Shouldn’t You Be in School?

From Lemony Snicket comes a dry, very funny mystery for 9 year olds about a town where buildings keep burning down, called Shouldn't You Be in School?

What happens

Snicket is almost thirteen and an apprentice in a secret organisation. He tells you on the first page that he was wrong about all of it. This is the third of his four wrong questions, and it does lean on the first two.

The town is Stain'd-by-the-Sea, and it's fading fast. They drained the sea to hunt the last octopi for ink. Now the newspaper has folded, the ink company has shut and most families have gone. It's a gloriously gloomy place.

This time the case is arson. A sheep barn has burned down, and the Department of Education is very worried about the town's schoolchildren. Why a barn fire puts children in danger, nobody can quite explain.

Snicket and his chaperone go to interview the one witness. When they arrive, his house has burned down too.

Then there's Kellar Haines, a boy typing madly at the Department's front desk who ought to be in class. When Snicket asks him the question in the title, his fingers start to tremble. Who wouldn't want to know why?

The joy of these books is the voice. Snicket is bone dry and a little sad. He explains words "which here means" something else entirely. His chaperone, S. Theodora Markson, won't tell him what the S stands for, so he keeps asking (and she keeps dodging). The town's two police officers bicker nonstop about milk and towels while standing in the ashes.

There are proper friends in here too. Moxie Mallahan, the town's last journalist, keeps her business cards in her hat. Snicket clearly cares about them all, even when he pretends he doesn't.

It'll suit your reader if they enjoy puzzling alongside the narrator and don't mind being told half the story. Plenty stays unexplained for a long time, and that's on purpose.

What to read next

As it's the third book, a new reader will bump into people and past events they haven't met yet. They'll cope, but it's more fun in order. If they haven't met him before, start where he did, in a terrible tearoom with a secret note in his lap, in Who Could That Be at This Hour?