Review Time: MR. SAMUEL'S PENNY by Treva Hall Melvin

By: Maddy

This review is one that is long overdue. Our book club read this book a while ago, and I was the one who volunteered to write the review. Unfortunately, my laziness and general procrastination got the best of me, and something that should've been done a long time ago is only getting done now. My sincerest apologies to the author and the five or so people who check this blog often (five being a very generous number), and not only I, but the rest of our team as well hope to be more effective in the future.

Mr. Samuel’s Penny is a book about a young 14 year old girl who is a yankee at heart but goes down south to stay with her aunt, Aunt Alice, over the summer, in the small town of Ahoskie, North Carolina. This small town is mostly known for being quiet and peaceful, but this all changes when tragedy strikes. Mr. Samuel, owner of the town’s lumber yard, has been found dead along with his two year old daughter in a river after skidding off a bridge. Everybody is the under of the assumption that this was an accident as Mr. Samuel was a man liked by almost everyone in the town, but when the town’s sheriff finds evidence that they were bullets fired on the bridge, this turns an accident into a full blown homicide. However, even though it has been confirmed to be a homicide, there is almost no evidence linking to who the perpetrator is, with only one piece of evidence found at the scene; Mr. Samuel was found clutching a 1909 wheat penny as he drowned.



Elizabeth Landers, who more commonly goes by Lizbeth, is our protagonist of this story. This event happens soon after her arrival, and from what she sees at the crime scene and the information she gathers from the sheriff and her aunt. When she learns there is a penny involved, as a self proclaimed penny connoisseur, she decides to go to the local police station to see if she can provide some insight on the penny and identify the murderer. However, to her dismay, the penny had been stolen! This leaves Lizbeth determined to find out who took the penny, hoping it will lead to the murderer.

After reading this book, it is my personal opinion that this is a good book in the wrong genre. The writing is very descriptive, and undeniably has no lack of similes that fully conveys the general feel and vibe of the south. For the mystery itself, however, there was a noticeable lack of foreshadowing, especially leading to the end of the book. Since Lizbeth assumes that whoever has the penny will at the very least be related to the murderer, she spends most of the book doing that, sometimes with very little regards for morale values. Most of the book seemed to lead to a certain set of characters as possible perpetrators, but towards the end of the book, it seemed the mystery was solved through pure luck and coincidence, with no foreshadowing of how it ended, and with little to no development of the character of the murderer.

I believe that this book is more fit to be just a realistic fiction, and would of been alot better off ditching the mystery title entirely. I found myself much more interested in her interactions with characters such as Mr. Jake then her obsession of searching people and their houses for pennies. Along with the fact that the book didn’t have too much foreshadowing in the first place, and that most of the story isn’t really the most essential to the mystery, I think this book would have been great as a realistic fiction.

Finally, before I end this review, I wanted to address my qualms with a scene early on in the book, without getting into too much details. I wouldn’t call this any major spoilers but if you want a full clean start to the book without knowing anything more than the beginning, feel free to skip this paragraph, pass go, and move straight to the conclusion.

In this particular scene, Bob Jr., the son of Aunt Alice’s friend, has been talking to Lizbeth a lot and has seemed to have taken a creepy interest in her. Lizbeth ignores this however, after learning the he is the owner of a large coin collection, and wonders if it contains the elusive wheat penny. That night she goes to sleep however, she is awoken by the creaking of the door in her room opening. It’s Bob Jr., and he tries to get closer and closer to her by faking being nice before jumping her and trying to touch her in inappropriate places. This was without a doubt an attempt at rape and Lizbeth was lucky to overpower him and make him run before he could try again, but I question the existence of this scene in the first place. I do see that this book is largely inspired by Harper Lee’s, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, which also addresses things such as rape and incest. Despite this, I personally don’t believe it should've been included in the book originally, as the only way this really advances the plot is that is gives an excuse for Bob Jr. to give his coin jar to Lizbeth as an attempt of reparations/bribery for what he did. Finally, this is a book for Young Adults, and while I think Young Adults can handle graphic scenes like this, I think it is unnecessary to include it in the first place, especially considering it wasn’t essential to the plot.

Mr. Samuel’s Penny, while admittedly not my favorite book, had excellent writing, very well developed characters, and really made me feel like I was in the deep south (If you don’t consider southern Georgia as the “deep south”). While the mystery in the book itself wasn’t the greatest, and I would have rather prefered to have it ditch the mystery entirely, I am still excited for the next entry in the Elizabeth Parrot Landers mystery series, and I recommend this book to those who aren’t all in it for the mysteries.