A few pages later, Mary Anne mentions that Sharon doesn't eat meat and her dad won't knowingly eat tofu but Sharon sneaks it into casseroles sometimes. That feels pretty disrespectful. Richard is a grown adult who has the right to choose what to eat. I'm sure Sharon would be furious (and with good reason) if he snuck things into her food.
I should mention right up front that I don't care for this book. I think it's boring and trite. I have been told that my recaps are better when I don't like the books, so maybe this one will be enjoyable. That being said, here's the cover. It has a clearance sticker, but it's one of the ones I bought online to finish off my collection, so I paid more than the sticker says. Mary Anne looks cute in this picture, but I'm pretty grossed out by the fact that she's kneeling in stagnant water. I think. This book involves cleaning a basement after a flood and that may be a bluish floor but it looks like water to me.
Sharon's parents are going on a cruise to celebrate their anniversary. Mary Anne, Richard, and Sharon go to the ship to see them off. Granny and Pop-Pop's good friends Esther and Hank are also there. Mary Anne tells us that Hank is always a pessimist and it sounds like she's spent some time around him. This confuses me a bit since Granny and Pop-Pop were barely mentioned after the first Dawn book. I guess maybe they came to Richard and Sharon's wedding, but I don't remember them being there. Apparently in between babysitting and solving mysteries and dating Logan and going to school dances but being too shy to dance, Mary Anne has been bonding with Dawn's grandparents and their friends.
Right after Granny and Pop-Pop go on their cruise, a water pipe or something bursts at their house, flooding their basement. Sharon calls them on a shipboard phone and they give her permission to take care of it so they don't have to cut their lovely anniversary cruise short. Sharon hires a contractor to replace some things, and a plumber to fix the whatever, and enlists Mary Anne's help too. She and Mary Anne start out by carrying things upstairs so they won't get further water damage and so they can sort what they need to save. Mary Anne notices a loose piece of paneling and behind it she finds a wrapped package with YOU WILL BE CURSED IF YOU OPEN THIS AND PLUS YOU WILL HAVE A REALLY BORING BOOK WRITTEN ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE. THINK OF THE CHILDREN. PLEASE, THINK OF THE CHILDREN written on it. She rationalizes that if she doesn't open the mystery package, whatever's in it will stay damp and probably rot and mold and be ruined, so she takes it home and opens it. It's a lovely music box. They talk to Granny again via the shipboard phone and she tells Mary Anne she doesn't know anything about a music box.
Mary Anne decides that the box must have belonged to whoever lived in the house before Granny and Pop-Pop and she tries to find out who it might have been. She also starts having dreams about a sad looking "sailor boy". Mary Anne is thirteen and the sailor in her dreams is 19-ish. I don't know why she refers to him as a boy. I mean Sailor Man is way too Popeye but she could just say sailor. She finds a secret compartment in the music box and inside she finds a picture of the sailor she's been dreaming about. He is standing next to a girl whose face has been cut out of the picture, who is wearing a bracelet with stars on it. Claudia, who has taken photography courses, attempts to ENHANCE PICTURE, but they learn nothing new.
We find out that Granny grew up in the house next door to the one they now live in, and she loved the neighborhood so much that she insisted on buying a house in the neighborhood when she got married. Mary Anne reads some of Granny's old letters, possibly under the premise of drying them out. I had lost interest by this point. Granny wrote to her cousin about the girl next door and her romantic love story, and Mary Anne draws the conclusion that the girl next door was the box's original owner. I get that there wasn't internet and long distance calls were crazy expensive when Granny was a kid, but I don't really know why she would spend so much time writing letters to her cousin about the next door neighbor's teenage romance.
White Collar did a story arc about a music box, and I have to say, they did it way better.
Oh also Mary Anne and the rest of the club are suspicious of the work crew because they seem to be meddling around in areas they have no reason to be working in. They know from Granny's letters that the owner of the house got fired for stealing from the bank he was president of, so they decide the money must be buried in the backyard and the work crew magically knows this because they are psychic. The club tries to set a trap to see who is trying to find the stolen money. They stand around loudly saying that they dug up a metal box and isn't that mysterious. Then they hear someone digging and it is the father of one of the work crew, who has been hanging around being a creeper, and now thinks the stolen cash may be buried under a crabapple tree. He grabs a shovel and starts digging and nobody objects to this. He digs up a metal box that has some worthless papers in it, because of freaking course there would actually be a buried box. Everyone is disappointed that they don't actually get stolen bank money. Maybe it is just me but if I heard that someone got fired from a bank they worked at for stealing, I would think "embezzlement" and not "box of cash". They decide that there was probably never really any money buried and it was just a story.
