Mary Louise: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Mary Louise, credited to L. Frank Baum, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Mary Louise, by L. Frank Baum. Read by Sibella Denton. The Bluebird Books is a series of novels popular with teenage girls in the 1910s and 1920s. The series was begun by L. Frank Baum using his Edith Van Dyne pseudonym, then continued by at least three others, all using the same pseudonym. Baum wrote the first four books in the series, possibly with help from his son, Harry Neal Baum, on the third. The books are concerned with adolescent girl detectives— a concept Baum had experimented with earlier, in The Daring Twins (1911) and Phoebe Daring (1912). The Bluebird series began with Mary Louise, originally written as a tribute to Baum's favorite sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster. Baum's publisher, Reilly & Britton, rejected that manuscript, apparently judging the heroine too independent. Baum wrote a new version of the book; the original manuscript is lost. The title character is Mary Louise Burrows. In the first books of the series, she is a fifteen-year-old girl with unusual maturity (though the other girls in her boarding school find her somewhat priggish). She is suddenly confronted with the fact that her beloved grandfather is suspected of no less a crime than treason against the United States. With the help of old and new friends of Mary Louise … the truth is uncovered. The novel features a federal agent named John O'Gorman; he is assisted by his daughter Josie, a young woman he has himself trained to function as an investigator. (The Josie O'Gorman character, despite preceding Nancy Drew by more than a decade, is much less traditionally feminine.) (Summary from Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Mary Louise
• Author credits: L. Frank Baum
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 27
• Listed recording duration: 4:12:20

Catalogue topics

• teen/young adult
• mystery
• girl detectives
• bluebird series
• baum
• edith van dyne

Opening tracks: first 24 of 27

1. 00 - Publisher's Note — 2:03
2. 01 - Just an Argument — 7:50
3. 02 - Gran'pa Jim — 9:28
4. 03 - A Surprise — 7:21
5. 04 - Shifting Sands — 5:48
6. 05 - Official Investigation — 11:59
7. 06 - Under a Cloud — 10:44
8. 07 - The Escape — 9:16
9. 08 - A Friendly Foe — 12:07
10. 09 - Officer O'Gorman — 14:33
11. 10 - Rather Queer Indeed — 7:28
12. 11 - Mary Louise Meets Irene — 14:53
13. 12 - A Cheerful Comrade — 8:03
14. 13 - Bub Succumbs to Force — 13:48
15. 14 - A Call from Agatha Lord — 13:00
16. 15 - Bub's Hobby — 10:45
17. 16 - The Stolen Book — 4:08
18. 17 - The Hired Girl — 6:29
19. 18 - Mary Louise Grows Suspicious — 9:10
20. 19 - An Artful Confession — 11:42
21. 20 - Diamond Cut Diamond — 14:38
22. 21 - Bad News — 6:29
23. 22 - The Folks at Bigbee's — 8:10
24. 23 - A Kiss from Josie — 7:04

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.