The Love Boat: Secrets at Sea by Richard Peck

"Everybody has two futures," Aunt Fannie said.

"The future you choose. Or, the future that chooses you.

Here's your other future, Helena. The one you can choose. If you dare."

When the small-town nouveau riche Upstairs Cranstons decide to attend Queen Victoria's Jubilee Celebration in hopes of marrying off their sallow and unpromising older daughter, the Downstairs Cranston mouse family, headed by oldest sister Helena, faces a quandary. How will they live without the generous crumbs provided by the hearty-eating Cranstons and their clumsy cook Mrs. Flint? Helena decides to make the trek next door to the hidden home of her cousins to consult Aunt Fannie, the mouse matriarch of the clan and her crystal ball. What she learns is even more worrisome than the departure of the Upstairs Cranstons.

Not only is little sister Louise visiting the youngest Cranston daughter for nightly gossip as she suspected. It seems that her rascally little brother Lamont is skipping school and into all kinds of mischief with Gideon McSorley, bad-boy scion of the lowest-class mouse family around, and worse yet, middle sister Beatrice is slipping out at night to meet with this same rapscallion Gideon. That is the future that Aunt Fannie warns her of, the future that is sure to choose her family if she stays where she is.

But that other future is incredibly daunting to the Downstairs Cranstons. Their mother and two older sisters drowned in the rain barrel and they are justly terrified of water. But Aunt Fannie's fortunetelling is asking them to leave everything they treasure behind and stow away on the long ocean voyage to London in search of a different future.

And what a future it is in two-time Newbery-winning Richard Peck's newest novel for middle readers, Secrets at Sea (Dial, 2011).

Forsaking his usual boyish protagonists, Peck does not forsake his characteristic wry wit and eye for social absurdities in this sea adventure that combines harrowing escapes from the ship's one-eyed cat, storms at sea that nearly toss Helena into the drink, rubbing shoulders with both British human and mouse aristocracy. In a bit of matchmaking that would do the Bronte sisters proud, both the Cranstons' old maid daughter and her charming younger sibling and the mice sisters find their own fortune and heart's desire in shipboard romances. and even the wayward Lamont finds a respectable vocation at sea before their luxury liner docks. The brave Helena has embraced the risk and found a future for them all that she could never have imagined. As she wisely reflects,

"You can't go back, not in this life. You have to go forward."

Trying a bit of a new twist himself, Peck and his Victorian rodent tale take their place among the literary mouse aristocracy, alongside Kate DiCamillo's Newbery-winning The Tale of Despereaux, George Selden's classic Newbery book, The Cricket in Times Square (Chester Cricket and His Friends), and Newbery winner Lois Lowry's recent and delightful Bless This Mouse. (see my review here. ) Readers will be glad they set sail with Richard Peck, who is at the top of his witty adventurous tale-telling game here in Secrets at Sea.

Family Secrets: The Kneebone Boy by Ellen Potter

That night, Lucia lay in her bed, listening to nothing. The sound of nothing is the most ominous sound in the world. It's the sound a cat makes a second before it lunges for a mouse and sinks its arrow tippy teeth into the poor thing's neck. The sound of nothing was also the sound that Casper made right before he was about to leave them.

It's not for nothing that their schoolmates in the town of Little Tunk give the Hardscrabble kids a wide berth. Thirteen-year-old Otto never speaks--hasn't made an audible sound since his mother went missing when he was eight--and there's that black scarf around his neck, which along with his long blond hair, covers most of his pale face. Lucia (that's Lu-chee-ah, thank you) and Max are bright enough, maybe too bright to get along with their mundane age mates, so the kids stick with each other.

Their dad, Casper, is an odd one, too, making his living by painting portraits of the far-flung remnants of the world's cast-off royalty, a craft which often requires absences of several weeks and means that the children are sloughed off to stay with the ascerbic and misnamed Mrs. Carnival, an unimaginative village lady who obviously tolerates them only for the money.

Now, just as Lucia senses her father is about to be off again over their summer break, a letter comes from a mysterious relative, Great-Aunt Haddie Piggitt of Snoring-by-the-Sea, which ends with a thought-provoking P.S.:

What do the children know about their mother?

P.P.S. If the answer is "Yes," don't you think it's time you told them?

But just as the strong-minded Lucia is about to pursue this mystery, their father whisks them off to the railway station and puts them on the train to London to stay with his distant cousin Angela. Angela, however, is nowhere to be found when they arrive at her apartment, and when her dogwalker arrives to find the Hardscrabbles awakening from a rough layover in the hall, she tells them that Angela is off for a holiday in Germany. The Hardscrabbles reluctantly agree that there's nothing for it but to return to Little Tunks and throw themselves upon the none-too-gentle mercies of Mrs. Carnival until Casper's return. But on the way back to the station the kids are so frightened by a tattooed mugger that they abandon their bags, and escaping, find themselves stranded with very little money--only enough, it seems, to take the train to the nearby Snoring-by-the-Sea and seek refuge with the mysterious Great-Aunt Haddie.

