This first story features three kids, Dink who loves to read, Josh who's into art, and individualist Ruth Rose who likes to wear outfits all in the same color. Their inaugural mystery begins when Wallis Wallace, Dink's favorite author, doesn't show up for the author visit at the local bookstore that Dink and the store owner set up. The three friends follow a variety of clues, along with shy Mavis Green, an aspiring writer, until they finally find the solution.
Mavis Green turns out to be Wallis Wallace, trying out a new plot for her next mystery book, and the kids are excited to meet their favorite author and look forward to their next mystery.
A lot of things in this book have dated - no cellphones and getting information about someone on a plane flight just by calling the airport for example - not to mention three young kids roaming the city with little supervision. From an adult perspective, Wallace is a jerk, disappointing a bunch of kids and messing up a store owner's planned event by staging a mystery and not telling anyone. There's no mention of any apology or rescheduled event either. The kids have generic clothes that don't look substantially different from modern clothing, and the adults are mostly shown in pants, long skirts, or other neutral styles.
Verdict: No matter how outdated I find these, they're still heavily used and recommended by teachers, which means that kids frequently ask for them as well. So, regardless of my personal opinion I'll keep replacing them. I would at least make sure you have more diverse options though, like Field Trip/Museum mysteries and Milo and Jazz.
Revisited: These continue to be popular and most have been updated with new covers. I continue to replace the worn titles and will be purchasing the new spin-off, A to Z animal mysteries.
ISBN: 9780679881681; Originally published 1997 by Random House; Purchased for the library and replaced several times.
2 comments:
I've seen a couple of series of this vintage that have tweaked the characters to be more diverse-- Malcolm's Jewel Princess series has the girls as cousins rather than sisters so they are different ethnicities.
Yeah! I'd love to see that for this series. There is a spin-off series - Calendar Mysteries - which is also 100% white and another series, Capital Mysteries where the sidekick kid is Asian-American. Maybe they'll update this series sometime in the future...
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