The Spanish Kidnapping Disaster - Softcover

Hahn, Mary Downing

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380717123 ISBN 13: 9780380717125

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1993

Synopsis

The Spanish Kidnapping Disaster

Twelve-year-old Felix is fascinated. She has never met a woman like Grace -- beautiful, mysterious, and a citizen of the world. If it weren't for Grace, the family's trip to Spain might have been pretty dull.

The trouble started when Felix and her stepsister Amy got lost in the middle of Spain, and Grace came to their rescue. Grace not only helped them find the rest of the family, but volunteered to show Felix, Amy, and her brother castles and windmills and Grace's car, bouncing down a dusty back road, when Felix realizes something is very wrong. Grace is not her friend...and they're headed for the most dangerous and terrifying experience of their lives!

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Downing Hahn is the best-selling author of more than twenty award-winning books for young readers, including Stepping on the Cracks, which won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. Anna on the Farm is the follow-up to Anna All Year Round, both based on the author’s mother’s memoirs about growing up in Maryland pre-World War I.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 4-6-- While accompanying her newlywed mother; stepfather; and new siblings, Amy and Phillip, on a trip to Spain, Felix's exaggerations to a stranger about her family's wealth get the three children abducted by the mysterious Grace. Once the kidnapping has occurred, Felix plots with her stepbrother and stepsister to escape, and after a wild bus and van chase, the family is reunited. While the abduction and escape are one aspect of the plot, the other is the adjustment of the children to their new family situation. Thus, a craving for attention leads to Felix's lies, and the wearisome bickering between the two girls lasts until the very end of the story. While Grace, a "citizen of the world," does have a foreign air that would be intriguing to a young girl, her two cohorts in crime are rather shadowy, almost stereotypical figures who are fairly incompetent for all their glares and threats. There's little edge-of-the-seat suspense in the story, which depends on some implausibility and occasionally weak dialogue. In the end, Grace, who had initiated the kidnapping to get money "to help the African babies," is rewarded for helping the children escape after she is disillusioned with her partners, and the girls promise to be kinder to each other. --Susan Schuller, Milwaukee Pub . Lib .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0380717123
• ISBN 13: 9780380717125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132