I took my daughter to the library, just to return a book, but she wanted to go in. Then, inevitably, she wanted to hold and rearrange each item in a collection of approximately fifty Berenstain Bears sagas. And something else tumbled out.
Steven Kellogg is now known for "Pecos Bill," "Johnny Appleseed," "Jack and the Beanstalk"--beautiful, lavish retellings of classic tales. But I hadn't known, early in his career, he had an interest in mystery stories.
"The Mystery of the Missing Red Mitten" concerns a little girl, Annie, who may or may not be a victim of theft. Where is that mitten? She has lost five this winter.
Here is the challenging thing about a mystery. It needs to reconstruct the past--but, at the same time, there needs to be forward momentum. Alliances need to shift, and shift again, in the present. If it's just a story of one interrogation after another, after another, the plot becomes tedious.
The joke of Kellogg's book is that Annie cannot focus; she is *sort of* investigating the mystery, but really she is daydreaming (about a family of mice who may have converted the mitten into a home, a "tree" of mittens that might grow out of a well-placed scrap of cloth, a friendly bloodhound who might emerge, from nowhere, to assist with the hunt). At the same time, her colleague, her dog Oscar, is similarly inept; he thinks that a red bird is not a bird but a mitten.
This book makes me feel like I'm reading about my own child--and it's also weirdly suspenseful. The twist ending earns five stars.
I look forward to seeing the few additional "mystery" books from Kellogg's early days.
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