Barbara Newhall Follett, from Wikipedia

This weekend I happened upon Paul Collins’ essay “Vanishing Act,” about the writing prodigy Barbara Newhall Follett, whose The House Without Windows was published by Knopf in 1927 when the author was twelve.  Our own Bertha Mahony loved the book, devoting three pages to it in the February 1927 Magazine. While Follett would go on to publish a few more books in her teens, her life became shadowed when her beloved father deserted Barbara and her mother; Barbara’s own marriage (at age nineteen) ended when she quarreled with her husband (she suspected he was having an affair) and (allegedly) walked out of their apartment in Brookline in 1939 and disappeared. Forever. Brrr!

According to Collins, Barbara’s last published work was in the Horn Book and I give it to you here, from the February 1933 issue of the Magazine.

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Caroline Lawrence’s The Case of the Deadly Desperados is a bang-up series starter told in flashback by young P.K. Pinkerton. P.K.’s story opens when a gang of outlaws, dressed as Indians, kills his foster parents. He escapes to Virginia City, “the vilest place on earth,” with a medicine bag his foster ma instructs him to take before she dies (it holds his “Destiny”). P.K.’s strongly voiced account succeeds as a rousing adventure that promises more action in another installment just around the corner. (8–12 years)

Phillip Pullman’s Two Crafty Criminals!: And How They Were Captured by the Daring Detectives of the New Cut Gang includes novellas Thunderbolt’s Waxwork and The Gas-Fitters’ Ball, first published in the UK in the 1990s. Set in Victorian London, the novellas feature a band of children who fancy themselves detectives. In the first story, the New Cut Gang clears a man of counterfeiting charges; in the second, they add matchmaking to their skills. Both tales contain lots of characters and lots of plot, with everything coming together in complicated, satisfying endings. (8–12 years)

In Tom Angleberger’s Fake Mustache: Or, How Jodie O’Rodeo and Her Wonder Horse (and Some Nerdy Kid) Saved the U.S. Presidential Election from a Mad Genius Criminal Mastermind, a spree of bank robberies strikes the wacky town of Hairsprinkle. Narrator Lenny Flem Jr. knows his best friend Casper is the culprit; it’s only with the aid of has-been preteen TV star Jodie O’Rodeo that Lenny can bring Casper to his knees. Goofy black-and-white illustrations by Jen Wang reinforce the story’s slapstick humor. (8–12 years)

Rebel Fire, the second book in Andrew Lane’s Sherlock Holmes: The Legend Begins series, sends young Holmes to America. He’s in pursuit of a seriously deranged John Wilkes Booth, whose gang has Sherlock’s sidekick Matty in its clutches. The detective’s journeys via ocean liner and train lead to cat-and-mouse games with the bad guys as well as to opportunities for the nascent detective to sharpen his skills. With smart and dignified pacing, there’s more action here than Conan Doyle’s Holmes probably saw in his entire lifetime. (9–13 years)

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The Name of the Star [Shades of London]

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The January/February Magazine is out and selectively up. You can read the BGHB speeches, check out some anecdotes about agents and find out what makes for a good sports novel. And I encourage you all to read and learn from Barbara Bader’s portrait of Virginia Haviland, children’s librarian to the nation. It’s the first in a series Barbara is writing about the “second generation” of children’s library leaders in this country; next up in the May issue is Augusta Baker. Barbara is currently doing preliminary research on the children’s librarians of the 1950s and 60s in Cleveland and Pittsburgh; anyone with knowledge of pertinent people and places should write to her at bbader at earthlink dot net.

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My other question is for readers and has to do with series books–Think Twice is something like Scottoline’s tenth book about Bennie and her all-lady law firm. When we’ve been following a series, what does it take to make us give up? I think we forgive weak elements or even weak entire entries because we feel invested in the characters, and there is no question I’ll finish Think Twice and eagerly anticipate the next one. But sometimes it can take just one book, bad in some unforgivable way, to make me swear off a series forever and never look back. I dumped Faye Kellerman’s Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series when one of them seemed pruriently violent to me. I dropped Jon Land’s books about the American and Israeli detective team when he put his heroine on an iceberg parked in the Red Sea. But is it that the author has made a fatal mistake, or that he hadn’t really had me hooked in the first place?

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Back from Vermont–we did get to visit the Patersons (that Katherine bakes a mean scone and gave us plenty to take back to our Killington chalet, no snow but there was a hot tub) but not JRL as poor Buster was by then too exhausted and disoriented to either move or leave behind. (He is better now but still, twenty.) Our chief entertainments were books in the daytime (me, a Joy Fielding–never again–and the second Stieg Larsson mystery; Richard, Possession (and finally skipping the poetry like I told him to) and The Godfather movies in the evenings. (How had I missed all three of those?) Like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire only really comes to life when The Girl is onstage, but then it is irresistible. Christopher Hitchens suggests that Winona Ryder should play her in the movie but I kept seeing Bjork or that little fey thing who was on Absolutely Fabulous.

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Anyone else?

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With our best girls Charlene and Lori at Lorraine’s in Provincetown last night. Ptown was hit by a blizzard yesterday so it was something of a haul getting to the restaurant but the streets sure looked pretty with the Christmas lights twinkling against the snow. I’ve discovered a problem with bringing lots of books on vacation–it’s hard to settle on one. Currently I’m dividing my time between an audiobook of My Cousin Rachel, an ebook of an old Lisa Scottoline favorite (on my new iPod Touch–thank you honey) and Tana French’s The Likeness. Hope you all are having an equally relaxing week.

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