Book Review: Mystery at Shadow Pond

Title: Mystery at Shadow Pond

Author: Mary C. Jane

Date: 1958

Publisher: J.B. Lippincott

ISBN: none

Length: 121 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Raymond Abel

Quote: “Mr. Willey scares me...Usually he doesn’t say a word, and that makes me think he’s cross.”

Siblings Margie and Neale Lawson live on a farm. Mr. Willey, their neighbor, who lives alone and buys milk for his cat, shows signs of being a miser. He “could live on beefsteak and ice cream if he wanted to. But even your grandfather could never persuade him to spend an extra penny,” so he grows thinner and his cat grows fatter.

That’s not the mystery the title promised, though. Someone is snooping around the farm, and meanwhile the Lawson parents are fretting about having to sell a horse the children love. First the children have to find out what their recently deceased grandfather left behind that might interest thieves. Then they have to find their grandfather’s treasure. Mr. Willey’s memories of their grandfather and a friend who died before he did, and his thoroughly normal, non-social, food-oriented cat, will help.

This is a wholesome little story primary-school-age readers can enjoy—could read aloud to preschoolers if they felt like it. “Treasure” and “poultry” are about the most challenging words used, and though there’s no suspense about who the thieves are, an adult might pass an enjoyable fifteen minutes finding out how the children recover the treasure. I thought this writer’s mysteries were on the easy-reading side when I was in grade two, but I was a precocious reader. Many primary school children of my generation liked them, and as an adult I appreciate their nostalgic, topophilic Maine atmosphere.