Alice-Miranda In New York

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda In New York is a boarding school story for 9 year olds with a proper mystery ticking away underneath it.

What happens

It opens with a man called Hugh reading a letter in his office. It was his father's. He doesn't understand it, the solicitor has no answers, and whatever it says is troubling enough that he folds it up, puts it at the very back of a drawer and locks it.

Then we're in a dormitory, where the real business of the book is going on. Alice-Miranda is packing, and her friends are taking it badly.

Jacinta, who used to be the school's second best tantrum thrower, wants to know why she has to go at all. Millie wants to know who is going to ride out with her now. (Nobody is volunteering to take Bonaparte, Alice-Miranda's pony, who has opinions.)

Mrs Howard the housemistress arrives to pack for her, folds a pink cardigan with military precision, and then insists the tears are hayfever and the room needs dusting. It is spotless. Everybody lets her have it.

Alice-Miranda is off to New York for a month because her mother's family own a famous department store on Fifth Avenue, which has been shut for six months for a refurbishment and is about to reopen.

Except the refurbishment keeps going wrong. Deliveries turn up in Chicago instead. Tradesmen who were booked don't arrive. The city inspectors are being difficult over nothing. Her mother says out loud that she can't help thinking there is something strange going on over there.

And her father, who is normally very straightforward, has quietly decided to spend the trip doing a bit of research.

The charm of these books is Alice-Miranda herself. She is tiny, ferociously polite, and completely unembarrassed about hugging people, and she goes through life assuming everyone will be lovely to her, which means they mostly are. It's funny rather than sickly because everyone around her is a bit ridiculous.

A couple of practical things. This is a later book in a long series, so a first-time reader will meet friendships and family business that were settled earlier, and it does spoil a few of those. It stands up fine on its own but your reader may prefer to go back.

The other is the world. There are department store empires, film star uncles and a family friend called Aunty Gee who is also the Queen. Some children absolutely love all that. Some find it a bit much.

What to read next

If the New York trip goes down well, they can pack again for Alice-Miranda in Paris. Same girl, same friends, and a Paris fashion designer with a locked-up sadness of his own that the grown-ups think nobody has noticed.