Tom Swift Inventors’ Academy 3 – Restricted Access

Victor Appleton's Tom Swift Inventors' Academy 3 - Restricted Access is a gadget-packed school adventure for 9 year olds about a boy who just wants to be treated like everyone else.

What happens

That's tricky when your dad founded the school and it's named after you. Tom goes to the Swift Academy of Science and Technology. Drones fly down the corridors and nobody blinks. What Tom hates is special treatment.

So he's not thrilled when his dad's old friend, a journalist, wants to write a story about the school through Tom's eyes. Tom tries sneaking past him after school. It doesn't work. The compromise is worse. The journalist's ten-year-old son Rowan will follow Tom around instead, with a tiny camera clipped to his T-shirt.

And Rowan is coming to the big event too. The whole seventh grade is spending the night in Swift Enterprises, Tom's dad's company, with the run of its labs and machines. The building blocks every phone signal. And at some point that night the whole building goes into quarantine, with nobody able to get out.

Tom's friends are a big part of the fun. Sam has built self-balancing skates with a gyroscope in each one. Noah is working on an app that maps a building as you walk it. Amy has smuggled a tiny Chihuahua called Otis into algebra inside her jumper (his growling gets blamed on her stomach). She wants to print him a little cart, because his back legs don't work.

It's told by Tom himself, and he's good company. He's brilliant at science and hopeless at planning. He built a trebuchet to fling his dirty washing into the laundry basket and hit his dad instead. Only one sock made it!

Look out for the jokes hiding in plain sight too. Tom keeps saying things "swimmingly" or "observantly", little puns that are easy to miss the first time. And the chapter titles rhyme. The first one is The Interrogation Frustration.

If you've got a reader who likes their mysteries with a side of invention and doesn't want anything too dark, this is a good fit. The worst thing in the opening chapters is Tom landing on his bottom on a running track.

What to read next

If they haven't met this gang yet, The Drone Pursuit is where the series starts. Tom and Noah fly a home-made virtual reality drone through the school corridors before first bell.