The Sugar Creek Gang, Book #8
It’s been a year since I read a book from the Sugar Creek Gang series to my kids and 5 years since we picked up the first book, The Swamp Robber. I blame COVID, because we’ve been away from our home for so long that we’d nearly forgotten how much we enjoyed these books!
Over the past month, however, we’ve finally made our way back overseas, back to family, back to our house, back to my bookshelves. I’ve still got a handful of these books that haven’t deteriorated over the years, and as far as I can tell, this Book #8 is the next one available in the series. We read it over the course of the week for our bedtime reading, and my kids (13 and 11) enjoyed it as much as I hoped they would.
This story takes the Sugar Creek Gang to their first foreign country (and boy, these kids got to travel a lot as 10-or-11-year olds!). They join their chaperone, Barry Boyland, on a flight to visit a missionary on the Spanish-speaking nation of Palm Tree Island. The “Manhunt” part of the story comes with a parting wish from Old Man Paddler that he’d love to see his long-lost twin brother before he dies, a man who’s said to have gone to Palm Tree Island and never returned.
There isn’t as much adventure in this book as in the previous ones, yet Bill Collins and his buds certainly get into some scrapes—like getting lost in the city of Palacia, meeting a crazy person—well, it’s better (as Bill Collins reminds us) to call him “mentally ill”—who looks just like old Man Paddler. The thing is, he calls himself “John Machete,” says he was born on the island, and rides around in a wheel-chair-cart pulled by an angry old goat. It’s the goat that gives the boys their closest scrape later on in the book, and it was so fast-paced at the end that I finished the final 4 chapters in one sitting.
Like the other books in the series, this book also contains a good number of Christian life-lessons to consider and discuss. At one point, Bill Collins mentions how the sacrifice and blood of Jesus is the only thing that rescue a person, no matter where in the world they’re from. Later, Little Jim hints at his inklings to become a missionary one day, especially after learning that all the little Chinese immigrants to Palm Tree Island don’t even have one single Sunday School available in their language! He was heartbroken and angry.
This book was a good reintroduction for us to the Sugar Creek Gang. I hope to get back into the swing of them now that we’re back. Soon enough we’ll feel settled and will stretch our reading habits again, but for now, these books are perfectly short and entertaining for our needs. I’m glad we’re back into them.
©2024 E.T.
Previous books in the series:
#1 The Swamp Robber (1940)
#2 The Killer Bear (1940)
#3 The Winter Rescue (1940)
#4 The Lost Campers (1941)
#12 Screams in the Night (1947)
Elliot's Blog 