The Calder Game by Blue Balliett

Petra, Calder and Tommy are back with another great math and art related mystery. Calder goes to England with his Dad. He has a great time exploring the small town where they are staying. There's a new art installation in town of a Calder (the artist) sculpture that he finds fascinating because his class had just gone to see a Calder exhibit in Chicago before he left. He's got a whole plan for how let his friends know how much fun he's having...until he dissappears and so does the sculpture. Are the related? That's the mystery


Petra and Tommy get to go to England to help find him and they create lots of extra intrigue and humor to the rest of the plot.

The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

A solid mystery about the dissappearance of the main characters' cousin. He gets on the London Eye to ride it but never gets off.

What happened to Salim? Has he been kidnapped? Did he run away? Did he get lost? Maybe he didn't get on in the first place!

This book has an interesting twist in how it gets solved. Ted, one of our main characters, has a "brain that runs on a different operating system" than everyone else. We are never told but can assume he has asburgher's (sp?) syndrome. His autistic tendancies, and his sister's ability to keep him focused, are the fuel to figuring out this mystery.

Great family story and an intriguing mystery. There's a little bit of british cultural stuff that kids might confuse but not enough to keep anyone away from this little gem.

Pretty cool

The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin

Winston Breen loves puzzles. When he buys his sister a box at the local antique store, he is amazed to find part of a puzzle inside. The two children decide to solve the puzzle with the help of a public librarian and some disturbing adults who seem to want any prize for themselves.

Berlin, a puzzle creator, said he wrote the kind of book he wanted to read as a kid. The book is filled with logic puzzles for added enjoyment, but the reader does not need to solve the puzzles in order to understand the story.

Readers can print out copies of the puzzles from the book's website (click on the book title--hopefully it has linked correctly!) so they don't need to write in the book!

This book is a lot of fun--I booktalked it with 4th and 5th graders and then had them do one of the puzzles from the book. The puzzles have different complexity, so all readers can feel successful on at least some of them. (OK, I admit it--I didn't get them all correct!)

Good for grades 3 and up, and at least some middle school readers.