Every peak holds a secret
Can a book have a rhythm similar to a song that makes you smile? If so, The Treasure of Mad Doc Magee would sound like The Devil Went Down to Georgia, the Charlie Daniels Band’s “story” — more spoken than sung — of young Johnny who wins his deal with the devil. This book is as rollicking as that song.
Elinor Teele, an English/US playwright and author who spent eight years in the South Island, has crafted a suspenseful Western-style novel for 8-12-year-olds, set in and around the fictional town of Eden in the late 1860s where goldrush fever still courses through the veins of those who didn’t pack up and leave when the gold ran out.
The young hero at its heart is the unstoppable Jenny Burns, a motherless girl with a largely absent father who lives in small and rundown town. Whereas there might be others who can’t wait to escape to the big smoke, Jenny has only ever called Eden home and is desperate to stay in town with her best friends, Pandora, Kam and Lok.
“The roots of the trees are in her bones, the air of the mountains is in her breath, the lakes and rivers are in her blood. And that’s why, when her father loses his job and tells Jenny that they may have to move on from Eden, she knows she can’t let that happen.”
Enthralled by the legend of Doc Magee, who reputedly found the largest gold nugget anyone had ever seen and hid it in the hills before disappearing, Jenny decides finding the rock is the answer to her problems. She’s not about to let propriety, bad guys and even worse school teachers, hammy actors or stormy weather stop her from finding her pot of gold. Or nugget.
There are riddles within the central mystery, puzzle upon puzzle, danger and a good helping of humour. These risk weighing proceedings down in the middle of the book and might be a little complicated for some younger readers to follow, but as Jenny closes in on her goal the pace picks back up again and we root for Jenny and her band of young adventurers.
While she doesn’t make explicit the country the book is set in, Teele says Arrowtown, surrounded by mountains, was the inspiration for Eden: “To picture the world where our heroine roamed, you’ll have to imagine a snug little valley, with pastures like hides and rivers like arteries. This was a living, lively place, where every peak held a secret.”
Miss Nine and I enjoyed the descriptions of Jenny’s world, chuckled at some of the one-liners: “She wouldn’t be getting short, Mum,” interrupted Pandora. “Unless she’d been amputated.” — and relished the challenge of working out where the gold nugget might be and who the villains actually were.
We’re looking forward to reading Teele’s first book, The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin about a thwarted young inventor who’s got to rescue his younger sister from being put to work in the family coffin business.