Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze by Elizabeth EnrightSquare Fish, 2008 (Originally Rinehart & Co.,1951)

Unlike the rest of the Melendy Quartet, this one’s not really about the whole family: summer has ended, the older boys (Rush and Mark, who’s an adopted Melendy now) are away at boarding school, and Mona is living in the city, where she’s staying with Mrs. Oliphant, a family friend, and going to school and acting in the radio show she’s been doing for a few years now. This leaves the youngest kids, Randy and Oliver, at home in the country, and they’re a bit apprehensive about how quiet and lonesome their fall and winter and spring are going to be. But then, on a glum and quiet September day, a mysterious envelope arrives for them: it’s addressed in unfamiliar handwriting and has a New York City postmark; inside, there’s the start of a treasure hunt: a rhyming poem/clue that promises to lead them to the next poem/clue.

The hunt means that this book is, as a whole, fairly different in tone and feel from the other books: the central mystery means that it feels much more action-driven, episodic in a different way from the unpredictable or meandering episodes of the earlier books. The chapters can be formulaic: there’s a whole lot of them that follow the pattern of Randy and Oliver thinking early on that they’ve figured out what a clue means/where the next clue is, setting out in search of the next clue, and realizing they were mistaken—often with humorous consequences. But it’s still fun to read, and charming, and often really hilariously funny: there’s an episode near the end of the book involving Oliver and a chimney flue that had me laughing riotously/feeling glad I was reading this particular chapter at home instead of on the subway or something, and another episode involving “taking the waterfall off” that was similarly excellent.

There are still bits of lyrical loveliness, too: I particularly liked the chapter in which Oliver finds his way through a forest of pokeweed and meets a new friend, an old woman named Louisianna Bishop. Miss Bishop, with her little house and her cats and the winter moss-gardens she cultivates indoors and her knowledge of weeds and their uses, culinary and otherwise (purslane in salad, sorrel in soup) is pretty excellent. I also enjoyed the Christmas chapter, which features a beautiful snowy December, plus caroling in a sleigh on Christmas Eve.

And oh, Oliver! Oliver, who is now nine years old, continues to be sweet and determined and wonderful. The below, from the ride home after Christmas caroling, made me grin:

As they drove home, shortly before midnight, they were soon half-asleep in the cozy straw. All but Oliver, that is. Oliver had drunk a cup of coffee at each place (without drawing attention to it, naturally) and was as brightly wide-awake as any owl. He asked Father so many questions about the stars that Father begged for mercy. “I never knew I didn’t know so much,” he said ungrammatically, for he was very sleepy.

“Never mind,” said Oliver. “I’ve just about decided that astronomy is going to be my next phase, anyway. (130)