Barbara Ann: Mystery Across the Boarder

 

    When Barbara Ann's father has to take a business trip to Mexico City Barbara and her best friend Beverly join him. Barbara's unofficial boyfriend Bob and his friends, Mort, Jerry, and Jimmy, all decided to take a trip to Mexico City too. 

    As they're driving through Texas on their journey Barbara's father allows her to take the wheel and do some driving. Unfortunately Barbara ends up in a minor bang up with a car parked on the side of the road. This car belongs to Mr. Stedman who begins to bawl out the teenage girl. However when he learns her name is Barbara his attitude completely changes to kind and friendly. 

    Once across the border the group of Americans stay at a quaint Inn suggested to them by Mr. Stedman. It is owned by Mr. Sweizer who tells Barbara about Stedman's tragic life; 

    Stedman, a widower, had lost his only daughter and son-in-law in an automobile accident. His only remaining family was his granddaughter, Barbara, who he had custody of and doted on shamelessly. One day while at the beach with her nanny the three year old child went missing. It was ruled that the child had drowned but as her body had never been found Stedman holds onto hope that she is alive. She would now be 16 years old. 

    Once in Mexico City the party pays a visit to Mr. Stedman and meets his nephew, Gordon. Barbara senses a coldness between the two which is enhanced when Gordon makes it clear to Barbara that he does not approve of his uncle's hope that little Barbara is alive. 

    I'm going to stop my summary here because when it comes down to it the book is mostly filler. Barbara Ann of course finds little Barbara in Mexico, completely by coincidence. The nephew, of course, organized the child's kidnapping, and grandfather and granddaughter, of course, are reunited. 

    Mexico was a very popular place for books to be set in and I have read numerous ones taking place there, specifically in Mexico City. However I've never read one in which Mexico is looked down upon so much. The food is described as disgusting and inedible, the women as fat, the children as dirty, and the locations are picked apart. Almost all these old books in Mexico include a trip to the floating gardens of Xochimilco and this one is no exception but instead of describing the beauty of the place and the thrill and excitement of mingling with floating musicians and merchants who pass by the place is called "beautiful from a distance" and a complaint is made about Mexicans tossing their food waste into the water as well as complaints about it turning into a floating market where natives make money off of tourists. 

    To me it appeared as if no one in their tourist party was enjoying the experience of a different country. So it felt very ingenuine when Grosby writes the characters as being sad to leave Mexico. From their reactions throughout the whole book I thought they would be happy to leave. 

    I don't have much to say about this book. It's a typical Barbara Ann book in that the mystery doesn't take up much space and there's plenty of filler events. I did however find it less tedious than I did after my first reading and I think it is a step up from the last book in the series. 

Barbara Ann: The Mystery at Mountain View

    Barbara Ann is on a 3 week class trip through Colorado. The group is spending one week staying at Mountain View Resort, where Barbara's friend Bob Allen is working for the summer. Strange things begin to happen to drive all the guest out of the resort. Together Bob and Barbara decide to get to the bottom of thing.

- One night at Yellowstone everyone is heading to their cabins for the night and the boys offer to open the cabin door for the girls because they assume the girls will be scared since it's dark inside. The girls are offended that the boys would think them so timid and frighten and the boys promptly mock them for being so "independent". The girls then head to their cabin very peeved at the boys. When they open the door a giant bear is in their cabin and they have to run screaming to the boys to protect them. The boys then rub this in their faces. Let this be a lesson to all you women out there; if you try to be independent you will be accosted by a wild bear in your home.

- The answer to the strange occurrences at Mountain View are almost all attributed to a radio broadcast. The lights going on and off, the telephones ringing, etc are all done with a radio broadcast which just isn't accurate. I don't know if Ruth Grosby knew this or not but I found it a little annoying.

- Similar to the last book Barbara, and Bob in this case, reveal all their evidence to the culprit while they are alone in an isolated area with them. Barbara learned nothing from her last kidnapping.

