The Box-Car Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner

[rachelmanija]

This is the original book published in 1924. I have no idea how I missed this for so long, because it’s SO up my alley.

Four children are left alone when their alcoholic father dies, their mother having died long ago. Their father told them their only relative is their grandfather and he’s mean, so the kids flee into the night rather than be sent to him. That is the last time anyone will think of their father; this is not a book about grief and trauma.

The kids find an abandoned boxcar in the woods near a town, and proceed to transform it into a cozy home. The oldest boy works in town to make money for food, and events eventually reveal that their grandfather is in that very town and is a very nice person who will give them a good home. But really the story is about four kids living cozily in a boxcar in the woods, making stews and rescuing cups from the dump and digging a swimming hole. If that is something you like, you will certainly enjoy this story.

I know this has a bazillion sequels. What are the sequels about? Do they also feature boxcar homemaking coziness?

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

I know this has a bazillion sequels. What are the sequels about?

Solving mysteries!

[rachelmanija]

Huh. Not so interested in that. Oh well.

[osprey_archer]

Genuinely shocked that you haven't been inundated with recommendations for this book over the years! It's so far up your alley that I can only assume that everyone figured you'd already read it, so they wouldn't bother mentioning it.

Also shocked that their father was alcoholic and I managed to miss it over circa twenty thousand rereads. Clearly I was much too taken with the whole "living in a boxcar close to a tiny beautiful stream and wild blueberries" thing to worry about such things as the children's dead parents. (Or maybe this is something that got edited out of later editions as the book series became a popular franchise?)

The sequels are all about the children solving mysteries. The first twenty or so are by Warner herself and as I recall, a few of them are pretty good; the books after that were ghostwritten after Warner's death and IMO aren't nearly as good. (I should add the caveat that it has been perhaps two decades since I read any of these books except The Boxcar Children itself, so my memories are VERY fuzzy at this point.)

[rachelmanija]

Hahahaha, I know!

[sovay]

I know this has a bazillion sequels. What are the sequels about? Do they also feature boxcar homemaking coziness?

I don't know if I read any of them! I just remember the original, which I read around the same time as Felice Holman's The Wild Children (1983) and the novelization of The Journey of Natty Gann (1985).

[genarti]

I LOVED this book as a kid, and read it over and over. I felt so cheated when I read one of the sequels -- it was still cute and all, but it had pivoted genres to Plucky Siblings Solve Mysteries. While I loved that genre too, I already had several series in that niche, and wanted more kids surviving in a boxcar! (They may use some of those skills in other books, I dunno, but it wasn't the central focus anymore, at least in the one I read.)

[rachelmanija]

I only care about living in a boxcar.

[whimsyful]

I remember reading a ton of books in this series as a kid, though my memories are very fuzzy now. After the first book it basically turns into a Plucky Children Solve Mysteries In Different Settings (on a houseboat! on a ranch! on a private island!) series of varying levels of quality.

[lirazel]

I remember liking the houseboat one pretty well but that may just because I have a thing for houseboats.

[hannah]

Echoing the sentiment of disappointment they ditched the wilderness and survival aspect for cozy kids' mysteries, because while I enjoy those, they weren't what I'd signed up for.

[princessofgeeks]

I see you have your answers re the sequels.

I adored this book as a child and read it over and over.

[sheliak]

I loved this book so much! I should reread it sometime.

I enjoyed the sequels as a kid, but even then the genre swerve was pretty obvious to me. (Though some of them had really nice sense-of-setting.)

[silverflight8]

Sadly the first book is the ONLY one with boxcar homemaking, which is too bad, because I love, love, love that. The other books are all quite formulaic mystery (though I read a bunch of them too, lol). They're probably not great mysteries once you're not a kid any more.

[lirazel]

I love this book and have since I read it as a wee thing. One of my favorites! Unfortunately, I was completely uninterested in the bazillion sequels because (as everyone already told you) they do not involve homemaking in a boxcar, which broke my tiny heart. But my little sister loved all of them.

[ellenmillion]

I cannot believe you hadn't read this - I would have recommended it in a heartbeat if I knew you hadn't. This was one of my very favorite books as a kid, though I haven't revisited it since childhood. I remember being disappointed that the sequels had basically nothing to do with the boxcar.

[rachelmanija]

Boo.

I really enjoyed it as an adult.

