Alice-Miranda Keeps the Beat

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda Keeps the Beat is a mystery for 9 year olds with a village fire, a brand new teacher and a girl who can't stop drumming her fingers.

What happens

Alice-Miranda has a secret. Two afternoons a week she sneaks off to a teacher nobody knows about, and she won't say a word until she's got something worth showing. In the meantime she taps out rhythms on every desk she sits at. Mrs Clinch is NOT impressed.

Then, walking home from a barbecue, the girls spot a plume of black smoke over the village. It's Fattoush, the Abboud family's restaurant, and the family live upstairs.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The fire comes early and it's properly frightening. A little girl screams at an upstairs window, twin babies are asleep in the attic and their dad is carried out with bad burns (he ends up in intensive care). For a few awful pages everyone thinks the eldest daughter is still inside when the roof caves in.

Alice-Miranda, Millie and Jacinta go into the burning flat themselves rather than wait for the fire brigade. It's very brave, and probably worth a little chat about NOT copying it. If your reader is frightened of fires, or has been through one, this opening could be a lot. A child who loves a daring rescue will be gripped.

After that the book settles into what this series does best, lots of threads at once. To help the family, the friends decide to put on a music festival, and not everyone in the village thinks it's a good idea.

Over at school there's a new English teacher, Miss Crowley, who'd love to take on the school choir. Miss Reedy, who's running the school for now, is very prickly about that. Miss Crowley's first supper with the other staff is so frosty you could skate on it.

That's one of the real treats here. Mr Pratt privately thinks Mr Plumpton is hopeless, and Miss Reedy grills the new arrival about her favourite books. Who doesn't love seeing the grown-ups behave badly for once?

There's family stuff too. Jacinta's dad, who she hasn't heard from in ages, rings out of the blue and wants to visit. And the girls are older now, so there's a little bit of boyfriend talk, all kept very light.

It's the eighteenth Alice-Miranda book and it doesn't stop to explain who anyone is. If your reader hasn't met this crowd yet, the early books are the place to start.

What to read next

If it's the singing they're keen on, Alice-Miranda in Paris has the Winchester-Fayle Singers abroad for Fashion Week, while somebody helps themselves to a designer's most precious cloth.