The Secrets of Stone Creek
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The Hardy Boys meets We Dream of Space in this tender middle grade adventure about a girl with the heart of an explorer who discovers more than she bargained for with her two brothers over the course of one fateful week.
Finley Walsh and her best friend Sophie were adventurers, like the ones they grew up reading about in 100 of the World’s Greatest Female Adventurers—that is, until Sophie found new friends. Between losing her best friend and feeling overlooked by her mother and older brother, Finley is determined to prove herself by becoming a great adventurer like the ones in her book.
The perfect opportunity comes when she and her brothers stay with an estranged relative in Stone Creek, a remote tourist town dedicated to the legend of a local adventurer who went missing two decades before. Finley knows that if she finds the missing woman, she’ll not only be able to prove herself to Sophie and her family, but also be able to meet a real, live adventurer just like her.
Finley convinces her brothers to join her in her rescue mission. But as they delve deeper into Stone Creek’s painful past, it becomes harder to know who they can trust—including each other—and they realize some places are better left unexplored.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With best friend Sophie Higgins off to spend spring break with new friends, seventh grader Finley Walsh feels abandoned and bereft when her mother drops her and her brothers off for the week with a cousin in Stone Creek, Vt. But Finley, who cofounded an adventure agency with Sophie back in first grade, is soon sucked into the town's highly marketed obsession with Meggie Riley, a resident who has been missing for 20 years after having discovered a cache of high-ticket antiques as a child. Seeking to collect the substantial reward and win Sophie back, Finley sets out to solve the mystery, regularly referencing the acts of historical heroines from volume 100 of the World's Greatest Female Adventurers. Rebranding her agency to include her siblings forces family cooperation and confrontation, especially between Finley and 13-year-old brother Oliver, whom she resents as their mother's favorite. Escalating suspense propels an increasingly dangerous investigation into small-town secrets that feels at times overly complex. McDonald (Pepper's Rules for Secret Sleuthing) studs Finley's first-person narrative with references to figures such as Nellie Bly, Anne Bonny, and Bessie Coleman, as the child's desperate need to prove herself as a successful adventurer evolves toward an increasingly thoughtful, mature worldview. Most characters cue as white. Ages 8–12.
