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Jigsaw Jones Mystery #15
The Case of the Haunted Scarecrow
Jigsaw and Mila discover what appears to be a living scarecrow while investigating a new case.
76 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2001
About the author
James Preller
217 books146 followersJames Preller (born 1961) is the children's book author of the Jigsaw Jones Mysteries, which are published by Scholastic Corporation. He grew up in Wantagh, New York and went to college in Oneonta, New York. After graduating from college in 1983, James Preller was employed as a waiter for one year before being hired as a copywriter by Scholastic Corporation, where he was introduced (through their books) to many noatable children's authors. This inspired James Preller to try writing his own books. James Preller published his first book, entitled MAXX TRAX: Avalanche Rescue, in 1986. Since that time, James Preller has written a variety of books, and has written under a number of pen names, including Mitzy Kafka, James Patrick, and Izzy Bonkers. James Preller lives in Delmar, New York with his wife Lisa and their three children.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jamesp...
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jamesp...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 31, 2018
I had no idea Jigsaw's real name is Theodore, and I just recently read one! I also didn’t know his grandma lives with him and that he has an older brother and a sister. I guess they’re only mentioned when they’re needed and at other times they don’t come up.
This one jumped right into the case, with Jigsaw getting a call while he raked the yard with his brothers. Kim hired him because she'd received a note and her sister Kayla suggested she call. On the way to Kim's house, Jigsaw and Mila had noticed this scary-looking house with a scarecrow in the front yard. I waited to see how that would evolve, but then the plot diverged. At her house they learned that the note said if she wanted her necklace back she had to wait by the phone. I was really thrown by this stolen necklace/ransom plot because I expected a good Halloween story about a scarecrow. The two things didn't go together and I wasn't as excited.
They advised her to deal with the thief, to take their phone calls and pay them, and to expect a drop-off place for the money. While interviewing Kim, the thief called and demanded that Jigsaw himself show up at a certain location, which happened to be in front of that creepy house.
The thief demanded the measly sum of $3. Idc if these are second-grade kids, they would have asked for a much higher price than $3. That is nothing, even to a kid. It just made no sense and glared out at me and made the whole thing fall apart.
Jigsaw noticed that one of the fliers his brothers had put out about their leaf raking had been torn down. The person requested Jigsaw to leave the money in a hole in a tree, and Jigsaw found the necklace in the hole, which was really stupid to me. Why would someone place the necklace where Jigsaw could take it without paying? Jigsaw asked himself why he should pay when he had the necklace, but then noticed the scarecrow was standing looking at him, and then started walking toward him. So at least he left without giving the money. He ran away and no wonder he thought there was a haunted scarecrow!
There were some inconsistencies, like the scarecrow on the cover isn't wearing a hat or gloves, but in the book he was drawn with them on. On the cover he has a pumpkin for a head, and in the text he was described as having a pumpkiny head, but the illustrations showed round eyes and a rounded, curved mouth, and no nose, not a pumpkin with triangle eyes and nose and jagged mouth.
The text described the trees at the house as being bare-branched, but the illustrator drew the trees with leaves on them. The title page showed the scarecrow with the legs tied off with straw coming out, but a later illustration had him wearing shoes.
The moment when Jigsaw called Kim was so funny. It actually made me laugh. He told her he got her necklace, but Mila was upset and couldn't understand why he hadn't come back to Kim's house, because she had to walk alone. Jigsaw's reaction was hilarious. He was still upset about the scare and warned her away from going home alone.
I always thought this author was so clever with his codes and things. I found them to be really cool as a kid. Jigsaw used a certain code to write a note to Mila. He puts the letters of the words backwards, and then writes the words in the sentence backwards. He called it a Double Backward code.
So it went:
"EM RETFA DESAHC
DNA EVILA EMAC
WORCERACS A YRROS"
So you just have to read the entire thing backwards and start at the end. "Sorry a scarecrow came alive and chased after me."
It really is ingenious and so much fun to read.
