Winterborne Home for Mayhem and Mystery

Ally Carter's Winterborne Home for Mayhem and Mystery is a funny, warm adventure for 9 year olds about a group of kids in care whose guardian leads a secret life with a sword and a cape.

What happens

April spent ten years moving between group homes and foster homes. Now she lives at Winterborne House, an enormous mansion by the sea, with four other kids who've become her family.

This one follows on from an earlier Winterborne adventure, so your reader will be catching up on a few things (like why April once set a museum on fire).

Their guardian is Gabriel Winterborne. He's a billionaire, he's very grumpy, and he's hopeless in the kitchen (baking soda is NOT the same as baking powder). He's also secretly the Sentinel, a masked hero out of an old local legend.

Things have been falling apart since Ms Nelson, who ran the home, went away. So of course that's the moment a stern social worker with a tiny pencil turns up for an inspection. She walks straight into a breakfast disaster. Eggs are flying.

Then one night Gabriel slips out in his cape and hat, and the kids follow him across the water. Straight back to that museum.

It's very funny. The narrator keeps popping in with little asides, and Sadie steals every scene she's in. She's a brilliant inventor whose pancake machine works perfectly (until it really, really doesn't).

Underneath the jokes is something that'll tug at you. April is terrified of losing the first real home she's ever had, and you can feel how much she's already been through. It's a proper found-family story.

Gabriel's past is dark, and that's good to know. His family was killed when he was young and he spent years planning revenge. At one point he's woken suddenly and grabs April by the throat before he realises who she is. It's brief and he's horrified, but it's a tense moment for a younger reader.

What to read next

For another crew of kids from the care system with secret skills, City Spies is here too. Sara, a young hacker in foster care, is facing juvie until a mysterious British man walks in and asks her to hack the court's computers again.