Read Nick and Tesla’s Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove by Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith is a museum mystery for 10 year olds with real build-it-yourself instructions folded into the story.
It opens on a question nobody wants to hear. Has anyone seen Tesla's head?
Not Tesla Holt, who is standing right there with her head firmly attached. The other Tesla. The animatronic Nikola Tesla in the museum's brand-new Hall of Genius, which reopens tonight and currently has no head and no hands.
The twins find it in the staff fridge, next to the chief curator's chicken salad. Uncle Newt left it there when he went for a soda and forgot. He's that sort of uncle.
Then the hall gets switched on for a test. Marconi starts talking. Then Franklin. Then Pasteur and Kepler and Hawking, all at once, faster and louder, until Isaac Asimov topples over on top of Nick and every light in the building goes out.
Uncle Newt has no theory at all. Tesla has one straight away. Sabotage.
What makes these books their own thing is that they stop and show your reader how to build the gadgets. The glove in the title arrives with a parts list and numbered steps, so a child who wants that little light on the index finger really can make one. Check the list first, though. It's American, with shop item numbers that mean nothing over here, even if the bits themselves are ordinary enough.
It's funny with it. Silas has decided the animatronics are about to rise up and destroy humanity, DeMarco is quietly hoping they will, and the museum director speaks entirely in business words nobody in the room can follow.
The book sits well into the series, and a thread runs underneath about the twins' parents, who are missing. Nick lays that out plainly in one conversation, so nobody will be lost. Your reader may well want more of it than this book gives them (which is rather the point of a series).
The trouble here is all slapstick. A beaker sails past Nick's ear and Charles Darwin's head falls off onto a display of model seabirds.
If the build-it pages are the part that lands, try The Drone Pursuit next. Tom and Noah attend a school where flying your home-made spy drone down the corridor before registration is nobody's business but your own, right up until they hear something they shouldn't.
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