Charlie Thorne and the Curse of Cleopatra

Stuart Gibbs's Charlie Thorne and the Curse of Cleopatra is a globe-trotting adventure for 10 year olds about a thirteen-year-old genius who breaks into a party to copy an ancient secret.

What happens

Charlie spends her thirteenth birthday committing a crime. Only a small one! She slips into a rich young man's penthouse in Giza disguised as a caterer, carrying a tray of canapés. Then she changes into a party dress in the bathroom, picks a lock with a hairpin and starts taking a rubbing of an old stone tablet.

The tablet is cracked and crumbling and its Latin is half worn away. Its owner thinks it's just decoration. Charlie knows it points the way to a treasure Cleopatra hid two thousand years ago.

And then the door opens...

Meanwhile, at CIA headquarters, the director is clearing her desk and her smarmy replacement is reading Charlie's file. It's quite a file. She speaks at least fourteen languages, she has a photographic memory and she's carrying a world-changing equation of Einstein's around in her head. Plenty of spies would like a word.

This isn't Charlie's first adventure, but that CIA briefing fills in what came before, so a new reader can jump straight in.

It reads like an action film. The story cuts from Charlie in Giza to the grown-ups at the CIA who want her back. There's a lot of real history folded in too (Alexandria, Rome, why Octavian wore a floppy hat) without it ever feeling like a lesson.

Charlie is brilliant, a bit prickly and very alone, because she's had to cut off all her friends. It's hard not to root for her.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Cleopatra's death is right there in the opening pages. Trapped by her enemy, she has her treasure store set alight and drinks poison, while her two servants stay with her to the end. It isn't gory, but it's described plainly.

A child who finds death upsetting might prefer to skip ahead to chapter one. If your reader already loves history, heists and a heroine who's cleverer than every adult in the room, this should be a big hit.

What to read next

For another child genius who runs rings round the grown-ups, try Artemis Fowl. He's twelve, pale from too long at his computer and chasing a mysterious Book across the world with an enormous, heavily armed butler called Butler.