Challenges and Consequences: A Talent for Trouble by Natasha Tarrant

Three young people, all very different.
All searching for something, though none knew quite what.
All unaware, as yet, that they might find it in one another.

A school bus was supposed to meet them at Castlehaig, but when they got off the train, it wasn't there.
"Late," said Jesse bitterly. "It's not fair!"

Alice looked at him curiously, and he realized with a start that she didn't know about the First Day Challenge."

Since her mother's death, Alice Mistlethwaite had retreated into her own world of reading and writing fantasy tales. Now that she is eleven, her aunt and her father Barney have decided Alice needs to be forced out of her shell. They summarily decide to sell her much-loved house, Cherry Grange, where she can pick summer cherries from a tree at her window, and Alice is put on a train to a boarding school in Scotland. Aunt Patience has found a teaching job in London, and her father, a famously unsuccessful actor, is off, "on-tour," and Alice finds herself on a train headed for Stormy Loch Academy with a pleasant but peculiar passenger named Jesse. Jesse's chief skill, she learns, is  the ability to run really fast--an unfair advantage, as Alice discovers when Jesse jumps out of the school van and at top speed dashes toward the medieval-looking Stormy Loch School. It seem the last one to touch the school door suffers a Consequence.

It was only fair that she should have known. But sometimes it just feels impossible to do what is right. Jessie ran like a champion on his long, strong legs. Alice, in contrast... did not run like an athlete. She looked more like a small and furious terrier.

And then Jesse stumbled and fell. Alice sailed past him. She could see the door, the lion's head knocker gleaming....

And then Fergus Mackenzie, the red-haired genius and breaker of rules, stuck his foot right in her path.

Justice of a sort is meted out by the headmaster, Major Fortescue. Alice, the last to arrive, receives the Consequence of having to sound the early morning Reveille Gong for the semester, and for his perfidy Fergis is appointed Pig Keeper. Alice gains revenge for the unfairness of it all by banging the gong, not three times but continually until all sleeping students are awake and stumbling outside into the chilly dark for what they think is a fire drill, and Fergus finds a perverse satisfaction in enjoying the pigs. As the semester goes by, Alice also discovers that Stormy Loch "continues better than expected." and the three of them forge a connection born out of misdeed and mischief which leads to a truce and an unexpected friendship.

But visitation day arrives and Alice's father fails to show up as promised. What she does receive is a mysterious package with a heavy, tightly wrapped small object labeled DO NOT OPEN, and a letter from her father exhorting her to meet him with that object on the small island of Nish, off the coast of Scotland, a place where he purportedly remembers a castle and moat from his childhood.

And then, an opportunity presents itself. It is time for the Year Seven Great Orienteering Challenge, and Major Fortesque groups Alice, Jesse, and Fergus together, thinking they "might learn from each other," and indeed they do.

Alice persuades the boys to accept her plan to meet her father at Nish, sneaking away from the island of Lumb and faking their way onto the ferry, using their classroom French to pretend to be foreign students on holiday. But what seemed like a lark turns into a survival test, as a mighty storm strikes the tiny island. Their tent is blown away, and the three friends realize that they are being pursued by a gang of continental art thieves who rightly believe Alice's package contains a stolen museum piece. The promised castle turns out to be a towering rock formation surrounded at high tide by a moat of roiling sea water, and the three find themselves finally escaping the gang down the cliff by rope. It is indeed much more of a challenge than Major Fortescue had planned, and Alice, Jesse, and Fergus forge an unshakable bond of friendship in the process.

In the style of British boarding school stories, the three friends from Stormy Loch form a close relationship in the best tradition of Harry Potter, Hermione, and Ron, relying on each other's strengths in an adventure not quite like any other, in Natasha Tarrant's forthcoming A Talent for Trouble (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2019). A real page-turner of a novel of three friends who pool their strengths and against all odds, come together in an amazing journey, this is a brilliant coming-of-age story that commingles unusual settings and developing emotional maturity in a great choice for those middle readers eager for unusual adventures without a single fantastical beast, mythic warrior, or evil sorcerer.

