Mystery of the Hidden Book

Mystery of the Hidden Book by Helen Fuller Orton (1953) A friend saw this book in a thrift store, and I considered picking it up before I realized I already owned it—I have an indestructible copy with a library binding from Red Wing, MN. The illustration on the cover is two kids and a dog looking through a bookshelf—it’s kind of irresistible. A pretty good premise, too—the kids are helping a neighbor (who is detained, out of town) by looking for a book in his house that might be in a secret hiding place, in a secret room. There is nothing I like better than secret rooms. You would think there would be more secret rooms in real life, but whenever someone buys a house, it seems like they suddenly become averse to implementing a secret room. (Could it be they have put in a secret room, but are keeping it… secret?) But I guess that’s why there are so many secret rooms in movies and books—maybe they’re better in fiction. The unfortunate thing here is that this is not the most inspired children’s book writing—and in some cases is just sloppy, unfocused, and repetitive to a maddening extent. I know that’s pretty much a standard thing with children’s fiction, the use of repetition—like you really need to hammer ideas in the little brains by force (which I don’t agree with). Sometimes it seems like authors are just desperate for word counts, I don’t know. For someone who is overly tolerant of shortcomings of kid’s books—and this one did have a lot of fun stuff in it—I mostly found myself a bit critical.