- When the forest fire is first spotted it is look upon as a nice, exciting thing. One of the boys calls it a "swell forest fire".

- The group of students and the teacher go to the forest fire to look for Bob and Barbara. They don't even call authorities first. Once at the site the fire is already out and they see Bob's scout pin and a charm from Barbara's bracelet and decide they're dead and all head back to the resort. Why would they not keep looking for the two in the hopes they are either alive or injured while one person goes back for the authorities. It's weird behavior.

- The three criminals get away and no ones cares. They don't complain about it or even mention it again. This bothers me so much because the bad guys are always suppose to be punished for their criminal actions. Even in books such as The Missing Formula the bad guy goes free but that's after he's been caught and the good guys have decided to let him go.

    The mystery is crowded in at the end and the majority of the book is more about Barbara Ann's fun school trip which was extremely boring. The only scenes I really enjoyed were the ones where Barbara was out in the woods. Everything taking place inside the resort and before they got to the resort was terribly boring.

    I didn't end up writing a full summary for this book due to a combination of feeling burnt out on writing summaries and because I kept setting this book down for long periods of time. 

Barbara Ann: The Stolen Blueprints

    Here we go! I've been looking forward to getting to this series! Barbara Ann is one of the harder to find series and I was very excited 5 years ago to build a collection of all four books. Unfortunately I ended up not liking them. The books have good premises but the execution is terrible in my opinion. Barbara is a very one dimensional character and she lacks a personality.

    I don't know who Ruth Grosby was but upon my previous reading I felt she must not have been an experienced writer and that based on her writing she might have been an older woman.

    The last (and first) time I read this book was five years ago so lets see I'm my opinion has changed at all.

    Fifteen year old Barbara Ann Wilson is excited for the upcoming school trip to Colorado. She announces it to her parents and asks them for the $250 fee. Her parents inform her that they're struggling financially as her fathers architecture firm has been losing business to a new firm, Howard and Johnson. The rival company has been winning over clients with designs that are almost complete rip-offs of Mr. Wilson's designs. As he's begun to believe someone is stealing his work he hires a detective to investigate it.

    Meanwhile Barbara happily takes a day trip with nine of her friends to a cabin owned by the family of her best friend Beverly. After an afternoon of eating and playing horseshoes Barbara, her boyfriend Bob, and a girl named Jane all go for a walk. After they've gone quite a ways from the cabin Jane sprains her ankle and Barbara walks to the only nearby home to ask for assistance. 

    It is a run down farm house who's occupant will barely open the door for her and refuses to give help. Barbara has a rather strange belief that this house and her father's copied architecture designs are somehow related.

    The detective hasn't been making much progress, mainly because Mr. Wilson will not let him suspect or investigate any of the employees. One night as Bob and Barbara are driving to a dance she sees a light on in her father's office from the street view. Rushing up to try and catch a culprit in the act she just finds Tony, the janitor. Barbara is disappointed this mystery has not been solved yet as she's desperate to go on the school trip so she decides to take things into her own hands.

    On a Saturday she sneaks into the office of Howard and Johnson to look for any evidence she can find. In the wastepaper basket she finds a scrap of blueprints with her fathers business stamp on it but before she can flee with this evidence the two men appear. Barbara reveals all she knows so the men decide to take her to the farmhouse and hold her until they can secure $25,000 from an upcoming building contract and then flee.

    While she is in the men's car being driven to the farm house she manages to drop three identifying items out the window; a compact Bob got her, a monogrammed fountain pen, and a handkerchief with her initials on it. At the house she is treated fine but securely locked in. This is when she finally realizes Johnson is Tony the janitor.

    Meanwhile Mrs. Wilson has been frantic over Barbara's continuous absence. After calling all her friends and the hospitals her and her husband still cannot find even a trace of their daughter. However Beverly's family has gone to their cabin for the weekend so the worried parents hold out hope that Barbara had made a last minute decision to go with them. Bob offers to make the two hour drive there to find out.

