The Vanderbeekers 4 – Lost and Found

Karina Yan Glaser's The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found is a warm Harlem family story for 10 year olds about five children who find out that someone they love has nowhere to live.

What happens

The Vanderbeekers have a community garden on 141st Street, and for a fortnight somebody has been sleeping in the tool shed. They have never seen him. They just leave food, and by morning the food is always gone.

Then Hyacinth reaches over a stack of soil bags to leave a scarf she has knitted, and on top of the neatly folded clothes is a T shirt she recognises.

The book tells you who it is almost straight away, and then spends the rest of itself on what a family does next.

There are five Vanderbeeker children, from teenage twins down to Laney, who is six and chews the neck of her jumper when she is worried. There is a basset hound, a rabbit, two cats and a cat cafe. It is a lot of people in a small space and Glaser is very good at that particular noise.

The best scene is a complete disaster. Jessie climbs the front of an apartment building to look through a window, falls backwards into a bush, and is caught doing it by a police officer who is not remotely impressed.

What makes the book work is that the children get things wrong. Jessie shouts at her best friend when what she means is that she is hurt he did not tell her. Oliver decides the answer is for nobody to speak to him at all. Isa is the one holding everyone together and you can see what it costs her.

This one does not dodge anything, which you should know going in. A family has been evicted and their furniture is thrown into a skip while the children watch. An elderly neighbour is seriously ill and a hospital bed arrives in his living room. Another character's daughter was killed by a car years earlier, mentioned in passing.

Jessie also looks the numbers up, and they are real numbers about children sleeping in shelters.

So it asks something of your reader. If they like a story that makes them feel it and then shows people being practical and kind about it, this will suit them right down to the ground.

It is the fourth book about this family and the first three are not in the library, but you can follow it perfectly well from here. Everyone is introduced as they arrive.

What to read next

When they want more of the same street, there is Make a Wish. A surprise fortieth birthday party to organise, a best friend in trouble, and grandparents nobody expected turning up on the doorstep.