In response Mila put a finger to her nose to show she'd gotten it, which was okay. But then she swallowed the note. No! You do not write kids swallowing paper! That is so wrong and I couldn't believe she did that. They took hiding their secrets too far. There are other, safer ways to dispose of the evidence.
Things kind of got out of hand for me. Jigsaw drew the scarecrow in class and of course another kid saw it. The boy said he should draw blood and of course Jigsaw had to say that there wasn't blood, prompting Bigs to ask if it was real. Bigs made him tell the story at recess, where Bobby thought he was making it up, but his friend Joey stuck up for him. Athena and Lisa believed it could be true because there are strange things out there.
In another class they practiced buying and selling things and counting money, and thinking about what they'd like to buy if they became millionaires. This had trouble staying on the tracks for me and I felt it was going in too many directions.
They realized they didn't know who stole the necklace and why, and I wanted more action, them actively trying to solve it instead of just sitting there thinking about it.
Mila shared that Kim's sister Kayla's boyfriend gave her a ride home, on the bike that Jigsaw had spied out the window when they were at Kim's. Jigsaw started thinking that Kayla and Buzzy were in league, because the phone call had been from a boy but there was a girl's laugh in the background.
After school they checked the scarecrow out and saw that it had no shoes, but the footprints surrounding it were big. They saw dirt on its clothes. Mila thought to check the tag for a name. Sure enough, it had a name and it was Buzzy Lennon.
They talked with Mrs. Rigby and learned that Buzzy had given her the scarecrow. He was going to rake her hard and Jigsaw deduced that he was using the scarecrow to scare away the competition.
Jigsaw and Mila went to Kim's to explain that her sister Kayla was in on it with her boyfriend Buzzy. The necklace was used as a way to get to Jigsaw; it hadn't been about money at all. He had Kayla urge Kim to call Jigsaw, who was supposed to see the scarecrow, and tell his brothers about it so they'd stay away. I didn't like it at all. That was such a far-fetched and complicated thing to do. If Buzzy wanted to hog all of the yards in the neighborhood, he shouldn't have involved his gf or Jigsaw, and went directly to the source and dealt with Jigsaw's brothers. Jigsaw has nothing to do with this and it's such a huge stretch to assume that Jigsaw would tell his brothers about the scarecrow. I was so disappointed that the whole haunted scarecrow turned out to be a lawn raking move.
Kim wanted to get them back for it and Jigsaw's idea was to beat Buzzy to Mrs. Rigby's house. So he had his brothers and all these kids from school show up early and offer to rake her yard for free. I didn't really believe that his brothers and the other kids would show up to do a hard job like that for free. I can understand Mila and Jigsaw and Kim doing it, because they had motive to get back at Buzzy. But not his brothers who were trying to make money, and not kids from school who had nothing to do with this. Kids aren't that nice.
Jigsaw had noticed when he questioned Mrs. Rigby that she was alone with no one to look after her. So it was nice that she was getting a free raking job. In art class he had made a leaf placemat. They put leaves on poster board and the teacher laminated them. Mrs. Rigby had commented to them that she would miss the leaves once they're raked because they're so pretty. So Jigsaw gave her his leaf placemat so she could see leaves all the time. That was a really nice gesture for a sweet lady living all alone.
Buzzy showed up and they were only too happy to rub it in his face. Jigsaw saw him wearing the shoes the scarecrow had been. Buzzy looked at Jigsaw, so mad, and his brothers moved beside him which was nice. I liked Jigsaw's lines, that Buzzy messed with the wrong guy and that the trick's on him.
Jigsaw realized that money isn't everything and that Mrs. Rigby's smile was worth $100, the price she had been going to pay Buzzy. He concluded that being a detective doesn't make a lot of money, but he did get free grape juice from Mrs. Rigby and smiles are priceless.
He is a really big fan of onomatopoeia, with the sound of leaves, owls, etc. I personally don’t like it.
