Module 9: Mystery

The London Eye by Siobahn Dowd

Summary: Salim is visiting his cousins, Kat and Ted, with his mother Gloria before they move to Manhattan.  Salim asks to ride The London Eye; his cousins watch him get on the Eye, but he never gets off.  Ted and Kat decide it’s up to them to figure out what happened to Salim, and Ted ends up figuring it out just in time to save Salim.

My Impressions: I really liked that if the reader was paying attention, it was possible to figure out what happened to Salim.  The narrator, Ted, ends up walking the reader through how he solved the disappearance of his cousin, and I liked that it is a solvable mystery (whereas some mysteries are impossible to figure out based on what the reader knows).  The book is well written and retains a great deal of British slang; because of this, I don’t think I agree with the 4.1 reading level.  While much of the slang is explained, some of it you have to get from context, and I think it would take a higher level reader to be able to do that.

Reviews: The facts seem simple enough. While their mothers have coffee, Ted and his older sister, Kat, and their cousin, Salim, wait in a queue to ride the London Eye, an observation wheel that allows those locked in the glass-and-steel capsules to see 25 miles in every direction. A stranger from the front of the line offers one free ticket, and since Salim is the visitor, stopping in London before moving with his mum to New York, he takes it. Ted and Kat see him enter the capsule and follow his ride, but to their shock, he doesn’t exit with his fellow riders. This book, very different from Dowd’s searing A Swift Pure Cry (2007), is much more than a taut mystery. In Ted, Dowd offers a complex young hero, whose “funny brain . . . runs on a different operating system” (seemingly Asperger’s Syndrome) and who is obsessed with shipping forecasts and with his inability to connect well with others. After several long days have passed with no sign of Salim, Ted must use the skills he has and overcome some of his personal challenges to find his cousin. Everything rings true here, the family relationships, the quirky connections of Ted’s mental circuitry, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the mystery. So often the mechanics of mystery don’t bear close scrutiny, but that’s not so here. A page turner with heft. — Ilene Cooper

Library Uses: Because the Olympics are being held in London this summer, I think that this book could be part of a display on London.  Students can learn about the city, view pictures of landmarks, and draw a map of London.

References:

Cooper, I. (2008). [Review of The London Eye Mystery by S. Dowd]. Retrieved from www.booklistonline.com

Dowd, S. (2008). The London eye mystery. New York, NY: Random House