Part 3: Karen's Treasure
Y’know, since I’m already feeling miserable as all get-out, I thought, “Why not finish my LS snark?” Because that’s the logical thing to do when you’re depressed and sitting about the house in your PJs and should be looking for productive employment. I question my life choices sometimes, honestly. Clearly my logic is already in question, so I’m armed and dangerous - well, armed with sarcasm and dangerous only to Karen, because by the time this book is over, I will be fantasising about ways to put her out of her misery.
Chapter Eleven
The kids are at the town hall and have just established that “Barrows’ back door” is actually at Nancy’s house and the stream is 22 paces from there. So they go there and Karen ponders whether she should take giant steps or baby steps towards the stream. Naturally, Kristy settles on ‘medium’.
Karen, I think you should take giant steps off a cliff so I don’t have to suffer through this.
The kids manage to end up at the little house. They “walk to the nearest quercus coccinea” as per the clue. Which I don’t understand because trees get chopped down! How do they know that’s the tree? How do they know there weren’t five other oaks there before they were cleared? This is a fifty-year-old map!
*sigh* Sorry, I was expecting logic from Carr. Let’s move on. Karen, in all her anticipation, starts to really get excited. Can you guess what she’s going to spend this imaginary money on? Maybe a lifetime’s worth of those cereal toy things she was so annoyed about missing out on in Karen’s Worst Day. Karen finally catches on that dear old Henry might just be trolling, but before she can process that this could be an elaborate joke, Lisa comes and sees them. And she’s not pleased.
Karen’s let off with a warning and a ban from digging in their backyard. Hang on, aren’t you going to punish her? UM. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW how much it’s going to cost to Astro-turf that yard, and you give Karen a WARNING? You can’t even confiscate her pocket money for the month?! For the love of God, Lisa. I think you deserve whatever you have to pay the gardener to fix the gaping holes in your lawn. Also, Carr thinks we’re all morons, but what’s new?
Chapter Twelve
K&A play detective again and investigate the attic in a pretty kid-standard way (looking behind boxes with a torch, etc.). I’ll be the first to admit that this scene is actually well written, and also that it’d be hella cool to find secret doors or tunnels in your house. Anyway, our intrepid heroine stumbles on an old photo. No, it’s not Lisa’s secret stash of kinky porn, so don’t get too excited! Instead it turns out to be a spectacular missed opportunity to, I don’t know, give us some educational and historically relevant information for once, because this is all we get: “In one photo a young boy was playing in the yard. He was wearing funny clothes. His pants came just past his knees. They were held up by suspenders.”
Christ on a carrot cake. Where’s Ann when we need her? Come on, I’m missing out on the deets! What did people wear in that period? Don’t you think your average eight-year-old would benefit from - oh, stuff it. Let’s stick to screaming at the BSCverse rather than expecting it to somehow sprout some potential against all logic and reason. So anyway, Karen sees a letter H and the date 1934 and about wets herself with excitement because there is a Real Live Dead Historical Figure With a Whole Lot of Treasure in her house! They realise there’s a tree in the yard that isn’t there now, and that the hedge is in a different place.
Chapter Thirteen
When Karen begs to be allowed to dig in the backyard again, because now they know where the hedge is, Seth very sensibly points out that the pipes could be damaged. Yay, sensible parenting!
But because Lisa wants to get it on with Seth without kids interrupting them, she ruins everything. What the hell, Carr? You know, I’d almost have preferred a Kristy’s Big Day/Jimmy Neutron/GONE series-style setup, where the parents actually couldn’t look after the kids, rather than the writers having them give decent advice and then go back on it. I mean, what is the point of that? Realistically (oh, who am I kidding) Lisa would’ve stuck to her guns and Karen would’ve gone off and found something else to do.
So Karen and Andrew (and Kristy, who is promptly fetched from the Brewers’) start digging. Karen closes her eyes and wishes for treasure. Yeah, okay, Karen, you keep dreaming. Since this is the BSC, it might actually happen.
Chapter Fourteen
I wiped my hands on my pants and rested my foot on the blade of the shovel. Oof! I shoved it into the ground.
“Now I know why they call it a shov-el,” I said, giggling.
