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Something Queer #3
Something Queer at the Library
Jill's excited about entering her basset hound, Fletcher, in the big dog show, so she and her best friend, Gwen, go to the library to learn about training dogs.But they're puzzled and surprised to find that many pictures are cut out of the special dog books they've borrowed. Who would want to destroy library books? Luckily there's strange clue on one page and that's enough to get super sleuths started on their search.
The books are due back soon and Jill and Gwen don't want to be blamed for ruining them. But someone is to blame. Will they find the person in time?
The books are due back soon and Jill and Gwen don't want to be blamed for ruining them. But someone is to blame. Will they find the person in time?
48 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 1977
117 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Levy
194 books66 followersElizabeth Levy has been writing and publishing books for over thirty years and sometimes now she meets kids whose parents read her books when they were children! She has written over 80 books, a number that continues to surprise her, as it surprises her how long she's been at it.
Over the years they've printed lots of her books - over five million of them.
She loves to try writing different types of books - everything from funny mysteries to novels about kids who get in trouble to history.
One of the most pleasant surprises about writing is that she's been invited to travel all over the country and even the world speaking to children, teachers, and librarians. She's made some wonderful friendships and gotten lots of ideas for her books. One of the most special treats is that kids have drawn wonderful pictures of one of her favorite characters, Fletcher.
She grew up in Buffalo, New York, then went to Brown University, where she majored in history. When she graduated, she came to New York City and worked for ABC-TV and then for Senator Robert Kennedy. She has lived in New York ever since, and she loves it. She knows all the best places for salami, she has run four marathons, and she has completed many 5-borough bike tours, so she thinks she really knows this place well.
At certain times of the year, she can be found out at Shea Stadium watching her team, the New York Mets. She has always loved baseball.
Mostly she enjoys hanging out with her friends. They spend lots of time going to movies or plays, playing sports, having meals together.
When she's alone and not writing, she is usually reading. She reads mysteries a lot, always has, which is probably why many of her books are mysteries.
Over the years they've printed lots of her books - over five million of them.
She loves to try writing different types of books - everything from funny mysteries to novels about kids who get in trouble to history.
One of the most pleasant surprises about writing is that she's been invited to travel all over the country and even the world speaking to children, teachers, and librarians. She's made some wonderful friendships and gotten lots of ideas for her books. One of the most special treats is that kids have drawn wonderful pictures of one of her favorite characters, Fletcher.
She grew up in Buffalo, New York, then went to Brown University, where she majored in history. When she graduated, she came to New York City and worked for ABC-TV and then for Senator Robert Kennedy. She has lived in New York ever since, and she loves it. She knows all the best places for salami, she has run four marathons, and she has completed many 5-borough bike tours, so she thinks she really knows this place well.
At certain times of the year, she can be found out at Shea Stadium watching her team, the New York Mets. She has always loved baseball.
Mostly she enjoys hanging out with her friends. They spend lots of time going to movies or plays, playing sports, having meals together.
When she's alone and not writing, she is usually reading. She reads mysteries a lot, always has, which is probably why many of her books are mysteries.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
October 5, 2019
APRIL
as part of my personal reading challenges for 2017, once a month i will be revisiting a favorite book from when i was a little bitty karen and seeing if it holds up to my fond memories and determining if i can still enjoy it as an old and crotchety karen.
fingers crossed.
so: first things first. in answer to the question 'does this book hold up?' yes, it does. it more than holds up, in fact - i think i may have liked this one even MORE reading it as an adult.
baby-karen's review:
i like doggies and books and what the heck is a lhasa alpo??*
hahah - queer**
adult-review:
what a fun and truly heartwarming memory-ride i have just experienced! maybe this got an extra boost of nostalgia brought into the mix by seeing those familiar illustrations again, which cracked me up because they label EVERYTHING, completely unnecessarily, but so so cutely.
and check out mr. hobart - a black, male librarian? not bad, 1977!
i so clearly remember gwen’s habit of tapping on her braces when deep in thought about queer things:
revisiting it just brought all sorts of warm floody heart-feelings into me.
i’m not sure why i got such a kick out of this book here in my dotage - it’s barely a book - fewer than fifty pages with manymany illustrations. baby-karen no doubt responded to the fun adventure of little girls solving book-related mysteries and SO MANY DOGGIES, but surely grown-karen is more discriminating? more refined in her tastes? more - OH LOOK A CHUBBY DOGGIE!
it just oozes charm - a couple of pre-teen girls solve the mystery of “who is cutting out all these pictures from the dog books we just borrowed from the library and what if we are blamed for it?”
i love the gleeful-terrorist expressions on their faces in mr. hobart’s presumed imaginings of them. and also the inception-y thought-within-a-thought of the illustration.
i loved all the ups and downs of their investigation, determining what is and what is not a helpful clue:
i love that they hang out in the library as much as i did when i was little
and i love their youthful confidence that all solutions can be found in books and that two days is plenty of time to read twenty books and to prepare a recalcitrant dog to win a dog show and ALSO solve a crime.
i mean, some of these things won’t happen, but they definitely do solve that crime! which satisfied baby-karen, although adult karen definitely would have preferred a harsher punishment than for such a ruthless book vandal.
in any event, i’m really glad i reread this one; it’s practically a pamphlet, but it really did make me smile, which is exactly what one needs in april, this cruelest of months.
