I’d been bugging my kids for weeks to read The London Eye Mystery.  And then, while child #3 sat in the barber shop chair, I held the novel for him.  It’s a small, squarish book.  I’m supposed to be looking at my phone less, so I read.

The pages turned quickly.  And I giggled.  Fortunately, no one in the barber shop seemed to notice, especially not my children.  Kids #1, 2 and 4 all had their noses in books.  (Hurrah!)

An Interesting Character

The London Eye Mystery is told from the unusual prospective of Ted.  He suffers from a “syndrome”, probably Asperger’s, although nobody ever comes out and says that.   Ted explains that his brain “runs on a different operating system.”  His issues?  He takes words literally, has trouble reading other people’s emotions, shakes out his hand a lot, and is obsessed with the weather.

Here’s an example of his literal thinking, one that made me giggle:

It was like the time I’d asked why footballers were still being kept as slaves when slavery had been abolished, after a newsreader announced that a Manchester United star had been bought by another club for twelve million pounds.

The cool thing about The London Eye Mystery is that Ted’s unusual perspective on the world actually helps him solve the case when the police and his sister cannot.  He puts all the pieces together by looking at the clues differently:

I remembered a picture Kat had once shown me of a waterfall.  Only, the way it was painted, it looked as if the water was flowing upwards.  Perhaps this was a clue to Salim’s disappearance.  Perhaps Kat and I were looking at things the wrong way up, or the wrong way round.

An Enjoyable Mystery

Here’s what happens.  Kat and Ted take their cousin Salim into London to ride The London Eye, the largest observation wheel ever built.  A mysterious man offers Salim a ticket, and he takes it, disappearing into one of the pods on the “giant bicycle wheel in the sky.”  Thirty minutes later, when the pod comes back around, Kat and Ted watch for their cousin to get out. But he never does.

Much like Sherlock Holmes, Ted doesn’t reveal how he’s pulled the clues together until the end of the story.  He drops hints along the way, but I was too dense to notice.  Maybe if I read more mystery I could have seen what was coming.

Besides having all the necessary components for kid lit sleuthing,The London Eye Mystery also touches on the importance of family and the difficulties of communicating well with family members, whether you have Asperger’s Syndrome or not!

Recommendation

All three of my kids (aged 9-13) who read The London Eye Mystery enjoyed it.  (The youngest didn’t read it because he’s just in first grade and is plowing his way through The Magic Tree House series.)  There’s nothing scary, and yet tension moves the plot along.  It also gives kids insight into people who are “different.”  Although Ted has his quirks, he wants to help, and he ends up a hero.  That’s a character every kid can relate to.

Soon, I hope to tackle Colin Fischer, which is about an older kid with Asperger’s who solves a mystery at his high school.

Can you recommend other books about kids with disabilities or other kid lit mysteries?

Thanks for stopping by!

Julia