About book The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline (1983)
While this book was entertaining, I feel it falls short of Lois Lowry's other books. It was predictable and kind of silly, but one must keep in mind that this review is coming from a grown woman reading a youngster's book. However, I do feel that Ms. Lowry is way more talented than is revealed in this particular novel. Caroline is a young girl who lives on the west side of Manhattan with her older brother and divorced mother. She loves dinosaurs and the Museum of Natural History. Her best friend, Stacy, lives with her family, including her lawyer dad, in a high rise on the east side, a much more high end neighborhood, where she has a real dining room, a chandelier, a maid, and so on. When Caroline spends the night with Stacy, as a way of avoiding parsnips for dinner, she has a shrimp cocktail, steak and artichokes, which she would never dream of eating with her mom, unless she ordered a shrimp cocktail as her entree on the rare occasion that they went out for dinner. Stacy wants to be an investigative reporter when she grows up.The girls believe they have found a mystery to solve, and to them, the clues are clear as day. Are they correct in their assumptions, or are they totally missing the mark? I will leave the discovery up to you. Humor, romance and friendship all make an appearance in this sweet but simple tale. For me, I definitely need to get back to adult novels for a good long while!
The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline by Lois Lowry (1983): Caroline Tate lives with her “Beastly” older brother and her single mother in New York City, dreams of becoming a paleontologist, and hates weird vegetables. But when she stumbles onto a neighbor’s plot to “eliminate the kids” in his apartment building using an overdue toxicology book, she and her brother may have to team up to protect themselves.This story is told from Caroline’s perspective, and enough information is given right away that makes her easy to identify with: she doesn’t like eggplant, she has an annoying brother, her family is on a lean budget, and she secretly sleeps with a stuffed animal. Although the resolution to the “mystery” plot may be anticipated by YAs, the story still surprises and amuses. Also notable is that each of the children has embraced an eccentricity: Caroline wants to study dinosaurs, her brother regularly dismantles and “repairs” the household electronics, and her future-journalist friend Stacy regularly speaks in headlines, e.g. “KIDS RESHOD. MEAL BEGINS.”
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First read this book when I was younger and found it again searching for books for my niece. She passed on it but I read it for nostalgia's sake and found I didn't like it as well as I had the first time around. Looking at it now the premise seems pretty ridiculous -- young girl becomes convinced that her mysterious upstairs neighbor is out to murder her and her brother (if this was really what was going on this would be one scary book!) I did still like Caroline and the bits I had remembered liking from my childhood were still good (like Caroline's dinosaur fascination and her journalist-wannabe friend who speaks in headlines) but overall the book was not as good as I remembered. So sad it goes that way sometimes with childhood favorites.
—Wendy
