Book Review: The Invisible Chimes by Margaret Sutton
This is a simple mystery story aimed at young teen-aged girls, ala Nancy Drew. Judy Bolton is a girl with a forceful personality and boundless curiosity, plus she’s good at details, all of which serve her well in dealing with the mysteries she runs into. Her primary weakness is that she jumps to conclusions, and will ignore data that contradicts her hypotheses until someone reminds her otherwise.
Judy and her friends witness a robbery, and then encounter an apparently amnesiac girl who Judy takes in, and may be more closely connected with the robbery than she’s letting on.
The mystery itself is pretty straightforward; I guessed all the twists several pages before Judy herself did (and I think most genre savvy readers will as well.)
Two things struck me about this story. First, the group of friends going out to the antique store/cafe where the robbery takes place consists of three high school girls, three college student boys, and a man who’s already graduated college and is fully employed. The last is one of the fellows who’s interested in Judy in a “more than just friends” way, though Judy herself seems oblivious to this.
The other thing was the strong current of classism; such things as “the better sort of people” comes up several times, including a conclusion that the sweet-tempered Honey could not have come from a lower-class family. It’s briefly mentioned that Judy has friends from the low-income end of town, but they make no actual appearance.
If you share this book with a young reader, you may want to talk about the assumption that wealthy people are that way because they’re “better” than poor people.
Otherwise, a fun book for its target audience.
