The Explorer’s Code

Allison K. Hymas's The Explorer's Code is a mystery for 9 year olds about three children, one enormous shut-up house and a weekend with no phones allowed.

What happens

Idlewood Manor hasn't been lived in for decades. Ten families win a weekend there, and the rule is that you leave the modern world at the gate.

Anna Henderson didn't want to come. Her younger brother Charlie won the place with a perfect maths score, which is the sort of thing Charlie does, and Anna has spent the whole drive being told to behave. She's the one who got caught in a neighbour's attic and in the closed-off mummy exhibit at the museum. Her hero is a 1920s explorer called Virginia Maines.

Charlie sees the world as a code. He spends the journey turning Idlewood Manor into an Atbash cipher, and his own name into Xsziorv.

Then Emily Shaughnessy arrives with her historian parents, a Polaroid camera hidden in her bag and a book about the house disguised under a cover marked MATH. (Her parents don't know about the camera either.)

The three of them want completely different things from the same weekend, and that's what makes it tick. Anna wants a locked door. Charlie wants a pattern. Emily wants to prove she can do her parents' job.

The house is doing its share. An owner whose smile is held a little too tight. A dead woman's will saying nothing in the building may ever be changed. A Greek statue standing in the Roman room with a crack across its shoulder.

The chapters move between the three children, so you see the same person from inside and from outside. Charlie thinks Anna is fearless. Anna thinks Charlie looks down on her. They're both wrong and neither of them says so out loud.

Does your reader enjoy the kind of puzzle they can have a crack at themselves? The ciphers here are real ones, with enough on the page to work a word out.

The brother and sister who have quietly drifted apart is the heart of it, and it's done without a single speech.

What to read next

For another child who runs on routine and gets handed a partner who doesn't, try Chester Keene Cracks the Code. Chester lives by his timetable and by secret messages from a dad he has never met, and then a girl called Skye turns up at lunch with a clue and no respect for timetables at all.