The 100-year-old Secret

Tracey Barrett's mystery was just what I needed for my 6th graders who need to read a mystery, horror, or suspense novel in October. Xena and Xander move to London with their parents, and aren't terribly happy about it because it is gray and rainy. Out playing "the game" (they try to detect one thing about a person, and then prove it. Xander spots a ballerina and asks where he can take dance lessons), they are contacted by a member of the Society for the Preservation of Famous Detectives and find out that they are related to Sherlock Holmes. They are given a mystery that Holmes could not solve, and try to find out what happened to a painting that disappeared one hundred years ago. The mystery is easy to figure out, but the 156 page book moves quickly and is easy to understand.

Loved the cover for Ward's Escape the Mask, but it was an odd, dystopian sci fi story that I couldn't get into. Lost me at the first sentence, really: "There was fear coming from the Onesie's cage. " Am I the only one who had a vision of a bunch of terrified infants' underwear?

Margolis' Price of Admission looked okay, but it was another story of celebrity, and included a lot of screen play script. If I can't get into a pink and fluffy book, I'm not buying it.

Ain's Revolution of Sabine also left me cold. It intrigued me at first-- Sabine rebels against her upper class family in Paris in 1776, meets Ben Franklin, and learns to be a free thinker-- but the constant talk of the class struggle and how everyone in her life manifests various aspects of this did not keep me interested.