Marthe Jocelyn’s The Body under the Piano is a murder mystery for 10 year olds about a shy girl in 1902 who is far more comfortable with a corpse than a conversation.<\/p>\n
Our narrator introduces herself like this. She’ll tell you about her new friend first, and save the dead body for later, because that’s how proper storytelling works.<\/p>\n
Her name is Agatha Morton. She is twelve, she lives in Torquay, and she desperately wants to be a writer. Her new friend is a very precise Belgian boy called Hector Perot, who arranges his liquorice pastilles in straight rows in a box rather than carry them loose in a paper cone.<\/p>\n
The joke is not hidden. Enjoy it.<\/p>\n
Aggie doesn’t go to school. Her mother has decided that children should roam free under the eye of a nursemaid, which in practice means no school, no governess and no friends her own age. So she has invented a whole classroom of imaginary girls instead, named them, dressed them and worried about their quarrels.<\/p>\n
Her father died last November, and she misses him with every breath.<\/p>\n
Then there’s the Mermaid Dance Room above the sweet shop, a charity concert, a great deal of bristling between the local ladies, and at last the dead body she promised us.<\/p>\n
What makes this so good is the narrating. Aggie edits herself as she goes. She describes Hector’s eyes as being like a glass of lime cordial and then tells herself off, offering glittering emeralds and a new spring leaf instead. She observes a blush and works through raspberry pudding, poached salmon and flamingo feathers before settling.<\/p>\n
She also has a gruesome imagination and a grudge or two. There’s a glorious stretch where she daydreams an entire horror story about a girl she dislikes, complete with a scheming nurse and a cellar of unusually large spiders. Any child who has ever invented a satisfying disaster for a classmate will feel seen.<\/p>\n
Worth knowing before you hand it over. Somebody is murdered, the children find the body, and a woman Aggie is fond of is suspected of it. It’s a cosy, period sort of murder rather than a frightening one, and the writing is warm throughout, but it is a murder and your reader should be up for that.<\/p>\n
The grief is the other thing. Aggie’s father has been dead less than a year, her mother is flattened by it, and it sits underneath every page. It’s handled beautifully, and it may still land hard on a child who has lost someone.<\/p>\n
There’s also period snobbery about refugees arriving in the town, repeated as gossip by people the book clearly thinks are foolish. Good material for a conversation rather than a reason to avoid it.<\/p>\n
For the next one, Peril at Owl Park moves everybody to her sister’s enormous manor house for Christmas, with a maze, a secret passage, a troupe of travelling actors and a cursed emerald.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marthe Jocelyn’s The Body under the Piano is a murder mystery for 10 year olds about a shy girl in 1902 who is far more comfortable with a corpse than a conversation. Our narrator introduces herself like this. She’ll tell you about her new friend first, and save the dead body for later, because that’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11508,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":6752,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Peril at Owl Park","lr_seo_hook":"A shy girl in 1902 Torquay who finds a body and starts asking questions."},"book_tag":[22],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[685],"class_list":["post-6753","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-mystery-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-marthe-jocelyn"],"yoast_title":"Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen – The Body under the Piano by Marthe Jocelyn | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A shy girl in 1902 Torquay who finds a body and starts asking questions. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n