My apologies for an unplanned blog hiatus, but graduate school happens. I will resume my critical review of Missing Since Monday before long, but first I would like to take a moment for the annual Reading of the Embarrassing Christmas Children's Books.
Richard Scarry's Best Christmas Book Ever by Richard Scarry, Sterling, 1981.
I don't know where to begin. Literally. This book is approximately 6030453408 pages long. Stories, colorful illustrations, sheet music for two Christmas carols, a game board and the instructions to make a pomander apple are all crammed into this slim volume. And all of them are of poor quality. The game board is printed across two pages at the center of the book such that any game pieces you use will slide off. The pomander instructions refer to the pomander as "the best Christmas gift for grandma or anyone," which betrays an optimism bordering on mania. The stories are ridiculously trite and feature the usual stilted, oversimplistic Richard Scarry style of writing. The text somehow manages to be long enough that it might have been written by Victor Hugo, with a sparsity of wording reminiscent of Hemmingway, and the artistic ability of E. L. James. And speaking of E. L. James, look at the above illustration. Just look at it. What is that rabbit holding? Why does it have a perineal raphe? Why in the name of all that's holy and decent did Scarry feel the need to write "nuts" next to the rabbits vacant, smiling face as he fondles the pink package? Chilling. Two candy canes, out of a possible five.
Christmas on Exeter Street by Diana Hendry, illustrated by John Lawrence, Alfred A. Knoph, 1989
This story is a heartwarming parable about the virtue of hospitality as seen through the lens of an acid trip. I quite like it. Unlike the Richard Scarry book, it tells one story and tells it succinctly; the story begins after the title page and when it finishes, the book also ends. And it is a genuinely fun story, the story of what happens when one hospitable housewife opens her home to everyone in the neighborhood on a snowy Christmas eve. Guests who arrive early get actual beds to sleep in, and the rest are not so lucky. Of particular artistic merit is the scene wherein five old maid aunts from Abingdon arrive with their dogs, and the protagonist makes beds for them on the pantry shelves without first removing the fine China. This is the true meaning of Christmas, after all: giving of yourself and not counting the cost, or the local fire code laws. The book also features detailed illustrations including a particularly lurid drawing of Santa counting his toes on a snow-covered doorstep. Four candy canes.
Merry Christmas Space Case by James Marshall, Dial Books for Young Readers, 1986.
Merry Christmas Space Case is the sequel to Space Case, which was featured on Reading Rainbow nearly thirty years ago. It tells the story of "The Thing's" return to visit Buddy and experience an Earth Christmas, and it does so adequately with the expected visual gags, grotesquely deformed bullies, mistaken identity dilemas and blind or stupid adult characters to move the tale along. Feminist mommies will particularly enjoy the liberated Granny character, who is a scientist of some sort and always wears a lab coat. Merry Christmas Space Case features no innovation, but it repeats its comedic tropes with such confidence that one is drawn to laugh in spite of oneself. While one must admit that this book is lacking in some of the charm and originality of the older Space Case, this is nonetheless a worthwhile addition to your Christmas science fiction library. Three and a half candy canes.
A Christmas Wish for Corduroy by B. G. Hennessy, Viking, 2014
Ah, Corduroy. That lovable and naive little bear who always manages to get back to wherever it is he's wandered off from, with the help of obliging New Yorkers. Ah, Cordury. What else can be said about Corduroy? Nothing. And that is the main problem with A Christmas Wish for Corduroy. It is attempting to capitalize on the two most hackneyed and trite literary topics in the history of children's fiction: Christmas and bloody Corduroy. He is a one-trick bear with a tired shtick: he misunderstands things and wanders off. This was relatively charming in the original two books penned by the artist Don Freeman. Perhaps it should have been everyone's first clue when this book was labeled as "Based on the characters created by Don Freeman" rather than with the actual new author's name. Hennessy understandably wanted little to do with this mess. A Christmas Wish for Corduroy is a rather dark and nihilistic prequel to the original text, and it blatantly steals two illustrations and a bit of dialogue from the same. It never once uses Corduroy's signature "This must be a [noun], I think I've always wanted a [noun]" monologue or any of its variations, and for that we can be grateful. But it has no originality, no insight, no building on or illuminating the other texts; it has absolutely no reason to exist except as a shallow attempt to score some money in the name of a competent dead author. Shame. One and a half candy canes.
Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to put before you my recap of the next five chapters of Missing Since Monday, wherein Maggie knows nothing, the cops do nothing, and Lay is a nervous wreck.
Chapter five: Questions! Maggie calls the police, sounding like a basket case, and answers their questions. Then, while she's waiting for them to send an officer over, she tries to call Dad and Frito/Leigh, but the overseas operator can't find them. Then, the phone rings. She thinks it's Courtenay for a few moments, but then realizes it's her friend the funny-voiced stalking caller asking if she's alone. She screams "no," hangs up, and calls the high school for Mike. Then the phone rings again and she refuses to answer it in case it's the stalking caller. The phone stops after three rings. Maggie and I hope it wasn't Courtenay calling for help or anything important like that.
Maggie sits down, wondering if Frito will "disclaim [her] as a stepdaughter." I wonder if the police will do what they always do nowadays, and assume that the mood-swinging mother who is sometimes too overprotective to give her child a mint, and sometimes so lax she leaves the country for an island vacation where she can't be reached by phone, is the culprit.
The house creaks randomly, making Maggie wonder if she's alone or not. Then a random storm breaks complete with thunder, lightning, and probably Jacob Marley clanking his chains somewhere in the house. Subtlety is not Ann M. Martin's strong suit.
The actual rain begins just as Mike and two police officers arrive at the same time.
The officers, Stuart and Martinez, look barely older than Mike. They begin to ask questions, all the answers to which we are treated to in real time. I don't really mind except that this would have been a much better time to give necessary exposition than in the first chapter... Maggie is telling the officers everything she told us already in chapter one as a clumsy wad of internal monologue. We needed to know almost none of it prior to this chapter.
Anyway, the officers and Maggie and Mike have a back-and-forth that's fairly informative and entertaining, as such things go. Courtenay's age is finally revealed as four (five in July), and her middle name is Louise. I'm surprised that they didn't give that name a trendy spelling too; something like "Louieghz." The officers ask about Maggie's real mother, which she takes exception to. Shouldn't they be out searching for Courtenay?
Maggie is then shocked when the officers suggest that Courtenay was kidnapped instead of just randomly wandering off. The thought hadn't yet occurred to her.
Mike takes over answering questions while her sister broods. He explains that their mother moves around a lot. It's not that she doesn't love them; it's just that she likes a lot of space because she's an "old hippie."
Maggie is shocked again when the officers mention that the FBI wants their mother's last known address.
Then they ask about Lay-- is this her first marriage? No it is not; she was married previously to a man named Tierno, who left her childless. Apparently they wanted children very much. Maggie is insulted when they ask if Tierno might be Courtenay's real father. Mike and Maggie keep on talking about Tierno as if he's a shadowy figure they've never met, until the officer asks for his first name... and then we get this line from Maggie:
"Wait! Yes, we do know it, Mike! He runs a bicycle repair shop. We went there once. It is in Lawrenceville. His name is Jack Tierno."
Just a moment. HOW DO YOU FORGET SOMETHING LIKE THAT, and then remember it so quickly? Does Maggie get her bicycle repaired so often that she just can't keep track of repairmen? I mean, wouldn't it stick in your mind if you were introduced to a bicycle repairman who turned out to be your stepmother's ex husband? How did the conversation go? "Hello! I see your bike is broken. Would you like me to repair it here in my shop in Lawrenceville? My name is Jack Tierno, and I am your stepmother's ex husband." I suppose I might have repressed that incident as well, come to think of it... Or maybe Maggie's bike broke, and suspicious Lay recommended her ex husband to repair it. Or something. I'd far rather hear the drama of how suspicious Frito/Lay and her rambling, kid-wanting bicycle repairman husband married and split up than listen to Maggie answer more questions, anyway.
