Maureen Hume

Eloquent Books

ISBN: 978-1-60860-337-4

78 pages (Includes front and back matter)

As I read The Pizza Gang by Maureen Hume, I was impressed with how quickly the author gives the main characters unique personalities through her description and dialogue.  Ten-year-old Katie, along with Ben and Joe, all loved pizza and adventure.  The boys were twins who looked alike except for their hair styles.  All three of them were sure that a Witch lived in their neighborhood.  The elderly woman was cranky, and it didn’t help that her cat ate a goldfish that belonged to Katie.  Rumors and frightening stories about her were the talk of neighborhood kids.

It didn’t take long for the new policewoman in town to learn that these three kids liked pizza.  When Katie, Ben, and Joe went to the police station to meet Dullsville’s newest police officer, they had expected to see a man; instead they met a young woman named Pamela.  She was very friendly and, after showing off her police badge and other gear, she took them up on their offer to help by suggesting they clean out the lost property room.  This was after Joe had bragged about Katie helping a friend find her white mouse by following the poop trail; however, he wasn’t very enthused about cleaning out the lost property room until Pamela mentioned that she would share a pizza with them afterward. Ben loved pizza; they all did so the three of them quickly went to the room and began working. The pizza would help make up for an incident that had happened earlier in the day when they had a frightening confrontation with the Witch after they accidently damaged her lavender bush.  Fearing for their lives, they agreed to be at her house the next afternoon and do some work to pay for the damages. 

The plot thickens when the children discover a hat and a romantic letter written from the battlefield in the property room—for some reason this package had never reached its intended destination.  The three of them decide to try to find the woman who should have received the letter and hat.  But it would take some doing and involve some very colorful characters, especially the Major who lived at the Dullsville Nursing home.  With his help, and after a comical mishap at the local library, they enlist some would-be actors and actresses and devise a scheme to unravel the “hat in the box” mystery.  Things didn’t exactly go as planned, and I found myself laughing out loud at the sequence of events that clearly demonstrated the creativity and skill of the author.

I’m sure that Katie, Ben and Joe agree that chocolate cake followed by pizza provides a happy ending for this children’s book; however, are they celebrating or being appeased by others because of failed detective work?  Did they have other confrontations with the neighborhood Witch, and were they able to deliver the hat to its rightful owner?  This is a great children’s book that I highly recommend.  Follow this author as she is talented and hopefully will be writing many more books.

Bettie Corbin Tucker

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