Three Times Lucky

If I were to describe the "typical" Newbery winner, it would go something like this: The protagonist is an adolescent (girl more often than boy) from a broken/dysfunctional family who seeks to understand more about his/her identity and/or family connections through the course of the book. And maybe that stems from the fact that many adolescents come from broken families and struggle to understand their own identity! Nevertheless, it has become a trite Newbery plot line for me.

Three Times Lucky seemed to fit the stereotype UNTIL, suddenly, there was a murder (and a fairly terrifying confrontation with an alcoholic father). A murder in a Newbery? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that is unprecedented. I kept thinking it would turn out to be just a case of a missing person (and a clue to Mo finding out something about her family), but it really was a murder. And there really was a murderer, and Mo even interacts with him. The book lacked the suspense I associate with crime novels, but largely because I knew it had to end happy because it was a Newbery.

While the book was spunky and fun, I had a major problem with the resolution. They find the murderer, they figure out his accomplice, and simultaneously discover the Colonel's (Mo's adopted caregiver) past and his relationship with Miss Lana all in a few pages. And get this: The Colonel and Miss Lana had been in love, then he had lost his memory in a car accident and couldn't remember who he was or his love for her. BUT SHE DOESN'T TELL HIM!!! Instead, she just waits for 11 years for him to recover his memory and love her again. WHAT?! So, nobody (including the Colonel himself) but Miss Lana knows the Colonel's past, but she lives with him in a house (separate bedrooms) and helps him raise a girl, Mo, for over a decade. Don't you think, if you had been in love with someone and he lost his memory, you would at least tell him his name and explain what happened to him and how he ended up in a creek and what he'd been doing prior to ending up in the creek and who you were to him? Perhaps she had a really good reason for withholding that information, but for the sake of the book's believability, that reason should have been explained somewhere.