Each chapter page had an image of what was coming up, like the pearl necklace, the jewelry box, etc. I loved the one with the scarecrow. It was adorable! This tiny black and white illustration of the little scarecrow with his pumpkin head and hat and gloves. Very cute! And the tiny little Rigby house was cute.
Not the Halloween story I was expecting, not by a long shot. I kept waiting and waiting for the scarecrow to come back into the story but it never did. It was a one-time haunting. The cover made it look like they were out in a scary woods but the scarecrow was in someone's front yard. Not a good mystery and not a good motive. I expected this to be about Halloween but Halloween wasn't mentioned once. It's just a fall book. The summary implies that the case Jigsaw is hired for is directly connected to seeing the scarecrow walk, and they are connected because Buzzy used the necklace to Jigsaw to see the scarecrow and get scared, but these things didn’t go together for me and I didn’t like this at all.
Also, there were no suspects and I suspected Buzzy from almost the beginning. On pg. 25 Jigsaw saw that someone was ripping down his brother’s posters and Buzzy was the only one who would have done that. Then on pg. 50 Mila said she’d been taken home by Kayla’s boyfriend, and mentioned the mountain bike. She revealed his name so that jumped out as being really obvious. Since he was being talked about I knew he was going to be important. On pg. 52 he had connected the dots and implicated Kayla and Buzzy, so we had the rest of the story through pg. 76 knowing who the culprits were and why they had done it. All it was was confirming where the scarecrow came from and setting their plan in action. To have only 1 suspect the entire time, so soon into the story, was anticlimactic. There was no suspense. It flopped. It didn’t even come anywhere near to living up to my expectations. This should have been creepy and scary and fun and instead it ended up being about befriending a lonely elderly woman, not what I was looking for in a book called the Haunted Scarecrow.
This one jumped right into the case, with Jigsaw getting a call while he raked the yard with his brothers. Kim hired him because she'd received a note and her sister Kayla suggested she call. On the way to Kim's house, Jigsaw and Mila had noticed this scary-looking house with a scarecrow in the front yard. I waited to see how that would evolve, but then the plot diverged. At her house they learned that the note said if she wanted her necklace back she had to wait by the phone. I was really thrown by this stolen necklace/ransom plot because I expected a good Halloween story about a scarecrow. The two things didn't go together and I wasn't as excited.
They advised her to deal with the thief, to take their phone calls and pay them, and to expect a drop-off place for the money. While interviewing Kim, the thief called and demanded that Jigsaw himself show up at a certain location, which happened to be in front of that creepy house.
The thief demanded the measly sum of $3. Idc if these are second-grade kids, they would have asked for a much higher price than $3. That is nothing, even to a kid. It just made no sense and glared out at me and made the whole thing fall apart.
Jigsaw noticed that one of the fliers his brothers had put out about their leaf raking had been torn down. The person requested Jigsaw to leave the money in a hole in a tree, and Jigsaw found the necklace in the hole, which was really stupid to me. Why would someone place the necklace where Jigsaw could take it without paying? Jigsaw asked himself why he should pay when he had the necklace, but then noticed the scarecrow was standing looking at him, and then started walking toward him. So at least he left without giving the money. He ran away and no wonder he thought there was a haunted scarecrow!
There were some inconsistencies, like the scarecrow on the cover isn't wearing a hat or gloves, but in the book he was drawn with them on. On the cover he has a pumpkin for a head, and in the text he was described as having a pumpkiny head, but the illustrations showed round eyes and a rounded, curved mouth, and no nose, not a pumpkin with triangle eyes and nose and jagged mouth.
The text described the trees at the house as being bare-branched, but the illustrator drew the trees with leaves on them. The title page showed the scarecrow with the legs tied off with straw coming out, but a later illustration had him wearing shoes.
The moment when Jigsaw called Kim was so funny. It actually made me laugh. He told her he got her necklace, but Mila was upset and couldn't understand why he hadn't come back to Kim's house, because she had to walk alone. Jigsaw's reaction was hilarious. He was still upset about the scare and warned her away from going home alone.
