The Wishing Well is my favorite Penny Parker mystery and I've quoted my favorite line from it (with enough dialogue before it for it to make sense). I was a girl myself when I first read this book and I agreed with Penny.

In the first chapter Penny has to see one of the teachers after school. I had to chuckle at her reply when her friend, Louise, asked what she'd done. Both girls are members of the Palette Club, which plans to do some sketching at a pre-Civil War plantation that has gone a bit to seed. New student Rhoda Wiegand has considerable artitstic talent, but hasn't been asked to join the club. Rhoda doesn't know that Penny is asking her to come along because of their teacher, but they soon become friends for real.

The Marborough Place, called 'Rose Acres,' has a wishing well with a reputation for actually granting wishes in years past. Penny and Rhoda are the only two to make serious wishes. Will they come true?

There's an embarrassing scene when Penny and Louise meet the Breens, the family who took in Rhoda and her brother, Ted, so they wouldn't be put in an orphanage after they were orphaned. The Breens and Wiegands rent a trailer in greedy Jay Franklin's Dorset Tourist Camp (what we would call a trailer park). Mean people would call the Breens trailer trash, but they're nice.

Rhoda and Ted know they're a financial burden to the cash-strapped family. Two men from Texas turn
up. One of them, a Mr. Coaten, wants to become the orphans' legal guardian. Ted and the Breens are all for the idea, but Rhoda is suspicious. If Mr. Coaten was a friend of their father, why did they never hear about him before? Penny shares Rhoda's suspicions. There's no known financial advantage in the deal...

Another subplot involves the discovery of two weathered boulders bearing carvings in Elizabethan-style English and Native American pictographs. The local museum is sure they're real. Penny's father is sure they're a hoax. Jay Franklin just wants to sell one to the museum for much, much more than he paid for it. Penny notices the name 'Ananias' on the first boulder and suspects that means it's faked because Ananias was an awful liar. The museum curator says it was a common name in the early days. I find it difficult to believe that any settler would have named a boy after Ananias. Check out chapters 4 and 5 of the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible if you don't recall the story.

This site gives some colonial boys' names for parents who want to go beyond Victorian and Biblical names (apparently unaware than many of the names on their list are Biblical names). I note that Ananias isn't on it. http://nameberry.com/list/246/Colonial-Names-for-Boys.

Another subplot is the strange behavior of the widowed Mrs. Marborough, who has returned to Rose Acres. Why won't she let people into her house?

There is one racist term for Native Americans used in regard to a show Penny attends in chapter 19.
Louise gets the nationality of the maker of the silken ladder from book five wrong in chapter 13. Shame on her or changed because the USA had entered World War II?
In chapter 4 Jerry Livingston uses a slang term for 'mistake' that has a very different meaning today.
It'll probably amuse some readers.

I wish the illustrator had signed the frontispiece. It's nice to see Jerry, Mr. Parker, and Penny all in the same action shot, though. ( )