Customer Reviews

The Four-story Mistake

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is something about this book that is very, very special. There are some many moments in the Melendy series (of which I think this book is the best) that really stay with you always. A few---Christmas eve, and Randy talking about how Christmas eve sometimes feels more special than Christmas---as you are waiting for everything---I think about that every Christmas eve. Oliver seeing the Luna moth. Mona coming home from her first dance. The way Cuffy is described---I can picture her as if I knew her. It's hard to use my own words to do any justice to Enright's words. Just will say---I hope you will try this book and let it become as special a part of your life as it is of mine.

As a child I checked this book out because it was part of an collection of 3 Elizabeth Enright books(in one very large book now out of print) that was thick enough to put me first on our class reading chart (you moved up a level for every 100pgs). After 3 years and more than two dozen readings I returned it to the library. This book takes a child and thier imagination out to play with the Melendy kids and help them explore thier new house with all its secrets and adventures. Along the way it gives understanding of what it was like for American children in the WWII Era. For me this book inspired a lifelong interest in the real lives of people behind the statistics of our history. I have been looking for this book off and on for 20 years. Now I have found it and even better, my kids are old enough to go on Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver Melendy's adventures too. The Melendy's lives continue in the book Then There Were Five. Don't let the reasonable price fool you both books are treasures for a childs mind.

This is a book about the Melendy children-Mona, Rush, Randy and Oliver-who have lived in the city all their lives. Now they must move to an old mansion in the countryside, "The Four-Story Mistake." The house got its name because when built it was meant to be four stories, but was only built three stories high. The owners of the house built a cupola on top to make up for the missing fourth story. The house is full of places to hide and more adventures than anyone could imagine. I found the Melendy children very entertaining and their adventures quite humorous. I enjoyed this book a lot, and think it would be a very good book for other fifth-grade girls.

Elizabeth Enright(what a great name for an author!)wrote quite a few wonderful books which have been mostly out of print until recently-so if you're looking for great, real, imaginative stories, I'd suggest buying all of them. "The Four Story Mistake", as other reviewers have noted, is just a wonderful slice of life, with the Melendy children growing up, adjusting to life in "the country". When I read it 30 years ago, it made me desperate to live in a ramshackle victorian house(great escapism for urban kids)! Although the story is set almost 50 years ago, it really doesn't "date" at all. Read it and see!

Elizabeth Enright's The Four - Story Mistake (1942) focuses on a once - strong tradition that has all but disappeared from the American home: individual and family cultural development. Today, when America has largely become a nation where most people view rather than do, a novel like The Four - Story Mistake can be a healthy inspiration for children and young people concerned with improving themselves in addition to simply enjoying life. The second title in Enright's Melendy family series, the book focuses on the four children's (Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver) adventures after moving from New York City to a fairly isolated house in the country.

Though the story follows the children as they explore the meadows, brooks, pastures, cellars, cupolas, and mysterious locked rooms of their new home, the book also subtly focuses on the children's developing talents and cultural interests. These include Rush's composing, piano lessons, and classical musicianship, Mona's acting, Randy's sketching, painting, and dancing, and the sibling's love of producing musical and dramatic variety shows for interested audiences. Enright is clearly so comfortable and familiar with this forwarding - reaching lifestyle that she is able to illustrate it without the slightest sense of pretension or priggish self - consciousness. The Melendy children are merely living life as they have been raised to live it; they accept their father's guidance but constantly discover new enthusiasms of their own as well. For instance, when Rush is sick and confined to bed, he's either reading a book or writing a short story called "The Ghost In The Dumbwaiter." Mona, a budding actress, naturally also devotes time to amateur playwriting. Readers won't find it difficult to imagine the family's library or the leather - bound volumes of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities, My Antonio, Roughing It, The House of the Seven Gables, or War And Peace that line its shelves.

