Michael D. Beil

The Ring of Rocamadour, the debut to The Red Blazer Girls mystery series, is a valentine to New York City and the thousands of plaid-skirted parochial school girls that swarm Upper Manhattan. It made the decades that I’ve been gone just melt away and inspired a nostalgia-tinged smile.

Seventh-grader Sophie St. Pierre and her friends/classmates at St. Veronica’s Catholic School on East 68th Street in Manhattan, Margaret Wroble and Rebecca Chen, are genuinely big-hearted, intellectually show more curious, and plucky. The threesome serendipitously meet the elderly Elizabeth Harriman, who has only just found a long-lost birthday card from 20 years ago. It holds the first clue in a scavenger hunt for the valuable birthday present he obtained for Ms. Harriman’s daughter, Caroline, who was turning 14 and was herself then a student at St. Veronica’s; old Mr. Harriman died on the eve of the girl’s birthday. He never had a chance to give Caroline the birthday card, and no one ever knew about the scavenger hunt — or the gift — until now. The addled Ms. Harriman turns to Sophie and her pals for help in finding and solving the clues. The Red Blazer Girls — as they dub themselves due to their school uniform — prove more than up to the task of solving puzzles and deciphering math problems, including one involving the Pythagorean Theorem, to help Ms. Harriman find her birthday present — and perhaps something more.

While readers from Middle America may disbelieve that seventh-graders would traipse all around the city, as a native New Yorker, I can testify that private-school kids routinely walk and take the bus or subway all over the borough of Manhattan. In New York, parochial school attendance doesn’t signify wealth, even at a school in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, just as Sophie notes in the book’s first few pages. Author Michael D. Beil, a teacher at a Catholic girl’s school quite like St. Veronica’s, portrays Sophie, Rebecca, Margaret, and their new friend Leigh Ann Jaimes as girls every bookworm would love to know. Is their English teacher, Mr. Eliot, possibly Beil’s alter ego?

Sure, sometimes the schoolgirls in this middle-grade mystery ring too good to be true; however, the girls’ positive attitude towards books and math will come as a welcome relief to studious girls everywhere, girls sick of novels featuring shallow pretty little rich girls and anti-intellectual Goth rebels. I wish I’d had Sophie and company as role models when I was a lonely geeky junior-high student in the 1970s, before geek was even a word — much less cool. Highly recommended. show less

After the success of their first case, the Red Blazer Girls get wound up in a mystery about a missing violin. The girls encounter multiple puzzles as they race to crack the case.

RESPONSE: This book was quite witty and interesting. The girls speak in a natural way, and the banter was both familiar and hilarious. The puzzles were also pretty neat, though I must admit I skipped some and just went to the end of the book for the answer. I really didn't feel like putting the book down and grabbing show more pen and paper to work a pig pen code. I could see the codes being popular with children, though. Kudos for having the answers at the back for us sleepy college students!

THEMES/CONCEPTS: Mystery, adventure, New York City, contemporary life, puzzle solving, friendship, girl power show less

At the beginning of this book, Sophie, one of the Red Blazer Girls (a group of mystery-solving 12-year-old friends who are also part of a band), is at swim practice, where her nose is broken (accidentally? on purpose?) by Livvy, her nemesis. Soon after getting her nose broken, Sophie finds out that her father has not only met Nate, her celebrity crush, he has also arranged things so that she and the other Red Blazer Girls (Margaret, Becca, and Leigh Ann) can meet him. This would be 100% good show more news if Sophie didn't feel a bit self-conscious about her nose.

Sophie's meeting with Nate is brief. Without checking with her parents first, she agrees to watch out for Nate's dog, in exchange for the possibility of continued contact with Nate and the $50/day pay he offers her. To further complicate things, Father Julian (if I remember right, he's a teacher at her all girls' Catholic school) has given Sophie and her friends more mysteries to solve. One of those mysteries involves two identical signed baseballs: one is real and one is a fake, and the girls are asked to figure out which one is which. Another one of those mysteries involves a family heirloom, a painting that may or may not be a real Pommeroy. Father Julian wants the girls to try and figure out if the painting is real by using a bunch of photographs to prove that his family owned it prior to Pommeroy's death in 1961.

Even though I had some serious suspension of disbelief problems as the story progressed (so many convenient doubles, and so many potentially valuable items given to a bunch of twelve-year-old girls), I enjoyed myself so much that I didn't really care. Sophie's "voice" (the book is written in the first person, from her perspective) is likable and fun.

The snappy, fast-paced writing was just what I needed to help get me out of a nasty reading slump. Had I been in a different mood, the book might almost have felt too busy and fast-paced. There were tons of things to keep track of, and, although I was sure that fakes and doubles would prove to be an important part of the book's ending, I wasn't sure how much of what was going on would end up being related. There were the baseballs (it occurred to me after I finished the book that it was never revealed who created the fake baseball, and why), the repeated hints that there was more than one little black dog named Tillie, people's comments that Livvy and Sophie looked remarkably similar, the painting that may or may not have been painted by Pommeroy, and the strange, shy artist who was so terrified of a certain someone that he never left his gallery. It was fun trying to put all the pieces together, but sometimes I just had to sit back and go with the flow, there was so much going on.

Although the cover art made it clear that the book is intended for younger readers (according to Amazon.com, ages 9-12), which usually means young protagonists, I originally guessed that Sophie and her friends were 14-years-old, maybe 15. Sophie's life is filled to the brim with extracurricular activities (swimming, her band, investigating mysteries, and hanging out with her friends and Raf, the guy she keeps saying isn't her boyfriend even though I'd argue that he is), and that's before her life is further complicated by trying to take care of a dog. Somehow all this, plus something about Sophie's "voice" and her tendency to swoon over Nate and Raf, had me thinking she was older, but it was still only a slight surprise when I came across a bit in the text that confirmed her actual age.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was a nice, quick read with plenty of likable characters, and it was the kind of mystery that invited you to put the pieces together yourself if you could. Throughout the text are illustrations of the photographs the girls used to try to date the painting, so readers even get the same visual clues that Sophie and the other Red Blazer girls do.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

Lantern Sam is the wise-cracking, sarcastic, talking cat (for those who can hear him, that is) who lives on board the Lake Erie Shoreliner train and is one of the best detectives no one knows about. He doesn’t have much patience for humans (unless they bring him sardines), but when 10-year-old traveler Henry can’t find his new friend, the exuberant Ellie, Sam’s enlisted to help. A ransom note is soon discovered and just like that, Sam and Henry are on the case, with the help of show more Clarence the Conductor (who supplies Sam’s sardines). But is Ellie still on board the train? Did the salesman with his trunk full of samples sneak her off? And why does that couple keep acting so suspiciously? show less