Friday, July 21, 2017

The Spotlight Club and the Lookouts Mystery Series

I have been trying a bunch of books that I have needed to read for a long time.  These are books that I will not be keeping.


The Spotlight Club series was written by Florence Parry Heide and Roxanne Heide. These books were written for pretty young readers.  I first read The Mystery of the Missing Suitcase.  This book has short, repetitious sentences.  Words are repeated often, and the book is similar to a reader.  The mystery is almost nothing.

Next, I tried the Spotlight Club book, Mystery at Keyhole Carnival.  This book is rather similar to many series books that are set at carnivals.  The carnival is plagued by accidents, and the children must figure out who is responsible.  This book was written on a slightly higher level than The Mystery of the Missing Suitcase.  I liked it better, but it was not very compelling.

I also tried Mystery at the Weird Ruins, which is a title in the Lookouts Mystery series by Christine Nobel Govan and Emmy West.  The children go to government property upon which they see circles of rocks, supposedly placed there hundreds of years before.  The children dig around, moving the rocks.  I had trouble accepting that the authors seemed to think it fine for the children to tamper with an archaeological site on government property.

The children speak in dialect, and I always struggle when books are partially written in dialect.  Most of it was fine, but there were a couple of dialect words that I could not decipher.  That always bothers me.

I did not enjoy Mystery at the Weird Ruins very much.

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