Read Hardy Boys Clue Book 09 – Who Let the Frogs Out free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Franklin W Dixon's Who Let the Frogs Out is a muddy Hardy Boys mystery for 7 year olds about a fun run that gets stopped by a pit full of frogs.
It's spring break in Bayport. Joe is eight, Frank is nine, and the Mud Bud Run through the park is going to get them dirty from head to toe. How often does anyone tell you you're ALLOWED to jump in mud?
Not everybody's pleased about it. Daisy and her twin brothers think the runners will flatten their pizza topping garden. A boy from Frank's class needs that exact mud for his sculptures. And the owner of a dog spa is cross that his pack can't do their morning dash.
Then the whistle goes, the runners reach the pit, and it's hopping with frogs. Dozens of them! Nobody saw a single frog there overnight or when the park opened at seven.
Aunt Trudy grabs the coach's bullhorn and gets the whole run called off (for the frogs' sake, of course). So out comes the clue book.
This is what these books do really well. Frank and Joe write down who, what, where, when and why, and your reader works through the same questions with them. The timeline goes on the page. Suspects get added and crossed off. A shop receipt for exactly four frogs turns out to matter a lot.
It's very gentle. Nobody is in danger, and the biggest disaster is a pizzeria with frogs hopping between the customers' legs.
The jokes are silly in all the right ways. Their friend Chet thinks about food all the time. Joe shouts "Holy guacamole!" And the coach once had a pet frog called Larry.
Near the end the book stops and asks your reader to crack the case first, with four questions to try before they turn the page. If you've got a child who loves beating the detectives to it, that page is the best bit.
If they enjoy having a go at the case themselves, start from the beginning with the first Clue Book, The Video Game Bandit. Frank, Joe and their friends are setting up a big fund-raiser for their baseball team, and a brand-new games console is going up for auction.
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