HENRY: Father is dead
THE TOWN: get out, you orphans
THE BAKER: I’ll sell you to just about anyone
BENNY: this old train is asleep
VIOLET: lets live in it, instead of society
HENRY: we won’t like the grandpa man
BENNY: i found this pink trash to eat off of
HENRY: that’s good
JESS: lets dip our bread in milk for some reason
BENNY: there are no adults here
and i sleep on a bag
JESS: showering can be fun
HENRY: let’s do chores all the time
VIOLET: lets use the river for a fridge and put everything we cherish in it
JESS: someday we’ll solve crimes
HENRY: all of our ideas are good, I will be our father now
JESS: Benny you must learn to read
BENNY: no
the dog is my father now
GRANDPA: i’m grandpa
i make people run for money
VIOLET: lets stop living in this old train
BENNY: lets never live in it again
Tags: books, it’s basically the same thing, the boxcar children
The one thing I always noticed about the early books of these, and this has stuck with me through my entire life – is that whenever Benny talks, it’s always framed like this:
“Blah blah blah blah blah!” cried Benny.
What the hell is that kid doing that he is crying THAT CONSISTENTLY?
The only redeemable thing about Benny was his love of that dog.
Presumably they meant cried as in a loud excited utterance. Like how in ye olden times they had the town crier; he didn’t go around weeping he shouted out the news.
Obviously you’ve never met my eight-year -old son. He only has two modes: Deafeningly Loud and Asleep.
I am operating on an imperfect memory of these books, but I read a TON of them when I was little, and it is not at all clear to me why this book about orphans in a train car turned into a series about these orphans solving mysteries. Was there something mysterious in the first book? Were their parents both detectives? Cause I feel like rather than write this book, then write separate, more logically situated mysteries, the author was just like “I already invented four characters, that is plenty of characters for one lifetime!”
Yeah I read a ton of them too. Basically all of the mystery books have little to no thematic relation to the original book except for being about the same set of children. The first book is about how orphans survived in the woods for weeks on potatoes that Jess figured out a way to cook because they were afraid of being sent to live with their grandfather whom they did not know. Eventually one of the kids gets deathly ill and they are forced to seek help and find out that their grandfather is both super nice and super wealthy and they never have to live in a train car again. They keep it in the backyard and use it as a clubhouse. Their grandfather takes them on numerous vacations where there is always a mystery to solve, which they do.
As an adult I now wonder if maybe the kids actually just all died in that boxcar and the mystery series is just all their dying hallucinations about a better life.
That makes so much more sense.
The mystery stuff started to creep in the next couple of books (Surprise Island and The Yellow House Mystery), which were published 20+ years after the original book was published. So, probably.
The books REALLY went off the rails when Scholastic reprinted them and then got ghost writers to write an infinite series of books with increasingly ludicrous mysteries, so Warner’s original books (the first 18 or 19 I believe) got drowned out for formulaic mystery solving with the kids.
How did a group of children find SO MANY MYSTERIES? In my experience life is not as mysterious as this book series suggests.
They just kept finding Encyclopedia Brown’s rejected mysteries.
I loved Encyclopedia Brown! But I remember that even as a child I was wary of over-empathizing with male protagonists.
LMAO , IRL . My childhood felt so BORING bc there were so few MYSTERIES
Right!?! I was constantly looking for mysteries!
Between this, and Nancy Drew, and Encyclopedia Brown… I guess that’s why someone wrote Harriet the Spy, because she wanted mysteries too, just like the rest of us! But she didn’t really have any, just like the rest of us.
I fucking LOVE Harriet the Spy. Looking back at Harriet now, I feel like probably she grew up and spends time reading the Toast and writing fanfiction, hanging out with some cats (possibly a dog?) and has a job that is cool but not overly time-consuming, so she can do whatever the hell she wants on the weekends – possibly stream Netflix, or make fanvids. Or both.
My childhood had many mysteries but none of the fun, resolvable kind.
My friends and I tried so HARD to find mysteries in our neighbourhood. We thought the guy wandering around the neighbourhood in a dark jacket and balaclava was casing houses. We tailed him and it turned out he was delivering Penny Savers.
We thought the neighbours with the unmaintained pool and heavy drapes were up to something suspicious … so we would throw balls into their backyard to have the excuse to knock on the door and retrieve it.
Our neighbourhood was apparently plagued with pesky little girls.
The MYSTERY of the PESKY GIRLS
See also: the BSC mysteries, Super Mysteries, Super Specials, basically everything that happened to the BSC ever
Their grandfather was rich and BOUGHT THEM MYSTERIES.
Not that I was bitter. But some children have neither mysteries nor boxcars to call their own.
I would totally have settled for a boxcar. A boxcar would have been rad!
Not gonna lie, at the age of 8 (and a devout fan of the first 19 mysteries) I had a MASSIVE tantrum when they started expanding the series with ghostwriters. They were destroying my childhood for senseless profit! How dare they sully Warner’s perfect series! I believe I may have ripped up my scholastic order form in protest. It was probably my first and best canon geek entitlement meltdown, made all the more hilarious by the fact that no one knew (or cared) what I was going on about.
It’s just a natural part of the precious urchin lifecycle.
They found them on their Magical Mystery Train? IDK, I never got into the series. (But I looooved Nancy Drew! So aspirational.)
