Alice-Miranda in Scotland

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda in Scotland is a mystery for 9 year olds about a leadership trip to Scotland that Alice-Miranda doesn't get picked for.

What happens

She's just moved up to the senior campus early, and she's ever so excited to hear back. (Millie has even been practising a Highland jig, just in case.)

Then the names are read out at dinner. Seven girls get a place, including Millie, Jacinta and Sloane. One of them is Chessie, the new girl, who's going thanks to a glowing letter Alice-Miranda wrote about her. Alice-Miranda's own name never comes.

She's lovely about it, of course. Everyone has to build their "disappointment muscles", she tells her friends. But sitting on her own in the empty dining room afterwards, she finds out what proper disappointment feels like.

It's quite something to watch the girl who's always cheering everyone else up need a bit of cheering herself. A few days later she has a good sob in the kitchen with Mrs Smith, then gets on with making scones. If your reader has ever been left out of something they REALLY wanted, they'll feel every bit of it.

Meanwhile your reader is a step ahead. In an office in Edinburgh a jumpy assistant called Davina is cramming letters into a shredder and fibbing to her boss that they've all been posted. Nobody at school has a clue.

Her boss is Barclay Ferguson, who runs the program and talks almost entirely in business jargon. Everything is "the cat's pyjamas" or "ducks in a row". When the girls arrive in Edinburgh he greets them in a room with tartan carpet and thistle wallpaper, next to a lady in a skirt covered in cats.

Familiar faces turn up from other schools too, including a boy from Barcelona and the girl who used to bully Chessie at her last school (Chessie is NOT pleased). There's a trip on Loch Ness still to come, and the scariest thing in Scotland may not be the monster.

It's very funny in places. The book opens with Alice-Miranda's naughty pony Bonaparte losing a race and then breaking wind in front of the headmistress, which should get a giggle.

This is the seventeenth Alice-Miranda book and the in-jokes come thick and fast. It's best enjoyed by a reader who already knows the gang, and a newcomer should really start with Alice-Miranda at School.

What to read next

If they'd like to see where the Queen's Colours began, go back to Alice-Miranda at Camp. It's the one where the whole school tries out the Queen's brand new award for the very first time.