Pee-Wee Harris and the Sunken Treasure

Pee-Wee Harris and the Sunken Treasure was pretty disappointing. But I shouldn’t have been expecting much — this is the first Pee-Wee Harris book I’ve read, but I’ve read a couple of the Roy Blakeley books, and it’s like Percy Keese Fitzhugh added a lot more jokes and thought no one would notice that he took out everything else. Oh well — at least the Pee-Wee Harris books have a third-person narrator.

I really am disappointed, though. In both series. Percy Keese Fitzhugh is a clever writer, and in the Tom Slade books it really shows, but in these other series — well, I think he thinks he’s being clever. One of the local girl scouts in named Minerva Skybrow.

The book is funny in a lot of places. But people make fun of Pee-Wee so much that it begins to seem kind of cruel. Not that it ever shakes Pee-Wee’s self-confidence — nothing can — but I felt pretty bad on his behalf.

But what really irked me was that, after Pee-Wee and the other scouts spend half the book looking for the sunken treasure, it is discovered by someone else in the last paragraph.