I read these books RELIGIOUSLY as a kid and then made my sister pretend to be boxcar children in our play set where we would sweep with pine branches and make ink and pens out of berries and sticks.
My childhood was an odd time.
me too! except with the neighbor kids. they were not nearly as into it as I was and eventually they got their mother to make excuses for why they couldn’t come out.
If we were neighbors, then at least one kid in my cul-de-sac would have played Boxcar Children with me in the boxcar I drew on the asphalt with chalk and wouldn’t have thought I was weird.
“What do you mean we’re not in a forest, is your imagination broken?” – 8 y/o Me, if I’d had the emotional tools available to help me not be embarrassed that no one else could figure out what I was doing.
I had a friend in elementary school, whom I now realize came from a very unhappy home, who learned about the Wonders of Imagination from me. Seriously, we had forts and went exploring and were sometimes Boxcar Children, even though he was terrible at pretending things.
And then we would go into his house, where his dad was passed out in a recliner, and watch age-inappropriate movies like The Terminator.
If the multiverse theory is true then somewhere there is a universe where everyone in this thread where neighbors as children and we all spent hours larping boxcar children and little house on the prairie. It’s so sad that we’re not apart of that one!
that’s like how I would play Little House on the Prairie by peeling acorns and grinding them up
newsflash: acorns taste terrible
and they’re poisonous! (Or maybe this is just what my mom told me to stop me from eating them)
I thought that acorn flour was a thing? At least I think I remember the little boy from My Side of the Mountain making food out of it. Maybe they need to be treated to make them not-poisonous?
You have to wash the tannins off of them to make them palatable. Not sure about them being poisonous before that. They don’t have a huge amount of nutritional value, but if you don’t have anything else….
*Also spent her childhood at LHOTP/Boxcar Children camp.
My people! I didn’t have many neighborhood friends before fifth grade, though, so I originally played LHOTP by making a mud pit beneath our pine tree and using that mud and twigs to build Barbie-sized log cabins. Barbies were much better than American Girl Dolls for LHOTP because they were so much easier to clean. I also often “camped” in the “woods” behind our house, likely inspired by the Boxcar Children. I was a loner for a long time…
he made pancakes! I have always wanted to try acorn pancakes :(((
it’s not too late – you’re an adult now (probably) you can make it happen! Si se puede.
Proposal: try chestnut pancakes instead. They’re very closely related, they sell them at stores, it’s 90% less awful to prepare them, and they are actually pretty tasty.
Yeah, I could see chestnuts working! I like chestnuts. Acorns are gross.
They are not gross, but not palatable. It’s an interesting flavor space to explore. I eat things like barley and poi and quinoa, and I realize why I’m fatter than older cultures: there is a lot of staple food that is not very tasty.
If you want to eat acorns, but do not have a handy creek where you can place a loose basket of peeled acorns to wash away the tannins, confess to doing something really really strange on the internet, and lose a lot of respect from strangers.
Peel the acorns – take off the skin around the kernel too – and put them in a cloth bag. (You know what is an excellent disposable cloth bag? One of your socks that came out of the wash with no partner.) The tank above your toilet is full of potable water (ahahahaha, we’re going to a special drought hell) and refills several times a day. Suspend the acorn sock in the toilet tank for about a week. (Water will wick up the sock and drip onto the floor. Put something under the sock.) The water in the toilet bowl will turn an unsavory brown – like weak tea, or the very worst 10000 flushes.
What’s that? You’re no longer interested in acorns?
haha, no this is amazing!!
honestly it’s not so much the washing (toilet-based or not) that stumps me as all the grinding that would be required to get enough flour to get even one pancake. the kid in My Side of the Mountain had a LOT of arm strength and free time on his side, I guess. I would give up after grinding like 3 acorns, probably.
The chestnuts, tho…. I will have to think about it.
You can even buy it commercially: http://buyacornflour.com/ !
My mom told me all the berries and such growing in our yard were poisonous so I was never brave enough to try them. TBH, I’m amazed I never made my sister eat them, seeing as my parents say I spent half my childhood trying to off her so I could be an only child again.
I found out at one point that the mulberries that grew on the massive tree in the backyard were edible, which delighted me. Did not stop my dad from hating the tree, though, and I can’t really blame him as they got everywhere and stained (and it was technically the neighbors’ so he couldn’t have it cut down.) Still, though, I could eat berries just like in all the books where people went outdoors and ate berries!
Same! I made a mulberry cobbler one time! My mom hated that thing too: our dog made purple pawprints everywhere, and the birds pooped purple on the car.
we had no edible berries, but my parents taught me how to find wild onions/scallions among our back yard, and I used to eat that for fun because I was so excited I could identify food “in the wild,” as it were.
Fun related story: I think I was about 8 when my mom explained to my Irish father that no, we cannot eat the mushrooms he picked in the back yard (in NY state) because they almost certainly were not the same species of edible mushroom he was used to foraging growing up. But I’m always tempted, in case he was right after all. (However, as he never tried this again, I’m not going to second guess my mom’s decision there…)
My siblings and I used to climb in the mulberry tree, barefoot. Our mother was furious every Saturday night, trying to scrub our feet free of stains for church in the morning. Nope, the stains do not scrub off. Never stopped her from trying, though. Ouch.
