Author: Michael D Beil
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WORTHY!
This is a first person PoV narrated middle-grade story about four girls (Sophie St. Pierre, Margaret Wrobel, Rebecca Chen, and Leigh Anne Jaimes) who become engaged in a quest to solve clues and find a treasure at St. Veronica's Catholic school.
I see this novel being promoted as "The Ring of Rocamadour: Red Blazer Girls #1" in reviews, but my copy has The Red Blazer Girls on the cover, and that's it. No ring puts in an appearance until chapter eight, although the inside title page does mention the Ring of Rocamadour, but I don't get how reviewers translate that into retitling the entire novel!
One day whilst pursuing a foolish 'ghost' sighting, some of the four girls discover that the ghost is really an old woman who lives in a house attached to the local Catholic church. While visiting with her, the girls discover a birthday card hidden inside a book - a card which a man had intended that his then 12-year-old daughter Caroline would solve, but she's now an adult and living far away, so it falls to the new generation of 12-year-olds to solve it. Not a one of them - neither girls nor adults - thinks of calling or emailing Caroline to get her help solving the clues for some bizarre reason.
On a rather flimsy pretext, the girls end-up in a house attached to the school church, and meet Ms. Harriman. They discover a long-forgotten clue that leads on a treasure hunt. The first clue is pretty sad. It's a simple anagram - a very, very simple anagram that reveals a book title that leads to the next clue. The second clue is a bit more complex.
For supposed Catholic girls, these four sure seem to have a rather salty vocabulary! They don't seem very religious, either, which is fine with me, but the clues are pretty much all imparted through investigations inside a church. Why he put them in a church goes unexplained, especially since the clues are hidden in very difficult to get at places, such as being under a dedication plaque that's screwed to a pew, for example. Recall that the clues were placed a decade ago, and for a girl who was highly educated and very literate, not for the four girls who are now trying to locate and decipher them in the present. It would seem that several of those who negatively reviewed this novel forgot that important distinction.
One major problem with this is that it's written by a mature guy, and he's trying to portray juvenile girls, which is admirable, but which gets him into trouble in places. Some of the references the girls use are mature guy references, not middle-grade girl references, so while this makes it accessible to older readers, it also makes it rather unrealistic as well.
Some of the clues are a bit weird, too. The first one - the title of a book and the name of its author - was so limp and easy as to be pathetic - not remotely worthy of an intelligent and very literate young woman. Others were so obscure that there was no way you would get them unless you were a literal expert on, or dedicated devotee of, Charles Dickens, for example, which his daughter evidently was, but which these girls are really not.
Others were math problems, mostly focused on Cartesian graphing. These were well done, and it's admirable that the girls were depicted not only attacking them, but also relishing the prospect. I liked that very much and it's one of the reasons I'm positively reviewing this novel. It portrays girls as smart, independent, can-do kind of people, no boys required, although there is a lot of interaction between the girls and male figures, mostly authority figures (or a potential bad guy), but also including one of their own age upon whom one of the quartet has a crush.
I think it would have been better had the author kept strongly in mind that these were modern twelve-year-olds (the book was published in 2009), and that they were dealing with a very personalized problem which was set for a highly educated girl a decade or two previously. It seems that he perhaps became a bit muddled as to who he was writing for or to whom he was trying to appeal, and who he was representing in the writing.
That aside I liked the novel, I liked the portrayal of the girls for the most part, and the puzzles were not too awfully bad. I think it will appeal to middle-graders - probably mostly female, but ones who are not afraid to admit to an intellect and to a love of adventure and mystery.
