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Geeks and the Holy Grail (Camelot Code #2), by Mari Mancusi, for Timeslip Tuesday

The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book.  The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it.  King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him.  Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave.  But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys.  His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail.  But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
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The Secret

The Secret

The Thief Knot, by Kate Milford

The Thief Knot, by Kate Milford, is the third of the Greenglass House series (though there are other books set in the fictional town of Nagspeake). The first, Greenglass House, will always have a special place in my heart, because not only did I myself love it, but it was the last book I read out loud to my little one (now 16), and he loved it too....So it was a treat to anticipate returning to Nagspeake with The Thief Knot (it's a real pleasure to keep a book you really want to read out for a few days, so that every time it catches your eye you get a happy zest moment), and a treat to actually do so (because it was really good)!

The Thief Knot is essentially the story of a group of kids coming together to solve a mystery--in this case, the kidnapping of a politician's little girl, Peony.  Best friends Marzana and Nialla had been wanting excitement, and despite all the curious and dubious things about their home in the Liberty district of Nagspeake (full of shifty characters with pasts not talked about, magical "old iron" that transforms itself, and lots of secrets), they hadn't found a good adventure.  When Peony is kidnapped, and Marzana's parents (who fall in the "pasts not talked about" category) are asked to use their connections to help find her, Marzana and Nialla decide that they will help too.  They are joined by four other kids, each with their own unique attributes and abilities, and set to work to hunt for clues, starting in their own school....

And a delightful tangle of clues they are too, with false leads and improbable connections taking the kids into places in the own neighborhoods that blow their minds!  It's not just the place that was familiar being made extraordinary to the kids; the stories they learn about each other and their families do the same. Along the way, the kids themselves are changed. For instance, Marzana doesn't exactly overcome her crippling self-doubt once and for all, but she is able to trust her new friends and her ability to make decisions as leader of the group, and able to make mistakes, realize she has, and set things right.

I myself have no yearning to solve mysteries, but if ever there was a group of kid detectives that I could join, it would be this one.  I feel they might value my skills as historian/archaeologist/person able to draw to scale underwater (although no drawing to scale underwater was needed to crack this particular mystery).  My lack of innate detecting ability makes me unable to comment on the manner in which the mystery was solved--when I read, I almost never see clues and if I do I assume the writer has failed somehow and made things too obvious.  In this case, I went into the book with a bit of bird knowledge that let me make a connection before it was pointed out in the book, but that being said, I found this mystery satisfying (although the group dynamic was really what I enjoyed, and the really truly fabulous architecture. Nagspeake's always had great fabulous architecture, but it went up a notch here).

So if you enjoy kid detectives in fantastical settings (with a bit of actually magic and fantasy elements to it), you will love The Thief Knot!  It would probably be pretty confusing to read this one before any other Nagspeake books, and part of the pleasure is seeing old friends from the first two books, but as a story it stands on its own just fine.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher


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Dead Voices , by Katherine Arden (middle grade, G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2019), is a delightfully spooky sequel to Small Spaces , perfect for a chilling read as winter draws closer! Ollie, Coco, and Brian became close friends under somewhat trying circumstances last fall--the evil Smiling Man trying to turn them into scarecrows--and now winter has come, they're on their way to a fun weekend at a new ski lodge with Ollie's dad and Coco's mom.  They almost don't make it through the intense snowstorm, and when they arrive, they find themselves the only visitors.  The snow keeps falling, trapping them inside, and the power goes out.  And there are ghosts. The day after they arrive another visiter makes it through the snow, a young reporter for a ghost hunting magazine.  The owners of the hotel aren't sure that publicity about the hotel's previous incarnation of an orphanage with a dark, sad, history is what they want, but the young man is keen to get ghost hun...
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Premeditated

I'm going to start with the blurb from the back cover of this book, because it does a remarkable job of introducing the story in very few words: A week ago, Dinah’s cousin Claire cut her wrists. Five days ago, Dinah found Claire’s diary and discovered why. Three days ago, Dinah stopped crying and came up with a plan. Two days ago, she ditched her piercings and bleached the black dye from her hair. Yesterday, knee socks and uniform plaid became a predator’s camouflage. Today, she’ll find the boy who broke Claire. By tomorrow, he’ll wish he were dead. Claire and Dinah are cousins who are incredibly close, close enough that when Claire ends up in a coma in the hospital from a failed suicide attempt, Dinah knows where to look to find Claire's diary (or the computerized version of one, anyway). Dinah figures out what drove Claire to the point of suicide--a boy from the private school that Claire was supposed to attend that fall. Dinah enrolls at the school herself, determined to get...
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Storm

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