Thoughts before reading:
I'm loving this super dramatic cover! I also love books about bookstores, so I actually have some hope for this one.
The basics:
Mary Anne's home alone reading Poe for her English project on mysteries, and she gets spooked. (This is admittedly pretty dark reading material for SMS...) She picked him for her project because there's a new bookstore opening in Stoneybrook called Poe & Co. It will specialize in mysteries. In addition to reading for her project, Mary Anne also has to come up with a project using the author's work in some way.
At the next BSC meeting, the bookshop owner calls, Mr. Cates. He needs a sitter for his two kids: 10 year old Tom, and 7 year old Gillian. Mary Anne really wants, and gets, the job. His new store is in the old Benson Dalton Gable house, and his family lives above it. (Apparently this house is somewhat infamous in Stoneybrook, although it's never been mentioned before. Benson Dalton Gable was also a mystery writer, and a contemporary of Poe's.)
Tom and Gillian turn out to be sad kids... they hate Stoneybrook, and their mom recently up and left the family. Gillian blames herself, and Tom blames their dad. On top of all this, the kids are worried that their dad is dating his assistant, Ms. Spark, who the kids keep playing small pranks on.
Mr. Cates tells Mary Anne he's interested in hiring more BSC members to help out in the bookstore. She's thrilled, and spreads the word. That Saturday he hires her, Mal, Kristy, and Logan to work in the store, and Claudia to babysit. A high school boy named Alex Gable is also working with them. (Mr. Cates bought the house from his dad.) Alex tries to impress the girls by bragging about how BDG was a better writer than Poe, and his dad's trying to get his papers published. Mary Anne notices Alex poking around the house quite a bit too.
While everyone's working, a professor from Stoneybrook University, Ramona Kingsolver, stops by. (Mary Anne recognizes her because she once visited her English class.) Alex starts up with his Poe and Gable theories again with her: he thinks Poe was jealous of Gable and stole ideas from him, because during their time Gable was more successful. He even thinks the ravens carved into the mantel in the house gave Poe the idea for "The Raven".
Logan and Mary Anne stay behind when everyone else leaves to wait for a delivery, and Mary Anne gets spooked because she keeps hearing a weird noise that sounds like a heart beating.
The girls also continue to have trouble with the Cates kids, especially Tom. He's a real handful, not listening to his sitters, and being rude to other kids and adults. (He also just tries to make things difficult when he can, Sean Addison style.)
The next week, Mary Anne continues to work at the store, this time with Abby, Stacey, and Claudia. Alex wastes no time in hitting on Stacey, then he starts telling her about the mystery surrounding BDG's death. No one has ever found his grave, or knows when he died... and Poe was one of his last visitors. Alex also mentions a lot of BDG's papers vanished around the time of his death, which is why they've been unsuccessful at getting him published. There's simply too many gaps.
That same afternoon, the store cat, Pluto, gets stuck in a wall that the workmen had just finished... just like in a Poe story. Mary Anne starts to think the house is haunted. The BSC decides they have a mystery on their hands, but there's no real leads.
The next time Mary Anne goes to the store to work, Ms. Spark is yelling at the workmen about how they aren't working fast enough. She also overhears the workmen grumbling about how the town doesn't need a new bookstore, and they'd be better off just tearing the place down. Mary Anne then finds the word "nevermore" carved onto a shelf, and sees Mr. Cates drop a note that mentions Annabel Lee.
A few days later, one of the workers thinks he sees a ghost in the basement. Mr. Cates tells Mary Anne about it, and shows her a stone slab they found in the basement that says, "today I wear these chains, and am here. To-morrow I shall be fetterless- but where?" It looks like a tombstone.
Ms. Spark tells a reporter about all the weird things that have happened.
Kristy ends up helping Tom by telling him about her dad leaving the family, so he won't feel so alone. He also mentions to her that his mom's name is Annabel Lee.
Ms. Spark mentions to some of the girls that she used to be a set designer in Hollywood. (HINT HINT!)
