Holy shit, guys, this is the last book in the Boy/Girl Battle Series! I have been working on this series for eight years. For perspective: when I started this blog, I was in high school. People in my school were obsessed with Twilight and everyone had Facebook albums titled “I throw my hands up in the air sometimes.” Like! It’s been a while!
The cover of this book features Eddie and Jake — according to the blurb on the back, they’re the ones who instigate this final round of the “war”, because they’re the only ones who still actually care. Because they have cooties.
Mrs. Malloy tells the girls that they are officially moving back to Ohio. The girls sigh that they’ll miss the house and the river and the library — it’s never stated where exactly in Ohio they’re from, is it? Are they not from some janky small town there, too? Anyway, the one thing they definitely won’t miss is the Hatfords. They’re like, “Remember the good times, like when they dumped a bunch of dead animals by the river to make us think it was polluted?” Mrs. Malloy’s like, “What the hell?” because maybe if she had any idea what these kids were up to over the course of the year, none of the crazy shit they pulled would have happened.
Eddie decides that they have to pull a final prank on the boys to prove that they’ve won the war. “I didn’t know we were at war,” said Beth. Beth, did you even read — nevermind. To be fair, Eddie is less about the pranks, and more about proving that they can do whatever the boys can do. The boys have been bragging all year about the fun stuff that they did with the Bensons, like going to “Knob Hill” and “Smuggler’s Cove.” Eddie says that the boys probably never did any of the dangerous stuff they claimed to do, so if they try to brag about climbing around in abandoned coal mines again, she’s going to make them take her there. Caroline doesn’t really love the idea, but she agrees because she doesn’t want to be left out. This is called peer pressure, Caroline.
The boys are busy helping clean out the gutters (ew), so the girls give the message to Peter. Predictably, he’s very Peter about it: he goes out and tells the Jake that “Eddie Malloy wants you to take her to Knob Hill and the old coal mine and Smuggler’s Cove.” Jake’s all, “OMG, like a date?” Just kidding. He asks when she wants to go, and Peter’s like, “IDK, before the girls go, I guess.” The boys are like, “Go where?” and they dance around like this for like five minutes before Peter says the girls are moving back to Ohio. Jake is all hype, but Josh and Wally are depressed. Wally thinks that his life might be kind of empty without Caroline around, not that he likes her or anything, because that would be gross. Because of the cooties.
Jake is suspicious that Eddie might be trying to pull something. Josh and Wally suggest that the girls just want to have fun before they leave, to which Jake says, “And maybe the Pope’s Protestant.” That seems like a very old lady-ish thing to come out of a fairly secular middle school boy’s mouth. Do eleven-year-olds even know what Protestants are? I mean, I did, but that was because I went to Catholic school and we learned early on that Protestants are heathens that broke up with us and can’t be trusted.
Anyway, the boys agree to take the girls out exploring. The girls show up bright and early with a picnic basket, which makes Wally and Jake immediately suspicious. Still, they manage to make pleasant small talk about the girls moving and what they’ll miss about Buckman. The boys even invite Caroline to do a dramatic reading. She’s all excited to perform, until Jake ruins it by dropping a bug down her shirt. Then Eddie puts the dead bug in Jake’s sandwich, and they almost fight but then they don’t. Jake asks what Eddie wants to do next, and she suggests hiking up Knob Hill after midnight.
Wally reflects that the rest of the kids are getting along okay, but Jake and Eddie keep picking fights and arguing with each other. For some reason, this makes Josh upset, and he snarks that they should take the girls up to Knob Hill and leave them here. Josh, weren’t you just — oh my God, nevermind.
Mrs. Hatford muses that she should invite the Malloys over for brunch before they leave. She wails that she should’ve been a better neighbor and helped Mrs. Malloy fit in with the faculty wives, blah blah it’s suddenly the 1950s up in here blah. She tasks the boys with finding moving boxes for the Malloys, and Wally and Peter go around the shops downtown asking for boxes. Later, when they’re stacking them up to take over the Malloys, a piece of paper falls out of one of them. It’s a shopping list, and it lists things like “rope” and “dynamite.” Hey, maybe whoever wrote it was just working on their aforementioned Facebook album titled “I throw my hands up in the air sometimes.” Anyway, the boys are suspicious, and Wally invents a whole story in his head about how there’s some guy called Mad Bomber Bill out there, and gives himself nightmares about small children being blown up. I like how Wally is lowkey just as dramatic as Caroline when the situation calls for it.