Haddie, however, is not the expected elderly pensioner. She is a youngish and definitely offbeat woman who claims to have been their mother's only slightly older aunt and who has taken a summer rental of the Kneebone Castle's folly, a quirky but intriguing model of the deserted castle made for the children of the former owners, complete with scaled-down drawbridge, a miniature dungeon with mechanical rats where the children are put to bed, and a reputed underground secret passageway to the castle itself. Haddie feeds them on her despicably American peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and soup heated in her Bunsen burner, and regales them with stories of the folly's oddities and the neighborhood legend, The Kneebone Boy, a supposedly horribly hairy and deformed older brother of the folly's former residents kept prisoner somewhere in the castle.

The whole experience is exceedingly odd, even for the Hardscrabbles, admittedly the odd ones back in their own environs, but Max and Lucia especially are captivated by the Kneebone Boy tale and set out, with Haddie's nonchalant blessing, to discover the secrets of Kneebones' strange home and especially that secret passage.

How the resourceful Hardscrabbles solve that mystery and not incidentally one of their own makes for an amusing, absorbing, and suspenseful Gothic tale of a summer break like no other. What the three find at the end of that perilous, literally cliff-hanging secret passage changes everything for them and reveals mysteries, not of the Kneebone family so much as their own--including why Otto never takes off that black scarf.

Ellen Potter's The Kneebone Boy (Feiwel & Friends, 2010) is no sunny suburban mystery for a summer's day, but as a mystery/adventure, it has its own eccentric charm, rather like that of a Lemony Snicket with heart. The intrepid Hardscrabbles are an endearing and refreshing trio of young heroes, and the narrator (unrevealed but surely Lucia) has a memorable voice. As Kirkus Reviews succinctly says, "A quirky charmer." It is that.

More Tales from The Rock: Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko

"DONE."

That's all the note in Moose's laundry had said. "Done." But when Al Capone does your laundry, a note in your pocket is a big deal. Big Al may be confined to a five by seven cell in Alcatraz, but his powers extend far and wide.

That's why twelve-year-old Moose has written Capone a letter, pleading for his help in getting his sister Natalie into a special school which can give her a chance at a more normal life. With that "Done," an acceptance letter soon follows and Natalie is on her way to the Esther P. Marinoff School in nearby San Francisco, and Moose's life with his prison guard father and his mother on Alcatraz Island, heretofore centered around his autistic sister's care, is about to change radically.

But now Annie, who is a crack baseball pitcher and nobody's fool, knows that something is up between Moose and The Rock's most famous prisoner. And then comes another note, one that makes Moose's heart almost stop:

Annie props open the screen door with her foot. "Moose." She gulps. "You won't believe what happened."

"What happened?" I asked.

"We got the wrong laundry. We got yours." she whispers.

"I didn't realize it was your laundry. I started putting it away and...Moose, there was a note in the pocket of your shirt."

"A-a note?" My voice breaks high, like a girl's.

The note is written on the same paper in the same handwriting as the other one.

YOUR TURN, it says.

When Scarface Capone does you a favor, he expects a payback, and when Moose gets that note, his life becomes a misery, waiting for the other shoe, perhaps shined by Al Capone, to drop. First, when Big Al's wife Mae visits him on The Rock and drops her hanky, it's no accident. Then when Natalie comes home for a holiday visit, there is a dread object found in her suitcase, a bar spreader obviously intended to be used in an upcoming escape attempt. "Bottom drawer," says Natalie. "He told me to put it in the bottom drawer. 105, 105, 105." Moose, Annie, and his friend Jimmy know that there's more to that story than they want to know.

The kids are terrified. There is obviously an escape attempt being planned, but if they tell what they know, they fear their fathers will lose their jobs, no minor matter in the Depression of 1935. Trustee inmates are in and out of their apartments often for repairs, and Moose's family's toilet seems always to need the services of Seven Fingers, ax murderer and master plumber, and when the escapee wannabees discover the tool not in Natalie's bottom drawer but part of the toy carousel of six-year-old Janet Trixle, the warden's youngest, the cons are sure to suspect that the kids know more than is good for them.

Secret hideouts, a touch of romance with the warden's pretty but manipulative older daughter, spying on the big reception for FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, and an exciting prison break scene are all part of Gennifer Choldenko's rousing sequel to her Newbery Honor Book, Al Capone Does My Shirts. Picking right up on the heels of the first book, this one has the same colorfully drawn characters and plenty of suspense as Moose gets his first kiss and Buddy Boy, One-Arm Willy, and Seven Fingers break loose from the cell house and take them all, including Natalie, hostages in their escape plan. But Natalie has powers of observation beyond those of the average kid, and it is she who makes the right connections when push comes to shove.

Choldenko's historical fiction chops are just right in her latest, Al Capone Shines My Shoes (Dial, 2009) one sure to please fans of her first book. Although this novel is plenty strong enough to be read on its own, it would be a shame to miss the fun of reading the two together. As the Kirkus reviewer puts it, "Choldenko hits a grand slam...Effortless period dialogue, fully developed secondary characters and a perfectly paced plot combine to create a solid-gold sequel that will not disappoint."