The police ask if anything out of the ordinary happened this morning, including any strange phone calls, and Maggie says "no," declining to tell them that she's had a stalking caller.
Mike grimly gets up to try to reach his father and Lay.Chapter six: Bleak Tuesday! Mike finally gets ahold of Lay and Dad, which is complicated by the fact that they'd taken a trip to a completely different island on a whim "to visit friends."
The police deem the case a "stranger abduction" without saying why they ruled out a "parental abduction;" the parents are acting suspicious as hell to me. Two new officers are stationed at the house at all times: the heavyset Lamberton "with a constant craving for coffee," and a woman named Becker "whom I liked very much." We're not treated to why Maggie likes her; presumably because she's not heavyset and therefore a pariah like Lamberton. I also like to imagine Lamberton wandering the neighborhood breaking into houses to satisfy his constant coffee craving, but that's too much personality to ask of one of these characters.
Maggie is given the phone number of an organization called Search for the Children, which are apparently consultants in how to search for lost children The whole town of Princeton bands together to search the local woods for Courtenay, which surprises Maggie.
The police use dogs to look in wells and septic tanks. Maggie is so surprised that her head is "spinning" when Courtenay's picture even shows up on the eleven o'clock news, and she claims to have never heard of the Associated Press.
Maggie goes to bed and has another undescribed nightmare; she comes downstairs to find the police officers have spent the night and are drinking "a huge pot of coffee." I certainly hope the Princeton police are paying Maggie's family back for all the coffee.
The officers say that somebody spotted an old green Ford outside Courtenay's school yesterday, and that Jack Tierno has conveniently left town in the past weekend. Also, they would like Maggie and the family to do a personal interview on the news. They also explain that, according to the interview with Birdie, Courtenay got off the bus to school, but was not seen to enter the building.
Maggie ruminates for a moment that Birdie had always regretted not having children of her own.
The phone rings, and Maggie finds out that the principal of the high school is giving two days off to anyone who wants to join in the search, which surprises Maggie. And then she realizes that her brother fell asleep on the couch.
This chapter is rather boring, which isn't inexcusable; in the search for a missing person there is a lot of sitting around feeling useless, and it's good to try to illustrate that for the reader. But I think the general level of angsting and puttering in a book intended to be a sensational child abduction story is rather high, here, nonetheless.
Chapter seven: Secrets! Dad and Lay come home earlier than expected, because they "rented a private plane on Saint Bart's." Her father promises to tell her the whole story another time. That actually sounds like an interesting story, as is the story of how an illustrator and someone who works in children's publishing raised the funds to rent a private plane. But the question is never revisited. Maggie asks Lay how she is.
Lay, a total and complete bitch, asks Maggie how she could let this happen.
Maggie protests that it was in no way her fault.
Lay almost agrees, but still blames her because it happened on her watch.
Maggie fires back that at least thanks to Maggie, Courtenay has some preparation for what to do in case of an abduction.
Lay can't think of a mean response to that, so she's mercifully silenced before I can throw the book in the toilet.
Becker takes Lay into one room to grill her on her ex husband, and Lamberton takes Dad into another room with Maggie and Mike, to ask him about his ex wife.
Dad begins to sweat profusely, even though the house is chilly. He asks the children to leave the room when he's asked how he was granted full custody-- which is a bit less unusual now, but was probably very uncommon in the 80s. They absolutely refuse, and Lamberton threatens to drag him down to the station if he doesn't spill the beans about his ex.
Maggie says internally that "wild horses couldn't have dragged me away. I was consumed with curiosity." I feel like I'm being consumed by a rabid cliche monster. Originality is also not Ann M. Martin's strong suit.
Dad's next few lines are so corny that they have to be heard in their entirety to be appreciated.
Dad:Maybe you're right, Maggie, but what you and Mike are about to hear is not going to be easy for you. There are things I've tried to keep from you. Someday, when the time was right, I might have told you the truth. Unfortunately this is a terrible time and a terrible way for the truth to come out... If any of this is too difficult for you to handle, I-- well, I'll have to answer the questions anyway. I still prefer that you not be here, but...
