Everybody in this story says the house is haunted. The book answers them with architecture.
Ada Twist's Aunt Bernice inherits an old mansion from an ice cream mogul named Herbert Sherbert. It is stuffed with rooms built in different architectural periods, it is missing a pile of valuable antiques that were meant to pay for its upkeep, and without them she loses it. Iggy Peck thinks in buildings, so Iggy is the one with the right shaped brain for the problem.
Third in the Questioneers chapter book series, by Andrea Beaty.
The science it actually teaches
I will be plain, because the shelf is only worth anything if I am. Architecture is not natural science. No organisms, nothing to measure with an instrument, no experiment. If you came looking for physics or biology, this is not the one.
What it is instead is a book about reading the built world, which almost nothing else on a chapter book shelf does.
Buildings carry their own dates. The shape of an arch, the pitch of a roof, the way a ceiling is held up: those changed over centuries, and they changed in an order. Someone who knows the order walks into a room and says roughly when it was made, the way a geologist reads a cliff face. Aunt Bernice's house has periods sitting side by side, so a hallway in it is a timeline. That is an unusual thing to hand an eight year old.
It gives your child the words as well. Column, gable, vault, cornice, foundation. Naming a part is the first step to seeing it.
Then there is the ghost, which is the best thing in here. A haunted house is a house doing something. Cold spots are drafts. Groans are timber moving as it warms and cools. A bang travels through a duct and arrives in a room it did not start in. Knowing how a building is put together is how a haunting stops being a haunting, and that habit outlasts every fact in the book.
The mystery rests on the house adding up as a structure. Where a plan and a set of walls disagree, the difference is a space, and a space is somewhere.
The child it lands with
The child who notices ceilings. The one who draws floor plans of houses that do not exist, or rebuilds the same room out of blocks over and over with one thing changed each time.
It suits a mystery reader who has run through the easy ones, too. The plot is a proper find-the-thing mystery with a deadline on it, and the architecture is the tool rather than the lesson.
One place to stop and talk
Put the book down at the first strange noise and go find the oldest room in your house, or the oldest building on your street. Work out together what tells you it is old. Not how it feels. What it has.
What to know going in
This is the spookiest of the Questioneers chapter books, and that is worth saying out loud, because the store bands the series at grades 1 to 4 and a first grader is six.
The setup is an old dark house, everyone insisting it is haunted, objects that have gone missing, and noises nobody can account for. It resolves. Nothing supernatural is being sold to your child, and the point of the whole book is that a building explains itself. But there are chapters before the explanation arrives, and a jumpy six year old lives in those chapters at bedtime. Read it in daylight, or read it aloud so you can say "that will be the pipes" a beat before it is needed.
There is a money worry on the page as well. Aunt Bernice can lose her home if the antiques are not found. Children who have overheard adults talking about a house payment pick that thread up fast, and it deserves a sentence from you when it turns up.
Where to get it
$7.99 at Iggy Peck and the Mysterious Mansion. Of the Questioneers chapter books we carry, this is the one to buy for a particular child rather than for a subject: the one who cares about buildings, or the one who wants a mystery and will take the architecture as the price of admission. If what you want is the strongest science in the series, that is the helium book, not this one. This title sits on the Stealth Science shelf under a wider definition of science than the rest of that shelf uses, and I would rather tell you that here than let you work it out at home.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Aaron Slater and the Sneaky Snake: Who Gets to Decide
Aaron Slater and the Sneaky Snake: The Questioneers Chapter Book #6 by Andrea Beaty
Grade 1 to 4
Ada Twist and the Disappearing Dogs: Method, Out Loud
Ada Twist and the Disappearing Dogs: The Questioneers Chapter Book #5 by Andrea Beaty
Grade 1 to 4
Caterflies and Ice: The Book Where Zoey Gets It Wrong
Caterflies and Ice: Zoey and Sassafras #4 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Dragons and Marshmallows: The Science and the Catch
Dragons and Marshmallows: Zoey and Sassafras #1 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