Making the Grade: The Scandal by John Grisham

Theo tucked himself into his sleeping bag, warm and comfortable.

He was thirteen and unwilling to grow older. The entire week had been about the future, about testing for placement in high school and the mysteries of ninth grade. Theo liked where he was in life. He loved camping, he liked his school and friends and teachers. He liked being a boy on a bike, zipping around town. If he got into trouble his excuse was always, "Hey, I'm just a kid."

Why couldn't a kid stay thirteen forever?

But time and tide wait for no kid, and when the ever-optimistic Theo's test score misses the benchmark for high school honors classes by one point, he finds himself unwillingly in the middle of the simmering issue of state-mandated tests and college-track exams for eighth graders. And then his best friend April drops a bomb on him.

"I have something to show you," she says. "I couldn't sleep, so I decided to do this. She reached into her backpack and removed a plain white envelope. "Just read it." Theo removed a letter:

To Dr. Carmen Stoop, Superintendent of Strattenbury City Schools

I am a concerned citizen. The rise in scores at East Middle School is very impressive. But you should know the real story, On the Saturday after the tests, a group of eighth-grade teachers met at the school and behind a locked door began replacing wrong answers with correct ones....

Suddenly, Theo finds himself in an ethical dilemma. As the son of two lawyers, the complete kid insider at the local courthouse, he has become the de facto "kid lawyer" for his classmates, but Theo can't help wishing April had never written that letter or "consulted" him about her involvement in the scandal. And when the school system examines the actual tests, they find clear evidence of substantial tampering. As the news of scandal spreads through town and the controversy widens to the validity of state testing to determine placement in classes at high school becomes fierce, April is seized with whistle blower's remorse. And yet she has a point: if cheating at East Middle can put certain students unfairly into the magic top ten percent, aren't students like Theo and herself being cheated out of the best classes and teachers at high school? Is using one test to lock the other students out of advanced high school classes even fair? And then, has an actual felony been committed by the guilty teachers?

And when Theo's parents take on the defense of the five accused teachers, the usually cheeky Theo finds himself a somewhat unwilling insider and potential witness, in John Grisham's latest in series, Theodore Boone: The Scandal (Dutton Books, 2016). Although this latest in Grisham's Theodore Booneseries lacks the danger of investigating a murder, rescuing a kidnap victim, or helping the FBI capture a killer as he did in earlier books, the subject of mandated testing is one in which his 'tweener readers have a real stake, willingly or not, and the real-world ethical dilemmas that the author lays out for Theo, the informer April, his lawyer parents, and even his friend Judge Gantry are all too real. Grisham's blithely corner-cutting young legal eagle seems to be taking a turn toward more mature ethical sensibilities as the move to ninth grade comes into sight. Still, this teen sleuth tale has the page-turning suspense that his readers require and is already a near best-seller. Will "Kid Lawyer" Theo survive a fourteenth birthday and graduation from middle school and go on to solve more cases? That's one mystery John Grisham doesn't reveal.

For middle readers who haven't yet met the irrepressible Theo Boone, the previous books in this series are Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, Theodore Boone: the Activist, Theodore Boone: the Abduction, and Theodore Boone: The Accused. (Read my reviews here)

Read All About It! Isabel Feeney, Star Reporter by Beth Fantaskey

"Isabel," Miss Giddings said--still sounding worried. "You just be careful out here. Then she glanced down the street. "I've got to run now. Izzy. Take care, okay?"

"Yeah, you, too," I said. That was when I realized a man was waiting for her down the street in the shadows, his hat pulled low. They were obviously arguing, and the man was rough with her as they walked into the darkness. I bent to pick up my newspapers. The winter wind, as strong as it was, couldn't drown out the sound of a gunshot. A single, sharp report that echoed from the alley into which Miss Giddings and that man had just disappeared.