My parents probably should have done that, instead they sent me to a nature program with a naturalist who encouraged things like licking slugs. I now put far more naturey things in my mouth than is wise, and find taste the easiest way to tell a couple of the native fir tree species apart. I’m going to poison myself one day, I am sure.
So bitter!
eta – Acorns are bitter, not I am bitter because you got to eat acorns.
I did the same thing, except instead of acorns I would make my friends gather hazelnuts and grass that had gone to seed and therefore looked vaguely like wheat stalks. Also, sometimes there were pirates, because my playhouse had a steering wheel and a telescope.
That playhouse sounds like the best!
I tried to make the maple syrup snow candy one time, but it didn’t work. I don’t know whether it wasn’t cold enough by then to actually freeze the syrup, or whether Aunt Jemima is just not the right substance for that purpose. (High-fructose corn syrup, or something, in the formula, maybe?)
Ditto. Except I was an only child, so it was even weirder
My sister and I did the same, but spent most of our time gathering firewood and trying to figure out how to dam a creek well enough with rocks and pine needles to get a swimming hole. It never, ever worked.
Oh, maybe that’s why I inevitably, given a creek and free time, will try to dam the creek. Lots of happy memories of attempting this and failing throughout my life.
Humans all have beaver genes; that is what all humans do with creeks.
I accept this explanation wholeheartedly, because it means I can continue asking my friends to dam creeks with me and not feel weird about it.
I did the opposite: I would go into my friend’s backyard and widen and deepen where the lake drained off, turning the tiny trickle of a creek into an actual river. Somehow the beaver gene got messed up in me.
I really like un-damming little creeks too! I live in Phoenix, so we don’t have too many of those around, but whenever my family goes up north and we visit a creek, I have a great time.
My cousins and my brother and I routinely played orphans. WHY WAS THIS SO FUN?
We had a “house” in the pine trees at my grandmothers and we would run and hide every time a car came by because OBVIOUSLY it was the police and OBVIOUSLY orphans are illegal?
One of the younger brothers would be forced to become deathly ill while myself and my older cousin mashed up holly berries in her very cool mortar and pestle for medicine.
I hope my future children try and build a house in the woods to pretend to be orphans. Those are some of my favorite memories of childhood.
I am so excited that other people had childhoods like this.
Orphan is the the best game possible.
Respectfully disagree: ALIEN orphans (or FAERY – always with an E – orphans) is the best game possible.
Wow, that’s like a whole ‘nother level.
My 8 year old and her friends play a game at recess called “AHHH! Twister!!” in which they live in olden times, and they were formerly wealthy, but the butler killed their parents and then a tornado demolished their town so now they are poor and live in the barn with the horses. Orphans is definitely still A THING.
Orphan plus twister! Perfect!
I am officially no longer worried about the Kids Today.
I love how rather than letting the parents die in the twister, the kids have the butler kill them beforehand. Kids are awesome.
That’s not odd, that is hugely imaginative and awesome!
I read all the survival books like island of the blue dolphins, little house on the prarie, my side of the mountian, julie of the wolves, and swiss family robinson so my brothers and I spent a lot of time trying to fletch our own arrows and string our own bows. I still remember the basics of arrowmaking, but we never had any really sharp rocks.
ALso anyone else ever have their dad read them Boy Captive of Deerfield? My aunt really did live in deerfield and in a lurid moment I imagined that the creek behind her house had once run red with blood and after that I could never NOT think that when we waded in it, except when the leeches tried to get us, and then I was all ingalls wilder.
ALL OF THESE ARE THE BEST BOOKS, I had a major crush on My Side of the Mountain kid, although now that I am an old I realize he’d probably grow up to be one of those dudebros who brags about “going off the grid” and then starves to death or gets eaten by a grizzly in Alaska.
Also this one: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2895779-walkin… and where the red fern grows- i made my mom buy horehound seeds so we could make the candy and then we hung it in the attic and it got so dusty my mom wouldn’t let me use it for candy! years later I had horehound candy at an old timey story and man do I ever like it. Its super herby and almost medicinal. Horehound liquer would be AWESOME.
OMG, all those, plus Hatchet was like, childhood survival porn at its greatest.
“Hatchet” was amazing, I was way too addicted to Gary Paulsen’s wilderness adventuring. I think I read “The Island” about a million times — spend all my time alone on an island, shun civilization for awhile, and paint birds? Sure!
Definitely played boxcar children with my childhood best friend and her two brothers. I don’t remember many details except we’d basically build a fort and do chores and utterly ignore any adults in the house at the time. Just acted like they didn’t exist. Which I doubt they minded, because we were being quiet and getting along and cleaning things like weirdos.
I have never met anyone else who read these! So much of my childhood was pretending to live in a boxcar, with the pink cups and “gathering food”. Especially awesome when I look back at how long I managed to bully my brother and cousins into playing this with me before we would have to switch to Ninja Turtles (there were four of us, so these were obviously the perfect games to play, even if I was the only one of us who had read any of the Boxcar Children books.)
My friends and I had two designated trees at the park that were our boxcar, and a VAST collection of sticks that each stood for a different thing – this stick was our plates, and this stick was my bed, and this stick was our pet deer, and THIS stick was a new bicycle, and THIS stick was a refrigerator… Our boxcar was imaginary-tricked-out, man.