Lamberton: All right, I'll go back over what you know already. Your wife left you eight years ago?
Dad: That's right.
Lamberton: And she left voluntarily?
Dad: No.
Maggie: No? What do you mean, Dad?
Lamberton: *nods*
Dad: The court asked her to leave. She'd been charged with child abuse... neglecting and mentally abusing Maggie and Mike. When the divorce was final, I was given full custody. Jessica wasn't even allowed visitation rights.
Maggie and Mike, of course, refuse to believe this. Father sadly answers that he did it to protect them. He hoped that Maggie "Wouldn't have to remember or understand the years with Jessica. I was trying to keep you from being hurt-- again."
It turns out that Jessica/Mom used to leave the children home alone when they were little, and lock Maggie in the closet "for hours" and physically abuse her dolls. A psychologist said that was proof of what she meant to do to Maggie.
Maggie wants to scream "Liar!" but can't. I should remind the reader at this point that she mentioned in the first chapter having no memory of her time with Jessica-- no memories before the age of eight-- and not feeling that this was strange.
Mike sternly wants to know what this has to do with Courtenay, as if that isn't obvious.
Dad reveals that Jessica has spent the past ten months trying to get "shared custody" of her children. I wonder how in the name of raw sewage you're supposed to share "custody" of an eighteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old. Jessica can visit Mike any time because he's not a minor anymore. She can visit both of them whenever she pleases in two years, anyway, unless they get a restraining order. "Custody" isn't even an issue. Oh, and in case you wanted to know what spurred Jessica's sudden change of heart? *Spoiler alert* We're never told. Apparently it was just a whim.
Maggie is angry that her father didn't tell her about the joint custody angle, and Dad loses his temper. He says it wasn't easy keeping such a secret by himself all these years. He says Jessica is "unstable." And that is the only explanation we're ever going to get for any of Jessica's behavior: she's "unstable." Not even a real mental health diagnosis, just "unstable."
Lamberton announces, without doing anything to verify that Dad is right, that Jessica is now the prime suspect but they're not going to tell the media.
Maggie storms away, vowing to clear her mother's name.
Chapter Eight! On The Air.
Dad contacts Search for the Children, which is going to distribute Courtenay's photo all over the country. I get a lump in my throat because I have a baby girl of my own, and this would be tragic and terrifying to all parents. Then the TV crew comes.
Maggie doesn't even want to be in the room with her father, not for the legitimate reason that her father covered up her horrible abuse rather than help her heal, but because she still believes her mother is innocent. Mike reminds her that they have to set aside their differences for Courtenay's sake.
A makeup woman fixes Courtenay's face, "clucking over my freckles and red hair." Then they sit on the sofa for their interview. At this point Lay is on the verge of hysterics. I'd say she was doing a very good impression of all the "grief porn" in Twin Peaks, but Twin Peaks actually came out in 1990 and this book is 1986, so perhaps David Lynch was an early Ann M. Martin fan?
Robert Ford, the snazzy newscaster, makes the mistake of asking Lay how she feels and Lay goes ballistic, justly. Then Maggie takes Robert Ford upstairs to show him Courtenay's room. Ford looks grim as Maggie shows off Courtenay's toys and impressive book collection. Maggie pleads at the camera for whoever took Courtenay to comfort her if she has another red mitten nightmare. Then the camera turns off, and Ford says "That was beautiful, kid, beautiful." I don't know who in this cast of characters I want to slap more, but Ford is definitely high on the list. Likable characters are apparently not Ann M. Martin's strong suit either.
Maggie goes to watch the camera crew leave out a window, and notices all her neighbors standing around outside. Then she notices a "shadowy figure" in the trees across the street. Maggie realizes it's the very very Italian Brad DeChristopher who called her "baby" several chapters ago.
"I shivered as fear ran its icy fingers down my back."
And I started an internet fund to buy Ann M. Martin a series of writing lessons, because I'm beginning to realize she has no strong suit.
