Nate the Great

Nate the Great by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat is a detective story for 5 year olds about a boy who takes his own cases very seriously indeed.

What happens

Nate works alone. He has found lost balloons, slippers, chickens and once a goldfish. This morning he is hoping for diamonds.

What he gets is Annie from down the street. She painted her dog, left the paint to dry on her desk, and now the whole thing has vanished.

Nate puts on his detective suit. He picks up his notebook and pencil. He leaves a note for his mother, because he always leaves a note for his mother when he is on a case.

Then he asks whether Annie's house has any trapdoors or secret passages. It hasn't. He tells her this is going to be a very dull one.

That's the joke your reader gets to be in on. Nate is quite certain that he, Nate the Great, thinks of everything. He also spends two hours digging up a garden and finds worms.

The suspects are short in number and very funny. There's Annie's friend Rosamond, who owns four cats and has named all of them Hex. There's Annie's little brother Harry, who is small and covered in red paint (Nate does not stay paint-free for long).

Reading it feels like being handed the case yourself. Nate tells you each thing he notices at the moment he notices it. Nothing is held back and then produced at the end, so your reader has a proper shot at working it out first.

The lines are short and mostly sit one to a row, with plenty of white space around them. That makes this a kind one for a child who has just started reading on their own. It also works nicely if they read a page and you read the next.

Nothing here is frightening. Fang is a very big dog with very big teeth and he does not bite anybody.

The bit that usually gets the laugh is Nate's own opinion of himself. He announces his full name constantly. He hates a cool trail. He cannot possibly work while hungry, so there are pancakes at more or less every turn.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Nate the Great and the Snowy Trail is in the library too. Rosamond turns up again with the four cats, and this time she has lost Nate's birthday present in the snow and will not tell him what it is.