Book Review: The Pink Motel

I searched the Internet. Today a row of six little pink cabins on the beach is hard to find in Florida, because so much of the beach has been filled with big expensive hotel buildings...and yes, some of the big ones are pink! In real life, a pink motel has turned out to be a viable idea.

Photo from Google.

Title: The Pink Motel

Author: Carol Ryrie Brink

Date: 1959

Publisher: Macmillan

ISBN: none

Length: 183 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Sheila Greenwald

Quote: “Although they had been warned in advance, the Mellens were also astonished by the color of the motel...It was pink, pink, PINK.”

There’s plenty of nonsense in this tale of the bland Northern family who inherit the flamingo-pink motel building. There’s even a fictional motif I usually hate—the plot where the ten-year-old is the only one who notices or understands something any competent adult would have noticed or understood first—which becomes tolerable, in this book, because it’s deliberately exaggerated for comedy purposes. But it’s not pure nonsense; The Pink Motel is also a satire about conformity, and probably also about McCarthyism.

This is a comic satire about people who try to be sensible, inconspicuous, and predictable at all times, and therefore either fail to see what’s right under their noses, or else use their own superficial conformity to take advantage of anyone who believes conformity is good. Children and eccentric senior citizens have to rescue people like the Mellen parents from crimes, even though the crimes are both preposterously petty and preposterously obvious, because the Mellen parents have mental blind spots for anything unexpected. Kirby and Bitsy Mellen want to consult their parents when things look suspicious to them, but their parents keep telling them not to be silly—well-dressed, icily polite men with bulges under their coats can’t be carrying concealed weapons, and so on.

Kirby, Bitsy, and their parents have inherited the motel and its guests from an eccentric uncle. Kirby’s buddy, nicknamed “Big” because he’s the smallest in his family, speaks an outdated dialect but knows more about living in Florida than any other character in the book. Bitsy’s buddy, Sandra, has been trained to sit still “with her nose in the air” by her rich conformist parents, but the other children liven her up.

Then there’s Miss Ferry, whose shrewdness and ability to produce snacks out of nowhere suggest that she may be a “fairy” or wizard, and Mr. Carver, a very wise penniless eccentric wood carver, and Marvello, a depressed stage magician, and Miss DeGree, who will become the damsel in distress, and Mr. Black and Mr. Locke, who ooze criminality to such an extent that only conformists like the children’s parents would trust them for a second. Then there’s the baby alligator...

Carol Ryrie Brink is best known for realistic family stories that were based on facts, like Family Grandstand, Mademoiselle Misfortune, Two Are Better than One, and most of all the Newbery Award story of Caddie Woodlawn. Not all readers who liked those books appreciated The Pink Motel. Brink had written other whimsical stories in the doesn’t-have-to-make-sense-as-long-as-it’s-funny mode, however, like Baby Island and The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit; and some of her readers liked her in both modes.

Today, The Pink Motel is an obscure children’s classic...and my copy definitely shows the effects of fifty years of enjoyment by children.