I am reading this thread with the biggest grin on my face. YOU GUYS ARE MY PEOPLE. I did every.single.one of the things listed on this thread. Hell, I still forage for things like mulberries, wild blackberries, mushrooms, and the like to this day!
I just said the exact same thing to my partner. I feel so much less lonely knowing that there were indeed kids like me in the world, I just didn’t know any.
As a fellow former kid prone to fantastical flights of imagination, I can completely relate. There was not a book I didn’t read in childhood where I didn’t try to become the protagonist in some form or fashion while I was playing. Like, I’m talking making outfits, recreating the meals they ate, and — especially in my pioneer/survivalist phase — making the same kind of crafts and such that they did.
And as such I was considered more than a little weird by my peers. But hey, I’m a far more interesting person now because of it! 🙂
just a few minutes before reading this, i was thinking i should comment on here just to say “i love you weirdos.”
Yep yep yep. This whole thread had me thinking, “MY PEOPLE.” Why did you lot not live nearby when I was eight, building fake campfires in the woods behind my house and pretending I was a lady knight on a Noble Quest?
Even today I would still rather live in a trash-bedecked old train than with any of those grownups.
(I loved this book with a strange fervor when I was small. Something about the scrappy, totally sexist domesticity-of-garbage really appealed to me. But why do the girls stay home and wash the garbage-dump dishes all day while the boys go out and Do Things?)
i think that’s part of why playing Boxcar Children with my girl friends was so appealing – we could be Jessie and Violet and do all the fun adventure stuff!
I never read these but did anyone else ever read The Great Brain books? Man, I loved those but they were so exotic to me, having Mormons in them. Up in Northern Ontario we had 50 flavours of Protestants, Catholics, *French* Catholics, and a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were the strange ones because they left the room during O Canada.
I DO! The Brain was so awful to JD all the time and I hated his guts.
He was terrible, a little sociopath in traning!
He wasn’t that bad. He tried to help people. The terrible thing was when the town basically let that guy starve to death because of their anti-Semitism.
ABIE!!!
Yeah, it’s really interesting that the book was from a Christian (Catholic) perspective, which is majority compared to Mormons, but set in a place where Mormons are the majority and deal with the religious intolerance and friction between the two as well as poor Abie, and also the Greek Orthodox family.
Obviously the Toast needs to do a piece on The Great Brain!
You just sent me into a wormhole-esque flashback to Mennonite kids leaving the room during O Canada, I forgot that was “a thing” and I always love finding new childhood memories!
Up north where I’m from there were no Mennonites back then (80s & early 90s) but now there’s a bunch. It’s great because of the pie. And of course, more horses is always better.
I loved those books! I still clearly remember the chapters describing the installation of an indoor toilet and how the family helped Americanize a young Greek immigrant.
And also that girl who beat the boys up during recess. Though I think they went too far in making her conform to the sexist stereotypes of their day. They gave her a nice dress, though.
I don’t remember a girl who beat up the boys, and that was definitely the sort of thing I would have remembered. I remember the toilet, and a boomerang, and the raft, and also the oldest brother getting… a fly fishing hat? and JD making a phosphor lamp and I always wanted to try that.
maybe I missed a book? I only remember two or three Great Brain books. what a perfect excuse to look these up!
I did not understand the most usual meaning of “Gentile” for many years because of those books.
(And UGH I hated The Brain.)
I loved the Great Brain, and I really loved the descriptions of all the cons he would run on his friends. Remember when he ran a “carnival” and he was all “I don’t actually have the baseball you were supposed to win, but I do have its cash value,” and every kid put the cash value right back into the carnival games?
YES. I was sure I was the only kid that had read those! I remember JD trying desperately to get the mumps, and the whole cave rescue scenario where the Brain charged the family to go rescue their kid. And of course, the water closet!
The mumps before MMR and anti-vaxers!
OH MY GOD I have never met another person my age who has ever read The Great Brain, mostly because I was reading my mother’s copies and my friends were too into Harry Potter to try anything else. I’m so glad The Toast exists to bring us together! I learned so much about making ice cream and Catholic boarding school and how to teach basic concepts to small children and fishing from the Brain. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but the Brain was pretty much my role model in 3rd grade. I was essentially JD in tiny overly knowledgable girl form.
Also, STEW. I will do a concordance of this book just to see how many times the word STEW is used. What is it with hobo-children and stew?
The best no-grownups book EVER is still _The Far-Distant Oxus_. Which, not coincidentally, was written by a couple of preteen girls.
I mean what else are they going to eat?
THERE IS ONLY STEW. STEW WILL CONTENT YOU.
I had the Boxcar Children Cookbook when I was younger (I fucking DEVOURED these books) and let me tell you, they had the BEST recipe for egg nog. And it went along with accompanying paragraphs from the books!
WHY DIDN’T I KNOW ABOUT THIS?!
DID THEY TELL YOU HOW TO MAKE THE TINY VEGETABLE STEW?!
I can’t remember but I think so! You can get one on Amazon for like two bucks!
Wait, that cover looks REALLY familiar.
Possibly we had this, but I was too lazy to make the stew.
Or the book is bullshit, and didn’t include it.
I may have to purchase and find out.
