This didn’t have the most complex plot, and it was relatively predictable. However, its charm was pretty compelling. I liked the gentle moral guidelines, and the ending suited me well. The story flowed smoothly without getting boring, and I felt like all of the characters grabbed me in appropriate ways. I appreciate when authors give a very casual push in how to treat people ethically. If people are cruel to you, you get to be cruel to them back, right?! ... Well... hmm.
The book laid this out with the naivety of two children trying to help their uncle and figure out the family history. It worked for me. ( )

One of five Newbery Honor Books for 1922, the year the award was first established, The Windy Hill is the story of fifteen-year-old Oliver Peyton, who, together with his younger sister Janet, comes to stay with his Cousin Jasper at his home in Medford Valley. Resentful at Cousin Jasper's unprecedented inattention, Oliver is at first inclined to rebel, even setting in motion a short-lived runaway scheme. But a fortuitous meeting with the amiable "Beeman" and his daughter Polly, on the eponymous Windy Hill overlooking Medford Valley, gives Oliver's thoughts a new turn, and he decides to stay. As events unfold, the Peyton children become more and more puzzled by the behavior of the hostile Anthony Crawford, another cousin of whom they had never heard. Who is this unpleasant man, and what strange hold does he have over Cousin Jasper? Could the answer lie in the Beeman's stories about the history of the valley, and their family?

Read online, through Project Gutenberg, The Windy Hill is a fairly pleasant story, although I would hesitate to describe it as a "mystery." I was able to guess the true identity of the "Beeman" and Polly from Oliver's first encounter with them, and although the specific nature of Anthony Crawford's dispute with his cousins had yet to be revealed, it wasn't difficult to intuit the general nature of the argument. Although I am not sorry to have read it, I found nothing remarkable in it, and am at something of a loss to understand it being awarded an honorable mention for the first Newbery Medal. I can't help contrasting it with another Honor Book from 1922, the intensely involving Cedric the Forester, and it suffers from the comparison. All in all, I would recommend The Windy Hill only to those who, like me, are attempting to read the entire Newbery oeuvre. ( )

Strongly moral and gung-ho for capitalism with individual restraint: unsurprising early Newbery fodder. It features the only land transaction between a native American and an immigrant one that was mutually understood, agreed upon, kept to, and, get this, financially honest, that I have ever come across in fact or fiction. Propaganda, ahoy!