However, the Melendy children are not merely sensitives or hermits happily sequestered away in an ivory tower. They also build tree houses, buy war bonds, sneak out of the house when they're supposed to be in bed, get into fist fights, struggle with their arithmetic, tune into radio programs, crash their bicycles into the backs of buses, knit, solve historical mysteries, ice skate, keep a small alligator in a bathtub, and make friends with the garbage collector as well as the local family of eccentrics.

The Four - Story Mistake is the kind of book that will cause readers to briefly wonder why children's fantasy novels are necessary. Enright had a special gift for revealing the miraculous in the commonplace and for showing readers that wonders never cease if people not only know where to look, but how. The book is also illustrated with Enright's own beautifully fluid drawings, each which suggests carefree days, happy comradery, and easy fellowship.

Although I bought this book for my 9-year old daughter, I decided to read it one Saturday afternoon when my supply of reading material ran out. I thoroughly enjoyed the book - it's a terrific story, the characters are wonderful, and the focus on family and the lack of "electronic entertainment" make it a book full of important lessons that have been mostly lost for kids today.
I wish, however, that I had realized that the book reveals the secrets behind Christmas - because of this, I have hidden the book until my daughter discovers this truth on her own. Kids today have too little magic in their lives, so I'm thankful that I read the book BEFORE she did. Please keep this in mind before ordering it for your child.

For my 11th birthday my aunt gave me "The Melendy Family". I would list it as one of my top, desert-island, comfort reads. The quality of Mrs. Enright's writing is excellent; these books should never be out of print. I appreciated children who had experiences which made me want to broaden my knowledge. Mrs. Enright drops Shakespearean quotes, references to classical music and such-like into ordinary, everyday experiences, treating her readers with an intelligent sensitivity. These are books that grow with you, even if a child doesn't understand all the references, it's delightful to go back to and get the gist at a later age. (Even Beatrix Potter dropped the word "soporific" into "The Flopsy Bunnies"!) This is how a good writer should treat young readers, and this is how they learn with pleasure and enjoyment of a shared experience. Not to mention that the characters and situations make for a wonderful read. I have just ordered the other available Enright books, and expect to enjoy them as much as the Melendy series.

I got *The Saturdays*, the first book in the Melendy series, as my first selection from the Calling All Girls Book Club. I was an 8-year old Air Force Brat in Honduras ["own-doo-rahs"] and that book club was a lifeline. I hoped the club would send me more books about the Melendy family, but it didn't. I thought there were no more and was disappointed. Then the revolution of 1963 sent us back to the states and I was able to go public libraries. How wonderful it was to discover there were *three* more Melendy books! I fell in love with the Four-Story Mistake from the start. I wanted to live there then and I wouldn't mind living there now. What a wonderful place! What a great family! I hope I'll never be too cynical or jaded for these books. If you last read this series as a child, it's more than time to reacquaint yourself. Ann E. Nichols

This second in the Melendy series is at least as good as the first, and perhaps even better. Not only do all the "family"--the four children, their father, housekeeper Cuffy, and handyman Willy Sloper, plus dear friend Mrs. Oliphant--return, but there's a wonderful new (actually Victorian) house in upstate New York, new friends (many of them adult), and the beginning of Mona's longed-for career as a serious professional actress. Slightly accident-prone Randy continues her pattern (running her bike into the back of the Carthage bus, spraining her ankle while ice-skating), and Rush finds a way to contribute to the family finances. Like all the best juvenile writers of her era, Enright "talks" to her audience as if they were intelligent human beings, which makes the book thoroughly as enjoyable by adults as by kids, and in fact an excellent family read-aloud. Not to be missed.

Having discovered this book completely by accident, I had no idea how good it was. The old house that the title refers to is essentially another character in the book, which makes the story that much more evocative of times past. What is also really great about this book is the way it focusses on both the home life (as opposed to school life) of the children and the way minor characters can suddenly come to the fore, full of life. Reading the first chapter aloud to my kids, I felt a sort of mental high that I seldom experience with either adult or kids' books. Need I say more?