They definitely did, because tiny vegetable stew was the first family dinner that I made (with some supervision, because knives). The cookbook also included a recipe for the Caboose Special, which was a delicious mocktail made from orange juice and cola, which I did not realize was weird until people saw me drinking it in college and got seriously grossed out.
MY BROTHER COMBINED ORANGE JUICE AND COLA ONCE.
I think he took credit for the invention, but now I am suspicious.
Now I just want to buy this and the Little House Cookbook. ’cause adulthood is hard: let’s live in a boxcar.
It’s actually a pretty good cookbook – very simple things to make, everything tastes good. I still make the pancake recipe from it.
“Gimme an onion, a shoelace and a Mr. Coffee and I’ll make you some hobo chili!”
Have you read “The Girl Who Owned A City”? That is, for my money, the greatest dystopian/no-adults book ever written and it amazes me that so few people seem to have read it.
omg the girl who owned a city, it is both awesome AND kinda creepy if you read it as an adult and slowly begin to sense you are reading some weird propaganda designed to indoctrinate children into libertarianism and then you read the author note: “O.T. Nelson founded and runs one of the most successful housepainting enterprises in the country. College Crafts Inc.has become nationally known as an example of the libertarian philosophy at work.” and yep.
Objectivism, not libertarianism.
But yeah, that was weird when I first realized it, because the book scared the HELL out of me when I first tried to read it.
I want a whole Mallory-penned series on orphan children.
Yeah, I just went and looked up the plot summary and HELLO AYN RAND FOR CHILDREN. I need to re-read the book and rethink my childhood.
I started reading it and then somehow didn’t finish…but isn’t there a book with the exact same premise getting a lot of attention now because it’s Literary and Important? (The Country of Ice-Cream Star)
I had to read this in 6th grade English class! I remember very little about the actual plot, but I do recall that I was the perfect age for no-adult dystopia and developed plans to write my own.
I HATED Girl Who Owned a City so much. I didn’t know what Objectivisim was, or that that was what it was about, but I did think that the main character was sociopath and that her reasoning was crap. “Cities each run by a dictator are obviously the best form of social organization, because people will move to the cities that serve their needs and so the market will take care of good government.” OKAY BUT YOU LIVE IN A DYSTOPIAN POST-APOCALYPTIC WORLD. THERE IS NO MARKET. It made middle-school-me so angry.
I had the Boxcar Children Cookbook as a kid and it had many stews. Stews and biscuits.
I have just been reading Wynne-Jones’ ‘Tough Guide To Fantasyland’ and she is so scathing about everyone eating stew all the time in fantasy novels. ‘We’re making a perilous journey where we may be attacked at any time and are in kind of a hurry. What shall we have for every single meal? Stew! It takes ages to prepare and you need bowls and actual cutlery to eat it! It’s perfect!’
VIOLET: lets live in it, instead of society <– how i felt this morning
The most disappointing series ever. So many books, and only the first half of the first book was any good. Who writes a successful book about homeless kids living in a boxcar in the woods and then turns it into a series about rich kids solving mysteries? I just wanted to read more about using a river as a fridge and finding eating utensils at the dump, dammit!
I don’t think I realized they DID become a series about rich kids solving mysteries. I just remember the fridge river and romantic trash. Not sure if I am happy or disappointed to learn I missed a whole second half here.
I like how in every single later book they would set up camp in the wilderness and Jess would inevitably say, “This is just like the dear old boxcar days!” No it isn’t; in the dear old boxcar days you were homeless hobo children living off your wits and garbage; now you’re lame rich kids going camping in between your heavy schedule of crime solving and never going to school.
Dude, yes. YES.
My kids’ school librarian explained to me that the first few books were written by the real author. Then she died or otherwise lost control of the series, the publisher saw dollar signs, and the next zillion books were written by incompetent ghostwriters. I’m sad to admit I’ve never read any of these books, even the first, but if I ever do I’ve made a solemn vow to find out where the bad ones start and stop reading just in time.
I too used to read these religiously, until one afternoon I was reading one and thought, “GEEZUS these dumb kids are always so GOOD.” They never got into “scrapes”, they never talked back…they were kind of the worst. Book characters are so much more enjoyable when they’re realistic.
I did the exact same thing. I got bored with the characters! I was into the mysteries, but nobody ever had any pluck or sass or even a hint of rebellion in them (even in a tame way!) and I just couldn’t take it anymore. Sigh.
Whereas the Bailey School Kids are the stupidest schmucks ever. “When was it EVER really a monster???”
Yes! To be fair, I didn’t even discover these books until I had my own kids, but the only thing I really remember is how excited they were about chores. We’ll do chores! We love chores! We love working! Please give us more work to do, because of how much we love working!
I remember that poor Benny would try. He’d be like, “or we could eat dessert FIRST!?” and they’d all laugh at him and be like, “Oh Benny, you are so crazy, that’s so scandolous you MUST be joking.” and he’d be like, “no guys, I really mean it, we’re super rich and have no one watching us…and I just…its not even that bad, cant’….”
And violet would be like, “eat your vegetables dear, we all are right now, for vitamins.”
Let’s have dinner of blueberries, day-old bread and creek milk.
I mainly just remember all the meals they ate and no plot points.
So this is like those “poor” English children last week?
