The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour
*Starred Review* A familiar heroine—the girl detective—gets a fresh look (red blazer!) in this delightful debut. Narrator Sophie and her pals Margaret and Rebecca go St. Veronica’s, on the Upper East Side, where, one afternoon in English class, Sophie screams. She has seen a ghostly face in the church window across the courtyard. The woman is real and needs help. She is estranged from her daughter but has found something that could bring them together: a card, the first in a series that leads to a scavenger hunt wrapped in clues about religion, literature, and math, with a museum-quality treasure at its end. Beil, an English teacher, does a lot of juggling here. Besides the mystery, there’s Sophie’s incipient relationship with a boy friend who is morphing into a boyfriend, as well as her pals’ family problems. The girls have to make sure others with more nefarious motives don’t find the treasure before they do. The dialogue is fast and funny, the clues are often solvable (except, oy, the math), and even though a bunch of the adult characters are stereotypes, they work in the context of the mystery. More Red Blazer Girls, please. Grades 5-8. --Ilene Cooper