Book review: Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett

The forty-third book I read in 2016 was Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett.  I have enjoyed sharing with Faith and Eric the JFic series of my library-haunting childhood, like McGurk and The Three Investigators.  Blue Balliett's contemporary series is in the same "kid detective" genre, but where the older teams of investigators were white kids in the suburbs, Calder and Petra are mixed-race children living in a diverse neighborhood next to the University of Chicago, where their parents are employed.

Both feel like misfits and outsiders at the progressive school they attend, Calder even more so as his one friend has recently moved out of state.  Initially hostile to one another, the pair are drawn together when a Vermeer painting on loan to the Art Institute in Chicago from the National Gallery of Art disappears en route and a series of coincidences leads them to believe they are the only ones who can find it.  The text is accompanied by illustrations with a built-in code for readers to decipher.

My biggest problem with the book are the coincidences.  The "kid detective" series of my past were of the old-school Scooby-Doo philosophy that, if there appears to be a ghost or a monster or some sort of supernatural phenomenon involved, there's a bad guy in a rubber mask or a hidden tape recorder behind it; the protagonists solved the case with determination, logic, and bravery.  Balliett's world is in the magical-realism genre: Yes, the subject of A Lady Writing really did communicate with Petra through a vision, and the pair unravel the case not because they were clever and determined but because they are special children magically chosen by the universe for greater things.  The message is not, like in Encyclopedia Brown or Harriet the Spy, that anyone can, with ambition and attention to detail, set up their own neighborhood detective agency; it's that, if you're "special" (with specialness seemingly determined by being unpopular), you can do things that the great unwashed mass of children cannot because you really are Better Than Them.

Also, while the main characters are well-developed, the secondary characters are disappointingly flat.  Petra, in particular, is unhappy about being one of five children in a chaotic household, but apart from her original complaints about how much time she has to spend helping take care of her younger siblings, they don't interfere in her activities for the rest of the book; I don't think we even learn their names.  Parents are only slightly more visible and relevant than in Peanuts cartoons.

Despite my qualms, however, the story is enjoyable and holds together, once you've accepted the premise that  the universe is collaborating to empower the protagonists.  There's a great deal of information on Vermeer and his paintings, which is not merely educational but really intrigues the reader to learn more about him.