A raven flies into the store one day while Mary Anne's there. She decides to check out the local pet store for clues on who might have set it free in the store, because the bird seems really tame. The owner tells her he doesn't stock ravens, but that he special ordered one for a woman using the name Lenore.
Stacey finds a stereo system set up in the store's basement, with a tape inside... and all it plays is the sound of a beating heart. Mal says the triplets have a kit for taking fingerprints, and they can borrow it and try to lift prints from the tape. The girls make coffee for everyone working in the store, then get the prints off each cup to compare. Mr. Cates is a match, which leads Mary Anne to think he's haunting his own store for publicity.
The next time they're all at the store, the girls set off the beating heart tape, act terrified, then catch Mr. Cates in the act of turning it off. He admits that all the strange events have been for a publicity stunt, to help make the store a success. He apologizes, and the club assures him that they've had fun figuring everything out.
Tom and Gillian also end up finding a hidden compartment with a lap desk inside... and in it are all BDG's missing papers. There's also letters between him and Poe that reveal they were friends, not rivals.
At the store's grand opening, Mary Anne wins The Complete Edgar Allan Poe collection.
Side plot: It's been raining a lot, so much so that everyone's calling Stoneybrook "Water World". Kristy decides to have a Rainy Day festival for the BSC charges, to cheer them up about the bad weather. YAWN.
Timeline:
*It's Spring.
Misc. thoughts:
*Apparently Edgar Allan Poe once visited Stoneybrook, and from the sound of this plot, spent some time there. This really is some little town... it has even more famous people, relative to population, than Tree Hill, NC! :)
*Annabel Lee makes Mary Anne cry, because it's too sad.
*The jobs sitting for Tom and Gillian are more where the adults are still home (in this case, working in the store). These jobs are my favorites, because as I've said before, these are the kinds that kids in junior high could actually get.
*Pluto is a black cat, named after a Poe story.
*I think all these Poe stories and references are pretty wasted on the BSC readers age group... I could see middle schoolers getting into him, but most BSC readers are much younger than that. By ten, I was pretty much done...
*I guess hiring kids is one way to get cheap labor, but do you really want 11 year old employees setting up your store? At least hire some more high school kids.
*Star Wars is one of Stacey's favorite movies? Which one? This is really hard to picture, and doesn't really fit into her established character that well.
*I remember Hi, Ho, Cherry-O! Late 90s board game, to those who don't.
*Alex Gable hits on Stacey and is shocked that she's only 13. I so saw this coming, haha. Any high school aged guy in this series always hits on her.
*This book really made me want to read some Poe, something that's never interested me before. Unlike a lot of my friends, I never had a teenage Poe phase.
*I'm surprised they were allowed to write all this fictional stuff about a real historical figure.
*Claudia paints a silhouette of Nancy Drew with her magnifying glass in the children's room of the bookstore. That's actually really awesome.
*Stacey has the idea for, and then leads, a mud pie making contest? Yeah right...
*Everyone calls Mary Anne "Dupin" in here, after the Poe detective.
*Ghostwritten by Vicki Berger Erwin.
*I don't think this new ghostie writes a very good Mary Anne. She was way too outgoing in here, joking around with the adults in the bookstore... it felt very off.
*The book never ends up telling us what Mary Anne does for her project?
*I wonder if this store or the clients will ever be mentioned again? By now hardly any old clients are ever brought up.
*I'd be pretty pissed if someone hired me to work for them and then put me through all this scary stuff on purpose, but the BSC members are just like, "Oh well, it was fun!"
Books mentioned:
*Poe stories:
"The Tell-Tale Heart"
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
"The Purloined Letter"
"The Goldbug"
"Annabel Lee"
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
"The Black Cat"
"The Raven"
"The Cask of Amontillado"
"The Mystery of Marie Roget"
*The Complete Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
*View From the Cherry Tree, by Willo Davis Roberts
*The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin
*From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E. L. Konigsburg
My rating:
3 stars. This wasn't bad at all. It was at least one of the more fun mysteries, and I enjoyed the setting, the Poe references, and the basic set up.
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