* baby-karen did not live in a world with the internet, so here is where i help out all current-day baby karens. a lhasa apso is this:
**baby-karen lived in a different time, where words like “gay” and “retard” were used as playground calls that had nothing to do with intolerance; just a child’s instinctive assessment of such words as loaded or taboo in some way. also, this was new england, and you can’t expect new englanders to excise the phrase “wicked retarded” from our vocabulary. we never used racial slurs, though, so retroactive props to us for that. wicked progressive.
******************************************
this one might be the cheapest of them all ! LGM!
despite the evidence gleaned from rigorous archival research that tells me i read many of the books in this series*:
this is the ONLY one i remember.
no bookplate, AGAIN, dammit, but admire my drunken decision to mark my territory, crookedly, just wherevs:
* and in which i made a mess beside the first book on this list, which i think is a result of my having mistakenly marked it as ‘read’ before i had in fact read it, dutifully correcting that error, and then adjusting/updating my records once i had read it, leaving confusing scrawls all over this very important official record of reading history, and causing me to resort to an all-new notation - the clarity of a gigantic arrow leading from the word “read” to the title of the book. you’re welcome, posterity.
JANUARY: wait till helen comes
FEBRUARY: the little gymnast
MARCH: zucchini
MAY: good-bye pink pig
JUNE: the girl with the silver eyes
JULY: the phantom tollbooth
come to my blog!
as part of my personal reading challenges for 2017, once a month i will be revisiting a favorite book from when i was a little bitty karen and seeing if it holds up to my fond memories and determining if i can still enjoy it as an old and crotchety karen.
fingers crossed.
so: first things first. in answer to the question 'does this book hold up?' yes, it does. it more than holds up, in fact - i think i may have liked this one even MORE reading it as an adult.
baby-karen's review:
i like doggies and books and what the heck is a lhasa alpo??*
hahah - queer**
adult-review:
what a fun and truly heartwarming memory-ride i have just experienced! maybe this got an extra boost of nostalgia brought into the mix by seeing those familiar illustrations again, which cracked me up because they label EVERYTHING, completely unnecessarily, but so so cutely.
and check out mr. hobart - a black, male librarian? not bad, 1977!
i so clearly remember gwen’s habit of tapping on her braces when deep in thought about queer things:
revisiting it just brought all sorts of warm floody heart-feelings into me.
i’m not sure why i got such a kick out of this book here in my dotage - it’s barely a book - fewer than fifty pages with manymany illustrations. baby-karen no doubt responded to the fun adventure of little girls solving book-related mysteries and SO MANY DOGGIES, but surely grown-karen is more discriminating? more refined in her tastes? more - OH LOOK A CHUBBY DOGGIE!
it just oozes charm - a couple of pre-teen girls solve the mystery of “who is cutting out all these pictures from the dog books we just borrowed from the library and what if we are blamed for it?”
i love the gleeful-terrorist expressions on their faces in mr. hobart’s presumed imaginings of them. and also the inception-y thought-within-a-thought of the illustration.
i loved all the ups and downs of their investigation, determining what is and what is not a helpful clue:
i love that they hang out in the library as much as i did when i was little
and i love their youthful confidence that all solutions can be found in books and that two days is plenty of time to read twenty books and to prepare a recalcitrant dog to win a dog show and ALSO solve a crime.
i mean, some of these things won’t happen, but they definitely do solve that crime! which satisfied baby-karen, although adult karen definitely would have preferred a harsher punishment than for such a ruthless book vandal.
in any event, i’m really glad i reread this one; it’s practically a pamphlet, but it really did make me smile, which is exactly what one needs in april, this cruelest of months.
* baby-karen did not live in a world with the internet, so here is where i help out all current-day baby karens. a lhasa apso is this:
**baby-karen lived in a different time, where words like “gay” and “retard” were used as playground calls that had nothing to do with intolerance; just a child’s instinctive assessment of such words as loaded or taboo in some way. also, this was new england, and you can’t expect new englanders to excise the phrase “wicked retarded” from our vocabulary. we never used racial slurs, though, so retroactive props to us for that. wicked progressive.