I had a Boxcar Children cookbook that had a KILLER pancake recipe.
one of the later books is set on a tropical island? Near Haiti maybe? And they eat brainfruit. That is all I remember.
see also: every Redwall book
I remember when they weeded a garden for some woman, and she let them take some vegetables, but they weren’t yet fully grown, so they just had tiny vegetables for dinner.
All I can remember about these books is the milk. I feel like they talked about milk a lot. Cold milk, milk in the waterfall, bread in the milk…MILK.
MILK and STEW.
Oh god I forgot about the stew!
I’m assuming I’m not the only child who tried the bread in milk thing and was both baffled and disgusted by it. You’re living in a boxcar! You have no money! Don’t ruin the limited food items you have by combining them!
I think this must have been a Depression-Era thing, because when I was little, my grandmother used to make cornbread using buttermilk. Then, she would pour herself a glass of buttermilk, and stick a piece of cornbread in it. She’d mash it around and spoon it out and eat it that way. I never understood it. The cornbread was so good on its own! WHY???
!!
Is it maybe more filling, somehow?
I think that was the purpose, yes. There wasn’t much food if you were poor (and she had grown up VERY poor), so you’d make your calories count as much as possible. They wouldn’t have said calories, obviously, but that’s the general idea.
My understanding about depression-era bread is that it was pretty terrible. There weren’t additives to keep it soft for as long as today’s bread, so it would turn into a rock REALLY fast (seriously– try making your own bread, cut into it, and see how fast it turns into a rock– it’s pretty darn fast)– so they needed to soften it up to make it edible again, because obviously they weren’t going to do away with perfectly good bread. Doing so with milk was actually the fancy way, plenty of people just used hot water.
But bread in milk is actually good! It doesn’t work with breads that are already pretty soft, but anything that is reasonably crusty works pretty well. Sourdough and milk ended up being one of my favorite comfort foods as a kid because of books like this.
We were sorta poor, and if we ran out of cereal, my mom would tear up bread, add some milk and a little sugar, and feed it to us for breakfast.
And did every kid have big pine trees to play under? I’m so happy to find that all you who came after me (I’m middle-aged) still played the games ai loved so much!
I read the Boxcar Children book that had canoes in it–maybe it was called Mystery Island? I was really mad at it because Henry was paddling his own canoe despite being a little boy, and when they had to pick up the canoe and carry it they called it a “carry” instead of a “portage,” which is the correct name as any snobby bookish Boundary-Waters-going little Minnesotan knows. I complained loudly about these flaws. I don’t think I’d learned the concept of “picking your battles.”
So THAT’S what “portage” means! (MST3K Midwesternese)
I’m kinda surprised this term came up in MST3k–it’s not very sci-fi. But yep, that’s what it means! Probably a word we got from the Voyageurs.
Yeah, it’s when they’re carrying around (He’s not) Sinbad after he’s caught that one fish. “This turned out to be one heck of a portage, YES, IT’S ME! HELLO!”
That was The Yellow House Mystery and I was FASCINATED by the way they, like, hung bacon from trees and stuff. But I was a city kid.
I think it was Surprise Island. I was not a city kid but I still couldn’t make head or tails of most of the stuff these kids did in the wilderness.
I LOVED mystery island! That was the best one!
My freshman year roommate & I bonded over the fact that we spent our childhoods convinced that Henry/Jessie were clearly in love. And Susan/Peter (of Narnia) were in love. Not that we necessarily shipped them, it was just a fact to us as kids.
I think I had this feeling too, but when I read the books originally I wouldn’t have known what to call it. I can’t decide if I actually read this in the subtext (a la “A Separate Peace”) or if it came from consuming media where males and females can’t be friends unless there sexual tension and where all male/female pairs end up mated :-/
Oooh. Interesting point.
I wonder if it was that or just the mother/father of the Boxcar and king/queen of Narnia thing? Oh hetero-normative binaries…
As a kid, I just took it as fact that at the end of “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe” Peter/Susan and Edmund/Lucy were a thing. I mean, they keep saying there’s no other humans around and then they announce them as the new royalty in boy-girl order. And by that age I knew there was a lot of incest in ye olde royalty days, so it made perfect sense. As an adult, I’ve occasionally brought this up with friends and most of them seem to have come to the same conclusion.
I always thought it would have been kind of traumatic for them to grow up and then go back to being children. This just makes it worse!
You could make good/creepy fanfic about this, I think.
oh man, I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one. It always felt really obvious to me. Then when I actually, like, thought about it one day, it grossed me out (of course). But it was still obviously true. (Talking about Henry/Jessie here, I didn’t read the Narnia books as a kid)
Well they did play mother and father in that boxcar, so maybe they kept on playing “mother and father” (*WINK*) after.
Flowers in the Attic!
If I remember my childhood correctly, Violet is the best, but looking at it now Jessie could also be the best.
Maybe they were both the best, and I should re-read the books to solve this mystery.
You could be the series’ new ghostwriter! “The Meta-Mystery of the Best Boxcar Girl.”
135 pages of Violet and Jessie arguing about who is the best while Henry is off doing Man Things and Benny plays with Watch and keeps screwing something up.
15 pages of Grandpa Alder determining that Violet and Jessie are Both the Best, 5 pages of dinner, and then the rest of the book is a checklist for Boxcar Children books in print (never a comprehensive list).
