Review: "Mystery on the Fourteenth Floor" by Dorothy McKay Martin

Mystery on the Fourteenth Floor by Dorothy McKay Martin
Published 1980
★★★

Gosh. Okay. This was a childhood reread, and one I remembered fondly—I bought a secondhand copy when I was a teen or preteen and sympathized, I think, with Vickie's boredom and inability to rein in her imagination. But rereading it as an adult is...a bit odd.

It goes like this: Vickie has recently moved to "the city" with her parents and older sister Francine, a rookie reporter who is, among other things, following a case about a kidnapped young boy. Vickie hasn't made friends in the area yet, and she's bored—so when she starts seeing SOS signs in the building across the way, she's convinced that they're from the kidnapped boy...and that it's up to her to save him.

I still genuinely love the way Vickie lets her imagination run away with her—part of her knows that there are many more reasonable explanations for the signs than that this one kid the entire city is looking for happens to be in a swanky apartment building. A bigger part of her pushes that knowledge down, because it's the only interesting thing that's happened all summer; she convinces herself of it so thoroughly that not only does she disguise herself to go investigate, she makes multiple (rather endearingly bungled) calls to tip lines to get the police looking in that direction too. Also kind of love that the reason they've moved to the city is that Vickie's mother has had enough of playing the good suburban housewife; while it's a move that suits the whole family, it's Vickie's mother's art career that has the biggest step up in the city.

But.

I missed a few things as a kid: first of all, turns out this was published by a Christian publisher, which is of course fine but in this case means that a bunch of religious conversion material is shoehorned in—Vickie's father, for example, decides on a whim to read the Bible and to take every word as fact (seems odd for a lawyer to just accept it all without question, but okay), concluding that Jesus is God; also, Francine's boyfriend at one point basically goes "well, I'm not really religious, and golly gee, my religion teachers would have a laugh to think about little old me teaching someone about Jesus—but Vickie, have you thought about Jesus?"

All in all, it's not the worst early-80s example of unsubtle religious conversion attempts (the book, I mean, not the sister's boyfriend's clumsy golly-gees). But other things trouble me more. That same boyfriend (again: Francine's boyfriend) tells Vickie, more or less unprompted, that she's fat and should go on a diet to be more attractive; he's presented as the totally ideal guy, perfect for Francine, so it's not meant to be creepy or inappropriate, which is in some ways worse.

Vickie chewed and swallowed the big bite of pizza, not looking at Pete. After a moment she said in a small voice, "What you mean is that I am too fat."

"I wouldn't have put it that bluntly, but yes, you are." (104)

While the book has to be read within the context in which it was written—in this case, the 80s—it still feels gross and sad. Like, here's this lonely kid who briefly feels seen by her sister's boyfriend (who, incidentally, does not apply his diet advice to himself; he eats like a carnivorous horse)...and his advice is "buck up, kid; take the one joy you currently have out of your life and you might someday be hot too."

And then there are Vickie's investigations, which I doubt I thought twice about when I was her age but which as an adult trip a "yikes" factor. At the risk of spoiling a 44-year-old book that does not seem to have retained any kind of cult popularity...at the end of the book she follows the instructions on the signs in the window across to the other apartment to finally learn who communicating with her. It's (surprise!) not the missing boy. Perhaps more of a surprise: it's also not an adult who has been working to lure her into his clutches. I know I've become an Actual Adult because there are all these moments when Vickie thinks "should I leave a note to tell someone where I've gone?" and then decides "nah, it'll be fine." And because this is the end of a 1980 teen novel, not the beginning of one, it is fine, but it's not the smartest message ever.

I'm one part happy to have found this again and two parts bummed that it doesn't live up to my memory.