Nancy Drew Clue Book 15 – The Great Goat Gaffe

Nancy Drew Clue Book 15 - The Great Goat Gaffe by Carolyn Keene is a gentle starter mystery for 8 year olds, set on a farm full of very small goats.

What happens

Nancy is a child in these ones, by the way, not the teenage detective you might remember. She, Bess and George are on their spring break, volunteering on Sweet Creams Farm and feeding pygmy goats out of bottles.

Over in the pen there's a goat yoga class going on. Grown-ups lie on mats while tiny goats wander over and climb on their backs.

Nancy has an idea. Baby goats are called kids. So why not a goat yoga class for human kids? She calls it Kids with Kids.

Then it all gets complicated. A local breakfast TV crew is coming to film the class. The yoga teacher, Nina Pickles, wants to use the slot to launch her new children's activewear range, is told that isn't what the programme wants, and flounces off.

On the walk home the girls hear bleating from somebody's back garden. There's a pygmy goat on a trampoline doing backflips and midair spins. That's Pogo, a bit of an online celebrity, with a brown star-shaped mark on his side.

You can feel the mystery assembling itself.

Nina is the funniest thing in it. She works a plug for her shop into every single pose, so the low lunge becomes a chance to mention her low prices.

The detective work is laid out properly for a newish reader. The suspects announce themselves. The motives are right there on the page. Nancy notices things and says so, and your reader gets a fair shot at working it out first.

If you've got a child who has started asking for mysteries but really doesn't want to be frightened, the scale here is spot on. Nobody's in peril. What's at stake is a farm's good name and a class that goes wrong on television.

One practical thing. This is the fifteenth of these and nothing in the opening chapters expects you to have read the other fourteen. Start wherever the cover appeals.

What to read next

The same three turn up at a three-day zoo camp in Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew 14 - Zoo Crew. They're making toys for the animals, earning junior zookeeper badges, and then the toys start going missing overnight.