The Mystery of Tupelo Landing: Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage

;

Dear Upstream Mother,

Miss Retzyl claims my vast experience in discovering where you're not helps me zero in on you. But frankly my map can't hold many more pushpins. Neither can my heart.

Eleven years is a long time to search. Drop me a line or pick up the phone. I'm on the verge of puberty.

Mo

Mo (nee Moses) LoBeau's life itself is a missing person mystery.  Washed up on a fragment of a billboard in the flood following Hurricane Amy, she  was pulled from the waters by an amnesiac man who had just crashed into a tree (hereinafter the CrashTree) and who named himself The Colonel and her Moses. Since then Mo has lived with her adoptive parents, the Colonel and Miss Lana, who operate the Cafe, the center of life in Tupelo Landing, North Carolina. A rising sixth grader, Mo devotes her spare time to trying to locate her true mother, and when all the usual investigative methods come up empty, has fallen back upon writing letters to her "Upstream Mother," and launching them into Contentnea Creek inside empty ketchup and hot sauce bottles from the Cafe.

So far, Mo's investigations have turned up clueless, but then, out of the blue, Tupelo Landing has a new mystery. Community curmudgeon Mr. Jesse has turned up dead in the fishing boat that Mo's sidekick, Dale (full name Dale Earnhardt Johnson) has "borrowed" for their clandestine fishing trip, and when Mo's sworn enemy Attila (a.k.a. Anna Celeste) testifies that she saw him with a boat down by the creek, Dale becomes the prime suspect for Detective Joe Starr from Raleigh. Mo and Dale decide that his only hope is for them to find the real murderer first and so they launch The Desperado Detective Agency (Lost Pets Found Free).

But there's a tangled web of local secrets woven around Mr. Jesse's demise among the citizens of Tupelo Landing. As Mo puts it pungently,

"That's another thing about a small town: Everybody knows everybody's schedule.  We spin around each other like planets around an invisible sun.

However invisible, that central sun is the Cafe, and when the Colonel and Miss Lana go missing, Mo puts  all her hard-won waitressing skills of observation to work detecting the real prime suspect. Mo LoBeau speaks with the authentic voice of  Harper Lee's Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Kate DiCamillo's Opal from Because of Winn-Dixie, a memorable character whose common sense, humor, and straight-ahead loyalty make her the sort of character you love, one you'll hate to close the book on when one mystery is solved and the other--finding her mother--suddenly seems no longer a priority.

Sheila Turnage's Three Times Lucky (Dial Books, 2012) is a wonderful novel of life and love and  friendship, and being true to yourself and those around you that fully deserves its 2013 Newbery Honor Award. In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews emphatically says, "Turnage achieves a wickedly awesome tale of an 11-year-old girl with more spirit and gumption than folks twice her age. Mo LoBeau is destined to become a standout character in children's fiction. Readers may find they never want to leave Tupelo Landing." Readers could do a lot worse than spend some time sipping iced tea at the Tupelo Landing Cafe.

In the Beginning: The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart

What Mr. Harinton was doing certainly helped Nicholas--but it also simply felt right to Nicholas.

No sooner had he thought this than he realized what was anchoring his happiness. It was purpose. He knew what he wanted to do.

Nicholas had something to aim for now.

He might not know what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he knew with absolute certainty how he wanted to be.

At the very least, he knew where to begin.

With three very sucessful series books behind him, author Trenton Lee Stewart takes us back to the beginning of the The Mysterious Benedict Society, the backstory behind benefactor Nicholas Benedict himself, in his recent prequel, The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict (The Mysterious Benedict Society) (Little, Brown, 2012).

The orphaned Nicholas Benedict has been dismissed from the waif's home where he has lived because his narcolepsy and screaming nightmares have caused untenable "administrative problems." In a Jane Eyre-style arrival amid a gloomy rain, Nicholas is driven from the station by the uncommunicative Mr. Collum, who seems displeased with the problems the nine-year-old Nicholas brings and preternaturally absorbed with the matter of an ancient, hand-written ledger from which his new charge seems an annoying distraction. Upon arrival at the dark and gloomy Rothchild's End, Nicholas is quickly shown the a dark windowless and crowded storeroom where his sole comfort is a cot and blanket, where Mr. Collum observes that Nicholas will be locked up nightly so that his sleepwalking and nightmares will not cause problems for the other student inmates.

As Mr. Collum relocks the door and escorts Nicholas to the bathroom before bedtime, however, Nicholas manages to convince the headmaster that he needs to use the key to get his forgotten toothbrush, and making use of the melted wax in the guttering hallway candle's sconce, he quickly makes a wax impression of Mr. Collum's key, which he happily speculates is a skeleton key that will unlock many doors in 'Child's End manor.