******************************************
this one might be the cheapest of them all ! LGM!
despite the evidence gleaned from rigorous archival research that tells me i read many of the books in this series*:
this is the ONLY one i remember.
no bookplate, AGAIN, dammit, but admire my drunken decision to mark my territory, crookedly, just wherevs:
* and in which i made a mess beside the first book on this list, which i think is a result of my having mistakenly marked it as ‘read’ before i had in fact read it, dutifully correcting that error, and then adjusting/updating my records once i had read it, leaving confusing scrawls all over this very important official record of reading history, and causing me to resort to an all-new notation - the clarity of a gigantic arrow leading from the word “read” to the title of the book. you’re welcome, posterity.
JANUARY: wait till helen comes
FEBRUARY: the little gymnast
MARCH: zucchini
MAY: good-bye pink pig
JUNE: the girl with the silver eyes
JULY: the phantom tollbooth
come to my blog!
May 2, 2013
Loved the Something Queer mysteries as a grade schooler and my daughter, who is in the midst of a great mystery/detective kick, is loving them now. I love that we currently live in the service area of a public library that still has lots of weird, old, beat up, out of print books on their shelves. I think they are about to do a big purge of their collection as part of a remodel to make it more new and shiny looking, but they are going to lose a lot of great older titles like this one.
Best friends Jill and braces-tapping Gwen along with droopy basset hound Fletcher are on the trail of a library book vandal that leads to a thrilling confrontation at a dog show. (How could I resist the premise of this one?)
Best friends Jill and braces-tapping Gwen along with droopy basset hound Fletcher are on the trail of a library book vandal that leads to a thrilling confrontation at a dog show. (How could I resist the premise of this one?)
May 24, 2008
Something Queer at the Library concerns some vandalized library books, and Gwen and Jill's attempt to uncover the culpret and motive (actually not a bad subject to cover~though i wonder how many young readers would recognize the library of the late seventies~no matter.) Jill wants to enter Fletcher in All-State Dog Show and since he has never competed before she goes to the library to do some research (now there's a novel idea.) The two girls find certain pictures cut out and set out to discover which pictures are missing and why.
February 18, 2008
With a title like this I had to read it. With queer and library in the same title I was sure it would be good. It's not bad either. A nice mystery for the kids. The pictures keep the humor real light and fun. Gwen's tap, tap, taping of her braces is nice and she and Jill refer to the mysterious book-mangler as "the creep". Awesome.
December 31, 2025
I first read this book when I was about 8-9 years old (got it as part of a Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club) and especially loved it then because I really wanted a Llasa Apso. Reading it now was just as fun! I think I picked up on some of the smaller notations in the illustrations a bit more (eg, “Of Mice and Dogs”) and learned again what Lhasa Apso means. :) It gave me such a nice feeling of nostalgia! It packs a lot into such a short mystery!
May 8, 2010
This is an entertaining story in the Something Queer Mysteries series by Elizabeth Levy. It's a fun hybrid between a graphic novel and a chapter book. It has lots of illustrations and short chapters and is a fairly quick read. Our girls enjoyed this book and we will look for more of the books in this series at our local library.
June 5, 2012
Jill and Gwen borrow some books from the library for the dog show. But they discovered that pictures have been cut out of the books. They have to find who did it so they won't be blamed for the pictures being cut out.
It was a cute and a little weird mystery book. It was fun and I think kids will like it.
It was a cute and a little weird mystery book. It was fun and I think kids will like it.
January 31, 2008
This was one of my favorite books as a kid. It's a mystery that takes place in a library. That's cool! The book has the word "queer" in the title. That's even cooler!
April 16, 2008
I've always like these books. The little details in the pictures, especially.
February 6, 2012
one of my favorites growing up, I loved this series but to be placed in a library made it the ultimate.
February 16, 2012
I had been trying to find this book for a long time because I loved reading it (and re-reading it) at the local library in Aurora when I was young. I'm glad I know the title now.
September 2, 2015
Childhood favorite.
July 8, 2008
I adored these books when I was ten.
October 16, 2021
I am 47 and I can not believe I just found this book! This was one of my favorite books in elementary school. Because of starter mysteries like Something Queer at the Library, Encyclopedia Brown and Trixie Belden I am now an avid reader of mystery, thriller and suspense books. I enjoy being a beta reader and have been on several early reader teams for wonderful authors.
As a young child I enjoyed reading Something Queer at the Library over and over. The mystery was entertaining, but easy to understand. I loved the characters and was fond of the art work. But there was also a comfort in checking this out at the library over and over.