I don’t know, something’s off about this scenario. I think it’s the fact that Karen doesn’t seem the type to make a pun, and her sense of humour would tend more towards riddles or well-placed insults. She’s portrayed as too smart and too appreciative of words (one might even say nitpicky) to say a silly thing like that. Then again, she also says ‘meanie-mo’ and ‘boo and bullfrogs’.
They take turns digging, and just as Karen is beginning to have doubts they hit something metal. They pull it out and discover it’s a box, and when Karen rattles it, it sounds like there’s money inside. That’s pretty wicked, really, so I don’t blame her for being excited. But in a rare touch of realism, they’re all just pennies, quarters and dimes rather than “gold doubloons, half dollars or silver dollars”. Aw, tough luck, Karen. Maybe you can become an archaeologist when you get out of the time warp, and find something worth ten times more than a doubloon.
When they begin counting the coins, Andrew counts each coin as one cent and Karen tries to tell him the different denominations, but he doesn’t get it. That’s actually cute!
The total comes to $2.47, and Karen’s disappointed that it’s not a lot of money, but you can’t win ‘em all.
Chapters Fifteen to Eighteen
Over soup (yum!) for lunch, Seth suggests that the coins themselves could be worth something. When Seth suggests they go to a coin shop to get the pennies valued, I clutch my head and wail because we all know where this is heading.
Sure enough, they all get lost on their way to the coin shop and end up in the desert, where Karen escapes the time warp by bus and ends up murdering the Doctor in a fiendish scheme involving Let’s All Come In.
Whoops, wrong universe! We can dream, right?
I once asked my Year 8 science teacher how much a 2-cent coin from 1966 would be worth and was horribly disappointed when she only said 2 cents, so I’m skeptical that money would be worth this much even after 50 years. But natch, Karen’s coins turn out to be worth hundreds of bucks. If you didn’t see that coming, congratulations, you haven’t permanently warped your brain trying to peer into the madly swirling aurora borealis that is the BSC-verse. Fuck you, Carr.
For a change, Karen volunteers to keep the money because she wants to give it to Henry Carmody, the rightful owner. Okay, that first part’s actually remotely plausible because Karen stands to inherit Real Live Millions. But a kid like Karen would totally be all “FINDERS KEEPERS!”. I mean, come on. Anyway, she goes and looks Henry Carmody up in the phone book and oh my God, WHAT IS IT with the BSC writers legitimising this kind of stuff?
Henry Carmody is still living in Stoneybrook, which, okay, I can believe because this is the 90s and it’s more common that people of Henry’s generation would’ve stayed in jobs longer and in the same area for much of their lives. When she finds him, she doesn’t even introduce herself and just launches into the tale of how she found his coins. Okay, if some strange kid called me rambling about how they’d dug up some old coins at my childhood house, I’d be intrigued, but also confused, like, why are this girl’s parents giving her permission to call random strangers? Luckily, Henry’s a nice guy, so he humours Karen and they all go to his house to show him the coins. On the way there, there’s this exchange:
“Karen,” said Seth, “I have a good job for you. Your job is to keep all of us entertained while we are in the car.”
Translation: “You talk enough for six, so allow us to at least laugh at you behind our hands if we can’t shut you up.”
Karen makes everyone guess what Henry will look like. Of course, she has to go first:
I thought a moment about Henry and how old he must be. “I think he is very feeble now,” I said. “He has to use a cane. I bet the cane is carved from wood and has a silver elephant on top.” I thought that was a very good guess.
In fairness, that’s a detailed and pretty imaginative and concise portrait of Henry.
Seth and Lisa take the piss: “Well,” said Seth, “I think Henry has a beard. And I think he wears a pirate’s patch over one eye.”
I frowned. Seth was not taking my game very seriously.
“Mommy’s turn,” I said
“I think he has a big tattoo on one arm,” said Mommy. “And I think he has a parrot sitting on one shoulder.”
“Mommy,” I said. “Please guess for real. This is not a joke.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “I guess that Henry wears wire-rimmed glasses. And I really do think he has a tattoo.”
Finally it was Andrew’s turn. “I think Henry has a pet salamander,” he said. “And the salamander’s name is Andrew.”
D’awww, I love Andrew. He’s adorable, okay? And that’s the most realistic exchange I’ve read in a BSC book in quite a while, so non-snarky congratulations to Carr for hanging around actual writers and not brain-dead gumbies stuck in the fifties like Ann.
