Mouse's Vineyard

by Charlotte MacLeod, Roseanne Burke (Illustrator)

A young girl looks forward to a quiet and lazy summer with her aunt on Martha's Vineyard but finds her plans upset when she is expected to entertain an unpleasant visitor.

152 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Naturalized US Citizen

Also wrote as Alisa Craig

Charlotte MacLeod, born in New Brunswick, Canada, and a naturalized U.S. citizen, was the multi-award-winning author of over thirty acclaimed novels. Her series featuring detective Professor Peter Shandy, America's homegrown Hercule Poirot, delivers "generous dollops of...warmth, wit, and whimsy" (San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle). But fully a dozen novels star her popular husband-and-wife team of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn. And her native Canada provides a backdrop for the amusing Grub-and-Stakers cozies written under the pseudonym Alisa Craig and the almost-police procedurals starring Madoc Rhys, RCMP. A cofounder and past president of the American Crime Writers League, she also edited the bestselling anthologies Mistletoe Mysteries and Christmas Stalkings.

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Mouse's Vineyard (1968) to complete Charlotte MacLeod's fiction, expecting another of her young adult mystery romances that preceded her adult cozy mystery series of the 1970s-1990s. Instead of the 19-21 year old female protagonists of her other young adult novels, this book features Hannah, who "looked closer to ten than almost-fourteen". Even as a juvenile novel the mystery plot is rather tepid. Hannah is saddled with an unpleasant houseguest. In an effort to find something to interest her, Hannah invents a mysterious boarder at a neighbor's house. While snooping, the girls seem to confirm the mystery man actually exists. All is resolved in the final five pages.

Non-series - Juvenile - Mark and sister Hannah, visiting artist aunt Alexia on Martha's Vineyard, find their solitary reveries interrupted by the plastic-coated, bleached New Yorker (Alexia's agent's daughter), who is clinging to pop glop while her parents are separating from each other. So Hannah, appropriately known as Mousekin, has her hands full of slacker SuSu instead of her bird list. She dreams up a menacing man hiding at a neighbor's to charge her transistorized roommate (her favorite group is The Agonies): then they overhear something vague that verifies their suspicions.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites as a child!