With Eyes Wide Open: The Cameo Necklace (A Cecile Mystery) by Evelyn Coleman

As quickly as the old woman had disappeared. Cecile found herself being moved along by a new crush of people emerging from the showboat.

At the same time, Cecile reached up to feel for her necklace. Her fingers grasped air.

Panic exploded in her chest. The necklace she had borrowed from her aunt was gone.

Cecile had marveled at the circus aboard the showboat, and she was secretly pleased that her rival Agnes Metoyer was obviously envious of Tante Tay’s cameo, the last gift from her young husband who had died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1853. Cecile’s aunt had promised to let her wear it for a really special event, and even hough her favorite aunt was away, Cece had felt sure that the circus would count as that special event when she took the necklace from her aunt’s bureau and placed it proudly around her own neck.

But a tall marchand selling sweet buns had stumbled into the crowd, and Cece had fallen, knocking down an old woman as well, who had pulled Cece to her feet with a sharp gaze.

And now the cameo necklace is gone. Tante Tay will be back in only ten days, and Cecile knows she must find that necklace. There were several people near  when it  disappeared–the orange bun seller, the old woman with the bracelets, a blonde lady circus performer, two elusive dark-eyed children selling cypress baskets, even Agnes and Fanny Montoyer, caught in the press of the crowd. Could one of them have found her necklace, or even stolen it in the melee?

Always sheltered by her well-to-do and protective free Black gens de couleur libres family, the need to recover her aunt’s beloved keepsake takes Cecile Rey out of her family and into the diverse community that is is New Orleans in 1854.  Well-brought-up girls of the Creole culture do not go out alone, so Cecile manages to go along to the marketplace with their cook Mathilde and their new maid Hannah where she looks for the two young basket sellers and the old lady.

Cece even turns to her older brother Armand, confiding her secret to him, to help her find the those around her at the time the necklace went missing. And with him at Congo Square, she finds the old woman, who beckons her near:

“Come, Cecile,” the old woman called. “ My name is Madame Irene. I knew you would be here today.”

“Those we cannot know have your necklace. Open your eyes so you can see. And you will learn much more than you seek, Cecile Rey.”

And in the next days, Cecile meets circus performers, takes a wild elephant ride at the dock, and sees her brother Armand almost taken away in chains by slave catchers. Following the old woman’s lead, Cecile meets the two mysterious children and learns they are maroons, fugitive slaves living in the swamps just outside the city, and that her new maid, Hannah is herself an escaped slave. And when the slave catchers come for her at midnight, it falls to Cecile and Armand to help Hannah flee to the shelter of the swamp and the maroon community. In the search for the cameo necklace, Cece’s eyes are indeed opened.

Until the last few days, Cecile had been blind to all the things that happened to people of color. She’d thought only of people like herself, the gens de couleur libres; she had rarely thought about slaves and certainly not maroons. She touched the paper in her pocket, the only thing that kept her free. It seemed very fragile now.

Cecile shivered. Her eyes were opening, but Armand was right–-she wasn’t sure she wanted to see.

As in all the popular American Girl series, Evelyn Coleman’s The Cameo Necklace: A Cecile Mystery (American Girl) (American Girl Mysteries) (American Girl, 2012) tells the story of an American girl in transition into an an awareness of the society around her in a significant period of American history. New Orleans in the early 1850s was a peculiarly diverse community, in which the cultured and well-to-do free people of color held a unique place of some power and influence. But as the country worked its tortuous way toward the upheaval of the Civil War, even Cecile and Armand, sheltered and well-educated, find themselves in peril of losing the small freedoms their family have cherished. A rare coming-of-age tale set in the colorful atmosphere of a mystery in old New Orleans, this book can be an eye-opener for its readers along with its heroine Cecile.

As in all books in the American Girl series, there is an color illustrated appendix, "Looking Back--A Peek into the Past" which puts the story into the context of pre-Civil War New Orleans, followed by a glossary and pronunciation guide to the French words and names used in the story.

Watch That Spider: The Hidden Gold--A Marie-Grace Mystery by Sarah Masters Buckey

My dearest Wilhelmina,

If I am gone before you arrive, Monsieur LaPlante will give you my trunks to take home with you.

Do not doubt that I have kept the promise I made to you and your brothers.

Do you remember the riddles I used to send you? I have prepared a riddle for you. I meant to surprise you when I arrived home, but now you must solve the riddle on your own.

With love,
Pa

Marie-Grace is off on an adventure, traveling from New Orleans with her father Dr. Gardner, up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers by steamboat to visit relatives in Pennsylvania. She has promised her best friend, Cecile Rey, to write lots of letters describing everything exciting she sees. "But what if nothing exciting happens?" Grace fretted. "Oh, something will!" Cecile insisted.  But Grace hardly has time to begin her first letter before she is invited on deck to watch the boat cast off. With her father she watches the hubbub below as the crew stows the final cargo on the lower deck and the last passengers come aboard.

Grace's eyes are drawn to the figure of a girl her age in worn, wrinkled clothing, arguing with the captain. It seems that Wilhelmina, only eleven years old, orphaned by her father's death from a fever, needs to return to New Madrid, Missouri, where her grandmother lives, but can only afford deck passage on the steamer. Wilhelmina is quietly but passionately protesting that her two trunks must not be stored with the other cargo. Grace's kindly father intercedes on her behalf, and Grace offers to share her tiny stateroom with Wilhelmina while she is on board.

