Most Popular Books by Mary 1907-1981 Chase

Ten-year-old Colin Mason, the eldest of four children, learns from a neighbor that he has an ill-behaved older sister who, when he meets her, takes him down a secret tunnel to a fairytale world that seems to connect with many Mason family secrets.

The main people (according to Chapman) “are seven or eight youths who might be called nice Dead End kids. These lads love practical jokes, hang out in a beer parlor in a Western town, and talk endlessly about females and their conquests over same. But they are sham hoodlums; they are good kids from good families trying to grow up. Their leader is a fascinating young man nicknamed Beau, who has a crazy twinkle in his eye and a supple imagination. When things grow dull with his companions, he cheers them up with tales of the ideal town, where the boys stay downstairs and send their parents up to bed. In his [ideal] town, Sneaky Falls, Idaho…it is the mothers who enlist in the Navy and their sons run around like crazy mailing them packages of cookies. This chap Beau…has invented for the gang the ideal female. She is slinky, sexy and willing, being from Sneaky Falls, where only one word is spoken. The word is ''Yes.'' The girl’s name is Bernardine…The only really unhappy member of the crowd is a character named Wormy. Wormy wants to be a big wheel, a conquering male, the way the others say they are—but somehow he can’t make it. His attempts at playing wolf never succeed, and none of the girls in the town will date him. His mother’s watchful affection bores and irks him. In one great, desperate effort to become important in the eyes of his companions, he hangs out in a hotel lobby and makes passes until he succeeds with an older woman who must be at least in her twenties, maybe thirties. Wormy’s adventure is agonizing and funny."

THE STORY: The main people (according to Chapman) are seven or eight youths who might be called nice Dead End kids. These lads love practical jokes, hang out in a beer parlor in a Western town, and talk endlessly about females and their conquests