Girl, Missing

Sophie McKenzie's Girl, Missing is a gripping thriller for 11 year olds about a girl who types her own name into a website for missing children.

What happens

Lauren is fourteen. She was adopted at three, and she knows nothing at all about her life before that. A homework essay called "Who am I?" gets her thinking about the part of her life she can't remember.

Then, just messing about online, she finds a little American girl called Martha Lauren, with her eye colour and very nearly her birthday. The girl went missing less than two months before Lauren's own adoption.

Could it be her? Her best mate Jam asks the question she really doesn't want to hear. If she was taken, how did she end up in London by Christmas? And what did her mum and dad know?

What follows is a very determined girl on a mission. She sneaks into her mum's locked diaries in the attic, finds an old business card for an agency in Vermont, and lets Jam's hippy mum Carla hypnotise her. Then she talks the whole family into a half-term trip to America (with a secret plan of her own).

Lauren tells it herself, and she's brilliant company. She's moody and sharp about her family, especially her little brother Rory, but you can feel how lost she is underneath. One minute she's joking about Mum's tidy trunks. The next she's lying awake, desperate to know who she really is. (And who hasn't wondered, at some point, where they came from?)

It's worth knowing this one sits at the older end of the shelf. Lauren is in Year Ten and there's some mild swearing. Early on she mentions, quite casually, that some missing children are murdered. And the whole story turns on the idea of a child being stolen from her family.

For a child who worries about strangers or being taken, it might be too close to home. A confident reader who loves a page-turner will race through it.

What to read next

If they'd like another London mystery where the kids do the detective work, try The London Eye Mystery. Ted and Kat watch their cousin Salim board the Eye, and he never gets off.