Nicholas is indeed a lad of many talents besides persuasion. He is a natural speed reader with a photographic memory and a lightning-quick mind, and after fashioning a duplicate key in metals crafting class, Nicholas decides that he will spend part of every night in the school's well-stocked library. Observing the headmaster serriptitonsly knocking on wooden panels in various rooms, Nicholas intuits that he is searching for some sort of hidden treasure and determines to give some of his midnight explorations over to deciphering the meaning of that old ledger-journal which Mr. Collum keeps locked in his office.

Indeed, there is an intriguing mystery there, the whereabouts of the inheritance of the mistress of the manor, Mrs. Rothchild. Nicholas Benedict believes that if he can find and claim what the journal calls her "treasure," it will be his escape from interminable years in institutions such as this one is turning out to be.

And while not quite the Dickensian orphanage where Oliver Twist suffered, "Child's End is aptly named for a boy like Nicholas. Befriended by only one boy, John Cole, Nicholas is shunned by the others because of his far-ranging vocabulary and his peculiar narcoleptic attacks, and little Nick also is selected for tormenting as the perennial victim of the school bullies, the "Spiders," seemingly under the noses of short-sighted and overburdened staff, including only an extremely myopic nurse, an elderly and arthritic housekeeper a equally superannuated cook, a reclusive caretaker/gardener, and a part-time schoolmaster.

Nicholas pins his hopes on discovering that treasure, and deduces from the accounts in the ledger than the Rothschilds had constructed an elaborate personal astronomiocal observatory on a hill in the area, and equipped with a lantern and alarm clock he has rebuilt from discards in the cellar and storeroom, Nicholas moves his midnight mission outdoors and eventually locates the abandoned observatory, where he is certain the treasure must be hidden. As time goes by, he confides in John and later in Violet,the deaf daughter of the local farmer whom the two meet in their nocturnal ramblings. Nicholas enlists both as confederates in the quest and the three hang their hopes on that treasure, a means to art school for Violet and an escape from orphanage life for John and Nicholas.

But as Nicholas Benedict's research and investigations continue, his simple theory of Mrs. Rothchild's vanished fortune is confounded, and the actual truth that he ultimately discovers changes everything for Nicholas forever.

Fans of the Mysterious Benedict Society's quirky young heroes and heroines will be fascinated by that peculiar Society's founder's childhood story and how the Society's own mission came to be. Stewart's narrative is as darkly atmospheric and labyrinthine as their midnight rambles, reminiscent as it is not only to Harry Potter's dark nighttime forays at Hogworts but also to the many Gothic mysteries of the late John Bellairs and the resourceful orphan family in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events> Hard-core readers of the series will find the young Nicholas Benedict a delightfully off-beat character, from whom the redoubtable Benedict Society springs.

Previous books in this series include The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, The Mysterious Benedict Society: Mr. Benedict's Book of Perplexing Puzzles, Elusive Enigmas, and Curious Conundrums,
and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Heading Home: Carolina Harmony by Marilyn Taylor McDowell

Carolina reached up and felt the wood carving she wore as a pendant. She rubbed her finger over its wings and its tail, feeling where he daddy had made the cuts and where he'd sanded it smooth.

"It's a present for you, Carolina.
It's a catbird, case you couldn't tell."

She remembered that clear June night, when they were camping up near Grandfather Mountain.

"Lift your hair so I can tie a knot in the cord."

She remembered leaning into the crook of his shoulder and gazing into the night sky with the campfire crackling and blazing before them.

Fans of Anne of Green Gables, that classic tale of a red-headed, pigtailed orphan girl which celebrated its centennial last year, have a new novel of an extraordinary red-haired orphan to enjoy, in Marylyn Taylor McDowell's recent Carolina Harmony (Delacorte, 2009).

When Carolina Campbell's parents and baby brother Caleb are suddenly killed in a car accident, she moves in with her dad's foster mother, "Auntie Shen," (so called after her baby pronunciation of the Gaelic seanmhair for grandmother.) It's 1964, but life in the high mountains of western North Carolina is still primitive for that time. Auntie Shen supports them with cash from her her wild berry jams and jellies and her paintings of mountain plants and animals sold at her Morning Glory Jelly Stand. Although memories and dreams of her lost family haunt Carolina, Auntie Shen's stories of her father's boyhood and frequent "I just love ya, girl!" give her a feeling of continuity and security.

