"I am much too short to be the heroine of this story." --Hazel Wong
It's just a few steps from the cozy-dangerous boarding school of Harry Potter to the cozy-dangerous drawing rooms of classic British murder mysteries, via the witty, thoughtfully plotted middle-grade Wells & Wong novels. Robin Stevens's series, originally published in England, follows the two brightest students of Deepdean, an isolated 1930s girls' school.
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The first two books, Murder Most Unladylike and Arsenic for Tea, have been released in the United States by Simon & Schuster with some light vocabulary changes for an American audience--they've been re-titled Murder Is Bad Manners and Poison Is Not Polite, respectively--and the U.S. versions retain their agreeable British flavor.
Daisy Wells, the 13-year-old self-appointed president of the Wells and Wong Detective Society, takes the Sherlock Holmes role, chasing her cases "like a dog after a rabbit" and, she claims, the pure facts. But narrator Hazel Wong is often just as keen an observer, and she never loses sight of death's awful emotional costs.
Wong comes from Hong Kong, and she brings a welcome perspective as an outsider explaining the quirks of boarding-school life, such as the importance of "bunbreak" and of sometimes failing at lessons so as not to be a "swot." She's also frank about the difficulties of being best friends with the tall, blonde and beautiful Daisy, something many junior-high girls will identify with.
Though solving the crime is always the bottom line, Stevens's books satisfyingly explore the forging of a friendship between the two girls, and quietly make the point that adulthood involves facing uncomfortable facts. Even if you're an adult fan of classic mysteries, these lightly gruesome tales are highly enjoyable bunbreak reading. --Ali Davis, freelance writer and playwright