Last but Not Least

Longtime readers of this blog will know that mystery is not my favorite genre.  So when the 7th grade reading department announced that the last novel of the year would be a mystery I was a bit nervous.  Then I read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and I stopped being nervous and started getting really excited.

This is the kind of book that I couldn't stop reading because I had to see what happened next.  I think my students will have that same excitement.  I like to think that I am pretty good at picking up hints in the text but by the end of the story I had no idea who the murderer was.  Luckily Christie wrote an epilogue that explains everything (to any students reading this don't you dare read the epilogue first!!!).  Trust me I would have been furious if I got all the way through the book and still didn't have any resolution.

This is also the kind of book that as I was reading I had a million ideas of how I could teach this book.  I cannot wait to put them all into practice.

There is no better intro to this book then what is written on the back cover: "Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion...at dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead...haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one...one by one they begin to die...who among them is the killer and will any of them survive?"

Solving the mystery...that's kids stuff