(Please note that this is a revised and edited version of a snark that appeared some time ago in the LiveJournal forum BSC Snark.)
When I was a child, I loved The Baby-Sitters' Club. I was borderline obsessed with the Baby-Sitters' Club. I wanted to be a member of the Baby-Sitters' Club. Mind you I don't mean that I myself wanted to join the Baby-Sitters' Club; I wanted to become a character from the book. I wanted to be Claudia Kishi the gorgeous svelte Japanese-American artist and spelling dunce who was required to be described in each book as "exotic." This despite the fact that I am Caucasian, plump and a pretty good student. But I digress; I was in love with the Baby-Sitters' club. And I viewed Ann M. Martin, the author of the Baby-Sitters' Club, as a literary genius. I wasn't alone. Ann M. Martin is one of the most prolific authors in history and has written (or at least had her ghost writers write) well over 200 novels. I thought she was a fantastic writer.
I was wrong.
Recently I've acquired a copy of Missing Since Monday, a young adult mystery penned by Ann M. Martin at the dawn of her career in 1986. This book was published the same year as the beginning of the Baby-Sitters' Club series. Her editors must have know this when they hired her to design the Baby-Sitters' Club, but apparently they never read it. I myself read the book in just one sitting over the course of a couple of hours, because it does have a certain infectuous angsty suspense. There's really only one problem with the whole novel: it sucks. It shows notably less writing skill than even the famously mediocre BSC series did. The characters are swoonily overwritten narcissistic ninnies; the dialogue is terrible; the constant emo internal monologue is absolutely rife with the most appalling cliches; and the plot is so soapy that I've got dishpan hands just from reading the damn thing. It's like some kind of 1980s, Vampire-free version of Twilight. This book is archeological proof that the tradition of Lifetime Original Movies preceded the invention of the Lifetime channel itself.
Have I whetted your appetite? All righty then, let's get to it.
Chapter One: Leigh.
We open with our heroine, such as she is, just returning from a trip to the park with her half-sister Courtenay. The hip offbeat spellings in this book are going to drive me up the wall in short order, I feel, and I'm going to take out my aggression buy pronouncing them phonetically as they appear in my head.
Courtenay, who is sometimes called Cortie, and occasionally called both Courtenay and Cortie by the same character in the same sentence, scampers upstairs to show her mother, Leigh, how messy her candy-stained face is. I'll be mentally pronouncing Cortie's name as "Cort-ten-nay," if anyone is keeping track, and her mother is "Lay" or perhaps "Frito."
Lay is in her illustrating studio; she stops illustrating in horror when she sees her daughter's grass-stained knees and the sticky red patch on her cheeks. She chides Maggie for giving Courtenay a mint, which will "ruin her teeth before she gets to kindergarten" and probably also spoil her dinner. Maggie tries to be casual about her stepmother's chiding. Courtenay seems used to her mother and half-sister bickering. Maggie exposits for the audience that Lay overprotects her daughter and has never gotten along with casual Maggie. Maggie and Lay got off on the wrong foot when they met five years ago: Lay gave Maggie a present and asked to go for a walk while they got to know each other, and Maggie said no because she had plans and has always had a "thing about breaking promises." This made Lay feel "hurt and resentful and suspicious." They've never gotten along since. I can't decide who's the bigger ninny, but right now I'm Team Lay.
Maggie also exposits that Lay and her father are going out of the country on a belated honeymoon this weekend, leaving Courtenay in the care of sixteen-year-old Maggie and her older brother. Lay, who is so overprotective.
Lay asks Maggie to go do her homework, and Maggie goes away "to be alone with my thoughts." She goes to her room, and then she begins to tell us her entire life story, complete with descriptions of her best friends. She really does. Somewhere along the line, Ann M. Martin decided that this was the only way in which exposition should be given. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
The following information is divulged in the form of a long, stringy digression: Maggie's mother left home when she (Maggie) was seven and Maggie never sees her, though she does send postcards. There's no resentment on Maggie's part, though; it's just that her mother is such a "creative person, and creative people need space. Well, some of them do." Indeed.