The boys bring the boxes over to the Malloy house, and show the girls the suspicious shopping list. The girls wonder what it might be for, or where one might be planting dynamite. Josh brings up the coal mine, which reminds Eddie that she wants to needle the Hatfords about it. She asks if they’ve ever been there, and Jake hems and haws that they’ve been, like, really close to it, but not like inside, because it’s fenced in, and they’ve never actually been over the fence, but like, they’ve seen the mine. From outside. Eddie calls Jake out on totally not having ever been in the mine, and says that she’s going to hop the fence and go in. Sure, that will end well. She asks the boys if they’re in, and Josh and Wally punk out. Jake says that he’ll go with her, because their love is real.
Caroline thinks: They were not going to move out of Buckman. They were going to be kicked out of Buckman, Caroline was sure. Hee.
The next day, the girls come over to go to Knob Hill. They’ve decided to go in the morning, since they probably won’t be able to go at night. Josh and Jake panic because they’ve just gotten up, and they’re still in their underwear. Heh. The girls have brought over some research they did about Knob Hill, and read a spooky legend about how the “Shanatee Indians” (not a real tribe) believed that if your shadow touched another person’s on the hill, you would die. Or something. The boys are freaked out.
They go hiking up the hill, and the boys are all paranoid about their shadows bumping into each other. This is pretty difficult to do in the middle of the day, obviously. Then the boys find some arrowheads and the girls get all hype and try to find some themselves. Then the girls realize that the arrowheads are fake, and the boys realize that the Shanatee Indian legend is fake — Beth wrote it for a short story competition, which seems kinda racist — and they all have a good chuckle. Eddie uses the word “hornswoggled” because she is a 60-year-old woman.
In the next few days, Caroline starts sneaking over to school and acting out one-girl performances on the stage. She’s going to miss Buckman Elementary, because it has an auditorium that looks like a real theater, unlike their shitty stage/gym combo back in Ohio. Heh. I think anyone that went to a school with no budget can relate. Caroline is doing a dramatic reading of “The Raven”, because of course she is, when she realizes the custodian is in there with her. She decides that she has to up the ante for her audience of one, and tries to pull the curtain closed as she says the final line. Instead, she manages to pull the heavy set backdrop down on herself, and it pins her to the ground. The janitor’s like, “Dude, are you okay?” and Caroline is all, “Quoth the raven, nevermore!” while pretending to faint. I imagine it looks something like this:
Wally’s at home when he hears the ambulance siren, and notices it’s going to the school. He immediately gets on his bike and starts following it, thinking he’ll get to have an exciting story to tell his family. Instead, he sees Caroline being wheeled in on a stretcher (oh my God, you guys, a really thick piece of canvas fell on her, not a whole building), and panics that “Mad Bomber Bill” got her. He’s actually pretty distraught (aw!) and freaks out that she might be dying. One of the nurses tells him that she’s not, but someone should probably notify her family. Wally goes to tell the Malloys what happened, and then he starts worrying that Caroline will die and he’ll have to give a eulogy at her funeral and think of nice things to say about her. Heh. Okay, so he’s not that distraught after all.
Caroline’s in trouble for sneaking into the school, and Mrs. Malloy says that she doesn’t want any more problems in the last few days before they move away. So they finish out their days in Buckman in relative peace: Beth’s racist story about fake Indians wins second place in the competition, Eddie and Jake’s baseball team wins their tournament, and crazy heat wave hits both West Virginia and Ohio. And then! The book mentions that there’s an insane amount of traffic coming into town, because “the college” is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The college in Buckman is meant to be West Virginia Wesleyan, which was founded in 1890. So this book technically takes place in 1990. This makes sense in the earlier books in this series, where no one had computers, but of course makes no sense now. Also, “faculty wives” would’ve been hilariously outdated even in 1990.
Anyway, moving day comes, and the movers take the Malloys’ stuff away. They stop by the Hatfords’ for brunch before they hit the road, and it’s mad awkward: none of the kids really know how to say goodbye to each other, and the moms are just making weird 1950s small talk while they eat. Then Mr. Malloy calls — on the Hatfords’ home phone, because this book was published in 2006 but they still don’t have cell phones — and says that somehow the heat has knocked the power out in half of Ohio, and it won’t be back on for another three or four days. Mrs. Hatford immediately gets all neighborly and offers to let the Malloys stay at the Hatfords’ house. As all the hotels are booked for the college’s anniversary, Mrs. Malloy accepts. Wally’s like, “Okay, but there’s only one bathroom for all ten of us, so…awkward.” He has a point.