[lannamichaels]

I actually just reread this book last month! I had so many questions I never had as a kid, such as what was up with the parents, why didn't they know anything about their grandfather, just, what was going on with everything. I missed that the father was an alcoholic and the mother had previously died? For them to go right to "we have to live in the woods" causes so many questions to me as an adult that it didn't as a kid. ;)

The first one is BY FAR the best. The sequels are just the kids, and not much regarding the boxcar itself. The second one in the series, Surprise Island, also has them making a home, but in this case it's on an island their rich grandfather owns, and features lovely elitist ideas like a handyman who lives on/near the island wouldn't know the names of fish or other stuff.

[sabotabby]

Wooow, that's what it's about? I've heard about it and never read it.

[zana16]

A few of the sequels feature homemaking coziness - on an island, in the woods - but a lot of them are mysteries. They stand out to me because the children actually grow up over the course of the series (then suddenly revert when the ghostwriter came on).

[thistleingrey]

Suddenly I feel better about trying #3 or 4 randomly--the library didn't have #1 that day--and bouncing, when I was eight or nine. I would've loved boxcar homemaking.

[rivkat]

You sent me in search of one of these types of books that I remembered fondly; I think it was Where the Lilies Bloom (found via https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18057877-books-about-children-surviving-without-adults)

[rachelmanija]

Ohh, thank you for the link! There are a bunch there I haven't read:

Empty World by John Christopher
The Key of Rose Cottage by Margaret Baker
I Am David by Anne Holm
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham
Hiding Out by Elizabeth Laird

The Secret Island by Enid Blyton - this one still holds up, IMO.

[mme_hardy]

I was honestly terrified when I opened this link. When I was a child, I loved, so much, survival-on-your-own stories. My Side of the Mountain. Julie of the Wolves. Island of the Blue Dolphins. The Mysterious Island. Like that.

I was afraid this one was going to turn out to have been racist; I'm glad it's not.

[scioscribe]

One of the sequels endeared itself to me as a kid by at least giving a bunch of inside info about ice cream parlors--very early cozy mystery, in retrospect--but that's basically the only one I remember. Nothing lives up to the improvised domesticity of the original, and I feel like it's a proximate cause of both my love of "partly wild domesticity" and also "orphans living on their own." It's like an id explosion. Even thinking about it now, I want to reread it.

[rachelmanija]

Dooo iiiiit. It's on Kindle.

[landofnowhere]

I owned and loved this as a kid! I read some of the sequels (after someone told me that I didn't need to read them in order) but found them forgettable.

[landofnowhere]

Also, I just saw that this is in the public domain now, I may have to reread! (Had no idea it was so old.)

I remember feeling like Cynthia Voight's Homecoming was in the same genre as this, though grittier (as I noticed rereading as an adult) -- also it's not homemaking, the kids are traveling together to find family.

[pengwern]

This was how I started reading books in english, and I loved them so much! There is a lack of homemaking coziness, alas, but iirc there were some yuletide fic that might hit the spot? The original sequels by the original author were good, although I don't know if they'll hold up when not read by a small child away from the US gawking at the exotic new englandness etc.
In one of the sequels (probably within books 2-5?) the grandfather does bring the trailer over to their home though.

[carbonel]

I'm pretty sure the grandfather bringing the boxcar to their new home is at the end of the first book.

[telophase]

Well, in the realm of "books I never mentioned because I assumed you'd read them," there's Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. Not fully surviving without adults, but certainly a story where the adults aren't particularly important to the children.

[rachelmanija]

I have read that but not recently.

[starlady]

I was completely obsessed with this series as a child, I read so many of them. I suspect the fact that there were four children like Narnia greased the wheels. I remember liking the Plucky Children Solving Mysteries aspect quite a lot, but I suspect I should track down the original unexpurgated edition of the first book on Project Gutenberg.

[skygiants]

When I was a kid, my best friend and I used to make our brothers play Boxcar Children with us, except this always backfired on me because I was always Assigned Violet and handed their cat to cuddle because Violet loves animals, despite the fact that I was terrified of her (this was before we got our first cat and I learned not to fear them.)

[laleia]

I loved this series as a kid! Although it was kind of wild to me at the time that the first book and all the subsequent books were entirely different genres. I enjoyed both "survival in the wilderness" and "precious children solving mysteries" as a kid, but I did used to wonder if after her first book got wildly popular, she decided to change genres so she'd have something to write about in the sequels.

[torachan]

I loved the Boxcar Children! I feel like I did read at least a couple sequels back in the day, but have zero memory of them. One of the things that really stuck in my mind about the original for some reason was them boiling utensils to clean them.