My dad has always been a fan of this book for as long as I can remember, I think because he used to read it aloud to me and my sister when we were little. Apparently, I was too little when this happened (or maybe just not paying enough attention), because when I finally read it on my own recently, nothing about it was familiar. The story centers on Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, a brother and sister who run away from their home in Greenwich, CT to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. During their stay there, they become entangled in a centuries-old mystery regarding a sculpture and Michaelangelo. Their investigating leads them back to CT to the home of Mrs. Frankweiler, who plays a critical role in the Kincaids solving the mystery.I had been expecting to love this book, but I ended up only being sort of lukewarm to it. Plotwise, the mystery was never all that intriguing to me, so I wasn't particularly driven to keep reading to find out how it gets resolved. I was also disappointed with the lack of real character development of Mrs. Frankweiler. She's actually the one who narrates the book, and while her occasional parenthetical asides and interactions with the Kincaids in the end give a glimpse of her personality, it and her background are never really fleshed out enough for my liking. Considering she is the title character, I was expecting a bit more of her, and not just as a convenient and, dare I say, anticlimactic plot resolution device.
The Kincaids are fun characters to read, and the museum setting is probably my favorite part of the story, so regardless of a somewhat weak plot, I still managed to enjoy the book. Unlike a lot of the children's books I've been reading lately, though, I'm not sure I would recommend it to anyone that isn't in elementary school.
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