But when Auntie Shen has a stroke and is moved to a nursing home, Carolina learns what being an orphan really means. Taken away from the care of Auntie Shen's Black friend Ruby to "be with people of your own kind," Carolina is sent first to an unkind and autocratic minister's family. When Carolina runs away, she is found and moved to Boone to stay with Miss Lily Jean, a woman motivated mostly by the money she gets for fostering children. Athough befriended by Lily Jean's mischievous nephew, Russell, Carolina is frightened by her trucker husband and once more flees to the woods, finally making her way to Harmony Farm, where she is quietly taken in by Ray and Latah and their son Luke. A wonderful summer passes in which Carolina feels that she has found a family who will keep her and love her for all time.

But when Russell turns up with his Uncle Sims, come to shear the sheep at Harmony Farm, he tries to convince Carolina that Ray and Latah only keep her for her work on the farm. When Sims carelessly sets the barn on fire, Carolina is afraid that she will be blamed and, fearing that she has lost her family all over again, stows away with Russell aboard a freight train heading for Tennessee.

Strong and unique characters, a strong sense of time and place, and plenty of orphan-style adventure make this novel both a sensitive and suspenseful story. Carolina is more than lucky in her many rescuers, from the grandmotherly Ruby to the soft-hearted Knoxville beauty school student Georgia, who sweet-talks her sheriff's deputy boyfriend into giving Carolina a second chance at Harmony Farm. A bit of an old-fashioned tale of a 1960s "Annie," Carolina Harmony is an engaging story of a resourceful orphan who finally comes home to stay.

The Ties That Bind: Lucky Breaks by Susan Patron

...A certain insight came to Lucky about Lincoln. He was reliable, calm, orderly, and on top of that, a boy. A boy who was going to leave the whole country. It wasn't entirely his whole fault, but standing as she was on the top of the mountain of ten, about to transform her 11 into a pair of skis and fly off in a blur of speed, what Lucky wanted was a girl best friend, an adventurous girl. And without even knowing that she'd been looking, now Lucky longed for that girl to be Paloma.

Lucky Trimble is on the brink--about to turn eleven--and now secure that her step-mother Brigitte, who is determinedly trying to become Americanized, is with her to stay, she begins to hope for something big to happen, for some life-changing intrepid adventure to come into her life. She is even discontent with her best friend Lincoln, so strong and steady, and so engrossed with his love for knot tying that he is working on an enormous creation with which he hopes to win an international prize and a year studying his passion abroad. Somehow, Lucky feels a bit betrayed by Lincoln's eagerness to leave Hard Pan to follow his obsession, a feeling with undertones of romantic jealousy which puzzles her.

And then, helping Brigitte serve luncheon at her Hard Pan Cafe to a group of desert geologists, Lucky meets a girl, a girl with whom she immediately shares secret smiles, stifled giggles, and rolls of the eyes. Paloma is the niece of one of the "ologists," and she and Lucky form a bond so immediate that the two begin to scheme to get permission for Paloma to spend the weekend of her birthday party in Hard Pan. An over-protected child of well-to-do parents, Paloma longs for the freedom and warmth she sees in Lucky's life, and with after some lengthy telephone conversations with Brigitte about the dangers of tarantulas, snakes, and wild burros in the desert, Paloma's mother consents to the sleepover.

Waiting for the next weekend to come, Lucky is both anxious and happy, but when she sees that Lincoln, too, is intrigued with Paloma, she impulsively and secretly makes three dire cuts in his knotting project, the one with which he hopes to win the prize. Lucky regrets the action almost immediately, but strangely enough, Lincoln methodically comes up with esoteric knots which mend the cuts decoratively, but although he seems to suspect her part in the sabotage, says nothing directly to her.

Then, on the morning of the big party, Lucky talks Paloma into an intrepid adventure, one with more than a little danger, a visit to an abandoned well once involved in a local murder. Once there, Paloma declines to descend the rickety-looking ladder into the deep, dark well shaft, but Lucky has come too far to turn back and with a bit of bravura starts the trip down. Near the bottom, however, the last rung of the ladder shatters, and Lucky, unable to reach the next rung to climb out and aware that the city-bred Paloma has not even a inkling of which way to go to find help, realizes that she has brought about her own downfall. Ironically and almost inevitably, however, the broken ladder turns out to be the lucky break which changes her friendship with Lincoln and Paloma as well.

The reading of the sequel to an award-winning novel always begins with a bit of trepidation. Will the author recreate the spark of creativity which made the first book hard to put down? Will the characters grow and develop while remaining true to themselves? Will the theme of the first book be extended and deepened? All the hopes of the reader/reviewer temporarily hang in the balance as the story begins to play itself out.