I probably shouldn't have run toward a gunshot, but Miss Giddings always looked after me, if only by buying a paper she probably didn't even want, and I couldn't seem to stop my feet, flying toward the alley.

Chicago Tribune newspaper girl Isabel Feeney is the sort of girl who runs toward adventure, and when she rounds the corner into the alley, she finds her favorite customer Miss Giddings bent over a bleeding man, a gun beside her on the concrete alleyway, looking dazed and speechless. A police car screeches to a halt in front of the alley, and two cops rushed toward them.

"I'm Detective James Culhane," he barked. He looked at me and and Miss Giddings, pointed to the weapon lying in the snow and asked point-blank, "So, which of you fired the gun?"

Isabel Feeney, a ten-year-old truant and newspaper girl, supplementing her mother's scant earnings as a night janitress, finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation, with the pretty and stylish clerk Miss Giddings the chief suspect. Under questioning at the police station, Isabel has to admit that the man and her friend seemed to be quarreling, and Miss Giddings is held, pending an arraignment.

Isabel just knows her friend is not a murderess, even though she becomes a prisoner on Chicago's famous "murderesses' row," and when she read the Tribune's headliner written by star female report Maude Collier, Izzy sets out to set the reporter straight on Miss Giddings' innocence. Miss Collier is sympathetic to her story, but explains that she writes her crime stories based on the existing evidence. Isabel realizes that it's up to her to set the story straight and write it as it happened--when she has all the evidence--that is.

And Isabel Feeney is on her way, sniffing out the evidence behind the shooting of Charles Bessemer, a known gangster, with a prissy, bossy diva of a daughter, Flora, the star of the Bakery Pride Bread commercials and billboards and wannabe movie star. Izzy investigates the crime scene, proving herself a real gumshoe, discovering two bits of evidence the police ignored, snowy footprints outside a door in the alley that go nowhere, and a smelly piece of chewed Pepsin gum in the snow, and a memorable investigative crime reporter is born.

And investigate Isabel does, with the help of Maude Collier, Miss Giddings' crippled son Robert, and even the snooty Flora, who knows more about her father's gangster world than anyone. Izzy finds herself attending the gangster's funeral, crawling through a broken window at midnight to check out what's behind that alley door and even chased down that same alley and knocked out by someone bent on foiling her sleuthing, and at last turning star witness at Miss Giddings' trial.

Isabel is part Nancy Drew, part the orphaned Annie, and an altogether delightful character, in Beth Fantaskey's newest novel, Isabel Feeney, Star Reporter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

Fantaskey is a writer who can spin a fascinating yarn with the best of them, and in her newest, she takes two of the cliches of pop lit, the girl sleuth with plenty of smarts and the plucky girl reporter going for a above-the-fold lead story, and runs with it. As you would expect, Isabel Feeney takes to both roles tenaciously, with a deliciously written first-person account of 1920s-era cops and robbers and strong female figures making their way among them.

Set in a cold and windy Chicago in the days when Al Capone was its de facto mayor, Isabel's voice is likewise breezy, savvy, and brassy in a way that fits her time and place, right at home in the merrily melodramatic cast of jazz age characters that Fantaskey digs up. Short chapters and shifting action keep the story moving to the beat of the city, swirling like the snow around Isabel as she hustles between leads in her case. Middle readers will willingly follow Isabel Feeney down any dark alley to get the story, and no doubt will be rooting for more Izzy stories from this talented storyteller.

"Isabel's innocence and intelligence combine to form a complex character full of moxie," says Booklist in its starred review.

Taken! Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls Are Used in War by Jessica Humphreys and Michel Chikwanine

My name is Michel Chikwanine. The story you are about to read is true. It is my story, and it is just one of thousands like it.

I was five years old. There were rumblings of chaos in the distance, but I didn't hear them. I played soccer, I watched TV, I went to school, and I daydreamed.

Michel's life in the town of Beni in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is good. His dad is a lawyer, and his mom sells goods in the market. He has a best friend, Kevin, to teach him soccer skills and walk with him to school, and he has three sisters. He is the only son and the apple of his father's eye.

