The Area 51 Files

Julie Buxbaum's The Area 51 Files is a funny alien mystery for 8 year olds about a girl who has to move in with an uncle she's never met.

What happens

Meet Sky Patel-Baum. She's twelve, she's an orphan, and the proud owner of a hedgehog called Spike (who needs nappies on long car journeys). Her grandma has moved into a retirement home, so Sky is packed off to Uncle Anish.

She thinks he digs up dinosaur bones in South America. He doesn't. He's second-in-command of a top-secret bureau at Area 51, and it's crawling with aliens.

Sorry, Break Throughs. That's what they'd much rather be called.

Her new neighbour Elvis looks like an ordinary boy with a big fluffy dog called Pickles. He isn't. He's a shape-shifter, and what Sky sees depends on her. His first T-shirt has her grandma on it, eating an ice cream!

Then some aliens go missing on the very day Sky turns up. Sirens wail, helicopters search the gardens, and Sky ends up with electrodes on her head while two agents ask if she had anything to do with it. They're called Agent Belcher and Agent Fartz. Yes, really.

Sky is super nosy and very funny about it. She's read a million Nancy Drew books, and she and Elvis decide they'll find the missing aliens themselves.

Underneath all the jokes there's something really gentle. Sky misses her grandma. She and her uncle are basically strangers. And Elvis lost his birth parents too, so the two of them get each other straight away.

The alien facts are brilliant as well (one kind farts out of its ears and smells of roses).

If you've got a reader who loves a mystery with lots of silliness mixed in, this is perfect.

What to read next

And since Sky is such a big Nancy Drew fan, your reader might like to meet the real thing. In The Stolen Show, Nancy and her best friends go to a dog show in snowy Quebec City and walk straight into a case.