The Thin Red Line

So it’s Sunday and I am off and I should be doing laundry but am blogging instead. I always thought of audiobooks as being for the old and blinding, the Large Print crowd and am always at little amazed at audibooks for children. Yesterday I checked in the audiobook of this children’s classic, From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, then went over to the shelf and retrieved the original and brought it home.

I remember reading this as a child and being so taken with the idea of running away to live in a museum. Re-reading it last night was not a disappointment at all, it was every bit as good as I remembered. Thirteen year old Claudia, a bored honors student in Greenwich, Connecticut and her nine year old brother, Jamie, catch a train to Manhattan and move into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They sleep in antique beds in the French furniture collection, bathe in the fountain where they also collect change to pay for food and other expenses and get a lot out of the museum tagging along with various school groups, including at one point Jamie’s own class.

The children are very taken with a new statue on display, an angel, believed to be a Michaelangelo but the provenance still up in the air. They become fascinated with this mystery and set out to learn for sure who created the angel. Their sleuthing leads them to the Fairfield, Connecticut estate of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler, an eccentric and curmudgeonly old lady and the narrator of the tale who is most interested in the children’s story of running away to live at the Met.

Initially Mrs. Frankweiler refuses to tell them where the statue cames from but offers to allow them an hour to search her files (described as rows and rows of metal filing cabinets) for the answer. But, she warns them, her filing system is unique and things are placed where they make sense to her, so they are unlikely to find anything by looking in obvious places. In the nick of time Claudia thinks to look under Bologna, for Bologna, Italy and there finds a note, preserved in glass, in Michaelangelo’s hand that makes clear he sculpted the angel.

Mrs. Frankweiler has the chauffer drive the children home, and Claudia returns to Greenwich feeling changed inside, which she realizes is what she wanted all along.

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