But his dad listens intently to the news on the radio, and one morning he has a unusually stern warning for Michel as he leaves to walk to school.

"Be home by six, Michel!"

But Kevin and the boys are planning a soccer game right after school, and little Michel brushes aside his father's words to stay for the game with the boys. That choice changes his life.

As they play, a group of army trucks pull up, with soldiers packed inside. Suddenly he hears a loud BANG!

A group of wild-haired men bolt out of the truck and seize the boys, separating them by ages, and throw them into trucks.

When the truck stopped, we were ordered out. I heard a crunch underneath my feet. It was a skeleton without a head. My legs couldn't move.

"Put out your hands." The rebel soldier blindfolded me. He put a gun right into my hands. Someone grabbed my fingers, putting one on the trigger.

"SHOOT! SHOOT!"

Someone took off my blindfold. I had been forced to kill Kevin, my best friend.

"Your family will never take you back now," whispered one of the soldiers."You are one of us."

Michel Chikwanine's story of his captivity and brave escape is that of many young children, estimated at a quarter million worldwide, taken into bondage as child soldiers, forced to labor, fight, and serve as spies, decoys, and suicide bombers. With Jessica Humphreys, Chikwanine tells the story of those children who cannot speak for themselves in Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls Are Used in War (CitizenKid) (CitizenKid, 2015). Artist Claudia Davila utilizes the graphic novel format--with empathetic full-page illustrations and panels--in a style that tells the grim story of child soldiers worldwide without being unduly disturbing for elementary and middle school readers. The authors append a thumbnail update of Mechel Chikwanine's life and information on the United Nation's program to end the use of children under 18 as combatants along with a appealing "What You Can Do" section. "An enlightening, accessible, and, above all, child-friendly introduction to the issue," says School Library Journal in its starred review.

Making It in Middle School: Caught in the Web (How I Survived Middle School) by Nancy Krulik

"I think every school has its own group of Pops.

Basically they're at the top of the middle school food chain."

The non-Pop girls--Jenny, Felicia, Rachel--are bored. Television stinks; the weather stinks; and as they rummage through Jenny's collection of old home movies for entertainment, they run across the video of her third grade sleepover and Easter Egg Hunt.

Laughing over the sight of themselves as eight-year-olds make them yearn to do something telegenic, and the girls suddenly come up with the idea of producing a webcast for the middle school audience. Titling it the Webcast Underground (for the basement from which it is to be broadcast), they soon recruit Marc, their movie fan friend, as director, Liza, their artsy pal, as set designer, and Chloe (who has a new laptop) as their tech person. Jenny prepares promotional flyers to blanket their middle school, and when their talent show takes to the webwaves, the non-Pops find themselves, well, instant celebs at Joyce Kilmer Middle.

But their moment as neo-POPs doesn't last. The Pops can't stand to give up center stage and waste no time in trotting out their competitive webcast School Style. But for their second show, the Pops get more notoriety than popularity. They select a bespectacled plain Jane non-Pop named Melissa for their glamor makeover special. The webcast goes great, but when they trot out their new beauty queen at lunch the next day, the nearsighted Melissa, not wearing her dorky glasses, of course, mistakes the false eyelash she drops in her soup for a spider, and there's a lot of flying food decorating the perfect outfits at the Pops table, to the amusement of the whole cafeteria.

As usual, the Pops get their comeuppance, in Nancy Krulik's Caught in the Web (How I Survived Middle School), the continuing middle school saga featuring Jenny and her non-Pop friends whose humor and resilience make sixth grade fun despite everything. Other books in the How I Survived Middle School series include Can You Get An F In Lunch? (How I Survived Middle School), Madame President (How I Survived Middle School), It's All Downhill From Here (How I Survived Middle School), I Heard A Rumor (How I Survived Middle School), Who's Got Spirit? (How I Survived Middle School) and Cheat Sheet (How I Survived Middle School).