I enjoyed Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School more than I did the first three books. It had more interesting events than the previous volumes.Soon into the story, the girls chance to meet Mabel Allison's mother and return Mabel to her. It's funny how lost parents are always found in a chance meeting in the same location where the lost child is. I am usually able to suspend disbelief in these cases, but I had trouble enjoying this particular reunion. I mean, really.
In fact, it makes me think of the blurb that appears in the back of the Altemus books. Keep in mind that Grace Harlowe was published by Altemus. The blurb reads, in part:
Really good and new stories for boys and girls are not plentiful. Many stories, too, are so highly improbable as to bring a grin of derision to the young reader's face before he has gone too far.Sorry, Altemus, your books do that, too.
Eleanor Savell continues to be extremely hateful in this book, although she does get reformed towards the end. I would prefer it if the mean girls would get expelled and banished to a faraway place. That would be more fun. Something like that happened to a mean girl in Lavell's Girl Scouts series. I like it when the mean girls get punished.
Meanwhile, Marian Barber becomes very friendly with a 29-year-old man named Henry Hammond. He influences her to dress up in expensive gowns with low necklines. She shuns her friends, and they can do nothing to help her. It turns out that Hammond is a thief and uses Marian to get money.
The relationship is very scandalous to me, since I see it from a modern point of view. Nowadays, I think the 29-year-old man would be getting a lot more than money from Marian, if you know what I mean. I also think that even in real life 100 years ago that the man would be getting more than just money.
Marian Barber is not to be confused with Miriam Nesbit, who was Grace's rival in the first and second books. At first I thought that Miriam was the one who was interested in the older man, then I realized that I was misreading the name yet again. This has been a problem for me since the first book. The author had no business making two important characters have extremely similar names.
I also noticed a bunch of dropped quotation marks in this book. Altemus got sloppy with this book, kind of like what Burt did with Harriet Pyne Grove's books. The saving grace is that the writing is good, unlike with Grove's books.
Grace is still close to perfect in this book, but I was happy when she and Eleanor break into an abandoned house in order to retrieve stolen property. There may be hope for Grace. Way to go!
2 comments:
In the Marjorie Dean high school series, I believe there's an unreformed bad girl at one point. There's also one whose reformation doesn't result in her becoming BFFs with Marjorie et al.
I might have mentioned it elsewhere on here, but of the Altemus books, you might also like Madge Morton - she runs into some actual mysteries more often than Grace does.
A couple of things about this Grace Harlowe story:
1) Henry Hammond has to be the dumbest villain in all of juvenile fiction. He's a swindler. One would think that swindlers would be ingratiating to make people trusting and comfortable with them. In his second conversation with Grace, he speaks of hating her in a completely crude fashion. Even if he has no suspicion that Grace is the nemesis who will thwart his scheme, it just doesn't seem bright for someone in his profession to make anyone suspicious.
2) At one point Grace says of Eleanor Savelli, "She comes of a race who swears vendettas." That seems a perfect example of the kind of ethnic stereotyping has long since ceased to be acceptable. But as I think about some of the things that have happened on the Sicilian side of my family, maybe it's more of a matter of a truth it is no longer fashionable to tell. (It should be noted that at least in this volume -- not the only one in which Eleanor appears -- it is not stated that her ancestry is Sicilian.)
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