Read Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Stuart Gibbs's Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation is a breathless spy adventure for 10 year olds about a girl who's cleverer than the whole CIA.
It starts in 1955, on the night Albert Einstein dies. His last words are a muddled warning in German. Then his oldest friend races in and starts burning every paper in his study, just as men with guns kick the door down.
Fast forward to today. The CIA has been hunting for Einstein's secret ever since, and one agent has a very odd idea. If you want to find something a genius hid, why not send a genius after it?
That genius is Charlie Thorne. She's twelve. She's already at university, she speaks at least twelve languages and she aced a physics exam her professor rigged so she'd fail (then marked his mistake "Sloppy work").
She's also broken the law in a pretty spectacular way. Which is exactly how the CIA plans to make her help.
The trouble is catching her first! Charlie is skiing off a fifty-foot cliff when the agents turn up, doing a backflip she's already worked out on the chairlift. She spots them in seconds. What follows is a chase through the trees, a ski pole wedged between two tree trunks and a truck borrowed (sort of) from a very rude pool man.
Reading it is like watching an action film with the maths switched on. When Charlie is scared, the numbers come to her and calm her down. You even get a quick lesson in why two people in a class of thirty probably share a birthday.
She's cheeky and fearless. But she also can't bring herself to run anyone over, even the agent standing in her way, and that tells you a lot about her.
Einstein's death is right there in the first few pages, and an old man gets knocked out from behind. Charlie fights a grown man who shoves her, bending his fingers back before tipping him into a hot tub. There's some name-calling too.
None of it is gory. A child who's upset by deathbeds or fights might want to wait a while. If your reader loves heists, gadgets and a heroine who's always three steps ahead, they'll be hooked.
If they'd like another twelve-year-old in trouble with the law until a very strange grown-up walks in, try City Spies. Sara hacked New York's juvenile justice computers, and the man who turns up at court claiming to be her lawyer has three passports in his briefcase.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
