Offer this to fans of Blue Balliett who like sophisticated adventures. At first, the frame device (Martha tells the story in flashback as she celebrates her 100th birthday) seems superfluous, but the neat ending wraps up the mystery in a satisfying way. Sewell may be sending through the paintings that hang in the eponymous gallery. Fitzgerald (Under the Egg) stuffs the story with period detail: the Herbert Hoover/Al Smith presidential race, Sacco and Vanzetti's execution, and women's suffrage all figure in the plot as Martha, sensing something amiss, tries to decode the messages Mrs. Archer Sewell, a newspaper mogul with a problem straight out of Jane Eyre: a mad wife locked away upstairs (with an art collection that would make curators drool). Her first book for young readers, Under the Egg, won the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association’s Middle. Martha's Irish immigrant mother gets her a job as a maid at the Fifth Avenue mansion where she keeps house for J. Laura Marx Fitzgerald studied art history at Harvard and Cambridge Universities. This cleverly constructed historical mystery stars 12-year-old Martha O'Doyle, expelled from her Brooklyn parochial school in 1928 for what Sister Ignatius deems cheekiness but others might call curiosity.
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