[Poll Book Tally] The Witch Tree Symbol by Carolyn Keene 3 stars

[Karin]

The last time I read this I was about 8, so had managed to forget virtually all of this book.

Nancy is asked to help a woman get to a house of a late relative where she has inherited half of the antiques in it (it's full of antiques), but when they get there, the antiques are gone. Then Nancy sees someone leaving the attic! Soon she has been asked to solve this case and she and her two 17 year old (I seem to remember her being 17 when I was a kid, but I could be wrong) friends have permission to drive to Amish country in Pennsylvania to work on this. There are lots of adventures and some dangerous narrow escapes! There are false leads and new clues, plus a missing Amish girl who has run away from a very strict father.

One of the things I do want to mention that was done better than in many of the Amish fiction books I have read is the way whoever was writing this under the Carolyn Keene name was the Amish dialogue. If any Amish fiction authors manage to read this review (not very likely, but how can I predict?) read this book. For one thing, the word order is correctly misplaced by some of the speakers. Having grown up around German speakers and having heard the old line "Throw the horse over the fence some hay" many times (this makes sense in German if the articles are correct and means that you throw the hay over the fence), but in English it's just plain funny. For another thing, they don't randomly just throw in the odd PA "Dutch" words in odd ways, but use them for names of foods, etc, and then the author says "chust" for just but doesn't overdo this stuff.