Children’s Classics Mystery Challenge

I don’t know what it is, but I just cannot get the new 5 Minutes for Books schedule to sink into my brain.  Granted, I should’ve known the second Tuesday of the month has always been the Children’s Classics challenge, and with the new year we just have a new genre stipulation added to the old challenge (for six months, anyway), but this one slipped by me.  Next month, Lord willing, I will be prepared!

Instead this month I’m going to make some plans.  I loved mysteries as a young teenager and beyond, and I’ve sort of fallen out of the habit of reading them.  I think part of the problem is that now that I’m an adult, I don’t want to read anything that might even have the remote potential to give me a nightmare or make me stay awake thinking, so I generally avoid them.  (That’s not to say I never read them; I just try to be very choosy.)  However, there are several authors from my youth that I’d like to revisit, and this challenge provides the perfect chance!

While other pre-teen girls were devouring Nancy Drew, I was devouring Trixie Belden.  That’s not to say I didn’t read Nancy; I did.  I just felt more kinship with Trixie, I think, because she didn’t seem nearly as perfect and put-together.  I also liked the gaggle of kids she was always with.  Their adventures in upstate New York always sounded like so much fun to me. I led a fairly boy-less existence until I was in college (and then, really, until I met my true love, Steady Eddie!), so the fact that Trixie and Honey were great chums with a bunch of boys was intriguing to me.  I have several Trixie Belden titles on my shelf, so I’m sure I’ll pull one of those and re-read it for old time’s sake.

Another series I hope to delve into through this challenge is The Boxcar Children mysteries by Gertrude Chandler Warner. Somehow I missed these books all together, although I do have a distinct memory of having a fifth grade teacher for the half of a year I was at one particular school who loved these books.  I’m curious about them, so I hope to satisfy that curiosity in the next few months.

The author I’m most excited about re-reading, though, is Phyllis A. Whitney.  With seventy-six books to her credit, Whitney is no stranger to most avid readers of suspense novels.  However, it might come as a surprise that she wrote some twenty juvenile mysteries.  If my memory serves me correctly, I don’t think I discovered her until I was out of high school and working as a public library aide, and while I definitely consider myself a late bloomer, these books didn’t seem too juvenile to me at the time.  I’m not even sure if any of these books are available at my local libraries, so I might have to do a little ILL-sleuthing myself (or PaperbackSwapping!) to find them.  I’m looking forward to it!

Next month, I plan to be prepared!  To read other, more prepared bloggers’ reviews, though, click over to the Children’s Classics Mystery Challenge at 5 Minutes for Books!