Alison McNair and her sister are on vacation in Upstate New York with their parents and older brother when they succumb to measles, so they are bored and miserable in their recovery, giving Allison (12) even more opportunity than usual to lord it over Jeannie (7). She tries telling stories, then turning Jeannie’s doll into a vampire, which ends in disaster:
Later that afternoon – after she had apologized to her mother for being the cause of the screaming, and had refused to apologize to her sister on the ground that the scaring had not been intended, and had apologized to her mother for refusing to apologize to her sister, and had then apologized to her sister but with crossed fingers – Alison sat by the window, being GOOD, and HURT, and CALM, and PATIENT.
Alison – not so very patient - wishes they were back home in NYC where there is action and her friend Emmeline, until she finds something hidden at the back of a bookcase, a fragile tome entitled The Secret Arts of Witchcraft and How to Become an Adept. Soon, Alison has a new purpose in life – she will use this book to turn herself and Jeannie into witches!
Jeannie wants to be included in Alison’s new pastime, so they start spending all their time in the attic (luckily, their mother is busy with golf lessons), trying to reconstruct the book’s incantations, although the spells demand ingredients the girls have never heard of or cannot produce:
But Alison had gotten around this in her usual way, by improvising. Thus she used spoonfuls of detergent (borrowing some of the words printed on the packet to form a brand-new incantation, incorporating such phrases as “active-enzyme” and “lemon-freshened”). Pinches of bath salts she used too, with additional dashes of talcum powder – which last she also used as incense, sprinkling it over the charcoal blocks she heated on a bed of sand in the chafing dish.
Grandly, Alison decides the culmination of their work should be to summon the devil and “raise the shade” of their dearly departed cat, Norton (killed on Madison Avenue by a taxi)(who lets a cat out in NYC, even in 1973?). While the spell ends in disaster (no sign of Satan but lots of angry parents), a cat does appear and returns with them to New York at the end of the vacation. All this self-created drama turns out to be good preparation for the McNairs’ return to East 75th Street (and reunion with Emmeline) when Alison’s instincts lead her to a identify a real threat – a mysterious stranger who seems to be watching the three girls! Naturally, it is Alison’s intrepid or reckless, depending on your point of view, behavior that saves the day . . . .
This is a witty and amusing book that I remember from my childhood, and I suspect I was originally intrigued by Alison’s interest in witchcraft. However, it is Hildick’s gift for convincing dialogue and sibling interaction that bring it to life. Alison and Jeannie belong to that group of fictional New York City children like the Melendys whose adventures inspire envy from afar. She is also the kind of know-it-all that adults find annoying but children want to play with because of her imagination, and if she’s hard on Jeannie, aren’t we all a bit bossy to our younger siblings? They need us to keep them in line. The narrator sees through Alison’s posturing and grandiose ways but appreciatively.
Hildick was a British author who lived in America and is best known for his juvenile series, including the McGurk mysteries. I never read any of those but I probably picked this up originally for my sister and me because of the title; now I learn there’s a sequel I never knew about. You wouldn't expect girls in 1973 to get measles but, thanks to RFK Jr. and other ignorant people, that could happen today! There was another dated reference to garter belts.
This is my 13th book of my 20 Books of Summer.
Title: The Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School
Witch
Author: E.W. Hildick
Illustrator: Iris Schweitzer
Publication: Doubleday, hardcover, 1973
Genre: Juvenile fiction
Source: Personal copy
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