When Granny and Pop-Pop return from their cruise, Sharon throws them a surprise party for their anniversary. She lends Mary Anne a bracelet with stars on it that looks awfully familiar to Mary Anne. Granny sees the bracelet and reveals to Mary Anne that it was given to her along with the jewelry box by her first love, Frank, who died in WWII. She has kept it a secret all these years because I don't know, maybe Pop-Pop is a jealous asshole who would not want her to have a gift given her by a sailor who died in the war. She was the one who hid the box when they moved into the house. So apparently Granny, as a married damn adult, was the one who wrote YOU WILL BE CURSED as a way to keep people out of the box which was hidden away in her own home. Granny says Mary Anne can keep the box if she keeps Granny's secret. Also when Mary Anne says "The box really is beautiful," Granny replies with, "You opened it despite the horrible warning?"
Well, yes, you senile old bag, she asked you about it about 150 boring pages ago, and if you'd said then that it was yours, you would have saved me from reviewing this book, and for that I will never forgive you.
Oh also at Granny and Pop-Pop's anniversary party, Mary Anne and Logan fill up a huge plate of food from the buffet to share instead of each getting what they want, and due to my food issues, I seriously gagged reading that part. Gross.
In the "Stoneybrook Parents are Morons" category we have Mrs. DeWitt. If you don't remember or didn't get this far in the series, I'll remind you that the Barrett family of Buddy, Suzie, and Marnie became a large blended family when their mother married Franklin DeWitt, who has sole custody of his four young children: Lindsey, Taylor, Madeline, and Ryan. Their mother is never mentioned. I do not like the Barrett/DeWitt family probably because it just stresses me out to read about all those kids and the chaos they create. In this book the family is having an addition built onto their house. You see, none of the kids wanted to move away from Stoneybrook when the parents married, but most houses were out of their price range, so they ended up in a small house that didn't have room for everyone. Then the kids were stressed and fighting because they were so crowded, so their parents pulled money out of thin air to build a large addition onto the house they could barely afford in the first place. They planned to do a few bedrooms but the kids threw a fit and demanded to have two large rooms so they could all share, and since apparently you should let your kids dictate where you live and what kind of addition you should build, their parents went for it. So this is the book where they have work crews in building the actual addition. Mary Anne and Abby show up for a sitting job for the seven kids, and instead of saying "Take the kids to the park to get out of the work crew's way," Mrs. DeWitt casually announces that she has told the kids they can invite friends over, so three of the Pike kids and all three of the Kuhn kids are coming over.
What. The. Hell.
So Mary Anne and Abby call Claudia and Mallory to also come over, so now we have four sitters and thirteen children, giving us a total of seventeen kids aged thirteen and younger milling around while the contractor tries to work. The contractor is really nice to them and suggests the kids go play in the shed out back working with scrap lumber on the beginnings of a playhouse. Seventeen people in a shed, really? The book says all the kids really get into working on the playhouse. I totally believe this, because Marnie Barrett and Ryan DeWitt who are both two years old probably have a clear idea what's going on and are thrilled to work on the playhouse.
A few chapters later, Claudia babysits the
Claudia had on her favorite painters' pants. They used to be white, but she's worn them during so many art projects that they are now splattered with paint in every color of the rainbow. To complement the pants, Claudia wore a tie-dyed shirt she made herself that features a huge yellow peace sign surrounded by starbursts of orange, red, and purple. She also had on her red high-top sneakers, and she had braided her hair in two pigtails, tied with purple ribbons, to keep it tidy and out of the way.The kids are excitedly working on their playhouse again. Apparently Eddie the contractor has been helping them out and leaving them wood cut to the right lengths. There is only one problem, when they go to move the finished playhouse out of the shed, it is too big to fit through the door.
The Barrett/DeWitt family has a housewarming party to celebrate the completion of the new addition, and at the end, it is revealed that Eddie the contractor disassembled the playhouse, took it outside, and reassembled it, so the kids don't have to go in the shed to play in their playhouse. And they get a bunch of presents from the neighbors like an easel and beautiful rugs to decorate their new addition. Good for them, I guess. Being really crowded in a small house does suck.
