In Harm’s Way drops you into the middle of a war over a school building, Andrew Clements’ mystery for 9 year olds about three children trying to stop the bulldozers.<\/p>\n
Ben, Jill and Robert stand in the principal’s office watching a video of themselves. Three kids in a dark corridor. Time stamped at seventeen minutes past three in the morning. Somebody emailed the link anonymously.<\/p>\n
Robert gets them out of it by staging a breakdown about his parents, who really did die in a car crash when he was little. Ben watches this with horror and admiration in roughly equal measure. So will your reader.<\/p>\n
The Captain Duncan Oakes School sits on the harbour in Edgeport and it is coming down in less than two weeks to make room for a theme park. The children have worked out that the man who built it in 1783 expected exactly this, and hid a run of safeguards around the building for whoever ended up defending it two hundred years later.<\/p>\n
One of those safeguards was a brass token that turned out to be the key to a bank account. Fourteen thousand dollars of gold, quietly growing since the eighteenth century, now sitting at over eighty-eight million.<\/p>\n
It does not help. The janitor and his new assistant are watching them every minute of the school day, and the next clue is seven words long.<\/p>\n
The pleasure here is a treasure hunt with a clock on it, inside a building your reader can picture completely. Hooks along a corridor. A staircase. A hidden compartment that a dog scratched its way into. Ben spends assembly singing with his mouth while his head runs through the clues, which is something every child has done about something.<\/p>\n
Be warned that it assumes a lot. This sits well into the series and the book does not stop to catch anyone up. There is an ongoing feud with two adults who genuinely mean the children harm, a dog used as a threat, and a strand about a hidden station on the Underground Railroad, which is American history a British reader may not have met yet. Robert using his parents’ deaths as a tactic is played for laughs, and some children will find that brilliant while others will find it horrible.<\/p>\n
Honestly, start with We the Children instead. It opens with Ben late for registration, finding the old janitor collapsed against a dust mop in an empty corridor, and stopping to help him. That turns out to be their last conversation, and everything in this one grows out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Harm’s Way drops you into the middle of a war over a school building, Andrew Clements’ mystery for 9 year olds about three children trying to stop the bulldozers. Ben, Jill and Robert stand in the principal’s office watching a video of themselves. Three kids in a dark corridor. Time stamped at seventeen minutes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11166,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9691,"lr_next_read_anchor":"We the Children","lr_seo_hook":"Eighty-eight million in an old account, two weeks to save the school."},"book_tag":[22],"age_group":[24],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[96],"class_list":["post-6934","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-mystery-books","age_group-books-for-9-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-andrew-clements"],"yoast_title":"Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School – In Harm’s Way by Andrew Clements | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Eighty-eight million in an old account, two weeks to save the school. For ages 9+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n