Lisa’s guess turns out to be right and Karen’s completely wrong. Henry isn’t poor, frail, sick or lonely, but he does wear wire-rimmed glasses and has a tattoo (of an anchor, from when he was in the Navy, get it?). I feel like Carr attempted to inject a little bit of a moral that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions about people, which completely undermines previous books considering Karen judges the hell out of almost everything and everyone (Morbidda Destiny and Natalie, anyone?). Henry serves them snacks and shows them the photos of his large family in the living room. The only reason I can believe all this is because he seems genuinely nice and is probably lonely, despite Karen pointing out that he “isn’t all alone in the world”.
Chapters Nineteen and Twenty
Henry drops by the next evening with a surprise for Karen, which turns out to be a book on coin collecting and one of the pennies she gave him, all polished and cleaned up. Zomg, Karen now has a new hobby!
In return, she shows him the secret panel in the wall, where she’s saved the map (*sigh* physics notwithstanding) and he gets weirdly sentimental over some old map that he drew when he was nine or whatever.
Then he comes over for dinner and actually goes with the Brewers to Nancy’s ballet recital. Okay, then. That’s totally something you do with people you’ve only just met. Does this warrant a pedobear tag? As they’re buying the tickets, Karen is obnoxious and suggests that she check everyone’s change before they put it back into their wallets in case there’s a priceless coin from the Han dynasty hidden in anyone’s back pocket.
Nancy’s performance goes well. Karen thinks she looks graceful and “[is] so proud of her.” You know what, I’m just going to leave this here and go drown myself in the nearest bucket of Jack Daniel’s.
Heh. Karen calls out “Yea, Nancy!” and when Nancy blushes and ducks her head, Karen thinks it’s from modesty rather than the probable real reason: mortification at having such an annoying best friend.
After the recital, Karen finally has her best friend back again! She introduces Nancy to Henry and then drags Nancy off to show her her coin collection.
Phew! That’s over, three years in. I think I need a good strong cup of tea after that. It was the most boring book I’ve had the misfortune to read, and that’s counting all the godawful Goosebumps books I survived on in Year 4 (and here I feel the need to point out that though I may not be the brightest lightbulb in the shed, at least I don’t ghostwrite these damn books).
Dare I snark another just to see if it compares?
Chapter Eleven
The kids are at the town hall and have just established that “Barrows’ back door” is actually at Nancy’s house and the stream is 22 paces from there. So they go there and Karen ponders whether she should take giant steps or baby steps towards the stream. Naturally, Kristy settles on ‘medium’.
Karen, I think you should take giant steps off a cliff so I don’t have to suffer through this.
The kids manage to end up at the little house. They “walk to the nearest quercus coccinea” as per the clue. Which I don’t understand because trees get chopped down! How do they know that’s the tree? How do they know there weren’t five other oaks there before they were cleared? This is a fifty-year-old map!
*sigh* Sorry, I was expecting logic from Carr. Let’s move on. Karen, in all her anticipation, starts to really get excited. Can you guess what she’s going to spend this imaginary money on? Maybe a lifetime’s worth of those cereal toy things she was so annoyed about missing out on in Karen’s Worst Day. Karen finally catches on that dear old Henry might just be trolling, but before she can process that this could be an elaborate joke, Lisa comes and sees them. And she’s not pleased.
Karen’s let off with a warning and a ban from digging in their backyard. Hang on, aren’t you going to punish her? UM. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW how much it’s going to cost to Astro-turf that yard, and you give Karen a WARNING? You can’t even confiscate her pocket money for the month?! For the love of God, Lisa. I think you deserve whatever you have to pay the gardener to fix the gaping holes in your lawn. Also, Carr thinks we’re all morons, but what’s new?
Chapter Twelve
K&A play detective again and investigate the attic in a pretty kid-standard way (looking behind boxes with a torch, etc.). I’ll be the first to admit that this scene is actually well written, and also that it’d be hella cool to find secret doors or tunnels in your house. Anyway, our intrepid heroine stumbles on an old photo. No, it’s not Lisa’s secret stash of kinky porn, so don’t get too excited! Instead it turns out to be a spectacular missed opportunity to, I don’t know, give us some educational and historically relevant information for once, because this is all we get: “In one photo a young boy was playing in the yard. He was wearing funny clothes. His pants came just past his knees. They were held up by suspenders.”
