A Report for the Summer Reading Club - Holly Hotel: A Mystery by Elisabeth Kyle

On my second report on my 1959 Summer Reading Club list I find Holly Hotel.  It was a favorite: a girl in Scotland writes posters that advertise her old house as a hotel, and the guests arrive.  With beautiful illustrations, the story is enriched with fictional history about the Village of Whistleblow, named, sadly, for the story of an unsuspecting shepherd led to betray his neighbors to the Redcoats during a war with England. 

Near the end, Mollie Maitland uses the N word. 

In context, her use of the N word is a short moment, a reference to vulgarity comes twelve pages before it - a character says, “Are ye so ignorant as not to know that knock’s the old Scotch word for clock?” And another ‘ “Aye, so it is, but Rowena says it’s awful vulgar.. “”  On the internet, I find the reference she makes – She refers to a book called Ten Litte N. Boys  -

Ten little n boys went out to dine;

One choked his little self, and then there were nine.

The fourteen-page picture book with the verses is on the internet at

University of Florida, Baldwin Library of Historic Children’s Literature. 

 Social change and cultural change since the nineteen-fifties make it necessary that new books reflect the experience new children have. To read an old children’s book can be a useful reminiscence.  We can reflect on the social change, the cultural change, the demographic change.  

 We can wonder what other reasons place a book like Holly Hotel: A Mystery in university libraries of historic children’s books.  Among possible reasons is that fact that one of the several sub-plots, a lost poem, is by a fictional Scottish-American Writer – perhaps they object to fictional history for children.  Three of those who arrive at Mollie Maitland’s hotel are adult men who smoke.  Active descriptions of these men include lighting cigarettes, leaving a tobacco pouch behind as a diversion, coughing because of the smoke.  There is violence in Glasgow toward a little girl guest. 

There  are new authors as well,  so new books are a natural change.