This, the next in the series, is (as I have just discovered) the first not written by Warner, as she died after #19 and the series carried on without her. Honestly, I can tell the difference, and it's for the better. All four children are featured equally, which is a marked improvement over the Benny Show that the Boxcar books were becoming, and there's also a return to the children being genuinely helpful and useful, as they go to stay with a lonely, injured friend of their grandfather, so that he has people to look after him as he recovers. The kids look after the garden and the animals and the house, and there's a mystery too, as always, and it's well-structured and interesting. The oddest thing is the kids seem to all be several years younger again, as they were in the first book, and not the aged-up versions of themselves that they had become by the last. I don't mind that, so long as the quality keeps up.