Alice-Miranda in Paris

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda in Paris is a school trip with a robbery in it, for 9 year olds who like a puzzle alongside the sightseeing.

What happens

It opens nowhere near the children.

Christian Fontaine is a couturier finishing a collection in a workroom above the rooftops of Paris. The last gown is buttercup silk, a colour he hasn't touched in years because it was hers, and he still doesn't know where she went or why. There's one piece left to cut, a cape in the finest yarn in the world, one bolt of it worth more than his assistant earns in a year.

He opens the storeroom. The bolt isn't there. Neither are several others.

Nobody has been in. Which means somebody knew exactly which shelf to go to.

Then we're on the Seine with the Winchester-Fayle Singers, twenty children and eight adults, marched off the coach and straight into a very long walk by a headmistress with plans. They're in Paris because a choir dropped out of Fashion Week at the last minute and Mr Lipp knows somebody. Mr Trout is going to practise the organ at Notre Dame while everybody looks round.

The grown-ups are half the fun. Miss Reedy can't see a cathedral without firing facts at it. Miss Grimm mutters about Mr Trout's hand waving where she thinks nobody can hear.

And the girls talk the way girls actually talk. Jacinta has decided she'd like to be proposed to under the Eiffel Tower and is cross that the boys aren't paying attention. Two minutes later she and Sloane are having a proper scrap about whose mother is more embarrassing.

This one sits well into the series and it shows. Friendships have history, old enemies have been half forgiven, and the children arrive already knowing each other. Your reader can follow it cold, but they'll get a lot more out of it having read a couple first.

One thing that may need a word. Jacinta's parents are separating, and she talks about it plainly, worrying that her mother will get bored of the village and go looking for a new husband. It's a small thread rather than the subject of the book, but it's there and it's honest.

What to read next

If they'd like another city, Alice-Miranda In New York is in the library too. Skyscrapers, hot dog carts, a term at a school beside Central Park, and a family secret her father has just locked in a desk drawer.