Tightrope Walker Book

I have spent the last week sorting through all the books in my Arizona bookcases. I haven't even seen most of them for eight years, so this has been a fun journey through my reading history. But I am also culling the herd: dividing everything into Keep, Give Away, or Read ASAP And Then Decide piles. This book was one that I could remember nothing about and I decided to start my re-read list with it.

Dorothy Gilman is best known for her Mrs. Pollifax novels. I've read one or two of those, and I suppose that is what originally led to my buying this one at a book sale years ago. Name recognition is a wonderful thing sometimes, isn't it.

This story does not feature Mrs. Pollifax. Our main character here is a sheltered young woman named Amelia Jones. She is 22 years old and still struggling to recover from her childhood. She is insecure, shy, still traumatized by what she saw at age 11, but she wants very much to become 'normal'. She is also wealthy and buys herself a carousel horse one day after seeing it in the window of an antique store. this is the beginning of her Grand Adventure. She passes the shop again, sees another carousel horse in the window, and since she doesn't have room for it in her little apartment she ends up buying the whole store and taking over the business.

While examining her new treasures she finds a note hidden inside a hurdy-gurdy and becomes quite obsessed. Was it a joke? Or was someone really about to kill the woman who wrote the note? She has to find out. In typical 'nosy female sleuth' fashion, Amelia then launches into her own investigation of the hurdy-gurdy and its many previous owners, eventually finding not only the truth about the writer of the note but many truths about her own life.

If you like such stories, this is an entertaining one. I liked it much better years ago, but my tastes have changed now and I am putting it in the Give Away pile. It's not the book, it's me. Really.