Nate the Great and the Boring Beach Bag

Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great and the Boring Beach Bag is a seaside detective story for 6 year olds about a very plain blue bag that goes missing.

What happens

Nate the Great is swimming in the sea with his dog, Sludge, when Oliver swims up behind him. Oliver is always behind him. Oliver is a pest.

Oliver's beach bag has gone. His clothes were in it, and his shoes, and a seashell he was fond of. Only the beach ball is still where he left it. So Nate takes the case (because Oliver needs clothes).

Nate is such a funny narrator. He talks in short, serious sentences like a grown-up detective and always calls himself "I, Nate the Great". He writes a note to his mother on soggy paper and sends Sludge home with it. He never stops thinking about pancakes.

The beach gives him plenty of clues and suspects. Rosamond is running a restaurant that sells sandwiches made of actual sand. Annie's dog Fang is tied to a post and eating it. And the big blue bump bobbing in the water turns out to be Esmeralda's head!

What's lovely is that the clues are all there for your reader to spot. Why isn't the sand pressed down next to the beach ball? Which way were Annie and Fang running? Children can try to crack it before Nate does, and the answer is clever but fair.

The whole case is short and easy to follow, which makes it great for newly independent readers. The sentences are simple and the jokes are dry, so grown-ups reading aloud will get a smile too.

After the story there are some beach extras, including how to make a kite, ice pops and star-shaped sandwiches. That could lead to a very nice afternoon.

What to read next

If they'd like to go back to the beginning, the very first Nate the Great book has him hunting for Annie's lost painting of Fang, with Rosamond and her four cats all called Hex.