The Boxcar Children

Before Christmas I picked up The Boxcar Children on CD at the library.  The kids had listened to The Incredible Journey a few weeks earlier and enjoyed it (although the vocabulary was pretty advanced for them, following up with the movie helped a lot).  The Boxcar Children was much more enjoyable for them.  Annalise requested a repeat...twice.  They listened to it on the road trip and it was every bit as entertaining to them as the little DVD player.  The CD also included the two sequels Surprise Island and The Yellow House Mystery.

I can understand why these books are so endearing to children.  The Boxcar Children is about four orphaned children who hide in a boxcar, for the young reader/listener, they are basically playing house.  For the adult it is an incredibly questionable book to read!  For starters, the parents of the four children are dead and there is no one to take care of them because their grandfather has shunned the family.  There is no mention of any other grandparents, how (or how recently) the parents died, why the grandfather avoided the family (other than he "did not like" the mother, but it doesn't ever tell why), and the kids never show any grief over losing their parents.  The older boy and girl assume parental roles.  The girl cooks and directs home-life in the boxcar and the boy gets a job helping out at a wealthy man's house.  The wealthy man discovers who the kids are and who their grandfather is (he put an ad in the paper looking for them), but decides not to turn them over to him.  When the grandfather finds out he's not blinded with rage, he understands the doctor's decision.

The books cover 3 consecutive summers.  By the summer of Surprise Island the children are living happily with their grandfather and as a treat to them, he lets them spend the whole summer living on a small island (with extremely limited adult supervision - the eldest child is about 15 at this point, the youngest 6).  There they meet a strange man who turns out to be their cousin.  He wants his identity kept secret, but the reason for that is never given.  At the end of the book, he goes to live with them at their grandfather's too.

To me, The Yellow House Mystery was probably the best of the bunch.  It still had some hard to reconcile items, but for the most part didn't have any parts that left you wondering why no one had called the police.  The gist of it is that a man who had worked for their grandfather's father had disappeared years earlier.  The children and their cousin and his new wife go to Maine to hunt for clues about the man's disappearance.  By this time, the kids know the characters so well they can concentrate on the mystery and the adult listening with them has just given up on the difficulties, suspends her disbelief and begins to enjoy the story.