Scarlet and Ivy 1 – The Lost Twin

Sophie Cleverly's The Lost Twin is a spooky boarding school mystery for 10 year olds about a girl who is ordered to become her own sister.

What happens

It begins with a letter, the day after Ivy Grey's thirteenth birthday. Rookwood School wants her to take her twin sister Scarlet's place. Scarlet was a pupil there, and the school says she died of a fever just before the summer.

Ivy is the quiet twin. Scarlet was the bold one, the one everybody loved best. They're mirror twins, so even their birthmarks sit on opposite sides.

Then a teacher called Miss Fox arrives to collect her. Her pockets jangle, her office is full of stuffed dogs (she can't stand the things, she says, so she likes to see them dead) and she has a very strange plan. At Rookwood, Ivy isn't to be Ivy at all. She's to BE Scarlet.

Hidden inside Scarlet's mattress, Ivy finds her sister's diary. Most of the pages have been torn out, and there's a note on the first one that's meant just for her. The missing pages are somewhere in the school, and so is the truth.

It's a first-person story, so you're right there with Ivy as she tries to be braver and louder than she's ever been. She messes up her tie on purpose. She answers to her sister's name. And she walks down corridors of girls whispering about something Scarlet apparently did.

The letter is dated 1935, and the whole thing has a lovely gothic feel, with rooks, a lake and a school that looks like a castle (or a prison). Her new roommate Ariadne, who introduces herself in one breathless word, is a bright spot in all the gloom.

It's worth knowing that this is a book about grief as much as mystery. Ivy misses her twin terribly and there are a lot of tears in the early chapters. Their mother died soon after they were born, too. If your reader has recently lost someone close, it could hit hard.

But if they love a mystery with a lump in the throat and a proper sense of dread, it's very hard to put down. What is Miss Fox hiding, and what was Scarlet trying to tell her?

What to read next

For another girl arriving alone at a gloomy boarding school where something isn't right, A Girl Called Justice would make a lovely next step. It's 1936, the school sits on the Romney Marshes and Justice decides it has "potential for murder" before she's even through the gates.