Reading post: The Calder Game

This book has been sitting on my shelf for literally forever. Picked it up randomly the other day. 

Calder, Petra and Tommy are back again in The Calder Game, another mystery involving a famous artist – this time, it’s Alexander Calder and his beautiful mobiles and statues. The three find themselves separated near the beginning of the book when Calder goes to England with his father, who is attending a horticultural conference near Woodstock, home of Blenheim Castle.

One thing on my mind at the start of the book was how the author would manage to get Petra and Tommy across the ocean from Chicago to England. It does require rather more suspension of belief than normal, and is really the only “flaw” in the book. When Calder goes missing, Mrs. Sharpe arranges to bring both Petra and Tommy with her to England to help look for Calder; it did strike me as odd that there was no objection from the part of the parents to this arrangement. But this is a small point, and doesn’t take away from the rest of the book at all.

Which, in a nutshell, is really wonderful. As with her previous books, Balliett illustrates concepts and ideas beautifully with her writing; for example, in the following passage in an early chapter where the three children visit an exhibit of Alexander Calder’s mobiles with their classmates, Petra, the word lover in the group, comes to her own personal understanding of his art:

“Petra forgot the frustration of not being allowed to write, and thought instead about pulling sentences apart and balancing words in three dimensions, as if they could float off a page. Words as things, not just meanings … words in space, words set free! Could it be done? Petra’s mind felt as if it were exploding with possibilities.”

Helquist’s illustrations add to the mood of the story, and this time around, I found myself involved in the happenings in The Calder Game in a way that I wasn’t in the two previous novels. After all, there is so much more at stake. Calder is missing.