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.

The Boxcar Children series stumbles with Special #3: "The Mystery at Snowflake Inn"

It's difficult to read a book meant for children when the language is so clearly not childlike.  The use of proper grammar in every sentence, an utter absence of slang or local vernacular, the constant use of "yes" instead of "yeah" or "okay" make the book feel more like a 10 page beginner reader, rather than a 100+ page chapter book.

As for the mystery in this story, there seems to be a lot of jumping to conclusions on the part of the children.  The Aldens, along with their cousin, Soo Lee, are at a Vermont Inn for the holidays (it’s never stated, but the holiday is obviously Christmas).  The first incident that gets their mystery caps on is that the horses for the sleigh rides are let out of the barn.  Now, I’ve lived on farms and know that it is in fact possible to accidentally let the horses out.  Horses are smart creatures, and if you don’t lock the pens up real tight, they can finagle many types of locks open again and get out.  It’s also possibly, considering how obviously understaffed the inn is, that the person in charge of locking them up at night got distracted by one of the many plumbing issues and fire hazards around the place, and forgot to check all of the locks before leaving the barn.  However, the children automatically assume that someone intentionally let the horses out of the barn.  While this turned out to be true, it is not a necessary conclusion given the circumstances. 

The only clue the children unearthed by snooping around was that there were strange bootprints in the snow outside the barn that could match either the Inn owner’s son, Larry (who was the one to go out to the barn and discover the horses were missing, so of course his bootprints were there) or Larry’s cousin, Betsy (who’s an avid rider and goes to the barn every day, so her bootprints would be there, too).

The suspects are easy to identify, as everyone in the inn loudly expresses how they feel about every little thing at all times.  No one seems to be harboring any secret motives as their intentions are all out in the open for anyone to see.  The son wants to take over the business and make major renovations.  The cousin thinks the place is a dump and doesn’t want to be there or around anyone (she comes across as a spoiled brat).  The two kids staying at the Inn with the parents really don’t want to be there and just want to go back home.  The cook is fed up with the poor excuse for a stove she has to work with and keeps demanding that it get replaced (and when it craps out on her one too many times, she quits).  All these revelations take place in public, quite loudly.  There are no secrets at the Inn.  In fact, the “secret” passageway, that allows the culprit to sabotage the oven in the middle of the night, is shown to the Aldens by the Inn owner on their first day.

The children don’t actually solve the mystery at all.  The culprit becomes overwhelmed by the holiday festivities and confesses all.  Sure, the children are able to see how it was that the culprit did everything – but that’s hind sight rather than inductive reasoning.  They wouldn’t have been able to solidly identify the culprit based on the paltry “evidence” they’d amassed by that point.  Definitely not the Boxcar Children’s best work.