For nineteen-year-old Harriet Morton, the daughter of an unfeeling widowed professor, life in 1912 Cambridge is no more than a dreary existence completely bereft of happiness and love, except for the moments when she is dancing in Madame Lavarre’s advanced ballet class. When she is offered a position in a touring ballet company that will be performing in the Amazon, her father refuses his permission for her to go. Harriet decides to run away with the company. She makes friends with the star ballerina and falls in love with the wealthy young theater founder, Rom Verney, who is the estranged uncle of a young boy she became friends with back in England. But when her boring would-be fiancée shows up to take her back to England, all her happiness is put on the line. (Read complete review)

Recommended ages: 13+

This witty repartee begins on page 24 of Josepha Sherman’s romantic fantasy novel, Child of Faerie, Child of Earth, and goes on with slight variations until page 157. (Read complete review)

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie

Recommended ages: 12+

A young girl, Ellen, finds a strange silver crown on her pillow on her tenth birthday. Since she always saw herself as a true queen, she is not surprised by the gift, and is not terribly curious about the giver, since, after all, it is her birthday. After a short walk alone early that morning, Ellen returns home to find her house burned down and her family assumed dead. Since she had just recently moved to town and has no friends, Ellen decides to get help from her aunt Sarah, who, unfortunately, lives several hundred miles away. She gets a ride from a pleasant-looking man, but is forced to escape from him when she realizes that he has something to do with her family’s death. She is helped by a small boy and his mother, and is sent on a trek through the wilderness with the boy, Otto, to try to find her aunt. To complicate the matter, the two find themselves being tracked by a mysterious man.  Could it all have something to do with the silver crown, which seems to have a subtle but mind-freeing effect on Ellen whenever she wears it? (Read complete review)

When 15 year-old Mary Russell nearly walks right over a middle-aged Sherlock Holmes in a field, a heated argument arises, in which he is shocked that someone her age can have the deductive reasoning skills she has. As they begin to study together as teacher and apprentice, an interesting friendship begins. A few years later, when Russell begins attending Oxford, they become partners in investigations ranging from two missing hams to a kidnapping, which seems to be linked to a larger plot intent on ending more than their partnership. 

GOOD: The movie-like and absorbing descriptions draw the reader into the story instantly, and Mary Russell’s knowledgeable banter with the much older Holmes clearly defines the character’s personality. The many action sequences are depicted so clearly that the reader is left with little doubt as to the danger facing the characters. The Holmes of this story is different in many ways from the traditional Baker Street character, which is justified by the mention of Watson and Doyle’s “romanticism.”
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Recommended ages: 14+