    When he's almost there he notices an object in the road; Barbara's compact. He then finds her pen and further on her handkerchief. Then he notices a flashing light in the distance. It's Barbara flashing S.O.S in Morse code with the light in the bedroom that she's been locked in for the night. Bob uses his flashlight to signal back to her than races back to the closes town to call Mr. Wilson who rushes out with three police officers. 

    At the farmhouse Bob climbs a tree that extends close to Barbara's window and throws her a rope which she secures to the bed frame and climbs across to Bob. Then the police offers burst in the house and take the culprits by surprise. Barbara goes home and falls asleep excited for her school trip

- The small bits of sexism in this book are minimal and I wouldn't even point them out if it wasn't for it being more prominent in the books that follow in this series. Barbara and her mother are bad at math while Mr. Wilson and Bob are good at it. While at Beverly's cabin the 5 girls are told to wash the dishes by Beverly's mother, when the five boys want to help she tells them no, they need to go relax while the girls do the cleaning. After Barbara has been kidnapped she is expected to help the other woman wash the dishes which I found strange in general.

- I found the baseball game to be really boring but I can't stand the inclusion of sports games in any books.

- I can't help but feel that Ruth Grosby wrote herself into the part of Barbara's mother, Mrs. Wilson. Granted, I don't know anything about Ruth Grosby but I find that a lot of authors from this time and genre were in their 40s/50s so it's not too much of a reach to think Grosby might have been and therefore related to the character her age.

    Anyways the reason I think Grosby wrote herself as the mother is because Mrs. Wilson is written strangely. Her descriptions are very complimentary, way more so than Barbara's descriptions and Barbara is the main character. She's also included in the book in places that, in my opinion, she shouldn't be. Whenever Barbara's with her friends Mrs. Wilson is constantly butting in and then the book gives a whole description about how much everyone likes Mrs. Wilson, about how she's so popular among the young crowd, and about how young people like hanging out with her more than with peers of their own age.

- The chapter sizes are rather wonky. It went from A 30+ page chapter to a 7 page chapter. Since I like to sit down and read a chapter in a few moments of free time this made it difficult.

- Barbara instantly believing the farm house was somehow tied to her fathers copied blueprints was absolutely ridiculous. She had no reason to think this what-so-ever.

- Mr. Wilson hires a detective to investigate the copied blueprints but then gets upset when the detective does detective work. He gets upset when the detective even suggests it being any of the employees and refuses they be questioned or even informed an investigation is happening. Why not have everyone questioned including himself and his business partner, Mr. Radcliff. Also if word gets out there's an investigation and everything with the office is being watched then that might deter the thief. 

    The detective also tells him to start locking the blueprints up at night and keeping them within the office. Why were they not doing this after the second time they were stolen let alone the third or fourth time. Barbara father is an idiot.

- When Barbara is caught by Howard and Johnson in their office she tells them why she's there and that she's found evidence against them. She should have lied. Since they know who she is she should have pretended to be there to ask them to let her father get the building contract so she could go on her school trip or something like that, just appear kind of childlike and harmless. By this point she knew the men were mixed up with the shady farm house and working criminally but she still decided to antagonize them while alone with them in a private office in an empty building.

- When the men kidnap Barbara they tie a handkerchief around her mouth so she can't yell while they're in traffic yet she's sitting upright so people would still be able to see a gagged and bound girl in the car. Makes no sense.

- When Bob traces Barbara to the farm house the men hear him when he is just standing in the yard but when Bob throws pebbles at a window, climbs a tree right outside the house, tosses a rope twice, talks to Barbara, has Barbara climb across the rope, and both run away through the yard none of it is heard.

    Overall this book isn't as bad as I remember it but it also wasn't great. Even though I literally just finished it minutes ago there's nothing that strongly pops up in my mind when I think of it, no stand out scene or event. Just all feels rather blah and blends together.