Book Review: The Four-Story Mistake

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Title: The Four-Story Mistake


Author: Elizabeth Enright

Date: 1942

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: my copy has none

Length: 177 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: "There were thirty acres of land that went with the house, and a sample of everything delightful, short of an active volcano and an ocean...brook, woods, stable, hollow tree, and summerhouse."

After the fictional Melendy family's New York brownstone caught fire, the old lady the children learned to appreciate in The Saturdays invited them to spend the summer at her beach house. Then she helped their father sell the brownstone and buy an old farmhouse in the Adirondacks where the children could explore the things that really interested their author. The Four-Story Mistake is the name of their new home (meant to be four storeys, it was built only three storeys high by mistake). Here they discover architecture, antiques, and history, especially the Victorian Era that most interested Elizabeth Enright.

They don't lose their own interests. Actually, they grow in them. Mona, whose fifteenth birthday apparently occurs during the time frame of the book, qualifies for a paid acting job in a 1940s live-production radio soap opera. (It could have happened, back then.) Thirteen-year-old Rush gets a tutoring job. Meanwhile, they discover the secret room where the Victorian papa tried to wall off the memory of his runaway daughter, ride to school on antique bicycles, and will be cruising around, by the end of the book, in a surrey with fringe on top.

Of course, this book is a piece of its own historical period too. It's not just that the Melendys are Christians, in the bland unobtrusive way mainstream publishers expected at the time. It's that when they raise money by putting on talent shows, or even find a genuine diamond in the brook, they rush into town to buy...war bonds!

Some children enjoy learning new words from context clues, in phrases like "their swelling necks and biceps," "a light shining vertically through the rain," or "junior prima donnas temperamenting around the house." These children may or may not have been formally identified as gifted, themselves, but they also enjoy reading about the gifted and talented Melendy family; they're the ones who kept these books in print for forty years.

Perhaps family members who can explain concepts like war bonds and gramophones to eight-year-olds are in shorter supply than they were in the 1970s. Perhaps, too, the three later volumes in this four-book series gave me more pleasure than the first ones because they have a strong regional flavor; they're about the Appalachian Mountains all right, and there's not a coal mine or a moonshiner in this book. (There's a moonshiner in Then There Were Five, though.) Still, this is a classic book by a Newbery Award author. Every child deserves the opportunity to discover Enright's books.