The Secret of the Emerald Star

Secret of the Emeral Star by Phyllis A. Whitney; illustrated by Alex Stein. When Robin Ward and her family moved to Staten Island, one of the first strange scenes she encountered was a lovely young girl whirling around on the front lawn of a huge house. Suddenly a white-haired woman ran out and dragged her away. She found out later that the girl, Stella, was blind, and born in Cuba, where her father had been killed. The stiff and unpleasant old lady was her Grandmother who put lables on everyone -- "blind" for Stella, "newcomer" for the Wards, "Jew" for the sculptor's son, and "Catholic" for Stella's mother, since none of them fitted into her world. Robin tried to make friends with Stella, but it was a rocky, up-and-down friendship, yet the girls learned from each ohter and the world around them. Stella wore a diamond and emerald pin all the time and there was mystery and danger around the girls upon the arrival of a menacing stranger. An excellent mystery with an unusual approach to the blind youngster.

To Mrs. Devery, whose whole world is Staten Island, strangers are not people: they are Jews or Catholics or Cubans or whatever is unlike herself, and therefore very strange indeed. All of which is rather ironic, of course, since the children of the neighborhood look upon the provincial, autocratic old woman herself as a witch. How well the label fits, thirteen-year-old Robin Ward is in a better position than most to know. She and her family are newcomers to secluded, fading Catalpa Court. From the window of her third-floor bedroom she commands a perfect view of the balconies and turrets of the house next door-can see everything that happens within the shrouded grounds of the big, forbidding Devery place. None of that first weird scene seems real. Round and round on the front lawn turns a girl in a white dress, her arms out wide as if she were flying, her voice making the tuneless, high-pitched sound of an insect. Suddenly the white-haired mistress of the house, dressed in clothes of another era, rushes toward the girl, grasps her angrily by the arm and virtually drags her away. A famous sculptor also living in Catalpa Court is willing to teach a limited number of talented beginners. Robin's eagerness to qualify becomes inextricably involved not only with the strange girl and her grim "jailer" but with the fate of a valuable pin made of emeralds and a diamond and shaped like a star. Mystery and menace progressively deepen with Mrs. Devery's behavior amid the ruins of an old house and her association with a short, fat man whose white moon face, bald head, and habit of sucking lemon drops add chills to each sinister moment he appears. Completely unmysterious is the point dramatized by this excellent and exciting book that prejudices about people can only harm the prejudiced.

Artistically inclined Robin is drawn into the mystery of the cranky old woman next door and a beautiful young girl who seems to be held against her will. Twelve-year-old Stella and her mother are refugees from Cuba, and Stella's overbearing grandmother treats her like a helpless baby because of her blindness. In defiance of her grandmother, Stella constantly wears a beautiful emerald and diamond pin in the shape of a star, a gift from her (dead) Cuban grandmother. Robin senses that more is at stake when a mysterious, unpleasant stranger shows up at the Devery house searching through rubble and sneaking around, but is preoccupied with trying to find a subject to sculpt in clay so that she can enter a sculpting class by a talented local artist. Although dated, "Secret of the Emerald Star" is another wonderfully engaging, crisply written entry in Phyllis A Whitney's long list of excellent juvenile mysteries, which are all sadly out of print. The book makes an honest attempt to deal with ethnic and religious discrimination, a 1960s view of the Cuban crisis, and (for the time) forward thinking about dealing with blindness. The author includes a brief chapter on the inspiration for Stella's character and of her conversations with blind adolescents in preparation for writing the book, as well as the inspiration for Grandmother Devery's stuffy Staten Island neighbourhood that labels people as "Cubans," "Catholics," and "Jews."

I am 46 yrs old and I read Secret of the Emerald Star in the fourth or fifth grade. It left an everlasting sensation on a certain summer day, when the air seems just right that brings me back to the day I read that book for the first time. It was long ago given away in a box of paperback books purchased from the scholastic book club or something like that. I have recurring flashbacks of the scenes in the book and how I hoped to befriend a blind girl to see if she was the same as the character in the book. I perceived these thoughts at 10 or 11 years old and have been on a mission since this past summer to find the old friend and see how I like it 35 yrs later...I will send the REAL review at a later date to see if I am pleasantly pleased or disappointed this time around.

This book taught me a lot about blind children. The basic plot was interesting, but was not developed very much. The book focused more on the relationships of the characters in the book than on the mystery. Overall, I would recommend it to readers who do not get impatient if there is not a lot of action. Otherwise, people might find this book boring.