Maggie's Mom's last known address was in the mythical land of California, working in a cafe. Before that, she'd been in Michigan, studying pottery.
Maggie and her brother Mike look just like their mother, whom Courtenay can't remember physically and has only a few photographs from which to verify this statement. They have flame-red hair and "I've got enough freckles on my body to share with half the world." Readers of the Baby-Sitters' Club may recall that Ann M. Martin never missed an opportunity to tell us that redheads are ugly and unlucky comic relief; however, in this book Maggie and Mike are both foisted upon us as good and sympathetic characters. If anything, "tawny-haired" Courtenay is the buttmonkey of this piece. One can only wonder what traumatic experience in 1986 caused Anne's viewpoint on the subject of gingers to shift so radically.
The family lives in Princeton, New Jersey, now, where Lay is a respected illustrator of children's books. Her father works in publishing in New York , where he's met Judy Blume and Maurice Sendak. One ought to get used to the constant name-dropping of much more competent children's authors; it happens with alarming frequency. It's as though Ann sensed that this book was a disaster and wanted to at least make it worth the audience's while by providing them with a list of further reading.
Maggie's boyfriend is one David Jacobssen, and her best friend is David's twin sister Martha. Mike's best friend Andrew DeChristopher has a sister named Jane, who is also Maggie's friend. There must be a thousand less confusing ways to introduce our cast of characters, but the author has elected to just name them in a list like this. Perhaps she should have included a flow chart.
Courtenay comes in at that point and asks Maggie to come to dinner. Maggie realizes that she's been daydreaming about her life story in real time, and is embarrassed. But not as much as she should be.
That night, Courtenay has a nightmare about a red mitten that snores under her bed. This happens to her frequently. It's a fairly creative thing and rings true, which means Ann probably heard it from a real child. Maggie goes to comfort her until Lay arrives, and then goes back to bed. She informs the audience that she's "battling nightmares of my own." They happen even more often than Courtenay's red mitten nightmares, and they terrify her. But she doesn't bother to tell the audience what they are about.
Chapter Two! On Our Own.
Dad and Lay leave for their honeymoon on Saint Bart's in the Caribbean. Maggie dresses Courtenay in lavender baggy pants and a lavender and white striped sweatshirt. This is the first of many instances of the blatant costume porn which went on to make the BSC famous. Mike makes pancakes and bacon, with fresh orange juice, coffee and hot chocolate in the time it took Maggie to dress Courtenay. The family eats together and plays the "lost game" wherein they drill Courtenay on what to do if she's lost or kidnapped, what her phone number is, and so forth. Maggie tells us that Lay doesn't like the Lost Game; it makes her "incensed." She's afraid it will make Courtenay frightened. Lay says that child abduction and abuse never happens in Princeton anyway. So, so far Lay, who is described as so overprotective that she won't let her daughter have a mint before dinner, has jetted off to the Caribbean leaving said daughter in the care of two teenagers, and refused to allow her to be quizzed on her own phone number. Consistent writing is for lesser artists, apparently. The genius of Ann M. Martin is how she keeps us guessing.
Maggie and Mike decided to invite a few friends over for pizza, because Lay will be angry if they have a full blown party. They decide to invite David, Martha, Andrew and Jane over for pizza and hope that Andrew and Jane's creepy older brother Brad won't come as well. Brad likes to blackmail the younger teens into doing things, and he's never been caught. Maggie thinks he's "slime."
The bus comes to take Courtenay to school; Maggie exposits that the bus is always being driven by retired volunteers, but that she doesn't recognize this particular retired person.
After school, Maggie receives another postcard from her mother. She still works at the same cafe.
Then the bus pulls up with Courtenay, this time driven by Birdie, an eccentric old lady with false eyelashes who loves the children. Birdie and Maggie exchange pleasantries.
Such a riveting chapter, no? No, I don't think so either. Let's move on.
Chapter Three: The Weekend.
Courtenay has another red mitten nightmare on Friday night, and Maggie has another of her nightmares as well. She lies awake in bed sweating, waiting for the horrible night to be over. Again, she does not describe this nightmare to the audience. In this entire book, she never describes her nightmares to the audience except to say how terrible they are. I can't remember if this the last or only the second to last time they're mentioned, but the content is apparently none of their business. I like to imagine they're about her sharing her freckles with all the world.
The next morning, as the family eats Grape Nuts, the phone rings. Courtenay tries to answer it, but Maggie stops her in a panic, so quickly that Courtenay breaks her cereal bowl. Mike puts her in the sink to be rinsed off as Maggie answers. It's Leigh, asking how things are going. Courtenay informs her mother that she's naked because she spilled her cereal because she was trying to answer the phone. Lay blames Maggie for this, because Lay is a bitch. Apparently Courtenay is never supposed to answer the phone in case of an obscene caller-- in this chapter, it seems, Lay is back to being consistent with her description. Or maybe Lay just always has the opposite rule Maggie has, no matter what. That seems about right.
That night, Maggie and Mike ready their house with pizza and M&Ms, and set the TV to MTV. The phone rings and Maggie gets it. It's the first of many stalking phone calls to which we'll be treated in this book-- a deep, husky voice whispering "are you alone?" to Maggie. She gets these calls frequently, but has never told her parents so that they won't be afraid to let her babysit.
David and Martha arrive then; David sexily pecks Maggie on the cheek. Then Andrew and Jane arrive with Brad. He blackmailed them into making them take him along by threatening to tell their parents about Andrew's bad grades.
Brad is 21 and a college dropout who works at a pancake house-- this is treated as evidence of his imbalanced mental state. He likes to ask Maggie awkward questions and touch her inappropriately on the leg. She's never told anyone about this. Fortunately Brad is also quite handsome, with olive skin and black hair. So I guess he's supposed to be Italian, though Brad DeChristopher is about the worst made-up Italian name I've ever heard.
Brad calls Maggie "baby" and puts his arm around her. Jane blushes and explains about the blackmail quietly. Maggie exposits that once Brad stole Jane's underwear, so she had to walk home with nothing under her sundress and boys kept lifting the hem to look underneath. I'd say that that makes the random neighborhood voyeur boys the perverts and not Brad, but then I'm a dirty Italian by marriage, so what do I know?
When Maggie comes into the kitchen, she finds Brad bouncing Courtenay on his knee. When she protests, he says "Cool out, Baby. We'll have a lovely evening together if you just relax." Trust Ann M. Martin to provide us with scintillating authentic dialogue.
David and Maggie steal a moment to cuddle in the kitchen and complain about Brad while Mike watches Courtenay. When they come back, Brad grabs Courtenay and says "Let's play horsey, honey." Maggie bundles Courtenay off to bed, but gets the impression she's being followed. When she re-joins the party, Brad has left. Maggie informs us that "a feeling of unease" has settled over her. I couldn't empathize more.
Chapter four! Missing.
Maggie and Mike have fun taking Courtenay to the park all day Sunday, since like all Martin' characters, they're not church-going people. I have no problem with non church-going people, but you'd think a writer writing about the 80s United States would throw in some practicing Christian characters just to look realistic once in awhile in her hundreds of novels. Judging by AMM's books, you'd think America was entirely populated by agnostics and the occasional Informed Jew.
Maggie makes everyone frozen waffles, cleans the syrup off Courtenay, and bundles her into the bus which is being driven by Birdie that day. Birdie mentions that she's going to get her hair done, which seems like a clue to the upcoming intrigue but is actually meaningless banter.
After school, Maggie sits on the porch and studies French while she waits for the bus. When the bus is five minutes late, she begins to worry that there's been an accident. Five minutes later, she calls the school, and is told that Courtenay wasn't on the bus this afternoon. She calls back Jane, who reports that Courtenay wasn't even in school. The school calls back to say that, while Birdie remembers letting Courtenay off the bus, Courtenay was never checked into the school. She's MISSING.
The school secretary informs her that "it's time to call the police."
And on that note of suspense, we shall leave them for the moment; I shall continue the recap in the next installment.
