I'm done with The Boxcar Children series, after the catastrophe that is #24 "The Mystery of the Hidden Painting"

I’m trying to remember why I used to like these books so much when I was a kid.  I must have checked out a dozen of them each time we went to the library when I was about 7-years-old.  I thought they were funny and a little suspenseful.  I even did a book report on one of their adventures at a dude ranch.  But now…I guess I just grew up, or developed a better literature palette, or something, because these books are just not well written.

The language is forced, awkward, and often pretentious.  No one actually talks like this, and certainly not children.  The writer feels the need to bring up the boxcar, and why the children lived there, every other page.  Sure, not everyone who picks up a Boxcar Children book is going to know the story of why they are called that, but surely they’ll remember being told three pages ago – you don’t need to say it so many times within the same book.

As for the mystery that the children get to solve, it had potential – they want to find the long lost (presumed stolen) necklace of their late grandmother, in time for their grandfather’s birthday.  (By the way, how many kids actually call their grandfather “Grandfather”?)  They see a photo of a woman in the newspaper (how many 12-year-olds read the newspaper) who appears to be wearing the necklace and immediately concoct a scheme to interrogate the woman.  Of course, multiple people in the village try to scare away the children: calling them late at night, following them in a car with tinted windows.  And when the children don’t get the information they want, they latch onto a “clue” on a return address label that happened to come from a town right next to where the necklace had been stolen from.

The overreaction of the townsfolk to the children’s investigation is downright absurd.  It’s not like the police were pounding down doors, it was a couple of kids who just wanted to know what happened to their grandmother’s necklace.  If the people really wanted to keep it a secret, they should have lied politely to the children’s faces instead of acting rude and suspicious.

The mystery ends, like always, with a non-forced confession from the perpetrator and, of course, no involvement from the police.  The culprit gets away with it, and the children and their grandfather even allow for the necklace to stay where it was (in a museum in the middle of nowhere).  The incredibly unrealistic ending is a fit for the incredibly unrealistic plot, and neither are worth the trouble of putting up with that horrid writing style.

I may have loved the Boxcar Children when I was Benny’s age, but I think children today deserve better writing than this series has to offer.