Detective Work

When my brother and I were younger we would play "spy" with some of our friends.  Basically whenever my parents had people over we would play, for a bit, with their kids then we would organize spy sessions to see what the adults were doing.  They were never talking about anything interesting, but there was a thrill in overhearing even snippets of conversation.  Unfortunately, the fear of getting caught kept us from getting close enough to do any useful spying.


Mo LoBeau, star of Shelia Turnage's Three Times Lucky, had no such fear.  She and her best friend
Dale start their own detective agency and bravely confront all the towns mysteries.  But these aren't the dinner party conversations I tried to observe, theses are real cases: upstream mothers, missing pets, and even murder and kidnapping.

The charm of this book is one hundred percent wrapped up in the main character, Mo, from whose perspective the story is told.  Mo (short for Moses), is a maybe orphan found floating in a basket after a hurricane.  She has gumption and spunk and all of those other antiquated pleasantries we use to describe a particularly self-sufficient, if a little over bearing and involved sixth grader.  I loved Mo.  She is exactly the kind of student I would love to have in my class.  All of the extra excitement and intrigue are just the icing on the cake, I loved this book because I loved Mo-and I would have loved it even if Mo just had an ordinary summer.

Solving mysteries...that's kids stuff.