Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Linda Carlton's Island Adventure

This book reads like a Beverly Gray mystery. If you love the Beverly Gray books like I do, then you will love this book. I have speculated about which series might have inspired Clair Blank to write the Beverly Gray series, and the Linda Carlton series has to be added to the list of possibilities.

In fact, since Clair Blank submitted her first four books to the A. L. Burt Company, then surely she was familiar with the books published by Burt. Therefore, it is extremely likely that Blank had read some books published by Burt, such as the Linda Carlton books.

In this book, Linda has become famous after her exploits from Linda Carlton's Ocean Flight. Linda finds that fame is a great annoyance and even goes by Ann Carlton during this book in hope of keeping people away from her.

Linda purchases an autogiro and takes a job in Georgia. Soon after Linda reaches Georgia, she is intercepted by bandits who take her captive. The bandits target Linda because of her fame. They knew that she was headed to Georgia because of the newspapers. Linda is held captive on an island in the middle of a desolate swamp. The bandits force Linda to use her autogiro to help them smuggle jewels out the country.

Linda has quite a few wild adventures in this book, such as swimming through the alligator-infested swamp, getting marooned on an island in the ocean, and more! Linda's adventures in this book are very much like Beverly Gray's outrageous adventures. I love it!

The book even has some melodrama, like a young man's mother snubbing Linda so she snubs her son in return. The son falls in love with Linda at first site, so he proceeds to show up in unexpected places as Linda continues to snub him.

I also should mention that people get killed in the Linda Carlton books. Not our beloved Linda—so far, at least—but other people meet terrible ends. Of course I seriously doubt that anything happens to Linda since she is the star of the Linda Carlton series.

Now, I'm going to find out if those reprints of volumes 4 and 5 were worth it.

3 comments:

Gina said...

The bad guys were actually killed off? That's different! Normally they just go to jail, run off in shame, learn their lesson, etc. Yeah there might always be that evil school rival who never learns, but killing someone off seems pretty serious!

For whatever reason I'm always suprised when characters get killed off in girls series books (with the exception of an elderly relative who leaves some kind of fortune behind, or maybe an old housekeeper).

I just started reading The Ranch Girls by Margaret Vandercook last week, and it was really odd to finish one book, start the next, only to find out that some character got written out of the series due to passing away. Obviously none of the characters written out were the ranch girls (or at least not yet), but it was still kind of suprising. Death is always just so final, so I wouldn't think it would be used much in girls series books.

Jennifer White said...

Death seldom occurs in series books, at least in girls' series books, that I can remember. It always grabs my attention in the few cases in which it happens.

It is also not normal for people to be having a picnic or to go to sleep with a recently discovered dead body nearby. I'd be too creeped out to eat or sleep.

Gina said...

Haha. Yeah I'm pretty sure if a dead body turned up nearby, a picnic is the last thing that I would want to do!