Rose Rita Pottinger is dreading summer. With her best friend, Lewis Barnavelt away at Boy Scout camp, vacation threatens to be altogether boring. But when Mrs. Zimmermann, Lewis's next door neighbor and a genuine witch receives a strange deathbed letter from an eccentric uncle, unexpected thing start to happen.

I very much enjoyed the previous two books in this series, which chronicled the magical adventures of Lewis Barnavelt, but we get a bit of a change of pace with this third novel in the series. Bellairs shifts focus to put Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmerman in the spotlight for their very own magical escapade while Lewis is away at summer camp. The story begins when Mrs. Zimmerman inherits the estate of her crazy old cousin, which seems harmless enough until we add a magical ring into the mix. Mrs. Zummerman is, of course, a logical sceptic, even as a trained magician, so she assumes that the ring is another of her cousin's made up stories, but this proves to almost be her downfall as her childhood rival gets a hold of the ring and turns it against her. Bellairs has never shied away from having truely frightening and realistic villains, but Gert Bigger is a keen example of how jealousy and vindictiveness can make a person go bad. At the crux of the story Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmerman are in real danger and it seems like Gert will go through with her plans to kill them both, but thankfully her own greed and the tricky way that magic works ends up being her undoing and our protagonists escape unharmed. Will we ever know if the magic ring really belonged to King Solomon? Probably not, but it is definitely for the best that Mrs. Zimmerman melted it down and got rid of it for good, as the spirit in the ring was clearly a negative influence on its wearer. ( )

I feel for Rosa Rita! But she comes out of it ok, sort of. The last book in this series written entirely by Bellairs, so I get to stop here. ( )

Rose Rita faces a summer alone after Lewis goes to Boy Scout camp. It gets worse when her mother suggests they have a "little talk" about boys and girls soon, and Rose Rita thinks about how she's 13 now and about to enter Junior High where there's even less room for a tomboy like her as well as dances and dating.

Thankfully Mrs. Zimmerman invites her along on a road trip to see the sights of Upper Michigan and take care of some inherited property. But there's something amiss. When they arrive a ring that may be magical has been stolen and it feels to Rose Rita that her and Mrs. Zimmerman aren't alone either in the new Plymouth Cranbrook on lonely backroads or in the bedrooms of the tourist homes they stop in at. Bellairs really creates a claustrophobic mood that's offset by Rose Rita's inner struggle about what the future will hold for her and Lewis' friendship.

What I really love, more and more, about Bellairs' books, particularly these early ones, is his grey shading of his characters and villains. The evil here isn't faceless. In Clocks Jonathan theorizes that Isaac and Selena Izzard weren't treated so well in the present world and so took drastic steps to begin a new one, the Figure in The Figure in the Shadows came to be after he was burned alive in his house, but in The Letter the villain is unnervingly sympathetic. Gert Bigger blames Mrs. Zimmerman for her eventual fate of being married to a wife-beater after Mrs. Zimmerman won away the affection of a boy in their youth. Lewis found acceptance in The House with a Clock in its Walls and faced down his inner demons in The Figure in the Shadows but we didn't know much about his best friend.

Rose Rita becomes a fully fleshed out character and her outsider status, as a tomboy and otherwise peculiar girl in 1950, is explored. This was the last Lewis/Rose Rita book completely written by Bellairs, he wrote two different similarly themed series after this, which disappoints me still, but I see why he left them behind, now. Bellairs had moved Rose Rita and Lewis forward to the point where, almost inevitably, their friendship would turn towards romance or break apart when all Rose Rita wants is for things to remain the same. That awareness of Rose Rita's about the changes approaching because of their ages and because of societal expectations dominates the book and elevates it above some of Bellairs' later output and all of Brad Strickland's completions and original "John Bellairs Mysteries".

Lewis & Rose Rita

Next: 'The Ghost in the Mirror'

Previous: 'The Figure in the Shadows' ( )

Rose Rita's best friend, Lewis, is off to summer camp and she's left facing an entire summer of dullness and worry about starting junior high in the fall. But then Mrs. Zimmerman - a good friend who also happens to be a witch - invites her to tag along on a road trip through the Upper Peninsula and things start to look up. Mrs. Zimmerman's trip is brought on by a letter from her recently-deceased acquaintance, who has left her his farm and a particular magic ring, which ends up causing all sorts of trouble for both her and Rose Rita, including some hairy encounters with a nasty old witch, who also wants the ring and has it out for Mrs. Zimmerman.
I love Bellairs' books - great characters, fun stories, and just enough of the scary stuff to be creepy but not enough to keep a 10-year-old up at night. Perfect for bedtime reading with Charlie. ( )