Alice-Miranda to the Rescue

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda to the Rescue is a boarding school mystery for 9 year olds that begins with a science lesson and a very large amount of red paint.

What happens

Term has only just started. Mr Plumpton has proposed to Miss Reedy, the wedding is weeks away, and it is all anyone can talk about.

Then Mr Plumpton hands out tapers and asks seven girls to light seven hydrogen balloons at once. They go off together. Red dye rains down, the sprinklers come on, and the whole class ends up looking like a crime scene.

Somebody filled those balloons on purpose. Miss Grimm wants to know who, and she is quite prepared to cancel lunch until somebody owns up.

That is when Caprice stands up and points at Millie.

Millie does have paint under her fingernails. She can explain it, sort of, and her explanation only makes her sound more like a liar. Watching a girl get cornered over something she genuinely didn't do is uncomfortable in the best way.

Two more stories run alongside. Down in the village, Myrtle Parker carries a home-made cake round to the new neighbours and discovers they breed Afghan hounds and have built them an insulated, double-glazed, soundproofed doghouse. Myrtle is at her most Myrtle about this.

And a curly caramel puppy pushes his paw against a wire door in a filthy shed, squeezes out, and runs.

The book swaps between the school, the village and a farmhouse where a boy called Daniel is having a much harder year than he lets on. Your reader will be a chapter ahead of the characters for a lot of it, which is a lovely feeling when you're nine.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The first two pages sit inside a puppy farm. Six brothers and sisters tangled up to keep warm, a mother with flea-bitten skin, bare concrete, and two lads who feed the dogs and fight each other while they do it. One kick lands.

There is sadness at the farmhouse too. Becca uses a wheelchair after the accident that killed her husband, and Daniel disappears on long runs because he thinks it was his fault. Both of those arrive in the opening chapters, so you'll know quickly whether it suits your reader.

For a child who loves animals and can take a story that starts badly for them, it's a strong hook. For one who finds neglected dogs hard going, this may not be the one.

What to read next

If your reader takes to Alice-Miranda and wonders how she ended up somewhere like that, try where Alice-Miranda first arrives at the school. She is seven and a quarter, she has telephoned to enrol herself, and the headmistress won't come out of her study to meet her.