Christ on a carrot cake. Where’s Ann when we need her? Come on, I’m missing out on the deets! What did people wear in that period? Don’t you think your average eight-year-old would benefit from - oh, stuff it. Let’s stick to screaming at the BSCverse rather than expecting it to somehow sprout some potential against all logic and reason. So anyway, Karen sees a letter H and the date 1934 and about wets herself with excitement because there is a Real Live Dead Historical Figure With a Whole Lot of Treasure in her house! They realise there’s a tree in the yard that isn’t there now, and that the hedge is in a different place.
Chapter Thirteen
When Karen begs to be allowed to dig in the backyard again, because now they know where the hedge is, Seth very sensibly points out that the pipes could be damaged. Yay, sensible parenting!
But because Lisa wants to get it on with Seth without kids interrupting them, she ruins everything. What the hell, Carr? You know, I’d almost have preferred a Kristy’s Big Day/Jimmy Neutron/GONE series-style setup, where the parents actually couldn’t look after the kids, rather than the writers having them give decent advice and then go back on it. I mean, what is the point of that? Realistically (oh, who am I kidding) Lisa would’ve stuck to her guns and Karen would’ve gone off and found something else to do.
So Karen and Andrew (and Kristy, who is promptly fetched from the Brewers’) start digging. Karen closes her eyes and wishes for treasure. Yeah, okay, Karen, you keep dreaming. Since this is the BSC, it might actually happen.
Chapter Fourteen
I wiped my hands on my pants and rested my foot on the blade of the shovel. Oof! I shoved it into the ground.
“Now I know why they call it a shov-el,” I said, giggling.
I don’t know, something’s off about this scenario. I think it’s the fact that Karen doesn’t seem the type to make a pun, and her sense of humour would tend more towards riddles or well-placed insults. She’s portrayed as too smart and too appreciative of words (one might even say nitpicky) to say a silly thing like that. Then again, she also says ‘meanie-mo’ and ‘boo and bullfrogs’.
They take turns digging, and just as Karen is beginning to have doubts they hit something metal. They pull it out and discover it’s a box, and when Karen rattles it, it sounds like there’s money inside. That’s pretty wicked, really, so I don’t blame her for being excited. But in a rare touch of realism, they’re all just pennies, quarters and dimes rather than “gold doubloons, half dollars or silver dollars”. Aw, tough luck, Karen. Maybe you can become an archaeologist when you get out of the time warp, and find something worth ten times more than a doubloon.
When they begin counting the coins, Andrew counts each coin as one cent and Karen tries to tell him the different denominations, but he doesn’t get it. That’s actually cute!
The total comes to $2.47, and Karen’s disappointed that it’s not a lot of money, but you can’t win ‘em all.
Chapters Fifteen to Eighteen
Over soup (yum!) for lunch, Seth suggests that the coins themselves could be worth something. When Seth suggests they go to a coin shop to get the pennies valued, I clutch my head and wail because we all know where this is heading.
Sure enough, they all get lost on their way to the coin shop and end up in the desert, where Karen escapes the time warp by bus and ends up murdering the Doctor in a fiendish scheme involving Let’s All Come In.
Whoops, wrong universe! We can dream, right?
I once asked my Year 8 science teacher how much a 2-cent coin from 1966 would be worth and was horribly disappointed when she only said 2 cents, so I’m skeptical that money would be worth this much even after 50 years. But natch, Karen’s coins turn out to be worth hundreds of bucks. If you didn’t see that coming, congratulations, you haven’t permanently warped your brain trying to peer into the madly swirling aurora borealis that is the BSC-verse. Fuck you, Carr.
For a change, Karen volunteers to keep the money because she wants to give it to Henry Carmody, the rightful owner. Okay, that first part’s actually remotely plausible because Karen stands to inherit Real Live Millions. But a kid like Karen would totally be all “FINDERS KEEPERS!”. I mean, come on. Anyway, she goes and looks Henry Carmody up in the phone book and oh my God, WHAT IS IT with the BSC writers legitimising this kind of stuff?