Now that I found this book again I can't wait to read it!
As a young child I enjoyed reading Something Queer at the Library over and over. The mystery was entertaining, but easy to understand. I loved the characters and was fond of the art work. But there was also a comfort in checking this out at the library over and over.
Now that I found this book again I can't wait to read it!
April 12, 2020
Something Queer Is Going On is my childhood top 5 favorite book. When I found out there were more books in the series, I knew I had to try to read them all.
This book is almost as good as the first. I love how the girls followed all the clues to find the culprit.
I almost giggled when Gwen tapped her braces. That is one of those things that stay with me.
They still have all the close ups to add bits to the story. I love the art style. I think it influenced every bit of how I draw today.
I think I might have to buy this one!
This book is almost as good as the first. I love how the girls followed all the clues to find the culprit.
I almost giggled when Gwen tapped her braces. That is one of those things that stay with me.
They still have all the close ups to add bits to the story. I love the art style. I think it influenced every bit of how I draw today.
I think I might have to buy this one!
May 6, 2025
Gwen and Jill decide to enter Fletcher the basset hound in a dog show and are outraged when their library books have pictures that have been cut out.
So of course they decide to investigate who has damaged the books. Their clues include a chocolate fingerprint, dog doodle drawings, and the fact that all the pictures were of Lhasa apsos. Fletcher ends up winning a prize at the dog show despite his drooping belly and the friends find the library book damager. If only life was this easy!
So of course they decide to investigate who has damaged the books. Their clues include a chocolate fingerprint, dog doodle drawings, and the fact that all the pictures were of Lhasa apsos. Fletcher ends up winning a prize at the dog show despite his drooping belly and the friends find the library book damager. If only life was this easy!
October 18, 2023
I'm sure I read this as a kid, but I was reminded of it again recently and got it out of the library. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed this silly and gentle mystery.
Jill and Gwen take some books out of the library, only to discover that they have been vandalized. They start an investigation to discover who the culprit is with fun results.
Jill and Gwen take some books out of the library, only to discover that they have been vandalized. They start an investigation to discover who the culprit is with fun results.
March 6, 2022
Fun 1970's tale of a mystery with a library book. Enjoy the fact the girls solve the mystery and still fulfill all the things going on in life.
Word use for the title is obviously dated, but true to meaning for the mystery.
Word use for the title is obviously dated, but true to meaning for the mystery.
April 3, 2023
Very short read. It’s a chapter with entire story. My daughter would enjoy it. I was wishing it was more chapters and not so quick.
Want to read
December 27, 2025read this for a bit because of the title but it wasn’t bad!
October 19, 2012
While this was a cute little mystery, the title is really off-putting. Language evolves.
Now, for the content about a library, it SHOULD be a little off-putting, since the librarian is checking out books the old fashioned way, but it's not for THIS librarian at HER library.
So in a way it's kind of a perfect book, with perfectly colored drawings for the time it was published (1970's). But oh to have the language updated.
Now, for the content about a library, it SHOULD be a little off-putting, since the librarian is checking out books the old fashioned way, but it's not for THIS librarian at HER library.
So in a way it's kind of a perfect book, with perfectly colored drawings for the time it was published (1970's). But oh to have the language updated.
February 19, 2016
One in a series of books featuring Gwen, Jill and Jill's dog Fletcher. Stylistically more like a graphic novel than a novel, the mysteries in these books are all logically solved and without sugary sweetness. I read this book in second grade and used it for my art project for Books on Parade and I won! I still have my clay Llasha Apso somewhere. A fun series for young kids who aren't that keen on reading.
June 14, 2007
It's a pity that these children's mysteries had to be titled as they are, severely limiting their likelyhood of rerelease, because they're absolutely wonderful. Hilarious and crazy, and in my mind, far better than your Cam Jansen or your Nancy Drew.
August 7, 2007
me and my sister loved reading this book as a kid. Im so happy i found the the title
because the only thing i could rember was Gwen tapping her braces and it drove me nuts!
trying to figure out the title and the plot.awesome children's book
because the only thing i could rember was Gwen tapping her braces and it drove me nuts!
trying to figure out the title and the plot.awesome children's book
April 25, 2007
this was one of my absolute favorite books growing up! all of my knowledge of lhasa apsos came from this book.
October 11, 2008
My children loved this book and it prompted us to get a Lhasa Apso mix dog who is now 16 years old.
April 11, 2014
too short!
October 13, 2015
A simple chapter book ideal for dog lovers and mystery introduction.
January 1, 2022
A genuine mystery... who has been cutting pictures out of the library books? And how will Jill and Gwen manage to solve this mystery and compete with Fletcher in the dog show at the same time???
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews