Deet’s dad is in jail. He’s been taking drugs to stay awake so that he can hold down a second job, and somehow he got caught. It’s a first offense, but nevertheless Dad gets sent to jail for a six month stretch. A first, Deet is humiliated, angry, and confused, but slowly he begins to see that having a parent in jail is not the end of the world.

Good story. Good characters. Deet is the super-organized, hyper-responsible, oldest child, and both of his parents are a little too loosey-goosey and disorganized for the family’s own good. Some of that irresponsibility is what gets Deet’s family into this mess. Deet has a great teacher at school in whom he can confide via a assigned “quotations journal.” (Deet writes his reflections on various quotations from his quotation book.) Deet also meets other people who visit their loved ones in jail, and he becomes friends with some of them. These are the good parts of the story.

However, all the way through the book, I felt as if I were trapped in a sociology lecture about prison reform. The author inserts comments on how many people the United States jails and how high the illiteracy rate is among prison inmates. I liked the story parts, but when the author “went to preachin'” I had the impulse to skim. And sometimes I did.

“I wondered if the pressures of schoolwork had unhinged his mind. His mind hangs by a single hinge at the best of times.” (p. 43)

“I don’t take much pleasure in the discomfort of others. But I take some.” (p. 48)

“You would need your own personal Rosetta Stone to decipher the peculiar ways of a parent.” (p. 48)

Cute story. Not much historical information. If you’re disturbed by the idea of a corpse travelling back and forth from Ancient Egypt to small town USA or by mummies’ curses and psychic visions and suchlike, you might want to skip this one. But it is funny, and the voice of the narrator, Blossom, age 14, is feisty and memorable. In fact, Mr. Peck has a whole series of books about Blossom Culp set in the early 1900’s in Bluff City, (Iowa?), and this one is the fourth in the series. If it sounds good to you, you might want to start with the first one, The Ghost Belonged To Me. I read this book to see if it would fit into our study of Ancient Egypt. It didn’t.

I was planning to write about author and illustrator John Verney’s Callendar family series from the 1960’s, but I googled and found that Linda at A Cozy Nook to Read In wrote a much better plug for the series than I could, considering the fact that I haven’t seen most of the books in the series in thirty years. I did find a used copy of February’s Road a few months ago and re-read it; it was full of antiquated British slang, but otherwise quite readable. Maybe I liked the Callendars because they were a family with lots of urchins with unusual names: Friday, February, Abigail, Beryllium, Chrysogon, Desdemona, and Hildebrand, to name a few. The family and the names and the adventures all remind me a bit of Hilary McKay’s Casson family. Under the radar, out of print, and worth every minute.

I don’t know whether Penelope Wilcock’s The Hawk and the Dove trilogy, published in the 1990’s, are truly “under the radar” or not. Certainly, the books have many devoted fans, but they don’t exactly fit into a niche. The frame for the stories in the book has a mother telling her daughters stories about her medieval ancestor who was a Benedictine abbot. That makes the book sound like historical fiction for children, and it is. However, the stories deal with topics such as pain and suffering, chastity, faith, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, and finally euthanasia. Are these the subjects of children’s fiction? Maybe, but the novels, or stories, are definitely appropriate for an older audience as well. Wilcock can tell a story confined to the setting of a 14th century abbey and make it relate not only to a teenage girl at the end of the twentieth century but also to the universal human dilemma. The monks of St. Alcuin’s are a mixed lot, saints and sinners, usually within the same person. I’d recommend these books for children aged nine or ten through adults. Good plots, challenging philosophy and ethics.

Here’s another blogger, Danielle, who’s beaten me to the punch, reviewing two series of books that hold fond memories for me: the mysteries of Helen Fuller Orton and the series of historical fiction books set in post WW2 Germany by author Margot Benary-Isbert. The Ark by Benary-Isbert is a fascinating look at how ordinary German children may have experienced WW2 on the homefront —in Germany. The sequel, Rowan Farm, is just as good as the family of refugees from the first book go to live on a farm while the war comes to a close.

