Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes

Lauren Child's Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes is a code-cracking spy story for 9 year olds, and its heroine has been quietly writing everything down for nine years.

What happens

We meet Ruby on a stool in the bathroom with binoculars, keeping notes on a cake delivery van that has been parked outside for twenty-one minutes without anyone getting out of it.

She has six hundred and twenty-two notebooks like the one in her lap. They live under her bedroom floorboards. Nobody has read a single word of them, not even her best friend Clancy.

There's a pink one too, for the rules. Seventy-nine so far. Rule one is that you can never be completely sure what might happen next, which is hard to argue with.

Ruby is small, scruffy, wears whatever she likes off a T-shirt pile with things written on it, and is a genius at puzzles. Crosswords, riddles, anagrams, jigsaws. Anything with a trick in it. That's what took her to codes, and codes are what she is very, very good at.

Her parents are lovely and have absolutely nothing going on upstairs. They are away in Switzerland at the start, they lose all their luggage, and they come home talking about schnitzel. Everyone else in the house is more interesting, especially Mrs Digby the housekeeper, who is tiny, ancient and completely unimpressed by anybody.

The thing worth paying attention to is the museum. A jade Buddha, missing for a thousand years, dug out of a glacier, coming to Twinford for a bit before it goes home. Ruby's parents are on the party committee. The display case rises out of the floor at midnight and the man who designed it has never been seen by anyone.

And then a secret organisation called Spectrum comes looking for a code-cracker, and gives her a butler.

It is very funny. The jokes come sideways, in asides and in Ruby's own running commentary, and half of them are about how ordinary she looks while she is running rings round adults. Your reader gets the rules dropped in capitals as they come up, so they are being taught how to notice things at the same time as Ruby is using it.

This is where the series starts, so it's the right one to pick up first. Everything Spectrum means, and the villain, begin here.

What to read next

If they tear through it, the sequel is Take Your Last Breath and it swaps the museum for the open sea. Ruby is a proper agent by then, learning to dive, being told cheerfully what a shark does when it wants to find out whether you're lunch.