Customer Reviews: Read 308 more reviews...
 light and pleasing but not teasing December 22, 2008
Two siblings, a boy and a girl, run away from home and hide in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, where they become involved in trying to find out whether a new statue was the work of Michelangelo. In the end they do find out by talking to the person who sold the statue to the museum.
So there you have it: easy to read, easy to summarize, pleasing and somewhat diverting. It's no brain teaser, though, it didn't really draw me in, I didn't feel captivated by the language or the story - I cared what happened to the characters but in a detached way, sort of like you wish your neighbors well but don't ponder too much on it.
I don't really understand why this is supposed to be a classic: I mean it's not bad, but common: can it really compare with something like Pinocchio, or Alice? It's too much of a light souffle for that, in my humble opinion.
 Just ew November 25, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I had to read this in 5th grade and it was torture throughout. The story was good but the way it was written gave no true human reactions and it was a normal book with a weird displaced mistery put into it.
 From the Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler November 23, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I received 8 of 10 individual orders of this used novel within a few days and the other two before the deadline. The quality of the novels was overall good - perfect covers and very slight yellowing. I had one query from a vendor for which I received a prompt reply from the vendor and from Amazon. I'm very satisfied.
 If I'd Read This Book Forty Years Ago... November 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As I child I would have wanted to be Claudia: brave enough to run away, worldly enough to live in a museum, and smart enough to figure out the "cupid" mystery. But having read it only a few days ago, as an adult, I'd like to have written some of lines author E.L. Konigsburg attributed to her narrator Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Here are two examples:
"Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around."
"...Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow."
Note: Find a new edition that contains Ms. Konigsburg's Afterword. You'll like her discussion of things around and in the museum that have change, or stayed the same, since she wrote the book.
Still good after all these years October 7, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I feel funny reviewing books that are older than I am (this was published in 1967), but I will share what I thought. I thought this was a cute story, and I don't know how I missed this one when I was young...it seems like it would have been just my style! And, except for a few details (such as how much things cost and the fact that Claudia wears a petticoat), it doesn't feel like it's outdated. I thought a couple of parts were particularly funny, like when Claudia and Jamie find an unopened candy bar on the ground, and Jamie wants to eat it. Claudia says "You better not touch it. It's probably poisoned or filled with marijuana, so you'll eat it and become either dead or a dope addict." How funny!
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