You Won't Believe What’s Happening in January, and it Involves Your Childhood Obsessions!
Back when I was living in Los Angeles, I would frequent the local thrift stores. One day I found myself at Vintage Treasures on Fairfax Avenue, and as I walked through the jam-packed aisles, my eyes fell on a book placed on a piece of vintage furniture. I gasped and ran to the chair, picking up the book and saying (not knowingly out loud), “Oh my goodness, I’ve found you again!” The clerk looked at me quizzically, but then realized how genuinely happy I was to see a battered book that no one else bothered to notice.
That feeling of joy when you spot a book that you know you will enjoy tends to fade as we go through life. Some of my fondest memories of my early school years were the Scholastic book fairs. I would save my birthday money and buy as many as I could. The theme was always the same: a mystery, with a hidden tunnel under a house, or a curse from local lore. Kids were the focus, and they worked together to solve the mystery. I was weaned on Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, and I always gravitated towards the mystery section of B. Dalton, Doubleday, and Barnes & Noble.
That long-lost feeling of joy came rushing back when I picked up Mystery at Shadow Pond by Mary C. Jane. The iconic cover and the simple but erudite writing keep you moving through the story. You could read these books in a day, and yet the story stayed with you for years. My original copy had been lost due to moves back and forth across the country, and I honestly thought I would never see it again. The clerk was so happy for me that she didn’t even charge me for it. She said, “I think you need that book!” and she was so right. I went home and read it again.
Dwight and I love a good mystery. The thrill of working out puzzles and solving crimes is something we could spend the rest of our lives doing. As he worked on The Waadizi Cycle books, he already had in mind a book series centered around kids and mysteries. The TV was turned off, and we went to our shelves of books and dived back into stories that inspired us then and rekindled our world-weary imaginations now. The result of all this reuniting with old, beloved literary texts will be available in January. But more on that later. I wouldn’t want to give too much away, now, would I?
Rebecca