I always thought this author was so clever with his codes and things. I found them to be really cool as a kid. Jigsaw used a certain code to write a note to Mila. He puts the letters of the words backwards, and then writes the words in the sentence backwards. He called it a Double Backward code.
So it went:
"EM RETFA DESAHC
DNA EVILA EMAC
WORCERACS A YRROS"
So you just have to read the entire thing backwards and start at the end. "Sorry a scarecrow came alive and chased after me."
It really is ingenious and so much fun to read.
In response Mila put a finger to her nose to show she'd gotten it, which was okay. But then she swallowed the note. No! You do not write kids swallowing paper! That is so wrong and I couldn't believe she did that. They took hiding their secrets too far. There are other, safer ways to dispose of the evidence.
Things kind of got out of hand for me. Jigsaw drew the scarecrow in class and of course another kid saw it. The boy said he should draw blood and of course Jigsaw had to say that there wasn't blood, prompting Bigs to ask if it was real. Bigs made him tell the story at recess, where Bobby thought he was making it up, but his friend Joey stuck up for him. Athena and Lisa believed it could be true because there are strange things out there.
In another class they practiced buying and selling things and counting money, and thinking about what they'd like to buy if they became millionaires. This had trouble staying on the tracks for me and I felt it was going in too many directions.
They realized they didn't know who stole the necklace and why, and I wanted more action, them actively trying to solve it instead of just sitting there thinking about it.
Mila shared that Kim's sister Kayla's boyfriend gave her a ride home, on the bike that Jigsaw had spied out the window when they were at Kim's. Jigsaw started thinking that Kayla and Buzzy were in league, because the phone call had been from a boy but there was a girl's laugh in the background.
After school they checked the scarecrow out and saw that it had no shoes, but the footprints surrounding it were big. They saw dirt on its clothes. Mila thought to check the tag for a name. Sure enough, it had a name and it was Buzzy Lennon.
They talked with Mrs. Rigby and learned that Buzzy had given her the scarecrow. He was going to rake her hard and Jigsaw deduced that he was using the scarecrow to scare away the competition.
Jigsaw and Mila went to Kim's to explain that her sister Kayla was in on it with her boyfriend Buzzy. The necklace was used as a way to get to Jigsaw; it hadn't been about money at all. He had Kayla urge Kim to call Jigsaw, who was supposed to see the scarecrow, and tell his brothers about it so they'd stay away. I didn't like it at all. That was such a far-fetched and complicated thing to do. If Buzzy wanted to hog all of the yards in the neighborhood, he shouldn't have involved his gf or Jigsaw, and went directly to the source and dealt with Jigsaw's brothers. Jigsaw has nothing to do with this and it's such a huge stretch to assume that Jigsaw would tell his brothers about the scarecrow. I was so disappointed that the whole haunted scarecrow turned out to be a lawn raking move.
Kim wanted to get them back for it and Jigsaw's idea was to beat Buzzy to Mrs. Rigby's house. So he had his brothers and all these kids from school show up early and offer to rake her yard for free. I didn't really believe that his brothers and the other kids would show up to do a hard job like that for free. I can understand Mila and Jigsaw and Kim doing it, because they had motive to get back at Buzzy. But not his brothers who were trying to make money, and not kids from school who had nothing to do with this. Kids aren't that nice.
Jigsaw had noticed when he questioned Mrs. Rigby that she was alone with no one to look after her. So it was nice that she was getting a free raking job. In art class he had made a leaf placemat. They put leaves on poster board and the teacher laminated them. Mrs. Rigby had commented to them that she would miss the leaves once they're raked because they're so pretty. So Jigsaw gave her his leaf placemat so she could see leaves all the time. That was a really nice gesture for a sweet lady living all alone.
Buzzy showed up and they were only too happy to rub it in his face. Jigsaw saw him wearing the shoes the scarecrow had been. Buzzy looked at Jigsaw, so mad, and his brothers moved beside him which was nice. I liked Jigsaw's lines, that Buzzy messed with the wrong guy and that the trick's on him.
