This is a really sweet, contemporary, young adult romance. Steffi is 16, and has been struggling with select mutism and anxiety since she was five. Her best friend just left, and she is not looking forward to the year ahead, when a teacher introduces her to a new boy, who is deaf, as she speaks some sign language. It’s about the experience of anxiety, the complicated, messy world we live in, and the importance of real communication and self determination, wrapped up in a really sweet love story.
Winner of the Waterstone’s Best Fiction Award 2015, kids over 9 years old, who aren’t daunted by a book of 322 pages, will get a thrill from this book and might even look for the rest in the series. Set in the Deepdean Boarding School for Girls in England in the 1930s the girls get up to some pretty serious sleuthing, narrowly escaping becoming victims themselves. This is the first real investigation for the Wells and Wong Detective Society (excluding the missing tie case of course!). Daisy and Hazel find it is hard to investigate a murder when they can’t even prove that a murder has taken place because the body has disappeared. This is a new series and can be found in the 
11yr old Jesse, aka Bleakboy, is trying to fit in at his new ‘inclusive’ school and impress Kate, a girl with curly black hair, an infectious smile and glittering braces. He talks aloud to Trevor (really a poster of Jesus but he is being sensitive to his parents who are atheist) about his many problems which drives his sister wild. One of his problems is Hunter, the ‘class anarchist, law breaker and boy most likely to set the record for continuous detentions’. From the alternating perspectives of both Jesse and Hunter we feel the pressures on today’s children in this easy, sensitive read for ages 9 and up. If you like Steven Herrick’s style you might like to try Pookie Aleera is not my boyfriend.
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