MMGM- The Mystery of the Locked Rooms When Forests Burn

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Unleashing Readers

Currie, Lindsay. The Mystery of the Locked Rooms 

April 2, 2024 by Sourcebooks Young Readers

E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

Sarah Greene and her best friends Hannah and West love puzzles and escape rooms. The three even manage to beat the buzzer on the second hardest escape room at Escape City, Lasers and Lava, because they have an unbeatable combination of organization, puzzle skills, and team work. Sarah's aunt has given her a membership to Escape City, and it's a highlight in her otherwise difficult life. Her father has chronic fatigue syndrome and has been so ill that he can't work. Her mother has to work a couple of jobs, and her older brother Sean is worried that he won't be able to go to college. When Sarah sees a foreclosure notice in the mail, she knows what she needs to do. She, Hannah, and West are enthralled by the abandoned fun house from the 1950s that is near their town of Park Glen. The longstanding rumor is that the triplets who constructed it, Hans, Stefan, and Karl Stein, left keys to a treasure in it. The brothers were orphaned at age 8, separated, and built the house when they reunited as adults, only to have one of them die young. Some people have tried to get in, but most are caught by the police first, including some recent attempts. The house has been in the news for years; back in 1962, parents were saying that the place was a hazard. Still, given the skills of the "Deltas" as they call themselves, and Sarah's urgent need to find a way for her family to get enough money to not have to move away and live with grandparents, the trio attempts to solve the mystery. They manage to arrange a day when they can get to the site and not have their parents come looking for them so that they have more time to unravel the clues. They are lucky right away, thanks to their keen observation, and manage to get inside the house without forcing any doors. Sarah is worried that this isn't a good idea, which isn't unwarranted given that West breaks through the floor and the kids have no phone signal in the building; and no one knows where they are if things go wrong. The Deltas escape room background serves them well as they figure out clues, manipulate locks, search for hidden doors, and manage to understand the decades old riddles that the Stein brothers posed. It's stressful and dangerous; the kids end up in tight spaces with no ways to get out, experience some significant sheer drops, and sustain some minor injuries. West and Hannah have their own challenges; West has an extraordinary memory that he tries to hide even from Sarah and Hannh, since people at school treat him differently when they find out about it, and Hannah has "failed out" of dance. Despite all of the challenges, the three friends manage to make it through the house right before their parents and law enforcement show up at the fun house, but don't find any treasure. Is this the end of their attempt, or are there still a few clues that they missed? 

Strengths: This was a particularly well crafted book; I can't imagine the notes necessary to lay out all of the clues and rooms in the house! The emotional state of the three students was interspersed through the adventure perfectly, so this never dragged or got too confusing with all of the fun house action. Pacing is tough, and this book is a master class in balancing elements so that the story is engaging. This also gets off to a great start, after a thorough but brief explanation of the Deltas' interest in puzzles, the Stein's creation of the funhouse, and Sarah's problems at home. I spent a lot of time after reading this thinking about what the house must look like and trying to map things out. This will appeal to middle grade readers because of the absence of parents (who are struggling but still alive!), the intricate mystery, and, of course, the promise of a treasure that will help kids save the day! I sort of want a prequel about the Stein brothers! 
Weaknesses: I'm not an anxious person, and certainly let my own personal children play in the creek and bike around town on their own. But a 70 year old fun house with secret passage ways sounds like all kinds of dangerous, so this made me very uncomfortable. Younger readers will love this, and the chances of my students reading this and then trying to get into abandoned buildings is pretty low! I am also the last person you would ever want to be in an escape room with! It does not sound fun! 

What I really think: This had all of the engaging clues and puzzles of Bertman's Book Scavenger (2015), the fun house elements of Guterson's Winterhouse (2018), and the enticing but hard to balance mix of adventure and personal growth found in Anderson's Ms. Bixby's Last Day. 

Marrin, Albert. When Forests Burn: The Story of Wildfire in America 

March 19, 2024 by Knopf Books for Young Readers

Copy provided by the publisher

Focusing on how wild fires have affected the US, Marrin takes a look at what the country looked like before being taken over by Europeans. Forests and forest products were crucial to indigenous ways of life, providing not only food, but also tools, and these resources were carefully superintended. Discussing how Native people were able to use controlled burns to manage the environment, we see how these practices helped Europeans be able to set up towns, since they did not have to clear the land as much as history reports. Unfortunately, this settlement brought many diseases to the US, killing many Native people. Europeans were very wary of wild places, preferring open land, so they continued to clear cut areas, not realizing until the 1850s that there was profit to be made from forests. The mid 1800s brough steamboats, railways, and more access to different areas of the North American continent, but also an increase in logging and timber industries. These were not often well managed. 

Combined with the increase in towns and settlements, the practice of felling large numbers of trees in unsustainable ways led to some terrible fires. I had not connected the Peshtigo, Wisconsin fires of 1871 with Laura Ingalls Wilder, but she had been born in the area just four years before! I did find it interesting that after people were forced from their homes in the middle of the night in their nightclothes to survive the fire that consumed the town, aid was sent by Frances Fairchild, the wife of the governor, who was away. Even though the great Chicago fire happened around the same time, there were not a lot of advances made in fire fighting, and there were also enormous fires in Hinckley, Minnesota in 1894 and the Big Blowup in Idaho in 1910. 

In between the descriptions of the causes and devastations of these fires, we do see some indications that people were trying to rectify these man made problems by working toward conservation. George Perkins Marsh, Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt and their work are all discussed, and this book offers a slightly different view of John Muir than I had read before. Even though he did a lot of good with the Sierra Club, he also held highly racist attitudes about both Black and Indigenous people. 

Moving on from historic fires, there is a discussion of the evolution of fire management, including the 1944 debut of Smoky the Bear, aimed at trying to avoid fires. Of course, since controlled burns do a lot to control wild fires, this campaign has had mixed results. The final chapter addresses climate change and how modern fire fighting has been improved in many ways. 

This is a well researched book with lots of valuable information about many facets of forest fires. I enjoyed that many contributing facets are discussed; from the European disliked of unmaintained nature to sketchy logging practices. Everything from how to girdle trees to make them easier to fell to the invention of wood based paper is covered in order to underline the importance of forests in US society. Marrin, who is 87, does a great job of including information about how some of the actions of the past are problematic by today's standards without delving into them at the expense of the focus of the book. 

This is a good nonfiction companion to fictional books like Vrabel's When Giants Burn, Henry's Playing with Fire, or Downing's Controlled Burn, and an excellent addition to nonfiction books about fires like Hopkinson's The Deadlist Fires Then and Now and Cooper's Fighting Fire. 

I do wish that the format of this book had allowed the book to be taller than it was wide. There's no particularly compelling reason to bind the pages on the short side, since the text could have been arranged differently, and the pictures are not large enough to need this layout. Binding a book this long on the short side means that the pages are apt to pull apart from the binding more easily. I've had to glue Marrin's similarly bound 2011 Flesh and Blood So Cheap back together on several occasions.