Henry Carmody is still living in Stoneybrook, which, okay, I can believe because this is the 90s and it’s more common that people of Henry’s generation would’ve stayed in jobs longer and in the same area for much of their lives. When she finds him, she doesn’t even introduce herself and just launches into the tale of how she found his coins. Okay, if some strange kid called me rambling about how they’d dug up some old coins at my childhood house, I’d be intrigued, but also confused, like, why are this girl’s parents giving her permission to call random strangers? Luckily, Henry’s a nice guy, so he humours Karen and they all go to his house to show him the coins. On the way there, there’s this exchange:
“Karen,” said Seth, “I have a good job for you. Your job is to keep all of us entertained while we are in the car.”
Translation: “You talk enough for six, so allow us to at least laugh at you behind our hands if we can’t shut you up.”
Karen makes everyone guess what Henry will look like. Of course, she has to go first:
I thought a moment about Henry and how old he must be. “I think he is very feeble now,” I said. “He has to use a cane. I bet the cane is carved from wood and has a silver elephant on top.” I thought that was a very good guess.
In fairness, that’s a detailed and pretty imaginative and concise portrait of Henry.
Seth and Lisa take the piss: “Well,” said Seth, “I think Henry has a beard. And I think he wears a pirate’s patch over one eye.”
I frowned. Seth was not taking my game very seriously.
“Mommy’s turn,” I said
“I think he has a big tattoo on one arm,” said Mommy. “And I think he has a parrot sitting on one shoulder.”
“Mommy,” I said. “Please guess for real. This is not a joke.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “I guess that Henry wears wire-rimmed glasses. And I really do think he has a tattoo.”
Finally it was Andrew’s turn. “I think Henry has a pet salamander,” he said. “And the salamander’s name is Andrew.”
D’awww, I love Andrew. He’s adorable, okay? And that’s the most realistic exchange I’ve read in a BSC book in quite a while, so non-snarky congratulations to Carr for hanging around actual writers and not brain-dead gumbies stuck in the fifties like Ann.
Lisa’s guess turns out to be right and Karen’s completely wrong. Henry isn’t poor, frail, sick or lonely, but he does wear wire-rimmed glasses and has a tattoo (of an anchor, from when he was in the Navy, get it?). I feel like Carr attempted to inject a little bit of a moral that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions about people, which completely undermines previous books considering Karen judges the hell out of almost everything and everyone (Morbidda Destiny and Natalie, anyone?). Henry serves them snacks and shows them the photos of his large family in the living room. The only reason I can believe all this is because he seems genuinely nice and is probably lonely, despite Karen pointing out that he “isn’t all alone in the world”.
Chapters Nineteen and Twenty
Henry drops by the next evening with a surprise for Karen, which turns out to be a book on coin collecting and one of the pennies she gave him, all polished and cleaned up. Zomg, Karen now has a new hobby!
In return, she shows him the secret panel in the wall, where she’s saved the map (*sigh* physics notwithstanding) and he gets weirdly sentimental over some old map that he drew when he was nine or whatever.
Then he comes over for dinner and actually goes with the Brewers to Nancy’s ballet recital. Okay, then. That’s totally something you do with people you’ve only just met. Does this warrant a pedobear tag? As they’re buying the tickets, Karen is obnoxious and suggests that she check everyone’s change before they put it back into their wallets in case there’s a priceless coin from the Han dynasty hidden in anyone’s back pocket.
Nancy’s performance goes well. Karen thinks she looks graceful and “[is] so proud of her.” You know what, I’m just going to leave this here and go drown myself in the nearest bucket of Jack Daniel’s.
Heh. Karen calls out “Yea, Nancy!” and when Nancy blushes and ducks her head, Karen thinks it’s from modesty rather than the probable real reason: mortification at having such an annoying best friend.
After the recital, Karen finally has her best friend back again! She introduces Nancy to Henry and then drags Nancy off to show her her coin collection.
Phew! That’s over, three years in. I think I need a good strong cup of tea after that. It was the most boring book I’ve had the misfortune to read, and that’s counting all the godawful Goosebumps books I survived on in Year 4 (and here I feel the need to point out that though I may not be the brightest lightbulb in the shed, at least I don’t ghostwrite these damn books).
Dare I snark another just to see if it compares?