Stacked Shelves

I read two new books recently that deal with the death of a child and how that death affects others in the family. If you haven't read See You at Harry’s , by Jo Knowles, sorry for the spoiler. But don’t let the fact that I’ve just told you someone dies keep you from reading it. It’s a great book. (Another to add to the list I’m keeping of possible Newbery contenders: Wonder , The One and Only Ivan , The Lions of Little Rock , Crow and The Mighty Miss Malone . I haven’t read the last two yet, but they look like good books.) The book jacket will tell you that the family suffers a tragedy and that perhaps our narrator is to blame. She’s not. Fern, 12, suffers early on in the book from being ignored and being a tween. Her father is too busy running the family ice cream shop, her mother is too busy taking care of 3-year-old Charlie and locking herself in her office when she needs to meditate, her older sister Sara is too busy trying to figure out what she should do now that she...

I believe I have found my Flavia de Luce for tweens. Sheila Turnage’s Three Times Lucky isn’t quite a mystery in the Nancy Drew sense -- it's better. Her heroine Mo LoBeau attempts to discover who murdered an ornery old neighbor, while also searching for lost pets and lost parents. She’s smart, industrious, and sassy. I loved that Turnage lets Mo experience real emotions (like getting sick with shock when she finds her guardian missing). And that her sidekick Dale doesn’t let Mo play the orphaned kid card all the time. As Dale, the child of a alcoholic father, tells her, they're all throwaways. It looks as though Turnage might revisit the town of Tupelo Landing, North Carolina, in the future – her website hints at it. But I hope murder doesn’t follow Mo around. She deserves to be more than Miss Marple.