Robin Kane series // by Eileen Hill

Oh hey, I’m back!!  I did so well getting all caught up on all my reviews through the end of March… and then disappeared again!  The craziness of life just isn’t letting up and I have been working a lot – loads of transplanting and watering going on at the greenhouse!!

• The Mystery of the Blue Pelican (1966)
• The Mystery of the Phantom (1966)
• The Mystery of Glengary Castle (1966)
• The Candle Shop Mystery (1967)
• Mystery in the Clouds (1971)
• The Monster of Wolf Point (1971)

I’m not exactly sure when I first discovered this series, but in the books I’ve written that I’ve owned them since 1998.  They remind me very strongly of the Trixie Belden books (although I have no idea which actually came first!) – there is a spunky 13-year-old tomboy heroine with freckles and a bobbed haircut who loves horses.  Her best friend is slightly more timid and girly and is super rich and also super lonely.  Her best friend has a super nice and very good looking older brother who can drive. The heroine also has a nice older brother, although to change things up this heroine also has a younger sister.

Overall, this series was just 3* all the way through.  They aren’t horrible, but they are completely unbelievable (way more unbelievable than Trixie), and they are mildly racist thanks to the era in which they were written – while the Mexicans in the story are portrayed with affection, they are quite stereotyped.  Honestly, the whole series feels more like a television series than books – a very sitcom vibe to them, to the point that I sometimes felt like they should have come with a laugh track for the terrible jokes.  My notes for all these books say something along the lines of “fun, but completely impractical,” and that basically sums it up.

So if you’re like me and you enjoy reading random MG mysteries written in the 1960s, you should totally pick these up.  But if not… give them a miss, because they really aren’t anything amazing.

However, I did really like the cover art, which is probably why I bought them in the first place!