in Alcatraz, but his powers extend far and wide.

That's why twelve-year-old Moose has written Capone a letter, pleading for his help in getting his sister Natalie into a special school which can give her a chance at a more normal life. With that "Done," an acceptance letter soon follows and Natalie is on her way to the Esther P. Marinoff School in nearby San Francisco, and Moose's life with his prison guard father and his mother on Alcatraz Island, heretofore centered around his autistic sister's care, is about to change radically.

But now Annie, who is a crack baseball pitcher and nobody's fool, knows that something is up between Moose and The Rock's most famous prisoner. And then comes another note, one that makes Moose's heart almost stop:

Annie props open the screen door with her foot. "Moose." She gulps. "You won't believe what happened."

"What happened?" I asked.

"We got the wrong laundry. We got yours." she whispers.

"I didn't realize it was your laundry. I started putting it away and...Moose, there was a note in the pocket of your shirt."

"A-a note?" My voice breaks high, like a girl's.

The note is written on the same paper in the same handwriting as the other one.

YOUR TURN, it says.

When Scarface Capone does you a favor, he expects a payback, and when Moose gets that note, his life becomes a misery, waiting for the other shoe, perhaps shined by Al Capone, to drop. First, when Big Al's wife Mae visits him on The Rock and drops her hanky, it's no accident. Then when Natalie comes home for a holiday visit, there is a dread object found in her suitcase, a bar spreader obviously intended to be used in an upcoming escape attempt. "Bottom drawer," says Natalie. "He told me to put it in the bottom drawer. 105, 105, 105." Moose, Annie, and his friend Jimmy know that there's more to that story than they want to know.

The kids are terrified. There is obviously an escape attempt being planned, but if they tell what they know, they fear their fathers will lose their jobs, no minor matter in the Depression of 1935. Trustee inmates are in and out of their apartments often for repairs, and Moose's family's toilet seems always to need the services of Seven Fingers, ax murderer and master plumber, and when the escapee wannabees discover the tool not in Natalie's bottom drawer but part of the toy carousel of six-year-old Janet Trixle, the warden's youngest, the cons are sure to suspect that the kids know more than is good for them.

Secret hideouts, a touch of romance with the warden's pretty but manipulative older daughter, spying on the big reception for FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, and an exciting prison break scene are all part of Gennifer Choldenko's rousing sequel to her Newbery Honor Book, Al Capone Does My Shirts. Picking right up on the heels of the first book, this one has the same colorfully drawn characters and plenty of suspense as Moose gets his first kiss and Buddy Boy, One-Arm Willy, and Seven Fingers break loose from the cell house and take them all, including Natalie, hostages in their escape plan. But Natalie has powers of observation beyond those of the average kid, and it is she who makes the right connections when push comes to shove.

Choldenko's historical fiction chops are just right in her latest, Al Capone Shines My Shoes (Dial, 2009) one sure to please fans of her first book. Although this novel is plenty strong enough to be read on its own, it would be a shame to miss the fun of reading the two together. As the Kirkus reviewer puts it, "Choldenko hits a grand slam...Effortless period dialogue, fully developed secondary characters and a perfectly paced plot combine to create a solid-gold sequel that will not disappoint."

History Mystery: The Tangled Web: A Julie Mystery by Kathryn Reiss

Julie, one of American Girl Collection's newer historical characters, returns in her first historical fiction mystery. As the story begins, Julie is still trying to settle into her new life in a tiny apartment above her mom's store, Gladrags, on a busy urban street in the San Francisco of 1973.

"It's a mystery we manage to live here at all," Julie declared.

"This apartment is no bigger than my locker at school!"

Julie misses her big old house in the suburbs, with her best friend Ivy Ling just next door. However, being the new girl at the beginning of the school year does make her sympathetic with Carla, a new girl in her class, and Julie determines to make her feel welcome. And at first Carla seems perfectly at ease, telling Julie and her friends about her big new house in the historic "Painted Ladies" neighborhood, her talented brothers Tom and Tim, who are attending a private school, Maxwell Academy, her successful physician parents, and even her adorable Kindergarten sister Nancy. But gradually Julie and her friends begin to suspect that Carla's stories can't be true, and Julie realizes that her new friend is a real mystery.

Shadowing Carla only adds to the suspicious inconsistencies in her story. On a weekend sleepover, Ivy agrees to help follow Carla to find out if her story about her beautiful new house is true. The girls see Carla, walking a large, friendly dog, about to enter the house, and when they call out to her, she reluctantly invites them in for a quick visit, nervously adding that she is not allowed to have friends over when her parents are away. Carla hastily answers a few questions about family photos on display, but when a middle-aged man appears at the front door, Carla quickly pushes Julie and Ivy out the back.

But when Carla is absent from school the next day, Julie returns to the house, ostensibly to take Carla her missed work, planning to investigate further. Entering through the open front door, she meets the man she and Ivy saw the previous day, who seems puzzled when she asks about Carla.

"Carla lives quite a way from here. Carla's our dog walker," he says.

When the man good naturedly offers to give Julie Carla's address, Julie decides that she must pay a visit to Carla to ask her to explain her deceptions and to make sure that she is not in any danger. What she learns is not at all what she expected, and she soon sees that Carla's secrets have a story which goes much deeper than Julie imagined.

The Tangled Web: A Julie Mystery (American Girl Mysteries) gives the young reader a view of life in the early 1970s, a time in which girls and women found their lives changing radically. In the first book of the series, Meet Julie: An American Girl (American Girls Collection), Julie has to become an activist under Title IX to be allowed to play basketball for her school, and in this latest installment in the series, she and her mother and sister become involved with the rehabilitation of Viet Nam veterans in her community. There are no stereotypical hippies and flower children here, just ordinary people dealing with the challenges of their time.

As always for books in the American Girl Collection, an illustrated appendix illuminates the events and sights of those times, including, interestingly, those picturesque "painted lady" houses on Steiner Street which figured in the familiar opening to the television show "Full House."