Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew 40 – Butterfly Blues

Carolyn Keene's Butterfly Blues is a Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew mystery for 8 year olds about the one butterfly that was never supposed to be able to escape.

What happens

Nancy's class is off on a school trip to Flutter House, a new butterfly centre with a warm glass dome full of them. A butterfly lands on Nancy's shoulder, and Bess tells her to make a wish quick.

Then the star of the show arrives. A big blue morpho, all the way from South America and the only one they've got. He settles on the guide's shoulder, and a wedding planner in a tan trouser suit drops a butterfly net right over the poor man's head. She wants the morpho for a wedding on Saturday. She's told no.

That evening the local news comes on in Nancy's kitchen. The blue morpho is missing. "No butterfly has ever escaped Flutter House!"

Who'd take a butterfly? The Clue Crew have a few ideas. The wedding planner, obviously. Harper, the new girl, who loves butterflies so much she wears a different butterfly hair clip every day. And Peter, who ran for the bus clutching a paper bag he won't open.

The joy of this one is how much fun the girls have finding out. Bess invents a butterfly net that folds into her pocket. George has a tablet app that can name any butterfly you point it at. There's a nearly-netted wedding cake, a back-garden magic show and a giant caterpillar sleeping bag that gives everyone a fright.

Harper's story is a sweet one too. She's new, she wants friends, and she tries a slightly wobbly way of making them. If your reader has ever been the new one in class, they'll feel for her.

It's cheerful and completely unscary. It's number forty in the series, but your reader could happily start right here. There's a simple butterfly craft to make at the end, with tissue paper and a clothes peg.

Is it a spring book? Very much so. But butterflies work in any month.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the same three girls turn up in the Nancy Drew Clue Books too. In A Star Witness, George takes Nancy and Bess on a trip to the planetarium with her astronomy club, where something called the Starship 5000 is waiting for them.