I get nervous when asked about favorite books. The list is always too long to cover, so any answer is necessarily arbitrary. A further complication is that some are written by friends (even relatives!). If you mention them, is it blatant cronyism? If you don’t, is that one less Christmas card to open? One book I always thought I could mention with no repercussions was E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. People either smiled warmly and said, “I love that book,” or stared and said they never heard of it. (If anyone ever disagreed, I would have to walk away - this one’s a litmus test in my world.) But then I made the mistake of mentioning my passion for the children’s book I lovingly refer to as FTMUFOMBEF to Jon and Ruth Jordan. This is not a couple who can simply smile and exchange trite pleasantries, at least not when an opportunity to add to the pages of Crimespree is at stake. So they’ve asked me to document the reasons why I continue to tell everyone who will listen to read this book.

For those who don’t know the basics, Claudia Kincaid is an almost-twelve-year-old who desperately wants an adventure away from her adventureless family. Ideally, she’d leave her three little brothers in the wind, but she persuades her little brother Jamie to accompany her because Jamie, unlike Claudia, saves his money -- money they will need to make it to New York City. Claudia has chosen a place to run to that is “great and large and wonderful and free to all” -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once the Kincaid kids are settled in, they get entangled in a mystery about the museum’s newest acquisition, a marble statue called “Angel,” which may or may not be an early work of Michelangelo.

The Mixed-Up Files has the pacing of plot, sense of place, and character development that we all search for as grown-up readers. It has the kind of beginning, middle, and end that good mysteries need. The question at the center of the book is conceivable but suspenseful, accompanied by interpretable clues, and all of it comes together at the completion, just as it should be. And, also the way it should be, the puzzle is part of a larger story -- this one about a young girl’s search for self-identity and specialness in a place where she first hides to find anonymity.

The place is magical, and the author puts the place to good use for her purposes. Children can move in an out of the museum with books bags and music cases unnoticed, the rest of the world unaware that the make-do luggage contains pajamas and changes of clothes. At night, after closing, Claudia sits in lounges made for Marie Antoinette and sleeps in canopy beds made for lords and ladies. She and Jamie bathe in a gigantic fountain with bronze dolphins and say Sunday prayers beneath the stained glass of the Middle Ages room. Outside of their sanctuary, the kids have to prioritize funds as they learn that bus fare, laundromats, and Italian Ices eat through their savings in the city.

The characters are likeable, believable, and quite unlike the smarmy kids you see in most kids’ books. Jamie is a cheapskate wiseacre who hates school and cheats at cards. Claudia is an organized list-maker who’s obsessed with grammar, but she’s also a runaway who dreams of either living in India or at least dressing as if she did. And standing over us throughout the book is our narrator, the wealthy and persnickety Mrs. Frankweiler, whose mixed-up files contain the mystery’s clever -- in fact, downright cute -- resolution.

My mother found this book for me when I was a young reader obsessed with mysteries. I read it over and over, losing myself in the Metropolitan Museum of Art until the last satisfying pages when the clues fell together and Claudia had completed her inner journey. When my family went to New York City for a middle school vacation, I insisted on roaming the rooms alone and then imagined life there as a hideaway. And just last week, as I read the book once again, I found myself grilling my future husband -- who, how’s this for coincidence?, works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- about how the details stack up to reality more than thirty-five years later.

This is a book that stays with you. And that, Ruth and Jon Jordan, is why I still love it.