The Malloys get Jake and Josh’s room, and the twins panic about giiiirls looking in their underwear drawer or seeing their report cards from the second grade. Whatever, dudes! They’re moving to another state in like three days! Jake in particular is grossed out by the idea of Eddie sleeping in his bed. I’m, uh, not gonna touch that. The kids mostly leave each other alone all day, but eventually their moms tell them to be sociable. I just had war flashbacks to when I was little and my cousins would visit. Anyway, Jake and Eddie snipe at each other until finally Josh tells them to shut up. He’s like, “You’re literally the only ones who care about this war thing anymore. The rest of us are perfectly fine getting along and introducing 9-year-olds to the concept of shipping.” He dares them to go into the old coal mine and leave the rest of them alone.
That night, Jake and Josh panic that they left their underwear in their room. NOBODY CARES, YOU GUYS. They enlist Wally to go get them back, and Wally basically dives blindly into the drawer and runs off with whatever’s inside. So did he get his brothers’ underwear? Of course not. If you guessed, “He grabbed the girls’ underwear instead,” then you clearly know how these books go by now. Caroline is the first to notice and tells their mom, but the boys manage to put the underwear back, and Mrs. Malloy thinks Caroline is being overdramatic, as usual.
The boys decide to set up a lemonade stand, and they charge people an extra dollar to see them fry an egg on the sidewalk. It’s so hot that they actually manage to cook a couple of eggs, and everyone’s amused for about five minutes before it gets old. Eddie and Jake start fighting again, some more, and Josh tells them to take it to the coal mine, again, some more. This time Eddie and Jake actually take him seriously, and decide to set off right now at this very minute. The rest of the kids go with them because they’re a bunch of lemmings.
Jake and Eddie stop fighting long enough to go into the mine together. The rest of the kids watch and worry that the mine’s going to collapse or they’re going to fall down a hole. Wally’s like, “Yeah, this mine’s been closed for twenty years for a reason.” They’re not worried enough to actually, like, stop them though. But as it turns out, Jake and Eddie don’t get very far into the mine anyway, because some dude comes busting out of the nearby brush and chases them out. He yells that he’ll find out who they are, and the kids get so scared that they run pretty much all the way home. All of them are rightfully freaked out — mostly that he’ll find them and kill them in their sleep or something, but also partially that he’ll tell their parents, although some of the kids note that he didn’t look like a cop or a guard. They make a pact not to mention it to their parents. Adults should never know about other adults creeping around their kids!
The next day is even hotter, so all the kids go swimming in the river. They’re having fun hijinks together, until they see a truck pull up and recognize the driver as the dude from the mine. They’re like, “Holy shit, this adult man is following us around and now knows where we live!” Do they tell their parents, though? Of course not. They run back inside the house, where Mrs. Malloy tells them that there’s something the paper that they should see. The kids freak out: “Jake stared at Eddie. Josh stared at Beth. Wally stared at Caroline.” Heh. It turns out to just be a little story on Wally frying an egg on the sidewalk, and the kids are like, “Oh, cool, we totally didn’t think it was going to be a story about us breaking into an abandoned mine and running into a serial killer or anything.”
The power goes out that night, and everyone is stuck trying to think of ways to entertain themselves. They ask Mr. Hatford to tell them wacky mail delivery stories, and he’s like, “Uh, I almost ran over a cow today. That was pretty fun.” I can never tell if these books make me want to live in small town West Virginia or if they horrify me to my very bones.
The adults ask Caroline to recite “The Raven” for them. She does, and this time she’s not interrupted by anyone dropping bugs down her shirt. The girls do find bugs in their room, though, because somehow the house has become invaded by ladybugs. Everyone is freaked out except Wally, who’s blown away and amazed in a really sweet way by the sight of all the ladybugs in the ceiling. They get a vacuum cleaner and get rid of most of the bugs, but there’s still a trickle of them.
Eventually the heat wave breaks, and the Malloys’ house is expected to get their power back in a couple of days. Everyone is a little more chilled out, and Wally resolves to be nice to the girls for the last couple of days that they’re here in Buckman. Everything’s going swimmingly, until they hear an explosion one night. You’ll recall that Mr. Hatford is both a policeman and a postman because why not (it’s alliterative!), so he gets a call from the sheriff’s office that someone’s blown up the coal mine. All the kids are like, “Oops,” but keep quiet about it. They worry that they might get in trouble for not reporting the evidence that they found earlier — you know, the shopping list with “dynamite” written on it. Eddie notices that Dynamite is a brand of detergent that the Hatfords have in their house, so it really could be just a normal shopping list after all.
