Despite the cheeky title, Gordon's (When JFK Was My Father
) New England boarding school novel, set in 1965, follows fairly tame conventions. Discontented seventh-grader Lydia Rice narrates via a sometimes self-conscious diary format. Lydia hates her new school, resents her parents' divorce (and her father's remarriage) and mourns her grandmother's death. Roaming the halls at night, she meets Howie, the goodhearted, wise night watchman and maintenance worker, aka the Silly Wizard, who dares her to solve the puzzle within a school mural. Thanks to lively pacing and appealing if improbable alumnae characters, many readers will be caught up in the mystery and how Lydia connects the clues, though they will likely figure out who's who before Lydia. Gordon's execution, however, is uneven. Aside from a few references to popular music, the novel does not particularly evoke the period setting. Some of Lydia and her friends' antics seem a bit young for their age (e.g., using a very easy-to-crack secret code), while other pranks seem formulaic (raiding the mean teacher's classroom closet). Readers may also not hold the Silly Wizard stories Howie writes and gives to Lydia in the high literary esteem the characters do. Lydia's most painful problems, her sense of rejection by her parents, aren't convincingly explored or resolved, so that while Lydia makes strides and offers some clever observations, the mystery in the mural proves more intriguing than the heroine herself. Ages 8-12. (Apr.)
