PUBLISHER: Ballantine, 10/1970GENRE: Fiction/Suspense
SETTING: California, USA
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B-
FROM PUBLISHER: It’s the last week of summer. California’s golden sun shines hot on Malibu Beach. Film stars, the rich, the beautiful tan a sleeker brown. Cold Chardonnay frosts crystal goblets. The blue Pacific rolls up white sand.
In a to-die-for beach house curtains are drawn. Doors are locked. The five Moss children – age five to nine – stare at a huge television from morning until they fall asleep in front of the glowing screen. Where are their mother and father? Marty and Paula Moss are finishing his new film in Italy. And the babysitter? Isn’t she taking care of them? She was until three days ago when her body washed ashore. Drowned? Only the kids know. For reasons of their own, they’re not telling.
Day after day, sprawled in front of the television, shut in with their secret horror, the Moss kids fight off every adult invasion from the outside; be it cops, the FedEx man, postal people, curious neighbors, Marty Moss’ prying secretary, and a mysterious man who peers at them nightly through a rip in a beachside window curtain. Somehow they survive.
MY THOUGHTS: The title isn't quite right. It leads you to believe the children are up to no good and plotting bad things against people when in actuality the only thing they're "watching" is the t.v. This started out a little boring, with the siblings bickering all the time over what to watch on television. It got slightly interesting when they did the first bad thing. I'm not sure they realized what the end result would be at the time but when it came to light, they didn't seem to care one way or the other. A few times a child said something too mature, something that would be out of character for someone so young which made me think the authors hadn't been around children much. The ending is very unsatisfying; too tidy and perfect.
The only think I really didn't like in here is a certain male character. Aside from stealing items from inside the house, I don't think his actions were something that someone would really do. And he never tried to find out what happened to the maid.
Once in here, I think it was the youngest character, Marti, age four, she touched her crotch for no known reason and much later Cary, the boy on the cover with glasses and who's age is unknown, attempted to masturbate but stopped when he "went limp."
I don't like the newer e-book synopsis for this either as it's inaccurate and gives too much away; FedEx was never mentioned in the book, just a delivery person was, and in fact they weren't in existence when this was written, and the youngest child is four, not five. The original synopsis for this is too short, though, so I reluctantly used the newer one.
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