When we meet Sara, the protagonist of Deetjen’s Closet: A Quest for Magic, she’s just climbing down from the “Reading Tree,” a big oak near her family’s new home in Edna. Then she gets smacked in the face with a pinecone thrown by one of her jerky new classmates.
“Look at the freak in the tree. Whatcha doin’, loser?”
Welcome to Sara’s world, where she’s having a tough time fitting into a new town and a new school. To make matters worse, the fourth grader deeply believes in magic, and she’s worried she’ll be made fun of if anyone finds out.
The book, published by Morro Bay’s Coalesce Press in 2023, is now followed by The Old Secret at Hotel Oregon, released in June—another installment in what author Debbie Noble Black hopes to be an ongoing series for readers 8 and older.
Both books follow Sara as she traverses the pitfalls of preadolescence and goes on travel adventures to Big Sur’s Deetjen’s Inn with her mother in the first book and to McMinnville, Oregon, and to McMenamins’ Hotel Oregon in the second book with her whole family: mom, stepdad, and older brother, Daniel.
I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but in the first book, Sara discovers a talking blue Army coat named Silas in the closet of their room at Deetjen’s Inn, and he becomes the conduit for Sara to talk to other clothing and travel items that have been stored in the closet and which tell her wondrous historical stories about the people who once owned them.
“One of the reasons I do this is to provide an interest in history,” Black explained over tea on the patio of Linnaea’s Café. “I’m a history geek, and that started when I was in fourth grade and our teacher read to us chapters of the book Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone. Big tome, like almost 600 pages, and so he read in his big booming baritone voice, and I was hooked.”
The neat trick Black manages is to impart fascinating history without it feeling didactic. We learn, for instance, the story of Levi Strauss & Co. The copper-riveted jeans were actually invented by tailor Jacob Davis. Strauss was a merchant who put up the $68 to secure a patent for the design. Readers learn about Julia Morgan—the architect behind Hearst Castle; the Spruce Goose—Howard Hughes’ massive wood-constructed plane; the humongous fungus—the largest living thing in the world; and a whole lot more.
“Since California history comes into local kids’ curriculum in fourth grade, my goal is to whet their appetite about history but in a fun way,” Black said, noting that she’s the youngest of three girls, and every time she learned something interesting in school and relayed it to her family over dinner, her sisters would dismiss it as old news.
“My two sisters would go, ‘Oh, yeah, we learned that years ago.'”
Black was determined to unearth history that wasn’t necessarily taught in school.
“I set out to do research on things that are very unique, so that when the reader takes that home to the dinner table, it’s gonna be, ‘Wow!'” she said. “I also have to recognize that I need to write things that are interesting to that age group without boring the socks off of them.”
With each book visiting a special location, she notes that they’re also like “Rick Steves travel books for kids.”
Sara’s an engaging and likable protagonist who for the most part models laudable behavior. In the first chapter of Hotel Oregon, we immediately understand she’s empathetic, moral, earnest, and responsible when on the way to school during a rainstorm she risks being late to stop and save stranded earthworms on the sidewalk, moving them onto a nearby lawn. Black said Sara’s character evolved during the writing process.
“I’m not the kind of writer who sets out with the whole character study. I’m more of a—like they say—’pantser,’ you know? I get in there and write by the seat of my pants,” Black quipped. “I wanted [a protagonist] in that age group, a female protagonist because that’s what I know best having been that little girl at one point. I wanted to be honest about how kids seemed to be in today’s world. They’re earnest, and they’re still relatively fresh and innocent, and yet the world is growing them up pretty quickly. And so the struggle is, ‘Who am I? How do I fit into this world?’
“Trying to gain their own agency hits right about that middle grade period of 9 to 12, so I’m homing in on that. So yes, she is empathic and sensitive and caring, but she’s also struggling with taking care of herself and who she is and trying to do the right thing. She doesn’t always do the right thing. It’s not like she’s a pure goody two-shoes. She’s more of a full character.”
Deetjen’s Closet, the book Black specifically targeted for SLO County kids, won first place in the Gertrude Warner International Middle Grade Fiction Awards. Hotel Oregon raised the stakes for Sara as she’s forced to rely on her dismissive brother to succeed. This is kid stuff with a heart, and both books are fun reads for anyone.
Black shared a photo of a little boy standing by three small headstones in the Cayucos-Morro Bay Cemetery, which Black wrote about in Deetjen’s Closet.
“At the end of the book, I enticed kids to see if they can find those. That’s a student at Hawthorne Elementary in San Luis,” Black explained, “and two fourth-grade classes have the books and are reading them. This boy asked his parents to go take him out to see if he could find it. I don’t know if you noticed, but there’re little toys in between the headstones. Those showed up around a month after Deetjen’s was published back in 2023. Some little kids found those headstones and have been leaving little toys for those three deceased children. This is why I do it.” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Aug 14-24, 2025.