I found a copy of this book on the sidewalk and picked it up without realizing it had been annotated by its previous owner, a kid (his name and classroom number are written on the inside front cover and on the sides of the pages). This lead to some amusement: mostly, this kid underlined words, presumably vocab words or words that were new to him, words like “deciphering” and “discriminating” and “convention.” He highlighted key sections or thoughts or passages, things like: “There is much more to be uncovered about the world than most people think” (49). But he also, at least early in the book, wrote quotes from the text on Post-it notes, so for example, on the first page of Chapter 1 there was a Post-it that said “A PLUMP TANGERINE MOON” (a phrase that appears on that page); two pages later there was a Post-it that said “COULD THIS BE A COINCIDENCE, OR A CLEVER WARNING,” (a phrase that appears on that page).
Unfortunately, early on I started to think that the kid’s Post-it notes and highlights would be the only source of interest for me: I felt like should have trusted Megan when she said this book was not really worth reading. I could see how it’d be good for reluctant reader kids, maybe, but as an adult reader, I just found the style too clunky: “This was one of the weirdest coincidences ever. Was this letter insane, or inspired?” (4). But I decided to give it a chance, to see if the excitement of the plot/intrigue of the mystery might get me to ignore the style, or if the style would improve.
So, the plot: one night, in Chicago, three people receive an unsigned letter asking them to help identify “a crime that has wronged one of the world’s greatest painters” (1). Meanwhile, Calder Pillay and Petra Andalee, who live a few doors down from one another, are both in sixth grade, in Ms. Hussey’s class at the University School. Petra’s a quiet and bookish kid in a big family and a noisy house; she’s thoughtful and likes writing, and is the kind of kid who stops at the used bookstore down the block when her mom sends her to the corner store for milk and bread. Calder is a bit of a loner and sees patterns everywhere: he’s a spatial/geometrical thinker who is good at and fond of things like pentominoes (at which I am terrible*!). Ms. Hussey, it soon becomes clear to the reader, is one of the three people who got the letter. Petra and Calder, clearly, are going to work together to solve the mystery, or at any rate, to solve a mystery.
And the style? I think it does get better, or I was more willing to overlook it because I liked Calder and Petra as characters. There are some pleasing descriptive bits, passages about reading or art or the world in general, sentences like this: “Monday morning was blue and white, and everything was blowing: cumulus clouds, bare branches, scraps of rubbish” (71). But there were still things that bugged me about this book. One of its key ideas is the idea of coincidence, the question, in particular, of whether coincidence exists: when people see patterns in coincidences, is it because there are patterns there, or because our minds like patterns, and look for them, and are all to ready to see them even when they don’t exist? The book also explores the idea of the unexplained: there are several events that “couldn’t” really happen—or could they? I bet I would have liked this as a kid—my mom had a book about mysterious stuff that included some info about Charles Fort, who features in Chasing Vermeer, and I remember reading about things like showers of frogs and people disappearing and being intrigued/freaked out. But as an adult reader, I was bothered by the leaps of thought that Calder and Petra made, the way answers sometimes just came to them from some ghostly realm. (I found my annoyance interesting, because there are similar ideas in, say, The House with a Clock in Its Walls—when I read that book in March, I copied out a whole passage into my notebook where Bellairs writes about countering logical magic with a magic of “wild swoops, sudden inexplicable discoveries, cloudy thinking. Knights’ jumps instead of files of rooks plowing across the board.” I guess the difference, for me, is that Bellairs was explicitly writing in a world in which magic exists, and you know that when you start out.)
So right: this book wasn’t terrible, but I don’t really recommend it, either, and I don’t plan to read the sequels.
*No, seriously, you’d laugh if you knew how long it took me to solve the “Medium” level on that Scholastic page I linked to above.
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