My daughter and I picked up The Boxcar Children: The Mystery of the Traveling Tomatoes at the library this week, completely at random.

Oh my. Over 100 Boxcar Children titles?!? And my daughter has already been playing her own invented “boxcar kids” game, so I know we’re going to be reading more of them.

According to Wikipedia, the Boxcar Children series was created in 1924 by a teacher named Gertrude Chandler Warner. The word “created” is interesting, because I can’t tell how many of the books she actually wrote. She definitely didn’t write The Mystery of the Traveling Tomatoes, even though her name’s on the cover. It was published in 2008 and she died in 1979. (See how hard it is to fool me?)

Wish me luck. I may be reading these aloud for the next five years.