The Paper Caper

by Caroline B. Cooney, Gail Owens

Mischievous Lynn and her twin Victoria visit their aunt and uncle and become involved in discovering the thief of a stolen computer program.

58 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1981

About the author

Caroline Cooney knew in sixth grade that she wanted to be a writer when "the best teacher I ever had in my life" made writing her main focus. "He used to rip off covers from The New Yorker and pass them around and make us write a short story on whichever cover we got. I started writing then and never stopped!"
When her children were young, Caroline started writing books for young people -- with remarkable results. She began to sell stories to Seventeen magazine and soon after began writing books. Suspense novels are her favorites to read and write. "In a suspense novel, you can count on action."
To keep her stories realistic, Caroline visits many schools outside of her area, learning more about teenagers all the time. She often organizes what she calls a "plotting game," in which students work together to create plots for stories. Caroline lives in Westbrook, Connecticut and when she's not writing she volunteers at a hospital, plays piano for the school musicals and daydreams!
- Scholastic.com

Reviews

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It's one that holds up after many years - 58 pages that somehow feel like a complete, fully developed, cleverly plotted story. And it's so, so funny.

Modern day kids will not understand this book at all, sadly, since its focal point is the early model computer that was just green code on black screens. I'm old enough to remember when computer work involved hunching over a bulky monitor in a dark, sweltering room, stabbing away at the keyboard and surrounded by sheaves of green-and-white striped paper with those little punched out edges that were so satisfying to peel off.

The basic plot is quite simple. Lynn is a twin whose parents go on holiday and send her to her aunt and uncle's house for the summer. While she's there, she gets a paper route and learns how to use her uncle's computer - a little, anyway. He's in the middle of developing a program to handle the paper's distribution, which runs into some issues, because it's a lot easier to cheat the system (and steal money!) when there isn't a digital record keeping track of all the numbers.

When it was written, this was probably a fairly cutting-edge book about technology; now it's a nostalgic look back in time. But the writing is still as fresh as ever: wonderfully funny, sharply witty, and as enjoyable to read as it was when I was Lynn's age.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short story about a precocious preteen girl who goes with her twin sister to visit her Aunt and Uncle for a few weeks in the summer. There, she unravels a mystery involving the theft of a disk from her Uncle's computer business. What was interesting, is that this book was published in 1981, so the computer, hardware, and software are now really out of date. But, I remember those computers well because my husband was working with computers then and even earlier and evolved his knowledge as the computers evolved.

[Sarah Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, this book has the same main characters as Safe As the Grave. It was okay, but nothing special. I wouldn't read it again.

* Victoria gets invited to a birthday party but Lynn doesn't, so Lynn decides to hang the laundry on the line to look like people, which doesn't go down very well 🙈
* Lynn and Victoria then go to stay with their aunt and uncle while their parents go on vacation to England.
* Lynn is bored, so asks her uncle about what he's doing on his computer (and this book is ancient). He's writing a computer program for the newspaper.
* This program is then stolen, but nobody knows who did it or why.
* Lynn works out that if someone were selling newspapers without paying for them, they would make a lot of money, and realises that if someone were doing that, her uncle's program would mean that they would get caught.
* Lynn is home alone when someone enters the house and starts going through her uncle's office again. She calls the police and the criminals are caught.