At first Wilhelmina says almost nothing, and Grace, who has recently lost her own mother, feels sympathy for this girl, left poor and orphaned in a strange place. But eventually Wilhelmina  confides in her, telling her that she is sure her father had concealed a fortune in Gold Rush gold in his trunks before he died, leaving only a cryptic note with the innkeeper addressed to her. Wilhelmina is sure that one of the boarding passengers, Mr. Bolt, knows something about the gold, having heard her father's delirious ravings about gold and nursery rhymes at his hotel. Then, inside Wilhelmina's old copy of Mother Goose rhymes, Grace notices one corner turned down on the page with the rhyme about Little Miss Muffet. The two girls guess that some word in that rhyme is a clue to where the gold can be found.

And then the nursery rhyme book is stolen from their stateroom, and the two girls realize that someone else is looking for a clue to the gold in that old nursery rhyme book. Can they find her father's trunk and discover where the gold is hidden inside before the thief finds it first? If they can, Wilhelmina's family will have money to stay together, and Marie-Grace knows that she will have an exciting story to tell Cecile in her first letter back to New Orleans!

Sarah Masters Buckey's The Hidden Gold: A Marie-Grace Mystery (American Girl Mysteries) (American Girl, 2012) combines plenty of historical detail within a solid girl sleuth story with much at stake beyond a satisfying case closed at the conclusion. Marie-Grace, half of the friendship story between a white doctor's daughter and Cecile, the privileged young Creole (of the gens de colour libre of old New Orleans) figures in her first mystery on a steamboat journey up the Mississippi in 1854 that offers plenty of excitement--riverboat gamblers, traveling Vaudeville magicians, an intriguing young portrait painter, and collisions with flatboats along the way. As the American Girls series always does, an appended section ("Looking Back") of notes, photos, prints, and drawings and a glossary provide historical background for this American Girl beginning chapter mystery adventure.

And while Marie-Grace is solving a mystery on the Mississippi, back in New Orleans Cecile Rey is also sleuthing out the mystery behind her aunt's missing heirloom cameo necklace in The Cameo Necklace: A Cecile Mystery (American Girl) (American Girl Mysteries). (See my 2012 review here.) Fans of this duet series will want to keep up with each of the girl's adventures until the two friends are reunited again at home, older and wiser in the ways of the world, and perhaps (we hope) joining forces to solve a new case back in old New Orleans.

Marley and Me, The Movie Review

The cinema version of John Grogan's best-selling family memoir Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog, opened on Christmas Day to generally good reviews and great box office. At just over two hours, it's a longish movie which nevertheless seems to race through the years of family life covered in Grogan's book.

Grogan, the "me" in Marley and Me, worked as a reporter drafted into being a temporary columnist, and his weekly ruminations about his Labrador, Marley, the "world's worst dog," made his reputation in the Miami area and eventually
earned him a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer, while his journalist wife Jennifer pitched in as a stay-at-home mom of three children as the family grew up and grew older over the course of Marley's life.

Owen Wilson plays a laid-back but appealing Grogan, shirt perpetually untucked and blond surfer hair uncombed, while Jennifer Anniston plays an appropriately put-upon career woman who finds herself a stay-at-home mom with three babies and a dog that eats the telephone, and the sofa, and parts of the floor. Kathleen Turner takes a cameo turn as the obedience school madam who flunks Marley out at his first lesson, and Alan Arkin turns in an old pro performance as Grogan's dour but wise mentor and editor at the Miami Sun Times. The hunkie Eric Dane plays Grogan's college buddy Sebastian who becomes the globe-trotting, lady-killer journalist Grogan aspires to be before Marley and the wife and kids intervene, and a series of ever-older child actors and twenty-two yellow Labs of assorted ages ("The Marleys") round out the capable cast.

Director Frankel keeps the Marley mayhem just on the tasteful side of slapstick as we watch Marley charge through screen doors and destroy a succession of household goods. Everyone's favorite Marley moment from the book is reprised when Grogan gives the newly pregnant Jen a gold necklace and the romantic moment is cut short as Marley makes off with the necklace trailing from his mouth, only to swallow it whole as John and Jennifer finally collar him. Of course, there is only one thing to do and good hubby John dutifully does it--hosing down Marley's considerable poop at each opportunity until the necklace is, er, recovered.

These Marley moments are worked into and around the ups and down of married life, as in one scene Jennifer, exhausted and jealous of John's daily escape to the world of work, finally orders him to get rid of Marley. While Marley cools his heels at ace reporter Sebastian's bachelor pad, love triumphs over all and Marley returns to stay and teach the kids to love his wacky ways as they grow up.

But big dogs don't live forever, and when Marley's time comes, it is a sad time for the Grogans. In one of the longer episodes in the film, visits to the vet conclude in Marley's death, and the movie ends with John's vigil as he passes and the family's memorial service for the dog who loved them through it all.

Marley and Me is rated PG, and rightly so, not only for the fairly realistic death scenes which may disturb some children, but also for some mild marital nuzzling between the principles and salty language from Dane's devil-may-care character.

All in all, it's a entertaining and decent rendering of the book, funny and touching and familiar to anyone who's ever lived with a dog from puppyhood to old age.

For a summary of Grogan's several adaptations of the Marley story for young readers, see my recent review of A Very Marley Christmas posted here on December 8, 2008.