Danielle says “today’s children are too worldly for this book” about one of Orton’s mysteries. But if you or your children enjoyed The Boxcar Children books, I’d suggest Orton’s mysteries as a follow-up. I own six of Ms. Orton’s mysteries: Mystery of the Hidden Book, Mystery Over the Brick Wall, Mystery in the Old Cave, Mystery of the Lost Letter, Mystery in the Pirate Oak, and The Secret of the Rosewood Box.. I re-read Te Secret of the Rosewood Box, and it’s much as I remembered. The story is set in the 1880’s. Charley’s family is moving from New York to the wild country of Michigan where Charley and his sister Mabel see all sorts of exciting things: bears, a beaver dam, a gristmill, deer, and a lumber camp. The language and the plot are simple, suitable for a confident second or third grade reader. Grandma’s special rosewood hatbox falls off the wagon on the way to their new home, and Charley takes responsibility for finding it. I don’t think my younger children would be “too worldly” to enjoy this story, and I doubt yours would either.

So there, with a little help from a couple of new blogger friends, is my list of recommendations from under the radar for children’s fiction. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s trio of adult fiction authors who have been sadly neglected or maybe even forgotten.

Today’s Recommendations from Under the Radar:

A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy: A discussion of author Ellen Emerson White and why she is “under the radar”

Big A, little a: Ingo by Helen Dunmore

Jen Robinson’s Book Page: The Changeling and The Velvet Room both by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Bildungsroman: Girl in a Box by Ouida Sebestyen

Finding Wonderland: A Door Near Here by Heather Quarles

Miss Erin: Girl With a Pen and Princess of Orange, both by Elisabeth Kyle

Fuse Number 8: The Winged Girl of Knossos by Erick Berry

Bookshelves of Doom: The Olivia Kidney series by Ellen Potter

Chicken Spaghetti: Natural History of Uncas Metcalf by Betsy Osborne

Writing and Ruminating: Jazz ABC by Wynton Marsalis

The YA YA YAs: Massive by Julia Bell

Also Becky of Becky’s Book Reviews is highlighting a childhood favorite, The Gorilla Did It by Barbara Shook Hazen.

Saffy’s Angel, Indigo’s Star, and Permanent Rose by British author Hilary McKay make up a series of books featuring one of the most dysfunctional functioning familes in children’s literature. The Casson family consists of Cadmium (Caddy), Saffron (Saffy), Indigo, Permanent Rose, mother Eve, and absentee father Bill. Caddy spends most of the three books being wishy-washy about her multiple boyfriends, while she remains somewhat committed to her driving instructor boyfriend, Michael. Saffy, who’s really the daughter of Eve’s twin sister, is an adopted Casson. She and her friend Sarah careen about town and home, Sarah in a wheelchair, seriously shopping, sunbathing in the nude, doing mountains of homework for fun, and creating culinary disasters. Indigo represents stability, sort of the strong, silent type, but totally accepting of his insane family’s eccentricities. Tom, Indigo’s American friend, is a callous dope, but Indigo and Rose “like dopes.” Permanent Rose (all the children are named after artist’s paint colors) is a feisty eight year old who sometimes shoplifts for the fun of it and who paints murals on the walls of the Cassons’ house. Eve, the mother of all these children, is an artist who produces what her husband Bill calls “not really art.” She spends her days and most of her nights in a backyard shed where she paints and dozes and daydreams. Eve also teaches art to juvenile deliquents and paints murals at the hospital to make a little addition to the family income. Bill, the father of this ridiculous family, is a “real artist” based in London in an immaculately orderly flat where he creates great art and lives with his girlfriend, Samantha. Bill and Eve are not divorced, and Bill sometimes visits his family and contributes to the housekeeping fund in a jar on the kitchen counter.

I forgot to mention that the Cassons keep pet guinea pigs in the garden, and Eve doesn’t know how to shop for groceries or cook. Sarah decides by the end of the third book that Eve is “a saint or just more or less totally bonkers. . . probably both.” If you can suspend disbelief for a while and take it on faith that a family like the Cassons could survive in modern-day England, then you might enjoy a visit with the Cassons. It’s a nice place to visit, but I think, like Bill, I’d have a hard time living there. At the very least, Ms. McKay keeps the reader guessing as to what totally bonkers thing will happen next. There’s a fourth book about the Casson family, Caddy Ever After, that I’m going to pick up soon, just for that very purpose, to see what will happen next. I feel a bit responsible after three books to see that they all come out all right.