Rose Rita Pottinger is dreading summer. With her best friend, Lewis Barnavelt away at Boy Scout camp, vacation threatens to be altogether boring. But when Mrs. Zimmermann, Lewis's next door neighbor and a genuine witch receives a strange deathbed letter from an eccentric uncle, unexpected thing start to happen.

I very much enjoyed the previous two books in this series, which chronicled the magical adventures of Lewis Barnavelt, but we get a bit of a change of pace with this third novel in the series. Bellairs shifts focus to put Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmerman in the spotlight for their very own magical escapade while Lewis is away at summer camp. The story begins when Mrs. Zimmerman inherits the estate of her crazy old cousin, which seems harmless enough until we add a magical ring into the mix. Mrs. Zummerman is, of course, a logical sceptic, even as a trained magician, so she assumes that the ring is another of her cousin's made up stories, but this proves to almost be her downfall as her childhood rival gets a hold of the ring and turns it against her. Bellairs has never shied away from having truely frightening and realistic villains, but Gert Bigger is a keen example of how jealousy and vindictiveness can make a person go bad. At the crux of the story Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmerman are in real danger and it seems like Gert will go through with her plans to kill them both, but thankfully her own greed and the tricky way that magic works ends up being her undoing and our protagonists escape unharmed. Will we ever know if the magic ring really belonged to King Solomon? Probably not, but it is definitely for the best that Mrs. Zimmerman melted it down and got rid of it for good, as the spirit in the ring was clearly a negative influence on its wearer. ( )

I feel for Rosa Rita! But she comes out of it ok, sort of. The last book in this series written entirely by Bellairs, so I get to stop here. ( )

Rose Rita's best friend, Lewis, is off to summer camp and she's left facing an entire summer of dullness and worry about starting junior high in the fall. But then Mrs. Zimmerman - a good friend who also happens to be a witch - invites her to tag along on a road trip through the Upper Peninsula and things start to look up. Mrs. Zimmerman's trip is brought on by a letter from her recently-deceased acquaintance, who has left her his farm and a particular magic ring, which ends up causing all sorts of trouble for both her and Rose Rita, including some hairy encounters with a nasty old witch, who also wants the ring and has it out for Mrs. Zimmerman.
I love Bellairs' books - great characters, fun stories, and just enough of the scary stuff to be creepy but not enough to keep a 10-year-old up at night. Perfect for bedtime reading with Charlie. ( )

John Bellairs third book in the House with the Clock in Its Walls series, The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring, focuses on Rose Rita, Lewis' best friend, and Mrs. Zimmerman, Uncle Jonathan's best friend. Bellairs was innovative for his time because he made the best friends for each of the males from the original book female, but he went even further with this third book by barely even mentioning the series protagonist, Lewis, instead focusing on issues facing girls and women of post World War II America. The book begins with Rose Rita upset because she cannot go to the Boy Scout camp that Lewis is going to for the summer. Labeled a "tom boy," Rose Rita likes to do activities that, at the time, were believed only to attract boys, so she resents having to go to Girl Scout camp instead. Until Mrs. Zimmerman helps her see the situation from Lewis' point of view: "He wants to learn how to tie knots and paddle canoes and hike through the wilderness, and he wants to come back and tell you so you'll think he's a real boy and like him even more than you do" (11). Lewis, after all, doesn't have Rose Rita's self-confidence or skills, so she finally understands that he wants to live up to her abilities--a shocking revelation for 1967!

Mrs. Zimmerman invites Rose Rita to go with her to visit a farm up-state, which she recently inherited from an old friend, luring her with the promise of determining if an old ring the friend had has magical abilities. Rose Rita's growing sense for magic, though, becomes apparent as the story progresses. Once they discover the ring has been stolen, and proceed to explore another part of the state, Rose Rita begins to sense a malevolent presence. Mrs. Zimmerman dismisses her concerns at first, but then, after finding a photograph of her and her deceased husband at a shop in a small town where Mrs. Zimmerman had never been before, the older woman begins to take Rose Rita's concerns more seriously, realizing that someone is attempting to curse her.

The strength of the book comes from the believable way in which Bellairs has Rose Rita work out what she can and cannot do about Mrs. Zimmerman's disappearance as a seventh grade girl in a strange place. Some writers would have been tempted to have the girl suddenly be able to do magic; instead, Bellairs has her use her wits.

While not quite as magically oriented as the first two books in the series, The Letter is an excellent examination of negative issues facing girls and women in post-War America--with the biggest challenge being seen as mere females, with both proving that gender does not determine capabilities.