Alice-Miranda Shows the Way

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda Shows the Way is a boarding school story for 9 year olds with a village show, a famous horse race and something very wrong going on in the stables.

What happens

It opens away from the school altogether. Evelyn Pepper, a racehorse trainer with one trophy still missing from her cabinet, walks out before dawn to see her black stallion Rockstar and talk to him about the Queen's Cup. She goes into the tack room and flicks the light switch. Nothing happens.

Then a thud, a horse screaming, and Evelyn is on the floor.

Back at Winchesterfield-Downsfordvale, Miss Grimm is announcing a school holiday for the Winchesterfield Show, with the Queen's Cup Carnival at the end of it. Everyone is to enter as many events as possible. Alice-Miranda and Millie start plotting the pairs events. Jacinta only wants the carnival rides.

And it's Alice-Miranda's birthday, which the entire dining room has been keeping quiet about all through breakfast.

If you haven't met her before, Alice-Miranda Highton-Smith-Kennington-Jones is tiny, relentlessly cheerful and completely impossible to put off. She talked her own parents into letting her start boarding school a year early. Here she's the one who invites the girl nobody else wants to sit with to come and sit down.

That girl is Sloane, and she's the reason this one lands better after a few others. Sloane behaved horribly in earlier books, helped her mother try to bring the boys' school to its knees, and is now back at Winchesterfield-Downsfordvale on trial for the term. The book takes her second chance seriously. It means much more if you saw the damage.

Reading it is comfortable in the very best sense. Masses of characters, lots of small school business, a headmistress whose left eyebrow arches menacingly, and a mystery ticking away underneath all of it. Australian author, thoroughly English school.

If your reader likes a heroine who is kind on purpose rather than by accident, this will suit them down to the ground. If they're after a real edge or a proper threat, it's gentler than the opening makes it look.

That opening is the one bit to know about. A woman is hurt in the dark and left lying there, and it's a while before you find out how she is. Nothing about it is described in detail.

What to read next

New readers really are better off starting at the beginning. The very first Alice-Miranda book has her arriving at seven and a quarter, waving off two sobbing parents, and noticing within minutes that there are no flowers in the gardens and no headmistress anywhere to be found.