I remember that Violet was the best, but that may have been because my favorite color was purple so I liked her name.
Who else had a major crush on Henry, especially when he was mowing that old guy’s lawn with an old-timey push-mower?
I did! Because he was a fast runner. Or at least, he is when Grandfather sees him racing.. I’m not sure that his quickness of foot is ever mentioned again after that first book?!
My elementary school library only had the first book. So it wasn’t until recently that I found out it was a whole series which still puzzles me. The first book seemed to take care of the story. I desperately wanted to run away with them and then discover I had a nice, rich relative.
For the longest time all I knew was to tell kids “‘Warner’. They’re shelved under ‘Warner’.” I finally did some investigation and…sonofabitch….they’re only in the boxcar for one book? That sounds pretty finite! “But now I’ve got a brand name!” cries Warner. Yeah, I’m sure you wrote all those books just like V.C. Andrews and Matt Christopher did, Ms. “Warner”. Feh!
Oh and I had the Proustian rush just now of…..some movie on TV…where Andrew McCarthy was pretending to BE the grandpa for his party of five. Apparently it was this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088787/ It was good makeup but no one would have bought his act for a second.
Oh hey, I read the book that movie was based on! I still remember it with fondness. The kids worked so hard on their house and they really cared about each other and the little family they’d made. I had no idea there was a movie.
To be fair the reason why her later books were ghostwritten wasn’t because she was lazy… it was because was dead.
So all she can be blamed for is for being sickly and too quick to sign lucrative contracts.
Definitely preferred Enid Blyton’s Hollow Tree House for my children-living-off-the-grid fix. But they had the added bonus of 1) being British and 2) having a rich friend who could bring them ginger beer.
It just occurred to me that Cynthia Voight’s Tillerman cycle is like a more sophisticated, better-written version of The Boxcar Children. Anyone else like those books? I read all of them, even the disappointing “Seventeen Against the Dealer”.
I also just realized that, reading these comments about milk. The Tillermans knew about calorie-dense, inexpensive food. And they showed up in my life not long after I outgrew the Boxcar Children.
OBSESSED with those books as a 7th grader.
Oh god, yes! I read those too! 7th grade was a wonderous land of Cynthia Voigt.
OH MAN I was just thinking about how I wanted to reread A Solitary Blue the other day. Was obsessed with that series.
I also remember that she wrote a fantasy series?? that was pretty good too, but I don’t remember it nearly as well as I do Homecoming etc. The scene in Dicey’s Song where the shopkeeper gives her a wooden box for her mother’s ashes has stuck with me for a long, long time.
Her kingdom series is excellent and holds up well (Jackaroo is the first one, but the second On Fortune’s Wheel was the definite favorite in my family).
LOVED them. I wrote my college essay about The Runner (well, partially about it).
I LOVE LOVE LOVE those books and literally just reread ‘Dicey’s Song’ two days ago. It still makes me cry.
I see ‘Dicey’s Song’ as the socialist version of ‘Little House on the Prairie’. Which I also love with a ridiculous passion. (I have never actually read the Box Car children and based on this post & comment thread i must rectify that POST HASTE.)
Cynthia Voigt wrote some other realistic fiction was is also very good – I love ‘Tell Me if the Lovers Are Losers’ and definitely recommend that to lovers of the Tillerman series. I also have a soft spot for ‘Izzy, Willy Nilly’ even though it has a certain amount of disability fail.
YES, I keep thinking about those books while reading (and loving) these comments. A Solitary Blue is still in my bookcase. SUCH a wonderful book. <3
YES. and those books are SO FUCKING GREAT. i love Dicey. Still. and Maybeth. And James. And Sammy. I LOVE THEM ALL.
However my favorite Voight is probably “When She Hollers,” which is lesser known but so, so amazing.
These were my favorite books as a kid and I read them all and loved them so, but as an adult I don’t understand why each of the characters had a color that was associated with them? Like every time they got a present from grandpa it was color coded. Benny was red and Violet was purple (obvs) and Henry was blue and I don’t remember what Jess was because she’s a girl and therefore unimportant.
Man poor Jess.
What if Violet didn’t actually like the color purple and actually resented being forced to associate with that color because of her name?
Oh yeah totally. She grows up, legally changes her name to Ruby or Esmeralda or something and then gets stuck with red or green presents for life. Damnit!
Turns out from some googling, that Jessie’s favorite was blue, although interestingly enough no one mentions what else they like- they mention violet and Jessie, and apparently Benny’s favorite cup was pink? The boxcar children wiki is the saddest internet wiki of them all, no one has put anything on Henry’s page.
I only ever read the first book. Mysteries bored me, but I was deeply interested in the idea of living by myself in the wilderness and how I might go about doing that. And now, as a grown-up ladyperson, I’m pretty well self-reliant and able to take care of myself in a lot of situations where other people might be a bit underwater. Granted, I loathe camping, but that aside. That book just sort of caught the dormant aspects of my developing personality and kind of shaped them in a cool way, so. I’ll always love it for that. But I remember thinking the ending was kind of a cop out.
Also, there is an absolutely HEINOUS animated adaptation on Netflix if anyone is interested. It stars Martin Sheen as Grandfather Alden and J.K. Simmons as Someone That I Don’t Remember If He’s In The Book Or Not:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3246908/?ref_=fn_al_t…
This is sooooo happening tonight.