Jigsaw realized that money isn't everything and that Mrs. Rigby's smile was worth $100, the price she had been going to pay Buzzy. He concluded that being a detective doesn't make a lot of money, but he did get free grape juice from Mrs. Rigby and smiles are priceless.
He is a really big fan of onomatopoeia, with the sound of leaves, owls, etc. I personally don’t like it.
Each chapter page had an image of what was coming up, like the pearl necklace, the jewelry box, etc. I loved the one with the scarecrow. It was adorable! This tiny black and white illustration of the little scarecrow with his pumpkin head and hat and gloves. Very cute! And the tiny little Rigby house was cute.
Not the Halloween story I was expecting, not by a long shot. I kept waiting and waiting for the scarecrow to come back into the story but it never did. It was a one-time haunting. The cover made it look like they were out in a scary woods but the scarecrow was in someone's front yard. Not a good mystery and not a good motive. I expected this to be about Halloween but Halloween wasn't mentioned once. It's just a fall book. The summary implies that the case Jigsaw is hired for is directly connected to seeing the scarecrow walk, and they are connected because Buzzy used the necklace to Jigsaw to see the scarecrow and get scared, but these things didn’t go together for me and I didn’t like this at all.
Also, there were no suspects and I suspected Buzzy from almost the beginning. On pg. 25 Jigsaw saw that someone was ripping down his brother’s posters and Buzzy was the only one who would have done that. Then on pg. 50 Mila said she’d been taken home by Kayla’s boyfriend, and mentioned the mountain bike. She revealed his name so that jumped out as being really obvious. Since he was being talked about I knew he was going to be important. On pg. 52 he had connected the dots and implicated Kayla and Buzzy, so we had the rest of the story through pg. 76 knowing who the culprits were and why they had done it. All it was was confirming where the scarecrow came from and setting their plan in action. To have only 1 suspect the entire time, so soon into the story, was anticlimactic. There was no suspense. It flopped. It didn’t even come anywhere near to living up to my expectations. This should have been creepy and scary and fun and instead it ended up being about befriending a lonely elderly woman, not what I was looking for in a book called the Haunted Scarecrow.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 6, 2015
This is book #15 of the Jigsaw Jones Mystery series but you don't have to read these in order; they can be a 'stand alone' book. You may just understand the characters and the way they think better if you read them in order. This mystery was a different one than has been written on other books. Jigsaw and his friend Mila turns the pages and turns the 'mystery' around on the one that set it up. And in the process realizes that there is an elderly woman in their neighborhood that at first they were scared to go near her home because it was run down and just plain scarey looking. But after they realize she has no family and no friends to come visit Jigsaw learns that although it's fun solving the mysteries it's the most fun to give away part of him that brings smiles on people's faces.
Mr Preller always does a fabulous job at helping children reading the books to understand and be aware of others around them in their environment. That it's okay to "step out of the box" and do something that others aren't doing. And just about in every book he mentions 'someone' reading, and most of time will mention a true to life author and book so the reader reading the Jigsaw mystery could look up that book in their library and read themselves.
Really enjoyed the mystery in this book , the way it was written and the life stories within this book.
Mr Preller always does a fabulous job at helping children reading the books to understand and be aware of others around them in their environment. That it's okay to "step out of the box" and do something that others aren't doing. And just about in every book he mentions 'someone' reading, and most of time will mention a true to life author and book so the reader reading the Jigsaw mystery could look up that book in their library and read themselves.
Really enjoyed the mystery in this book , the way it was written and the life stories within this book.
February 15, 2014
Cute Halloween book. something I will read to my class during fall months. another great transition book.
May 15, 2026
Someone wants to ransom off a stolen necklace, and Jigsaw Jones sees an animated Scarecrow. What really happened?
Jigsaw Jones comes through!
Jigsaw Jones comes through!
October 1, 2013
My five-year-old who adores Halloween and can read hundreds of pages a day took forever to finish this book because he thought it was really boring.
Read
November 10, 2014great
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