The Windeby Puzzle

Lois Lowry's The Windeby Puzzle is part true history and part story, for 10 year olds who like to know what really happened.

What happens

It opens with workmen cutting peat in northern Germany in 1952. Their machine pulls up a human leg. The police are called. But this isn't a crime scene, not in the usual sense. The body is around two thousand years old, preserved by the bog, and it belongs to someone young. Scientists name her the Windeby Girl.

Then Lowry steps in and talks to you directly. She read about the girl and couldn't stop wondering who she was. So she starts piecing the puzzle together, the way you'd work on a jigsaw. What did life look like in an Iron Age village? Why would a thirteen year old end up in a bog with a woven blindfold over her eyes?

She gives the girl a name. Estrild.

And then the story begins. Estrild creeps out before dawn to meet Varick, an orphan boy with a crooked back who sleeps in the blacksmith's shed. He's secretly teaching her to hold a shield and roar the warrior chant into it. Estrild doesn't want to spend her life weaving and fetching milk like her worn-out mother. She wants to stand with the new warriors at the spring ceremony.

It's a very unusual way to tell a story. Your reader sees the author choosing, doubting and changing her mind, then gets swept into Estrild's village with its goats and bees and noisy little ones. It makes you think about how every life is a story (even one from two thousand years ago).

Worth knowing before you hand it over

From the very first page you know this is about someone who died young. Lowry explains the real theories about why bog bodies died, including punishment and human sacrifice, and some of that is grim. Estrild also remembers her uncle carried home dead from a battle.

A child who is upset by death, or by the idea of children being harmed, may find it heavy going. If your reader is fascinated by archaeology, mummies or how historians work things out, it's gripping. It would also be a great one to read alongside a school topic on the Iron Age.

What to read next

If they love the way Lowry puts herself into a piece of real history, try On the Horizon next. It's a book of her poems about Pearl Harbor, and it starts with Lowry as a small girl on a beach in Hawaii, with the battleship Arizona on the skyline behind her.