Nancy Drew Clue Book 11 – The Tortoise and the Scare

The Tortoise and the Scare is a Nancy Drew mystery for 8 year olds, and it starts with the best school trip of the year.

What happens

Nancy, Bess and George know their exotic animals. The class has been studying them for weeks. Hedgehogs. Scarlet macaws. A three-toed sloth that swims. Then the class arrives at the River Heights Wildlife Center and the animal everyone came to see, a tortoise called Rainbow, is not in her enclosure.

Rainbow was Belinda's very first rescue and Belinda founded the whole place. She adores that tortoise. There are no gaps in the habitat either, so Rainbow did not wander off on her own.

Which means somebody took her.

What I really like here is how ordinary the detective work is. Nancy gets out her clue book and writes things down. Two mums describe the same suspicious boy and then contradict each other completely (white T-shirt or stripes? and how old is a boy anyway, five or fifteen?). There is a footprint in the sand made by a trainer, and every single person who works at the centre wears boots.

Then Nancy spots Rainbow's medicine still sitting in the fridge, twice a day on the label, untouched. Your reader gets a lovely few seconds to work out what that rules out before the girls say it out loud.

The chapters are short and it really moves. Bess is the one who assumes the worst, George is the one who would quite happily wear a python round her neck, and the two of them winding each other up is half the fun.

Nothing in it is frightening. An animal goes missing, somebody says out loud that she might be sold on, and that worry sits there for a while without anyone being hurt or in any danger. If your reader gets upset when an animal is in trouble in a story, this is about as gentle as that plot ever gets.

It is American, so the trip is to a wildlife center and the suspect wears high-top sneakers. Nothing your reader will trip over.

One small thing. The story keeps a few threads going at once, the twins and the footprint and the medicine, so it rewards a reader who can hold more than one idea in their head. If they are still very new to chapter books, read the first two together and see how they get on.

What to read next

If clues lined up and compared is the bit they love, there are plenty more of these. The Great Goat Gaffe puts Nancy back among animals, this time at a goat farm where one very small goat goes completely berserk in the middle of a yoga class.