The book's problem, unfortunately, is that it does take quite a while to get going. Konigsburg is a gifted writer, and once this book gets going, it's fabulous. Margaret to the rescue, and in organizing the fight to stop the towers from being torn down, she learns far more than she would have stuck in some summer camp in the woods. As with all these sorts of sillinesses, there are people trying to stop it, but no one's quite sure how to go about doing so. After she and the head of the camp reach a “mutual decision” (read: she quits just before they toss her out on her ear) and she's rescued by one of her uncles, she finds out about those prior commitments-they're fighting a legal battle with their neighborhood association, who are trying to get the towers taken down for being unsafe and a blight on the community. The trouble first starts when Margaret's parents are travelling in Peru for the summer, and the uncles have prior commitments, so Margaret is shipped off to a summer camp she loathes. Margaret Rose Kane is going through adolescence with the help of her parents and a couple of eccentric uncles who are well-known in the community for three large works of art in their backyard, forty-foot-plus towers decorated with all sorts of shiny gewgaws.
The time is the end of the eighties, the place small-town middle America. Frankweiler can do no wrong in my eyes, so away I went.
Konigsburg, who after From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Pretty familiar territory to me, though, as my in-laws' parents and grandparents were intimately involved with the now-dismantled Euclid Beach Park (watch for the forthcoming Arcadia Press title!), and, well, it's E.
What do you do when you're faced with the destruction of a local landmark? What do you do if that local landmark was built by your relatives? It's an interesting question, though on the surface one has to figure it's going to be pretty narrow-market subject matter. Konigsburg, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place (Atheneum, 2004)
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