Welcome to Wonderland Author Chris Grabenstein on Solving the Mystery of Summer Reading

If you ask me, when it comes to Fun-In-The-Sun summer reading, nothing beats a great mystery.

When you’re reading a mystery—like my Welcome to Wonderland or Lemoncello Library books—you get to play along with the characters in the stories. In fact, you might be able to piece together the clues and come up with the solution before the kids in the books do.

When you pick up my newest book, Welcome to Wonderland: Beach Party Surf Monkey, you’ll have fun trying to figure out what’s really going on at the world’s wackiest motel before my heroes P.T. Wilkie and Gloria Ortega do. Plus, the story takes place in Florida. What could be more fun than that?

Mysteries are interactive, which turns reading into a game. You don’t just “read” a mystery. You get to match your wits against some of the sharpest sleuths ever imagined.

With the help of a few terrific websites like ReadKiddoRead.com and Brightly not to mention my friends at Mystery Writers of America, I have compiled a list of five fantastically puzzling and perplexing mysteries for upper elementary and middle grade readers to play with (I mean “read”) this summer.

That’s another great tip for summer reading: Find a series and devour it. Knock them down like dominoes!

In Book Scavenger, twelve-year-old Emily and her family are relocating to San Francisco, home of her literary idol: Garrison Griswold, creator of the online gaming sensation Book Scavenger, a game where books are hidden all over the country and clues to find them are revealed through puzzles.

But Emily soon learns that Griswold has been attacked and is in a coma, and no one knows anything about the epic new game he was working on. Emily and her new friend James discover an odd book, which they come to believe is from Griswold and leads to a valuable prize. But there are others on the hunt for this book, and Emily and James must race to solve the puzzles Griswold left behind before Griswold’s attackers make them their next target.

A sequel, Ghosts of Greenglass House, will be coming out in October.

Unput-downable are my favorite kind of summer books!

There are so many other terrific mysteries that will keep young readers frantically flipping through the pages all summer long. Check out the Sammy Keyes mysteries by Wendelin Van Draanen. Introduce the next generation to Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and Sherlock Holmes (he’s a lot of fun and the stories are short).

For your more advanced reader, you might even try a few Agatha Christie titles. (Those were the ones that got me hooked on mysteries when I was young.)

It’s really no mystery about how to beat the summer reading slump: Read more mysteries!

Welcome to Wonderland: Beach Party Surf Monkey is on B&N bookshelves now!