The Secret of Saturday Cove

I enjoyed Mystery of the Witches' Bridge so much that I immediately purchased The Secret of Saturday Cove, which is another book written by Barbee Oliver Carleton. The Secret of Saturday Cove was originally published in 1961 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. I have a Weekly Reader Children's Book Club Edition that was probably published during the 1970s or 1980s. The Weekly Reader edition is the only version that is readily available.

In this story, David and Sally Blake are descended from the original Blakes of Saturday Cove. The original Blakes lived on Blake's Island back in the Revolutionary War years. During the war, young Jonathan Blake hid the Blake's valuables on one of the nearby islands so that the British would not steal them. The original Blakes were never able to recover the treasure, so the story goes.

David and Sally hope to be able to find the treasure, but most of the original Blake land has now been sold. Making the problem worse, David and Sally's parents plan to sell Blake's Island, which is where the original homestead rests. David convinces his parents to keep the land and let him pay the taxes on the land by selling the lobster that he hauls each day. Soon, though, the other men accuse David of hauling their traps when their lobster disappears, and David may lose his chance to make money.

This book has an "About the Author" section. From that section:

Barbee Oliver Carleton was born in Thomaston, Maine, "of a Ship's Log and a Latin Grammar," she writes, "the ancestral stock being sea captains, teachers, and island builders of ships."

At the age of ten she wrote a book of children's verse, which far from making her rich and famous merely cost her mother postage to and from publishers. At Wellesley College she majored in English, became a member of the newspaper staff, and contributed to college publications. She was a recipient of the Masefield Prize for Poetry.

After graduation she became a high-school English teacher in Caribou, Maine. For a time she held an editorial post with Houston Mifflin Company, but this ended with her marriage to an aeronautical engineer from Maine.

Now she lives north of Boston with her husband and two children, and spends her summers in a Maine fishing village. She is the author of The Wonderful Cat of Cobbie Bean, Benny and the Bear, and over eighty stories which have appeared in Highlights for Children, Child Life, and Jack and Jill.

Unfortunately, Carleton's books, aside from Mystery of the Witches' Bridge and The Secret of Saturday Cove, are almost impossible to find. Some of the stories from magazines would not be that difficult to find, aside from figuring out which issues contain her stories.

I thoroughly enjoyed both Carleton books.