Monday, July 29, 2013

Summer Reading Club: The Mirrors of Castle Doone, by Elisabeth Kyle


A book can strike a chord with an event in life.  In past weeks the Washington Grade School’s restoration project entered the phase in which the 1948-49 kitchen-lunchroom-auditorium is torn down.  At the end of The Mirrors of Castle Doone, by Elisabeth Kyle (Agnes R.M. Dunlop, The Riverside Press, 1947), Mollie and Sandy see workmen shatter glass as they tear down Castle Doone.  In this third of a series, we meet Mollie and other characters from Holly Hotel, there is a reference to the second story, and the theme again of long-ago Scotland at war with England and the English Dragoons.  Boys camp on the moor and discover a mystery to solve.  It is well-told, scary to read and as it ends the reader knows the workmen are about to discover the story’s secret passageways.  The reader also knows Sandy and Mollie will leave the Whistleblow village school for the high school in Doone in the autumn and perhaps for another volume of the Holly Hotel books.

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