The beauty pageant has an Asian ('Asiatic' in the book) theme. However, this would have been a good opportunity to get rid of the girls and rename the series the 'Aunt Harriet Mystery Stories.'įrom page 131: 'The remark gave Aunt Harriet's spine a tingling sensation from top to bottom.' Reading that statement gives me a weird sensation. Anyway, someone comes along and dumps a load of wet sand on them! Since this book is not the last book in the Dana Girls series, you can figure out whether the girls survive. On pages 93 and 94, the girls decide to take a nap face down on the beach in a shallow pit that somebody had dug.

They track him down, and he just happens to be staying at their hotel in Newport Beach. The girls think that they can get some information from the photographer. Professor Ching has a book with a photograph of a phoenix. Gasoline should never be brought inside a house!

Gasoline is then brought inside the house and is poured into a basin. This is odd advice in the first place, and even worse, the doctor has no idea what kind of poison is involved since the consultation is by telephone. A doctor is called on the telephone, and he says for the girls to douse their hands in gasoline. On page 74, the girls' hands turn green and swell up from a supposed poison that was on the fake crown. Harriet Adams was well into her eighties when this book was written, and she apparently enjoyed making her namesake the center of the stories. We might as well begin calling the series the 'Aunt Harriet Mystery Stories.' Aunt Harriet finds the owner of a plane, and she solves the coded message in the invitations. She gives suggestions on what the girls should do next. In this book, Aunt Harriet makes phone calls to obtain needed information. At times, Aunt Harriet's role is more prominent than the girls'. With this story, the Dana Girls series enters a bizarre new world in which Aunt Harriet takes a very active role in solving the mysteries. In a seemingly unrelated case, Evelyn Starr gets into a wreck in Newport Beach and is accused of causing it. Meanwhile, the crown disappears as well as one of the contestants.

The girls figure out that the duplicate invitations contain a hidden message. In Dana Girls #14, The Curious Coronation, Jean and Louise receive eight invitations to a teen beauty competition in Newport Beach.

Coronation by Grace R. Duncan