Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring

Angela Cervantes's Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring is a proper detective story for 10 year olds about a girl who doesn't want to be in Mexico at all.

What happens

Paloma Marquez has lost her summer. Her mum won a four-week fellowship in Mexico City, so Paloma is going too, whether she likes it or not.

She has opinions about this. The Spanish she picks up first is "I don't want", "I can't" and "I don't like it". Her mum notices.

Her dad was born in Mexico City. He died when she was three, and Paloma has no memories of her own, only the ones her mum hands her, written on note cards and kept in a purple box with butterflies on it.

Then a boy slips her a folded note. A great injustice has happened at Casa Azul. Tell no one. It's a matter of life and death.

The injustice turns out to be a ring. Frida Kahlo designed it as a birthday present to herself, with emeralds and sapphires, and after she died in 1954 it vanished out of a locked room. Gael and Lizzie want Paloma to help them get it back before Frida's birthday comes round again.

Why her? She has been asking herself the same thing.

Half the fun is how much of a detective Paloma already believes she is. She has read every Lulu Pennywhistle mystery going, and she narrates her own life the same way, taking careful mental notes on a strange man's shoes and shirt in case she has to describe him to the police. (He's her mum's new colleague, come to collect them from the airport.)

She learns a country at the same pace you do. She doesn't speak Spanish, so words arrive one at a time and she writes them down. Same with the paintings. She stares at a self-portrait with a thorn necklace and decides an artist leaves clues in a picture exactly the way a suspect leaves them at a scene, and suddenly art isn't boring any more.

A couple of things a parent might like to know. Her father's death is background rather than something that happens in the story, but it comes up early and Paloma keeps returning to it, including a moment where she works out that he was killed by a car while stopping to help someone. There's also a boy at a party, some blushing and a kiss on the cheek, which delights some readers and mortifies others.

Paloma is twelve and in her first year of junior high.

What to read next

If your reader takes to her, Lety Out Loud is by the same author and runs the other way round. Lety came to Kansas from Mexico, she likes to take her time getting her words right in English, and the animal shelter she volunteers at needs somebody to write the profiles that find the dogs a home.