Only my favorite book series as a child! I was kind of disappointed when they left the eponymous boxcar after one freaking book but I think the series did a good job of keeping that kind of… musty, mysterious aspect going. All their mysteries (that I recall) sprang forth from abandoned beach houses and hidden rooms and the elderly. The ruins of Americana. etc. Man, I am awash in happy nostalgia now. Adding “dig up old Boxcar Children copies” to my list of ‘things to do the next time I visit my parents.”
This was one of the first books where Child!Nicole was *very angry* with the cover art, because I knew the book took place in “the past” and the cover had everyone in 1980s business casual wear. And I was all “seriously, this is ridiculous.”
Did anyone else read Enid Blyton books? I read a ton, as they were the only English books available in my great-aunt’s house in Germany. They were about four or sometimes five English kids who would be “on holiday” and have an adventure without any parents. There would be a castle or an island or a house on a hill that needed exploring, and then it would always turn out that the castle or island or house on a hill was populated by Bad Guys (smugglers or thieves or Nazis, very often Nazis) and then the kids would have to stop the bad guys.
I did! I loved the Famous Five and the Adventure series so much that I bought a full set of the latter as a grown up. The sales person wrapped them up for me and said something like: “No peeking in yourself!” , which confused me no end. It was only at home I realised he probably thought I was buying them for a child…
The famous five! I LOVED those books. I just remember being very enraged though because the boys always got to go out on the quests while the girls stayed home and worried.
Yes! My sister and I read SO MANY Enid Blyton books. She mostly read the kids having adventures in sheds ones and the prissy cautionary tales for young ‘uns (the Bedtime Books) and I read the ones with the kids who traveled and had adventures and the school books. (Even now I sort of like scheming Gwendoline from Malory Towers, just out of perversity. Also Jo, the girl everyone was horrible to (with the approval of the narrator) because she had a Northern accent and her father had made a lot of money in industry so she wasn’t from the same social class but they perceived her as trying to buy her way in. My mom pitched a fit over the messages in these books and often tried to “deprogram” us after we read them.)
and the boarding school ones where they got midnight feasts! it’s all i ever wanted
Which was the Enid Blyton series with the really clever boy named Fatty? I loved those ones, although they were really all great. My mother read them as a child and kept all of her old books for me.
The Five Find-Outers!
http://www.goodreads.com/series/44423-animal-resc…
Did anyone else read these? The grandparents owned an animal park of some kind and the kids all healed troubled horses?
YES OH MY GOD. I had totally forgotten about these until now. Weren’t there…more than three, though? I could be mixing them up with something else; I read a lot of series when I was little.
Maybe there was another set like this? There was a black beauty reboot I think? I read a lot of critter and child who is a genuis at figuring out what is wrong with the critter books as a kid. I got these at the days when Schoolastic would come dump the leftover books out on tables and let us take them for free as part of a “reading is important” program. It was exciting to me because i read so many books as a kid I knew how many the library would let you take out at a time (7 until you turned 18, then 14)
Fun fact: my grandmother lived in a boxcar until she was 16 years old. The whole town was made of abandoned boxcars, because that was how the railroad got out of spending actual money housing its workers. Their family had a luxury boxcar, though, since it was a refrigerator car. INSULATION.
But then Great-grandpa got a new job where he had to travel, so they moved in to town to avoid bandits.
I feel like this is the most important comment on here thus far and no one knows.
BANDITS!
Her dad even ran electricity to it, so they had lights! My grandma grew up in the fanciest boxcar in town.
My next door neighbor and I formed a club called “The Mystery Club” and we would wander around the neighborhood with binoculars, looking for mysteries and climbing trees to spy on people with our binoculars.
I spent a happy afternoon picking mulberries from the tree in front of my last apartment before realizing they were covered in aphids 🙁
ronblecore > every other kind of core
When I was about third grade, I wrote a letter to the publisher of Boxcar Children (Scholastic, I guess?) informing them that the should make a Boxcar Children movie, because that would be awesome.
They sent me a form letter informing me that unfortunately Gertrude Chandler Warner was dead, so she couldn’t respond to my mail. I was so offended. I knew Gertrude Chandler Warner was dead! I wrote a report about her for my author project. I just wanted a movie, and I didn’t require a living author for that.
*respectfully doffs cap* ma'am.
YES. and those books are SO FUCKING GREAT. i love Dicey. Still. and Maybeth. And James. And Sammy. I LOVE THEM ALL.
However my favorite Voight is probably "When She Hollers," which is lesser known but so, so amazing.
The girls are totally overfocused on housekeeping and dishes. My god, they would be camping or otherwise in the wilderness and the boys would build a shelter or get firewood, and Jessie and Violet would be scampering about looking for leaves to use as plates and pestering Henry to make a cabinet to hold them. I remember this exact scenario from at least three books in this series.
Yep yep yep. This whole thread had me thinking, "MY PEOPLE." Why did you lot not live nearby when I was eight, building fake campfires in the woods behind my house and pretending I was a lady knight on a Noble Quest?
The first twenty books of the series were written by Warner. In those books they aged. about half a year passes between books. So Benny is about 18 by the end. After GCW died, her estate started to publish more books to make more money. But de-aged everyone to their age in the first book. And now they fight crime.