A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

Karen Romano Young's A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon is an odd and lovely mystery for 9 year olds about a small library in trouble and a statue with no head.

What happens

Pearl is nearly eleven and she practically lives at the Lancaster Avenue branch. Her mum runs the desk. Pearl checks the book drop, carries the manager his coffee and his cinnamon doughnut, and every morning she leans out of the third-floor window and sings one daft line across the garden.

One August morning she looks down before she sings and screams instead. The stone head of the poet in the garden has gone. There's a metal spindle sticking out of the neck and a fresh scrape down the side of the pedestal.

The police turn up, decide it was teenagers, and make jokes about where the head might have ended up. Pearl is not having any of that.

What makes the book unusual is how it's told. There are footnotes (proper ones, with the publisher and the year). There are little sidebars with a byline, and one of them stops to explain what an aside is, which is cheek of a high order in a book this full of them. And there's a narrator watching from the yew bushes who is very much not a person.

Six books came back through the drop overnight. Hardly anybody visits. Everyone knows the branch is next for closing, and the man across the road who sells everything for a dollar is openly delighted about it.

So the head is the mystery, but the library is what's actually at stake. The crew who turn up to save it are a children's librarian in a sari, a page who arrives late on a bicycle, a girl with long braids Pearl isn't sure she likes yet, and a set of raccoons who turn out to be a great deal more literate than raccoons ought to be.

It's set in New York and it sounds it, with a bodega on the corner and a Mister Softee truck. Nothing hard, just a different street to the one your reader knows.

If you've got a reader who would rather be in a library than almost anywhere else, this will suit them right down to the ground.

What to read next

The Lost Library would be a good one to follow it with. That one starts with a library nobody expected either, and it's told partly by a large orange cat with strong views about how badly books describe cats.