by Trenton Lee Stewart
First sentence: “In a city called Stonetown, near a port called Stonetown Harbor, a boy named Reynie Muldoon was preparing to take an important test.”
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Content: It’s a bit long, and somewhat involved, so maybe it’s not for reluctant readers though I think it would make a good read-aloud. It’s in the middle grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

I was pretty sure, when I picked this one for my mystery book club this summer, that I had never read it before. But, about a third of the way into it, I realized if I hadn’t read it before, it must have been a pretty predictable book, since I basically knew (most of) what was going to happen. So, I will err on the side of bad memory and say I’ve read this one in the past (sometime) and not that it’s predictable (though maybe it is, a little bit).

The basic story is this: Reynie (and four others: Sticky, Kate, and Constance) is an orphan who answers an ad looking for gifted children to take a test. Once he (they) pass the test, he finds himself working for Mr. Benedict on a secret project: someone has been transmitting subliminal messages to the public (read by children) and Mr. Benedict needs them to infiltrate The Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened (or LIVE) where the messages are coming from and stop them.

From there, Reynie and his friends embark on a dangerous mission to fulfill Mr. Benedict’s wishes and stop LIVE (or is it EVIL?) from taking over the world.

On the one hand: this was kind of fun. It was nice to see Reynie and company working together, using each of their own strengths, to overcome the bad guys. It took a while — this book takes place over months, not days — but they eventually work together to solve the ultimate mystery. But, on the other hand, did it really need to be this long? And while I got that the mystery was figuring out who was sending the messages and then how they worked and how to stop them, I felt a bit disconnected from the whole book. Usually, with mysteries, I like to be aware that (if I am clever enough) I could possibly solve the puzzles and mysteries as well as the characters can. But this time, I felt like Stewart was just laying everything everything out for us, walking us through each step and not leaving readers any chance to solve the mystery on their own. Which made me a little disappointed in the book.

Still, not bad overall.