The Mysterious Shin Shira

The Mysterious Shin Shira, by G.E. Farrow, is a book of children’s stories about a guy who is occasionally forced to disappear and reappear elsewhere. It’s narrated by an writer of children’s books, apparently the author himself — some children in one of the stories credit him with having written a book of Farrow’s that’s mentioned on the title page.

When Shin Shira first meets the narrator and finds that he’s a writer, he asks, “What line? You don’t look very clever,” to which the narrator responds, “I only write books for children…and one doesn’t have to be very clever to do that.” I’m still not sure what to think about that, although I suppose the stories do seem as if they’ve been written by someone who thinks you don’t have to be clever to write children’s stories. Not that it’s bad, exactly. It’s just that most of its charm is unintentional. It’s as if the author doesn’t really know what makes fairy tales enjoyable, but stumbles on it by accident. There are children’s books where adults don’t really understand the magical things that are going on and it’s on purpose, but this isn’t one of those.

Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp + a question

Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp is more the sort of Ruth Fielding book I’m used to — lots of little adventures and one mystery that is a kind of background subplot. Ruth, Tom and Helen Cameron, and six of their friends spend a vacation at a big log cabin in upstate New York. The setting provides the adventures: a panther, a snowstorm, etc., and the mystery involves a local boy going by the name of someone who was recently murdered.

The scenes in which the kids are supposed to be having fun are the weakest part of the book. They don’t enjoy themselves as convincingly as the characters in a book by, say, Percy Keese Fitzhugh or Carolyn Wells. Also, one of the “funny” incidents parallels a scene in Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl a little bit too closely. But then, Ruth herself is a lot like Polly Milton, and that’s one of the things that raises this series above a lot of the others. Ruth actually has a personality — she’s gentle and inclined to worry, but also patient and determined. This gives her a great advantage over, say, the Rover boys, who can each be described in a word(Dick: smart, Sam: amiable, Tom: sociopath).