Alice-Miranda Shines Bright

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda Shines Bright is a mystery for 9 year olds in which a man goes missing from his sick bed and half the county starts hunting for treasure.

What happens

Alice-Miranda is tiny, relentlessly cheerful and certain that Winchesterfield-Downsfordvale is the best school in the world. Her friends are less sure about everything. Jacinta has a broken toe, missed the gymnastics championships she trained a year for, and is being unbearable about it. Sloane has become a surprisingly good footballer and keeps rubbing her dirty socks in Jacinta's face.

End-of-year concert auditions are coming. Alice-Miranda has learned a poem.

Outside the school gates, things are odder. The mayor is a vain man who wears his ceremonial robes to morning tea and makes the photographer take fifty shots of him. His new secretary is quietly capable and clearly has a past.

And in the village, Myrtle Parker's husband has been lying in a hospital bed in her sitting room for years. Then the bed is empty.

He turns up at his old friend Stan's cottage acting as though he was last there yesterday, with a plaster on his wrist, no memory of the years between, and six chocolate digestives inside him. He also has a plan. Something big he is on the verge of finding, if only Stan will fetch the torch.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The opening pages are the saddest in the book. A woman looks at a photograph and remembers a wet day, a log across a flooded stream, a crack, a fall, and then silence. Someone she loved did not come home. Her mother blamed her, and she eventually stopped writing to parents who never wrote back. It is handled quietly, but it is a child's death in a book that is otherwise very jolly. There is also an elderly man who has been unconscious for years, and a village out searching the woods for him after dark.

For most nine year olds that is the right side of sad. It gives the treasure hunt somebody to feel sorry for.

The pleasure of these books is the sheer number of threads. Schoolgirls, a mayor, a secretary, two old men and a donkey called Cynthia are all in motion before you are a third of the way in, and watching them collide is most of the fun. If your reader likes keeping several stories in their head at once, this is a good one.

It is a fair way into a long series and does not slow down to explain. The girls refer to a trip to Paris, a school in Spain, Sloane's Granny, Jacinta's difficult father. Your reader can follow the mystery without any of that, but they will meet a lot of names fast.

What to read next

For the trip they keep mentioning, Alice-Miranda in Paris is in the library too. Same girls, same pair of schools, loose on the Seine with a guidebook and a lot of opinions about the Eiffel Tower.