Ada Lace and the Suspicious Artist

Emily Calandrelli's Ada Lace and the Suspicious Artist is a clever little mystery for 6 year olds about a famous painter who might be a copycat.

What happens

Ada's best friend Nina is SO excited. Her favourite artist in the whole world, Guy Miroir, is having a show at Ada's mum's gallery. Nina has made him a scarf. Several scarves, actually (Ada said every single one was lovely).

Ada is less excited. She's spent all day trying to code a website for Nina's art and it's beyond her. And her mum is frazzled by Mr Miroir's demands. He won't even stay in a city hotel.

Then Nina finally meets her hero. He shouts at a photographer, charms the mayor and turns his back on Nina's present without even looking at it. Poor Nina! It's the kind of snub we've probably all had from someone we looked up to.

So Ada does what Ada does best. She notices things. At the big opening, one painting looks oddly familiar. A LOT like something already in Nina's online portfolio. Could that just be coincidence? Ada, Nina and their friend Tycho set out to find out.

The friendship is the heart of it. Ada gets fed up with Nina, then goes round to get her out of bed when she's crushed. Nina is dramatic and generous and talks about her "creative energies" a lot. They're very different and it really works.

The science is woven in without feeling like a lesson. Ada is colour-blind, which matters when her friend keeps going on about shades of red. Tycho uses a wheelchair and has built a hand-pulled lift so he can come and go on his own. Tycho is Mr Peebles's nephew and a coding whizz, and shows Ada you don't always have to build everything from scratch.

If you've got a reader who likes a mystery where the clues are things you could check yourself, this is a good one. It's not a scary mystery. It's a grown-up behaving badly and some kids who won't let it go.

What to read next

If this is their first Ada book, Ada Lace, on the Case is where she's just moved to San Francisco. She's got a cast on her leg after a bungee jump that went wrong, and she's already bored of being stuck indoors.