The kids are relieved that they won’t get arrested for hiding evidence, but they still might be in trouble for the whole going-into-the-mine-and-getting-chased-by-a-stalker thing. They decide to keep mum about it, which works out really well until Peter opens his mouth, because of course he does. I can’t believe we’re on the twelfth book and they still haven’t learned to leave Peter out of everything. He’s seven! Just ditch him!
Am I revealing what a bad older sibling I was? Probably.
Anyway, Mr. Hatford finds out that the kids were screwing around in the coal mine. He and Mrs. Malloy flip out (I guess Mrs. Hatford just doesn’t feel like parenting tonight) and yell at the kids. Mr. Hatford calls the sheriff and says that he’s going to make the kids talk to the police. The sheriff comes over and takes their statements, which aren’t particularly helpful because none of the kids can agree on what the guy looked like, other than the fact that he was driving a truck. Then the sheriff asks, “Who’s Tippy?”
Then I guess Phyllis Reynolds Naylor realized that she was over the usual page count for these books and had to wrap it up quick, because we don’t get any explanation of how the sheriff knows any of this or what happens next. Instead, we jump to Wally writing an email to the Bensons, recapping how it was all resolved: the dude that chased them out of the mine had a dog named Tippy, who fell down the mine and died. The guy got super mad that the county didn’t properly destroy the mine, and decided to blow it up himself so that no other dogs would meet Tippy’s fate. Then he wrote “THIS IS FOR YOU, TIPPY” on the mine wall. Way to give yourself away, guy.
The Bensons write back that they wished they could’ve been in Buckman this past year, because then they would’ve gotten to be involved with all the exciting shit that has happened. Sorry, Bensons! You’re just not cut out to be the protagonists of a book series! They say that they should be coming back tomorrow, and to say goodbye to the girls for them.
The night before the girls leave, they sneak over to the Bensons’ house and carve THE MALLOYS WERE HERE into the garage beams. The boys try to lock them in, but then the girls dump a bunch of hubcaps on them, and then they all walk back cackling over their hijinks. Caroline is all emo that this is the last time they’ll ever play a wacky prank on each other. Aw! I’m emo too! Finishing this recap will make me really 100% done with this series, for the first time since I was a kid. ;_;
But once all the hijinks are over, the book races towards the ending pretty quickly. The power comes back on in Ohio, and the girls leave the next morning. They say goodbye to the boys and the kids insult each other one last time, right in front of their parents (“Where did we fail?” Mrs. Malloy said, laughing. Uh, I believe it was in the very first book when both of you were terrible at parenting your children from the start.) Then the girls leave, and the boys go upstairs to reclaim their rooms. They find a bunch of ladybugs stuffed in their bags, and a note from the girls saying goodbye.
Meanwhile, out in the car, the girls find a bunch of ladybugs hidden in Caroline’s backpack, and a note from the boys. Then Phyllis Reynolds Naylor breaks the fourth wall and asks, “Now, you tell me: who won the war?” Probably Peter. He did absolutely nothing for all twelve books and kept getting rewarded with cookies.
And that’s the end of the series! These are by far not the most popular posts on my blog, but they honestly got more attention than I ever expected them to (i.e. more than absolutely none). Every now and then I get a spate of comments about how much people liked these books when they read them as kids. Honestly, they are pretty good books, and I would recommend them to young readers or anyone that needs a book to keep kids engaged. In retrospect, if I had bothered to actually think about it from a recapping perspective, I probably wouldn’t have chosen these books. They’re aimed at kids, yes, but they’re written well enough, and mostly self-aware enough, that making fun of them was actually kind of hard. The later books in this series eventually gave me ammo by being bizarrely behind the times with the kids’ speech mannerisms and general lack of technology, but the earlier books weren’t noticeably weird for their time. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor took a break or something when writing these; the first few books were published in the early-to-mid-’90s, and the rest of them came out in the mid-2000s. There was a definite stylistic shift in the meantime, marked by the iconic phrase, “E-mail rules!”
I actually think it’s kind of BS that the girls move back to Ohio, though. What was even the point of their family hauling ass all the way to West Virginia for a year? Naylor used the “teacher exchange for a year” plot device in the Alice series, too, which makes me wonder: is that even a thing? I mean, I guess if students have exchanges, teachers probably do, too. But like…is it that common? Would football coaches have an exchange? Why the F would anyone uproot their entire family for only a year? Whatever. Anyway, I finally finished a series, dudes, and it only took me 8 years! Thanks to everyone who read any of these posts — to everyone who read that first post back in 2010, if you’re still here, I hope you’re doing well and not crushed under the weight of being a responsible adult like I am.
THE END.
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