Lucky Breaks, Susan Patron's sequel to the 2007 Newbery Award winner, The Higher Power of Lucky (reviewed February 18, 2007), here) does not disappoint. At first leisurely and character-driven, rich in local color and insight into its unusual heroine, the plot nonetheless moves relentlessly toward an exciting climax which ties together the elements of the novel--characters, conflict, and theme--into a whole. Again, as in the first novel, Lincoln is a central element. In fact, an argument could be made that Lincoln is the key character, or at least a main character along with Lucky. It is his calm intelligence, his studious survival skills, and his devoted friendship that literally and figuratively pull Lucky out of her hole--in a way that reminds Lucky that the ties that bind her with her old Hard Pan friends and her new best friend are what really matter.

A deeply felt, genuinely funny, and honest novel for middle readers, male and female, (and, English teachers take note, one with a deeply symbolic double entendre of a title), Lucky Breaks (Simon & Schuster, 2009) does Susan Patron proud. A third book in this trilogy is promised for next year.

"Spit Spot:" The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry, two-time Newbery author, creator of one of the last century's most memorably funny girl characters, Anastasia Krupnik (Anastasia), author of notable historical fiction in Number the Stars, and the deeply philosophical dystopic science fiction Newbery winner The Giver, has proven that she has a few new tricks up her literary sleeve. In her newest book, The Willoughbys, Lowry rolls out her self-illustrated parody of the "old-fashioned" orphan tale genre in an original bit of writing which has been both controversial and lauded by readers and reviewers. What you get here is a marriage of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lemony Snicket, with a dash of Dahl, a bit of Bronte, a taste of Travers, and a dab of Dickens.

"Once upon a time there was a family named Willoughby," Lowry begins, "an old-fashioned type of family with four children, Timothy, twelve, Barnaby A and Barnaby B, identical twins, and Jane, six and one half. Their lives proceeded in exactly the way lives proceed in old fashioned stories."

Well, in the way of the worst of such tales, perhaps. To begin, the Willoughbys senior are made irritable by the very existence of their children.

"It's disgusting the way children today all want their own sweaters," observes Mrs. Willoughby (having suggested that her offspring share the one sweater she has knitted).

"Do you like our children?" she asks her husband.

"No. I never have, especially that tall one-- what's-his-name."

"I have a plan. It's thoroughly despicable."

"Lovely," said his wife.

Meanwhile the children are pursuing their own plan. "We should be orphans. I suppose we should do away with our parents somehow," said Timothy.

Fate steps in as the parents book a world tour with the Reprehensible Travel Agency and leave the children with the last of many "odious nannies" they try to hire, departing instantly with orders to an agency to sell the house from under their offspring while they are gone. "Well," said Timothy, "while we're getting rid of them, they are getting rid of us. Despicable!"

But the "orphans" land on their feet in true potboiler style. When a baby is left on their doorstep, they name it Ruth, deftly re-depositing her on the doorstep of Commander Melancoff, a lonely but irascible candy tycoon, who adopts the infant, christening her "Baby Ruth" (leaving the Willoughby orphans "Ruth-less" just as they had planned), and takes in the Willoughbys and their cheery and culinarily gifted nanny. By the ending all are prepared to live happily ever after--that is, as soon as the author can come up with the proper old-fashioned ending. Their joy is marred only by the failure of the launch of Melancoff's new nougat, nut, and chocolate confection, unfortunately named the "Little Ruthie," thereby narrowly missing a historic brand name in the candy bar pantheon.

"What is there to say at the end of an old-fashioned story?" Lowry asks.
Well, for one, she appends a sly bibliography of classic orphan tales with humorous annotations and adds a glossary with wry definitions, viz,

Tycoon: Tycoon means somebody who has amassed great wealth and power in business. Usually a tycoon is a man, for some reason. Maybe Oprah Winfrey is a tycooness.

The critics have had quite a tussle coming to terms with this new direction from a gifted author whom they thought a known quantity. "Sly humor and a certain deadpan zaniness give literary conventions an ironic twist, with hilarious results," says Booklist in a starred review; "A lollipop of witty metafiction...cunningly crocheted into a hilarious doily of drollery," chortles Horn Book. As for its several detractors, reviewing the book in Publishers Weekly the master of unfortunate (orphanly) events concludes by saying

There are those who will find that this novel pales in comparison to Ms. Lowry's more straight-faced efforts, such as The Giver. Such people are invited to take tea with the Bobbsey Twins. Ms. Lowry and I will be across town downing something stronger mixed by Anastasia Krupnik, whom one suspects of sneaking sips of Ms. Lowry's bewitching brew.
--Lemony Snicket